THE WIDOW WAS A KILLER . . . .

MARTIN FENNISTER’S DEATH WAS OFFICIALLY LISTED AS A SUICIDE.

ANNABELLE, HIS WIDOW, INHERITED A MERE THIRTY THOUSAND.

THEN GERALD MALLOW DIED IN A MYSTERIOUS AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT.

HE HAD A LOT OF MONEY AND HE LEFT IT ALL TO HIS BEAUTIFUL SECRETARY.

THE SECRETARY WAS ANNABELLE!

THIS IS THE STORY OF A MAN WHO SET OUT TO TRAP ANNABELLE.

HE SWORE HE’D MAKE HER CONFESS TO DOUBLE MURDER.

“IT HAS A SMASH ENDING THAT WILL TAKE EVEN THE MOST EXPERIENCED READER OF MYSTERY FICTION BY SURPRISE!”

—BOSTON HERALD

THE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES . . . .

SOME WOMEN HAVE A TALENT FOR ATTRACTING MEN. BUT ANNABELLE FENNISTER HAD AN ADDITIONAL FLAIR—A TALENT FOR MURDER.

JIM TORRANT HAD NEVER MET ANNABELLE WHEN SHE WAS MARRIED TO MARTIN, HIS EX-PARTNER. AFTER MARTIN’S STRANGE DEATH JIM TRIED TO LOOK HER UP. BUT ANNABELLE AND HER HUSBAND’S MONEY HAD DISAPPEARED.

HE FOLLOWED HER CLOUDY BACK TRAIL UNTIL HE CAUGHT UP WITH HER. BUT INSTEAD OF A GRIEVING WIDOW HE FOUND A WOMAN WHO WAS WAITING FOR ANOTHER INHERITANCE FROM ANOTHER MAN IN HER LIFE WHO HAD JUST DIED.

IT WAS THEN JIM LEARNED ABOUT THE SECOND “ACCIDENT.”

IT WAS THEN HE MET ANNABELLE’S SINISTER NEW BOY FRIEND.

IT WAS THEN HE DISCOVERED A THIRD STIFF WHO HAD STUMBLED INTO THE WIDOW’S WEB.

WIDOW’S WEB

Copyright, ©, 1956, by Ursula Curtiss.

All rights reserved.

The characters, places, incidents and situations in this book are imaginary and have no relation to any person, place or actual happening.

Cast  of  Characters

JIM TORRANT—A writer and correspondent, he followed a macabre trail in search of his best friend, Martin Fennister

MRS. POLLY STARK—A Greenwich matron who reluctantly revealed a few clues to Torrant

MRS. JUDD—Thin, nervous and frantic, she took in roomers and dispensed gossip

ANNABELLE BLAIR—Martin Fennister’s widow and the late Gerald Mallow’s secretary. She had an instinct for finding men whose deaths were near and profitable

MARIA ROWAN—Who rented a garage apartment in Chauncy, Massachusetts, for her own very good reasons

MR. SIMEON—His big, charming voice belied his appearance, and his business in Chauncy was just as challenging

MRS. PAULETTE KIRBY—Ebullient real-estate agent, in a position to know. too many things about too many people

MRS. SARAH PARTRIDGE—Housekeeper for Louise and Gerald Mallow, her tenure, like her employers’, did not last long

CHAPTER 1

IT DIDN’T LOOK like an afternoon to shake a man’s world. It was made up of February’s standard ingredients: piercing dampness, gray plush sky, country landscape frozen under glass. There seemed to be a threat of sleet or snow in the air; for Torrant, turning into Bolton Road at exactly four o’clock, there was nothing more than that.

For some reason he didn’t want to analyze, he had left his taxi at the corner of this road on the outskirts of Greenwich, so that he could approach Number 37 on foot. Three years ago, before he had gone abroad as a correspondent, he would have been astonished at the notion of consciously planning an arrival at Martin Fennister’s house. You might be circumspect with other people; it didn’t occur to you with your best and oldest friend.

But there wasn’t only Martin now, there was Martin’s wife, and he had to keep reminding himself of that. Wives, it was widely recognized, held strong opinions on the subject of old friendships. They went through them briskly, like socks in a basket: this one would do, this one wouldn’t, this one might possibly be made presentable . . .

Was this it? Torrant, trying moodily to attach a face to Martin’s wife, stopped on the asphalt road, gazing at a house set back on a lawn under leafless trees. But it was in modernistic red cedar, so low that it could only be inhabited by flat-headed dwarfs, and in any case it was Number 33. Torrant left Martin’s wife’s face blank, because she looked better that way, and walked on.

Photographs by Fennister, text by Torrant: before Korea and the separate offers that neither of them could turn down, and in spite of the friendship that usually made such arrangements impracticable, they had made a trademark out of that in the country’s leading magazines. They went wherever there was something for Martin’s cameras or Tarrant’s typewriter—to a hospital waiting room, a comer on Broadway, a Florida fruit grove on the first night of frost. What they covered wasn’t news, but they made it news.

Like the twenty years they had known each other, it had been much more than satisfactory.

At Number 35 a chow on a chain gave Torrant a meaning look. The chain was heavy and Torrant gave him an equally cold stare back as he walked past and turned in, twenty yards farther along, at an opening in a thick tall privet hedge.

The Fennister house sat well back from the road on a slight rise of lawn. It was gray, shuttered in white, and there were tubs of something green and glossy flanking the white door above a stone stair railed in black iron. It wasn’t a big house, but it had a look of grace and space under the trees at its back. The lights were on against this bleak afternoon, and with any luck there would be an open fire.

Torrant went up the flagged path, mounted the stone steps and used the knocker, suddenly aghast at the notion that his wire might not have gotten here after all. The knocker fell with a shattering sound in the icy graying afternoon. From the depths of the house, someone began to approach.

Martin—or Martin’s wife?

The white door swung in, and a woman in a red wool dress stood there. Torrant rearranged all his ideas in a twinkling; he had tried a number of faces on Martin’s wife, but he hadn’t tried one like a cheerful rosy child’s, plump and round-eyed under glossy dark bangs. She was staring at him in equal surprise. She said in a tone of amiable reproach, “Oh dear, I thought you were Greg.”

There must be a party, then, which was the last thing he had expected. Torrant told her his