Better off Dead

by Helen McCloy

Genres: Mystery; Traditional Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

After 15 years of living elsewhere under an assumed name - one he has made famous by becoming a successful writer - Frank Bly, aka Stephen Longworth, returns to the town where an attempt was made on his life, and from which he escaped leaving no clues behind.

He confronts several people who have thought him dead. He thinks one of them is the person who tried to kill him. Before he finds the truth, there is more murder, attempted murder and a suicide ...

Release date: March 14, 2014

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 256

Sample

HIS NAME COULD NOT BETRAY HIM. They had known him as Frank Bly. He was Stephen Longworth now. Would anyone in Yarborough remember his face? After
fifteen years?

He turned to look into the beveled pier glass that came with this apartment at the Waldorf. His hair was flecked with steel-gray now, at thirty-two. At seventeen, when he was last in Yarborough,
his hair had been brown, his face plump, his skin tanned by that long summer on the water. His mouth then was a boy’s, loose-lipped, plastic as clay. This was another face, lean and pale,
with a man’s hard mouth. The eyes were still a lively hazel, set wide under slanting brows. Yet they had changed most of all. They had lost a boy’s trust in others and doubt in
self.

It was years since Bly had thought of going back to Yarborough. By the time he had enough money he was no longer interested. Or thought he wasn’t, until he saw her picture in the paper
this morning.

An old picture from the files? Or was Tessie really the same after all these years? No photograph ever did her justice. There was nothing pretty about the shape of her features or the shadows
they cast, and that was all a camera could catch. Her enchantment lay in life itself which is motion—her swift step, her light breathing, the grace of her hands, the movement of intelligence
in her eyes, the various inflections of her voice—and what else? Coloring? Say, rather a sort of bloom or sheen that lay upon her. Instinctively she avoided all soiling of body and spirit. Or
so he had thought until that night when he wondered if she could be the one who had tried to kill him.

Again Bly looked at the newspaper picture. A smudge of printers’ ink on pulpy newspaper. Tessie, who should have been painted on ivory with a brush of gauze. He reread the caption: Mrs.
Llewellyn Vanbrugh of Yarborough. But Tessie’s married name had been Mrs. Geoffrey Vanbrugh. Llewellyn was her own maiden name. With a thrill of shock he realized what the change meant.
She was divorced.

What a fine, wavering hairline held the boundary between love and hate! Did he hate her now, as he hated the others? Was he going back simply to punish all four of them? Or to discover the truth
about Tessie? How had she explained to the world Frank Bly’s sudden absence that next morning? Was he just another unsolved case of disappearance? An open file, gathering dust in the Missing
Persons Bureau of Yarborough Police Department?

He wouldn’t stop at a hotel. He would do in Yarborough as he did in London or Rome, Marrakech or Peking—rent a comfortably furnished house and enter into the life of the place at his
leisure.

He glanced at his watch. Dillon, clerk in the law firm that handled his affairs, should be at his desk by now. Bly put through a call:

“Dillon? . . . Longworth speaking. I want you to get hold of a real-estate agent in Yarborough, Pennsylvania, and find me a furnished house for the winter. . . . Nothing big; just ten or
fifteen rooms and an acre or so, on the east bank of the river outside the town. . . . No, I’ve never been there—I’ve just heard about it.”

He frowned as he put down the telephone. Almost a slip, that. Frank Bly must remember that Stephen Longworth had never been in Yarborough.

There wouldn’t be any of the usual pitfalls involved in the use of a false name. The initials “S.L.” were on all his belongings and it was habit to answer when anyone said
“Steve” or “Mr. Longworth.” He even signed contracts as Stephen Longworth. All New York knew him under that name, including police and reporters. Outside Yarborough there
was no one alive today who had known him as Frank Bly except a few oil prospectors in faraway Persia and his former chief in the OSS.

It was not his incognito alone that gave him confidence. In the last fifteen years he had learned to take care of himself. He smiled a little, remembering the starving Arab who tried to stab him
in Mosul, the frightened, little crook who tried to hold him up in Chicago, the Malay sailor who ran amuck in Bangkok.

He crossed the living-room to one of Marie Laurencin’s wan, delicate portraits and swung the picture back on hinges, revealing a wall safe. Inside, in a shallow drawer, lay two
guns—the revolver he had carried prospecting in Persia, the automatic he had used overseas during the war. A revolver is accurate and therefore merciful, but it is too big to be concealed. An
automatic is inaccurate and therefore merciless, but it can be concealed in the hip pocket of an ordinary suit or even in the palm of the hand. To a crook this advantage outweighs the risk
involved—an automatic may jam.

Bly was neither cop nor crook. Merely a potential murder victim. He could use either, in self-defense.

It was characteristic of the man that he chose the automatic. He had taken risks all his life. And he was not merciful to enemies.

After Bly’s train left Philadelphia he looked up from his book. He wouldn’t have been surprised to see some Yarborough faces. They were always running up to New York for a day or so
of shopping. Covertly he studied the younger women. Had Tessie’s daughter, little Nan, grown up to be. . .