I.O.U. – Three Stories by Cornell Woolrich

Book Details

I.O.U. – Three stories of people on the run and what they do for love.

But my reason for choosing “I.O.U.” is not so dramatic. I like
this story above all others that I have written because:

1. It is about a family situation. (I prefer this kind of story to
   the dashing, high adventure type.)
2. It is about a father-teenage-daughter relationship (my
   favorite family situation).
3. It poses a very serious problem: a choice between gratitude
   and duty-a difficult choice for anyone to make.
   

— Cornell Woolrich

I. O. U.
A Choice Between Gratitude And Duty

The Hunted
The girl came running into the room at the geisha house when Hollinger was lying there attempting to get high on saki. He noticed two things, first: her breathtaking beauty — and the blood all over her dress.…
A five chapter novelette.

The Town Says Murder
Janet had stepped out of his life ten years before, and he’d heard nothing about her since—until he read that she’d been indicted for murder…
A twenty-three chapter novella.

Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968) is one of the most highly regarded writers of mystery and suspense of all of the writers from the pulp fiction era.

Under his pseudonym “William Irish”, Woolrich wrote the story It Had to Be Murder, published in Dime Detective Magazine (February 1942), which was the source of the 1954 Alfred Hitchcock movie Rear Window. François Truffaut filmed Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black in 1968, and followed that the next year by filming Waltz into Darkness as Mississippi Mermaid.

Files:

1. Woolrich-IOU-ThreeStories.epub

Excerpt: I.O.U.

I. O. U.

A Choice Between Gratitude And Duty

TO THE OTHERS IN THE BACK room, Second-Grade Detective Clinton Sturgess said, “So long, fellows—see you tomorrow.” He went down the hall, past the sergeant’s desk, out of the precinct house and into the velvety softness of an August dusk. He went around the corner to the garage, got his old car out. He swung it up the ramp to the street, stopped long enough to light a cigarette, exhaled an enjoyable “Aahh!” and started homeward, whistling.

It was a swell night. It was a swell life. He was thirty-five, had a nice wife and a nice kid, he was a second-grader and he wasn’t stopping there. He had it all lined up before him, step by step: first-grade, lieutenant, captain, inspector.

He was out on the lake shore drive now, with its lights curving around before him in a long vista and the lake gray-violet in the twilight.

He was whistling My Blue Heaven, It was old but it stayed with him, and the words in his mind fitted his contentment:

A turn to the right—
A little white light—

He made the turn (but it was to the left) and climbed the steep grade that led to their house. The development was called Lakeview Heights because it was strung along the top of this bluff. He parked at the curb instead of backing into the garage because he’d decided to take his family to the movies. He sounded the horn, and the porch light went on and they both came out in a flurry, his wife just to the lower step, the kid flying out all the way to swing from his neck as he stepped from the car and caught her.

The kid was pretty. Everybody said so. She’d been on loan to them from heaven for seven years now, and each time he could see the place she’d come from just by looking at her.

“Get your things ready. We’re going to the movies.”

The flurry became a whirlwind. His wife said, “I’ve got supper waiting for you on the table. We’re finished already. Barbara, come in and get your hat.”

He turned the car around to face downhill, to save time leaving, and braked once more. The kid came racing out past him a second time as he got up to the porch. “I’ll wait for you in the car!” she cried gaily.

“All right—but don’t monkey with the horn now.”

He wasn’t even sitting down yet, he was crouched above a chair in the act of pulling it forward under him, and his wife was passing him a plate across the table. He was in a straight line with the porch door. He happened to turn his head that way, and there was something wrong. There was a blankness out there where there shouldn’t have been. He could see the opposite side of the street.

His chair cracked over and he was running through the living room to the porch. Behind him a plate shattered on the floor and the SOS of his wife’s heels came tapping after him.

He could still hear the whisper of the car’s going, receding on the hushed night air. No engine. So then he knew what had happened, and the knowledge nearly felled him, like a crowbar across the top of his head, even before he got out to the porch and could see.

Street lamps made it bright all the way down, all the way to where—the lake was. The car was going straight as an arrow. It didn’t swerve at all. Its momentum held it gripped too tightly. A little arm was thrust briefly out at the side, then withdrawn again.

There wasn’t a sound behind him. Somehow he knew, without looking, that his wife had fallen senseless there on the walk. But he was already yards down that fearful incline. He ran down that hill like nothing that had ever run down it before.

It was all over so quickly, so soundlessly. He had been gaining on the car, but the foot of the street came too quickly. Horror such as a man sees only once in a lifetime was fleetingly there before his eyes, then gone again. But never quite gone again until the day he’d die. For the car reached Lakeshore Drive, swept across its triple-lane width, unerringly hurtled the pitifully low pedestrian parapet—it was such a new development, and it would have hidden the beauties of the lake to have built it any higher—cleared the barrier almost by the unaided resiliency of its own tires and springs, with a flaring of dust and a crumbling along the top, and was gone from sight.

It was as instantaneous as the exposure of a snapshot. Two of the limestone blocks along the upper tier, a car’s width apart, had been knocked out by the wheels, giving a battlement effect. But the spray that had risen on the other side never seemed to finish falling back into place.

There was a screaming of brakes off to one side of him as he darted across the roadway, and some kind of a pitching, swerving beam of light flicked at him.

A horrid heaving was there below him as he mounted one of the loosened blocks. The high-posted driveway lights behind him played up a single blister-like bubble formed there in the water, a bubble that refused to burst, that kept renewing itself from below. He didn’t bother about his coat. He aimed himself face forward into those roiling eddies, and as he went down the thought that he couldn’t swim was with him, but that didn’t matter.

He went in wrong, with a spanking blow across the chest and stomach. He went down a little way, arms groping before him—toward nothing. Then he was being pushed up again, and he didn’t know how to make himself go down any farther. He didn’t know how not to breathe either, and long before he could get up again he was nothing but a mass of convulsive muscular spasms, drawing in destruction at every inhalation. He broke the surface briefly, but he didn’t know how to take advantage of it. He was already dying himself now, as he went under again.

Excerpt From: Cornell Woolrich. “I.O.U.”