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Title: Clicking red heels
Author: Paul Ernst
Illustrator: Margaret Brundage
Virgil Finlay
Release date: August 7, 2025 [eBook #76644]
Language: English
Original publication: Indianapolis, IN: Popular Fiction Publishing Company, 1937
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CLICKING RED HEELS ***
Clicking Red Heels
By PAUL ERNST
_Nobody knew that Gruin had killed his
sweetheart, but her little red heels tapped
a march of death wherever he went, driving
him to a desperate resolve._
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales June 1937.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
There are two kinds of fear. There is fear of the known--terror of
death or disease or accident, or of social consequences of wrong
actions. This is bad enough, but it is a little thing compared to fear
of the unknown. _That_ is the horror that freezes your brain and stops
your breath in your throat; _that_ is the terror that wrings sweat
in icy drops from your clammy skin. Somewhere near you a black force
lurks, some shadow from a hell incomprehensible to mortal mind, some
_thing_ from another world which looms over you and threatens you with
a menace all the more awful for being unguessable. It is then that you
go mad and babble in your frightful torment of danger--and cannot even
say what that danger is....
Eldon Gruin was in the grip of the first fear. He was to know the
second, too; but at the time he knew only the first, and thought that
bad enough. His fear was of the consequences of a wrong act, and it was
embodied in a girl.
The name of Gruin's fear was Maria José, whose father cut and stitched
leather in the repair of shoes in a dingy basement shop on Eighth
Avenue in New York. Her father was a gargoyle of a man, alone in the
world save for his Maria. But Maria--ah, she was a throw-back to some
Castilian ancestress who supplied inspiration for the fiery men who
made Spain unconquerable.
Maria had great black eyes with ridiculously long lashes, and a
perfect, dainty oval of a face, and red, red lips, and a body that
sculptors in old Greece would have loved, and tiny feet on which--as
a sort of symbol of her mercurial temperament and gayety--were always
red-heeled shoes. They danced, those red-heeled small shoes, in a sort
of gay, mad rhythm of their own as Maria clicked down the street in
them. They had danced into hearts and out again, with an unsatisfying
trill of laughter before they carried their shapely, tempestuous young
owner into Gruin's life.
It was all inconsequential, a thing no sane person should have built
hopes on, Gruin often reflected irritably.
He was thirty-one, fairly wealthy, single, and out for fun. He had
met her at a night club where--till the fat proprietor had tried to
mix intimacy with managership--Maria had danced for a little while
professionally, in twinkling white satin pumps with red heels.
Gruin had made her a few promises, perhaps. A man does when he is
captivated. And Maria had begun to cling. At first it had been
exhilarating. Men looked after her when she clicked up the sidewalk on
those ridiculous, pathetic, appropriate little red heels to meet him.
Gruin, who was not bad-looking, knew that he and Maria made a striking
pair together.
Nice to have a girl like that live only for your whims. Intoxicating
to have such beauty almost abjectly at your command. Exhilarating to
the ego to know that you can turn on such a love-stream. Natural to
forget that it might be difficult to turn that love-stream off again.
It wasn't long before Gruin had found that he was driving a force that
could not be controlled much longer. And then it was annoying. No, more
than that--it was rather terrifying!
So he sat in the Lance Club lounge the afternoon of the evening which
was to be the turning-point in his not very useful young life, and
condemned Maria José.
Any girl with any sense would have known that the affair must be
transient. She was a garlic-eating cobbler's daughter. He was heir to
a modest fortune and owned an old name. Had she seriously thought he
meant to--marry her? She couldn't have! Yet she was certainly acting
like it now.
Gruin shifted in the leather club chair and sipped some of his
cocktail. And he felt faint perspiration steal out on the palms of his
hands as he reviewed Maria's recent conduct.
When she clicked up on her red heels to meet him now, it was more often
than not to burst into tears because she hadn't seen him last night
or the night before--she demanded all of his time. When he talked of
taking a trip, she stared deep into his eyes, tearful no longer, and
advised him not to. There had been a newspaper rumor of his engagement
to a debutante in New York, and----
* * * * *
Gruin sipped his cocktail again. Rather, he gulped it for strength. He
had at first thought it cute and picturesque of Maria that she carried
a little knife in her garter just above her beautiful right knee. He
didn't think it was at all cute now. So Gruin sat in the lounge of the
sleek, quiet club and knew what had to be done.
He had started something with Maria that would never die while she
lived. If he tried to slide out of her life, she would raise a scandal
that would ruin him with his righteous grandfather, from whom all
monetary blessings flowed. If he tried to leave town, she would follow.
If he tried to get it over quickly and finally by marrying some girl of
his own class----
The knife at her knee was small, but it was slim and sharp, and it had
been flashed more than once before his white face.
Living, Maria, the cobbler's daughter, was a constant menace to Eldon
Gruin. So Maria must die.
Gruin shivered a little in the big leather chair in the luxurious
lounge. Murder is a large order, even when you're as sure you can get
away with it as Gruin was. In addition, there was a dim realization
in the back of his mind that the Josés, father and daughter, were
not quite as other people were. There was something a little--well,
mystic--in their vital black eyes.
The one time when Gruin had consented indifferently to meet Maria's
father they had come upon him in the back room of his solitary
sweatshop, talking. Talking--with no one else in the room. Talking to
her mother, his dead wife, Maria had explained seriously, afterward.
And in the man's deep-set eyes had been a flame that killed laughter on
Gruin's lips. Something in the spirit and soul of the Josés, father and
daughter, that set them a little apart from others--something mystic
and unknown....
"Hell," said Gruin, finishing his cocktail and grimacing contemptuously
at himself.
He was a fool. He was imagining things. Maria was just a girl--a woman
whose ardent infatuation had grown to the point where it threatened a
fortune he was to inherit, and his whole future life and good name. He
could imagine his grandfather's disinheritance speech if he presented
the mercurial cobbler's daughter in the gaudy red heels as his wife!
"It's my life or hers," Gruin told himself, to stifle the gray fear of
murder--even so easy and fool-proof a murder as he had in mind.
And with the gray fear lulled by what he chose to call the inevitable,
he had dinner at the club and then went to meet Maria....
He met her at Eighth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street at a little
after half-past eight. She clicked over the sidewalk in her red heels
to the curb, glowing and beautiful in a squirrel coat which he had
indiscreetly called an "engagement" present when he offered it--because
otherwise she would not have accepted it.
"Eldon! My darling! You are late. I have waited and waited."
"I said, eight-thirty," Gruin mumbled.
"I did not want to wait that long. I could not. I have been here since
before eight.... Sweetheart, you haven't said you love me...."
Gruin opened the door of his roadster and she got in.
"Eldon, this waiting and waiting--I cannot understand it. When are we
going to--to stand before Father Mollé, so I will be with you always?"
"Very soon," Gruin said, sliding into gear. "You will not have to wait
for me ever again."
Up Riverside Drive they went, across the Hudson and up the Palisades,
to a place where they had parked often at night during the spring and
summer and fall--a place that had given Gruin courage to do murder by
simplifying it.
There was a spot where you drove off the crowded highway, down half a
block of unfinished dirt road with a low wooden rail at the end. The
rail barred the street-end from a hundred-foot drop down the cliffside
to piles of crushed rock that were to be a new dock soon. And the rail
was very flimsy and a little rotten. And there was a great tree that
grew at the cliff's edge and flung one branch straight over the road so
low that a car's top almost scraped it.
* * * * *
Another car was parked in the road-end when Gruin got there with Maria,
in spite of the December cold. Gruin had to wait for this car to leave.
He put his arm around Maria, meanwhile gazing upward to be sure that he
had stopped the roadster directly under the low branch of the big tree.
"It is cold," said Maria, shivering in spite of her fur. "Would we not
be warmer with the top up?"
"The air tastes good," said Gruin hastily. It would ruin his plan if
the roadster's top were put up. He had to have a clear space above him.
The other car left. He and Maria were alone in the open roadster under
the December stars.
"Are you sick?" said Maria, gazing at him in the dashlight.
"No, no. Not at all," said Gruin, whose teeth showed a tendency to
chatter.
Maria looked deep into his eyes. Something mystic and inexorable in her
black ones....
"Eldon, you are acting very strangely. It is not that you are thinking
of breaking your promise?"
"Of course not," Gruin said hastily.
Maria's eyes still searched his, aflame with infatuation, and with
tempestuous resolve. The light from the roadster's dash showed on
little red heels, on a length of silk stocking that even now could make
Gruin's pulses jerk a trifle, on soft white flesh with a twisted garter
under it--on a slim little dagger! Then slowly her skirt went down
again.
"I think we'd better leave," Gruin said, a trifle thickly. God! this
was the kind of thing you read about in the funny papers. You didn't
dream, at first, that it would force you to murder....
"We'll go," he said hoarsely.
He started the car, and shifted to first gear with the clutch pressed
down. He raced the motor, pulling out the hand throttle on the dash so
that the engine speed would maintain itself.
"Why are you making the engine go so fast?" said Maria.
"The motor's cold--have to warm it up...."
With the words, Gruin stood up suddenly, as nearly erect as the wheel
would let him. His fingers hooked over the overhanging tree branch--and
his foot left the clutch.
[Illustration: "His fingers hooked over the branch and his foot left
the clutch."]
The scream of tires spinning from sudden power of a roaring,
full-throttled motor mingled with Maria José's shriek. The roadster
leaped toward the wooden rail at the edge of the cliff, with Gruin
hanging over the road behind.
Maria's fingers tore at his legs as she sought to clutch him, and his
left heel ground into her face, forcing her back in the seat. The
roadster smashed through the wooden rail, teetered for just an instant
on the edge of the cliff, then plunged forward.
The noise of nearly two tons of metal smashing on rock a hundred feet
below, shocked the night. And Gruin dropped into the road and ran to
the edge. He looked down.
Flame was rising from the wreck far below. He saw a black cascade in
the path of the flame. Maria's hair. He was whimpering a little as he
moved, without being conscious of it. There was a ledge ten feet down,
with a thick bush growing from it. He lowered himself to that, clung to
it, and began shouting for help....
* * * * *
It all went as he had thought it would. The papers got just the right
angle.
A Gruin, scion of one of the city's best-known, if not richest,
families, had been out with some girl named Maria José. He had parked
at the edge of the Palisades. Probably there'd been a little drinking.
When leaving, he had carelessly shifted the gear lever forward into
second instead of forward into reverse. The car had plunged over the
cliff carrying both of them, but he had been thrown out and had caught
a bush which saved his life. The girl had gone on down--to death.
There was unfavorable publicity; there were infuriated lectures
from his grandfather; there was talk of prosecution for criminal
carelessness.
And that was all. With one clever stroke Gruin had gotten rid of
a danger that had grown to intolerable proportions in his life.
Decorously he went to the funeral in which a girl's shattered body was
lowered into the ground. And afterward, Maria's father came up to him.
Gruin looked hastily around. There was no one near, and he was a little
afraid of the somber fire in the man's deep-set black eyes. He had aged
twenty years. He looked like a gargoyle with an iron-gray beard and
white hair.
"You killed Maria," he said, with the words coming slowly and painfully.
"I know." Gruin's face took on a contrite and sympathetic expression.
"A terrible accident----"
"That is not what I mean," said Maria's father. "It was not accident.
_I know._ You killed my girl on purpose. _You murdered her!_"
"No, no! I swear----"
Gruin stopped at the look in his eyes. And José went on, slowly,
painfully, with every word ringing in Gruin's brain.
"I bring her curse on your head. You killed her to be free from her.
But you shall not be free. She will be with you always, beside you,
walking when you walk, stopping when you stop. Always, always beside
you...."
Gruin got away from there, and also, he was sure, away from all that
had threatened him.
There were, when all the smoke had cleared away, no consequences at
all. The charges of criminal carelessness never materialized. His
grandfather, unconcerned with death, finally forgave him for wasting a
few evenings with a cheap unknown named Maria. The world didn't dream
that the tragedy at the cliff was not an accident. He had murdered
successfully....
And then he strolled from his grandfather's house one evening, bent for
an engagement with a girl almost as beautiful as Maria had been and
much more sensible, and a queer thing happened.
As he walked across the curb from door to car--a big new coupé to
take the place of the roadster--he heard someone walking beside him.
At least he thought for a moment that he had heard steps matching his
own. But he saw an instant later that he had been wrong, because when
he turned around, there was no one on the sidewalk. No one within half
a block of him.
* * * * *
He got into the coupé and drove to the apartment of the girl he had the
engagement with. Again, as he walked from curb to building door, he
heard steps sound out beside him--possibly a little behind him, that
matched his steps. But he scarcely thought twice about it, because
there were half a dozen people around him here, and any one of them
could have made the sound.
He had one vague and irrelevant memory as he opened the vestibule door.
It was a memory of Maria and him walking down the street. Striving to
match his moods, Maria also, laughingly, strove to match his strides.
She tried to keep her small red heels clicking on the walk in time with
his steps. He had often teased her about it, taking longer and slower
strides that taxed her smallness more and more till finally she simply
could not keep step with him and would break rhythm with a gay laugh.
Maria and he, walking down the street, with her absurd red heels
clicking in time with his step....
He thrust the picture aside and went up deep-carpeted halls and
stairways to the apartment of the blond with the slightly hard blue
eyes with whom he had a date. And they went to a Broadway club and
danced.
During the evening, Gruin cursed his memory for bringing back the
picture of himself and Maria walking, with her red heels tapping the
time of his steps. Because, after that recollection, his imagination
really began to play tricks on him.
He began to hear heels clicking with each of his steps as he moved. Not
just now and then, but all the time.
When he stood up from the table as the orchestra started, and walked
around to help the blond with her chair, he heard a precise little
heel-click with each stride he took. The click sounded, scarcely
audible, right beside him as he escorted her to the dance floor.
In spite of himself, Gruin thought of those words of Maria's father:
"You killed her to be free from her. But you shall not be free. She
will be with you always...."
The blond smiled up at him.
"Do you want to stand at the edge of the floor all evening? Or do you
want to dance with me?"
He smiled back and they danced. He heard the click only once in a while
over the orchestra's rhythm. And he paid no attention to it. There were
many high heels here, and all high heels make that clicking sound.
He lost himself in the promises in the slightly hard blue eyes just
below the level of his own eyes. And he stopped his ears to the queer
clicking, which sounded as he moved, for the rest of the evening.
But after he had left the blond and returned home, when he was walking
from the garage to his grandfather's house, he couldn't stop his ears
any more. The clicking was too infernally loud in the stillness that
clutches city streets at three in the morning. And there wasn't a
person within blocks that he could blame the noise on.
Click, click, click came the sound, as he walked along through the
night. Exactly as though a woman's high heels clicked beside him. High,
_red_ heels....
He stopped to light a cigarette which he thrust between disdainful,
half-sneering lips. And the clicking stopped. He went on toward his
grandfather's house--and the light, precise tapping continued, a click
for every step he took, like a ghost-thing marching in step beside him.
An unseen ghost-thing....
"Hell take it!" he said angrily aloud in the night. "I suppose this is
a sample of what they call remorse. Well I'll be damned if I----"
* * * * *
The light was on in the house. That was strange, at this hour of
the night. Gruin hurried to the door--with the neat, small clicking
increasing as his steps quickened. His grandfather opened the door
before he could insert his key--and the old man was icily angry.
"Eldon," he said, "I want to speak to you, in the library."
Gruin followed him to the room in which he had received most of the old
boy's rebukes. It was a psychological wood-shed where a verbal strap
was applied to him. But this time the strap was unjustified to the
point of being bizarre.
"You have tried my patience to its extreme limit," the old man said,
ice-blue eyes smoldering. "You have achieved your final indiscretion.
How dare you bring a girl to this house and sneak her in when my back
is turned? And above all, a girl named Maria--after what happened a few
weeks ago? To this house!"
Gruin's bewilderment was complete.
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"You deny you brought some girl to this house, to your room, secretly?"
"I certainly do. I've never----"
"Come upstairs, Eldon," the old man interrupted grimly.
Gruin followed him from the library up to the second floor of the big
house. And as he moved, some unseen thing seemed to move beside him.
Very softly, almost furtively, the clicking tapped in rhythm with his
step. They got to Gruin's suite, a big bedroom and bath and a small
den, on the second floor. And there the old man pointed. He pointed
toward a great leather chair by a flat-topped desk. There was nothing
in the chair.
Gruin turned with a puzzled frown to his grandfather. And then, without
going to the chair, he caught the odor that emanated from it--a faint
perfume that filled the den--an odor of hyacinth.
Maria José had always used that scent. Hyacinth.
"Some woman has been in this room," the old man accused sternly. "The
scent proves it. And her name was Maria. _That_, scribbled no doubt
idly while she sat with you here, proves it!"
Gruin walked to his writing-desk. He wasn't quite aware of how he got
there. He knew only that in a minute he stood by the desk looking down
at it--at a torn scrap of paper on the blotter--at one word, faintly
scrawled on the paper.
"Maria."
And it was Maria José's handwriting.
At the pallor on his grandson's face, the old man promptly forgot all
charges of ribaldry. He caught Eldon Gruin and helped him to another
chair, and then called the butler and a doctor....
Gruin was a strong-minded person. You have to be to plan and execute
deliberate, cold-blooded murder. It wasn't long before a logical
explanation occurred to him, and he drove to the shop of Maria's father.
"You broke into our house," he accused. "You set a stage in my
room--dropped perfume of the kind your daughter used on my chair, and
wrote her name on a scrap of paper, imitating her handwriting, on my
desk."
He had come there confident in his conviction. But that conviction
slowly faded as he looked into José's eyes. Dark eyes, smoldering,
mystic, so like Maria's eyes.
"You know it was not I who was there," José said in his pedantic,
accented English.
Just that. Nothing more. Gruin turned and almost ran from the basement
shop. And as he hurried, beside him hurried unseen little heels that
clicked and clicked with each swift step he took. They followed him out
the door, a little behind him as he rushed, and to his car. And there
they stopped.
But he thought he saw the seat cushion beside him give a little with an
unseen weight as he drove away....
* * * * *
A strong-minded person in good health--that was Eldon Gruin. There was
no insanity in the Gruin family. Yet in the days that followed he began
more and more to fear, with a mighty fear, that he was going mad. For
always he heard the little heel taps beside him as he walked, stopping
when he stopped, beginning again when he went on. And always in his
brain was José's curse, "_She will be with you always, beside you,
walking when you walk, stopping when you stop. Always, always beside
you._..."
So Gruin came to know the worst fear the known holds for us: fear of
madness. But that fear did not last long. It very speedily deepened
into that last ultimate horror--of the _un_known--which can prey on a
man's mind.
Mad because he seemed to hear the weird clicking of heels beside him?
_Seemed_ to hear?
He went into the library one night when his grandfather sat at his
desk, reading. It was late, and the house was very still. The old man's
senses were excellent. He didn't become aware of Gruin's entrance for
a moment, but then he glanced up quickly, with a slightly surprized
expression.
"Oh," he said, carelessly. "You're alone."
"Of course. Why?"
"It sounded for a moment as though there were two of you," the old man
said. "A sort of clicking. It must have been your hard heels against
the floor."
Gruin managed to get out of there without letting his grandfather see
the chaos in his brain. But he staggered like a drunken man after
leaving the library.
"Sounded as though there were two of you ... must have been your hard
heels against the floor." God! Gruin didn't wear hard leather heels.
Every shoe he owned had rubber on it.
"A sort of clicking...."
The clicking of Maria José's small red heels as they twinkled unseen
beside him! Maria José, who had died in flame and ruin at the bottom of
the cliff!
He was _not_ mad, then. The sound he had thought to hear in madness,
actually was there to be heard. And then Gruin knew that ultimate
horror which comes with the unknown. For if the sound really was there,
perceptible enough for others to hear it, the cause of the sound must
be there too!
A dead girl walking beside him! A thing from some unknown sphere!
"_Walking when you walk, stopping when you stop_----"
"I walk with death!" Gruin told himself, shuddering, with the icy sweat
of horror on his forehead.
Red heels clicking beside him, as small, unseen feet kept time with
his. As Maria had kept time when they walked down the street together.
With one difference. Maria, alive, had been unable to match his strides
when he increased them to their full masculine length. Maria, dead,
could do that. He caught himself crazily shortening and lengthening
his step as he walked down the street--with people turning to look
curiously after him. But no matter how he walked, the unseen little
heels beside him clicked in even pace.
Walking with death. Escorting a dead girl wherever he went. Sometimes
Gruin talked with her, damning her, whispering curses, telling her to
get back to the grave from which she had come. And more people began to
turn to look after him as he walked the streets.
His grandfather and his friends began asking him what was wrong, and he
couldn't tell them. His grandfather sent him to a great psychiatrist,
and Gruin couldn't tell him what was wrong, either. Confession as
to what was wrong with him lay too dangerously close to a murder
confession.
Red heels clicking always with him as he walked, stopping when he
stopped, beginning again when he moved ... the red heels of Maria who
had been sent by him to death over the edge of a cliff....
* * * * *
He drove in his coupé to the street-end where the roadster had crashed
over the wooden barrier and plummeted to piles of rock below, while he
hung from the branch over the road.
There was no wooden barrier there now. There was a concrete wall,
hastily erected after the "accident." It was a thick wall. It would
stand any shock. Or--would it?
Gruin got out of the coupé and went to the wall. As he strode, beside
him sounded the quick, half-dancing, half-marching accompaniment.
Gruin shuddered, as much with cold as with ever-present horror. He
weighed only a hundred and twenty pounds, as against his former hundred
and eighty, and the winter wind seemed to go through his coat and to
his bones.
The wall was pretty solid. He walked along it. And, click, click,
click, click, walked the unseen Thing beside him.
"Solid," he said aloud, chuckling a little and then jerking his head
around to see if anyone had heard him. "Not so easy to send anybody
over the edge here, now."
He stood on top of the wall and stared down. The piles of crushed stone
were still there; it had been too cold for work on the dock.
"That's where you went, damn you," he mumbled to the Thing in the
phantom red heels that clicked beside him. Beside him--even as he
walked down the wall with nothing but thin air on either side.
He began to chuckle again, aloud, craftily.
"Nobody's ever suspected, except your father. And he can't hurt me any.
Nobody knows I killed you."
He stepped down from the wall. And beside him a click sounded, a
little louder than usual, the click of a red heel coming down from the
two-foot step from the top of the wall.
"_Damn you!_" Gruin shouted. And then he pressed his hand to his lips.
On the highway, several blocks away, a hitch-hiker stared curiously at
him, then went on his way, signaling for rides.
"Shouldn't be out here," Gruin muttered laboriously.
He started for the coupé, parked a dozen yards from the new concrete
wall. Dully he strode toward it. And as he walked, with each step came
the accompanying small tap of little red heels, almost coinciding with
his step on the ice of the road.
"Better not come out here again," he mumbled, "I'm safe now. But
somebody might see me here and think it was funny--might start
investigating the accident again."
He got into the coupé, settling laboriously behind the wheel. And then,
as his eyes strayed sideways, his teeth met through his upper lip.
Always when he got into his car--which was often, as he drove a great
deal to save walking and hearing the tapping heels beside him--he
strove to keep his eyes from going sideways, to the cushion beside him.
And always he was unsuccessful.
And always he saw the same thing--saw the seat cushion give a little as
though someone had sat down there, next to him.
He saw it now.
"Damn you--damn you----" he cried brokenly.
The motor of the coupé was thrumming, responding to the mechanical
touch of his foot to the starter. The depression in the seat beside him
shifted a little.
"_You'll go back to hell where you came from!_"
Like another person, Gruin heard those words keen from his lips. Like
another person he heard the motor roar into full-throated power as his
foot jammed down on the accelerator.
"No," he breathed, as his hand slid the gear-shift lever into first.
Like another person, pleading, remonstrating--and being unheeded. "No!"
The motor bellowed, the coupé's tires screamed as they felt full and
sudden power applied. The car leaped forward.
"_Oh, my God, no_----"
The car, nearly two tons of steel, hit the concrete wall with all the
power of the great motor, in first gear, behind it--hit the wall,
crumpled, then crunched on through. The thunder of the coupé's crash on
the rock far below shocked the late February afternoon....
* * * * *
Remorse, they called it. Eldon Gruin was so weighed down by the
carelessness that had taken a life that he had gone to the scene of the
accident and committed suicide by driving his car over the same cliff.
That was what was in the papers. What was not in them was something
else; something that puzzled detectives for a while, till they gave it
up as irrelevant, since they had no knowledge of the little red heels
of Maria that had clicked beside Gruin from the time of her death.
That was, the curious thing found in each heel of each shoe that
Eldon Gruin owned--a little sliding weight that had been inserted and
re-covered by some deft cobbler. They didn't move when the shoes were
handled, unless they were shifted briskly up and down as a person
walking would move them. Then they made small clicking noises in unison
with the movements....
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