“What do you mean?”
“The woman’s husband is going to bring suit. She was twenty-four. There’s a child. In these actions they usually base damages on life expectancy, so much a year for her services as homemaker and mother and so on. It’s hard to guess what a jury will do, but certainly any judgment would be way over ten thousand. The husband will bring a civil action. The police report establishes the blame pretty clearly. It will be at least two years before it can be scheduled, but — well, the woman is dead. I’ll defend as well as I can. I’ll try to keep the judgment as low as I can, but that will depend on finding some way to bring out that she — well, she wasn’t exactly a savory character. Whatever the insurance doesn’t cover, you and Johnny are going to have to pay off.”
“I just don’t understand all this — believe me — I don’t. You just sit there, Tom, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, and you have Johnny all written off before you could possibly have heard his side of it.”
He looked indignant. “But Lester made his investigation. And I went up there three days ago and poked around. And I’ve seen the accident report the troopers made out. It’s open-and-shut, Jane Ann.”
“Not to me, it isn’t.”
“Now I don’t understand you, Jane Ann.”
“Johnny drove up there to Hartsville to see a Mr. T. J. Arlington. He was up there once before to see him too. He thought he’d be home in the evening. He phoned me at five o’clock from Mr. Arlington’s office. He sounded sort of rueful and annoyed. He said they had some more figures to go over, and Mr. Arlington wanted to show him one more tract of land in the morning and wanted to take him out to dinner when they finished in the office. It was a horrible night, Tom. Foggy and raining, and you know how miserable that road is, two-lane asphalt and all those curves and hills. So he said he thought he would buy a toothbrush and hole up in the Village Motel, and would I please phone Don in the morning and tell him. He said he thought he could probably take a look at the tract and be on the road by nine thirty the next morning. Those are facts too, Tom. I know he did work later in that office, and he did have dinner with Mr. Arlington, and he did get a room in the Village Motel.”
Tom Haskell leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips, his expression troubled. “I don’t want to argue with you. Believe me, I’m not trying to condemn Johnny for anything. I’m his lawyer. And I have to go along with what has been shown to be true. He was in a roadside joint called the Mountaineer until one in the morning, and he left there with the Mannix woman and drove away with her. He had been drinking. He drove south with her, and wrecked the car seventeen miles this side of Hartsville, killing Shirley Mannix and coming very, very close to killing himself. From the skid marks they estimate he was going between seventy and eighty when he hit that curve.”
She stared at him. “Do you know what you do? You speak about Johnny as if he were some other kind of man. He never drinks very much, and when he has his two or sometimes three drinks, he never shows it. And he’s twice as careful in the car when he’s had a drink. I just don’t see how you can act as if you have it all figured out when you haven’t even heard Johnny’s side of it yet.”
He nodded. “That’s certainly fair enough. I am going to talk to Johnny, of course. And I’m going to help in every way I can. What I want you to understand, though, is that I don’t see what Johnny can say that is going to make very much difference one way or the other.”
“Tom, all I ask is that you listen to him with an open mind. Don’t condemn him in advance.”
He smiled at her and shook his head and said, “Now I know what they mean by savage loyalty.”
“I’m Johnny’s wife. But I didn’t mean to sound savage.”
The talk with Tom Haskell distressed her. In another context, it all seemed too much like the sneery little hints in the newspaper account of the fatal accident. Married man with somebody else’s wife.
And his remark about savage loyalty stayed with her. He had looked at her as if he meant stupid rather than savage. But how could you explain the very personal and very private things to a casual friend like Tom Haskell?
Like that dreadful occasion that Johnny had mockingly called the “Affair of the Merry Widow”...
Her morale hadn’t been very good. Tess was five then, and Linda three, and Jane Ann was seven months pregnant with Skipper. She had trouble controlling her weight, and she was nauseated as she had never been when she was carrying the girls. It seemed to her the longest nine months in all of history. Taking care of the house and the girls in that condition left her depressed and exhausted. And vulnerable. To make matters worse, Johnny was working long hours on a special project. The company had made extensive loans to a contractor, he explained. The man had died suddenly and left things in a tangle. He was working to get things straightened out to the point where the contracting firm could fulfill its obligations and pay off on the loans. Many nights he would not be home until after midnight.
The phone calls were what started the insecurity. She would answer, and there would be silence and then a click as someone hung up. She kept thinking about those phone calls, but said nothing about them, and began to look for other clues. Was this not the traditional time for infidelity-seventh year of marriage?
And then there was the new shirt. One of his good ones disappeared, and there was a new one in the laundry. So he had worn one out of the house and come home wearing a different one. But why? Lipstick? And then a bobby pin on the floor of the car.
She had not wanted to look for such things, or think about them. But they kept happening. The sickening little clues, like the envelope she found in his topcoat pocket. Small, blue, scented, tom open, empty, with his first name written on the outside of it in a dainty script.
He came home at eleven one evening. She sat in the living room. He seemed tired. He did not have much to say about his day, and he did not seem to be interested in what kind of day she had had.
It was all too much, and she held herself stiffly and said, “I think it’s time you told me about her.”
He stared at her. “What?”
“Who is she. Johnny? How much does she mean to you?”
His expression was odd. She tried to read guilt into it but could not. He took her hand.
“Don’t you even know who I am?” he asked her gently.
“I... I thought I did.”
“I don’t know what started all this, Jane Ann, but that isn’t as important as what could make it start. It would have to be partly my fault, I guess. I’m trying not to be full of outraged indignation. Wounded innocence.” He frowned. “What part of our marriage is so bad that I would have to go looking for something to make up for it?”
“I didn’t think...”
“I love you. There’s nothing I have to prove. I love you, and God knows I don’t feel deprived. You are about seven or eight women, all earthy.”
“Except now I—”
“Hush. You don’t feel very good, I know, but you look lush and abundant and marvelous. Honey, jealousy is a dreadful disease. It eats people. Let’s just say I am worthy of your trust. Now and forever. Now, what in the world started you off on this?”
The explanations made her feel ashamed, but it was true that it was in part his fault. He was being pursued by the widow of the man whose business affairs he was trying to straighten out. He had spoken to Don Jennsen about it; Don had suggested that he depend on fast footwork until the job was done, because if she became offended, it would increase their chance of loss. Johnny’s mistake had been in not telling Jane Ann about it. Normally he would have, but he had thought that it might worry her. He had been trying politely, deftly to discourage the woman. The envelope was from a note she had left for him at the construction office. He had ruined a shirt while inspecting a piece of heavy equipment and had merely forgotten to mention it. He had taken several calls from the woman at home, about business matters. Certainly Jane Ann remembered those. He could not explain why she would hang up without identifying herself when Jane Ann answered. And he suggested that the black bobby pin might belong to one of her friends rather than one of his.