“It could be very important. How long do I have to wait to find out?”
“I really couldn’t say. A few weeks, months, even years sometimes.”
“I wish you would be more specific.”
“I wish I could be, Mrs. Foley. These mental side effects are never completely predictable.”
She glowered at him. “What if you had to find out and he couldn’t remember?”
He shrugged mildly. “I suppose, when he’s strong enough, there are some things worth trying. Hypnosis, if he’s a good subject. I’ll look into it.”
By the following Tuesday, Johnny’s improvement was dramatic. He could remember more of it — seeing Arlington, phoning her, renting the motel room. There was a vague memory of having dinner with Arlington at the Log Cabin, but that was all.
Her chair was close to his bed. The head of the bed had been rolled up so that he was almost in a sitting position. She held his hand, and he looked at her and said, “You’d better tell me what’s going on, Jane Ann.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t kid me, honey. I had an accident. You’ve been anxious to find out how much I remember. You’d better tell me all of it.”
“Not just yet, Johnny.”
He gave her a tired smile. “It’d better be now, because something keeps going around and around in my head, and now I’m at the point where not knowing is maybe worse than knowing. A nurse out in the hall was saying something about me, about me and the accident. She said the woman was killed. What woman? Tell me, honey.”
“I don’t know all of it. But I... I can tell you what I do know.”
She told him. She tried to temper it, but the ugly edges of the known facts poked out through the softer fabric of her voice. In the middle of it he scowled and closed his eyes and shook his head slowly, in agony or in disbelief. When she was finished he opened his eyes and looked toward her and said. “It’s something you read in a paper, happening to somebody else.”
“Does her name mean anything? Shirley Mannix?”
“Nothing definite. It has a very slight familiarity, as if I’d known it a long time ago. I can’t put a face to it.”
“And the place called the Mountaineer?”
“Oh, I’m sure I’ve seen that place. It’s about three miles this side of Hartsville. I’ve seen it but I’ve never been in it.” He tried to smile. “That’s not exactly right, is it? Apparently I have been in it.”
“They say you were there, dear.”
“And people actually saw me leave with that woman?”
“Yes.”
He put his forearm across his eyes. “What is it drunks say? I hope I had a good time?”
“You’ll have to remember what really happened.”
“Maybe it will be just as well if I can’t.”
She reached out and took his arm away from his eyes. “Johnny, don’t say things like that. You mustn’t.”
“A date with Shirley Mannix.”
“Not the way it sounds! Not the way they’re trying to make it sound, Johnny! Don’t say it and don’t think it. When you remember, we’ll know what happened.”
He freed his hand and touched her cheek with his fingertips. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“Johnny, can I give you all the rest of the bad news?”
“Remember the man who was so kindhearted that he docked his little dog’s tail a piece at a time?” He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his hospital gown.
She told him about the suit, about what Tom Haskell had told her and what Lester Maynard thought the insurance company would do.
“That makes a nice golden future,” he said bitterly. “Lester was after me to bump it to twenty-forty. But I economized.”
“You sound as if the suit were lost!”
“But if I killed — if that woman was k—” His gray eyes went wide and shocked, as if he seemed to realize for the first time the implication of having been responsible for the death of someone. He put his hand over his eyes. “Dear Lord,” he whispered.
She looked at him for a long moment and then said, “You might as well have all of it right now.” Angrily, bitterly, she told him about Don Jennsen and his decision.
“Don’t be too rough on Don, Jane Ann. He has to handle it this way. Man gets drunk, smashes his car, kills a woman, he’s a liability.”
“But he just assumes that’s what happened!”
“What else can anybody assume?”
She stared at him. “What do I have to do? I fight everybody in the world. Do I have to fight you too?”
Suddenly all of it was too much. She bent and buried her face against the bed, muffling the raw sobs.
He stroked her hair and made soothing sounds. “You’ve had this to handle all by yourself,” he said.
She straightened up. “I’m t-tough enough, darling. More than you know.”
His eyes were grave and steady. “And what if it turns out to be just what it looks like?”
“But it isn’t!”
“What if?” he insisted.
“Maybe I can be tough enough for that too. I don’t know. I just don’t know, Johnny.”
At eleven that night in the quiet kitchen she said to Irene, after a long silence, “I’m going up there.”
“What, dear?”
“To Hartsville. He can’t remember. Maybe he won’t ever remember. But maybe somebody else will.”
“But it has been investigated, Jane Ann.”
She made a face. “Yes. By experts. State police, lawyers, insurance people. And we read about it in the paper, didn’t we? If you can get along without the car. I’ll go early tomorrow. And keep going back until I find out what this was all about.”
“You’re welcome to the car, of course, but I think this is a mistake. What can you tell those people?”
“It’s what they can tell me.”
It was a misty, overcast day, cool in the hill country. Vacation traffic was heavy on the narrow, winding road. The accident had happened three miles north of the village of Dowellburg. There was a state police barracks within the village limits, consisting of a headquarters cottage, a large garage and a radio tower. The man in charge remembered that Trooper Vernon Gyce had handled that particular accident. Gyce was out on routine patrol. She asked if she could see their file copy of the report. He said he could not let unauthorized persons see official reports. She asked if being the wife of the driver of the car gave her any kind of authorization. He said he was sorry, but that’s the way things were. And so she waited, sitting in a chair by a window, turning the pages of old magazines.
“He won’t come off shift until four in the afternoon. Mrs. Foley.” the man said after a while.
She smiled up at him. “I’ll wait, thank you.” She looked back at her magazine.
Forty minutes later he came over to her again and said, “I ordered Gyce to come in and talk to you. He’ll be here in maybe twenty minutes.”
“I’m very grateful to you.”
He flushed and said. “Just don’t take up too much of his time.”
Trooper Vernon Gyce was very tall, tanned and broad-shouldered. He came in, creaking and glittering and clinking, and muttered to the man in charge for a few moments. Then he took off his hat and came over and sat in the neighboring chair.
“I’m Trooper Gyce.” he said. “Is there any way I may be of assistance to you, ma’am?”
“Well, I thought that if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, you might show me where it happened and sort of... explain it to me. It isn’t far from here. I understand.”
Gyce went back and murmured for a time to the man in charge, and a few minutes later she was beside him in the gold-and-gray sedan, rolling north out of the village.