“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Will you come in, please?”
I went up across the porch and into the cottage. Dimly in the darkness, I could see Laura Quintin standing beside an easy chair near the bed. In the chair was the slumped figure of a man who was, from his size, either Dan Grimes or Ira Boniface.
“It’s Dan Grimes,” she said. “He’s passed out.”
“What’s he doing in your cottage?”
“He got sick at the party and went outside. Afterward he came in here and passed out in the chair. I just found him a few minutes ago.” Her curiously flat voice had suddenly a thin edge of disgust. “He always gets drunk and sick when he tries to drink.”
I had been aware of something unpleasant in the air of the room, and I recognized it now for the faint and sour stench of vomit. Grimes, in his sickness, had soiled his shirt.
“Do you want me to get him back to his own cottage?” I said.
“No. Just help me put him on the bed. He can spend the night here.”
“What about you?”
“Jerry and I can take his cottage.”
“You needn’t help move him. I can do it alone.”
“No. You’re kind enough to help at all. Just take his feet, please.”
“He’s a heavy man. You’d better let me do it alone.”
“I’m quite capable, thank you. I’m really much stronger than I look.”
As if to settle the matter without any more delay, she leaned over the chair and slipped her hands under Grimes’s slack arms at the shoulders.
“You’ve got the heavy end,” I said. “Come take the feet.”
“I’m quite all right.”
So I took his feet, and we carried him between us to the bed and put him on it. She must have been, as she claimed, much stronger than she looked, for he was very heavy, dead weight, and she carried him well. We left him on the bed and went out onto the porch. I offered her a cigarette, which she took. In the light of the match that I struck for her, her face looked pale and slightly drawn, set in lines of fastidious distaste.
“Thank you for helping me,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “I only wonder why you bothered with him.”
“He was drunk. I put him on the bed, that’s all.”
“Your bed. In your cottage. It will be an inconvenience, at least.”
“No inconvenience is too great to suffer for Dan Grimes. Haven’t you heard? People will do anything to gain his favor. If you don’t believe me, ask Jerry.”
“You don’t approve of Grimes?”
“He’s an unclean animal,” she said, “who corrupts everyone he touches.”
She spoke quietly with no inflection of anger. It was as if anger had burned itself out in its own excesses, leaving only a kind of sodden acceptance and bitterness. I said good night and turned to leave, and she spoke again.
“Please don’t go,” she said.
I stopped and turned back. She lifted a hand, touched me on the arm, dropped the hand again to her side. The gesture was a kind of appeal.
“It’s late,” I said. “It’s almost one o’clock.”
“I couldn’t possibly sleep,” she said. “I feel as if I’ll never sleep again. I’d be grateful if you’d stay with me. I don’t think I could bear being alone.”
“Your husband will be looking for you.”
“No. He’s been drinking heavily. He’ll go to sleep just as soon as the others leave. I’ll go tell him to stay in Dan’s cottage for the rest of the night. Will you wait for me?”
“I’ll wait.”
We went outside together, off the porch, and I waited in the darkness under the trees while she went alone into the middle cabin. The radio was not playing. I could hear no more laughing, no talking. The party, I thought, was over. In about three minutes Laura Quintin returned.
“All right?” I said.
“All right.”
“Shall we go down to the dock?”
“No. I think I’d like some coffee. Is there someplace we can go?”
“The places on the highway are closed by this time. There’s an all-night restaurant in the nearest town.”
“Will you take me there?”
“If your husband doesn’t mind.”
“He doesn’t. The truth is, I told him you were taking me for coffee and not to expect me back for a while. He’ll go to sleep on Dan’s bed when Ira and Rita leave.”
“In that case,” I said, “let’s go.”
We walked past the Boniface cottage to my own, and I put her in the front seat of my Ford and went around and got in beside her, and we drove down the lake road to the highway and south on the highway about fifteen miles to the nearest town, which made a total distance, lake road and highway together, of about eighteen miles. She sat all the way on the far side of the seat by the door, her body slumped and her pale head against the back of the seat and her eyes staring at the roof of the car above the windshield as if she could see through it to the stars in the sky beyond. Now and then I turned my head and looked at her, and I began slowly to see and feel the beauty of her, not lush and belting beauty like that of Rita Boniface, but a stark, high-fashion beauty that a man, once he was aware of it, might never forget. She didn’t speak once in the eighteen miles.
In the all-night restaurant, which wasn’t much of a restaurant in a town that wasn’t much of a town, we sat across from each other in a booth and had good coffee, and finally she began to talk, or it seemed she did, but afterward I realized that she mostly listened to the talking of John Laird. I told her how I happened to be running a fishing resort, and why I liked what I did and didn’t particularly want to do anything else, none of which was important to anyone but me, and it wasn’t long before early dawn when we left the restaurant and started back for the lake. She was more relaxed then, and I thought there was more color in her hollow cheeks beneath high bones. She sat close to me in the seat and rested her head on my shoulder, and I liked the feel of it there, the nearness of her pale hair. On the lake road, just before we reached the cottages, she sat up and kissed me lightly and said, “Thanks for humoring me, John Laird,” and I said, “It’s part of the service,” and then, in a minute, we were pulling into the area beside my cottage, and Ira Boniface was standing there waiting for us in the first faint light of the day.
That was the little bit of good in all of it, the short time with Laura Quintin, and it was the end of the good when we saw Boniface. I knew it even before we got out of the Ford, before Boniface spoke.
“Where the devil have you been?” he said.
“To town for coffee,” I said.
“You were gone long enough,” he said.
“We took our time,” I said.
“Never mind that now,” he said. “Laura, you’d better go to your cottage. The one Dan had.”
“I know which one,” she said.
She looked at him for a moment after speaking, as if trying to decide whether to go or not, and then she shrugged and walked across the slope to the cottage and went in.
“What’s the matter?” I said.
“Did you see Dan Grimes last night after we got back from eating?”
“Yes. He was drunk. Passed out in the Quintins’ cottage.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There’s nothing much to tell. He’d been sick. He went into the cottage and passed out in a chair. Laura Quintin found him there, and I helped her lay him on the bed.”
“How’d you happen to be around?”
“I’d been down to the point. On the way back I passed the cottage, and she heard me. She called me in to help.”
“All right.” He took a deep breath and held it and then released it slowly. “Dan’s dead.”
“Dead? You mean he died after we left him?”
“He was killed. Someone murdered him.”
I had felt in my bones that things were going bad, but not this bad, and I stood there for a long minute staring at him and trying to make some kind of sense of what he’d said, and then, when I had, the first thing I thought afterward was what a hell of a bad break it was for my little camp that I’d worked so hard to build into a good place for good people to come fishing.