After a long silence he said, “Holy Jumping Nellie!” His tone was husky.
“I was doing it to save Bob’s life,” she said.
“Your husband? But he’s dead!”
“I found out yesterday that he’s alive, Clint. Alive and in prison.” She laughed, dangerously close to hysteria. “Not that it makes any difference, now. Now he will die.”
He shook her hard but she could not stop laughing. He slapped her sharply, and she was able to stop. He walked her across the compound, unlocked a door, thrust her inside, turned on a light. The small room contained a chair, table, double bed, and bookshelf.
“Please wait here,” he said gently. “I’ll be back in a few minutes with Dr. Cudahy. Handkerchiefs in that top drawer.”
Cudahy and Clint Reese were with her for over an hour. Clint sat beside her on the bed, holding her hand, urging her on with the story when she stumbled. Cudahy paced endlessly back and forth, white-lipped, grim. When he interrupted her now and then to ask a question his voice was harsh.
At last they knew all there was to know. Cudahy stopped in front of her. “And you, Mrs. Aintrell, were planning to give them the—”
“Please shut up, Doctor!” Clint said tiredly.
Cudahy glared at him. “I’ll require some explanation for that comment, Mr. Reese.”
Clint lit two cigarettes and gave Francie one, while Cudahy waited for the explanation. Clint said, “I don’t see how a tongue-lashing is going to help anything, Doctor. Forget your own motivations for a moment and think of hers. As far as this girl knows, she has just killed her husband, just as surely as if she had a gun to his head. I doubt, Dr. Cudahy, whether either you or I, under the same circumstances, would have that same quality of moral courage. I respect her for it. I respect her far too much to listen to you rant at her.”
Cudahy let out a long breath. He turned a chair around and sat down. He gave Clint a sheepish glance and then said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Aintrell. I got carried away with a sense of my own importance.”
Francie said, tonelessly, “Bob told me that they put him in a brown suit and made him expendable. I married him, knowing that. And I guess my life can be as expendable as his. He said we had to be tough. I know they made him write that. He isn’t the kind of man who begs. I almost... did what they wanted me to do. It isn’t courage, I guess. I’m just... all mixed up.”
“Francie,” Clint said, “Dr. Cudahy and I are amateurs in the spy department. This is a job for the experts. But I’m in on this, and I’m going to stay in. I’m going to make it certain that the experts don’t foul up your chance of getting your husband back. The Jack-sons — we’re going to make them believe that you are co-operating. The experts can’t get here until tomorrow. Do you think you can handle it all right when they contact you tonight?”
“I... I think so. I can tell them that I didn’t do any transcription today.”
“Don’t give them any reason to be suspicious.”
“I’ll try not to.”
Clint walked her to her car, stood with the door open after she had slid under the wheel. “Want me to come along?”
“I’m all right now.”
“The best of luck, Francie.”
He shut the door. The guard opened the gates. She drove down the gravel road toward Lake Arthur.
Betty, in ski pants and white cashmere sweater, was sitting on the bunk reading a magazine. The fire was burning. Her jacket was on a nearby chair.
Betty tossed the magazine aside and smiled up at her. “Hope you don’t mind, hon. I nearly froze on the porch, and I only had to make a tiny hole in the screen, just where the catch is.” Francie took off her coat, held her hands toward the flames. “It’s all right.”
“Got a little present for us, dear?”
“I couldn’t manage it today. I took a lot of dictation and then I was put to work filing routine correspondence.”
Betty leaned back, her blond head against the pine wall, fingers laced across her stomach. “Stew was pretty anxious. This might alarm him a little, hon. He might worry about whether you’re cooperating or double-crossing. You know, he told me last night that lots of war widows got so depressed they killed themselves. I’m not threatening you. That’s just the way his mind works sometimes.”
“I dropped J. Edgar Hoover a personal note,” Francie said bitterly. “It’s so much simpler than getting a divorce.”
“You don’t have to be nasty, you know. This isn’t personal with us, dear. We take orders just as you do.”
“Tell your husband, if he is your husband, that I’ll have something for him tomorrow.”
After the woman left, Francie stood and bit at the inside of her lip until she tasted blood. “Forgive me, Bob,” she said silently. “Forgive me.” It had been done. Now nothing could save him.
She found the lure on the shelf over the sink, at eye-level. The body was carved to resemble a frog. After she stopped trembling she forced herself to pick it up and throw it on the fire...
The men arrived in midafternoon. Three of them. A slow-moving, dry-skinned sandy one with a farmer’s cross-hatched neck. He was called Osborne and he was in charge. The names of the other two were not given. They were dark, well-scrubbed young men in gleaming white shirts, dark-toned suits. Cudahy and Clint Reese were present for the conference.
Osborne looked to be half asleep as Francie told her story. He spoke only to bring out a more detailed description of the Jacksons.
“New blood,” he said. “Or some of the reserves. Go on.”
She finished, produced the letter. Osborne fingered it, held it up to the light, then read it. He handed it to the nearest young man, who read it and passed it to the other young man.
Osborne said, “You’re convinced your husband wrote that?”
“Of course!” Francie said wonderingly. “I know his writing. I know the way he says things. And then there are those references — the housecoat, Willy.”
“Who is Willy?”
“We bought him in Kansas. He’s in storage now. A little porcelain figure of an elf. We had him on the mantel. Bob used to say he was our good...”
Suddenly she couldn’t go on. Osborne waited patiently until she had regained control.
“...our good luck,” she said, her voice calm.
“It stinks,” Osborne said.
They all looked at him.
“What do you mean?” Reese demanded.
“Oh, this girl is all right. I don’t mean that. I mean, the whole thing implies an extent of organization that I personally don’t believe they have. I just don’t believe that in a little over thirty days they could fix it so Mrs. Aintrell, here, is balanced on the razor’s edge. Three months, maybe. Not one.”
“But Bob wrote that letter!” Francie said.
“And believing that he wrote it, you opened up for Reese here?”
“I almost didn’t.”
“But you did. That’s the point. You won’t get any medals. There are a lot of people not getting any medals these days.” His smile was an inverted U.
“What are your plans?” Dr. Cudahy demanded.
The office was very still. At last Osborne looked over at Francie. “I’m going to go on the assumption that your husband is alive, Mrs. Aintrell, and that he wrote this letter. At least, until we can prove differently.”
“I know he wrote it!”
“Dr. Cudahy, have you got a file on some line of research that proved to be valueless? A nice, fat file?”
Cudahy frowned. “Things are so interrelated here that even data on unsuccessful experimentation might give a line on the other stuff.”
“Pardon me, sir,” Clint Reese said. “How about that work Sherra was doing? And you couldn’t make him stop. Wasn’t that—?”