* * *
The cars had been arriving and departing since mid-morning. Three of them had come and gone by now, and there was one still parked in the front yard while its two occupants searched the river bottom. As each arrived and began to disgorge its slickered, white-hatted men with rifles, Cass would leap up from beside the radio and run out into the rain in an antic frenzy of lamentation with the burlesque and monstrous hat athwart his head.
“He’s drowned,” he would wail. “It said on the radio He didn’t come up no more. I’m his daddy and I tried to raise him up a Christian, but he’s drowned in the river.”
“We don’t know,” the men would say. “And we don’t believe anything until we see it.”
“But it said so on the radio,” he would cry out, trotting after them as far as the barn and unable to grasp the fact that these men in the field were the ones who fed the information in the first place into radio’s all devouring gut and were uninterested in its digestive rumblings.
And then, as they left him, he would stand for a moment lost and uncertain in the rain and call out after them the repeated theme and password of his incipient madness: “I’m his daddy. He was my boy.” Whether this was a misguided bid for fame or the tortured admission of a sense of guilt they had no way of knowing—if they cared.
Joy sulked in her room and looked with contempt upon all this frenetic exhibitionism. I’m only his wife, she thought. Nobody cares enough to ask me how I feel. The silly old idiot, making a fool of himself like that. I think he’s going nuts. But you’d think somebody might have heard that he had a wife.
The last car, which had a press sticker on the windshield, rolled into the yard in midafternoon carrying two men, neither of whom had raincoats. They got out and ran up on the porch, one of them carrying a bulky camera case. The reporter was a lean-faced young man with closely cropped dark hair and alert gray eyes, and an air of eager impatience about him like a hunting dog on a frosty morning. The photographer was older, around forty, sloppily dressed in an old gray suit with food stains on the vest. The vest itself was closed with only one of its buttons, which was in the wrong buttonhole, causing it to extend down some two inches lower on one side than on the other. He was dark-haired too, but the hair was long, with a few strands of gray, and would never stay combed, springing up wildly on both sides of the part and giving him a perpetual air of having just got out of bed. The face was gaunt, long-jawed, with cavernous eye sockets, and the eyes themselves were gray, with an expression of detached and somewhat cynical boredom. His name was Lambeth, and he was half drunk.
Cass was sitting on the bed in the front room listening to the radio when they arrived. Springing up, he ran into the hall and onto the front porch just as they leaped upon it from out of the rain.
“There’s news coming in.” he said excitedly, pausing only for an instant in his headlong orbit. “Got to listen to the news. I’ll talk to you in a minute.” Then he whirled and was gone, disappearing through the open window back into his room again.
They started, and looked at each other. They could hear the radio’s voice inside the room.
“Looks like one of the listening audience,” Lambeth said, unslinging the camera case and leaning boredly against the wall.
The reporter walked to the window and looked in. Cass was seated on the edge of the bed with his face pushed up in front of the radio, rapt, intent, unmoving, while the comic and improbable hat dripped water onto the floor.
“Are you Mr. Neely?” he asked.
“Can’t talk to you now,” Cass said, frowning.
The reporter withdrew his head, he stood still, listening and could hear the news.
“—no late developments in this sensational man hunt. Police officers at the scene are now almost unanimous in their opinion that Neely is dead, either drowned or killed by a rifle bullet at the time he was swimming down the river. However, the search is being pushed relentlessly and will not be written off as closed until the body is, recovered.”
The reporter looked in again. “There’s nothing new in that,” he said. “I filed it myself less than an hour ago.”
Cass looked at him blankly. “It’s the news,” he said. “Can’t talk to you now.”
“But I tell you,” the reporter said impatiently, “there’s nothing new in it. I wrote it.”
Cass shook his head. “Don’t make no difference.”
The young man withdrew his head from the window and looked helplessly at Lambeth, who was leaning against the wall and wishing he had brought the bottle in from the car.
“Nobody ever believes anything until he hears it on the radio or sees it in the paper,” Lambeth said wearily. “God help the human race.”
“There must be somebody else around here we can talk to,” the reporter said. He started toward the door to look down the hall.
Joy had been in the bedroom engaged in changing into another dress when she heard the car drive up. But instead of going on down into the bottom as the others had done, these men had come up onto the porch. It’s about time somebody remembered he had a wife, she thought angrily. All this fuss and hullabaloo and that old cluck running around like a chicken with its head chopped off, and you’d think there wasn’t anybody else on the place or that had anything to do with Sewell at all. Slipping into a dressing gown, she gave her hair a shake back over her shoulders and went down the hall.
She emerged onto the porch just as the reporter was coming toward the door. He was quite attractive, she thought, and at the same time there was something vaguely familiar about him. She put on her best and warmest smile and started to say something.
Just then Lambeth heard her and turned.
“Well, well,” he said. “If it isn’t Narcissus.”
Twenty-two
“Oh, hello,” the reporter said. “You’re Mrs. Neely, aren’t you? You remember us, I guess. At the trial? We didn’t expect to see you out here, but I’m glad we ran into you.”
Joy smiled at them. “Why, yes,” she said. “I remember you, Mr.—er—”
“Shaw,” the younger man said. “And this is Byron Lambeth.”
“Oh, I know Mr. Lambeth. We’re old friends, aren’t we?”
“Mrs. Neely and I have seen a lot of each other,” Lambeth said gravely.
“Now, what would you like to say, Mrs. Neely?” Shaw asked with professional briskness. “Do you have any idea where your husband was headed when he—uh—”
“Well, I’m not sure,” she said slowly. “I hadn’t heard—”
“Don’t you think he might have been trying to come here?”
“Why, yes. I’ve thought of that. He was coming this way, wasn’t he? I mean, when he— Oh, it’s so awful! You don’t know what it’s been like all day, not knowing.” The idea of Sewell’s coming back to her began to blossom and take shape, and she knew. She just knew. Why hadn’t she realized it before? Why, of course. It really couldn’t have been anything else. He had been headed right this way, hadn’t he?
Forgetting the two men for a moment, she let her mind run unhampered along this delightful and beckoning pathway, seeing herself as the irresistible beauty for whom men would take incalculable risks. It happened all the time in the movies. And then, even as she was beginning to believe in herself as this fatal beauty, all the terrible tragedy of it came rushing in upon her and she fought to hold back the tears as she thought of how near he had been and she had not known. Sewell had been killed while risking everything just to be at her side for one final, beautiful hour, and she hadn’t known it until too late.