“Ed,” he said, “when you find Gerald, please remember that whatever — that if he’s done anything — that he didn’t know what he was doing.”
“Sure,” I told him, and he knew I meant it. He closed the door slowly, like he was shutting something out of his life. I jumped down the steps and into the car.
“Bassett says O’Moore’s been using that old shack a lot this summer,” I told them. “You remember, the one up beyond Forty-Rod Fields.”
Doc Rennie’s voice sounded a mile away. “Just a minute, Ed. Let me get this blankety-blank ankle of mine fixed.”
I said: “Doc, I’ll drop you off at the Inn. We’re goin’ up that way anyhow.”
“The hell you will,” said Doc Rennie, even more faintly.
Bill Dorset spoke up. “Leg hurtin’, mister?”
“A little,” admitted Doc Rennie, and you could just hear him.
I turned just in time to see Dorset handing Doc Rennie a pint bottle. “Good brandy,” he said. “Made it m’self.”
The bottle was half full when Doc Rennie turned it up. Bill Dorset whistled. Doc Rennie finally took it down, coughed once, and even in that dark car I could see his grin. It was a pale grin, but a grin. He handed the empty bottle to Bill. The grin faded.
“Ed,” said Doc Rennie, “if I were you, I’d drive like the very devil.” And he braced himself with his crutches.
It’s seven miles over mountain roads to Forty-Rod Fields. Nine minutes later we were helping Doc Rennie out of the car, and I’ll lay even money I wasn’t the only one who was glad that ride was over.
Dave said: “There’s a light in the shack.”
I fished my gun out from under the seat and we worked our way up the path and across a rocky meadow toward that single line of yellow light-on the hillside. It was Bill Dorset who was helping Doc Rennie now. The Doc cussed once or twice and that was all. That brandy of Dorset’s will pretty near raise the dead.
At the rock fence that marks Bassett’s land I made them stop, and Dave and I went on alone. I’d turned off my flashlight and the going, through brambles and over lichened rocks, was dead slow. We’d covered perhaps fifty yards of the hundred-odd to the shack when we heard the shot.
The shot had come from the shack, but there was no gunflash. Before I breathed again, the echo had come back across the shallow valley to our right.
Neither of us said a word; just kept going. Twenty yards from the shack I pulled Dave into the lee of a big rock. I laid my gun on the rock and cupped my hands.
“O’Moore!” I called. “Gerald O’Moore, can you hear me?”
I waited. No answer but the echo.
“O’Moore!” I called again. “Open the door and stand in the light with your hands up. This is Sheriff McKay.” Still no answer.
“Your last chance,” I called. “We’re coming for you.”
And we left the cover of the rock and started up. Dave wormed his way off to one side so he could come in from behind. I headed for that window. The shade was down, all but four or five inches.
When I heard Dave’s whistle from the rear I ran along the side of the shack to the window and smashed out the glass with my gun-barrel.
I heard Dave yelling, “Are you all right, Ed?” Then, when I didn’t answer, I heard him racing and stumbling around the shack. He pulled up beside me, panting.
I said, “Look.”
Then I turned and shouted down into the dark. “It’s all right, boys, come on up.”
Three minutes later we were gathered around the table with the oil lamp on it. Gerald O’Moore had shot himself through the head with an old .22 target pistol. He was seated in a chair, head forward on the table, gun still in His dead hand. The blond hair over the little red holes in either side of his head was almost white in the lamplight. There was almost no blood.
I guess he hadn’t figured on writing anything when he came to the shack, so that’s why he’d had to use a pencil stub and the back of a sheet torn from a five-year-old calendar. The sheet lay right under the lamp. On it he’d scrawled:
“How can I go on living with this thing on my mind? O Julie, I loved you so.” And there it trailed off.
So he thought it was Julie Welch he’d killed!
Bill Dorset turned his seamed face to Doc Rennie.
“Mister,” he said, and there was double horror in his eyes, “you and Ed McKay kept us from...” He shuddered and bogged down. Then he glared suddenly at Tom Hogan, who stood there dumb, jowls slack and eyes staring straight ahead.
“Tom Hogan,” growled Dorset, fierce as an old bear, “if you ever open your trap around this town again I’ll kick your teeth down your throat.”
Hogan never said a word — just stared at O’Moore’s body.
“Dave,” I said, “suppose you take Bill Dorset and Hogan back to town. There’s a few folks they want to see. Doc Rennie and I will wait here till you come back for us. Bring Chronister’s dead-wagon.”
I figured the Doc could use a rest. I’d never seen him take anything like he was taking O’Moore’s suicide; just staring, like Hogan, but he looked like a man who was being dragged by his neck through the lower reaches of hell.
Dave said: “Let’s go, boys.”
When they’d gone I put a hand on Doc Rennie’s arm. “At least it’s settled,” I said briskly, trying to cheer him up a little.
He had me worried. It was his eyes that bothered me.
He reached out a long arm and took hold of the back of O’Moore’s coat collar. He pulled the body upright in the chair. The gun clattered on the floor. The head hung down, chin on breastbone.
Doc Rennie looked at me. The lamplight flickered and he seemed to grow taller.
I looked at O’Moore, and a chill like I’d never felt before settled right around my heart, and the sweat was cold along my wrists and forehead.
“Oh my God, Doc!” I flopped down on the edge of a pine bed. “What do we do now?”
“I wish I knew, Ed.” Doc Rennie said it like he was trying to soothe a scared child.
O’Moore hadn’t killed Johanna Welch. Even I could see that. Whoever killed Johanna Welch had blood on them, plenty of it. There wasn’t a speck of blood anywhere on O’Moore, outside of the little around the holes in his head. And he’d had no time to change his clothes between leaving the Welch house and scrambling on foot all the way up to the shack.
I tried to talk to Doc Rennie about it, but he waved me silent. He was thinking. He stretched himself out on the cot and smoked those oily cigarettes until I had to open the door.
“Let things stand as they are,” was all I could get out of him that night. He said this when Dave and I left him at his room at the Inn. He was terribly earnest about it, and we swore we wouldn’t scotch the story that Dorset and Hogan were spreading. As we left him, he was muttering something to himself about whether Messick or Tilling would be the best man.
Who Messick and Tilling were, I had no idea.
Chapter Five
Awakening of Julie
At four A. M. I was no nearer sleep than I’d been at three A.M. My mind was a movie screen, and all it would run were close-ups of Johanna Welch’s face — or rather, what had been Johanna Welch’s face. Sitting on the edge of the bed in undershirt and shorts, I quinched my eyes tight together and gritted my teeth and forced myself to see her as she was when she was alive.
The next thing I knew I was up and pacing the floor almost at a trot, and my wife was bolt upright in bed, staring at me, scared. I’d seen Johanna Welch’s face a/ it was in life, all right: very dark brown hair with a glint of red here and there; creamy skin; big, calm brown eyes; full lips. A lovely face.
It was a lovely face, beautiful, in a quiet way. That was the Godawful part of it. How could even a crazy man drive a hatchet-edge into that face, over and over again? Gerald O’Moore had gone off his head. But Gerald hadn’t killed Johanna. He couldn’t have...