After a long pause Eunice said flatly, ‘I guess I was wrong about that guy being sweet.’
We ate an amicable lunch and spent the afternoon on the beach under a fringed umbrella, with the bright green-blue Pacific hissing gently on the sand. Out on the rollers the golden boys rode their surfboards, and flat by my side little Lynnie sighed to the bottom of her lungs with contentment.
‘I wish this could go on for ever,’ she said.
‘So do I.’
Eunice, on the other side of Lynnie, propped herself up on one elbow. ‘I’m going to take a dip,’ she said. ‘Coming?’
‘In a minute,’ Lynnie said lazily, and Eunice went alone. We watched her tight well-shaped figure walk unwaveringly down to the water, and Lynnie said what I was thinking. ‘She hardly drinks at all now.’
‘You’re good for her.’
‘Oh sure.’ She laughed gently, stretching like a cat. ‘Isn’t this heat just gorgeous?’
‘Mm.’
‘What are all those scars on you?’
‘Lions and tigers and appendicitis.’
She snorted. ‘Shall we go in and swim?’
‘In a minute. What did you and Eunice and Offen say to each other before I arrived?’
‘Oh...’ She sounded bored. ‘He wanted to know what you were doing. Eunice told him you and Walt were cooking something up but she didn’t really know what. And... er... yes... he asked if Walt was really an insurance man, and Eunice said he was... and he asked other things about you, what your job was and so on, and why you were out here with us...’
‘Did Eunice tell him I got her to show him that photograph on purpose? Did she tell him that I was certain that the horses he has at Orpheus Farm are Moviemaker and Centigrade?’
Lynnie shook her head.
‘You’re quite sure?’
‘Yes, absolutely. Would it have been a nuisance if we had?’
‘A fair way to being disastrous.’
‘Don’t worry then. He was only here about a quarter of an hour before you came down, and all Eunice said was that you were er... er... well her actual words were, some dim bloody little office worker on vacation.’ Lynnie laughed. ‘She said her husband had been grateful to you for saving his life and was paying your bill here, and that all you seemed to be interested in at present was a girl up in San Francisco.’
I looked down to where Eunice’s head bobbed in the surf and wondered whether she’d given him perfect answers from design or bitchiness.
‘What’s she like?’ Lynnie said.
‘Who?’
‘The girl in San Francisco.’
‘You’d better ask Walt,’ I said, turning my head to look at her. ‘He invented her.’
She gasped and laughed in one. ‘Oh good! I mean... er... then what were you really doing?’
‘Ah, well,’ I said. ‘Now that’s something I’d hate Eunice to have told Culham Offen.’
She lay looking back at me steadily for several seconds. So much more assurance, I thought idly, than on that day on the river, when she had still been a child.
‘Is that why you’ve told us practically nothing? Don’t you trust her?’
‘She’s never wanted the horses back.’
Lynnie blinked. ‘But she wouldn’t... she wouldn’t have ruined on purpose what you’re trying to do. After all, you’re doing it for her husband.’
I smiled and she sat up abruptly and put her arms round her knees.
‘You make me feel so... naïve.’
‘You’, I said, ‘are adorable.’
‘And now you’re laughing at me.’
I wanted impulsively to say that I loved her, but I wasn’t sure that it was true. Maybe all I wanted was an antedote to depression. She was certainly the best I’d found.
‘I’m going away again in the morning,’ I said.
‘To San Francisco?’
‘Somewhere like that.’
‘How long for?’
‘Two nights.’
‘This is your last week,’ she said, looking out to sea.
The thought leapt involuntarily, if only it were... I shook my head abruptly, as if one could empty the brain by force, and climbed slowly up on to my feet.
‘There’s today, anyway,’ I said, smiling. ‘Let’s go and get wet.’
Walt came back at seven with dragging feet and a raging thirst.
‘Those detectives from the DA’s office will scalp me if they find out we’re only using them,’ he said gloomily, up in my room. ‘Two of them have agreed to go out to Orpheus Farm tomorrow, and I’m meeting them on the LA road to show them the way. Day after tomorrow, some guy from the bloodstock registry office is going out. I got the DA’s office to call him and fix it.’
‘Couldn’t be better.’
Walt recharged his batteries with Old Grandad and said, ‘So what’s new with you?’
‘Offen came here on a fact-finding mission.’
‘He did what?’
‘Came looking for answers. Got some real beauties from Eunice which won’t help him any, and went away believing we’d be back on his doorstep pretty soon.’
‘I guess’, Walt said, ‘that he wanted to know if we’d called it off and gone home, and whether it was safe to bring those horses back again. It’s days since he saw any sign of us. Must have been like sitting on an H-bomb with a tricky firing pin.’ He swallowed appreciatively and rolled his tongue over his gums. ‘He’ll get all the action he wants, tomorrow.’
When he plodded tiredly off to shower before dinner, I telephoned Jeff Roots.
‘How was Miami?’ I said.
‘Hot and horrible, and I gained four pounds.’
Commiserating, I thanked him for his help with the newspaper files and told him that owing to Miss Britt we had found the two stallions.
‘I wish I didn’t believe it. Are you certain?’
‘Yes.’
His sigh was heartfelt. ‘We’d better start proceedings...’
‘I’ve... er... already started them. We may in a day or two have two horses on our hands which will need to be stabled somewhere eminently respectable while their identity is being investigated. Owing to the length of time they’ve been lost, it may take a couple of months to re-establish them. Where would you think it would be best to put them?’
After a pause, he said, ‘I suppose you’re asking me to have them here?’
‘Not really,’ I explained. ‘Too much of a coincidence after Chrysalis, perhaps. I’d thought rather of a more official place... I don’t know what you have.’
‘I’ll think of something.’ He coughed slightly. There won’t be anything illegal about their recovery?’
‘No more than for Chrysalis.’
‘That’s no answer.’
‘There shouldn’t be any trouble with the police,’ I said.
‘I guess that’ll have to do,’ he sighed. ‘When do I expect them?’
‘If all goes well, they should reach Lexington on Sunday.’
‘And if all doesn’t go well?’
‘You’ll have no problem.’
He laughed. ‘And you?‘
‘One more won’t matter.’
Chapter Sixteen
For most of thirty hours I sat in the mountainous Arizona desert and looked down at Matt Clive leading a boring life.
Like his sister, he was capable, quick, efficient. He watered the stock and mended a fence, swept out the house and fed the hens; and spent a great deal of time in the largest barn on the place.
I had found myself a perch among the rocks on the east-facing side of the valley, half a mile off the dusty road to the farm. At nearly three thousand feet above sea level the heat was bearable, though the midday sun blazed down from nearly straight overhead, and eggs would have fried on the sidewalks if there had been any. Desert plants were designed to save themselves and no one else: at my back grew a large agave, its central stem rising six feet high with flat outspreading flowers turning from red to brilliant yellow. For leaves it had razor-sharp spikes springing outwards from the ground in one large clump. Stiff; angular; not a vestige of shade. The spindly buckhorn and the flat devil’s fingers would have been pretty useless to a midget. I folded myself under the overhang of a jagged boulder and inched round with the meagre shade patch until the sun cried quits behind the hill.