She stopped, and he looked at it. “Great, isn’t it?” he says.
“Just lovely.”
“You’ve got a funny look in your eye tonight, Polly. I wonder if you’re thinking what I’m thinking.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Up at the lake, they think you’re in Hollywood.”
“Yes.”
“And down in Hollywood, they think I’m in Frisco. Does that put ideas in your head? It does in mine.”
“I never knew you thought about me that way.”
“I think about you that way plenty.”
“Well — what do you mean?”
“I mean how about you and me slipping off to Santa Barbara tonight? A little stroll by the sea, a nice late supper, and then when we show up at the lake in the morning, we just happened to bump into each other and you ran me up. How’s that hit you?”
“It’s an awful temptation,” she says.
“Sure, that’s what we’ll do.”
“Can we stop at the lake so I can get a few things?”
“Holy smoke, no! Listen, baby, I don’t want any trouble with that Irishman. This has got to be quiet. Get that right now.”
“I’ll have to have some things. I’ll slip in back, quiet, so nobody’ll ever know. They’re all asleep anyway.”
“You sure you can get away with it?”
“Easy.”
When they got to the lake, she cut the lights and they coasted in back. She got out and sneaked into the clubhouse. It was all dark. She was afraid to call Kennelly for fear Hornison would hear, so she felt her way to the front porch. She thought Kennelly might be there. He wasn’t, but his voice was. It was floating up from the lake, doing a nice croon number on “Home on the Range.” And mixed in with it, doing a swell barber-shop second, was a woman’s voice.
“Home, home on the range,” sang Kennelly, “where the deer and the antelope play—”
“Home, home, home,” sang the woman, “home, home, ho-me.”
It was a knife in Polly’s heart, after all she had been doing for Kennelly, and she didn’t wait to hear more. She went straight back to Hornison.
“I’m all ready,” she says. “My, isn’t it a pretty night.”
But Hornison, he had heard the singing too. “Something funny about this,” he says. “Wait a minute.”
He tiptoed around to the front of the clubhouse. She got in the car and sat there. The longer she sat, the madder she got. After a couple of minutes she jumped out and ran down to the canoe-landing. The singing stopped, and there wasn’t a sound. She called Kennelly. No answer. She called again. Still no answer. Then she went off the handle right. She began to bawl out Kennelly across the water, and while she was doing that, she was peeling off her clothes, anyway down to the silk. She meant to swim out there and make a free-for-all fight of it and it was Hornison that stopped her. He ran down and grabbed her as she was about to dive in.
“Polly!” he says. “What are you doing?”
“I’m going to kill him!”
“You can’t pull stuff like that!”
“Oh, can’t I! I’ll kill him, and I’ll kill her!”
“Cut it out! You’re off your nut!”
“Would you mind telling me what you’re doing there, in that attire, with Jack Hornison, at this hour of night?” It was Kennelly alone, about twenty feet offshore, in the canoe, and talking in that quiet tone of voice an actor puts on when he wants to sound like a grand duke.
“Oh!” says Polly. “There you are!”
“And there are you. And I’d like an explanation of it.”
“Explanation! Where is she? Give your own explanations!”
“One thing at a time,” says Kennelly. “Begin. Now.”
“Can I put in a word, Tim?” says Hornison. He was getting a little nervous, because he didn’t know what Polly might pop out with. “Polly and I just drove out together, that’s all. And then she kind of got a little sore about something just now, and she was going to swim out to you. I stopped her. That’s all.”
“Oh, thank you, Jack. That clears that up.”
“Did you hear me?” says Polly. “Where’s that woman?”
“What woman?” Kennelly asks.
“The woman you were singing with.”
“I don’t know, I’m sure. Some woman on shore.”
“And you just sang duets with her?”
“Why not? I didn’t know where she was, but I kind of liked it. Sure I sang duets with her. A thing like that don’t happen every night.”
“Do you expect me to believe that?”
“Do you see any woman?”
“No.”
“That’s it,” says Hornison. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“All right. If you’ll put your clothes on, I’ll be coming ashore.”
He dipped in his paddle. In about two seconds he would have won in a walk. But he didn’t quite make it. You see, Kennelly wasn’t alone in the canoe at all, and Polly would have known it if she had noticed how the bow wasn’t riding high the way it would if only one person was in it. And how that came about was that Polly wasn’t the only one that was pulling some fast work that night. Hornison’s secretary, after he called up he was going to San Francisco, saw a chance to blow herself to a day off. But she had the checks and contracts still to get rid of, so she thought she’d take a little run up to the lake and hand them over that night, and next day she would be all clear.
So that was what she did, except that when she got there and found Kennelly singing to himself out on the porch, she kind of got to feeling romantic, and a little sorry for him besides, and that was how she happened to be out there on the lake, doing the second part with him eleven o’clock at night. She still hadn’t handed over the checks or the contracts, or even said anything about them, and that was when Hornison showed up. She knew it was Hornison up there on the porch because he lit a cigarette just after he left Polly, and she could tell it was him by the way he kept waving the match around after he got his light.
And then she made her big mistake. She knew Hornison would raise hell about her being up there, just because he always raised hell about everything, so she did some quick whispering to Kennelly, and got him to hide her. She was pretty small, so she curled down in the bow of the canoe with the robe over her, and they were going to let Kennelly step out, accidentally on purpose let the canoe slide out in the lake, and then she would paddle off to another spot and slip home before Hornison could find out. At that, they would have got away with it, if they didn’t have some tough luck.
What happened after that hip’ came off bottom with the canoe on his back took about half a minute, near as I can figure out, but I’ve got to take it one thing at a time, or you’ll never get it straight. First off, the air was split by the worst shriek that ever was heard this side of kingdom come. Of course, that was the secretary. When she felt that hip’ rub his snout on the canvas, she knew it wasn’t any bullfrog, and even her first yip, the State cop heard it on the main road, and that was a mile away. Her other yips, I think they heard them in China, with a war going on.
Next off, both she and Kennelly were in the water, because the canoe slid off gunwale first, and filled before you could see it go down. Next off, all hell broke loose. The hip’, maybe he wanted to get back for what he had to stand for earlier in the day. Anyway, he began to bump Kennelly and bump the girl, and he meant business.
“Polly!” yells Kennelly. “For God’s sake, help me get her out! He’ll kill her!”
And Polly? What did she do? She folded up on the float, and laughed like it was the funniest thing she ever saw in her life. “Ride him, cowboy!” she yells, and kicked up her heels in the air.