It was a must. Bradley, who had traveled further at later hours on smaller cause, tarried just long enough to replenish his fuel tank before hitting the road again.
The trip was a twenty-miler, over concrete — sixteen minutes and some odd seconds from gas pump to the rescue. Starting, Bradley had known exactly where he was going. He knew the house well. It was the homestead on the old Ketchum place, a farm long deserted and recently rented to people who were new to the hill counties.
The homestead, built close to the road in a day when farm dwellers looked to passing couriers for news of the world beyond their narrow horizon, was blazing with light. That was symptomatic in itself of panic within, and when Bradley had stepped onto the veranda a frightened voice challenged him from the far side of a closed door.
“If… if you try to get in, I’ll shoot! I’ve got a rifle here!”
“Then please put it away,” Bradley urged. “This is the state trooper you talked to on the telephone.”
A bolt creaked and the door opened then — opened on a vision of blond beauty for which Bradley had been totally unprepared. Femininity in these hills didn’t come generally in pink and fluffy packages like this; in the main, it ran to angles, the coiffure perennially in vogue was a tight combination of topknot and comb, and the favored material for negligees was gingham.
Blond and svelte, Mrs. Liggett could have been recognized as “city folks” at any distance under a mile. Her hair was bobbed and wavy, she wore a soft and shimmering something of silk, and she smelled of sweeter things than good yellow soap. On Bradley she had something like the effect of the pistol butt wielded from that rumble seat. She stunned him.
There were red glints in her hair, red glints in the shimmer of her wrap — and more than a trace of Little Red Riding Hood in her speech.
“I… I can’t believe that you’re here so soon!” she gasped in a voice not quite grown-up, it seemed to Bradley. “Didn’t you say you had twenty miles to come?”
“Motorcycles move,” he rather unnecessarily assured her. Then he snapped to business. “Been annoyed any more since you phoned?”
“N-no!” she said. “But I’ve been scared out of my wits. I… I’m afraid I won’t want to live here any more after tonight.” Her perfect lips, cherry red, trembled to a sigh. “Oh, and I’ve loved it so!”
Bradley, not wholly at ease, was fishing for his flashlight. “I’ll take a look around,” he said.
“Please don’t!” she cried. The cherry lips parted in swift alarm. “He may have a gun.”
Bradley grinned cheerfully. “Well, so have I,” he said and hopped down from the veranda. “Where did you see him last? Across the road, wasn’t it?”
He jumped one ditch and then another and with the flashlight boring a hole in the night ahead of him went beating through the brush. A few minutes of that was enough. The prowler, if he hadn’t already gone on his way, was a needle in a hay-stack. Bradley went back to the refurbished farm house and made a report to that effect.
“This probably will never happen again as long as you’re here,” he reassured his dazzling client. “But you really ought to keep a gun in the house, Mrs. Liggett — just for your own peace of mind, I mean.”
Her reply to that was a timid confession. “Guns frighten me. I am really a terrible little coward.” She looked appealingly at Bradley. “You… you don’t have to leave me right away? Couldn’t you stay until Mr. Liggett gets here? He should be home almost any minute now, you see.”
That, somehow, didn’t quite click.
“I thought you said,” Bradley told her, “that he was staying in Boston tonight?”
She smiled. “Did it sound like that? What I was trying to say was that he’s on his way home from Boston — but I might have said anything, being in such a state of nerves. Won’t you stay?”
In mind’s eye Bradley could see a hobo hitting the grit after one glimpse of the gray uniform, a hurrying hobo, a mile away by now and wishing he were further. But it would be impossible, he knew, to convince a lone and badly frightened woman that the picture was authentic. He didn’t even try.
“I’ll sit out here,” he promised, resigned, “until your husband comes or until—”
“Out here?” She seemed to see something humorous in the proposal. “Don’t be foolish! Whatever kind of husband do you think I’ve got? He’ll laugh when I tell him. No, no; you come right on in and wait until he’s here to thank you. I’ve got hot water on for tea. It was going to be a case of tea for nerves; now — please? — can’t it be tea for two?”
Bradley just at that moment was looking down at the garage — seeing something that suddenly interested him.
“I don’t know,” he demurred. “Don’t you think it might be better for you to leave a note and drive over to Holtsville and stay at a hotel?”
“But how can I? Mr. Liggett has the car.”
Her eyes had widened; Bradley’s for an instant narrowed. Here was something else that didn’t quite click. Light from a nearby window had showed him a closed padlock on the garage door, and no one-car family of his acquaintance ever had made a practice of locking the garage when the car was out.
He rubbed the back of his head, sore as a boil and getting sorer. And that hurt, and what it brought back had something to do with his irresolution. As he stood debating, she held the door open and continued to urge him in. Hers wasn’t the only voice urging.
“Go ahead; see what happens!” a reckless inner voice insisted.
He looked her in the eye and smiled.
“Why not?” he said.
Chapter IX
A Trap Springs
She left him in a living room that seemed to him a little garish, a room no more suggesting a farm parlor than she suggested a farm wife. While she was in the kitchen he was thinking fast. There was something queer about this invitation, something in her eagerness to get him into the house that held him on his guard. Something offside about the whole business, phone call and all. What? And why? Well, at least he had put himself now on the road to find out.
She came back first with an ornate cream and sugar service, teaspoons and a sliced lemon. Next she brought a steaming earthenware pot, and finally two cups she had filled in the kitchen.
“Cream or lemon?” she wanted to know, slim and beautifully kept hands hovering after she had seated herself across from Bradley at the cozy table. “And for Heaven’s sakes, take off that belt and hang it up somewhere. You do look so awfully uncomfortable.”
“I’m used to the belt — just as comfortable as I can be,” he said, and as he spoke he shifted his chair a trifle so that both doors at the rear of the room would be in his range of vision.
She had baby-blue eyes — but they were not, under the light, baby soft.
She repeated, “Cream or lemon?”
“Neither. I take mine straight.” How could he get her out of the room again? Simple! “I… I hate to bother you,” he said, “but a sandwich would go fine. I missed dinner.”
He thought that her eyes clouded, but she was quickly on her feet. “Oh, you poor famished thing! Of course!”
When he heard her rattling in the refrigerator, Bradley lifted his teacup — not to his lips, but to his nose. It smelled like tea, and also it smelled like something else. He said to himself, lifting the cup again: “Here goes, anyway!” The cup was empty when a cold roast and bread and butter came on another tray, and it brought a stare and an exclamation.
“You’ve drunk your tea! How… how did you like it?”
“Can’t begin to tell you,” Bradley said.
Truth again. He honestly could not begin to. He hadn’t drunk, hadn’t even tasted, what had been in the cup. Instead, he had spattered it along the rug under the table, not enough in any one spot to make the smallest puddle, and he was ardently wishing the dry fiber would hurry and absorb it.