“Was he really drunk?” I asked.
“He was stiff!” Bill Garrison told us from the steps. “We just poured him into the car and Mavis took him home. Never saw anything happen faster. One minute he’s sitting here with this glass in his hand, singing — the next, he’s flat on his face. No wonder, after all the liquor he took aboard.”
Anne and I avoided looking at each other. We were both remembering what Troy had said about not wanting to drink, and what David had told us about the straight ginger ale.
“Don’t worry about Troy,” Bill said. “He’ll be all right. The fresh air’ll sober him up on the way home. And Mavis is a good driver.”
“Of course,” Anne said. She sank to the steps of the lanai where Troy had recently been sitting. “Give me a cigarette, Johnny.”
As soon as Bill and Umi had wandered off, she stood up. “Let’s go after them.”
“We haven’t a car.”
“Take David’s. Take the first one we find. But hurry!”
We took David’s car without permission. Anne opened the glove compartment as we started.
“What are you putting in there?” I asked.
“The glass Troy drank from. When we get as far as Kaneohe I want to telephone.”
I pressed the accelerator. At Kaneohe, Anne reported no answer from Troy’s house or Umi’s. “All the Kealohas are at the party, of course. And Mavis probably hasn’t had time to get home yet. Are we taking the Pali road?”
“It’s quicker — if it doesn’t start to rain when we get there.”
The rain started when we were halfway up the long, winding drive. It didn’t rain hard; there was just a blowing mist which clouded the windshield and made the road Like glass. We drove in silence and Anne said nothing as we skidded on curves; nor did she grab at the door when we scraped, once, against stones of the outside wall.
When we reached the summit we were in a downpour. Wind rocked the car as we made the turn and started down. It had taken us almost an hour, slowed as we were by the weather. We were possibly twenty minutes behind Mavis, and in that much time anything could happen — or could be made to happen — to Tray.
My thoughts went back and forth with the clack of the windshield wipers. One minute I thought this whole thing was preposterous and we were acting like idiots; next I recapitulated everything we knew plus what we surmised, and I was sure we would be too late.
We found a filling station on Nuuanu Avenue and Anne was out of the car even before it stopped. She was inside for quite a while and I watched her through the window as she spoke over the phone. She came back with a set look on her face and said, “I reached her.”
“What did she say?”
“She was hysterical. She called me a fool. But when I told her we have the glass Troy drank from — and that several witnesses remembered her giving it to him — then she was scared. Let’s go to the house now.”
We turned at last up the steep drive which led to the cottage, and I parked near the path to the front door. The house was lighted, but when we knocked there was no answer. We waited and listened but heard no sound other than the drip of water from the eaves and the soughing of trees in the wind which swept down the valley. We knocked again and called, then tried the door and found it unlocked. We walked in.
The living room was empty. The wicker table by the side of the broken-springed couch was piled with magazines; there was a manicuring set, a filled ashtray, and an empty glass with cigarette butts in it. We went into the bedroom. It was lighted and empty. Troy’s grass slippers, one strap torn loose, were half under the bed. It gave me a queer feeling to see them. The white dress Mavis had worn was tossed on a chair and her white sandals lay close by.
On the dresser were jars and cosmetics of all descriptions. A bottle of liquid cleansing cream lay smashed on the floor, as if the woman who was using it had dropped it there, perhaps, when she heard the telephone ring. We went into the kitchen and found the screen door half ajar; light from the room streamed out over the small rear landing onto steps which led to the concrete driveway.
It was there we found Mavis.
We saw first her naked legs, then the shell pink satin of the dressing gown which had spread over her face when she tripped and sprawled headfirst down the steps. She lay still, in that final stillness which is death. But we heard a sound.
It was the familiar sound of the ancient car which had chugged so faithfully as it carried us to the luau.
“The garage!” Anne cried. “Quick! Open the door!” As I went to it she ran around the side of the building.
The door was padlocked. I heard breaking glass, and then Anne came back and said, “The window is nailed. Can’t you get the door open?”
While I tugged at the hasp she went to Mavis’s body and snatched the key from her outflung hand. I took it and opened the lock.
Anne untied the halter top of her bathing suit and thrust it at me. “Be careful, Johnny. Hold this over your nose while you turn off the ignition—”
But there was no key in the ignition. The motor chugged on, while I dragged Troy’s sagging body out of the car and across the garage floor to fresh air and Anne shut the garage doors again. “He’s breathing,” I said when she turned. “He can’t have been in there long. He’ll probably be all right once we get him to the hospital. I’ll go phone.”
As I reached for the screen door I was dimly aware that Anne was leaning over Mavis’s body. Then I almost tripped over a high-heeled satin mule. Mavis should have known better than to rush down a flight of steps in high heels, I thought, as I went into the house.
When I came out Troy’s breathing sounded normal and his face looked less pink. We left him lying on the damp grass and went to sit on the steps of Umi’s cottage. I helped Anne tie her halter back on, and we moved very close together. After a while she stopped shivering.
We didn’t hunt for the ignition key. Later, after disconnecting some wires to stop the motor, police found it in the pocket of Mavis’s dressing gown.
As we waited, Anne and I began to talk.
The story Mavis had planned to tell seemed fairly obvious, we decided, remembering the one she had already told the Erickssons. Troy had “refused” to enter the house, and she left him in the car to sleep off his “drunk.” He had revived and decided to go back to the party, had started the motor, and then passed out again — while Mavis slept. The next day — or the next hour, it did not matter — she would become alarmed and go to the garage and find him.
“By the time she’d have called the police,” Anne said, “the door would be open, of course, and the key back in the ignition. She must have taken the idea from a newspaper, or from one of those stories she read.”
“She would never have got away with it.”
“She might have. A pretty woman, a good lawyer, and a husband with a reputation for drinking heavily? And even if she were convicted—” Anne let out a long, ragged sigh — “that wouldn’t have done Troy any good.”
She looked at her hands, which were dirty, and went to brush them across the wet grass. When she sat beside me again I said, “Hey, kid. Your legs are all streaked, as if you’d been carrying—” I looked at Mavis’s body, then I squared around. “Anne. You moved something away from there. What was it?”
Instead of answering directly, she said, “Johnny, do you remember the things we heard about Troy and Mavis — the two accidents they almost had?”
“Once when she was nearly drowned, and he went in after her—”
“That was the time Troy ‘absent-mindedly’ hung his shirt over the warning sign at the beach.”