Katherine’s look was away from him, pensive. “I understand, I guess, something of what she feels. Besides, she’s been like a mother to me; and Harry was almost like a brother.” She touched her light brown hair absently and there was a small indecisive quiver at one corner of her mouth. But then she sat up straight. She shuddered. “When that awful news came over the radio last May—”
Her Aunt Grace had let him have that, too, last night — how Katherine had fainted after one rigid, terror-stricken moment and a wild scream that still haunted the brown-shingled house like a ghost.
Kin said now with great earnestness, “But things like that don’t happen to experienced men. Harry was young, green, and you know yourself how reckless he was. Katherine, honest, I’m careful, cautious — why, nowadays, knowing how you feel, I’m the most cautious character—”
“Kin,” she said, stopping him with the directness of her tone, “I couldn’t take that kind of news again — or even anything like it. Kin, I’ve had it. I couldn’t even take the chance. But please believe me, I don’t blame you for helping Harry to make the grade at the police academy, even though Aunt Grace never wanted him to be a trooper. And as for the other thing—” She flushed a little, shook her head. “I... I don’t even think Aunt Grace meant to say that.” Then she brisked up all at once and glanced at her watch. “You understand, I’m sure, Kin. I’m sure you do. Everything. Me — and how I feel — anyhow. And you were sweet to pick me up this morning.”
“I’m sweet,” Kin said, starting the engine. “I understand,” he said, taking off like a rocket. The speeding car churned up waves of brown leaves which the heavy rains had threshed from the trees. He slid the car into Dr. Wilmott’s driveway on South Main and said, “I understand nothing.”
She was out of breath from the mad ride, and trembling. She got out and said, “Please, Kin, don’t — don’t do anything reckless. For my sake, please.”
“Why for your sake, please?”
She turned and ran, hop-skipping up the driveway, and after a minute Kin drove off. Slowly this time, coming back into focus again, back under the check-rein of care and caution he’d held on himself these past months.
He stopped at the cemetery and smoked a cigarette, all the way down, beside Harry Eaves’s grave. The remembered hysteria in Harry’s mother’s voice last night made a pulse beat in Kin’s throat.
That night back in May, at the last minute, late, Harry had substituted for Kin on the night patrol. And Harry’d been shot to death.
By seven, after supper in the barracks dining room, Kin was in uniform. The November wind all day had dried out the leaves and now they were rattling and scuffing against the windows like blown twigs. He moved restlessly from window to window: the trees out there, oaks, and maples, reeled and tossed in the moonlight and high up shredded clouds sailed fast, far off, over the Witch Hills. Behind him the police teletype clicked intermittently; DiPolo, the civilian dispatcher, talked lazily from time to time on the police radio with some patrol car or the district command post at Plummerston. McGraw, the night sergeant, spoke at odd intervals on the telephone.
“Checkers, Kin?” McGraw said at eleven thirty.
Kin cleared his throat. “Little headache, Mac.” And went to the washroom at the back of the central room to take an aspirin. And then he was at the windows again, restive under the pall of inactivity yet vaguely apprehensive — tonight like any other he was on duty — that despite all his care and caution something, some night, would happen to him. He peered toward town, where Katherine was at a church supper.
“Kin,” McGraw said at midnight, yawning, “how’s to liven up a dull night by making us all a pot of coffee?”
Kin jumped at that. “Right, Mac.” And he moved swiftly enough on long, lithe legs across the central room to the kitchen wing.
“He’s sure changed,” DiPolo said, making a complete turn on his swivel chair. “He gives me the creeps. Loosening his belt one minute, tightening it the next. Off in corners. Hesitating before he comes around corners.”
McGraw said, “All right, all right,” and scrubbed his red hair energetically with thick fingers.
“So all right, all right,” DiPolo said, spinning the chair round again; he had dark, knowing eyes and a sly, teasing smile. “You like the kid, huh? Troopers always stick together, huh?”
McGraw opened a desk drawer for no reason whatsoever, then slammed it shut and beetled round the room, everywhere and nowhere.
“Could be,” DiPolo said, “he lost his guts when—”
McGraw said, “Button up your loose mouth, Lulu. Belt out the midnight summary on the teletype to Headquarters and Plummerston. You just take care of your end, that’s all.” McGraw tramped over to the washroom.
DiPolo’s soft whistling was somewhere between drollery and insolence. He drummed the keyboard with offhand efficiency. Kept on drumming, no let up, when a radio report started coming in. He glanced at the big electric clock above his head; he nodded, typed one-handed, wrote with the other hand on his sheet. The time he put down was 12:09.
“Boagard,” he said when McGraw returned. “On the Turnpike trying to overhaul some throttle-happy drunk. Guy’s weaving all over the place.”
McGraw said, “Tell Boag not to knock his brains out on that. We can always get the drunk by his license number.”
“You know the law, Mac, on drunk driving. Park the car, lock it, and bring the drunk to the barracks. Book him, toss him in the clink overnight — his operator’s license automatically suspended till trial. You know Boag and you know the law. No guy laughs off eighty an hour with Boag — drunk or sober. Besides, can’t read the license — mud on it.”
Kin came in just then with cups and a pot of coffee on a tray. He’d heard the last part and asked what was up with Boagard; and when McGraw told him he fiddled with the knot of his tie and then made his belt a notch tighter. “He ought to be careful out there, Mac, even if he does overhaul the car.” He poured the coffee, slopping some.
DiPolo said, “Boagard’s a man for the book, all right. All he was trying to do in the first place was a favor — Chapter Twenty-one, Courtesy and Assistance to Motorists. He was cruising west on the Pike when he saw this car up ahead start off from the muddy shoulder. Then his headlights spotted something on the shoulder, he stopped, picked up a fedora and took off after the guy, to give it back and now—” He broke off, listening to the loudspeaker, nodding; he said, “Okay, Boag, I’ll do that. Good luck.” And then to McGraw: “You heard. The Hake Mountain road now, so it won’t be long.” He marked down the time — 12:14 — and chuckled. “Up hill, down dale, and either Boag will nail him or the guy’ll fly off one of those hairpin curves. Don’t bother him, you heard, with the radio; he’s got all he can do to handle the wheel.”
Kin said, “Hake’s a bad road. Where they’ve straightened out some of those hairpins they left the old loops and a desperate man could scoot in there, brake sharp, sideways, then turn out his lights and jump. Hitting in there hard, a trooper would plow into it—”
“This is just some knuckle-head drunk, kid,” DiPolo said. “Get the ants out of your pants and pass some coffee.”
But at 12:20 McGraw said, “Get hold of Boag, Lulu. Never mind — I don’t care what he said.” But Boagard made no answer and that caused McGraw to get up and make a circle of the room. At 12:25 he told DiPolo to try again, and peered across the room, uncertain, where Kin stood by a window tugging this way and that at his belt.
“Nope,” DiPolo said. And then he was half out of his chair and his coffee cup crashed on the floor. “Boagard? Boag — is that you, fella? Boag!” He was writing the time down — 12:27 — and then he was all the way up on his feet, still writing; but he shouted: “Mac!”