His age? Oh, he was pretty old. Forty-five or around there. No, he hardly ever went to town. Maybe just once every two or three months to cash his pension checks and buy what few clothes he needed. No, he had never asked them to cash one, but it seemed like the man who’d had the place before did say something about cashing one for him now and then if he had enough money on hand. His mail? Oh, it came in care of the camp, at the rural mailbox out on the county road. He never got anything, though, except the checks. They came in a long envelope with the name of the railroad on them. She thought it was the Southern Pacific. He probably didn’t have any kinfolks at all, the poor old thing.
When he did go to town he came down the lake in his boat and hitched a ride with George. His cabin was a mile or so above the road that came into the upper lake from the highway, but the road wasn’t open except when it had been dry for a long time, and he didn’t have a car anyway.
She poured two cups of the coffee she’d been making as we talked, and came back and sat down again. We were swung around, facing each other across the stool in the middle. I was on the left hand one, with my back to the door.
She took a sip of the coffee and smiled. “I ought to get back to work,” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve talked so much.”
“I’ve enjoyed it,” I said. “Very much.”
I took out cigarettes, wondering how to get her started on Cliffords again, and offered her one. We leaned toward each other as I held the lighter. She was quite pretty, I thought, the way she was now with that warm friendliness in her eyes.
Then her face froze up as suddenly as if I’d hit her. She was looking over my shoulder. I turned just as Nunn pulled open the screen and stepped inside. He must move like a cat, I thought; neither of us had heard him come up on the porch.
I nodded, lit my own cigarette, and snapped off the lighter. “How’s fishing?” I asked, wondering why he was back this time of day. I hadn’t even heard the boat come into the inlet.
He stared at me. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer. Then he said, “So-so. And how’s it been with you? You catching a lot of fish?”
“I had a little luck at first, but it died out.”
“Maybe you just give up too easy. Or do you?”
She had said nothing at all, and I was conscious of the tension in the room. There was ugly feeling about it, as if it could blow up if anybody made a bad move.
He stared bleakly at the two of us and then at the coffee cups. “I wonder if I could trouble you to go get that box of shear-pins?” he said to her. “That is, if you think you could spare the time.”
She got up from the stool without a word and disappeared through the doorway behind the counter. The silence she left behind her would have been awkward if it had been two other people. We cared so little for each other it didn’t seem to matter.
“You people do a fine job of overhauling motors,” he said.
I stared at him coldly. “What seems to be the trouble?”
“Sheared a pin.”
“I gathered that,” I said. “But just what do you think those pins are in there for?”
“Forget it, forget it,” he growled. “You got your money, what do you care?”
“If the pin didn’t go you’d tear up the propeller when you hit something, or bend the shaft.”
He struck a match on his thumbnail and lit a cigarette. “Yeah? They’re supposed to have a friction clutch that’ll slip.”
“The new ones do,” I said. “Not the old models.”
“Sure. Sure. I knew you’d have all the answers. I’ve had nothing but trouble with those motors since I bought ’em.”
I finished the coffee, put a dime on the counter, and stood up. “Try taking care of them,” I said. “It helps.”
I started for the door. He moved aside grudgingly. You could see he was looking for trouble, but he wanted me out of here even more. It was all right with me; I had other things to do myself.
“You don’t want anything else?” he said.
I stopped and turned, looking into the bleak hatchet face from a distance of about two feet. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“I just wanted to be sure. That’s all right, ain’t it?”
“I guess so,” I said.
I went on out and crossed the sun-drenched clearing to my cabin. The argument about the motors was a phony. He probably hadn’t even sheared a pin, or if he had he’d done it on purpose for an excuse to sneak back. He was spying on her. Or on me.
I wondered why. Did it have something to do with the thing that’d brought me out here? Or did he simply believe she was the thing? It might figure that way, to a mind like Nunn’s, and the way he’d acted all along seemed to bear it out.
Well, if he wasn’t sure he was keeping her at home, that was his hard luck, not mine. I had other things to think about, such as the fact that while this whole thing might have appeared to be mildly goofy to begin with it was now completely insane.
You had all these pieces of evidence. They interlocked. You put them all together, and you had the answer. So what was it?
One of the great police organizations of the world was shaking down North America trying to find the loot from a bank robbery, while some dreamy birdbrain in his second childhood was serenely buying comic books with it.
Move over, Cliffords, I thought. I’ll bring up an armful and we’ll trade. Dibs on Superman.
Six
I cut the motor and came to rest beneath dense overhanging foliage along the bank. It was a little after one p.m. I had come over a mile, I thought, since entering the mouth of the winding waterway up which Cliffords had gone with his boat, and I could as well be lost in some remote back country of the Amazon drainage. No sound broke the stillness of midday. The channel, about a hundred yards wide at this point, materialized out of the timber a quarter of a mile behind me and disappeared around another bend just ahead.
I opened the tackle box and unfolded the large map of the county. Here was the channel I was on; it was the easternmost arm of the lake, next to the highway and roughly paralleling it at a distance varying from two to three miles. I was about—say, at this point on it. Now. There was the access road coming in from the highway. It turned off the road a mile or so south of that tricky S-bend.
I sat still for a moment, frowning thoughtfully at the map without actually seeing it. What the devil was it? I shrugged, and lit a cigarette. It didn’t matter. Now, here. The dirt road, merely a thin line on the map, dead-ended on this channel. I glanced at the scale at the bottom of the map and estimated the distance. Say another four miles. And beyond it somewhere was the shack Cliffords lived in. She’d said a mile or two; I wondered if she had ever been up there herself.
I put the map back in the box and took the ten-dollar bill out of my wallet. It was an old one, creased and limp from the thousands of hands it had been through and like any one of a million others except for that narrow stain along the edge at one end. I compared it with the twenty. The stain was exactly the same color, a reddish shade of brown, and it was on only that one place. Why never anywhere else? There was one very good answer to that, I thought, and the picture it brought to mind made my skin prickle with excitement. Wherever it had been to pick up that discoloration, there had been a lot of it, stacked in bundles so that only this edge was exposed to the contaminating agent. You didn’t need a doctorate in physics to realize that a mere handful of banknotes, thrown loosely into a box or something, seldom stood on end of their own volition or stuck straight out from the side with no support. I moistened a finger and rubbed it along the stain; it smudged slightly and a faint trace of it came off. It was the same stuff.