“Then you didn’t see him at all?”
“No. I was only there a few minutes.”
“Oh,” I said. “Cliffords just told you he was under arrest? But he was wandering around alone.”
“That’s right, Barney. You see, he had to take the crutch and some bandages out there where the F.B.I, man was hurt. He couldn’t walk.”
“Oh,” I said again, frowning. “Well, I suppose. . . . Aw, I don’t know.”
“What do you mean?”
“I was thinking of what you told me about him. That he was a little—you know. He might have just dreamed it up. Or got it from one of those comic books.”
“No,” she said. “He was telling the truth, all right.”
“How do you know he was?
“I saw the man’s coat there on the bed, when we went in to wrap up the fish. And Mr. Cliffords showed me some of the money, in a paper bag.”
Well, it was a good try, I thought. But it wouldn’t have worked, anyway; she didn’t have to be able to prove it. Just whisper it down a well. Roughly half the F.B.I, agents in the State would be down there looking for Cliffords in another few hours. The other half would be looking for me. If they weren’t already.
“What were you doing up there?” I asked. We might as well talk; that’s what we’d come out here for.
She puffed on the cigarette and tapped ashes out of the window. “Well, sometimes when I do an errand for him I take the stuff on up there, just for the boat ride and to get away from that camp for a few minutes. And then, he pays me.”
So that’s why she had had that other twenty.
“And George and I’d had a—well, a fight. He’d gone off to town. That was a little while after I’d got back from Exeter. I had to get away from the place or go crazy. Maybe I was a little scared, too; he can be pretty mean sometimes, and I didn’t want to be there when he came back if I could help it. So, anyway, when it was late in the afternoon and Mr. Cliffords still hadn’t come down to get his glasses. . . .”
“Glasses?”
She nodded. “The poor old soul can’t read a word without ‘em. He’d dropped his old ones and one of the lenses had come out. He thought he had a spare set, but when he went to look . . .”
I closed my eyes. They could kill you, but did they have to do this first?
“. . . anyway, he found out he’d lost the spare ones so he came down Monday morning and asked me if I’d pick him up another set in Exeter. You remember, when I called you that was where I was going. They have his prescription there at the Berg Brothers.”
You had to admit it. Purely as a work of art it was perfect. There wasn’t a flaw, or a superfluous brush stroke. It had all the cold and functional beauty of a cobra coiled to strike.
“What did George think about it?” I asked.
“Oh, he doesn’t know about it yet. Unless he heard it in town.”
I kept my face perfectly still. “You mean you didn’t tell him?”
She shook her head. Her eyes were moody. “No. We had a fight, like I told you. We haven’t spoken since”
Don’t hope yet, I thought. I was almost afraid to breathe. “How about the other people you told? The ones who knew him, I mean? I bet they were surprised to know he had that money all the time.”
“The people in Hampstead wouldn’t know him,” she said. “I haven’t told anybody but you.”
I was limp, and wanted to put my head and arms down on the steering wheel and just rest. But what now? There was no way I could stop her from telling somebody else, and the instant she breathed one word of it anywhere in this country swarming with F.B.I, agents. . . . Was I any better off? It was just slower this way, prolonging the agony. No. No, no, no. I had to turn her off some way. But how? I couldn’t ask her not to say anything about it. She wasn’t that stupid. She’d guess.
Well. I’d stopped Cliffords, hadn’t I?
Jesus Christ, no. Not that. Not ever again. . . . I’d rather go on and get it over with. Not this kid. . . . She trusted me. She practically followed me around because she thought I was something special.
Well? Hadn’t Cliffords? Are you all right, Mr. Ward?
Stop it, I thought. I felt sick.
“Didn’t he come home at all last night?” I asked.
“Yes. But it was late.”
Then he didn’t even know she’d been up there at all. Wait. . . . The warning bell was ringing in my mind. It was something she’d said. “—to wrap up the fish.” That bass! That big bass Cliffords had caught, the one I thought he’d thrown back into the lake.
“You said something a minute ago,” I prompted her. “Something about a fish. What did that have to do with it?”
“Oh. It was a great big thing Mr. Cliffords had caught. He insisted on me taking it. He said George might like to have it mounted to put in the lunch-room.”
Well, we were back where we started.
“Didn’t George ask you where it came from?”
She shook her head. “I guess I wasn’t very nice. I didn’t want to take him any fish. But I couldn’t hurt the old man’s feelings. When I got down to the lake I threw it away.”
I couldn’t take much more. This yo-yo routine was too rough.
There was something else that didn’t jibe, too, but maybe it didn’t matter. Cliffords had said he’d phone her from the jail to collect his stuff and sell some of it. But she’d just been there. Why hadn’t he told her then; Probably didn’t think of it until she’d gone, I thought.
“Does George know where you are now?” I asked. “I mean, does he know you came to Hampstead?”
She shook her head. “He’s up the lake. Guiding for a man.”
In other words, it was now or never. Nobody knew where either of us was.
Why? I thought in agony. Why did they do it; Both of them—Cliffords, and now this kid—cut you off at every turn. You’d think they had spent a year studying the precise moves to back you into a spot from which you could not escape without killing them. They insisted on it; they left you no choice at all.
I had to do something. I couldn’t sit here all day trying to make up my mind.
“Barney,” she said quietly, “I get afraid of him when he’s like he was last night. He thinks there’s something between us. We know there’s not, but . . .”
But there could be. She might as well have said it.
Then, suddenly, I got it. The whole thing solved itself at once. Of course I couldn’t do anything to her, even if I were able to bring myself to do it. There was another reason. Nunn suspected us; so did Otis. If anything happened to her, the police would pick me up for questioning within hours.
But if you merely turned it around, it fell right into place for me. It was made to order. All I had to do was get her out of the country. Today. Now, before she had a chance to speak to one other living person. Run away with her. Sure, they’d know we had gone together, but that just made it better. Wouldn’t that answer all Ramsey’s questions at once, if he had any? I didn’t know anything about Haig’s money; all I’d been doing was chasing some other man’s wife.
I turned and gave her a long, somber look. “Do you mean that?”
“What, Barney?”
“About being afraid of him?”
“I don’t know really. But . . .
“You’ve got to leave him,” I said. “We’re going away together.”
She stared. “We—we can’t do that.”
I caught both her arms. “Today,” I said harshly. “You’re not going back there at all. If he ever hurt you I’d kill him.”
“Barney, you’re squeezing my arms . . .”
I turned them loose and dropped my head contritely. “I’m sorry,” I said. I took a deep breath and exhaled it shakily, still looking down at my hands clenched in my lap. “I—I’ve got to tell you something, Jewel. You’ve never been out of my mind since that first minute I saw you. Wait. . . . I know how crazy it sounds. Of course it’s been only a little over a week. But don’t you see? Time has no meaning any more. It would be the same in five minutes, or a thousand years.”