“Where?” I asked, hanging over their icebox.
“Sumner Lake,” they replied.
“With live bait? Or hand grenades?”
“Fly-rod bugs. Cork poppers. . . .”
“Cut it out,” I said. “In August?”
“It’s the truth,” they said. “We found an underground spring. The water was this cool. . . .”
Otis had come out too. He glanced resignedly from the fish to me and sighed. “How long’ll you be gone?
“Where?” I asked.
“Hah,” he said mournfully.
Sumner Lake was perfect. It was ninety miles in the opposite direction. “Well, if you insist. But I wouldn’t knock off go fishing for anybody but you.”
“You want Pete to come in?”
Pete was his boy, the fourteen-year-old who looked like a Sherman tank. During summer vacations he sometimes filled down here when I went fishing.
“Sure,” I said. I went back in the shop and picked up the 3-h.p. motor I used on rental skiffs. I put it in the back of the station wagon, along with a can of fuel. We locked up.
“I’ll be back Wednesday night or Thursday,” I said. “And, look. If another of those twenties comes in, call the F.B.I, in Sanport. They want us to watch for them; here’s the serial number of the other one.”
I drove home. When I pulled into the drive under the oaks I saw her Chrysler was in the garage. So she was home, and probably loaded to her silken ears with my inhumanity to dear Mr. Selby. Here we go again, I thought.
She was in the kitchen writing a check for Reba for the day’s housecleaning, wearing a lightweight knit thing that looked as if she’d been built into it by an oriental sybarite with a do-it-yourself kit. It was strange; her clothes were never tight on her but you didn’t have any trouble sensing that their occupant wasn’t a collegiate pole-vaulter. Well, maybe there a Turk somewhere back in my ancestry and I was just sensitive to the voluptuous wave-form of her particular radiation. She’d been to the beauty shop, and her hair-do gleamed like embossed and highly polished chrome. The full-mouthed and broad-planed face was as outrageously blonde as the rest of her, faintly sensuous and at the same time stamped with that strong suggestion of purely female cussedness that was no lie at all.
She turned the blue eyes on me now and smiled with sweet deadliness. “Oh. Home so early, dear? I didn’t think you’d be able to get away.”
This was for Reba’s benefit, and you could see it was fooling her. She took her check and started retreating toward the back door before she got blood on her.
I opened the refrigerator and took out a can of beer. “Oh,” I said. “Something important came up, sweet. I’m going fishing.”
“Isn’t that nice. Reba, Mr. Godwin is going fishing. Does your husband fish much?”
“Yes’m,” Reba said. “He fish ever’ now an’ then.”
“Well, I think it’s so wonderful for men to have a hobby, don’t you?”
“Yes’m,” Reba said. She left. She was forty-something and had learned what this world does to non-combatants.
The blue eyes flashed. The first pitch was high and inside and smoking. “Well! Just leave me sitting there like a fool! You couldn’t get away from your precious toys for five minutes to show a little consideration for your wife, but you can drop everything to go fishing. And what do you suppose Mr. Selby thought?”
She couldn’t make me lose my temper now. I was too excited about this other thing, and I wasn’t even thinking about her. “Oh, he didn’t mind,” I said. “Think how he enjoyed looking at your legs.”
I took a drink of the beer and did a brief impersonation of the oleaginous Mr. Selby stalking a crossed thigh. He was the devious type, the long-range planner; he maneuvered into position and then caught the target obliquely on a passing shot.
“Mr. Selby is a gentleman—!”
“Which is more than you can say for some people you know,” I said. “Did you bring home that paper you wanted me to sign?”
“I told you it had to be notarized,” she snapped.
“So you did. Well, by God, that’ll teach me a lesson; the next time you whistle I’ll dash right over.”
“You enjoy humiliating me, is that it?”
“No,” I said. “It’s actually just confusion. I get busy down there and forget which way I’m supposed to jump when you press the button.”
“Oh, you make me tired.”
“Take a rest, then. I’m going to Sumner Lake and I’ll be gone till Thursday.”
She stared coldly, facing me across the kitchen. “The Wheelers are coming tonight to play bridge. But that wouldn’t matter, would it?”
“Tell ‘em to stay home and start their own war,” I said. “Haven’t they got any initiative at all?”
She whirled and went out. She looked regal as hell. I finished the beer and went down the stairs to the basement. The instant I was alone everything else faded from my mind and the thousand fascinating aspects of the puzzle came swarming back at once. Did Mrs. Nunn know that money was hot? She couldn’t have. Then how had she got it? Why two of those bills? I irritably brushed all the questions aside. There were no answers to any of them, and I was merely wasting time. I began gathering up my camping and fishing paraphernalia—duffel bag with my fishing clothes and shaving gear in it, tackle box, fly-rod, mosquito dope, and bedding. I wouldn’t need cooking equipment or food; my information was the Nunn’s ran a lunch-room of sorts along with the three old cabins and the boat and motor rental business.
I carried it all out to the station wagon. It took two trips. As I was going through the living-room the second time she came down the stairs from the second floor. I paused, with both hands full, and said, “Well, see you Thursday. . . .” She stared, stony-eyed, and said nothing. I went on out to the car, threw the rest of the stuff in, and slammed out of the drive.
I turned left on Main, going north toward Sumner Lake. Javier lay to the south and east and this would be a roundabout way to get there, but when you start lying you have to be consistent. I stopped at a service station on the highway at the edge of town and had the gasoline tank filled and the oil checked. The man who ran it, Wendell Graham, was a fisherman himself and a frequent customer at the store.
“Lucky devil,” he said. “Sumner Lake, huh? I hear it’s been pretty good.”
“I’ll let you know,” I said.
Eight miles north of town I turned off the highway on to a secondary road going east. It was a little after six. I met few-cars. Twenty miles ahead the road connected with another north-south highway, State 41, after skirting the edge of the wild and heavily timbered country at the upper end of the lake. State 41 passed along the east side of Javier at a distance of two to three miles. There was an access road in from that side, but it ran through swampy bottom country and was passable only in dry weather.
There were a few more cars after I turned on to 41, though traffic wasn’t heavy. It was not one of the principal routes to the coast. Once as I topped a slight rise I could see the unbroken wildness of the bottom country to the west, though I could not see the lake itself. It was broken into channels and inlets this far up and they were out of sight in the timber. It was superb duck hunting country in winter, but the only way in then, aside from walking, was to leave your car at the camp on the south end and go up by boat. At the foot of the grade was the poorly banked S-curve that had killed five people in the past three years. I slowed automatically, even though the road was dry, idly noting the white crosses the Highway Department had put up on the shoulder where cars had gone off the road due to excessive speed or drunken driving. I frowned thoughtfully, trying to remember something that nibbled at the edge of my mind. Then I was past. It wasn’t important.