Lucy roused as if from a trance and threw her arms across her breasts. And he laughed.
My crutches leaned against the bed. I could use one of them as a club, I thought. A futile weapon, for he had two good ankles and a gun, but I would have to try. My hand crept toward the nearest crutch.
Laughing, he said, “Think of that, Taylor, all of a sudden the dame’s modest. And after all the times I’ve seen her stark naked.”
She cowered at my feet, hugging herself, and my hand reached for the crutch.
He saw it. “Don’t try making like a hero. All I’m here for is to remind you what happens if you pull anything. Maybe, Lucy, you got an idea sneaking out and bringing the cops. Well, get it out of your head. I’ll be looking in here every once in a while. If you’re not here, your husband catches lead. Understand?”
“You don’t have to worry,” she said.
“I’m just reminding you, that’s all.”
He left, leaving the door open. Slowly Lucy straightened up and I heard her sob under her breath. She went to the door and closed it and came back to me.
After the lamp was out, moonlight flooded the room. She lay in the circle of my arm in bed.
“Do you still care for him?” I asked her.
“I love you,” she said.
“But you loved him once.”
“Did I?” She seemed to be thinking it over. “I was very young when I married him. He was very handsome, and — and there was a certain virility about him.”
“Did you know he was a crook?”
“Not when I married him, although...” She stopped; she seemed to have trouble expressing herself. “But when I found out — well, he was my husband and I stuck to him. Then he and Pop — that armed robbery and getting caught.”
“Who’s Pop? He seems like a pretty good guy.”
“He was one of Roy’s cronies. That’s how I happened to know him. He and Roy were both given twenty years. And two years ago I divorced Roy. But please, I don’t want to talk about it now.”
“All right.”
I heard them go to bed in the room next door, and then I lay for a long time listening to the night.
“Lucy?”
She stirred against me. “Yes, darling?”
“We can both get out through the window.”
“I’ve been thinking of that, but he did something to the car.”
“Listen,” I said. “I can get into the woods if I go slowly. I’ll hide there while you run to the nearest house that has a phone and call the police.”
“He said he’ll kill you, and he will.”
“But if I hide in the woods...”
“It’s too much risk. They’ll leave tomorrow or the next day. We don’t have to worry.”
Maybe not, I thought. But just barely maybe not.
I held her close in my arms and the night wore away.
All next day Pop sat in the living room playing solitaire, but Roy Kester couldn’t stay in any one spot. He prowled the rooms and the grounds, and his restlessness was like a smoldering fuse. And wherever he went to, inside or outside the bungalow, he always came back to wherever Lucy happened to be at the time.
Usually she wore shorts and a skimpy halter in hot weather, but today she had put on slacks and a polo shirt. Because of Kester; because of the way he seldom stopped looking at her. But it made little difference what she wore. She looked just as beautiful; just as desirable. If she had been covered with a blanket, his brooding eyes would have stripped it off her.
Sooner or later something was bound to happen, I kept thinking. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I sat helpless, only half a man with that broken ankle, watching and waiting.
I had never known weather could be so sultry.
Shortly before lunch he touched her for the first time. He stopped her as she passed, holding her wrist with one hand and his other hand caressing her.
She froze and looked at me with frantic appeal not to do anything. Pop stopped shuffling cards. The tableau held for a heartbeat or two, then she yanked away from him.
“Set the table, Roy,” she said, trying to act as if nothing at all had happened. “It’s time for lunch.”
He passed the back of his hand over his mouth. Then he said, “Okay, where’s the stuff?”
I sank limply back in the chair and Pop started clearing the table of cards so that we could eat on it.
The second time Kester touched her was in the late afternoon. I was glancing through a magazine, and suddenly I was aware of the quietness. Both Lucy and Kester were outside. I took my crutches and went to the side window. He was talking urgently to her as she hung kitchen towels on the line.
His hand went to the back of her thigh. She moved away from him and he followed her.
“Only one day,” Pop said pleadingly to me. “One more day and we can leave.”
He stood beside me at the window, seeing what I was seeing.
Kester’s hand was again on her. If I had had anything to kill him with, I would have killed him then.
“One more day at the most,” Pop said, “and then you’ll have her all to yourself forever.”
She twisted away from Kester and ran to the bungalow. He didn’t follow. With his head down, he strode back and forth near the clothesline, as if he were still caged in a cell.
That evening Lucy and I went to bed even earlier than the day before. It was only twilight, but our room was the one place where we could close a door between us and Kester.
We didn’t sleep. We lay close together listening to them start to quarrel over their card game. After a while Kester said, “The hell with it!” and the screen door banged. Being a fugitive from the law, he couldn’t have gone anywhere, but he must have been outside in the dark at least an hour. We were still awake when he returned. He and Pop muttered to each other, and then there were the heavy footsteps on the way to the other room.
Except that he didn’t go to his room. There were the two bedroom doors in the little hall, and instead of opening the right door he opened the left. Our door.
Naked to the waist, he loomed immense in the moonlight. I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I could hear him breathe and I could sense the turmoil in him.
“What the hell you doing in his bed?” he said. “You’re my wife.”
Under the cover Lucy shrank against me.
“You hear me?” He advanced to the bed, his powerful shoulders hunched forward like those of a bull about to charge. “Get out of his bed!”
She found her voice. “Roy, don’t joke. You know very well Neal is my husband now.”
“I’m your husband. I never divorced you. They never asked me. You come to me where you belong.”
I knew there was nothing I could say to him, or that she could either. He had been too long without her or any other woman, and he had had too many tormenting hours of being under the same roof with her.
He took out his gun and pointed it down at me.
“I’ll kill him and then you’ll have only one husband. Me!” Moonlight flickered on his grinning lips. “You stay in bed with him, baby, and his blood will spatter all over you.”
“Roy, wait! I’m getting out.”
I tried to hold her, but I was too slow. She rolled to the edge of the bed and stood up in that clinging, transparent nightgown. Moonlight burnished her bare shoulders and her throat and her breasts swelling out of the low bodice.
His arm went about her waist. She shrank from him, but she didn’t fight him. She looked at the black automatic his other hand held pointed down at me, and she was limp as he drew her to him.
I jumped out of bed on one leg, dragging my other foot in the cast after me. There must have been a great deal of pain, but I don’t remember feeling it. I hopped to the crutches standing against the wall.
Lucy was screaming. She had put her body between us and was clawing at his gun. I got my hands on one crutch and raised it. I swayed, trying to brain him without hitting her.