“No, I didn’t have the craw to kill him right then. I should have, but I just couldn’t do it. He got away from me. I come back to the house — and there’s poor Martha laying there, all chopped to hell and gone, and this crazy swine coming at me with his cleaver. I just barely had time to get my gun up and pull the trigger...
“Yeah, that’s right. He circled around me out there, somehow, and come back to the house.”
Henry let his voice break. He sobbed for a moment, then went on raggedly, “If’n I’d been another minute sooner, I could have saved her. It was all my own fault, Jim...
“Yes, it was too...
“Yeah, I’ll stay right here.” He hung up, shook a cigarette from his pack and strolled between the bodies toward the door.
It was so easy, he thought — so damned easy. He walked out on the porch and leaned back against a post, to wait for the constable. It wouldn’t be much of a wait, he knew — the Shanley place was less than half a dozen miles away.
He had just started to strike a match to his cigarette, when a flash of colour in the elm grove caught his eye. He froze, staring at Colleen Kimberly, while the flame crawled up the match and burned his fingers.
How long had she been there? What might she have seen? He dropped the match, flicked the cigarette away and strode toward her. For a moment, he thought she meant to turn and run away, but then she stood still and leaned back against a tree-trunk, to wait for him.
He stepped close and nodded to her. “What are you doing up here in the grove, Miss Colleen?” he asked.
She smoothed the blonde hair back from her forehead and smiled up at him shyly. “I heard the gun,” she said.
“You just get here?” he asked.
She bobbed her head and pressed her back a little closer to the tree-trunk. “I thought maybe you’d had an accident,” she said softly. “Like my Uncle Carl had that time he shot himself in the foot.”
Henry drew a deep breath. “You was worried about me? Is that what you mean, Colleen?”
She looked away from him and moistened her lips. “Yes. And I kept wondering why you never came back to the knoll. I waited and waited.”
Colleen was really a very small girl, Henry noticed, now that they stood face to face like this. Small and perfect and all woman — and almost his. It seemed the wrong time to be telling her about Martha, but it had to be done.
“Something pretty awful has happened here, Colleen,” he said. “Did you hear about the maniac that got loose from the asylum?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been out on the knoll all afternoon, and everybody else is visiting in town.”
“He was here,” Henry said. He paused. “He was here — and he killed Martha.”
Colleen sucked in her breath sharply. “He killed her?”
“Yeah,” Henry said. “With a meat-cleaver.”
She was staring at him. “He killed your wife?”
Henry nodded, and, for some reason, the look on the girl’s face made him feel a little uneasy.
“With a meat-cleaver?” she asked. “Some man killed your wife with a meat-cleaver?”
Henry bit at his lip. For the first time since he’d talked to Colleen on the knoll that day, he was beginning to understand what folks meant when they said she wasn’t quite bright. She was so pretty to look at that a man didn’t notice anything else at first.
But there was something wrong with her, he realised now. Her voice was clear and sure, but it was like a little girl’s — like a little girl reading words from a book she didn’t understand, saying the words properly without knowing what they meant.
There was something about Colleen’s eyes, too. They never showed any expression at all — at least none to speak of. Like right now. Colleen didn’t look one way or another. She just stared at you, or smiled at you, and all you saw were those beautiful blue eyes with their long, sooty lashes, and all you could think about was how pretty they were. You thought so hard about the eyes themselves, you never even noticed that they never had any thoughts in them, that they never said anything.
Colleen smiled at him and gestured toward the house. “In there?” she said. “He killed her in there?”
Henry didn’t say anything. A moment ago he had been sweating. Now he felt cold.
Colleen shook her head wonderingly, then glanced toward the blacktop. “Somebody’s coming,” she said. “I’d better get back before they see me. Pa wouldn’t like it a bit, me being over here this way.”
The deputy sheriff’s pickup truck was already turning off the blacktop. The cage with the two bloodhounds in it rattled and slid toward the tailgate.
“No use going now,” Henry said. “It’s too late.” He moved away from her and waited for the constable and the deputy to climb out of the truck. He couldn’t afford to think any more about Colleen now, he knew. He’d have to watch every word he said, be on guard for every question.
The constable came up to him, his face compassionate. “Henry!” he said. “Goodness, man, what a terrible thing! What a terrible, terrible thing to happen!”
Henry nodded, pretended to struggle for words a moment, then looked away.
“Leave him be, Jim,” the deputy said. “He won’t be feeling like doing any more talking than he has to.”
“Sure, Henry,” the constable said. “You just take it easy now. Me and the sheriff’ll just take a look inside.” He glanced at Colleen and frowned. “Your pa know you’re over here, girl?”
She shook her head and smiled at Henry, and Henry got that cold feeling again. “Pa isn’t home,” she said. “Henry, do you remember what you told me that day over on the knoll? About going to a movie in town?”
Henry stared down at the ground, trying to keep back the panic. “Maybe you’d best go home now, Colleen,” he said. “Your pa may be home.”
“I never been to a movie,” she said quietly. “Never once in my whole life. Pa would never let me.” She was studying Henry’s face, and beginning to frown at what she saw there. “You promised me, Henry,” she said. “You said that if something happened to your wife, you and I could go to the church suppers and the movies. Don’t you remember, Henry?” She stopped, and now the blue eyes held a sheen close to tears.
The constable glanced sharply at the deputy; then both men looked at Henry, with eyes grown suddenly narrow. No one said anything. The seconds pounded away for a small eternity, and then, abruptly, Henry realised that the only sound in the elm grove was his own rapid breathing.
At last, Constable Weber cleared his throat. “You look just a little sick, Henry,” he said. “Maybe you’d best go inside and stretch out a while.”
Henry walked the mile it took to pass the constable, and the second mile it took to pass the deputy, and walked into the house on legs that threatened to collapse beneath him at every step.
They suspect me, he thought. They suspect me — and pretty soon they’ll know for sure. They ain’t fools — now that they’ve got their suspicions they’ll keep at it till they know.
He picked up his shotgun, reloaded it from the box of shells in the kitchen and carried it with him into the bedroom. He was still cold. He took off his shoes and socks and lay down on the bed and pulled the sheet up over him, keeping the gun beside him, pressed close to his body.
He listened to the sounds of the constable and the deputy, as they came into the house and moved about in the parlour. He listened to them leave again. He listened to the grating sound of the blood-hound’s cage being opened, then to the deep voices of the dogs themselves. He heard them, up in the grove for a long time, making the sounds bloodhounds always did, when they were trying to pick out a scent. Then he heard the grate of the cage again, and the sharp click, as someone secured the hasp on the cage-door.