After the mad scramble to get to the launch, the next hour and a half was slow and dragging anticlimax. Dave roared the launch down to the farther end of the lake, where the madman had gone in, and they crossed back and forth, back and forth, searching the shore through binoculars, searching this area of the lake. They didn’t concern themselves with the island; it was too far away for a man to have swum it.
At four o’clock, the first state police cars appeared at their end of the lake, and Sondgard through his binoculars saw Captain Garrett standing at the water’s edge, near the Lounge, waving to him. He turned to Dave. “Go on in to shore.”
They couldn’t get the launch in to the short pier where the theater’s rowboat had stood, but there was a longer pier behind the Lounge itself. Dave eased the launch in next to it, and Sondgard and Mike threw the lines to two uniformed state policemen, who held them while Captain Garrett came aboard.
He was a bluff and hearty man, invariably cheerful of manner, surrounded by an aura of fantastic patience and competence. He shook Sondgard’s hand and said, “You’ve got a rough one this time, eh, Eric?”
“Do you want to hear it now?”
“If it’ll help.”
Sondgard told it quickly, sketching in what the madman had done, and what he had done in retaliation, outlining his own blunders as clearly as possible. But Captain Garrett immediately reassured him, saying, “Don’t go putting on a hair shirt, Eric. You were up against a lunatic. A normal killer now, somebody who kills for a reason, you can almost always track one of those fellows down. But a lunatic now, that’s a horse of a different color. I think you did just fine. You flushed him out in a day, didn’t you? Couldn’t ask for better than that.”
“Two people died who shouldn’t have died.”
“You thinking about that fingerprint? Now, don’t go putting a lot of hope in one lone fingerprint off a cake of soap. Just listen to me, I’m making up poems. But take my word for it, Eric, that little slip with the soap could have happened to anybody. And it probably wasn’t a print worth a damn anyway. Soap’s too soft, it blurs the outlines.”
“Rod McGee is dead,” Sondgard said bitterly.
“That boy would probably of been killed anyway. Him or somebody else. He got killed because you flushed this Forrest fella out. Now, if you hadn’t of flushed him out, how many people would of been killed? Maybe this same Rod McGee, plus a whole lot more. Don’t you go getting mad at yourself, Eric, you did this just fine. I can’t think of anything I’d of done different, and there’s one or two excellent things you did I wouldn’t of even thought of.”
Sondgard remained unconvinced, but he let the conversation lapse because they were wasting time. They agreed that Captain Garrett would take charge of the search on shore, and Sondgard would stay on the launch. Forrest had undoubtedly crawled onto land somewhere by now, but he might just try heading back into the water again if Captain Garrett’s men got too close to him.
They spent a little while setting up a radio connection between the launch and one of the state police cars, through the nearest state police substation and Joyce Ravenfield back at the office. Then Captain Garrett left the launch, and they headed out into the lake again.
Four o’clock. Four-fifteen. Four-thirty.
A flash of color kept itching the corner of Sondgard’s eye. A flash of color, an irritant. He kept trying to concentrate his attention on the shoreline and the near water, and this flash of orange color kept intruding on him, until all at once his mind was full of it.
Orange. A bright orange sail out beyond the madman’s bobbing head, when Mike had been shooting and missing. And now, a bright orange sail...
He turned, squinting, peering for it. Down by the island. Stopped there, down by the island.
It didn’t have to mean a thing. Somebody out for a sail, and taking a break on the island.
But the madman had disappeared. And that orange sail had been down at this end of the lake before.
Sondgard hesitated. But one more blunder now, and he didn’t know what he’d do with himself. He turned to Dave. “Go on over to the island,” he said. “Let’s just take a look at the island.”
It was a one-room shed, as old as the hills. Half the roof had rotted away, part of one wall had fallen outward, and if there had once been flooring, it was now all gone. The windows were blank rectangles in the standing walls, and there was no door in the doorway.
Mel stepped inside, gazed around, and said, “Charming.”
“I hoped you’d like it,” she said. “The servants are off today, so we’ll have to rough it.”
“In appointments like this, who could complain?”
They were both feeling very giddy, and completely unaware of the passage of time. They’d spent a long, long while doing a lot of necking and very little talking, and had stopped only when it had become obvious to both of them that within the next minute they must either stop or mate. The spell broken, they were nervously hysterical with one another, laughing too much, touching one another gingerly and trying to make believe that they were all calm inside.
They’d gone swimming again, for the cooling influence of the water, and then had spent a while just lying on the ground, smoking and talking idly. They got around to Mary Ann’s future again, and this time she agreed that she probably would go to New York this fall, and he would introduce her to everybody he knew, because who knows, somebody might know of a job for her. They talked it over and decided she should ask Bob Haldemann for some acting jobs in the plays this summer, so she could qualify for Equity membership and then try her hand at acting when she got to the city. She couldn’t very well expect to walk into New York and be given a job as a director, but if she could act even fairly decently she might get some work and meet some people, and once again, who knows?
The sun had climbed to the top of the sky and then slid halfway down the other side, so that now it was facing them, shining hot and yellow in their eyes, finally forcing them to move on. “I still haven’t showed you the shed,” she reminded him.
“I’m game,” he said. “Let’s go.”
So they picked their way in through the shrubbery, the ground marshy and oozing beneath their bare feet, and came to the shed. They played a nonsense game here, making it up as they went along, gradually becoming Cynthia and Reginald in an English sentimental comedy, drinking imaginary tea from imaginary cups and telling one another how much they would miss one another while she was being a missionary in Ceylon and he was back with his outfit in Inja.
Then a voice said, “Doctor Chax.”
They turned, and Mel smiled with surprise. “Ken! What are you doing here?”
The madman came into the room with a stick.
Chax.
The madman had come to the island. Had crawled from the little boat with the orange sail, had rested awhile on the wet ground, exhausted from the unfamiliar labor of steering a small sailboat across open water, exhausted more from the turmoil raging inside his head.
Chax.
All his beings were active now, all his selves, commingled and confused together. Even the artificial ones, the ones he had assumed with conscious knowledge, for conscious purposes. All mixing together, all babbling at once, all in mortal terror of extinction.
Chax.
The sun beat down, baking his body, drying the sweat that sprang constantly to his burning forehead, covering his eyes with orange haze. Once again — as always and always — he was alone and exposed, the bright light of the sun beating down from above, pointing him out to his enemies, and the flat empty water all around. All around this time, encircling him, holding him while his enemies crept closer.