If Mom made a pass with the gun, I don’t know. Maybe she just thought about it. Whatever she did, Jill caught it and flinched in her chair. “I’m taking that,” I told Mom, reaching for it. But she backed away and I had to get tough to make her give it up. She kept saying: “Leave me be. This gun’s mine. It belongs to me. Your father bought it for me, so I’d be protected.” That was news to me; I thought he had bought it for himself.
“Whoever it belongs to,” I snapped, now pretty disagreeable, “it’s evidence in a killing. It has to be handed over to the police.”
At last I had it and could put it on the living room table, the low one in front of the fireplace. “I think it’s time for breakfast,” I said, and to Jilclass="underline" “Could you stand some food?”
“I’d like some coffee, please.”
“Coming up.”
Generally I did the cooking, but this time I took Mom out to the kitchen with me to get her away from Jill — and away from that gun. The stove was electric. After I’d got out the kettle and filled it, I snapped on the coil under it and got out my grill that I used for fritters. It was stainless steel, twelve by twenty-four inches, with bolt holes around the edges. I bought it in a junkyard. What it had been part of, I don’t know — the floor of a truck maybe. But for me, once it was greased with Crisco, it was perfect for top-of-the-stove frying, like fritters. I greased it up now and cut the corn off the cobs, starting the bacon first in a heavy skillet I had. Soon as the kettle started to whistle, I made coffee and took it to the living room on a tray, with a napkin, sugar, and cream. Pretty fancy. Mom didn’t bother to hide her disgust. I put it on the table in front of Jill. She put in four lumps of sugar and some cream and started to gulp, flinching in between from its being so hot. Suddenly she looked like a half-starved child, and my heart went bumpity-bump. I made quick work of the orange juice, eggs, bacon, and fritters, but ate mine out there with Jill while Mom ate in the kitchen. Every so often I’d pat a strong little hand and it would pat me on the cheek. I’d just got through washing the dishes when the door-bell rang. I opened the door and there the officers were.
4
It seemed the sheriff was in Europe on some kind of business. The officer who was in charge was a sergeant named Edgren. He introduced himself and then the deputy with him, a middle-aged man named Mantle. He also introduced, or pointed at, the intern on the ambulance, who had pulled up in back of the sheriff’s car, a doctor named Cline, and the undertaker, Santos, who was getting out of the “dead wagon,” a black, enclosed truck with no markings of any kind, that had pulled up behind the ambulance.
Sergeant Edgren asked me: “You killed a man, that right?”
“The hijacker, Shaw, yes.”
“You identified him already?”
“The girl identified him. The one who came down with him on his parachute.”
“She here?”
“Right inside.”
“She’s the one that’s to go? In the ambulance?”
“She’d better go, sergeant. I’d say she’s in pretty bad shape.”
“Dr. Cline?”
Dr. Cline came up with two men who got a stretcher out of the ambulance, and I led the way inside. When I’d introduced the whole bunch to Jill, she motioned to the blanket and started talking like she was used to taking charge. “Pardon my informal clothes,” she said, very cool, “but my others got wet in the river, where I came down on the parachute. Mr. Howell fixed me up with this blanket.”
Dr. Cline touched her forehead, felt her pulse, and made a face. His men put the stretcher down, lifted her on it, and carried her out. As they were sliding her into the ambulance I bent down and kissed her. “You get well,” I whispered.
“For you I will.”
Edgren was at the door keeping an eye on me. As soon as the ambulance drove off, I went back with him. “OK,” he said. “Start at the beginning.”
“Not much to tell. However—”
So I told it, beginning with Mom’s waking me up, the walk to the water’s edge, the argument there with Shaw, my trip up to the landing, my paddling down in the boat, my order to drop the gun, the shot he took at me, and the one I took at him. “That killed him, at least, I think it did. I didn’t look, but I imagine my mother did. You can talk to her about it.”
“When was this?”
“Little after five. Twenty after, I’d say.”
He opened a notebook and glanced at it. “You called us at six after six.”
“Something like that, yes.”
“What took you so long? What were you waiting for?”
“I had that girl on my hands. She was in awful shape from the cold after coming down in the water, fright from his holding that gun to her head, and shock at seeing him killed. First things first. She was important. He could wait.”
“Your mother was there, you say?”
“That’s right.”
“Why couldn’t she have called?”
“She was looking for the money.”
“What money?”
“The money the airline put up. That was put in a zipper bag with straps to go over his shoulder, so it said on TV. That he had on him — that he must have had on him — when he jumped with that parachute.”
“What she have to do with it?”
“She wanted to claim the reward.”
“For what?”
“Sergeant Edgren, from what the girl had told her, the water took everything when they came down in the river — his hat, coat, shoes, the girl’s shoes — everything they had, including, of course, the money. But my mother thought it just might have floated after he threw off the strap, after he swam to the island, and that if she got going real quick, if she rowed out there and looked, she might be able to grab it before it sank, before it got waterlogged, or got knocked to pieces below, going over the dam. So you can’t call from a johnboat. So that’s why she left it to me.”
“She find it?”
“I’m sorry to say, she didn’t.”
“Where’s he at now?”
“Where he fell — on the island.”
I led them around the house and down the path to the boat. “That’s him,” I said, pointing. “Over there in the bushes.”
I offered to row him out, but he motioned to Mantle who pushed the boat in. Then the two of them — Edgren in the stern, Mantle at the oars — rowed out to have a look. “OK,” he told Mantle. “Load your camera. You got work to do.” Mantle snapped film into his camera, then got busy, shooting pictures of the corpse, measuring with a steel tape Mantle had on a spool, taking note of the trampled underbrush, and so on. Then Mantle called to me, wanting to know where I had been, “when you fired the shot that killed him.”
“I’ll show you.”
They rowed to shore again, and I stepped in the bow of the boat. Mantle headed downstream, then to the island’s far side. I had him pull for the tree and caught it, just as I had before, and pulled the boat in to jam it, exactly the same way. All three of us got out and headed for the stump where I’d picked up Jill, which was four or five feet from the corpse. Mantle spotted a twig, a fresh one on top of a bush, and looked at it with a glass. Then he wrapped it in a Kleenex and put it in his pocket. “I think,” I said, “it was cut off the tree by his shot.”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “It’s important. More or less proves you shot in self-defense.”
The three of us got in the boat again and rowed back to the bank. Edgren said: “I broke Shaw’s gun, found one empty shell in the chamber. The rest of it, one twig cut off the tree, apparently by his bullet, corresponds with what Howell said.”
“You mean, write it up that way?”
“It all checks out.”