It was nearly three when Jay went into his room. He changed into trunks, went out to the pool. For several minutes he thought he wasn’t going to be able to force himself to dive into the water. He sensed that Ellen had suggested the swim as a way of helping him ease that grotesque image of Joan. And he wondered if Ellen could be watching him from the shadowed room. He gripped the pool edge with his toes and dived. He swam across the pool and back and realized that he was avoiding the shallow end where she had died, so he forced himself to swim two slow lengths of the pool and then it was all right. It was just a swimming pool where water sparkled in the sun. He looked up and saw Ellen standing tall on the pool edge, tucking her dark hair under the bathing cap, smiling down at him. After they were both winded, they stretched out on the poolside mattresses, settling themselves gingerly on the sun-hot rubberized fabric, the first cigarette tasting odd, and he told her of Goddard, and of Joan. Ellen thought for a long time and then agreed that the thought of Joan and Gerald Rice was impossible.
He said, “There’s so many things that just don’t quite fit. Your saying her hair was dyed. That business of the fingernails. This business with Rice. It is all tied up, somehow, with her nervousness the last few days she was around.”
“Don’t get too much sun, dear,” she said, and then gasped and said, “Did you hear that? I hate those meaningless little words sprayed across conversation. Dear, darling, honey. I don’t know where that came from, honestly. I apologize, Jay.”
“If you hadn’t mentioned it, I wouldn’t have noticed it. What does that make me?”
“Complacent, perhaps.”
“I’ll make sure I won’t get too much sun, darling,” he said, grinning.
She turned and looked into his eyes, and an awkwardness grew between them. “It isn’t a very good game, I guess,” she said.
“Not very good.”
He closed his eyes. When he opened them, he could see her hand, inches from his eyes, resting slack in the sun. There were water droplets on the back of her brown hand. The fine hair on her wrist was sun-whitened, almost invisible, and he could see the pale finger-band where rings had been. He wondered what they had been like, whether she had sent them back, or whether they were in some box and she would take them out when she was very old and try to remember clearly how it had been and how it had failed.
A voice shattered the sultry afternoon silence. “There you are, John Shell,” Dora Northard said. “Hello, Mrs. Christianson.” She wore white shorts and a white halter, and she sat down on a corner of Jay’s mattress, hugging her brown, too-thin legs. Ellen sat up, smiling politely, murmuring a too-polite greeting.
Dora Northard’s eyes had a satisfied, secretive glitter. “I’ve just heard all about the most interesting murder, dears.”
“The woman they found under the rocks at Candy Ridge?” Ellen asked politely.
Dora pouted. “This place is the limit. How do people find out these things, anyway? Smoke signals? I better wake Kitty up and tell her. She hasn’t gotten up yet today, so she can’t possibly know about it. I suppose you know who the girl was, too?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Ellen said. Jay noted that it was said politely, yet with the delicate inference that she couldn’t care less.
“It was Gerry Rice’s girlfriend. That Sheila person. The whole town is in an uproar since they identified her. I heard they’ve been questioning Mr. Rice for hours. They say she’s been dead over a week. It seems she was mixed up in some sort of dreadful scene down at the Golden Sixpence about three weeks ago and after that Gerry Rice had been very annoyed at her. They fought about it. They say his story is that she wanted to go back East, and so he gave her some cash and told her to clear out. She walked right out with her suitcase about midnight, and one of Jerry’s men says he saw her walking along the highway trying to thumb a ride. I guess it wouldn’t take her long to be picked up. Some fiend must have picked her up. They found her suitcase in the rocks near the body. If it hadn’t been for that funny old man and his dog, they’d never have found her, because who would go climbing around all those jagged rocks? I guess the body was in dreadful condition. Absolutely dreadful!” Dora Northard shuddered delicately and licked her thin lips.
Jay saw Ellen’s quick look of distaste, fading as quickly as it had appeared. Ellen stood up, picking up her bathing cap. “That’s very interesting, Mrs. Northard. Thanks for telling us.”
She poised on the pool edge and dove in cleanly, breaking the still, blue mirror of the water. Dora got up and looked venomously toward the pool. “An old friend, you said?”
“An acquaintance,” Jay said carefully.
Dora shrugged. “I’m going to go rouse sleeping beauty. Take care of yourself, John.” She left without looking back.
Ellen swam over and grabbed the pool edge near him, making a face. “Gerry, she calls him. Good old Gerry. I am not going to think about that girl. I am firmly decided that I shall not think about her at all.”
“You saw her?”
“Several times. With him. A wench. A chippy. With a carefully practiced walk and a florid taste in clothes. But alive, Jay. Let’s not think about her. Swim again and then go in, because you are getting disastrously pink, my friend.”
He swam and went back to his room to change, leaving her out there, making her ritualistic lengths of the pool, slow brown arms lifting in the sunshine, cupped hand slipping neatly into the water for the long, slow pull of the smooth stroke while the good legs worked tirelessly.
At five-thirty, when he went to the lobby, the Reno newspapers were on the rack. He bought one. There was a page-one box, show Girl slain. Bottom of the page. With a picture. A glamour pose, and he guessed the rest of the picture had been deleted. Black hair spilling over the edge of a pale couch. Face trying to look sultry, looking merely filled with an animal sleepiness. Sheila Star. A name as phony as the photography. It was routine coverage of the finding of the body, a human-interest angle on the lost dog, the coroner’s estimate that the body had been dead ten days, state and county authorities co-operating in the investigation. It was delicately and indirectly inferred that she had been a guest of someone or other and that she had been on her way back, perhaps, to New Orleans where she had previously been an entertainer. The body had been found near Oasis Springs. Jay could guess the extent of the entertainment. A Bourbon Street dive, perhaps. With a G-string picture of her on the outside poster, eight feet tall. Maybe Gerry Rice, after selling the moist land, had stopped there in New Orleans and seen that poster and acquired her as casually as, back in the lean years, he had acquired a Blue-tick hound to add to the pack he took out after the cats in the swamp country.
He looked at the girl’s face again, at the odd harshness of her features. A greedy, troublesome girl with an empty, whining voice. And all of it ending there, in the rocks, with the vise of the sun clamped tight on the show-girl body. Something about that face puzzled him, but he could not determine exactly what it was. He shrugged away the small feeling of irritation.
Ellen sat in a chair outside her door, waiting for him. She did not notice him arrive. She came to, with a slight apologetic start, got up quickly.
“Deep thought?”