“Why don’t you?”
“They live in Bridgeton, Illinois.”
It was a long jump, but not so long as the jump my mind made into blank possibility. I had handled cases which opened up gradually like fissures in the firm ground of the present, cleaving far down through the strata of the past. Perhaps Helen’s murder was connected with an obscure murder in Illinois more than twenty years ago, before Dolly was born. It was a wishful thought, and I didn’t mention it to Dr. Godwin.
“I’m sorry I can’t be more help to you,” he was saying. “I have to go now, I’m already overdue for my hospital rounds.”
The sound of a motor detached itself from the traffic in the street, and slowed down. A car door was opened and closed. Men’s footsteps came up the walk. Moving quickly for a big man, Godwin opened the door before they rang.
I couldn’t see who his visitors were, but they were unwelcome ones. Godwin went rigid with hostility.
“Good morning, Sheriff,” he said.
Crane responded folksily: “It’s a hell of a morning and you know it. September’s supposed to be our best month, but the bloody fog’s so thick the airport’s socked in.”
“You didn’t come here to discuss the weather.”
“That’s right, I didn’t. I heard you got a fugitive from justice holed up here.”
“Where did you hear that?”
“I have my sources.”
“You’d better fire them, Sheriff. They’re giving you misleading information.”
“Somebody is, doctor. Are you denying that Mrs. Dolly Kincaid née McGee is in this building?”
Godwin hesitated His heavy jaw got heavier. “She is.”
“You said a minute ago she wasn’t. What are you trying to pull, doc?”
“What are you trying to pull? Mrs. Kincaid is not a fugitive. She’s here because she’s ill.”
“I wonder what made her ill. Can’t she stand the sight of blood?”
Godwin’s lips curled outward. He looked ready to spit in the other man’s face. I couldn’t see the Sheriff from where I sat, and I made no attempt to. I thought it was best for me to stay out of sight.
“It isn’t just the weather that makes it a lousy day, doc. We had a lousy murder in town last night. I guess you know that, too. Probably Mrs. Kincaid told you all about it.”
“Are you accusing her?” Godwin said.
“I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, anyway.”
“Then beat it.”
“You can’t talk like that to me.”
Codwin held himself motionless but his breath shook him as though he had a racing engine inside of him. “You accused me in the presence of witnesses of harboring a fugitive from justice. I could sue you for slander and by God I will if you don’t stop harassing me and my patients.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.” Crane’s voice was much less confident. “Anyway, I got a right to question a witness.”
“At some later time perhaps you have. At the present time Mrs. Kincaid is under heavy sedation. I can’t permit her to be questioned for at least a week.”
“A week?”
“It may be longer. I strongly advise you not to press the point. I’m prepared to go before a judge and certify that police questioning at the present time would endanger her health and perhaps her life.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t care what you believe.”
Godwin slammed the door and leaned on it, breathing like a runner. A couple of white-uniformed nurses who had been peeking through the inner door tried to look as if they had business there. He waved them away.
I said with unfeigned admiration: “You really went to bat for her.”
“They did enough damage to her when she was a child. They’re not going to compound it if I can help it.”
“How did they know she was here?”
“I have no idea. I can usually trust the staff to keep their mouths shut.” He gave me a probing look. “Did you tell anyone?”
“Nobody connected with the law. Alex did mention to Alice Jenks that Dolly was here.”
“Perhaps he shouldn’t have. Miss Jenks has worked for the county a long time, and Crane and she are old acquaintances.”
“She wouldn’t tattle on her own niece, would she?”
“I don’t know what she’d do.” Godwin tore off his smock and threw it at the chair where I had been sitting. “Well, shall I let you out?”
He shook his keys like a jailer.
Chapter 12
About halfway up the pass road I came out into sunlight. The fog below was like a sea of white water surging into the inlets of the mountains. From the summit of the pass, where I paused for a moment, further mountains were visible on the inland horizon.
The wide valley between was full of light. Cattle grazed among the live oaks on the hillsides. A covey of quail marched across the road in front of my car like small plumed tipsy soldiers. I could smell newmown hay, and had the feeling that I had dropped down into a pastoral scene where nothing much had changed in a hundred years.
The town of Indian Springs didn’t entirely dispel the feeling, though it had its service stations and its drive-ins offering hamburgers and tacos. It had a bit of old-time Western atmosphere, and more than a bit of the old-time sun-baked poverty of the West. Prematurely aging women watched over their brown children in the dooryards of crumbling adobes. Most of the loiterers in the main street had Indian faces under their broad-brimmed hats. Banners advertising Old Rodeo Days hung limply over their heads.
Alice Jenks lived in one of the best houses on what appeared to be the best street. It was a two-storied white frame house, with deep porches upstairs and down, standing far back from the street behind a smooth green lawn. I stepped onto the grass and leaned on a pepper tree, fanning myself with my hat. I was five minutes early.
A rather imposing woman in a blue dress came out on the veranda. She looked me over as if I might possibly be a burglar cleverly creeping up on her house at eleven o’clock in the morning. She came down the steps and along the walk toward me. The sun flashed on her glasses and lent her searchlight eyes.
Close up, she wasn’t so alarming. The brown eyes behind the glasses were strained and anxious. Her hair was streaked with gray. Her mouth was unexpectedly generous and even soft, but it was tweezered like a live thing between the harsh lines that thrust down from the base of her nose. The stiff blue dress that curved like armor plate over her monolithic bosom was old-fashioned in cut, and gave her a dowdy look. The valley sun had parched and roughened her skin.
“Are you Mr. Archer?”
“Yes. How are you, Miss Jenks?”
“I’ll survive.” Her handshake was like a man’s. “Come up on the porch, we can talk there.”
Her movements, like her speech, were so abrupt that they suggested the jitters. The jitters under firm, perhaps lifelong, control. She motioned me into a canvas glider and sat on a reed chair facing me, her back to the street. Three Mexican boys on one battered bicycle rode by precariously like high-wire artists.
“I don’t know just what you want from me, Mr. Archer. My niece appears to be in very serious trouble. I talked to a friend in the courthouse this morning–”
“The Sheriff?”
“Yes. He seems to think that Dolly is hiding from him.”
“Did you tell Sheriff Crane where she was?”
“Yes. Shouldn’t I have?”
“He trotted right over to the nursing home to question her. Dr. Godwin wouldn’t let him.”
“Dr. Godwin is a great one for taking matters into his own hands. I don’t believe myself that people in trouble should be coddled and swaddled in cotton wool, and what I believe for the rest of the world holds true for my own family. We’ve always been a law-abiding family, and if Dolly is holding something back, she ought to come out with it. I say let the truth be told, and the chips fall where they may.”