If you are a clever girl, Louise, you will have never received these final letters. You will have packed and vanished when they first hinted the game was in its last stages.
If you aren’t as smart as I’ve believed, then this is all I can do for you. This will be put on the southbound train an hour or so from now, it will be a special delivery. If you are still in Capitol City you’ll be reading these lines shortly after sunrise. And I promise you, Louise, that Don Thompson won’t find me — anywhere — until noon, at least.
I owe you that much.
I owe it to you because you are my wife, and I love you. It does no good to say we should have tried harder to make a success of our marriage; and it’s equally useless for me to remind you that I never liked this experiment of five years’ separation to determine whether we should live together again, or call it quits and divorce. I’m only sorry that we were separated for those three years that can never be recaptured.
So long, darling. I offer you my apologies for being the man who pulled your house of cards down around you. We’ve had a lot of good times together.
And Louise... I hope they never catch you.
Chapter 20
Dr. Elizabeth Saari pushed open the door without knocking and stood on his threshold.
“Chuck,” she asked him, “will you carry the suitcases down to the car for me? Mother stuffed everything she won’t need for the next two months into them. She just called me at this hour of the night! She wants me to bring them over to the hotel.”
He stood up, pulled a sheet of paper from the typewriter, scribbled his signature on it, and placed it in an envelope.
“That I will,” he answered wearily, “if you’ll do me a favor in return.”
“Name it.”
“Drive me down to the train. I want this to go out tonight.”
“Gladly. Oh, Chuck — hadn’t you better open that telegram? It might be important.”
He shook his head. “It isn’t, now. It’s from Rothman, the detective in Croyden. It will tell me that he has checked on you all the way back to your kindergarten days, and has found you perfectly wonderful.”