"Don't look like she did any packing or took much of anything with her," he decided when he came back to where I was sitting by the dressing-table. He pointed a thick finger at the monogrammed silver toilet-set on the table. "What's the G. D. L. for?"
"Her name was Gabrielle Something Leggett before she was married."
"Oh, yes. She went away in the car, I reckon. Huh?"
"Did they have one down here?" I asked.
"He used to come to town in a Chrysler roadster when he didn't walk. She could only have took it out by the East road. We'll go out thataway and see."
Outside, I waited while he made circles around the house, finding nothing. In front of a shed where a car obviously had been kept he pointed at some tracks, and said, "Drove out this morning." I took his word for it.
We walked along a dirt road to a gravel one, and along that perhaps a mile to a gray house that stood in a group of red farm buildings. A small-boned, high-shouldered man who limped slightly was oiling a pump behind the house. Rolly called him Debro.
"Sure, Ben," he replied to Rolly's question. "She went by here about seven this morning, going like a bat out of hell. There wasn't anybody else in the car."
"How was she dressed?" I asked.
"She didn't have on any hat and a tan coat."
I asked him what he knew about the Carters: he was their nearest neighbor. He didn't know anything about them. He had talked to Carter two or three times, and thought him an agreeable enough young fellow. Once he had taken the missus over to call on Mrs. Carter, but Carter told them she was lying down, not feeling well. None of the Debros had ever seen her except at a distance, walking or riding with her husband.
"I don't guess there's anybody around here that's talked to her," he wound up, "except of course Mary Nunez."
"Mary working for them?" the deputy asked.
"Yes. What's the matter, Ben? Something the matter over there?"
"He fell off the cliff last night, and she's gone away without saying anything to anybody."
Debro whistled.
Rolly went into the house to use Debro's phone, reporting to the sheriff. I stayed outside with Debro, trying to get more-if only his opinions-out of him. All I got were expressions of amazement.
"We'll go over and see Mary," the deputy said when he came from the phone; and then, when we had left Debro, had crossed the road, and were walking through a field towards a cluster of trees: "Funny she wasn't there."
"Who is she?"
"A Mex. Lives down in the hollow with the rest of them. Her man, Pedro Nunez, is doing a life-stretch in Folsom for killing a bootlegger named Dunne in a hijacking two-three years back."
"Local killing?"
"Uh-huh. It happened down in the cove in front of the Tooker place."
We went through the trees and down a slope to where half a dozen shacks-shaped, sized, and red-leaded to resemble box-cars-lined the side of a stream, with vegetable gardens spread out behind them. In front of one of the shacks a shapeless Mexican woman in a pink-checkered dress sat on an empty canned-soup box smoking a corncob pipe and nursing a brown baby. Ragged and dirty children played between the buildings, with ragged and dirty mongrels helping them make noise. In one of the gardens a brown man in overalls that had once been blue was barely moving a hoe.
The children stopped playing to watch Rolly and me cross the stream on conveniently placed stones. The dogs came yapping to meet us, snarling and snapping around us until one of the boys chased them. We stopped in front of the woman with the baby. The deputy grinned down at the baby and said:
"Well, well, ain't he getting to be a husky son-of-a-gun!"
The woman took the pipe from her mouth long enough to complain stolidly:
"Colic all the time."
"Tch, tch, tch. Where's Mary Nunez?"
The pipe-stem pointed at the next shack.
"I thought she was working for them people at the Tooker place," he said.
"Sometimes," the woman replied indifferently.
We went to the next shack. An old woman in a gray wrapper had come to the door, watching us while stirring something in a yellow bowl.
"Where's Mary?" the deputy asked.
She spoke over her shoulder into the shack's interior, and moved aside to let another woman take her place in the doorway. This other woman was short and solidly built, somewhere in her early thirties, with intelligent dark eyes in a wide, flat face. She held a dark blanket together at her throat. The blanket hung to the floor all around her.
"Howdy, Mary," Rolly greeted her. "Why ain't you over to the Carters'?"
"I'm sick, Mr. Rolly." She spoke without accent. "Chills-so I just stayed home today."
"Tch, tch, tch. That's too bad. Have you had the doc?"
She said she hadn't. Rolly said she ought to. She said she didn't need him: she had chills often. Rolly said that might be so, but that was all the more reason for having him: it was best to play safe and have things like that looked after. She said yes but doctors took so much money, and it was bad enough being sick without having to pay for it. He said in the long run it was likely to cost folks more not having a doctor than having him. I had begun to think they were going to keep it up all day when Rolly finally brought the talk around to the Carters again, asking the woman about her work there.
She told us she had been hired two weeks ago, when they took the house. She went there each morning at nine-they never got up before ten-cooked their meals, did the housework, and left after washing the dinner dishes in the evening-usually somewhere around seven-thirty. She seemed surprised at the news that Collinson-Carter to her-had been killed and his wife had gone away. She told us that Collinson had gone out by himself, for a walk, he said, right after dinner the previous night. That was at about half-past six, dinner having been, for no especial reason, a little early. When she left for home, at a few minutes past seven, Mrs. Carter had been reading a book in the front second-story room.
Mary Nunez couldn't, or wouldn't, tell us anything on which I could base a reasonable guess at Collinson's reason for sending for me. She knew, she insisted, nothing about them except that Mrs. Carter didn't seem happy-wasn't happy. She-Mary Nunez-had figured it all out to her own satisfaction: Mrs. Carter loved someone else, but her parents had made her marry Carter; and so, of course, Carter had been killed by the other man, with whom Mrs. Carter had now run away. I couldn't get her to say that she had any grounds for this belief other than her woman's intuition, so I asked her about the Carters' visitors.
She said she had never seen any.
Rolly asked her if the Carters ever quarreled. She started to say, "No," and then, rapidly, said they did, often, and were never on good terms. Mrs. Carter didn't like to have her husband near her, and several times had told him, in Mary's hearing, that if he didn't go away from her and stay away she would kill him. I tried to pin Mary down to details, asking what had led up to these threats, how they had been worded, but she wouldn't be pinned down. All she remembered positively, she told us, was that Mrs. Carter had threatened to kill Mr. Carter if he didn't go away from her.
"That pretty well settles that," Rolly said contentedly when we had crossed the stream again and were climbing the slope toward Debro's.
"What settles what?"
"That his wife killed him."
"Think she did?"
"So do you."
I said: "No."
Rolly stopped walking and looked at me with vague worried eyes.
"Now how can you say that?" he remonstrated. "Ain't she a dope fiend? And cracked in the bargain, according to your own way of telling it? Didn't she run away? Wasn't them things she left behind torn and dirty and bloody? Didn't she threaten to kill him so much that he got scared and sent for you?"
"Mary didn't hear threats," I said. "They were warnings-about the curse. Gabrielle Collinson really believed in it, and thought enough of him to try to save him from it. I've been through that before with her. That's why she wouldn't have married him if he hadn't carried her off while she was too rattled to know what she was doing. And she was afraid on that account afterwards."
"But who's going to believe-?"
"I'm not asking anybody to believe anything," I growled, walking on again. "I'm telling you what I believe. And while I'm at it I'll tell you I believe Mary Nunez is lying when she says she didn't go to the house this morning. Maybe she didn't have anything to do with Collinson's death. Maybe she simply went there, found the Collinsons gone, saw the bloody things and the gun-kicking that shell across the floor without knowing it-and then beat it back to her shack, fixing up that chills story to keep herself out of it; having had enough of that sort of trouble when her husband was sent over. Maybe not. Anyway, that would be how nine out of ten women of her sort in her place would have played it; and I want more proof before I believe her chills just happened to hit her this morning."
"Well," the deputy sheriff asked; "if she didn't have nothing to do with it, what difference does all that make anyway?"
The answers I thought up to that were profane and insulting. I kept them to myself.
At Debro's again, we borrowed a loose-jointed touring car of at least three different makes, and drove down the East road, trying to trace the girl in the Chrysler. Our first stop was at the house of a man named Claude Baker. He was a lanky sallow person with an angular face three or four days behind the razor. His wife was probably younger than he, but looked older-a tired and faded thin woman who might have been pretty at one time. The oldest of their six children was a bowlegged, freckled girl of ten; the youngest was a fat and noisy infant in its first year. Some of the in-betweens were boys and some girls, but they all had colds in their heads. The whole Baker family came out on the porch to receive us. They hadn't seen her, they said: they were never up as early as seven o'clock. They knew the Carters by sight, but knew nothing about them. They asked more questions than Rolly and I did.
Shortly beyond the Baker house the road changed from gravel to asphalt. What we could see of the Chrysler's tracks seemed to show that it had been the last car over the road. Two miles from Baker's we stopped in front of a small bright green house surrounded by rose bushes. Rolly bawled:
"Harve! Hey, Harve!"
A big-boned man of thirty-five or so came to the door, said, "Hullo, Ben," and walked between the rose bushes to our car. His features, like his voice, were heavy, and he moved and spoke deliberately. His last name was Whidden. Rolly asked him if he had seen the Chrysler.