So he worked and walked and thought and ate and slept and the plan grew in his mind until he knew exactly how it would have to be. On the twentieth of June at six-thirty he took the first step in the plan.
He looked across the dinner table at Myra and said, “Hopper told me that he’d like me to take my vacation early this year. The first two weeks in July. I’ve taken a camp for us on Wallace Lake.”
Myra stopped chewing and looked up at him in dull surprise. She started to chew again and he waited until she had finished and swallowed. “That doesn’t give me much time to get ready, Arthur. Clothes and packing and food and all.”
“Ten days. That ought to be plenty.”
“You men never know how much work there is. You can’t just up and go. There’s lots of things to do. Why couldn’t Mr. Hopper have told you sooner?”
Paul tossed his fork onto his dish with a clatter and said, “I’m not going. Little hick lake. Nothing to do. Not me.”
Arthur felt sudden alarm. It was necessary that Paul go. He needed a dull-witted witness. He was so anxious that he nearly made a mistake. He caught himself in time. He almost said, “I’ve seen...” In time he changed it to, “I’ve heard it’s a nice place. I won’t have nonsense. You are going with us anyway, so you may as well accept it gracefully.”
When he was at last alone he felt uncertain of himself. After carefully concealing the trip to Wallace Lake, he had almost given it away in two words. There couldn’t be the slightest basis for suspicion...
It took four hours for the drive to Wallace Lake. He enjoyed driving. He pretended that the heavy woman in the front seat beside him didn’t exist. He felt a sharp catch of excitement in his throat, a chill internal tremble of viscera as he realized that soon she wouldn’t exist. Paul sat in the back seat with the suitcases and grumbled about the idea of going so far away from cities and people.
The camp was small and neat, three bedrooms and a long living-room and kitchen combined. It sat at the end of its own small road, finished in dark stained wood. From the long porch you could see down the mountain slope to the lake shimmering grey in the Adirondack dusk. The surrounding hills seemed to grow taller against the stars as the dusk deepened into night. He sat on the porch and heard Myra working at the unpacking. He smoked cigarets and listened to the loons down on the lake. He had refused Paul permission to take the car down to the village. The boy sat on the other end of the porch — a sullen, rebellious shape in the darkness. The plan had begun and Arthur looked at it and found it good. There would be no need for revision, for changes. It had been born out of a cautious, careful mind. He bit little pieces of skin from the sides of his fingertips and spat them off the porch with little ‘whi-thoo’ sounds. He thought of the flaming sun on the white sand of the islands. It was no longer necessary to think of the plan. It would go along almost of its own volition, like a small and deadly machine which required no operator. He wondered vaguely if he could teach himself to paint. He had often thought that his hands looked like the hands of an artist.
It was on the second day that he drove them to the lookout point on the mountain road. The car had strained and roared to get up the steep curves. He saw the familiar spot ahead, its every aspect sharp in his mind. He fitted his mental picture of the actual scene and they fitted like the two pictures of a stereoscope, lending each other dimension.
The white concrete posts seemed to stand out sharp and clear against the far blue of distant hills. They were like the regular markers for geometric graves. He liked the symmetry. He slowed and turned off the asphalt, through a wide space between the white posts. He stopped the car, the hood tilted gently down a graveled slope. Ahead the hare in the valley had drifted half-way up the opposite slope of the hills. Distant bird-calls sounded sweet and clear in the heat.
He turned and saw Myra’s questioning stare. “Thought I better let it cool off for a while. Plenty of steep road to come.” He yanked on the hand brake, remembering the stench it had made when he had burned it out. He set the gears in low and took his foot off the brake. He knew that only the low gear held the car on the slope.
With studied casualness he looked to the left and right. He was parked at right angles to the road. To the left he could see a mile of the road winding up the hill until it disappeared around a rocky cliff face. To the right he could see the road over which they had come, winding down toward the valley.
He looked straight ahead and felt sudden dizziness as he realized that just beyond the gently sloping brink was the drop off. He remembered how deep it had looked when he had cautiously clung to the bank and peered down. Now he wondered if it was quite deep enough.
He heard the back door of the car open. He had planned on that. Paul would be restless, would want to walk around in the sun. The boy mumbled something that he didn’t quite hear. The back door slammed.
He waited a few more seconds, feeling hard and hot against his chest the heavy thumping of his heart. He caught a small piece of the inside of his lower lip between his teeth and bit through it. The blood tasted flat and salty.
He forced himself to yawn and said, “Guess I’ll stretch my legs.” He opened the car door and stepped out onto the gravel He looked at Paul. The boy stood about twelve feet to the left of the car, kicking bits of stone toward the brink of the place where the hill dropped steeply away. He slammed the door, his eyes on Paul. The boy was looking off toward the far hills.
He reached quickly through the window and hit the gear lever smartly upward with the palm of his right hand. It knocked it out of low gear, and for the smallest part of a second, just as the rolling car struck his elbow, he gazed deep into the growing knowledge and fear in the dark dull eyes of his wife.
He shouted hoarsely and grabbed at the door handle, trotting beside the car, getting the door open and throwing himself at the seat. He turned slightly, making his hip strike the edge of the seat, letting himself bound back out onto the gravel. On his hands and knees as the back wheel rolled by him, he shouted again, hearing above his shout the growing crackle of the gravel compressed by the hard tires, hearing the odd throaty bubble in his wife’s throat as she called his name — just once, extending it out over a second’s infinity. He felt the bite of the gravel into his palms as he saw the nose drop, the back of the car seem to rise, and caught the yellow flash of his license number, the sparkle of sun on chrome before the car disappeared.
He scrambled in the silence toward the edge, scuttling on his hands and knees, getting almost to the edge as upward came the surprisingly dim crash. He clung and saw the four wheels, the mechanical-toy underside rolling up and over in an odd slow motion that was more than half a dream. Then the second noise of crashing metal and the slow rolling as it went down into the thick woods near the stream. The world was silent and he clung at the edge and saw the brownish dust rising slowly from near the foot of the slope.
Now that it was done, he felt odd and sick and weak. He turned his head quickly and looked up and down the road and saw that it was still empty. He started to work his way cautiously backward and felt the sudden unbelievable thrust against his hip — the sudden thrust that sent him forward, and he turned clinging with fingers that tore, with sudden drench of sweat that was like ice. The gravel rolled under his bleeding fingers and he slipped an inch at a time backward toward the edge.
He saw, sitting on safer ground, one leg still outstretched after the push against his hip, the boy Paul who was somehow not a boy — staring down at him as he slipped. He heard his lips say hoarsely, “Help me!” knowing as he said it that there was no help in the sullen face, the blank eyes.