No answer. She waited. Still no answer.
Then possibly he was still at the office. She looked up another number and tried that, but with the same result. No one answered. In exasperation she fluttered the pages of the directory and found still a third number. From that one, at least, she got a voice which told her, yes, that was Mr. Escott’s residence. She asked to speak to Mr. Escott, and he was put on. No, he said, with the decent courtesy due a $5,000 client, he didn’t know where Mr. Dillon could be found at the moment. Mr. Dillon had been there speaking with him, but had left only a few minutes ago. It was possible that Mrs. Cowles might find him, then or a little later, at the Brand home on Vulcan Street, if she cared to try...
So she looked that number up and tried it too, but again there was no answer. She gave it up in disgust. Anyway, it would be another thirty minutes before Delia would get to Cody, and she could try again later.
Chapter 19
The idea of the mountain cat popped into Delia’s head as she sat in the car, stopped at the roadside a mile or so beyond Frenchy’s Corners. She had stopped there because she didn’t want to enter Cody until she had resolved what to do. At the moment the idea came she had about decided that the only possible thing was to run away. She could go home and get the money from the drawer, all but that twenty-dollar bill, facing through it somehow with Clara if she was there, and leave at the first opportunity. She would go in the car, heading for California, perhaps taking a train from Ashton for the coast... at least, somehow, somewhere, losing herself.
The vengeance of man. God’s errand. She could be the instrument of neither. Not now. What others might or might not do about it, that was either God’s business or man’s, but not hers.
What kept her from instant execution of her plan of flight was the germ of doubt that still existed. If she had possessed certainty it would have been at once incommunicable and unbearable, and to flee with the unsharable secret would have been the only recourse of desperation; but she was not certain. She was horribly sure, but she was not sure.
It was there at the roadside near Frenchy’s Corners, where she had stopped for a decision, that she thought of the mountain cat and remembered the scene three days earlier when her coyote’s howl had interrupted the inspection of a furry belly on which no hair was slipping.
That would prove everything. She might, if she had that proof, even be able to tell Clara and Ty, and share the secret and not have to carry it all alone...
She started the engine, swung into the road, and in five minutes was in Cody. It was exactly half past seven. He wouldn’t be there. The usual dinner hour in Cody was around six o’clock, but it was his custom to work at his bench until seven and then go to the Pay Streak lunchroom three blocks away. Even if by mischance he were there he would be upstairs, and she needed only three minutes. And as a sudden impulse to repeat a childish trick had been responsible for the scene three days earlier, so now the memory of another childish trick from the days of Del the tomboy was the inspiration of her strategy.
She parked the car around the corner and walked to the two-storied frame building, with the plate-glass window, elevated above the sidewalk level, displaying the brown bear licking a cub. Without making undue noise, she climbed the four steps and tried the door. It was locked. She nodded to herself, and stood there a moment, aware that her heart was beating too fast and that her hand had been far from steady as she had turned the doorknob. But coolness was not especially required; the chief thing was speed, to get it done. She descended the steps, went to the corner of the building and passed along its side to the rear.
In the rear was clutter and chaos. Amid a stack of discarded mounting frames of rusty wire, weeds grew up to a man’s belt. Bales encased in burlap were stacked under the rickety steps. Packing boxes of all sizes and conditions were scattered around, and weeds were everywhere. Delia took it in with a swift glance, and saw that one of the packing boxes, a long narrow one, needed to be shifted only a few feet to serve her purpose. She grabbed a corner of it and tugged, got it moved, and upended it, propping it against the wall of the building. Then she scrambled up. It teetered and nearly fell, but she lunged to seize the window sill above her, got it balanced again, and pulled herself upright so that the window sill was at the height of her breasts. She saw that the window was open and the screen was apparently unfastened, and was trying to get purchase with her finger nails under the frame of the screen, when she nearly toppled off at the sound of a sharp call from somewhere behind her: “Hey there!”
She twisted her head and saw a man in a back yard among tomato vines. She waved a hand, clinging to the window sill with the other, and called, “Okay! The human fly! Free seats in the grandstand!”
“You’ll fall and break your neck!”
“Oh, no! You just watch!”
She stood a moment, her brain whirling. But why stop for that? Why stop for anything? She got her nails under the frame again, broke one prying it up, squeezed the tips of her fingers in the slit, exerted all her strength, and the screen went up with a bang. The rest was easy. Taking a firm grip with both hands inside, she leaped up and dived through, hung there an instant, wriggled on, and flopped onto the floor. She scrambled to her feet, waved from the window to reassure the horticulturist, and closed the screen. Her heart was a hammer on the wall of her chest. Four steps took her to the workbench, where a miscellany of tools were arrayed in slotted cleats. She had long ago been permitted to play with many of those tools, though never the sharp knives; now a knife with a long sharp blade was what she took. With it in her hand she went to the door at the end of the partition and passed through it into the large front room. She had thought, anticipating this moment, that now she would go to the foot of the stairs and call his name, to make sure he wasn’t above in his living quarters, but the momentum of her urgency abandoned that precaution. Without even a glance at the stairs, she went swiftly to the mountain cat on the platform in the center of the room, the cougar with his paw resting on the carcass of a fawn; and, throwing herself on her back underneath its belly, ripped the tough hide with a savage sweep of the knife. But it was well mounted and there was only a slit, so she wriggled her shoulders and slashed crosswise, once, twice, three times. She seized the corners and jerked at the flaps, and the hole gaped open, and objects tumbled out and fell on her face and shoulders, and she squirmed away as if they had been deadly snakes, though a glance showed her that they were money, currency, packets of twenty-dollar bills. Her heart was hammering her chest.
A voice came: “Del!”
Her heart stopped. She became rigid, there under the mountain cat on her back. She was aware of steps, a hand touching her, fingers gripping her ankle, and she jerked her leg away, rolled over, rolled from under the mountain cat, causing two of the bundles of bills to fall from the platform, and was on her feet. Quinby Pellett stood there, looking at her, his face pale and contorted, his lips twisted like those of a child trying not to cry. “So,” he said.
She nodded her head without knowing it. “So,” she said.
“Del.” His hand lifted, fluttered, and dropped again. “Godamighty.”
She was looking at his middle, where a fold of his untidy shirt was escaping from his belt. She couldn’t look at his face. Involuntarily she took a sidewise step, and another one. He moved toward her.