When he finally approached the bed, she raised to a seated position, threw her arms about his neck and fell back again, forcibly pulling him down across her body. Her mouth, wide open, fastened on his, but first she whispered two short, earthy words.
He obeyed her request...
Later, lying with her head on his shoulder, he considered their relationship. Though she had gone with no other man during the two years they had known each other, and he had gone with no other woman, there was no formal commitment between them. She never spoke wistfully of marriage, or even inquired if he loved her. The word “love” had never been mentioned between them.
There had been other women in his life since Betty, but never for this long a period. He always backed skittishly away the moment they began to hint at marriage, which sometimes was on the first date; and never, except in Lydia’s case, had it been more than three months after the first date. Because Lydia didn’t try to hem him in, he felt as though he were a free agent, even though they had become nearly constant companions.
Sometimes he wondered if he was in love with her but, while he liked her tremendously, he didn’t feel the same overwhelming yearning for her he had once felt for Betty, and which he still occasionally felt in a much lesser degree when he thought back to their youthful romance. He told himself that he had outgrown such teen-age emotions and that it probably wasn’t fair to Lydia to expect her to arouse the same feelings in him at thirty-one that Betty had aroused when he was a teen-ager. Still the shadow of that overpowering passion hung over him, preventing him from surrendering himself completely to any other woman.
The affair of that afternoon in the woods further complicated things. It not only completely changed the formal relationship of the past ten years between Betty and him, it made it seem probable that she would be a free woman before long. He knew Betty was a believer in conventional morality, and he was reasonably sure she would never have allowed him to touch her if she expected to stay with her husband.
He wondered what he would do if she left Bruce. His heart pounded at the thought of again having her to himself, yet he couldn’t quite imagine completely giving up Lydia.
Maybe he ought to see a psychiatrist, he thought. It couldn’t be normal to be in love with two women at the same time.
They spent the whole evening alternately making love and dozing in each other’s arms. Marshall had planned to go home about midnight, but they both fell asleep with the light on. The phone awakened them.
The phone was in the front room. Lydia stumbled to it, still half asleep, and Marshall could hear her say, “Hello.”
Glancing at his watch, he was startled to see it was three a.m. He bounced up fully awake and went to the doorway.
“For you,” Lydia said in an abashed voice. “It’s your dad.”
Even before he took the phone Marshall knew it must be something important, for his father wouldn’t have called merely to find out why he wasn’t home yet. He was beyond the age where his father would think of attempting to exercise any parental authority.
“Yes, Dad?”
Jonas Marshall growled, “It was very enterprising of you to arrange with the police desk to phone you at any time of the day or night when a story broke. It would have been even more enterprising to let them know where the hell to reach you, so your hard-working father could get some sleep.”
“The police called?” Marshall asked.
“Yeah. Pat Sullivan’s on the desk. There’s been a shooting out at the old Runyon place.”
Marshall felt a chill move along his spine. That was Betty and Bruce Case’s home. Though both Betty’s parents were dead and the family home was now hers, no one in Runyon City ever referred to the landmark as the Case home. It was still “the old Runyon place,” and probably would remain that as long as it stood, no matter who occupied it.
“Not Betty?” he said a trifle unsteadily.
“The only information Pat had was that there had been a shooting. Better get out there.”
“All right, Dad. Thanks for relaying the message.”
Hanging up, he moved past Lydia into the bedroom and quickly began to dress. She watched him from the bedroom doorway.
“A news story?” she asked.
“There’s been a shooting out at the old Runyon place,” he said in no particular tone.
Lydia was aware that Betty Case had been a teen-age romance of Marshall’s, because he had once casually mentioned that they had been high-school sweethearts. He had volunteered no information other than that, however, and she had never questioned him about it. She must have suspected that Betty was still somewhat special to him, though, for on the rare occasions he and Lydia encountered the Cases socially, Lydia invariably examined Betty in the estimating manner of a woman studying a rival, and he had caught a similar look in Betty’s eyes when she examined Lydia.
“Betty?” Lydia asked.
“Dad didn’t know. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you at the office in the morning.”
He gave her a quick kiss on the forehead and hurried across the front room to the door.
Chapter IV
The old Runyon place was a huge, two-story building dating back to the Civil War. It had always been well kept up, though, and was in as solidly good condition as the day it was built.
All the lights on the lower floor were burning when Marshall drove through the driveway gate, and a few lights were burning on the second floor. There was a police car parked where the driveway circled past the front porch.
A young uniformed policeman named Nat Thorpe opened the door to Marshall’s ring.
“Oh, hello, Kirk,” he said. “News sure travels fast in this town.”
“I have an arrangement with the police desk you must not know about,” Marshall said, moving past him through the entry hall to the door of the front room.
Relief washed over him when he saw Betty seated in a chair at the far end of the huge room. She was wearing a robe over her nightgown. Standing before her was the burly figure of Chief Barney Meister.
The chief glanced over his shoulder as Marshall approached and said without surprise, “Hello, Kirk.”
Betty, her face pale, merely looked up and gave him a weak smile.
“What’s the story?” Marshall asked.
“A shooting,” Meister said. “Doc Derring’s upstairs with him now, if you want to take a look.”
Marshall looked at Betty and the chief said, “I’ve only gotten the bare details from her so far. I’m waiting for her to quiet down. You’ll have time to go upstairs before I start detailed questioning.”
Retracing his way to the wide staircase, which was off the entry hall, Marshall climbed to the second floor. The hall light was on here, and light also streamed from the open door of a bedroom at the far end of the hall. The body of a man lay face-down in the doorway, his legs in the hall and his head inside the room.
Moving to the doorway, Marshall saw Dr. Emmett Derring inside the room, bending over the body. Apparently the doctor had dressed hurriedly, for beneath his suit coat he wore pajama tops instead of a shirt. He lived only two doors away, Marshall knew, so if he still hadn’t completed his examination of the shooting victim, the shooting couldn’t have happened too long ago.
The prone man’s head was turned sidewise so that Marshall could see his profile. It was Bruce Case. He was fully dressed in slacks and a sport shirt. In one outstretched hand was gripped a meat cleaver.
Dr. Derring closed his medical bag and rose to his feet just as Marshall appeared in the doorway.
“Hi, Kirk,” he said. “Hell of a thing, isn’t it? We were fishing together just this afternoon.”