PATRICK QUENTIN

THE MAN IN THE NET

Copyright © 1956 by Patrick Quentin

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Table of Contents

- Cover

- Chapter 1

- Chapter 2

- Chapter 3

- Chapter 4

- Chapter 5

- Chapter 6

- Chapter 7

- Chapter 8

- Chapter 9

- Chapter 10

- Chapter 11

- Chapter 12

- Chapter 13

- Chapter 14

- Chapter 15

- Chapter 16

- Chapter 17

- Chapter 18

- Chapter 19

- Chapter 20

- Chapter 21

- Chapter 22

- About Patrick Quentin

- Bibliography

The Man in the Net

1

ONLY a few days before it happened and the long nightmare began, the children were running ahead of him through the striped maple saplings and the tall ferns at the edge of the woods. A car was coming down the dirt road. John Hamilton heard it, and Emily Jones must have heard it too, for suddenly she cried:

“The Enemy!”

The children—all five of them—tumbled down, disappearing from view beneath the fern fronds. John Hamilton threw himself down too. He knew the game they were playing. He’d invented it. He’d invented most of their games. (The frustrated father; that was what Linda called him when she wanted to hurt him.) He’d originated this one right here in the woods one day when he’d said to Leroy Phillips, “Think what it would feel like to be an animal. Whenever you heard a human being coming you’d shiver and say—The Enemy.” Emily Jones—it was always Emily who investigated things —had taken it up. “We’re animals! All people are the Enemy!”

That had been early in spring, but still, off and on, at a word from Emily, they’d be animals again and the world of human beings would be the world of the Enemy.

Lying there in the ferns, inhaling their green lushness and the dank, generic fungus smell of the woods, John Hamilton had almost forgotten the letter from Raines and Raines in his pocket and the ordeal with Linda which lay ahead. The children had done that. As so often before, they had performed their small miracle.

The drone of the car grew louder and louder. John Hamilton could see one of Angel Jones’ small sneakered feet thrusting out from the ferns. Timmie Moreland and Leroy Phillips somewhere nearby were completely concealed. From a little to the left he could hear Buck Ritter’s suppressed panting. Buck was fat and always short of breath. The oncoming car was just a car from Stoneville, going probably to Archertown or up the dirt road past his own house. And yet it was no longer quite “just a car”. To John, with his artist’s susceptibility to the mood of others, the tenseness of the invisible children, the strength of their temporary belief, had changed the quality of everything. It was Danger coming; it was the Unknown, the menacing—the Enemy.

Then the car came into view. It was his own old black sedan and his wife was driving it.

For a moment, as the car slid past them, it assumed for John the unnatural significance of an object grotesquely magnified on a movie screen. Linda was alone in the car, and yet she was smiling her public smile which he knew so well—straight, frank, uncomplicated from the eyes to show what a straight, frank, uncomplicated person she was, and then the slight downward droop of the corners of the mouth to indicate that the frankness wasn’t just naiveté, that there were wry, New-Yorkish subtleties too.

She’d been, he knew, into Pittsfield to have her hair done. She’d left just after he’d picked up the mail at the village post-office where Emily and Angel’s mother presided as postmistress, and he’d deliberately let her go without telling her about Charlie Raines’ letter in order to give himself these few hours of respite. Watching her, absurdly hiding from her, he could imagine her under the dryer, charming Madame Whatever-her-name-was all over again with her naturalness and her extra sparkle which, so definitely, put her above the other dowdier customers. She’d left the beauty parlor smiling that way —and waving. But now, when the smile no longer had a purpose, it was still there. She was, of course, smiling for herself. She, too, was part of her own public.

Suddenly, pity for her, which so often came at the worst moments, the pity hardly of love any more but of total understanding, engulfed him, undermining him. Linda! he thought, his throat aching. Poor Linda. The illusion of release which the children and their game had brought was shattered. He had reassumed his burden.

The car disappeared from view up the road toward his house. For a moment there was nothing but the smooth fronds of the ferns, undulating and gleaming in the afternoon sunlight.. Then Emily’s voice sounded, high and wailing in a mystic chant.

“Fellow animals—chipmunks, woodchucks, flying squirrels—O fellow animals of the woods, hearken. The danger is past. The Enemy has departed.”

She sprang up then from the ferns and all the other children were jumping up too—Buck, fat and red-faced; Timmie Moreland, skinny and tense as a fox-terrier; Leroy, his teeth gleaming white against the golden brown of his skin. Angel Jones, who was always prissy about her clothes, started daintily picking scraps of dead frond from her jeans. She turned to Emily, her round, pudgy face marred by her constant need to compete with her elder sister.

“That’s a dopey game. That wasn’t the Enemy. That was only Mrs. Hamilton. Everyone knows that.”

“It wasn’t either, dope.” Emily tossed her long dark pigtail. “It was the Enemy. They’re all the Enemy.” She turned to John. “Aren’t they, John? All people, all of them, are the Enemy. Fathers, mothers, wives, everything.”

“Sure,” said John, feeling awkward now and out of place. “When you’re animals, they’re the Enemy.” What the heck was he doing here anyway? A grown man fooling around with a bunch of kids at this of all times.

“I’m a beaver,” shouted Buck Ritter.

“I’m an old muskrat,” yelled Leroy.

Timmie Moreland, his voice high and reedy, cried, “I’m a big black bear.”

Angel Jones, suddenly infected by it all, danced madly around, waving her arms, pursing up her lips. “And I’m a skunk. Look, everybody. I’m a skunk.”

John said, “Well, kids, I’ve got to be getting home.”

“No,” they cried. “No.”

Emily threw her arms around his waist. “John, dear, dearest John, you said you’d come swimming.”

“Yes,” said Timmie. “You promised.”

“You promised,” said Angel. “Mean, nasty, dopey old dope. You promised to come swimming.”

Leroy Phillips, very shyly, put his hand in John’s. His fingers were warm and dry like an animal’s paw. “Please, Mr. Hamilton.”

John dropped down through the ferns on to the road and waved.

“See you, kids. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“Tomorrow!” they yelled. “We’ll see you tomorrow. You promised. Tomorrow.”

“Look, Buck.” He heard Angel’s shrill, excited voice. “I’m a woodpecker. I’m a great big woodpecker with a great big woodpecking nose.”

John Hamilton started to walk home.

It wasn’t far. The woods, huge, silent, almost as primitive as when the Algonquins had hunted in them, stretched on either side of the road. He had to go away from the village of Stoneville about a quarter of a mile up the hill and turn over the little bridge across the creek. Then he would be at the house.

The pity for Linda had not left him. She would be mad keen to go back to New York. Of course she would. Linda could always forget what she wanted to forget. New York would now be the Eldorado. As he walked through the bland summer sunshine, bracing himself for the inevitable battle, he was already partially defeated because he hadn’t even yet learned to harden his heart against his wife. It wasn’t just because he still so often remembered her as she was or had seemed to be when he had first fallen in love with her, it wasn’t even resignation to the fact that he was indispensable to her because she had nothing to buttress her but him—no family and no real friends, either, for all her play-acting at friendship. It was more than that. It was the knowledge that she couldn’t help herself. When she lied and boasted and deceived herself and even, in her worst moments with the drinking, when she so implacably tried to destroy him, he knew that she was suffering the torments of the damned. She didn’t want to be what she was; she wanted to be what she had, with his help, managed to make most people believe her to be—gay, warm, affectionate and good.

Now, long after his love had changed into something far more complicated, it was the awareness of that loneliness and terror which shackled John to her. He realized all the dangers, but there it was. Linda was Linda and she was his wife. John Hamilton was not equipped to take his human relationships lightly.

He reached the turn in the dirt road. In front of him, over the little wooden bridge, the house which ten months ago had seemed the symbol of “the new life” perched in its orchard of venerable apple trees. As he saw it, the temptation came: Why tell Linda about the letter at all? Why not just write to Charlie Raines without letting her know anything about it? Things were bad enough as it was. But he instantly recognized the temptation as a temptation. Sooner or later she’d be bound to find out. Mrs. Raines or someone would write to her. Besides shirking this issue would be just another step downward. He knew what had to be done about the Raines and Raines offer. He had never been surer of anything. If he was going to keep any self-respect or any real relationship with his wife, he would have to put his cards on the table, whatever Linda might choose to do about it.

He started to visualize the scene ahead and felt the beginnings of panic. To steady himself, he thought of the quintet of children—Emily, Timmie, Leroy, Buck, Angel —those improbable allies who had drifted by chance into his life and done so much to make the last year endurable. Once again the children’s charm worked.

He had walked up to the house and around it toward the back door before he saw the second car parked by his own in front of the old hay barn he had made over into a studio. He recognized it as Steve Ritter’s. Buck Ritter’s father was the owner of the local gas-station-ice cream parlor and had, that year, been elected Stoneville cop. Like most of the village people, Steve was one of Linda’s conquests. She was always complaining about his habit of stopping by for a beer. (Why should I be stuck with these dreadful bores?) But it had been her own doing, of course. When they first arrived in Stoneville, before she had got to know the wealthy residents, old Mr. Carey, the young Careys, the Morelands and the Fishers, her constant need for admiration had made her play the folksy line to the hilt with the natives. (Drop in any time. We’re not snooty summer people; we’re just a poor struggling artist and his wife.)

Because he’d steeled himself to have it out with Linda now and because, too, he was always cripplingly shy with the people whom she had charmed on false pretenses, John cursed under his breath. He went into the kitchen and through it into the living-room.

Steve Ritter, tall and swaggeringly the local Don Juan, in blue jeans and an old work shirt, was alone, eyeing the cabinet full of phonograph records and boxes of tape recordings.

“Hi, John. You must have a couple of hundred of them things. Don’t it ever drive you nuts? All that music?”

His shrewd New England gaze flicked around the walls on which John’s pictures, just back unsold from the show in New York, were hanging. He was careful to make no comment, but the comment was made anyway. John knew exactly what the village thought of his paintings. To Stoneville they were a queer but harmless enough joke just as he himself was a joke—“that crazy guy who threw up a big-money job in New York to sit on his fanny in the country, painting pictures nobody wants to buy.”

“I was delivering a battery up to the Careys. Thought I’d drop in for a visit with your beautiful wife. She’s upstairs making herself more beautiful. She called down to wait.” Steve’s dark, handsome face was watching him with that quizzical, amusedly tolerant expression which wasn’t quite contempt and was Stoneville’s standard way of looking at John. “Well, how’s the art world? Hear you had a big show in New York the other day. Didn’t do so well, they say.”

“Not too well,” said John. So Linda had already let it out around the village that his second show in the Denham Galleries had been a spectacular failure.

Steve sprawled into a chair, stretching his legs voluptuously. “Well, boy, money isn’t everything. That’s what I always say. You’ve got your health; you’ve got enough to buy the little woman a couple of pretty dresses once in a while. Can’t expect too much, can we, John, boy? How’s about offering a guy a beer?”

John brought two cans of beer from the ice-box to the little bar-table in the living-room. As he poured them, he noticed the bottle of gin and the bottle of bourbon on the lower shelf. Should he hide the liquor? No. It would be awkward to do it in front of Steve, and Linda would notice they were gone. She would instantly guess why he had hidden them and that would only increase the danger of starting her off.

The very fact that he’d had to make that decision brought home to him once again the infinite complexity of the cat-and-mouse game which was doomed to go on between his wife and himself. As he carried the beer across to Steve, he wondered: What would he think if I told him what really went on in this house? He wouldn’t believe me, of course—none of them would. Not unless they saw Linda with their own eyes.

And it had been his job to make sure that they never did.

Steve Ritter took a deep pull at his glass. “Boy, that hits the spot. Does something to you, beer. After a couple of beers there isn’t nothing I couldn’t do. No, sir. Guess I could even paint pictures like you—all them straggly lines going one way and all them other straggly lines going the other …”

He stopped abruptly as Linda’s footsteps sounded tapping down the stairs and jumped up, watching the door. He was, thought John, almost a parody of the comic-strip muscle-boy hero strutting for the attractive female.

“Here she is. Here’s the beautiful, glamorous Mrs. Hamilton.”

And Linda came into the room, fresh and extraordinarily young-looking in a little off-the-rack dress with which she managed somehow to create an effect of style. As so often before, watching his wife, John Hamilton marveled at her camouflage. One of those dreadful village bores? Not a bit of it. Steve Ritter was her dearest friend. She moved toward him, smiling, both hands extended in the classic movie gesture of a gracious hostess. On her left wrist she was wearing a gold charm bracelet which John had never seen before. She must have bought it in Pittsfield.

“Steve, how sweet of you to drop by. Please forgive all that waiting. The drive to Pittsfield always exhausts me. If I don’t have a long hot shower the moment I get home, I’m dead. Oh, John.” As if she’d just seen he was there, Linda turned on her husband the smile particularly reserved for him in public, the affectionate, slightly pitying mother’s smile for the impractical artist who lives in the clouds. In the same instant she put her right hand over her left wrist and he noticed her slip the bracelet off her wrist and drop it into the pocket of her dress. So she had bought it in Pittsfield and, feeling guilty about the extravagance, was waiting for the “right moment” to break it to him. “So you’re back already, darling. I thought you’d still be out playing with the children.”

She turned back to Steve. “John’s too sweet. He just lives for those kids. Your Buck and all of them. Stoneville ought to give him some sort of official status—elect him scoutmaster or something. Sit down. Really, do sit down. Don’t keep standing for me.”

Steve dropped back into his chair and Linda perched herself on its arm, chattering intimately, laughing, gesturing with her cigarette. As he watched her, John thought suddenly: Isn’t it all a bit too much? Weren’t her eyes a little too bright? Hadn’t the crack about him and the children revealed its malice a shade too obviously? Had she had a drink in Pittsfield?

The moment the thought came, he hated himself. He knew it was as destructive for him as for her to have these constant suspicions. But once the worm of doubt had slid in, it couldn’t be dislodged. For almost a week now, ever since the failure of the show had been definitely established, she had been on the verge. He knew the symptoms so well.

Steve left surprisingly soon, refusing a second beer. Linda went with him to the kitchen door.

“How boring you have to rush off. You will come again soon, won’t you? Promise me, Steve.”

From the living-room John heard his wife’s caressing, almost flirtatious voice and then heard the slam of the screen door. Linda didn’t come back immediately. She must be standing at the door waving goodbye.

Holding his beer, John sat down on the arm of a chair. It had come to him, with a returning stir of panic, that this was probably the most important moment of his life. If he let himself down now, through cowardice or fake humility or diseased concern for Linda, he was through.

Pray God she hasn’t started to drink, he thought. And then, with savage self-contempt: What’s the matter with me? Do I just pretend I’m sorry for my wife? Am I really afraid of her? Have I come as close as this to the breaking point?

2

HE COULD hear Steve’s car moving away past the wall of the studio when Linda finally returned. The cigarette was dangling from her lower lip and her forehead was creased in a comedy scowl.

“Those poor dear boring clods! What have I done to deserve them?” The frown smoothed away and she smiled a quick, affectionate smile. “Darling, you’d better be thinking about changing. We’d got to be at Vickie’s party by six.”

He’d forgotten Vickie Carey’s birthday party. Why was there always some little extra thing to make it worse? Should he postpone it then? No. To hell with the party.

“Look, darling. Look, John. Look at me.” Linda touched his wrist and then, picking up folds of skirt in each hand, pirouetted in front of him. “Do you like me? Do you like my new hair?”

The very faintest hint of thickening in her voice told him the story. It had started. He was sure of it now. He felt a flattening exhaustion. She began to dance around the shabby wicker furniture.

“There’s a new girl at Madame Helene’s. She did my hair for the first time today. She said she found some grey hairs.” Linda let the folds of skirt drop and came back to him. “Darling, do you see them? Look, can you see the grey hairs? Here?” She raised a hand to her temple. “I can’t. I swear I can’t. It’s the sun, isn’t it? You know how the sun always bleaches it out in summer.”

He could see the grey hairs. There were only a few of them and they were hardly visible, but they were there. So that’s what had done it, he thought. Just a chance remark from a tactless girl had been enough. That was why she’d been making such charm to Steve, too. She’d been defying the girl, reassuring herself. Why did he always have to understand her so well? And why, understanding her, did he still find it so touching? Other women got grey hairs. They didn’t have to be lied to, propitiated, bolstered.

“That girl should be fired,” he said lightly, making a joke of it. “If you’ve got any grey hairs, I’ll eat them.”

“Oh, you wouldn’t notice. You’re far too sweet. But she said she found some. Not many, but some.” Linda shrugged. “Well—who cares? I’m twenty-nine. Lots of women get grey hair before they’re thirty.”

She was thirty-three. He’d seen her birth certificate once and she knew he’d seen it. But that hadn’t stopped her from keeping up the legend. Before she could drag him too far into the realms of unreality, he took the letter out of his pocket. It was going to be disaster anyway. It didn’t matter anymore about how he handled it.

He said, “Linda, I got a letter from Charlie Raines.” “From Charlie?” For a moment she wasn’t interested; then she was. Quickly, suspiciously, she said, “But you brought the mail before I went to Pittsfield. Why didn’t you tell me then?”

“I wanted some time to think about it.”

“Think about it? Think about what? What did he say?”

He held the letter out to her. “Want to read it?”

“Yes. Of course.” And then, “No. You read it to me.”

He’d forgotten how she hated putting on her reading glasses. His fingers unsteady, he took the letter out of the envelope and smoothed it.

“It’s long,” he said pointlessly. “Typical Charlie.”

He read;

Dear Johnny:

How is life in the great outdoors treating you? Don’t think we’ve forgotten you. You’ve been very much on our minds. To the extent, in fact, of a long, bang-up conference at the summit this afternoon. First, we all want you to know how badly we feel about the show at the Denham Galleries. We realize, of course, that half these art critic boys don’t know what they’re talking about and that they’re just gunning for you because your first show, when you were still with us, was such a success. But we also realize it must be a disappointment to you, financially, if for nothing else, since we understand, when you left us, that you would have to depend in the long run upon a steady sale of canvases if you were going to make this painting deal work out.

I hope you know us all well enough to be sure we aren’t a bunch of Philistines around here. Nor do I want you to think of me as a mean old Mephistopheles picking a “weak” moment in which to tempt you. But it so happens that H. C. has been forced by his doctors to retire as the head of the art department. For a couple of weeks we’ve been desperately looking for someone who could swing the job. The combination of first rate executive and first rate commercial artist doesn’t grow on trees, as you know, and, even though you felt at one time that the set-up here was too restricting for you, you are still considered by us as one of the most outstanding men in the field.

Yes, Johnny, let’s get down to brass tacks. This letter is frankly a plea for you to come back to us. The salary we are prepared to offer is the salary that H. C. has been getting plus the regular bonuses etc. It will, I would say, be about double what we were paying you when you left us. God knows, I don’t want to butt my nose into your private affairs, but we all feel that, just perhaps, after ten months of it, you might be getting a little bit tired of poverty in a garret (do they have garrets in the country?) and that, just perhaps, you might consider returning to the Raines and Raines family which has never stopped thinking of you as “one of us”.

Think it over, Johnny, and let us know as soon as possible. Speaking personally, I don’t see that it’s at all impractical for you to swing the job and have a considerable amount of time to continue your “serious” painting on the side. Maybe you’d drop down to the office one day this week and talk it over. We’d love seeing you anyway.

All the best and to Linda,

Sincerely …

While he was reading he had deliberately put the thought of his wife, standing by the mantel, out of his head. He had made himself concentrate on the things that really mattered—the fact that he knew, in spite of the critics, in spite of the burden of Linda, that he was gradually groping toward achievement in his painting; the fact that he was overwhelmingly sure a return to the sleek high-pressure commercialism of Raines and Raines would destroy in him the only thing he cared about any more; and the other fact—almost as important—the fact that Linda had been far worse in New York than she’d been in the country. She would have forgotten it, of course, because she was bored now and playing the role of the exiled martyr. But another desperate bid for competition with the Mrs. Raines, the Parkinsons, all those mercilessly chic and sophisticated women in Manhattan would break her.

Dr. MacAllister, the only person he’d confided in, had been emphatic about that.

“Since Linda won’t come to me as a patient, John, I can only give an opinion based on my observations. But I’d say if you don’t take her out of this rat-race she’ll be a hopeless alcoholic in a couple of years.”

As he put the letter down on a table, he looked at his wife for the first time. He had expected a virago explosion; he’d even expected her to break in before he’d finished reading the letter. But, as so often before, he’d been wrong about her. She’d lit another cigarette and was standing watching him, very quietly, with the forlorn dignity of someone who has abandoned hope because there was no point in hoping.

“You’re not going back,” she said.

He felt amazement and gratitude and a stab of guilt. Had he then underestimated her?

“So you do understand?”

“Of course I understand. You know you can paint. The critics haven’t changed that at all. And you want to paint. That’s all you want. That’s all you care about.”

“I couldn’t go back, Linda. Not unless we were starving, and we’re not starving. We’ve got enough to go along the way we’re going for five years, at least. You know that.” Because she wasn’t fighting him, all his old only partially destroyed affection for her was flooding in. He went to her, putting his hands on her arms. “Going back would be the end. You do understand, don’t you? You can see what a weasel letter that is. Charlie knows what that job would really be! Up to my eyes in it twenty-four hours a day. Doing my painting on the side! I couldn’t do anything on the side. Painting isn’t something you can do on the side anyway. I’ll go to New York tomorrow and explain. Charlie will understand.” It was heady, this realization that, against all expectations, he could still talk honestly with her. “After all, I made my decision when I made it. You remember, don’t you? We decided it together. You as much as I. You know it was the right thing. Not only for me but for you, too. You .. .”

“For me?” Suddenly her body stiffened. “What do you mean—for me?”

“You were just as fed up with New York as I was. You …”

“Me? Fed up with New York? Are you out of your mind? New York was my whole life.”

He felt the sense of well-being—that absurd, deluded sense of well-being—draining away.

“There hasn’t been an hour,” she said, “not an hour when I haven’t been dreaming that just possibly, one day, just possibly all this would be over and I would be back in my apartment, with my friends, with my kind of life. I haven’t said anything. I’ve tried so desperately not to say anything. And I’m not going to say anything now. But when you claim that it was for me, that it was only because of me that you dragged us here . .

“Linda, I didn’t say just for you. You know I didn’t. I said …”

“It doesn’t matter what you said. Nothing matters.” Her lower lip under the cigarette was trembling. “I’m not important anyway. I’ve always known that. I’m just the woman around the place—the woman to cook the meals, to clean the house. That’s a woman’s function, isn’t it? While you go off and lock yourself up all day in that dreary barn, painting your pictures. Off somewhere—God knows where—in a world of your own. And then, when you do have some free time, when we might be together doing things, getting closer—when you might be making it better for me, you just sit here blaring that phonograph or go off in those goddam woods with those goddam children like—like a-” She suddenly dropped into a chair, throwing her hands up to cover her face.

“Oh, hell. Oh, hell. Oh, hell … .”

“Linda!” Because he’d once again let himself be fooled and because he’d been idiotic enough to minimize the fact that the drink had started to work in her, all the affection had gone. He looked down at her, wearily, almost hating her.

“You think you can paint!” Her voice came, husky with spite, through the covering hands. “There’s something I’ve never told you. I swore I’d never tell you. I shouldn’t be telling you now. You can’t paint. You’re no good at all. Everyone knows that—not just the critics —everyone. Ask anyone in Stoneville. Anyone at all. They all laugh at you. And they all laugh at me. You, they say, you who are so charming, so bright …”

She got up jerkily like a puppet. Not looking at him, still pouring out the babble of words, she started across the room.

“You who’s so charming, so attractive. Why, in God’s name, have you saddled yourself with that crazy, untalented oaf who’s dragging you down as surely as you’re standing right there, who …”

The words—the stale, dead words which he’d heard innumerable times before—fell on his nerves like water drops.

“I could have married many other men. I could have married George Krasner, the president of the Krasner Model Agency. I could have married …”

She was at the bar now. Casually, almost as if she wasn’t conscious of what she was doing, she was stooping down for the gin bottle.

“Linda,” he called.

She went on fumbling.

“Linda,” he called again.

She straightened, bristling with outraged hauteur.

“Why are you shouting at me like that?”

“Don’t,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t.”

“Don’t? Don’t—what? What on earth are you talking about?”

“Linda, please. As a favor to me. You don’t have to start it. It won’t help.”

“What won’t help?” Her face was scrawled now with astonishment and shock. “My God, you’re not accusing me of going to take a drink, are you? I was only arranging the bottles.”

He didn’t say anything. He just stood with his arms dangling at his sides.

“Well, are you?” Her voice tilted higher. “Is that how you’re going to justify yourself? I suppose you’ll say I had a drink in Pittsfield, just because some stupid, ignorant girl said some stupid, ignorant thing about my hair. Oh, you’re so clever. You know how to do it, don’t you? I’m here to tell you I haven’t had a drink for months. For that matter, there’s hardly been any time in my life when I drank anything more than—well, a couple of cocktails at a party or …”

She gave a little whimper and ran across to him. She threw herself in his arms, pushing her face against his chest.

“Oh, help me. Help me, John. Darling, help me.”

It was a real cry from her heart. He knew it was. This wasn’t acting. But, as he put a hand on her waist, all he felt was the panic of an animal caught in a net.

“It wouldn’t do any good,” he said, stroking her hair. “Going back to New York wouldn’t change anything.” “I’m so afraid.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t want to say all those things, John. I didn’t want to.”

“I know.”

“They weren’t true. Really they weren’t. I didn’t want to say them. Oh, John, if you’d help …”

Hope, or an illusion of hope, stirred in him. He might as well try again anyway.

He said, “If you’d talk to Bill MacAllister.”

Her body, pressed against his, started to tremble. “No,” she said. “You can’t do that. You can’t do that to me. You can’t have them shut me up in a …”

“You know it wouldn’t be anything like that. Bill? He’s an old friend. He’d understand …”

“No. Don’t talk about it. No.” At least it had its secondary value of shocking her back. Her fingers, clinging to his shirt, relaxed. “I’m all right. Honestly, I’m all right. And, darling, I’m so sorry. How could I have said those things? Of course I see you’ve got to turn Charlie Raines down. We’re better here. We’re both better here. And I did have a drink. Only one. I swear it. But it’s all right. It’s nothing to worry about.”

She drew away from him, smiling up at him, her huge green eyes glistening with the suggestion of tears.

“It’s just that I needed time to get used to it. Don’t you see? Springing it on me like that. It wasn’t easy. Right away … having to take it. You know it isn’t easy for me. If you’d done it another way, if you’d been a little more tactful …”

Her hand moved up from his shirt collar and caressed his neck. Already she was rewriting the scene in her mind. Already she was seeing herself as the sensitive wife who’d been a little unreasonable because her husband had handled her clumsily.

Even now she was still capable of staggering him.

“Darling, you’ve got to hurry and change. You should be leaving for Vickie’s right now.”

“Me? You’re not going?”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—not now.”

“Then I won’t go either.”

“But of course you’ve got to go. One of us must go. What would she think? It’s her birthday. We’ve got the present and everything. Give her my love and say I’ve got one of my migraines. I’ll lie down on the bed for a while. I’ll be all right.”

From where he stood, the bar-table was in his direct line of vision. Almost without his realizing it, his eyes settled on the bottle of gin.

Linda’s voice came quick and sharp. “Trust me, John. Trust me just for once. If you knew how important it is to trust me.”

There it was again—the cry from the heart, and the dilemma. If he called the Careys to say neither of them were coming, he’d be undermining her with an obvious lack of faith. But, then, if he did leave her here alone …

He turned back to her. Her face was imploring—a little girl’s face.

“She knows about my migraine. They all do. Tell her I didn’t call because I was hoping right up to the last minute that I’d feel well enough to go.”

Didn’t he have to trust her? If he didn’t, after a direct plea like that, wouldn’t it be admitting the total defeat of their marriage?

He said, “You really think it’s best for me to go? That’s really what you want?”

“Yes, yes. And I won’t—I swear I won’t …”

“Okay, then. Where’s the present?”

“It’s upstairs in the bedroom. It’s all beautifully wrapped. I wrapped it myself.”

She was smiling happily now. She slipped her arm around his waist. They started up the stairs together. John was remembering that they’d bought the tray for Vickie together three days before in an antique shop. It had been the woman in the store who had gift-wrapped it.

In the bedroom Linda lay down on the bed. John peeled off his work clothes and took a shower. When he came back from the bathroom, she was still lying there with her eyes closed. He put on a shirt and tie and a summer suit. As he was brushing his hair, she called softly: “John, John darling.”

He put down the brush and turned to her. Her eyes were open and she was stretching her arms up toward him. He crossed to the bed.

“Kiss me, John.”

He bent over. She put her arms around his neck, drawing his mouth down to hers. Her lips clung to his in a long, passionate kiss. Her breath smelt of peppermint life-savers with a faint metallic back-taste of liquor.

“I’m sorry, John.”

“It’s okay.”

“I want you to be happy. That’s all I care about in the world—that you should achieve what you want to achieve—that you should live the life you want to live. Nothing else matters but that.”

“Sure, Linda.”

Her arms were still around his neck. Her mouth slid to his cheek. “Darling, if it was twice as much as you were getting before, it would be about twenty-five thousand, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

She giggled. “My, we’re being poor in the grand manner, aren’t we?”

She patted his hair and released him.

“I’ll just lie here for a while and then I’ll make myself something to eat. Don’t hurry home. I don’t want you to spoil your evening worrying about me. And give Vickie my love. Give them all my love. Say how terribly sorry I am.”

“Sure.”

He started for the door.

“Darling,” she called, “you’ve forgotten the tray. My beautiful gift-wrapped tray.”

3

HE GOT into the old black sedan, put the tray, wrapped in gold paper with a large blue ribbon rosette, on the seat next to him and swung down the weed-matted drive to the road.

I mustn’t worry, he told himself. For a long time now anxiety had been his greatest enemy, eating into his reserve of strength, making him each time progressively less adequate to face trouble when it came. Getting through the party would be tough without the added burden of agonizing about what Linda might be up to at home.

And perhaps she wouldn’t be up to anything. It was perfectly possible that, when he got back, he would find her all right. She’d controlled herself before after she’d started to drink. This habit of always expecting the worst was bad.

Vickie and Brad Carey lived on the edge of Lake Sheldon which was the most attractive situation in Stoneville. It was just about a mile away from the Hamiltons’ old farmhouse down a plunging hill through the woods. Brad was the only son of old Mr. Carey who owned one of the longest-established family paper companies in New England. He worked at the factory as vice-president and heir-apparent, and five years ago had married Vickie, a wealthy girl from California.

Although Stoneville was in the heart of the Berkshires, that swarming ground for summering New Yorkers, it was still surprisingly undiscovered. Old Mr. Carey had lived there for years and established his family as a sort of self-elected “gentry”. But, apart from them and the Fishers who were currently visiting in California, the only other people with social pretensions were Gordon and Roz Moreland, Timmie’s parents, who collaborated on almost best-selling historical novels and wintered in Europe. With the Fishers away, a party at Brad and Vickie’s inevitably meant a party consisting of the old Careys and the Morelands and, since their discovery of Linda, the Hamiltons.

The very smallness of the group made it fanatically closely-knit. The Morelands took an intense interest in the Careys and the Careys in the Morelands, and the old Careys in both families. They were beginning to be the same with Linda.

It was this growing intimacy which worried John. Except for Vickie and Brad, who were simple and friendly, the Carey set were not his kind of people, nor was he theirs. To him, old Mr. Carey was a boring bully and the Morelands silly and affected. And yet for Linda the fact that they had accepted her was enormously important. It gave her that added security which she so desperately needed, and for almost six months she had been able to keep her public personality intact with them. But John knew that the whole relationship hung by a hair. If ever the Carey set, smugly insulated against the seamier side of life, suspected the truth, they would discard her in a minute. And once that happened …

As he drove past the empty Fisher house and down the hill through the vast stretches of maple trees, paradisically serene in the yellowing sunlight, John felt once again a spasm of anxiety in his stomach. Twice already he’d had to use Linda’s migraine as an excuse. Would it work for a third time? And for a birthday party too? The Carey set made a cult of birthdays, and Linda, always lightning quick to pick up other people’s affectations, had been gushing for almost a week about this one.

“Vickie darling, a real Carey birthday party; I can hardly wait. It’ll be such an event for me. Then I’ll feel I really do belong.”

He turned into the highway which skirted the lake and soon swung into the Careys’ drive and down it to the old gravel parking area at the back of the house. The old Careys’ Cadillac was already there, parked by the young Careys’ Buick and their old convertible, but the Morelands’ Mercedes, brought back from a recent foray into Germany, had not yet arrived. John climbed out of the car, carrying the tray, and rang the doorbell. As he did so, there was an insistent tinkling behind him. He turned to see Leroy Phillips, very neat in a white shirt and grey shorts, appearing through a stone archway on a bicycle. Leroy’s parents worked as cook-butler for the young Careys and, sticklers for etiquette, made a point of keeping Leroy out of their employers’ eye. John had scarcely ever seen him at the Careys’ before The little boy pedaled determinedly up and smiled his dazzling smile.

“Hi, Mr. Hamilton.”

“Hi, Leroy.”

Leroy looked down at his handlebars, overcome by bashfulness. “We went swimming. We all went swimming, Emily and Angel and Buck and—and Timmie.”

“You did?”

“Yes, we did. And”—Leroy glanced up from under long black lashes—“Emily and Angel have a secret.”

“What sort of a secret?”

“A great big terrific secret. Do you think they’d tell me, Mr. Hamilton?”

“They might.”

“But they said they wouldn’t. They said they wouldn’t tell anyone. Timmie … he’s getting a space-suit from his father, and Timmie said if he’d let Angel wear his space-suit would she tell him the secret. But Angel said no. She said …”

The door opened and Alonso Phillips, in his white butler’s coat and black pants, beamed at John.

“Evening, Mr. Hamilton.” He saw Leroy and bent down, scowling a ferocious mock scowl. “What’s the matter with you? You know better’n to bring that bicycle around here. Scat, you—disappear.” He beamed back at John. “It is you, Mr. Hamilton. He’s been hanging around waiting ever since he knew you was coming. That boy’s just crazy about you. I guess all the kids are—just nuts about you. Come in, sir. They’re out on the terrace taking their cocktails. Mrs. Hamilton not with you tonight?”

“No. I’m afraid she’s got a bad headache.”

“My! That’s a shame. And a birthday party too.”

John followed him through the living-room and then went out on to the paved fieldstone terrace.

It stretched the whole length of the house and looked across Lake Sheldon which, although its north shore belonged to the township, was considered by the Carey set as their own private lake. The Carey family was seated around a cluster of wrought-iron porch furniture and blue-and-white-striped umbrellas. Old Mr. Carey, bland, vigorous and formidable, sat holding a martini in his hand like a gavel, as if the party were a board meeting at which he had indulgently condescended to preside. His wife, faded and fluttery, was seated at his side in her perpetual role of handmaiden. Brad Carey, very much the respectful son and heir, was mixing drinks at a glass-and-iron bar. Vickie was ensconced at a central table which was loaded with birthday gifts.

When they saw John, the old Careys, as always, pretended they hadn’t seen him. Unless you were a real member of their court, you were given the royal dead-eye until the formal moment of presentation. Brad waved from the bar. Vickie jumped up and hurried toward him.

“Hello, John. How nice to see you. But where’s Linda?”

Her odd, irregular face was almost homely but its spontaneous smile always warmed John. As he presented the gift and made his explanations, she shook her head.

“Poor dear Linda. How miserable.”

Brad, crew-cutted, smooth and cheerful, joined them with a martini for John. In the Carey set you were never asked what you wanted to drink. It was beyond belief that anyone could want anything but a martini mixed to the exact Carey formula. Except Linda, of course. Everyone in the Carey set knew that Linda didn’t drink. For Linda there was always the ritualistic tomato juice with a dash of Worcestershire sauce.

Vickie said, “Darling, Linda’s got another of those migraines.”

“Gee, that’s tough, poor kid.” Brad turned his straight blue gaze on John. “She was so crazy about the birthday party, too. You’re sure she couldn’t make it?”

“I’m afraid so. When it hits her, it knocks her out completely.”

In a loud voice, Mr. Carey, who had a ponderously flirtatious weakness for Linda, said to his wife, “Why do they say she’s not coming?”

Mrs. Carey started, as she invariably did when her husband addressed her. “I think, dear, they say she has a headache.”

“A headache!” Mr. Carey snorted. “What sort of an excuse is a headache for missing a birthday party?”

“It’s migraine, Daddy,” called Vickie. “That’s much worse.” She unwrapped the tray and thanked John warmly.

Mr. Carey said, “What have they given her?”

“I think, dear,” said Mrs. Carey, “it’s a tray.”

As John moved to pay his formal respects to the old Careys, there was the sound of voices in the house singing “Happy birthday, dear Vickie”, deliberately off key. Instantly the terrace was galvanized as Gordon and Roz Moreland erupted on to the porch with Timmie trailing behind them. Roz was carrying an enormous package and was stooping comically as if its weight was crushing her. Gordon had one arm uplifted, and looped on to an arched little finger by a pink bow was a tiny, contrasting package.

The completed Carey set greeted each other with cries and kisses.

“Vickie darling, open the packages. Quick. We brought them all the way from Europe, from a divine little shop in Taormina.”

“Oh, Roz, you shouldn’t …”

The large package turned out to be an embroidered Sicilian peasant dress on a hanger, the little one was a pair of silver earrings made like miniature donkey carts. Vickie was enchanted; old Mr. Carey guffawed. Everyone got their martinis. The Morelands were shown the present the Fishers had sent them from California and had Linda’s absence explained to them, not by John, but by Mr. Carey who had taken over the role of information bureau.

Only Timmie was left out. The Carey set firmly believed that children should go everywhere their parents went, but, as Timmie was the only actual child involved and since the Morelands also believed that you shouldn’t let your children run your life, he hadn’t been given a present to bring Vickie and was now ignored. Inevitably, he gravitated to John. Tense and anxious, he was the least aggressive of the children’s quintet and John had a special protective affection for him.

Timmie was telling him excitedly about the space-suit.

“Daddy said he’d get it in Pittsfield today, but he had so much to do, he said, there wasn’t time. But I’m going to have it soon and it’s going to be a great big space-suit with a great big balloon thing for my head and maybe Buck’s going to get one too. He said that maybe …”

“Now, Timmie darling, don’t be a bore. Poor Mr. Hamilton doesn’t want to hear about your space-suit.” Roz Moreland had swooped over, giving John a rueful “this mother-thing” smile. A long tortoiseshell cigarette holder was in her mouth. “Timmie, dear, go out and look for that cunning little colored boy who’s such a pal of yours. You know, Mr. Hamilton, Gordon and I think it’s absolutely absurd to put up barriers. In Marrakesh, winter before last, Timmie had such a cute little Arab side-kick. Abdullah, such an enchanting Arabian Nights name.”

“His name is Ahmed,” said Timmie. “That’s his name. Ahmed.”

Roz Moreland patted him absently on the head. “Now, darling, don’t be difficult. Just run off and play with your little friend. What a pity about poor dear Linda, Mr. Hamilton. And we’ve brought our Sicily slides, too. Aren’t people who travel dreadful, persecuting their friends? But Mr. Carey insisted …”

The rest of them had drifted back from the French windows and were settling down in the wrought-iron chairs. The party—the typical Carey-set party—was under way.

Stubbornly hiding his still unconquered anxiety about Linda, John sat holding his drink while the conversation shifted to the Lake Disaster. Every year Carey parties had their standard topics of conversation. This summer the primary topic was Mr. Carey’s automobile accident, the splendidness of his recent and total recovery from several months of hospitalization and the inferiority of all men, less positive-minded than he, who failed to face up squarely to misfortune. The secondary topic was the Lake Disaster. Certain aggressive selectmen, ignoring the Careys’ moral right to privacy, were anxious to sell the north shore to a promoter of summer hotels, and in three days’ time it was going to be put to the vote at a town meeting.

Soon Mr. Carey was pontificating.

“It’s sticking together that counts. All of us are going to that town meeting—yes, sir, all of us; even you, Hamilton. Every little counts. I’m not scared for a minute. One way or another, I can put pressure on half those selectmen. Young Standon, for example …”

They had their second martinis and then their extra half. The extra half was a traditional birthday excess and a great deal of playful argument went on as to whether the halves had been equably divided by Brad. Then they went in to dinner where family jokes started to spark.

Death was ritualistically drunk to the sponsors of the hotel scheme, and the private world got more and more private.

Although John was, both by his own choice and theirs, only a courtesy member of this private world, he could understand why it meant so much to Linda. This was precisely the life she wanted for herself, shielded from any need to compete by wealth and a comfortable conviction of superiority. Almost certainly, in the excitement of his first show’s success last year, when she had urged him to quit Raines and Raines, it had been this sort of existence she had visualized, with herself at the center of it miraculously converted into a Celebrity’s Wife with him at her side as a kind of glorified Gordon Moreland.

While Gordon told amusing stories about the primitiveness of the hotel in Agrigento, interspersing unintelligible phrases of Sicilian dialect, John thought of Linda lying on their bed in the dark bare bedroom. “If it’s double what you were getting before, it would be twenty-five thousand, wouldn’t it?” That was what would be tantalizing her. That more than anything. With all that money, she would be thinking, I could dress far better than Mary Raines; I could snub the Parkinsons; I could give the most elegant dinner parties …

This vivid, unwanted glimpse into his wife’s reveries threw him off balance. There wasn’t, on the face of it, anything unreasonable about them. Gordon Moreland would sympathize with her. So would old Mr. Carey. For that matter, almost everyone would sympathize. He tried to imagine the faces around the table if he announced he’d just turned down a twenty-five-thousand-dollar job, plus bonuses, merely because he was determined to paint the pictures which, in the Carey set, were considered so “wrong” that they were never even mentioned.

Suddenly the anxiety was back. Was he, after all, just a self-deluding egomaniac? Was he only kidding himself that a return to New York would be fatal to Linda? Dr. MacAllister had given his warning. But if she had a lot more money and the confidence which went with it, mightn’t it be the one thing that would put her on her feet again?

The worm was back, nibbling at him.

After dinner Mr. Carey insisted upon the Morelands’ slides. In the living-room furniture was moved; the screen and projector were hilariously set up. Timmie and even Leroy were tracked down and settled cross-legged on the floor. As the lights were extinguished and Gordon Moreland, in a high stilted voice intended to parody an affected lecturer, started to show the slides, John sat in the darkness, fighting the worm.

They were out of Cortina on their way to Austria when he heard a laugh. It came from behind them, from the hallway—a suppressed, excited, giggling laugh. For one moment of sickening unease he thought: Have I reached a point where I’m hearing her when she’s not there? Then the laugh came again and Linda’s voice called gaily:

“Yoo-hoo. Anybody home?”

A slide of the Tyrol stopped half-way across the screen. Gordon Moreland exclaimed, “It’s Linda.” The others called out, “Linda? Darling! It isn’t you? Linda!”

“Don’t stop. You know I want to see the slides, all of them. Darlings, please. Go on, do. It’s only me.”

Turning, John saw his wife’s figure in the living-room doorway, silhouetted by the hall light behind her.

4

A LIGHT was turned on. Then another. Everyone had swung round, but, instinctively respecting the theatricalism of the moment, kept their places while Linda came down the few steps from the upper level by the door. She was wearing her new green dress and walking with a carefulness that was only a fraction too careful. She was triumphantly the center of attention. Her smile was only a shade too fixed, her eyes only a trifle too bright. But John, looking at her with a sinking heart, knew she had reached the most dangerous stage, the intermediate stage when she was still in control of the liquor but when her malice was rampant, at its most destructive.

This is it, he thought. How could I have been such a fool as to trust her? And then, with a stirring of hope: Maybe they won’t realize, maybe they’ll think it’s just the migraine, if I can get her out of here fast enough.

The others had all started to converge on her. As he pushed forward too, he saw a puffy red swelling running from under her left eye down her left cheek. So she’d fallen. A sickening picture came of her standing by the bar-table with the metal measuring glass in her hand, sipping the gin, thinking out some devious plan, and then starting for the stairs, stumbling, hitting her face, giggling, getting up, climbing the stairs to put on her green dress …

“Happy birthday!” She had come to a stop on the bottom step and was blowing kisses from her hands. “Darling, darling Vickie, happy birthday. Happy birthday, dear Careys. Happy birthday, dear Morelands. Happy birthday, all.”

John tried to get at her, but Vickie had put her arms around her and was kissing her cheek while the others crowded behind, chattering.

“Darling … how marvelous … but why didn’t you phone? Brad would have come to pick you up … What did you do? Walk? You couldn’t have walked—not all the way.”

“Of course I walked. Down through the woods. It was divine. Once I’d decided to come, it was far more amusing to be a surprise. And I just had to come. I decided it was too absurd, too childish to stay at home merely because …”

She broke off and for the first time her eyes sought out John’s. They were flat and hard, and he knew then that his fears had been right. After he’d gone she’d been lying there, thinking of the twenty-five thousand dollars, flogging herself back into hating him again, distorting him in her mind into the Enemy who was depriving her of all she was entitled to in life. She’d gone down to the bar-table. He said I was drunk. I’ll show him. That’s what she’d come here for. He was sure of it now. It was to have her revenge against him.

They were all watching her, not getting on to it yet but reacting to the unnatural tension in her.

Quietly, knowing it wouldn’t help, that nothing was going to help, he said, “Linda, you shouldn’t be here with that migraine.”

“Migraine!” For a second her eyes, still on his, revealed their spite. “So that’s what you told them. I might have guessed. You are such a one for the proprieties, aren’t you?” She turned back to the others, smiling her bright, social smile. “Don’t be fooled, my dear, dear friends. I don’t have a migraine at all. In fact I’ve never felt better in my life. We just had a fight. That’s all. A domestic fracas. Might happen to anyone.” Slowly she raised her hand to the swelling under her eye and, for the fraction of a second, her eyes flashed triumphantly back to John. “Poor darling John, he didn’t mean to do it. It just happened and, the moment after, he felt terrible, as you may imagine. But … he decided I’d better stay home. He thought it really wouldn’t be the height of dignity to bring me to a Carey birthday party—with a shiner.”

There was a politely muted gasp from both of the Morelands. Mr. Carey looked thunderstruck. So that was her plan, thought John. She was hitting as far below the belt as that. He didn’t give a damn for himself. These people were nothing to him. If she wanted them to think he’d beaten her up, to hell with it. All that mattered was to get her away as quickly as possible before she was washed-up with the Carey set for ever.

Still smiling, she had pushed through the others and was taking his hands.

“Please, John, don’t be mad at me for coming after all. I know they won’t mind. They’ll realize that I love them and that, shiner or no shiner, I couldn’t keep from saying Happy birthday.”

“Okay, Linda,” he said. “Now you’ve said it, how about coming home?”

“Home? Are you out of your mind? I’ve only just arrived and I’m determined to see the slides—all of them, all those lovely slides.”

She was still holding both his hands. He could feel her balancing her whole weight on them as she turned back to the others.

“Where have we got to, Gordon dear? Sicily?”

All the others were grouped around them now, even Timmie and Leroy hovering wide-eyed on the fringes. He could, of course, drag her out of the room by force. But that would be playing even further into her hands. This time she’d really thought up a good one. Better leave it, better let her have her fun. Perversely fascinated now disaster was assured, he watched the Carey set reacting exactly as she intended them to react. Even yet they hadn’t realized she was drunk. Because it was such an established fact in the group that Linda never touched alcohol, they hadn’t made the jump. But avid curiosity, imperfectly hidden behind a veneer of diffidence, showed on all the faces except Vickie’s and Brad’s. It was Mr. Carey who took the bait. He, of course, was the inevitable fall-guy because, as the recognized father-image of the group, it was his privilege to be bluff and outspoken.

“Let’s get this straight, my dear.” His pale eyes flicked for an instant to John, looking right through him. “You had a fight, you say? And he hit you?”

Brad looked miserable. Vickie said quickly:

“Daddy darling, everyone has fights. It’s none of our business what they were quarrelling about.”

“It’s certainly our business. All of our business. Linda’s our friend. If she’s in trouble …”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t think I blame poor John,” said Linda. “It’s me I blame. It’s all me.”

She stretched out a hand for a cigarette. Eagerly Gordon Moreland offered a silver case and lit a cigarette for her. Puffing at it, Linda threw up at John a quick, intimate smile.

“Darling, I’ve been a dope, haven’t I? I should have kept my big mouth shut. It’s just that I knew they’d see my eye and wonder and … Oh well, now I’ve put my foot in it we might as well come clean. After all, we don’t have anything to hide from our friends.”

She slipped her arm around his waist, ostentatiously aligning herself with him against his would-be detractors. He could feel her body quivering with satisfaction.

“Darlings, let me announce the great drama of the Hamilton household. The people John used to work for in New York wrote and want him back again as head of the art department. Twenty-five thousand a year plus bonuses and plenty of free time to do his painting on the side. You all know little old me. I’m so materialistic. Sometimes I get so bored with skimping and saving, running the house, existing on the edge of poverty. I’m not the artistic type, I guess, and the idea of going back to New York and be able to live decently again—the way you people live here. The idea …”

Her voice faltered. It’s all rehearsed, thought John. She’s been practicing, coming down the hill, to the last gesture, the smallest catch in the throat.

Her voice sounded again, studiedly brave.

“But that’s just my selfish point of view. I realize that now. It’s John’s life that matters. If he wants to go on with his painting, if he doesn’t care about what the critics say, if he doesn’t mind pigging it in that sordid house and … well, that’s all that matters, isn’t it? And tomorrow he’s going to New York to turn them down, so that’s that, and, after all, I shouldn’t complain. It isn’t as if I didn’t have my dear friends. Life can’t be too dreary, can it, when I have dear Vickie and Brad, the dear Morelands, the dear, dear Careys?”

Her mouth started to quiver. With a sudden, blurred gesture, she held out her cigarette for Gordon Moreland to take from her. Clumsily, her head lowered, she ran to Mrs. Carey and threw her arms around her.

“Oh, I’m such a selfish monster. How can I be ruining the birthday party? How can I be making this appalling spectacle of myself hashing over a scene that’s settled, that’s all settled, that never should have begun? Ob, poor John.” She buried her face against the lace of Mrs. Carey’s capacious bosom. Her voice came, thin and forlorn. “I should have stayed home. I know I should. But when I was left there alone, I got to brooding and my eye hurt and—and I took a drink.” She gave a giggling laugh. “That’s what’s the matter with me. I took a big shot of bourbon. Linda’s stinking drunk.”

The laugh cracked and disintegrated into deep, racking sobs.

Perfect, thought John. The best to date. She’d even exploited the drunkenness just at the moment when it must finally have become obvious to them all, and turned it into yet another claim on their pity. He needn’t have worried. She hadn’t lost the Carey set at all. She had made them her allies and her champions for ever more, and for ever more to them he’d be pigeonholed as the louse of the world.

He could feel the outraged antagonism in the room. Mr. Carey was loathing him; Mrs. Carey had become a formidable, protective mother. The Morelands were watching him as if it was inconceivable that they could ever have met him anywhere. Dimly he reflected that there had once been a time when this sort of thing had hurt him the way Linda wanted it to hurt. When? Three years ago? When it had first started in New York, when his love had still blinded him and he’d really believed that, by asking her to entertain his sister or by pleading with her to go to a business dinner, or by whatever it happened to be, he had, in some way, let her down again. Yes, it would have hurt him then. But that was over long ago. All there was now was a kind of dull disgust, contempt for her and contempt for himself and for the life he had let them drift into. Loyalty, wasn’t that what he called it? Nobly standing by his afflicted wife who needed him so much.

Look at them now.

Wearily, ignoring the hostile glances, he went up to Linda.

“Okay. You’ve made your speech. Let’s go.”

Mrs. Carey clucked like a flustered hen. Mr. Carey barked, “You’re not going to take that poor child away and brutalize her again!”

“No,” said Mrs. Carey. “No. Linda dear, you must come home with us.”

Under half-closed lashes, Linda glanced up at him. The glance lasted only a second but John saw in it the inevitable concomitants of drunken spite—the defiance, the potentials of panic. Have I gone too far this time?

“Come on,” he said. He knew she would come now, not because he had her in control but because she’d achieved her purpose.

Slowly she drew herself away from Mrs. Carey. For a moment she stood looking at her, smiling ruefully, the tears shining in her eyes.

“Darling Mrs. Carey, I’m so terribly sorry. Everyone, I’m so sorry. I’m drunk and I’ve ruined the party. Of course I’m going with John. He’s my husband. I hadn’t any right. .

She started quickly through the room. She almost stumbled over the slide-projector. Gordon Moreland sprang to help her. Mr. Carey cried, “Linda.”

“Please.” She brushed Gordon Moreland aside with her hand. “I’m all right. And please—forgive me. John, dear, I’ll wait in the car.”

She ran up the steps and out through the hall.

Vickie said, “Brad, go after her. See she’s all right.”

As Brad hurried out, John said into the glacial silence, “Well, good night, everyone.”

“That poor child,” said Mrs. Carey into the air in front of her.

The Morelands had turned their backs on him. Mr. Carey, bristling, at his most imperious, started toward him but, before he could say anything, John moved away up the steps.

Vickie came with him. When they reached the open front door, Brad hurried from the car to join them.

“She’s all right, I guess.”

Vickie asked awkwardly, “Is it true what she said, John?”

“More or less true.”

“And you’re going to turn down the offer?” Brad’s voice was faintly incredulous.

“Yes, I am.”

Unexpectedly Vickie said, “Don’t let Father and everyone worry you. It’s none of their business. You do what you feel is right.”

“Yes,” said Brad. “You’ve got to decide for yourself, of course.”

John turned to look at them through the summer darkness. Had he too surprisingly acquired allies?

Vickie took his hand and kissed him on the cheek. “Good night, John dear. And call us, if you need us. We’re so fond of Linda—and of you.”

They stood at the door, waving, as he walked across to Linda and the old black sedan.

5

ON THE DRIVE home up the hill through the woods, dim and unfathomable in the starlight, she sat huddled on her side of the front seat. She didn’t say anything, but he could feel the implacable hostility radiating out from her—and the other thing, too, of course. How am I going to get a drink? That’s what she was thinking. When we get home, he’s going to lock up the liquor. Or had she settled that already? Had she bought a bottle in Pittsfield and got it hidden away somewhere?

For the first time, John Hamilton was without hope. Always before, unreasonable as it had increasingly become, there had been the feeling that, if he tried hard enough, if he just clung on, life would somehow become workable; she would get a little better, better enough to consent to seeing a doctor, or even worse, worse enough where the whole matter would be taken out of his hands or hers. But now even that frail support was gone because he knew he was running out of strength. He could feel exhaustion in him, paralyzing his will. She was going to fight to the death about the job. He knew it. This was the time when he needed his reserves for an all-out struggle. And there was nothing left. He didn’t care what the Careys thought about him any more than he cared what the village thought about him. He didn’t care whether Linda got to the liquor or didn’t get to it. He didn’t even care about his painting. Painting? To hell with it! Let it go— let everything go.

He made the turn at the head of the hill by the Fishers’. They were almost home now.

Suddenly she said, “I’ll go to them tomorrow and tell them I lied about you hitting me.”

When he didn’t reply, she said more belligerently, “I was only telling them my point of view. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there? After all, you’ve probably been trying to get them around to your side all evening and they’re my friends. Aren’t I allowed to take my friends into my confidence when it’s something as important as this, when it’s … ?”

“Linda.”

“And I had to explain about my eye. I suppose I could have said I’d fallen down walking in the dark through the woods. But I didn’t think of it. Honestly, I didn’t think of it. I just thought I’d got to explain and everyone knows people have fights, don’t they?”

The house loomed ahead of them. She’d left no lights burning. It looked desolate, uninhabited.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t see why you’re being so absurd about it. You always say you don’t like them. You’re always saying they’re such bores. Why do we have to go to those boring Careys? That’s what you always say.”

As he swung the car into the drive, she lurched sideways, bumping into him.

“You park the car,” she said. “I’ll get out. I think I’ll just get out.”

Almost before the car had come to a halt, she was out of it, making for the kitchen door. To hell with her, thought John. Not hurrying, oddly detached from himself and from everything, he put the car in the garage, rolled down the door and stood a moment, looking through the skeletal silhouettes of the apple trees toward the woods beyond. A faint cry sounded from the darkness, almost like a human voice calling. An owl?

He went into the house through the dark kitchen. The living-room was dark too. As he turned on a light, he looked at the gin bottle and the bottle of bourbon. Their levels hadn’t gone down. Had she watered the gin? Or did she have a bottle upstairs? A bottle upstairs probably.

He could hear her moving around above him. He sat down in a chair. Soon her footsteps were tapping on the stairs. She came in. The drink had sobered her. She was at that stage. She had combed her hair and put on more lipstick. The swelling under her eye was darker in spite of powder. A little secret smile was playing around her mouth.

Automatically, although he didn’t care anymore, the machinery of his analysis creaked on. Was the smile just self-satisfaction at having outsmarted him by hiding a bottle upstairs? Or was it … ?

She came to him and sat down on the arm of his chair, casual, affectionate, as if nothing had happened. “You’re not still mad at me, are you? I’ll make it all right. I promise. I told them I’d had a drink anyway. It’ll be easy to explain that I didn’t know what I was saying, that I got it all mixed up about you hitting me.”

She ran her hand through his hair. He got up. “For God’s sake, Linda. Let’s go to bed.”

She climbed off the chair arm and hurried to him, putting her hands on his sleeves, smiling up at him with that same, secret, excited smile.

“Darling, we’ll go to bed soon, but not just yet. There’s something I’ve got to tell you.”

Danger signals alerted.

“It’s something terribly important. And you must be sensible about it. You’ve got to realize that there are times —it’s always that way in marriage—times when you’re too close to things, when you can’t see it in the proper proportion, when … Darling, I called Charlie Raines.” He stood looking at her, momentarily stunned.

“I called him at home,” she said. “I told him you were terribly excited about his letter and had asked me to fix up a date because you’d had to go out. It’s all arranged. You’re to meet him tomorrow at six o’clock at the Barberry Room for a drink—just the two of you to talk it over quietly between yourselves. You can take the two o’clock train. It’ll get you there just in time.”

Trust me, he remembered. Just this once. It’s so important to trust me. So, even then, only five minutes after he’d told her the news, she’d decided what she was going to do. That’s why she’d stayed away from the party. The deviousness of it, the enormity of the betrayal brought anger flooding into the vacuum of his exhaustion. And it wasn’t only that. It was worse. Looking at her smiling up at him, sublimely confident of victory already achieved, he realized what he had never realized before. She despised him. Under all the layers of pretense (Dear John, help me! What would I do if it wasn’t for you?) she had him tabbed as a nothing, a piece of play in her hands to be molded into whatever shape her whim directed. I’m tired of New York. I’d like to live in the country. I’ll get him to give up Raines and Raines. That’s how she’d seen it in New York. And now she was thinking: I want all that money and I’m bored with it here. I’ll fix it to make him go back. If she hadn’t been drunk, of course, she wouldn’t have been quite so blatant about it. But the same feeling would have been there. Wouldn’t it?

His thoughts reeled away from the complexity of it all and, in his anger, he decided: I’ll call Charlie now. I’ll tell him my wife was drunk—and to hell with his job. But even as he thought it he knew he couldn’t do it. Not over the party line. He’d have to go to New York anyway to undo this damage.

His anger was merged now with the odd, heady feeling that after this he owed her nothing any more, that he was free of her at last.

He said, “You’re smart, aren’t you?”

“Not smart. Just being sensible, that’s all. Sensible for both of us. I understand your pride. Of course I do. You’d rather die than admit the critics were right. It’s only natural. But really, deep inside, you do know—deep inside you know it hasn’t worked out. You’re not going to make the grade. You don’t have it in you. And to ruin everything just for foolish pride. To turn down the only good offer you may ever get just because …”

The anger was suddenly out of control. He slapped her across the mouth. She gave a whimpering cry, throwing her hand up, watching him from eyes distorted by astonishment and fury and fear.

He’d never hit her before, but he felt no shock. Rather, he felt elation.

“Okay,” he said. “Now there’s no explaining to do at the Careys. That makes your little speech one hundred per cent correct.”

She had backed away from him and sat down in a chair, her hand still up to her mouth.

“You hit me,” she said.

He crossed to the bar-table and, deliberately, poured himself a shot of bourbon.

“John …” Her voice came from behind him, low, faltering. “John …”

He didn’t turn.

“John,” she said, “you mean—you mean you’re still not going to take that job?”

He swung round with the glass in his hand. “What do you think?”

“But you must.” There was only panic on her face now. “You’ve got to. I told Charlie Raines. I said you were going to take it. We’ve got to go to New York. I can’t stay here. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t …”

“Then go,” said John. “If you don’t want to stay here – go.

She got up, half stumbling over the skirt of her green dress. She ran to him. She clutched at his arms and then let her hands move spasmodically up and down the sleeves of his coat. He could have pushed her away, but he didn’t. He was luxuriating now in his sense of freedom from her. Let her clutch and grab. What difference did it make?

“John … maybe I didn’t do it right. Maybe I shouldn’t have called. I didn’t know. It was such a terribly difficult decision. I didn’t know what to do. But … if I did it the wrong way, forgive me. But you see, if you only knew …”

She had thrown her arms around him. Her face was pressed against his chest. Her hair was touching his cheek. In the light from the table lamp he could see the grey hairs at her temple, flat, dull, dead. Her body was warm and yielding against his. Incredulously, he thought: She still thinks I’m attracted to her. And then, without any warning, as his body revolted from hers, he felt the pity flooding back.

“John,” she said, “please listen.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’ve got to listen. We can’t stay here anymore. Don’t take the job. If you really don’t want to, don’t take it. But we can’t stay here. We’ve got to leave. We’ve got to go somewhere else.”

She raised her head. Her face, with the puffy swelling under the eye, was only a few inches from his own.

“It’s Steve,” she whispered. “Steve Ritter.”

“Steve?” he said blankly, without a clue.

“Oh, I wanted to tell you. A dozen times. John will be able to help me, I said. But I couldn’t. I was too ashamed. I …”

“Linda.”

“I didn’t want it to happen.” She was still looking straight into his eyes with a wild, desperate abandon. “I swear I didn’t. You know that. You know it’s only you I love. But all the time, when you were away, when you were out with the kids, he’d come. I told him. I told him I didn’t want him. But it—it was like something too strong for me. He … Even today,” she said, “when I came back from Pittsfield he was waiting. And, before you came back …” She dropped her face against his chest. “It's like a disease. It’s … You thought I’d been upstairs taking a shower and that he … oh, John, you’ve got to get me away from here. Mrs. Ritter will find out. You know how she’s always suspicious of him. She’ll find out. They’ll all find out. Oh, please, help me.”

Steve Ritter! The image of Buck’s father swaggered through his mind, the blue jeans hanging low on the lean hips, the brash blue eyes watching him with their special quality of sardonic amusement. So Steve Ritter … And then, almost before the anger, the humiliation, the disgust, came the thought: I saw her car pass when I was with the kids and I went straight home. I got here less than ten minutes after her. She’s lying. This is just another device. Since all the others failed, she’s been bright enough and mad enough to invent this.

He began, “But, Linda …”

Then he stopped. What about the gold bracelet she’d been wearing that afternoon, the bracelet he’d never seen before and which she’d slipped off her wrist the moment she realized he was in the room? Had Steve given her that? And if he had… No, don’t go into it now. What was the use? Perhaps it was a lie; perhaps it wasn’t. It didn’t really matter anymore, not now, because he knew what he had to do. At last she had forced him beyond pity, beyond crippling indecisiveness into action.

He drew her away from him and guided her to a chair where she sat down meekly, her face covered in her hands.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I’ll do.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“I’ll go to New York tomorrow. I’ll talk to Charlie Raines. I’ll turn down the job and then I’ll go see Bill MacAllister.”

She looked up quickly. “No. No, John, no.”

“I’ll tell him the whole story. And then either he’ll recommend a good psychiatrist around here or”—he couldn’t bring out: If you’re not lying about Steve—“or we’ll move to New York and Bill can help you himself. Those are my terms. If you don’t like them—you can get the hell out of here. You can work out your own problems in your own way.”

The panic still showed on her face but there was also a look of incredulity too, as if she couldn’t believe he’d said what he’d said, that the idea of the worm turning was beyond the reach of her imagination.

“But, John, you know I’m not going to a doctor. I’ve told you.”

“You’re going—or else.”

“But I’m not sick. Are you out of your mind? Nothing’s the matter with me, nothing at all. It’s only you all the time, pressing, distorting, trying to make me that way.” She got up, her face set in a stubborn, threatening mask. “If you go on talking that nonsense about a doctor, I’ll go upstairs. I shall drink all the rest. I’ve got a bottle hidden. You’ll never find it. I’ll drink it all.”

He knew then that she’d played her last card. Never before had she admitted her secret drinking. Even if he’d found her hidden bottle, she’d disowned it. The hidden bottle had always been the unmentioned threat. Now, at last, she had brought it out into the open. It was meant to shatter him, to bring him round even now to her purpose. It was pitiful if you looked at it that way. Of course it was. But what difference did that make?

“Okay,” he said. “Go drink your bottle.”

She collapsed then, as he’d known she would. Slowly, almost like an old woman, she sank into the chair.

“So you won’t take the job?”

“No.”

“And you won’t leave here—not even because of Steve?”

“I don’t believe you about Steve.”

“You don’t believe me?” She gave a little dry laugh. “So that’s it. That’s funny. That’s really funny. You don’t believe me.”

“And you’ll go to a doctor, either here or in New York.” She started to sob again, softly, hopelessly. “All right,” she said. “I’ll go. I’ll go to anyone. I’ll do anything. But you can’t leave me. You can’t throw me out. Where could I go? What could I do? You can’t. Oh, you can’t …” Her voice babbled on and, as he listened more to the sound of it than to the words, he felt the net narrowing again. He wasn’t free of her. For a moment—it had seemed wildly, improbably—just possible that he had escaped. But it had to be this way. He had to give her the chance of the psychiatrist. If he didn’t, she’d be on his conscience to his dying day.

Something had been achieved, at any rate, much more than he had ever hoped for at his most optimistic. Or had it? What would she be like tomorrow?

The exhaustion had come back now. Eventually the words stopped pouring out of her and she too seemed half dead from fatigue, slumping back against her chair. He helped her up the stairs. She undressed herself and went into the bathroom. She didn’t take another drink. He was almost sure of it. She climbed into the bed and, while he was still undressing, fell sound asleep. He wanted to move into the guest bedroom. Now that he was still committed to her, he wanted at least a few hours of illusory independence. But her sleeping face was the serene, vulnerable face of a child. Even the swelling under the eye looked innocent and comical—like a child with mumps. She was terrified of sleeping alone. She might wake up. Oh well …

When he came out of the bathroom he slipped into his side of the bed and turned out the light.

Steve Ritter, he thought. And then, suddenly, a picture came of his first meeting with Linda. At the Parkinsons’. She was moving through the crowd of guests in a white dress with her hair in a pony tail, looking lost and shy but fresh as a spring flower, so different from the others.

“Hello.”

“Hello.”

“Are you enjoying this party?”

“Not particularly.”

“Aren’t parties terrible?” She looked up at him from those great solemn green eyes. “I can’t imagine why people go to them. Everyone so phony, just trying to impress the right people! A world without parties. Think of it. How wonderful it would be…”

He turned over on his side but he didn’t sleep for a long time. To help him relax, he thought of the children.

6

IT WAS after six and the train had passed Sheffield. John Hamilton, sitting next to Brad Carey, who was doing a crossword puzzle, looked out at the familiar New England summer evening—the parched meadows, garish with black-eyed susan and devil’s paintbrush, the distant, wooded mountains, the scattered white clapboard houses, lawns shaded by sugar maples, a peony or two, narrow beds of phlox—sedate, pastoral, faintly sad.

It wouldn’t be long now.

Already New York seemed infinitely remote, except, of course, for its exasperations. The “little talk” with Charlie Raines at the Barberry Room had faded completely. It had been so easy once the time had come to face it. Charlie was a nice guy. “I guess Linda got carried away on the phone. Of course I understand, Johnny. We’re sorry. I don’t have to tell you that. But good luck to you.” Over. End of Raines and Raines.

It was the frustrations that remained, the strain of having Brad with him on both train trips and at the hotel, so friendly, so concerned over the “misunderstanding” with Linda, such a constant temptation to break down and admit the truth which he knew he mustn’t admit. And then the frustrations around Bill MacAllister too. The nurse’s brisk voice on the phone that morning. “I’m sorry, but Dr. MacAllister’s away on his vacation … in Canada … No, I’m sorry. He didn’t leave an address. He doesn’t really have one. He’s out in the wilds, you see, fishing … Oh yes, he’ll be back around the end of the mouth.”

It always seemed to happen that way. When a chance came for things to get better, another chance stepped in and neutralized it. Perhaps he could find a psychiatrist in Pittsfield? Just look one up in the classified directory?

“I want you to help me with my wife. She drinks. Of course she doesn’t admit it. But for years now …”

His exhausted mind refused to plan any more. Soon he’d be facing her again. That’s all that had any reality for him. How would she be? A day and a half had gone by—over thirty-six hours, with her alone in the house, knowing what he was arranging for her in New York. Had she been genuinely panicked by his stand? Had she really reached a point where at last she was ready to let someone try to help her? Or had it all swung around? Would he return to find her on the war-path, full of ruses and stratagems— with him as the Enemy again?

She’d been all right when he’d left her. Or it had seemed to him, with the new optimism brought by a definite plan of action, that she had been all right. As the conductor called “Great Barrington next” and Brad, looking up from the puzzle, said “Not long now, thank God”, John forced himself to review every minute of his time with her from yesterday morning until he’d left her to drive to the station.

It had been she who had awakened him. He’d felt a light tap on his shoulder and had opened his eyes to see her. The sunlight was streaming through the window behind him. She was wearing a neat white dress with a kitchen apron over it. She was holding a tray and smiling brightly.

“I’ve brought your breakfast. I thought you’d like to be pampered once in a while.”

She was wearing sunglasses. Still confused by sleep, John wondered why. Then he remembered her eye.

“Sit up, darling. Do sit up properly.”

She arranged the tray, the pathetic peace offering, on his knee. She was very careful about it, proving how steady her hands were.

“There. Call me if you want anything.”

She walked, humming under her breath, out of the room. Later, as he was dressing, the phone rang. He went downstairs to answer it and it was Brad saying an important client had shown up in New York. Mr. Carey, who had to go off to Springfield, had given him a long briefing after the party the night before and was sending him to New York as his proxy.

“You going on the two o’clock train, John?”

“Yes.”

“Fine. So am I. I’m leaving the Buick for Vickie. Where are you staying in New York?”

“I don’t know. At a hotel, I guess.”

“Come to mine. That was Vickie’s bright idea last night. We can keep each other out of trouble, she says, and, more important, I can wangle you on to my expense account. Don’t tell Father.” His laugh was conspiratorial. “How’s Linda this morning?”

“She’s fine.”

“Not hung-over, I hope?”

“Doesn’t seem to be.”

“Fine. See you on the train. Vickie would send her love, I know, but she’s out on the lake teaching Leroy to catch bass. It’s her new mother routine. They were up at dawn.” Brad’s voice became serious. “Don’t worry about Linda, John. It’ll be okay. Women … It’ll all iron itself out.”

John dropped the receiver and took the breakfast tray into the kitchen. Through the window, he saw Linda strolling toward the studio. She skirted it and disappeared around the rear wall into the old cow-barn, which formed the basement of the studio, where the logs were stacked and where, in a recent spurt of gardening enthusiasm, Linda kept her tools. Soon she reappeared, dragging a plastic hose behind her. She pulled it up to the bed of zinnias she had planted in front of the studio and started to sprinkle them.

The sunlight was full on the flowers and she usually made a great point of only watering in the evening. It seemed an improbable thing for her to be doing at that hour, anyway. Then he realized. Of course. She had another bottle hidden in the cow-barn. She’d gone for a drink and was sprinkling the zinnias to justify the visit to the barn.

He went out to join her. Looking up from the flowers, she gave him the same bright smile.

“So you’re up already. Do be an angel, will you, and keep in the studio this morning? When I’m through with the flowers I’m going to have a great house-cleaning project and I don’t want big feet tramping around.” The smile stretched even wider. “Or maybe you’d rather go out with the kids. I had to call Mrs. Jones about some dress pattern I’ve been promising to help her with for weeks. Emily answered the phone. She said they were expecting you at the swimming hole. You’d promised specially to go swimming, she said. But it’s just as you like, of course.”

So this was her way of letting him know she had capitulated? No recrimination. No references even. Just the busy cheerful housewife, the considerate neighbor, the model helpmeet. He was sure now that she’d had a drink in the barn. But it didn’t matter. Once she’d made the decision to be co-operative, she’d need the drink to fortify her.

She turned the nozzle shut and dropped the hose. “Now for the living-room.” She started away and, turning, asked with elaborate casualness, “Oh, are you going to New York?”

“Yes. I’m going.”

“I see. I just wanted to know about lunch. If you do go out with the kids, remember to be back by twelve-thirty. I’ll have to get your lunch a bit early for you to make the train.”

She started back toward the house and he went into the studio. Pictures were stacked against the walls. His latest canvas was on the easel. He stood a moment, looking at it. It made no sense to him, and he knew it would be hopeless to try to work. The kids, he thought. Why not? The morning had to be got through somehow. Linda had suggested it and probably that’s what she wanted—to get him out of the way. She was afraid of herself, scared that if they gave themselves any opportunity for another scene her good intentions might crack.

He returned to the house, put on swimming trunks and slipped his pants back over them. He could hear Linda running the vacuum in the living-room. Calling to her, “I’m off swimming”, he went out of the front door and started down the road.

The bend in the creek which the kids used as their swimming hole was only half a mile away toward Stoneville at a point where disused pastureland broke, for a while, into the vast acreage of woods.

When he reached the edge of the meadow he saw the kids’ bicycles piled against the rough stone boundary wall and, as he climbed over the wall into the knee-high weeds, he could hear their voices shouting down by the creek. The sound, high and clear, brought him a great relaxation of nerves, a feeling almost of security.

Except for Leroy, they were all there and all in the brook, their skin flashing, oiled with water—like seals. Emily, of course, saw him first while he was only half-way down the slope through the wild apple trees, the pine saplings, the clusters of choke cherry which, in a few years, would have swallowed up the pastureland again as if it had never been cleared. She climbed up on to the bank and came running to him.

“John, you came. I knew you’d come.”

She grabbed his hand and started running with him back to the creek. Soon he was in the water too. Frustrated father! He remembered Linda’s crack, but it had no sting any more. If he were a frustrated father, all the kids, in one way or another, were frustrated of parental love—the fatherless Emily and Angel with their harassed mother at the post office all day; Timmie, a victim of the Morelands’ thinly-veiled indifference; Buck, a pawn in his parents’ constant quarrels. Leroy’s parents loved him, but, working as servants in someone else’s house, they had little time for him. Yes, they all needed him as much as he needed them.

Just after eleven Leroy ran down through the meadow, stripping off his clothes, and jumped into the creek too. He was triumphant about his fishing expedition. He had caught three bass and Vickie had only caught one.

“And we were up at dawn. And I rowed. And … you should have seen the fish I almost caught. You could see it in the water. Boy, it was three feet long, I bet.”

As the other children crowded around him, wide-eyed and impressed, the sense of peace enlarged in John.

It was later, almost when it was time for him to leave, that it all went bad. Emily and Angel were lying with him in the sun on the creek bank. Emily suddenly said, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell John the secret.”

“No,” cried Angel. “No, no, you’re not.” She hurled herself with savage fury at her older sister, beating at her with her fists. “It’s my secret. It’s my secret first.”

“It isn’t either.”

“It is. It is.”

The other kids all came out of the water and stood tensely around. John pulled the little girl off her sister. She struggled wildly in his arms. Her face, round and puffy with anger, glared up at him.

“You’re not—you’re not going to know the secret. You’re mean and wicked. You hit your wife.”

“Angel!” Emily had jumped up and was trying to grab at her sister again in John’s arms. “Don’t you dare … Don’t you dare …”

“He did,” screamed Angel. “He hit his wife. He beats his wife up. Timmie said so. Timmie saw. She came into the room with a great big beat-up eye and she said so. My husband hit me, she said, and Timmie …”

Bleakly thinking: So it’s got to the children now, John put her down. He glanced at Timmie. Timmie was squirming in agonized embarrassment. Suddenly he twisted round and started running away from them through the tall weeds.

Emily, John’s passionate advocate, was crying, “It isn’t true. I hate them. I hate Timmie. I hate Angel …” John went after Timmie. He found him behind a pine tree, lying on his face in the grass, sobbing. He knelt down by the boy’s side and put his hand on his shoulder.

“It’s all right, Timmie.”

“I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to tell them. Then I thought maybe if I told Angel a secret she’d tell me hers and I asked her and she said maybe if I told mine first. And I told and she wouldn’t tell me anyway. And I didn’t mean to …”

“Okay, Timmie. Let’s forget it. Come on.”

But the boy wouldn’t come. Lost in some child’s nightmare of treachery performed, he just lay on the grass, whimpering and kicking his toes against the ground.

John went back to the others. They were all awkward and shame-faced. The spell was broken. The shadow of Linda had stepped among them.

He left soon and walked back to the house.

And there was Linda, as brisk and bright as ever. She had his lunch ready and sat with him while he ate, not eating herself, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching him from behind the sunglasses, and talking with a rather hectic casualness about trivialities.

She came up with him while he changed and packed an overnight bag.

“You don’t mind driving yourself to the station, do you? I won’t be needing the car while you’re away anyway. And …” She raised her hand to the glasses. “I don’t want to go through the village like this. I don’t want them to talk.”

That was the nearest she got to any reference to what had happened until she was standing by the car, waiting for him to drive off.

Then, suddenly, she said, “John, promise me one thing, please. It’s all right with Bill. I swear I’ll be all right. I’ll do everything if it’s Bill. But don’t go to anyone else. I mean, if he isn’t there or anything … please.”

“Okay,” he said.

“And, John …”

“Yes.”

“About Steve. You were right. What I said last night— it was a lie. I don’t know what got into me.”

“It’s all right, Linda. Well, see you tomorrow evening.”

“Yes, tomorrow. Goodbye, John.”

“Goodbye.”

And she’d stood outside the kitchen door, smiling and waving as he swung the car down the drive …

The conductor had already called the station and Brad had pulled their suitcases down from the rack. When the train stopped and they climbed out, John saw the old black sedan still parked where he had left it. Vickie was there too with the Careys’ Buick. They joined her and she kissed them both.

“Well, John, is the great deed done?”

“It’s done.”

She squeezed his hand. “Linda will understand, I’m sure. If you feel like it, come over, both of you, later. Father’s been off in Springfield and Mother stayed with me last night, two lorn females together. But he’s just got back and he’s whisked her off again. So do come.”

John drove home, trying not to think about Linda any more. What was the point of tormenting himself with speculations? He would know soon enough. In the village, he stopped off at the post office. He was expecting the monthly Art Review which should have a criticism of his show and he knew that Linda, without the car, probably wouldn’t have picked up the mail. Several of the villagers were lounging around inside. As he went up to his box, he nodded and said, “Good evening.” No one answered. His box was right by the window where Mrs. Jones was arranging a stamp book. He smiled at her as he took out his letters. For a moment she glanced right through him and then turned back to the stamps, and gradually he began to realize that the atmosphere was not just neutral, it was antagonistic. So news of the episode at the Careys’, distorted into God knows what, had spread through the village already. To Stoneville, he wasn’t just the slightly comic outsider any more. He was—what? The wife-beater? The degenerate city interloper?

As he walked out again to his car, the silence seemed to follow him like a threat. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He’d made no effort of friendship toward the village, any more than he had toward the Carey set. All he’d ever asked was to be left alone. But, as he climbed into the car and started off again, the memory of the rejection clung on, cold and faintly sinister. It was as if an invisible Linda had slipped into the car with him. Because this was all Linda, of course. The man they’d rejected hadn’t been he himself—the real John Hamilton. They didn’t even know him. It had been the image of John Hamilton which Linda had built up in their minds.

He was driving through the woods now. The road dipped down a hill and then up again to the corner. He turned it, passed over the wooden bridge and, suddenly dreading his wife, swung up the drive and parked outside the kitchen door.

Linda wasn’t in the kitchen. He passed through it, calling “Linda”. Then he moved into the living-room and stopped dead. The room was in total chaos. All his pictures were off the walls; all the records and boxes of tapes had been pulled out of the cabinet. The floor was a wild litter of them. Half the records were smashed and the pictures had been ripped savagely to and fro as if by a knife. Even the phonograph turn-table and amplifier and the tape recorder had been swept off the shelf and lay on their sides, spewing broken tubes.

As he stood there, gazing down at the confusion, it seemed to John as if this had happened before or rather as if something which he’d always half known would happen but had kept from admitting to himself had happened at last. And the dread became horror as an image came of Linda wielding a knife, Linda trampling on the records, Linda, her face wild, contorted, gibbering—a maniac’s face. He closed his eyes as if the vision were actually there in front of him.

And then suddenly he could feel her presence in the house or rather the presence of her madness. It seemed to permeate the air, infecting it, like a poisonous gas.

Where is she? he thought. I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to go and face …

That was when he saw his typewriter. It was usually kept out in his studio, but it was on a table in a corner, and propped on it was a piece of paper. He threaded his way through the ruin of records and canvases to the table. He picked up the message. It was all typed, even the signature.

YOU NEVER THOUGHT I’D DO IT, DID YOU? WELL, THAT’S WHERE YOU FOOLED YOURSELF, AT LAST I’VE FOUND THE COURAGE TO ESCAPE. SO—FIND YOURSELF ANOTHER WOMAN TO SLAVE FOR YOU, TO STICK PINS IN, TO TORTURE. FIND ANOTHER ONE IF YOU CAN. IT’S A CINCH YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME. BAD LUCK TO YOU—FOR EVER.

LINDA

7

SHE HAD gone. He stood looking at the note, not reacting to the insane, distorted spite of the words, just registering the fact that she had left him. But dimly behind the shock, his reasoning processes were working. Why had she typed the note? He never remembered her having typed anything. He hadn’t even known she could type. Why had she taken the trouble to go out to the studio and bring the typewriter here and … ? The image of her, mad, gibbering, plunging around the room with a knife came back. And he thought: She hasn’t really gone. This note is just another devious trick. She’s still here somewhere—in the house.

He picked his way through the havoc on the havoc, thinking, almost impersonally: She’s destroyed the pictures. Later I’ll be murderously angry. But what he felt now wasn’t anger; it was fear, a sliding miasmic fear that somewhere—upstairs maybe—madness was lurking, crouched in a corner to spring.

He went into the dining-room. Nothing. No one. Then he went up the stairs. It’s our bedroom, he thought with blinding certainty. But, when he went into the bedroom, she wasn’t there and the door of the closet was open. He could see into it to his suits and her dresses hanging there. No one was in the closet.

He investigated the other rooms. Then, with a sudden jitteriness, he thought of the pictures in the studio. He ran out through the kitchen door, across the lawn, serenely dappled with the evening shadows of the apple trees, and into the studio. The pictures stacked against the wall hadn’t been touched, nor had the one on the easel. That was something. But Linda wasn’t there.

So she really had gone—without the car? Without any clothes? He went back to the bedroom and started to ruffle through the clothes in the closet. Yes, her new green dress was gone and her grey suit—several other dresses, too. And the new suitcase which she kept on the top shelf wasn’t there. She’d gone. She’d walked out of the house with a suitcase.

He sat down for a moment on the bed. The feeling of evil, of infection, was still there. Was it perhaps he who was going mad—who was imagining all this? She had stood there by the car, watching him steadily, telling him, surely with sincerity, that she was all right, that she was ready to co-operate. “Anything’s all right with Bill. I’ll do anything Bill says.’' She had waved when he had gone. How could the plunge have happened from that—to this, to the frenzied chaos of destruction downstairs and that note with its appalling slashes of spite? Even if she’d drunk everything in the house, she’d never …

He got up from the bed and hurried down to the living-room. The bottle of gin and the bottle of bourbon were still there on the bar-table. Their levels hadn’t lowered. He picked them up, pulled out the stoppers and took a swig from each of them. No, they hadn’t been diluted. She’d had a bottle hidden upstairs. He ran upstairs again and started with a kind of wild concentration to search everywhere. At last, under blankets in one of the drawers of the linen closet, he found a bottle of gin. He pulled it out. It was still half full. She must have drunk at least half a bottle before she left. But—there was another bottle perhaps in the cow-barn?

He stood looking at the bottle automatically and then automatically bent to put it back where he had found it. As he did so, he saw—what was it?—a postcard lying where the bottle had been. He picked it up. It was a view of wooded mountains and a lake. Lake Crawley, Manitoba, Canada. He turned it over. It was addressed to him. His mind functioning clumsily, he read the message. It said:

This is the life. Why don’t you drop those paint brushes and fly up for a few days? Best to Linda …

Bill MacA.

Bill MacAllister. Only just believing it, he looked at the postmark. It had been mailed five days before. Then it must have come, say, three days ago. Linda must have picked up the mail that day and, with her sly, neurotic terror of everything connected with Bill MacAllister, hidden the postcard from him. So she’d known all along that Bill wouldn’t be in New York. She’d known it when he’d thought he had at last won his victory over her; she’d known it when she’d stood by the car. “Promise me one thing, John. If for any reason, Bill isn’t there …” The whole capitulation had been rigged. It had been yet another of her fantastically complex betrayals.

He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, dropping the postcard on to the floor. He felt exhaustion sliding up through him like the tentacles of some blood-sucking vine. She’d sent him to New York knowing he couldn’t achieve his purpose, and then, now that he had come home—this.

He leaned back against the pillows and lit a cigarette. He knew this was the greatest of the many crises of his married life, the moment for which he should have strength in reserve, but the paralyzing torpor had him in its grip. She’d gone with a suitcase, without the car, and with no money. Or did she have money? Could she have been planning this for months and hiding money away? But where could she have gone? To New York? With him reinstalled at Raines and Raines, earning a big salary, yes. But not this way. Never in a million years. And surely she wasn’t planning to go back to the small town in Wisconsin where she’d been born and where her parents had both died five years ago just after he’d married her. No, not to New York. Not to Wisconsin. Where? Where was there for her to go? Nowhere.

But if she’s mad! he thought. If the tension in her had finally snapped … ! Slashing the pictures, smashing the records, rushing upstairs, packing the suitcase, starting off on foot—going where? Nowhere—thumbing a ride from any car that passed. The panic image of her, mad and wandering around the countryside, brought him a synthetic vitality. He must call the police.

But the “police” in Stoneville was Steve Ritter. There was Linda again, distorting everything, making it impossible. If he called Steve Ritter, if he had to admit to Steve, and through Steve to the whole village, that Linda had slashed his paintings, and run off, insane! Suddenly he thought: What’s the matter with me? Of course she hadn’t gone off like that. She’d gone to one of her “dear, dear friends”, the Carey set. That would be it, of course.

He could see her dramatic arrival at the old Careys’ or the Morelands’.

“Darlings, I’ve done the most terrible thing. How can I begin to explain? I’ve left him. I couldn’t bear it any more. If only you knew … Oh, Mr. Carey … or Oh Roz …”

Yes, that was it. She could even have walked over to the young Careys’ while Vickie was on her way to the station.

He was so certain of it that everything seemed bearable again.

He hurried downstairs and rang the Careys. Vickie answered the phone.

“Hi, John. We’re waiting for you. Come over, both of you.”

“Then Linda isn’t with you?” John was surprised at the steadiness of his own voice.

“With us? Why, no. I haven’t seen her since the other night. As a matter of fact, I was planning to call, but I didn’t get around to it. There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

John thought of the party line. “I’ll come over if I may.”

“Of course, but …”

“I’ll explain when I see you. Vickie, I wonder if you or Brad would call the Morelands and your parents and ask if she’s with them. I’d rather not do it myself after the other night. …”

“I’ll do it right now.”

“Thanks, Vickie. I’ll see you.”

He put down the receiver. If she wasn’t at the Morelands’ or the Careys’, he’d have to tell Vickie and Brad the truth, of course. Although for years now it had become almost second nature to him to cover up for Linda, he knew things had gone far beyond that point. And Vickie and Brad would be all right. At least they wouldn’t treat his confidence as salacious gossip to be spread around as quickly as possible. He was sure of that. Maybe they might help; between them, the three of them might even find Linda before any scandal broke. If she wasn’t at the old Careys’ or the Morelands’ …

But she must be, he thought as he hurried through the kitchen out to the car, because, if she wasn’t at the Morelands’ or pouring out her tale of woe over the Careys’ dining-table, then … Once again the horror image came —the blank, dead eyes in the mad face, the dazed figure wandering at random, clutching a suitcase. He suppressed it and, as he swung the car down the drive, he thought of Steve Ritter. Could what she’d claimed about Steve actually have been true, after all? Could she conceivably have run away with him? It’s like a disease. No, she’d even admitted that had been one of her perverse alcoholic’s lies. But, even if it hadn’t been true, Steve Ritter was a staunch admirer, as, for that matter, were most of the people in the village. Perhaps the hostility to which he’d been submitted at the post office had something to do with this. Linda might have been just scared enough that the Carey set would be too sophisticated to swallow whatever story it was she now wanted to be swallowed. Instead she might have “taken refuge” with one of the people in the village and was using them for her audience. It didn’t seem probable—not with Linda’s snobbishness and her desire to be adored but respected by those she considered “beneath” her. But she’d done something. It might just have been that.

Instead of taking the short route to the Careys’ past the Fishers’ empty house and down the hill through the woods, he turned left along the road toward Stoneville. He wouldn’t ask Steve outright. The situation was too delicate for that. But he needed gas. He could stop off at the gas-station and see how the land lay.

The darkness had come. When he reached the little ice-cream parlor about half a mile out of the village, the neon lights were burning inside and the raucous blare of a juke-box sounded. He stopped by the gas pump. It was Mrs. Ritter who came out of the screen door, thin and dowdy with her greyish hair straggling over her forehead. Betty Ritter, soured by her husband’s neglect, old before her time, was the misanthrope of the village. If there was one person in Stoneville who wouldn’t be up on the gossip, it would be Betty Ritter. She filled his gas tank, treating him surlily but no more so than usual. When she came up to the front of the car and started wiping the windshield with a dirty rag, John said:

“Is Steve around?”

“Steve? He just went out on a call. Just a couple of minutes ago.” Mrs. Ritter snorted. “Steve Ritter the Stoneville police officer! That still makes me laugh. There’s only one character ought to be arrested and locked up around here and that’s Steve Ritter. Want me to charge this, Mr. Hamilton?”

“Yes, please.” John felt his nerves tautening. “You mean he’s out on a police call?”

“Don’t ask me. That’d be the day when Steve tells me what he’s up to. Buck was in just now babbling out some story or other about the kids. It was Steve he was telling. I was busy with a customer and didn’t pay much attention. Then the phone rang. Steve answered it and then went off in the car. He took Buck along with him, so I guess whatever it is, at least it isn’t monkey business this time.” Betty Ritter laughed and then, for a moment, paused by the car window, watching him from sardonic, faintly malicious eyes.

“My, you look jittery, Mr. Hamilton. What’s the matter? Got a guilty conscience? Murdered your wife or something?”

8

HE DROVE through the village. Lights gleamed in the windows of the store. A couple of cars were parked under the huge sugar maples outside the post office. A boy and girl were sitting on the porch of one of the clapboard houses. Someone was standing, smoking a cigarette, by the side of the church near the door to the basement Assembly Rooms where the town meeting was going to be held. When? Tomorrow. His anxiety accelerated by what Mrs. Ritter had told him, John had half expected a scene of unnatural bustle, indicating disaster. But everything was as quiet as usual, as pretty as a Christmas card out of season—New England in summer.

If someone had found Linda wandering on the highway, he told himself, Steve would never have taken Buck with him. The police call couldn’t be anything to do with Linda. It was just a coincidence.

He swung the car past the church, up the hill and down. Soon the north shore of Lake Sheldon gleamed at his right, ghostly grey in the early summer darkness. The sound of the bull-frogs’ croaking vibrated in the air. He could just make out the diving raft the township had put in the year before. The lake! he thought. It’s a cinch you’ll never find me. The words from Linda’s note seemed to be blazoned across the windshield in front of his eyes. What if she’d jumped into the lake and killed herself? No, not with a suitcase. Whatever had happened to her, however mad she had become, she wouldn’t pack a suitcase to commit suicide. Or—would she? Was that any madder than slashing the pictures, stamping on the records, typing the note when she’d never typed before and had had to go out to the studio to bring in the typewriter? How could he tell any more what she might or might not have done?

The first anesthesia of shock was wearing off. Sitting at the wheel, his body felt as brittle as glass which the anxiety, fermenting inside him, might at any minute splinter into fragments. To steady himself, he made himself believe that Vickie would have located her. She would have called and Linda would be at the Morelands’ or the old Careys’, weeping probably, full of remorse, the fit of hysteria burned out. “Oh, how could I have done it to him? I don’t know what got into me.”

Soon he had skirted the lake and was driving into the Careys’ gravel parking area. All the downstairs lights in the house were on. As he got out of the car, the door opened.

“Is that you, John?”

He saw Vickie on the threshold. Then she was hurrying toward him. She took both his hands.

“John, dear, isn’t she back?”

He said, “Did you call?”

“Yes. I called Father. She wasn’t there. And the Morelands don’t answer. They must have gone to the movies.”

She was drawing him into the house. In the hall she glanced up at him, her eyes flashing to his face for a second and then flashing quickly away as if whatever she saw was too intimate to be scrutinized.

“You need a drink.” She took him into the living-room. “Brad, fix John a drink.”

All the french windows were open on to the terrace. Brad, who had changed from his city clothes into a sports shirt and slacks, was standing by the bar. He made a drink and brought it to John, his eyes flicking to his and then, like Vickie’s, away. Does it show that much? thought John, taking the drink. It must. It had been the same way with Betty Ritter.

Brad said, “Sit down, John. Sit down.” And, as John sat down on a long sofa, “Vickie called Dad and the Morelands.”

“John knows,” said Vickie.

Brad sat down on the arm of the sofa. Their concern for him, their lack of prurient curiosity and their desire to help were obvious. It returned to John some sense of normalcy. These were sensible, nice people. Once he’d told them, the quality of nightmare would go.

He said, “When I got home, she wasn’t there—and she’d left a note.”

He hadn’t really stopped to think how it would sound when he told what had happened. He was, of course, conscious of the great gulf between the Linda he knew and the Linda the Careys had been presented with, and dimly he realized that somehow the gulf would have to be bridged. But at first he just blurted out what had happened —the note, the slashed pictures, the broken records, the missing clothes and the suitcase. It was only gradually that their reaction began to dawn on him.

It was Brad who broke in first. There was no hostility in his tone; there was no feeling of hostility from either of them. The quality in his voice was one of sheer incredulity.

“But Linda, John! Linda writing a note like that, destroying your pictures? It can’t be Linda.”

“She’s so gentle,” said Vickie. “Can you imagine Linda hurting a fly? And she—she loves you so much. You’re her whole life. And your pictures—why, they’re almost sacred to her. She’s said so over and over again.”

“Sure,” cut in Brad. “She was over here the day after the reviews came in on your show. Maybe you didn’t know. I’ve never seen anyone so indignant. To hell with all critics, she said. He’s going to be a great painter. She— she just couldn’t have …”

His voice trailed off. John looked from one of them to the other. They weren’t accusing him of lying. They just couldn’t believe it had happened. And suddenly he could see the Linda he didn’t know, the Linda who moved through a room when he wasn’t there, coming to the Careys’ after the bad reviews, acting the outraged champion of misunderstood genius, and then, in another role, the woman in love. “John—he’s my whole life.” Of course they’d react this way. What he was telling them was just as improbable to them as if he’d said he’d seen old Mr. Carey dancing the mambo naked on the church steps with Betty Ritter.

The nightmare quality wasn’t fading; it was growing.

Somewhere he had to make a beginning. He said, “She didn’t sound that crazy about me the other evening, did she?”

“But you’d fought.” Vickie was watching him, frank, bewildered. “Anybody would have had a fight over something as drastic as the decision you two had to make. A fight like that doesn’t count. Besides, she’d had a drink. She admitted it. She wasn’t herself and, right away after she’d said those things, she was desperately sorry. Anyone could have seen that.” She glanced quickly at her husband. “John, please don’t think we’re not believing you. We know it’s happened if you say it’s happened. But it can’t be like that.”

Now that the time had come, he felt, absurdly, a sense of betrayal. This would do it. When he’d finished telling them, this would be the end of Linda with the Carey set, the end of any chance they might have had to find a workable life for themselves in Stoneville. Some vestigial part of him, some ingrown loyalty, prompted: Don’t do it to her. Don’t take away what little she has got—even if she’s got it on false pretenses. But he knew there was no sense in thinking that way. They were all washed-up in Stoneville anyway, and it was all washed-up between Linda and him too. He’d not actually realized it until that moment. But he saw it clearly then. Now, after she’d done that to the pictures, whatever happened, however it explained itself away, the irrevocable break had come. He was through with her forever.

He took a pull at the drink, not looking at either of them. Then he brought it out.

“You don’t know Linda. Nobody knows her except me. At least I don’t think they do. I’ve done my best to see that they didn’t. You got a glimpse of her the other night. But only a glimpse. You see, the other reason I went to New York was to consult a doctor. She’s sick. She’s been sick for years.”

He started to tell them, not everything, not the most intimate, the most sordid details, but enough. He knew, as he talked, that he was saying far less than the truth, but surely it would be coherent to them—the tale of insecurity, the compelling urge to compete, the failures, the constantly heavier drinking, the dream-world which more and more took the place of any reality. His only worry, at first, was the fear that they would think he was demanding their pity, that he was picturing himself too emphatically as the suffering one, the good-intended, loyal husband who had sacrificed so much of himself for a cause that was virtually lost from the beginning. And yet, as he talked, as they sat watching him, their faces carefully arranged, polite, with no expression, he began to realize that he wasn’t making contact.

Was it as difficult as this then for people to grasp the infinite complexities of an alcoholic’s make-up? If they didn’t have any personal experience of one, or only knew one as the Careys knew Linda, was the elaborate front of normalcy so convincing that it seemed more real than the truth? Gradually, as he went on, he felt less and less confidence; his words stumbled over each other, and then, at the last, as he felt the gulf between them growing wider and wider, he stopped.

Their faces were still as polite as they had been before. They were still carefully avoiding each other’s eyes, watching him with a kind, alert determination to be just. And yet, although they were trying at all costs to conceal it, he could feel their embarrassment, particularly Brad’s, and he knew they hadn’t believed him or, at best, they thought he was ignobly exaggerating, trying to get his point of view in first, because his relations with Linda had been unsatisfactory and he was scared now of what might have happened.

It was Brad who spoke. The quality of his voice was very slightly changed. “So the other night, when she was here, you hadn’t hit her at all?”

Wearily thinking: I did hit her later, John said, “I hadn’t hit her. She’d fallen down because she was drunk and it’s the drinking she wants to hide more than anything.”

“But she admitted she’d had a drink.”

“One drink, yes. Just because she knew you’d realize something was wrong. That was her complicated way of covering up.”

“So to keep us from knowing she was on a drinking jag, she was ready to lie and accuse you of having hit her?”

“Sure. That wouldn’t phase her for a minute.” Be careful. Don’t put it that way. It sounds bitter. It’ll only antagonize them more. “But maybe it went deeper than that. You see, when she’s drunk, when she so desperately needs to make a heroine of herself, she usually wants to make a villain out of me, too. Probably that was it. She wanted you all to hate me.”

There was a long flat pause. Then Vickie said, “So all we know about her, all she’s ever said or done here is an act?”

“More or less, I’d say. Almost everything she does or says is an act.”

“Then—is this an act too? Is she just pretending to have run away, to – to scare you or punish you or something?” There was no trace of sarcasm in Vickie’s voice, but that question, coming from her, made everything he’d tried to explain seem completely preposterous.

“If she’d been here or at your father’s or at the Morelands’, it could have been an act. But now … She’s never been this violent before. Maybe once she’d committed herself to my consulting a psychiatrist she got panicked. She couldn’t face … (But she knew Bill MacAllister wasn’t going to be there) Maybe …”

The exhaustion was in full control again. What was the use? What did it matter anyway? It wasn’t his business to convince the Careys. His business was to find Linda.

“But if she’s gone”—it was Vickie who spoke—“where would she have gone to?”

“There isn’t any way I know of.”

He hadn’t gone so far as to admit his dread of insanity and suicide. He was glad now. If they’d had to swallow that on top of everything else!

Brad said gruffly, “We’d better call the state troopers.” “But if it is just an act.” Vickie was watching John now. “If she—she got mad and slashed the pictures and then got scared, maybe, and ran off in the woods. Think of it, Brad. The scandal and everything for her, if it’s only something like that. Couldn’t we try to find her ourselves?”

“At night?” asked Brad. “In the woods? Do you know how many thousands of acres of woods there are around here? You’d need search parties even in the daytime.” He got up, lit a cigarette and started pacing the room. Suddenly he turned back to John. The friendly, easy quality which he’d shown in New York and on the train was gone. His eyes were registering not antagonism exactly but an obvious desire to disassociate himself from a situation in which he could no longer be comfortable.

“Why don’t you call your house? Maybe she’s back.”

“Yes,” said Vickie.

“If she isn’t and if she isn’t back by morning, then call the troopers.”

“Yes,” said Vickie. “That’s it. Yes.”

The phone rang. Brad almost ran to answer it.

“Yes … Yes … No, she isn’t here, but John’s here. Do you want to talk to him? … Okay, wait a moment.”

He turned, cupping the receiver. “It’s Gordon. He tried your house, got no answer and called here.”

“Is Linda… ?”

“He didn’t say.”

John crossed the room and took the phone from Brad, who, taut and uneasy, remained at his side. Gordon Moreland’s voice, high, fancy and glacial with dislike, said, “John? Is that John?”

“Yes.”

“Is Linda with you?”

“No, she isn’t.”

“Where is she?”

John felt the anxiety like a clenched fist in his stomach. “She isn’t here right now.”

“But you know where she is? That’s what we want to know.”

“No,” he said. He had to. “No, I don’t.”

“Then you’d better come here right away and join us. Us—and Steve Ritter.”

The police call! “Where are you?”

“I’m calling from the first house I got to. Steve and Roz are at the village dump. That’s where Steve wants you.”

“The dump?”

“You know where it is?”

“Yes. But what is it? What’s happened?”

“You’ll know when you get here. Right away, Steve says, as quickly as possible.”

John heard the receiver click at the other end.

When he told the Careys, Vickie wanted to come with him, but the thought of them on top of Steve Ritter and the Morelands was too much. They were nice about it and sympathetic. They had never stopped being nice and sympathetic. It was worse, almost, than if they’d come out with what was in their minds. Brad didn’t go out with him to the car, but Vickie did.

“Let us know, John, if you need us….”

If he needed them! If Linda was lying out there on the dump….

He swung the car recklessly out of the drive. The dump was about a mile away from the lake up a little track off the highway. The world for him was now completely a world of nightmare. Linda was lying on the dump. What have you been up to? Murdering your wife or something? No, it couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. How could Linda be lying … ?

As he approached the turn-off to the dump, he saw cars ahead of him at the side of the road with their parking lights on. He stopped his car beside them and jumped out.

“John … John . .

He heard children’s voices, strangely muffled, calling his name and two grotesque shapes ran toward him into the dimly illuminated semi-circle made by the cars’ parking lights. They were round and cumbersome, topped with weird, onion like domes of plastic that sprouted antennas—Buck and Timmie in their new space-suits.

“We found it, John,” panted Buck excitedly. “We were exploring the Earth.”

“With our space-suits,” said Timmie.

“We explored the dump. We were scientists from Mars exploring the dump and …”

“John?” Steve Ritter’s voice—deep, faintly threatening—sounded from somewhere down the dark track. “John? Is that you, John?”

He started up the track with the bizarre children scampering around him. The darkness seemed to engulf him. Fireflies, winking and bobbing under the great shadowing branches of the trees, added to the illusion of fantasy.

“Here, John. This way.”

A flashlight beam sprang out of the darkness, high up at an odd angle. He turned left toward it and stumbled over cans and bottles which slithered away under his feet.

“Up here, John.”

He started scrambling up the treacherous pile of heaped refuse. Dimly now he could make out figures above him and the glowing tip of a cigarette. Just as he reached them, the flashlight went out.

“The kids found it, John.” Steve Ritter’s voice sounded deliberately, menacingly casual. “Timmie told the Morelands. Buck told me. Then Mr. Moreland called me. He thought we ought to investigate. Didn’t seem right, he said, the way the kids described it.”

“We found it.” It was Buck’s voice again, muted through the plastic dome. “It was treasure trove. We found it—me and Timmie.”

“We’re pretty sure what it is,” said Steve. “Leastways, Mrs. Moreland’s sure. But you’re the one got to identify it and maybe explain to us what it’s doing here.”

Suddenly, dramatically, the flashlight pointed downward.

There, sprawled across the top of the mountainous trash pile, was Linda’s new suitcase. It was open.

John saw the green dress first, Linda’s new green dress. Its skirts, full and neatly pleated, drifted over the side of the suitcase and trailed across the edge of a rusty oil can.

9

JOHN STOOD looking down, feeling a sensation of doom. Roz Moreland’s voice, cultured, emphatic, sounded from behind the burning cigarette end.

“It’s Linda’s new dress. There’s no point in arguing about it. She only just got it last week and she came over right away to show it to me. She was thrilled about it. She’d never throw it away. Never in a million years. And her grey suit, too—all her best things. That’s why I knew, immediately, when Timmie described it.”

“Roz.” Gordon Moreland’s voice broke in, prissily correct. “This isn’t our business at the moment. It’s Steve’s. He’s the proper authority. It’s up to Steve.”

“Well?” asked Steve Ritter. “We’re waiting, John. Do you identify these things and this suitcase as your wife’s property?”

John’s eyes were accustoming themselves to the darkness. He could see the vague outline of Steve Ritter’s jaw and even the faint gleam of his eyes, just as he could sense the near-hysterical hostility in the Morelands, hemming him in, accusing him. Danger was here. He felt its presence as strongly as if it were standing at his elbow—another weird, domed figure like the children.

He had to be careful. It was changing now—changing for the worse.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re all Linda’s things.”

“Kind of funny, isn’t it?” said Steve. “Throwing out all those good things? Her best dress and everything? Throwing them out on the dump?”

“It’s absurd,” said Roz. “Never in a million years …”

“Roz, please,” said Gordon Moreland.

The sour smell of abandoned refuse trailed up around them. If the suitcase is here, then Linda’s here. The thought sounded in John’s mind like a roar. There was no way now of avoiding what had to be faced—all of it.

He said, “I don’t know where my wife is.”

“You don’t know?” echoed Gordon.

“You …” Roz’s voice cracked.

Steve Ritter said slowly, without any expression, “Just what do you mean by that, John?”

“I went to New York yesterday. I just came home this evening. She wasn’t there. She’d left a note to say—she’d gone.”

“Gone? Gone where?” said Gordon.

“My God,” said Roz, “I’m not surprised.”

“Roz…”

“Well, are you surprised? After that spectacle the other night? When he’d hit her, when he’d …”

“Hey, wait a minute, Mrs. Moreland.” Steve’s voice, crisp now with authority, cut in. “You and Linda had an argument, John? You went off to New York and while you was away she walked out on you? Is that it?”

“Yes, I guess so. I guess that’s about it.”

“Did she take the car?”

“No. I had it at the station. I drove myself in.”

“She went off without the car? How? Walking? Thumbing a ride?”

“I don’t know. How would I know?”

For a moment none of them spoke. The fireflies sputtered in the darkness. Roz Moreland’s cigarette end gleamed—a round, stationary firefly. The odor of decay impregnated the air.

Timmie suddenly said in a high frightened voice, “Mummie, I want to go home.”

Steve said, “Okay, Mrs. Moreland. Maybe you’d take the kids down to the cars and wait.”

“I wanna stay,” said Buck.

“Mummie,” wailed Timmie, “I want to go home.”

“Take them, Mrs. Moreland.”

“But…” Roz Moreland gave a shrill little cry. “Steve, you don’t think … You don’t think that Linda …”

“You just sit in the car, Mrs. Moreland. Relax now. Take the kids.”

“Timmie—Buck.” Roz Moreland’s voice sounded distractedly. “Come, both of you, come.”

Her vague silhouette started down the edge of the refuse heap. There was the clatter of slipping bottles and cans. Timmie began to whimper. The thin mournful sound trailed away down the track toward the cars.

“Okay,” said Steve tersely, the man-among-men. “Got a flashlight in your car, John?”

“No.”

“Mr. Moreland’s got one. You better come with me. Okay, Mr. Moreland, you cover it way over to the edge at the right. We’ll head left from here.”

Gordon Moreland made a whinnying exclamation. “But, Steve, the kids were here searching all over. That’s how they found the suitcase. If Linda … if …”

“Maybe somewhere they didn’t look,” said Steve. “Maybe somewhere in the weeds.”

Gordon Moreland started off toward the right behind his flashlight beam. For a moment Steve Ritter stood motionless. John was very conscious of his big, quiet body close to his own. He could even hear the low steady breathing. Then Steve switched on his flashlight and turned to the left.

“Okay, John. Let’s go.”

They were searching, John knew, for Linda’s body. They had already accepted the fact, as a possibility anyway, that she was dead. Dazed and exhausted though he was, he knew too what was stirring in the Morelands’ sharp, novelists’ minds. It had been obvious in the excited shrillness of Roz’s voice and in Gordon’s stiff formality. They were thinking … He forced himself to push the thought away, to keep the words from actually forming, because it was all he could do to get through this as it was. I’ll crack up, he thought, if I let myself think about that.

He stumbled on at Steve’s side, watching the flashlight beam swinging slowly to left and to right, exposing this— that, an old iron bedstead, a clump of iris fantastically growing out of nothing, cardboard cartons, partially rotted away, and everywhere bottles and cans, bottles and cans, as if, insanely, twenty-four hours a day for generations the inhabitants of Stoneville had been doing nothing but eat and drink, eat and drink …

As they inched forward warily, peering, Steve Ritter didn’t say anything at all. John had never seen him like this, as the official, the local representative of the law. He was quite different, much more formidable, with all his waggishness gone. Once he tripped, half falling against Steve. He could feel the warmth of the other man’s hard arm under the shirt sleeve and, with a vivid repelled awareness of the sensuality of the other body, the thought came again of Linda’s confession.

It’s Steve … I don’t want him … But it’s stronger than me ….

It was Linda who was responsible for this terrible sense of unreality. Because of Linda, there was nothing that was certain any more. Steve was her lover; Steve wasn’t her lover. He would never know; and if he couldn’t know even that, what was there to cling to?

And then, gradually, just when the tautness of nerves had become excruciating, the tension began to relax. She isn’t here, he thought. He knew it with vivid certainty, almost as if, in some mad, special way, Linda—wherever she was—was communicating with him. It’s all right. We’re not going to find anything in the weeds. The ultimate moment of horror when they all turn from the thing on the ground and look at me isn’t going to come.

And they didn’t find her. After about three-quarters of an hour of their awkward, fumbling search, Steve called across the dump toward the other flashlight fanning back and forth beneath the fireflies.

“Anything, Mr. Moreland?”

“No, Steve.”

“Okay. We’ll knock off. Looks like there’s nothing anyways.”

They went back to the suitcase. Carefully Steve folded the clothes back into it, flicked the locks and lifted it up. Gordon Moreland joined them at the mouth of the dump. They all three walked in silence down the track to the road. Timmie had forgotten to be afraid. He and Buck were stalking around—sinister Martians—in the area lit by the cars’ parking lights.

Roz Moreland scrambled out of the Mercedes. She was wearing very high heels. In her hand she had her long tortoiseshell cigarette holder. An elegant, cityish, incongruous presence. Her eyes flashed for one steel second to John’s face.

“Well?” she said. “Well?”

Her husband went to her side. Her counterpart. Neat, finicky, with his cold blue eyes under reddish eyebrows and the fine, long, reddish hair meticulously in place. The conventional eccentric. The established author.

“We didn’t find anything, dear. But it’s impossible in the dark. Quite impossible.”

Roz turned to Steve, who stood, large and relaxed, a little apart from them all with the suitcase in his hand.

“What are we going to do? How do we know what’s happened to her? We’ve got to do something.”

Linda’s my wife, thought John, and already they’re treating me as if I didn’t exist.

“Look, Buck. Look,” Timmie’s voice piped. “I’m not a Martian any more. I’ve taken off my head.”

“But we can’t just do nothing,” said Roz. “Not if she’s left the house, without a car, with the suitcase on the dump, with …”

“Okay, Mrs. Moreland,” Steve jerked his head toward her car. “You’d better take Timmie home. It’s past his bedtime. Your husband and me and John, we’ll go back to my place for a while and figure this out.”

“But…” Roz swung around, her silver earrings flashing. “But—I’m a witness too. If there’s to be any discussion with the troopers …”

She wants to be in on it, thought John, an unexpected, preserving irony trickling through him. She’s not going to miss a minute of it.

Steve Ritter merely shrugged her aside. “There’ll be plenty of time for that, Mrs. Moreland. You take Timmie home. I’ll drive your husband back later. Okay, Mr. Moreland, want to come in the car with me?” He started toward his own car, calling, “Follow us, John. Back to my place. Hey—Buck. Enough of that. Car—home.”

Steve’s car started off. John followed in his. Roz was left standing stiff, outraged, by the Mercedes.

John reached the gas-station immediately behind the first car. He got out and joined the others. A mambo was pulsing on the juke-box inside the ice-cream parlor. They all went in. Betty Ritter was behind the fountain. A boy and two girls sat on stools, drinking pop. An elderly man alone—someone John knew vaguely by sight—the Town Clerk?—sat behind an empty Coca-Cola bottle at a table. They all turned to look at them.

“Hi, Mom.” Steve grinned at his wife and at the customers. “Here’s your wandering Martian. Off to bed, Buck.” He stood a moment in the middle of the room with the suitcase in his hand, swaying his hips voluptuously to the rhythm of the mambo. He was completely changed from the quiet figure on the dump. Steve Ritter—the village card again. One of the girls at the fountain laughed and called out, “Hi, Steve, you been on a trip?”

“Sure, Arlene. A monkey-business trip. Just plain monkey business like always.” Steve swung around to John and Gordon, watching them both with that veiled sardonic appraisal of his. “Well, boys, how about a popsicle on the house? No? Okay, then let’s get down to it.” That’s his way of stalling the village, thought John. He knows his Stoneville; he knows how gossip can smell something out almost before it’s happened. He felt reluctant gratitude, as if Steve were doing it for him.

They went into a tiny room just off the ice-cream parlor. Steve shut the door behind them. It was the office where he handled the gas-station’s monthly accounts. There was nothing but an old studio couch, a desk with a wooden chair, and a telephone on the wall.

“Sit down, boys. Make yourselves at home.”

Steve put Linda’s suitcase on the floor and slumped on to the couch. Gordon Moreland hovered importantly. John sat down in the wooden chair.

Steve lit a cigarette, watching John over the trail of smoke from eyes which were quite unfathomable now. Hostile? Or not hostile? Knowing more than they were admitting? Or knowing nothing at all?

“Okay, John. Let’s hear it. Skip the fight with Linda for right now. Just let us know what happened when you got back from New York.”

John made himself bring out once again the bald facts which, even to the Careys, his friends, had sounded so improbable, so false.

When he told about the slashed pictures, Gordon broke in, “Linda destroying your pictures? But that isn’t possible. Linda, of all people … !”

“You can’t never figure out what a woman’s going to do when she gets riled.” Steve’s voice cut off the sentence. “Okay, John. Go on.”

His eyes never left John’s face, but, as John continued the story, it was of Gordon Moreland that he was most immediately conscious. Prurient fascination was exuding from him almost like a smell. Don’t miss a thing. Get every detail for Roz. Put it in a book. Of course, this isn’t historical. But why not a modern book once in a while? A change of pace. John felt anger welling up through the total weariness. What the hell had this to do with Gordon Moreland?

When he’d finished, Steve Ritter stretched from the couch and stubbed his cigarette in an ashtray by John on the desk. “Okay, John. How much money did she take with her?”

“Practically none, I’d say, unless she had some I didn’t know about.”

“And where do you figure she’d have been planning to go? New York? She’s always talking about New York. Got a lot of friends down there, it seems.”

“No,” said John, “as a matter of fact, there really isn’t anyone she’s friendly with in New York.”

“But that’s absurd,” exploded Gordon Moreland. “She has dozens of friends in New York. She’s constantly talking about them. She knows everyone. The Parkinsons. The …”

“Okay, Mr. Moreland.” Once again Steve Ritter interrupted him. “You may think you know Linda and I may think I do. But John here’s her husband, ain’t he?” His eyes shifted back to John. “If it wouldn’t be New York, John, then what about Wisconsin? But her folks out there are dead, aren’t they? No reason to go back there.”

“No,” said John, thinking: So he knows that much about her. She’s at least been that intimate with him.

“And she don’t have any brothers or sisters. Only child. She’s always yakking about that.” Steve gave a little whistle. “Seems like she was walking out into the blue, don’t it?”

“Seems like it,” said John.

“Maybe to give you a scare? You think that, John? Her way, maybe, of winning the fight?”

“Maybe.”

“But the suitcase.” Gordon Moreland’s voice was shrill and whinnying. “We found it on the dump. What does anything matter but that? If the suitcase is there, then something must have happened to her.”

“Sure, sure.” Steve pursed out his lower lip. “I’m afraid it’s that way. Whatever she was planning on, it looks like something’s happened all right.”

With a lazy physical grace, he got up from the couch. “Well, John, here’s where we call the troopers, I guess. Looks like this is way out of my range. Traffic cop on weekends, checking up that the church door’s locked, helping Old Bill Dairey home when he’s been hitting the wine bottle—that’s about it so far as my authority goes. I kind of hate to do it. I mean, if there’s any chance still that it’s not really serious. But… Okay, John? Okay by you if I call Captain Green?”

“Sure. What else can we do?”

“There isn’t nothing you haven’t told us? If there is, now’s the time, now before we let it rip.”

John looked back at him, wondering: Is this perhaps my mortal enemy?

“What could I know that I haven’t told you?” he asked.

“Okay, John. Okay.”

Smiling almost affectionately, Steve put his hand on John’s shoulder and with the other reached out for the phone.

“When Captain Green shows, we’ll go up to your place and have a look-see. Better yet. I’ll have ’em meet us there. That may hold the old biddies from going to town for a while.”

His eyes were still on John’s.

“And don’t you worry now, John, boy. We’ll find her. We’re all of us friends of Linda’s, aren’t we? We’re all of us just crazy about her. This is pretty near as tough for us as it is for you.”

10

GORDON MORELAND wanted to go with them to join the troopers, but Steve made him call his wife and have her drive around to pick him up. Roz arrived before the troopers, and the two Morelands, both protesting their great love for Linda and their appalling anxiety, drove away.

Just after they’d gone, Steve said, “Well, John, I figure Captain Green should be along any minute now. Let’s get started.”

He picked up the suitcase and, with a casual wave to his wife behind the counter in the ice-cream parlor, led the way out to John’s car. As they drove through the dark, sprawling expanse of woods, neither of them spoke, but to John the large, silent form of the other man seemed a constant threat. He had given up wondering what had happened to Linda. Whatever it was, it was something final, irrevocable which thinking about couldn’t alter. It was his own position that obsessed him now. Although he would still only half admit it to himself, he knew what the Morelands, Steve, even the Careys were all prepared to think the moment they were given any justification.

No, it wasn’t Linda any more. It was the net which Linda had thrown around him.

When they reached the house and parked by the kitchen door, Steve didn’t get out and he didn’t give any explanation for staying in the car. But the reason was obvious to John. No one was accusing him; no one was saying anything. But no one was to go into the house, either, until Captain Green, the accredited representative of the law, first saw—whatever there was to see.

Steve lit a cigarette and, as the match light spurted up, illuminating his full, sensual mouth, offered the pack to John. The troopers’ car drove up then, gliding to a stop beside them.

“Steve?”

Three troopers in uniform piled out as Steve and John got out of their car. One of the troopers came up to Steve, putting out his hand.

“Hi, Steve. How they treating you? Haven’t seen you down to the alley lately. What’s the matter? Getting old?” There was a deep, friendly laugh and then, in quite a different mood, “Okay. Where’s this guy? You got him there?”

“Yeah,” said Steve. “I’ve got him. Mr. Hamilton— Captain Green.”

There were no lights burning in the house. Dimly John made out the large figure of Captain Green who was not holding out his hand.

“Okay, Mister. Let’s get in there.”

The men started toward the kitchen door. John went in ahead and turned on the kitchen light. The troopers lumbered after him, large, calm, dehumanized by their uniforms. Captain Green, who was youngish and ruddyfaced with very bright blue eyes, turned to watch John.

“Wife missing, eh? Steve tells me she left a note. Let’s see it.”

John led them to the living-room and turned on a light. The chaos of ripped canvases and smashed records on the floor, seen again after all that had happened, brought back to him the panic sensation of madness crouched ready to spring and now to clutch him by the throat. The three troopers stood, large, solid, looking without comment. Steve Ritter gave a whistle.

“Boy, oh boy.”

Captain Green said, “Your wife done this, Mister?”

“Yes,” said John.

“Where’s the note?”

John threaded through the confusion to the table where he’d left the note by the typewriter. He brought it back and put it in the Captain’s large rough hand. Captain Green read it very slowly and deliberately, then he looked at it a while, then he handed it to Steve. Steve read it, his eyebrows puckering, and shot a quick glance at John which somehow subtly heightened the already soaring sense of danger.

“Okay.” Captain Green’s voice was the flat, official voice of a man doing a job. “You guys”—he jerked his head at the two troopers—“take a look around the house. Cover the whole house.” He turned to John.

“Where’s somewhere we can sit, Mister—somewhere where it’s not tore up?”

John took him and Steve to the dining-room. They sat on the little wooden chairs around the table. Captain Green took from his uniform pocket a notebook and a stub of a pencil.

“Okay. A description, Mister—height, age, build, what she was wearing.”

Suddenly John could form no mental image of Linda at all. Then his mind started functioning again. As he offered meaningless measurements. Steve Ritter got up from the table, searched for an ashtray, found one and sat down again, putting his cigarette in the ashtray in front of him.

Captain Green finished writing down the description. Then he picked up the note. Clumsily, as if this wasn’t the sort of thing he was accustomed to reading, he read out:

“Find yourself another woman to slave for you, to stick pins in, to torture…. Look like things have been pretty bad between you two? A lot of bitterness there. She feels you been treating her pretty bad?”

John could hear the heavy tread of the troopers upstairs. He looked at his own hands resting on the table in front of him. The skin over the knuckles was a whitish grey.

“It’s exaggerated,” he said. “It’s very much exaggerated. You see, my wife’s not normal. She’s a neurotic. In fact, she’s an alcoholic. She’s been drinking for …”

“Hey, wait a minute, John, boy. Hold on there. Wait a minute.” Steve Ritter was watching him across the table with a wondering, half-amused incredulity. “Ain’t you forgetting something? Ain’t you forgetting I’m a pal of Linda? Linda a drunk? Cripes, man, you know better than that.”

Captain Green looked from one to the other of them.

John said, “I’ve been trying to cover up for her, Steve. That’s why you don’t know, why nobody knows. It’s worse at home anyway. When she starts, she sees to it that she stays home. She …”

“Whew!” Steve Ritter shook his head. “What d’you know? Wonders will never cease, will they, Tom?”

He had turned to Captain Green and the skepticism on his face was obvious now—skepticism and something else, a signal, a quick, significant communication to the Captain Green, phlegmatic as ever, merely grunted.

“Okay,” he said. “She’s a drunk. She isn’t a drunk. Okay. But she’s gone. She’s disappeared. That’s it, ain’t it?” His eyes met John’s full on. “All right, Mister. There was some sort of quarrel between you, it seems. What was the quarrel about?”

John told them about Charlie Raines’ letter. As he spoke, with the two blue pairs of eyes fixed on him, he could hear it all as if he were hearing it through the other men’s ears and it sounded, he knew, preposterous. That is, his attitude seemed preposterous. A man with only just enough to live on meagerly for five years, with a sheaf of reviews telling him his painting was no good, turning down the offer of a job at twenty-five thousand a year.

“Twenty-five thousand?” Steve Ritter whistled again. “Boy!”

He glanced at Captain Green, and this time the Captain, glancing back, grinned a broad, ponderous grin.

“A wife don’t have to be no neurotic or alcoholic to get steamed up over that, eh, Steve? I know a couple of women who’d have done a lot worse than slash a few pictures, break up a record or two. Yes, sir.” The grin fading very quickly, he turned back to John. “So, on account of this feeling that you were interested in keeping up painting these—these paintings, you told your wife you were going to turn this job down?”

“That’s right.”

“And she was mad?”

“It was all more complicated than that. It…”

“But she got mad? Ain’t no need to be complicated about that, is there?”

“Yes, she got mad.”

“And she knew when you went to New York that you were set on turning this job down?”

“Yes. But it wasn’t only that. She knew too that I was going to consult a psychiatrist about her.”

“A psychiatrist?” Captain Green broke into a spontaneous burst of laughter. “A psychiatrist for the missus? On account of she was so neutrotic she got mad because you turned down a twenty-five thousand job?”

Anger flared in John, but with it the thought came: I’ve got to be patient. I can’t expect them to understand. Not like this.

He said, “As I told you, it’s far more complicated than that. She’d been sick for years. She’d never consent to see any doctor. Finally I’d got her to agree to seeing an old friend of mine in New York—Bill MacAllister.”

“And you saw this Bill MacAllister when you were in New York?”

“No, he was away on vacation.”

“And you hadn’t called to check first?”

“No, I hadn’t…”

The two troopers came in. One of them had a bottle of gin in his hand. They stood by the door until Captain Green looked at them. Then the trooper with the bottle said:

“We found this upstairs, Captain. It was in a drawer in a linen closet, like, just laying there. The drawer was open.”

“That’s the bottle she’d hidden,” said John. “I found it after I got home. When she drinks, she always hides a bottle.”

The trooper put the bottle of gin on the table. Neither Captain Green nor Steve Ritter said anything.

“And then,” said the trooper, “we found this, Captain. Guess maybe it ain’t nothing. But it was laying like on the floor in a bedroom. Maybe it just ain’t nothing.”

He put his hand in his pocket and produced a postcard —Bill MacAllister’s postcard. Captain Green stretched his hand out for it and read it. He looked up again at John.

“This Bill MacA—this ain’t by any chance this doctor —this Bill MacAllister?”

“Yes,” said John. “It is.”

The self-importance of a deduction made showed in the Captain’s round face. “Here on the postmark, it says it was mailed five days ago. So you got it before you went to New York. You knew all the time this Dr. MacAllister wouldn’t be there?”

“No,” said John. Did this have to be dragged in too? “I never received the card. I only found it when I got back. She’d hidden it where she’d hidden the gin bottle. She always had a neurotic terror of everything to do with Bill because he’s a doctor. She must have got the postcard out of the mail and …”

He heard his voice trailing off and he knew that he didn’t have the energy to push the point home against such stolid, implacable lack of understanding.

“Captain.” The trooper who hadn’t spoken, the younger of the two, was watching Green with bright hopefulness. The rookie, thought John. The eager beaver. “Captain, could I maybe show you something in the living-room?”

Captain Green rose cumbersomely and left the room with the troopers. John was immensely conscious again of Steve Ritter sitting across the table. Involuntarily he caught his eye. Steve’s face broke into a wide grin.

“Boy!” he said. “Boy!”

Soon Captain Green came back. He didn’t sit down again. He just stood at the door, almost blocking the whole area.

“That note,” he said. “She typed it, didn’t she, Mister?”

“Yes.”

“No signature, no nothing. Just typed.”

“That’s right.”.

“She do a lot of typing?”

Careful, thought John. Don’t tell them about the typewriter. Then suddenly anger flared up in him again. To hell with them. Why was he letting them force him into behaving as if he were guilty of something? Tell them the truth. The truth was the only solid ground. If he started to lie now, the nightmare would engulf him.

“No,” he said, “as a matter of fact, that’s my typewriter. It’s usually out in the studio. She must have brought it in.”

“So she went out to the studio and brought in the typewriter and typed her message without signing it or nothing? And yet—as Jim here just pointed out to me—there’s a pen right there on that table by the typewriter. Wouldn’t it be the easiest thing just to pick up the pen and write that note? Wouldn’t you say that, Mister?”

It was the anger that was preserving John. It was his only prop now. Suddenly, needing to assert himself and to cut through the miasma of suspicions, he said, “I didn’t type it. If that’s what you’re hinting around about, why not come out with it? I didn’t type that note.”

The moment he’d said it, it sounded terribly wrong and he knew that, in his attempt to break out of the net, he had taken the wrong turn. Now it was he who had said it.

Before anyone, even the Morelands, had voiced their accusations, it had been he who had brought it out into the open.

All pretense of formal politeness gone now, Captain Green came across the room until he was standing immediately in front of him. He glowered down at him. “Okay, Mister. Where’s your wife?”

“I don’t know.”

“How come that suitcase was found on the dump?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you type that note?”

“I told you I didn’t.”

“Did you break up those records?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Did you plant that gin bottle upstairs in the drawer?” The rain of questions stopped as abruptly as it had begun. For a moment Captain Green stood over him, glaring down. Then, with a little wheezing grunt, he went back to the table and picked up the notebook again. “Okay. When did you go to New York?”

“On the afternoon train yesterday. Brad Carey went down with me and came back with me too.”

“When you were in New York did you see this guy about the job?”

“Yes.”

“Name and address.”

John gave them. Captain Green wrote them down in the notebook.

“And you stayed in New York overnight?”

“Yes. At the same hotel as Brad Carey. Check with him if you want to.”

John named the hotel, and Captain Green wrote that down too.

“And you came back on the evening train today?” “That’s right. With Brad.”

“And you’ve told us all you know?”

“I’ve told you.”

“Okay.” Captain Green closed the notebook with a flip and glanced at Steve. “I’ll get the description on the teletype right away. If there’s no word come in, search-parties in the morning, farming out through the woods. The lake too. Better drag the lake. You can get that fixed up, Steve. Corral all the guys you need in the village.”

“Sure.” Steve was still looking at John, the white enigmatic grin stretching his lips. “There won’t be no difficulty getting volunteers. No, sir. We’re all crazy about Linda in Stoneville. All of us.”

“Start early, Steve. Early as you can.”

“Okay, Cap.”

Captain Green put the notebook in his pocket.

“Well, no use sticking around here. Gotta get back to that teletype.”

He started toward the kitchen. The two troopers went after him. Then Steve. John followed them. All the men crowded around the kitchen door. None of them was looking at John.

And then, with no warning, Captain Green swung to face him. His blue eyes were thin, brilliant slits.

“Okay, Mister. Tell us. What have you done with your wife?”

“Yes, John, boy.” Steve’s white smile suddenly gave itself away, revealing itself as the excited, sadistic smile of the Enemy. “Give us a break, John. Think of the trouble you’ll save us—and the money. What did you do with Linda before you went to New York and faked an alibi with Brad?”

All four of the men were looking at him now. They weren’t individuals anymore; they were merged into a homogeneous block of male watchfulness—the pack bound together by the pack’s preconceived suspicion of the outsider. He’s guilty. Just because he’s different, he’s guilty. Destroy him.

This, then, was to be the moment—not the thing found in the weeds, not an arm, maybe, sodden and pale, drifting at the water’s edge of Lake Sheldon—but this!

His anger was still there to combat them.

“Get out of here,” he said quietly. “All of you. Get out of here.”

“My, John!” Steve’s eyes were very wide open, showing the white all around the irises. “What sort of talk is that? To your pals?”

John swung toward him. Instantly Captain Green stepped between them, bulky, majestically impervious.

“Okay, Steve. Let it go. Don’t ride the guy. Come on.”

The young trooper, carrying the gin bottle, opened the screen door. Captain Green, with his hand on Steve’s arm. went out. The two troopers went after them.

John stood at the door, watching them. As the police car drove away, he heard Steve Ritter’s laugh, loud, derisive, ringing out through the darkness.

11

HE HADN'T eaten since lunch in New York. Although he wasn’t hungry, he remembered the fact and drank a glass of milk. Then, because being idle was worse than doing nothing, he went into the living-room and started to clear up the destruction. He made himself examine everything with care, treating it merely as damaged property, to keep from thinking about Linda and the spite and the madness. All the canvases were beyond saving, but the phonograph amplifier and the recorder seemed only to have their tubes smashed. Some of the records had not been broken. He collected them up and put them back in the cabinet. The spools of tape were his special love. He had only recently bought the tape-recorder and there were no more than seven or eight tapes of music which he had taken off the radio. He sought them out in the mess of broken records and canvas strips and found them all except his most recent tape of the Mendelssohn “Calm Sea And Prosperous Voyage” Overture. Probably it was somewhere under the couch or one of the chairs, but it didn’t matter. They were all useless anyway, hopelessly torn and tangled. He threw them down again. Then he gathered up all the debris, took it, armload by armload, outside and stacked it neatly against the studio wall.

His life had changed so drastically in the last few hours that it was impossible to imagine himself as he had been before he went to New York—just as it was impossible any more to speculate about Linda. She had gone, and by going had done this to him. That was all that had any reality. She had spawned the nightmare which had climaxed with Steve and the three troopers, ominous dream figures, staring at him from four pairs of eyes which, in their itch to destroy, had become one.

What have you done with your wife?

He stood by the studio doors, gazing through the shadowy trunks of the apple trees toward the great hulking darkness of the woods beyond. An owl cried—the strange, half-human wailing owl which he had heard once before. Suddenly he knew he couldn’t go back to the house. The house was Linda, madness, the danger that had come to strike him. In the house he wouldn’t be able to breathe.

He went into the studio, stripped to his underclothes and threw himself down on an old couch. He thought of Linda’s description tapping out, right at that very moment probably, over the teletype. And he thought of Stoneville.

Stoneville was now the Enemy. People were still awake. Old women whispering, “Have you heard … ?” Boys and girls, coming home from a summer’s evening, met by their mothers or their fathers. “Have you heard about Mrs. Hamilton?” And, the center of it all, Steve Ritter with his bland white smile, moving from house to house, collecting volunteers for the search-parties tomorrow.

“How about a little off-season hunting, boy? Sure, big hunt—big hunt for Linda Hamilton … Haven’t you heard? She’s crazy and drunk, wandering off in the woods. Leastways that’s what her husband says…. Now, boy, take it easy? … John Hamilton murder her? A nice quiet artistic type like John Hamilton, murdering his wife? … Shouldn’t say things like that around a police officer, boy … that’s libelous, that is … If John says she’s crazy and drunk, wandering off in the woods … then she’s crazy and drunk…”

Quite soon he was asleep, and in his dreams Steve Ritter was hunting him through the woods, galloping on all fours —like a hound.

He struggled up from sleep dimly aware that a voice was calling his name. He opened his eyes on to sunlight. For a moment he was vague as to his whereabouts. Then he thought: The studio—and remembered.

“Hey, John. John—shape up there, John boy.”

It was Steve Ritter’s voice, loud, heavy with false jocularity. The voice of his dreams?

“Hey, John. Want us to come up and get you?”

He swung off the couch. He had an old pair of blue jeans which he kept in the studio to wear when he painted. He went to the peg where they hung. They weren’t there. He returned to the couch, put on the pants of his city suit and his shoes and stepped out of the studio on to the lawn.

A group of men—seven or eight of them—in jeans and work-shirts were standing with their backs to him, gazing up at the house. In the center was Steve Ritter’s broad, muscular back.

They had a dog with them, a fluffy mutt with a long brown tail. It saw him and started dashing toward him, barking shrilly. Almost as if they were one unit, the group of men turned and stood absolutely still, watching him. His faculties were still blurred by sleep. Panic leaped through him. They’d found Linda. They’d found her dead and they’d come to get him. Then, as control came back, he realized it was one of the search-parties.

The men just continued to stand on the lawn with Steve Ritter in the middle of the group. Some of them were carrying lunch boxes. As he walked toward them none of them moved. When he was right up to them, Steve Ritter grinned at him.

“Hi, John. Slept in the studio, eh? House seemed kind of—lonesome, did it?”

It was there, the quality which had been in the dream, the threat masked behind the bland, smiling facade.

“Well, John, I guess you know all these folks?” Steve Ritter nodded down the line of men, some of whom he recognized. “They’ve all been kind enough to give their time. Them and a lot of other guys too. This here’s just one of the search-parties. We came to get you, John. Figured you’d want to tag along. After all, you must be feeling pretty bad, pretty eager to do all you can to locate Linda.”

One of die men spat on the lawn. The faces, wind-burned, blue-eyed, utterly without expression, were all watching him fixedly.

He said, “So there’s no word yet?”

“No, boy. ’Fraid not. Not a single response that amounts to anything from the teletype.” Steve Ritter hitched up his blue jeans. “Well—come on, guys. Let’s git gitting. But— wait a minute. You eat any breakfast, John?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Not matter? Sure it matters. You all het up and everything? You didn’t ought to start out on an empty stomach.” Steve Ritter turned to the others. “Did he, boys? He should get himself a cup of coffee or something.”

All the men grinned. One of them laughed and then stifled the laugh.

“Sure, Steve. Sure. Let the guy have a cup of coffee.” Steve Ritter went up to John and threw his arm around his shoulder. “Now you get in that kitchen and whip yourself up something. Don’t worry about us. Get yourself in good shape. We’ll be out in them woods quite a piece. You just don’t worry about us. We’ll wait for you.”

The dog started to bark again. Someone threw a twig at it. His arm still on John’s shoulder, Steve led him toward the house. All the men turned to watch. When they got to the kitchen door, Steve left him. Simultaneously, all the men dropped down on to the grass.

He made himself some coffee and fried a couple of eggs. Why not? He had to eat. From outside on the lawn, he could hear the murmuring voices of the search-party. Every now and then the dog barked and a voice was raised, shouting at it to shut up.

When he had finished, he went out of the kitchen door. All the men got up, edging together, forming a phalanx. “Well, John,” said Steve, “ate something? Feel better?”

“I’m all right.”

“That’s the boy. Now what do you say? After all, you’re the authority. Linda’d been drinking, you say, was kind of mixed up. She come out of the house with the suitcase. Now, which way you figure she’d go?”

The sarcasm in his voice was veiled, but the men responded to it. One of them grinned. They eased a little closer together. It wasn’t just Steve Ritter now. They all of them felt the same way. To them the search for Linda alive was a farce, but they were playing it Steve Ritter’s way, going along with it, drawing out the elaborate cat-and-mouse game until the word came from Steve.

“That way, you think?” Steve Ritter’s blue eyes were fixed solemnly on his face as he pointed beyond the apple trees to the woods. “Or that way, maybe?” He indicated the road. “Of course, with the suitcase being on the dump by the lake, looks like that’s where to look for her, but that ain’t our search-party. There’s another party handling that area. Maybe back in the woods, eh?” He turned to consult the others. “That way, you think, boys? Start off by covering the woods back there?”

“Sure, Steve. Start with the woods back there.”

“We got to cover the whole territory before we’re through, don’t we?”

“Anywheres, Steve. You’re the boss.”

One of the men had strolled away and was standing by Linda’s zinnias, peering through the open doors of the studio.

“Boy,” he said. “Look at them paintings. He must have got pretty near four dozen of ’em stacked up against the walls.”

“Okay, boys,” called Steve. “Shape up now. This is it.” And they all started off through the apple trees, down the slope choked with second growth and over the little creek into the woods.

Once the search had begun, Steve was as serious and expert as an officer with a platoon. He had the men fan out at regular distances from each other and maneuvered them slowly forward, covering every inch of ground. The timber hadn’t been cut for years; great maples, hemlocks and beeches towered up over the smaller trees, the bulky outcroppings of rock and the wreckage of dead trunks, and limbs torn off by ice-storms. Sunlight came down in wide shafts. The smell of the woods, damp, secret, which John had loved and always associated in his mind with the children, impregnated the air.

Nobody talked. John, off on the extreme right of the fan, could every now and then catch a glimpse through the high underbrush of the man next to him and every now and then hear the crunch of twigs under shoes. But, by and large, the silence was intact, and slowly, as he moved forward, ducking under saplings, climbing over dead logs, the horror began. It wasn’t the horror of finding Linda lying stretched there, under a rock, near a fallen tree, in a patch of sunlight; it was horror of the men. This was the dream again. It wasn’t Linda alive they were hunting for. It wasn’t even Linda dead. Not only that. It was the body of Linda, murdered, buried perhaps in a shallow grave. And it was him. Although he was part of the hunt, he was its destined victim too.

What have you done with your wife?

They covered the whole area on John’s side of the Archertown road and then crossed the road, swinging into an even larger stretch of woods. The only house they passed was the little neat clapboard box where Emily and Angel lived with their mother. John was familiar with the whole area; he knew the hills, the sheer drops, the brooks, the high cliffs of rock, but he had never before been so conscious of the vastness and desolateness. After a few hours, Steve Ritter called a halt for lunch. The men gathered together and opened the lunch boxes. Hardly anyone spoke while they ate, except for an occasional gruff monosyllable. They all lit cigarettes and lay for a while under the trees, smoking.

Then Steve said, “Okay, boys.”

And the search began again. It was almost four when the great circle had been completed and they came out again on the Archertown road only a few hundred yards from John’s house. There was an overgrown meadow between the road and the house, which was part of the property. Instead of taking the road, Steve led them through the strip of woodland into the meadow. As they walked across it, closer together now, weary, sweating from the afternoon sun, John caught a glimpse of the house’s roof ahead of them. At least this part of the nightmare was over. But maybe one of the other search-parties or the men dragging the lake … When they got to the house, Steve would call and they’d know whatever there was to know.

The dog was running ahead of them, hidden in the weeds except for the tall, foolish, wagging tail. They moved on, slower now, relaxed, down the slope toward the creek which separated them from the house. Suddenly the dog’s tail ahead of them stiffened. John saw the ragged, fluffy brown beacon quicken into quivering alertness. Then the dog started to yelp. All the men dashed forward. John ran with the others, feeling his stomach turn over. They all reached the dog at once. Steve Ritter pressed ahead. He stood looking down, while the others crowded around him.

John, straining over a shoulder, made himself look too, his mind infected by horror images. There was a small circular area of charred grass. In its center, with the dog sniffing at it, was—what? Some sort of material? A piece of clothing? A … ?

Steve Ritter picked it up and, as it fell into shape, it revealed itself as a pair of blue jeans. Both the legs had been burnt off to the knee. The rest was intact and was spattered with stains of various colors of paint.

John’s second of relief was splintered again as he recognized what they were. His blue jeans. The blue jeans he kept in the studio. The blue jeans which had not been there that morning.

It didn’t seem possible. It couldn’t surely be possible unless someone, with deliberate malice, had done this to him. Suddenly a totally new vista opened up in his mind.

If they had been planted, not by Linda, but by …

As if they’d received some inaudible word of command, the men eased away into a circle, leaving Steve Ritter holding up the jeans and looking directly at John.

“Someone’s been burning blue jeans on your property, John.”

John looked back at him, struggling against the panic of this new idea. Not by Linda, but by … Who?

Steve dropped his eyes to survey the jeans. “Blue jeans with paint on ’em, I guess. Blue paint, green paint, red paint—paint like a painter uses painting a picture. What d’you think, John? Who’d be burning up a pair of blue jeans on your property? Whose would they be, maybe, with paint on ’em like a painter’s blue jeans?”

All the red, round, blue-eyed faces were watching John. The circle seemed to move the fraction of an inch closer, hemming him in.

“What d’you think, John, boy?” Steve held the jeans higher. “About your size, would you say?”

When he stopped speaking, there was a sudden ominous silence.

Then one of the men called, “Have him try ’em on for size, Steve.”

The others all laughed and took it up.

“Yeah, Steve, have him try ’em on for size. Have him model ’em.”

John said, “They’re mine. I looked for them this morning in the studio. They weren’t there. Somebody brought them out here.”

“But they’re yours?” exclaimed Steve. “You admit they’re yours?”

“Have him try ’em on,” called one of the men again. “How can the guy be sure they’re his? Maybe there’s another painter around here wanting to burn up blue jeans.”

The circle contracted again. The hostility, the tension, the almost sexual excitation which had been there all the day was mounting. Steve looked from John to the men and then back to John. His features had sharpened into the features of a leader feeling his control over his men slipping away.

“Gee, boys, if the guy says they’re his …”

“Try ’em on. Try ’em on.” The words came in a chanted chorus. “What’s the matter, Mr. Hamilton? You modest? You scared of stripping down in front of a bunch of guys?”

One of the men sprang forward, grabbing at John’s belt. John swung at him. Steve Ritter shouted. But the excitement was unleashed. All the men plunged on to John, sending him sprawling to the ground. He was smothered in their hard, sweaty bodies. He felt hands groping for his belt and then tearing at his pants. Three of them were sitting on him; two others were tugging his pants down and then pulling on the jeans. The hands came up to his waist; then all the men were clambering off him. They took up their position again in a circle around him. He got up, buttoning the jeans at his waist.

“They fit,” cried one of the men. “It’s a perfect fit.”

They all started to laugh in a pulsing male roar and then, just as suddenly, were silent.

Sick with anger and disgust, John glanced down at his knees, protruding from the charred ends of the pants legs. Then, while the silence seemed to thicken, he pulled the blue jeans off and put his trousers back on.

The fever had left the men now. They moved awkwardly from one foot to another. One of them coughed. Steve Ritter, his face hard with annoyance, bent and picked up the blue jeans. The men had rejected his authority and now he was rejecting them.

“Okay, you guys.” His eyes glinting, he gestured with his thumb toward the road which stretched about twenty feet to the left. “Knock off. The party’s over. Get the hell back home—all of you.”

Hangdog, ashamed of themselves, the men started to stream away across the meadow to the road and up it toward where they’d parked their cars by the house.

Steve Ritter stood holding the blue jeans. Slowly he turned to John.

“So,” he said. And then, “Okay, boy, these jeans go to Captain Green. It’s not me anymore. It’s Captain Green. He’s the boss.” A ghost of the old, almost affectionate mockery showed behind the brilliance of his eyes. “I figure he’ll be wondering, don’t you, John? He’ll be wondering how come, on the day your wife disappeared, your blue jeans happened to get burnt up here in the meadow. Why burn ’em up? he’ll figure. Was there maybe something on ’em—something that was better off burning? That’s what he’ll figure. They got an analytical laboratory, the troopers, up to Springfield or some place. All the most modem gadgets. They’ll be able to find out. Even if there’s only the teensiest spot of…”

He stopped suddenly, his eyes challenging John. The anger was burning in John like acid. Someone had done this to him. Steve? I didn’t want to… but he forced me … It’s like a disease … Fling it at him, he thought. You were my wife’s lover. You’ve murdered her. You’re pinning it on me. But that wasn’t true. Steve hadn’t been Linda’s lover. That had been a lie born of devious, alcoholic malice. And why talk about murder? How did murder come into it? What was it but the assumption of the Enemy? A kind of cold, despairing calm descended on him. The known facts, the truth. Stick to the truth. It was the only weapon with which to fight the nightmare.

He said, “I’ve told you I don’t know anything about those jeans except that they’ve been taken from my studio. And, since it seems about time to say it again, I haven’t any more idea than you what’s happened to Linda.”

“Any more idea than me?” Steve’s lips stretched into the white grin. “Maybe you haven’t, John. Maybe you haven’t any more idea than me or all those other guys or Captain Green or, for that matter, the whole of Stoneville. Maybe we’ve all got the same idea.”

He touched John’s arm lightly. “Okay, John, boy. I guess you won’t be hearing from Captain Green today. What you done anyways to get Captain Green on your tail again? You didn’t burn those jeans. You’ve said so. You don’t know nothing to help the search. No, I guess you won’t be hearing from Captain Green, unless word of Linda comes through on the teletype, until they got those jeans checked up by the laboratory. Then, of course, seeing how they’re your property, I guess the Captain’ll keep you informed. That’s only civil, ain’t it?”

The hand on John’s arm gently caressed his skin. “So— you just take it easy and stay home painting some of them paintings. Don’t you start getting all twisted up inside or, before you know it, you’ll be the one needing the psychiatrist. How I figure it—there’s no cause to worry anyways. Linda’s going to show up, ain’t she, John? When she sobers up, gets all that liquor out of her system—bingo, she’ll show up like magic. Oh, John dear”—his voice raised into a mincing soprano—“how could I have done it—writing that terrible note, destroying all those lovely pictures in a drunken orgy? Oh, John, darling, forgive me …”

The grin still on his face, he turned abruptly and started across the meadow, dangling the charred jeans from his right hand.

12

WHEN JOHN reached the house, the phone was ringing three rings—his number on the party line. Don’t answer it, he thought. Whoever was calling, it was someone of the same breed as Steve Ritter and those red-faced, hamhanded men in the meadow. Reject them all. Pretend, for a while at least, that they didn’t exist. The finicky, tinkling rings sounded again. A sudden irrational optimism surged through him and he ran to the telephone.

A man’s voice—booming, meticulous, familiar … who was it?—said, “Hello, hello. Is that Hamilton?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Hamilton, this is George Carey.”

That came as a shock. Surely, of all the people who now considered him a pariah, old Mr. Carey must be the first and foremost.

“Yes, Mr. Carey?”

“I’m sorry to hear about your wife, Hamilton. Very sorry. It all seems most odd.” The voice sounded stiff and awkward as if Mr. Carey felt the social necessity of making some comment but was finding it highly distasteful. “They are searching for her, I understand. They appear to be doing everything that can be done under the circumstances.”

“Yes,” said John.

“I’m calling,” said Mr. Carey, “because, as you may remember, the town meeting is being held tonight at eight. I realize this is not exactly—ah—precisely an easy time for you, but both Mrs. Carey and myself feel that you, as a resident, are as anxious as we to preserve the quality in Stoneville which means so much to all of us. The fight is going to be very close as you know. Every vote counts.” Mr. Carey cleared his throat. “There may have been a little misunderstanding between us the other night, Hamilton. Nothing serious. I hope you agree. But both Mrs. Carey and myself feel sure that your attitude toward the hotel project hasn’t changed and that you’ll be down there this evening, doing your part. That is, we’re both hoping you’ll register your vote against the sale of the north shore. We are both hoping it.”

John’s first reaction was vague astonishment that, in a world which for him had turned completely insane, Mr. Casey could still be worrying about whether or not a hotel was built on the north shore of the lake. Then, merging with the astonishment, came indignation at the old man’s gall. There may have been a little misunderstanding between us the other night. That was his cynical token gesture of apology. Smooth him down. Probably what they’re saying about him is true. Probably he murdered his wife. But a vote is a vote.

Before he said anything, Mr. Carey continued, “Of course, Hamilton, we’re not exacting any promise from you. I only want you to know that we’re relying on you.” The receiver at the other end of the wire clicked down. John went, at random, into the living-room and sat down on the couch. He tried to think of Linda. Where was she? What had become of her? But he seemed unable to have any feelings about her at all and even the memory of her face was blurred in his mind. It was as if she had never existed and was some almost legendary figure whose only function had been to create for him this new obscene world of unreality.

The sensation of lethargy which had been growing on him all day was more potent now even than the anger. This, he realized, was going to be his greatest enemy—this feeling of hopelessness, almost of doom. What had come had come—submit to it. It was the victim psychology. The village had chosen him as a victim and, in choosing him, it was as if, ichneumonlike, it had injected into him a paralyzing serum that stultified all action. What was there to do anyway? Inch by inch, ever since he’d found the note on the typewriter, the net had been closing around him. The suitcase—the blue jeans …

Now news of the blue jeans would be crackling through the village. He killed her. He was wearing the blue jeans. He tried to burn them. He faked the note. He slashed his own pictures. He packed her suitcase to make it like she’d gone away and threw it on the dump. He went to New York with Brad as his unwitting dupe to stage an alibi. He tried to make the troopers believe she was crazy …

Those were the words. At that very minute, they were being spoken in the post-office, in the store. Groups were gathering in the street, under the maple trees. He thought of the town meeting in the Assembly Rooms at eight with everyone there, the whole village gathered together. Sudden terror of the mob—a mob of red faces, heavy, sweating bodies, a huge magnification of the men in the meadow— invaded him. For a moment it was as if he were actually there hemmed in by them in the Assembly Rooms.

Get away, he thought. Get in the car, drive like hell. At least there was still space. Put space—miles and miles of it —between him and the nightmare.

Oddly, that momentary yielding to hysteria saved him because the anger rose to challenge it, smashing through the lethargy. They wanted him on the run. Of course they did. Let the victim run. Then the hunt could begin. But why should it be on their terms? Why should he let them infect him with a guilt which they had invented for him? He hadn’t done anything. Was it so hard to remember that? Stand up to them. Defy them. Don’t run from that town meeting. Go to it. March right in there….

The phone rang.

Almost light-headed, he went to answer it.

“John?” It was Vickie. Her quiet, ordinary voice belonged with his new mood of confidence almost as if by checking his panic he had willed it into being. “John, I’m absolutely disgusted. I just heard what Father did. He called you, didn’t he? He tried to bully you into going down to vote tonight?”

“He called,” said John.

“He’s certainly got his nerve. It’s just that he’s so hipped on the lake thing. He doesn’t even stop to think how other people might be feeling. John, I apologize for the whole family. Of course you’re not going to pay any attention to him.”

“I’m going to the meeting,” said John, his mind suddenly made up.

He heard her little gasp of astonishment. “But—but, I mean, do you realize how they are? Do you realize what they’re saying in the village? What…. ?”

“I know,” said John. “That’s why I’m going. I’ve nothing to hide. Why should I act as if I did?”

“But—gosh, you really mean that? You’re really going to stand up to them?”

“I’ve got to.”

“Yes. I do see. All right then. Go with us. With Brad and me. You might as well have some support.”

A kind of incredulous gratitude and affection came to him. “But, Vickie, what about Brad?”

“Don’t be silly, my dear. If you’re going, Brad certainly wouldn’t want you to go alone any more than I would. Come over here right now. Have something to eat with us. Then we’ll go together.”

He bathed and changed and drove to the Careys’. It was amazing how the balance had been restored. And when Alonso Phillips, smiling the way he always smiled, led him into the big living-room, he was back again in a world of ordinary, everyday dimensions. Neither Vickie nor Brad sympathized or made a point or acted in any wav differently from usual. Brad made them martinis; they drank them on the terrace where the sun, paling to evening, hung over the tree-tops above the glimmering smoothness of the lake; then they went in to dinner.

This, John knew, was definitely Vickie’s decision. Brad, for all his good manners, was only going along with his wife. There was too much of his father in him for his imagination to stretch beyond a certain point. John knew too that even Vickie wasn’t necessarily endorsing him by this gesture. For all he knew, she had suspicions of him too. But that, for Vickie Carey, wasn’t the point. To Vickie, he was a man in trouble, a man not to be condemned before he had even been accused—a man entitled to asylum.

They were drinking coffee in the living-room when a voice from the hall called, “Hi darlings. Ready?”

Roz Moreland appeared through the doorway, chattering. “No dawdling now. What will Daddy Carey say if the old brigade is late and … ?”

She saw John. Her voice stopped instantly and she stood looking at him with a mixture of astonishment and theatrical revulsion.

“Oh, I. . . Gordon and I thought we’d all go together. We thought …”

She retreated hastily through the door.

John got up. “I’m sorry. If you were planning to go with the Morelands …”

Brad looked unhappy.

Vickie said quickly, “Don’t be silly. Of course we hadn’t planned anything. They just dropped in. Really, that absurd woman.”

They finished their coffee, not hurrying. It was after eight when Brad put down his cup and, avoiding John’s eyes, said, “You’re set on going, John?”

“It’s the best thing to do.”

“Okay. Then we’re with you.” He turned to Vickie. “Ready, dear?”

“I’m ready.”

“Okay. The car’s outside. Let’s go.”

They drove to the village. Automobiles were already parked for several hundred feet up the roadside from the church. As they left the car and started to walk through the darkness beneath the overhanging elm branches toward the Assembly Rooms, John could see people streaming in through the door or standing around in little groups, smoking. There was nothing to suggest his personal ordeal. The buzz of voices, an occasional laugh, a voice louder than the others, calling cheerfully, “Hi, Joe”—they were all ordinary sounds of a village summer evening. Even the extra activity of a community turning out to fulfil its democratic obligation gave no taint of threat to the atmosphere.

A woman in a pale dress hurried past them. Vickie called out, “Good evening, Mrs. Seely,” and the woman, glancing at them abstractedly, replied, “Good evening, Mrs. Carey.”

And yet, as they moved away from the darkness closer and closer to the lights fanning down from above the door to the church basement, John could feel the tension in himself and in the Careys. It was as if they were a lighted fuse creeping inch by inch closer to dynamite. They were almost up to the nearest group of loiterers. Suddenly, beyond them, in the center of the main street, John noticed a tall figure in a cop’s uniform, directing the traffic. Steve Ritter. In the same instant, the three of them came up to the lounging men. Brad was a little ahead. One of the men was laughing. He saw Brad and, still laughing, called, “Hi, Brad, how are … ?”

Then he saw John. His voice stopped. All the other men stopped talking too. Automatically, as if imitating the men in the meadow, they drew a little closer, forming a semicircle barring the entrance. Some quality of tautness in them instantly infected all the other groups standing around near the doors. There was an abrupt cessation of sound and a sense of bodies moving very slightly closer. Then, beyond, John heard a woman gasp and little sexless half-whispers began to rustle in the air.

“It’s him … It’s Mr. Hamilton … Mr. Hamilton … Hamilton …”

It all lasted hardly more than a second. Brad was still in front of him. Vickie was at his side. Brad moved forward toward the unbroken semi-circle of men and, as he did so, the men stepped aside for him.

“Hamilton … Hamilton …”

The vague whispers were still behind them.

Brad, glancing quickly at John, murmured, “Maybe this isn’t so good an idea?”

“It’s okay,” said John.

“Yes,” said Vickie.

They passed through the door and emerged into the brilliantly lit basement.

13

IN THE FIRST second, John saw the whole scene in exact detail as if it were a painting—the wooden voting booths along the rear wall, the long table at which the town officials, neat and self-important, in suits and neckties, sat on wooden chairs, and then, in front of them, the inhabitants of Stoneville—old men gnarled as tree roots, husky farmers, youths, housewives, girls in bright summer dresses —crowding the central area around the heavy wooden pillars which supported the church above. Over to the right, Mr. and Mrs. Carey, aggressively aloof, stood with the Morelands as satellites at their side. The Town Clerk— the dour old man who’d been sitting in the ice-cream parlor the night before—was on his feet, talking lamely, rustling papers and glancing down every now and then at them through steel-rimmed spectacles. There it all was, the placid New England scene, the congregation of the earnest partisans, the conscientious, the frivolously curious, gathered together to perform a civic function. It seemed the most temperate of climates, in which nothing more dramatic than a pompous speech from Mr. Carey against “innovations” could possibly flourish.

But the people who had been outside were crowding eagerly in now behind them, pressing them forward, bringing excitement with them. John was pushed against a girl he had never consciously seen before who was standing by one of the pillars. She turned to glance at him. Her eyes narrowed in avid astonishment and then she gasped. Simultaneously, it seemed, every head turned toward them. The girl’s gasp was taken up all over the room as if there was some weird, distorting echo. For a moment that strange sound, the hiss of escaping air, fluttered and then dropped into a silence which was total except for the drone of the Town Clerk’s voice. Intent on his duties, the old man hadn’t noticed anything. He stood peering through his spectacles at his notes, and his voice, sounding almost grotesquely loud now, went on.

“Well, I guess pretty near everyone of us knows what we’re here for and I guess pretty near all of us have made up our minds one way or the other. But before we put this to the vote, we’re throwing this meeting open so that any of us that feels he or she’s got something to say … that is …”

His voice trailed off. He had become aware that there was something wrong with the silence. He looked up from the notes, peering around, not able immediately to locate the source of the disturbance. Then he saw John. His jaw sagged and his eyes became identical with the other eyes. To John, it seemed that there was nothing but eyes watching him, boring through him—steady, bright, menacing in their lack of expression. He was intensely conscious of the threat, but, now that he was exposed to it and returning the challenge, he felt an unexpected spurt of confidence, because he despised them. If he’d been one of their own, they’d never be reacting this way. It was because he was different, a “crazy artist”, something alien which had always been resented by their narrow, parochial minds. He knew it and, by defying them, his self-respect had come back.

The voice of some child, invisible in the crowd, broke the silence. High and piping, it said, “Mr. Hamilton.”

The echo effect came again, rippling round the room. “Hamilton … Hamilton … The sound was muted, hardly more than a whisper, but it suggested a restrained roar. The Town Clerk, recovering himself, tapped the table with a gavel.

“And so,” he said, going on with his speech, “it’s up to me now as Town Clerk to declare this meeting open to any discussion maybe you folks want to put …”

John saw Mr. Carey throw up his hand with a military swagger.

“Mr. Carey…” began the Town Clerk.

Then, before Mr. Carey could speak, a man’s voice from near the door yelled, “I got a question. Where’s Mrs. Hamilton?”

Instantly the roar was unleashed.

“Where’s Mrs. Hamilton?”

“Where is she?”

“Where’s Mrs. Hamilton?”

Shout clashed with shout until all sound was merged into a zoo-like, unintelligible babble. The old Town Clerk was banging with his gavel. Two of the selectmen, one on each side of him, had risen and were shouting for order. But no one paid them attention. In the sea of faces, all turned in John’s direction, stretching up from the jostling, lurching bodies, he caught a glimpse of Emily and Angel’s mother from the post-office. Mrs. Jones was hardly recognizable, her eyes gleaming like the other eyes with the predatory mob excitement. A man at his left just beyond Vickie was hollering something. John could see his mouth open in a wide “o”, but in the cacophony he couldn’t distinguish a word he was saying.

He glanced at Vickie and Brad. The skin around Brad’s nose had gone whitish grey. Vickie caught his eye and smiled encouragement. That helped, and his anger and the new feeling of contempt for them all. He could handle this. He was sure of it. Just as the roar faded from its peak, he threw up both his arms above his head.

The effect was extraordinary. Instantly the tumult subsided back into silence—the earlier hard, brittle, watchful silence. The Town Clerk’s gavel banged down once more. The two selectmen, looking outraged and important, glanced around and then sat down heavily.

“All right,” said John. “I didn’t come here to answer questions. I came because it’s a town meeting and I’ve as much right as anyone else to come to a town meeting. But if anyone wants to ask me any questions about my wife—okay, go ahead.”

They hadn’t expected that. For a moment they were thrown back into a mood of awkwardness, almost of embarrassment. In a loud, booming voice, Mr. Carey began.

“This is an outrage. We are a civilized community. We have come here …”

Suddenly the ringleader by the door yelled out again, “Where’s Mrs. Hamilton?” and the words, like a rallying cry, brought the antagonism back to fever pitch, obliterating Mr. Carey.

“Where is she? … Where’s Mrs. Hamilton?”

A woman close to John clutched his arm. He could feel her nails digging into his flesh.

“Where’s Mrs. Hamilton?”

Silence came again—silence completely concentrated on John. He pulled his arm away from the woman’s nails.

“I don’t know where she is,” he said.

“He doesn’t know … He says he doesn’t know …”

Over the clamor a young man in a yellow sports shirt called, “Why was the suitcase on the dump?”

John turned to him, “I don’t know that either.”

“Why did you burn your blue jeans in the meadow?” It was the first man again, his voice loud, jeering, deliberately goading the frenzy.

The uproar was almost out of control now.

Over it, John started to shout, “I didn’t burn the blue jeans. Someone …”

But the tumult engulfed him. Dimly he could sense that not all of them were against him. Someone shouted, “Leave him alone.” The words were just distinguishable. Over in a corner, two rival groups had formed. Men were pushing and jostling each other. But the division of opinion only heightened the pressure. A woman’s voice, thin and piercing, shrilled above the others, “Mr. Hamilton, did you murder your wife?”

The room went mad then. One of the men near John lunged at him. Brad hit him before John could. The crowd was a pitching, lurching, chaotic mass. A woman screamed,

John heard the hard slap of a body hitting against a pillar.

Brad was grabbing his arm. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

In the grip of his savage, exasperated excitement, John wanted to stay and fight them all, but he knew Brad was right. He’d stood up to them. He’d shown them he wasn’t scared of them. He turned toward the door. Vickie was immediately in front of him, jammed against him, her face only a few inches from his. With a ferocious effort, she managed to twist around. A man grabbed at John again. John shook him off. Brad was lost somewhere. Vickie battled forward toward the door. Then three men lumbered toward John and instantly Vickie swung around throwing her arms around him, turning herself into a shield.

Grotesquely carrying Vickie in front of him, John pushed toward the door. As they inched their way forward through the hot, hostile bodies, he saw Steve Ritter ahead of them, coming in from outside. His eyes under the cop’s peaked cap were gleaming and he was brandishing his night-stick. The sight of him had an instantaneous effect. Almost immediately John heard the clamor behind them subsiding and, in a few seconds, the room was quiet again. It had all collapsed as precipitously as it had flared up.

He let go of Vickie. Together they struggled toward Steve Ritter. As they passed him Steve flashed John a broad grin.

“Well, John, boy, you should of took my advice and stayed home.”

Indignantly Vickie said, “You could have stopped it. Why didn’t you come in before? You must have heard all the racket.”

Without waiting for him to reply she drew John away out of the lighted area by the doors.

“The animals,” she said. “The disgusting animals.”

Brad ran up to them then. His shirt collar was ripped. Outside there in the peaceful village night, the ripped collar looked improbable as if it belonged in some other world.

Vickie said, “I’ll drive you back to our house to get your car.”

As she spoke, Mr. and Mrs. Carey came hurrying out of the doors.

“Vickie—Brad …”

They turned, waiting, while the Careys came up to them. Mr. Carey was panting. His face was a sort of purplish pink. Ignoring John, he glared from Vickie to Brad.

“What are you two doing? Why didn’t you come around to my house as arranged?”

“We were with John,” said Vickie. “And now his car’s at our house. We’re going to drive him back to it.”

“Without voting? Are you out of your minds? Go back in there—both of you. Stay for the vote. I demand it.”

“Demand!” Vickie returned her father-in-law’s glare. “What right do you have to do any demanding? You were the one who was so eager to drag John down to vote. You as much as anyone were responsible for all that disgusting havoc.”

Mr. Carey stared at her for one icy second and then swung back to his son.

“Brad,” he thundered. “Get back in there.”

The crude, tyrannical fury in his voice was astonishing. John had never seen the Careys stripped this way. And, as he glanced at Brad and saw the anxious, white-lipped expression on his face, he said, “Why don’t you go back? I’m all right.”

“I’ll be damned if I’ll go back,” said Vickie. “To hell with Stoneville. To hell with Lake Sheldon. I hope it sprouts motels on every square foot.” She put her hand on Brad’s arm. “Come on.”

Immediately Mr. Carey grabbed Brad’s other arm.

“Brad, I’m waiting.”

Mrs. Carey said agitatedly, “George, George, please. Don’t make a scene. Let the boy make up his own mind.”

For a moment Brad teetered between his wife and his father. Then, with a faint sickly grin at Vickie, he said, “Well, baby, after all. If you maybe took John back …”

Vickie’s eyes flashed with anger. Abruptly, dismissing him, she turned her back.

“But, baby, with the vote so close, with it all meaning so much to Dad …”

Brad’s voice faded. Slowly, self-consciously, he followed his parents back toward the Assembly Rooms. Without a word Vickie started hurrying up the road to the car. John went after her. They got in and Vickie started to drive back to the Careys’.

For a moment neither of them spoke, then Vickie burst out, “Sometimes Father makes me so mad I could kill him.” And then, as if defending her husband from some unspoken accusation of her own, “It isn’t Brad’s fault. He can’t help it if he’s under his father’s thumb. That’s the way he was raised, to worship him, the way his mother does. It’s disgusting being the wife of a Father’s Boy. Only half of your husband is married to you; the other half is married to his father.”

She glanced at him from the wheel. She was, John knew, deliberately, out of niceness, trying to conceal Brad’s major motive for defection which was the fact that he had been championing John’s cause not out of conviction but only through principle and a desire to stand by his wife.

“If only we could get away. We must own half of that goddam paper company by now. We could sell out any time. We could leave it all and lead some sort of decent, intelligible life of our own. But Brad will never do it— not as long as his mother’s alive anyway. We can’t leave her with the whole burden, he says. Burden! He doesn’t really think his father’s a burden! He’s mad for him and he’s mad for the great ancestral business. He …”

She broke off. “I’m sorry, John. This is a hell of a time to be pouring out my woes. You were wonderful with them—really wonderful.”

“I wasn’t. I couldn’t hold them.”

“The rats. And that Steve Ritter. He’s the worst of them all. He’s the one who’s started all the hysteria, going around hinting, whipping it all up … What is it? Why is he so against you?”

I didn’t want to, but it’s stronger than me…. It’s like a disease …

“I don’t know. I figure they’re all against me because I’m something they’re not used to. Something about me makes them suspicious. And then Linda …”

Suddenly he knew he couldn’t talk about Linda, not even to Vickie Carey. They drove on in silence until they reached the house.

He suggested that she should go back and vote anyway, but she was stubborn, still fighting her own personal battle against a bullying father-in-law and a bullied husband. He mustn’t go back to his house alone, she said. She insisted on following him in her car and coming in for a drink. It was only after they’d driven to his house and were sitting in the living-room with their drinks that John began to realize just how much it meant to him, after the horrors of the day, that there should be someone who could be sitting there with him casually, almost intimately, accepting him for what he was.

She didn’t stay long. When she’d finished her drink, she got up to leave.

“I’ll have a time with poor Brad. It kills him when Father acts like this. He feels curled up, trapped, emasculated. I don’t blame him.”

She held out her hand. When he took it, her odd, irregular homely face was lit up with a shy, almost embarrassed smile.

“Can I say something, John?”

“Of course.”

“It sounds silly, insulting almost. But until tonight, with Father and the Morelands and everyone saying all those things … I wasn’t sure. I was like Brad. Part of me thought: Maybe they’re right. Maybe he has …” She broke off, withdrawing her hand. “But now it’s different. Now I believe in you.”

She stepped away from him through the front door. Then she turned back.

“I mean about Linda too. I believe she’s the way you say she is. I can imagine what a hell your life’s been. And I admire you. You’ve got more guts than I’d ever have had. So whatever happens—I mean, whatever may have happened, I’m with you. And if you need me … Well, good night, John.”

“Good night, Vickie.”

He watched her hurrying across the lawn to the car. And then, as she drove away, breaking the only link, the nightmare feeling started creeping back through him.

He was alone in the house and the huge, invisible net had swung completely around it now, encircling him.

He turned out the lights and went up to the bedroom. He had hardly been in it since Linda had gone. As he looked down at their familiar bed with its rumpled white cover, the thought of her broke through the barriers of his obsession with his own predicament and suddenly she was real again to him. She was the woman he had been married to for six years, the woman he had loved. And she was somewhere. …

The old panic image came back of her, insane, slashing the pictures in the living-room, stamping on the records, running out to the studio for the typewriter, running upstairs to pack the suitcase … And then? Throwing the suitcase on the dump? Had she done that? Burning his blue jeans in the meadow? Could she have done that too?

He had never really come to grips with it. There had never been enough of him left over from the effort of fighting his own battle. Had Linda done all that? Or did it go the other way—the way of some mysterious, improbable enemy, not only his enemy but Linda’s too? Tossing the suitcase on the dump where it would certainly be found? Burning the blue jeans in the meadow by the house where they would certainly be found? Why? Because he had killed her, of course.

For hours now he had been living with the assumption that Linda was dead, but suddenly the assumption became an utter conviction. It infected the room like the presence of her corpse.

He went to the bathroom. The towel from his afternoon’s shower still lay on the floor by the tub. He bent automatically to pick it up and put it back on the towel rack. That was when he noticed the toothbrushes, and as he looked at them, taking in what he saw, he felt a twinge of nausea. He had been in the bathroom before. How could he have missed this?

Linda’s toothbrushes were kept on the left of the mirror and his own on the right. All of Linda’s brushes were hanging in their little rack; but two of his were missing.

Then—it couldn’t have been Linda who had packed that suitcase. Someone—the Enemy—had gone to the bedroom, pulled down the suitcase, packed the dresses, hurried to the bathroom, grabbing toothbrushes, any toothbrushes … So someone—not Linda—had typed the note, slashed the pictures, stamped on the records?

He sat down on the edge of the tub. His head was aching. Didn’t he know now? Didn’t the one small fact of the toothbrushes prove once and for all that Linda had been murdered and that all the rest of it was a frame-up, a devious plot to pin suspicion on him? Gradually, through the tangle of his thoughts, he began to feel that here at least there might be a life-line. Call Captain Green. Explain about the toothbrushes. That would prove his innocence. Even Captain Green would realize that he would never have made a mistake between his own brushes and his wife’s.

But the glimpse of hope faded almost as soon as it had come. How would he be able to prove that one set of brushes had been his and the others Linda’s? He thought of the struggling, shouting mob at the town meeting, flinging at him their conviction of his guilt. That was Captain Green’s mood too. There was nothing in a quibble about toothbrushes for Captain Green.

He didn’t go back to his and Linda’s bedroom. He went to one of the other rooms, bleak, impersonal, intended for guests who had never come. He took off his clothes and lay down on the bed, struggling against new images of Linda backing away from someone, screaming, her face distorted with terror….

He tried to think of Vickie. When it didn’t work, he thought of the children, but the memory of Angel Jones kicking and yelling in his arms—“You beat up your wife” —tainted even that. A vivid picture came of the blue jeans in the state troopers’ laboratory. Men in white coats were peering through microscopes.

“If there’s something on them jeans, even the teensiest-weensiest spot…”

Steve Ritter was back. When finally he fell asleep, Steve was hunting him through the woods again, but this time he wasn’t alone. The whole population of Stoneville was crashing through the underbrush behind him, jeering and belling like hounds.

What have you done with your wife?

14

HE AWOKE with a start, thinking Linda had called his name. He looked at his watch. It was ten past ten. Anxiety leaped in him. How could he have slept so long? There was so much to do. Then, as memory came back, the old lethargy returned. What in fact was there to do? Telephone to Captain Green? Explain to him about the toothbrushes? He’d already decided that was useless. It was worse than useless because to Captain Green it would merely seem like another, even clumsier attempt by a guilty man to fabricate his innocence.

“John.”

Someone was calling his name, a faint, unlocalized female voice. Still only half out of his dream, he thought: Linda. He jumped up, his heart pounding.

“John … John …”

He ran to the window. A bicycle was propped against the lilac bush near the kitchen door. He pressed his face against the screen and could just catch a glimpse of a small figure, with a long dark pigtail, standing at the door. Emily Jones.

Feeling unreasonable pleasure, he shouted, “Coming.”

He hurried into the other bedroom, put on a robe and went down to the kitchen.

He opened the door and joined Emily on the step. She had a bundle of letters clutched in her hand. Her face was flushed and her eyes were very bright.

“I brought your mail.” She held the letters out to him. “Mother doesn’t know. I snuck into the post office and I pulled them out of your box—and I brought them.”

“Thanks, Emily.”

John took the letters and put them down on top of the bottled gas cylinders by the door.

“And—and I’ve come to say you mustn’t go down to the village. That’s why I’ve come.” She was panting. She must have pedaled like mad. “Bob Seely and George Hatch and all those men … they said they’d get you next time you came. They should have got you last night, they said. I just heard them. They were all talking at the store. They said they wouldn’t wait for the troopers. It wasn’t the troopers’ business anyway. It was Stoneville’s business. They said …” Suddenly she threw her arms around his waist and buried her face against him. “Oh, I hate them. I hate them. I hate them…”

Her thin body was quivering. Gently he patted her head. “It’s all right, Emily. They talk that way, but it’s just talk.”

“And Angel—she’s just as bad as the others. Just as bad as Mother and everyone. She says you did it. She says you killed Mrs. Hamilton.” She looked up at him despairingly. “But you didn’t, did you? I know you didn’t.”

“No, Emily. I didn’t. I haven’t any idea where she is.”

“Then why do they say it? Why are people like that? Why are all people so lousy?”

One arm around her, he started to open the kitchen door. “Come on in and have something to drink. You must be thirsty after the ride.”

“Oh, no.” She drew away from him with a muffled sob.

“I can’t—not now. Now, when I feel like this, I’ve got to be alone.” She ran to her bicycle, pulled it up from the lilac bush and turned to gaze at him from black, tormented eyes. “When—when this feeling’s over, maybe I’ll come back. If you want me to, I’ll clean up and I’ll cook and I’ll … But n-not now.”

Once again there was the sound of a sob. Choking it back, she jumped on the bicycle and pedaled furiously away, the dark pigtail flopping behind her.

For a moment John stood looking after her. When she disappeared around the house, he dropped down on to the kitchen step and felt in the pocket of his robe for a cigarette. There were none there. He got up to go into the kitchen and then, seeing the letters, picked them up and sat down again with them on the step.

The first thing he noticed was the Art Review. It had come at last, and its critic was the one he cared about the most. He tore off the wrapper and listlessly searched for his review. It was a column long and, to his amazement and delight as he read, he found it was wildly enthusiastic.

“… Perhaps in this show, the enormous step forward has not entirely been solidified. But these are by far the most exciting canvases which this critic has seen this year and it now seems incontrovertible that, with John Hamilton, this country will soon find itself in the always embarrassing position of having a really great American painter on its hands ….”

For one moment there was nothing but joy, but only for a moment. Almost immediately the irony of the situation came to him, tainting everything. What did a good review matter anymore? He dropped the magazine and looked at the letters.

It was the end of the month and they were all bills—the bill from the village store, the milk bill, a bill from Ritter’s Service Station. The last vestiges of pleasure from the review fading, he glanced at the envelope. He thought of Steve Ritter in his cramped little office making out the bill. When? Yesterday? After the search party? Before he went down to direct traffic for the town meeting?

There was a bill from a hardware store in Pittsfield. It was a store he couldn’t remember ever having been in. It must be something that Linda …

He slit the envelope and pulled out the bill. His name and address were written in at the top. Underneath was written:

August 29

3 100 lb. sacks ready-mix cement at 1.95 = 5.85

1 cement trowel = .79

Total = 6.64

For a moment he sat looking at it. August 29! That was the day after Vickie’s birthday party, the day he had gone to New York. But he hadn’t bought any cement or … He felt the suffocating nightmare quality returning. Cement! The lilac bush in front of him seemed to tremble and blur out of reality. A robin was stalking on the lawn. It seemed much larger than life and his eyes were hypnotized by it, watching while it stabbed savagely into the grass with its beak.

He jumped up, ran into the house and called the hardware store.

A woman’s voice answered in a flat, bored voice.

His hand was shaking. He could feel the receiver wobbling against his ear. He said, “This is John Hamilton in Stoneville. I’ve just got a bill for some things I didn’t order. Can I talk to someone about it?”

“One moment, sir.” Was her voice changed? Surely she, like everyone else, knew that name now—the pariah name: John Hamilton. “I’ll inquire. Hold on.”

He heard her footsteps tapping away from the phone. The sound seemed booming, quite unreal, like the sight of the robin on the lawn. Is this how it feels, he wondered, when you start to crack up, this uncontrollable shaking, this dislocation of sight and sound?

“Hello.” A man’s voice was on the phone.

He said, “This is John Hamilton.”

“Yes,” said the man. “I know. She told me.”

“I just got a bill for some things I never ordered. I thought I’d check.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then the man’s voice came again, dour, without expression. “Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton, but I think you’ll find the bill’s correct. I took the order myself.”

“You took it? When?”

“On the phone. You called in the morning real early just around nine.”

“But I never called you.”

“John Hamilton in Stoneville. That was the name. John Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton said he wanted the cement to repair a dam in the creek for a kid’s swimming hole. I said he’d be better off with regular cement but he was set on the ready mix and he wanted it right away. It was nine and the truck was just going out for your neighborhood. It always goes out at nine on Tuesdays, so I had ’em load it right on there. And you—he said not to stop at the house because he wouldn’t be home but to just take it and dump it way past the house there by where the creek bends close to the road.”

He knew then, of course. It was as if the net had suddenly become visible and was sagging over him, black, inescapably intricate, deadly as a vast spider’s web. By the bend in the creek. Down the road behind the house toward the Fishers’—where he’d never gone since he returned from New York, where the search-party might have gone but hadn’t because Steve had got angry with the men and sent them home.

He had to say something. Dimly he was conscious of the necessity and of the potential danger for him at the other end of the phone, but there was nothing to say that could change what had happened.

“It wasn’t me,” he said. “If someone called you and used the name John Hamilton, it was somebody else. I never gave the order.”

He dropped the receiver. The phone didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered but the bend in the creek. He ran upstairs, put on the pants and shirt he had been wearing the day before and hurried out of the house up the road. The shadows of the sugar maples made feathery blue-grey patterns on the dirt road surface at his feet. The shadows, shifting, merging, growing now darker, now paler, seemed to him like shadows of the net. The point where the creek bent close to the road was less than a hundred yards away from the house. As he ran forward, the sound of the creek came, fresh, gurgling, cheerful. Then the brook itself came into view, looping down in a sharp curve to the roadside and twisting almost immediately back again into the meadow. The tall weeds by the side of the road were mashed down. He saw that even before he came up to them. The panic images blazed.

He reached the spot. There were the weeds, sprawled down where the cement sacks had been thrown from the truck. They lay broken and bent over, wilting in the hot sun. But the cement sacks weren’t there anymore.

Nothing was there.

It was several seconds before he noticed the track, but once he had seen it, it cried out for attention, biting deep into the damp grass by the bank of the creek. A single track. A wheelbarrow track. He left the road and moved through the battered weeds toward it. A thin white curling line paralleled it for a few feet and then stopped. He bent down but, even as he bent, he recognized it as cement— a trail of cement from a sack that had broken open.

That had broken open? That had been broken open! He knew that now. The cement trail was obvious just as the wheelbarrow track was obvious, because it had been deliberately arranged that way. This was part of it all, the climactic part of the nightmare of the typed note, the slashed pictures, the suitcase on the dump, the blue jeans …

He started to follow the wheelbarrow track across the overgrown meadow. Whenever it faded there was always something else to guide him, a broken cherry sapling, a patch of crushed golden-rod or the cement trail again. It was a track that a child could follow, and it progressed relentlessly away from the creek, always nearer and nearer to the house.

Suddenly, as he moved forward, the illusion came that he wasn’t alone any more but that other person, the Enemy, whose presence he had been dimly conscious of lurking in the center of the web, but who now seemed to spring forward and take possession of him. It was almost as if he himself had called the hardware store to order the cement (“Don’t stop at the house: I won’t be home”), and as if, at that very moment, he were pushing the wheelbarrow stacked with cement sacks, carefully indicating the track as he did so, breaking a sapling, mashing the weeds, letting the thin stream of cement ripple out from the split sack. The intensity of the illusion became such that he could actually feel the sensation of the wheelbarrow’s rubber handles, hot and sticky, in his palms.

Stop it, he told himself.

The back of the studio was looming ahead of him. He came down here so seldom that the barn, seen from behind, was grotesquely unfamiliar—like a building that had no part in his life. The windows at the back of the studio stared, flashing in the sunlight. Below them, its heavy wooden doors sagging on their hinges, was the old basement cow-barn.

Now, as the treacherously clear track veered slightly to the left, directly toward the sagging doors, the tension in him was more than he could bear. Ignoring the track— why bother to follow it anymore?—he ran to the doors. A rusty old padlock hung on a hasp. He flicked it off, and grabbing one of the doors, tugged it open. To his eyes, accustomed to the brilliant sunshine, the interior was dark and shadowy as a crypt. For a moment he hesitated on the threshold, smelling the musty smell of disuse and decay. He saw the old ice-chest with Linda’s garden tools grouped around it and the plastic hose coiled under the faucet. Beyond them he could make out the wooden cow-stalls stretching down each of the side walls. Ancient hay was scattered over the beaten earth floor. Something gleaming caught his eye—something thrusting out from inside one of the stalls. The handle of a wheelbarrow?

He ran into the gloom. There it was, in the stall, his own beat-up, red, metal wheelbarrow. It was tilted over on its side and its interior was heavily coated with cement.

He looked at it, making an immense effort at control. He mustn’t feel anger or panic or anything for Linda. Nothing at all. He must be like a machine. Walking with deliberate slowness, he turned from the stall and into the next one and then the next one and then the next.

It was the last stall to the right. The floor wasn’t of caked dirt like the floors of the other stalls. It had been smoothly surfaced with cement, and stacked on the cement, taking up almost all the stall, was a high neat pile of logs. He didn’t have to try to remember how the stall had been before. One glance at the cement, in spite of the strewn shavings of bark, was enough to tell that it was brand new.

As he stood there gazing down, feeling as dead as the thing which, inevitably, lay there under the cement, he became conscious of a qualification of the silence—a rustling, a dry, furtive scurrying sound like the patter of tiny mice feet. He looked up at the window above the stacked logs. It was grimy and criss-crossed with grey, dirty spider webs, and there were dozens of yellow butterflies. Some were beating against the window pane. Some were caught in the webs, flapping one wing spasmodically. Others lay dead on the sill, wound around with grey silk or broken into scraps—a fragment of yellow wing, a black antenna, hard, stripped little body with jointed, hairy legs thrusting up in the air.

Nausea welled up in him.

He ran out of the barn and around it toward the house.

As he crossed the lawn, he heard the telephone—three rings … his ring.

15

THE SOUND of the telephone seemed to him as terrible as the thing he had left behind him in the cow-barn. The telephone was the outside world clamoring to get him; the thing in the barn was the ultimate, damning “proof” of his guilt. The two ends of the net were meeting at last. He ran on across the lawn and into the house by the kitchen door, not because he had any purpose in going into the house, simply because the house had now become less threatening than the barn.

He stood in the kitchen, his heart pounding. The telephone was still ringing its little persistent rings. It’ll stop, he told himself. It’ll have to stop. And then some vestige of self-preservation warned him: If you don’t answer, they may come; and if they come, they’ll go to the barn … Answer it. There’s less to lose by answering it.

He hurried out of the kitchen, his mind functioning imperfectly through the scar-tissue of shock, and picked up the phone.

“Hello.” His voice sounded quite strange to him. “Hello, hello.”

“John?” It was Vickie. He recognized her voice and it steadied the confusion of his thoughts. “John? Is it you?”

“Vickie.”

“Thank God. I’ve been ringing for over ten minutes. Quick. There’s practically no time. They’re coming to get you. Not the troopers. It’s Steve—and all of them. The whole village. I’m here at the store. I’ve seen them out of the window. I’ve seen the cars gathering. And they’ve driven off. They’ve been gone over five minutes. They’ll be there any moment … John, you can’t stay there. Not the way they are. Go to our house. That’s what you’ve got to do. Drive over right away. I’ll get back this minute. If you’re there with me, they’ll have to calm down. They —John, do you hear me?”

He was standing staring out through the thin nylon curtains of the hall window toward the road outside.

“Yes, Vickie, I hear you.”

“It’s the troopers. They called Steve. They’ve found blood and cement stains on the blue jeans, and some store in Pittsfield has reported that you bought sacks of cement. You buried her in the cellar, that’s what they’re saying. They’re coming to dig up the cellar. They’ve got picks and shovels and …”

He heard the cars then. Maybe he’d heard them even earlier as a faint wasp-like drone that had seemed to be a sound inside his own head. But now he heard them and there was no mistake. The drone was growing steadily louder. Not far away, he heard brakes screech. They were turning the bend in the road beyond the bridge.

It was the nightmare again, with nothing in it real except Vickie’s voice.

He said, not feeling anything, “Thanks, Vickie. I’ll be over.”

“Quick.”

“Yes. Quick.”

He dropped the receiver. Down the road a horn blared. Instantly other horns took it up until there was a wailing like an air-raid siren. For a moment panic had him completely in its grip, paralyzing him from action. He just stood, turning his head meaninglessly as if to shake off the scream of the automobile horns. He couldn’t get to his car. He knew it. He saw himself running to the garage, pushing up the door, trying to back out …. No, there was no time for the car. Then there wasn’t anything to do. He just had to stand there. Wasn’t that what the dream intended of him?

Through the window, he caught a glimpse of the first automobile gleaming beyond the shield of underbrush at the roadside. The sight of it jolted him out of the destroying lethargy. Not the road. Not the car. But the woods. Run through the woods and down through the woods to Vickie. That was it.

These were hardly reflections, merely vague instinctive reactions. Get to the Careys’. There seemed then to be no other goal but that. What came later didn’t matter.

He ran back through the hall, through the kitchen and out through the kitchen door on to the lawn. As he zigzagged through the apple trees toward the overgrown slope behind them which fell to the woods, he heard a yell from the road behind him. Then, and then only dimly, he realized that by running across the lawn he had exposed himself, not to the first cars, but to the rear cars in the cavalcade way down the road where the bank flattened out and there were no bushes or trees to block the view. The yell was followed by other yells. Some of the horns stopped. He heard a car door slamming shut and then another.

He didn’t look back. To have seen the men—little dark dots streaming down through the meadow behind him— would have brought the panic again, would make real the dream he dreaded so much, the dream of the hunters and the hunted.

But this was the dream. He knew that, and once again the dream quality distorted everything around him. The sunlight seemed yellower than real sunlight. The details of the leaves, the weeds, the butterflies, as he dashed through the choked meadow, were frighteningly vivid as if they were things he had never seen before and now was seeing from eyes ten times more powerful than human eyes.

Behind him, someone bayed like a hound dog. Or was that just his imagination—part of the dream of human pursuers on all fours galloping after him?

The grove of pines which guarded the threshold of the woods gleamed ahead of him. He reached them and plunged among them, the needles slashing against his cheeks like gentle whips. He came through them and in front of him the creek prattled over its rocky bed. He jumped across it from stepping-stone to stepping-stone. He was in the woods now. All around him was the anonymous world of great trunks, underbrush, fallen trees and filtering sunlight. He was immensely conscious of the screening pine trees behind him. He was out of sight at least. The sensation of invisibility was like a balm, descending on him, making it almost possible to think and feel again like a human being. Don’t lose your head. You know these woods. You know exactly how to curve around to the left and eventually down to the lake and Vickie. You’re way ahead of them. You can travel as fast as they.

Then he heard shouts from the meadow just behind him, beyond the screen of pines. Was that, too, his imagination? They couldn’t be as close as that—not the men from the far slope. Then, with a flutter of panic, he understood. The men in the first cars, near the house, had seen the others streaming down the slope and had realized that he’d been sighted. They’d plunged down directly from the house.

His lead had been cut in half.

Ahead through the trees, beyond a sprawling patch of blackberry vines, he recognized a huge beech trunk. His mind blindly obeying his nerve-ends, he thought: Make for the beech. It was the wrong direction, off toward the Jones’ house, but beyond it the terrain dropped sharply downward into a little gulley thick with hemlocks. There, beyond the beech, would be cover.

He ran forward, skirting the blackberries. With a deafening clap of wings, a partridge shot upward almost from under his feet. He reached the beech tree and, as he slithered down the slope beyond, he heard the shouts behind him, suddenly, shockingly nearer. Had they heard the flushed partridge? And what if they had a dog with them? A memory came of the sharp-nosed white mutt with the fluffy brown tail. If they had a dog! He came to the bottom of the slope and started running again, twisting to left and right, his heart thumping, his breath coming in spasmodic gasps. He could see the hemlocks ahead, a dark solid screen flanking a long outcropping of rock. He dashed toward them and then, just before he ducked into the shelter of their feathery branches, he heard a voice from behind and what seemed like miles above him, yelling:

“There he is!”

The hemlocks were terrible. He hadn’t thought of that. The limbs intertwined with each other and grew, some of them, right down to the ground. It was like being in a cage, a cage of dark, feathery elastic branches. Running forward, he tripped; he got up again; he collided with a lattice of branches as impenetrable as an iron grille. He swung to the left, fell on all fours, tried to push himself under a low-growing limb, stuck and only dragged himself through by an effort. Suddenly the immediate panic of the hemlocks was worse than the other panic of the men behind. The tiny twirling twigs curled around him like fingers; the leaves were in his mouth. Almost hysterical, his bearings lost, he beat his way forward and then precipitously he was out of the trees, staggering forward into a dim clearing with the rock wall in front.

He felt himself falling and made no effort to check the fall. He lay on his face, quite still, his breath coming thickly in great sobbing wrenches.

Behind him were the shouts. No, not just behind him, to his left, to his right. The morbid, end-of-tether sensation came again that he wasn’t himself, that he had lost all identity, that he was merely something that belonged to the men behind him, their puppet, their thing—inescapably theirs.

He got up, his breathing still wrenching his chest like a pain. Quite pointlessly he started groping his way along the wall of rock, keeping a hand on it as if the cold, impersonal surface of the rock was somehow steadying.

The rock wall swerved to the right with the wall of hemlocks still following on the left. He made the turn and then in front of him was a figure.

In the first second it was just a figure, a faceless, shapeless thing, part of the horror that was pursuing him. He stopped dead, shaking his head as if to deny the existence of everything. Then it wasn’t just a figure. It was Emily.

Her finger was up to her lips in a strange ritualistic gesture which brought the sensation of unreality to a climax. They stood in total silence, looking at each other. Then she held out her hand. Automatically he reached his out for hers. The shouts were all around them, no more real now than Emily’s hand, or his own hand for that matter. Stealthily she guided him forward, picking her way, avoiding twigs. He imitated her in this, automatically, too. She was leading him along the rock wall to a place where the hemlocks in front pushed right up against the rock itself. They were moving, it seemed, into a dead end of branches. They came up to the trees. Emily released his hand, dropped down on all fours and disappeared among the branches. He dropped down too. He was back in the hemlock cage again. Dimly in the submarine light, he saw Emily ahead. She swerved sharply to the right and vanished into what seemed like the face of the rock. He reached the point where she had been and her hand, small and pale, came out from the rock. He saw then that there was a semi-circular hole, hardly more than two feet in diameter. Flattening himself out, he squeezed through the aperture into a vague, shadowy dimness. He could feel dry dirt under him as he crawled. Then he was through the hole and Emily’s hand was tugging at him, indicating that he could stand.

He scrambled up on to his knees and then cautiously stood up. Her hand was drawing him forward, deeper into the cave. Now that his eyes were seeing better he could vaguely make out its general outlines. It wasn’t completely dark. There was a sort of twilight. Looking up, he saw yards above him a thin fissure in the rock ceiling.

“It’s all right here, John.” Emily’s whisper sounded faint as the ringing in a sea-shell. “Nobody knows this. Nobody at all except Angel and me. It’s the secret.”

16

HE STOOD close to her as if she as much as the cave itself meant safety. His body was quivering, but the painful rasping in his chest was growing less. The shouts were all around them. He could hear them and the crash of running bodies as clearly as if there was nothing between him and them but the thinnest sheet of paper.

“You mustn’t be scared,” said Emily. “They can’t hear us in here. Angel and I have tried. It’s something funny about the cave. You can shout in here and right outside you can’t hear a thing. It’s all right. They’ll go away. Listen, they’re going now.”

The shouts and the crashes were fainter now, weren’t they? Weren’t they fading away to the right?

“After I left you,” she said, “I came here to be alone. And I heard the shouts and people running and I knew what it was. I went out. I didn’t know what to do. Then I found you.”

With the slackening of tension, exhaustion came. He felt his knees sagging under him. Emily’s hand touched his.

“You’re tired. You better lie down. Here … on my bed. Not on Angel’s. She won’t let anyone lie on her bed.”

John obeyed the gentle tug on his sleeve.

“Here,” said Emily. “They’re not beds really; they’re only blankets with pine needles under them. But we call them beds.”

He sat down and then stretched himself out on the barely visible blanket, sinking into the soft embrace of the pine needles. Yes, his pursuers were way off to the right now. They were heading down the gulley—away.

“We’ve got furniture and everything,” said Emily. “Orange crates from the store and candles and things. It’s our house. We come here most every night too and sleep. Mother never knows. We climb out of the window and we’re back just when it’s light. We practically live here. And Louise lives here all the time.”

“Louise?”

He felt Emily slip away from him; then he heard a struck match. As a flicker of light came, he turned violently to see her standing with a lighted candle in a coke bottle in one hand and in the other a large shabby, sunbonneted doll.

“This is Louise. She …”

“Put out the candle, Emily.”

“It’s all right, they’ve gone.”

“But they’ll be back, maybe.”

She stood a moment looking at him gravely, then she blew out the candle.

“All right. But that’s Louise. She’s the queen of all Angel’s dolls. I think dolls are dopey, but I don’t let on. You see, it was really Angel who found the cave. I really lied that day. I mean, it really actually is Angel’s cave and Angel gave it to Louise.” She came back and squatted down on the floor next to him. “So it’s really Louise’s cave, I guess.”

This world of the children’s cave was as unreal to him as his panic flight through the woods. And, with the shock of what he’d found in the cow-barn still as raw as a wound, his mind had only the feeblest power to plan. He was safe for the moment; that was all that had seemed to matter. But now he started imperfectly to grapple with the future. He’d run away. He knew that, and he knew that by running away he’d admitted his guilt. That’s how they would see it—because they would want to see it that way. The thing in the barn was there to damn him utterly, but now there was this too: he’d run away. What then should he do? Try to get to Vickie? Gamble on the respect the rabble had for the Careys to keep him safe until the troopers came? And then give himself up?

‘I didn’t run away. I was only trying to get to the Careys because I was afraid of what the men would do…”

Captain Green’s solid, uncompromising face seemed blurrily to watch him from the twilight above.

Maybe that’s what he should do. Wasn’t it the only thing anyway? But not yet—not while the men were still in the woods and might at any minute swing back.

A voluptuous irresponsibility descended on him. There was nothing to do at the moment—nothing but to lie here in the darkness on the pine needles, miraculously exempt from making a decision.

“John.”

Emily’s voice came through to him.

“Yes, Emily.”

“Was it Steve and the men—or was it the troopers?”

“Steve and the village.”

“They came up to your house and you ran away.”

“Yes.”

“What were they going to do to you?”

“I don’t know.”

“But you ran.”

“Yes.”

“I hate them,” said Emily. “I hate them.”

“Yes. And it’s worse now.”

He had to tell her. Why not? There could be nothing valid between them until she knew and took her stand.

“They found cement on the blue jeans and someone had called up a store in Pittsfield, using my name, and ordered cement. They were to dump it, he said, by the bend in the creek beyond the house. For a dam. I went to the bend and there were wheelbarrow tracks and a trail of cement. They led up to the cow-barn, and in the cow-barn …” How did you tell this to a kid? Suddenly, in his mind, he was back running into the cow-barn. He broke off.

Emily said, “And the cement was in the cow-barn?”

“Someone had made it into a floor for one of the stalls— a new cement floor.”

“So she’s there,” said Emily almost perfunctorily. “Mrs. Hamilton’s there. She’s dead and under the cement.”

“I guess so, Emily.”

“Who did it?”

“I don’t know.”

“But someone did it, didn’t they? Someone put her there and then tried to make believe it was you.”

“Yes.”

Telling her hadn’t helped. It had only made his predicament more sharply defined to him. Cement on his blue jeans; his voice ordering the sacks on the phone; Linda there under the new cement in his barn. It was all a monstrous illusion fabricated by an enemy. But who would ever believe that? Captain Green? A district attorney? A judge? A jury? A jury—twelve ruddy, blue-eyed men and women sitting in the courtroom, watching him as the town meeting had watched him, as the men in the meadow …

“John? What are you going to do, John?”

“I don’t know.”

“You didn’t do it.”

“No.”

“Someone did it.”

“Yes.”

“Shall I go out? Shall I see if they’ve gone?”

“Not yet. Wait a bit.”

“John.”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to stay here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because if you are going to stay here—Angel’s coming any minute.”

He had been only half listening, answering mechanically, tied up to his own thoughts. His attention came sharply back.

“Angel?”

“Yes. She’s coming. She said so. We’re going to have a picnic with Louise. And I’m afraid.”

Angel, kicking and screaming in his arms. You shan’t know the secret. You beat up your wife.

“It’s the secret, you see,” said Emily. “She’ll be mad that you’re here because of the secret, and then—it’s the other thing. What she says—like Mother and all of them. You did it, she says, and …”

Weirdly, from high in the shadowy area above them, came the faint hoo-ing of an owl. Emily clutched his arm. The sound came again. Where had he heard it before? The owl, of course, wailing out beyond the apple trees at night.

“It’s Angel.” Emily’s lips were pressed against his ear. “It’s our owl signal. She’s up at the window. She’ll come right down. That’s what we do. Hoot and come right down.”

John jumped up.

Emily jumped up too. “Where are you going?”

“Out in the woods again.”

“But they’re still there. You can’t. And she’ll see you going out. She …”

He started toward the aperture in the rock. Emily ran after him, tugging at his sleeve.

“No, John. No. Stay. I’ve thought. It’ll be all right. We can fix her. We can fix Angel.”

He stood hesitating between panic and the insistent tug at his sleeve.

“Louise,” said Emily. “Talk to Louise.”

She ran from him. He heard a match striking and she was returning with the lighted candle. In the quavering illumination, he could see the sunbonneted doll, propped against the cave wall on an orange crate. Emily put the candle down by the doll.

“Sit down. Sit with Louise. When she comes, say Louise invited you.”

“But she won’t believe me …”

“She’ll pretend to believe you. She’s got to pretend about Louise. And say I came later. Say I don’t believe you, say that I say Louise is just a dopey doll who can’t invite anybody.”

Emily ran back into the shadows at the furthest end of the cave. John paused a moment, thinking dimly: Has it come to this? Am I more frightened of a seven-year-old child than of all the men in the woods? Then he squatted down in front of the doll. He kept his gaze on the aperture. The circle of candlelight didn’t quite stretch that far. There was a vague impression of movement. Something was pushed through into the cave. A paper sack? Then a small dark head appeared, wriggling forward, and after it a small plump body. Angel scrambled to her feet and started finically brushing the dirt from her blue jeans. Then she bent and grabbed up the paper sack and, clutching it tightly to her front, turned toward the candlelight. She saw John and the round black eyes in the pudgy face shone like sequins.

“Hello, Angel,” said John. “I was passing by and Louise invited me in. I hope you don’t mind. Emily’s mad. She says …”

“Of course Louise didn’t invite him.” Emily was running out of the shadows toward Angel. “I found him here. He’d come in by himself. And he pretends that Louise … as if Louise could invite anyone—a stupid dopey nothing old doll.”

Angel stood clutching the paper sack, looking first at John and then at Emily. She blinked.

“There are men out in the woods. I heard them. All those men. They came up from the village. They’re looking for John.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” cried Emily. “It’s the secret that matters and he says Louise …”

“He was bad,” said Angel primly. “He was very bad with Mrs. Hamilton. That’s why they’re looking for him.”

“But I wasn’t, Angel,” said John. “That’s all a mistake. If you don’t believe me, ask Louise.”

“She wouldn’t know,” said Emily jeeringly. “How would a stupid old doll know anything?”

Very deliberately Angel stooped and deposited the paper sack on the floor. Then she turned her back on both of them and stood respectfully in front of the doll.

“Good morning, Louise. Did you pass a pleasant night? Louise—is Emily a stupid, wicked dope?” After a fractional pause, she turned triumphantly back to Emily, her face flushed with malicious excitement. “She says, yes. She says you’re a stupid, wicked dope.” She spun back to the doll. “And did you invite John here, Louise? Did you figure out that the men were looking for him and you were inviting him here because they were wrong and because Mrs. Hamilton is bad anyway and sneaky, saying: Dearest Angel, it’s our secret, isn’t it, and I’ll give you one just like it, saying …” Once again, after a pause, she spun round to Emily and put out her tongue. “Drip,” she said, “you don’t know anything. Louise invited him. And Louise says …”

Suddenly, from outside, John heard a man’s voice shouting. He stiffened. Almost immediately another voice called back. It was so close that it seemed only inches away and the whole cave took it eerily up in an echo, sending it fluttering around above their heads like an invisible bat.

Emily’s eyes flashed to John: then she started running toward the hole in the wall.

“I’m going to get the men. I’m going to tell them John’s here. I …”

“No!” Angel flung herself on her sister, grabbing her pigtail, beating at her with her fist. “No. Louise says no. Louise says no.”

The voice came again, just outside, calling, “Nothing here, Fred. Maybe he’s doubled back to the road.” John stood, digging his nails into the palms of his hands. He could hear the man’s footsteps crunching on dry twigs. He could even hear the slow, stertorous breathing.

With a simulated whimper, Emily dropped down on to the floor. Angel straddled her imperially.

“So—so John’s got to stay?” said Emily.

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“Forever? For as long as he wants to?”

“Yes.”

“And we’ll have to help him? Whatever he wants us to do, we’ll have to do because Louise says so?”

“Yes,” said Angel.

A dead branch snapped outside. John, holding his breath, heard the rustle of the hemlock twigs as a body pushed through them. Angel turned to him with a wide, dazzling smile.

“You can scream in here,” she said. “You can scream and scream and scream, and outside you can’t hear a thing.”

She opened her mouth into an enormous “o” and started to scream in a terrible high piercing shriek which splintered back and forth from the walls. John tried to swallow but couldn’t. Angel closed her mouth and gradually the clamor faded away. Outside the man’s voice, further off, called:

“Okay, Fred. Back to the road then.”

John felt his legs giving away. He threw out a hand to support himself against the wall. In front of him, illuminated by the candle like a saint in a niche, Louise sat stiffly, her head with the heavy sunbonnet sagging slightly forward.

Angel squatted down on the floor by the paper sack.

“Now we’re going to have our picnic,” she said. “And Louise says John can have half of Emily’s share.”

17

SHE WAS taking things out of the sack—a box of Fig Newtons, two bottles of Coke, sandwiches wrapped in napkins, a chocolate bar. Meticulously, she arranged them on the floor in front of Louise, a large pile for herself, smaller piles for Emily and John.

“Louise says that John has to have the other Coke. Emily isn’t to drink anything.”

The men had gone. Improbably he had been saved. In the relief from tension, his mind was suddenly, preternaturally alert. This had happened. Make use of it.

While Emily hovered in the shadows beyond the candlelight, he sat down on the sandy dirt next to Angel and began to eat. Mrs. Hamilton is bad and sneaky, saying Angel, it’s our secret … Angel had said that. It may not have meant anything, but she’d said it. Perhaps … But that shouldn’t come first. The men thought he’d doubled back out of the woods to the road. That was the important thing at the moment. Keep them thinking that way. At least it would give him time.

Craftily he said, “It’s kind of Louise to let me stay.” Angel had started to eat the chocolate bar. “Louise likes you. I like you too. I think maybe I love you. It’s only Emily pushing into everything that makes me so mad.”

“Then Louise wants to help me?”

“Yes.”

“Would she make Emily do something for me?” Angel had finished the chocolate bar and was wiping her fingers on the wrapper.

“Louise says that Emily has to help you before she can eat her lunch.”

“But Angel…” began Emily.

John looked around to her quickly. “You come here on your bicycles, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“Hidden in the hemlocks at the back.”

“Could you do something for me?”

“If I’ve got to.” Emily’s whine sounded dangerously overplayed to him, but Angel didn’t seem to notice it. Smugly she announced:

“She’s got to.”

John said, “You know the dirt road down from the Fishers’, Emily. It’s not far. Take your bicycle there, ride it down to the highway and leave it by the side of the road. Don’t let anyone see you. Then come back here. Later, when you go back to the village, tell them you were riding your bicycle down the dirt road and I ran up and asked to borrow it. They’ll find the bicycle on the highway and think I thumbed a ride from there.”

Angel was staring at him. “So you’ll pretend you’ve gone away and be here?”

John was still watching Emily. “You think you can do that?”

She broke into a delighted smile. “Of course. I’ll go this very minute.”

She ran to the opening, dropped down and wriggled away out of sight. Angel didn’t even turn her head. She sat a moment looking from the sandwiches to the Fig Newtons. She took a Fig Newton.

It should work, John was thinking. If there was anyone he could trust, it was Emily. Once she’d got the bicycle to the highway, he was safe for a while or as safe as he could be under the precarious protection of Louise. And if he could stay here! It was only then that he actually admitted to himself that this way there might be hope. He hadn’t planned it. It had just happened. But now that it had happened, wasn’t it the lesser of two evils? He knew exactly how it would have been if he’d given himself up. Even if Vickie had been able to protect him until the troopers came, he would have been arrested with everything lined up remorselessly against him. The plan of his enemy would have worked out exactly as it had been intended to work out. But now that he was here and still free, couldn’t he fight back? Someone in the community had done this to him. Someone. Steve Ritter? If, somehow …

Angel’s voice came through to him. “Emily’s a slave, isn’t she? A great fat stupid grind-her-under-your-foot slave.”

He looked at her and she giggled.

“I keep on saying you’ve done bad things to Mrs. Hamilton. I keep on saying it over and over. It makes her so mad. That’s why I say it. Just to make her mad.”

Restraining a hope which he knew was far too fragile to bear any weight, he said, “But you say Linda’s bad too.”

Angel brushed crumbs off her fingers, looked at a sandwich and then started to unwrap the napkin from it.

“Mrs. Hamilton’s bad. She’s bad and sneaky.”

“Sneaky? Why is she sneaky?”

“Hiding,” said Angel. “Hiding in the Fishers’ house when the Fishers are away. That’s sneaky, isn’t it? And it’s bad. When people are away, you don’t hide in their houses. It’s bad.”

In the candlelight her round plump face above the clutched sandwich was heavy with disapproval.

John said, “You found her hiding in the Fishers’ house?”

“She was there and there was someone with her. I was coming up the road and I saw the car drive away and then I saw her coming out of the house and she saw me and she thought I hadn’t seen her and she tried to sneak back into the house and I knew it was bad so I went up to her and I said out loud so she knew I’d seen her, ‘Hello, Mrs. Hamilton.’ I said it and she stopped trying to sneak back into the house and she came up to me and she smiled and she smiled. Oh, she’s sneaky.”

Angel stuffed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth and tilted the Coke bottle to her lips. John looked at her, his pulses tingling. Linda with someone in the Fishers’ empty house. Was this to be believed? Or was Angel just weaving another of her elaborate, spiteful fantasies?

“When was this, Angel?”

She watched him from flat black eyes. “Two weeks and two days ago. I counted. Every day that came I counted, saying: She’s going to give it to me today. But she didn’t and it’s two weeks and two days.”

“Give you what?”

“The bracelet.” Angel curved her wrist in an absurd gesture of chic. “The gold bracelet with Angel written on it, each letter on a little gold thing that wabbles. An A and an N and a G and an E and an L.”

“But why was she going to give you a bracelet?”

“Because it was like the one she had. She was standing there and she was smiling and smiling and I said, ‘It’s bad to be in someone’s house when they’re away,’ and she said, ‘I know it’s bad, Angel, but it isn’t really bad, you see, because they asked me to take care of their house for them and that’s what I was doing.’ But I knew she was just saying that and it wasn’t true because you could see from the way she looked and smiled and smiled to make me think she was so good, and it was then I saw the bracelet and I said, ‘What a pretty bracelet,’ and she let me look at it and it was gold and it had all the little things that bobble hanging on it and on each of the things was an L and an I and all that to spell Linda. And I said, ‘Oh, isn’t it pretty,’ and she stooped down and she kissed me and she said, ‘Do you like it?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And she said, ‘Oh, yes, we are, and if you don’t tell John or anyone that you saw me taking care of the Fishers’ house, I’ll give you a bracelet just like mine with your name on it,’ and I said, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Hamilton,’ and she went away. But she didn’t give me the bracelet and every day I was waiting for it and she didn’t for two weeks and two days—except that it’s two weeks and three days because today’s a day and anyway I don’t want her stinky old bracelet anyway—and I know what she was doing in the Fishers’ house. She was stealing, don’t you think? She was in there stealing with the other person who went away in the car and the other person wasn’t you otherwise she wouldn’t have said, ‘Don’t tell John.’ So that makes it really bad and probably you knew about it and that’s why you beat up on her.”

Do I believe this? he thought. And then gradually he felt excitement stealing through him. There was only excitement. Linda, conjured up like this out of the past, had no reality to him as a person, as his wife who might or might not have been unfaithful. All that was over long ago. But the bracelet existed. Of course it did. It was the bracelet which he’d seen her wearing when she came down to greet Steve Ritter and which she’d slipped off her wrist into her pocket the moment she became conscious that he was in the room. Then, if Angel were telling the truth, the bracelet and the man must go together. Linda was wearing it for her rendezvous with him at the Fisher house because he’d given it to her.

Steve Ritter, he thought. So it had been true about Steve Ritter after all? Steve Ritter meeting her clandestinely, sometimes at the house, sometimes, if that was too dangerous, at the Fishers’, so conveniently empty and so conveniently close. The swaggering Don Juan adding Linda to his conquests and finding out too late that he had a tiger by the tail …

The shadowy enemy had taken on shape and sprung into the open. John felt the sensation of meaningless nightmare slipping away from his predicament. This way he could see it as the logical plan of a man driven to murder, desperately trying to incriminate a substitute victim. At last there was something tangible to fight against.

“You didn’t see who drove off in the car, Angel?”

“No. But he was bad too, wasn’t he? They’re both bad. And that’s why she’s run away, isn’t it? Because she was stealing in the Fishers’ house and she knew they’d catch her so she ran away and now everyone says it’s you who’s done something bad to her. But they’re dopes, stupid, drippy dopes. They don’t know what they’re talking about.” She jumped up and, lifting Louise down from the orange crate, rocked her affectedly in her arms. “That’s it, isn’t it, Louise? Louise says Mrs. Hamilton is wicked and because she never gave me the bracelet Louise says she condemns her to death.”

With the excitement mounting in him, he thought of the bracelet. Except for that moment when it had been on her wrist, he had never seen it. Where had she kept it? It wasn’t in the house with her few other pieces of jewelry. He was sure of that, not only because she’d left the little jewel case open on the vanity in their bedroom, but because, knowing Linda as intimately as he did, he knew that it would be her deepest instinct to hide anything as significant to her as a present from a lover. She would have hidden it as she had hidden her gin bottles and Bill MacAllister’s postcard. And perhaps, since there was one gift, there might be others. And other things too. Letters? If there were letters, if there were a cache …

Angel was swinging Louise to and fro in her arms, crooning a flat, droning lullaby.

Wasn’t that like Linda? If Steve had been her lover, wouldn’t she inevitably have seen to it that somehow or other he should be in her power? Of course it must have been that way, because he had killed her. He would only have killed her because she had made some unendurable demand on him, and how could she have made such a demand without the possession of some powerful weapon? Letters! Was the new hope pushing him too far into fantasy? Of course, even if there had been letters, Steve might have destroyed them when he killed her. But wasn’t it more likely that she would have been sly enough to have been sure they were hidden somewhere beyond his reach?

A secret cache? A cache which, if somehow he could get to it, might make it possible for him to break the net or, better, turn it back to entangle its own creator? He was virtually a prisoner here in the cave. He would need help, but …

A scuffling sound behind him made him spin around. Emily’s head, then her shoulders, were wriggling through the hole in the wall. She squeezed in and hurried toward him, saying exuberantly:

“I did it. Nobody saw me. I took the bike to the highway and dumped it right there where everyone can see it.”

Suddenly he thought: The children. Why not? Not just Emily and the terrifying, exigent Angel, but all the children—his allies.

In a second the decision was made. He turned to Emily who had squatted down on the floor and was hungrily eating a sandwich.

“Do you think you could get the other kids here?”

The moment he’d said it, he realized his mistake and, turning to Angel, saw the look of thunderous disapproval on her face.

But then, before his own wits had made the jump, Emily said in horror:

“Bring them to the cave? Louise would never, never, never allow that. She’d hate it. Louise would …”

“No she wouldn’t, either.” Angel was clutching Louise to her breast, her head bent down as if she were listening to an invisible voice issuing from below the sunbonnet. Then she glared at Emily. “Louise says yes. Louise says Timmie can come to the cave and Leroy and Buck. Louise says, Yes, yes, yes.”

“Then”—John smiled humbly at Angel—“do you think Emily could go back to the village now and tell them about the bicycle and then bring the other kids here?”

Angel stumped back to the orange crate, carefully settled Louise on it and dropped her a solemn curtsy. Then she turned back to John.

“We’re both going now. I’m going to ride my bicycle and Emily is going to walk.”

Emily exchanged a swift glance with him, letting him know it would be all right.

“I’ll tell them about your coming up on the dirt road and borrowing my bike. Then we’ll come back with the others.”

“And find out whatever you can.”

“Of course I’ll find out everything.”

Angel had picked up a little twig from the floor. She beat at Emily’s legs with it.

“Go on. Go on first—slave.”

Emily hurried toward the hole in the wall. Angel started strutting after her and then turned back to John.

“Why are we going to bring Timmie and Buck and Leroy? Is it some kind of a game?”

“Yes,” said John. “It’s some kind of a game.”

“I’ll play it,” said Angel. “If it’s a game, I’ll play it. But I’m the head of the game. Louise says so. Whatever it is, I’m the head, the top, the queen of the game.” She simpered. “And if I’m not, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go to those men and I’m going to say, ‘You want dopey old John Hamilton, don’t you? I know where he is,’ I’ll say. ‘I know where dumb, dopey old John Hamilton is.’”

The simper became a giggle. Emily had slipped out through the hole. In a crazy skipping dance Angel ran to the hole, ducked down and wriggled away after her sister.

For a moment John stood still, his arms limp at his sides. In the flickering candlelight, Louise, perched on the orange crate, seemed to glower menacingly like a pagan idol. A brutal memory came of the butterflies struggling in the dusty webs of the window above the new, nightmare cement floor. It was as if he were still there in the damp, musty atmosphere of the barn. Then, in his mind, the men were running down the slope from the cars, belling like hounds. And, with Angel’s giggle still echoing in his ears, the cave became not an asylum any more but a trap.

He was still too close to those moments of horror to have full control of his nerves and he felt panic pushing up in him, urging him to run, to escape from the cave before Angel Jones betrayed him.

But gradually the thought of Emily steadied him. Emily could control Angel. Couldn’t she? Wouldn’t it all be all right—because of Emily?

Exhaustion hit him. He dropped down on one of the pine-needle beds; then, realizing it was Angel’s, automatically got up and moved over to Emily’s.

He would have to stay. Whatever might happen, that was the only possible road to salvation—to stay, to trust Emily, to make himself believe that with the help of the children …

Before he realized it, he was asleep.

18

HE WOKE UP with a start. The candle had burnt out. Above him daylight still filtered down from the remote fissure in the rock, thrusting a greyish quality into the darkness. How long had he slept? Would the children be arriving soon?

The thought of the children brought a nauseous sensation of anxiety. Hadn’t he been absurdly rash? Now there would be five complex, unaccountable entities who had it in their power to betray him. Not intentionally, perhaps…

To steady himself, he thought of Linda’s problematical cache. If it existed, if he could find it, if his hunch were fantastically proved to be right, everything might be resolved. As if the answer had come to him while he was asleep, he thought of the cow-barn. If Linda had something of great secret importance to hide, she would never have hidden it in the house itself, but the cow-barn, where she had kept her garden tools and to which he never had reason to go, was different. Could that be it? A magpie cache in the cow-barn? But where in the barn? The old ice-chest was the only piece of furniture there. In the ice-chest? Why not? No one ever used it; it was near the door. Why should she have bothered to look for a more elaborate hiding-place when the ice-chest was so ideally suited to her purposes?

Couldn’t he send one of the children to look? Almost certainly there would be troopers guarding the house. But —a child! After dark … !

Yes, he needed the children. Of course he did. It could work with the children.

Not long after that they came. He heard the scuffling sound of their bodies wriggling through the hole and then could dimly make them out as patches of movement in the darkness.

“John!” It was Emily’s voice, low, conspiratorial.

“The candle burnt out,” he said.

She brushed past him, going toward the back of the cave, and soon light flickered behind him. She passed him again, holding a candle, moving back toward the other kids, and, as the light spread out in front, he saw them. Angel was sitting on the floor by Louise’s orange crate. The boys stood in a line, Buck fat and red-faced, Timmie slim as an alder switch, Leroy small, golden-brown, beautiful—all of them completely different and yet all of them wearing the identical awed, round-eyed expression.

“We told them,” said Emily. “And we made them swear the oath. Swear it again, swear it in front of John.”

Leroy opened his mouth, showing blazing white teeth.

“We swear …” he began, then the other boys joined in, all of them half whispering, half chanting:

“We swear, cut our throats and hope to die, that we’re on John’s side through thick and thin. Whatever he wants us to do we will do and we won’t tell anyone even if we are tortured with every torture known to man. And Angel is the head of the gang.”

Angel, who had pulled Louise down into her lap, looked up smugly. “I made them put that in. I made them say that.”

The boys shuffled awkwardly from one foot to the other.

Leroy said, “It’s a beautiful cave. The secret is beautiful.”

Buck said, “Gee, they were hunting all through the woods and they didn’t find you.”

“No,” said John.

“Daddy was with them.” Timmie Moreland blurted it out and flushed. “Daddy was with them, running through the woods and everything, and he called Mummie and he said you’d got away. You must have got to the road and thumbed a ride and got away, he said.”

The image came of Gordon Moreland, precise, keen-eyed, enormously civilized, running with the blue-jeaned farmers through the woods.

Emily said, “It’s all right, John. I told them about the bike. Didn’t I, Buck? I told Buck’s father. I just brought it out like it was something I ought to say and there were other men with him at the gas station and they all jumped in a car to go after my bike. So they’ll find it and everything will be all right.”

Angel got up, clutching Louise to her bosom.

“They found Mrs. Hamilton,” she announced. “They found Mrs. Hamilton. She was in the cement. They dug her up out of the cement.”

She started rocking Louise wildly back and forth. All the other children, even Emily, were watching her, appalled and impressed by her daring in putting into words what they all obviously knew and had been keeping back. Slowly Angel started to dance around with Louise while the children’s eyes were fixed on her, beady with the thrill of fascinated horror.

“They dug her up. They dug her up. And I guess she looked awful—awful starey, starey eyes, awful starey, starey mouth, awful …”

“And blood,” broke in Buck Ritter, clumsily trying to share the spotlight. “Blood everywhere. Blood all over her clothes. Blood …”

“Blood,” piped Timmie, though his face was a greyish white.

“No,” cried Angel, in a sudden ecstasy of self-induced terror. “No, no. Don’t say those bad, wicked things. Don’t …”

She dropped down on the floor clutching Louise and, with her collapse, the children’s game of making their flesh creep collapsed too. They looked scared and uneasy. John, for whom, unlike the children, the horror was a real horror, said quietly to Emily:

“They’ve really found her?”

“Yes. The troopers did. The troopers came right after the others and they looked in the cellar, then they looked in the bam and they found the new floor, they …”

She broke off. It had been hours since John had known that Linda must be dead, known it with a certainty which should have mitigated the shock, but it didn’t. She was dead. She was really dead. He tried to bring a memory of her alive in his mind, but nothing came except the children’s horror-movie image of her—awful starey,

starey eyes, blood, blood all over her dress …

The boys had crowded around him. Emily was watching him with an anxious, maternal gaze. He became conscious of them again and, through them, of the urgent needs of the present.

“Have they taken her away, Emily?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes,” said Timmie. “Daddy said yes. They took her away in an ambulance and she’s gone.”

“But the troopers are still at the house?”

“Gee, I don’t know. I …”

John felt a gentle tug at his sleeve. He looked down. Leroy had the material of his shirt delicately squeezed between finger and thumb.

“Mr. Hamilton, can I go up there? Can I go up to the house and see if the troopers are there?” He dropped his eyelids shyly. “Then I can come back and I can tell you and you can know.”

“No,” cut in Timmie excitedly. “Me. Let me go. John, let me go.”

It was like a game again. They didn’t think about whether he’d killed Linda or not. None of them had even asked. Those terms didn’t exist for them. To them, this was just a game—like the game he’d invented in the woods. “If you were an animal, every time you saw a human being you’d shiver and say—the Enemy!” Play it that way, then, handle it the way he used to handle the games, with game rules and game ethics.

He looked down into Timmie’s passionately eager face. “No. Timmie. Leroy thought of it first. It’s his idea. He’s the one who must go.”

“But I wanna. I wanna do something. I wanna …”

“You shall, Timmie. But this is Leroy’s idea.”

“Then I’ll go?” Leroy’s smile was dazzling. “I’ll creep up there? Right now?”

“Yes, Leroy. But be careful. Don’t let anyone see you.”

“No, no. I won’t. And I’ll come back and I’ll tell you.” Leroy started to run toward the hole in the wall. Just before he reached it, Angel called out:

“What are you doing? You can’t do anything without asking me first. I’m the leader.”

Leroy hesitated, glancing back at John. Play it their way. Respectfully John turned to Angel.

“Angel, would it be all right for you to send Leroy up to the house?”

Angel looked back at him, her eyes revealing flat, child’s malice. Then, with a toss of the head, she said:

“It’s okay. I say Leroy must go up to the house.”

Leroy dropped down on to the floor and wriggled away out of the hole. Both Timmie and Buck were clamoring: “What can I do? What can I do?”

Beyond anything, he had to impress upon them the fact that the game was secret.

“What time is it?” he said.

“It’s four-thirty,” said Emily.

“When do you have to be home for supper?”

“Six,” said Buck.

“Five-thirty,” said Timmie. “Mummie says I’ve got to be back at five-thirty to wash my hands and everything and to lie down before supper because I’m nervous, she says, and it makes my nerves better to lie down before I eat.”

Emily said, “Angel and I have to be back at six. Mother gets home from the post-office and I’m supposed to have supper fixed.”

He said, “All of you see, don’t you, how important it is to keep this a secret?”

“Yes,” said Emily. “We know. Of course, all of us know, don’t we?”

And Buck and Timmie said, “Yes, yes, we know.”

“Then that’s the most important thing; and if doing nothing is the best thing to keep it secret, then you’ve got to do nothing.”

“But I wanna …” Timmie broke off, looking ashamed.

John’s gaze moved from one to the other of the solemn faces gleaming in the soft yellow candlelight. After Leroy had reported on the lay of the land, one of them would have to go to the barn. He thought of the atmosphere of horror that must cling around the barn for them. Could he ask it of a child to go there of all places—and after dark? Or was that just an adult’s conception of a child? Hadn’t they shown just now that all that had happened was only partially real to them, only a sort of grisly make-believe? He didn’t know, but it didn’t matter because he would have to do it anyway. If he didn’t fight back with the only weapons at his command, this breathing space in the cave was merely a meaningless postponement of inevitable disaster.

“Which of you can get out after supper without arousing suspicion. If there’s any chance of making people wonder what you’re doing, then you’ve got to stay home.”

“I can,” said Buck. “No one never bothers what I do much with Mom on the fountain and Pop—like tonight, Pop being on a job and everything …”

“We can come,” said Emily. “Mother goes back to the post-office for between seven and eight and I’m supposed to put Angel to bed at eight and then I sit up and when Mother comes back we just sit there and I go to bed when she does but that’s always at ten because she gets up so early in the morning. So after ten’s all right. Like I told you, most every night Angel and I sneak out after ten anyways and come here to sleep and she never knows.”

“I can come too,” said Timmie. “I can come. I can fix it. I can.” His eyes were shining with excitement but there was uneasiness in them too. Suddenly his face fell. “I guess maybe I can’t either because of what you said about arousing suspicions. When we’re at home and don’t go any place, Daddy always plays records to me after supper, records that he says I like, and then, when I go to bed, Mummie always reads to me in bed out of books. So I guess it’s got to be like you say, that the important thing is not to arouse suspicions. So I’ll have to let them play the records and read out of books and all the time know I’m keeping the secret and that they don’t know anything and that I’m in the game all the time and I’m doing something terribly important and …”

A sound came behind them and they all turned to see Leroy wriggling through the hole. He ran to them, beaming with pride.

“I ran.” His chest, under the striped T-shirt, was heaving up and down. “I ran all the way there and all the way back and no one saw me and I snuck around and there’s a trooper there. Just one trooper with a car. He’s got the car there in front of the house and he was sitting in it and then, when I watched, he got out of the car and went around the house. But he’s the only one. Just him. Just one trooper.”

So they must have swallowed Emily’s bicycle story. They didn’t really believe he was in the neighborhood. There was only the formality of one trooper. Then it could be worked easily.

“Thanks, Leroy.”

“I did it.”

“You did fine.”

Which of them, then? Timmie with his “nerves” which had to be quieted before meals was out definitely. Buck? Buck didn’t have a nerve in his body and, due to the casualness of his family life, could slip away at any time. But Buck was Steve Ritter’s son. If possible, he should avoid that. Then it would have to be Emily, even though that meant pushing it all forward until after ten.

All the children except Angel were crowding around him, watching him.

He said, “Okay, this is what you do. All of you go back now to supper and all of you, the way I said, do nothing until tomorrow except”—he glanced at Buck—“I’ve got to have something to eat. How about it? Could you snitch something out of the ice-cream parlor?”

Buck’s grin broadened with delight. “Sure, sure. I can bring anything. They let me eat what I want all the time. They don’t pay attention. I can bring ice-cream and candy bars and coffee—I can bring coffee in a container and . , .”

“Okay, Buck. When you’re through with your supper and when it’s safe.” He turned to Emily. “Could you do something very important for me?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, John, yes.”

“Could you come back after your mother’s in bed? Bring a flashlight. It’s something … Maybe you’ll be scared. It’s to go to the barn.”

“The barn!” Emily’s face looked pinched. “The cow-barn where … ?”

“Yes. There’s something I think may be there. Something I want you to search for.”

Buck broke in, “Let me. She’s only a girl. Let me.”

“No, Buck. There’s a reason. It’s Emily I want. Emily, will you go?”

It was then that Angel ran up to them. She had dropped Louise. Her face was scarlet with fury.

“I’m going. I’m not going to let old Emily go. I’m going. I’m going to the barn. I’m the head of the gang.”

She stood in front of him, legs astride, glaring up at him defiantly. Angel! There was always Angel—the implacable fury, the threat. Suddenly, looking down at her, he felt his new self-confidence sag, and what he was trying to do seemed to be quite fantastically removed from reality. This insane conspiracy with the children would never work. His doom was as inevitable as it had always been. Who did he think he was kidding?

All the children were looking at Angel. Suddenly, with a whimpering cry, Emily said:

“Oh, yes, yes, John. Make Angel go. Please. Make Angel go. I’m scared. It will be terrible in the barn, in the dark, with the blood everywhere, the blood on the floor and the darkness and the bats and the ghost of Mrs. Hamilton. It will be there, the ghost of Mrs. Hamilton, crawling around, creeping and crawling, white as a sheet with clutching hands and with great starey peering eyes … And it’ll creep around and lurk in corners and wait and spring out suddenly. It will spring out …”

Angel was still standing in front of John. Her lower lip had started to bulge.

“The ghost,” said Emily. “Make Angel go to the ghost. Let the white, creepy, crawly ghost…”

Angel started to scream. She jumped up and down, banging her plump little feet against the dirt floor.

“No,” she screamed. “No, no. I won’t go to the bad, wicked old barn. I won’t … I won’t. Emily must go. Emily must go to the ghost.” She dashed away to her bed and threw herself down on it, shouting fiercely, “Emily must go. Emily must go.”

For a moment Emily’s eyes met John’s and she winked. It was a broad, adult, enormously incongruous wink. John smiled back at her.

“Okay. Then Emily goes to the barn. It’s all fixed. Timmie, Leroy, you’ll have something important to do, but not today, tomorrow. Get here as early as you can in the morning. Now all of you go back home. You know what to do. You all know …”

“Swear the oath,” broke in Emily. “All of you swear the oath.”

And the boys’ voices echoed in unison around the walls of the cave:

“We swear, cut our throats and hope to die …”

While they were chanting, John moved over to Angel and sat down cautiously on the floor by her bed.

“Angel.”

“Go away.”

“Angel, dear, would you do me a big favor? When Emily comes back to go to the barn, would you come with her and you and I can stay here together while she’s away. You can keep me company.”

Better this way. Leaving her at home without Emily would be asking for trouble.

She stirred on the bed, looking sideways at him.

“You and me alone?”

“That’s right.”

“Without old Emily. Emily must go up to the barn. The ghost will eat her.”

“Maybe.”

“You and me,” she said and her voice was as sanctimonious as a kitten’s purr. “It’s me you love, isn’t it?” “Yes.”

“Me and Louise. Me and Louise.” She got up, patting her blue jeans to smooth out creases. “Yes, I’ll come. And we’ll send old Emily away and we’ll be together.”

Emily was crossing to them. Just as she joined them, Angel looked up at John with languishing coyness.

“Lift me up, John. Lift me up.”

He bent and picked her up. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him passionately on the cheek. But, as she did so, her eyes slid sideways to watch Emily with malicious excitement.

“I love John,” she said. “I love him. And he loves me. And he hates Emily. Say it, John. Say you hate Emily.”

Over her small dark head, he looked at Emily. To his astonishment, her lips had tightened into a hard, jealous line.

“John doesn’t hate me,” she said.

“He does so,” said Angel. “Say it, John. Say you hate Emily.”

“I hate Emily,” he said.

He tried to catch Emily’s eyes, but the moment he said the words she turned abruptly away.

The boys had dropped to the floor. One after another they were wriggling out of the cave. He thought with a stirring of alarm: Surely Emily can’t believe I meant that. She had been handling Angel so expertly herself it seemed unbelievable that she could still be child enough to misinterpret so transparent a ruse.

He put Angel down.

“Emily …” he began.

But she had dropped to the floor too and was scrambling out through the hole.

“She’s mad.” Angel giggled. “She’s terribly mad. Now she hates me and she hates you.”

She tripped away from him to the hole and, pausing before she flopped down, waved her fat little hand at him.

“Goodbye, John. Goodbye, dear, dearest John.”

She disappeared through the rock wall.

19

IT WAS six-thirty when Buck came with the food. Not long after the children had gone, John had found the cave unendurably oppressive. He had slipped out through the hole and the hemlocks and cautiously explored the surrounding terrain. The cool evening air revived his spirits and the late sunlight, slanting down through the trees, gleaming on the rock-faces, the ferns, the rolling carpets of ground pine, created a tranquil world where children’s games seemed far more real than the horrors which had taken place in his life. He lay on the ground close to the hemlock wall. A hermit thrush was singing high above him in a beech tree, its song as watery and lyrical as the distant gurgle and splash of the creek. Suddenly he heard the sharp warning chirp of a chipmunk and then somewhere ahead of him a dead twig cracked under a foot. He ducked back into the hemlocks and, peering out, saw Buck running toward him.

As he emerged from the hemlocks again, Buck came up to him. His arms were loaded with cartons and packages.

“Hi, John. Hi.”

His voice was loud and cheerful. With a tensing of nerves, John said:

“Quiet, Buck. Voices carry in the woods. Maybe they’ll hear up at the house.”

“Gee! Sorry.” Buck’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “I said could we have a picnic? Leroy and I, I said. I said Leroy’s parents had said it was okay and could I bring a picnic for two, and Mom was tickled because she didn’t want to bother fixing anything so she said yes and to take what I wanted and I brought …”

He sat down on the ground pine next to John and started to arrange the packages between them.

“I brought strawberry ice-cream and pistachio ice-cream and coffee for you and milk and a couple of Mars bars and … oh, lots of junk, and we can eat together. We can have a picnic.” He looked up anxiously. “Can we eat now? Gee, I’m dying of hunger. Can we eat?”

“Sure,” said John.

“It’s in the papers.” Buck was gobbling strawberry ice-cream out of a carton with a cardboard spoon. “Gee, it’s all over the front page of the Eagle. You should see. Stoneville woman found murdered in cow-barn; artist husband flees. And there’s your description and everything and it’s to be relayed all over everywhere. Anyone who gave a ride to a man answering the following description … And all that about the town meeting, all that about putting the hotel on the lake they were all so het-up about—there’s only a little bit about how old Mr. Carey wanted it voted against and they voted for it anyway. All the rest’s about you. Surprise arrival of John Hamilton at town meeting. Boy! And Pop’s half crazy. You should see him. They’re out of their minds, all of ’em, running around, gabbing, yakking, everyone in Stoneville. It’s a nuthouse. That’s what it is—a nuthouse.”

He glanced up, his broad, friendly face grinning around the ice-cream-laden spoon.

“Gee, if they knew you were here. That’d be something, wouldn’t it? Boy!”

“There’s still a trooper up at the house?”

“That’s what Pop says. They gotta keep a trooper up there. It’s the law, he said. But they don’t figure on anything happening. They don’t know, you see. They figure you’re off some place. Anyone who gave a ride to a man answering the following description…He dropped the empty ice-cream carton and leaned forward eagerly. “Gee, John, whatever it is you want looking for up to the barn—let me go. I can sneak up there easy and, even if they see me, it doesn’t mean a thing. No, sir. I know all them—those troopers. I can just go up to them, any of ’em, and say Hi, Bill, how’s tricks? How’s about a guy investigating this house of horror? I can walk right in, I bet. Man, it’s a cinch. It’s in the bag.”

As he listened, John asked himself: Why not? He knew it was largely the pressure of nervous impatience which made him find Buck’s offer so alluring. But didn’t it make sense anyway? Buck, as Steve’s son, was in a privileged position. It probably wouldn’t matter if he were seen. In fact, he might actually be able to stroll in right under the trooper’s nose. His earlier scruples no longer seemed to have any validity. Why be scrupulous with Steve Ritter? And even though he had allotted the task to Emily, he shouldn’t let himself be ham-strung by the protocol of the children. Emily wouldn’t mind. She’d probably be relieved that she had been spared the ordeal of a lonely, scary search after dark.

He said, “You know the cow-barn. You know where it is, under the studio at the back?”

“Sure I know it. Boy, you mean I can go?”

“If you think you can get away with it.”

“The cow-barn! With it all right there in the papers! Stoneville woman found murdered in cow-barn.”

“Listen, Buck, this is what I want. Right by the door there’s an old ice-chest …”

He told the boy what to look for, some sort of a box perhaps, or, if not a box, then anything that might be lying there loose. But he stressed the bracelet—the gold charm bracelet with the dangling gold initials: Linda.

“Maybe it all won’t be in the ice-chest, Buck. But that’s where I think it is. Look there first and if it isn’t there and you have any time, search the rest of the place. You think you can do it?”

“Sure, sure.” Buck had jumped up. “Don’t you worry. It’s in the bag. I’m this way with the troopers.” He raised a hand with two plump fingers crossed. “That’s the way I am. Boy, I can walk right in there … Well, be seeing you, boss-man.”

He started away and then, remembering the food, came back, grabbed up a Mars bar and dashed off through the trees.

For a while after he had gone John’s new mood of optimism remained. It would be all right. Buck would handle the trooper. He would find what there was to be found. In a few minutes, maybe, everything would be changed.

But gradually, as he sat by the hemlocks and the thrush sang and the creek babbled, the woodland landscape lost its serenity and became increasingly menacing. Anxiety tightened in him and morbid suspicions started to crowd into his mind. Had he been a fool to trust Steve Ritter’s son? What did he really know about Buck? What if he’d already told his father, what if this were just another trap … ? As he felt himself veering toward panic, memories returned of the men crashing after him through the woods and an almost irresistible urge came to run, to abandon this preposterously risky conspiracy of the cave. He should have got in touch with Vickie. That would have been the sensible thing. Why hadn’t he … ?

And then, when the excruciating indecision was reaching its climax, there was Buck strolling nonchalantly through the trees toward him. Incredibly, he was grinning his usual wide, uncomplicated smile and incredibly he was carrying under his arm a flat red-leather box.

The boy came up to him and held the box out to him with a bland, comic-strip-hero casualness.

“This what you want? It was right there in the ice-chest. I didn’t see it at first. I looked every place and I couldn’t see it. There wasn’t anything but an old liquor bottle with liquor in it. Then I saw there was a kind of metal lining in the top part and there was a gap behind the lining and I felt down and it was there. The bracelet’s there okay; the bracelet and lots of other junk. Man, there wasn’t nothing to it. I just went up there. The trooper was sitting in his car. It was George, old Georgie-Porgie, my pal, and he was eating his supper and he didn’t even see me. So I just snuck behind and into the cow-bam and there it was right in the ice-chest like you said.” He ran a hand over his spiky crew-cut hair. “Boy, was that a cinch. Nothing to it. No, sir.”

John took the box. His fingers clumsy with eagerness, he flicked back the little gold clasp and lifted the lid. The bracelet was the first thing to catch his eye. It was exactly as Angel had described it—a broad gold band with five little gold plaques dangling from it. Some of the plaques had the side with the engraved letter face upward. I, he saw … D … A … There was other jewelry too. Earrings, a necklace, a gold ring with a large gleaming stone. A diamond? But he merely flashed them a glance because of the other thing which lay in the box. It was a spool of the tape he used on his tape recorder.

He picked it up and turned it over. A piece of paper was stuck on it and, on the paper, in his own neat script, was written: Mendelssohn—Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage —Kletzki.

For a moment he gazed at it blankly, thinking: This is the tape I couldn’t find in the living-room. Then, gradually, he felt excitement seeping through him. It was the last tape he had recorded and its playing time was half an hour. The Mendelssohn only ran about ten minutes. There had been almost twenty minutes of unused tape at the end of the spool.

So, in his knowledge of Linda, he had almost hit the mark. Not love letters, but a record on tape. A record of what? Some compromising conversation? That must be it. Of course … When had he recorded the Mendelssohn? About a week ago. Then, sometime during the last week after the reviews of the show had come in….

“Gee!” Buck’s voice came through to him. “What is it— that thing? Some sort of typewriter ribbon or something?”

Wasn’t it all now blatantly clear? Linda with a lover. (Who? Steve Ritter? Think of it as Steve.) Linda thinking after the failure of the show: John’s no good to me as a husband; I’ve found someone else who’d be much more satisfactory—if I could swing it. Linda, being Linda, arranging a compromising scene in the living-room and stealthily flicking on the switch of the tape recorder.

Success had come with such astonishing ease that his mind was confused by a multiplicity of thoughts. He picked up the ring and examined it. Wasn’t the square-cut stone a real diamond? And weren’t the pearls in the necklace, if not real, at least cultured? If they were, how could Steve Ritter have afforded such extravagant gifts? And, if he were right about Linda, how could it be Steve anyway? Could even Linda have fooled herself that the way to a better life could conceivably open up to her through Steve Ritter?

No, of course Steve hadn’t been her lover. He saw that now. If he had been, she would never have admitted it. The confession had been a lie after all—or rather a half lie, a tacit admission that she did have a lover but that the lover wasn’t Steve.

Then—who? One of the Carey set? It had to be. If there had been anyone else he would at least have had some knowledge of his existence. Brad? No, not Brad. Brad had been in New York with him all through the period of the murder. Mr. Carey? How could it be Mr. Carey, who, during the key months when the affair must have been going on, had been in hospital? Then Gordon Moreland?

Gordon Moreland running through the woods with the villagers! Gordon Moreland, implacably hostile, pushing Steve Ritter deeper and deeper into his suspicions!

The excitement was making him feel almost drunk.

Here was the tape in his hand. All he had to do was to get the recorder, play the tape and he would know. Where could he play it? At the Fishers’? Why not? The recorder was broken, but it could be fixed. Yes, he would send one of the children to Pittsfield in the morning. And once he’d played the tape, once he knew …

Suddenly all the dangers surrounding him seemed to be only sham, cardboard dangers—even the trooper up at the house.

“Listen, Buck, could you get the trooper to let you into the house?”

The boy’s face shone with delight. “Boy, you want me to go back—to go to the house?”

“You think you could talk him into it?”

“Me? Georgie-Porgie? You kidding? I could talk old Georgie-Porgie into buying my space-suit for, say, twenty-five dollars when it cost only nineteen eighty-five.”

“Then listen. Get him to let you into the house. You know what a tape recorder looks like?”

“A tape recorder?”

“You’ll see it on the record cabinet in the living-room, right by the phonograph amplifier. It’s like a portable phonograph in a leather case. You can’t miss it. If you get in, open the living-room window at the back, drop the recorder down into the flower-bed and then go out again through the front door. When you get your chance, sneak around to the back and bring the recorder down here.” “Boy,” said Buck. “Oh, boy. Just you hold your horses. That’s all. Just you sit here and hold your horses. Little old Super-Buck Ritter will carry out that mission in a flash.” He grinned, thumped his chest and ran off again through the trees.

20

GORDON MORELAND? As he waited, John sat in the sun by the hemlocks, contemplating his potential enemy. He was sure of it now. Linda had always been impressed by Gordon Moreland. He was the celebrity which John should have become and hadn’t; and not only that, he was doubly dependent on Roz both as a wife and a collaborator, an ideal challenge. How satisfying it must have been to Linda to have stolen the husband of the chic winterer-in-Europe. It had been the Parkinson-Raines situation again—the corroding compulsion to compete beyond her league. Linda entangling Gordon Moreland, wheedling gifts out of him, using the affair as a sophisticated secret to bolster her ego, and then, when her dreams of John’s easy success had collapsed with the show at the Denham Galleries, Linda suddenly thinking: Make Gordon marry me.

He could reconstruct it all now. Some time, just before the Raines and Raines letter, Linda had challenged Gordon with the tape. Divorce Roz, marry me—or else. It might have worked with some men, with Brad for example, but it could never have worked with Gordon Moreland. Gordon Moreland was made out of granite like old Mr. Carey. Not even Linda could have succeeded in railroading him into giving up for a penniless neurotic woman a wife whose collaboration was his bread and butter, and a life of cozy respectability as the idol of the Carey set. It would have been her will against his. Had he pleaded for time? Probably. And then … Of course! Linda’s spectacular appearance at Vickie’s birthday party had not been merely to humiliate him. He should have realized that, with his wife, things had always been far more complex than they seemed on the surface. Behind that elaborate front, Linda had been making her final threat. All the time she was telling the Carey set of his decision to refuse the job, she had been speaking directly at Gordon Moreland.

You see? John’s finally proved he’s no good for me. Okay. If I can’t make him change his mind, this is it. Get ready.

And he had. There, announced to the world by Linda, was the news of a violent quarrel in which John had hit her, and the next day he was going to New York. There it was all laid out for Gordon Moreland—the perfect opportunity. He could kill her—and frame it on John. He could order the cement early in the morning when John was still in Stoneville and could still physically have committed the crime, and then, after he’d left for New York …

That was it. All he needed now was to get the recorder and have it repaired—and then it would be over.

In less than half an hour Buck was back again, carrying the recorder and whistling jauntily. Suddenly he remembered, stopped whistling, looking guilty and whispered:

“Man, was I smooth. Boy, I’m telling you. Old Georgie-Porgie—is he a dope! There he was sitting in the car, smoking a cigarette. And I said, So you’ve got to guard the house of horror. And he said, It had to be me stuck out here and not being relieved until midnight. And I said, Gee, think of it. Don’t it give you the creeps with her murdered and all? And he said, What you think I am, a kid? And I said, A kid wouldn’t be scared. And he said, You’re a big mouth, aren’t you? And I said, Want to bet? Want to put a dime on it? I bet I can go right over all that old house in every room and everything and not be scared. I bet you a dime, old Georgie-Porgie. And he laughed and threw out the key to me and said, Okay, a dime on it that you come running outta there in less’n sixty seconds. And I took the key …”

John had opened the case of the recorder and was sitting with it on the ground pine. As Buck’s breathless story rattled on, he examined the machine carefully. Yes, the tubes had gone. Three of them. But otherwise it seemed undamaged. He’d had his wallet in his pocket when he’d run away from the house. There was enough money in it for tubes. Tomorrow one of the kids could thumb a ride into Pittsfield and buy them. Would the electric light have been cut off at the Fishers’? It wasn’t likely, for they were only spending a couple of months in California. But one of the kids could go up there tomorrow and check that too. Yes, with any luck, tomorrow he would be able to play the tape at the Fishers’ and then he would know. And once he knew …

“. . so I opened the window like you said and put out the recorder and I shut the window and I went out again through the front door to Georgie-Porgie and I said, So what about it, Georgie-Porgie? I stayed in over five minutes, didn’t I? And I went upstairs and everything. How about that dime? And he gave me the dime. Boy, that’s what you wanted, isn’t it, John? I got it for you, didn’t I?” Buck’s plump red face was wreathed in smiles of triumph. “Want me to go up again, John? I could do it. I bet I could do it.”

“No, Buck'. That’s all.” John looked at his watch; it was almost eight. “I guess you’d better get home. We don’t want to take any chances.”

“But, gee, John …”

“No, Buck. Thanks a million. You did fine. You were terrific. But now you’d better go home. See you first thing tomorrow and bring some breakfast if you can.”

He wasn’t going to need Emily now. Should he ask Buck to stop off at the Jones’ house and tell the girls not to come? No, he thought. It was better to have them come. It was always safer to have Angel under his eye, and he remembered Emily’s abrupt departure from the cave. He had to make things right with Emily.

After Buck had gone, he took the recorder and Linda’s box into the cave. The candle had gone out again. He put the recorder and the box down in a corner at the back and lay down on Emily’s bed in the darkness.

In his nervous tension, the thought of having to wait until tomorrow for the recorder to be fixed seemed almost unendurable. But it had to be, and once it was fixed … But was that true? The first excitement was over now and he was thinking more soberly. With all the evidence against him, would he be able to exonerate himself merely by offering the troopers the tape? What would it prove? That Linda had been having an affair with Gordon, perhaps. But couldn’t that, just like everything else, be turned against him? What was to stop Captain Green from interpreting it as just another motive for his having killed his wife? He felt the old anxiety crowding back. This wasn’t as nearly over as he had thought. Of course it wasn’t. Somehow he’d have to think out something else— something much more damning …

His thoughts raced ahead, collided with each other and went around in circles. There had to be a way. But nothing came to him and his mind was still churning ineffectually much later when the faint owl cry sounded above him. In a few moments he heard scuffling at the hole in the wall and then Angel’s voice, cooing:

“John? Dear John. Dear, dearest, darling John. Are you there, dear John?”

“I’m here.”

It was pitch dark now and the children were quite invisible to him.

Angel said, “Emily, light the candle.”

There was no reply from Emily.

“Emily!” Angel’s voice was preposterously haughty.

“Light the candle, I said. Didn’t you hear me? John and Louise and Mickey and Cow and I want a candle. Slave, big, fat, drippy slave, light the candle.”

Still Emily made no reply, but John could hear her groping her way past him toward the back of the cave. Soon he heard the spurt of a match and candlelight quivered from behind him. Angel was standing by the hole in the wall, blinking. Under one arm she carried a dilapidated Mickey Mouse, and clutched against her breast was a large brown-and-white toy cow. She smiled at John and then, turning to the orange crate, dropped a low curtsy to Louise and put the Mickey Mouse and the cow down next to her.

“We’ve come to spend the night with you and Louise. Mickey and Cow and me. We’re all going to spend the night while Emily goes off and is eaten by the ghost.” She ran to John, threw her arms around his waist and beamed up at him with swooning sentimentality. “Oh, I love you so much. I love you. I love you.”

Emily came up with the candle in a Coke bottle. She bent and set it down on the floor. John glanced at her anxiously. Her face was a set, cold mask and she deliberately avoided his gaze.

“Do you want me to go up to the bam now?” she said. “I brought a flashlight.”

“Yes,” said Angel. “Go now, go now.”

John said, “It’s okay, Emily. There’s no need to go. Buck was here bringing me something to eat and he knew the trooper. It seemed so much easier that way. So I let him go and it worked.”

Still not looking at him, Emily said, “But you said I was to go.”

“I know I did. I’m sorry if you wanted to do it. But I thought you’d be glad not to have to go.”

“You said it was me. You picked me.”

“Emily dear…” he began.

“Don’t call her dear,” screamed Angel. “Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.”

“Emily …”

“She isn’t dear. We hate her. We all hate her. And she can’t go to the barn and see the ghost because she’s too dopey. She’d do it wrong. Wouldn’t she, John? That’s why you made Buck go because stupid old Emily’s too stupid. Nyah.” Angel started to dance madly around. “Nyah, nyah, nyah.”

Suddenly the set mask of Emily’s face collapsed. Her mouth quivered out of control and tears spurted in her eyes.

“I can’t bear it,” she said. “I’ve tried and tried, but it’s too much. I can’t bear it. I—I wish I was dead.”

She threw her knuckles up against her mouth and then, the pigtail swinging, she spun around and ran toward the hole in the wall.

“Emily…”

John started after her. But before he could reach her she had squeezed in a flash out through the aperture. Angel was still dancing.

“Nyah. She’s gone. Old Emily’s gone.”

He dropped down on the floor by the hole. Behind him, Angel’s voice tilted threateningly upward:

“You’re not to go. You mustn’t go to Emily. If you go to Emily, I’ll tell.”

Ignoring her, he started to ease his way out through the hole.

“I’ll tell. I’ll go to them. I’ll say, I know where wicked, bad John Hamilton is. I’ll scream. There’s a trooper at the house. I’ll scream and he’ll hear me. I’ll scream and yell. I’ll …”

Her voice was cut off abruptly as he pulled himself out into the hemlocks. He scrambled to his feet. It was as dark in the dense growth of trees as it had been in the cave before the candle was lit. Throwing his hands out in front of him, he started through the branches. Ahead, he heard a faint clank of metal. Emily’s bicycle?

“Emily!” he whispered. “Emily! Wait.”

He was suddenly free of the hemlocks. The woods stretched ahead of him dappled with patches of silver moonlight. There was a dull metallic glint. The bicycle. He ran forward. He could see Emily quite clearly then, pushing the bicycle through the trees. He caught up with her and put his hand on her arm. She shuddered violently away from him.

“Don’t touch me.”

“Emily. Dear Emily.”

He eased the bicycle gently out of her grasp and, letting it drop down between the trees, put his arms around her small, quivering body.

“Emily, you know you don’t believe any of that. You know I love you. You know I only sent Buck because it worked out easier that way. Why do you pay any attention to her?”

“You hate me.” Emily was sobbing hopelessly. “You said it. You said you hated me. And I’ve been trying to help. I’ve been trying to do things right.”

He held her more closely. “You know why I said it. It was because of Angel. We’ve got to do what she says. Don’t you see? She can give everything away and she knows it.”

“I hate her.” Emily pressed her face against his chest. “I guess I love her. I know I love her, but I hate her too. She’s on and on all the time. John hates you. John hates you. Stupid, fat, drippy old slave. All the time she’s on at me. I hate her. I want to kill her.”

“But it won’t be for long. Emily, please, everything depends on you. It’ll only be a little while now. I promise.

Let her do whatever she wants. It’ll all be over tomorrow. Of course she’s a brat, a spoiled, jealous, mean little brat, but . .

He broke off and turned sharply as a twig snapped behind them. Vaguely he made out a small form creeping toward them and, as he sprang away from Emily, there was a loud, piercing scream which echoed wildly through the trees around him.

John felt the sweat of panic breaking out on his forehead. He lunged forward and dropped down on Angel. He could hear the deep intake of her breath. She was going to scream again. Just in time, he threw his hand across her mouth. She started to struggle in his grip. “Quick, Emily,” he said. “Get back to the cave.”

“But the trooper! He’ll have heard.”

“I know. But the cave …”

As he picked up the battling Angel in his arms a new sound came, the long, mournful hoot of an owl. It was so realistic that it was some seconds before he realized that Emily had made it.

“There, John. It’ll be all right. He’ll hear the owl. He’ll think it was a rabbit and an owl. That’s what he’ll think. It’s all right. Follow me—back to the cave.”

Her voice was happy and excited because she’d saved him. Emily was herself again. In his pleasure, even the ferocious kicking Angel in his arms seemed to lose some of her menace. Emily slipped away to the hemlocks. He followed. She disappeared through the hole and then her hand came out to him, illuminated by the faint candlelight behind, and he heard her whisper:

“Push her legs in. Keep your hand over her mouth. I’ll pull. Then when we get her in it’ll be all right.”

They got Angel into the cave. John wriggled in after her. He found Angel beating at Emily with her fists. He pulled her away and she swung around, starting to rain blows on him. Her face was red and distorted with fury.

“I heard”—the fists went on flailing ferociously—“I heard what you said. I’m a brat, you said. A spoiled, jealous, mean brat. That’s what you said. I heard. I heard. Louise heard. Everyone heard.”

Abruptly she spun away, dashed to her bed and dropped down on it, kicking her toes against the ground in a frenzy of rage.

“Tomorrow. I’ll tell tomorrow. You can’t stop me. No one can stop me. I’ve got to go back. If I don’t go back, Mother will know. I’ve got to go back and when I go back I’ll tell. I’ll tell them all. Emily’s hiding John Hamilton. Emily’s hiding John Hamilton in the cave.”

John looked down at her. his heart sinking. She meant it, of course. There was no doubting the bitter implacability of the little girl’s fury. It was more terrifying almost than Linda’s rages. He had antagonized Angel forever. And he couldn’t stop her telling. He knew as well as she did that he and Emily could not keep her here by force. Whatever story Emily might invent, Mrs. Jones wasn’t going to be talked into accepting the disappearance of a seven-year-old daughter. No, the children thing had been hopeless anyway. Tomorrow Angel, the rejected one, would go to the village—and that would be that.

“I’ll tell.” Angel’s screaming voice was still echoing around the cave. “I’ll tell.”

Emily had been standing quietly at his side. Suddenly she flashed him a glance and then, with a new, exaggerated swagger, strolled over to Angel and looked down at her.

“You won’t tell,” she said. “You think you’re smart, but you won’t tell.”

“I will. I will.” Angel turned up a face tear-stained and puffy with loathing. “You’ll go to prison. Both of you. They’ll put you in prison for years and years and years.”

“No, we won’t either. We won’t go to prison.”

Emily laughed and, whirling around, ran to the orange crate.

She swept up Louise and the mouse and the cow and, crossing to John, thrust them into his arms.

“Keep them. Don’t let her get them.”

“Louise!” Angel had sprung to her feet. Emily rushed at her and, grabbing an arm, twisted it behind her back.

“Tomorrow we’ll go home when it’s light, but you won’t tell because John will keep Louise and Mickey and Cow. And if you tell, if you ever breathe a word, he’ll kill them. He’ll tear them up; he’ll pull them apart; he’ll mash them; he’ll gouge out their eyes. He’ll kill them.”

“No!” As she struggled, Angel’s eyes were bulging with horror. “No, no. Give me Louise. Give me Louise.”

“He’ll kill them. That’s what he’ll do. So swear. Do it. Swear on Louise. Cross your heart and hope to die. Say it. Say it.”

Angel’s scream soared to a thin squeak. She gave one last desperate tug to release her arm and then collapsed into whimpering defeat.

“I’ll swear. I’ll swear on Louise.”

“Then swear.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die on Louise, I swear that—that I won’t tell.”

“Won’t ever tell.”

“Won’t ever tell. I swear.”

“And you’ll leave Louise and Cow and Mickey here with John. That way you’ll know. All the time you’ll know that if you break your oath he’ll kill them.”

“I’ll know. I’ll know.”

Angel was sobbing desperately. Emily released her arm.

Instantly the little girl dashed to her bed and flopped down on it.

“There.” Emily turned to John, her face seraphic with the delights of revenge. “That’s fixed her. Now let’s go to bed. You’d better sleep by the hole—right across the hole. That way she can’t get out.”

John’s feeling of relief had been delayed. It was only then, as he looked at Emily, that he felt it flooding through him. She’d done it. Wonderful Emily, she’d done it. There was a respite. The recorder could be fixed and he would think of something. If, perhaps, he could work out a trap …

“Is that all right? To go to sleep now?”

“Sure, Emily.”

“You can have a half of Angel’s bed. We’ll pull out the pine needles.”

“No,” said John. “I’m okay.”

“You can have it.” Emily turned back to Angel and said in the clipped voice of authority, “Take out half your needles; bring them here to make John’s bed.”

Meekly, her nose snuffling, Angel got up and started to pull back her blanket. Let it happen, thought John. Let Emily have her victory; let Angel learn something about defeat.

But Emily had run to Angel. “No, I didn’t mean it. No. Keep your bed. John can have mine and you and I can sleep together.”

“But, Emily …”

Angel looked up at her sister, her eyes swollen with tears; then, suddenly, she threw her arms around her and buried her face against her.

“Emily, Emily, he won’t hurt Louise, will he?”

“Of course he won’t, baby, because you’re not going to tell.”

“No, I won’t tell. I won’t tell. Oh, I hate being bad and wicked. I hate it.”

“It’s okay, Angel. You go lie down. I’ll fix John’s bed and then I’ll come to yours.”

Angel dropped down on her bed. Emily went to the other bed, pulled back the blanket and rearranged the pine needles by the mouth of the cave.

She said to John, “You’d better keep Louise and Mickey and Cow. She’s meaning to be good now, but you can’t ever tell with her.”

She moved away from the finished bed and picked up the candle.

“Okay, John? Shall I blow it out?”

“Okay.”

As darkness descended, John lay down on the pine needles, the dolls tucked between him and the wall. It would be all right. Somehow he could work things out. A trap. That was it. He would think out a trap. He was aware that Emily was still standing by him. He couldn’t see her, but he could feel her presence close to him.

“John.” Her voice came in a whisper.

“Yes, Emily.”

She dropped down by him. He could feel her hand groping out for his.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to act that way—like a kid. But I couldn’t help it. I felt so terrible.”

He squeezed her hand. “You’re my girl.”

“John.”

“Yes, Emily.”

“I love you.”

21

EMILY’s hand on his shoulder awakened him.

“It’s daylight. Let us out, John, and pick up the dolls. Don’t let her get them. We’ll be back as soon as we can.”

For a long time after the girls had slipped away he lay there with the dolls in his arms, thinking and getting nowhere. Eventually he dropped the dolls and squeezed out of the cave. The light in the woods was still cold and grey but there was a hint of sunlight-to-come and the air was wonderfully invigorating. He pushed through the hemlocks and then, gaining courage, moved on to the creek. He knelt down beside it and scooped water up over his face.

Suddenly it came to him. A trap needed a bait and he had the bait. Gordon Moreland just might have thought he’d destroyed the tape with the others in the living-room, but it was much more likely that he knew it still existed somewhere. If he was given the least hint of its whereabouts he would be desperately eager to get at it. Let him know, then, that the tape existed. Somehow … How?

His reflection glimmered back at him from the sliding water. It looked gaunt and unfamiliar with a day’s growth of beard. He should have had Buck bring his razor from the house.

Buck—the children. Of course. Let Gordon know through the children. Have Timmie babble out some story about the children finding a box with jewels in it and something else like a typewriter ribbon? Timmie? Father and son again. Did that matter? Yes, but. . .

Beyond the creek he saw something white moving through the pine trees. He dropped down on to his face among the ferns. Peering through the fronds, he saw Buck in blue jeans and a T-shirt running to the creek bank, his arms piled with packages. He stood up and called softly: “Buck.”

The boy saw him and came panting up.

“Hi, John. I brought our breakfast.”

“Any news?”

“Boy, is it a nuthouse? Pop, he’s fit to be tied. And Mr. Moreland! He was calling up all last night. Any news? Why aren’t you getting anywheres? They’re all of ’em fit to be tied. If they knew! Man, if they knew…!”

John found he was ravenously hungry and grabbed at random from the packages.

Timmie telling his story that the children had found a box? Where? At the Fishers’ house maybe? Somewhere in the garage or under the porch steps? Gordon and Linda had used the Fisher house; Gordon should believe it was consistent with Linda’s character to have kept her cache not at her own house but at the Fishers’… Yes, if Timmie said they’d found the box and realized the jewels were valuable and hadn’t dared to take it, that would send Gordon dashing straight to the Fisher house, and if John was there, not alone, but with a witness, the trap could be set. Vickie could be the witness. Why not? She had avowed herself his champion. He could send one of the kids to her with a message. The box of course would be hidden in a prearranged place as a bait. Not with the tape actually in it, but …

He turned to Buck. “You know that tape in the box— the thing you thought was a typewriter ribbon. I’ve got a lot of junk stacked up against the wall of the studio, broken records, bits of canvases. There are six or seven of those tapes mixed in with the other stuff. Could you run up and get one without being seen?

“Gee! Boy! Now?”

“Yes.”

Grinning, Buck jumped up and leaped away across the stepping-stones toward the pines.

It would all have to be carefully timed. Since he would have to go himself to the Fisher house, wouldn’t it be safer to leave it until nightfall or at least until evening? Yes, the recorder would be fixed by then, too. He could play the tape first with Vickie at the Fishers’, then they would know, and later, when Gordon came for the box it would be doubly damning. He’d have to coach Timmie and sometime that evening, as late as possible, Timmie could tell the story to Gordon. But could Timmie be trusted? He felt a diminution of confidence. Timmie with his nerves! Timmie who had blurted out his “secret” to Angel! Everything would depend upon Timmie and …

He heard the sharp crack of a twig beyond the pines. Buck wouldn’t be back already. He threw himself down again among the ferns and, watching through them, saw Leroy with a package in his hand hurrying toward the creek. He sat up again and Leroy, seeing him, broke into a dazzling smile and came springing over the stepping-stones.

“I’m here,” he announced.

“Hi, Leroy.”

“And I’m late and I know it’s bad to be late but I went to get Timmie. I went first to Timmie’s house to have us come together and he can’t come. His mother says so. She talked to me. She said he was in because he had a fever because he got over-excited yesterday. So he’s in bed.” He lowered long lashes and then raised them again. “So he can’t come and she says I’m to go to see him at tea-time, at five o’clock, because he’ll be better then and I’ll cheer him up, she says.” He held out the package. “And I’ve brought this for you. It’s a sandwich with peanut butter and jelly and cottage cheese and … I made it. I brought it for you.”

For a moment John’s heart sank, but only for a moment. It was better this way, of course it was. The unstable Timmie and all the ethical problems surrounding him could now be shelved. Leroy could do it when he went to visit Timmie at five. He could tell the tale of the box with the jewels and the typewriter ribbon to Timmie in front of Gordon. Or, better still… The excitement was back. The little plaques on the bracelet! The story could be that the children hadn’t taken the jewels, but they’d broken the bracelet by mistake and each had kept a plaque to play with. Leroy could be taking Timmie his plaque. If Gordon Moreland saw Leroy handling one of the little plaques with its tell-tale L or N or D, he would instantly demand to know where Leroy had found it. The story could be told without Timmie having to be present at all.

That was it. The box with the substitute tape, Leroy as the carrier of the bait, and Vickie …

“Leroy, you didn’t see Mrs. Carey this morning, did you?”

“Yes, she was up. She came in the kitchen. She saw me making the sandwich.”

“Did she say if she was going out today?”

“She said what was I doing and I said I was going out in the woods and she said, What energy, Leroy. I’m not going to move a muscle. I’m going to sit and read all day. That’s what she said. That …”

There it was then. Vickie as the witness.

The trap.

Soon Buck was back with the tape, reporting that the new trooper on duty at the house hadn’t seen him. They went to the cave and in a few minutes Emily and Angel returned, each of them carrying a brown paper sack of provisions. Angel, subdued and silent, went straight to the dolls and, disapprovingly dusting them off and arranging Louise’s skirt, replaced them on the orange crate and sat down beside them.

Now that John knew exactly what had to be done, it was easy to organize the children. He checked the numbers of the tubes he needed, wrote them on a slip of paper, gave Buck the money and sent him off with Leroy to thumb a ride into Pittsfield.

“Just hand in the paper and say your father sent you, Buck.”

After the boys had gone, he took the tape out of the red leather box, with Emily eagerly watching him, and put it in his pocket. He rewound, as effectively as he could, the tangled tape Buck had brought, substituted it in the box for the Mendelssohn, and then, twisting the five little plaques from the bracelet, slipped them into his pocket too. While he was working, he decided that it would be more convincing for Linda’s fake cache to be somewhere outside the Fisher house. Behind the wooden steps at the back which led to the screen porch. That would do.

He had chosen Emily to set the trap and explained exactly what she had to do—to hide the box behind the Fishers’ porch steps, then to find some way into the house itself and to check that the electric light had not been turned off.

Having solemnly repeated his instructions, she took the box and slipped away out of the cave.

While the other children were there Angel had paid him no attention, but the moment they were alone she left the dolls and came tentatively over to him.

“You’re not mad with me, are you?”

“No, Angel. I’m not mad.”

“I’m not really the head of the game, am I? It’s Emily, isn’t it?”

“You can be the head too if you want to be.”

“Can I? Can I?” Her face broke into a broad smile.

“Can I do something then? Like the others? All the others are doing something.”

“You can keep me company. You can come out and sit by the creek and wait for the others to come back.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Oh, yes.”

They went out together and sat on a rock by the creek. The sun was slanting down through the trees now in wide yellow shafts. Angel nuzzled up to him.

“I do love you. I do.”

“I’m glad.”

“And I didn’t tell and I don’t really mind about you throwing Louise and Mickey and Cow in the dirt.”

“I’m sorry, Angel.”

With his new sense of achievement he could feel affection even for Angel. He smiled down at the small cozening face which even now at its sunniest still managed to look affected.

“John, dear.”

“Yes, Angel.”

“Could I bring Louise and Mickey and Cow out? Could they sit in the sunshine too?”

“Why, sure.”

She scrambled up and ran away toward the cave. The boys should be back by noon, he thought. He would coach Leroy and then—when? At four—he’d send Emily with a message to Vickie asking her to meet him at the Fishers’. He’d slip up there through the woods with the recorder and wait for her. Then Leroy could go off to the Morelands’ to spring the trap. It would still be light, of course, but, working through the children, it would be impossible to make it any later. It didn’t really matter. No one was likely to see him stealing through the woods.

His thoughts were snapped by the realization that Angel hadn’t returned. He jumped up and ran back to the cave.

He wriggled inside. Angel wasn’t there; neither were the dolls.

Anxiety tilting over into panic, he squeezed out of the cave again and, brushing through the hemlocks, started to run back to the creek. As he ran he caught a glimpse of Angel, clutching the dolls, disappearing into the pine trees beyond the creek.

His heart pounding, he dashed across the brook after her. Beyond the pines there was only the overgrown slope between him and the trooper at the house. But that couldn’t matter. He ran to the pines and through them without any attempt to conceal himself. Angel was only a few yards ahead of him, running stumpily up the slope toward the house.

In a couple of seconds he caught up with her, but, before he could grab her, she let out a piercing scream. He swept her up off the ground, slipping his hand over her mouth. The dolls fell, scattering over the weeds. With her struggling in his arm, he ran back through the pines and over the brook and soon, panting and sweating, he had her back in the cave again.

A few minutes later, when he was still trying to subdue her, Emily came back.

“It’s all right and the lights are on. I left a window open and I did everything …”

“Emily, Angel tried to get away with the dolls. I caught her on the slope up to the house, but she screamed. The trooper must have heard, and the dolls are there.”

“You let her do it? I told you. I warned you.”

“Quick, Emily. Get the dolls and, if the trooper’s there, tell him something, anything …”

“Yes, quick.”

She disappeared and in about ten minutes she was back with the dolls.

“It’s all right. I’ve got them.” She threw them contemptuously down on the floor and Angel screamed. “And the trooper, he was there. He was standing looking at the dolls and he said, ‘What’s all this?’ And I said Angel and me had fought about the dolls and it’s all right. He believed me.”

At twelve-thirty the boys came back with the tubes. John fitted them into the recorder. It was, he told himself, going to be all right after all. Even Angel, sulking with the dolls on her bed in the corner, an admitted Enemy in their midst, didn’t matter anymore. .She could be kept here until it was all over. They ate lunch and afterwards he coached Leroy. The situation was so flexible that he would have to depend on Leroy for details, but he drilled him in the essentials. Emily insisted that she should be the one to stay and guard Angel, so Buck was to be sent for Vickie. John briefed him and exactly at four sent him off. A few minutes later he picked up the recorder.

“Okay, Emily. You’ll take care of Angel. And. Leroy, you know what to do. Leave here at four-thirty by Emily’s watch; that will get you to the Morelands’ by five. And if it’s Mrs. Moreland who comes to the door and not Mr. Moreland, tell her you have a special message for Mr. Moreland from the Careys.”

“To say to come fishing tomorrow.”

“That’s right. And, when he comes and you give him the message, that’s when you bring out the plaque and play with it. Be sure he sees it. Have it right there in your hand … Okay?”

“Okay.” Leroy smiled down in shy pride at the little gleaming plaque with an L on it in his palm. “Gee, it’s the most important, isn’t it? It’s the biggest part of all.”

“Yes, Leroy.”

“Gee!”

John stood looking at the children. It was all right, wasn’t it? He hadn’t forgotten anything? He hadn’t given them anything to do that was beyond their capabilities?

Pushing the recorder ahead of him, he slipped out through the hole.

As he started through the woods, the inevitable doubts began to invade him. Had he cut the timing too fine? The Careys’ house was nearer the Fishers’ than the Morelands’. Vickie should be there at least half an hour before Gordon, even if Gordon were to come right away. No, the timing was all right. He would be able to play the tape to Vickie first. That in itself would be almost enough, but when later they caught Gordon red-handed …

It took him longer than he had expected to curve up through the woods to the back of the Fishers’. When he reached it, the lawn was unmowed and the house from behind looked already deserted as if the Fishers had been away for years. He went straight to the porch steps and, dropping down, peered behind them. Yes, the box was there. It was the back window on the right of the living-room which Emily had left cracked. He found it almost a third open from the bottom and it pushed up easily. As he scrambled into the living-room, his excitement soared to a peak. Vickie wouldn’t be here yet, but he would play the tape. The front windows of the house looked out directly on to the dirt road. He was dangerously exposing himself. Anyone passing would hear the music. But that would have to be risked. It wouldn’t be for long.

He put the recorder down on the Fishers’ baby grand piano and plugged it into the wall socket. The excitement fluttering in his stomach like birds’ wings, he took the tape out of his pocket, fitted it on to the machine and flicked the player switch. The tubes lit up; the tape whirred.

But no sound came.

He cursed under his breath. The tubes had to be all right. Then—what? The amplifier? He pulled out the plug, lifted the machine down on to the floor and started to examine it with growing tension. Perhaps the fall had broken a connection. He’d need a screwdriver. Somewhere the Fishers must have a screwdriver.

He got up and hurried into the kitchen, controlling his agitation. Where did they keep their tools? He pulled out drawers, opened cabinets. There was nothing. He ran down into the cellar. Finally in a cabinet in a corner he found a tool chest. He took a screwdriver and pliers and ran back to the living-room.

He glanced at his watch. It was five-fifteen already. Vickie would be arriving any minute. Well, it couldn’t be helped. If he couldn’t get it ready in time … He started to work feverishly. Tension made his fingers clumsy. As he disassembled the machine he was constantly looking at his watch. Five-twenty-five. Five-thirty. Leroy had set the trap at the Morelands’ half an hour ago. What had happened to Buck and Vickie? What if Vickie had changed her mind after talking to Leroy and had gone out after all… ? Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. Why hadn’t he made sure of Vickie beforehand? Without a witness the trap would have no validity at all.

What if Gordon arrived first?

At twenty to six he located the trouble. With an hysterical deftness born of panic he repaired the connection and started to reassemble the machine. Now his plan seemed to him to make no sense at all. What if Vickie had lost faith in him and was an enemy too? And, even if she did come, where should they stand so that they could see Gordon and he couldn’t see them? That was all right. Behind the curtains, in the rear window. From there there was an uninterrupted view of the porch steps. But …

It was a quarter to six. Something must have gone wrong with Vickie. There was no doubt at all about it now. Something …

From a long way off in the woods behind the house he heard a sound. It came again. Wasn’t it a man’s shout? He ran to the window. Yes, he could hear it distinctly. Somewhere off to the right, near his own house, a man shouted. Another man shouted back,

The village again? Steve and the villagers? The dream?

“Mr. Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton …”

He heard the thud of running feet and, just as he ducked behind the curtain, saw Leroy coming around the side of the house.

“Mr. Hamilton.”

He showed himself at the window. Leroy dashed up, panting, his face taut with distress.

“Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Hamilton, it’s all gone wrong.” He started to scramble up to the window. John caught his arms and swung him into the room. Leroy was panting:

“I went. I went like you said. And Mrs. Moreland opened the door, but before I could say that about my message, she said, ‘Come in, come in. We’re all here and we’re giving a party’, and she took me into the living-room and Timmie was there with them and they were all there, Mr. Carey and Mrs. Carey and Mr. and Mrs. Carey’s mother and father. They were all there, drinking tea. And I had the little gold thing in my hand like you said and I didn’t know what to do but I figured I had to say what you said, so I went up to Timmie and Mr. Moreland was right there and I gave Timmie the gold thing and I said it was for him and we’d found the box under the Fishers’ porch steps with the jewels and the typewriter thing and they were all listening and Timmie took the gold thing and he was terribly excited and he said, ‘Did you really find it or is it part of the game?’ And then he said, all excited, ‘I did my bit of the game. I stayed home and I never did tell. Just like John said .. .’ And Mr. Moreland swung around and said, ‘John? Did you say John? What is this?’ And Timmie got scared. And …”

Leroy’s eyes, tormented with shame, were fixed on John’s face.

“And it wasn’t my fault. I did what you said. Honest I did. But Timmie got scared. And they all crowded around him, saying, ‘John. What do you mean—John.’ And he cried. And he sat there and he cried and they went on and on and he told them. ‘It’s the cave,’ he said. ‘John’s in Angel’s cave.’ And they were all dashing about and old Mr. Carey went to the phone and he called Buck’s father. I heard him. Timmie was crying and Mr. Carey was saying on the phone, ‘Get a posse right away. John Hamilton’s in the woods … ’ and I didn’t wait. I just ran away. They didn’t think about me and I ran away and I got my bicycle and I came …”

Off in the woods a cry rang out again. Yes, the nightmare was back. Vickie was out of the picture. Steve and the village were on their way back to the cave, and in the cave they would find Angel, the Enemy. Angel would direct them here to the Fishers’.

But Gordon had heard the story. Surely then Gordon would slip off in the confusion and come anyway. And there was a witness. Leroy was a witness.

Yes, if Gordon came it might still …

The shouts were ringing around the woods. He dropped down to the floor and screwed the last screws in the recorder into place.

“Mr. Hamilton—did I do all right?”

“Yes, Leroy. It wasn’t your fault.”

He lifted the recorder up on to the piano again. As he bent to put the plug in the wall socket he suddenly stiffened.

A car was coming up the road outside.

22

HE RAN to the front window with Leroy and drew the boy back into the screen of the curtains.

“Watch what he does, Leroy. It’s terribly important.”

The sound of the oncoming car grew louder. Then the car itself appeared from behind the maples at the roadside. It was the Careys’ old convertible. It stopped and Vickie and Buck jumped out. Relief surging through him, he ran out of the front door toward them.

“I got her,” Buck said. “She’d gone to the Morelands’, but I got her.”

“John!” Vickie’s face was pinched with anxiety.

“Quick,” he said. “Park the car further up the road out of sight. And then come back.”

For a moment she stood looking at him searchingly, then she hurried to the car and drove off. He went with the two children into the house. Soon Vickie came running in through the front door, closing it behind her.

“I’ve hidden it up beyond the trees. John, they’ve gone to the cave.”

“I know. Leroy told me.”

“And you were there all the time with the children!”

He poured it all out to her while her eyes fixed on his face and the sound of the posse, nearer now, rang out in the woods beyond. Had they got to the cave yet? Had Angel redirected them?

“… so he’ll have to come for the box, Vickie. And with you as a witness …”

“Gordon!”

“It’s got to be Gordon. And once we’ve seen him …”

“Listen.” Her voice cut in sharply. “A car’s coming.”

He heard it too.

“Quick, Leroy, Buck, stay at the front window. Don’t let him see you. Quick.”

He hurried Vickie to the back window which looked out on to the porch steps. Excitement was balancing his panic fear of the men in the woods. Vickie had come. And Gordon was coming.

For a few more seconds he heard the drone of the car; then it stopped. So Gordon wasn’t driving right up to the house? No, of course he wouldn’t do that. He’d leave the car further down the road as if he’d come to join the posse; then he’d slip up through the trees. As they waited, frozen against the wall, the silence around the house made the noises in the woods sound like a tumult.

“Buck,” he whispered. “Can you see anything?”

“No, the car stopped.”

“Yes.” It was Leroy’s voice, high and wabbly. “He’s there. He’s coming through the trees down to the left. Oh, I can’t see him anymore. But I saw him. He’s gone. He’s gone around to the back.”

Tensely John moved away from Vickie to the other rear window and peered out behind the curtain. He could see the man clearly now. He was running up across the lawn toward them.

And it wasn’t Gordon; it was Brad.

Feeling faintly sick, he slipped back to the other window and put his arm around Vickie’s waist. She smiled up at him quickly. His mouth was dry. He tightened the pressure of his arm around her waist. Brad appeared then outside the window, only a few feet from them. He felt Vickie’s body go rigid. For one moment Brad hesitated, looking furtively from left to right; then he went straight to the porch steps, dropped down and felt behind them. His hand came out with the box. Standing there in the full sunlight, he opened the box, took out the decoy tape, put it in his pocket and, dropping down again, replaced the box behind the steps.

While John watched in an agony of bewilderment, he started running away down the lawn in the direction of the voices in the woods.

Brad! he thought. Of course, everything he’d reconstructed about Linda and Gordon could apply equally well, better maybe, to Linda and Brad. But Brad had been in New York with him all the time. It couldn’t be Brad. It. . .

He turned to Vickie, crippled with embarrassment for what he’d done to her. Her face was stricken. She looked crumpled and old. The boys had come running over to them, hovering, solemn and subdued.

In a sudden, fierce voice Vickie said, “Play the tape.” “But, Vickie …”

“Play the tape. Then we’ll know.”

He crossed to the recorder, plugged it into the wall socket and flicked on the player switch. The tubes lit up, the tape whirred, and then the serene opening bars of the Mendelssohn floated through the room. For a moment he stood returning Vickie’s haunted gaze, then, from the rear window, Buck cried:

“They’re coming. All of them, they’re coming up the lawn. It’s Pop and Mr. Carey and George Hatch … And, gee, they’ve got guns. They …”

John moved to switch off the recorder.

“No,” said Vickie. “Let it play.”

She grabbed his hand and together they ran to join the children behind the curtain at the window. Fifteen or twenty men were streaming up from the woods on to the lawn. In the van John saw Steve Ritter and old Mr. Carey and one of the men in blue jeans. All three of them carried rifles. Behind them in the group he made out Gordon Moreland and Brad and, yes, running among them, Emily. But none of it seemed to matter to him anymore. All that mattered was his new anguish for Vickie. The men were all on the lawn now; they were marshalling into a phalanx behind Steve and Mr. Carey.

“John Hamilton.” It was Steve Ritter who roared his name and then the others took it up, bringing a faint echo of the nightmare.

“John Hamilton … John Hamilton …”

He said, “I’m going out.”

“Are you crazy? They’ll shoot. Let me. Yes, John, stay there. Let me.”

Vickie’s fingers clutched into his arm; then she ran away from him out on to the screen-porch. He heard the door pushed open and then saw her running toward the men. Behind him the solo flute rippled, leading the orchestra into the bustling central section of the overture.

Vickie had gone straight to Steve and her father-in-law. Gordon Moreland hurried to join them and then, very slowly and casually, Brad strolled up.

“Gee, John.” It was Buck. “Are they gonna get you? Gee, John, what are we gonna do?”

“It’s okay, Buck.”

Vickie was talking rapidly to Steve. The “Prosperous Voyage” theme soared from the recorder. At length, glancing over her shoulder, Vickie started back toward the house. Steve, Mr. Carey, Gordon Moreland, Brad and a couple of the villagers came after her. John saw Emily run up, looking distractedly toward the house. Then she plunged after the others, but one of the men grabbed her and pulled her back.

Vickie and the men crowded into the room which was resounding now with the music. Gordon Moreland was avid, old Mr. Carey’s face was heavy with disapproval, Brad kept his eyes on the ground. Steve Ritter, smiling the old white sardonic smile, stood watching John.

“So you fooled us—you and the kids. What d’you know?” He jerked his head toward the recorder. “Is that the tape Vickie’s talking about?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the pay-off? Vickie says it proves you didn’t do it. I don’t get it. Music. What does music prove?”

The drums were thundering. The overture was building up to the finale. Any minute now … John’s eyes flashed to Vickie. Had she told about Brad? Wasn’t that expecting too much? She returned his gaze with a kind of dead intensity.

“Wait,” she said. “Let it play, Steve. Then we’ll know.” The full orchestra roared above the drums, then it subsided and a snatch of the “Prosperous Voyage” theme came again. John stood, digging his nails into his palms. There seemed to be nothing now but the music and the eyes, the bright, cautious eyes, watching him.

The music stopped. There was a whir of empty tape. John turned to Brad. He was by the window, his face a greyish white.

For a moment there was total silence except for the whir of the tape; then, suddenly, there was a little giggling laugh. It sounded so realistic that it could have been someone laughing in the room, but it was Linda’s laugh, and then, softly, caressingly, Linda’s voice said:

“Relax, darling. He won’t be back for hours. He never is when he’s out with the kids. Really, a retarded husband has his advantages … Oh, darling, the ring is so wonderful, but you shouldn’t. You’re mad to spend all that money.”

And then, behind the faint surface scratch of the tape, Brad’s voice came:

“It wasn’t anything. You know that, Linda. If it helps to make you happy. My God, when I think of what you have to put up with.”

“It’s not too bad. Honestly it isn’t. Not now I’ve got you. Brad, if you knew how I need you.”

“Not as much as I need you.”

“Darling, do you mean that? Do you really mean that?”

“Of course I mean it.”

Linda laughed again. The laugh’s cozening intimacy was terrible. John was keeping his eyes from Vickie, looking straight past Steve at Brad.

“But it’s different with you. You’ve got Vickie. You …”

“Don’t talk about Vickie.”

“But how can I help it when you’re married to her?”

“Linda, please. I’ve told you the deal on Vickie.”

“Oh, I know I’m silly, but tell me again. Darling, it helps so much when you tell me; it’s the one thing that gives me strength. What you said was really true? You don’t love her?”

“Love her! Do you of all people have to be told that? I never loved her. From the first it was nothing—nothing at all. I told you. It was Dad. The mill was in a desperate way, debts, God knows what. Dad had done everything, straight and crooked, I guess. And then Vickie came along with all that money. Dad said she was a gift from heaven. If I married her, we could save the mill. If I didn’t, maybe we’d both end up in jail. Linda, you must believe me. I didn’t mind her. She was perfectly harmless and when it meant so much to …”

With a sudden violent movement Vickie had sprung across the room and snapped off the recorder switch. She spun around. Her eyes, bright in a dead white face, settled for a moment on Brad, then they moved to Steve Ritter.

“You heard. And now you know. John set a trap with another tape and he fell into the trap. I saw him. John saw him. He went to the box and took out the tape.”

She ran across the room, plunged her hand into Brad’s jacket pocket and brought out the decoy tape.

“There.” She threw it to Steve Ritter. “Now you know.”

As he watched, Linda was still obsessively in John’s mind; Linda, the cannibal, eating up the wretched Brad as she had tried to eat him up, never faltering in her devious plan, turning on the recorder, wheedling out of Brad an admission which would keep him tied to her for ever—the admission of a crooked company and an even more crooked marriage.

The men were all standing in transfixed silence, looking from Vickie to Brad. Finally Steve Ritter moistened his lips.

“So you say it’s that way, Vickie. Brad got kind of tangled up with Linda, out of his depth, and when it all got too much …”

It was then that Mr. Carey moved. He had been standing perfectly still. Now, his face thunderous, he turned to Steve.

“You heard the accusation she’s trying to make and you know it’s nonsense. How could my son possibly have killed Mrs. Hamilton and buried her under that cement floor. In the morning? When Hamilton was still there in the house. Preposterous. And after that he was in New York. I sent him there myself on business. He was there all the time and Hamilton here is a witness.” He glanced at John. “Isn’t that true? Wasn’t Brad with you all the time?’1

John was looking at Brad who stood by the window, his shoulders stooped, his eyes on the ground. So …

“Yes, Mr. Carey, he was in New York with me.”

“But he took the tape!” The words came explosively from Vickie.

“And you can tell them why.” Mr. Carey swung around, glaring at her with a malignity which was terrifying. “Can’t you, Vickie? You can tell them. Or do you want me to?”

The two of them stood watching each other, the antagonism crackling between them.

Then, in a very quiet voice, Vickie said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”

“No, you haven’t, because you didn’t realize I was listening at the Morelands’. You didn’t know that I heard when you drew Brad aside and said, ‘Go to the Fishers’ and get that box.’” Mr. Carey flung out an accusing finger at her. “You must have enjoyed that. It must have given you a very satisfactory sensation—not only to have killed the woman who came between you and your husband, but also, in the end when your first plan failed, to be able to incriminate my son in the murder …”

In the uproar that ensued, John felt excitement pulsing. So—it was all right. It was going to be all right.

Steve Ritter was staring at Vickie. She was standing very stiffly, her face scrawled with astonishment and anger.

“Steve.” When Steve Ritter turned to him, John said, “We might as well get this over.”

“Over? With Vickie … ?”

“Whoever called the hardware store to order cement, using my name, must be the murderer, mustn’t it?”

“Sure, sure, I guess so.”

“He called at nine in the morning. The man in the store remembers that clearly. Even if you imagine Vickie could fake a man’s voice, she couldn’t possibly have made that call. That day she’d been on the lake with Leroy fishing since dawn. They didn’t get back until after ten.” He looked around for Leroy and saw him hovering with Buck behind the thin, alert figure of Gordon Moreland. “That’s right, isn’t it, Leroy?”

“Yes,” he said. “We were out fishing, yes.”

“So much then for that fantastic accusation of Vickie. But you know now, don’t you? Everyone knows. There’s no doubt about it now.”

Slowly, savoring this moment which, against all expectations, had finally come, John turned to Brad.

“Are you that much under his thumb? Are you going to stand there and let him accuse Vickie without doing a thing about it? Linda decided to marry you, didn’t she? That’s why she made the tape. She threatened you with it and you were scared, far too scared to get out of your own mess yourself. But there was always Daddy. There’d been Daddy to fix your rich marriage for you and for himself, and now there was Daddy to rescue you from the clutches of Linda. You went to him, didn’t you? After Linda had given her final threat at the birthday party, you had that long ‘business’ conference with him. You confessed the whole miserable foul-up. I’m in a terrible jam. It’s not only my marriage. It’s the company. I let her know the company had been crooked and that you used Vickie’s money to get you out of the hole … You were terrified, weren’t you? But Daddy wasn’t. Just leave this to me, Brad. You get down to New York, out of the way, and when you come back …”

Anger and contempt were merged now with his excitement.

“After that, you didn’t know, did you? After you came back, you couldn’t be sure. Maybe I’d done your job for you. Maybe miraculously I’d done what you wanted to be done, just when you needed it being done. That’s what Daddy told you, wasn’t it? Oh, he hadn’t done a thing. He hadn’t any idea what had become of Linda. But you couldn’t have been sure. Could Daddy really have liquidated her—ruthlessly wiped out the menace to the family and the family firm? Couldn’t Daddy have done that? Wasn’t he perfectly capable of it? How about calling me and persuading me to go to vote? Couldn’t he have been hoping that I’d be lynched at the town meeting and it would all be over before any investigation began? And then, tonight, at the Morelands’, you knew, didn’t you? You had to know.”

He crossed the room and grabbed Brad by the arm. “Tell them. Go on. If you don’t, God knows what will happen to you. But you’re innocent. You can put up a good fight in court to prove you had nothing to do with it at all. So. Go on. Tell them. Who sent you from the Morelands’ to get the tape out of the box?”

Brad looked up. The disintegration of his face was pitiful. His tongue came out flickering over his lower lip.

“I didn’t know, John. Honestly, I didn’t …”

“Brad!” Mr. Carey’s voice rang out in a harsh travesty of authority. “Brad, don’t let him …”

“Who sent you to get that box?”

For a moment Brad’s eyes shifted between his father and John. Then he hung his head and whispered, “It was Dad. He sent me. He had to wait for Steve Ritter. He said I must go. But I didn’t know. He didn’t say why. Go get that box, he said. I…”

Steve Ritter and the farmers had closed in around Mr. Carey. Brad turned to his wife and put out a hand tentatively.

“Vickie…”

But she swung away from him and ran to the window, turning her back on them all.

It was over, thought John. With the demoralized Brad in the witness stand against him, Mr. Carey was as doomed as if he’d made a confession.

All the men were milling excitedly around, but John felt completely removed from them. He went over to Vickie. She was still at the window, gazing out past the lounging men and over the Fishers’ unmowed lawn to the woods. He put his hand gently on her shoulder and, as she turned her head slightly toward him, he felt the pity and affection in him growing and expanding into a sensation of kinship. Linda … Mr. Carey … He’d been a monster’s victim; so had Vickie. It had been the same for them both, and now …

“John.”

A hand was tugging at his sleeve. He looked around and there was Emily gazing up at him from black anguished eyes.

“Angel told. I tried but I couldn’t stop her. When they came, Angel told. Oh, John, is it all right?”

His hand was still on Vickie’s shoulder. With his other arm, he drew Emily toward him.

“Yes, Emily,” he said. “It’s all right.”

FIN

PATRICK QUENTIN

Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (19 March 1912 – 26 July 1987), Richard Wilson Webb (August 1901 – December 1966), Martha Mott Kelley (30 April 1906 – 2005) and Mary Louise White Aswell (3 June 1902 – 24 December 1984) wrote detective fiction. In some foreign countries their books have been published under the variant Quentin Patrick. Most of the stories were written by Webb and Wheeler in collaboration, or by Wheeler alone. Their most famous creation is the amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.

In 1931 Richard Wilson Webb (born in 1901 in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, an Englishman working for a pharmaceutical company in Philadelphia) and Martha Mott Kelley collaborated on the detective novel Cottage Sinister. Kelley was known as Patsy (Patsy Kelly was a well-known character actress of that era) and Webb as Rick, so they created the pseudonym Q. Patrick by combining their nicknames—adding the Q "because it was unusual".

Webb's and Kelley's literary partnership ended with Kelley's marriage to Stephen Wilson. Webb continued to write under the Q. Patrick name, while looking for a new writing partner. Although he wrote two novels with the journalist and Harper's Bazaar editor Mary Louise Aswell, he would find his permanent collaborator in Hugh Wheeler, a Londoner who had moved to the US in 1934.

Wheeler's and Webb's first collaboration was published in 1936. That same year, they introduced two new pseudonyms: Murder Gone to Earth, the first novel featuring Dr. Westlake, was credited to Jonathan Stagge, a name they would continue to use for the rest of the Westlake series. A Puzzle for Fools introduced Peter Duluth and was signed Patrick Quentin. This would become their primary and most famous pen name, even though they also continued to use Q. Patrick until the end of their collaboration (particularly for Inspector Trant stories).

In the late 1940s, Webb's contributions gradually decreased due to health problems. From the 1950s and on, Wheeler continued writing as Patrick Quentin on his own, and also had one book published under his own name. In the 1960s and '70s, Wheeler achieved success as a playwright and librettist, and his output as Quentin Patrick slowed and then ceased altogether after 1965. However, Wheeler did write the book for the 1979 musical Sweeney Todd about a fictional London mass murderer, showing he had not altogether abandoned the genre.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

As Patrick Quentin

- A Puzzle For Fools (1936)

- Puzzle For Players (1938)

- Puzzle For Puppets (1944)

- Puzzle For Wantons (1945) aka Slay the Loose Ladies

- Puzzle For Fiends (1946) aka Love Is a Deadly Weapon

- Puzzle For Pilgrims (1947) aka The Fate of the Immodest Blonde

- Run To Death (1948)

- The Follower (1950)

- Black Widow (1952) aka Fatal Woman

- My Son, the Murderer (1954) aka the Wife of Ronald Sheldon

- The Man With Two Wives (1955)

- The Man in the Net (1956)

- Suspicious Circumstances (1957)

- Shadow of Guilt (1959)

- The Green-Eyed Monster (1960)

- The Ordeal of Mrs Snow (1961), short stories

- Family Skeletons (1965)

As Q Patrick

- Cottage Sinister (1931)

- Murder at the Women's City Club (1932) aka Death in the Dovecote

- SS Murder (1933)

- Murder at the 'Varsity (1933) aka Murder at Cambridge

- The Grindle Nightmare (1935) aka Darker Grows the Valley

- Death Goes To School (1936)

- Death For Dear Clara (1937)

- The File on Fenton and Farr (1938)

- The File on Claudia Cragge (1938)

- Death and the Maiden (1939)

- Return To the Scene (1941) aka Death in Bermuda

- Danger Next Door (1952)

As Jonathan Stagge

- The Dogs Do Bark (1936) aka Murder Gone To Earth

- Murder by Prescription (1938) aka Murder or Mercy?

- The Stars Spell Death (1939) aka Murder in the Stars

- Turn of the Table (1940) aka Funeral For Five

- The Yellow Taxi (1942) aka Call a Hearse

- The Scarlet Circle (1943) aka Light From a Lantern

- Death, My Darling Daughters (1945) aka Death and the Dear Girls

- Death's Old Sweet Song (1946)

- The Three Fears (1949)

As Hugh Wheeler

- The Crippled Muse (1951)

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

About Patrick Quentin

Bibliography