Beware the Young Stranger

Ellery Queen

MYSTERIOUSPRESS.COM

CAST OF CHARACTERS

JOHN VALLANCOURT—He had played for high stakes before—but never for his daughter’s life

KEITH ROLLINS—Life was a survival of the fittest, and he would stop at nothing to reach his querencia

HOWARD CONWAY—Married into the country club, he resented any tremor that might affect his money-in-law

RALPH HIBBS—With his major stockholder lying in a funeral home, Ralphie boy could finally make his own decisions

IVY FERGUSON CONWAY—To her, existence was a cocktail in one hand and a bridge deck in the other

DORCAS FERGUSON—She had built a financial empire out of debts and despair, and a private life out of deception

NANCY VALLANCOURT—Young and vulnerable, she could not attach conditions to her loyalty

SAM ROLLINS—Ironically, he was paid to keep silent when the last thing he would have done was to talk

1.

Vallancourt was the last of the foursome to reach the locker room. Coming off the eighteenth green, he had been hailed by a gushing, well-padded matron he barely knew.

She had three out-of-town guests at a cocktail table on the clubhouse terrace, and she insisted on introducing John Vallancourt to them as “our own distinguished diplomat, the man who knows all the secrets of those nasty foreign countries.”

Lanky and trim, a silver-and-tan man of fifty-odd years, Vallancourt exchanged small talk, managed a tactful escape, and immediately forgot the incident. He had more important things to think about. Nancy, for instance, his daughter.

In the deserted locker room, he stripped, showered, toweled briskly, and put on the dark gray Italian silk suit he had worn to the club this morning.

He made an admission to himself: he was disturbed. Playing around sixty-five hundred yards of golf course with Keith Rollins today hadn’t quieted his sense of caution. Vallancourt had experienced similar emotional radar in foreign capitals when United States prestige and best interests were at stake; and in the solitude of big-game country, when the hunter was cut down to size.

His wariness over Rollins was not because the time had inevitably arrived when there must be a change in his relationship with Nancy. He was prepared for the change. The emergence of his daughter into womanhood was welcome and good. He looked forward to seeing his bloodline extended in Nancy’s children …

Vallancourt thought he was alone. But then he turned and saw Keith Rollins at the far end of the row of lockers. The diplomat’s usually warm brown eyes chilled slightly. He wondered how long the man had been standing there watching him.

Keith was smiling as he came forward—a good-looking young man of twenty-two, heavy-shouldered. His face was cut in firm, rather angular lines. He had restless eyes of dark blue, almost purple, under brows as heavily black as his curly hair.

He lit a cigarette. “Afraid we all ducked when we saw the old biddy making for you. Mr. Conway and Mr. Hibbs are in the cocktail lounge.”

“I’m used to old biddies,” Vallancourt said, also smiling.

Keith squinted through a wreath of smoke. “You play a bang-up game of golf, Mr. Vallancourt. Nancy warned me.”

“You don’t play so badly yourself. You had me scrambling right down to that wild second-shot gamble on seventeen.”

“Maybe next time,” Keith said.

In spite of Keith’s casual friendliness, the words came out with an I’ll-get-you-yet undertone. It struck Vallancourt, coming after a whole day of observation, as being prompted by something more than a mere desire to win. The older man wondered suddenly how often before Keith’s need had carried him almost to victory, then turned on him in the final moment, as it had today on the course.

Keith moved ahead, holding the locker room door open for Vallancourt.

“Anyway,” Keith said, “today meant a little more to us than a golf game, didn’t it?”

“In what way?”

“You wanted to look me over, didn’t you?”

There was a flicker of resentment in the nightshade eyes.

“I suppose I did,” replied Vallancourt.

They started down the rubber-tiled corridor in the direction of the dining room and cocktail lounge.

“At least,” Keith laughed, “I’m glad you didn’t suggest a weekend hunting trip in the mountains. I show up better with golf clubs than a rifle.” They walked on a few steps, and he went on without a pause. “From what I hear you’re pretty good at assessing people. I’d value your opinion of me, Mr. Vallancourt.”

“Do you think I’ve had a proper chance to form one, Keith?”

“Some men in your spot would have formed one right off—even before they met the poor guy.”

“And what do you think of me?” asked Vallancourt.

“You’re Nancy’s father. That’s good enough for me.”

Clever, Vallancourt thought. Designed to put the opponent on the defensive. Does he see opposition in all people? They reached the end of the vaulted corridor. Wide doors directly ahead swung into the dining room and bar; an archway to their left, fringed with ivy, led onto the terrace. Faint sounds of people drifted to them.

Keith paused, looking through the arch at the sun outside. “I get the message, Mr. Vallancourt. In your silence.”

“Keith,” Vallancourt said quietly, “aren’t you jumping to conclusions?”

“How come?”

“Aren’t you actually anticipating that I’m set on forming a negative opinion of you? The contrary is true.”

“I know Nancy is all you have, Mr. Vallancourt, how close you two have been.”

“It was my job to bring her up, Keith. Her mother died when Nancy was very young.”

“More than just a job. Lots of men would have parked her in a school and let it go at that. But all those years in Cairo, Rome, Athens, you kept her with you.”

“They were wonderful years.” Vallancourt sighed.

“If the Secretary of State or the President need you, you’ll go again. You always have. Only this time without Nancy. That must be a grim prospect.”

“You’re a perceptive young man, Keith, but you’re wrong about that.”

“I see,” Keith said, slowly. “You’re glad to see her grown up.”

Vallancourt smiled again.

“I’ve known it was coming, of course.”

“You just want to make sure she doesn’t fly out of the nest with the wrong pigeon.”

Vallancourt felt a prickle on the nape of his neck. This boy, he told himself, carried himself in an eggshell.

“Keith, why don’t we give each other a little time?”

Keith’s glance slid away. “Maybe you’re right, Mr. Vallancourt. I get the feeling we’ve started off like two tomcats rounding a dark corner from opposite directions.” He hesitated. “I don’t want it that way, Mr. Vallancourt.”

The quick shift in the boy’s mood was ingratiating. Vallancourt said warmly, “Neither do I.”

“Nancy and I wish it could be perfect for us,” Keith said. “But, perfect or not, I know how we feel about each other. Nothing can change that, nothing.”

“Then we’ll have to try to put a light on that corner, won’t we, Keith?”

“Yes, sir. Well, I’ll cut out now. I know you want to have a drink with Mr. Conway and Mr. Hibbs.”

“You’re more than welcome to join us, Keith.”

“Thanks. I’ll take a raincheck.”

“Are you seeing Nancy this evening?”

“Yes, Mr. Vallancourt.”

John Vallancourt watched the boy move through the archway to the terrace. Then he slowly turned toward the cocktail lounge.

Howard Conway and Ralph Hibbs were at a table near the floor-to-ceiling windows. Vallancourt had little trouble spotting them. Few people were in the lounge; most had sought the terrace in the perfect weather. A promise of summer was in the air.

With gestures, Conway was talking golf. Hibbs nodded morosely; he had had a miserable time of it, from the first tee.

They glanced up as Vallancourt approached the table. Conway lifted his drink. “The old girl inveigle you into addressing the Thursday Literary Society?”

“Not quite.”

“Buffoon like that, calling you across the terrace. It would bug me.” A robust man whose awkward appearance was misleading, Conway finished his drink and eyed his glass thoughtfully.

“Oh, she probably has her points,” Ralph Hibbs said. “If it was a feather in her cap to introduce John to her friends, I’m sure John didn’t mind.”

“For you, Ralph, everybody’s got points,” Conway said with a sigh. “What are you drinking, John?”

“A short Scotch will do it.”

“I owe you five bucks,” Hibbs said. “Let me add a drink for interest.” He turned to order from the trim waitress who had come to the table. He was a big, placid, very likable man, in Vallancourt’s opinion. He golfed as he did everything else, with sweating, honest effort.

“I might as well shell out, too,” Conway said. “You trimmed us today, John.”

“Playing over my head,” Vallancourt smiled. “Keith was pressuring me. The boy is good.”

“If he’d let himself be.” For the benefit of the waitress, Conway jiggled his glass. He and Hibbs had a common heartiness of physique, bone and flesh. But otherwise the two men differed. There was a kind of fagged-out quality in Ralph Hibbs, a softening at the edges, a sagging of the jowls, an under-pallor in the full cheeks. His hair had grayed, thinned, and all but vanished. An ophthalmologist had put bifocals on him; an internist had prescribed pills, which Hibbs carried about with him and took faithfully.

Howard Conway’s large, firm face, thick hair, quietly clear eyes made Ralph Hibbs seem bumbling by contrast. Vallancourt wasn’t at all sure.

“By the way,” Hibbs said, “where’d Keith get to? I thought he was waiting for you, John.”

“He was. He had to leave.”

“Burned off in that sport car, I bet,” Conway said.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Hibbs said. “He’s conservative behind the wheel, considering his age. Good with cars. If I add a European make at the agency, I may ask Keith to go to work for me. I think he could sell cars.”

“What do you know about the boy, Howard?” Vallancourt asked Conway.

“Not much.”

“You’re married to one of his aunts.”

“But it wasn’t Ivy who brought him here to live, John.”

“Then he didn’t arrive at Dorcas Ferguson’s on a casual visit?” Dorcas Ferguson was Ivy Conway’s sister.

“No,” Conway said, “he’s here for good, from what I understand.”

“Early today, Keith made a casual reference about his father’s being in town.”

“Yes, Sam Rollins got rid of that two-bit business of his downstate. Maggie—Keith’s mother, the sister between Dorcas and Ivy—died last fall. The Rollinses have no more ties or connections in their old home town.”

“Is Sam Rollins staying with Dorcas, too?”

“No,” Howard Conway said, “he’s living in a small apartment on the north side.”

“I’d like to meet him.” Vallancourt nodded to the waitress and tasted the mellow Scotch.

Light glinted on Hibbs’s glasses as he leaned forward. “You think Nancy is really serious about Keith Rollins, John?”

“Knowing my daughter, I wouldn’t be surprised if she decided to marry him. And it’s happened quickly, you know. Very quickly.”

“I’m sure he’s a fine boy. If there’s a … well, a hint of strain in his personality …”

“You noticed it, too?” Vallancourt said slowly.

Ralph Hibbs shrugged. “It hasn’t been long since he lost his mother, you know.”

“I was in Europe,” Vallancourt said. “I’d never met Maggie Rollins or her husband or son. But I was sorry I could do nothing more than cable a word of sympathy to Dorcas.”

“Dorcas managed,” Conway grunted.

“Doesn’t she always?” Hibbs laughed.

2.

John Vallancourt’s Continental whispered its way up the elm-shaded driveway the next day, stopping in the Normandy shadow of Dorcas Ferguson’s castle-like home.

Vallancourt was acquainted with the history of the mansion. Dorcas Ferguson’s grandfather had built it. Her parents, social gadflies on the fringes of the international set, had lost the estate to mortgage holders in the process of squandering the modest fortune handed down to them. Years later, Dorcas had returned to native soil, paid cash for the place, and restored the house to its original condition.

The heavy oaken door swung open and Dorcas’s matronly housekeeper, Mildred Morgan, smiled out at him. “Good morning, Mr. Vallancourt. Miss Ferguson is expecting you.”

The housekeeper ushered him into the spacious entry hall and took his hat.

Vallancourt liked this house, for all its size. It was sound and solid, qualities which Dorcas, like her grandfather, esteemed. She had put a great deal of herself into the house, Vallancourt thought, in the décor and furnishings. The lack of pretentiousness appealed to him. It was the home of a woman of character.

“Miss Ferguson will be right down,” Miss Morgan said. “Mrs. Conway is waiting, too. Would you care to join her?”

Vallancourt nodded.

“May I get you something, Mr. Vallancourt? A cup of coffee?”

“Thanks, no.”

He stepped into a long, friendly living room. Ivy Ferguson Conway was at the grand piano, playing a sentimental melody badly.

“Morning, John.” Ivy swung herself around on the bench. Vallancourt detected a nervousness in her manner. “Do you have a cigarette?”

He offered her the thin, engraved gold case Nancy had given him on his last birthday, and held a light for her, thinking that if Dorcas was a throwback to her grandfather, Ivy, her younger sister, was the orthodox product of her parents.

Ivy’s life was a continuity of cocktail and bridge parties, fashion shows, country club gossip, and shallow squabbles with Howard, her husband. Occasionally, she and Howard went abroad, and when Ivy referred to these trips it was always with an accent of condescension for foreign places and foreigners.

She gave a first impression of prettiness, being delicately made, with a fragility of feature. She had small eyes and mousy hair worn in a casual trim. Although she was in her thirties, girlishness clung to her.

“Oh, damn!” She coughed, her hand fluttering to her throat. “John, must you smoke these unfiltered weeds?”

“Don’t inhale,” Vallancourt suggested.

“Then what’s the use of smoking?” Her glance kept going beyond him, to the living room entryway.

“Are you expecting someone, Ivy?”

“No,” she said quickly. “You’re Dorcas’s only caller. I dropped in while she was phoning you this morning.”

Vallancourt waited.

Her eyes pinched at the corners. “Aren’t you going to ask me what she has on her mind?”

“I assume Dorcas will explain the call.”

“Sure. The way she wants it explained.” Ivy’s nervousness was suddenly gone. She snubbed out her cigarette as if she were pressing the hot coal against something more animate than an ashtray.

“John, you’re right in suspecting him,” Ivy said.

He made no pretense of not understanding to whom she was referring.

“Howard told me,” she said, “how you were sizing him up yesterday, during and after the round of golf.”

Vallancourt lit a cigarette.

“I see,” she said icily. “You don’t care to discuss it.”

“Is there a reason I should, Ivy?”

“Oh, most naturally not!” Her gaze was haughtily fixed on a point over his head. “Nancy, of course, is merely your daughter, and Dorcas will come in here with a whitewash brush in hand.”

“Without a sense of fair play? Dorcas?” John said gently.

“Better drop the rules in the trashcan, John. I know you would value Dorcas’s opinion over mine. But any human personality has its foolish zone. Including Dorcas’s. No matter what she tells you, remember this: Keith Rollins is a bastard, John!”

She picked up a small handbag from the piano bench, rose, and started stiffly from the living room. But before she reached the foyer she stopped and turned.

“John …”

“Yes?”

She was worrying the handbag. “Do make allowances for me.” The rosebud mouth pleaded; she was very much the little girl now. “Having Keith brought into this house after what happened … It upsets me to think about it.” Then she hurried out, leaving Vallancourt frowning.

He was standing at the windows overlooking the long terraced lawn when Dorcas Ferguson appeared.

“I’m sorry to have kept you waiting, John. I had a call from Baltimore.”

“I didn’t mind. This house is a pleasant place in which to wait.” The statement was a half-truth. Today, some of the pleasantness was gone from the house.

She glanced about the room. “Did Ivy leave?”

Vallancourt nodded.

Dorcas was paler than when he had last seen her. He had met her five years ago, when he and Nancy had returned home for the summer. He had formed a strong feeling for her almost at once.

She was not a beautiful woman, although she was lithely attractive, wide-shouldered and tall, in contrast to Ivy. Dorcas’s almost Indian face was dominated by a firm and generous mouth, high cheekbones, and large dark eyes. Her glistening black hair, stranded with silver, swept in a high widow’s peak from her wide forehead.

She took his hand in both of hers. “It’s so good to see you again, John.”

“Could I say less?” Vallancourt smiled.

She gestured him to a deep chair. He sat down, and she began to pace in a fretful manner that was uncharacteristic of her.

“Dorcas … if you have something difficult to say, please remember how I feel about you.”

She gave him a grateful look. “It’s about Keith, John.”

“I suspected as much.”

“I want you to like him.”

“I’ve the same wish,” he said.

“But you don’t.”

“That’s not quite true, Dorcas. After all, I haven’t had a chance to get to know the boy.”

She eased herself to the edge of a chair. “But you do have reservations.”

“I honestly don’t know. I like some things about Keith. He has a good mind, quick, above average. In his off-guard moments, he’s very personable.”

“Off-guard?”

“It’s what I sense inside the boy that disturbs me, Dorcas. There is a turmoil, a kind of watchfulness, in his eyes.”

“The cub, backing up, prepared to growl defiance,” she said in a faint, bitter voice. “Many people would look at him and never see. But not you. Not when he moved in on someone dear to you.”

“Would you rather I were less candid with you, Dorcas?”

“You know I wouldn’t. There’s always been honesty between us, John. I’ve found little enough of it in the world.” She drew a deep breath, seemed to derive strength from it. “That’s why I called you here this morning. I want you to know … what you should know … about Keith.

“You never knew his mother. Maggie was the middle sister, John. Somehow she got lost between me and Ivy. She was the gentle one. She lacked Ivy’s brittle selfishness and my energy. The very act of living was bewildering to Maggie. When her final illness came, she didn’t know how to put up a real fight. She simply died, helplessly, one morning before dawn.

“I wonder whether it would have made a difference to Keith if Maggie had lived a little longer. I think not. He would have made the trip anyway.”

Dorcas had spoken with composure, in a soft, even voice. But she had aged before Vallancourt’s eyes. She raised her slender hand and brushed the corners of her eyes.

“John, you know the latest spring vacation custom adopted by college students. It’s become a stupid tradition. They pile in cars and drive non-stop as much as two thousand miles to converge on coastal resort towns. A sleepless weekend on a main diet of hamburgers follows.

“Individually, they’re everyday, normal kids. They go, some of them, because it’s the thing to do. Parents permit it because they’re too busy to think it through, because everybody’s doing it, and because such jaunts by the youngsters have taken on the earmarks of status symbols. The results are not always pretty.”

Vallancourt waited patiently for Dorcas to go on.

“This past spring, a lovely girl from Keith’s home town—Cheryl Pemberton was her name—talked her parents into letting her go with a group of girls to Port Palmetto, Florida. She put up the usual arguments. The girls had reserved a cottage, quite apart from the boys, she assured them; girls from the best families in town were going; she simply had to fit in with the crowd; she could take care of herself; and, finally, didn’t they trust her?”

Vallancourt watched her shiver.

“Cheryl Pemberton’s parents never saw her alive again.”

“Dorcas …”

She looked resolutely away from him, spine stiff, hands locked in her lap.

“Don’t, John. Please. I have to get this out quickly.

“When darkness came to the beaches at Port Palmetto that Saturday night, the ferment began to work. No one knows just why or how these things get started, but before midnight, in the light of bonfires dotting the beaches, hundreds of young people were snake-dancing and chanting a pagan praise to beer, sand, and sex.

“The local police came out in force. Their appearance on the beach touched off a riot. Several officers were hurt. Squad cars were overturned. The jail was literally packed with youngsters.

“Early the next morning, a city sanitation crew was put on emergency duty to clean the beaches of débris.

“The nude and battered body of Cheryl Pemberton was found under an old wooden fishing pier. Indications were that some boy, inflamed by liquor and mob pyschosis, had lost control of himself and momentarily become a fiend.

“Keith … it was Keith whom the police suspected. He and Cheryl were classmates, completing their senior year. There’d been a tacit agreement that they would be dating each other in Port Palmetto. Keith was the last boy to have been seen with her. He was picked up as he was leaving town.”

Vallancourt mercifully looked out the window.

“Keith withstood nearly sixty continuous hours of interrogation, John. He was able to do this because he was telling the truth. I know he was telling the truth!

“The truth was that he had got separated from Cheryl Pemberton, knew nothing of her death until the police took him in custody. The scenes on the beach had sickened him, and he had decided to leave.

“He was released because there wasn’t a shred of evidence against him, just suspicion. John, that suspicion mustn’t destroy the only living soul close to me I care anything about!”

3.

Vallancourt turned back to Dorcas with sympathy. But he lacked her subjective entanglement. He had already sensed the tension and hostility in Keith Rollins. He reserved judgment. But then, he could afford to. Dorcas must be prey to her uncertainties and their clash with her loyalty and attachment to the boy.

Vallancourt caught a swift mental glimpse of the girl’s beginning to struggle as panic overcame her, and of a drink-crazed boy losing control. It was conceivable that Keith had acted during a black-out, without later recollection of the event. He would then feel only revulsion and a desire to get away.

“I think,” Dorcas was saying slowly, “I’ve been working all these years for Keith’s sake. They haven’t been altogether pleasant years, John. When my parents died and left three young daughters in a world of bankruptcy and creditors, the responsibility fell on my shoulders. Poor Maggie would have survived on charity. Ivy might have drunk herself to a bitter, self-pitying end. I picked up the scanty remains, John. I planned, I badgered loans from creditors and bankers who saw the chance of recouping their losses to my parents, I worked eighteen hours a day. And I rebuilt it, John, I rebuilt it.

“Now—I know what drove me to do it. Given the chance, Keith will mature. He’ll pick up where I leave off.”

As Dorcas spoke, cold purpose came into her eyes. Without knowing it, Vallancourt thought, in declaring herself she has warned me. The shadow of this boy Keith has fallen across us.

He felt a touch of sadness; he knew the shadow had already darkened the relationship between him and this admirable woman. She would struggle in Keith’s behalf. And Vallancourt would fight for his daughter.

“As always, Dorcas, I’m glad things are open and aboveboard between us.”

“I knew you would make inquiries about Keith. After all, she’s your only child. I wanted you to hear the truth about Keith.”

He rose. She remained on the edge of her chair, looking up at him.

“I wish I could read your face, John,” she said quietly.

“I’m not given to snap judgments.”

“Will you take Nancy away?”

“And lend the enticement of forbidding the fruit?” he asked wryly. “I don’t think that would be the answer.”

“John, if she finds her only satisfactory answer in Keith …”

“She’s twenty-one years old, Dorcas.”

“Then you won’t stand in their way?”

“Did you expect me to?”

“Frankly, yes.”

“I could think of no better way to defeat my own purposes.”

“You’re not yielding so easily.” She moistened her lips. “Right now, you frighten me. You’ve always awed me a little. Many men born to wealth and an old name are plagued with uncertainty about their identities and personal worth. Not you. You’ve never needed ego-satisfactions; you’ve taken full advantage of your heritage. But if you were marooned naked in the world’s worst jungle, you’d walk out alive—and probably bring a valuable assessment of the area with you.”

“I hope none of us has to yield, Dorcas.”

“What can I do, John? What must Keith do?”

“What all of us must do. Be patient. Take time to be sure about the answers, all the answers.”

“Thank you for coming, John.”

“Goodbye.”

He heard the faint sound of weeping from the living room as Mildred Morgan showed him out the front door.

Vallancourt had lunch at an inexpensive place on the south side of town where he was not likely to run into anyone he knew.

He needed some time to himself.

Rape-murder …

He ate without much notice of the food. The boy had defenders—Dorcas, Ralph Hibbs. Even Howard Conway had exhibited yesterday the tolerant friendliness of an older man unbending for a companion from the next generation. Howard’s grouchy remark about Keith’s driving habits had been on a plane of general prejudice, words Howard would have spoken about any male driver of Keith’s age.

So far, Ivy was the boy’s only detractor. But Vallancourt didn’t believe she really sensed Keith’s potential. Ivy would feel the same way if there was illness in the house requiring her to put a halt to a gay party.

Ivy, Vallancourt thought, resents the boy for personal reasons—for the care and attention Dorcas lavishes on him, care and attention of which Ivy had always been the beneficiary.

A brief recollection came to Vallancourt of the desperate time when there had been guerrilla warfare in Greece. In all Athens, it had seemed, only he, an American diplomat, had suspected the treachery of Koutsourais—until the night Koutsourais had arranged, impeccably, the details of a regrettable accident. Everything had gone beautifully for Koutsourais, up to the final detail when he had discovered that his intended prey, too, had shark’s teeth.

Vallancourt left the restaurant and drove without haste past the country club where he had golfed with Keith the day before.

As the Continental swept into the privacy of Canterbury Boulevard, the uniformed guard in the gatehouse waved a brief greeting. The first of the meticulously landscaped estates flowed past. The greenery gave the air a heady freshness; it was cooler here, the giant shade trees throwing a mantel of shadows over the boulevard.

Vallancourt turned in between the ivy-grown stone columns that marked his own driveway.

When the Continental purred around the sweeping curve of the driveway, the house came in view. It was a multi-storied mansion of antique brick and leaded windows. The house reposed quietly in its bed of lawns and gardens.

Vallancourt entered the house, his steps quick and restless on the parquet. He rang for Charles, and when the lean, grave houseman appeared, Vallancourt left word that he wanted to see his daughter when she got home. Then he went into his study.

Vallancourt relaxed a little as he stood at the tall windows and lit a cigarette. He moved noiselessly to the mammoth desk that had been created for this large, wood-paneled room with its high arched ceiling and hand-rubbed beams. Beyond the desk was a solid wall of books, for each of which Vallancourt felt a particular regard. Not all the volumes personally inscribed to him, memoirs of world leaders and works of famous writers, were included here.

Seated at the desk, he forced himself to go through the morning mail. But his thoughts kept circling around to his forthcoming talk with Nancy. He thought of Keith Rollins embracing Nancy, kissing her, caressing her. And the hellish phrase wrote itself again in burning letters across his brain: Rape-murder …

He attacked the mail. He knew it had already been weeded out by Mrs. Ledbetter, Charles’s wife. The couple had been in Vallancourt’s employ for many years as secretary and houseman.

He sorted the mail quickly into two piles. The letters in franked envelopes he dropped on the further pile.

He attacked the nearer pile. In several minutes he had created a third pile, for which he would dictate on tape the earliest replies. Mrs. Ledbetter would transcribe from tape and clear the decks before nightfall.

The whispered sigh and click of the door caused him to raise his head.

Nancy had slipped in quietly. She gave him a smile, and it brought light to the room.

“Hi, daddy.”

She hasn’t had time to step out of the sun yet, Vallancourt thought, his heart wrenched. She would soon enough find the ugliness lurking at the boundaries of her world.

He got up, went around his desk grinning at her. She was lovely—rather tall, well made, full of spring. So much like her mother. Just a trace of angularity about her, but no awkwardness. A wide, barely lopsided mouth that smiled even in sleep. A slightly pugged nose given to peeling from sunburn. Wide-spaced, clear eyes with an oriental slant. Hair to match the sunlight streaming through the windows.

He opened his cigarette case and offered it to her. She hesitated. He knew she had started smoking a very short time ago; she was still not completely at ease about it.

Nancy chose a cigarette almost carefully. Vallancourt struck a light for each of them, eased himself to a half-sitting position on the edge of the desk.

“Well, are you going to be a senior next fall?”

“You know me, dad. Lit, anthropology, ancient history, the art courses I have as an appetizer before breakfast. But get me in the realm of math and science …” She crossed her eyes as she looked at him and shuddered. Then she grinned. “Anyhow, I’m in there plugging away.”

“Fine. Then we can make plans for the summer.”

He watched the smile begin its death. “Is that why you wanted to see me, dad?”

“I usually like to know what you have in mind, Nancy.”

She stood in a hesitant attitude; then the tension went from her shoulders.

“I think,” she said, “the time has come for a powwow.”

He matched her effort to keep it light. “Big chief all ears.”

“I’m in love, dad.”

“With Keith Rollins?”

“Yes.”

He studied her through the smoke. “How does he feel?”

“The same way.”

“Are you sure, princess?”

“Completely. It’s one of those once-in-a-lifetime things for both of us.”

“I’ve had a hunch about it,” he said lightly.

“I know, dad. Keith told me of your inspection yesterday.”

“Do you resent it? Or does Keith?”

“Don’t be silly! Wouldn’t it be goopy to have a father who wasn’t interested in me? Only …” Her lips quivered.

He touched her chin with his forefinger. “What is this?”

She caught his hand and pressed the back of it to her cheek fiercely. “Growing up is just plain hell.”

“Not always, Nancy.”

“When you find that relationships change?”

And Vallancourt thought: She’s trying to tell me she will always love me, but that I’m no longer the center of her universe.

“Change is the natural order of things, darling. All we can do is try to make sure it’s chiefly for the better.”

She dropped his hand and half turned toward the window, no longer facing him directly. “I’ve wanted to talk to you, daddy.”

“Why haven’t you?”

“I’ve been afraid. Not of you. Of my botching it. You see, Keith was in Port Palmetto, Florida this spring when a dreadful thing happened.”

“I know all about Port Palmetto, Nancy,” he said gently. When she flashed him a startled look, he added: “I haven’t been keeping it from you. Dorcas Ferguson called me this morning and she’s told me all about it.”

“I see,” she said slowly. “Then you know Keith is innocent.”

“I know the police released him.”

“He told me everything, dad, when we began to get serious. Told me—and offered to go away.”

He would, Vallancourt thought. He felt a tightening inside. The boy had played it cool and smart. His admission had actually increased his stock with Nancy. He had known what his self-sacrificial offer would do to her.

Vallancourt realized that Nancy was studying him in a covert way. She glanced aside when his eyes met hers.

“If he asks me,” she said, “I’m going to marry him.”

Vallancourt knew the importance of the next moment, his words, every inflection and nuance.

“When a woman prepares an answer,” he said with a smile, “she’s usually pretty sure of the question. But don’t be disappointed, Nancy, if he doesn’t ask you right away. I’ll hazard the guess that Keith will withhold the question until the Port Palmetto thing is settled. Feeling about you as he must, he wouldn’t want to begin with an ugly thing like that hanging over him.”

She turned to him then, and he gave her the shelter of his arms.

A subtle change had taken place in his position, Vallancourt knew. He felt no qualms. Let the boy show the depth—or shallowness—of his feeling for Nancy. After all, if he measured up, he would want to wait until the Port Palmetto police had announced a solution to the rape-murder of the Pemberton girl.

Nancy slipped away from him, moving with her angular grace. “Pardon, please,” she said in a slightly damp voice, “while a lady seeks privacy to blow her nose.”

She hurried from the room, leaving her father to stand very still for a long time.

4.

Sam Rollins, Keith’s father, called at four o’clock that afternoon. Charles showed him into the library and carried news of the caller to the study, where Vallancourt was working with Mrs. Ledbetter.

Entering the library, Vallancourt saw a tall, thin, intense man whose clothing, while of good cut, was rumpled as if from chronic lack of attention. Rollins’s lips were thin, his nose a high-bridged blade of bone, his eyes small and restless under salty brows that matched his hair. The aroma of alcohol surrounded him.

“Good afternoon,” Vallancourt said. Rollins’s feverish eyes were going over him in a quick, envious appraisal. “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Rollins?”

“Call me Sam. The mister is too damn formal for me.” Rollins dropped into a chair, gripping the arms with his long, predatory fingers. “So you are John Vallancourt.” The shifty eyes darted about the library. “Nice place you got here. But I don’t guess you have time, with all you have to do, to really read all these books.”

“There’s time for everything, if you make it,” said Vallancourt. “Incidentally, I’m glad you dropped in, Mr. Rollins. I’ve wanted us to get acquainted. As a matter of fact, I’d intended to phone you this evening.”

“I figured as much,” Rollins said. Vallancourt wondered if the man realized his own insolence. Apparently it had been many years in cultivation, becoming an automatic response. Briefly, he felt compassion for Rollins, and for the son who had been exposed to this seething belligerence during his formative years.

“I played a round of golf with your son yesterday.”

“I heard. He tried to win, too, didn’t he?”

“Is there any reason why he shouldn’t?”

“Hell, no.” Rollins’s bony shoulders twitched. “It’s just that it’s so pathetic. He failed. Naturally. Keith always does, you know.”

“Did he tell you about the game?”

“Keith? Confide in me?” Rollins uttered a thin sour laugh. “He didn’t have to tell me. I guess I know my own son.”

“I see.”

“But I don’t blame you.” A hint of obsequiousness crept into Rollins’s manner. “If I had a knock-out daughter, I’d want to know something about the stud, too.”

“I’m glad you understand,” Vallancourt said dryly.

“Does Port Palmetto mean anything to you?”

He sat down in a chair only partially facing Rollins’s. The man had to turn his head to look at him.

“Yes, it does, Mr. Rollins.”

“Keith tell you about it?”

“No, someone else.”

“I didn’t think he’d have the guts.” Rollins waited; and when Vallancourt remained silent, Keith’s father said, “Okay, okay, I guess you claim diplomatic immunity in protecting your source of information. The only thing is, not all stories are the same.”

“Would you care to give me your version, Mr. Rollins?”

“The girl was raped, killed. They picked Keith up, then let him go. He says he’s innocent.”

Vallancourt began to feel as if the room needed airing. “You’ve nothing to add?”

“Maybe you think I should get sentimental?”

“A young girl has been killed—and Keith is your son.”

“A son should be a comfort to his father, Mr. Vallancourt. You haven’t had to worry about that boy for twenty-odd years, or you’d know what I’m talking about.”

“I’m sure there are a great many things about Keith that I don’t know.”

“I was hoping you might know the inside,” Rollins said. “You’ve got connections. You’ve made inquiries. You may know more about Keith in one respect than I do.”

“In respect to what?”

“His innocence—or guilt,” Rollins said.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.” Vallancourt rose, and Rollins took the hint with a flattening of his lips and a glitter in his restless eyes. He rose, too.

“It was kind of you to give me so much of your valuable time, Mr. Vallancourt.” The insolence again. Or frustration. Perhaps a little of both, Vallancourt thought.

After Rollins was gone, he found it hard to return to work. His thoughts kept returning to Keith. Having met the father, he felt a sympathy for the son. But he was not reassured. Knowing why the young lion was hungry did not make his appetite less dangerous.

Vallancourt was on the point of driving off the next morning when Mrs. Ledbetter called to him with unaccustomed shrillness.

He stopped the car and hurried back into the house.

“It’s Miss Ferguson, Mr. Vallancourt. I’ve never heard her so upset. She says it’s very urgent.”

He crossed the high, vaulted entry hall. Charles was plugging in a phone, extending it.

“Dorcas?”

“Thank God! John …” Her voice was gurgly, as if she had been sobbing. “I must see you.”

Keith … rape-murder … The words sprang into his head.

“Dorcas, what’s the matter? What’s happened?”

“I can’t tell you … not over the phone. Can you … I hate to break in on you this way—”

“I’ll be right over,” he said.

She made a choked sound of gratitude and the line went dead.

Vallancourt swung into the Ferguson driveway twenty minutes later. The Norman lines of the house wheeled into view.

Two cars were parked at one side of the driveway ahead of him—a small open sports car, and behind it a blue sedan.

The door of the sedan on the driver’s side was open. Howard Conway had apparently just got out and gone forward to look into the sports car. He turned toward the Continental as Vallancourt brought it to a nose-dipping stop.

Vallancourt got out quickly and moved to the fleshy younger man.

“I just got a call from Dorcas, Howard—”

“So did I. Just minutes ago. What’s up, John?”

“I don’t know.” He glanced at the sports car. “Keith’s?”

Conway nodded.

They hurried across the strip of lawn between the driveway and the house.

“Dorcas?” Conway called when they were inside. He glanced at Vallancourt, moved a few steps further. And then a tremendous shock rippled over Conway’s frame. All the color left his face.

“God Almighty!”

Vallancourt rushed into the living room where Dorcas lay, and dropped beside her. His heart seemed to dissolve, leaving a cold cavity in his chest.

He knew instantly that Dorcas Ferguson was dead. The black, silver-stranded hair was fanned across her Indian face, wisps of it sticking to her unseeing eyeballs. Her lower jaw hung to the limits of it hinges, making an ugly red and black hole of the once-warm, generous mouth.

From the odd, twisted position of her head, Vallancourt raised his eyes slowly. Up the leg of the heavy table. To the edge of the table where the finish was marred by a smear of blood and a few hairs. He guessed what the table’s edge had done to the base of her skull. He did not care for a closer look.

He was aware of Howard Conway standing nearby, grasping the back of a chair. He rose, started toward Conway … and out of the corner of his eyes saw a drapery move.

Vallancourt lunged, ripping the drapery aside.

It was Keith Rollins.

Vallancourt saw the blow coming and rolled with the punch, taking it high on his cheek. His brain jarred, his left knee buckled slightly. Then he was all right. With his right foot he thrust himself forward, ducking under Keith’s next frantic blow. His fingers touched the boy’s arm. Keith screamed softly and lashed out with his foot. Vallancourt slid to one side, and Keith had an instant in which to turn. He covered his face and head with his arms and plunged through the tall window in a shower of glass.

“Look at him! Look at him!” Conway shouted senselessly.

Keith struck grass, tripped, rolled, bounced to his feet, tore his way through shrubbery. He did not pause to look back, but darted toward his sports car.

Nearer to the front door, Conway was outside before Vallancourt. The sports car was fishtailing around the bend in the driveway. The breeze carried the pungency of scorched rubber back to them.

“Call the police, John,” Conway shouted as he ran. “Tell ’em to head him off!”

Conway threw himself in his car, fumbled with the ignition, shouted a four-letter word, and got the car started. The sedan shot away in pursuit.

Vallancourt phoned the police.

Dorcas Ferguson is dead. The most important woman in this end of the state has been murdered.

He could see the headlines, the editorials. The shortwave police band would soon be chanting the old litany that was always new:

All cars … Wanted on suspicion of murder, Keith Rollins … age twenty-two. Husky build. Black hair. Dark blue eyes. Driving MG, late model, license BF-3850. Fleeing estate of Dorcas Ferguson, victim. Approach with caution. Suspect was recently questioned in connection with a Florida rape-murder …

Vallancourt returned to the front door, watching the driveway. He made a pad of his handkerchief and applied it to the bruise Keith had left, only partially aware of the throb in his cheekbone. In these scant remaining moments of quiet, the fact of Dorcas’s death was a vaster pain. Dorcas dead. Dorcas dead.

Grief was acid in his throat.

He heard the sound of an approaching car, and looked up. It was Ivy Conway’s compact sedan.

She parked sloppily, leaving the driveway barely passable.

“Hi,” she said wanly. She looked tired. She manufactured a grin, touching her temple. “Long evening at the country club bar,” she confessed. “Why do I always say never again?”

She started toward the front steps, the breeze feathering the gossamer brown hair about her small face. “What’s wrong with you, John? Don’t tell me you tied one on, too! This I would have to see.” She laughed.

Vallancourt touched her arm. “Before you go inside, Ivy …”

“Whatever is the matter with you?”

“A dreadful thing has happened.”

“Happened?” Then she said quickly, “Not to Dorcas!”

“I’m afraid so.”

They had stopped midway up the front steps. She jerked her head toward the house.

From the distance came the approaching wail of a police siren.

Very slowly and carefully, Ivy turned.

“An ambulance, John?”

“No,” he said gently.

“Then—police?”

“Yes.”

“Dorcas … the police?”

She darted into the house. She was at the edge of the living room when Vallancourt caught her. She looked into the room, struck herself in the temple, and began to scream.

5.

During the police preliminaries Ivy Ferguson Conway crouched in a chair and refused to move, like a child waking in the dark after a nightmare.

Her husband’s voice mingled finally with that of the uniformed policeman on duty in the foyer. Conway came in, shaking his head. “Lost him, John. He must have slipped the MG through that parking area at the shopping center. When I tumbled to it and backtracked, there was no sign of him.”

Vallancourt tilted his head in Ivy’s direction. Conway looked startled. He crossed the room, stooped over her, spoke quietly. Some of the blankness left her eyes. She moaned suddenly, grabbed her husband about the neck, and began to sob. He picked her up, glanced at a policeman, got a nod, and carried Ivy out of the room.

A lanky, sweating detective in a rumpled gray suit followed the Conways out. Vallancourt knew him; his name was Woody Britt.

Britt was in charge at least for the moment. He had questioned Vallancourt in a halting fashion, unsure of himself. The man was obviously dreading the important investigation that had fallen to him.

Vallancourt needed to get out of that room. He walked to the front door and lit a cigarette. An ambulance with Dorcas Ferguson’s body inside was vanishing around the curve in the driveway. He looked away from the heavy vehicle.

In one respect, he thought, Britt had shown tact, barring TV and newspaper reporters. Dorcas would not be subjected to the horror of having pictures of her battered corpse frontpaged all over the state.

A station wagon eased to a stop at the end of the string of parked cars. Ralph Hibbs backed out and came puffing up the driveway.

Behind his glasses, Hibbs’s gentle eyes were bewildered. His large, soft body was shaking.

“It’s true, John?” he said. “It’s true?”

“I’m afraid so, Ralph.”

“Those policemen guarding the driveway … I had a time convincing them I was a friend, not a reporter. Have they taken her away, John?”

Vallancourt nodded.

“I can’t believe it! How could it have happened?”

Easily, he thought. In a moment of violence, she was shoved, went over backward, and the edge of the table was waiting for the base of her skull. Very easily.

“The news is flying around town,” Hibbs babbled. “There was a special bulletin on TV. Said that she’d been murdered and her nephew was being sought. Have they caught him yet?”

“Not to my knowledge, Ralph.”

“Just think of it! A couple days ago we were playing golf with him, and Dorcas was full of plans for his future …”

There was movement behind Vallancourt. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the detective.

“Hello, Woody,” Ralph Hibbs said. “Terrible thing! Have they assigned you to the case?”

“I’d rather be chasing down a nameless punk,” said Britt gloomily. “Well, at least I can wrap it up quick and get it off my back.”

“It’s so damn unbelievable,” Hibbs said. “Dorcas had taken Keith in, was giving him the chance for a new start.”

“And got her head stove in for her trouble.” Britt added a bitter note: “Too bad you and Mr. Conway let him get away, Mr. Vallancourt.”

Vallancourt let it pass. He had been the victim of surprise, in a moment of shock. If Britt didn’t understand that, no explanation would suffice.

“What do you think happened, Britt?” he asked.

“It’s a cinch it goes back to that Florida murder,” the lanky detective said. “They almost had a case against him, you know, and Dorcas Ferguson was nobody’s fool. Something the boy said or did must have told her he was that girl’s killer, all right. The way she called her brother-in-law and you, Mr. Vallancourt, shows how upset she was. She wanted help and advice. I figure she wasn’t quite ready to pull the string on the murdering louse.”

The two men said nothing as Britt paused to light a cigar. “Miss Ferguson was alone, remember. It was the maid’s day off, and Mildred Morgan had taken the chauffeur-handyman to the center for the week’s shopping. We’ve just finished talking to them.

“Miss Ferguson was in her study when the servants went grocery buying. She must have been there when Keith Rollins showed, suspecting a chill wind was about to blow his way. A few words with his aunt convinced him of it.

“I don’t think the boy wanted or intended to kill her,” Britt frowned. “He got panicky, is all. Wanted to make tracks. He needed dough and had a fat chance of getting it from his aunt right then. But she always kept a metal cashbox in her desk. And, friends, that box is now missing.”

“But she wasn’t killed in her study,” Hibbs protested.

Woody Britt gave him a sour look. “He threatened her, see? And took the box. Started out of the house, coming through the doorway connecting the living room and study. You expect her just to sit there? Not Miss Dorcas Ferguson.

“In the living room, she catches up with him. She’s plenty put out after all she tried to do for him. She gets in his way, and Keith …” Britt made a shoving motion with his hands. “So she falls backwards and her head …” Britt snapped his bony fingers.

The man’s teeth were yellowish clamps on his cigar. “Only he ain’t out of the woods, not by a long shot. He’s in the living room with her dead body, and two men are walking in on him, Mr. Conway and you, Mr. Vallancourt. He ducks behind the drapery, hoping you’ll take one look and run like hell to get help, giving him a chance for a getaway.”

“That’s all pretty much guesswork, Britt,” said Vallancourt.

“Sure, but how the hell else could it have happened? You figure another way, Mr. Vallancourt?”

Vallancourt shrugged. “Do you mind if I leave now? I’ve given you all the help I can, and I’m anxious to get back to my daughter.”

“Sure. Go on. If I need you, I’ll give you a ring. But I don’t think I’ll have to. We’ll have him behind bars by nightfall. The state patrol’s been alerted, roadblocks set up. We got this Rollins kid bottled up in this section of the state. If he gets out, it won’t be alive.”

Charles and Mrs. Ledbetter had heard the news. Vallancourt called them into his study and briefed them on the details, concluding with the thought uppermost in his mind: “It’s possible, perhaps probable, that Keith Rollins will try to contact Nancy.”

The Ledbetters, he suspected, had already considered the possibility. Charles said, “We’ll bear it in mind, Mr. Vallancourt.”

They left and he placed a call to the dean’s office at the college. When Dean Hansbury was on the line, he said, “This is John Vallancourt. I’m reluctant to disrupt her schedule, but can you have someone contact my daughter in class and have her call home? It’s urgent.”

As he hung up, the sound of a voice drifted in. He went out quickly. Charles was at the front door, firmly insisting that he would have to determine if Mr. Vallancourt was home.

The caller was Sam Rollins. Vallancourt said, “It’s all right, Charles.”

Rollins’s clothing flapped about his scarecrow frame. Beads of sweat glistened on the sharp planes of his face.

“We can talk in the study,” Vallancourt said. Rollins preceded him, and he closed the door behind them.

Rollins pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and massaged his palms. Then he teetered on the balls of his feet. “What are you and Howard Conway up to, Vallancourt?”

“I don’t believe I follow you.”

“The hell you don’t! Accusing my boy of murder!”

Vallancourt’s eyes went cold. It was rather late for the man to be putting on the conscientious father act.

“I’ve accused no one of anything, Mr. Rollins. I simply told the police what happened.”

“You didn’t see Keith do anything, did you?” Rollins punctuated his words with a soiled finger. “You bet you didn’t! Even that lunkhead Keith wouldn’t hang around after a killing. You scared him, he lost his head and ran. If he’d killed her, he wouldn’t have panicked. Maybe later, but not then. He’s cold as a snake when he’s in a corner. I’ve seen him …” Rollins suddenly broke off, as if he had said too much.

“Yes, Mr. Rollins?” Vallancourt prompted.

“I mean, I’ve seen him as a kid when he had to take a licking. Go cold as turkey. Not a nerve. Afraid of nothing. Couldn’t reach him if you used a razor strap. Him being in Dorcas Ferguson’s house today don’t prove a thing.”

He was pretty damned cold and nerveless behind the drapery, Vallancourt thought, primed for anything.

“I’m not trying to prove or disprove anything, Mr. Rollins.”

“A stinking, lousy break,” Rollins said. He dropped into a leather chair and his face drooped. “A square shake for my kid, that’s all I’m after.”

“He’ll get one.”

“Like hell. It’s stacked against him. All the Ferguson heirs, the Ferguson interests. They’ll throw him to the wolves. Fat chance my boy’ll have of saving his skin, much less collecting a dime of his inheritance.”

So that was it!

Vallancourt’s teeth acquired an edge. He reminded himself that he was a civilized man.

“What is it that brings you to me, Mr. Rollins?”

“Your girl, of course. I’ll lay you six to one Keith tries to contact her. If we play it right, she’ll lead us straight to him.”

The study door sighed open. Charles said, “A call for you, Mr. Vallancourt.”

Vallancourt reached for the phone on the desk. “Yes?”

He listened.

His face went bloodless.

He said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

Rollins came sliding up from the chair, looking interested.

“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Rollins.”

“Now listen here! You can’t dismiss me like I was some kind of—”

“Get out of here, Rollins.”

When the door clicked, Vallancourt reached for the phone. He would start the search here and now, calling everyone she knew.

But his hunter’s instinct told him he already had the answer.

His caller had been Dean Hansbury. Nancy had attended none of her classes today. She had not arrived at the college this morning.

She must have gone to a rendezvous with Keith. Innocently, in the manner of that other girl in Port Palmetto, Florida.

6.

As the MG growled deeper into the hills on the winding county road, Keith tried to keep out of his thoughts the picture of his aunt’s lifeless body.

The strange slow-motion quality was fading from his surroundings. A bird flitted normally across the path of the MG, and the details of the creature were not agonizingly clear.

The acuity of his senses in times of crisis was frightening. It was as if the phenomenon did not really belong to the dweller in his flesh. He had heard or read somewhere that soldiers under fire often experienced the same sharp appreciation of danger. He could not remember when he had experienced the feeling for the first time. He was nagged by a dark suggestion, that his father was somehow mixed up in it. The experience went a long way back, to the beginning of memory. As if he had been under fire since the birth of consciousness.

He braked the MG and took a steep curve under light acceleration. The car was a friendly tool in his hands. Below, the shallow valley rolled blue-green. Only the throaty tones of the car broke the silence.

The MG nosed up, framing the cloudless sky in the windshield. The crest of the hill swept past and the car began to drop.

She had felt so loose, so boneless … He bit his lip. Like a bundle of rags …

And when he had jerked his hands away, there had been a smear of red jelly on his fingertip.

The memory needled his face with a sweat which the rush of wind over the MG could not evaporate.

It was an out-of-kilter, Dali-like grotesquerie, this portrait held in memory. He could identify the wavering outlines of a crouching figure as his own. He had looked at her stillness and the smear of red on his finger, and he knew she was dead.

Then a scratchy needle on an invisible turntable brought forth sound. Voices belonging to Howard Conway and Jonathan Vallancourt.

He felt again the flowing movement of his muscles, the touch of drapery fabric against his cheek. He had stood behind that frail armor, not breathing, hearing Howard and Vallancourt come into the room.

If they would only leave the room for a moment, he had thought, he could slip out the window, re-enter the Ferguson living room from the rear of the house, pretend he had been looking for his aunt.

Oh, God, let them go away. Please make them go out for just a few seconds …

Instead, Vallancourt had jerked the drapery aside.

He shivered, remembering. And not remembering. For there was no real recollection of the next few minutes, merely a sense of motion. And an echo of Howard Conway’s astounded voice: “Police, John … Head him off!” The voice had been swallowed in the roar of the MG’s engine.

Keith lifted his hand from the wheel and wiped the sleeve of his checkered sports shirt across his face.

At least they hadn’t yet headed him off. He had been able to reach this lonely, little-used road. They didn’t know his destination, his reason for being here … unless Nancy had let it slip.

No, he thought. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t have. They won’t suspect I’m here.

He dared to think he might get away for good. It had happened. Men disappeared, changed their names.

The System was the thing you had to beat, not individuals. The System digested a man’s habits, appearance. It was electronic devices, test tubes, cameras, microfilmed files; it never rested, never slept. It picked up a man in one place and through simple routine discovered that his fingerprints matched those left a thousand miles away.

With the name-change, therefore, had to come a change in personality, habits. He had to find a steady job, live quietly in the endless shadow of the System, never let it touch him, never draw its attention.

A dense woodland threw a heavy blanket of shadow over the MG. The air was cooler. It felt good on his face.

“I can. I will,” he said to himself. “This won’t be like the other times when I’ve almost made the grade, only to see everything go sour.”

His stomach muscles quivered at the thought of failure, of letting the System net him. Failure now meant total destruction. They had that Cheryl Pemberton thing in Florida, and now the death of Aunt Dorcas …

The road coiled with the contour of the land, dropping gradually. Through a break in the timber he glimpsed the sapphire lake. A boarded-up summer cottage shot past, then another. Several such cottages were about the lake, but not in sufficient quantity to spoil its natural beauty.

The MG rushed past the timber line, and the splendor of the cold, silent, miles-long lake, embraced by the green hills, monopolized Keith’s view. He began to feel better.

My querencia, he thought with a bitter smile. He wondered if it was the right Spanish word. Querencia, the place where the bull feels strongest. The spot on the sand to which el toro, tortured by the blood-lusting olé from twenty thousand throats, returns time after time. The brave bull, Keith recalled, with the matador’s sword finally piercing his heart, will strive blindly to reach his querencia, his dying place.

Always the bull dies, he thought, alone on the bloody sand. Always.

He tried to shake the thought from his mind. A bull was a dumb animal, with no gift or chance for making a choice. He was born to die, his end planned before he dropped from the cow’s womb.

But a man was different.

Wasn’t he?

Opposite a flimsy pier and boathouse, a gravelled driveway lay tangent to the road. Keith braked the MG, nosing into the drive. With a brief spurt of crushed stone, the car rounded the curve; and there was Dorcas Ferguson’s lodge, a rambling, rustic building with a railed-in gallery across the front.

Parked near the house was a small sedan.

Keith stopped the MG behind the other car. He got out quickly. As he did so, he heard Nancy Vallancourt’s quick footsteps crossing the porch.

His throat tightened as he looked at her.

She ran to him, laughing in relief. And she took his hand, and leaned toward him, and kissed him lightly.

“I was wondering if you’d changed your mind,” she said.

He drew her over to the split-log steps, sat down on one of them, pulled her down beside him.

She looked away, staring across the mirror of the lake at the distant blue mist of the hills. “Have you, Keith?”

“I haven’t changed my mind,” Keith said.

“Then why that look in your eyes?” She touched his chin. He jerked away.

“I beg your pardon,” Nancy murmured. She let her hands drop to her lap.

He turned to her then. “You don’t understand, Nancy.”

“I think I do.” She jumped up. “We went over all this last night. It wasn’t easy for me to come here, you know.”

“Nancy, please …”

“I suppose it’s better this way. For a while there you almost made a believer of me, bud.”

She ran toward her car. Keith rose. Let her go, he thought. Don’t say anything. Just let her go, back to the safe and normal world.

He stood slack-mouthed, sweating. She had reached her car. She was touching the door handle.

“Nancy!”

She paused then, but she did not turn to look at him. “Save it, Keith. At least you haven’t tried to postpone the elopement and substitute sex by the lakeside.”

“Listen!” he said. “You listen to me! What do you think I am?”

“I thought I knew, Keith.”

“Okay,” he said. “Remember it, will you?”

She ventured a look over her shoulder. “Do you really want me to go?”

“Why not?”

“What’s the matter with you, Keith?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re lying to me. What happened in town? Did my father get across to you?”

“No.”

“Tell me if he did, Keith. He means well. He may even be right.”

“He is, Nancy. He’s a smart man. Go back.”

“Come with me. We’ll tell him what we planned, and why. We’ll make him understand that nothing can come between us.”

He said nothing.

She was facing him now, trying to grin. “All right, let’s follow the original plan and find a justice of the peace. I prefer it to returning to town, anyway.”

He said nothing. How could he tell her?

“Lately, Keith, my bed feels cold. It isn’t a place to sleep, just to think of you. How can I be so shameless?”

“Nancy, I can’t take …” It burst out of him.

“But it’s got to be legal, Keith. The way we planned.”

“Nancy …”

“No. I can’t talk myself again into treating dad this way. It’s now or not at all, Keith. If you let me get into this car and drive away, that’s it.”

He stood with dangling arms. The wind off the lake was cold. The day began to take on the old slow-motion clarity.

“All right,” he said through stiff lips. “Here it is. They’re looking for me. They’re saying I killed Aunt Dorcas.”

She stared at him as if she were about to giggle.

He ran over and caught her arms and shook her hard. “Did you hear me, Nancy?”

She continued to stare at nothing. Holding on to her arm, he guided her toward the cottage. When they reached the porch steps, she sank down.

Then something snapped in her. With a clawing motion, she put her hands to her face and started to sob.

Keith wanted to clap his palms over his ears. The sight of her, the sounds coming from her, added to everything else, were too much to bear.

7.

When she stopped sobbing, he lit two cigarettes and offered her one. He was standing on ground level, one foot on the bottom step, his shadow enveloping her.

“Please sit down, Keith.”

He eased down on the step.

“Don’t you want to tell me?”

“Would it help?”

“You owe it to me.”

“It’s really simple, Nancy. Aunt Dorcas phoned the apartment where I’m staying with the old man. She asked me to hurry over. She sounded so upset that I went right over. I knew it wouldn’t be long until you’d arrive at the lake here, but I didn’t think the few minutes would matter.”

“Of course not, Keith. I didn’t mind waiting.”

“When I got there, the place looked deserted. No sign of the servants, so I figured she’d sent them out. I called her name a couple of times, looked in her study. Even went through the kitchen and had a look out back from the windows.”

He broke off, sat looking at the ground. “You know, a funny thing happened then. I’ll remember it a long time. I got sore at her, Nancy, really miffed. I was anxious to get up here. I thought to myself, she has one hell of a nerve, jerking strings any time she feels like it, making people jump.”

“She wasn’t like that, Keith. Not at all.”

“Don’t I know it? All my life she did for me, for my mother, for that louse of a father of mine. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Dorcas, we’d have gone hungry plenty of times. My old man with his rotten liquor and his big deals that never paid off … Always Aunt Dorcas was a kind of fairy godmother to us.

“The old man … Being married to Dorcas Ferguson’s sister gave him a leg up on a pretty soft life. He could be a country club bum instead of a saloon rummy.”

“Keith.”

“No, I’ve got to say it, Nancy. The way I got so put out with her this morning, just because she wasn’t there. As if she’d ever failed me! The way she came to my rescue after that Florida nightmare, and afterward, in my home town. God, I hope she forgives me, wherever she is.

“All the time I was swearing at her, she was lying in the living room dead.”

“Keith. Don’t. No more, darling.”

He raised his head slowly. “I decided to go into the living room and wait for her. That’s when I found her.”

She took his hand and held it protectively.

“Then I heard them coming, Nancy, Aunt Ivy’s husband and your father. All of a sudden I realized the spot I was in. So I really corned the whole deal off. I hid.”

“Oh, Keith!”

He ground the cigarette under his heel, savagely. “Your father found me, skulking behind the drapes. All I could think of was making a break for it. I lost my head—what there is of it.”

An early jay berated them from a nearby sapling. Water whispered against the pier and boathouse.

“I’m in real trouble this time, Nancy.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we are.”

“Not we!”

“Why not?”

“Nancy, I can’t involve you in this. You’ve got to go back.”

“Did you do it, Keith? Look at me and tell me. Did you?”

“As God is my witness, I loved Aunt Dorcas. I didn’t lay a finger on her.”

“Then how can I turn my back on you?”

“You’ve got to.”

“You don’t understand,” she said softly. “You’re everything that has meaning for me. Keith?”

“You’re crazy, Nancy,” he said in a hoarse voice. But a part of him was wildly rejoicing. He sat struggling with himself.

“I’m not being altogether unselfish,” he heard Nancy say. He wished she would get up and leave, now, while he could still let her go. “If I turned my back on you at the first sign of trouble, Keith, what would I think of myself? Keith, this is so new to you, isn’t it? Having someone … You don’t know how to react, do you?”

“I should have passed up the lake and kept going,” he muttered.

Her hand slipped from his arm. She uttered a shaky laugh. “If I were swimming naked, you’d hesitate to get your feet wet. Jump in, bud, there’s water enough for two.”

Without moving any other part of his body, he thrust out his hand. “Keys,” he said.

“Keys?”

“To your car. We’ll leave the MG. They’ll be looking for it.”

The keys clashed. His hand closed over them. He got to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants.

They walked over to Nancy’s little compact without looking at each other.

“I’d better drive,” he said.

She nodded and walked around the front of the car to get into the suicide seat.

“With you in a sec,” he said.

The gravel of the driveway crunched beneath his feet as he went to his sports car. He had no luggage. He had planned, upon his aunt’s sudden call this morning, to stop back at the apartment and pick up a few things after he met Nancy.

He kept a lightweight London fog in the MG. The coat lay on the front seat. He leaned across the door of the car and picked the coat up.

There was a small metal box lying on the seat. Frowning, he triggered the catch and opened the box.

He didn’t lift the money out right away, merely stood there touching it. Then with a jerk, his fingers closed over the sheaf of bills, scooped it out of the box, slipped it into the side pocket of his trousers.

He went back to Nancy’s sedan and slid under the wheel. He turned the key and started the car.

They dropped out of the driveway, wheeled around the edge of the lake. He felt a need to talk. But he did not say anything. Neither did Nancy, until the car turned away from the lake and burrowed into the woods.

“Got a cigarette?” she asked lightly. But there was a tautness in her voice.

He handed her the pack.

“Want one?”

“Please.”

She lit a cigarette for him, one for herself.

“What’s the agenda?”

She was resting her head against the seat back, smoking calmly, blowing the smoke in a cool stream.

His stomach writhed. This was not the Nancy he had known. There was now a cold-bloodedness about her, as if she had deliberately shut out of her mind all the guilty questions, doubts, and fears. The change alarmed him. It wasn’t like Nancy. And he shared it. A sort of hardening process had set in. In both of them.

“I won’t go back, Nancy.”

“The police usually dig out the truth.”

“I had a round with those small-town cops in Florida,” he said. “They had no evidence, but it was rough. The police here … they’ve got a lot more on me. The minute I’m jailed they’ll throw away the key.”

“I don’t know, Keith, you may be right. Whoever killed your aunt may get careless. The longer you’re missing, the greater the possibility of the real murderer’s tipping his hand.”

“Sure,” Keith said.

She hadn’t, he realized, quite understood that they weren’t going back, period. The implications of vanishing, of never again seeing familiar faces or surroundings were unreal to her. Maybe when the chips were down she’d regret her decision back there at the lake house. Probably would. He would have to watch, be prepared. Wait and see, he told himself. Take one thing at a time. Act as if there weren’t a screaming nerve in your body. Improvise. Regard everything and everybody as a potential enemy.

Even Nancy.

The dark sadness reached deeper inside of him.

Like a beetle, the little sedan stretched the distance between itself and the lake. The timberland fell behind. They met no traffic as they moved across the hills on the secondary road.

Finally the stop sign at the intersection with the primary road came into view.

Keith braked, quietly waiting for a heavy car and house trailer to trundle past. Then he gunned the engine and swung onto the highway.

Nancy was again lighting cigarettes.

“Don’t burn yourself,” she cautioned him. “Here.”

Without taking his eyes from the road, Keith took one hand from the wheel and let her put the cigarette between his fingers.

The highway was not of the best. A two-lane road a generation ago, it had been widened, patched, repaired until it was a crazy conglomerate of tar, asphalt, concrete.

Keith checked the dashboard. Plenty of gas; nearly a full tank. Temperature gauge showed the engine running cool. Generator operating properly. He held the car to an even fifty miles an hour. He could make more than two hundred miles before having to stop for gas. The countryside lay quiet. Traffic was light, and the day was perfect for driving.

He began to feel easier in his mind than at any time since he had walked into his aunt’s home this morning.

A big diesel rig chuffing from the opposite direction caught his attention. It might have been the glint of sun on glass, but it was not. Its headlights were on.

Keith touched his switch, blinked his lights. The truck blinked in reply.

The two vehicles drew abreast, and Keith gave the trucker a brief wave of his hand. The trucker perched in his cab, a grin on his face, returned the wave and was gone.

Nancy sat up. “What is it, Keith?”

He did not answer immediately. His eyes were searching, his body drawing itself up over the wheel.

A filling-station-garage-and-country-store appeared a quarter of a mile ahead. The weathered buildings lay well back from the highway. There was a hard-packed apron that offered ample room for a U-turn.

Keith toed the brake, steered off the highway, turned in a tight half circle.

He sat nerveless, waiting for a chance to fire the sedan into the farther highway lanes.

“Why are we turning around, Keith?” Nancy asked.

“You see that truck?”

“The one you waved to?”

“He was tipping off oncoming truck drivers and any other hep characters to trouble ahead.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“A weight or license check. Or a state cruiser hiding behind a billboard with a radar whammy and a fresh book of speeding tickets. Or a roadblock. We’ll have to go back—until nightfall.”

“To the lake cottage?”

“Can you suggest a better place?”

8.

Vallancourt got home from police headquarters late in the afternoon. Charles had the front door open before he reached it, and Mrs. Ledbetter had made it her business to be hovering nearby. As he handed Charles his hat, Vallancourt shook his head.

“Mr. Hibbs is in the study, Mr. Vallancourt,” Charles said.

“How long has he been here?”

“Five minutes or so When he arrived, I called the police station. You were on your way here. Mr. Hibbs said he would wait.”

He went quickly to his study. Ralph Hibbs was thumbing through a travel magazine. He let the heavy periodical fall to the desk.

“Anything at all, John?”

The question and the anxious eyes behind the glasses killed his faint hope that Hibbs might have heard something.

“Not yet.”

“Surely Nancy is too level-headed to get herself in trouble.”

“Nancy is in love. At least she thinks she is, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Are you sure she’s with Keith Rollins?”

“Every other possibility has been eliminated.”

“Maybe she’ll talk some sense into him.”

“Don’t remind me which of the runaways will influence the other, Ralph.”

“I didn’t mean …”

“Of course not.” Vallancourt walked to the window, looked out. Darkness was falling dismally. “There’s a breed of woman, Ralph, who can’t attach conditions to loyalty.”

“I can’t believe she would deliberately …”

“How about you, Ralph? You’ll have to make plans of your own, won’t you?”

“You mean about the agency?”

“Yes.”

“With so many other things on my mind, John, I hadn’t given it much thought. But you’re right, of course. I’m still running the biggest auto agency in this end of the state, and Dorcas Ferguson was a major stockholder. But right now the business doesn’t seem important. What about you, John?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t had time to talk to Howard since this morning. I left word for him to come over when he felt he could leave Ivy.”

Howard Conway arrived a few minutes later. A look of gauntness had managed to attach itself to his robust frame today.

“How is Ivy, Howard?”

“You can imagine.”

“Anything I can do?” Hibbs asked.

“No, thanks, Ralph. She’ll live through the ordeal.” Conway lit a cigarette with jerky motions. “I don’t need to ask you if you’ve heard anything, John. It’s all over your face.”

“She’s with him somewhere. We’re sure of that. We’ve had the day to check the college, her friends—to turn the town over and shake it out.”

Howard’s face tightened. “Too bad we didn’t nail him this morning.”

“Now we have to be very careful,” Vallancourt said. “He won’t back into a corner pleasantly.”

“He’s hardly more than a boy …” Hibbs mumbled.

Conway regarded him coldly. “The trouble with you, Ralph, is that you view every situation with the same preconception.”

“But he wouldn’t …”

“He’ll run himself right into a stone wall if he’s pushed to it. And when his own destruction is inevitable, he’ll wreck everything he can lay his hands on. Do you agree, John? Isn’t that what’s sticking in your craw?”

“I’m afraid so,” Vallancourt admitted. There was a helpless silence. Then he said, “The roadblocks haven’t stopped him. It means he stole a car and got through. Or else he’s still in this area.”

“Stealing a car would be risky,” Hibbs argued.

“A poor swimmer won’t regard a river as much of a risk with a forest fire behind him,” Vallancourt said grimly. “Anyway, a switch of cars wouldn’t be difficult. Take your own used-car division, Ralph. Stalwart, clean-cut young man comes in, looks around. Would any of your salesmen refuse to let him try out a car?”

“No, but we’d report it stolen.”

“Sure,” Conway said, “in an hour or so. When it became clear he wasn’t coming back. After you’d inherited one secondhand MG.”

“Which puts the search on a nationwide basis,” Vallancourt said. “Let’s take the smaller bite first.”

“You think he’s still in the area?” Hibbs asked.

“Yes.”

“One chance in two,” Howard said.

“On the surface, yes. Actually, the odds are in our favor.”

“I don’t dig,” Conway said.

“I don’t believe he’d realize at first that a whole section of the state had been cut off by roadblocks. He’s under tremendous pressure. He wouldn’t start sorting out details right away.”

“So he spots a string of cars at a roadblock.” Conway ran his fingers through his untidy hair. “He sneaks a turnaround on a sideroad and slips back to town.”

“No,” Vallancourt said. “He wouldn’t do that.”

“Why not?” demanded Hibbs.

“Because, Ralph, the roadblock turns his pressures inside out. Now his brain starts exploding with details, real and fancied. Every pair of eyes that looks at the MG is filled with recognition, or suspicion. Everybody in sight is running for a phone to report his location. He wouldn’t dare venture back into town.”

“Stealing a car in the country wouldn’t be like going into a car lot.”

“Or walking city streets until he finds a car with the keys in it,” Conway said.

“But he can still pull a switch.” Vallancourt read the question in their eyes, and he gave them the painful answer: “Nancy’s car.”

Hibbs blinked. “Sure!”

“The sonofabitch,” Conway cried. “He may be three hundred miles from here by now!”

But Vallancourt shook his silvered head. “A switch occurred to me immediately. A description of Nancy’s car was sent out by the police. The only thing is, neither car has been spotted, in use or abandoned. The odds are that Nancy and Keith are still in the net.”

“In an area covering about four counties,” Conway said.

“Parked on a side road waiting for night?” Hibbs suggested.

“Waiting for night,” Vallancourt nodded. “But not on a side road, tavern, even a motel. No public place. A private place where he would feel safer.”

“His father’s apartment?”

“The police put Sam Rollins’s place under surveillance the first thing,” Vallancourt said, “along with the homes of Nancy’s friends.”

“He needs his attic room,” Conway said.

“His what?”

“Something Dorcas mentioned when she was planning to bring him here to live. One night at dinner she got pretty emotional about the poor darling’s lot in life.”

“Let’s get to this attic room, Howard.”

“It seems that Keith had a favorite spot back home, an attic room, where he would hide when his father decided to enforce his orders with a club, or life got too tough some other way.”

“We all occasionally need to close a door,” Ralph Hibbs said.

“Sure. Even a woman with the self-possession of a Dorcas Ferguson.”

Vallancourt came to quick attention. “She had such a place?”

“A cottage on the lake,” Conway said. “She never advertised the location. Would have defeated her purpose. It’s a kind of lodge. Now and then she’d take a day there to dig in the garden, or lie in the sun, or get drunk. Depended on her mood.”

“Did Keith know about the lodge?”

Conway paused with a cigarette lighter half raised. “Come to think of it, yes.”

Vallancourt’s eyes caught fire. “His querencia!”

Hibbs said blankly, “His what?”

“The other Sunday Nancy was talking to Keith on the phone. She laughed and said they’d picnic at ‘the querencia.’ I dismissed it at the time as some sort of new catch-phrase among the college set.”

Conway remembered his cigarette and lit it with a triumphant drag. “You’ve got it, John! We’ll corner the sonofabitch and make him sorry he ever walked through his aunt’s front door!”

“We’ll do nothing of the kind, Howard.”

Conway stared, and Hibbs sluiced moisture from his pale forehead with his finger. “We’d better call the police.”

Vallancourt caught him by the wrist. “We’ll not do that, either, Ralph. With Nancy there, the last thing I want is a posse of armed men and a battery of searchlights. Anyway, we’re not sure yet we’ve pinpointed the location.”

“All right,” Conway said on an unwilling note, “we’ll play it your way. Approach him nice and friendly. Talk Nancy away. Then let him look out.” He glanced at Hibbs. “You in?”

“Certainly, if I can be of help.”

“On my terms and conditions,” Vallancourt said in an iron voice. “Otherwise I go alone.”

The other two men nodded.

They rode in silence, Vallancourt holding the Continental to a fast, steady clip. Howard Conway had shucked his boredom; there was a pleasurable excitement working up in the man. An occasional uneasy rustling in the back seat reminded Vallancourt of Hibbs’s presence.

“Turn here,” Conway said intently.

The heavy car slued a trifle as it entered the right fork of the narrow county road. The countryside lay in a twilight hush through which the car’s rushing passage was a whisper.

The twilight was instantly transformed to black night as the Continental swooped down through the timber.

A graveled driveway flicked into view. Vallancourt touched the brakes.

“Not this one,” said Conway. “It belongs to the Harkleroads. They never get up from Florida until midsummer. We’re going to the upper end of the lake … Watch the curve when the road reaches the lake, John.”

The big car rocked. The lake was a limitless glass, unsilvered, mysterious. The hills made a broken black horizon against the deepening purple of the sky.

“The next driveway, John.”

“We’ll park on the road.” He stopped the car, leaving the headlights burning. His glance made a rapid orientation, marking the boathouse and dock to his left, the driveway toward his right, the outlines of the lodge with its long open gallery crouching on the hillside.

The three got out. Vallancourt and Hibbs carried flashlights.

“We’re making a social call,” the diplomat reminded them.

He was first up the driveway, keeping to its center. He held the flashlight steady.

“Keith,” he called in a clear, calm tone. “If you’re here, we came alone. We’d like to talk to you. You may show yourself safely. We’re not armed and we’ll keep our distance.”

A breeze, surly with the last chill of spring, snapped through the pines. Gravel crunched beneath the footsteps of the three men.

“Nobody’s here,” Hibbs whispered.

Vallancourt continued to climb toward the cottage. He raised his light to play the beam across the front of the building. The windows shone blackly. A hoseful of wind swept a shower of pine needles from the porch.

Vallancourt spoke over his shoulder. “Got a key, Howard?”

“Nope.”

“Does Keith?”

“I don’t know.”

“Listen,” Ralph Hibbs said.

“What is it?”

“I heard something.”

They stood listening.

“You’re hearing things,” Conway decided.

“No,” Hibbs insisted. “I tell you I heard movement up there. On the hill above the driveway.”

Unbidden, Vallancourt’s mind created an imaginary scene, Nancy up on the dark hillside realizing now what a foolish and terrible mistake she had made … Nancy helpless against Keith’s strength … Keith’s arm locked about her throat, his breath hot against her ear as he warned her not to make a sound …

“I don’t hear a thing,” said Conway.

“Neither do I, now,” Hibbs said. “But I know damned well I did a minute ago.”

“Probably a dead branch blowing off a tree.”

“We’ll have to make sure,” Vallancourt said. He raised his voice again: “Keith, we’re not armed. We have not brought the police. Let’s have a word with you, that’s all.”

“Hell, John,” Conway said, disgusted, “he isn’t up here. He’s probably getting wrapped up by a roadblock while we stand here like idiots talking to the wind.”

“We’ll have to make sure, Howard.”

He walked quietly forward, then stopped with a jerk. His flashlight ray had fallen across the MG. The car sat empty. It looked like a toy.

The light probed, swung, stopped, swung back to the MG.

“At least we know he was here,” Hibbs said. “That means the two of them are in Nancy’s car.”

Vallancourt crossed the driveway to the MG and aimed the light. The key was not in the ignition. A glint of gray metal in the farther seat caught his eye.

“Howard, Ralph, will you come here?”

His tone brought Conway and Hibbs lumbering over.

“Take a look.”

“Looks like a cashbox.”

“The one Dorcas kept in her study, Howard?” Vallancourt asked.

“Could be.”

“Its disappearance was discovered right after her murder. The city detective seemed to consider it an important find.”

“Don’t you?” Conway asked.

“I’m not sure. We reached her place at about the same time, Howard. You were passing the MG when I pulled up. Did you get a look inside?”

Conway knuckled his chin. “I think I did. It’s natural to glance inside a convertible when it passes with the top down.”

“Did you see the cashbox?”

“No, John, I think there was a coat or jacket lying on the seat. Trenchcoat, maybe.”

“The cashbox might have been under the coat,” Hibbs said. “Anyway, the police can lift fingerprints from the box and determine if it really is … was Dorcas’s.”

“Yes,” Vallancourt said, “I’m sure they can. I’m sure they will.”

I’m equally sure, he thought, that Keith didn’t have the cashbox with him when he went out the window of the Ferguson living room. He was in there with a murdered woman, and the box was outside, in his car.

Why didn’t he keep going when he carried the box out? Why should he return to her lifeless body?

9.

From the advantage of the cottage porch, Keith watched Nancy’s sedan crawl along the lake and disappear into the distant woodland.

It would be getting dark soon now. The lake was as peaceful as a church.

Keith told himself he should be feeling better. He knew the worst now. He knew what he had to do. Always in the past, when he realized the full extent of his predicament, a strange calm had come over him, an ability to crouch down within himself, watchful, ready.

The old man used to say he had a streak of bulldog in him.

Maybe I do have, Keith thought.

He scuffed at the porch floor with his toe, remembering.

It was some consolation to know how many times he had denied his father victory. The experiences went as far back as Keith could recall. The old man would freeze him out, cut his allowance, humiliate him, pile ridiculous chores on him. Like the time he’d made Keith spend a Saturday carrying leaves from the front yard a bucketful at a time.

And then the resort to physical violence. Keith would vomit in private, but facing his father he was stolid, prepared for pain, knowing whose endurance was the greater. The ending was always the same, with his father sweating, backing away finally with a curse. And the boy carrying a heavier load of hatred and contempt.

Keith walked to the top of the porch steps and sat down.

Of course, it hadn’t been uninterrupted war between him and the old man. Mother was an angel, he thought. Vague, helpless, unable to cope with the old man; but she was jake, george, and number one, all put indefinitely together in a little woman everybody called Maggie.

Elbows on knees, hands knotted, he rubbed his forehead against his knuckles.

Mom, I’m glad you don’t have to wonder and worry. About this thing now … and that Cheryl Pemberton mess in Florida.

They thought they had me. But I knew I could stand it. The nerves all dissolved, leaving nothing for them to get to. Like with the old man. Sixty hours of it. One after another of them. I worked them in shifts, Mom. And there weren’t enough of them …

He jerked his head up, jumped to his feet, grabbed the porch post. A fluttering went through his chest. Too soon for Nancy. She hadn’t had time to get to the drive-in and back.

He stood listening. He was certain the breeze had carried the faintest sound of a car down the trough of the long, shallow valley.

He vaulted the porch rail, dropping like a cat to the yard. After a moment’s hesitation, he ran toward the lake.

They’ve got her, he thought. They’ve made her talk. I should have gone myself, the way I wanted to. Why did I let her talk me into her going?

Far down the lake, twin shafts of light stabbed across the water.

Keith faded across the road into the shadows. He stood breathing hard, studying the dark hills behind him, the road ahead.

He had to decide quickly.

He jumped a drainage ditch with an easy flow of movement and started dog-padding parallel to the road, in the direction from which the car was coming.

He could hear it quite clearly now. Far ahead of him, the car’s lights danced, closing the distance rapidly.

He reached a cave of darkness beneath a giant spreading oak. He dropped in a crouch, hands spread on the rough bark.

He recognized the Continental as it surged past. John Vallancourt was driving. He wasn’t sure how many people were in the car. Three, he thought. At least one man in the suicide seat, and an impression of another in the rear.

Howard Conway and Ralph Hibbs, he decided.

Join you for golf, fellows? A smile twisted Keith’s mouth as the taillights of the car dwindled.

His grim humor was brief. He was again in motion. Vallancourt and his cronies would go to the lodge, look around and, when they found the place deserted, return this way.

She’ll meet them head on, he thought. I’ve got to reach her before that happens.

Off the road, underbrush and rough stony terrain impeded his progress. He slipped to the edge of the road, looked back. The taillights of the Continental were far down the lake, almost to the driveway, he judged. Even if they looked down the road from there, at this distance they wouldn’t see him.

Keeping to the side of the road, he moved at a ground-eating pace, loose and loping, getting his second wind and breathing through his nose.

He reached the woodland, stumbled over a shallow pothole in the shoulder of the road. Still no sign of Nancy’s compact. Had Vallancourt and the others left the cottage yet?

His lungs began to pain at last, and he had to stop for a brief rest. He gulped deeply. Then he saw giant fireflies through the trees. Up around the next curve.

He stepped out into the middle of the road, gambling that he had correctly identified the sewing machine-like whirr of the small sedan’s engine.

He began waving his arms as the headlight glow enveloped him. The sedan stopped, and he ran over to it. Nancy’s face was white mist under her blonde hair.

“Keith …”

“Move over,” he said, “quick.”

He opened the door of the car and threw himself under the wheel. His body slammed against hers. She slid over.

“Hey,” she said with a taut laugh. “I’m making mush of these hamburgers I got at the drive-in.”

“Never mind that. Listen!”

He had turned off the headlights and engine. Nancy pulled the bag of hamburgers from between herself and the door.

“Keep it quiet, can’t you?” he snarled.

Her face snapped toward him, shocked. “Keith …”

“For God’s sake, shut up!”

She eased back in the seat, suddenly pressing away from him, from his voice, so cold and hostile.

He poked his head out. Down below the trees, the lake was an effective sonar, catching and echoing all sound.

“Oh, God,” he chattered, “they’re coming!”

“Who, Keith?”

“Your father and a couple of other men. Maybe a carload of them.”

He knew there was no chance of getting the sedan turned around and beating the Continental in a race. He kicked the parking release, threw in the clutch. The sedan began to roll forward. He set the ignition key and put the gear shift to the third position. When the sedan had rolled several yards, he slipped the clutch out. The engine caught without the grinding of the starter.

Through the foliage he was now able to see the big car’s headlights. How far away were they? Second or third curve?

He felt naked, disarmed, on the narrow road. Underbrush on either side formed hemming barriers.

He tried to unroll a mental map. The cottage belonging to the Florida people … Harkleroad, that was their name!… right after this next curve …

Or the curve after? The one that would put him in full view of the approaching Continental?

He kicked at the accelerator. The sedan shot forward.

He followed the heavy darkness of the trees and thickets, headlights off. Come on! A century later, there was a break in the dense shadows, a lighter patch, the gravel of a driveway twisting up behind the dark house.

Keith twisted the wheel, sending the compact into the driveway. It jackrabbitted upward, vanishing in the shadows of the deserted house.

The Continental purred past on the road below.

10.

Keith didn’t like the looks of the proprietor. The motel had seemed made to order, an older one, clean, inexpensive. Not a fancy place, and not a seedy dump a rat would run to, either. Just an everyday, run-of-the-mill motel. The kind of place he’d told the taxi driver he wanted for himself and his sister.

“Say you had car trouble?” the proprietor said.

Keith nodded, looking at the registry card he was signing. Why was the old bird quizzing him? The story he had told was perfectly plausible: He and his sister … driving downstate … car trouble … the need for an overnight repair.

“I guess you want adjoining rooms,” the lanky, wrinkled man said.

“If you have them.”

“Sure.” In a wise tone.

Keith let his breath out cautiously. This map-cheeked character with the granite eyes … did he think he’d spotted a couple of college kids shacking up for the night?

He handed the man the card. The eyes shifted. It made Keith want to reach across the registry desk in the dingy office and tap the old man on the chest and ask him what the hell was bugging him. Instead, Keith jammed his hands into his pockets.

“You’ll have to sign a card of your own, honey,” the man said, smiling at Nancy.

Keith pictured himself backhanding the old punk, wiping that wet, wise smile off the withered lips.

Nancy bent over the card. The eyes met Keith’s across her shoulders. The eyes turned stonier, and the old man got two keys from a pegboard behind the desk.

“Just the one bag?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Keith said. “Left the rest of the luggage in the car. It’ll be locked in the garage until the mechanic gets started on it tomorrow morning.” He reached down and picked up the bag. It was heavy. Her trousseau kit, Nancy had called it when they’d planned the elopement.

The heft of the bag, the sight of her blonde head bent over the registry card, caused an ache to spread through him. He was almost overcome by a feeling that it was useless to keep running. They were unreal people stumbling through a nightmare. Cold, greasy hamburgers for their dinner. Her compact abandoned on the other side of town. A ride on a municipal bus. A taxi to here. We’re making progress like a turtle backing his rear into a pot of water the cook has got boiling, he thought.

“This way,” the motel man said. Keys in hand, he started around the waist-high desk.

“Newt?” a shrill female voice called.

The man glanced with irritation at the open doorway beyond the desk. “Heather,” he called toward the living quarters, “we got …”

“I have to go out, Newt. None of those crummy friends of yours while I’m gone, hear? I’ll only be …”

A woman appeared in the doorway. She was thin and sallow, an arrangement of slats in clean, threadbare clothing. “Oh.”

“You never give me a chance to tell you,” her husband said. “This is Mr. and Miss Lonergan, Heather. They’re staying the night. I’m putting them in three and four.”

The woman glanced at Nancy’s left hand.

Keith looked frankly into the narrow face with its pinched mouth and anxious eyes.

“We’re not from the college, ma’am,” Keith said with a forced smile. “Brother and sister, on our way down-state because of sickness in the family. Our car broke down and we can’t get it fixed until tomorrow morning.”

“Sure. Well, you’ll rest easy here. We have a nice place.” She brushed by Newt, took Nancy’s bag, and led the way outside.

Keith glanced over his shoulder as he followed the woman across the parking area. Old Newt was standing in the doorway. Stiffly, watching.

The woman opened a door, switched on a light. A small, commonplace room was revealed.

“There, now,” the woman said. “The young lady can have this number three. New print curtains, see? Like them, miss? I work my fingers to the bone keeping this place up. If I had to depend on that sorry husband of mine … Here’s the bathroom. And a nice big closet. My father built this place, you know. When he and mama passed away, I made up my mind I’d keep it as nice as they left it. Respectable, too. We don’t take in the trash some of the older motels do nowadays.”

She crossed the room, threw a bolt. “This is your room, young man.”

Keith followed her in. “Fine.”

“I’m glad you like it.” She moved about quickly, like a sparrow. “I own up, when I first saw you two, I thought to myself, uh-uh, a pair of those college hellions. They do try to register here, you know. But I took one look at you, young man—”

“Why, thank you,” Keith said. And get the hell out, he thought.

He looked through the window. Old Newt was still in his doorway, watching.

The woman paused as she started from the room. “Oh. We always collect in advance.”

“I paid your husband.”

“Oh, excuse me. By the way, you’ll find extra blankets in the bottom drawer of that bureau. Nights still get chilly this time of year.”

“Thanks very much.” Get out!

Finally, she left.

He shut the door behind her, leaned against it. Nancy was standing in the middle of the room, looking at him.

“Keith.” She took a couple of steps toward him, noticed his change of expression, came to an indecisive halt. “You’re very tired, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said, “I’m not a damned bit tired. I can last for days. Weeks. I know how not to get tired.”

She was turning slowly toward her own room, stricken. He felt a savage frustration. Something was happening between them. It had begun back there on the lake when Vallancourt’s car had almost cornered the compact. It was getting worse. It was all that suspicious sonofabitch Newt’s fault.

“Nancy …”

She shivered. Then she came across the room deliberately, put her arms about him, stood thigh to thigh against him.

“The only way you can hurt me, Keith, is to close the door against me.”

“I don’t understand why you bother with me.”

“Why try?”

“I need to. I want to. If you were a plain Jane or a cripple, I might understand. But you could have your pick.”

“Why do you keep running yourself down, Keith?”

He passed the back of his hand across his forehead. “You mix me up. Worse than hell, Nancy.”

“Everything is mixed up right now. But we’ve reason for hope.”

“Give me one.”

She stood looking up into his face. “You really don’t know how to hope, do you, Keith? You just know how to survive.”

“I’ve made it for twenty-two years,” he mumbled.

“Then you can keep on doing it.”

“Nuts,” he said.

“All right, I’ll give you another. You think whoever killed Dorcas Ferguson is lying on a bed of roses while you’re loose? While the case remains wide open?”

“His nerve won’t break. I’m on the run. Why should he walk in and confess?”

“I didn’t mean that, and you know it. But he’s trying to cover up a murder. He’ll make a slip. As long as the investigation goes on, we’ve plenty of reason for hope.”

Outside, a rough-running old car started with a backfire.

Keith slid away from Nancy.

“Kill that light!”

She jumped for the wall. He eased up to the side of the window.

He saw an old sedan leaving the parking area. It stopped at the street’s edge, and in the light of the street lamp he saw that the woman Heather was driving. She got the bucking jalopy into the street and disappeared.

Keith glanced back to the office of the motel. Newt was still standing in the doorway.

“That old guy suspects something!”

“Keith …”

“Damn it, don’t use that patronizing tone to me, Nancy! I tell you, he thinks we’re up to something. He’s a canny louse, living off a woman who does all the work.”

“Keith, you’ve got to control these suspicions.”

“I know what I’m talking about. I could feel it in the old man. That Newt and my father … They carry the same stink in their eyes.”

Across the parking area, Newt had come to life. He was at the telephone, dialing quickly.

Keith pushed Nancy aside. As he burst out of the cabin, she ran after him, caught his arm. “Keith!” she said in a sharp whisper. “You mustn’t!”

He shook her loose without taking his eyes off the lighted window of the office. Newt was acting furtive. Any fool could see it. There could be only one reason why. The old man had given his wife time to get out of harm’s way …

Newt spun about, guilt written all over his cunning face.

“What the devil …”

Keith jerked the phone from his hand.

Newt stood staring as Keith lifted the phone to his ear.

“You sure you want it that way, Newt?” a voice said. “The whole ten bucks on Sandy-boy in the fourth tomorrow at Gulfstream? Well, it’s your dough, but if your wife finds you’ve been laying more bets …”

In a panic, Keith let the phone drop on its cradle, killing the voice.

Newt was pressed against the wall, studying Keith nastily.

“Boy, who’d you think I was calling? The cops, maybe?”

“Forget it,” Keith muttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”

“You acted like you meant plenty, busting in here this way. You know, you look damned familiar to me. You ever do time at Prison Farm Four? Nah, that ain’t where I seen you …” Newt stopped, his mouth slack. He went mud-colored. He tried to recover, to move nonchalantly across the office toward the sanctuary offered by his apartment.

But, Keith was there, grabbing a handful of sleazy shirt-front.

“Okay, let’s hear it. Where have you seen me before?”

“Boy, I ain’t. I swear.”

Keith pulled the man up on tiptoe. “You’re a liar. You’ve seen my face on every TV newscast today, in the newspaper. Isn’t that it?”

Newt swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking. “Boy, why didn’t you just stay in that cabin? I had my mind so set on calling the bookie soon as my old woman was out of here, I wouldn’t of remembered you from Adam …”

11.

Ivy Ferguson Conway was waiting when the three men returned.

“In the living room, Mr. Vallancourt,” Charles said quietly. “Mrs. Ledbetter has been keeping her company, and I’ve left word at Mr. Conway’s home, in case you dropped him there.”

They went into the living room. Mrs. Ledbetter was standing beyond a high-backed brocaded chair. Vallancourt dismissed her with a nod. She slipped out of the room.

Ivy was sprawled in the big chair, very drunk. All her girlishness was gone. She looked like a surly, vain old crow.

“Home the hunters,” she said in thick mockery. “Did the great big mans make heroes of themselves? I don’t believe they did. The nasty delinquent is still at large.”

“Ivy.” Conway’s voice was full of phlegm. “You’ve no business coming here in this condition.”

“Dear boy, I had to welcome the shining knights. John, get me a drink.”

“You’ve had enough, Ivy!” her husband said.

“This is John’s house, and John can do as he likes in John’s house, can’t you, John? Poor John … thought you knew her so well, didn’t you? And Nancy turns out to be just another female with the usual streak of bitch.”

Conway towered over his wife. He seemed about to strike her. Vallancourt caught his arm.

Ivy was staring at her husband’s broad hand. Then he shook himself and moved backward, and she giggled. “We never never never strike little wifie before friends, do we, darling? Only in the privacy of home sweet home.”

“Please, Ivy. We’d better go.”

For an instant, his tone reached through the fog. Her eyes deepened briefly with suffering. “Home is where the heart is, Howie boy. So I have no home. Because you don’t have a heart.”

Conway took her arm. The glaze hit her eyes. She pulled away from him.

“Don’t touch me, Howard!”

He straightened, standing heavy and miserable, not looking at either Vallancourt or Hibbs. “Ivy, John has more than his share of trouble without you …”

“The devil with John! What do I care about John?” She clutched the arms of the chair. When her eyes refocussed, it was on Hibbs.

“Poor old Ralph. Good old Ralph. Here, boy.” She puckered her lips in a whistle, producing a dry, gusty sound. “And what are you, Ralphie? With your heart lying in a funeral home? Big man of the auto business! Big front to everybody—”

“Ivy,” Howard said distinctly. “We are going home.”

Blearily she swiveled her head, looked at him. Then she crumpled and began to cry as he helped her to her feet.

“John …” Conway began.

“It’s all right, Howard,” Vallencourt said.

“Thanks. If you need me, call.”

“Of course.”

“Well. Good night.”

Watching them leave, Vallancourt remained the self-possessed image in silver and tan. But Ivy’s words stuck in his mind like knives. She turns out to be just another female with the usual streak of bitch.

Ivy’s drunkenly candid assessment of Nancy, my daughter. How close to the truth?

His belief of a short time ago, that he understood his daughter better than most fathers, now seemed fatuous. He had also guessed wrong in at least one other respect. She had not postponed the seriousness of the relationship.

He pushed aside the temptation to dwell on the error. The truth went deeper. She was a healthy young female, designed by nature to desire and arouse desire. But physical need alone would not have caused her to take the plunge with Keith Rollins. Vallancourt knew beyond any shadow of doubt that she was not that variety of bitch.

She had gone to the lake cottage before the murder of Dorcas Ferguson, since she had not reported for any classes. Keith had homed in on the same spot. The meeting was therefore prearranged.

The nature of their dialogue was obvious, Vallancourt thought. Thinking of what he had said, Nancy had wanted to stall him, to wait. He had reacted in the only way possible for a father, taking it as a rebuff. And so she was in the dilemma of either pleasing her father or doing what her love for Keith Rollins demanded. Not an easy decision. And not the kind of marriage she would have wanted. A load on her conscience because of dear old dad. But, up to that point, a spunky rightness in her actions.

Then, he thought, comes the crucial moment when they meet at the cottage. Keith would have to tell her that he is in trouble. It had to have been that way. Otherwise there was no sensible explanation for their actions, running, hiding, switching cars, not heading for the nearest justice of the peace.

It was Nancy’s last opportunity to turn back, and she had let it pass. Either Keith had made it physically impossible for her to return, or she had been convinced of his innocence and the decision had been hers.

And Keith. Guilty and doomed, he was dangerous. Innocent and doomed, he might well turn deadly.

The sound of a running car invaded the room. That was Conway, taking Ivy away.

Vallancourt lit a cigarette and turned to Ralph Hibbs. “Will you stay to dinner?”

Later, Hibbs rode with Vallancourt toward the apartment building where Keith had been staying with his father. When they were near the place, Hibbs stirred. “Terrifying, isn’t it, the way the world can turn upside down? Like a ship breaking up under your feet. I’m trying to recall the steadiness of the deck, John. Am I being a coward?”

“I think not.”

“Just a matter of hours … I spend the morning showing a car, a big expensive one. I go back to my office with a big fat sale in my pocket. And all the time … Ivy wasn’t the only one who leaned heavily on Dorcas, John. Maybe Ivy was right. I’m not sure how I’ll get along without Dorcas’s business brain.”

Vallancourt glanced at him. “Are you sure you’re not underrating yourself, Ralph? You built up the agency.”

“Not alone.”

“True, but maybe Dorcas didn’t make as many of the decisions as you thought.”

Hibbs subsided into silence.

Vallancourt pulled up at the curb.

“Will you need me?” Hibbs asked.

“I think not.”

“Then I’ll wait. I have no particular yen just now to look at a man whose son has a murder rap hanging over his head.”

“It’s you.” Sam Rollins’s sharp face caught light on its ridges. He was carrying a beer can. “What do you want?”

“May I come in?” said Vallancourt.

“Sure the place is good enough for you?” Rollins kicked the door closed. The living room of the flat was a mess. “Make yourself comfortable. You ought to feel right at home here. We’re in the same boat, aren’t we? My son. Your daughter.”

“Have you heard from Keith?”

“You out of your mind? That young punk call on me? Not that it’d do him a damn bit of good.”

“I was hoping …”

Rollins flopped into a chair. He grinned evilly. “Hoping. You would. You live in such a nice, hoping sort of world. Where everything is set up for you.”

“Shouldn’t we stick to the subject of Keith and Nancy?”

Rollins gulped the rest of the beer and sat with his arm dangling, the empty can touching the floor. “The fine home, the comforts, the whole bit. And she runs off with the first crummy thing in pants!”

“You think so little of him? Or of anyone who would have anything to do with him?”

“Let’s face it, Vallancourt. He’s scum.”

“He’s your son.”

“I wouldn’t claim the bastard if he had the key to Fort Knox.”

“You know,” Vallancourt said, “twice I’ve heard that epithet tacked on him. By Ivy Conway, the first time we discussed Keith, now by you. Maybe it isn’t an epithet at all, but the literal truth.”

Rollins turned wary. “You’re nuts.”

“It would explain a few things. Ivy’s aversion to him. Your attitude. Afraid of losing your link to his inheritance if he were proved guilty of that rape-murder in Florida.”

“You’ve conducted too much business in foreign capitals, Mr. Ambassador,” Rollins said, heaving out of the chair. “You should have brought along your cloak and dagger.”

“I’m giving you a chance to level with me.”

“Level? What the hell have I got to hide?” Rollins pitched the beer can toward a wastebasket and went into a small kitchen. Vallancourt followed him as far as the doorway. He stood watching as the man opened the refrigerator and took out a quart bottle of beer. “You wouldn’t know how it’s been with me, Vallancourt. All my life … nothing ever going right. And that damn kid hating me through it all.”

“And Maggie?” Vallancourt said. “The lost middle sister of the Ferguson girls? She finally lay down and died to get out of it?”

“Listen, you can’t accuse me …”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, Rollins. I’m merely saying that you’d never let go of Maggie and her bastard son.”

“If what you think is true,” Rollins said, fumbling with a bottle-opener, “I’d have given her the boot years before she died.”

“Maggie had a wealthy sister who loved her, and who loved her illegitimate child as well. After all, there was Ferguson blood in the boy’s veins. Your wife and Keith—they were your ticket to an easy life.”

Rollins returned to the living room, Vallancourt following. “He won’t see no light from the bottom of this hole he’s in. This is one time he’ll get the stubborn streak kicked out of him.”

“What have you told the police?”

“The truth. I think he’s guilty. He’s got an extra switch in that brain. I ought to know, I’ve seen it. The switch clicks, he turns into Mr. Hyde. Just one thing the cops have to do when they corner him, and that’s take no chances. Cornered, he’ll kill, quick, like an animal.” Rollins sucked at the beer, looked at Vallancourt, laughed. “Doesn’t it give you the creeps, knowing your daughter’s with a rat like that?”

“I can’t share your pleasure in the situation,” Vallancourt said coldly.

Rollins shrugged, dropped into his chair. “I did what I could for the kid. Tried to beat that streak out of him. Now it’s up to the cops. And it ain’t a teenager he’s killed this time. It’s an important woman, a business and social leader. The meat grinder is hungry, and the cops ain’t looking for nobody but him.”

“Who was his father, Rollins?”

“Me.”

“I think you’re lying. You’ve known the truth and hated him from the day he was born.”

“Pal, you’re boring me.” Rollins tilted the bottle and took a long swallow.

“I suppose it was the one act of rebellion against you Maggie ever allowed herself. And you made her pay and pay and keep on paying, didn’t you?”

“Look, Vallancourt, you got no proof of anything. So why don’t you quit wasting my time?”

Vallancourt took hold of the man’s soiled shirt front and yanked him to his feet so abruptly that his head snapped back. The beer bottle flew from his hand, spewing foam on the floor.

“One word of advice, Rollins. If Keith should get in touch with you, think twice before you set him up in a way that will cause shooting. Stray bullets and my daughter are incompatible quantities. Are we clear on that?”

Vallancourt let him go and went to the door. He looked back at the sprawled man. “I hope I don’t have to come back, Rollins. Think about it.”

Vallancourt’s breathing was not quite normal when he reached the car. He got under the wheel. Ralph Hibbs stirred, clicking off the car radio.

“Anything on the newscasts, Ralph?”

“No, except that he’s still at large.”

“Then he’s beaten the odds and slipped through. Or he’s still in town, which is more likely. He knows he can’t trust either the MG or Nancy’s car. He’d pick a place with care. Not a dive where he and Nancy would stand out. Not a fancy place, where questions might be asked. And certainly not a downtown hotel, with the city hemming him in. He’ll want space around him for maneuverability.”

“You’ve described a type of motel, John.”

“Yes,” Vallancourt said.

“There aren’t so many we can’t check them out.”

“I know.” Vallancourt started the car.

12.

Keith herded Newt from the office into the drab little apartment at the rear.

Now what? Keith asked himself. No more kookie stunts. You’ve already fouled it, tipping this guy to your identity.

The motel man was recovering from the shock. He backhanded a drop of spittle from the corner of his mouth, leered as if he sensed Keith’s indecision.

“The girl with you,” Newt said. “She’s the big shot’s daughter, ain’t she?”

Keith made no useless denial.

“Ought to be worth plenty to him, a kid like that,” Newt mused.

His movements were casual, but his eyes betrayed him.

The old man had worked his way to a cheap kneehole desk that occupied a corner of the room. As his hand shot to the top drawer, Keith threw himself across the distance between them.

The impact slammed Newt against the desk, closing the drawer on the old man’s hand. He screamed, eyes watering.

Keith took him by the shoulder and yanked him clear of the desk. The proprietor reeled against the wall, cradling his injured wrist and whimpering.

Keith pulled the desk drawer open. A tingle went through him. He reached slowly, and his fingers touched the cold metal of a .38 revolver.

The gun was cheap and old, but the heft and balance of the weapon seemed good to him. He had the oddest feeling that the gun had been designed to fit his hand.

As he turned, holding the gun, the old man looked at the young face and forgot the pain in his wrist. He began sliding down the wall. His knees touched the floor.

“Listen, kid, you can’t …”

“What’s to stop me? When you get right down to it, there’s not a damn thing to stop me. And if the gun was all right for you, why not for me?”

“My God, boy—”

“Come on, you creep. Explain it to me. Who makes the rules? Punks like you? Politicians on the take? Cops who look the other way when some Mr. Big gets behind a steering wheel stoned to the eyeballs and takes the chance of killing somebody? Then why not me?”

“Kid, I figured you for real smart the minute I saw you. Too smart to get himself in a worse jam.”

Keith laughed. “Worse? They say I raped and killed a girl in Florida. They claim I knocked off the most respected woman in the state. Now if I step on a worm, it’s going to make it worse?”

“You got to give me a break, kid! I won’t talk! I swear! It ain’t even my gun, kid. Heather … she got it while she was here alone, when they had me in prison. It’s her fault, not mine.”

“You make me sick, Newt, you know that?”

“I know a little what you been through, boy. You’re keyed up tight. Only don’t do nothing while you’re nervous. It’s the first thing you got to learn.”

“As a teacher, Newt, you miss like a junkyard jalopy.”

Newt’s head slumped. Keith’s interest in him became less immediate. He stood thinking. Then he said, “You’ll take us out.”

The old man raised his head, began inching up the wall.

“When your wife gets back with the car,” Keith said, “we’ll borrow it. You, me, and Nancy.”

“It won’t work, kid.”

“Why not?”

“The car … It’s junk. Just use it for errands. Get it on the open road and it heats up. It won’t run for beans.”

“We’ll make it run.”

“You’re wrong, kid. It ain’t the car you need. You’d be better off stealing one.”

“I’d still be behind the wheel. No, you’ll drive us out, Newt. They’re not looking for your face. Certainly not for a car like that.”

“Kid—”

“How’d you like this gun barrel right where the teeth meet the gums, Newt?”

The old man whimpered. The racket of a noisy car in the parking area drifted in to them.

“It’s your wife,” Keith said. “Remember the girl in Florida, Newt, and the big-shot woman. You’ve got snake brains. You’d better use them. Now let’s get going.”

He slipped the snub-nosed revolver in his trousers pocket, keeping a grip on it. With his left hand, he gave the old man a shove.

They were several feet into the parking area when the man’s wife met them.

“Ma’am,” Keith said gently, smooth-cheeked, innocent in the dim lighting, “I phoned our relatives downstate to let them know about our car breaking down. The sickness there is worse. Our relative may be dying. We want to rent a car and push on tonight. Your husband said he’d drive us to the car-rental agency.”

“I don’t give no refunds!”

“That’s all right. We put you to a lot of trouble. We don’t mind you keeping the night’s rent.”

“Ain’t that I mind doing a favor. But I’m not one to borrow, or lend.”

“Just your husband and the car for thirty minutes or so. We’ll never forget the favor, ma’am.” Keith edged closer to Newt and touched him with the gun through the fabric of their trousers.

Newt coughed. “These people are strangers, Heather. Not somebody I’ve hatched up a party with.”

“If I knew you’d come right back—”

“I will, Heather. Sure to goodness, you can’t turn them down.”

“All right.” She opened her purse, handed him the keys.

The old man’s eyes were bugging, trying to get across a silent message. Keith’s stomach bunched in knots.

But the woman’s mind was elsewhere. “Now, Newt, don’t you be a minute longer than you have to.”

“I won’t, Heather.” It was a croak of defeat.

Keith crowded old Newt into motion. Heather stared after them a moment, then went inside.

Nancy was standing in the open doorway of the cabin.

“Bring the bag,” Keith called. “We’re not staying.”

“What is it? What’s happened?”

“Just bring the bag!”

Nancy moved out of sight. The two men reached the car.

“You’re doing fine, Newt,” Keith said. “Buying the smartest insurance in the world.”

Nancy reappeared. “Over here,” Keith said. She came across the parking area in a very fast walk.

“Keith,” she began worriedly.

“No time,” he said. “I’ll explain later. Newt’s going to drive us.”

She stood there for an exasperating minute.

“For God’s sake, Nancy, get in, will you?”

The menace in his voice galvanized her. She opened the door quickly and got into the car.

“Under the wheel, Newt. I’ll ride in back.”

The car crept out of the parking area with rattles and bangs.

“Just baby her along,” Keith said, “and she’ll run all night.”

He slumped in the rear seat, letting out a long breath as the lights at the edge of town fell behind them. Fenced farmland, woods and meadow, all dark and silent, slipped past.

“How far are we going, Keith?”

“All the way.” He studied the pale sweet blur of her face. “He knows about us, Nancy.”

She glanced at the old man, who was driving doggedly, hunched over the wheel.

“How much are you paying him?”

“Paying me?” Newt choked.

“Forget it, Nancy. He’s doing us a favor.”

“No, Keith, I want to know why a stranger should run the risk of helping us. I want to know what you’ve promised him.”

“Promised me,” Newt sniveled. “Lady, talk to him, talk to him!”

Nancy lit a cigarette. Keith glimpsed her face in the brief flame. The change in her eyes, the set of her mouth brought a dryness in his throat.

“Or is promise the wrong word, Keith? Would threat be a better word?”

“Nancy, we’ll be out of this in a little while.”

“I haven’t wanted to think about it, Keith. But I can’t help it. Will we ever be out of it? I keep telling myself nothing matters, so long as I can believe in you.”

“You can! You know you can!”

“But this man … And his wife—did you say you’d hurt her, Keith?”

“I said nothing of the sort! Look, Nancy.” He jabbed Newt’s bony shoulder. “This punk doesn’t care about his wife. He’s an ex-con. She’s just somebody to keep him in food, a roof over his head, in the motel she inherited. If he had the guts he’d probably cool her.”

“Don’t rile him,” the old man choked. “I’ve seen his kind in the pen, lady. They look like Joe College, but they carry a short fuse. Let it lay! He’s got a gun.”

Keith saw the rigor invade her shoulders. He expected her to say something, to turn on him. But she merely sat there. He was prepared for anything but this utter absorption with the darkness.

“Okay,” he flung at her finally. “But ask him where I got the gun.”

“Does it matter?”

“He was going for it, Nancy. A man doesn’t go for a gun unless he intends to make use of it.”

She continued her refusal to look anywhere but at the night through which they moved. “Does that include you, Keith?”

His lips slitted, twisted. She was putting him on a spot. Why couldn’t she understand? If he started acting soft, Newt would get ideas. The old man was a hardcase, the kind who gouged eyeballs. You had to put the screws on his kind, and keep turning. Any hint of human feeling and Newt figured you for a blubber-belly.

“Nobody but Newt has anything to worry about, Nancy.”

She stirred at last, turning to look at the old man’s crooked profile.

“Newt,” she said quietly, “I don’t care very much for you.”

Newt concentrated on his driving.

“But you’re a matter of concern to me, Newt.”

“Yes, lady,” Newt said eagerly.

“I’m concerned, Newt, because you’re the next drop of grease on the skids.”

“Nancy,” Keith said distantly, “I’m handling this deal!”

“Newt,” she said, “I want to be rid of you.”

Keith inched his way forward. “Nancy, I’m telling you …”

“I want you out of our lives, Newt.” All feeling was pared from her voice. “Turn into the next side road. We’ll leave you where it will take you a good part of the night to walk back to the motel. We must have a little time.”

“You can trust me, little lady! I know trouble first-hand. And I hate the fuzz. I won’t say a word. I hope you make it.”

“You’re a liar,” Keith said. He sensed that Newt was hovering on the brink of a decision, balancing risks, tempted by the thought that his chances might be far better now than at any time in the future.

A break in the woods ahead marked a dirt road that meandered over deserted countryside toward the hills.

Newt slowed the car.

The gun came out of Keith’s pocket. Nancy screamed his name and threw herself backward.

Her body pressed against Keith. The gun was smothered. He struggled to free himself. His arm flailed and struck Newt. The car veered onto the soft shoulder of the road. Newt’s foot struck the brake too quickly. His shoe slipped from the edge of the worn pedal and jammed against the accelerator. The car bucked across the shoulder. The right front wheel crunched into a shallow ditch as the engine died.

Instinctively, Keith grabbed Nancy. The car smashed to a stop, lurching, almost tipping over.

Keith’s head crashed against the door frame. He had only a dazed awareness that old Newt was getting out of the car; that Nancy, unharmed, was pulling herself back across the top of the seat.

He heard the thud of the old man’s footsteps. The pounding was faraway, unreal. He made a herculean effort to force will into his muscles.

Keith half fell when he got out of the car. He squinted through fog. Newt’s running figure was a weaving blur. But after several reeling steps, Keith’s senses began to clear, his stride steadied, Newt became a sharp image. A frozen look snapped over the dark landscape, as if a giant clock said tick and then waited, refusing to tock.

Keith had no authentic sense of movement. Newt seemed to be rushing backward toward him, the weasel face turned to throw a look over the bony shoulder, the eyes desperate, the etching mouth gasping for breath … The sight gave Keith renewed strength. He knew the old man would not escape. All uncertainty left him.

Newt ducked, twisted, darting away from the empty road toward the heavy thickets and trees.

Keith’s rush carried him past the old man. He wheeled, laughing. Let the punk sweat. Prolong the agony.

Newt jumped the ditch. As he came down, Keith hurtled into him. With a wild cry, the ex-convict spun and threw a looping punch. Keith raised his shoulder to take the blow. He launched his fist like a piston and felt the stringy musculature of the old man’s middle quiver and collapse.

Grabbing his abdomen with both arms, Newt reeled in a senseless circle. Keith punched him on the nose. Cartilage flattened, a black fountain spurted. The color carried no bloody meaning for Keith.

Newt’s knees struck the weedy earth. As he pitched forward, Keith struck him again in the face, and the old man flopped on his back. His fingers clawed and dug as he slewed himself around. He looked like an overturned turtle.

Keith was reaching for his collar when Nancy flew against him. “Stop it, Keith! You’ll kill him!”

He struggled to pull away from her as Newt blindly burrowed his way into the thickets.

Nancy seemed to have eight arms. “Let him go, Keith—for your own sake …”

Keith suddenly grew quiet. He stood without docility or penitence, spent. Nancy clung to him; almost gently he disengaged her arms.

He walked to the car, examined it. He squatted near the right front wheel, picked up a bit of dirt, flicked it at the car.

“Spindle’s broken,” he said. “When this crate moves again, a wrecker will be towing it.”

“Keith, a moment ago …”

He rose; his face was remote. “I don’t want to talk about that creep. If you’re ready to cut out on me, Nancy, go ahead.”

“Is that what you want?”

“You know I don’t. But I was wishing instead of thinking. I was fool enough to think you would stick. It’s the same old story. But don’t let it worry you, Nancy. I’m used to going it alone.”

Twin lights appeared in the darkness. Would the oncoming car stop? Sooner or later some curious motorist or a highway patrolman would see the wrecked jalopy and apply the brakes.

Keith dog-trotted across the highway, glancing down the road as he crossed the shoulder. The shadows of the trees closed over him. A dim trail of sorts pointed toward emptiness and silence.

Behind him on the highway the car swished past. His tension lifted. That one hadn’t been stopped by the sight of the junker. Nor by a girl standing alone.

Keith stopped and turned. Nancy was no more than a dozen yards away, closing the gap between them.

13.

Vallancourt sensed Ralph Hibbs’s growing discouragement. He was not strongly affected by it. By training, tradition, and experience, he and Hibbs were very different. The attempt to anticipate their quarry’s moves, to track down a course of action as if a mistake would not have terrifying consequences—these were factors in a milieu strange to Hibbs. Vallancourt was the hunter.

With Hibbs standing disconsolately beside the door, Vallancourt tapped the bell on the motel desk and waited.

Although their search had so far proved fruitless, Vallancourt was not discouraged. Against big game there were no rewards for impatience or discouragement. You followed the trail and your hunches. He had never felt more vitally alive.

A woman came through the doorway beyond the desk. She had a spare frame, a dry-skinned face. Her mouth was plotted in lines of strain, her eyes snappish.

Vallancourt felt himself tighten.

She looked surprised at Ralph Hibbs’s prosperous portliness and the well-cut excellence that was Vallancourt.

“What can I do for you?” She seemed to take it for granted that such men would not have chosen her place for lodging.

“We’re looking for a young couple,” Vallancourt said with absolute assurance, “who registered here this evening.”

“We only had one young couple. Don’t get much calls here nowadays. Folks have gone soft on fancies—swimming pools, air conditioning.”

“One couple is all we’re after,” Vallancourt smiled. “The boy is husky, with black hair in a widow’s peak—good-looking youngster, twenty-two years old. The girl is tall, blonde, with a golden tan.” He added, “Pretty.”

The woman’s eyes flickered. “My husband registered them. What have they done?”

“Which unit are they in?”

“They took two cabins. Registered as brother and sister.”

Bless you, Nancy, Vallancourt thought. And bless you, woman, for telling me.

“They said they wasn’t from the college,” the woman said. “We’re careful here, we don’t break no laws. They told my husband they was on the way downstate to see a sick relative and their car had broke down.”

“They gave you a plausible story,” Vallancourt said. “But they’re runaways.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Of course not.”

The drab, pale pink of her lips curled inward until it disappeared. “If they’re what you say, I want them out of here.”

“They’re what I say. Where are they?”

“You the girl’s father?”

“Yes.”

The woman sniffed like a wolverine. “Probably give her a nice home, car of her own, all the advantages. Kids nowadays are going to hell in a basket.”

Vallancourt held himself in. It would do no good to rush her. A glimpse of his inner suffering would probably cause her to keep him dangling.

“You might as well sit down over there and wait,” she said. “They ain’t back yet.”

“They checked in and went out?”

“Practically right away. I just had time to do a little shopping and come back. They was ready to leave when I drove in.”

“Did you notice the car they were driving?”

“It was Newt’s and my car. Newt’s my husband. They came here in a taxi.”

Dumped Nancy’s car, he thought.

“May I speak with him?”

“Newt went with them. I let him talk me out of the keys. Should have knowed better.” Her lips curled. “They didn’t make even a show of going to the car-rental agency, like they said. Instead, they turned right on the state road. If you ask me, they’re over in Tuscawana by this time, lapping away in some gin mill. With Newt sitting next to your girl so’s he can let his leg bump hers now and then. When that old lech gets back …”

“Will you describe your car?”

“An old one. Packard, about the last that was made. Black and gray; the gray part is on top.”

“Now if you’ll give me the license number, please.”

“I don’t want nothing to happen to my car.”

“Shall I call the police?” Vallancourt asked pleasantly.

“BD-4418,” she said quickly.

“Thank you.” Vallancourt jotted the number down. “Come on, Ralph.”

“I just don’t like trouble,” she said. And when Vallancourt reached the door, she called, “Better watch out for Newt. He’s got a mean streak a mile long, ’specially when he’s been drinking.”

“We’ll be careful.”

“I didn’t know, remember,” she said. “You can’t law me. Newt was the one registered them.”

“You have nothing to worry about.”

“Mister, with Newt you always got something to worry about.”

They went outside. When they were in Vallancourt’s car, Hibbs said, “A rented car, John? I mean, after he ditches the Packard?”

“I think we can rule that out, Ralph. He’d have to identify himself, show his driver’s license.” Vallancourt studied the highway briefly. “He means to make his try tonight, in that jalopy with the other man driving.”

“Newt sounds like an unwholesome character,” Hibbs said. “Keith might have bribed him. He was pretty well heeled with the money from Dorcas’s cashbox.”

“The primary question is direction,” Vallancourt said. “The right turn on the highway might have been a deception play. But we’ll have to play the odds. He was under pressure and in a hurry, conditions that don’t make for complicated thinking.”

A block from the motel Vallancourt turned into a filling station. While the Continental was being gassed, he used the station telephone and called police headquarters.

A desk sergeant had to say hello three times before Vallancourt could bring himself to answer. Let him go through, he was thinking. Hang up and don’t throw Nancy into the danger of what might happen at a roadblock.

But let him through, and you make him drunk with triumph. It might be catching.

Stop him?

Surely by this time Nancy has begun to think, to be her old self. Whatever her feelings for him, she must know now that this route is inexorably downward. At this very moment she may be praying that you’ll do the best thing for both of them.

On the other hand … play the ostrich and you make the showdown tougher. The moment of truth you and Nancy will have to face some time, somewhere …

“John Vallancourt speaking.”

“Oh, Mr. Vallancourt. Have you heard from your daughter?”

“Not directly. But I’ve run across their trail.” Vallancourt gave the desk sergeant the motel woman’s story about the Packard.

He hung up, the steadiness of his hand a passing mockery. He went outside, paid for the gas, and got into the Lincoln.

As the car hissed onto the highway, Hibbs said sulkily, “I’m still here, you know.”

“The roadblocks are ready for him, Ralph.”

Hibbs looked at him a moment longer; then he shifted his gaze to the highway ahead.

The big car pressed over the outer edge of the speed limit.

Suddenly Hibbs jerked forward in the seat. “John! Off there in the ditch!”

Vallancourt had already seen the wrecked car. He eased off, letting the Continental roll onto the shoulder before bringing it to a stop.

He had the door open and was out before Hibbs could hitch himself around.

Vallancourt had swung in several yards past the ditched car. He had completed his circuit of the old Packard by the time Hibbs came puffing up.

“Looks like the one,” Hibbs gasped.

“It is. The license checks.”

“Is she … Are they …?”

Vallancourt shook his head. His eyes were probing the darkness.

Ralph had lumbered around to the front of the jalopy. “Doesn’t look as if they hit anything—until the ditch.” He glanced from the car to the road. “It’s a straight stretch. Funny place for a car to go off the highway. Unless an oncoming car forced them off.”

Or there was trouble inside the car, Vallancourt thought.

“Might as well notify the men at the roadblocks.”

Vallancourt nodded absently. His brain was busy trying to put itself behind the dark, brooding eyes under the fine forehead and widow’s peak.

Newt is driving, he thought. And I’m sitting beside him.… No, that would leave Nancy alone, out of my line of vision, in back. I am in the rear seat where I can watch Newt and lay a steadying hand on Nancy’s shoulder.

Everything is going well. We have the car and Newt to drive us out.

Then it begins to go sour. How? Why? Perhaps Newt wants more money. Or gets cold feet. No … won’t do. It’s something more than a sudden, irrational dissatisfaction with a deal.

Back up …

Newt is driving. He wrecks the car? Deliberately? If so, it was certainly not from greed, but from fear. The only explanation. He’s afraid of what will happen once he’s past the roadblocks. He’d rather take a chance on running the car in the ditch here and now …

Vallancourt moved to the hood of the Packard and laid his palm on it. The metal was still warm.

He suddenly thought, Keith, you haven’t had much time. You may be watching every move I’m making.

Any of the thickets offered a shelter. For Keith—and what else?

“Ralph …”

“What is it?”

“You’ve expressed a desire to be of service.”

“Anything I can do. You know that.”

Vallancourt took the keys from the ignition, moved to the trunk of the Packard, opened it. From the welter of old papers, oil cans and junk tires, he salvaged a jack-handle.

“Turn the Lincoln around. Find a phone and get the highway patrol out here.”

He watched the Continental swing full circle. Then, as the red taillight glow dwindled in the darkness, he stepped off the road to stand in the thickest shadows, listening, waiting.

He won’t like the waiting, Vallancourt thought. He’s an aggressor, not a counterattacker.

Stepping very carefully, inches at a time, he drifted several yards further from the Packard. He carried the jackhandle loosely, ready for instant launching in any direction.

The silence became a heavy question. Had some unwary motorist stopped and found himself impressed into service as a chauffeur? If so, where was Newt?

In the stand of trees ahead, a twig cracked. In the silence, it sounded like a shot.

“Keith,” Vallancourt said quietly. “Before you make a move, listen to what I have to say. You’ve a chance, understand? The cashbox, Keith … the box that belonged to Dorcas Ferguson. I question the way it showed up after it disappeared from Dorcas’s study. It’s a detail that makes me want to hear what you have to say.”

Nothing.

“Nancy—if you’re there with Keith, convince him that I mean what I say. By itself, the cashbox isn’t enough. But it’s a starting point.” Vallancourt’s tone took on an edge of anger. “Keith, you young fool! I’m trying to tell you I don’t think you’re guilty. And I want to help you.”

He held his breath. Twigs cracked. Undergrowth swished somewhere ahead.

And then a human form stumbled into view. The shadow was too tall and rawboned to be Keith’s.

Vallancourt moved quickly to the other man. The man was old, and his face was clotted with blood. He saw that the old man’s nose was broken.

“Are you Newt?”

“Yeah. Where is he? Where is he?”

He took the trembling arm and helped the old man toward the highway. “I don’t know. Neither he nor my daughter was around when I got here. Did he do this?”

Newt cursed steadily and horribly. “If I was younger—so help me I’d break his back. I’d rip—”

“You’ve no idea where they went?”

“No,” Newt stumbled; Vallancourt supported him. “I laid low, scared he was still looking. Then I heard your voice.” He hawked blood from his throat. “The way he hit me … Nearly killed me. I think he busted something loose in my gut.”

“We’ll get you to a doctor, then you’ll have to tell the police what happened.”

“Sure,” Newt croaked. “I’ll tell! One time I got nothing to hide from the fuzz. He made me haul them off. Used the gun.”

Ice water coursed down Vallancourt’s back. “Gun?”

“Belonged to my wife. He took it. Even money they bury the first man catches up to that sonofabitch.”

14.

Stabbing between the slats of the Venetian blind, a strip of early sunlight lay across Keith’s forehead like a scar.

The downward creep of the band of light measured the rising of the sun. When the light touched his lids, his eyes opened. He blinked, moving his head away from the dazzle.

He sat up quickly, immediately remembering the long stumbling hike through the night to the lake cottage.

In the familiar surrounding of the lodge’s living room, he sprang from the couch. He had intended to rest, not to sleep. But exhaustion had overcome him.

Noiselessly he moved from the stone and timbered room to the pine-paneled hallway. He stopped at the first door and inched it open.

He stood in silence, looking at Nancy. She was still here; she hadn’t run away. Fully clothed, she was sleeping relaxed, her young body curled like a child’s, one slender arm outflung. He looked at the firm lines of her thighs; the swell of her hips, the cups of her breasts warmed and thickened his blood. He took a step into the room. But then he turned and moved away.

In the stainless steel kitchen, he boiled water for instant coffee and opened a can of condensed milk from the generous supplies that Dorcas Ferguson had always maintained in the lodge.

He sat down to the coffee, playing with his thoughts. What would it be like with her—the long smooth body naked, the lips in fever, the buttocks writhing, demanding? Coffee slopped as he picked up the cup; he had to steady it with both hands. A picture leaped to his mind, of his hands undressing her, the slipping of a button, the slide of a zipper, the tantalizing peeling off of each garment …

He kicked his way back from the table. The light wooden chair tilted and fell as he jumped up.

He moved to the window, fumbling through his pockets for a cigarette. Why not? he thought bitterly. You’ve been kidding yourself. There’s no way out for you this time. In a little while it will all be over.

So why not?

You’ve already lost part of that wonderful miracle the two of you possessed. Admit it. It was too fine to last very long. She’s beginning to doubt you. You sensed it last night, after you slugged the old creep. You knew, as you brought her here, that regret and fear were building in her.

She didn’t run away because she was so damned tired; both of you were caved in when you finally got here. She must have fought sleep, waiting for her chance, thinking of Cheryl Pemberton, listening for a sound from the living room. In the end, exhaustion had slugged her, too.

He dropped his cigarette and ground it underfoot on the kitchen tile. Quickly, he passed through the cottage to the bedroom door.

She had heard him this time, swung her feet off the bed. She was sitting up, warm and wobbly from sleep.

An instant change came to her eyes. She was afraid, all right. Terrified. His lips twisted. Move a few feet, he thought, and you can confirm every rotten thing they’ve ever believed and said about you.

“I’ve got some coffee, Nancy, if you don’t mind the instant kind.”

“I’ll be right out.”

He turned away from the doorway, went back to the kitchen. He had coffee steaming in two cups when she came in.

The terror was still in her eyes, her smile.

“Went beddy-by as if I were drugged,” she said.

Small talk, he thought. She’s going to cut out. So it’s the same old story. He could have throttled her as she stood there.

She picked up her coffee and sipped it, moving about the kitchen opening cabinets, refrigerator, freezer.

“Eggs?” she asked. “Some cereal?”

“Toast will do.”

While Keith smoked and drank his coffee, she made toast, got out butter and marmalade. They ate silently. The food was tasteless.

Like, man, you counted on a first breakfast together once, he thought.

“Scram,” Nancy said. “Get some sun on the porch while I KP.”

Her bright pretense was touching, but transparent. He walked out of the kitchen, knowing that the decision was crystallizing in her head. He wondered how she would tell him and what he would do when the moment came.

He swung over onto the porch railing and sat hunched, legs dangling. It would be different now, being alone. He had glimpsed what it was like not to be alone.

He heard the hiss of water, the clatter of dishes. Why the hell hadn’t she sneaked out during the night?

She’d had her chance. She hadn’t taken it. She should have realized how the prospect of again being alone would hit him now.

A breeze soared through the hills, across the long surface of the lake. It carried sound within it.

His back straightened. He grasped the porch post beside him. His head tilted to one side.

Then he swung around and dropped to the porch floor. Nancy was at the sink when he ran into the kitchen.

“We’re leaving,” he said curtly.

“I haven’t dried the dishes.”

“Never mind the damn dishes. We’ve got to get out of here! A car’s coming around the lake.”

She stood planted at the sink as if she were paralyzed.

He crossed the kitchen and grabbed her arm. “Don’t you understand? We came back here because I figured they wouldn’t expect us to take cover in the same place twice. But it hasn’t worked out. Could be the police coming. Or your father. Somehow, he digs the way my mind works.”

“Keith, it’s no good.”

“So what?” he cried. “It’s never been any good. But we have to keep trying. Come on. Let’s go!”

She arched away from him, looking at him with pity and fright. Resentment boiled up in him.

“I should have taken you last night!”

The words brought no lessening of his pain, merely the turning of the invisible knife inside.

“It isn’t me you’re striking at, Keith. You don’t mean that.”

“I said it, didn’t I?” He started to pull her with him. “I don’t want to be alone, Nancy. Not now. You’d better hope we get out before your father walks in here.”

“All right,” she said quietly. “You can let go of me. I won’t run away.”

He chose the back door. The yard was on a grand scale, with redwood patio furnishings and a barbecue pit. They ran to the stone retaining wall. He jumped up on it, reached for her hand, hauled her up beside him.

“This way!”

They fled across the narrow stretch of open hillside to the cover of the woodland. The shade of the trees fell over them, soft and cool. Against the quiet of the lake and the woods the growl of the approaching car came to them distinctly.

Keith loping ahead, they moved through the trees for about two hundred yards. Nancy was breathing heavily.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll rest a minute.”

She sank to a patch of moss beneath an oak tree, folded her arms about her knees. Her head drooped.

Keith said, head cocked, “The car’s stopped.” That brittle clarity struck him again. He thought of the dishes she had left stacked on the sink drain, the cigarette he had crushed out on the spotless floor, the rumpled bed where Nancy had slept. He felt for the short-barrelled revolver hidden beneath his shirt.

“I wish I knew for sure,” he muttered, “who’s in that car.”

She raised her face. “You said dad …”

“A guess. But I can’t take chances on a wrong guess.”

Tears came to her eyes. She made a gesture, as if to reach for his hand. Then her hand fell to her side, on the moss.

He was looking in the direction of the cottage.

“Could be Aunt Ivy, or her husband. Even Mildred Morgan, the housekeeper, up to ready the cottage so the town house can be closed for a while after the funeral.” Murmuring his thoughts aloud was no help. He was unable to evaluate the risk of returning quickly to the cottage and trying to make off with the car.

“We’ll wait,” he said finally. “It’s safer. Get up.”

Nancy got to her feet. They worked their way along the spacious curve of the hill, the lake to their left, visible occasionally through breaks in the foliage.

When they had reached a position beyond and around the end of the lake, Keith veered their course downward. After several minutes of walking, they came in view of a house.

The place was smaller and less elaborate than the Ferguson lodge. It was a squat, stout log structure, the woods growing close at the rear, the lakeside road passing to the front of it.

Keith helped Nancy down an embankment. He had already noticed the lack of tire marks in the dirt driveway and the unflattened bunched leaves and pine needles which had drifted onto the back porch.

He inspected the hasp and padlock securing the back door. Nancy watched stolidly, leaning against the porch rail. He slipped the gun from his shirt, inserted the tip of the barrel in the hasp, and snapped the lock. He flipped the flange back and turned the knob. The door opened with a rusty sound. A smell of must flowed out.

“Lots more of the niceties than when the Indians were prowling,” Keith said mirthlessly. “But we don’t use them. Catch? The place is deserted. We keep it looking that way.”

He motioned Nancy inside. When she was in, he shut the door.

At the same instant, Ivy Ferguson Conway was rattling her key in the front door of the Ferguson lodge, not noticing that a key was really not needed.

The bulky shopping bag in her arms made her entry an awkward one, and she reached with a spike heel to nudge the door shut. She went down the paneled hallway and fumbled under her burden to open the door to the furthermost bedroom.

She set the shopping bag carefully on a bureau. Then she kicked off her shoes, unbelted her expensive polished cotton dress and, consulting the mirror, fluffed her short brown hair with a touch of her fingers.

She saw a trim, girlish woman with rather empty eyes and a haughty expression. She made a face at herself.

She picked up the bulky bag and carried it to the bed. Here she sat down, setting the bag on the floor.

The deserted silence of the cottage caught at her. That Keith … They said he had taken refuge here after Dorcas … after what happened to Dorcas. If somebody had walked in on a boy like him …

Ivy shivered and made an effort to put such ghastly thoughts out of her mind. She stopped and opened the shopping bag. It held a half dozen fifths of Scotch. She babied the first bottle from the bag and opened it.

She held her breath during the first long swallow. Gagging, eyes watering, she placed the uncorked bottle on the nightstand and stretched full length on the bed.

The rebellion in her belly was gradually quelled by the scotch. A wry smile lifted her lips. Why was the first drink always so damn difficult?

She reached toward the nightstand—toward temporary oblivion.

15.

Vallancourt returned to his home from police headquarters in mid-morning. Ralph Hibbs was waiting in his study.

“I heard a newscast,” Hibbs said. “The search is now state-wide.”

“The police think Keith got hold of a car and slipped through. An incident downstate caused the waste of several hours.”

“What incident?”

“A man was found badly beaten, unconscious, near some dive of a bar early this morning. He was lying in a ditch at the rear of the parking lot and it looked as if he had been there for some time. While he had a driver’s license and auto registration, he had no keys. Looked promising, but turned out a dud—some sordid business involving two men, a prostitute one of them had picked up, and a drinking bout. The man talked readily enough when they finally brought him around.”

“Nancy may phone you, John.”

“I’m hoping so, but I’m not counting on it. There are a number of reasons why she may not.” Reasons he did not care to think about. For the byways of hindsight, Vallancourt thought, are the hiding places for anxiety, and anxiety saps a man. God knows, he thought, I need everything I’ve got.

“Have you heard from Howard this morning?” Hibbs asked.

“Early. He came by police headquarters. He was on his way to discuss arrangements with the mortician.”

“Later, he called me. Looking for Ivy. Seems he got back home and found her gone.”

Vallancourt offered cigarettes from the carved box on his desk. “You’ve known the Ferguson women a long time, haven’t you, Ralph?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Dorcas trusted you. I’ve always had the impression.” Vallancourt struck a match, “that you were more than just her business associate.”

“We all need a father-confessor at times,” Hibbs smiled sadly. “Even Dorcas.”

“Strange that she never married. I wonder why. Dorcas was made for a husband and children.”

“The one man she might have married was killed years ago when his hydroplane flipped during a Miami regatta.”

“I didn’t know that,” Vallancourt said thoughtfully.

“She rarely referred to it. I don’t know the whole story; never pressed her for it—picked it up by bits. I do know that afterward she went away for a long time to try to forget.”

Idly, Hibbs spun the world globe that stood near the vast desk. He watched continents and oceans spin by under his fingers. “She was a rare woman, John.”

“All people are rare to you, Ralph.”

Hibbs looked up slowly. “I suppose they are. Even characters like Sam Rollins.” He made a queerly appealing gesture. “I know how people feel about me. They see a bumbling, naive sort of slob—good old Ralphie. I don’t really mind. I can’t help the way I feel about people, and it doesn’t cost me anything. In fact, if you believe the best of people, you get the best out of them more times than not.”

“How long ago did that hydroplane accident happen to the man Dorcas was in love with, Ralph?” Vallancourt asked slowly.

“I’m not sure.”

“Twenty-two, three years ago?”

“Just about,” Hibbs said with an odd hiss.

“Keith’s age,” Vallancourt said.

The other man stopped the spinning globe with a sudden slap. “So you suspect, too,” he said softly.

“I’m reasonably certain Sam Rollins isn’t Keith’s father. Sam’s always known it. So he’s hated the boy, refused to assume any measure of responsibility. But he never broke the relationship, because Keith is his meal ticket.

“If it had been Sam’s wife, Maggie, who had borne a child by another man, Dorcas could have taken care of her sister and nephew and cut out a brute like Sam Rollins. But she didn’t. It adds up, Ralph.”

Hibbs was pale about the lips. He said nothing.

“I’m speaking of a good woman who was young and full of life and loved a man. It happens every day, Ralph. Dorcas was carrying his child, and they intended to marry—I don’t believe she would have given herself to any other kind of man. But he was killed, and she was building an outstanding business career. She was afraid of scandal and disgrace. And she was human.”

Hibbs stirred. “So you figure that, rather than give the child to strangers, she turned him over to her sister and brother-in-law.” He looked unhappy.

“It would explain several things,” Vallancourt nodded. “The strong physical resemblance between Keith and Dorcas. Same hair, same eyes, same quick intelligence and fighting spirit, which in the boy has been battered and misdirected.

“It would explain Dorcas’s undiscourageable interest in Keith, her providing for him indirectly all these years, even bringing him here after the Florida rape-murder thing. It would explain Sam Rollins’s following Keith here. It would explain Sam’s inside track even after the boy came of age and Maggie died. Need I go on?”

“No,” Hibbs said. “I thought I was alone in suspecting. My case was built on watching Dorcas with him, her eyes, her expressions, little things she said about Keith, the way she said them.”

“You were never sure?”

“I didn’t think it my business to try to confirm my suspicions.” Hibbs wiped his face with a damp handkerchief. “I don’t think Keith suspects at all. Sam Rollins was too solidly real in Keith’s life for the boy to dream he was another man’s son.”

“So what we have done,” Vallancourt said, “is reduce this affair to matricide.”

Hibbs shuddered. “What a ghastly word!”

“It’s in every dime-store dictionary, I’m afraid, Ralph.”

“But John, the boy didn’t know! Anyway, how sure are we that he’s guilty?”

“Not sure at all,” Vallancourt said. “But that’s damn little comfort. The fact is, guilty or innocent Keith is on the run, with the whole world chasing him. With his temperament, that could make him try to bring everything down with him.”

“I know,” Hibbs said miserably. “That’s what I’m most afraid of, John. It keeps haunting me.”

“And time is working against us,” Vallancourt said. “If he did get hold of a car, he’s probably out of reach. If not, we have a chance. He may have returned to the lake cottage.”

“We knew he was there earlier. We almost caught him. It’s the last place he’d choose.”

“Which would make him think of it as the first,” Vallancourt said.

When they reached the lodge, Vallancourt recognized the two cars in the driveway.

Ralph did also. “Howard’s and Ivy’s,” he said. “So Howard’s run her down.” He seemed depressed.

They approached the cottage slowly. Howard Conway had come out on the porch and was waiting, gray and tired. His eyes, however, reflected annoyance.

“She’s in there drunk.” Conway’s heavy lips pulled themselves into a mockery of a smile. “Family skeleton, boys, secret of the country club queen. Once in a great while, when the accumulated pressures of living get too heavy for her, Ivy goes for the bottle. She’ll be fine in a day or so. She always is.”

“It isn’t news to me,” Hibbs said gently. “But I’ve never found it worth talking about.”

“Good old Ralph,” Conway said grimly.

“We were playing a long shot,” Vallancourt said, “coming out here.”

“Keith and Nancy?”

“Any sign of them having returned here?”

“Someone has been here.”

“Are you sure?”

“There are used dishes and a rumpled bed in the first bedroom off the hallway. Butts in an ashtray near the living-room couch. I started noticing after I’d found Ivy and calmed down.”

“Only the one bed mussed up?” Vallancourt asked with an effort.

“I think he spent the night on the living-room couch, John. They both smoked a lot. The butts in the bedroom ashtray show lipstick smudges. Those near the couch don’t.”

Vallancourt gave silent thanks. For the first time he began to realize that he was an old-fashioned father. If they had gone to bed together, did it really matter? All other factors excluded, they were in love with each other—or had been.

“I was searching the place when I heard your car,” Howard Conway said.

“As he must have heard Ivy’s,” Vallancourt said, taking himself in hand. “We can guess his choice of direction. Away from the lake road. An incoming car would present a threat.”

“He must have left fast,” Conway said, “before he found out that it was a lone woman driving the car.”

Hibbs looked around at the hemming hills. “He may be in shouting distance this minute.”

“Not necessarily. He’s got several thousand acres to hide in. It’s my opinion he’s long gone. If he’d stuck close, he’d have made a try for Ivy’s car.”

“But he likes cover,” Vallancourt said. He had been deep in thought. “A cottage. A motel room. An attic.” He started from the porch. Conway glanced inside the house, then fell in beside him.

“Ivy will be out for a long time,” Conway said. “She isn’t going anywhere, and I’m needed here like a boil on my secretary’s fanny. You staying, Ralph?”

Hibbs shrugged. “I’ve been with it this far, Howard. I’ll keep going.”

Vallancourt stopped at the top of the porch steps. “Let’s keep one thing in mind. If Keith’s taken shelter in an unoccupied cottage, we want him to know we’re coming. We have to move openly. Otherwise he may panic and do something foolish.”

Both men nodded.

“Think he’ll bargain?” Conway asked. “I don’t know. But I want him to have the chance to warn us off. I want talking room. As long as there’s talk, hotheads don’t fight.”

“Isn’t it stretching the law,” Hibbs asked, “giving him a chance to get away?”

“Nancy’s welfare is my law at the moment,” Vallancourt said.

“We need luck,” Conway said. “The motel man wasn’t very lucky.”

“He was luckier than he knows,” Vallancourt said grimly. “Keith didn’t lay a finger on the man until he became a threat … Keith might have killed him, but he didn’t. His overriding thought is to hide, to get away. No doubt he’s felt a sense of nemesis, a lack of choice in everything that’s been forced on him.”

“You sound as if you’re defending him!”

“We need to understand him, Howard, if we’re to keep from triggering him. He has a need to rationalize a rightness into everything he does. I want to direct the process until Nancy is safe.”

“He’s been under pressure quite a while now,” Ralph Hibbs said. “What if he’s slipped over the line?”

16.

In the living room of the log cottage, Keith stripped a muslin dust cover from a big chair. He glanced at Nancy. In the gloom created by the shutters and the drawn blinds, her face and hair gave a blurred impression of loveliness with details obscured. He could look at her without enduring the sight of the changes in her.

“Might as well cradle it,” he said. “The chair’s for free.”

She came to the chair and sat down. He watched her, yearning.

“You don’t have to do it like a robot,” he said savagely.

“You offered me the chair, Keith.”

“And you’re so damn obedient!”

He turned away. His eyes stung; he was going to jelly inside, he thought. Time had grown teeth, grinding him to shreds. He wouldn’t break suddenly; nothing in him would snap He was just being picked to pieces, taken apart. Like a worm being cut into sections.

He looked over his shoulder at Nancy. She sat gripping the arms of the chair, head turned, staring at the floor.

Why in hell did I ever meet you? Keith thought. Then there would have been none of this almost-having, nearly-winning, having it end up slipping through my fingers.

“Big devil cat got your tongue?” he sneered.

She shook her head, bit her lip.

“Okay,” he said, making a flat gesture with his hand. “Okay, oh-oh-kay!”

He walked across the room and sat down on the floor, back against the wall.

“Anything special you’d like to hear? Want me to tell you what a hot-looking dish you are, doll?”

She looked at him then.

“Maybe you’d rather hear about me,” he said. “Cops all over the state looking for me. I’ve crowded the politicians out of the headlines today. They’re spending thousands of dollars this minute trying to find me. Cool, hey? My old man always said I’d make the grade. ‘You bastard,’ he’d say, ‘you’ll end up on the business end of a police bullet one of these days.’ Damn dutiful making your old man’s predictions come true. Don’t you think so, chick?”

“You’re convinced you have to go that way,” Nancy said.

“My God!” he said. “It talks! You see any alternatives?”

She turned her face away again. He snapped his fingers, hard, rapidly.

“Come on, doll, you can do better than that. You’re a sexy piece who happens to have brain to go with the equipment. Why don’t you give me a bookful of alternatives? Let me pick and choose.”

“Maybe there aren’t any, Keith. Not for you.”

“So I should be somebody else. Everybody else has alternatives.”

“Let me go, Keith,” she said like a little girl.

“Cut out? You? You’re the babe what came on the joyride of her own free will. I didn’t hold a gun to your head.”

“Let me go, Keith!”

“But I’ve got a gun now,” he said. “Full of bullets. Bang, bang, bang! They make holes in people and the blood runs out and they fall down dead.”

She raised herself from the chair. He watched her almost sleepily.

Nancy was reminded of a big black and white cat she had once had. It would crouch over a bug for endless minutes, only its tail twitching. The day the cat had killed a bird, she had asked her father to give it away. That night she had cried herself to sleep over her lost, loved, hated cat.

She took a step from the chair, then another. She was halfway across the room.

Magically, he was standing before her, blocking her way.

“What’s the rush, doll? The party’s just starting. In another couple of days it’ll really jazz. We’re bound to snag a crate by then. We’ll go crashing out.”

“You’ll go alone, Keith.”

“The hell I will. I like this togetherness kick. I find it the greatest. How could I dream of doing a solo?”

“You won’t make it, Keith,” she said. A great sadness was in her voice.

The sadness reached out and touched him. Almost he let it go through. But then he forced himself to laugh. “Why not? Other cats have made it.”

“But not you, Keith. Even if you were within reach of it, you wouldn’t let yourself stretch that last inch.”

“So what’s the diff, a hundred years from now?”

“No difference a hundred years from now. But we don’t have a hundred years. The difference is today and tomorrow.”

She was so right that a sense of doom overwhelmed him. It had lain buried in him all his life. He recognized it now. He had glimpsed it before, many times, in a dream, or in his father’s eyes. At last he was face to face with it, and the face of doom was no stranger.

“Let me go, Keith,” she saying again. “Let me take what I have left with me. Don’t destroy it all.”

“They’ll know where you came from.”

“No. I won’t tell, Keith.”

“What’s to stop you?”

“Don’t you know?”

“They’ll make you tell.”

“They can’t.”

“They’ve got ways. They’d work on you. I know. It happened to me for sixty hours in Port Palmetto, Florida.”

“My father wouldn’t let them.”

“He’d get it out of you.”

“No more than they would.” She put her hands on his shoulders. “Can’t I make you see? Don’t you understand at all?”

Close to her, he could not avoid the details of her face, that precious, lovely, hated face. His brain pulsed and pumped in his skull.

Why couldn’t she see through his talk? he wondered. See the desolation inside him? Understand that he couldn’t stand the thought of being alone at the end? He’d been alone most of his life, knowing that he was different, that there was something strange about him. Why wouldn’t she stay to the end?

Without warning a man’s voice cut through the log and mortar walls.

Keith moved first, flinging his arm about Nancy’s waist and clapping the palm of his other hand against her mouth.

The voice outside was joined by another. Two … no, three of them at least.

They were making no pretense of stealth. He was instantly suspicious. They were looking for him—there could be no other reason for their appearance—and yet they were tipping him off, giving him a chance to get set.

Her father’s voice … and Uncle Howard’s … yes, and Ralph Hibbs’s. The big, soft man’s sermonizing tones were unmistakable.

Nancy struggled briefly, and Keith’s hand tightened on her face. He could feel the bones of her cheek and jaw and teeth under his fingers. She rolled her eyes with pain.

The brittle time-suspension snapped into place. His mind raced. Had they all come in the car he’d heard? If others were outside or on their way … John Vallancourt had outguessed him.

They were here. They had seen the signs of disturbance in the Ferguson lodge and Vallancourt had pegged his compass point of flight.

Turning Nancy around, he walked her toward the back door. With Nancy as his shield, the hunters’ position would not be so good. He’d warn them to stand clear. He’d take her with him into the timber. When he had sufficient cover, he could make a break for the hills. Good thing he hadn’t yielded to sentiment and let her walk out. He really needed her now.

Push back the end minute by minute, second by second, Keith. Damn them all!

Then he stopped. He stood still, with Nancy’s back against him.

Don’t give in to the first impulse, he told himself. You’ve really got to cool it this time.

Man, they want you to step outside. It’s the thing they’re after. They’re betting you’ll react to pressure and do half their work for them. That’s exactly why they’ve come with the yak-yak, the lack of caution.

Cross Vallancourt up, Keith thought. A rabbit doesn’t get hit until he’s flushed.

His iron clasp kept Nancy immobile. She heard her father’s voice, calm, reasonable, unhurried: “Keith, we know you’re in there.”

The hell with you! Keith thought.

“Howard Conway and Ralph Hibbs are with me, Keith. But no police. No arms. No threats. We know you have a gun. We’ll keep our distance. It can’t hurt you to talk to us. How about it, Keith?”

Sweat crept down his face. He was more certain than ever that they didn’t know he was inside. They were stabbing in the dark. Well, he wouldn’t fall for it. Let John Vallancourt deliver his sweet little speech outside every cottage around the lake. By that time, Keith thought, I’ll be over the hill.

The voices informed him that they were splitting up. Howard Conway was drifting up the hill around the cottage. Ralph Hibbs called to Vallancourt from below.

Keith stopped breathing as footsteps scuffed on the porch. Then they were going away again. Keith half closed his eyes; dizziness swept over him.

He waited. Nothing was moving outside now. No sounds came to him. The need to know what was happening became urgent.

“Not a sound,” he whispered in Nancy’s ear.

He eased his grip on her just a little. Pulling her with him, he moved to a front window. Slowly he removed his hand from her mouth and inched a slat in the venetian blind.

Through the narrow line of vision, he saw them on the road below. They were all there. As he watched, they turned away from the cottage and went on down the road.

When they were out of sight around a bend, Keith let the blind slat fall. He leaned against the wall, releasing Nancy. His muscles were suddenly flaccid, his stomach stirred sluggishly. But he was buoyed by the thought that he had beaten them. Give them time to work their way far down the lake, he thought. Then out the back, across the hills.

It was then that Nancy made her move. She was a flicker, like a bird, in the near darkness. He plunged after her.

She reached the dining room. Without looking back she grabbed one of the cane-bottomed chairs at the rustic table. He saw the chair and heard its clatter, but he was too close to avoid it. The chair fell in front of him and he pitched forward, lunging for the end of the table to break his fall. The house shook under his weight as he struck the floor. He heard the back door open and slam.

Keith scrambled to his feet. Pain sheared through his right knee. He ignored it, trying to reach the door. But the door echoed the slap of metal as she threw the flange over the heavy staple.

He struck the door with his shoulder, grunting. Again the house shook. But the door refused to yield. He bounced back, holding his shoulder.

He stood there gasping. How good it would be to tear the door apart with his bare hands. She had slipped the broken padlock back in the staple, he knew, securing the hasp. The lock was as effective against him as if it had not been broken at all.

He wasn’t beaten yet.

He wheeled about, returned to the dining room, grabbed a chair.

With the chair drawn back at full cock, he approached the nearest window.

17.

“The next house is almost a mile,” Howard Conway said. “The one up on the Point.”

“I think we’ve drawn a blank, John,” Hibbs said. “We’ve tried three cottages now without luck. I don’t think he’d have gone all the way to the Point.”

“We’ll try it.” Vallancourt walked doggedly along the dusty road, studying the stone house set on the jut of land far up the lake. “If we miss there, we’ll go back for a car. On second thought, Ralph, maybe you should return for a car now. Bring my Lincoln.”

He pitched Hibbs the car keys, and Hibbs started walking hurriedly back around the lake.

Vallancourt and Conway trudged on. They had gone a few yards when Hibbs’s voice stopped them.

“John! It’s Nancy!”

Vallancourt had already whirled and begun to run.

She had come out of the trees near Hibbs. Slipping, falling, she slid down the embankment formed when the road was cut.

Hibbs reached her first. But Vallancourt shouldered him aside and took her in his arms.

“Nancy, Nancy,” he said. He held the trembling form very tightly. She sighed.

After a moment, he held her away from him, looking at her hard and long. That was when Nancy began to sob. So he pressed her against him once more, murmuring to her, as he had done when she was a little girl in trouble.

She shook herself, raised her face, even managed a faint smile. “I’m okay, dad.”

“He didn’t harm you,” Vallancourt said. “No, he didn’t.”

“There’s so much to explain, daddy, to try to make you understand …” She touched her father’s lean cheeks with her fingertips, turned to the other two men. “And you two … it’s so good to see you.”

“By God, if he had done anything to you,” Conway began.

But Ralph Hibbs simply nodded and set about furiously wiping his eyeglasses.

“How long since you got away from Keith, Nancy?” Vallancourt asked.

“I was with him until a few minutes ago.”

“Where?”

“The house back there. That log one. We heard you coming. I thought for a while he was going to yell at you, order you away. Then he decided to lie low.”

“He’s as cunning as a damned stoat,” Conway growled.

“He forced me to remain quiet,” Nancy said. “After you’d gone by, he let go of me and I managed to get out the back door. I fastened it with the hasp and padlock he’d broken to get in. As I ran from the cottage, I heard him smashing a window.”

A breeze off the lake stirred her blonde hair. She seemed older than when Vallancourt had seen her last.

“Dad … what I did I did willingly. I went to him because of what I felt for him … and I had to leave him because of the same feeling.”

“We don’t have to talk about it now, darling.” Vallancourt glanced at Conway and Hibbs. “Take her back, and wait for me at the Ferguson cottage.”

He gave her a quick smile and vaulted up the embankment.

“Alone, John?” Hibbs asked anxiously.

Vallancourt nodded and plunged into the trees and made for the rear of the log cottage. Fifty yards up the hillside a fault had ruptured the earth, thrusting a spiral of granite upward. He began a hunter’s noiseless ascent. Then he was looking down, surveying the lay of the land.

Keith at last admitted to himself that he was bushed. He had to rest. He lowered himself to a bed of pine needles and lay on his stomach, gulping air.

He wanted to close his eyes and stay there forever. But closing his eyes was no good. When he did, Nancy’s face materialized. How she had looked at him that last time. He shook his head, wincing.

After a while he sat up. Got to get moving again.

He rose, backhanding sweat from his face, thinking of his long circling flight across the face of the hill. He had intended to go straight across, but the steep spine of shale near the ridge had turned him back. From a distance it had looked rough but climbable. Up close, it had loomed perpendicular.

He raised his eyes. Should be able to start upward again, he thought.

He started climbing, working out the stiffness that had settled in his muscles during the pause.

Still no sounds of pursuit, he told himself gratefully. They must have found Nancy. Or she found them.

Okay, Mr. John Vallancourt, have your damn reunion. You’ve got back everything that matters to you. No more worries, no fears. You can call the state fuzz, the county fuzz, the city fuzz. Tell them where the bull crap is. Mark it on a map for them. Then sit back and watch the fun. God damn you, Vallancourt!

He reached a small clearing where the spreading arms of giant oaks formed a natural arbor. As he took his fourth step into the clearing, a shock rippled over his body. He set his foot down like a man in a dream, with impossible slowness.

A man was standing at the edge of the clearing, to his left—Vallancourt.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Keith,” Vallancourt said, as if Keith were merely late for a golf date.

Keith stood very stiff and still.

“How did you get up here?”

“Walked.” Vallancourt’s tone was conversational. “I figured you’d made your try across the ridge, and the shale cliff would turn you back. In that case you’d have to swing around this way. So I came here on a straight line, and here we are.”

“You think you’re so great,” Keith said thickly.

“Not at all. But when you’ve done a little hunting you learn your terrain and the instincts of your quarry.”

“I don’t like being quarry,” Keith said. “I don’t like it one damn bit. I don’t like hunters. I don’t like you.”

“I don’t blame you, Keith.”

Keith was silent. Suddenly he said, “Hunters carry guns. Have you got a gun?”

“I’ve a dozen very fine guns at home,” Vallancourt said. “And I’m reasonably good at using them.”

“Too bad you didn’t bring one with you.” Keith’s eyes were roving. He looked very much like an animal, standing there, at bay.

“Why bring something I’d have no intention of using, Keith?”

“That’s tough, old man. I’ve got a gun.”

“I know.” Vallancourt stood there impeccable, unwinded, not a hair out of place. Tricky! Tricky as hell! Damn him.

“You know?” Keith said. “The hell you do.”

“Of course. The gun you took from the motel proprietor.”

“And you came anyway? You’re a fool!”

Vallancourt did not flinch. “It’s your folly we ought to be discussing, Keith. Besides, I’m not really running any risks.”

“You think I wouldn’t use the gun on you just because you’re Nancy’s father?” Keith snarled.

“Being Nancy’s father has nothing to do with it. I simply don’t believe you’re the kind who’d use a gun on a friend.”

“Friend! Are you kidding, Vallancourt?”

“Would I come here unarmed, knowing you have a gun, if I didn’t trust you?”

“You can’t trick me!”

“And how could I trust you,” Vallancourt asked patiently, “if I didn’t have some measure of belief in you?”

“You’re a liar!”

“Nancy believed in you, Keith.” Vallancourt took an easy step forward.

Keith bolted.

“Keith!” Vallancourt called. “You mustn’t! I want to help you!”

Keith began dodging among the trees. Vallancourt launched himself. He ran easily, with the long stride and kick of the professional runner. The distance between them began to shorten.

Keith glanced over his shoulder. Seeing how near Vallancourt was, he gave a short, angry cry and wheeled to one side. His feet slipped on pine needles, and he lost a tick of time. Then he was upright, meeting Vallancourt’s rush squarely.

His full young weight was behind the fist that he hurled at the chiseled face under the silver hair. But the fist never met anything. Instead he lurched off-balance, floundering to keep from falling.

He whirled about to look for Vallancourt. His fist lashed out a second time.

A steel vise clamped on his wrist. He heard Vallancourt’s quick hard breath, felt the impact of the older man’s surprising strength.

The pull on his wrist carried Keith forward. His body slammed against Vallancourt’s hip. He felt the ground give beneath his feet and saw the treetops pinwheel against the blue sky. The earth slammed against his back and shoulders, smashing the breath out of his lungs. He tried to rise.

Vallancourt’s knee hit him in the groin. He fell back, nothing real for the moment except the pain. Helplessly, he felt the gun being jerked from his pocket. Then the weight lifted from him. Keith crawled to his feet, lashed out feebly.

“You don’t know when you’re licked, do you?” asked the quiet, friendly voice.

Useless now. He had the gun … Keith stood with arms dangling, slobbering breath.

Vallancourt made no move with either his hands or the gun.

“Son, you have one hell of a fine physique and a lot of potential, but you lack the training,” Vallancourt said. “I was a Marine field commander in the war, and I keep in shape. No, Keith. Stand easy.”

Keith panted, “This isn’t the end. You haven’t got me down there yet. It’s a long way from here to the lodge.”

“The way back is as long as you want to make it, Keith.” Vallancourt studied Keith intently. “Yes, you have a great deal of her in you.”

“Her? What you are talking about? Who?”

“Your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Dorcas Ferguson,” Vallancourt said.

Keith glared at him.

“You won’t believe it on such short notice,” Vallancourt said, “but it’s true. Your real father was killed in a hydroplane accident before he and your mother could marry. She loved you too much to give you away. She gave birth to you in another city and left you with Maggie and Sam Rollins. All these years she’s cared and provided for you. I’m sure she didn’t know the full story of the relationship between you and Sam. He cowed Maggie to silence and put on a front when your mother, in the guise of aunt, was around.

“But as she grew older, I’m convinced Dorcas came to realize the wrong she had done you. Your mother, in your time of greatest need, brought you here, and I’m positive that only her death stopped her from telling you and the world that she, not Maggie Rollins, was your mother.

“I know you didn’t kill Dorcas Ferguson, Keith, and that’s why I’ve gone to all this trouble to talk to you.

“You can keep running. Or you can come off this hill and take hold of your future—start acting rationally. Which will it be? It’s up to you. I’m going back to the lodge.”

Vallancourt glanced at his hand, raised his arm, and threw the gun in a high, flashing arc. It vanished from sight with a crash.

Before the sound died, Vallancourt was walking rapidly down the hillside.

18.

They were waiting for him on the porch of the Ferguson cottage.

“You didn’t nail him,” Howard Conway said with disappointment.

“Aren’t you glad?” Vallancourt smiled.

“What do you mean?” Ralph Hibbs asked.

“Go inside, Nancy,” her father said.

A glance at her father’s face was enough. Nancy went into the lodge.

“I mean that the case is still open. A fugitive is still at large. There’s still the chance that he’ll stop a police bullet and close the book on the Dorcas Ferguson murder.” Vallancourt smiled. “Except for one thing. I know who the murderer is—and his name isn’t Keith.”

Conway and Hibbs exchanged puzzled glances.

“I suspected Keith was innocent quite early,” Vallancourt said. “In fact, when the cashbox from Dorcas’s study turned up in Keith’s car. He was not carrying the box when he broke out of the house. That means it had been put in his car beforehand. It simply wasn’t reasonable that Keith would kill her, lug the cashbox out, then return to her lifeless body.

“So it looked very much as if the cashbox was a plant, and Keith the victim of a frame-up—the sacrificial goat being offered up by the real killer to save his own skin. At the time, of course, my principal concern was not Keith’s innocence or guilt, but getting Nancy back before she came to harm.

“The morning of her death, Dorcas phoned Keith to come to her home. I’m convinced she was going to tell him the truth about their relationship—that she was his mother.

“When he got there, he found her dead. She had been dead only a short time. Someone had preceded him there. Obviously the murderer. And the murderer, having been informed by Dorcas that she had summoned Keith, and why, had used those few minutes to set his stage. He was desperate. He had nothing to lose at that point, and his neck to save.”

“Ralph,” Conway said, “you went by Dorcas’s house early that morning.”

“Even if Ralph did,” Vallancourt said, “it was too early, some time before she was killed. At the time of her death Ralph was selling a car to a customer.”

“That’s true,” Ralph Hibbs exclaimed. “I remember mentioning it to you, John.”

“And it would have been a silly attempt at an alibi if it weren’t true,” Vallancourt said. “Too easily checked.”

Howard Conway moved to the edge of the porch and leaned against the railing. “So where do we go from here?”

“Police headquarters, Howard. We’ll have a matron sober Ivy up.”

“Damned poor joke,” Conway said.

“Yes, it was. But it’s not on Keith any longer, Howard,” Vallancourt said. “I don’t think you intended to kill Dorcas, but she’s no less dead. And to have framed Keith … Did you think your own hide worth the lives of a boy and girl, Howard?”

“Afraid you’ve lost me on the curve, John.” But Conway was beginning to sweat.

“Then let’s take it from the beginning,” Vallancourt said. “You tried to talk Dorcas out of revealing the truth about Keith. Your motive was obvious. If the whole world knew she was his mother, she might then leave everything she had to him. And that would freeze out Ivy, her sister—your wife. You’d counted on that inheritance. So you argued, and she wouldn’t listen, and you lost your head and shoved her, and the edge of the table got in the way—and there you were, with a dead woman on your hands.

“You were on a very hot spot, Howard. Keith was due to arrive momentarily. But … the boy was already under suspicion of the nastiest kind of murder—that Florida business. Why not let Keith pay for the crime? Make it appear that Dorcas, the doting aunt, had become suspicious of his part in the Florida rape-murder, disillusioned. That he’d knocked her down when confronted, killed her, stolen money from her study, and fled.

“Sam Rollins was the only other person, aside from you and Ivy, who knew the truth about Keith. You figured that, if it ever came to that, you could buy Sam’s silence.

“Your more immediate problem was your wife. You had to tell her Dorcas was dead, and you had to force her to pretend to be Dorcas—to make the call summoning me, the needed witness whose additional testimony would wrap it up tight for you.

“Dorcas was dead. Nothing Ivy might do could change that. And you had a prime weapon. You could threaten Ivy with the exposure of Keith as Dorcas’s son and heir, if you went to jail. Ivy wanted that inheritance, too. She made the call.”

Ralph Hibbs was gaping at Howard Conway as if he had never seen him before.

“You were cutting it thin, but you had luck,” Vallancourt said. “But not quite enough, Howard. There never seems to be enough luck for that kind of thing.

“First detail to go haywire for you was the cashbox. I imagine you wanted it to look as if Keith had gone from the living room back to the study, grabbed the box, and opened it on his way out.

“You snatched the box, opening it outside while you waited for Keith’s arrival. I’m sure you intended to return the box to any point in the house where it would look as if Keith had dropped it. From your hiding place you saw Keith arrive. A mere matter of minutes for it fall in place for you now. If I got there late, it wouldn’t matter. You could pretend you’d just arrived, too; you’d seen Keith drive away hurriedly; we’d both go inside and discover the murder.

“Instead, I arrived a few seconds early and you had to leave the cashbox in Keith’s car. Still, no harm done, you thought. The police would catch Keith and close the whole thing out in a matter of a few hours. The presence of the cashbox in his car would be taken to be plain stupidity on Keith’s part. Anyway, so long as Keith’s true relationship to Dorcas remained unknown, no one could pin a motive on you for the murder.

“Second detail to blow up in your face was your certainty that Keith would be caught. But he wasn’t. He kept fighting, dodging, stayed out of the hands of the police. He strung it out, and the more he strung it out the deeper I got into it. And I got to the truth, Howard. About Keith’s parentage, the reason for the fight that led to Dorcas’s death, the identity of the man who wanted Keith’s true parentage to remain unknown, the only woman who could have posed as Dorcas on a telephone.

“Everything building like a wall around you, Howard. Until the final detail that nails the lid on—with implications that nauseate me!”

Vallancourt’s face was iron.

“When we started checking lake cottages earlier today, it was you, Howard, who went to the rear of the cottage where Nancy and Keith were hiding. Nancy later came out that back door, the door through which they’d entered after Keith broke the lock. You couldn’t have missed that broken lock, Howard. You knew they were in there, and said nothing. You wanted them to stay.”

“Why would I want that, John?” Conway asked blindly.

“I think you meant to go back there later—alone,” Vallancourt said. “I think you were so deeply corrupted by what you’d already done that you intended for the police eventually to find a young murder suspect in that cottage who, in despair, had apparently killed himself. And—God help you!—if Nancy was still with him when you went back, I believe you could have nerved yourself to making it appear a murder-suicide pact. Right, Howard?”

Conway wiped his forehead.

“It’s a nice tale, John. But you spent too much of your life in countries where intrigue is a way of life. This isn’t a foreign country. Here, you have to have proof.”

“I don’t have to prove a thing, Howard. That’s the job for the police. I don’t think they’ll have much trouble. How long do you think Sam Rollins will hold out? And Ivy—you can’t delude yourself into thinking she’ll last very long when the questions start coming—and she has no scotch to fall back on.”

Howard Conway rolled over the porch railing. He struck the ground and was off and running toward the road, the hills, anywhere.

And then Conway stopped dead. Keith was coming along the road, toward the lodge.

“Keith!” Vallancourt shouted. “Howard Conway killed her. Do you understand? Howard is the guilty man, Keith. Take him!”

Keith stood with face raised toward the cottage for an instant, intently. Then he looked at Conway.

Conway scrambled about and started running in the opposite direction.

Vallancourt watched a young tiger gather himself and spring. He nodded soberly as Conway crashed to the road. No more mental block, Keith, to bar the final act of winning, Vallancourt thought.

Nancy was back at her father’s side. From below came the sounds of turmoil.

Nancy touched her father’s arm. “Dad …”

“Going rather well, isn’t it?” Vallancourt said. “Do you have a cigarette, dear?”

“Dad, there’s still that Florida thing …”

“Keith’s claim of innocence down there was the truth, Nancy, or he was acting drastically out of character. I’m not speaking of the first uncertainties and fears I sensed in him. I’m speaking of the basic stuff I’ve discovered in him, the material that survived the slings and arrows. Do I make sense?”

Her eyes were misty. “You make sense, dad.”

“But no more of this elopement nonsense. I want to give you away in style.”

“Oh, yes, daddy!”

“And Sam Rollins—don’t you think we ought to suggest to him a less hostile environment?”

“Whatever you say, daddy.”

Three months later, on a day in late summer, Vallancourt happened upon a wire-story squib with a Port Palmetto, Florida dateline.

A known degenerate, with a long history of sex offenses, had been picked up on a molesting charge and, to the surprise of Port Palmetto police officials, had confessed to the sex murder of Cheryl Pemberton.

Vallancourt cut out the squib, sealed it in an envelope, and addressed the envelope to Mrs. Keith Rollins at Niagara Falls.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

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

Copyright © 1965 by Ellery Queen

Copyright renewed by Ellery Queen

Cover design by Kat Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-1714-5

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Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Cast of Characters

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Copyright Page