"But—but she must be dead, Sheriff, or she‘d have gone—“
"To the police? When she thought she was wanted for embezzlement and knew that would come out if she told her story?”
The sheriff flipped a hand. “Be seeing you tomorrow.” He walked toward the door and Weaver sank back in the chair. He reached for the whisky bottle and refilled his glass; some whisky slopped out on the, table but he didn't even notice.
Jenny might be alive. Why couldn’t she have run faster than a man who, even then, had moderately advanced tuberculosis and whose stamina must have been low?
And if she was alive he’d find her.
Sound of the motor of the sheriff's car starting. Weaver hurried to the door and out into the night, to the side of the car. “Sheriff, will you let me work with you on this? Help you from now on?”
“You didn’t give us a lot of help, keeping that suitcase and the letter from us ."
“I—I'm sorry about that. No more holding back, honest."
"Well—we’ll see.”
"I’m interested, Sheriff. Damned interested." Jenny, if you're alive I'll find you. "Listen, Sheriff, I want to be sure of one thing. The body that was found—it couldn’t have been Jenny? I mean—"
"That much is for sure, Weaver. Even if she grew two inches and dyed her hair all over, it couldn‘t have been Jenny. Jenny's mother says she’s got a mole on her left hip; if there’d been a mole on the body, Doc Gomez would have made a note of it. That old boy was thorough.”
Weaver turned and walked blindly into the house, into the kitchen. The sheriff’s car drove off but Weaver didn’t hear it.
Vi had a mole on her left hip.
Vi was five feet three and blonde. He'd met Vi three months after Jenny Ames had escaped from Charles Nelson. She'd been working as a waitress in Santa Fe, only seventy miles away on the main highway. She had no relatives. She'd been twenty-two.
Vi was Jenny. Jenny was Vi.
Santa Fe, the most likely place for her to have got a lift to, after she’d found her way back to the main highway that evening. The nearest town big enough to hide in, big enough to give her work.
He tried. to pour himself a drink but this time his hands were shaking so he couldn’t even hit the glass. He took a drink from the bottle.
He went to the bedroom door and opened it, looked and listened. That gross, sodden, stupid, snoring—
He braced himself against the doorjamb and made himself tum and go back into the kitchen.
Jenny.
He leaned against the table and reached again for the bottle. If he could only drink himself into a stupor quickly, quickly; it was the only way he could possibly keep his sanity, keep himself from—
“George.”
Jenny stood in the doorway. Her eyes were bleary from sleep and drink, her face blotchy, her mousy hair snarled, her voice thick.
"George, was somebody here? And then you left the bedroom door open and the light—”
She'd come into the room as she was talking, but she stopped now, between him and the outer door, looking at him in bewilderment.
“George, what—?”
There was nothing he could do except what he had to do, jerk open the drawer of the kitchen table and reach inside it—
Sudden terror in her eyes, Jenny backed away from the knife, her hand groping behind her for the knob of the kitchen door. She was too frightened to scream and anyway there was no one to hear, no one but the man who came toward her with the knife—and he was mad, he must be mad. Her hand found the knob of the door and . .
The Far Cry Page 20