Sure, I thought. I’m not crooked. Besides betraying him with his wife, all I’ve done lately is steal twelve thousand dollars. It was a little hard to look at him.
It didn’t take long to straighten out the details. Just before we left she had to go with Gloria to show her where the bathroom was, and as they went out of the room he looked after them. It was the first time I’d ever seen anything gentle in his face. I wondered which one he was looking at.
“That’s one of the finest girls who ever lived,” he said. And then I knew. He was speaking of Gloria. “You won’t have to pull any of your hardboiled stuff on her. So don’t, or you won’t be there.”
As soon as we were out in the car she said simply, “I’m so happy for you, Harry. I think it’s wonderful.”
I turned south on Main Street and drove down the highway. Without conscious thought I made the turn on to the road going up past the abandoned farmhouses. We were both silent now, as the road wound into the river bottom. It was black here in the timber. In a few minutes we came to the river. I stopped the car off the road at the end of the bridge and turned off the lights. The night closed in around us. I got out and went around the car to her door and opened it and helped her out.
When my eyes became accustomed to the darkness I could see the river, the stars reflected on the surface like silver dust across a mirror, and the ghostly outline of the bridge. We walked out on to it, her high heels rapping on the planks. We stopped and stood at the railing, looking down into the blackness and the water. I turned and I could see her face in the faint light here in the open between the walls of trees. The eyes were dark, looking quietly up at me, and there was just a whisper of that fragrance about her. I reached out and put my arms around her.
For a long time there were no words. I was kissing her and then holding her, like something very precious that might fly away, holding her with my face down against her cheek. Then she stirred a little and moved back and as my arms relaxed she took both of my hands and lifted them up against her face.
“The way you did before,” she said softy. “It’s crazy, isn’t it, but I love for you to kiss me that way. Maybe it’s because that was the way it was the first time you kissed me. Do you remember that, Harry?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve forgotten it entirely. It was just a little thing, like having a house fall on you.” I held her face that way and bent down until I was just touching her lips. “I love you,” I said.
“I love you, too, Harry.”
“You do?”
“Yes. It’s kind of funny. I’ve known you only about a month, but I can’t seem to remember what it was like when I wasn’t in love with you. I guess I ought to die of shame for telling you, but you’ll never know how much I was hoping you’d kiss me that night when you brought Spunky home.”
“You’re a crazy kid,” I said. “And wonderful.”
We were silent again, and after a while she asked softly, “What are you thinking about?”
“I was just wondering how we happened to come to this place. I think I knew right from the minute we left Harshaw’s that I was going to ask you if you’d marry me, and I just drove out here without even thinking about it. And I was remembering something he said when you were out of the room.”
“What was that, Harry?”
“It’s a little funny now. He said he’d fire me if I didn’t treat you right. On the job, he meant. You know he’s pretty crazy about you, too. He said you were the finest girl he’d ever seen.”
“Don’t say that, Harry!” She tightened up suddenly in my arms, and I could hear the beginnings of panic in her voice. “Don’t say anything. Just hold me.”
I held her, but it wasn’t any good. I could feel her going to pieces. And then she was crying, not silently as she had before but with a shaken hopelessness that tore me up. There wasn’t anything I could do until she quietened. It was an awful feeling.
It was a long time. When she was still at last I took out my handkerchief and mopped away the tears, and then I got hold of her arm and led her back to the car. We got in and I lighted a cigarette and held it for her while she puffed at it.
“All right,” I said, “start at the beginning. We’ve got all night, and we’re not going to leave here till you tell me. Something’s hurting you, and it’s gone far enough. So let’s have it.”
“All right, I’ll tell you, Harry,” she said dully. “I can’t stand it any more. I’ve got to tell you. And I’ll have to tell him, too. That’s the awful part of it. After the way he’s treated me, how can I tell—Harry, how can I?”
“Tell who?” I asked.
“Mr. Harshaw.” Her voice began to tighten up again. “I’ve been stealing from him, Harry. I’ve stolen nearly two thousand dollars from him.” It caught up with her again.
It’s fine, I thought. It’s wonderful. Harshaw should write a book about his faith in the human race. His wife’s a tramp, I’ve been helping her with it, and now this. And then I knew it didn’t fit. Two of us were guilty, but Gloria didn’t belong in the crowd.
There was nothing to do until she recovered, and then I said gently, “All right, baby. You just tell me what it is. We’ll straighten it out. There are two of us now.” I lighted her another cigarette and pulled her back to where she could rest her head against my arm.
“I’m sorry, Harry. But I think I’m all right now. I don’t think I can make you understand why I did it, because you’re not the kind of coward I was, but I’ll tell you the best I can. It’s been going on for nearly a year now. I keep paying the money back, but I can’t catch up with it because of the interest—”
She’s unique, I thought. She tells me she’s a thief, but still she’s paying interest on the money she stole.
“I won’t try to tell you what it’s like,” she went on quietly, with that hopelessness in her voice. “Just trying to keep going, I mean, trying to keep the books straight, paying back a few dollars here and a few there, and then having to write out another fake note to cover one that has to be paid. It all comes to over fifteen hundred dollars, and the interest on it takes up nearly half of what I can pay back out of my salary each month. And then there’s always more. Something new. Another twenty or thirty or fifty dollars. But I guess I’d better tell you where it all went, where it goes—”
“That I already know, honey,” I said. “What I want to find out before I go to talk to him is why.”
She shook her head with frantic entreaty. “No, Harry. No! Don’t you see that’s one reason I haven’t told you before? I mean, for fear of what you’d do. He might hurt you, or you might get into trouble over it.”
“You can tell me, baby.” I said. “And don’t worry about it. We’ll just have a little talk. It’s just possible I speak his language a little better than you do.”
She hesitated a minute and then she said unhappily, “All right. But there isn’t anything we can do. Except to go and tell him. Mr. Harshaw, I mean. Once I can get up the courage to do that … but I might as well start at the beginning. It’s about a girl, or a woman rather, who came here about this time last year. Her name was Irene Davey. She was a teacher. She’d been hired to teach high-school maths—algebra and plane geometry, I think—and to coach the girls’ basketball team. School didn’t start until September, of course, but she came along late in August to find a place to live. I met her on the tennis court one day just after she came.
“She was several years older than I was—I guess she was twenty-six or twenty-eight—but she was very good at sports. She was crazy about all kinds of games. She could always beat me at tennis without even trying, and kept asking me about places to swim around here. I understood she had been on the swimming team in college, and had won a number of diving competitions. She seemed to take a great liking to me right from the first. She called me a couple of times and asked me to go to the show with her. I introduced her to a few boys I knew, but she didn’t seem to be much interested in them.”
She stoppe
d, and then she said, “This is a lot of explanation, Harry, but I have to tell you all of this before you’ll understand what happened. It was awful. But I didn’t know—”
No, I thought, she probably didn’t. I was beginning to have an odd feeling about it, a kind of premonition. What I was remembering was the scene that Sunday morning when they had me trapped up there in that old barn.
15
SHE WENT ON. “ANYWAY, MISS Davey came by the house one Saturday afternoon when I was home alone and wanted to go swimming. I told her I didn’t like the idea of swimming in the river because it had snags in it and there might be snakes, but she seemed so anxious to try it I finally gave in. I put my bathing suit on, with slacks over it, left a note telling my Sister where I’d gone, and we started down here. We went in her car. I thought about this place because I remembered there was a pool just below the bridge.
“When we got here it was still early in the afternoon and the sun was awfully hot. We took off the clothes we had on over our swim-suits, but she didn’t seem to be nearly as eager to swim as she had been. She wanted to talk. We sat in the car and smoked a cigarette, almost in this same spot we’re in now, and she told me how much she appreciated my being so nice to her and that she liked me very much. It was a little embarrassing, but I just thought she was lonely and eager to make friends here and I didn’t want to be too stand-offish and rude and hurt her feelings. But then she started telling me I was very pretty, and how I looked in a bathing suit—”
She broke off then. I could feel her shudder slightly. “It’s awfully hard to tell you this, Harry,” she said hesitantly.
“It’s all right, honey,” I said. “You can skip most of it if you want to. There’s nothing new about it, and I can guess the rest.”
“I’m glad you understand,” she said. “I—I guess I was awfully naïve. I was just uncomfortable and wanted to get out of the car because some of the things she was saying were so personal. And then— It was horrible. She was trying to kiss me. I was so absolutely frozen with terror I couldn’t do anything at first, and then I tried to get out. She was talking to me and trying to hold me back, and I began to fight at her. She was terribly strong. I was crying by this time and trying to get the door open and push her away all at the same time when suddenly she stopped and looked around the other way, out of the window on her side. There was a man standing there in the road. I didn’t know him then, but it was Mr. Sutton.
“He looked just the way he did that time we saw him out at the oil well. He hadn’t shaved, and he had the gun in his arm and was carrying a dead squirrel by the tail.
“He stood there looking at us for a minute with that awful, filthy grin, and then he said, ‘Well, girls, a little lovers’ spat, huh?’
“I couldn’t do or say anything. I wondered if I was going to faint or be ill right there in the car. And then she tore into him, cursing just like a man. I don’t think I’ve ever heard such things as she called him. And all the time he just stood there and grinned. Then he said, ‘Well, girls, I won’t interrupt you. You go ahead and kiss and make up.’ And then he walked on away.
“I don’t know yet how I got away. I must have just grabbed my things and run, out into the timber. The next thing I knew I was all alone, lying in some leaves with my slacks and things in my arms, sobbing for breath. After a while I got up and put them back on over my bathing suit and started walking. I found the road all right, and a Negro woman in an old Ford came along and gave me a ride to town. When I got home Sister still hadn’t returned, so I tore up the note I’d left. I would never tell anybody about it.”
“And that was all?” I asked. “I mean, until he came and looked you up?”
“No.” She shook her head. “That was just the beginning. The terrible part was the next day, and Monday. She didn’t come back to town that night. Somebody at the boarding-house notified the Sheriff’s office that she was missing, and late Sunday afternoon Sutton came to town and reported the car had been parked there in the river bottom all night. He apparently didn’t say anything about having seen it before or knowing whose it was, or anything. They went out there, and when they found her slacks and shoes in the car they decided she must have gone swimming, and had drowned. They started looking for her in the river.
“I was scared, Harry. I was scared to death. Twice I tried to get up the nerve to go to the Sheriff and tell him about it, but I just couldn’t do it. How could I explain why I’d run off and left her? And then early Monday morning they found her. Right in that pool below the bridge. Only they didn’t think she had been drowned. They said she might have been killed by a blow on the head.”
I whistled softly. It was a mess, an ugly one. “Did they find out who did it?”
“No,” she said. “Of course, I was frantic by then. Now I couldn’t tell them I’d been down there. But nobody knew about it—except Sutton. Around noon on Monday, after they’d brought her to town, he came into the office. Mr. Harshaw was out and I was there alone. He pretended he didn’t know who I was at first, and just said he wanted to borrow five hundred dollars. I was so scared I didn’t know what I was doing, but I did ask him the usual questions, about security and co-signers, and so on, and got out the forms. And all the time he was watching me, as if he couldn’t remember where he’d seen me before. Somehow—I’ll never know how—I got the papers ready for him to sign. And that was when he did it.
“Just as he picked up the pen, he pretended to recognize me. ‘Now, I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘I knew I’d seen you somewhere before, and I couldn’t figure out how I’d forget a pretty girl like you.’ You know that awful grin he has. ‘It’s too bad about your lady friend, isn’t it? I wonder if they’ll ever find out who did it?’
“Harry, I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t think. I had to hold on to the counter to keep from falling, I was so weak. He said, ‘But I’ll tell you something that’s a scream. They’re looking for a man. Ain’t that a laugh, baby?’
“Then he put down the pen, without signing the papers, and said, ‘I’ll tell you what, honey. All this paper work looks too complicated for an old country boy like me, what with all this fine print and stuff, so why don’t you just give me the money now and you can fix up the fiduciaries and the hereinbefores yourself, like the smart little cookie you are. You see, I want to get out of town before that dam’ Sheriff drives me crazy. Just because I live down there he keeps pestering me with a bunch of silly questions about whether I saw anybody else or another car, until honestly I’m just in a pet about it.’ Then he winked at me and said, ‘How about it, sweetie-pie? You’d do that for a nasty old man, wouldn’t you?’”
She stopped and ran a hand across her face.
I’d told her I wasn’t going to do anything except talk to him, but now I could feel a cold and terrible rage churning around inside me. I wanted to get my hands on him so bad they hurt.
“So he went out without signing it?” I asked. “And he got the money?”
“Yes. I told you I was a coward, Harry. I was in such a panic I couldn’t think. So I had to falsify the books, to cover it up. Naturally, I didn’t have that much money myself. But it was all right. I’d pay it back a little at a time, until I got it paid off.”
“And then, the very next day, the Sheriff’s office said they were convinced it was just an accident. They found a big snag in the pool under the bridge, just under the surface, and they believed she had dived off the bridge railing and hit it. It had either killed her outright or knocked her unconscious and she’d drowned. You see, they’d performed an autopsy Monday afternoon, and found a little water in her lungs. If she’d been dead when she fell into the water there probably wouldn’t have been any.”
She stopped.
“Well, look,” I said, “then there isn’t anything Sutton can do. The whole thing was an accident—”
She shook her head wearily. “You don’t know Sutton, Harry. He came back a week later and got two hundred dollars more. Don’t you see? He k
new it wasn’t my money I’d given him the first time, so now he had me there too. And he was sure I was coward enough to keep on paying him to keep that ugly story from coming out. Don’t you see the suspicion there’d always be if people knew? Maybe it was an accident. And maybe it wasn’t.”
She was right. It was sweet, and it was murder. Sutton had it figured from start to finish. And now he’d gouged her for over fifteen hundred dollars, adding a little at a time, so she could never get it all paid back. The only way she could cover it up was with phony loans which called for interest, so trying to whittle down the actual shortage, with this interest and Sutton’s continued bites, was like trying to swim upstream over Niagara.
I gathered her up and kissed her. “All right, you can quit worrying about it. There won’t be any more ‘loans’ to Sutton. And between the two of us we can put every nickel of it back and have the books straight in less than three months.”
I wasn’t as optimistic about it as I sounded, but I wanted to get the load off her mind right then, so she could get some rest.
“But, Harry, I’ve got to go to Mr. Harshaw—”
“No, honey,” I said. “You can’t. Don’t you see, with his heart in the shape it’s in, you can’t tell him anything like that now? When it’s all over and we’re square with the world you can tell him if you want, but I don’t see any sense in it. Actually, he’ll have been making money on it at around three per cent per month for a year, so he should kick.”
“But—” she protested, “there isn’t any reason for you to get mixed up in it—paying it back, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “I can think of one. Maybe I mentioned it before. I’m in love with you.”
For the first time, she smiled. It wasn’t much, and she had to work at it awfully hard, but it was there and to me it looked like the sun coming up.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s look for tear stains. I’m going to take you home, and I don’t want your sister to think I’ve been beating you.”
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