“You’re coming with me,” he said. “Don’t argue with me. You’d better if you don’t want to be turned in. You don’t want to be executed for murder, do you?”
Her eyes on him were wide and staring. Eyes like an insane cat.
“I’m all you have now,” he said. “Your dear David wouldn’t lift a finger to save you now!”
His words seemed to whip her into submission. The wildness was gone. The deepest Peggy came into control. The weak Peggy, the Peggy who always needed guidance and discipline. Who could never think for herself. She looked at him like a frightened child at its parent.
“Jim, you…” she started, “you won’t… let them do…”
“Come on, Peggy,” he said. “How long do you think I can protect you from the world?”
She didn’t answer. She just stood by him and let him lead her to the door. I stood there bleeding and not feeling it. Staring after them helplessly. Detached from reality.
“You won’t let them, will you, Jim”? she begged.
He looked at her pathetic face. He heard the lost fright in her voice. And, for the first time in his life, he showed in my sight that there was more than machinery in him.
He drew her against him and pressed his lips to her hair.
“Peggy,” he said, “oh, Peggy.”
Only an instant. Then he raised his head and his face was hard.
“They won’t get you,” he said. “Not while I live.”
I might have been invisible standing there. The blood dripping from my finger tips onto the floor. Me watching a world slip away from me. A rootless, detached feeling. As if something I’d called my heart had been torn away leaving me hollow, a shell.
I noticed that there was somebody outside the door.
“Is there anything wrong in here?” the voice asked. “I heard shouting.”
Jim Vaughan spoke calmly, distinctly.
“This is my wife,” he said. “I’m taking her away from that man in there.”
Muttering. “I knew it, I knew it.”
Then, at the door, Jim turned. He had his arm protectingly around Peggy’s shoulders. And for some reason, all the smugness and the meanness and the cynical detachment seemed to have gone from him.
He looked at me. And it seemed as if he felt as helpless as I did. He had tried to save her again and again. Doing everything he could, even confessing for her crime. Now, if they were fugitives, it would be Jim they sought for murder.
And, despite all that, she had not changed.
And I knew later—not then because I could do nothing but stand there mutely—that Jim loved her. In a way that I and my sort of person cannot understand, much less appreciate. In the old way. The unquestioning way. Defying the traditions of society rather than losing it. Loving in a way that even allowed a man to kill for his love. Right out of the middle ages. Yet, something strangely and perversely noble there.
At least there seemed a sort of quiet unassuming nobility to Jim as he stood there by the silent Peggy. The frightened and weak Peggy who would never in her life be able to face the world without help even if she feared that help above all else.
“Just for the record,” Jim said to me, “I had both Albert and Dennis killed. Both. Do you hear me?”
I knew he hadn’t. He’d had Dennis killed. But Albert had died at another’s hands. The hands of a girl I had loved and who, even now, was my wife. But I was too dazed to think of that.
Jim turned to her then. His eyes were on her only and his mind and heart held her alone.
“Come away, my dear,” he said.
And led her out of my life forever.
***
The police came soon. I hadn’t left. They picked me up on a morals charge. Later they called Santa Monica and fortunately Jones was still alive. He gave them the facts and they released me and started after Peggy and Jim. But they didn’t catch them.
And one day I saw Jones and he told me they’d caught the man who’d attacked Peggy at Funland.
“I don’t understand,” I said, “Albert…”
“Grady didn’t do it,” Jones said.
“But… the scratches,” I said, in a last confusion about my Peggy Ann. “She said she’d scratched the man who’d tried to rape her. And Albert’s face was covered with scratches.”
“That’s right,” he said, “they both were scratched.”
I looked at him a moment and then I lowered my head. And I whispered, “God help her.”
That’s about all. I finished my novel and sold it and made $1700 on it. I talked Audrey into going back to her family in Pennsylvania. I met some people and laughed again and pretended that everything was status quo again.
I read the papers.
Maybe you read the story, too. It was about a month ago. When they found Jim and Peggy in a Kansas City hotel room. And when they took away the thing that Peggy was fondling in her lap she said they mustn’t.
She said they had to let her keep his head because she loved the man.
THE END
Someone Is Bleeding Page 15