"Listen," I said. "I never asked much out of life. But what I had, what I wanted most, was Lucy, and the Lord took her away from me. He took my arm away from me too. And now I've found something else I want, something I thought could make up for Lucy and for my arm, and now Stewart's taken her away from me. I couldn't do anything about the Lord, but I can about him, and I'm going to."
I felt cheap saying it; I felt dirty and treacherous. Because I knew I was deliberately trying to get him to do it for her; I was playing on the friendship and affection I knew he had for me to save her neck. Because if it was just my neck, I wouldn't be planning to risk it any more. I was risking mine for her and I was asking him to go against all his principles for her. I was using the grimy trick of arousing his pity to get him to do it.
I couldn't look at him then and I got up and turned my back to the big desk and looked out the window at the desolate, sun-swept street below.
For a long time he didn't say anything and the silence in the office grew thick and miasmic and I felt it coming up off the rug and choking me. Why doesn't he say something? I thought. Why doesn't he just go on and tell me to get the hell out or something, not just sit there and keep me sweating like a field hand picking cotton?
"All right," he said, his voice dull and fiat. "If you do it, I'll get you off. On one condition."
"Name it." I was facing him now, but I still did not meet his gaze.
"When it's done, you take this money and get out of here, like I said, and make something out of yourself again."
"What about her?"
He laughed, short and sharp.
"If you're going to kill a man for her, I don't expect you to toss her out. Not you."
"All right. I'll do it."
"Listen, Harry. I know how you feel. I can imagine if it were my wife. But it won't help any. Murder never helped anybody."
"I have to do it, Brax. It's like I can't help myself."
I almost gagged on the words.
"All right. I know you have to do it. Now get out of here. Just go on and leave me alone."
I walked out and on down the stairs. I didn't thank him. That would have been the final blow, because I knew he was also just doing what he had to do, what his whole life as an honorable man who stood by his friends had forced him to do. I didn't thank him for throwing aside everything else that same life had taught him for that principle of standing by a friend.
So now it was all ready, the trap was set, the trigger was ready to be pulled. We had laid a trail of lies and deception. I would shoot him and then we would go to court and the man I had pulled into our scheme of deceit and death would swear with us that what we had done was justifiable in the sight of God and we would go free.
And I didn't even want to do it any more. Maybe I never really had. But I would do it, and I would draw him into it with me, because it was what she wanted and, God help me, it was what I meant for her to have.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The sun was already beginning to sink in the sky when I drove the Chevrolet out of the rutted road that led from our little shack out through the trees to the bigger road. Instead of turning right when I reached that road and driving on to the paved highway that led into St. Johns, I wheeled the car to the left.
The dirt road upon which I drove was a connection between the highway through St. Johns and another paved highway that led into Belleview. a much larger town, about thirty miles away in an adjoining county. From the shack to the Belleview highway, it was about eight miles.
The road was seldom traveled, for it ran through the poorest farm region of the county and only one or two small houses were located along it. The dairy truck came by each morning, and a few mule wagons and an occasional car moved over it in the daytime. But at night, any vehicle was a rarity on that road. That was what made it the perfect place for what we had in mind.
I had the spot picked out. It was only about a half mile from the end of the road, where it joined the Belleview highway. At that junction was a filling station and store where there was a telephone. That would make it easy to get in touch with the Sheriff.
I drove slowly along the washboard road. We had had no rain in some time and yellow clouds of dust mushroomed behind the Chevrolet. The sky was bright blue and the sun was hot and blazing. Soon my hand on the wheel was gritty with the sweat and the dust.
In about twenty minutes I came to the place I was looking for and braked the Chevrolet to a stop. There was a small road leading off into the woods, a lonely, secret slash in the pines, even less defined than the ruts leading into my place.
An old signboard, nailed to a tree, slanted at a crazy angle. The weather had beaten hard against it, but I could still trace the faint, disappearing letters: "Rutherford Mill."
It had not been used in years. The mill building itself had long ago collapsed and disintegrated, and only a few rotting scraps of lumber among the weeds and the old stone foundation remembered its existence. The huge old wheel had vanished, too, but the pond was still there, deep and black and treacherous, and the dark waters still dropped over the stone spillway to the anonymous little creek that wound its way to the river.
The little road I looked at now led to that pond and what had been the old mill, only a few hundred yards away beyond the thick screen of pines.
I peered at the road and saw tire tracks entering it, not new and not just one car, but the sort of tracks a few cars, passing occasionally, will leave.
That bothered me. I hadn't thought the road would be used.
All I need is for somebody to have a still going down there, I thought. That would make everything just ducky. Like a hole in the head.
I stepped down on the gas again and the car nosed into the old road. It was not hard going, although a few branches banged against the windshield and gnarled old roots poked through the earth to jolt against the tires.
In a few minutes I came out of the trees and onto the shore of the pond. Along that part of the lake the former mill owners had erected a stone dam, so that the water was deep right up to the edge. On the far side of the lake a small beach backed up against the forest.
I cut the engine and the sound of it faded into the silence. I sat there a moment looking out across the still water. It was pocked and scarred with jagged stumps, rising starkly out of the water, and the surface of it was black, and you got a sense of the evil depths lurking beneath those stumps and that calm, still surface, and of the power of all that water contained there, waiting there. From far to my right the rush of the water over the small spillway carried faintly to me.
I shuddered, looking at it. I thought about the bodies that had disappeared under that even sheen of evil, broken only by the stumps, because under that sheen tangling vines and weeds and water-thriving growth waited, reached, to choke around the legs and the waists and the arms of people who swam there.
The pond had long ago been outlawed for swimming, but that didn't stop it. There are always fools, and every summer somebody drowned in Rutherford Millpond. Sometimes they recovered the body and sometimes they didn't. Few people cared to dive down to search for a drowned body in that lake.
Then I remembered the tire tracks and the worry went out of me about that. I looked out at the strip of sand running up to the dam, and sure enough, the tracks were there too.
Probably kids, I thought. Swimming out here at night. The fools. Let them just stay away tonight.
I looked again at the water. A good place to kill a man. I thought, especially if you have to get rid of the body. We don't have to do that, but it's a good place anyway.
I cranked up the engine again and pulled the car over to the side of the road that led into the pines. I cut the switch and got out and stood there a minute, thinking it all over, looking hard for anything we had done wrong, anything we had missed.
I couldn't find a thing. It had all worked out perfectly. Just the way I had planned it. Yeah, I thought. You're so goddamn smart. Harry London, Ph.D., Phi Beta Kappa, S-A-P.
I kicked at one of the tires and then I walked back along the silent road to the bigger one that lay, dusty and long, between me and the old Caldwell place. The sun was very low now and I did not think I would be seen. I could work through the woods around the few houses or cluck off the road if I spotted anyone coming and still be home long before nine.
I would be there in time, all right. And she would be waiting for me, with the pistol ready.
It was good dark now, and the sky was brilliant with stars. There would be a moon later, not a full one, but in the night it would hang above us like an all-seeing eye, and I thought that whatever we did, whatever happened, the moon would know the truth.
And wherever you go, you can't get away from the moon.
Crickets dinned all about me and a night bird sang sweetly. The tall pines cast shadows over the road, and along its edge, where I walked, it was very dark.
I was nearly there now, almost to the road leading into the shack, and then I saw something move under a tree. I stopped very still and watched.
Then she stepped out into the road and the stars spilled their light across her.
She was dressed very simply, in a white dress I had not seen before and high heels. The starlight, mellow and pale on her face, took all the faint traces of hardness from it, and she looked no more than sixteen. I took a step toward her and realized again that the top of her head did not come even to my shoulders.
"You took so long," she said.
I was moved by a sudden urge to put my arm around her, to feel the close blonde hair against my face, and the surge of her against me, and the warm, soft lips, and I almost reached for her.
Then I remembered what lay ahead for us, waiting in the night.
"Did you think I wasn't coming back?" I said. My voice was more harsh than I had meant it to be.
"No. I was just afraid something had gone wrong."
"I'll bet you were," I said. "I'll bet that scared you to death."
I started walking on and she turned and fell in beside me. We entered the narrow road through the scrub in silence. I didn't slow my pace. She had to hurry to keep up and I saw that the skirt of the white dress was slim and binding on her legs and I slowed down.
"That's a fine getup for the glorious occasion," I said. "Maybe we could paint a skull and crossbones across the bosom."
"That isn't funny."
"No. But then, I didn't mean it to be."
"I would be pretty well dressed," she said. "If it actually was the way we're going to make it look, I mean."
"All right," I said. "Don't expect me to pay the dry cleaner's bill. It costs a lot to get blood out of white cloth."
She didn't answer that. Far ahead of us now I could see the dim patch of light that marked the spot where the road entered the sand. The trees around us were not so tall as those out by the bigger road, but their shadows cast eerie patches of dark ahead of us.
"You've got it all straight, I hope," I said. "You'd better not miss a trick or you're going to find yourself sitting in a chair you won't ever get out of again."
"I know what to do," she said. "My part's not hard any more. It's you that can't make any mistakes now."
"I won't," I said. "When we get almost to that road, I put the gun in his neck and tell him to stop. Then you drive and we turn into the little road and go down to the lake. Then…"
"Yes. Then you do it."
"Then I do it," I said. "And then I muss you up a little, like I'd slapped you around some, and we get in your car and drive to that little filling station on the highway. We call the Sheriff and I tell him I caught you and Stewart engaging in a spot of sexual intercourse and deceased him on the spot."
"That isn't funny either."
"Nothing's funny," I said. "I told you that once."
Suddenly it came to me that she was speaking in a small voice, almost shaky, and that she had not once barked back at me when I snapped at her. It's getting to her now, I thought. It's getting close and she's not so cold-blooded about it now.
I didn't want to make any more bright remarks then. There was no use in riding her.
"The part after will he tough," I said. "That'll he worse on you than on me. They'll crucify you and say how they don't blame me a bit."
"I know. I almost wish we were going to bury him somewhere and just go oil and hope they never found him."
"Uh-uh," I said. "Not on your life. We'd spend the rest of our lives getting hives every time we saw a traffic cop. We'd be afraid to show our faces anywhere. It's better this way. We go on trial, we tell our story, and we get acquitted. Brax Jordan will get us acquitted. Then it's over and we don't have to worry about it any more."
Big talk, I thought. Mighty big. Mighty empty. Neither of us will ever think of anything else after tonight.
Then we were out from under the trees and walking across the sand toward the last big dune that hid the shack from us.
"How about the cabin? Is it all fixed?"
"I don't know. I did my best."
"When Stewart comes, it's got to look to him as if we're leaving. But only because he thinks we are, anyway. It can't look that way to anybody else."
"I've got a couple of bags of sand in each of those old suitcases of mine. They'll fool him. You can sink them in that lake-after you do it."
"That sounds good. That ought to take care of it."
We came over the rise and the kerosene glow from the door of the shack was surprisingly cheerful and welcoming across the brilliant night.
"Just a cottage small by a waterfall," I said. "But we call it home."
"It's all right. You don't need a big house. You can be happy even in a place like this, if you have to."
"Not us," I said. "We've got to play God. Who ever heard of God living in a shack?"
I stood back and let her go in first. The bags were standing by the bunk and the room had a stripped look. She had achieved it by hiding away a few things, things Stewart might reasonably expect us to carry along, but leaving out a few things too, so that if anybody cared to look we could still claim we had never planned to leave.
She stood in the middle of the floor, her hands clasped together. Then she turned her head and looked at me over her shoulder.
"Now what?"
"Now we wait," I said. "He ought to be along any time now."
They say when you are dying-drowning, for instance-all of your life passes in review before your mind's unwinking eye, a sort of monstrous omniscient newsreel of memory flickering across a giant screen to outline in relentless light all the things you could have been, might have done, should have achieved if it hadn't been for all the things you actually had been and done and achieved.
It is no different when you have elected yourself God's agent and are waiting to kill a man. Only if you have the guts and the luck and the strength, you can then get up and walk out of the theatre and give God back the franchise He never meant for you to have anyway and start trying to make up for all that the newsreel has hurled at you out of your own blindness.
I could walk out of it, I was thinking as we sat there and waited for the sound of his car, I could still get out of it. If I could only make her see, if I could only get her out of it too. If I could only be sure she wouldn't go on and do it anyway and get herself electrocuted.
Then I remembered her voice, the shaky little inflection and the stillness of it, and I thought, Maybe I can.
She sat calmly on the bunk, her feet in the high-heeled shoes placed together and her knees together too under the white skirt, her hands quietly folded in her lap, the thin shoulders bent a little, and her eyes steadily focused on nothing.
I love her, I thought. There isn't any sense to it, no rhyme, no reason, no logic, but I do. Because she has in her the same dead hopelessness I once carried in me. Because she delivered me from it. Because-yes, by God!-because I could deliver her from it if she'd let me.
I could give her hope again. I could show her that there is a place for her, that sh
e can find security and love and whatever all the things are that add up to happiness.
But not if we do this thing. Not ever then.
I have to try. I can't let her do it without trying.
"Jean," I said.
She lifted her head and looked at me.
"I don't want to do it."
Faint puzzlement knitted her brows.
"I don't want you to do it either. I want us to clear out of here now."
"I don't understand."
"Don't you see? Murder-it doesn't end anything. Do you think you'll ever sleep again at night? Do you think you'll ever feel any better than you do right this minute after we've done it? We've been wrong, Jean, so wrong, all down the line."
She began to laugh. Her head went back and her mouth opened and her laughter rang out across the room and into the night and bounced back at us from the dunes. She fell back against the wall of the cabin and her hands waved helplessly in front of her and peal after peal of terrible laughter came tumbling from her throat.
I sat there and watched her and my thoughts were bitter. All right, I thought, so it's no use. So it just makes her laugh. I'm going to tell it to her anyway.
She had quieted a little now and I went over and put my hand on her shoulder.
"That night," I said, "that night after we were married-and all the others-I knew then I didn't want to kill him any more. I would have told you a long time ago. But I thought you'd go on and do it by yourself if I backed out of it. I thought nothing would stop you."
"So now you tell me."
"I had to. I had to make a try at stopping it."
"Why didn't you do it sooner? Why didn't you tell me?"
"Damnit, can't you see why? I love you, Jean. If you're going to go through with it, I'll help you. I've got to help you. But I don't want to any more, and I don't want you to, either."
"You fool," she said. "Oh, you stinking, blind fool! You thought I wanted to do it! You were doing it for me! Oh, Harry, you fool… you fool…"
She began to laugh again and I watched her. And then I knew. I knew how right she was and what a fool I'd been.
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