I interrupted: “My guess is that Bennett himself called your husband out of the house, claiming official OFS business of some kind, perhaps connected with the stuff in your bank box, the original material we still don’t know about. It seems very probable that Dr. Ellershaw had actually got in touch with Bennett quietly, knowing him through his security duties and wanting to report those dangerous discoveries, whatever they were, to somebody official as soon as possible. Your ivory-tower husband would probably have been naive enough to take for granted that, since Bennett was a government man, he could be trusted. Just as he apparently took for granted that if something was locked up in a safe-deposit box, it was safe. And it’s very likely that Bennett learned from your husband that he hadn’t confided in you at all; that you didn’t know what was in those sealed envelopes you’d put away for him in the box you’d hired for him.”
Madeleine nodded. “You’re probably right. That must be why they didn’t feel compelled to have me killed, too. As I said before, both of us dying or disappearing at once would have attracted too much attention, anyway. They were probably very happy to know I wasn’t much of a threat. I could just be got out of the way with a phony espionage charge to keep me from making a nuisance of myself. That also made Roy’s disappearance seem logical—it gave him a motive for vanishing, along with Bella, his Communist contact.” She hesitated. “Do you think Bella was, well, planted on us deliberately?”
“It seems likely,” I said. “That’s another thing we’ll have to work on. I’ve already asked for a thorough check on the woman. But all this doesn’t answer the final question: Why did Roy Ellershaw put this dangerous material into the care of the wife he loved? He must have known she could be badly hurt by having it. As she was.”
There was a little silence. At last Madeleine said quietly, “Maybe he gave it to me because it was so terribly important, Matt. Because he was doing something of which he knew I’d approve, and he knew he was in danger and might be killed. He trusted me to carry on after his death, not anticipating that… that I’d be put out of circulation, too. I’d like to think that. I’d like to think he had that much faith in me even though… even though I was so damned preoccupied with my own important affairs that I never gave him a chance to tell me about it.” There was harsh self-contempt in her voice.
“It sounds plausible up to a point,” I said. “Well, we’ll know more when we find out what kind of a deadly secret it was he’d stumbled on. The question is, did he try to tell you about it somehow? Posthumously, so to speak.”
She swallowed hard. “You mean… a letter from the grave? ‘Dear Madeleine: I can’t seem to catch you long enough to talk to you in this life so I’m writing you from the next to explain why I have put this terrible responsibility on your… on your shoulders.’” She couldn’t go on.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I said. “It’s quite possible that Roy Ellershaw felt you were safer knowing as little as possible, as long as he was alive. But unless the papers, documents, photographs, diagrams, formulas, or whatever he left you were completely self-explanatory, he’d want to let you know how he’d got them and, presumably, how he wanted you to use them. Maybe it was all in that safe-deposit box; but then again, being a careful scientist type, maybe he arranged for a backup message somehow.” I hesitated. “And knowing you wouldn’t be using the material he’d given you unless he was dead, he’d also want to say goodbye, wouldn’t he? That’s item two on your agenda: to figure out where your husband could possibly have hidden a final message to you—”
But she wasn’t listening. She spoke in a flat and expressionless voice: “Yes, of course. He’d want to say goodbye, although it’s hard to see why he’d bother. I wasn’t much use as a wife, so busy with my own career, when it came to a real crisis involving my husband’s very life, was I? I don’t… seem to be much real use for anything; I couldn’t even do a lousy little stint in prison without falling completely apart and trying to kill myself.” Her face twisted in self-contempt. “Look at me now; look what I’ve let myself become! God, look at the pasty-faced middle-aged female slob trying to turn the clock back, trying to imitate the fashionable and attractive young professional woman she used to be, in a cheap new dress and bargain-basement shoes and a small-town hairdo! Matt, take me back to the motel, please.”
As I escorted her out to the car I wondered why, instead of being impatient with her manic-depressive behavior, I was feeling rather pleased with her. Then I realized that I’d just witnessed an important breakthrough. It was the first time she’d admitted that, while she’d certainly been the victim of monstrous injustices, she hadn’t endured quite as well as she might have.
9
In the morning, at breakfast, she was surprisingly cheerful and wryly apologetic: “I don’t know how you put up with me. It’s just that I’ve started getting these attacks of total self-disgust, when I realize what I’ve let them do to me, make of me. So they put me in prison; it wasn’t the end of the world. Gutless Ellershaw! No damn courage at all!”
She’d come a long way from the bitter woman at the penitentiary gates obviously blaming the whole world for her tragic condition. I told myself that I was letting myself get too involved with watching her fight her way back out of the gray limbo into which they’d thrown her, perhaps because at the beginning I’d really thought she was lost for good. But it was no business of mine. I should be concerned only with making sure she didn’t slit her throat until she’d served our purposes, and that nobody did it for her.
I said, “Don’t be too sure of that. With the help of your wealthy and loving parents, you’d got along on determination and hard work and a lot of brains. What occasion had you ever had to use your courage, in that sheltered lovely young life of yours? Like letting a gun lie rusting unloaded in a locked drawer. When you suddenly hear a burglar downstairs in the middle of the night, it’s too late to get it out and load it even if you can find the key and the cartridges. And the action’s probably too gummed up to fire after the years of neglect. And without any practice you’d probably miss your target anyway.”
“You mean, it takes practice to be brave?” She smiled at me. “Well, maybe I’ll be a real lioness by the time this dangerous expedition is over, but I’m not counting on it. Matt?”
“What?”
“May I drive today? We should get to Santa Fe this evening, shouldn’t we? And I’ve got to do something to keep from thinking about the people I’m going to meet there, people I used to know who’ll remember what I was, and… and how they’ll act when they see what I am now after serving my sentence, a shabby, flabby alumna of Fort Ames U.” She grinned. “Oh, God, there’s the self-pity girl again. Please, Matt?”
It was wide-open country now, the real plains, treeless and desolate except along the infrequent watercourses. Even the occasional irrigated areas were bleak and bare at this time of year. It was the kind of country that used to drive eastern women mad with loneliness when their land-hungry eastern men dragged them out here to settle; sometimes it drove the men mad, too. I guess if you get hooked on trees and grass at an early age you can develop quite an addiction and the withdrawal symptoms can be bad. Hell, even now when they move out to New Mexico—and lots of them do—they insist on using our scarce water to grow the damned little green lawns they can’t seem to live without. But even though I no longer live out there on a permanent basis, whenever I leave the dull, safe, fertile Midwest behind, and enter this endless arid landscape with its fine hint of menace, I still feel I’m coming home.
“I forget, when do we see the mountains on this road?”
I glanced at Madeleine behind the wheel—she’d been driving steadily since morning with pauses only for gas and lunch—and I saw that in spite of the ordeal that awaited her, she shared my feeling of homecoming.
I said, “Not until we pick up the backs of the Sandias ahead, and maybe the Sangre de Cristos off to the north.”
“There should be snow on the peaks,”
she said.
“The ski runs were hurting last year,” I said. “I don’t know if they’ve had any good snowfalls this year. But the higher peaks should be white, yes.”
She said, “Matt, I don’t like, the smell of it.”
Still a western girl no matter where she’d spent the past eight years, she’d noted it too: the oppressive stillness of the air, the sinister darkening of the sky.
I said, “I’d better have a look at the road map.” I spread it out and frowned at it. “Nothing for forty miles except one little town called Riker’s, and that’s just a speck on the paper… Oh, Jesus, there it comes!”
We’d topped a slight rise, and there was the storm ahead—a sooty black band across the horizon topped by boiling masses of dirty-gray clouds. I saw some little dots of buildings off to the right of the road about two-thirds of the way to the threatening cloud wall that blotted out everything behind it.
“That must be the town, such as it is,” I said, pointing. I reached over and hit the trip odometer, setting it back to zero. “I figure about ten miles across the valley. Go for it, Mrs. Leadfoot. Let’s see how close we can get while we can still see the pavement.”
“Don’t you want to—”
“Don’t waste time talking, goose it!” As the car accelerated obediently, setting me back in my seat, I said, “I’ll take it if we have to fight our way through the deep stuff. You probably haven’t played around much in heavy snow lately. But we should make it before it starts piling up too high.”
For a change, her laughter was pleasantly lacking in bitterness. “No, darling, I really haven’t had many opportunities for practicing my skiing and snow driving lately… What does that sign say?”
“RIKER’S 8 MILES.” I hit the odometer again, relieved to have a more accurate zero to work from if things got so murky we had trouble spotting the exit signs. At least now we’d know when to start looking. I said, “And they have a motel, thank God. There’s a billboard: MOTEL, CAFE, GAS, SOUVENIRS. We’ve got it made; all we have to do is make it.”
“Does it hurt the speedometer to go over the top?”
I glanced at her. She was concentrating hard on her driving, urging the little car right along; but there was color in her cheeks and her eyes were brighter than I’d seen them—well, since the time we were being shot at. An intriguing and rather disturbing lady.
I said, “Hell, no, that’s just one of the government’s fool ideas. Since your time, so to speak. They have the odd notion you won’t drive over eighty-five if that’s all that shows on the dial. Take it as high as you can hold it. You can trust the tires; they’re brand-new like the car, just barely broken in.”
The RX-7 was howling happily now, driven the way it should be driven, and I watched the miles click by—but we’d already lost the race. Riker’s had disappeared into the menacing black front that was bearing down on us, and the first snowflakes were drifting down from the murky sky. I switched the heater to defrost, turned the fan full on, and switched on the rear-window heating element.
“Windshield wiper on the stalk to the left of the wheel,” I said. “Just twist the knob counterclockwise.”
“Thanks.” Reluctantly, she was letting the car slow down now, as the visibility worsened rapidly. A few shadowy cars and trucks went by going east, on the other side of the wide median, but we could see nothing ahead or astern in our westbound lane. “I’d better turn on the lights, hadn’t I?” Madeleine said.
“Watch out, here it comes!”
Then we were in the thick of it, in the wild twilight of the storm, with the car jolted by heavy gusts of wind, and a full-scale blizzard attacking the windshield with dense formations of swirling white flakes.
“RIKER’S 1 MILE.” I read the passing, sign that was. almost invisible through the blowing snow. “Are you all right?”
“Fine, but I wouldn’t want to buck this clear to Santa Fe.”
I said, “Hell, you know you just conjured up this minor disturbance to put off the evil day.”
“Maybe you think you’re joking, haha,” she said. “Minor disturbance, hell, I can hardly see the front of the car… Ah, there’s the exit sign!”
The snow was already beginning to stick, and the pavement was disappearing from sight as we pulled up in the shelter afforded by a two-story frame building, the motel, and an older one-story adobe structure that was decorated with lovely neon signs—at least they seemed lovely to us under the circumstances—reading RIKER’S CAFE-COORS BEER, and MOTEL OFFICE-VACANCY. It was a small oasis of safety in the screaming white hell of the storm.
“A little adventure for the dull jailbird lady,” Madeleine said. The bitterness was back.
“You’re a real little psycho, aren’t you?” I said. “Up one minute, down the next. Why not just relax and take it as it comes?”
“I’m sorry. I must be a real drag to travel with.”
“And don’t give me that phony-meek bit, either!” I snapped.
She laughed abruptly. “Why are we fighting? Because we were scared? Of a little snow?”
I looked at her and grinned. “I think we need a drink. Luckily I bought a new bottle in Stockville. Come in with me while I register, please.”
“But I’ll get my shoes all…” She stopped, looked at me for a moment, and said in a questioning way, “Matt?”
I said, “The guy might get lucky, if there is a guy. The boys didn’t spot anybody behind you during your shopping spree yesterday, but that could just mean he’s smart and cautious. Right now our protection is out there on the freeway somewhere, counting snowflakes or sliding into a ditch or getting squashed by a skidding semi. And maybe our homicidal friend is out there, too, if there is a homicidal friend. But as I say, maybe he got lucky and, rolling a few miles ahead of us perhaps, ducked into the nearest haven when the storm hit, just as we did. And he happens to see a familiar little car drive up with a familiar female face at the window, and he goes boom once or twice and disappears into the blizzard never to be seen again. Two balls and one strike; but in this business all it takes is strike one and you’re out. It’s the kind of night—well, afternoon, although you’d never know it—when things happen, and I don’t want them to happen to you.”
“All right, Matt.”
I started to open the car door, and stopped, and looked at her again. “For the same reason, and because accommodations are going to be very tight around here tonight with everybody taking shelter from the storm, I’m going to put us into the same room if you think you can stand it. The Mister-and-Missis routine.” I glanced at her, but her prison-trained face told me nothing. I went on: “I have a feeling something’s closing in on us. Why should you have all the telepathy in the party? I got nervous about you last night—”
Her voice was gentle. “I know, I heard you come in and look at me. It made me feel protected.” She grimaced, and continued, briefly bitter again: “No objections, Matt. What the hell difference does it make? It’s not as if that hardened felon, Mrs. Ellershaw, had any reputation left to worry about.”
We signed in for a double room, Mr. and Mrs. Matthew Helm, and made our way to our assigned ground-floor unit, and hauled our luggage inside and shed our white-shouldered coats and stamped the snow off our shoes. It was really howling out there now, shaking the frame building; but once I’d figured out the control console of the all-in-one window unit—air conditioner in summer and heater in winter—we started thawing out pleasantly. It was a good big room, well worn but comfortable, and all the plumbing worked in the bathroom, although the original bathtub drain-closing mechanism had given up the ghost and been replaced by a rubber stopper.
I’d had sense enough to pick up some ice while I still had my coat on—I’d also, since there were no room phones in this desert hostelry, made a call from a chilly outside booth to report our situation—and I set out drink materials on the low round table by the curtained window. Madeleine emerged from the bathroom with her windblown hair tidy once more, but she p
aused to examine herself in the dresser mirror.
“I seem to have caught up with you, Matt, did you notice?” she said wryly. “I remember that one of the things that made me wary of you when we first met was that you were an older man with more experience.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly. “Nothing makes a man feel great like being called a senile Casanova.”
She was not to be distracted. “But the woman in the office obviously thought we were a nice, well-matched couple just about the same age.” Madeleine made a face at her mirror image. “Well, you can hardly blame her.”
I said, “Come have some rejuvenation fluid, Grandma. Actually, I find older women quite delightful.”
I watched her come towards me and take the glass I held out to her and sink into the other chair, kicking off her damp shoes and tucking her feet under her. I noted that, while she was wearing her by now somewhat travel-creased brown suit, and her pink sweater, she had on her fragile new nylons. Her heavy brown hair in its new soft arrangement still did nice things for her face. But I was disturbed by the realization that these things no longer mattered. I mean, after a couple of days in her company I had stopped judging her by how well or badly she was dressed, or how well or badly she combed her hair, or even how she might not be quite as narrow as she should be in the middle. I knew her too well now—liked her too well, damn it—to worry about such minor external details.
“Tell me about prison,” I said.
Her face changed. “I don’t think that’s a very pleasant subject for the cocktail hour,” she said stiffly.
I shook my head. “You can’t dodge it forever. You’ve told me practically everything else. It’s time you got rid of that, too, by talking about it. What made you decide to kill yourself in there, with a couple of years of your sentence already behind you?”
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