Her breath making small frosty clouds that crystallized along the edges of the parka-hood framing her face, she thought, “I’ll have a whole hour before the others gets here. I’ll have learned to do it good by then.”
Not until she was walking up a wooden ramp, trapped equally by the skates on her feet and the firm hand on her elbow, was she able to make a partial return to the present. That it should be only a partial return was something she was quite unaware of as, a glassy surface directly in front of her, she clung to the rail and refused to let go of it. “I can’t not do it—I can’t not do it!” she said piteously.
Astounded, Steve heard diction and grammar so at variance with anything with which the husky voice had so far presented him, that he could not at first credit it. The one thing that was quite clear was that he had somehow precipitated an emotional crisis stretching far beyond this moment, and, in doing so, assumed the responsibility of deciding whether it would be better to let her withdraw, or make her go on. Either way he might make a bad mistake. With only instinct and the little he knew of her to guide him, he made his decision.
“You must trust me,” he said quietly. “You’re not going to fall down. I promise you.”
“I ain’t afraid of fallin’ down. It’s just—it’s just that it’s happenin’ all over again!”
He put aside the familiar, sharp excitement he always felt when he first found confirmation of a story whose existence he had previously only suspected, in order to concentrate wholly on the problem at hand.
“What I am objecting to is that nothing is happening at all,” he said, and placing his arm securely around her waist, lifted her bodily onto the ice.
Forty-five minutes later, he closed the left-hand door of his car and went around to the driver’s seat and got in beside her. “Well,” he said casually, “none of your fears were justified, were they? Lord, it’s a hot afternoon. They should have a decompression chamber in that place.”
He had started the motor, and was reaching into the glove compartment for a fresh packet of cigarettes, when he saw that Psyche, her face in her hands, was weeping uncontrollably.
With only the briefest hesitation, he cut the motor, and drew her to him. “What’s troubling you now?” he asked gently.
“I—I—I was like a bird, wasn’t I?” Psyche said. And, her face hidden against his shoulder, she wept harder than ever.
4
STEVE, when he let psyche out of the car in front of oliver’s at a little before five o’clock, made no reference to any possible future meeting between them.
Although she had told him nothing factual, she had, he knew, betrayed more of herself than she had intended to, or would ever be likely to again. If he were to solve the complex mystery that intrigued him as much as, or more than, any he had ever come across before, his only hope of doing so now lay in staying away from her, and searching, undistracted, for a memory that had yet to come clear.
For he would, he was reasonably sure, know a great deal—if not all—about her past, once he had pinned that memory down. And this was something he intended to do if he had to stay up all night in order to do it.
After a makeshift dinner prepared on a one-burner hot plate, he stretched out in a deck-chair on the verandah of his cabin and lit the first of what was, as the night wore on, to be a long succession of cigarettes. Blind to the black-and-silver enchantment of the moonlit night, he moved slowly backward in time across every lead that he saw as at all pertinent.
The moon had set, and the first light of dawn was sharpening the serrated pattern of pines on the farther shore of the lake, when he came across the clue for which he had searched without any thought of sleep through more than nine hours.
Slowly he stood up, and pulled himself to his full height to ease stiffness from both his shouders and his legs.
That the clue he had finally found should point in a direction that seemed to make no sense at all, perplexed him even while he could not doubt its validity.
His first decision was to get in his car and follow up his lead as fast as possible. On second thoughts, he saw that it would be better to reach his destination toward the close of the working day rather than in the middle of it. This particular quest was one that he very much preferred not to advertise until he had a few of the answers.
When he reached the city in the late afternoon, he drove straight to the towering stone building that housed the offices of his own newspaper. Avoiding the city room, where he would have been forced to stop and talk, he took an elevator directly to the eighth floor and the newspaper’s morgue.
He had known and liked the tall, dark-haired woman at the desk inside the door for a long time. “Wyn,” he said, without other greeting, “have you got some off-the-record time to spare?”
They were always in a hurry, these men and women who came to her department to look through files that dated back across more than fifty years, who needed yesterday’s ashes in order to kindle to-morrow’s fires. Quite often they wasted her own time as well as theirs; but when Steve Ryerson came looking for something, the search was rarely fruitless.
“All right,” she said. “What are we looking for?”
“Theatre news.”
“Who, or what?”
“It’s damn vague this time. A picture of a fair-haired girl in a white evening dress.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Is that all you can tell me?”
“That’s all I can tell you because it’s all I know,” he said.
“What year?” she asked resignedly.
“We’re starting four years back, and working forward.”
“Oh, my God!”
It was, Steve felt, farther back than he needed to go, but he was thorough in anything he did.
Four hours later, in the vault-like silence peculiar to a large office building after closing time, he looked up from a table stacked with clippings, ran both hands through his thick hair in a gesture of irritated frustration, and said, “You better get the hell out of here, Wyn. We’re arriving nowhere, fast.”
She had already given him three hours of unpaid overtime, but she simply shrugged. “I’m staying if you are.”
He stubbed a cigarette in an overflowing ash-tray. “All right. But we’ll eat before we go on.”
They went to a restaurant in the same block, and the pavement under their feet was still warm even thought it was long after sundown.
They were waiting for coffee at the end of a meal during which he had maintained a preoccupied silence, when he brought the flat of his hand down on the table with a force that made the china rattle. “By God, I think I’ve got it! Right church, wrong pew! Come on, you don’t want any of that rotten brew they call coffee here, do you? You can exchange it for a case of the best Scotch whiskey. Name your own brand.”
She was too used to newsmen to be particularly surprised, but she said dryly, “You mean a bottle, not a case, don’t you, Steve?”
“I said a case, and I mean a case. Don’t waste time.”
She picked up her purse, and attempted to smooth the wrinkles from a black cotton dress wilted by the unseasonable heat. “This must be quite a story.”
“I’m beginning to think it is,” Steve told her quietly. He had his elusive memory placed now. All he needed were names to go with it.
Back in the deserted morgue, he was no longer at all vague.
“Three years ago I covered a theatre fire,” he said crisply. “It was in early October. A first night, and all the best people out in their glad rags. I don’t want the story. I want the full-page spread of pictures that went with it. Think you can find that?”
“What you mean is, do I think I can find it in thirty seconds flat?”
His smile was momentarily devoid of all tension. “You’re a bright girl, Wyn. Thirty-five seconds.”
Three minutes later she laid, not a full page, but a single clipping in front of him. “This is what you want, isn’t it?”
Photographs did not alw
ays do Sharon justice, but this flash picture, taken against the background of a soot-blackened brick wall, might have been a studio portrait. Her fur coat lost somewhere inside the theatre, she had stood in the cold October night, composed and quiet, waiting for Dwight to get their car. Her blonde hair framing her face, her white evening dress as unruffled as her manner, she could have been ready to be presented at court.
Steve, staring transfixed at a picture of Psyche that yet could not possibly be Psyche, began to whistle softly under his breath while he fitted guesswork with fact.
Looking up abruptly, he said, “Do you know anything about this woman, Wyn?”
“A little. Not much.”
“Would she, and/or her husband, rate a separate file?”
“Quite possibly. I’ll go and look.”
The file, when he had it in his hands, was not large, and for the most part failed to interest him. He was nearing the last of the items when he came on the one that sent excitement crackling through him. Swiftly computing dates, he saw that it could fit. Looking back at the picture of the lovely woman in white, he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it did fit.
Wyn, who had been studying Sharon’s picture, said slowly, “It may be just a coincidence, but I think”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not sure. Just a minute.”
Leaving him, she was back almost immediately with still another clipping, which she laid side by side with the one they had been looking at. “Oh,” she said, disappointed. “They’re very much alike, but they aren’t the same, are they?”
Steve, his eyes moving from Sharon to a newspaper reproduction of a National Gallery acquisition of the past year, seeing the extraordinary resemblance between the two, knew that this was additional proof of a conviction that actually needed no further proof. For in looking at “The American Venus” he looked at Psyche.
“There should be a medal struck in your honour, Wyn,” he said. “That case of Scotch will be delivered with a bunch of roses tied to it.”
“Is this a story that is going to stay off the record?”
“Consider it so until further notice.”
It was a story that he could break at once, if he wished; but for reasons that he did not stop to analyze too closely, he wanted to add to it anything he possibly could before doing so.
The following morning he left his downtown apartment early, and drove outside the city limits to circle the drive of a large stone house. Unchallenged, he briefly invaded a privacy hitherto unknown to him. From there he went back into town to enlarge further, through channels of his own, his knowledge of the people who lived in that house.
This part of his program completed, he made it his business to discover as much as could be readily known about the painter of “The American Venus.” Using every connection he had, seeing no need here for secrecy, he learned more about Nick in four hours than Psyche had learned in four months. And when, toward evening, he in his turn walked across the big field to the converted barn, he was well armed in advance for an interview that he foresaw might have its difficulties.
Their antagonism was immediate.
Nick, cleaning brushes at the end of a day’s work, was caught completely off guard by a visitor as unexpected as he was undesirable. He had been equally surprised by Sharon’s visit. On that occasion, however, he had realized at once that discretion was a mutual aim, and that in refusing to tell her what she wanted to know he might unnecessarily create an unpleasant situation. The purpose behind this tall, lazily moving newspaperman’s presence in the studio seemed obscurely threatening; for Steve, after debating the advisability of doing so, had decided in favour of making his profession clear, while at the same time intimating that he would not necessarily use what he learned.
Given time, Nick would have been acute enough to see that he could keep his own counsel with impunity. As it was, he gave ground steadily before subtle pressures well known to a man used to extracting information from those unwilling to part with it.
Steve, lounging against the model’s stand on which Psyche had once posed, his back to the light, finally rose to his feet, satisfied that he had learned all he needed to know. But when he reached the head of the stairs, he turned to make a sudden stab at something that he neither needed nor really wanted to know.
“How long did she live here?”
Nick, who had not admitted in so many words that she had lived in the studio at all, replied easily, “A little over four months, but I would like it clearly understood that she did so alone. I myself, as you already know, do not live here.”
Grey eyes and hazel fought a last silent duel, but this time the brilliant hazel eyes were unrevealing, giving away nothing.
Steve, striding back across a field, now warm with sunset light, thought, “He’s lying, damn his soul!”—and cursed himself for caring one way or the other.
In his car again, he did not turn back to the city, but took the road to the north, following at once the only lead that the artist had given him. And when he passed Oliver’s close to nine in the evening, he refused to examine his own feelings. But he could not banish an image of Psyche that had gone with him through every step of his search. It was as if she were in the car with him, and all he would have to do to prove this would be to put out his hand and touch her. Both innocent and sophisticated, vulnerable and strong, as appealing in laughter as in tears, she could not be submerged in her story as he would have liked.
After a night spent in a second-rate motel, he spent the greater part of the following day at a shack that, following the artist’s reluctant instructions, he found without difficulty.
It was one of his many gifts that he could adapt himself easily and unselfconsciously to almost any surroundings. Perceptive, sensitive to the embarrassments inherent in the mixing of different classes and conditions of humanity, he fitted himself briefly into Butch and Mag’s primitive existence as if he had always been a part of it.
His shirt sleeves rolled up, his hands in his trousers pockets, he was audience to Butch’s Sunday ritual of garbage disposal. Perfectly seriously, he listened to Butch’s somewhat improbable plans for retirement. Sharon and Dwight had made it quite possible for him to retire; but it would take Butch some years to get beyond the planning stage.
Apparently more than comfortable, Steve sat with Mag on the sagging red couch, and listened to the big woman talk on a subject obviously close to her heart—her kid. And as she talked, an ineradicable picture of a thin, lonely, tow-headed child was etched on his memory. A picture all the clearer because of the simplicity of the language with which it was evoked.
Butch and Mag, thinking him an emissary of the kid’s parents —an idea he did nothing to contradict—were both friendly and expansive. That they should have any other reason for being hospitable did not occur to him.
When, after having shared two meals with them, he prepared to leave, he was curiously reluctant to bid them what he considered to be a quite final good-bye. And he would, even then, have been torn between chagrin and amusement, if he could have heard the exchange between them after he had turned away from the shack.
Side by side, they watched him until he had disappeared amongst slag hills already merging with a night sky.
“That there’s a real man, that is,” Butch said weightily.
Contentment was an almost visible mantle around Mag’s shoulders. “He wasn’t givin” nothin’ away, but it was easy to see. The kid’s got herself a good man. We’ll be seein’ the both of them together the next time.”
Needing time in which to think, Steve checked in for the night at a commercial hotel in the nearby town—the same hotel, as it happened, where Nick had once paced a dreary room and rebelled against rain that kept him from painting.
Following almost the same trail over which Sharon had travelled three months earlier, he now knew a great deal more than she did, because he knew, as she did not, where the trail might properly be said to end. There were still
gaps, it was true, but he no longer judged these to be of any real consequence. Whatever had happened to her between leaving the artist and turning up outside Oliver’s in the oil truck, she had profited rather than lost by it. He had, at the shack, been given a convincing portrait of a “good kid”. He himself had met a lovely girl. Not just pretty, or attractive, but lovely in every way. Between these two it was quite impossible to credit any aberration in her own pattern of personal behaviour.
His face deep-etched with fatigue, he mixed himself a drink, turned out the lights, and sat down in an old leather arm-chair by the window. Then, and only then, did he admit to himself what he must have known subconsciously through the whole of the preceding forty-eight hours.
He had pursued her back across the years not in order to expose her, but so that he could know how best to help and protect her. If she would let him, he would protect her to the best of his ability across all the years that lay ahead of her. But this was something that would have to be postponed, the pressing of any claim he might make on her. There were two others, who had apparently never given up an almost hopeless search, who must first be allowed to re-establish a prior claim.
Mag had said, “The kid was always dreamin’ of her own folks.”
They, he now knew, had never stopped dreaming of her.
They would, those three, be able to make their own adjustments without any help from him or anyone else. Where they would need help would be in finding peace and privacy in which to do this.
Some publicity was unavoidable.
Knowing the newspaper business inside and out, concentrating in darkness that allowed no distractions, Steve outlined in his mind a story expressly designed to suppress rather than to invoke curiosity. It would have to be, he saw, a story that emphasized the original drama of the kidnapping while inferring that there had been no drama, as such, since. He could count on the co-operation of the miner and his wife because they loved her. He could count on Nick’s co-operation because Nick loved himself. He could count on other newspapermen to let the thing drop on the basis of his own reputation for never failing to get a complete story. Thank God, he had got in on the ground floor. With care, and there would be no lack of care on his part, it could be an overnight sensation, and that would be it.
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