Then the Tozers. Except in Connie’s young heart, there was little joy in the Nash that day. Agatha hadn’t told her husband about the money for the screen test—and since Cicely had changed into a thief and drowned herself, she didn’t know what to do. Henry, for a whimsical little man, was looking pitiably care-worn and haggard, more so than any sacrifice of life’s great adventure would account for.
Kemp and the Winter twins started latest, due to oversleeping on the part of the twins. Because their consciences were clear?
At any rate, there they were, all of them, westbound and bound together by what they had done, since at dawn they had formed another council of war. It was at Tozer’s suggestion that they had decided not to tell anything about Cicely. What the police don’t know won’t hurt them. They had cleared their skirts of Shanley’s death before; they could clear them of Cicely’s this time. Why get drawn into a long-winded investigation, coroner’s inquest, all that kind of thing?
One significant difference, though, between Migler’s and Elm Point: any honest doubts about murder in Ohio must have disappeared in Kansas. The innocent might suppress evidence once (after all, no man wants to be dragged into court) but not twice. They had confessed to guilt.
And so the mystery of Rex Shanley entered its last phase, one of fear and expectancy, the last desperate covering up of a slayer who still hopes to get away with it.
And the Woars? They still had their hopes too. For that little while, they seemed to have recaptured their old and easy affections. The inevitable separation was not to be thought of.
“Damn me, my love,” chuckled George after successfully passing through Hutchinson, “if we aren’t getting away with it!”
He swooped Hilda round the rump of a waddling trailer. California Here We Come was painted on its sides.
“A trip every motorist should make!” Katheren observed.
“See America First!”
“Unforgettable experience. Over this route have traveled the greatest of America’s great!”
“The Path of Empire!”
Caligula squirmed his screw tail and grinned. George and Katheren had a bout of giggles. George said, “See if any coffee’s left, and we’ll drink to the future—while there is one.”
4
Once, near Kinsley, at the bridge over the Arkansas River, they thought the jig was up.
A barricade shut off the road, and a highway policeman waved them to stop. He had a car. It was useless to turn and run for it. George stopped.
“Just ease along, Buick,” the policeman ordered. “Shoulder’s kind of washed out yonder. Stay to the middle an’ you’re all right.”
One Kansas policeman will always remember the stranger with the English accent who gave him five dollars and said, “My wife and I, we love you very, very much.”
Near Garden City, an ominous black sedan trailed the Woars for more than five miles before George could lose it. In Garden City, too, they picked up another telegram from Washington:
MARYS PARENTS VERY STRICT. URGENT YOU DO NOT LET THEM KNOW YOU ARE IN TOWN.
GAILLARD
“Meaning ‘in the United States’?”
“So I gather,” said Woar.
They raced along a perfect and strangely empty stretch of slab with the swollen Arkansas River sluicing eastward on their left and vast, gently rolling prairie extending in all directions to a far horizon. Grazing land had taken the place of farms. Katheren had never seen so many unbroken miles of wire fence before...
She sat up abruptly, aware she had been dozing. The brakes tugged Hilda to a halt.
“Look,” said George grimly.
It was an enormous detour sign, spreading across the road. An enormous arrow, like the hand of fate, pointed into the hills to the north. The detour, a gash of rutted morass churned by wheels and patched with standing water, ran to the horizon and beyond—as far as the North Pole, for all the Woars knew. Like a horrid warning, a mud-plastered and abandoned Chevrolet lay on its side in a puddle.
“Two miles west of here,” said Woar wistfully, staring past the detour sign, “is the State of Colorado. The police don’t know about us there. The cows are fresher and the trees greener and the nightingales do sing. Ah, God!”
He gingerly turned Hilda down off the slab.
5
For fifty odd miles, seldom better and often worse, Hilda plowed resignedly through the mud. Starting from the slab in Kansas at seven minutes after eleven, Mountain Time, the fugitives arrived nearly five hours later on the end of a long string of muddy cars. The string wound for a mile or so, ending in a knot of distant roofs and cottonwoods.
George climbed out to ask questions about it.
“Holly,” said the driver of a Nebraska Studebaker. “Holly, Colorado. Don’t see no cars coming through this way, so I guess the roads out. Been here since three o’clock myself.”
He climbed in again, resignedly, with clumps of mud on his feet. He shut off the motor and drew out his pipe.
“Why fret?” he said. “We aren’t going anywhere. Fourth car ahead happens to be a Chrysler, Michigan license. Ho hum.”
The Shanley disaster came over them like a wet blanket again. This was the beginning of the end of the Woar honeymoon.
In half an hour the waiting line increased by a score of cars; the Lagonda outstanding among them. Not so outstanding were the rest, Nick Leeds’s, the Tozer Nash, and Burnet, Ray and Boyd in the Model “A.”
As Katheren had gloomily predicted to herself, George wasn’t content to read Gouchard’s Guide through for the third time. He filled his pipe with restless fingers and proposed a stroll.
“Any particular suspect on your mind? Nick Leeds? Beardsley? Tozer...?”
She hadn’t meant to use such a sharp tone. He didn’t mean to be so infernally irritated. However: “Beardsley, if you must know.”
Mae flung open the door, embraced Katheren, and cried, “Why, it’s darling Katheren! We thought for sure you folks must’ve drowned!”
George leaned in Alden’s window like a friendly neighbor passing time of day over the back fence. He asked, “Where did you two spend last night?”
“Newton, wasn’t it, Mae?”
“Yes, Newton, wasn’t it, Alden?”
“Nick called up. Couldn’t raise you there.”
“That’s funny, George. We stayed at the Ripley, didn’t we, Mae?”
Mae caught the pass neatly:
“Alden calls it funny! You see, we didn’t get into Newton till about dawn, and if Nick called up before then, no wonder he couldn’t raise us. Where we were, they didn’t know about telephones. Of course Alden would try to turn around and go back about five miles west of Elm Point, and naturally he ran off into the mud and got stuck. I made him go and find a farmer—didn’t I, Alden?”
“And did I get bawled out?” Alden contributed. “I couldn’t raise a farmer till dawn, and the little woman was sitting there all alone, waiting for me to come back!”
George pointed his pipe-stem at Mae: “Alone? You didn’t happen on Cicely, then?”
Mae said, “I saw just four living things the whole night long—four jackasses. One was Alden, the other was the farmer, and the rest had long ears.”
She was extremely positive about it. She added for good measure a circumstantial account of how the jackasses dragged the Chrysler out of the mire, and defied George to doubt it. At least, her eye had a sparkle of challenge in it. Before he could take her up on it, Nick came down the line of cars and grinned quizzically at them:
“Ladies and gents, I got a flat. Can’t work the jack. Who’ll lend a hand?”
His trousers were rolled up to his knees, his feet were bare and his toes curled in the mud. Altogether he glowed that afternoon, exuding pride, adoration and a dash of healthy animal spirits.
A flat seemed to be precisely the diversion to fill in the long wait. Everyone gave a hand, even Smalnick and Tozer. Those who couldn’t get near enough with their hands crowded up to
give advice. The ladies made much of Ruth and the engagement ring Nick had bought her in Dodge City.
Not Agatha Tozer, though.
Woar went searching for a bit of plank. Agatha stalked him to the solitude of a field and confronted him with a worried, doubtful face. It was the first time in her life, he fancied, she hadn’t been supremely sure of herself.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Mr. Brendan. I gave some money to Mrs. Smalnick—a lot of money to us, it was. Connie’s whole future, all my hopes and plans for her, and—anyhow, the money wasn’t in her bag, and I’m terribly worried about what happened, to it. So I thought I’d talk to you. .
“You might ask Mr. Smalnick.”
“I did. But you see—he says Mrs. Smalnick wasn’t his wife at all. If he hasn’t got my money, who has?”
“Murderers have financial problems as well as anyone else.”
“Oh, dear! You mean she was robbed, just like poor Mr. Shanley?”
“Probably.”
“I simply must get that money back before Henry—well, I simply must find out who took it, that’s all!”
“Dear Mrs. Tozer, we’re none of us too well heeled, excepting Mr. Smalnick. He allowed Cicely to use his reputation to impose on you, therefore he’s responsible. My advice is: don’t let him get away from you.” From the purposeful look in her eye as she thanked him, George gathered she would take it. No fear that the Tozers would fall out of the race, anyhow.
He found the bit of plank near a tumble-down shed. He hurried back to the line of cars with it. He had reasons for not wanting to be away too long.
Katheren, watching him as she aired Caligula, could tell he had something up his sleeve. He wore an innocent, faintly ambiguous smile on such occasions.
She saw him strip off his own coat and tie and hang both over the door on the far side of Nick’s car. Well, that wasn’t so odd. Smalnick, Tozer and Nick himself had done the same thing. The Winter twins had left their sweatshirts there when they stripped for action.
Woar’s bit of plank and a patent pneumatic jack from Beardsley’s car did the trick. With nods of commendation from the dozen spectators, Nick himself tightened the spare wheel into place. Everybody looked proud and self-congratulatory. Everybody wiped hands, whether dirty or not.
Katheren had decided to keep an eye on the coats, merely on account of. She placed herself not too far away, and when the men came round the car—the line far ahead was starting up—she noticed particularly.
Smalnick came first, as if he had just remembered he was in a hurry. Tozer scurried at his heels.
These two were reaching into the pile of clothing when George removed his own coat and tie from on top. Then Nick.
Ray Kemp and the Winter twins struggled into their sweatshirts. Milton, Henry and Nick still couldn’t find something and Katheren suddenly knew what. Their neckties.
She saw Tozer put on his glasses, stoop and search the running board. Simultaneously, Nick and Milton seized ends of a tie, the only remaining tie, that had been under Milton’s coat.
No mistaking it, either. That tie had been Rex Shanley’s once. Katheren, having had all too good a look at it in the light of George’s flash on the road in Ohio, gave a faint gasp.
Henry stared at it. Nick and Milton, each with an end in his hand, stared at it. The three betrayals of recognition came late, but no weaker for the delay. The tie was hastily dropped in the mud, and Katheren then saw it had been threaded through the death’s head ring.
So that was what George had been up to!
Ruth found the proper ties on the floor of the car when she climbed in from the opposite side. She handed them out the window. As casual as could be, the men laughed it off, and finished dressing. If Woar had been counting on violent reactions from anybody, he must have been disappointed.
Somebody blasted on a horn. Somebody cried, “We’re off, folks!” There was a scramble of helpers and lookers-on from the vicinity of Nick’s car then, and Katheren hurried down the line to the Buick. At her last look over her shoulder, the group had made off, and the solitary figure of Hazlitt Woar remained on the spot, peering about him in an attitude of keen speculation.
She had to shout for him when the Studebaker moved on and left Hilda holding up the procession. He came running at last, but not too eagerly.
“You look let down.”
I am.
“The parlor trick fizzled, didn’t it? Silly performance, if you ask me.”
“Which I won’t, Katheren.”
“Don’t snap. And take that muddy haberdashery out of your pocket and wrap it in a tissue—if you must keep it.”
He uttered a small, distressed sound and drove on, ignoring her completely. The muddy haberdashery wasn’t in his pocket at all. Hence the distress.
He had heard the three men account for mistaking the fatal necktie momentarily for their own. Henry Tozer was far-sighted; Lefty was color-blind; Nick Leeds had been given a similar seven-fold Ancient Madder from the late Rex’s effects by his darling Ruth. She had a bent for seven-folds, and habitually equipped her males with them, it seemed.
And that was something.
He had also discovered, when trampling feet had gone off and permitted him to look for it in the mud, that both fatal tie and ring had vanished practically under his own lean nose.
And that, as it turned out, was something else again!
Fourteen
THE line of cars crawled ahead.
The Arkansas River had eaten a gulf out of the main street of the town. A huge oil truck and its trailer had gone over the edge. It lay up-ended on its nose, thirty feet down.
A temporary detour through somebody’s garden let cars pass the scene of the disaster.
Holly was a small but lively cattle town industriously digging itself out of a deposit of reddish mud. Only in the last few hours had the river subsided from sidewalks and shops. Business as usual, however. George put in at a garage for repairs to Hilda.
Everyone else put in an appearance at the State Line Short Order Café. Nick had invited them by way of celebration of the announcement of his coming marriage. Eager, reluctant or downright unwilling (as in Milton Smalnick’s case), each one had accepted, somewhat along these lines:
Nick: “Coming to my party, aren’t you? Then why not?”
Guest: “It’s pretty late, and I’m in a hurry...”
Nick: “If you don’t like me, say so.”
Guest: “It isn’t that, Nick. It’s just that...”
Nick: “Forget it. I’ll be seeing you.”
Nick, Katheren decided as she found herself in the State Line Café along with the rest, had discovered the basic principles of being irresistible. No wonder Ruth was going to marry him. Wonder would have been if she had managed to get out of it.
The drinks were fiery and inescapable. The State Line was noisy and crowded. The assemblage laughed loud and talked at the tops of their voices, probably to cover any morbid undercurrents in the party—since by this time none of them could doubt that one of them was a murderer.
But which?
Katheren could pretend outwardly that she wasn’t concerned. Inwardly, she couldn’t. Her last theory, trumped up after the news of Cicely’s death, was that Cicely herself had murdered Shanley (why, she didn’t even guess) and had tried to murder Ruth. Failing, she had drowned herself. In that case, Ruth ought to be relieved of her long terror.
If that had occurred to any other minds, a good look at Ruth was enough to eliminate it. Cicely’s death, far from having put her fears to rest, had done the contrary.
She was smiling, of course, making conversation and accepting hopes for a happy future and all that—but Katheren had never seen as much dismay, anguish and haunting dread in any eyes as in poor Ruth’s.
Didn’t men notice those things? Didn’t Nick?
Even now, with the hideous intimidation played to its end, Katheren finds those eyes impossible to forget.
However, except for s
ympathetic suggestions from Connie, Agatha and Mae that Ruth get a good long rest, nobody made comment, and Nick’s party began to break up. First Smalnick had to go. Then the Tozer family, quickly followed by Ray Kemp dragging the Winter twins in his wake.
Mae nudged Katheren, luckily spilling half of Katheren’s second whisky sour on the floor. Mae exclaimed, “What on earth! That isn’t your car, is it?”
It was.
Somewhere between amusement and dismay, Katheren saw that the top had been dyed black, and a battered radiator grill meant for a Chevrolet truck had been wired over the wounded nose. The Ohio licenses had been changed for Colorado numbers.
George’s way, she supposed, of giving Hilda a false beard.
“Looks like a cross between a duck and a weasel,” Beardsley decided. He gave George a glass and told him to drink up.
“She may be a bit of a mongrel,” said George, “but she’s whole again, bless her.”
“Ready for more detours,” said Mae.
Nick reassured them; they would be climbing the slope of the Rockies, drained by this time of flood waters.
“It comes down fast, and it runs off fast,” he told them. “You can make La Junta in about two hours—four thousand feet above sea level. We’ll put up for the night there. At the Kit Carson, probably.”
It seemed to be understood that the Beardsleys were in on the wedding. That couple had raised social ingratiation to the importance of a life work. They insisted on chaperoning Ruth up to the time of the ceremony, and took it for granted Alden was to give away the bride.
Katheren had sudden doubts, even as she watched Nick help Ruth tenderly into the Chrysler and kiss her as if he was afraid he’d never see her again. Mae had insisted on the impropriety of the bride-to-be traveling alone with her intended. She was to go with the Beardsleys, therefore, and Nick follow in his own car. The strong, masterful Nick; the docile Ruth; made by nature to be protector and protected, and tremendously in love with one another...yet somehow Katheren couldn’t quite believe the match would come off.
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