She thanked me again for the money
and got out. I saw her walk up the street toward the
station. What a life, I thought. Cat house behind, cat
house ahead. Then I snapped out of it. I was in a hell
of a spot to be feeling sorry for her.
River Girl — 122
I drove around and parked in front of the
courthouse and sat there for a minute, trying to
think. Cars lazily circled the square, boys out riding
with their girl friends; and something about it,
maybe the summer night or the hissing sound of
tires or the quick, musical laughter of a girl,
suddenly made me think of how it had been before I
went off to the Army all those years ago in 1942,
how it had been to be home from college in the
summer, out riding in the Judge’s automobile, a
Chevrolet somehow forever five years old. God, I
thought, that was a long time back.
I shook my head, trying to clear it, like a fighter
taking a beating. Get up there, I thought. Get up to
the office and see what you can find on Shevlin;
Buford can wait a little while. But what about this
other mess? It was going to blow wide open,
tomorrow or the next day. If I tried to disappear
now, wouldn’t everybody know it was a phony? And,
knowing it was a fake, they would do a lot of looking
into the place where I had disappeared, a place I
didn’t ever want anybody nosing around because
that was where Shevlin was. I’d be better off to stay
here and take the rap on the probable bribery
charge than to direct any attention toward Shevlin.
But, then, there was no use trying to kid myself that
Shevlin’s disappearance was going to continue
unnoticed forever. Somebody would miss him and
start looking into it. I shook my head again, and ran
a hand across my face. It was like being at the
bottom of a well.
I started around again, taking up all the obvious
facts and examining them, and when I almost
completed the circuit I suddenly found the one I
sought, the one that had escaped me until now.
Waites hadn’t talked; he’d never said a word about
why he was down there at Abbie’s and why he had
attacked her. Why? I wondered. Probably at first it
was a natural enough disinclination to go shouting to
the world that he was looking for his daughter in a
whore house—that was understandable. But when he
had a little while to think it over and see what a
River Girl — 123
mess he was in, that he might wind up charged with
murder… Had anybody been in to see him? A
lawyer?
I climbed quickly out of the car and started across
the street to the drugstore to call Buford and ask
him, and then suddenly remembered I didn’t know
the telephone number of Dianne’s, or Dinah’s,
apartment, and that I didn’t even know her full
name. I stopped. It adds up that way, I thought. I
know what’s going to happen tomorrow or the next
day, but Soames and the grand jury and everybody
else connected with it has every reason to believe I
don’t know a thing. But it was only a guess. Maybe
they hadn’t sent a lawyer to the jail to see him and
tell him to keep his mouth shut until they got ready
to close in on us. There wasn’t any way to know for
sure until I saw Buford.
But first, I thought, I’m going in that office and do
the thing I’ve been trying to get to for the past nine
hours. I’m going to find out about Shevlin. None of
the rest of it means anything if I’m wrong about him.
I wheeled and went up the front steps and banged
on the door until the janitor came down and let me
in. “Got to get in the office for a little while,” I said,
and went on past him up the stairs. I had a key to
the office itself. When it closed at five-thirty all the
telephone calls were switched to the office at the
jail, but the files I wanted were up here.
I went in and switched on the lights. Getting out a
cigarette, I turned to the bank of firing cases along
the wall. It was going to be a long, tedious job, for I
had no idea at all of how to begin, since there was
obviously no point in trying to look him up by name.
Shevlin was probably just the last of a series of
them. I started in, riffling through the circulars and
bulletins and notices, looking only at the ones with
pictures. Ten or fifteen minutes dragged by. It was
oppressively hot in the room with the big lights on
and the windows closed, and I began to sweat. There
was no sound in the building except occasionally the
ring of a bucket somewhere down below as the
janitor went about his mopping.
River Girl — 124
I slammed a drawer shut and paused, lighting
another cigarette and thinking. I wasn’t getting
anywhere this way. It would take a week to go
through all this stuff. The thing to do was to sit down
and try to analyze it logically. What was I looking
for, anyway? Well, obviously, a “wanted” notice out
on Shevlin, with the picture on it. But there were
two facts about it that didn’t jibe. It would be a very
old one, but still one that I had seen fairly recently.
It would be an old one because Doris had been living
with him for over five years and he hadn’t committed
any crime in that time; and it would be one that I
must have seen fairly recently because there was
still the fact that I had noticed something familiar
about his face that day when I had run into him up
the lake. I knew I had never seen him before, so I
must have seen his picture somewhere, and the most
logical place to have seen it was here. Therefore, it
really must have been some old notice that I had
looked at not too long ago. But why? In which
cabinet, and what had I been looking for at the time?
I smoked the cigarette out to the end in sharp,
vicious puffs, sitting there at the desk with my chin
on my hand, trying to remember, to concentrate.
Impatient, and conscious of the passage of time, with
all the other events of the night gnawing away at the
edge of thought, I struggled for the key to it. It must
have been here that I saw the picture. I was more
sure of it than ever. Some memory, some faint
recollection of a thing that had happened here in the
office lingered teasingly just beyond my grasp. I had
looked at it not too long ago, and something outside
the regular routine of office had made me do it. But
what? I reached out for it desperately, almost
knowing it, and it ran, laughing, off the edge of
memory. It had something to do with Lorraine and
the filing cabinets, some remark she had made. That
was it! It was a joking and rather stupid observation
she had made about the picture. And then I knew
what it was.
It had happened three or four months ago.
Lorraine had been firing papers in the cabinets and
River Girl — 125
forgotten that one of the drawers had a broken stop.
When she pulled it open it flew out on the floor,
spilling papers all over the office. I was there at the
time and had helped her gather them up. And it was
while we were bent over the disordered jumble that
she had picked up a picture that had caught her
attention and held it out admiringly.
“Boy, but he’s good-looking! If I ever get
murdered, I hope it’s by somebody as handsome as
that!”
I jumped up from the desk. Well, I thought, I know
what drawer he’s in. And I know what he’s wanted
for.
River Girl — 126
Fifteen
It took only a couple of minutes to find it now. With a
grunt of satisfaction, I jerked it from the file and put
it on the desk, and stood looking down at the picture
of Lewis Farrell, alias Roger Shevlin, wanted for
murder and escape.
The picture had been made a long time ago,
apparently in 1940, and Lorraine had been right in
saying he was a handsome man, but the identity was
unmistakable. Looking at it now, I could see why I
had still noticed the resemblance when I saw him
that day on the lake. It was the deep-set, rather
brooding eyes and the well-formed bone structure of
the face, which the lines of the years and that
grayish stubble hadn’t been able to hide.
I read it hurriedly. He had been tried and
convicted of killing his wife in 1939. There was no
information about the crime itself, or the trial, but
apparently it hadn’t been first-degree murder, for he
had drawn a life sentence instead of death. He began
serving time in the state penitentiary in 1940, was
transferred to a farm as a model prisoner in 1943,
and had escaped the same year. So far, so good, I
thought, and very good.
The picture stared up at me. Year after year of
running, I thought, and terror, and nights of looking
River Girl — 127
up at the ceiling in the dark while he wondered who
had seen him during the day. He’d had years of this
and then wound up lying face down in his own blood
in a backwoods cabin, and I had been the one who
had killed him, so now I had bought my own ticket
on the merry-go-round. I straightened up and ran a
hand across my face. There was no use getting
morbid about it now. I stuck the notice back in the
file.
I closed the office and went back out into the
square. It all depended now on what I found out
from Buford. If he said that a lawyer or someone else
had visited Waites after his arrest, we could be
pretty sure they believed we didn’t know what had
really happened down there, or what was behind it,
and that they were taking pains to keep us in the
dark. Bernice was gone, and they wouldn’t know we
had the letter, and...I stopped. The letter! My God,
why hadn’t I thought of it sooner? If Waites hadn’t
already told them that he’d lost it down there, he
would sooner or later, and they’d go look for it.
I crossed to the car as fast as I could walk, backed
out of the parking place, and shot down the street
toward the hotel. Parking in the same place I had
before, I took a look up and down the street. The
hotel itself was still dark and no one was in sight.
I went up the steps. Slipping softly into the lobby, I
walked down the hall by feel until I came to the door
of the room. Once inside, with the door closed, I
struck a match and looked around. It appeared to be
just as I had left it. Walking over to the sofa. I took
the letter out of my pocket and dropped it carefully
down against the wall where I had found it. Then I
went back out and got into the car, breathing easily
again. It would have wrecked everything if they had
found out, after I was gone, that I had read that
letter.
I was beginning to feel like a man being chased
through some horrible dream. How many hours ago,
I thought, did I stand there in that cabin and turn
her around facing me so I could see how she looked
in decent clothes and with her hair combed, stand
River Girl — 128
there feeling proud of the loveliness of her? Was it
months ago now? I looked at my watch as I went
past a street light. It was a little after nine. It didn’t
seem possible it could still be the same day.
Suddenly, I was conscious of a consuming desire to
get back to the girl’s apartment and find out the only
other thing there was left to learn. Somehow, that
seemed now to be the goal toward which I had been
running since eleven o’clock this morning, the final
knowledge that at last I had my hands on all the
loose ends of this thing I so I could know definitely,
once and for all, what I was going to do. It seemed
that for a length of time beyond all measuring I had
been running across the surface of a lake on
treacherous cakes of ice that sank under me as fast
as I stepped on them. When I got one thing
straightened out in my mind, something else would
explode in my face and change it.
I parked and hurried up the walk to the entrance.
The door clicked as soon as I pushed the buzzer.
They’re anxious too, I thought. I must have been
gone a long time.
Buford looked up as I came in. “I just called the
hospital. They think the Bell woman will pull through
all right. They won’t let anybody in to see her yet,
though.”
I was glad to hear it, in spite of the fact that I
knew the grand jury would probably subpoena her.
She was a bandit, but a cheerful one, and I liked her.
Buford went over and turned off the radio and
came back to sit down on the sofa beside Dinah. She
looked at me with interest.
“What did you find out?” Buford asked. He might
have been asking me who won the Tulane-Alabama
game, but I knew what was going on in his mind.
I sat down. I reached for a cigarette, and found the
pack was empty. Dinah pushed a silver cigarette
case across the table toward me, smiling. “Before I
start,” I said, “I want to ask a question. Did Waites
have any visitor after he was arrested?”
“Waites?”
River Girl — 129
“That’s the man you’ve got in jail. Maybe he gave
some other name when you booked him, but that’s
his right one.”
“Then you found out about him?”
“Quite a bit. And it’s all bad. But first, did anybody
go in to see him?”
He nodded. “Yes. Holloway.”
I knew then I’d been right. Holloway was a lawyer,
and a good one. He was also a member of Soames’s
congregation and active in church work.
“All right, let’s have it,” Buford said quietly.
“Well, hold onto your hat,” I said. “That fifteenyear-
old girl Abbie Bell had down there is Waites’s
daughter.”
Buford put down the cigar and whistled softly. As
rapidly as possible I gave him the whole thing, what
I had found out from Bernice, what the letter had
said, and what I had been able to figure out from it.
He got the whole picture as fast as I gave it to him.
There was nothing slow about Buford.
“So now we’ve got Waites in jail, where he’ll be
very handy for the grand jury any time they want to
listen to him,” he said. “And that Bell woman’s in the
hospital, where they can get her story as soon as
she’s able to talk.”
“Yes,” I said. “And you can’t do a damned thing
about either of them. You can’t move Abbie Bell; and
you can’t run Waites out of town because he’s under
a serious charge, or will be, and you’d never in God’s
world explain it if he turned up missing. It’s just
about as near perfect as anything can be.”
Buford picked up his drink and looked at it. “Sweet
Jesus,” he said.
“They know they’ve got us,” I went on. “Mrs.
Waites probably got in touch with Soames again
when her husband took off for here with his hot head
and his knife, asking him to try to head the old man
off before he got in trouble. It was too late for
Soames to do anything about it, but of course he
knew who it was as soon as he heard there’d been
River Girl — 130
trouble down at Abbie’s place. So he had Holloway
take the case to defend the old man, and in return
they asked him to keep his mouth shut for another
day or two until they could get their facts ready for
the grand jury. I don’t doubt that Holloway even told
Waites he’d be in danger of having something
happen to him if we found out who he was and what
his testimony would do to us.”
Buford got up from the sofa and walked slowly
over to the wall where the guns were and stood
there for a moment looking at them with his back to
us. I sat looking at him, waiting to see what he would
have to say, and then the rest of it began to fall into
place for me. It was a part of the idea that had never
occurred to me until this minute, and as I turned it
over in my mind I was conscious of a warm feeling of
elation and the knowledge that I had all the loose
ends taken care of at last. This last piece fitted into
it as perfectly as the final section of a jigsaw puzzle.
I turned back and noticed abruptly that Dinah had
been watching my face with that speculative interest
I had seen in her eyes before. Now that I thought of
it, I remembered that every time I had looked around
her eyes had been on me, not with anything
flirtatious in them, but only with that intense and
fascinated interest, as a child might watch grownups
getting ready for a hunting trip.
The gray eyes smiled at me over the top of the
highball glass. “You’ve got an idea, haven’t you?”
“I think so,” I said. “I’ll bet it’s a good one.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so.” Buford turned
back from the gun collection. He had lifted down one
of the shotguns, an English double barrel, and as he
turned he brought it up and swung it in an arc,
mounting the gun and swinging it through all in one
fluid motion the way a good wing shot gets onto a
covey of rising birds. Then he took it down, looked at
it once, and replaced it on the rack. “I like expensive
guns,” he said.
And expensive women, I thought, wondering how
many other custodians of the gun collection there
River Girl — 131
had been before Dinah. But I couldn’t quite follow
him at the moment. I knew he was down there at the
bottom of the well, where I had been, looking up at
the smooth, unscalable walls, and he wanted to talk
about guns. But maybe guns just happened to be a
good opening subject. I’d never underestimated him,
and didn’t intend to.
He reached down and picked up his drink off the
coffee table. “You have any expensive habits, Jack?”
I began to have a strange and unaccountable
hunch then, a feeling that we were both working our
way around to the same idea. I lit another of Dinah’s
cigarettes. “No,” I said. “None except staying out of
jail. That may be a little expensive at the moment.”
“It might be, at that.” He sat down across from me
on the sofa and looked at me. “You have any ideas?
Don’t worry about Dianne. Where information is
concerned, she’s a one-way street.”
“Good,” I said. “I wasn’t worried about her.”
Actually, I didn’t like this talking in front of her. Not
that I didn’t trust her, or had any reason to believe
she talked too much, for after all he trusted her and
he was no fool, but in something like this you
increase your risk a thousand times for every
additional person who knows what you’re up to.
However, there wasn’t much I could do about it. If I
insisted on talking to him alone, he’d probably tell
her all about it later anyway, and it would be the
same except that that way she might be angry about
it and more likely to talk.
“All right,” I said. “We’re in the middle. We might
as well admit it. Sometime tomorrow or the next day
they’re going to start issuing subpoenas by the
dozen to find out what’s been going on here. And
you know as well as I do that that thing about the
Waites girl is going to stir up a hell of a stink. It isn’t
anything that can be hushed up, especially now that
her father will probably go to the pen over it. And
Abbie Bell won’t have any choice in the matter but to
tell the truth when they get to her. She’ll be under
oath, and she’s been around long enough to have
River Girl — 132
heard of the perjury laws. ‘Why, I’ve just been
paying the sheriff’s office for protection,’ she’ll say.
‘Doesn’t everybody?’”
Buford nodded. “But we know that. Let’s hear
something new.”
“That’s right. But I just wanted to be sure we were
both starting from the same place. Now, here’s
where we split. As top man, you’re going to be the
one they turn to for the answers. But balanced
against that is the fact that I’ve been doing the
collecting, at least for a long time now; that is,
they’ve never actually given you anything direct.
They gave it to me. And that’ll be what they testify.
However, the people investigating the thing will
know who got the money unless you’re able to show
them otherwise. What you need is a goat.”
He nodded again. “I’m still with you.”
“However, you can’t make a goat out of me
without my consent. It’s too easy to tell the truth on
a witness stand, as we both know. But, on the other
hand, if you had a goat who wasn’t here to take the
stand, you might get by with it.”
“In other words, if you ran.”
“That’s right. And running is expensive.”
He took the case out of his pocket, selected a cigar
with extreme concentration, bit the end off it
reflectively, and flipped the lighter. “How expensive,
Jack?”
“Five thousand,” I said. I looked across at him and
then at Dinah. She had her elbows on her knees and
was staring at my face almost enraptured.
“I haven’t got that much,” he said. “But
disregarding the figure for the moment, let’s look at
this running angle. Just how long do you think you
could keep from being caught? You ever look at
yourself in a full-length mirror? Put you in any group
of a hundred people and you’d stick out like a
platinum blonde with two black eyes and a French
poodle. You’re six feet two, or thereabouts, you
weigh over two hundred, your face is as flat as an
River Girl — 133
Indian’s and two shades darker, and you’ve got coalblack
hair with a curl in it you couldn’t take out with
a Negro’s anti-kink solution. You wouldn’t be away a
week.”
“Yes, I know,” I said. “But if they thought I was
dead, they wouldn’t look very hard. Not in that way.”
It startled him. He had the drink in his hand, and
now he put it down and looked at me. “All right,” he
said. “Let’s have it.”
“There’s a man up there in the head of the lake
where I was fishing the other day who’s wanted for
murder and escape. I ran into him, thought his face
was familiar, and tonight I looked him up in the files.
You can verify this by looking yourself. His name is
actually Lewis Farrell, but he’s going under the
name of Shevlin now. He’s been on the run since
1943. Now, if I took one of the county cars tomorrow
morning, drove down to the foot of the lake, rented a
boat and motor, and went up the lake to arrest him
and never did come out, what would be the natural
conclusion after your searching parties found the
abandoned boat floating around in some Godforsaken
part of that swamp? Remember, this man is
dangerous, and he’s wanted for murder, not petit
larceny or crap-shooting.”
I could see the idea take hold of him. “By God, that
sounds all right, Jack.” And then doubt began to
show itself in his eyes, and he shook his head. “It’s
good, all right, but it’s going to look like too much of
a coincidence. Two weeks ago, or even last week, it
would have worked all right. But now—”
“No,” I said. “You haven’t looked at all of it yet. I
couldn’t be running from anything that’s going to
happen here, because I don’t have the faintest idea
anything is going to happen. Bernice is gone. Waites
has never said a word because they told him not to,
the letter is down there where he dropped it, and
I’ve never seen it.”
“Say, you’re right!”
“Of course he’s right,” Dinah said excitedly. “Mr.
Marshall, that’s good.”
River Girl — 134
Buford thought about it for a minute. “But how
about this Farrell or Shevlin, or whatever his name
is? If he gets caught—”
“There’s practically no chance of it,” I said,
wondering just how much he was guessing now.
“The man’s no fool, or he couldn’t have dodged
everybody all these years. And if I get careless and
let him give me the slip as I’m bringing him in, do
you think he’s going to hang around for me to make
a second run at him? He’ll be clear out of the
country in less than a day. And then, when he reads
in the papers that he’s being hunted for killing me,
he will make himself scarce.”
Buford nodded his head approvingly. “You’re right
about that, too. That would take care of you, all
right, but how about me? So I tell them that this
deputy of mine who just got himself killed was a
crook, that I’m sure he was because he’s not here to
defend himself, so everybody has a good laugh.”
“Yes I know,” I said. ‘There has to be more to it
than your unsupported word. That can be taken care
of.”
“And there’s Louise. Do you think she’s going to
hold still for it? Obviously, in a setup like this, you
can’t take her with you, unless you expect the grand
jury to believe that she was both clairvoyant and a
practical believer in suttee. So she’ll be here, yelling
her head off to get on the stand and deny that you
ever took anything.”
“Yes. I’m coming to that.” I leaned forward in the
chair and looked at both of them, and particularly at
Dinah. I didn’t know how she was going to take this.
“But suppose Louise suddenly lost interest in
defending my good name, if she has any anyway.
Remember, she doesn’t know I turned any money
over to you. All she knows is that I didn’t give it to
her. Suppose it turned out that all this time I had
been paying the apartment rent and buying Lincoln
convertibles for a girl friend named Dinah.”
Buford put down his drink. “Well, I’ll be damned!”
River Girl — 135
But I was more interested in Dinah’s reaction. Her
eyes met mine very gravely except for a flutter of
humor far back in the depths, and she inclined her
head. “Mr. Marshall was such a nice gentleman and
I appreciate everything he did for me, and I’m sure I
never had the faintest idea he was married.”
River Girl — 136
Sixteen
Buford went to the kitchen to mix another drink.
After he had gone out the door I looked across at
Dinah and said, “I hope you didn’t mind my
suggesting that. I mean, there’s no reason you have
to get dragged into it.”
The gray eyes crinkled up in a smile. “I don’t mind
at all. I’d love it.”
She puzzled me a little. I hadn’t paid much
attention to her, under the circumstances, with that
thing this afternoon eating away at the back of my
mind and the rest of it in a whirl from trying to cope
with all this other mess, but still I was conscious of
something a little disturbing about her each time she
got mixed up in my thoughts. The different sides of
her you saw didn’t add up to anything you would
normally expect, and it made you wonder where she
had come from and what made her operate. Small,
chic, and smooth, completely feminine and
disturbingly good-looking with the clear skin and
slender face and the hair like polished copper rings,
she looked like the classic example of what you
would collect if you had the true collector’s spirit
and plenty of money, but when you looked at her
again you were aware of the vitality and the
restlessness and the audacious spirit in the eyes. You
River Girl — 137
got the idea in a little while that she took excitement
the way some people took drugs, and you wondered
how she liked this bird-in-a-gilded-gun-collection
existence she was living now.
Buford came back in a minute with the drinks. As
he handed me mine he asked, “Where did you say
this Shevlin lives, Jack? How far up the lake?”
“It must be about twenty miles up from the store,”
I said. “There’s not much of anything except swamp
above where he is.”
He looked thoughtful for a minute. “That’s over the
county line, I think. Most of that swamp is in
Blakeman County.
I shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference. I
don’t think that anyone will ever take the trouble to
look into whether I went a little beyond the line
without knowing it.”
“No. I guess not. Well, here’s luck.” We drank, and
then got back to the question of money. I asked for
five thousand again. He insisted he couldn’t get hold
of it on short notice, especially without attracting
attention, but that he could put his hands on three
thousand in a safe-deposit box at the bank the first
thing tomorrow morning.
“O.K.,” I said. That would do. After all, I had
originally planned on having to do it on the two
hundred odd I got for my fishing equipment.
I stood up. “I’ll see you in the morning. It’ll be
better if you bring up this Shevlin job in front of the
others. But then, you know how to handle it.”
He nodded. “Leave it to me.” He got up from the
sofa and held out his hand. “I won’t be able to tell
you good-by tomorrow, so here it is. Good luck.” He
paused, and then went on quietly, with his eyes
directly on mine. “And remember, I’m buying a oneway
trip. Don’t come back, or we’ll both be in
trouble.” It wasn’t until later that I knew just how he
meant that.
I didn’t go directly home. I was too restless to go
back to the house. And in a way, though I didn’t
River Girl — 138
want to admit it to myself, I knew that I was a little
afraid. Ever since eleven o’clock this morning I had
been going at a full run and my mind had been
furiously intent on this problem, to the exclusion of
everything else, but what was it going to be like
when I lay down in the darkness with the problem
solved and the movement stilled, with Shevlin
putting his hand up to his chest in that terrible
gesture and turning to look at me as his knees gave
way under him and he started to fall? Was that what
I would see when I tried to close my eyes? Or would
there be nothing?
I turned and drove out north of town, past the lake
where we used to swim in summers a long time ago
when I was a boy. The bathhouse was gone now and
the lake was filled with weeds, but as I sat there in
the car in the summer night I could see the dazzling
sunlight and hear the splash and the laughter as the
sixteen-year-old Jack Marshall did a belly-buster
trying to jackknife off the high board to impress a
girl, coming out of the water stinging and crimson
from the impact. Circling through streets that were
quiet now and almost deserted, I went past the high
school and the football field, remembering October
afternoons and the sweat and the dry taste in the
mouth like copper pennies and the way the ground
jarred, tilting crazily against your face. The old
grammar school had burned, and there was a box
factory there now, but I could see the corner where
she had waited while I chased the dog, trying to get
the paper from his mouth, and I could hear the
school bell ringing, telling us we were late. I’ll never
see any of this again, I but it’s all gone now anyway.
It was midnight when I put the car in the garage
and walked through the hot, dead air in the kitchen,
hearing my footsteps echo through the house. I had
changed into pajamas and was sitting on the side of
the bed smoking a cigarette and wondering whether
there would be any use in trying to sleep when it
suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten
anything since breakfast. I padded barefoot out into
the kitchen and started looking through the
River Girl — 139
refrigerator, finding nothing except a bottle of milk
that had been there for two weeks and was sour. In a
cupboard I came across a can of salmon. I opened it
and had started to dig it out onto a plate when the
telephone rang. I started a little, surprised at the
unexpected sound. Buford, I thought. My God, has
something else happened? I went down the hall to
the stand.
“Hello,” I said.
“Mr. Marshall?” It was a girl’s voice.
“Yes. Who is it?”
“Dinah Weatherford. I tried to get you a while ago,
but I guess you were out. You haven’t gone to bed
have you?”
“No,” I said. “Not quite. Has something
happened?”
“Not exactly. But could I come over for a minute?
There’s something I want to talk to you about.”
“Why yes,” I said, wondering. “Do you know how
to find the place?”
“I think so. You’re sure it’s all right?”
“Sure. I was just opening a can of salmon. I’ll find
you a clean fork.”
She laughed. “I’ll have you know I’m not a cat. Or
am I?”
She hung up and I went back to the bedroom and
put on a dressing gown and some slippers. It was
hot, and I turned on the electric fan in the kitchen,
sitting under it with my elbows on the table. What
did Dinah have on her mind? I wondered if Buford
had asked her to tell me something.
Glancing up at the clock, I saw it was nearly half
past twelve and knew Doris would be at the hotel
now. I thought of her alone and scared and tried to
imagine what she would be doing at this moment.
Was she trying to sleep, with a light on in the
bathroom to drive away the dark? Was she standing
at the window staring out into the streets at busses
and neon signs and the hot bright lights of
restaurant fronts and the people going home from
River Girl — 140
shows, feeling the strangeness of it after a year of
living burial in that swamp? Was she counting the
hours, as I was? Tomorrow, and tomorrow night, I
thought, and part of another day…
I heard the car pull up and stop in front of the
garage. When I went outside she had cut the lights,
but I heard the car door slam shut and she came
toward me out of the darkness in the yard. I followed
her into the kitchen. She had changed into a white
linen skirt and a Russian-looking sort of blouse with
long, full sleeves quite tight at the wrists, and when
she turned under the light and smiled at me her eyes
were alight with that excitement I had seen in them
before.
“Let’s go into the living room,” I said. She shook
her head. “This is all right. I just wanted to tell you
something.”
I pulled out a chair and she sat down at the table. I
sat down across from her, watching the play of light
against the burnished copper hair and the audacious
tilt of the head. “What’s up?” I asked.
“I think I can help you.”
“Thanks,” I said. “How?”
“I got to thinking about it after you left and after
Buford went home. This thing you’re doing, I mean.
It interested me.” She stopped, her elbows propped
on the table and her chin resting on her hands,
looking at me. “You interest me.”
“Why?” I asked. I didn’t see what she was getting
at.
“Imagination. You shouldn’t have any, but you do.
Imagination, plus the gambler’s instinct. Don’t you
see?”
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