Go Home, Stranger by Charles Williams 1954(7)

“Don’t get any happy ideas,” Griffin warned. “The Luger’s still
looking at you. And remember, if I have to kill you, Pat will do.”
“Do what?” she asked. Her voice was calm now. She sat down in the
stern beside Reno. “I won’t do anything.”
“Come now, honey.” Griffin chuckled. “That’s an obstructionist
attitude. Don’t puzzles fascinate you?”
“What do you mean?” she asked coldly.
“Look down at your feet.”
The light dipped a little and they looked down. In the desperate
bitterness of defeat Reno had forgotten the thing Griffin had been
dragging for, but now it came back to him and he stared, completely
mystified. This was what had caused the death of Mac, and of Counsel
and Pat’s brother and a man named Charles Morton—but what was it?

Go Home, Stranger by Charles Williams 1954(6)

“Well, we both get lined out on the ranges and we’re only about six
hundred yards apart and closing fast and the Old Man and I are
hanging over the port wing of the bridge trying to see enough of the
Go Home, Stranger — 117
tanker’s running-lights through the rain to tell whether we’re lined up
red-to-red or whether we’re about to run between ‘em, when right
here about a hundred yards south of this Number Fourteen buoy
there is the damnedest ker-splash you ever heard, right under us.
Sounds like at least two men have fallen overboard.
“So of course the same thought hits everybody right at the same
time. It’s them two chowder-headed messboys at it again.
“Well, Captain Wilbur starts to wave his arms and foam out orders
like a soda fire-extinguisher.
“ ‘Cap,’ I says, ‘if you think I’m going to lose steerage-way on this
bucket with a hundred and fifty thousand barrels of high-test gas
booming down on us just because your pot-wallopers are throwing
each other over the side, you’re as nutty as I am. Steady as she goes.’

Go Home, Stranger by Charles Williams 1954(5)

The roaring was going out of his head now and he was beginning to
think again. He knew what she meant. The other man had crossed
over and would be coming down this side with his rifle.
She ran swiftly, and at first he had difficulty keeping up. In a
moment he began to get his breath back and came up alongside her,
helping her with a hand on her arm. Now and then he looked back
over his shoulder as they raced through the timber.
She began to tire. She stumbled once and would have fallen, but he
caught her. They stopped at last and sank to the ground in a mass of
ferns while they sobbed for breath.
“It’s—not much farther,” she gasped.
“What?”
“My boat. Just below—the bend.”
“The motor on it?”

Go Home, Stranger by Charles Williams 1954(4)

Just the routine press release, he thought. And that trailer swam
away without any help. He looked at the portraits again, while the
waiter brought their menus. “Grandfather, father, and son. Is that it?”
“Yes. The father was killed on the Italian front during the First
World War. But not until after he had married. An expatriate
American girl studying voice in Milan. In the winter of 1918 she came
back here to have her baby. Robert Counsel was born in the same
upstairs room as his father and grandfather. I understand there is a
dice table there now. He didn’t have any father, of course, and his
mother’s devotion to him was, from what they say, very close to
neurotic.
“Daniel Counsel—the grandfather, and from all accounts a regular
old pirate—was still alive then. I think he died in 1925. The family still
had plenty of money, but it must have been a very lonesome life for a
small boy, and maybe even a little unhealthy. They spent part of the
time in Italy, and when they were here on the plantation he never
Go Home, Stranger — 69
went to school. Private tutors, mostly English, at least until he was of
high-school age—”

Go Home, Stranger by Charles Williams 1954(3)

* * *
“Counselor,” the sign said, its twisted tubes of red and blue glass
blank and unlighted in the sun. A glaring shell driveway led off the
road to the left to swing up before the wide veranda of what had
obviously been a residence at one time, a large house with the
columned stateliness of another era. An expanse of lawn was now a
parking area, completely empty at this time of the afternoon.
Reno slowed, going past on the highway. This was where it was, he
thought. He was pulled off here at the side of the road with the car
and boat trailer, just looking at the place, when the girl went by and
saw him. Maybe he was waiting for somebody, or maybe, if he really
was Counsel, he was looking at the house he used to live in turned
into a joint with two tons of neon out in front. He glanced around at
the drowsy late-summer afternoon, the dark wall of moss-hung oaks
on both sides of the highway beyond the inn, and the steel bridge up
ahead shimmering in the sun, appraising the somnolent peacefulness
of it. And, on the other hand, he reflected, maybe his name was just
what he said it was and he was only running out on his wife like a
thousand other men and I’ve got rocks in my head.

Go Home, Stranger by Charles Williams 1954(2)

Four
He stared at her, incredulous and puzzled, and had just opened his
mouth to speak when the telephone rang in the bedroom. “Excuse
me,” she said, and arose.
He eyed the two envelopes hungrily, and then shrugged. He could
wait until she returned. Another minute or two wouldn’t make any
difference, and he had to be careful about rushing her. But what on
earth had she meant by saying it wasn’t a trailer? There was one
other ‘possibility, of course, but that didn’t make sense either.
Suddenly he was conscious that he could hear her in the other
room. “Yes. Yes. I understand,” she was saying in a low voice charged
with emotion. “Of course not, if you say so. No one. No one at all....
Where?... Counsel Bayou? And then turn— I’ll find it.”

Go Home, Stranger by Charles Williams 1954(1)

One
It took the message over a week to catch up with him because after
he had finished the job in the sierra he went over into the jungles of
the lower Ucayali to hunt jaguars. When he had read it he came up
out of South America traveling very fast, a big, hard-shouldered
young man in an ill-fitting suit, his face cooked dark by the sun and
his hair badly in need of cutting. He would have had time to get a
shave between planes in Miami, but he spent the time instead in a
stifling telephone booth making one long-distance call after another,
relentlessly shoving quarters into a slot and rasping questions over
thousands of miles of wire while the cold ball of fear grew heavier
inside him. On the third day after leaving the little town in the
Peruvian jungle he walked up the steps of the police station in
Waynesport, on the Gulf Coast of the United States.
It was a little after eight of a hot, breathless morning, and he
couldn’t remember when he had slept. It was the twenty-first of
August, and since the tenth of the month his sister, who was Vickie
Shane McHugh, the radio and television actress, had been in the
Waynesport jail, charged with the murder of her husband.
The Chief wouldn’t be in until around nine, the desk man said, but
he led him down a dim hallway to the office of Lieutenant Wayland.
The man behind the desk was big across the shoulders, with a heavy
neck and a graying shock of tough, wiry hair. Sharp brown eyes sized
him up as he came into the room.