John D. MacDonald

Linda

Looking back, I think it was right after the first of the year that Linda started hammering at me to take my vacation in the fall intsead of in the summer. Hammering isn’t exactly the word. That wasn’t Linda’s way. She started by talking about Stu and Betty Carbonelli and what a fine time they’d had when they went south for their vacation in November. And she talked about the terrible traffic in the summer and how dangerous it was. And about how not having kids made it easier too.

I kept my head down, thinking that this would blow over like most of her ideas. I wasn’t at all keen on this one. I knew it would mean more expense. Linda never thought or talked about money except when we didn’t have enough for something she wanted to do or wanted to buy, and then she had plenty to say. Actually, I never cared much for vacations. Sure, I like to get away from the plant for a while, but I’m content to stay around the house. I’ve got my woodworking tools in the cellar, and I like to fool around in the yard. There’s plenty to do.

Three years ago we did stay right at home. I thought it was the best vacation we ever had, but Linda kept saying it was the worst. This was the first year I was due to get three weeks with pay instead of just two, and she brought that up too, telling me how it would give us a real chance to get away.

I hoped it would blow over and I’d be able to talk her into taking the last three weeks in August. In fact, I put in for that early, in March. I thought we could rent a camp up at Lake Pleasant. That would mean only a seventy-mile trip and a chance for some fishing.

But Linda kept harping on it. Now, of course, I know why she kept after me the way she did. I know the horror that lived in the back of her mind all those months she was cooing and wheedling. Now that it’s too late, I can look back and see just how carefully it was all arranged.

Ever since Christmas we had been seeing quite a lot of the Jeffries. His first name was Brandon, but nobody would ever call him that. You instinctively called him Jeff. They were a little younger than Linda and me, and he was with the same company, but on the sales end, while I’ve been in the purchasing department for the past nine years — in fact ever since I got out of the army and married Linda. Jeff was one of the top salesmen on the road and last year they brought him in and made him sales manager of the northeastern division. He got an override on all the sales made in his division and had to make only about three trips a month. I guess he made out pretty well — probably a lot better than I do — and on top of that Stella, his wife, had some money of her own.

When they brought him in last year Jeff and Stella bought two adjoining lots about a block and a half from our place and put up quite a house. A little more modern than I go for, but Linda was just crazy about it. Linda always seemed to take a big shine to people who had more to do with than we did, and so it was always a strain trying to keep up. I tried to save a little, but it was a pretty slow process.

The four of us played bridge and canasta pretty often. Usually I don’t like to see too much of people who work at the same place because it’s like bringing your work home with you. But Jeff was in an entirely different division and we didn’t talk about the company at all.

Daytimes, Linda would go over and gab with Stella, or vice versa. They didn’t ever seem to become real good friends, if you know what I mean. We saw a lot of each other, but there was always a little reserve. Nobody ever seemed to let their hair down all the way. Maybe some of that was my fault. I have about two or three close friends, and a lot of people I just happen to know. I’ve always been quiet. Linda did the talking for both of us.

If you’ve ever been in purchasing, where you have to see the salesmen, you’ll know what I mean when I say that Jeff was a perfect salesman type. Not the cartoon type, slapping backs and breathing in your face, but the modern type of top sales hand — tall and good-looking in a sort of rugged way. When he told jokes, they were on himself. He’d listen when you talked. I mean really listen, drawing you out. He had that knack of making you feel important. I’m sure he wasn’t really interested in my woodworking shop, but he’d come down to the cellar and pretend to be. I probably bored him, showing him how the stuff worked, but you’d never guess it.

Jeff kept himself in shape too. He really worked at it — swimming and tennis and so on. And I guess he had a sun lamp home because he had a good tan the year round. All of which added to the kind of impression he made.

When you’re married to a woman like Linda, you develop a sort of sixth sense for those jokers who are on the make. We couldn’t ever go to a big party without somebody trying to hang all over her. I hate parties like that, but they made Linda sparkle. She was thirty-four when we met the Jeffries and looked about twenty-six or seven. People were all the time telling her that she looked like Paulette Goddard, but I never could see it.

One thing Linda really had, and that’s a beautiful figure. I have never seen a better figure anywhere, on anybody. She had to watch her weight pretty carefully. She liked to stay at a hundred and twenty-five. Personally, I liked her at about a hundred and thirty-two, because when she weighed less her face looked sort of gaunt.

But like I was saying, you develop a sixth sense when you have a wife like Linda. I watched Jeff pretty closely, worrying a little bit, because if anybody had a chance of making out, that Jeff Jeffries certainly would. But I could see that it was all right. They kidded around a lot, with him making a burlesque pass at her now and then, but I could see it was all in fun. And he was very loving with Stella, his wife, holding her hand whenever he could, and kissing her on the temple when they danced together at the club and that sort of thing. Which is funny when you think of it, because Stella Jeffries certainly was anything but a good-looking woman. She was just awfully nice. Really nice. I liked her a lot, more than I liked Jeff.

It certainly surprised me that I ever got to marry Linda Willestone. That was her name in high school, when I first knew her. We were in the same graduating class. She claimed that she remembered me, but I don’t think she really did. It was a big school, about seven thousand total enrollment, and I was even quieter then than I am now. I worked after school most of the time, so I didn’t have a chance to get in on those extra things a lot of the others did. Linda belonged to a different world. She was in just one of my classes. I was shy then. I thought about her a lot, at night, but it would have been just as easy for me to chop off my right hand as go up and say anything to her in the hall between classes. She ran around with a gang that included all the big shots in the student body. I didn’t see her again after I graduated, but I used to think about her from time to time and wonder what happened to her.

I got out of the army and got a job and a week later I saw her on the street and recognized her. I walked right up to her and said, “Hello, Linda.” She looked at me blankly. I told her who I was and how I’d been in high school with her. We went into a place and had coffee. Then I saw that she didn’t look good at all. She looked as if she’d been sick. Her clothing was shabby. All the life she had had in high school seemed to have faded.

She said frankly that she was broke and looking for a job. She’d come in on a bus from California. It was a pretty tragic story she told me. Her people were dead. She had married a marine and he’d been killed. He hadn’t transferred his insurance to her and his people, Kentucky people, wouldn’t have anything to do with her because the marine had married her instead of a girl in his home town.

She had worked for a while in California and then married an Air Force warrant officer. He got in some kind of a jam and had been given a dishonorable discharge and it was after that happened that she found out he’d already had a wife and two children back in Caribou, Maine. She’d worked some more and gotten sick and when sickness took her savings, she’d been a charity patient until she was well enough to leave. She’d worked just long enough to get together the bus fare to come home.

They talked about the war being rough on men, but I guess you could say that Linda was just as much a war casualty as any man. What happened to her had just taken the heart out of her, and it made me feel bad to see the way she was. I guess what I did was pick her up and dust her off and put the heart back in her. You could call it a rebound on her part, I guess. Not a rebound from any specific man, but a rebound from life. For me it was fine, because I never thought I would get to marry Linda Willestone. I could still remember the times in high school when I would be leaving to walk to my after-school job, and I’d see Linda hurrying out to get into a car with a whole bunch of kids and go driving off somewhere, laughing and having a good time.

They always say that the first year of marriage is the hardest. With us I think it was the best. At first Linda seemed tired all the way through, but as the months went by she began to come alive more and more. She was fond of me and grateful to me. I did not demand that she love me. I hoped it would come later, but when it didn’t seem to, I didn’t mind too much. It was enough to have her around, and know that wherever we went, people looked at her.

It’s hard for a man to assess his own marriage. He cannot say if it is good or bad. Maybe no marriage is entirely good or bad. I know only that after that first year there was strain between us. Linda wanted a life that I didn’t want. I told her values were superficial; she told me life was more than waiting for death. There were no blazing quarrels. My temper is not of that breed. And in the last few years things became easier between us. We worked out a sort of compromise. She lived my way, and when we could afford it, she would take a trip, usually to Chicago. That seemed to ease her nervous tension.

I had hoped, of course, that we would have children. But that was denied us. The doctor she went to said that it had something to do with how sick she had been in California. It would have done much to end her restlessness, I thought, but since it could not be, we managed to work out a life with a minimum of strain. Sometimes, out of irritation, she would say cruel things to me, calling me a nonentity, a zero, a statistic. But I understood, or I thought I did. She was an earthy, hot-blooded woman, and our life was pretty quiet. I understand a great deal more about her now.

During the past year she began to take an almost frantic interest in her appearance, spending a lot of money on creams and lotions, taking strange diets, working hard on grotesque exercises that claimed to firm up this part or that, remove slack or wrinkles here and there. That too, in the light of what happened, becomes significant.

To round out this picture of Linda, I must add in all fairness that she was a superb housekeeper. I believe that was the result of her energy and restlessness. The house always gleamed. Though the food she cooked was plain and unimaginative, she always prepared it quickly, with a minimum of fuss and effort, and did her marketing with the relentless efficiency that made me jokingly offer to hire her in the purchasing department at the plant. She was good with her clothes too. Though she spent an uncomfortable amount, her wardrobe was much larger than even that amount would justify. The one project I completed in my cellar shop that pleased her the most was a special closet for her wardrobe. I walled off one end of her bedroom with mirrored doors in such a way that the doors could be completely folded out of the way, or so arranged that she could stand and get a multiple view of herself. I built in overhead cupboards for her hats, designed a long shoe rack, built in one set of wide shallow drawers that reached from the floor to shoulder height. It took me over two months of my spare time. Hanging the doors so they would roll easily was the trickiest part. Sometimes on rainy Sundays she would shut herself in her room and try on practically everything she owned, putting a lot of things aside for changes and alterations during the week.

As I said, I had already put in for a summer vacation and didn’t tell Linda, because I was waiting for this idea of a fall vacation to blow over. One night in late March or early April Jeff and Stella had come over. It was when we’d finished a rubber of bridge and were talking while I made fresh drinks that Linda told them about her idea, and how Stu and Betty Carbonelli had had such a good time.

“Betty said that you can get beach cottages for practically nothing on the west coast of Florida in October and November because their season doesn’t really start down there until around Christmas. They were on Verano Key, quite a way south of Sarasota. They said they had the whole beach to themselves.”

As I put the filled glasses down on the bridgetable, Jeff said, “You know, that sounds pretty good to me. What do you think, Stell?”

“I’ve never been on the west coast. When I was little we used to go down to Palm Beach a lot. Sis still has a big place there, but it’s rented every year through an agent. She never liked it.”

The bridge game was ignored while we all talked it over. I said it was too far to go for just three weeks, particularly if, as Stu Carbonelli said, you had to have a car. You could subtract six days for the trip, going and coming. A full week gone out of three.

Jeff thought that over for quite a while, frowning, and then he interrupted Stella and said, “Hey! Here’s a deal. We have to have a car, right? We could rent places close together. I could fix it, Paul, so that my three weeks would start four days after yours. You and Linda could drive down and Stell and I could fly down. Then when your time was up, you both could fly back and Stell and I could leave at the same time and drive back. If we were close together, we would only need one car, wouldn’t we? And then we’d both have two weeks and four days down there. Driving both ways is a chore. But just one way...”

“And we could put all the heavy luggage for both of us in the car, so it wouldn’t mean messing with a lot of baggage on the plane trip,” Linda said eagerly.

Actually, Jeff’s idea made it sound a lot better. I didn’t want to take our vacation along with the Jeffries if we were going to be in an expensive place, because I knew we couldn’t keep up with them. But Stu had talked a lot about the place they had gone, and it certainly wasn’t any Miami. He said that the nearest town, Hooker, was eight miles from the key, and to get off the key you drive over a rattly old one-lane wooden bridge. He had said there was quite a bit of commercial fishing in the area. He had said you could eat, sleep, fish and swim, and aside from that, if you wanted any night life of any special splendor, you had to go to Miami or Havana. If the Jeffries wanted to make a side trip, there was no reason why we had to go along with them. And Stu had raved about plug casting for snook by moonlight in Little Hurricane Pass at the south end of Verano Key.

Stella, who had been dubious at first, gradually became enthusiastic, and the three of them concentrated their forces on me. I brought up every objection I could think of, and every time one of them would answer it.

Like I said, I’m quiet. And I’m pretty stubborn too. I guess those things go together pretty often. There they were, the three of them all heckling me. Florida had begun to sound better to me, but it was the idea of the three of them leaning on me that put my back up. I finally said flatly that I’d decided to take my vacation in August and go up to Lake Pleasant. It certainly dampened that party right down. Maybe I sounded cross when I said it.

I was sorry to see Jeff and Stella leave so early, because I knew Linda would be gunning for me. This would be one of the big screaming brawls she could throw every so often, yapping at me in a shrill way that would make me dizzy.

But it didn’t work out that way at all. She was quiet after Jeff and Stella left. I helped clean up the place, waiting every minute for the explosion. It just didn’t come. We went on up to bed.

Right here, in order to tell how that night was, I guess I’ve got to explain a little about the physical side of our marriage.

I’d never been with a woman until we were married. I kind of resented her knowing more about it than I did, but in some ways I was glad she did because it made things a lot easier at first. She was always moody about it. By that I mean that sometimes she’d seem to want to and a lot of the time she wouldn’t. It was generally pretty quick the times she’d want to, and the times she didn’t she acted like she was bored and just wished it would be over.

Anyway, on this night after Jeff and Stella went home and we went up to bed with me waiting for the explosion, it didn’t come. She fooled around and I was in bed first. Finally, she came out of the bathroom and stood in the doorway with the light from the bathroom shining right through some sort of filmy thing I’d never seen on her before. I guessed later that she’d bought it for the trip to Florida, after I knew why she bought it.

She stood there for a long time. As I said, I’ve never seen a better figure on a woman in my life. She turned the light off, finally, and I could hear the rustling of her as she came toward me in the darkness, hear the rustling, and then smell a new kind of heavy perfume she had put on, and then feel her strong arms around me as she brought her lips down on mine there in our dark bedroom.

When it was all over, she lay in my arms and she said, “This is the way it should always be, darling. Now you know why I want us to go to Florida. I want a new start for our marriage. I want a second honeymoon, a proper honeymoon this time.”

Well, I knew I wanted it to happen again just that way, and if I had to go to Florida to guarantee it, then I would go to Florida. It was as though I hadn’t even been married before. She was like a stranger, and I fell in love with her all over again.

In the morning she called Stella Jeffries. I told Jeff down at the plant. And it was all set.

Rufus Stick, the director of purchasing, tried to dissuade me. He said that the fall was a bad time to leave. But when he saw that I really wanted that time, he went along with it. We both knew that he owed me a lot. I devised the new spot check control of our perpetual inventory system and installed it. It works like a charm. And I set up the statistical control of inspection of incoming materials and revamped our point-of-reorder control system so that production hasn’t been on our necks in over a year. Besides, Rufus Stick knew that I didn’t want his job. I couldn’t handle the contacts with the top brass of other sections. I also owed Rufus a lot. He let me do my work in my own way, and raised me when he could. It was a good working relationship. He knew he had a loyal man under him who knew his job, and I knew that Rufus would protect me in every way he could.

We settled on Friday, October 22, as my final working day and I would report back on Monday, November 15. As soon as that was arranged. I phoned Jeff from my office and he said he would get to work on it. He phoned me that evening at home and said he’d gotten approval to start his vacation on Wednesday, October 27, and he would have to be back at work on Thursday, November 17. It gave him only twenty-two days to my twenty-three, but that was because of starting in the middle of the week.

I guess that he didn’t have much trouble arranging it because, from what I could hear, he was the fair-haired boy in sales. They were using him more and more on contacts with the advertising agency in addition to his regular job, and the new campaign he had worked on was turning out to be very successful. Contact work like that demands a talent I just don’t have. I find it very hard to talk to strangers. Once when I was in grammar school I tried to sell soap from door to door in my own neighborhood. I would press my finger against the door frame beside the bell rather than press the bell.

It was about a week after that when Linda had the Jeffries and the Carbonellis over one night. Stu brought his 35 millimeter slides and a portable projector and we took down a picture so Stu could flash the slides on the wall. Stu kept moaning because he had to take his vacation in July this year, and kept telling us how he envied us. The slides were fine. He gave me a lot of information on the fishing and said he’d even bring some good snook plugs to the office and leave them with me. Betty gave the girls the pitch on the marketing and so on. They gave us the name of the man who owned the beach cottages and rented them himself. Jeff said he would write on a company letterhead and make the arrangements. The man’s name was Dooley. Stu said he was a retired construction worker who had built the two beach cottages himself. Stu said the only bad thing about their vacation had been that during the last week of it the other cottage had been rented to some South Carolina people with four noisy children, but if we wrote early enough and sewed up both cottages, we could avoid that.

Stu and Betty had to leave early because of their sitter. We sat around and talked about the pictures and what we would take. We had a mild argument about which car we would take. It was mild because I certainly didn’t want to subject Jeff and Stella to driving back in our six-year-old sedan, not after the cars he was used to driving. Jeff was perceptive about it. He said, “Look, kids, I’ve got a new one on order for delivery next month. By October it will be nicely broken in, and there’ll be plenty of room in it for all our junk.” So we left it at that.

Jeff heard from Dooley ten days later, saying that we could rent both cottages for the full month of November, and he would let us take occupancy the last week in October. He wanted a hundred and fifty apiece for the cottages, plus four fifty for the Florida tax. It was twenty-five more than Stu and Betty had paid, but still reasonable, I gave Jeff my check for my share, and he mailed the full rental to Dooley. Dooley wrote back and said he would be away when we arrived, but we could pick up the keys to both places at Jethro’s Market in Hooker, and he said that before he left he’d make certain that everything was shipshape at the two cottages. He said he hoped we’d have a good vacation, and if there was any trouble about anything, any repairs to be made, we should please see Lottie Jethro at the market.

We had one of the hottest, stickiest summers on record. Even the baking city couldn’t subdue Linda’s enthusiasm for the trip. It seemed to mean an awful lot to her. It puzzled me a bit. I could understand how she could reach such a peak of enthusiasm if we were going to Paris or Rome or something, but she was brittle and nervous and quick, as though she expected the sandy expanses of Verano Key to contain the glamor and excitement of a royal court. I can see now how, in a special sense, that is what Linda went there to find.

Jeff’s car came and I drove it a couple of times that summer when the four of us went out together. It was low, long, pale gray and powerful. It had power brakes, power steering, power seats, power windows and startling acceleration. It rode so smoothly that it would be up to seventy before you were aware that you were speeding. When I went back to my own car after driving that monster I had the feeling that I was sitting nine feet off the ground and all the fenders were chattering. I must say that I looked forward to driving that thing all the way to Florida.

Actually, we did not see as much of the Jeffries that summer as I had thought we would. They belonged to the country club and we didn’t. On the hot days Jeff would go right to the club from the office, and Stella would be there by the pool waiting for him. I expected Linda to start her annual campaign to get me to join, but she didn’t. She was very easy to get along with that summer. She sang when she worked. She took sunbaths in our small back yard. I had made a frame for her and tacked striped canvas on it so she could have privacy. She sunbathed in the nude, oiling herself heavily so as not to harshen her skin, until she was the same even golden tan from head to toe.

I remembered one Saturday when I was working in the yard and she was in the small canvas pen sunbathing. I walked over and my footsteps were soundless on the grass. She lay on her back with little joined white plastic cups over her eyes. They made her face look most odd. I thought she was asleep, and then I saw that she had a cigarette between her fingers. She brought it slowly to her lips, inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs and then slowly blew it out. I wondered what she was thinking about. The plastic shielding over her eyes gave her such a secretive look. Sweat stood in tiny droplets on her brown skin. Her body was of such perfection, there under the sun, that it wasn’t like looking at a nude living woman. It was strangely like looking at statuary, at something very ancient and very perfect — something brought forward to this era out of a crueler past.

I had the odd feeling that I did not know her at all. It was much like the times in high school when I had stared, flushing, at the curve of her young breast, unable to look away, caught not by lust but by mystery. And throughout my nighttime imaginings of her during those young years I had thought deeply and forlornly that this special mystery would never be for me — that I would never content myself with lesser flesh and thus would go through life tragically alone.

I spoke her name and she removed the white plastic cups and squinted up at me and said, “What? What is it?”

She was Linda again and I went back to my yard work. I know now what she was thinking as I stood watching her, and I have come to believe that evil radiates its own special aura so that when you are receptive to it, you can feel a brush of coldness across your heart.

But that day I shrugged it off, not recognizing it for what it was. I was merely Paul Cowley, a mild man who grubbed away at the crab grass — a man of average height with a narrow introspective face, sloping shoulders, no-color hair that in the past year had thinned so much on top that under the fluorescent bathroom light I could see the gleam of my scalp under the sparse hair. I knew what I was. I was a worker, with a dogged analytical mind, and hands that were clever with both tools and figures. I had outgrown my boyhood dreams of triumph. I knew my place in my known world, with my work and my home and my restless and beautiful wife.

I now know that that Paul Cowley was a fool, and it is of such fools that you read in your tabloids. They believe they walk forward on a wide safe place, whereas in truth it is an incredibly narrow walkway, high over blackness.

The heat continued for two weeks after Labor Day. It turned cool then and the leaves began to change. I put my fishing tackle in order, bought traveler’s checks, bought the sort of beach clothing I thought I would need. I worked long hours at the office, determined that my desk would be absolutely clear on the day I left. I knew there would be enough of an accumulation by the time I returned.

The last days seemed to drag. At last it was Friday, the twenty-second. I said good-by to the people in the section and said good-by to Rufus. It seemed odd to be taking off after the summer was over. I left my address with Rufus — Route 1, Box 88, Hooker, Florida — so he could contact me if necessary. He said he hoped he wouldn’t have to.

On Friday evening Jeff and Stella brought the big car over. Their stuff was all packed in it, and ours was ready to load. Jeff brought our plane tickets for the trip back and I gave him a check. They would arrive at the Sarasota airport at seven-twenty on the evening of the twenty-seventh. We should arrive at the key on the twenty-fifth, and that would give us time to get settled before running up to Sarasota to get them. They took my car when they left, and my garage door key. They would use my car and leave it in my garage before they left.

Linda and I loaded the car and went to bed. In the morning we closed up the house, got an early start, had breakfast on the road. We arrived in Hooker on Monday evening at five o’clock. The trip was uneventful. The car drove easily. Linda was uncommonly quiet during the trip. We had no difficulty finding rooms at pleasant motels as there were not many people on the road at that time of year. We drove from the crisp bite of fall back into summer.

Hooker was a small sleepy town dotted with the crumbling Moorish palaces of the old boom of the twenties. Its streets fanned optimistically out into the palmetto scrub, tall weeds thrusting up through shattered asphalt. It was still and hot and there were a few dusty cars parked on the wide main street. I parked in front of Jethro’s Market and when I got out of the car two large black lethargic mosquitoes landed on my forearm.

Lottie Jethro was a vast faded young woman, with a cotton dress stretching tightly across her abundances. She gave me the keys and said, “You go right on out this road. It runs along the bay and then you come to a sign points west says Verano Key Beach. Get out onto the key and turn left, that’s south, and go about a mile and you come to a little sign says Cypress Cottages, and that’s it. You’ll have to try the keys because I don’t know which is which. But they’re both alike. The fuses on the electric is unscrewed. You got to screw them in. There’s fresh bottles of gas there for both, and just the one pump house, here’s the key. There’s a sign on the wall telling how you prime the pump.”

The screen door banged and Linda came in after me. She had changed to shorts for the last day’s travel. Some men in the back of the store stopped talking when she came in.

“I thought we might as well pick up some groceries now,” she said.

“We got a good line of frozen meats and groceries, lady,” Miss Jethro said.

I bought cigarettes and some magazines and some insect spray and repellent and looked over the fishing tackle while Linda completed her purchasing. I had to cash a traveler’s check to pay for everything. We drove about six miles south and found the sign and crossed a frail wooden bridge onto the key. The road down the key was a sand road, the hump in the middle so high that it brushed the differential. We passed two houses that looked closed. The sun was settling toward the steel blue Gulf. Sometimes the road would wind near enough so that we could see a wide expanse of pale beach and lazy waves that heaved up and slapped at the sand. Water birds ran busily along the water line, pecking at the sand.

“Pretty nice,” I said.

“Yes,” Linda said.

The two cottages were about a hundred feet apart. I asked her which one she wanted and she said it didn’t make any difference. I parked by the southerly one. I unlocked the door and we carried our things in. We unlocked the other one and looked it over. They were alike. The key was narrow there, and there was a long dock out into the bay at the back, and a rowboat overturned on the bank near the dock, above the high tide mark. The pump house was not far from the dock. Both cottages were of cypress, weathered gray. They each had two bedrooms, a living room with furniture upholstered in a vicious shade of green plastic, small gas heaters, gas stove, fireplace, refrigerator, tiny kitchen, a screened porch about ten by ten on the front looking across the sand road toward the Gulf.

I got the electricity going in each cottage, got the pump started, and then drove the car over to the other cottage and unloaded the Jeffries’ things, trying to put them where I thought they would want them. In addition to the usual luggage, they had packed a new badminton set and a gun case. I opened the gun case to see what Jeff had thought he would use. It was a Remington bolt action .22 with a four power scope. It looked new and it looked as though it would be fun for plinking at beer cans.

Linda had the food put away by the time I got back, and had started unpacking our bags. When we were through we took a walk down the beach. The big hot red sun was just sliding into the Gulf. About four hundred yards south of us was a big house with hurricane shutters over the large windows. Almost an equal distance north of us were four small beach cabins that were deserted and badly in need of paint.

“We’re certainly alone here.”

She didn’t answer me. With darkness came more mosquitoes. We took refuge on the porch. Linda made sandwiches. I plugged in our new portable radio and we listened to Cuban music from Havana. The waves made a soft sound on the beach. I couldn’t stop yawning. I went out and moved the car around to the bay side of the cottage so there’d be less chance of salt spray damaging it. When I went to bed Linda was still listening to the music.

When I got up in the morning, Linda was gone. I put on swimming trunks and went out on the beach. I could see her on the beach, far to the north, a tiny figure that bent over now and then to pick up shells. I was on my second cup of coffee when I heard her under the outside shower. She came into the kitchen in a few minutes wrapped in a big yellow towel, her soaked bathing suit in her hand. “That water must be eighty degrees!” she said. “And there were big things out there, sort of rolling. I’ll bet they were porpoises.” Her eyes were shining, and she looked like a child on Saturday.

I picked up a burn that afternoon that was still uncomfortable when we drove up to Sarasota on Wednesday to meet the plane. It was a small plane that brought them down from Tampa International. It was dark and Jeff said that I better keep right on driving because I knew the road. They said they had a fine trip down. They said it had snowed a little at home on Sunday but it had melted as soon as it hit the ground. Jeff seemed boisterous and exuberant, but I thought Stella was rather quiet. Linda spent most of the trip back turned around in the seat telling them about the layout. We all seemed a little strained with each other, and I guessed it was because we were all wondering how it was going to work out, four people taking a vacation together. It could be fine, or it could be a mess.

Jeff was awed by the primitive condition of the key road as shown by our headlights and by the lurching of the big car. I drove them up to their door with a flourish, and Linda went in first and turned the lights on for them. She had turned on their refrigerator the previous day, and stocked it with breakfast things.

They seemed pleased with the setup, particularly Jeff. That surprised me a little because, as with Linda, I thought he would be more likely to be enthusiastic about a more civilized environment. When they were settled we went over and sat on their porch and talked for a while. Stella said she was sleepy but not to go yet. She went in to bed and the three of us talked some more.

That evening was the last time that the four of us were what I would call normal with each other. It all started the next day. It started without warning and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it, or Stella could do about it. Here is exactly the way it happened.

At about ten o’clock we were all out on the beach. We had two blankets and towels and a faded old beach umbrella I had found in the pump house. I remember that I had a program of dance music on the portable radio. Both Stella and I had to be careful of the sun. Jeff had a good tan. Linda, of course, was browner than anybody. Our voices sounded far away and sleepy, the way they do when the sun is hot.

Linda got up. She stood there with her shadow falling across me. I thought she was going to go in swimming. She said, “Come on, Jeff.” I thought she was asking him to go in with her. But her tone of voice had seemed oddly harsh. Jeff got up without a word and the two of them walked down the beach, headed south.

I don’t think I can explain exactly why it created such an awkward situation. Certainly Linda and Jeff could walk together, as could Stella and I, should we want to. The four of us were, I thought, friends. But it was the manner in which they left us. Linda’s tone had been peremptory, autocratic. Jeff had obeyed immediately. It spoke of a relationship that I had not suspected. Had it been done in a normal way, they would have said something about walking down the beach, and coming back soon, and don’t get too much sun — like that. They just left.

Though you could see up the beach a long way to the north, you could not see far to the south. The big house south of us was on a sort of headland, and beyond it the beach curved inward and out of our range of vision.

Each time I looked they were further away, walking steadily. Then I looked and they were gone. Now this is also hard to explain. Their action made me revert to the way I had felt about Linda many years ago. She had walked off, out of reach. She was back with the beautiful people. I was again the Paul Cowley who worked after school and knew so few people in our class.

I could not help glancing at Stella, wondering how she was taking it. She wore heavy sun glasses with tilted frames and very dark lenses. Her eyes were hidden behind them. I thought of any number of inane things I could say, but in the end I said nothing.

After a time Stella got up without a word, took off her sunglasses and watch, tucked her pale hair into a white bathing cap and went down to the water. She swam far out with a lithe power at odds with the frail look of her body. I watched her float out there. After what seemed a long time, she swam slowly in and walked up and sat in the shade of the beach umbrella, arms hugging her knees, looking out to sea. Our silence with each other was awkward. The longer Jeff and Linda stayed away, the more awkward it became. I thought back over the relationship between Jeff and my wife. There seemed to be nothing to justify what they had done — rather, the way they had done what they had done.

A quiz program started and I turned off the portable.

“Well, Paul,” Stella said quietly. She came originally, I believe, from Hartford. Her voice had that flat quality, that special accent that women who come from that area and go to exclusive finishing schools acquire.

“I... what do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t know. She could have had a sign painted, I suppose. Or branded his forehead. I don’t think she could have made it any more obvious.”

“I don’t think it’s that way.”

“I don’t think it’s any other way. I didn’t want to come here. I did at first and then I didn’t. I tried to talk him out of it. I could have talked to walls or stones.”

“Now, Stella.”

“Don’t sound soothing. Please. We’ve got ourselves a situation, Paul. A large one. It isn’t pretty. I guessed at something of the sort... but not so blatant.”

“We’re all friends.”

She turned the dark lenses toward me. “I’m your friend, Paul. I’m Jeff’s friend, I hope. Not hers. Not hers, ever again. She made it plain enough. I should pack now. That would be smart. But I’m not very smart, I guess. I would rather stay and fight.”

She picked up her things and went to their cottage. At noon I picked up my things and went in too. I sat on the porch and read and finally they came down the beach. They separated casually in front of our place and Linda came in.

“Long walk,” I said.

She looked at me and through me. “Wasn’t it, though,” she said, and went on into the house.

The was the beginning. That was the way it started. Linda and Jeff were together whenever they pleased. It would, perhaps, have been better if I could have gone to Linda and demanded an explanation, if I could have shook her, struck her, raged at her. But, with Linda, the roots of my insecurity went deep. I tried to use reason.

“Linda, we planned to have a good time down here.”

“Yes?”

“You and Jeff are spoiling it for the four of us, Stell is miserable.”

“That’s a bitter shame.”

“Last night you two were gone for three hours. Not a word of excuse or explanation or anything. It’s so... ruthless.”

“Poor Paul.”

“Haven’t you got any sense of decency? Are you having an affair with him?”

“Why don’t you run along and catch some nice fish again?”

“I can’t get any pleasure out of anything I do, the way you’re acting. I just don’t understand it. What am I supposed to do? What’s going to become of us? How can we go back and live the way we did before?”

“Do we have to, dear? Goodness, what a fate!”

It wasn’t like her, not to get angry and shout and stamp her feet. She was... opaque. I think that is the only possible word. It was acute torture for me. I felt helpless. There seemed to be a cold precision about what they were doing that baffled me. Sometimes I felt the way you do when you walk into a movie in the middle of a very complicated feature picture. The story is incomprehensible to you. You seek a clue in the actors’ words and actions, but what they do serves only to baffle you the more.

One morning I watched Jeff and Linda on the beach directly in front of our cottage. He had a carton of empty beer cans. He had the .22 and he would throw a beer can out as far as he could. He would shoot and then instruct Linda. He put his arm around her bare shoulders to get her into the proper position. I could hear the snapping of the shots over the sea sound, and once I heard their laughter. I sat and watched them and felt ill. When Linda wandered down the beach and Jeff stayed there, shooting, I went down to him. It was the first time I had been alone with him since it had started. When he looked at me his face was very still. “Hi, Paul. Want to try a shot?”

“No thanks. I want to talk to you.”

He looked uncomfortable. “Sure,” he said. “Go ahead.”

It made me feel as though I were in a badly written play. “I guess you know what I want to talk to you about.”

“I can’t say that I do.”

He was making it as difficult for me as he could. “It’s about you and Linda, Jeff. What are you trying to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“The four of us never do anything together. You and Linda swim together, go off walking together. You’re making it damn awkward for your wife and for me.”

He seemed to gain confidence. “Have you talked to Linda about this?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What does she say, old man?”

“Don’t call me old man. She doesn’t say much of anything. She won’t explain or apologize. It seems to me like the most thoughtless piece of selfishness I’ve ever seen. It’s spoiling everything. My God, if you want to break up both marriages, at least put your cards on the table.”

He even smiled at me, though his eyes were still uneasy. “Paul, old man, a vacation is where you do as you please. I’m doing as I please. I guess Linda is too. So don’t get so steamed up. Relax. Enjoy yourself.”

He sneered a little as he said the last few words. I didn’t have any tiny fragment of liking for him left. I hated him and what he was doing. Linda’s personal promises had been no good. She hadn’t let me touch her since we’d gotten to Florida.

I was hurt and angry. My hands and arms are hard and tough. I sprang at Jeff and hit him in the mouth. He went over onto the sand and the rifle went flying. He looked at me with complete shock which changed at once to anger as he scrambled up. I was a fool to hit him. He had the advantage in youth, in weight, height, reach and condition. The last fight I had been in had been in a schoolyard — and I had lost.

Jeff charged me with such fury that he knocked me down without actually punching me. I got up and he hit me in the chest and knocked me down again. As I got up, Stella came running between us. Instead of calling out to her husband she said to me, “No, Paul! No.”

Jeff picked up the sandy rifle and stared at me and stalked toward their cabin. I saw at once what Stella meant. It didn’t do any good. It couldn’t do any good. Fighting over Linda was purposeless.

Back on the porch of their cottage, Jeff dismantled the rifle on spread newspapers and cleaned the sand from it with an oily rag. He was as opaque as Linda. It was a game, and neither Stella nor I knew the rules. They were both stronger people, and we did not know what to do about the strange situation. People should not act that way. They were not taunting Stella and me. They were not precisely goading me. They gave us no obvious evidence of infidelity, which would have forced it to an issue. They merely went their own casual way, as though we had changed marriage partners during the day, only to be sorted out again each night, quite late.

Stella and I were stuck with the marketing. Linda would give me a list. I would drive to Hooker and Stella would come along. Forsaking all pride, she had tried to talk to Linda. She had not wanted to weep, but she did, and hated herself for her weakness. Linda had been just as casual and noncommittal with her as Jeff had with me. It made a nightmare of what both Stella and I had hoped would be a good and happy time.

Because it was the two of us who did the shopping, the people in Hooker, as I found out later, were understandably confused as to who was married to whom. And much was later made of the fifth of November. That was the day when, as we were about to leave, Jeff asked me to get the car greased and get an oil change.

We rode to town, not talking much, both of us thinking about the two we had left behind us. It was a curious situation. We could not, in all pride, guard them and spy upon them. We left the car at a service station and walked down the hot street to a small air-conditioned bar. I suppose, as was later said, we did have our heads together, and we did talk earnestly in low voices to each other. And Stella did cry at one point, but very briefly.

When we got back they were both swimming about two hundred yards offshore.

It was on Sunday, the seventh, that Stella and I went for our walk. That was the day another distorted facet was added to our relationship. I did not know where Linda and Jeff were. Linda had just washed the lunch dishes and gone. I was on the porch when Stella came over, a strained look about her eyes. “Want to walk with me, Paul?”

“Sure.” We headed south, walking briskly. “Did they go this way?” I asked.

“No. They took the boat and went north up the bay,” she said. “Jeff took his tackle. I just... want to walk, Paul, and I didn’t want to be alone.”

She set a fast pace. The sun was hot on my shoulders, but neither of us had to be so wary of the sun any more. We were both barefoot, and she wore a strapless dark blue bathing suit which clung to her body. It had white ruffles at the hips and at the bodice. Her pale hair was fastened back with a silver clip and she wore the massive dark glasses. As I have said before, Stella is not a pretty woman. Her brows and lashes are too pale, her nose too prominent, her mouth too wide in her thin face.

I can quite truthfully say that until that walk I had never looked at her as a woman, as a woman to be desired. I had been as unconscious of her body as if she had been a younger sister. I do not think that is due to any lack in me. It is because I had gotten to know her as Stella, fully clothed, in her living room at home and in mine. Even after the transition to brief bathing suit, it was as though I still saw her in the rather quiet clothes she preferred, without provocative habits of walk or posture, with only her own subdued and quiet grace.

My vision of her changed without warning, and it happened this way. We went further down the beach than I had ever gone. We came to a place where a groyne had been built of heavy stones to forestall erosion. The sea had smashed it into a jagged barrier across our path.

“Turn back?” I asked.

“Let’s go on.” She picked her way cautiously, over the barrier. I was behind her. Her small firm hips were round under the ruffled suit. I saw the long delicacy of her legs, and the blue track of veins in the backs of her knees. Her waist was slender, her back straight. The lines of her shoulders and throat were clear and clean. When we were across and I walked beside her again I looked almost furtively at her high small breasts, the flex and lift of her thighs as she walked. I had taken her for granted, never quite looking at her, believing her body to be gaunt, bony.

Now that I was aware of her, I made inevitable comparisons. Linda was flamboyantly noticeable. Stella was subtle in the way that a Japanese print is subtle. Only after a study of the restrained delicacy of the print can you begin to see the strength and discipline and vitality of it. Linda was a portrait in heavy oils.

Do not think from this that I had begun to walk beside her drooling like a schoolboy. It was just that I noticed her for the first time and saw what she was and was saddened by it. For if Linda chose to hurt me, an action I could halfway understand through critical appraisal of myself, Jeff, in denying this woman, was doing something less understandable and more brutal. Perhaps there is always a deeper and more bitter significance when a woman is hurt. Traditionally, a man can turn to other arms, salving his ego. A woman can only wonder why the gift of herself is found not to be enough.

A half-mile beyond the rock barrier we found an old house. It had once been impressive. The flat roof had fallen in and storms had shifted plaster walls, exposing the old brick underneath. Sand had covered most of the shattered cement sea wall. Stella walked up the slope of the beach and sat on a tilted section of the sea wall. I sat beside her. Far offshore a school of bait danced and spattered in the sun as torpedo hunger smashed upward at it from deep water.

“I guess I give up, Paul,” she said tonelessly.

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Stop trying, for one thing. You and Linda have your reservations for next Saturday, don’t you?”

“That’s right.”

She gave me a crooked smile. “I’ll use the week getting some more sun and doing some thinking. I... I never ran into anything like this. I’ll let him drive me back. Maybe once they’re apart he’ll talk about it. Even if he was abject about it, I don’t think I could stay. Not after this... special kind of humiliation.”

She paused, then started talking very fast, not looking at me. “One summer when I was little they sent me to a very smart and exclusive camp for girls. At the camp everybody was assigned to a group of six. I arrived late. The group was all formed. I guess I was pretty discouraging to them. You see, the groups of six were in competition. Swimming and riding and so on. There I was, a wan, shy little bug-eyed thing, looking as I was made of pipe cleaners, and had a mouth full of metal and springs. They had a whole series of secrets they kept from me. They even had a special language. I had a hell of a summer. This keeps reminding me of it. I didn’t know I was still so vulnerable.”

I knew exactly what she meant. It surprised me because I had thought that money was always the perfect insulation against that kind of aloneness.

“Couldn’t you have asked your people to take you out and send you to some other place?”

“I could have. They would have. But I didn’t want to be humiliated in their eyes, either. I didn’t want to seem inadequate. They both were drowned two years later, off Bimini in their boat in a storm. They were always adequate. Big brown laughing people, with white white teeth. Daddy called me the white mouse. He meant it affectionately, but it always hurt a little. Now I guess that Jeff has — has turned me back into the white...” She put her face in her hands. She cried silently.

I put my arm around her sun-hot shoulders, moved closer to her. I held her for a long time and when she lifted her face toward me, I kissed her, tasting salt. I took my arm away awkwardly and said, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. They threw us together. We’re on the outside. We can comfort each other, I guess. Anyway, Paul, I’m glad you kissed me. It makes me feel... well, more competent, I guess. What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I haven’t got enough pride. I keep thinking this will blow over. Maybe it won’t be precisely the same again, but it will be enough for me. I don’t demand much, I guess. Or maybe merit much.”

“Don’t low rate yourself.”

“I’m not. I’m being honest. I’m still surprised Linda married me. I guess I’m still grateful, in a sense.”

She frowned and looked away from me. “Ever since I became what they coyly called marriageable, I’ve had a different problem. There were always plenty of them. Nice, polite, handsome, muscular young men. The thing was to decide whether it was me or the money.”

“It there that much?”

“Bushels. An obscene amount. I guess I’ve demanded that we live simply as a sort of continuing test of Jeff. Now I wonder if that was wrong. Maybe if I’d decided it was really me he wanted, and begun to live the way we can, he wouldn’t have done this. No, that wouldn’t be any good either. And there’s no sense in saying if I’d done this or if I’d done that. It’s done now. It’s over.”

“Are you going to leave him?”

“Yes. And then indulge myself for a while. Play hard. Financial bandages for the bruised ego. You know, Paul, we ought to take off together. Give them back some of their own coin. Acapulco, Rome, the Virgin Islands, the south of France. A tour of the playgrounds. God, how they’d writhe!”

I looked at her. “But we can’t, of course.”

Her eyes were somber. “No. We can’t.” She stood up and tried to smile. “Back to the wars, Cowley.”

We walked back to our strange war. Toward the callousness of two people who would not explain or desist. They conducted some strange campaign against us and we were helpless because we did not understand. Two white mice, perhaps. Two blind mice.

Wednesday, the tenth of November, was the hottest day of all. Though the sky was a deep and intense blue, the water was oddly gray, the swells oily, the horizon misted. There was a feel of change in the air. The day was very still, but from time to time gusts of superheated air would spin down the beach, plucking the sand up into small spirals that would die quickly as the gust faded away. A solemn army of billions of minnows moved steadily northward a few feet off the beach. Small sandpipers ran in flocks, pecking and then trotting up and away from the lap of waves, like groups of spry, stooped little men in tailcoats with their hands locked behind them.

There had been no change in either Jeff or Linda. If there was any change at all in Linda that morning, it was a slight irritability hitherto lacking, yet familiar to me, and I wondered if it foretold the beginning of the end of her strange actions. I went out onto the beach at about ten. Stella came out about fifteen minutes later, wearing a trim yellow suit. She spread her huge towel beside my blanket, went out and swam and then came back, taking her rubber cap off, shaking out her pale hair, smiling at me. She stretched out beside me and we surrendered ourselves to the hard pulse of the sun.

I heard a sharp, snapping sound and without opening my eyes I knew it was the rifle. I propped myself up on one elbow and watched Jeff shooting at the empty cans. I noticed that his eye was off. The day and the sea were so still that once I heard the skree of a ricochet when a slug skipped off the water.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Linda coming down from our cottage. She wore, for the first time, a new swim suit which she had bought just before we left. I wondered why she had saved it until now. I wondered why she had bought it. It certainly did not become her. It was dark green, and so conservative that it looked as though she had rented it. Compared to her favorite, a wispy Bikini which seemed to be supported only by faith, this green one was practically funereal. She stood close to Jeff. He stopped shooting, bent his head a bit to listen to her. Secrets. It made me think of the white mouse in that girls’ camp.

I lay back and shut my eyes. Some time later — I do not know how long, perhaps ten minutes — I opened my eyes and saw that Jeff was sitting on the other side of Stella. His long hard legs were brown, and the curled hair on them was bleached white. He sat looking out at the Gulf and I saw the knob of muscle stand out at the corner of his jaw as he clenched his teeth. I wondered what he was thinking.

It was still morning and the sun was high, though slightly in the east. A shadow fell across me. I looked down and saw the long thin shadow of the rifle barrel, the bulkier shadow of Linda. I looked back at her. She was standing behind me. She had the rifle to her shoulder and she was aiming it carefully at Stella’s head. I believe that what I started to say was something to the effect that you shouldn’t aim a gun at anybody, even as a macabre joke. I said half a word before Linda pulled the trigger. As the muzzle was about three feet from my face, the sound of the shot was much louder than any that had gone before.

It has been verified that the small leaden pellet struck approximately an inch above Stella Jeffries’ hairline and ranged down through her skull, hydrostatic pressure of the pellet against the brain fluid bulging her face grotesquely. The pellet lodged in her throat after smashing a major artery. The immediate brain damage imparted a stimulus to the central nervous system so that her body bowed upward, resting only on her heels and the nape of her neck, rigid as iron for what seemed to me to be seconds on end, then collapsed suddenly and utterly with a small wet coughing noise that smeared suit, throat, shoulders and big towel with bright red blood.

If you have never seen an equivalent moment of bright violence, it will be impossible for you to understand the mental and emotional results of the shock. For one thing, the actual moment itself is stamped into your mind as though hammered there by a great steel die. Imagine that each of your areas of thought is a sheet of paper, and these sheets of paper are carefully stacked, and the impact of the die embosses the picture of violence all the way down through the stack, sharply and clearly. So that later, should you think of chess or spinach, ashtrays or beef cattle, even the texture of that area of thought bears the clear-edged memory of sun and sand, of the way the long muscles of her legs pulled rigid as she bowed her body, of the way the single eye you could see, far open in the instant of death, showed white all the way around the blinded iris and pupil, of the way the hand nearest you, after the collapse and gout of blood, made one last movement, a tremor of thin fingers so slight that perhaps you didn’t see it at all.

The second aspect, more difficult to describe, is the way shock makes subsequent though processes unreliable. It is as though the brain makes such a convulsive effort to take in every tiny aspect of the moment of violence that it exhausts itself and, thereafter, functions only intermittently, absorbing varied memories but interspersing them with periods of blankness impossible to recall.

When I looked, stupefied, at Linda, I saw the muzzle of the rifle swing slowly toward Jeff. She worked the bolt expertly. A tiny gleaming cartridge case arced out onto the sand.

Jeff gave a great hoarse cry of panic. I believe I shouted something at the same moment. What it was, I do not know. I tried to grab at Linda, but she moved quickly away from me. Jeff had bounded to his feet and he ran hard, ran in a straight line away from us. The rifle snapped and he plunged forward, turning his right shoulder down as he fell, rolling over twice to lie still on his face. Linda fired again with great care a fraction of a second before I grabbed the gun and twisted it out of her hands. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Jeff’s body twitch as she fired.

I had the gun. She looked at me. Her eyes were like frosted glass. The lower half of her face was slack. Her underlip had fallen away from her teeth. I remember that there was a fleck of brown tobacco on one of her lower teeth and that I had the insane impulse to reach out with my finger and remove it. I do not know what was said, if anything, because at that point there came one of those blind spots in memory.

I remember standing there with the rifle in my hands. Linda had apparently walked up the beach some hundred feet. She was standing in the water, in shallow water, bending awkwardly forward and being sick. I could not look at the body of Stella or the body of Jeff. I have always been that way. Linda laughed at me one time a few years ago. During the night a cat had died in our yard. I don’t know what had killed it. I could not touch it. I could not stand looking at it. I dug the hole for it and went in the house. Linda put it in the hole and covered it up.

As I walked up to Linda she reached down and brought up sea water in her cupped hands and rubbed her mouth vigorously. She looked at me and her face was the same as before. “Go... report it!” she said in a thickened voice.

“Come with me,” I demanded.

“No.”

I took her by the wrist and tugged her toward the cottages, toward the car. Partway up the beach she let herself go limp. She lay there on the sand, her eyes closed. “Come with me. You’re sick,” I said.

“No.”

Again there was a gap in memory. I remember next getting into the car. There was something that impeded me and irritated me, and I did not realize what it was. I brought my attention to focus and found that I was sitting behind the wheel with my left hand still grasping the rifle, my fingers holding it so tightly that they were cramped. I could not shut the car door without either releasing it or bringing it inside. It was very like the infuriating obstacles which confront you when you are very drunk. I put the rifle on the back seat. I remember no aspect of the trip to Hooker. I was not thinking constructively about what should be done. Linda was sick and had committed senseless violence. Her violent temper had taken that one last step over the borderline into insanity. It was a hideous mess, and I realized vaguely that there would be no end of confusion and heartbreak. I believe that on that short drive I resolved to stand by her and convinced myself that her curious actions of the previous two weeks had been, had I only known it, the danger signal.

I parked in front of the market. The Jethro woman has given a description of the way I acted when I came in. “He come in here breathing hard and looking sort of wild. He stood looking at me and licking his lips and I asked him twice what the trouble was, and then he said his wife had shot and killed the couple in the next cottage, the other Dooley cottage. People like them, they come down here and drink and carry on and half the time they don’t know what they’re doing. He was in his swimming pants and it was hot in the store, but he was all over goose lumps and shivering.

“Buford Rancey was in buying bread and they got this Cowley over in a chair in the back while I phoned over to Bosworth, to the sheriff’s office. They said one car was on road patrol over on the Trail, and they’d be along in maybe five minutes after they told them over the radio. This Cowley sat in the chair with his eyes shut, still shaking, still licking his mouth every once in a while. Buford Rancey gave him a cigarette and he shook so bad I thought he’d miss his mouth with it.

“The road car came roaring up in front and there was just that Dike Matthews in it. That Cowley acted a little better. Dike said as how Sheriff Vernon and some folks were on their way from the county seat, and somebody better be at the market to guide them on out. Buford said as how he would do that, so then Cowley got in the big car and Dike followed him on out. People had come in the market knowing somehow there was some kind of trouble, so there were two more cars that followed along. I’d say that twenty minutes later, after Buford had just left to ride out with Sheriff Vernon, half the town of Hooker had gone on out to Verano Key to stand around with their fool mouths open.”

Because Matthews was following me in the other car, I didn’t get any chance to talk to him on the way out. I pulled in front of the Jeffries cottage, wondering in that moment if I would have to pack up their things and ship them north, and wondering if I would have to drive the car north.

Matthews pulled in beside me. You can’t see the beach proper from directly in front of the cottages, on the road. He was an angular man with a weather-marked face, lean throat, wattled jaw, prominent Adam’s apple, narrow blue eyes.

We got out of the cars and he looked in at the back seat of Jeff’s car and said, “That the weapon?”

“Yes,” I said, and opened the door to get it.

“Leave it be,” he said sharply. “You put it there?”

“Yes,” I said.

He spat and glanced at the sky. “Well, where are they?”

“Down on the beach. We were lying in the sun. Mr. Jeffries was shooting at floating cans. My wife took the rifle. She shot Mrs. Jeffries in the head from close range. She aimed at Mr. Jeffries. He ran. She hit him and knocked him down and shot him again. I got the gun away from her. She’s been... acting strange lately.”

We walked toward the road and the beach. Two other cars had pulled up beside the road. People had gotten out. They saw where we were heading and they began to drift in the same direction.

“Killed ’em both, eh?” he said.

“Killed Mrs. Jeffries. Maybe Mr. Jeffries was only seriously wounded. But I think he was dead.”

“Didn’t you look?”

“No. I... I should have. But I was shocked. I went after help.”

We stood on top of the sand rise and looked down at the beach. From that distance and that angle, Stella could have been sunbathing. I could see the dark glasses on the corner of her towel, see the glint of her lotion bottle in the sun. My blanket was spread out beside her body.

And that was all. Jeff’s body was gone. Linda was gone. I couldn’t understand it. I had all sorts of crazy conjectures. Linda had drowned herself. Jeff had crawled up to the cottage somehow.

We walked down toward the body. I forced myself to look at it. When I saw the sharp circling of the flies I looked away.

“Where’s the other body?” Matthews asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe he wasn’t as badly hurt as I thought.”

“Where was he?”

“Right there,” I said. “Right about there.” I pointed. I walked over with him. He sat on his heels and looked at the sand. He stood up.

Six people had moved down to within twenty feet of the body. They were all staring at the body. “Git back, dammit. Git back!” Matthews bawled. They all moved back a half-step, still staring. He strode over angrily, snatched up my balled towel, snapped it out and spread it with surprising delicacy over Stella’s broken head.

I looked at the sand. Hot dry sand takes no tracks. The sand spills loosely into any depression. A bare foot makes a depression indistinguishable from that made by a shod foot. I searched the water, far out, looking for a head. I looked north along the deserted beach, and south to the headland. The wide beach was empty. Terns dipped and laughed.

“Where’d she stand?” Matthews asked me.

I stood where Linda had stood. With my towel across Stella’s face, I could bear to look at her. It was a dark maroon towel. I remembered when Linda had bought the set. They had been on sale. I saw a small white diamond scar on Stella’s slack knee. The body bears the marks of life. A wound from skating, or a bold venture in a playground swing. Tears and comfortings, and a scab to go almost too tritely with the braces on her teeth. I tore my mind away from such imaginings.

Matthews squatted beside the cartridge case which had been ejected after Linda had shot Stella. He regarded it somberly, sighed and stood up and spat again.

“I’ll go look in the cottages,” I said.

“We’ll both go.” Now there were eight people standing around. I had not seen the other two arrive. Matthews bullied them back and then said, “You, Fletch.” A fat man in torn khaki pants nodded. “Keep ’em all back, will you? Don’t let ’em stomp around none.”

We went up to the cottages. Another car was stopping. The people got out and glanced at us and then hurried down to the beach. We went in our cottage first. It was empty. It felt empty. Our footsteps were loud. We looked in the other one. It was just as empty. We went in back and looked at the dock.

“What does Dooley get a month for these, this time of year?” he asked.

“A hundred and fifty apiece.”

“Hmmm,” he said softly. “You all friends to these Jeffries long?”

“About a year.”

“Drive down together?”

“My wife and I drove. The Jeffries flew down. Got here two days after we did.”

“Who owns the weapon?”

“Jeffries did.”

“Bring that on the plane?”

“No. We brought their bulky stuff down in the car. It’s his car, actually. He was going to drive it back and we were going to fly, leaving Saturday.”

“Sort of changes all your plans.”

“Yes,” I said. “It does.”

“Know why she up and shot them?”

“I haven’t any idea. She’s sick, I think.”

“Any medical history of being sick like that?”

“No. None. But I guess nearly anybody can go off the deep end.”

“We better get back on the beach before somebody gets the idea of looking under that towel.”

I counted fifteen people on the beach. Two small boys had lost interest. They were up the beach, excavating a sand crab.

Matthews herded the others back. He sat tirelessly on his heels, quite near the body. He had picked up a small white shell. He flipped it up and caught it, flipped it up and caught it.

“I’ll walk on down the beach and look,” I said. “You stay right here. Sheriff should be here by now.” Sheriff Vernon was a sick-looking man. He was heavy, short of breath, and his face was sweaty gray. Four men followed him, two of them in the uniform of the county road patrol. He shouldered through the crowd, turned on them and said, “Back!”

They moved back a few feet. “Back to the road,” he said. “All the way. All of you. Whoever belongs to those kids, get them back too.” His voice was like a whip. The spectators moved back sullenly, but they moved back all the way. They stood on the high mound this side of the road, outlined against the sky, watching us.

“Doc show yet?” he asked Matthews.

“Not yet.”

Vernon grunted as he stooped and lifted a corner of the towel. He looked for long seconds and dropped it again. He straightened up, glanced at me and said to Matthews, “Well?”

“This here man is named Paul Cowley. He and his wife was taking their vacation together with the Jeffries in those two cottages Dooley built. He says his wife...”

I stopped listening. I looked to the north again, and then to the south. As I looked to the south I saw two small figures in the distance come around the headland, walking toward us, walking side by side, a man and a woman.

“Somebody coming now,” Matthews said.

We all looked toward the two figures. They both began to hurry toward us. I recognized Jeff and Linda. Jeff carried a fishing rod. He began to run toward us, outdistancing Linda. I stared at him incredulously. He slowed down as he came up to the group, his face harsh with strain.

“What’s happened?” he demanded. “Paul, what’s the matter?”

He saw her then, beyond us. He dropped the rod and reel into the sand and plunged toward her. He fell to his knees, reached toward the towel, hesitated and then took it off. Linda had reached the group. She screamed. I turned sharply toward her as she screamed and saw the stringer drop to the sand. There were three plump sheepshead on the stringer with their gay wide black and white stripes. They began to flap around in the sand.

“What happened to her?” Jeff asked in a toneless, mechanical voice. “What did that to Stella?”

Someone took the towel from him and covered her face again. The people were moving down onto the beach again.

“She was shot in the head,” Vernon said brutally.

Jeff stared at me. “Paul... It was an accident. Wasn’t it an accident, Paul? Paul!”

He got to his feet. My mouth worked but I could not say anything. I took a step back. Linda made a sick sound in her throat, took a ragged step to the right and crumpled to the sand. Jeff came at me. His hard fist hit under my ear and knocked me sprawling. People were yelling. I was dazed. He fell on me and his hard hands closed on my throat. I grabbed his wrists and tried to pull his hands loose. He was grunting with effort. They pulled him away. I sat up, coughing and massaging my throat. Four men were clinging to Jeff’s big arms. He wrenched and plunged, trying to tear free. I coughed and swallowed. My throat felt as though it was full of sand. A man had rolled Linda onto her back. He knelt beside her, massaging her wrist, watching Jeff warily.

Suddenly the fight went out of Jeff. “All right,” he said woodenly. “All right, you can let go.”

They released him tentatively, ready to grab again, but when he just stood there, they stepped back. “Just what in the purified hell is going on here?” Sheriff Vernon demanded bitterly. I got slowly to my feet. The whole left side of my face ached where I had been hit.

Jeff looked out toward the Gulf, his face bitter. “I guess I can tell you,” he said. “Cowley has been pestering my wife for the last two weeks. Making a fool of himself. Making clumsy passes. Stell was amused at first. I told him to lay off. He said he would, but as soon as he had a drink he’d start again. We threatened to leave. Linda — Mrs. Cowley, begged us to stay. He was better yesterday and this morning. I was going to go fishing. Linda wanted to come too. Stell said she’d stay. Cowley borrowed my rifle to do some target shooting, he said. He probably started the same old routine and Stell got annoyed. I felt uneasy leaving the two of them here. I should have come back.”

I stared at him. It was like being in a nightmare. They were all looking at me. A man in uniform had eased around behind me. Linda was sitting up, looking at me with completely phony sadness.

I am positive that I looked the picture of shame and guilt. My voice was too shrill. “It wasn’t that way! It wasn’t that way at all! It was you, Linda, running around with Jeff. You shot her, Linda. I saw you shoot her and you shot Jeff too.”

He stared at me. “Linda shot her! Linda’s been with me for the last hour and a half. She caught two of those three fish. And you say Linda shot me, Cowley? Where? Show me where I’m shot.”

Linda came up to me. She put her hands on my forearm. Her fingers were cold. She looked into my eyes. Her mouth was sad. I thought I could see little glints of triumph and amusement deep in her eyes. She looked sedate, respectable, in her severe swim suit. “Please, darling,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Please be calm, dear.”

I hit her across her lying mouth, splitting her lips and knocking her down. They jumped me. They roughed me up and handcuffed me to a man in uniform. They hustled me up to the car. Two men were getting out of a tan ambulance. A man with a black bag glanced at us and walked down toward the beach. They put me in the back seat of one of the official cars. They drove me away from there. They spun the wheels on the sand, and screamed the tires when they were on concrete.

Bosworth, the county seat of Semulla County, was eighteen miles further south. I was officially charged with suspicion of murder, photographed, fingerprinted. I was still, incongruously, in swimming trunks, barefooted. There were no pocket items to be surrendered. They gave me a pair of gray twill coveralls much too large for me. They were clean and stiff and smelled of medicinal disinfectant. I rolled up the cuffs and turned back the sleeves. I gave my age, name, address, height, weight, date and place of birth and told them, when questioned, that I had no prior arrests or convictions. I felt as if it was all taking place behind thick glass. I watched through the glass. I could see lips move, but I could not hear clearly.

They walked me down a long hall with a cold tile floor. I could look through open doors and see girls in light blouses working at oak desks. My bare feet padded on the floor. People in the halls glanced at me with casual, knowing curiosity. They took me into a small room with a big table, five chairs, two barred windows. They pushed me into a chair. Stay there, they said.

They left a fat young man with a red face with me. He wore gray pants, a white mesh sports shirt, a black pistol belt. He sat on the table, swinging his legs, working a kitchen match back and forth from one corner of his mouth to the other.

Now I saw how all the parts went together. Nothing had made sense until the final act, and then it was all clear. I could enumerate all the little pieces which blended so carefully. Obviously, after we had gotten to know the Jeffries, Linda had met him clandestinely. Others too, perhaps. But I did not want to think about that. This was her big chance. What they had stolen had not been enough for them. They had to have everything. Everything in the world.

I remembered her strained silence on the way down. After she had heard the Carbonellis’ description of Verano Key, of how deserted it was out of season, she had decided on it as the perfect scene for the crime to be.

After talking it over with Jeff, she had brought it up casually while we played bridge. Jeff, according to plan, had become enthusiastic. Thus they had trapped the two of us. He had brought the gun. I remembered that it was a new one. They had spent hours alone together on the key while Stella was still alive, planning, practicing, rehearsing. Knowing they had to be alone to plan, they — or Linda — had taken the boldest way. They were confident that their two white mice wouldn’t escape from the trap.

All the parts fitted. His coaching her in the use of the rifle: her aim had to be good to miss him convincingly. She knew I wouldn’t go and examine him. She remembered the cat.

The people in Hooker would remember the times I had come in alone with Stella. They had even made certain of that.

Even the live fish. Sheepshead are durable. They will live overnight on a stringer in the water. Jeff had gone fishing alone, yesterday, on the bay side. I had seen him catching fiddler crabs for bait on the muddy bay beach. I had not seen him return. Obviously he had caught three fish, fastened his stringer to a low mangrove branch, hidden the rod and reel, sauntered back. Three live fish — that was a touch of art, nearly of genius.

They had known I would take the rifle away from her.

I wondered how many times they had gone over their lines. Perhaps the size of the audience surprised them a bit. Their act had not run true — not to me. But it had sounded right to the others. I could see that.

Linda had not rehearsed being sick. Perhaps that is the single thing in all of it that truly came as a surprise to her. How carefully she must have searched the beach, before turning the gun on Stella. Through the telescopic sight the hair lines would cross on that fair hair. How long did she hesitate before she pulled the trigger? Or did she hesitate not at all, while Jeff, jaw muscles bulging, body tense, sat and looked out into the Gulf, awaiting the snapping sound of the shot which would eliminate this wife who liked to live simply. Which would release him into a new world where the money was his own and the cat’s-paw woman he had used to obtain the money would also be his.

It had been easy to anticipate what the Cowley fool would do. As soon as the car went down the road they would hurry down the beach and cross over to the bay side where Jeff had concealed the fish and equipment. Perhaps he came, unseen, to a place where he could watch the beach so that their timing would be perfect — as perfect as it was. His attack on me had been planned, and wholeheartedly murderous. It was a release for his tension, and a chance to look good in the eyes of the law, so he had been enthusiastic.

I wondered what he thought as he looked at the dead face of his wife. Triumph? Sadness? A gnawing premonition that maybe it would all go wrong?

There was no point in thinking about it. The red-faced man glanced at me. His eyes were mild, good-tempered, speculative. “A nice mess,” he said softly.

“Can I have a cigarette, please?”

He slid a pack of matches along the table to me. “Keep the deck,” he said.

I lit a cigarette gratefully. “I should have a lawyer,” I said. I was surprised that my voice was so calm.

“It might help,” he said. Help was pronounced he’p.

“You live here. Could you recommend somebody?”

“Lots of times for bad trouble they get somebody all the way out from Tampa. Some good criminal boys up there. Me, I say Journeyman right here at home is good as any imports. A fighter, that boy.”

“Could I phone him?”

“They’ll let you know as to when you can use a phone, mister.”

“What’s going to happen next?”

“Well, I sort of imagine Vernon will get the reports together and get hold of Carl Shepp — he’s the county prosecutor — and then they’ll take statements from your wife and the Jeffries fellow, and then they’ll likely as not drop in here and have a chat with you.”

“I don’t have to talk without a lawyer, do I?”

“You don’t rightly have to.”

At two-thirty they brought me a fried egg sandwich and a coke. I was able to eat only half the sandwich. My red-faced guard ate the other half. At three they came trooping solemnly in, Vernon, a pimply female stenographer, a tall white-haired man who looked like a political poster, and a young man in a pink sports shirt with tanned powerful forearms, a face like a block of carved wood, alert eyes. Vernon glanced at me with bored professional distaste. The pimply girl stared with avid awe. The politico looked at me from stern and lofty heights of great principle. The husky young man looked at me with an alive, interested curiosity in his deep-set gray eyes.

They took chairs and Vernon said, “Cowley, this is Mr. Carl Shepp, the county prosecutor, and this is his assistant, Mr. David Hill,” Vernon opened a folder in front of him and said, “Now we got to ask you some questions for the record. Anything you say may be used in evidence against you.”

“May I have an attorney present, please?”

“That’s your right,” he said reluctantly. “We’ll adjourn this session until you can locate an attorney and confer with him, Cowley.”

“I don’t want to confer with him in advance. I’d just as soon answer anything you ask. I just want him to be here so he can hear what’s said.”

“Roose,” he said to my red-faced guard, who was standing by the door. “There’s a list in my office of all the lawyers practicing in this area. Get it and—”

“I’d prefer a man named Journeyman,” I said.

Vernon gave Roose a look of disgusted malice. “All mouth, eh? Well, phone your pal Journeyman and get him over here.”

While we waited, Vernon and Shepp sat close together and looked at the folder. Vernon turned the pages. From time to time they would whisper to each other.

His name was Calvin Journeyman, and he came into the room at a full lope. The other men wore sports shirts in concession to the thick heat. Journeyman wore a rusty black suit and a pale yellow bow tie. The suit did not fit him well. Perhaps no suit could have fit him well. He had a small torso and great long spidery arms and legs. He had black hair combed straight back, a knobbly red face, and at least a full inch of sloping forehead. His eyes were the milky blue of skim milk. They flicked from face to face, came to rest on me.

“Don’t let ’em lean on you, Paul,” he said. “Why’nt you folks clear out in the hall a minute, let me talk to my client?”

“I’m willing to answer anything they want to ask without any previous instructions,” I said.

“Go rassle another chair in here, Roose,” he said to the guard. He frowned at me. “Don’t like anybody to start off not taking legal advice. Anyway, we’ve got nothing to hide, like you say, so let it roll, Vern.”

The chair was brought and he leaned back, lean fists under his chin, eyes busy. First they had me tell the story in my own words. Then Vernon took me back over it, point by point.

“You saw the shadow of the gun barrel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What did you see when you looked back?”

“I saw Linda aiming the rifle at Stella’s head.”

“Did the dead woman have her eyes shut?”

“Yes. She was on her back. The sun was bright.”

“How far was the muzzle from the dead woman’s head?”

“Five feet, perhaps. Maybe a little less.”

“Did you give her cause — jealousy — to kill Mrs. Jeffries?”

“No. I told you that it was Jeff and Linda who—”

“All right. Are you familiar with that rifle?”

“Yes, sir. I’ve fired it at cans. I’m not a good shot.”

“How many times have you driven to Hooker with Mrs. Jeffries?”

“Five or six times.”

“Ever go into a place called the Crow’s Nest with her?”

“Yes, sir. To kill time while the car was being greased.”

“Did she cry while she was in there with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What made her cry?”

“Well, she was upset about the way Jeff and Linda were carrying on. It was spoiling our—”

“All right. Did you on the night of October thirtieth see Mrs. Jeffries walking alone on the beach and leave the porch of your cottage and go and catch up with her and make improper advances to her?”

“No, sir.”

“Did you not insist that the Jeffries take their vacation at the same time and in the same place, and do all the planning therefore?”

“No, sir. Jeffries wrote to Mr. Dooley and sent him the check and all.”

“Did he not do that at your request?”

“No, sir.”

The questions went on in that vein, on and on. And at last they ended. Vernon looked at me. He looked at the stenographer. “Don’t take this down, honey. Cowley, you look bright enough. Just how in the hell do you expect to sell intelligent people a yarn like you dreamed up? I was there. I saw Jeffries’ reaction. I saw your wife’s reaction. I saw the way you looked. I know the way you acted when you went into the market there at Hooker. I’ve talked to your wife. She’s a fine girl and you’ve broken her heart. I talked to Jeffries. He’s just plain stunned by what you did. And you can still sit there and lie to us the way you do and keep a straight face. It isn’t even a good lie. God help you.”

Journeyman drawled, “You’re yappin’ at my client, Vern. Beats me the way you think you can tell people are lying. I remember three weeks ago Saturday you folding three eights because you thought I wasn’t lying about my flush. It’s as plain as the nose on your face those two smart operators have set my client up in a bind. Jeffries gets the money and gets this boy’s wife too. Know any stronger motives than that? Lord, a man doesn’t kill off a little honeybear just ’cause he can’t get aholt of it, does he?”

“Gentlemen, I hardly think we’re trying this case here,” Carl Shepp said ponderously. He stood up. “Vern, I’d appreciate your cleaning up those other details we mentioned and bringing the file over to my office in the morning. Dave and I will go over it and make a recommendation as to the specific charge.”

They moved me to a cell. It was surprisingly large and clean, with heavy steel casement windows, a bed and chair bolted to the floor, a sink and toilet, a steel shelf for personal possessions. Journeyman followed me in. The door was slammed shut and locked and Journeyman was told to sing out when he wanted out.

I lay on the bed. I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired. It felt good to get my bare feet off the cold floors. Journeyman went over and looked out the window, hands in his hip pockets, black suit jacket hiked up.

“If you got two dollars or two million, you get the same effort from Journeyman,” he said. “But it’s nice to know. What have you got?”

“I make eight thousand. I’ve got at least seven thousand equity in a house, a car worth about five hundred and about twenty-one hundred savings.”

He came over and stood by the bed and looked down at me. “Paul, did you kill that woman? Now don’t answer right away. What would happen if lawyers in this country didn’t defend guilty folk? Whole judicial system would go to smash. I’ve seen a hell of a lot. If you killed her, it won’t prejudice me against you, boy.”

“I didn’t kill her. If I had, I’d tell you. It happened exactly the way I told them downstairs.”

“That story is no damn good,” he said.

“It’s the truth. It has to be good.”

“Being the truth doesn’t make it good. Being the truth doesn’t make it useful. That’s the damnedest sorriest story I ever heard. I can’t take a thing like that into court. You want to get out of this or don’t you?”

“I want to get out of it.”

“All right, then. Anything else we could use. The gun jammed. You were trying to free it. It was pointed at her head. You’ve been scared so bad you’ve been lying ever since.”

“No,” I said.

“Everything went black and when you woke up, there she was.”

“No.”

“It was a suicide pact and you lost your nerve.”

I got up off the bed. I’ve always been mild. I didn’t feel mild then. I don’t think I’ve ever talked louder to a human being. “No! None of that stuff. Because you know what it means? It might possibly get me in the clear, or a short sentence or something, but it gets the two of them all the way in the clear. Can’t you understand that? They plotted it and did it and they want to get way with it. If I get clear I’ll have to go after them and kill both of them. If I get a short sentence it will be the same. They thought I was a damn white mouse. I’m not. The only thing I’ll go into court with will be the truth, and if you don’t want to take the case, somebody else will.”

He waited a long time, until I had cooled down. “You just better think it over, Paul. Stick with this and the whole sovereign state of Florida is going to fall on your head like it fell off a cliff.”

“So I can’t—”

“Shut up. Your story is so wild they’re going to bring down some people to give you some tests and make sure you’re sane enough to try. Do you want to save yourself, or do you want to be some kind of martyr. Don’t answer now. Think it over. I’ve got some checking to do. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”

After he left and I was alone I knew that he was both right and wrong. Right in that it was my testimony against theirs, and I was the introvert. They were the extroverts. On the stand I would sweat and stammer and shake, and should I say the sun would rise tomorrow, it would sound like a lie. Jeffries, rugged, clean-cut, saddened, manly, would convince them. I knew in advance how Linda would be. As my wife she could not be forced to testify against me. But she could volunteer her testimony. She would try to make it look as though she were standing by me. And would damn me, while she smiled sadly.

I wondered why I had not thought of all this before — of how justice and truth are so unpredictably subject to the stage presence of the accused. I knew that Linda and Jeff had thought of it.

Waking up from an illusion is always painful, and often something that takes a long time. My awakening from the illusion of Linda had been painful, but quick. It had happened in a fraction of a second, during that moment after her contrived faint when she put her hands on my arm and I had looked into her eyes. Living with evil does not make it more apparent. I could now look back over the years of Linda and see all the things that I had misinterpreted because I had looked at them through the distorting glass of my own gratitude to her.

That night it was a long time before I could get to sleep.

After the morning meal I was told that Linda had come to visit me and had brought things for me. My first impulse was to tell them to have her leave the things and go. But I was curious about her, about how she would carry it off. Visiting me was something she had to do to preserve the illusion of the story the two of them had plotted.

She came with clothing over her arm, with cigarettes and magazines and the portable radio. She wore a plain dark dress and very little make-up. The jailer was very courtly with her.

“Now you can go right in, Mrs. Cowley, and I’ll be back in a half-hour. That’s all that’s allowed.”

I sat on the bed and watched her. “Dear, they told me you could have clothes, but no belt or shoelaces, so I brought the slacks that don’t need a belt, and your moccasins. Here’s the socks and underwear. I’ll just put them right here on this shelf. I guess the cigarettes and magazines can go here too.” She put the clothing on the bed beside me and sat down in the single chair, smiled briefly at me and dug into her purse for her own cigarettes.

“I’ve been talking to Mr. Journeyman, dear. The county is having two specialists come down from Tampa to examine you. They should be here this afternoon, they say. I think it’s for the best. You haven’t acted like yourself for months.”

“Keep right on. It’s almost amusing, Linda.”

“I’ve let everyone know, dear, that I’m going to stand by you no matter what you did. It was a terrible thing, but you were ill, dear. You didn’t know what you were doing. I’m not going to permit myself to be annoyed or hurt by the fantastic tale you’ve been telling them about me.”

I looked at her soft tan throat. I could reach it in two quick steps.

“I suppose Jeff is heartbroken,” I said.

“He’s had a terrible shock. The funeral will be on Saturday, in Hartford. We’ve both had a terrible time with the reporters. They’ve been so persistent.”

“But they got your story, of course.”

“You can’t just refuse to say anything,” she said, a bit smugly. “Jeff is leaving tonight with the body, by train. He’ll have to stay up there a little while. There are a lot of legal details, I understand.”

“The will, I suppose.”

“Yes, and the trust funds. That sort of thing. You’d understand more about that than I would, Paul.”

“Where are you staying?”

“I’m still at the cottage. The rent is paid so I might just as well stay there, don’t you think? Or would you rather have me here in town, dear?”

“You’re incredible, Linda. Incredible.”

“I’m only doing what I think is right,” she said. “They say that if these men from Tampa say you are sane, the trial will be in January. I think you ought to talk to Mr. Journeyman about our own financial arrangements, dear. He could probably arrange about having somebody up there put our house on the market and sell the car and so on. We’ll need money to fight this thing, dear, if they say you are sane.”

“Doesn’t it mean anything to you, Linda? Didn’t it change something inside of you, pulling that trigger and seeing what it did to her?”

She closed her eyes for a portion of a second. “Don’t be irrational, darling,” she said calmly.

“How long have you looked for the big chance? How many years? What made you think this was it? You’re a damn fool, Linda. Even if it works, it won’t really work, you know. He knows what you did. And that means he knows what you are. Maybe you can hold him for a little while, but the years are hardening and coarsening you, Linda. And your looks are the only thing to hold him with. You haven’t got anything else. You did the actual deed, not him. He’ll think about that more and more as time goes by. I suppose you plan to marry him. Maybe, right now, he’s thinking how foolish that would be. It wouldn’t give him anything he hasn’t already had. It would be a nice joke on you, Linda. You set him free, and he leaves you flat. You wouldn’t dare object. You wouldn’t dare open your mouth.”

She stood up abruptly. Her face was a mask. I saw that I had touched her. I saw the effort it took for her to relax again. Then she smiled. “Dear, you must get that fantasy out of your head. Poor Jeff. This tragedy has made him quite dependent on me.” She gave a subtle emphasis to the word “dependent.”

“You better go, Linda.”

She wouldn’t call the jailer. I yelled for him. He came, let her out. She turned in the open door and said, for his benefit, “Please try to get some sleep, darling. You’ll feel so much better if you get some sleep.”

I cursed her quietly and the jailer looked at me with pained indignation and slammed the cell door with clanging emphasis. When they were gone I undressed, washed at the sink, put on the fresh clothing. It felt good to have shoes on.

They took me to an office in the afternoon and gave me written and oral tests that lasted over two hours. A half-hour after I was back in the cell, Journeyman came in. He looked bitter. “You’re sane, all right. Know what you’ve got? A very stable personality and good intelligence.”

“What makes you so happy?” I asked him.

“All your prints they found on the gun. Plus some of Jeffries’ and some of your wife’s. But mostly yours. And Jeffries showed Vern where he and your wife caught the fish. Vern picked up four of her cigarette butts there, on the bank, with her lipstick on them. They fished in a hole near an old broken-down dock behind a mangrove point, so they weren’t seen by any of the boat traffic on the bay. It comes down to this, Paul. It’s your word against theirs. And a jury will believe them. Change your mind since yesterday?”

“No.”

He roamed around the cell, hands crammed in his pockets, head lowered, scuffing his feet, whistling tonelessly. He stopped and sighed. “Okay. I’ll do every damn thing I can. Shepp has decided to make a try for first degree. He’ll handle it himself. Voice like an organ. Makes them cry. Well, hell. We’ll do what we can.”

He said he would come back the next day and go over a lot of stuff in detail, and left.

David Hill arrived at eight o’clock. He wore a big briar pipe. He looked through the bars at me and said, “I’m the opposition, so you don’t have to talk to me, Cowley.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

He sat in the straight chair, thumbed his pipe, got it going again. “I’m a stranger here myself,” he said. “I came down three years ago. Used to practice in Michigan. Passed the Florida bar, set up here and got appointed as Shepp’s assistant. The doctors said my little girl would do better in this climate. Asthma. Ever play chess, Cowley?”

“No.”

“When your opponent launches an attack, you must watch the moves he makes and try to figure out what he has in mind. The most nonsensical-looking moves can sometimes conceal a very strong attack.”

“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

“We paid per diem to two men who confirmed what I’d already guessed. You’re intelligent, stable. I spent some more county funds today and talked to a man named Rufus Stick. I have a fair idea of what you’re like, Cowley. You are my opponent, let’s say, and I see you making a nonsensical move. In other words, your story of what happened on the beach. You stand up to stiff questioning, and they don’t trip you once. So I have two assumptions. One, you made up that story and went over it in your mind until you were letter perfect on it. Two, it was the truth. Now why would an opponent I know to be able, devise a story which practically means suicide? Answer: he wouldn’t. Conclusion: he told the truth. Next step, a closer look at the two other principals. How did you meet your wife, Cowley?”

I told him everything I could remember about her, and everything I knew about Brandon Jeffries. From time to time he wrote things down in a small notebook. It took a long time.

When at last he stood up to go I said, “It is the truth, you know.”

He looked into his dead pipe. “I think it is, Cowley. I’ll wire Jeffries to be back for the inquest. He was told his statement would be enough. I’ll get him back here.”

“What will you do?”

“I don’t know yet.” He looked at me and his face changed. “If your story is true, it’s the coldest, most brutal, most callous murder I’ve ever heard of.”

Journeyman was in the next day and we worked for three hours. Linda came the next day with more cigarettes and reading matter. I refused to see her and the jailer sullenly brought me the things she had purchased. This was Saturday, the day we were to have left, the day they were lowering the body of Stella Jeffries into the ancient soil of Connecticut. No one came to see me on Sunday. I had read everything at hand. It was a long day.

David Hill, complete with pipe, came at noon on Monday. He seemed ill at ease, as though he had to bring up something unpleasant. When he finally brought it up, it was not as unpleasant as it would have seemed a week before. It was about Linda.

“It’s a good firm,” he said. “We used to use them when I was in Michigan. They have an office in Los Angeles and they have a big staff, so things move fast. I had to use my own money for this.”

“I’ll pay you back, of course.”

“Her name was still Willestone when she went out there. She went out there with a married man. He left her. She was calling herself Mrs. Brady when you met her again. Mrs. Julius Brady, you said. There is no marriage record. She lived in San Bernardino with a petty gambler named Julius Brady for a while. He cheated some soldiers at Camp Anza and was sent up. There’s a blank, and then she turned up in Bakersfield, calling herself Linda Brady. She was sentenced twice there, thirty-day terms, for soliciting. She moved up to Los Angeles and was picked up in the company of a man wanted on suspicion of armed robbery. They found she was sick and committed her to the county hospital until she was well. Then she was warned to leave the city. That was about three months before you met her on the street. It... it isn’t pretty, Cowley.”

I thought of how she had been, years ago. I looked beyond Hill. “In school,” I said softly, “she was the prettiest, and the best. Life was going to give her all the wonderful things. You could see that, just looking at her.”

“Maybe she thought so too,” Hill said. “Life didn’t give them to her and she tried to take them, and her methods were wrong, and she got licked, beaten down. Then you picked her up and brushed her off. This time she waited for the long chance. The big chance.”

“This time maybe she’s made it.”

“I don’t think so. I don’t think so at all.”

“How about Jeffries?”

“Nothing on him. Orphaned. Brought up by an aunt. Never much money. Good athlete. He was working on a cruise ship — something to do with games and recreation — when he met his wife. She steered him into sales, and he did well. Her people objected at first, but finally came around. He’ll be back tonight. He’s flying in. I’ve wangled a delay on the inquest.”

“Why? What can you do?”

“I don’t know. They both know they’ll hang together if anybody slips. They’ll be careful. I’ve gone over it a hundred times. They did a good job. There aren’t any loose ends. You said you don’t play chess, didn’t you?”

“I don’t.”

“Sometimes you see an attack shaping up. It’s flawless. If you make all the expected moves, you’re going to be slowly and inevitably defeated. So you don’t make the expected moves. You make a wild move. It’s meaningless. But they don’t know positively that it’s meaningless. So they have to guard against the unknown. Sometimes it can put a strong attack off balance, just enough.”

After he left I thought about what he had said. Though I didn’t understand how it worked on a chess board, I thought I knew how it worked in life. I could even relate it, in a small way, to my own experiences.

They had the plot and the plan and the program. They were the ones — Linda and Jeff — who had moved. I was the one who was being whirled down the careful channel they had dug to the inevitable destination they had planned for me. I paced for a time and then I sat down and made a careful evaluation of my actions. What did they expect me to do? Obviously, I was expected to sit in this cell and insist that my story was the true one, and so instruct my lawyer, and wait calmly for a trial that would end me.

Just so long as I kept to the pattern, they would feel calm. Should there be any deviation from the pattern, they would begin to feel uneasy.

I wondered how I could deviate from the pattern. The most obvious idea was to escape. I discarded that at once. It was idiotic. Meaningless.

Yet David Hill had spoken of the meaningless move. And how the opponent must guard against the unknown. Purely as an intellectual game, it would hurt nothing to think of escape. It startled me a little to find that I could contemplate it even as a game. Linda had indeed changed me.

I knew that my cell was on the top floor. There were two cells to the left of the guardroom, of which this was one. The other was empty. Beyond the guardroom, on the other end of the corridor, were a drunk tank and a row of smaller cells. There were three stories and a basement. No elevators. To reach the stairs it would be necessary to go through the guardroom. I had no idea of who might be in there, or even if there was always somebody there. My radio was plugged in. I turned it up higher and examined the windows. They were casement windows worked by interior cranks. The mesh screen inside was heavy. They would open only so far, not far enough to squeeze through, even if I could cut the heavy screening. And the panes were small.

It had to be through the door, if at all. My mind moves somewhat ponderously, but with logic. I could not see myself going out armed, cowing the guards. They would not let me walk out, at least not as Paul Cowley, slayer. I would either have to be someone else, or invisible. Disguising myself presented almost insurmountable difficulties. I put that line of thought aside and addressed myself to the problem of the cell door.

In spite of the massive look of the door, the lock did not seem impressive. The jailer used two keys to open the door. One unlocked a flap arrangement which covered the second keyhole, thus preventing the prisoner from reaching through the bars and trying to pick the main lock. When he closed the cell door, the main lock snapped into place, and then he used his key just for the outer flap arrangement. The door fitted closely, but in the small crack I could see the brass gleam of the metal that engaged the slot in the steel frame. Each time he pulled the door shut, he would give it a shake to test it.

It was not until an hour after darkness that I had the vague stirring of an idea of how to cheat the lock. As it was a spring lock, I suspected that the force which held the brass portion in the slot was not great. It would resist great lateral force, of course, but if it could be pushed from behind...

At breakfast on Tuesday I was able to get a better look at the mechanism. During the morning, by sliding a piece of paper down the crack, I was able to get an accurate idea of the dimensions of the orifice in the steel frame. Later in the afternoon, after another discouraging visit from Journeyman, I took the back off the portable radio. I had to use one prong of the plug as a screwdriver. It would not fit the screw heads until I had rubbed it to a smaller dimension on the rough wall. I disabled the radio, taking out what I decided I needed — one short length of tough wire, a longer length of flexible wire. To break the tough wire to the length I wanted, I had to hold it in my teeth and wind it around and around until it snapped. I bent the short length into a U with square corners, the approximate size of the lock orifice. I knew the bolt was loose in the orifice by the way it chattered when the jailer tested the door each time. It took a long time to fasten the longer, more flexible wire to the small piece. I had removed a small thin plate from the interior of the radio. I put the back on.

During the afternoon I opened the back of the toilet, removed the rubber valve stop and gouged a small piece off it. I heated it with my matches, and when it bubbled and was sticky, I smeared it liberally on the small U-shaped piece of wire. An hour later it was still satisfactorily sticky to the touch. I managed with great difficulty to separate a six-inch piece of the rubber plug-in cord of the radio and peel back the insulation on both ends.

I was ready then, though not yet committed. It had seemed merely an interesting problem in mechanics. My uncommunicative jailer would visit me for the last time when he came to take away the dinner plate and spoon. Usually I passed them between the bars after, at his orders, scraping what I didn’t eat into the toilet.

I left the moment of decision until the very last moment. I even reached for the plate and spoon and then slumped back on the bed. He yelled at me in irritation and then came in. I moved slowly toward the cell door. My right hand was in front of me. I slipped the U-shaped bit of wire into the orifice and pressed it in tightly just as he yelled at me. I turned back and he told me to stay away from the door. I was certain he would see the length of flexible wire that hung down from the U-shaped piece. But he was too angry to be observant.

He clashed the door shut, mumbling. He went away and I let out a deep breath. After the guardroom door closed, I fished the hanging piece of wire out with a scrap of paper. When I held it in my hand, I had in effect a line fastened to a hook, with the hook firmly around the bolt. I held the thin plate in my left hand, the wire in my right. I exerted a steady pressure. The bolt slid easily back. I slipped the plate in quickly. The wire pulled free. The bolt spring held the plate in place. The door was unlocked. I stretched out. If any visitor had come, I would have had to snatch the plate out. The bolt would have clicked into place, and I would have had it to do over again. But no one came. The darkness came slowly. I waited until midnight. By pressing my cheek against the bars I could see the strip of light under the guardroom door. I had heard no rumble of conversation in a long time. The odds were that only one man was in the room.

I took the six-inch piece of insulated wire and shorted out the wall plug. Had the guardroom been on a different circuit, I would have had to start over again with another plan. I ran to the door and looked again. The strip of light was gone. I opened the cell door, catching the plate before it could fall. I closed the cell door and the lock clicked into place. The wire I had used was in my pocket.

I hurried silently up the dark hall. The guardroom door Opened inward onto the corridor, I remembered. I flattened myself against the wall beside the door. I heard somebody kick a chair in the darkness and curse. I saw a flickering light under the door. I had expected to feel shaken, jittery. I felt absolutely cold, and absolutely certain of myself.

The door opened suddenly, swinging back and snubbing against the toe of my moccasin. The night jailer walked grumbling along the corridor, shielding a match flame. Ten feet beyond me the match went out. I went through the dark doorway and turned to the right, crossed the small room cautiously, found the knob and opened the door to the main corridor. There was a light at the far end. The staircase was shadowy. I went down as quietly as I could. On the main floor I could hear someone typing. I went in the opposite direction. I found an unlocked door and went in. Streetlights outside illuminated the orderly rows of desks and filing cabinets. I slid one of the big windows open. It made a great deal of noise. It was a six-foot drop into shrubbery. I landed and hit my chin on my knee, biting my lip until it bled. I ran across the midnight expanse of the courthouse lawn, keeping to the shadow. I thought I could hear hoarse yelling behind me. I stopped, oriented myself, and turned north.

Every time a car passed, I moved back onto dark lawns, crouching behind bushes. I heard a siren, back where I had come from. I felt slightly hysterical suddenly and made a grotesque giggling sound. This could not be Paul Cowley, that bold slayer of crab grass, that desperate man who always says pardon me when you step on his foot, that desperado of the cellar workshop, that pirate of the purchasing section. The siren faded and then I heard it again, further away.

Hill had indirectly recommended a senseless move. I had really made one.

At the north edge of town I came upon a rustic bar set back from the road. Local cars were thick around it. I moved in on the cars in shadow and felt through open windows for ignition keys. A girl spoke, quite near at hand, and a man answered her. I crouched down. I realized, after a moment, that they were in a parked car, and only luck had kept them from seeing me. I wanted to be out of sight. I found a pickup truck. I crawled cautiously into the back, found a tarp and pulled it over me. The tarp smelled of ancient fish.

It was at least a half-hour before people got into the truck. Two young boys, I judged. They backed out briskly. I held my breath. They turned north. The road was smooth and they drove fast. The wind whistled, tugged at the corners of the tarp. I tried to make an estimate of the miles. Suddenly the truck began to slow down. I risked looking. The truck was slowing down to turn into a driveway out in the country. A single light was on in a house set back under the pines. I thrust the tarp aside and, as the truck made the turn, I vaulted out into the wide shallow ditch and fell headlong. I rolled onto my back and looked at the stars. Mosquitoes whined around my ears. A truck rumbled by. When I looked again the house light was out. I got up and began to walk north. I walked spiritlessly, forcing myself. I was one of those children’s toys powered by a coil spring. The spring had been wound up tightly, and now all the force was gone.

I had never done anything remotely like this. Perhaps I had assumed that I would be like men I had read about, tireless because of their anger and desperation. But I wanted to lie down in the ditch, or flag a car headed south. My feet hurt and I felt cross and tired. My bites itched. I plodded along through the night, feeling dulled and purposeless. For back of me I heard the thin lost whine of a siren, coming closer. I walked as before, telling myself I didn’t give a damn.

Then unexpected fear made me come alive. I plunged across the ditch and tripped and fell flat. I rolled into deeper shelter. The siren, on a high sustained note, screamed by and faded into the north. This could not possibly be me, this man who hid like an animal and heard, in the stillness, the quick hard beating of his own heart. That other Paul Cowley could never do this. Yet maybe he had ceased to exist when the finger had pulled the trigger. Perhaps the ridiculously small lead pellet had killed him as expertly as it had killed all that was Stella Jeffries.

I had no watch. I guessed it could be nearly four when I reached the turnoff to Verano Key. My eyes had adjusted to the night. I walked a half-mile down the sand road to the old wooden bridge. I stopped and listened. I could hear no far-off sound of a car. I did not want to be caught on the bridge. I ran across and turned into coarse grass and crouched on one knee, listening again. Far down the bay I could see the Coleman lights of the commercial fishermen spreading gill nets for mullet. Linda would be a mile down the key. I wondered if she slept calmly, quietly, without regret or conscience.

I trudged down the key road. From time to time I could see the night Gulf, inky under the sky, with a starlit paleness where small waves broke on the even paler sand. A shell worked its way into my left moccasin and I took it off, dumped the sand out of it. I realized that I was walking more slowly. I had no idea what to do once I arrived at the cottage.

I saw headlights ahead of me, rounding a bend in the sand road. I ran up over the sand bank to my right and stretched out. The car lurched by. It had a noisy motor, and I heard gear clattering on metal. I went back up onto the road. Finally I knew I was close. I rounded the last bend and I could see the two cottages. There were lights on in the near one, the Jeffries cottage. I stood for a moment, then turned abruptly to the left, forcing my way through the heavy jungly growth. The footing was bad, at places it was so thick I could not force my way through and had to detour. I moved as quietly as I could. I worked my way with difficulty over the tangle of mangrove roots near the water line. The bay stretched back in front of me, stars quivering on the surface of it. I stepped slowly into the warm water, moved out until I was five or six feet from the overgrown shore line. My shoes sank deeply into the mud with each cautious step.

A glitter and splash close at hand stopped me in my tracks, heart thumping. A fish had jumped. The spreading ripples made the star reflections dance. Far off I heard the commercial fishermen beating on the wooden sides of the boats, to frighten the encircled school into darting into the gill nets.

After about two hundred feet of cautious progress I saw the cottage lights on the water, making the dock visible to me. I stopped in the shadows and wondered how I could get closer. The far side of the dock was in darkness. I waded slowly out until the water was up to my chest. I lowered myself, swam with a noiseless side stroke, rounding the far end of the dock. I came in, in the darkness, until my knee struck bottom. I crawled, dripping, keeping below the level of the dock. I reached the overturned boat. I lay beside it on my back, got my arms braced and tilted it up. I eased under it, let it down slowly. The upcurve of the bow rested against the ground, so that there were two or three inches of free space on either side of me.

As I had worked at the boat, I had heard voices. Now I stretched out, waited until my breath quieted and then tried to listen. I could make out the timbre of Linda’s voice, but no word that she said. There were two men. I knew I could not risk trying to get closer.

Suddenly I heard the brisk slap of a screen door and realized they had been talking on the front porch of the Jeffries cottage. I recognized the voice of the man called Dike Matthews as he said, raising his voice a bit, “Like I said, there’s no need to get the jitters about it. He hasn’t got a gun, and you look like you could handle him, Mr. Jeffries. Besides, I don’t figure he’d head for here. What would be the point? Unless he’s nuts like some folks think, in spite of what those fancy doctors said. I suspect you can go on back to sleep and not give it another thought. We got the state boys co-operating and road blocks out, and by first light they ought to pick him up.”

“You’ll let us know,” Linda said. I realized she had moved out into the yard too. There was tension in her voice.

“Sure. We’ll let you know.”

“We’ll come on in the morning,” Jeff said.

“Folks down there’d give a lot to know how he got the hell out of a locked cell. The lock works fine. They been testing it and scratching their heads.”

“He was always clever with his hands,” Linda said. It gave me a strange feeling to hear her speak of me in the past tense. As if what they plotted for me had already happened. As if I were dead — a man she had once been married to.

A starter whined and the car motor caught and roared. The headlights swept across the boat as he backed out. I heard the car go on down the sand road. I listened for the sound of the screen door again to indicate they had gone back in. Linda said something I could not catch.

“I just don’t like it, that’s all!” Jeff said. “I don’t like any part of it.” His voice was pitched higher than usual. It was querulous. “As far as I’m concerned, I’d like to get in the car and go find a motel where—”

“Shut up! Shut up!” she said violently. “Good lord, do you think he’s going to pounce out from behind a bush or something?”

“No, but—”

“Will you please be quiet?”

“But we didn’t—”

“Come here,” she said. I heard the scuff of their feet on the grass as they came toward the overturned boat. They walked by the boat in silence. I heard the sound of their steps on the wooden boards of the dock. At the same time I heard the distant rumble as Matthews, on his way back, drove over the loose boards of the bridge a mile away.

They stopped so close to me that I could hear him sigh. I worked my way close to the edge of the boat, got my eye to the crack. They sat side by side on the dock, their legs hanging over the water. She wore her bulky white beach robe. The match flame illuminated their faces.

“Tomorrow,” she said in a low tone, “you’re going to move to Bosworth. It wasn’t smart to move back into that cottage. I’ll stay here. We were stupid to give anybody the chance to make any guesses about us.”

“He didn’t suspect anything. Why don’t we go up to the house? It’s too buggy out here.”

“We don’t go up to the house because I want to talk to you. I had to be away from the cottage several times. One of them, the young one named Hill, keeps starting the wrong kind of conversation. I don’t like the way he looks at me. And I’m playing this safe, Jeff. Terribly safe. He could have put something in the cottage, either cottage, so he could record what we said. That’s all right so long as we stick to our agreement always to talk about it as if Paul did it, but not now, not this way.”

“That Matthews didn’t suspect anything,” Jeff said sullenly.

“And if he didn’t, whose fault was that? I’m the one who heard him drive in. I’m the one who had to make the mad dash across the yard while you answered the door. You move into town tomorrow.”

“All right, all right. But I don’t like all this. Why did he break out?”

“Can’t you see it’s the best thing that could have happened? They’ll catch him and they’ll all think he escaped and tried to run because he’s guilty. He won’t have the ghost of a chance after this.”

“But I keep thinking that he thought of something we didn’t think of. Paul’s no dummy. You ought to know that. Suppose he came back here to check on something that we overlooked?”

“You kept telling me you had good nerves. Sure. Nothing could rattle you. Just plan it all out and then sit tight. No loose ends.”

“But—”

“But nothing. What could go wrong? Use your thick head. We even thought of putting cigarette butts down there with my lipstick on them proving that I spent time there with you. There was no one on the beach, no one out in a boat, who could possibly have seen what happened. If you could just see the way they treat me down there. I’m the loyal wife being brave about everything. I’m so demure it sickens me.”

There was a long silence. I heard a butt hiss as it was flipped into the water. He said, “I didn’t know it would be — the way it was. I guess I thought she’d just look as if she were asleep. But her eyes... and the blood...”

“Shut up!”

“Stop telling me to shut up!”

I sensed the effort behind her calm voice. “Jeff, darling, I’m sorry. I just don’t want you to think about that. I... I have to think about it too, you know.”

“Yes, you really have to think about it, don’t you?”

“Now don’t start that. From the point of view of the law, my friend, it was our finger on that trigger, not just mine. Ours. Please, Jeff. Try to take it easy. Nothing can happen to us. We planned it too carefully. And don’t fret about Paul. He hasn’t got the guts of a rabbit. All we have to do is wait and act sad and co-operate with them. When it’s all over, we’ll wait a reasonable period of time and then we can be together.”

“On her money.”

“Wasn’t that the object?”

“Hell, I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more. I just wish we hadn’t done it. I just wish I could turn some magic clock backwards and we’d all be there on the beach and—”

“You can’t.”

“I know.”

“It’s done and we have to do what we said we’d do and then we’ll be safe.”

“And all we have to do is live with it.”

“Honestly, I... You better go to bed. And lock all your doors and windows and put the pillow over your head.”

“That wasn’t necessary.”

“You make me so sick sometimes. Good night, Jeff.”

I heard him get up. “You better come and get your clothes,” he said.

“I’ll get them in the morning,” she said tonelessly.

He walked by the boat. I heard the screen door slam a few moments later. She lighted another cigarette. I wondered what she was thinking about, sitting there, looking out at the black water. Was she seeing Stella’s face too, as I was, as Jeff was? Or did it mean nothing to her? Was she ice all the way through, inhuman, inexplicable? This creature had shared my bed, and I thought I knew her better than any other person had ever known her. And yet I had known nothing about her.

The lights in the Jeffries’ cottage went out. I heard her walk by the boat. I could have reached out, caught her ankle, brought her down to where I could reach her throat. I could think of that, yet I could not do it. She knew about the rabbit in me. She was safe in the black night.

By gray dawn I had decided. The trap was too perfect. There was no flaw. They would punish themselves. Murder was the bond on which they were going to try to build a life. They were hostage to each other, and one day — perhaps inevitably — there would be murder again.

I did not know how far I could get. I did not care very much. With luck I could find a new place, work with my hands, try to forget all this. I lifted the boat, wriggled out, walked boldly between the two sleeping cottages out to the sand road. The big car sat heavy in the dawn light, windows misted. I looked down at the beach where Stella had died. Porpoise rolled a hundred yards offshore. I walked north to the bridge and crossed it. There were no cars. I decided to turn toward Hooker. I could cut across country behind the town and head on north.

I was fifty feet beyond the bridge when the harsh voice behind me said, “Cowley!”

I stopped. They told me to clasp my hands on top of my head. I did so. The one with the rifle was Dike Matthews. I did not know the other one. I found out later that they had been waiting below the bridge, out of sight. They had not stopped me on the bridge for fear I would leap the rail into the channel. The car was up on the shoulder of the main road. They manacled my hands and walked behind me. My shoes were still wet, and made squelching sounds. They would let me walk about four steps before they would shove me hard, so I would stumble forward. They shoved me into the car. Matthews called in to say he had picked me up. Then he drove at breakneck speed back to the cottages to see what harm I might have done Linda and Jeff. They came out, blinking with sleep and surprise. I saw the confidence flow back into Jeff’s face as he looked at me. I looked away.

Linda said, “No, he didn’t come here at all. Thanks for letting us know. I guess this proves how sick he is.”

They took me back. A photographer snapped pictures of me as fast as he could change bulbs and plates as they took me into the county building. They didn’t unmanacle me until they had shoved me into the cell opposite the one I had escaped from. Vernon came and asked questions. Journeyman came and talked to me. I answered neither of them. I had begun to understand that peculiar psychology of the criminal which enables him to close an unseen door, closing out the world. I had nothing to say to them, and no interest in what they were saying to me. Their words came from far away, and meant nothing.

I was sleeping heavily when David Hill arrived. When I awakened he was in the cell, smoking quietly, watching me. He took the pipe out of his mouth and grinned, said, “I was the one who was going to make an unexpected move, not you.”

“It didn’t do any good,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken since my capture.

“What did you do?”

I told him. I told him how I had gimmicked the lock, how I had gotten out, about the ride in the truck, the long walk, hiding under the boat. I told him, as nearly as I could remember, what had been said. I told him how they had grabbed me near the bridge.

He filled his pipe again, lit it carefully. “I might have had a few small doubts before,” he said. “But now I know you’re innocent, Cowley.”

“How do you know that?”

“You’re a steady and logical man, but you’re not very imaginative. You scored low on that. You had a hell of a job at those ink blots and seeing anything other than an ink blot. It would take a pretty active creative imagination to make up the conversation you’ve just told me. That’s good enough proof, to me, but not to anybody else. Not to Vernon or Shepp or any of them. They’d laugh in my face. Those jokers would have to have an actual playback of that conversation before they’d buy it. Then they’d be reluctant.”

“She was afraid somebody had wired the cottages, somehow. I wish I’d had some kind of tape recorder or something with me. Then that nonsensical escape would have worked.”

He looked at me for a long time, the pipe motionless in his hand, two deep wrinkles between his eyebrows. “Told anybody else about this?” he asked.

“No.”

He got up and paced back and forth. From time to time he would stop and look at nothing, and then pace again.

“It’s worth a try, anyway,” he said.

“What’s worth a try?”

“You did have a tape recorder with you. But first I have to do one hell of a sales job on Vernon and Shepp.”

It took him over an hour. He came back with paper, a clip board, pencils. He pretended to snap sweat off his brow. “A sales job indeed,” he said. “According to them I am, at best, a dreamer, a sucker, a soft-head. I pulled out all the stops. Indignant, servile, haughty, scornful. In effect, I’ve bet my job on you, Paul.”

“I don’t think you should—”

“Here. Start writing. I want the script of that talk. Every damn word you can remember.”

I took the pencil and looked at the empty paper. “I can’t remember,” I said.

“Look. You’re under a boat. It’s dark. You’re soaking wet. They walk by you, close enough to talk. They sit on the dock. Who spoke first?”

I looked at the paper. I put down on “L” to indicate Linda, put a dash after it and wrote, “Tomorrow you’re going to move to Bosworth. It wasn’t smart to move back here.” I looked at Hill. I said, “I don’t know if that was the exact wording or not.”

“Is it the way she could have said it? Is it in character?”

“Yes, but—”

“What makes you think their memories will be better than yours? Write what they said. Keep is as close as you can.”

I wrote, “I’ll stay here. We were stupid to give anybody a chance to guess anything about us.”

J— “He didn’t suspect anything. It’s buggy here. Why don’t we go up to the cottage?”

He left me alone to work on it. It was amazingly difficult. I could remember a lot of things, but I couldn’t seem to get them in the right order. It was easiest to remember what Linda said, like, “You said you had good nerves. Sure. Nothing could rattle you. Just plan and wait. No loose ends.” And the part about the cigarette butts. And about being so demure it sickened her.

I kept thinking of things I had forgotten, and then making marginal notes about where they should be inserted.

It was dusk when Hill and a guard came and got me and took me down to the small room where they had first interviewed me. He read over what I had written. He had me wait there with the guard. He was gone over an hour. When he came back he had four typed copies of what I had written. He had four people with him, two young girls and two men. He didn’t introduce them. He merely said, “Paul, these people are professionals. I got them down here from Sarasota. I’ve briefed them a little. I want you to check the voices, pick the two closest to Linda and Jeff.”

One of the girls was pretty good. Neither of the men seemed close. I told Hill that and he said I didn’t have to worry too much about that, just to pick the one which sounded nearest. Hill thanked the two who weren’t right, and they asked if they could stay and listen. He said they could, but when all of them left, they should remember that this was a very confidential matter.

I do not know how many times they went over it. Sandwiches and coffee were brought in. The guard lost interest and kept yawning. I got over my original reticence and coached them as to how the lines were said. The girl kept trying to sound too dramatic, and the man had a tendency to speak too slowly. I could tell that some parts were surprisingly right, and others weren’t so good. It seemed that they didn’t sound right because I didn’t have the words right. And it surprised me the way the right words came back to me when they would say the wrong ones.

Finally, I was as satisfied as I could get, even though I knew that those two didn’t actually sound anything like Linda and Jeff. They had the emphasis right, and the speed and the sort of secretive sound of it, but it just wasn’t right.

It was then that Hill brought in the machine. It was an ordinary dictation machine, of a kind seen in many offices. He had them do a portion of it and then he played it back. He said, “We’ll have to take it further from the mike, kids. You come through too clearly. Let me erase what we’ve got, and then we’ll try it about here. Okay?”

He made a second test, erased, and let them go all the way through it. It shocked me when he played it back. Their voices, through the imperfections of the recording equipment, had lost that individual tone quality that set them apart from Linda and Jeff. They could have been Linda and Jeff. It was uncanny. Some parts were so vividly real that my neck tingled. Other parts were not so good.

After I had heard all of it, Hill played it again, telling me to listen closely and indicate the best part, the most perfect part. It was where he said, “Yes, you really have to think about it, don’t you?”

And she said, “Now don’t start that. From the point of view of the law, my friend, it was our finger on the trigger, not just mine. Ours. Please, Jeff. Try to take it easy. Nothing can happen to us. We planned it too carefully. And don’t fret about Paul. He hasn’t got the guts of a rabbit.”

He marked that portion on a paper tape that stretched across the front of the black cylinder. He thanked the people who had helped. The girl made a face and said, “All that practice, Dave, and then you make us sound as if we didn’t have any voices at all.”

“That’s the way I want it,” he said, smiling. “And if it works, kids, you’ll get as much credit as I can give you.”

It was ten in the morning when they took me down to a big office I had not seen before. Hill sat behind a big desk. His smile was quick and nervous. Sheriff Vernon stood by the windows, pouchy and ill-humored. The pimply girl sat off to the side with her steno pad. Mr. Shepp sat alone in critical dignity. They put me in a chair in the corner.

“What do you want him here for while this damn fool stunt goes on?” Vernon demanded.

“The psychological effect, I guess. Tell your guard to wait in the corridor. I want Cowley to look as if he had been freed.”

Vernon reluctantly gave the order. Shepp said, “It behooves me to state at this point, officially and for the record, that I would not be a party to this were it not for the pleadings of my assistant. Is that quite clear? In addition I have grave doubts about the legality of this proceeding.”

Hill said, “It won’t take long. It’s an experiment.”

Vernon sniffed, turned his broad back to the room and looked out the window, disassociating himself from such nonsense. I sat uncomfortably. My moccasins had dried stiff and hard, pinching my insteps. The slacks were stiff with dried salt. I heard the distinctive click-tap, click-tap of her high heels, heard her voice on a rising, questioning inflection as she spoke to someone. A tall sallow man in uniform opened the door for her and she came in. She came three steps into the room and I watched her, saw her quick eyes flick around, pass across me. She wore a white blouse, fluffy and intricate, setting off her dark tan. She wore a brick red coarse weave skirt, a belt with a big silver Mexican buckle. She wore lizard shoes with four-inch heels, and I remembered that those shoes had cost twenty-nine dollars. She carried an oblong straw purse that looked like a doll coffin.

“Did you want to talk to me?” she asked the room at large.

“Please sit down right there, Mrs. Cowley,” Hill said. She sat down in her neat way, crossed her good legs, lizard toe pointing toward the floor, dark eyebrows delicately raised in question. Hill rubbed the bowl of his pipe against the side of his nose, inspected the fresh gloss.

“Mrs. Cowley,” he said, “purely as an experiment, and I might say contrary to the wishes of my superiors, I took the liberty of having recording equipment installed on the Dooley property.”

Her face did not change. I watched her hands. She held the wide straw strap of the purse. She began to scuff at the strap with her pointed thumbnail. It made a faint mouse-sound in the still room. “Yes?” Eyebrows still delicately raised.

“Mr. Cowley advised that you were shrewd enough to be on guard while in either of the cottages. While you were driving to pick up Mr. Jeffries on his return, I looked over the property and decided to have the installation made in that overturned boat near the bay dock.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand all this,” Linda said politely. But her thumb was digging harder at the straw. She had parted some of the small strands.

“I’d like to play back some of the results,” he said. He turned and fiddled with the equipment beside him, below the desk level, out of sight. The room was very quiet. I heard a girl walk down the hall, humming softly. I heard a far-off police whistle.

The equipment hissed and hummed and then the ghost voice of Jeff, crackling, disembodied, said sarcastically, “Yes, you really have to think about it, don’t you?”

“Now don’t start that. From the point of view of the law, my friend, it was our finger on the trigger, not just mine. Ours. Please, Jeff. Try to take it easy. Nothing can happen to us. We planned it too carefully. And don’t fret about Paul. He hasn’t got the guts of a rabbit.”

Hill turned off the machine. Linda sat very still, her head tilted to one side, her thumbnail deep in the soft strap, the cords of her throat harsh. She looked as if she was still listening to the voice. The ovoid pad of muscle between her thumb and forefinger bulged. I saw the tension go out of her hand and saw her throat soften. I do not know what went on in her mind. I suspect she detected some flaw in diction or phrasing or emphasis. She was good. She was a shrewd animal fighting for its life. She leaned back in the chair and she laughed.

It was a good laugh and it took the life out of Dave Hill’s deep-set eyes. “Really, Mr. Hill, I don’t understand what this is all about. Was that supposed to be me talking to Mr. Jeffries? Isn’t this a little quaint?” She looked over at Vernon. “Is this your idea of police work?”

“Not my idea, ma’am,” Vernon said.

“All right, Jenneau,” Hill said to the guard. “Take her to Room 12 and leave her with Mrs. Carty, and bring Jeffries in here.”

She had gotten up as Hill started to speak to the man in uniform. Her color was good. When Hill said to bring Jeffries in, I saw her eyes change and I knew that in that moment she knew exactly what would happen. The area around her mouth turned gray and bloodless under her tan. Her smile as she turned toward Shepp was grotesque.

“I think we’ve had quite enough of this nonsense,” she said. “I don’t see why Mr. Jeffries should be subjected to this sort of farce.”

“I agree wholeheartedly,” Shepp said in his bassoon voice. “We’ve had enough of this embarrassing farce, Hill. I’m calling it off right now. I’ve never had the sightest doubt in my mind but what—”

“Hold it!” Vernon said. He stood there, looking at Linda. The eyes in his fat, sweaty, sick-looking face were shrewd. He looked at Linda for a few more seconds. He nodded, as though deciding something within himself. “Do just like Hill told you, Jenneau.”

Shepp stood up. “But I insist that—”

“Sit down and shut your face!” Vernon said, never taking his eyes from Linda’s face. He smiled at her. It was not a smile I want anyone to give me. She turned violently away and they left the room.

Hill said softly, “Thanks.”

It was a long two minutes before Jeff came in. Big, rugged, hearty Jeff. Gray sports shirt with green fish on it. Material taut over the shoulders. Spiky bushcut, and engaging grin.

“Sure,” he said cheerfully and sat where Hill told him to sit. “Glad to help in any way I can.”

Hill gave him exactly the same build-up he had given Linda. I had the curious impression that, as Hill spoke, Jeff was dwindling before my eyes, shrinking down into himself. The recording was, of course, exactly the same as before. The rasping ghost voices.

Jeff did not break the long silence that followed the recording.

Hill said, in a kindly tone, “We have all of it. The entire conversation. Would you like to hear all of it?”

Jeff did not answer. I could not see his expression. I saw the big chest lift and fall with the slow cadence of his breathing. I realized that he was frozen there with terror and regret, and some animal caution told him that the only thing he could do would be to say nothing.

“Mrs. Cowley has informed us that it was your plan from the very beginning.”

I expected several things. A heated denial. A wild attempt at escape. I did not expect what he did. He put his big hands up and held them, palms flat against his face. He bent forward from the waist. The sobs were vocalized. “Ah-huh, ah-huh, ah-huh—” the phrasing and emphasis of a small child that cries, but projected grotesquely in a stifled baritone. Small, grown-up child, lost and alone. It made me acutely uncomfortable. I shifted uneasily. Hill was frowning. Vernon looked at Jeffries with heavy contempt. Shepp looked astounded.

No one spoke. Jeff slowly regained control. He snuffled, wiped his nose on the back of his hand. He sat with his elbows on spread knees, forehead resting on his fists as though he could not bear to look at anyone.

“It wasn’t... my plan,” he said, his breath catching from time to time. Hill nodded at the girl. She began to take notes. “Some of it was mine. The live fish. And the kind of gun. It started as a joke. After we started... seeing each other. I’d tell her how tight Stella was with her money. She’d tell me how dull Paul was. I think she was the one who said it would be nice if — if they dropped dead. I said Paul... ought to murder Stella and hang for it. Joking. Just joking like that. But... it grew. We talked about ways it could happen. Where it should happen. We had a lot of bad ideas. Then we had this one. It’s funny. Right up until... right up until the last second, I was... thinking about it like it was... a plan that wasn’t really real. Wouldn’t really happen. Then... she did it. She shot Stella in the head and that made it real and we... had to go through with it.”

He looked at Hill then. He said carefully, explaining it, “Once the shot was fired, you couldn’t take it back. You couldn’t change anything.”

“No,” Hill said gently, “you couldn’t change anything.”

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Jeff said.

There isn’t much more. I did one thing I’m sorry about. I had them let me in to see her. I looked through the bars at her. I had expected that she would be just the same, cold and fierce and haughty, even though they’d had her for three weeks. I wanted to call on her the way she’d called on me. I thought her eyes would flash at me and she’d make cruel hooks of her nails. But she just sat on the bunk. Her tan had faded a lot and she had put on a lot of weight. Her black hair was a mess and she didn’t have any make-up on. She had turned middle-aged in three weeks, and the new weight she had put on looked doughy. She looked at me with dull eyes and the lower part of her face was slack, the way it had been when I took the gun away from her.

She looked away from me. I stood by the bars and I said, “Linda.” She didn’t look at me. My eyes stung. I wasn’t crying for her, I guess. I was crying for the unknown girl named Linda I had once lived with.

At the trial they seemed like strangers. They didn’t look at me when I testified. I went back north after the trial. I worked in my shop in the cellar all through the night before the early morning when they were executed. I washed my hands in the cellar sink and hung up the sawdusty coveralls and went up into the kitchen. I looked at the electric clock she had bought. It was pottery, shaped like a plate. It was twenty past the hour and I knew it was over. I filled a glass with water and drank it slowly, looking out at the yard. The house was empty, and the world too seemed peculiarly empty. I felt as though I should do something dramatic, decisive, final. There seemed to be some great gesture I could perform, if I could only think of what it was.

In the end, all I did was shower, shave and drive to the office. I was early. When Rufus came in he told me I could take a day or week off if I felt like it.

I told him I felt all right.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Linda