John D. MacDonald

Deep Death

I

I got off at the first whistle-stop before Placid, waited for an hour and then boarded a rickety old green bus which took me to Hendreson, New York. It was a forty minute ride for a dollar, and, at Hendreson, the driver stopped dead for three seconds to let me out. He spat into the dust by my left shoe, swung the doors shut and shambled off.

I took a long look at the main drag of Hendreson. It looked as if nothing had moved up and down it faster than a slow walk for the last hundred years. There was a small park, a cluster of big, decayed Victorian houses, a few gas stations, bars, drug stores. The summer sun was hot. A horse stomped in the dust and quivered at the flies. Nothing stirred along the main drag except a small boy who was lethargically rattling a stick along the wrought iron fence in front of one of the Victorian piles.

The screen door slammed behind me as I walked into the dim stench of the nearest drugstore. A buxom and pimply miss was making herself something out of chocolate and marshmallow. She jumped when the door slammed. Several beautiful young ladies advertising mouth wash and soft drinks grinned at me with gummy cardboard teeth. A fly was buzzing angrily caught in the coil of sticky paper that hung from a light pull.

“Whacha want?” Pimples asked plaintively.

“Use your phone? How much to call Signal Lake?”

She softened visibly. She looked as if I’d asked how much it would cost to call God. “A dime, mister. Need change?”

After a good forty seconds while I held the greasy receiver to my ear, the operator said, “Number pleeyuz.”

“Oh, there you are! Nice to hear your voice. Signal Lake 2, pleeyuz.”

“Comic!” she muttered, I heard the distant ringing and a familiar voice said, “Hello?”

“Mike,” I started to say, but the pleeyuz girl snarled, “Ten cents pleeyuz.” Bong, bong, and the other end of the line said, “That you, Al Jarra?”

“It’s me, Mike.”

“Am I glad you’re here, boy! Nice of you to come so fast. Where are you?”

“In Burden’s Drugstore. Burden’s palace of good smells.”

Mike laughed. “I’ll send somebody down after you, boy.” He hung up. I hung up slowly. That wasn’t like Mike Leo — to send somebody after me. It didn’t fit with his big, wonderful friendliness. Maybe he was sick or something. His voice hadn’t sounded sick. Broken leg, maybe.

Pimples looked at me and said, “Who you going to see up to Signal Lake?”

“Who do you think I ought to see?”

She giggled. “Gee, I don’t know.”

I could see her giving my wrinkled summerweight wool, my battered suitcase and my flattened nose the once over. “Mister, you sure don’t look as though you were going to be a guest up there. What you going to do? Work at the clubhouse?”

“Gee, thanks,” I said. “Much as it may dismay you, I am a guest. What do you think of that?”

“You can’t tell a book by its cover,” she said primly, coining a phrase. A strand of the chocolate began to run down her chin, but she caught it cleverly with one finger and shoved it back up where it belonged.

“I’ve never been there,” I said, smiling. “It must be pretty nice.”

“Geez, it should be!” she said. “The filthy dough they spend on it. Just the six families and they got a whole lake. Can you tie that?”

“Wonder if they all get along,” I said, as though thinking aloud.

She snorted. “Get along! Mister, those people got the knives out for each other alla time! If I had the dough I wouldn’t move up in the middle of that tea party. Not me. Why I’d like just one good smack at that Jocelyn Geral, I would. I’d teach her not to go around showing off her British accent around decent...” She stopped as a horn tooted imperiously outside.

Pimples grinned at me. “There you are, Mister. That’s Sara Leo, the best one up there, believe me. Come down for a free glassa water some time.”

I winked at her and hurried out. Sara Leo was something you wanted to walk into your favorite spot with. For the first time I began to believe what Tommy, my partner, had meant when he had said, “Okay, Al. Go off. Have a vacation. That’s right. Leave me to do all the agency work while you play patty-cake with the damosels.” Here was one I wanted to start playing patty-cake with immediately.

She sat with one hand on the top of the wheel of the baby blue convertible, smiling at me, and a halo of red-brown hair escaped from under some sort of white net thing she was wearing on her head. The rest of her was lightly clad in a two piece lemon yellow sun suit, and the parts the suit didn’t cover were trim and smooth and golden brown. The teeth were as white as the job on her head. The eyes matched the car.

I tossed the bag in the back, opened the door beside her and took the hand she extended. “You’re Al Jarra,” she said.

“It never sounded so good before. And how you can in any way look like an ugly mess like your pa, I don’t know. But you do.”

“You look more like him than I do,” she said.

I touched the bridge of my nose. “I see what you mean. Mike and I both lead with a right. It’s sometimes effective, but it doesn’t help the profile much.” I climbed the rest of the way in, yanked the door shut. She put it into gear, spun a tight U turn in the main drag and headed back toward the hills.

I glanced at her. The smile of welcome had faded and I could see the lines of strain which it had concealed. I did some mental arithmetic. Four years before when Mike had been my CO in OSS activities in Italy and the South of France, Sara had had an eighteenth birthday. Thus making her twenty-two. Six years younger than I.

She gave me a sidelong grin. “Quiet, aren’t we?”

“Thinking about Mike, Miss Leo. Wondering why he didn’t come down to get me.”

“Sorry I’m such a letdown.” The smile took away the sting.

“You aren’t.”

“How gallant! Mike didn’t want to leave because Dennis Kemp is there and besides he wanted me to form an independent opinion of you.”

I frowned. I couldn’t help it. “Since when does Mike need a recheck on me?”

“Oh, it isn’t that. You see, Mike and I have been arguing about you. He thinks you ought to be given every scrap of information we have and told the whole reason for your coming up here. I think that it would be better for you to just settle down as a house guest and be told to keep your eyes open. I think maybe too much has happened for Mike and me to think clearly any more.”

I didn’t like it at all. I said, “Look, Miss Leo. I can give you the answer. Two years ago my partner and I started our own little investigation company in New York. After two years we’re still on the thin edge. I haven’t got time to sit around up here and soak up sunshine. Every day I’m away costs us money. You better give me all the dope.”

“But Mike will pay you for your time. Pay you well, too,” she said blandly.

“Do you think I’d take a dime from Mike Leo? You’re not as bright as you look. I owe him for a thousand favors, lady.”

She set the firm line of her jaw. Her eyes narrowed, “You can tell Mike all this, Mr. Jarra. I still say that you shouldn’t be confused by the conflicting information we have so far.”

“Hey,” I said. “I don’t want to scrap with you.”

“Then don’t try to start a scrap!” she snapped.

“With your temper, your nose should look like mine,” I said, laughing.

She fought a smile and then let it take over. I could sense that whatever it was that was bothering her really had her down. And if it had her down, old Mike was probably pretty baffled too.

The road was asphalt for five miles out of the village, and then turned to a well-scraped dirt road. She drove well, her hands firm on the wheel. I found that I like the shape of her wrists, the capable look of her hands. The climb was steep and the little car began to labor.

“Do you know about Signal Lake?” she asked.

“Just what I remember from Mike’s homesick conversation. It’s a small lake and six families own it. They all chip in so much each year for a staff and supplies for the community club house. Everybody eats and drinks in the club-house. Rich folks, all of them.”

“I’ll tack a little onto that,” she said. “It was the idea of a man named Henry Geral. He bought the lake and the surrounding land and then sold five portions of it to five other families with the stipulation that the camp or lodge constructed would have to cost a minimum of forty thousand and be approved by a Rochester firm of architects. He donated the clubhouse. He was a fine man. He’s dead now. He and his wife died within two months of each other. His son, Henry junior inherited everything. Henry junior came back from duty in England with a British warbride named Jocelyn. Last winter Henry junior died suddenly of a blood dot on the brain. The warbride is here at the lake this summer with her mother, a Mrs. Gordon-Kent, who is in the states on a six month visitors permit.”

“No question of anything but a blood clot in the case of Henry junior?” I asked.

She gave me a quick look. “Apparently not.”

She shifted into second and we rounded a high curve, stopped in front of an ornamental gate. I opened the door and jumped out and hurried to the gate. There was a simple latch device on it and springs to hold it shut. I swung it wide and grinned back at Sara Leo.

At that moment there was the distinctive whipping crack of a rifle fired from near by. The windshield spider webbed into fragments on the passenger’s side.

“Down,” I yelled as I dropped flat. I rolled into the shelter of a bunch of brush and, glancing back toward the car, I was glad to see that Sara was out of sight.

“Hurt?” I called.

Her voice was muffled. “No. My face is cut a little I think. Not much.”

“Sit tight,” I called. I looked down at my hand and was more than surprised to see that my 38 automatic was resting in it with the safety thumbed off. I had no recollection of yanking it out of the spring clip in my shoulder holster. The shot had seemed to come from a line of brush just beyond a small clearing off to the right of the gate, about fifty feet ahead of the car. And I knew it had been close.

I edged around, located another bunch of greenery in the proper direction, got my legs under me and ran like hell. I dropped in the new spot and listened. Birds sang happily. Bugs made creaking noises and the wind patted the leaves in the tops of the trees. A bright summer afternoon. I felt like a Hollywood bit player who had wandered off location.

On my second run, I got to the edge of the clearing. Still no noise. On the third run, my heart thudding, I dodged across the clearing and dove full length into something with thorns. It bit at my face. I spun around, trying to aim the damn automatic in all directions at once.

It was getting tiresome. Slowly I stood up. Nothing happened. My ears were practically wiggling, I was listening so hard for the snick of a bolt shoved into place or the crackle of a twig. With growing confidence I began to move around.

Ten feet away, by pure luck, f found the spot. The grass was matted down. Somebody had been there, and not long before. Even as I watched, some of the damp grass sprang upright. Five feet in back of the spot, a trail started. The floor of the trail was too dry and hard to show a footprint. I couldn’t tell the size or weight of the rifleman by the impression in the grass. I found one small hole that could have been made by an elbow. It told me nothing. There was no empty cartridge case around. No cigarette butts. No matches. Nothing. Just matted grass and silence.

On impulse, I stretched out in the spot and looked toward the car. Distance, about eighty feet in a direct line. I could see the hole in the windshield. It was dead center on the passenger’s side. At the moment of the shot, I had been holding the gate. The slug had to miss me by five feet to hit the windshield. The rifleman was firing from a rest. That gave me one answer. He hadn’t wanted to hit me. He had fired once and melted off into the brush. It would have been just as easy to have hit Sara. It seemed like some kind of a screwy warning.

I walked back to the car, and when I got ten feet from it, I said, “You can come out now.”

Nothing happened. I heard small noises. I looked into the car and saw that she was lying across the front seat, a balled handkerchief in her fist, her thumb knuckle against her teeth, making the small sad noises of a woman weeping.

“Hey, now,” I said, opening the door.

“Oh, damn, damn, damn!” she said weakly.

“Last straw?” I asked.

“Something like that. But I won’t go away. I won’t.”

I shut the door, went around the other side and said, “Sit up and move over, Sara. I’ll drive.”

By degrees she sat up. Her eyes were puffed with tears. Glass had made two thin cuts on her right cheek, two incites below the eye. Blood darkened on the cuts.

“Happy little vacation spot,” I said.

I started the motor. She giggled, and at first I thought it was hysteria. But I looked at her and saw it was genuine laughter. “Okay, Mr. Jarra,” she said. “I’ll open the gate for you.”

I looked ahead. The gate, of course, had swung shut. After a second or two, I began to laugh. It was release for both of us. We laughed until the tears came, and then, on impulse, I tilted her chin up and kissed her full on the lips. They tasted of salt. She sobered instantly, looked coolly at me and said, “Mike told me about that, too.”

“Mike talks too much,” I said softly.

I got out of the car. She drove through while I held the gate. I let it swing shut, then climbed in beside her and the next word spoken was four miles further when we drove down a sharp incline and I saw a massive log lodge ahead, the lake shimmering beyond it.

“That’s it,” she said.

II

After every long separation of good friends, there comes a time when the hand pumping and shoulder slapping and teeth showing slows down and all there is to do is look at each other and say, “Well, well!”

Mike looked almost the same. Take a hunk of dark wood, chisel a crude face on it with a blunt knife, paste some crinkled grey hair on top and set the result directly onto the shoulders of a bull ape, ignoring the need for a neck, and you’ll end up with Mike Leo... except for one thing. You’ve got to stick into the face a pair of the mildest, warmest brown eyes you’ve ever seen.

He had changed. There was a look of wariness in the brown eyes and his big hands trembled when they should have been absolutely still.

You have to understand about Mike. Once, near Naples, I was driving one of the detachment sedans and ahead of us, a command car slewed into a deep ditch, tossing the driver out and pinning him against the mud. In a matter of seconds Mike had his broad back against the side of the command car and his feet planted against the side of the ditch. He pushed until his feet sunk in up to his ankles and his face turned as white as pasteboard. And we yanked the soldier out.

But that is war stuff and war stuff seems to leave everybody yawning when you start to talk about it these days. It’s just enough to say that Mike Leo is a big man with courage and he can move like a burnt cat.

His place was what I expected him to have. The main room was probably forty feet long and a good twenty wide. It was set at right angles to the lake shore and about twenty feet above water level. The fireplace midway along the room was big enough to roast a Ford coupe in. Dark wood, big leather chairs. All that sort of thing.

But at the lake end, it ceased to be rustic. The walls slid back and there was a big concrete sun deck. I wondered how he sneaked that hybrid by the Rochester architect.

While I was looking around, he materialized a bottle of Scotch out thin air plus shot glasses and said, “Your tastes haven’t changed, Al?”

“Never dilute it,” I said, and took the brimful shot glass he handed me.

It was as smooth as a radio commercial, After the second shot, the little air of constraint in the big room indicated that we were about to get down to cases.

He said, “I hope I haven’t upset any plans phoning you like I did, Al.”

“Nothing important. Glad to come. Seems like a nice place here. Restful. Of course, somebody took a shot at your daughter and me on our way out.”

He sat absolutely still, “Sara didn’t say anything.”

“I think she wanted me to tell you, Trained observer, you know,” I told him the story in detail, including my assumption that it was intended as some sort of a warning.

When I had quite finished, I paused, and then said, “I’ve always laid things right on the line, Mike. I want to get this cleaned up in the shortest possible time, whatever it is. I’ve got work in New York. Sara told me on the way out that there’s, some thought of letting me come in blind. I don’t like that aspect of it. I want all the dope.”

The shotglass looked like a thimble in his big brown hand. He looked down at it stupidly. He said slowly, “Al, maybe I was wrong. Maybe you ought to stay the night and then get the hell back to New York. Maybe this thing can’t be bucked.”

“That doesn’t sound like you, Mike.”

He acted as though he hadn’t heard me. He said, “When a man is all by himself, he can afford to be stubborn. But Sara is the only thing I’ve got, Al. I can take chances with myself, but not with her. This is the first time it’s come close to her, I don’t like it.”

“Look, Mike, Is it anything for the local law?”

“We’re outside the village limits; of course. The only people we could call on are the State Troopers. So far there hasn’t been anything definite enough.”

“You called me up here, Mike, The least you can do is tell me what’s going on.”

He looked at me somberly, “Wait till Sara comes down. Then we’ll talk about it.”

The big room had a balcony effect around two sides of it. A stairway came down the far wall. I counted five doors that opened onto the balcony. The very high ceiling was supported by blackened beams that measured at least fifteen by fifteen.

One of the upstairs doors opened and Sara came out. She smiled down at us and walked to the stairs and came down. She had changed the sunsuit for one of those swim suits made of three average size pocket handkerchiefs. Her brown hair was fucked into a rubber, cap. She had a white terrycloth robe slung over her shoulders and sandals with high cork soles on her feet.

I liked the way she came downstairs. She didn’t flounce and she didn’t try to float. She just came downstairs.

We stood up. Mike said, “How about this man? He wants to know all.” I knew that it was an effort for him to make his tone light and bantering.

She looked at me in a cool manner. “We talked about that, Mike. While I was changing, I had an idea. We’ve got the group coming for cocktails in about an hour you know. Suppose we let him just look them over and then, this evening, after dinner, we’ll talk. Then he’ll know who we’re talking about. Is that satisfactory, Mr. Jarra?”

Her eyes were chill and I deeply regretted the impulse that had made me kiss her. It put the wrong stamp on my motivations.

Mike apparently had changed his mind about my not taking the job. At least he didn’t say anything. I glanced at him, then back at her. “That’ll be fine,” I said, matching her remoteness.

“Would you care to swim, Mr. Jarra?” she asked politely. “Martin unpacked your things in the last bedroom beyond the head of the stairs. I asked him if you had brought trunks.”

“This is pretty formal, kids,” Mike said. “His name is Al, honey. And he’s going to call you Sara.”

I grinned at her. “Okay, Sara. Be with you in a couple of minutes.”

My bedroom matched the rest of the place. I changed quickly, hurried downstairs and out onto the sundeck. When I got out there, I saw that an extension had been built off to the left. It extended out over the lake and had a big board strapped on it. Sara’s robe was on a chair, her shoes beside it. As I walked out to look down over the edge, she pulled herself up the last few rungs of the steep ladder, flushed and dripping.

The water seemed to be a fantastic distance away.

“If you can’t dive,” she said, “there’s a little sand beach below.”

That made it a matter of honor. “I guess I can get from the end of the board down to the water. How deep is it?”

“We have it dredged out every year. Fifteen feet, I guess. The height isn’t regulation, so don’t try anything fancy. Twenty-two feet, I think, I’m used to it.”

“Look,” I said, “I want to apologize for what I did in the car. That was pretty stupid. Let’s be friends.”

She stood very still. The water stood in little shining droplets against her brown shoulders. Solemnly she stuck her wet hand out. We shook hands. “Friends, Al,” she said. Then she turned quickly, paused, took two slow steps, landed on the end of the board and went off into space. In the air she curled into a ball, her arms wrapped around her knees. She made one full turn, straightened out and hit the water like a knife dropped blade first into butter.

She reappeared almost immediately, swam out a few strokes in a clean crawl, turned and shaded her eyes with one hand looking up at me. It was up to Jarra.

I duplicated her bounce on the board as best I could, and sailed off into space. It seemed important to enter the water in a vertical position, While I was wondering how best to arrange that detail, somebody slapped me in the face with a ten foot plank. I was spinning slowly in green depths filled with bubbles, I was sleepy.

Something grabbed my wrist and sunlight exploded around me. I coughed the water out of my lungs. I frowned. Sara was saying, “Turn on your back. I’ll tow you in.” I shook my head and tried to smile. “Okay now,” I gasped.

I clawed my way to shore, went up the beach on my hands and knees and dropped onto my face breathing hard.

I sat up. Sara looked down at me and said, “Did you ever dive before?”

“Off the edge of a pool.”

“You hit absolutely fiat.” She started to giggle. “Funniest thing I ever saw.”

“Ha, ha,” I said through gritted teeth.

She stopped giggling and said, “Anything broken?”

“Nothing important. My back, maybe.”

She looked at my arms and shoulders. “You’re put together like a concrete silo, Al. More muscles than sense.”

I grinned up at her. “And you’re put together like a brick structure of more dubious repute. Help me up the ladder.”

But I didn’t need help. Hell, it was as easy as walking up the side of the Washington monument with bubble gum on your heels.

Water is hard stuff. When I stripped in my room and looked at myself in the mirror, I was brick red across my chest and thighs. My face was puffed and even my gums were bleeding. My eyes were bloodshot and I felt as though my arms had been torn out of the sockets and put back in with gummed wrapping paper. I said to myself, “Next time pick an easier way to impress a woman. Jarra. Throw a flying block on a plough horse or roll downstairs.”

The house was well organized. My lightweight wool suit had been snatched while I was showing off, and it hung on the back of the door, crisply pressed. After a cold shower, I felt almost right again.

Mike was standing on the sundeck when I went down. His big hands were locked behind him and he was staring out across the lake.

I went up beside him and said, “How about a preview of the local residents, Mike?”

He jumped. His nerves were bad. That wasn’t like the Mike I knew.

“Sure, Al. Come down to this end of the deck and we can see the houses. That place down at the end of the lake is the club.” It was a rambling structure with two long, low wings.

“There’s a staff there?” I asked.

“A chef and two helpers in the kitchen. Two waiters, a bartender and a grounds keeper. That thing down near the water that looks like a small barn is where the seaplane is kept. We all chipped in on it just before the war. That’s a new plane bought last year. The pilot lives upstairs in the club with his wife. His name is Barney Wallace. Over in the trees to the left of the club. Can you see it? That’s the Geral place. Sara tells me that she told you about Geral. You know that Jocelyn Geral and her mother are there now.”

“What’s Jocelyn like?”

“A bit hefty. But worth a whistle or two. See that place almost directly across from us? The stone house? Owen Vincent lives there. Banker. Fairly young. He’s a widower and he comes up here every summer with his two boys. They’re both in their middle teens now. Nice kids. Move over here a little more. The next place down belongs to Mathew Momser. You can just see it among the trees. You’ve heard of him. Writes novels. Makes a mint at it. He got a divorce last year and remarried. Married a young girl who was a reader in his publisher’s office. He’s an old goat, for my money. New wife’s name is Carol.”

“There’s six families isn’t there?”

“Yes. I’ve told you of three besides us. Geral, Vincent and Momser. There’s just two more. Abel Carson and Dennis Kemp. You can see the Carson place dearly. It’s that white job at the end of the lake. He’s a contractor. Builds stale roads and stuff like that. A Buffalo firm. His kids are grown up and married. They visit sometimes during the summer. He’s alone there with his wife right now.”

“And Dennis Kemp has the last place?”

“Yes. You can’t see it from here. He’s up the shoreline to the left about a half mile. He’s an inventor. Lives off royalties now. Has a big shop in the bottom of his place there. He’s the only one that stays here the year round. Plows himself out in the winter. His daughter, Alice, and the bum she married live there with him. Fellow named Roger Malone. Used to sing on the radio before he married dough. That covers all of them.”

“They all coming for cocktails?”

“Every one, fortunately. Usually it’s tough to get them all together. This just happened to be a good day. Let me see. There’ll be Jocelyn Geral and her mother, Mrs. Gordon-Kent. Owen Vincent by himself. Mathew and Carol Momser. Abel and Constance Carson. Dennis Kemp. Roger and Alice Malone. Oh, yes, and Barney and Jeana Wallace.”

“The pilot and his wife?”

“Yes. I guess if Barney had married anybody except Jeana he’d be in the same slot as the rest of the personnel. But Jeana’s the daughter of an old Philadelphia family and socially has more on the ball than anybody else on the lake.”

“Where do these people live in the winter, Mike?”

“The Carsons, the Kemps and the Vincents are from Buffalo. The Gerals, the Momsers and the Leos are from Rochester. The Wallaces winter in Florida. Barney flies for a club down there.”

I glanced back into the big room and saw Martin bringing, in two big trays of canapes. He was a bloodless looking man with a fragile-boned face and no expression. Sara came out onto the terrace. It was the first time I had seen her in a dress. Oddly the dress made her look even slimmer. It was something in green. Bluish green.

At that moment there was a droning sound from down the lake. “That’ll be Abel and Constance,” Mike said.

The spray from the bow of the fast little boat glinted in the late afternoon sun. “Gar Wood hull,” I murmured.

“With a special Packard marine engine that Abel mounted himself,” Sara said. “It will really step.”

Abel Carson was an expert. He brought it around, wide open, in a big sweeping turn, headed it directly at the dock and then cut the motor just in time to come up and nudge it as lightly as a baby’s kiss. The stairs from the dock to the sundeck were normal stairs, completely unlike the ladder that reached up from the little sand beach.

The powerful engine burbled and a lean woman with grey hair jumped nimbly out and put an expert hitch around one of the little metal gimmicks on the dock. She waved up at us and, in a voice like a crow with tonsilitis, yelled, “Hello, darlings! Hope we’re not too early.” Her face was mostly wrinkles held together with sunburn. Abel Carson climbed out heavily. He was a massive man, completely bald, and sunbrowned to dark mahogany. Blue eyes twinkled in the middle of the tan. He moored the stern and followed his lean wife up the stairs.

Mike and Sara moved forward to greet them. I was introduced. Constance Carson shook hands like a man. Abel Carson gave me a keen, quick look. Naturally, no explanations were made of my presence.

Martin came out onto the sundeck with a tray of Manhattans and Martinis. After my first sip of mine, my appreciation of Martin took an upward leap. Across the lake a noisy kickerboat put out from Owen Vincent’s place!

At that moment two women came through the big living room out onto the sundeck. Sara registered surprise, hurried to the younger of the two and kissed her on the cheek. I remembered reading that women kissing is like boxers shaking hands before the last round.

“Why, we drove over, Sara,” the younger of the two said.

I knew from her voice that it was Jocelyn Geral speaking. There was a flat British note to her voice. Hepburn singing contralto. I looked at her with interest. Mike had called her hefty. That wasn’t exactly right. Her curves bulged the sleek fabric of her white dress, but I could have circled her waist with my hands. Her hair was glossy black, her skin faintly sallow, her eyes a little on the tilt. She looked as though some remote ancestor had smuggled a little Burmese blood into the family tree. She was definitely one of those female honey-pots that bring the males buzzing around.

Her mother was a small woman with a cream and rose petal complexion and the steel eye of a British sea captain. I couldn’t understand a word she said. She spoke as though she had a mouth full of crickets.

We were introduced. Mrs. Gordon-Kent gave me a jerky nod and a sabre cut with the steel grey eyes. Jocelyn put a cool slim hand in mine and looked at me with eyes that told every man that he was the one she had been waiting for all these long empty years.

I noticed that, in Jocelyn’s mother’s grasp, a Martini lasted a period of time that could only be measured on a stopwatch.

By that time Owen Vincent’s kicker was tied up to the dock and he came bounding up the stairs. He was trim and hard and brown. A widowed man with children always has a certain look. I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the look of desolation of the lonely and unmated. They smile with their lips. He seemed well liked, and he said exactly the right things to everyone.

I had not seen the small cabin cruiser approach. It seemed a most ridiculous thing to have on a lake so small. The brass shone in the setting sun and the deck was brightly varnished.

I lifted one eyebrow and looked at Sara. She moved over to me and said, “The Momsers.” I remembered vaguely having read one of Momser’s novels. It was of the school that Bill Sloane calls ‘decolletage’.

Somebody spoke to me and by the time I turned back, Mathew and his young bride were just stepping up onto the sundeck. She wasn’t what I had expected, even though I had heard that she was a reader for a publishing firm before Mathew snatched her out from under the manuscripts. She was a slim girl with nice features. She wore harlequin glasses with wide dark frames and she carried her head at a forward tilt of nervous tension. When anyone spoke to her, she stared at them nervously and moved her lips right along with their words. It was disconcerting.

But Mathew was what I expected. He was one of those men with a scrawny neck, bony wrists, angular joints and a wide, homespun mouth. The only flaws in his lean ranginess were a clubby little tummy the size of a striped watermelon and cheeks that looked as though he stored nuts in them. He was the type of man who, when introduced, stares affably at the knot in the necktie of the men, and the fourth button on the blouse of the women. His eyes were the color of gin in a pale blue bottle.

I don’t like to shake hands with women. His wife shook my hand interminably and nervously and said, “How do you do,” about five times and then moved her lips along with mine as I returned the salutation.

To break the monotony, the Roger Malones and Dennis Kemp walked over, following the half mile trail by the water.

Dennis Kemp was an enormously tall shambling man with an air of abstraction and dirty fingernails. His daughter was a chubby, giggling little piece who managed to bounce and wiggle every portion of her anatomy with each short step. Her husband, Roger Malone, was a poor boy who couldn’t make up his mind whether he should make capital of his vague resemblance to Gregory Peck, or his more vague resemblance to George Raft. As a result he looked like George Raft who had just washed his hair and couldn’t do a thing with it.

Barney Wallace and his wife, Jeana, were the last to arrive. They, like Jocelyn, had driven over. It was easy to see that they were popular. Barney was a sunbrowned guy with flap colored hair and weather wrinkles around his eyes. His wife was a slim little girl with a charming smile and a soft laugh.

With their arrival, the party was complete. I told myself that it was up to Jarra to garner some impressions. So, clutching my glass in my hot little fist I drifted hither and yon, tossing in the right words to get them talking.

I asked Barney Wallace about the new ship he was piloting and I traded names of Philadelphia Italian restaurants with his wife. They were both likeable. Owen Vincent acted remote when I tried a little entering wedge about the banking business, but he brightened up a lot when I switched to his two boys and asked him how they liked it at Signal Lake.

When I asked Mathew Momser what he was working on, he giggled stupidly and said that he was taking a short vacation from his work and that he had other things to do and he patted his young wife where her dress was the tightest and she giggled too and I managed to get away from the two of them before I gagged on a perfectly good Martini.

I made the mistake of mentioning the word ‘electronics’ to Dennis Kemp and he snowed me under with terms I had never heard before, his eyes suddenly glowing and his hands making such expansive gestures that some of his drink slopped onto the concrete of the sundeck. It took me precious minutes to slow him down and move away. His daughter Alice resisted all attempts at conversation. She was looking nervously over to where Roger Malone was hovering around the lush and exciting Jocelyn. I could see her point.

In spite of Roger’s dark looks I turned his two-way conversation with Jocelyn into a three-way deal. I couldn’t tell whether she seemed glad of the interruption or not. She seemed to be one of those women who have either a complete knowledge and acceptance of their own ability to collect men, or no knowledge at all.

Roger looked stupidly down into his drink until I mentioned that among all the suntanned residence I looked like a very pale kid. He blossomed at that. I thought for a minute he was going to take off his jacket and shirt and show me his pretty bronze back. He seemed to sense that the bouncy little wife missed him and he drifted away. I switched the line to Merrie Olde England and got the proper dreamy look of an expatriate from the Jocelyn wench. Her perfume was spicy and her lips were consistently moist. A veritable walking garden of temptation.

The Abel Carsons seemed chummy with each other and well-adjusted. I talked engines with Carson and sunburn with his wife.

After the rounds had been made I drifted back against the railing around the edge of the deck. The sun was so low that the rays were horizontal. The party milled around slowly, drifting into the big room and back out onto the sundeck. The perfect Martin drifted about like a wraith, refilling glasses from pitchers held in either hand.

It was time to try to catch some of the undercurrents. I learned several things rapidly. Mathew Momser was jealous of his brand new wife and couldn’t have stayed any closer to her if they were wearing the same girdle. Roger Malone had a roving eye and looked on Mrs. Momser, Mrs. Barney Wallace and Jocelyn Geral with equal gusto. I found myself being annoyed when I saw him look the same way at Sara. She was a very good hostess. Mike, with his booming laugh and large affability, kept things moving.

But there was something else.

For a time I didn’t get it. It evaded me until I remembered other parties at other lakes during other summers. These people had too fine an edge of control. There was something in the air that kept every one of them watchful and expectant. A tiny brittle edge on all laughter. An awareness in every eye.

Maybe, because of that little edge of tension, the cocktails had less effect. At any rate, outside of Jocelyn’s eyes getting brighter, Momser’s mouth getting looser and Barney Wallace’s grin getting broader, I couldn’t detect much of a change in spite of the constantly filled glasses.

There were no cliques apparently. Groups formed and reformed and everybody seemed equally friendly with everyone else. That in itself was an indication that there was a guardedness about all of them.

The lights clicked on in the big room as dusk settled over the lake. It was a warm dusk, and it was pleasant to stand on the sundeck with the breeze touching your face and listen to the light voices of the women, the deep laughter of the men.

Sara came over to me and said, “Are you a recluse, Al?”

In a low tone, I said, “I’ve backed out of the woods so I can get a look at the trees.” I happened to be staring at Jocelyn at the time.

“The trees or the limbs?” she asked.

“You sound like a wife,” I said.

“I’m the only one here who hasn’t ever been one. Maybe it’s contagious.”

“Don’t catch the Malone variety. She’s knocking herself out keeping the beady eye on the wandering Roger.”

Sara sighed. “I feel sorry for her.”

“Poor girl! All that lousy money piled up and nothing to spend it on but a George Raft, junior grade.”

“He’s sort of pathetic, you know,” Sara said.

“Lady, you have a heart loaded with loving-kindness. I think he’s about as pathetic as a sneer in the dark.”

I could see her smile in the gathering darkness. “Has your profession given you this hardened outlook, Mr. Jarra?”

“Yes indeed, Miss Leo. When, like myself, you have tramped the soiled streets of a great city and seen...”

She walked away, smiling back at me. In spite of the lightness of her tone, there had been a deeply serious undercurrent. There was something that she had wanted me to see. I went into the big room and gobbled up some canapes. Jocelyn took one too and popped it into a very ripe mouth. Then with a warm greediness, that was like a crack in her genteel mask, she licked the tip of her thumb with a very red tongue. She walked away, carrying herself as though she had four finishing-school text books balanced on top of her dark and shining head.

She went out onto the sundeck and I followed her. It was either follow her or be trapped in the circle that was forming around Mathew Momser who had suddenly decided to be a literary lion. With his bug-eyed wife looking up at him adoringly, he began to spout dainty and lascivious little anecdotes of the world of letters.

Jocelyn and I were alone on the sundeck. She leaned against the railing and looked out across the dark water. I walked up behind her and said, “Does he start that at every party?”

She turned suddenly, startled. Her white teeth gleamed as she smiled. “Every one. Y’know, I’m afraid I’ve forgotten your name. I’m dreadfully dull about names.”

“Jarra. Al Jarra.”

“What an odd name! What nationality is it?”

“Mixture. Italian, Hungarian and Irish. I’m the poor man’s U.N.”

Her laugh was throaty and personal. Inside the people were laughing dutifully. “He’s a dreadfully dull man, don’t you drink?” she asked.

“He doesn’t exactly scintillate.”

“I’m afraid he’ll see us standing out here, Mr. Jarra. Besides, I’m weary of standing. Could we go over there?” She pointed toward the direction of the diving board extension.

I walked beside her. She was one of those people who are so intensely alive that they are somehow frightening.

I tried to guide her toward the chair, but she sat on the edge where there was no railing, her legs hanging over. I sat beside her. Twenty feet below, the dark water glinted in the faint light of a new moon.

She laughed. “Whenever I look down on water, I want to spit.”

“Go ahead.”

“Oh, I shall. When I am alone.”

“Self-conscious?”

“Extremely.”

We were quiet for a long time. Suddenly she looked at me and said, “You’re very nice, you know.” She didn’t pronounce it with all the letters. It sounded more like ‘vey.’

“How so?”

“Oh, you’re not babbling away at a dreadful rate, trying to impress me with what a great fellow you are. That’s what most Americans do, you know.”

“Thank you kindly, m’am.”

“I miss my own people. Mother isn’t much help. Also, I miss Henry very much.” She said it flatly, with no appeal for pity, I liked her for it. She was in effect telling me that her widowhood was not a sore subject to be tiptoed around.

“As a very young and very wealthy widow without children, you’re fair game, Jocelyn.”

She laughed again. “After it was all in the newspapers, I got the most alarming letters from perfect strangers who wanted to marry me.” Suddenly she lifted her head and listened. “There! It’s breaking up, Mr. Jarra. Now everyone will go to the club to eat. We’ll have to go in and join them.” She sighed. “It’s much nicer out here.”

“How will they go to the club?”

“A few staunch ones will walk. It isn’t quite a mile and the trail is good. It walks off the liquor, you know. The rest will probably go on Mr. Momser’s boat.”

“Will they come back here afterward?”

“A few probably will.”

I could hear the group moving out toward the rear of the house. Apparently the ones going in the boat were seeing the walkers off. We sat beyond the edge of the house. I turned and looked out toward the back, but in the tree shadows I could see nothing.

“Will you be back?” I asked.

“I might,” she said. It was not a coy response. It was a clear statement of fact indicating that she had not yet made up her mind.

Everyone seemed to be out near the cars.

At that moment I heard a strange gasp, almost a scream. I sat absolutely still for one dangerous second, I turned and saw it. My feet were dangling over the edge. I jerked my knees high enough to get my heels on the edge of the concrete. I put one arm around Jocelyn’s slim waist and, with all the power of my legs, propelled the two of us to the side and backward.

Even at that, I wasn’t quick enough to avoid getting a resounding thump in the ankle. It was very rough on Jocelyn. She scraped along the concrete and I bounced heavily on top of her in flight. She cried out in pain just as there was a tremendous wallowing splash from below that sent water sparkling up above the sundeck level.

I stood up and there was an excited babble of voices, the sound of running feet. Floodlights clicked on. Jocelyn moaned. I helped her to stand. There was a bleeding abrasion along her cheek where her face had hit the concrete. There was a wide triangular tear in the white dress on one hip. Her lip was split.

The dazed look in her eyes turned to black, hot fury and she said, “Just exactly what was the meaning...”

“Shut up!” I snapped.

The others were around us. Mike came hurrying out and pointed a powerful flashlight down toward the water. We gathered cautiously and looked down. The car had missed the deep spot. It was on its side and only the left rear fender showed above the surface of the water. I could see by that it was a foreign car.

Jocelyn was beside me. She moaned, “Oh, my beautiful car!”

She looked up at me and then at the edge of the concrete where we had been sitting. Even with the people gathered around, we could see the two straight lines of dust and gravel drawn across the sundeck extension. We had been sitting at the exact spot where the car had leaped off into darkness.

She looked at me, her eyes wide. Before she could say anything. Mike said angrily, “Jocelyn, did you park that thing out beyond the house, headed toward the water?”

“Yes, but...”

“That was pretty stupid. What’s the matter with your face? Did it hit you? Obviously the brakes slipped.”

“No. Mr. Jarra and I... we were sitting right there.” She pointed. “He must have heard it coming or something. The next I knew he had... he had bowled me along the sundeck.”

A dozen eyes looked at me with respect. They murmured, “Quick work” “Nice going, Mr. Jarra.” “Quick thinking.” “Both would have been killed.” “Horrible thing.”

Sara took Jocelyn by the wrist. “You’re bleeding, dear. Come on upstairs and I’ll fix you up.”

The life had gone out of the party. People stood around and looked uncomfortable. Mike said, “Stupid way to leave a car. The brakes slipped.” He looked around defiantly, as though daring anyone to question him. Mrs. Gordon-Kent, pale as death, had gone upstairs with Sara and Jocelyn.

Momser rubbed his hands together and said, “Well, why don’t you walkers get started. I’ll bring the others in the Sandra Ann.”

In a tone of voice that was like somebody breaking icicles with a glass hatchet, his wife said, “I thought we had renamed the boat, darling.”

Momser gulped. “Yes, dear. In... in the excitement I forgot.”

Mike winked at me. I gathered that wife number one had been Sandra Ann. Owen Vincent, Dennis Kemp, Roger and Alice Malone and the Wallaces made gay remarks about seeing us at the club and left, a rather subdued group.

Martin brought a refill. It was needed. I drained mine and caught his eyes and he refilled it again, I watched his hands closely. They trembled. I cursed myself for not watching them before.

In a few moments, the three came back downstairs. White adhesive was startingly white against Jocelyn’s dark skin. Her upper lip was puffed. She looked better than I had suspected that she would in a pale yellow linen dress that obviously belonged to Sara.

Jocelyn seemed calm. She walked directly toward me front the foot of the stairs with her hand outstretched. When I took it, she cupped my hand in both of hers. Her hands were like ice, but her voice was calm. “Thank you,” she said simply. She turned away.

I said to Mrs. Gordon-Kent, “Maybe your daughter ought to go to bed. Shock.”

Mrs. Gordon-Kent leered at me. I could barely understand her has she said, “Oh, no. Not Jocelyn. Why, my dear boy, she was fourteen during the blitz and at one time they were plucking heads out of the pickets of our fence.”

That was enough for me. We went down to Momser’s plush boat. The Momsers, the Carsons, Jocelyn and her ma, myself, Sara and Mike had ample room on the boat. Momser cast off, backed it out, spun toward the lighted club and swung it steadily onto course. The soft breeze off the water was refreshing. I sat on the foredeck with my feet hanging over the side. I was startled when Jocelyn took hold of my arm. Her fingers were strong.

“Shhh,” she said, “talk quietly. Does anyone want to kill you?”

“Not that I know of. Not in this crowd anyway.”

“Don’t be flip. When I parked I cramped the wheels toward the house as far as they would go. If the brakes had slipped, it would have moved maybe five feet before nudging into the house.”

The pressure of her fingers was gone and I was alone, watching the dark shore move slowly past us.

III

After an excellent dinner at the dub, at a long narrow table set for fifteen, the party began to break up a bit. In spite of the tension at Mike’s place, the dinner had been very gay.

Jocelyn’s puffed lip had given her an oddly sulky look and I saw that she was observing the other guests very carefully.

The Momsers and the Carsons formed a bridge game in the card room and proclaimed their intention to stay there until dawn. Owen Vincent yawned, said goodnight and left to walk back to Mike’s place for his boat and a quick ride across the lake.

Alice Malone got dreamy and began to lean against Roger. She leaned and leaned until at last, with a sulky expression he said goodnight and left with her, disappearing along the trail under the trees.

Mrs. Gordon-Kent, Jocelyn. Sara and Jeana Wallace sat in a corner of the lounge sipping liqueurs and making with the woman talk. Barney Wallace took me down and showed me his trim little seaplane and then we joined Mike and Dennis Kemp in the bar.

By some sort of unspoken agreement, the near-accident had not been discussed during dinner. It was talked over in glances, and in sudden expressions, but not in words.

In the bar it was different. Big, shambling Dennis Kemp looked at me curiously and said, “You have a good reaction time, young man.”

Mike said proudly, “Al is an athlete, Dennis.”

“Was,” I said. “These days a good fast game of tiddly-winks and I’m pooped. But when I sensed a car rolling down on me, I got out of there. Good thing the Britisher was between me and safety or I’d have left her there.”

“You think it’ll be hard getting it out of there, Mr. Kemp?” Barney asked.

Dennis scratched his lean jaw. “Two Low trucks ought to be able to pull it up on a direct lift. Damage it a bit getting it over the edge, probably. And it might swing against the rocks. It’s a small car. I’ve got a lot of watertight 55 gallon drums. Best plan would be to fasten about eight drums to it with cables and then edge it off into deep water. Float it around to the club where the beach is Hat there. I’ll take a look at it in the morning.”

“Fine,” Mike said, heartily. “Dangerous to leave a car the way she left it.”

The rest of us nodded wisely. I glanced at Barney and thought I saw a flicker of something far back in his eyes. Amusement possibly.

At that moment Sara came to the door of the bar and said, “Will one of you husky gentleman walk Jocelyn and her mother home?”

“I can use the club boat,” Barney said quickly.

Mrs. Gordon-Kent appeared behind Sara. “That won’t be necessary. I’m not too decrepit to walk a quarter of a mile yet.” She beckoned imperiously at me. “You there. Finish that drink in your hand and hurry along.”

She and Sara went back to the lounge. Barney laughed and Mike said, “Al, you have the goodwill of the dragon. Don’t keep her waiting.”

There was a rack of flashlights by the beach door. I took one. There were protracted goodnights at the door and then the three of us walked off into the darkness. The batteries were weak and the light was a dim white glow on the hard floor of the trail.

Jocelyn walked a few feet ahead and the dragon dung to my arm. After several minutes of silence, Mrs. Gordon-Kent said, “You are some sort of policeman, are you not?”

“Mother!” Jocelyn said sharply.

The old lady was sharp. “What makes you think so?” I asked.

“Several things, Michael generally tells all about his guests. He didn’t say a word about you. I noticed that you did a great deal of watching and listening. For what, may I ask?”

“Maybe I’m just a watcher and a listener by inclination.”

“You don’t have to tell me, of course. I’m just a curious old woman.”

“Stop prying, Mother!” Jocelyn said.

“Anyway, Mr. Jarra, I wish you luck. It is very possible that you might need it.”

We came to their place. It was vast in the shadows. Dim lights glowed through the windows at the rear. Mrs. Gordon-Kent untangled herself from my arm, stomped briskly up the steps to the wide porch and said, “You’ll come in for a drink.” It was a command.

I followed them in. She turned on the lights in a big, comfortable room. That room didn’t belong at Signal Lake. It belonged in a duplex near the Park.

A small grey-haired woman came in and stood at attention and I indicated my preference for Scotch and soda. Jocelyn refused another drink and Mrs. Gordon-Kent asked for “some of the old brandy.”

The woman brought both bottles, ice, soda and glasses. “You may go to bed now,” Mrs. Gordon-Kent told her.

After a sip of her brandy, Mrs. Gordon-Kent looked at me with those sea-captain eyes and said, “Michael must be worried.” I was beginning to find it easier to understand her diction.

“I wish you wouldn’t, Mother,” Jocelyn said.

“I know what I’m doing, child,” she snapped.

I smiled peacefully. “Ladies, I am enjoying a restful vacation at Signal Lake as house guest of Mike Leo and his charming daughter. This talk of police and worry is over my head.”

Mrs. Gordon-Kent tossed off the rest of her brandy with a practised twist of the wrist and stood up. “If you won’t, you won’t,” she said. “I am going to bed. Goodnight.”

She went up the stairs with firm thumps of her small feet. After a door shut in the distance, Jocelyn said, “You mustn’t mind mother, Mr. Jarra. She says what she thinks.”

“Which, at times, is refreshing.”

She walked slowly and aimlessly cut onto the broad porch. Up the lake and on the other side, lights flicked on at about the spot where I guessed Mike’s place to be. Jocelyn went in and came out again. She handed me a pair of binoculars. “They’ve probably gone home.”

They were Navy glasses ten power, too strong to handhold. I knelt and rested them on the railing. With them I saw Sara standing at the sundeck door. Her face was in shadow, the lights behind her. She looked close enough to touch. Mike was in the room, standing with his back to the fireplace. No one else seemed to be about. I handed the glasses to Jocelyn. She braced them against a post, looked quickly and then hung them around her neck.

She sat on the railing, her back against the post. Some sort of fish jumped explosively down near their dock. The wind sighed in the leaves. The ripples, lapped at the dock supports. The moon was higher and the light of it touched her face, made a small highlight on her lower lip.

She turned and smiled up at me. “What do you say in a case like this? Borrowed time. That’s it. I’m on borrowed time. I’ve been thinking all evening of what it would have been like to have been swept off the edge by my car and smashed down into the mud of the bottom.”

“An unhealthy way to think.”

“Sometimes you can’t help unhealthy thoughts, Mr. Jarra, What is your light name? I heard Michael call you Al. I detest that.”

“Allan.”

“That’s much better! I thought it might be Albert.”

“Let’s get back to why you can’t help unhealthy thoughts, Jocelyn.”

She took a long time to answer. She said, in a remote voice, “Living can be very trying, Allan, I have thought tonight that, since you saved my life, I should say to you that from now on you have the responsibility for my life and it is you who must make my decisions. What a pity that when you save a life, you do not own, body and soul, the person you have saved.”

“It might be a bit awkward. Maybe I couldn’t make your decisions either!”

She slipped off the railing, stood up and came into my arms. She put her face against my chest. The hard shape of the binoculars bit into me. She cried, small hard sobs that seemed tearless — dry and bitter.

I held her tight as slowly the sobs decreased in frequency and force. When they stopped entirely, she lifted her face. I bent to kiss her, but she turned her lips away. She stepped back.

“That was stupid of me,” she said hoarsely. “I have used you for a wailing wall.”

“It’s happened before.”

“You’re not angry? It isn’t fair, you know. You are just a man who knows when not to speak. I’m lonely.” Surprisingly she laughed. “I couldn’t let you kiss me. My lip is far too sore.” She pushed the binoculars over her shoulder so that they hung down her straight back. She came back into my arms, lifted her face and kissed me very delicately on the corner of the mouth.

“There,” she said, moving away.

“Amends having been made, how about a little data?”

“Of what sort?”

“I know that you didn’t release that car. I believe you when you say that the wheels were cramped. You seem to be a person whose word is good. You asked me if anyone would want to kill me. How about you?”

“There was someone there who might want to kill me, yes.” She said it very calmly.

“Has any other attempt been made?”

“No.”

“What would the motive be?”

“Mother was right, wasn’t she? No, I can’t tell you any more about it. I’m sorry, Allan.” She stood up suddenly and held out her hand. “It was nice of you to walk us home, Allan. Goodnight.”

“Wailing wall abruptly dismissed,” I said.

“But the wailing wall will be back. I think.” It was the first note of promise she had given me — promise that she could consider me as anything except a symbol of protection.

“I think, too.”

At the bend in the path I looked back. She was silhouetted against the light that came dimly from the broad windows that faced the porch. She seemed to be leaning against one of the pillars and she seemed to have her face in her bands.

IV

When I walked in, Mike was slumped in a chair and Sara sat on a footstool near him. They had obviously been talking.

Sara looked at me with a twinkle in her eye. “Cute little bundle from Britain, hey?”

“Chawming,” I said.

Mike chuckled. “You always mark your women up that way, Al?”

“What are you people doing?” I asked. “Matchmaking?”

“Let’s get out of the banter department,” Sara said. “Down to business. Give us your general impression, Al.”

I glanced at Mike and he nodded. “Okay. Everybody seemed just ducky. But they were all nervous. They all seem to be tense about something. The least wholesome character is Roger Malone, but I don’t think he’s got the guts to step on a stink beetle. The rest of them seem all wound up in their own interests pretty much. That car was released on purpose. It was intended either as a murder weapon or as another phoney warning. Whether or not it was a murder weapon depends on whether or not the person who released it was aware that Jocelyn and I were sitting in its path.”

Mike sighed. “I figured it was an accident on purpose.”

“Who could have done it?”

“Anyone except the three of us and Jocelyn. We walked out of the lighted room into the dark. The bulb was blown on the floodlight out in back. You couldn’t see your hand in from of your face.”

“Bulb blown or unscrewed?” I asked.

“I thought of that,” he said. “Blown.”

“That’s not hard. You unscrew it and smack it hard on the heel of your hand a few times and you can ruin the filament.”

Mike looked at Sara. “You tell him about the layout here, honey.”

She waited a moment to line up her thoughts. “When Henry Geral, Senior, established this place, he was afraid that somebody would sell out to the wrong sort of person. Henry Geral, like so many self-made men, was more than a bit of a snob.

“So he devised a way to prevent that. He donated the use of the clubhouse, but kept it in his own name. In the terms of his will, the clubhouse title rests with his heirs — in this case, Jocelyn — and the six families on Signal Lake have the use of it for as long as the houses on the lake remain the possession of the six families in question and so long as the houses on the lake are not rented or used in any way by outsiders. Should any family be wiped out, leaving no heirs to take over the house on the lake, then the house is to remain empty.

“If any one of the families concerned should sell out to outsiders, then the use of the club will be denied to all and the club will be turned into a private foundation to use the lake as a testing ground to test the reaction of fish to chemical dyes, acids and industrial wastes. This foundation will be financed by a sum of money set aside in his will.”

For a moment it didn’t make sense. Then I saw it. One sale of property, and boom, the lovely little lake would become a stink-pool of dead fish and chemicals.

“Is it legal?” I asked.

“Absolutely,” Mike said. “We can’t do a darn thing about it. And before anyone could sell, they’d have to tell the prospective buyer what would happen to the lake. Just try to get say the fifty thousand I have in this place out again when I have to tell the prospect that the lake is going to smell bad and he won’t be able to swim in it. And if any one of us should try to sell, the other five families would never stop hating us. Old Henry really sewed us up.”

“But what has all this got to do with rifle shots and runaway automobiles?” I asked.

“Somebody is trying to scare us away from the lake.”

“What!”

“Just what I said, Al. Somebody is trying to make it so unpleasant up here that I’ll be glad to get out and take my loss. If I should sell, of course, that would ruin it for the others.”

“Are you the only one?”

“No. Funny things have happened all around the lake. That’s why everybody acted a little tense tonight.”

“Can you tell me about some of the other funny things that have happened?”

Sara said, “Well, somebody unscrewed the sea cocks on Momser’s cruiser a week or so ago. Not all the way. Just far enough so that the vibration did the rest of the job. He nearly lost it in the middle of the lake. Fortunately Barney saw he was in trouble and got out fast enough to locate the trouble and get it stopped. The Carol was pretty low in the water by that time. Water got in the engines and she had to be towed in, pumped out by hand and the engines dried.

“Ten days ago Abel Carson had an auxiliary marine engine up on a rope hoist. He and Constance went walking. When they got back the rope had parted and the engine had dropped right through a wooden dock onto the lake bottom. The rope had been frayed with a file or something.”

“Why hasn’t the law been called in?”

“Reporters would come right along with the law,” Mike said. “None of us have any desire to be a ten day wonder in the public press. And, until tonight, rather today, the stunts hadn’t been too dangerous. Momser can swim well. Abel wasn’t there when the engine fell.”

“Anything else?”

Sara giggled. “This one I sort of liked. Dennis and the Malones went down to the city three days ago. When they got back somebody had broken into the liquor cabinet and mickied the bottles. Roger got the best dose, Alice and her father were only mildly ill. Poor Roger would have willingly died. He still looks green around the gills.”

I looked at Mike. “But what brought it to a head? Why did you phone me?”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out an envelope and handed it to me. It had been mailed from Syracuse five days before. Mike’s name and address were crudely lettered. I pulled out a sheet of cheap paper from a five and ten pad. Letters of newsprint had been cut out and pasted on the sheet. In some cases entire words had been used. It was short and to the point.

It said: “Everybody knows the first one to sell out will get the best price.”

I grinned. “A nice commercial appeal.”

“And everybody else got one too,” Sara said simply.

“Get that imagination of yours working,” Mike said.

I thought for a moment, said slowly, “It looks to me as though for some reason this whole property around here had become very valuable. Suppose one man on the lake found out that there was some kind of mineral, or oil or something here. It would be to his best interests to put pressure on all the others and force somebody to start the parade by selling out. Then he could quietly buy all the other property for a song while the foundation was killing fish. If it was mineral rights or something like that it wouldn’t make any difference whether the water was polluted or not.”

“Very sound,” Sara said. “The only trouble with it being that we thought of that too. Our last house guest was a geologist from Syracuse University. He says that there is absolutely nothing of value here.”

“How about a road going through here?”

Mike shrugged. “From where to where? And why build it over the mountains?”

“How about the Federal Government. Maybe they want to stick some rocket launching stations up here in the hills. Or set up a lab for atomic research.”

“I’m disappointed in you, Al,” Mike said, “You know how Washington works. They come in and condemn the land and ease you off nicely and pay you a fair price. You can’t hold those boys up, you know.”

I thought for a few more moments. “It beats the hell out of me,” I said.

“And you think you’re different,” Sara said.

I snapped my fingers. “Wait a minute. How bad can you hate somebody? Can you hate and envy somebody bad enough so that you want to spoil the lake for them, not caring a hoot about yourself or the other four families.”

“We’ve been through that,” Sara said softly. “And also through the idea that one of the help is a psychopath and hates the well-to-do with a deadly hatred.”

“And what was your conclusion?”

“Just this,” Mike said. “It’s got to be that. Unreasoning hate. Envy, Either on the part of one of the servants or on the part of one of the fifteen individuals who gathered around the table tonight. Fourteen, I mean. I was counting you. Owen Vincent’s two kids don’t count. Your job is to find out who it is. And quick. I like this place. I’ve always liked it. Rather than ruin it, I’d just close it up and go somewhere else during the summer until the heat’s off. But I’m afraid somebody else might sell out. And that would ruin it for all of us.”

“Who might sell?”

“I have Kemp’s word and Carson’s word that they won’t sell. Momser, Vincent or Geral could be it.”

“And they all got the same notes?”

“Identical.”

I whistled softly. “Then the logical answer is that whoever released the car didn’t know that Jocelyn and I were right in the path.”

“That would seem to be the proper conclusion, Al,” Sara said.

I looked at her. The contrast between Sara and Jocelyn intrigued me. Sara was straightforward and dean-cut. A scrubbed sort of girl. Jocelyn was something a good deal more complicated.

That reminded me. “Jocelyn told me tonight that one person on the lake might want to kill her.”

“Who?” they both gasped at the same time.

“She wouldn’t say. That’s as far as she’d go.”

Mike and Sara turned puzzled stares on each other. Then Mike grinned. Sara flushed and said, “Oh, no! She couldn’t mean that!”

“Who else?” Mike asked.

“Hey, folks!” I said. “Cut me in on this.”

“Alice Malone,” Sara said, “I’ll tell you why. When Henry, junior, went into the army there was some sort of an arrangement with Alice. Not a formal engagement, I think Alice fancied herself as a tragic figure when Henry wrote back that he was getting married. Anyway, she went into a rest home. Nervous breakdown. All that sort of thing. But Alice is more wound up in Roger Malone than she ever was in Henry. From the reports Jocelyn has gotten, I can see how she might feel that bouncy little Alice might still harbor resentment.”

I grinned. “I can’t see fatso knocking anybody off.”

“Neither can I,” Mike said, “And I don’t see who else Jocelyn might mean.”

“Skip her for a mi time. What other random little resentments are floating around among these lovely people?” I asked.

“Nothing important,” Sara said. “Constance Carson was pretty clubby with Mat Momser’s first wife, Sandra. I think she resents the young stuff that now holds office. Roger Malone tries in a lot of little ways to make Barney Wallace feel that, after all, he’s just another employee. It doesn’t seem to bother Barney. Owen Vincent gets a faraway look in his eyes when he thinks about our Jocelyn. Alice Malone would like to take Roger to a place where there are no other women. I suspect that the new Mrs. Momser hates me in her gentle pedagogical way — probably because I don’t hide my amusement at the antics of Mat Momser, the old goat.”

Mike said, “And a few other little things. Jocelyn and Jeana Wallace seem to sharpen their claws when they get together. Also, quite a few years ago, Abel Carson gave Dennis Kemp some very bad advice on a business deal. Dennis isn’t much of a businessman. He took a licking and I don’t know whether he still resents it. And lately, Carol Momser has been trying to shine up to Owen Vincent’s two kids — in order to prove something or other to Mat Momser. But the kids are devoted to Sara here, and maybe that makes Carol resent Sara.”

I laughed, “Happy little group, isn’t it?”

“Now you know all that we know, Al,” Mike said. “Sleep on it.”

But before I went to sleep I sat up at the desk in my room and scribbled down a few questions. And a few answers. Among the questions were: Who had an opportunity to mail the anonymous notes from Syracuse? Who owns a thirty caliber rifle? Who can definitely be eliminated from the rolling car incident?

Martin’s gentle knock on the door awakened me. The sun was bright in my room. He took the breakfast order, and by the time I had showered and dressed, it was ready on the sundeck. Sara was there, and she had finished and was on her second cup of coffee.

“Hello, slugabed,” she said. “I had Martin get you under weigh. Big Mike is still in his downy little nest.”

I looked at her critically. “I like your early morning face, Sara.”

At that moment a boy of about fourteen came slapping up the stairs in his bare wet feet. I became conscious of banging and splashing going on down below. The boy said, “Sara, Mr. Kemp’s got all the drums fastened onto it and...”

“Tommy, this is Al Jarra. Tommy Vincent, Al,” I would have known without the introduction. The kid looked like a junior edition of Owen Vincent, A second edition, about two years younger came up behind him, and I found out that it was Robert Vincent. Bobby.

They had heard about my coming close to being run down by the car and they were full of questions. While I was answering them, I walked over to the edge and looked down. Dennis Kemp, up to his waist in water, was fiddling with a cable that was bound around one of the drums. He glanced up and said, “Good morning! How does it look?”

“Find Need any help?”

“Nothing more to do until Mat brings his boat over. Then we’ll need a lot of help shoving it off. Seems to have dug down into the mud a little.”

Kemp wore blue trunks. He lost his look of shambling frailty. The muscles along his shoulders and back were lean and flat, and they rippled when he moved his arms. For a guy his age, he was in very fine shape.

He walked out of the water back toward his place. I saw that he had managed to tighten the cables so that the drums were pulled well down into the water, exerting lift on the car.

I went back to my breakfast. Sara finished her coffee and left and I ate hungrily.

An hour later Momser had the line fastened to the car and the boat’s crew was churning the water. Mike, Kemp, the two boys, Sara and I stood on the shallow side and pried at it with timbers. Jocelyn knelt on the fantail of the boat and looked anxious. In a swim suit she lost her overly buxom look.

“I better get over there and help,” she said.

“One more try,” Mike grunted. “Back it up a little and get a start, Mat. When she hits the end of the line, everybody heave.”

At the moment of impact the car moved, and then slithered off into the deep water. For one horrible moment all the drums disappeared, then bobbed hack up, just the merest fraction of their bulk showing above the surface. Everybody cheered.

We towed it down to the club and cut it loose. Then Momser shoved instead of pulled and we got it up against the beach. By releasing the drums on one side first, Dennis Kemp succeeded in dropping it onto its wheels. The tow truck was waiting. I took the hook and got it around the front axle. Five minutes later it emerged slowly onto dry land. It was a very plush little sports model with the top down. The frame didn’t seem to be sprung, the water having cushioned the blow. Two fenders were bashed a bit.

Barney took over at that point. He said, “With the sun’s help, I ought to get this thing dried out by late this afternoon. Few little gimmicks I’ll have to take apart and spread out. Coil. If we’re in luck, there won’t be water in the gas, but my guess is that there will be.”

“Please charge me a great deal,” Jocelyn said. “The insurance company will pay, of course.”

Barney straightened up and looked at her. The lines around his mouth were tight. His knuckles were white on the wrench he held. “I’ll be glad to do that, m’am,” he said, his voice a mockery of servility.

“Barney!” she said, “I didn’t mean it that way. I just thought that...”

He looked at her blankly. “What’s that, Mrs. Geral?” But his knuckles were still white on the wrench.

“Oh, nothing,” she said petulantly and turned away. He looked at her and then turned back to the car.

I walked beside Jocelyn. “Touchy, isn’t he?” I said.

She kicked at the sand with her bare foot. “Too bloody sensitive!” she snapped. “That wife of his has a great deal of money. But he won’t touch it. Proud as Lucifer. You can see that she couldn’t buy the clothes she wears out of his pay. At least he lets her buy her own clothes.”

“Let’s go somewhere and talk about crime,” I suggested.

“Some other time,” she said absently. She went down the sloping beach with a woman’s awkward pigeon-toed run, but at the end of it she flattened out into a racing dive that was as expert as it was unexpected. I stood with my mouth open and watched her churn out into the lake in a fast crawl. She was probably getting the anger out of her system. A hundred yards out she stopped, oriented herself, and then started over toward her place with a slow powerful stroke, her arms lifting to gleam in the sun before they knifed smoothly ahead at the water.

Dennis Kemp had come up beside me. “Swims well, doesn’t she?”

“Too well. Walking back?”

“No, I’ve got to tie the drums together and Mat’s going to tow them back. See you later.”

I walked alone back to Mike’s place. Jocelyn’s mask had slipped. I was glad that I was alone. It gave me time to think about it. It seemed pretty obvious that when she had cried against my chest on the porch of her place, it could have been Barney’s Chest that she was crying against. Maybe it was he that she was crying about. And yet, by no word or sigh had she shown at the party that she was aware of his existence. It seemed to me that poor Jocelyn was all tied up inside with the impossible problem of coveting another woman’s husband. I wondered if I was reading too much into the little I had seen.

If I happened to be right, it was something that had escaped both Mike and Sara, or they would have mentioned it the night before when we were checking all the possible reasons for tension.

If I was right, it was equally obvious that Barney was aware of it. I remembered his white, stricken look the night before when he found out how close Jocelyn had come to getting a messy finish. It was bad for the two of them. I took another step forward in my reasoning. If both Jocelyn and Barney were lighting a mutual attraction, was Jeana aware of it? I remembered her calm eyes, the dean lines of her face and realized that if she was aware of it, she would never show it. She had far too much pride and far too much breeding to show that she felt the same way that Alice Malone did.

Chalk up another remote possibility, Jarra.

I paused and looked out at the lake, frowning. Though it was eleven o’clock on a bright summer morning, with the lake an almost impossible blue, there seemed to be no joy and no cheer in it. Maybe I was being conditioned by the odd fear that affected the others. Gloominess is something that should be reserved for squalid rooms and alleys grey with sticky fog. How could a shining lake manage to look gloomy and ominous? And yet it did. Sufficiently ominous so that there was a cool tingle at the back of my neck and the breeze chilled the slight perspiration. I looked across the lake. Jocelyn had just pulled herself deftly up onto her dock in a shower of spray. She was a tiny figure in the distance. I saw her stand up and followed her progress as she went up the steps onto the porch. I lost her in the shadows.

Suddenly I snapped my fingers. Cursing my stupidity. I hurried along the trail. Jarra and his great brain! So far five of the six families had received a pointed hint. Kemp with the poisoned liquor. Momser with his boat. Sara with the rifle shot. Carson with the frayed hoist. Geral with the runaway car. Only one was left, Vincent.

Whoever was encouraging the group to sell out would not stop before giving Owen Vincent a little touch of trouble. Also, following the same line of reasoning, it would be a quite different manifestation from any so far. Something new and different.

The Vincent boys were still with Momser on his boat. I turned the fast walk into a jog trot.

The bloodless creature named Martin nodded politely to me as I went in the side door. Mike was still at the club, helping Dennis Kemp with his drums. I hurried through the big room out onto the sundeck.

Sara had a blanket spread on the concrete and she was flat on her tummy in the full hot rays of the sun. She wore the trunks of her yellow sun suit and the bandanna top was beside her.

“Hey, you’re back too soon!” she said.

“That’s a matter of opinion. The point is open to argument.”

“Turn your back, copper,” she said. I obeyed. When she said it was okay, I turned around again and she was decent. “You look upset, Al,” she said.

“I am. The next candidate is Owen Vincent. Have you thought of that?”

She looked startled and said, “Why, no! But you’re right! We better go over and see him.”

The keys were on the mantel. I backed the baby blue convertible out of the garage and with Sara, tense and restless beside me, I drove as fast as I dared around the clubhouse end of the lake and parked behind his house.

V

There was a comfortable little study just off the living room of Owen Vincent’s place. Tired and hungry, Sara and I sat and looked at him. For the past two hours we had looked over his place. He seemed mildly amused by the whole process.

He leaned back in the chair, put his lean fingertips together and said, “I can find a few holes in your reasoning, kids. It is just as valid, almost, to assume that the mysterious troublemaker will repeat on one of the others before he tackles me. Secondly, two of the incidents have been passive — the sea cocks, the liquor. Three have been active — the shot, the car and the frayed rope. The odds are in favor of an active incident, and by looking around here, we can only hope to find evidence of a passive incident in the making.”

“Are you certain that you’re as relaxed as you seem to be, Owen?” Sara asked.

He smiled slowly. “After all, no one has been hurt.”

“Jocelyn lost a little hide off her cheek and came within a half second of catching her car in her lap,” I said.

Owen frowned. “I feel that incident probably scared the trickster as much as it did you. My guess is that he or she merely wants to make life uncomfortable for us. Maybe that incident last night scared our friend so badly that there will be no further attempts.”

There was a ring of logic in his supposition. I was forced to admit it to myself and I could see that it did a good deal to relax Sara.

Owen smiled. “Anyway, children, we’ll be giving our friend every chance this afternoon. This is the day you’re coining over here, remember?”

I looked questioningly at Sara. She smiled and said, “Owen’s float has got the best boards on the lake. It’s sort of a custom that every Friday we gather round and leap madly into the lake.”

I snapped my fingers. “The float! We didn’t take a look at that!”

Sara frowned for a moment and then said, “I see what you mean. Bolts loosened on one of the boards or something. Come on.”

As we weren’t dressed for swimming, we jumped into Owen’s kicker and, using the paddle, crossed the fifty feet of water to the big float. I steadied it while Sara climbed out and then climbed out myself. Owen stayed in the boat, holding onto the edge of the float and said, “I’ll watch you two play cops and robbers.”

I checked the tiedown bolts on the low board and it seemed solid. Just as a check I walked out onto the end and bounced up and down a few times. It was solid. There were four boards, each one projecting from a different side. Two low boards, one half way up, and one on the tower.

While Owen smiled peacefully at us, we checked the lot of them. “No sabotage,” I reported, as we climbed back down into the boat.

“I didn’t think there would be,” Owen said.

We were overdue for lunch. I drove and, a hundred yards from Owen’s place we met the two boys coming back from the club on foot. They waved.

“Nice kids,” Sara said.

“I’ve always got a soft spot for motherless brats,” I said.

“Having been one, I suppose,” Sara said softly.

“Mike told you? Motherless at six and fatherless three years later when Pop got knocked off enforcing the law in Kansas City. The death benefits put me through school. I know how rough it is on a kid, but maybe in the long run it’s better. It teaches you not to be dependent on any living person. Once you’ve been through it, you end up with an emotional stability that nothing can shatter.”

I could feel her looking at me. “You know,” she said gently, “That’s almost a challenge, my good man.”

Oddly, it bothered me. I felt a warm flush on my cheeks.

“My doodness,” she simpered in sticky baby talk, “It blushes, doesn’t it. How cute it is!”

“Shaddup!” I snarled.

By three o’clock in the afternoon I had begun to relax. I sat on the dock in the sunshine with a highball in my hand. The crowd was the same one that had attended the cocktail party except that Dennis Kemp and Jocelyn’s mother, indifferent to swimming, had stayed away, as had Barney Wallace, ostensibly to work on the car, but, I guessed, still stuffy about Jocelyn’s comment. The group, however, was almost as large, because the two Vincent kids were very much in evidence.

Everybody had done quite a bit of swimming except the Carsons, with Abel claiming that he was “too old and too fat” and Constance saying, “Why the sun would burn me to an absolute crisp in three minutes.”

The Vincents had a counterpart of Martin, except that he was younger, stouter and balder. The big bar on wheels rested on the dock and under the big umbrella the man acted as an expert bartender, tireless and smiling.

The sun felt good on my shoulders, and I enjoyed watching them out on the float. The skin-tight costume of Carol Momser brought out attractions that had only been hinted at before. Mathew Momser, in spite of plaintive glances toward the bar, stayed out on the dock with her. Evidently the nearness of Roger Malone constituted a threat more pressing than his thirst. Once I took pity on him and paddled out holding a drink on high. He was pathetically grateful.

Jocelyn was a seal in the water. But she wasn’t as good as Sara in the diving department. Also, she was extremely nice to watch.

Alice Malone’s contribution to diving was a quick run off the low board, holding her nose, striking fanny-first, rising immediately to the surface and shricking, “D’ya see me, Rog? D’ya see me?”

Roger, with his beautiful tan and good shoulders, could barely conceal his boredom every time she screamed at him. His standard procedure was to walk to the end of the middle board, arch his chest, suck in his tummy, and bounce up and down interminably until he was absolutely certain that he had been noticed by all. The only dive he did was a pretty fair swan. I guessed that he spent a good fifty percent of his time on the end of the board, flexing his muscles. I also noticed that he tried to swim close to Jocelyn in the water, but that whenever she saw him coming, she’d pour on the coal and leave him behind.

Owen Vincent was a dot far out in the water, floating and loafing in the sun.

Sara and Jeana Wallace did a lot of playing in the water, doing stuff like each holding onto the other’s ankles and revolving like a big wheel.

I was surprised that Sara and Jeana did so little diving. The few times they went off the low and middle boards, their grace was breathtaking. There was little to choose between them. Carol Momser did no diving. She seemed to have trouble finding the float without her harlequin glasses.

Big Mike was the one with a regular routine. He would chug out to the float like a working tugboat, rest for a minute, dive off, chug back, rest and have a drink.

It was hard, sitting there in the sun, to remember that this group of people were tense and worried. It was hard to remember that it would have been easy to die the night before, that I had heard two women cry and felt two women’s lips...

I remembered the dark alarm that I had felt as I looked out across the lake during the morning. In the bright afternoon, it was completely gone. I stretched, yawned and padded back to the bar for a refill.

Owen Vincent: was swimming slowly back in. I sat down on the dock next to Abel Carson and he said, “About time for the exhibition.”

“Exhibition?”

“Yes. Sara and Mrs. Wallace. They’ve got what you call a ladylike rivalry. Diving exhibition. At least they claim it’s an exhibition. Actually, they try to outdo each other. Owen’s coming in to organize it as usual.”

The day darkened suddenly and I looked up to see that the sun was shining with reduced fervor through a greyish cloud. I heard Owen say something to the people on the float, and the whole crew of them swam in with him. All except Sara and Jeana who climbed up onto the float and stood, slim and graceful, waiting for people to get properly settled on the dock.

“What’s it going to be this time, Sara?” Owen called out to her.

I could see her smile. “Same old stuff, Owen. You and Mike do the voting. We’ll work our way up to the high board.”

The gals were good. I don’t know a half-Gaynor from a full-Nelson, but Abel Carson muttered the names of the dives as they did them. Jackknife. Front one-and-a-half. And so on. The way they hit the water impressed me. Apparently the spectators were split into two camps. They shouted encouragement at their favorite. There was a spatter of applause after each good dive and a moan of distress when either of the gals botched one, which they sometimes did.

After about ten apiece off the low board, they went on up to the middle board. It gave them more of a chance to be spectacular. More turns and twists and gyrations in mid-air. Once I winced when Sara hit a little flat, remembering how it felt when the water had clubbed me the day before.

I found that I was pulling for Sara, and yet a little dubious about her outpointing Jeana Wallace. The slim Philadelphia girl seemed to have just a shade more grace, though Sara had a little more precision. Also Sara burst up out of the water so fast at the end of a dive that she sometimes seemed to spoil the effect.

Abel noticed it too and, chuckling, said, “Sara could dive into a saucer full of tea and never touch bottom.”

I glanced up and saw that the sun could barely be seen. Alice Malone was shivering a little, hugging herself with her plump arms. Roger, bored and placid, sat beside her admiring his own thighs.

At last they climbed up the ladder extension to the top platform. “Here’s where it gets rougher,” Abel said.

The board had less flexibility than the lower boards. It was Sara’s turn first. She stood for a long moment, studying the board. She walked slowly out, bounced a few times and walked back. The crowd was silent. She took two running steps, jumped, landed on the end of the board with both feet at once, went up, almost in slow motion, in a perfect, beautiful arc, arms flung back, back arched, chin high. A split second before she touched the water she brought her hands out ahead of her and cut in cleanly.

She burst from the surface, shaking the water out of her eyes and grinned back at the applause from the dock before regaining the float in four husky strokes.

Jeana waited until Sara rejoined her on the top platform before making her effort. Like Sara, she tested the board, came back, stood absolutely still for a moment and then took her running steps.

She jumped higher than Sara did before hitting the end of the board. She too, did a perfect and beautiful swan dive, made more spectacular by the fact that, at the top of her leap, the sun struck down, outlining her trim body in shining gold. She seemed like a creature more of air than of earth and water.

The people gasped as she knifed down into the water. “I concede!” Sara shouted, cupping her hands around her mouth.

They applauded, but not very loud, saving the major burst until Jeana should hear it. Oddly the applause pattered away into nothingness. Abel made an odd grunt. I looked out and saw Sara, her posture strained, peering down at the water. No shining head had broken from the surface.

Someone behind me made a sound that was part gasp, part scream. As I got to my feet, Sara went off the end of the board in a tight, workmanlike dive, knifing down exactly where Jeana had disappeared.

I smacked the water in a low racing dive, the muscles in my shoulders cracking as I used the longest fastest stroke I could manage.

Sara still hadn’t appeared as I reached the float. I could hear swimmers coming behind me. I yanked myself up onto the float, ran over to the side where the girls had landed just as Sara came up, her face like chalk, blood darkening the water around her.

“She’s down there!” Sara gasped, “Stuck somehow!” She held her hand above water. Blood ran thickly down her waist. She saw my intention and said, “Don’t help me! Go... after her.”

I let some of the air out of my lungs to reduce buoyancy, and dropped straight off the edge of the float, fighting my way down with an underwater breast stroke, my eyes open. The green of the upper water darkened as I went down, and I could feel the pressure on my ears.

Below me there was a flash, of something pale. I fought down to it, felt flesh under my hands. I grasped her, found that she was face down, that her suit was down around her thighs, probably ripped in Sara’s efforts to free her. I knew I couldn’t last much longer. I tugged at her, but she didn’t move. I pulled my way along her body to the shoulders, slid my arm under her throat and immediately struck something rough and hard, I felt with my fingertips and it seemed to be a curved rough object that had somehow entered the upper part of her chest near the collarbone.

My ears thudded and my vision began to waver. I knew that if I left her there, she would have no chance. I pirated in the water, got my feet braced against something solid and pulled slowly at her shoulder. She slipped free and I held her tightly, kicked up and, one arm around her, clawed at the water with my other hand. It was like trying to climb some unreal ladder. I choked and the water bit into my throat, I asked myself why I was making all this effort. Why not relax? There was a sound of distant music. Why try to climb this silly green ladder? Go to sleep, Jarra. Drift off to sleep...

I was on my face and somebody was trying to squash me. I grunted and tried to roll out of the way. I coughed up a gallon of water. My head hurt. I opened my eyes. The painted boards of the float were under my cheek.

“Okay, Al?” somebody asked from a vast distance.

“Oh, just dandy,” I said.

I rolled over onto my back and looked up into Mike’s face. Somebody was making a bad noise just over to my right. I lifted my head and saw that Mathew Momser, novelist, was on his hands and knees, clutching the edge of the float and being desperately ill.

When I sat up, I saw why. The naked body of Jeana Wallace was face down on the float. Owen Vincent knelt with one knee between her legs. Her white face was turned toward me. Through her slitted lids I could see nothing but the whites of her eyes. A great gout of blood had run from her mouth across the boards, darkening in the sun.

Owen, his face grey, looked over at Mike and said, “Artificial respiration’s no good, Mike. Whatever it was punctured her lung. Each time I press down...” He made a gesture of dismay.

“No sign of a heartbeat?” Mike asked.

“Not a flicker.”

Without a word Mike stepped over to the grey navy blanket that had been spread on the float for the benefit of sun bathers and tossed it over to Owen Vincent. He covered the body, tucking it in around her so that the wind would not whip it away.

I stood up and, as I wavered on legs that had turned to soft wax, Mike caught my arm and said, “Okay now, Al?”

“Sure, just a little wobbly. I wasn’t in time, I guess. Who pulled me out?”

“Owen pulled the two of you out.”

I turned to thank him but he was standing, looking down at the body of Jean a Wallace. Something in his face told me that no matter what I said, he wouldn’t hear me.

“Where’s Sara?” I asked suddenly.

“Getting her hand fixed,” Mike said. “She’s up in the house with Jocelyn. She ripped herself pretty badly on whatever it is down there. What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know. It’s heavy and rusty and it’s made of metal.”

I glanced toward the dock. Mike said, “Owen told the rest of them not to come out here.”

Abel and Constance Carson were holding hands, standing close together and looking out toward the float. Owen’s gesture in covering Jeana had been all too dear. I saw the tears shine on Constance’s red, wrinkled face. Abel was expressionless.

The two Vincent boys sat hunched on the dock, their bare shoulders touching, their faces identical masks of horror. Carol Momser was in a deck chair, a towel held to her face and Alice Malone stood beside her, patting her on the shoulder. Roger stood off to one side, his arms folded. The man was making him a drink, but even at fifty feet I could see that the once deft hands of the bartender were shaking badly.

Owen looked toward shore, shouted, “Tommy, go up to the house and phone the State Police and tell them there’s been a death here. Bobby, go to the boathouse, get that long manila line and bring it out here to me. Bring, it in the boat. We’ll need the boat.”

Fifteen minutes later Jeana’s body, wrapped in the blanket, had been carried up and put in the small study where Sara and I had talked to Owen Vincent earlier in the day. And the gadget had been brought up from the bottom of the lake. As soon as I saw it, I knew that I should have been able to guess what it was. It was a farmer’s hay rake, designed to be pulled behind a tractor or horses with the curved points down. But this had been in the lake with the curved points up, and curving back toward the float.

I stopped wondering how long it had been down there when I saw the edge of an oak leaf wedged into a crack in the metal. The oak leaf was green. There would be few oak trees on the bottom of the lake. Thus it had been dragged through scrub oak somewhere, and recently.

When no one was looking, I pulled the leaf out and pocketed it.

There had been a delay getting hold of Barney Wallace. He used the club boat, bumped it roughly into the dock and came bounding up the steps, his mouth working.

“Jeana! Where’s Jeana? What happened?”

Mike took him by the arm and the study door closed gently behind the two of them. Five minutes later Mike came out by himself. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and patted his broad forehead. His eyes looked as though they had sunken further back in his head during the previous half hour.

Mike had cautioned everyone to stay around so as to be available in case the police would wish to ask questions. I felt pretty rocky. I guess everybody else felt about the same. People wandered around vacantly with no desire to talk. Owen sent his boys up to their room. He stayed with them for a time, and then came down alone.

I found Sara outside the house, sitting on a stone bench and staring at nothing. Her hand was efficiently bandaged. I sat beside her. “Hand bad?” I asked.

“Not as bad as it looked at first. A three inch rip across the palm. I’ll have to have tetanus shots, I guess.”

“You ran right into that rake thing?”

“Yes. I went off the top, you know. I saw it, and turned my hands to deflect myself up but I wasn’t quick enough.”

“And after you did that to yourself, you stayed and tried to get her loose?”

She tried to smile. “I didn’t do much good. You got her loose.” She shivered and bit her lips. “What a horrible way to die! Down there in the blackness with that rusty iron in your chest.” Her face grew more pale. I put my arm around her and held her close for a moment, until she stopped shivering.

She sat up, smiled and said, “Thanks, Al.”

A white sedan with the top of the hood painted black rolled into the drive, the tires crunching on the gravel. Two mammoth troopers in grey climbed out of the front and a round man with the face of a disappointed spinster hurried out of the back seat. He carried a small bag. “Where’s the body?” he snapped.

I stood up and led them inside, Mike and Owen got Barney away from his dead wife and the troopers talked in low tones to Momser while the coroner examined Jeana.

I stood outside the door of the study. The fussy little man yapped, “Somebody! Come in here!”

I went in. He was bent over the body, fingering the frayed edges of the wound. He glared up at me. “What made this wound, young man?”

“A hay rake. Curved hunk of rusty iron. Apparently went right down into the lung.”

“Don’t try to tell me my business. Somebody’s going to pay for this. This girl has been treated in an absolutely criminal manner. A trained man should have removed the object from her lung. It was torn out. That’s what killed her. Somebody is going to answer for this. Yes, sir. I won’t keep my mouth shut after looking...”

“Hey! Hey, Doc. Relax, will you? Wait a minute!” He stopped sputtering. “She was in better than twenty feet of water when she hooked onto the hay rake. What would you have us do? Wait until you could come and put on a diving costume and take your bag of tools down to her?”

The look of auger faded away. “Oh,” he said. And a little later, “Oh.” He covered her up and I look him out and showed him the hay rake where it lay on the dock. He dunked at it a few times.

By the time we got back up to the main room, the youngest trooper was scribbling busily in a notebook while the older one asked bored but polite questions. He was a big man with dark hair and he looked tight in his skin — trim and hard.

He said, “Pretty dangerous, a thing like that in the deep water under your high board, Mr. Vincent.”

“I can’t understand how it got there?” Owen said.

“You just probably never knew it was there,” the trooper said, smiling officially.

I reached in my pocket, pulled out the little piece of oak leaf and handed it to the trooper. “What’s that?” I asked.

He glared at me. “Oak leaf, fella. What is this? Botany lesson?”

“Maybe. I took that off the rake when it came up out of the lake. It’s a fresh leaf. Thus the rake was put there. Thus this is murder. Thus you boys better stick around and order some higher brass. And that rake at the bottom of the lake is incident number six in a long line of funny incidents,” I said.

A hard hand grasped ray shoulder and spun me around. Barney Wallace had turned into a stranger. He searched my face with his eyes and said, in almost a whisper, “You said somebody put that rake down there.”

“That’s what I said.”

He let go of my shoulder and turned away. The older trooper looked at him and said, “When we locate who did it, we better not let Wallace get anywhere near them.”

By seven o’clock at night, it had turned into a joint teaparty. The troopers and the county cops. Not to mention the newspaper boys. They began to arrive in Hendreson by every means of transportation, including, in some cases, riding on a broom.

My statement to the troopers had exactly the effect on the others that I had expected it to have. Most of them acted more shocked and hurt that I’d bring the cops down on them than they did about somebody planting the rake in the lake.

But big Mike sighed heavily and said that I was right and that it was time for officials to come in and referee the game. Mrs. Cordon-Kent came over, and happily informed everyone that I had called in the police because I was one myself. In due time this got back to the police and they looked on me with the fine high regard that the professional gives the amateur.

Because the fatality had happened at the Vincent place, it became headquarters. Owen got permission to send his boys across to stay with the Carsons. As a further concession, the accumulated police interviewed the Carsons first so that they could take the boys with them.

The body was taken down to the Hendreson undertaking parlor and the little study became the sweat-box.

It was supposed to be routine with Abel Carson and Constance, but Abel had a small surprise for them. I caught on that something was going on when a trooper came out of the study fast, clumped down to the dock and began to examine Abel’s very fine boat. When he hurried back up, I took a quick look. The sun had gone behind the far hills and the long dusk was beginning to darken. But even in the poor light, I could see the deep gouges in the varnished wood, the spots of rust.

In a few minutes they chased me away from the boat and a trooper went on guard. Sara had seen the activity. She stopped me on the porch and said, “What is it?”

“Abel’s boat freighted the merchandise over here, probably during the night. I guess he had noticed the gouges earlier in the day and hadn’t known what had caused them. Then he added two and two.”

“Why Abel’s boat?” she asked, frowning.

I shrugged. “Quietest boat on the lake. Throttled down, it could sneak by your nose in the dark ten feet away, and you’d barely hear it.”

She nodded. “That makes sense.”

“And it’s a lead. It narrows it down to whoever could handle Abel’s boat.”

Shaking her head sadly, she said, “That won’t work, Al. Abel is proud of the way she handles. I don’t think there’s anyone up here that he hasn’t taken out in it and let run it around and around.”

“Funny he wouldn’t padlock it or something at night.”

“Why? There’s only the six families on the lake. You can’t exactly pick a boat like that up and run off with it.”

She was right. I had the feeling that the use of Abel’s boat wouldn’t give them a clue of any kind.

She said lightly, “Of course, it means that no woman could have done it. A great big heavy thing like that rake.”

“The only women it rules out are Mrs. Gordon-Kent and Constance Carson. The rest of you could handle it easy enough. It’s so rusted that it weighs maybe seventy pounds. Or eighty. Awkward for a woman, but not impossible. She’d only have to lift one side at a time to move it. The tough part would be sinking it in the right place with the dangerous side up. That would take a bit of doing. You or Carol or Alice or Jocelyn could have done it.”

“Don’t say that!” she said, shuddering.

At last they were through with Abel and Constance, and, after some flash bulbs were expended taking pictures of the boat, the Carsons left, taking the Vincent kids with them.

Out of the goodness of their hearts, and because they were hungry, the officials decided to let us eat.

Instead of the big table of the previous night, we were split up into small groups of two, three and four.

Sara and Mike and I met Jocelyn and her mother just inside the door of the club. Mrs. Gordon-Kent made an expansive offer to buy drinks, and the only one who took her up was Mike. The two of them went off into the lounge while I sat down at a table for four with Sara and Jocelyn.

In a way, it amused me. After all the years of batting all over the country without finding a single girl who was completely attractive to me, I had to run into two at the same time. And the two were so different that there was no real way to compare them. Jocelyn, the dark one who was unpredictable, Sara, the fair and shining one.

Though they were both pale and obviously shaken by the events of the day, they talked brightly, almost gayly.

I had to cut Sara’s meat for her. She couldn’t hold a knife with her injured hand. Jocelyn’s lip was still slightly puffed, but the adhesive was gone from her scraped cheek.

Over coffee, Jocelyn said, “It’s pathetic and tragic in a way, isn’t it? I mean that Jeana Wallace, the innocent bystander had to be the one. The idea was to worry the six families. One of the Vincents was supposed to get gouged with that rusty iron. Murder wasn’t intended.”

“It was murder none the less,” I said.

Sara said softly, “She liked to do that. Jeana, I mean. Off the high board. She liked to arrow right down to the bottom and then curve up again into the light. She told me once that she got an almost sensual pleasure out of it.”

“Who knew that?” I asked.

“Almost everyone. She was always going around with scraped arms and stubbed fingers.”

Jocelyn said slowly, “You know, if it weren’t for the chain of circumstances, the mysterious person trying to make us sell out, it would look as though someone had purposely murdered Jeana.”

“Nonsense,” Sara said calmly. “They didn’t want to murder Jeana. Nothing is gained there. Barney isn’t one of the six. Somebody was supposed to be gouged during a dive. Warning number six. Don’t make up things to fret about, my dear.”

But I had looked quickly at Jocelyn and seen something deep in her eyes, some stirring of comprehension that I couldn’t read.

Slowly I went over the incidents in my mind. There was nothing on the list that Barney couldn’t have done. Even to the mailing of the notes...

But it didn’t make sense. Nothing added up.

I wanted to chase the thought out of my mind, but I couldn’t. If I hadn’t seen that little byplay between Jocelyn and Barney, the thought would never have entered my mind.

After dinner, I went back to the Vincent place, Jocelyn walking slowly beside me. I thought of her tears, of the touch of her lips, and thought of what would happen to her if I told the police of my suspicions. Even those suspicions were practically groundless, Thoughts of that kind are difficult to dislodge.

With the lights of the Vincent place showing along the trail, I stopped Jocelyn, turned her around and said, “Who do you love?”

Her tone was light. “Why Mr. Jarra! You, of course.”

“How about Barney Wallace?”

Her shoulders tensed under my hands. Her hand flashed up from nowhere and cracked me across the mouth, hard. I tasted blood between my teeth.

“That’s for what you were thinking, Allan,” she said softly.

Before I could say a word, she turned quickly and walked into the light. I followed more slowly.

They certainly gave me ample chance to kick the idea around. They saved me for last. As each person emerged, weary-looking, from the questioning, their first thought was to get home to bed.

They got to me at midnight. Two beefy men in dark suits, county officials, sitting on the other side of a white desk. A thin man in a corner with a shaded lamp shining on the stenotype machine, a box of paper ribbon near it covered with strange hieroglyphics.

“Sit down. Yes, right there. You are Allan Jarra of New York City.”

“Yes.” With, each word the stenotype made furtive clickings.

“You are, I believe, a private detective.”

“That’s one term for it.”

“Please, Mr. Jarra. We have no time to listen to you be clever. It’s late. Please make your answers as short as possible. When did you arrive at Mr. Leo’s place?”

“Yesterday at two-thirty or three.”

“There was an incident down at the gate, was there not?”

“Yes. Someone shot out the right hand windshield of the car with what sounded like a thirty caliber rifle. The slug went right on through and off into the woods. I couldn’t find out who did it?”

“Did it occur to you to report this incident to the authorities?”

“It did not.”

“And why not?”

“I am a guest here. It! there is any reporting to do, my host can do it.”

“And yet you called attention to the proof of the rake being but recently placed in the lake.”

“That’s different. That’s murder.”

“What’s the difference between murder and intended murder? The intent is the same.”

“The business at the gate wasn’t intended murder. A six-year-old could have killed either one of us. It was an intended miss. If the miss was unintentional, there was plenty of time and opportunity to take another crack.”

“Why did you come up here?”

“Because Mike Leo called me up and asked me to.”

“Did he tell you why he wanted you up here?”

“Not until last night.”

“After the incident of the car?”

“Correct.”

“And what is your opinion on the car incident?”

“I don’t think the person who released it knew that Miss... I mean Mrs. Geral and I were in its path.”

“Pretty clubby with this Mrs. Geral, aren’t you, Jarra?”

“Yes.” I could see that it wasn’t the reaction he had expected, and yet I had given him nothing at which he could take offence.

He glanced at the other heavy-faced man and the two of them sat in silence for a time. It was supposed to make me nervous. Never let the boys with the heavy faces and fallen arches make you nervous. Save that for the smoothies, the ones from Northwestern and the other good police schools. The fallen arch boys usually became cops in order to financially come in out of the rain. These were county boys. Semi-political. At home at a smoker with their ward heeler pals, watching the blondies dance. Or watching dirty movies. They got where they were because the guys on top dropped dead or went on to bigger and longer troughs.

Beware of the slick little men who smile and talk gently and keep talking and somehow become your pal and they understand you. And never antagonize the heavy-faced boys who got in the cops because it was too noisy at the foundry. They can’t outsmart you but they can head-whip you until the board says “tilt” and the lights go out.

And these were the characters that I had hoped would accept a theory of mine with understanding and proceed delicately. Phooey!

So their psychology lost them a lead.

“You went down after the body?”

“So they keep telling me. I passed out on the way up.”

“Very brave.” The sneer was gratis.

“I didn’t think it was so bad myself. Thanks.”

“This isn’t a radio show, Jarra.”

“Oh, yes sir. I understand, sir.”

One to the other. “I don’t like this monkey.” Solemn shake of heads. I’m supposed to cry down my shirt front because I’m unpopular with the boys.

“Do you have any theory about this whole business, Jarra? Maybe you can teach us something. After all, you gave up your important New York affairs to come up here and help these poor, frightened people.”

I leaned forward, an earnest expression on my face and said, “I not only have a theory, friend, but I know who did it!”

“Yeah? Who?” Suddenly they were interested.

In a breathless tone I said, “Communists! These are rich people. Direct orders from the Kremlin. But the wife of a worker got killed by mistake.”

The nearest one sneered and balled a big fist. He said, “Why you...”

“And if you pop me one, every paper in New York is going to get a fat writeup on upstate methods, friend.”

“Get out of here!”

I walked to the door. He told me to wait. I stopped. He said, “And stay within the boundaries of this place. You can make gay with the dollies, pal, but don’t wander off the lot. Understand?”

“Oh, perfectly, sir!”

Owen was sitting on a beach chair on the porch. The red tip of his cigarette glowed in the dark and shifted as I walked out. “Want me to run you over, Al?”

“No thanks, Owen. I’ve got a lot to think about. I’ll walk. Sorry you stayed up, if it was for that.”

“I wouldn’t have been able to sleep anyway. I keep remembering the way she looked.”

I leaned against the post and said, “Somehow it’s always tougher when it’s a woman. More of a waste somehow. Maybe that’s just a male way of looking at it. I remember a picture in a newspaper years ago. Young gal jumped out of a hotel window. The photographer caught her just as she was whizzing by the front door, about six feet over the sidewalk, skirt blown up to show a very fine set of legs. You knew looking at that picture that one second after the shutter clicked those legs were all done as an object of interest. One kind of interest anyway.”

“Those other kinds of waste when a woman dies,” he said softly.

I flushed in the dark. “I always seem to get my foot in my mouth, Owen.”

“You didn’t say the wrong thing. I’m okay now, Al. Just... well just a little lonesome, I guess.”

I felt closer to him that moment than I could remember feeling to another human being. Shock will do that. Shock and the warm night and the sound of the water and something shared.

“Goodnight, Owen,” I said and left quietly. He didn’t answer.

Walking from Owen’s place, you didn’t follow the path all the way. The path led up through the brush and joined the road and you followed the road to the club. The moon was bright enough to cast shadows. I disturbed some birds and they made sleepy noises in the trees. Some small woods creature ran across the path, almost soundlessly.

I thought of how pointless and how formalized the chase of the criminal was as compared with the cold, brutal face of sudden death. Society demands that definite procedures be followed. Electric chair. Trial by jury. Hung by the neck. Attorney for the defence. It all has a hollow ring — a big, big production. Stars and walk-on parks and fat lines and a thousand columns of damp black ink.

Unreality, when you compare it to the cold pale face of the girl who died at the bottom of the lake. Murder by mistake. So sorry, m’am. Just meant to gouge somebody a little and it seems I killed you. So sorry.

Somebody was thinking that.

I walked along the shadow of the trees, the moonlight bright on the still road. The dew was damp on my face. A thousand miles away a dog barked.

The sudden roar of the car behind me startled me. I stepped aside, but the sweep of the headlights caught me and the car braked to a sliding stop next to me. One of my beefy friends from the small study said, “That you, Jarra? What are you walking around at this hour for?”

“I’m walking around to Mr. Leo’s place. Why?”

“Vincent could have taken you across.”

“Look. I like to walk. I like it line. Is there a law against it? Go ride away in your little white car and play copper.”

Oddly he didn’t take offence. He chuckled. “Don’t get so heated up, boy. We’re all through playing copper. At least we will be in a few minutes.”

“How come?”

“Oh, routine work. Adding this and that together. Seems to point in one general direction.”

“What this and that did you add up?”

“Little things, Jarra, Routine work. A passenger that Wallace flew down to Syracuse about the time those letters were mailed. That same passenger owns a 30-caliber rifle...”

“There are five 30-calibre rifles around the lake.”

“Well, our man could have easily done everything that’s happened. And he’s the only one that might have a good reason by nature of his occupation.”

I began to see who he meant. And I felt that he was wrong.

He continued, “Pretty smart operator, too. Told us about the marks on his boat before we could find them. Mr. Vincent told us where the rake came from. Used to be buried in the brush at the brink of a ten-foot overhang at the end of the lake. Right next to our man’s property.”

“Carson? You guys are crazy!”

I thought of the burly brown man with the sharp blue eyes. What had they said? “By nature of his occupation.” Contractor. If he could buy up the whole lake... It still didn’t make much sense. And yet, their quiet conviction had shaken me.

The man laughed. “You city kids have to come up here in the hills to learn anything. Just thought we’d let you know.”

The gears ground and the car leaped ahead, spattering small stones back against my ankles, leaving a swirling cloud of dust that settled slowly back to the road in the moonlight, The twin taillights disappeared around a curve a hundred yards ahead. The drone of the motor faded away.

Abel Carson would be awakened and taken down to Hendreson, or maybe all the way to the County lockup, fifty miles away.

I began to hurry. Mike should be told. As I quickened my steps, I remembered the whip-crack of the rifle, the windshield shattered in the sun. Had one of those keen blue eyes squinted along the shining barrel?

VI

As I hurried by the club, I saw lights shining in the windows of the small bungalow that had been pointed out to me as the Wallace residence.

I stopped for a moment, then walked across the grass and looked in the window. Barney Wallace sat slumped in a chair. There was a bottle and a glass on the small table beside his chair. His eyes were open. I went to the door and knocked. No answer. I tried the knob and the door opened.

He peered up at me. “Whassa marra?”

“Drunk?”

He looked at me owlishly. “Yep. Jeana gonna raise hell.” It put a chill along my spine to hear him refer to the girl.

I had wanted to talk to him, I had wanted to find out a few things.

I bent over and grabbed his shoulders and shook him. His head wobbled loosely. He struggled feebly and said, “Leggo me! Go way!” The fumes around him were heavy enough to slice with a knife.

I backed away. He winked at me, picked up the bottle by the neck and tilted it. His throat worked convulsively as he downed the last two inches in the bottom of the bottle. It slipped out of his hands, thudded on the rug and rolled over toward the fireplace. His chin dropped onto his chest. His eyes closed. In a few minutes his heavy breathing began to rattle through loose lips.

I grabbed his wrists and lifted him out of the chair, dropped my shoulder and let him hang down across it. He was a heavy kid. I put him on the couch, dropped a blanket over him, cut the lights and left.

The trail was darkened by the tree shadows. Once I tripped over a root and sprawled, twisting my wrist. Lights had been left on for me at Mike’s place. I was halfway up the stairs when I suddenly realized that I didn’t have the least idea which room was Mike’s. I hadn’t seen him go into it or come out of it during the day and a half I had been there. It seemed vastly longer than a day and a half.

I knew which room was Sara’s, Mike had to be in one of the other three. He was in the second one I tried. The moonlight shone across the bed. I found the light switch and, moments later, he sat up, scrubbing his eyes with big fists and squinting at me. “What’s up, Al?”

I sat on the foot of his bed. “The gestapo has made an arrest. Or they’re just about to do so.”

“Who?”

“Abel Carson.”

“What! Abel? What have they got on him?”

“Deduction, they say. And his boat was used. And the rake was near his property and he had an opportunity to mail the letters and to do the other damage around here.”

Mike swung his feet out of the bed and readied for his robe. “Police!” he shorted, “Have they figured out the reason?”

“Apparently they think that Abel, being a contractor, wants all the land to build something on.”

“Hell, I told them that there’d be no point in a road or airport or anything up here.”

I gave him a cigarette and he sat on the edge of the bed, the robe around his bulky shoulders, dragging heavily on the cigarette. I started to say something, but he shut me up, glowering into space.

Finally he said, “I’ve been trying to put my finger on something that was out of key. Something about Abel’s boat. Abel’s a careful man. He keeps those floating cushions in there. And Abel loves boats. Particularly that boat. It’s too fast for this lake, just like Mat’s is too big. Why if you walked up and scratched a match on that mahogany hull, Abel would beat the top of your head in.”

“I see it,” I said. “With the cushions he’d keep the rake from marking his boat. It would be too instinctive to even think about.”

“Unless he was smart enough to figure it the way we’ve figured it, and mark the boat to give himself an out. And that doesn’t seem logical. No, I think they’ve got the wrong person, Al. And there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.”

“Except find the right one to take the heat off Abel.”

“Al, he’s got high blood pressure and a shaky heart. I don’t like to think of what this might do to him. He’s one of my oldest friends.”

“Look, Mike. Suppose you go over and look in on Constance. She’s probably pretty upset.”

“What are you going to do?” he asked, looking at me suspiciously.

“I’m going calling. I don’t want to tell you who I’m going to call on. My suspicions aren’t definite enough. I don’t even know what I want to find out. By the way, Barney Wallace has drunk himself unconscious.”

Mike sighed. “A rough tiling. Can’t blame him much.”

As he started to dress, I went along the balcony to Sara’s room and tapped on the door. After the second, and heavier, rapping, a sleepy voice said, “Just a minute.”

A slit of light showed under the door and it opened. She held a robe around her and her eyes were swimming with sleep, “Oh! Hello.”

“Sorry to bother you, Sara, I want to know which room Jocelyn sleeps in. I want to wake her up without awakening the household.”

Out of the midst of grogginess, she smiled at me. “How flattering, Al? What am I running? A date bureau?”

“Something like that. Tell me quick before you wake up all the way.”

“Anything new in crime detection?”

“Nothing exciting. How about the directions?”

“Okay. As you face the house with the lake at your back, it’s the corner room on your right on the second floor. If you feel like climbing, it has a small balcony effect. Good hunting, Al.”

She shut the door softly. I sensed that I had annoyed her. I didn’t want to annoy Sara. She might be the one. One of the two, Jocelyn or Sara, had to cancel out. I seemed to be attracted equally to them. To find out which one was it was a second investigation, more personal, and yet, in the long run, somehow more important.

I met Mike on the stairs. “How are you going up to Carsons?” I asked.

“Kicker.”

“Can I use the blue wagon? I know where the keys are.”

“Go ahead.”

The bright headlights swept the road as I turned out of the drive. In a very few minutes I rounded the end of the lake. Two hundred yards from the Geral driveway I cut the lights and the motor and the little car drifted quietly in the moonlight. The tires made little noise in the dust of the road. I parked beyond the drive, and walked down to the house. On the way I picked up a handful of small stones.

The lake was very still. Even the small lapping of ripples had stopped. A thin line of cloud drifted across the moon, darkening it for a few moments. Across the lake I could see the lights of Mike’s place. The only other lights were up at the far end at Carson’s place. There could have been a light on at Vincent’s. I couldn’t see from the dark shore in front of the Geral house.

The first stone rattled against wood. The second pinged off copper screening. The third and fourth also hit the screening.

A throaty, sleepy voice said, “Who is it?” in a tone just above a whisper.

“Allan. Dress and come down. I’ve got to talk to you.”

After a long pause I heard faintly, “In a few minutes.”

No light clicked on in her room. I backed up against the house, cupped the match flame in my hands as I lit my cigarette, and listened to the soft noises of the night. After a bit I began to wonder if she had gone back to sleep. No sound came from within the house. I was considering finding some more small stones when a board on the porch steps creaked and a moment later, pale against the night, she came over to me.

There was amusement in her voice. “This is all very mysterious, Allan. What do you want?”

“Let’s get away from the house first.” Without further questions she went with me around the house and up the long driveway to the road. I held the door for her and she climbed into the car. I shut it softly, went around and climbed in behind the wheel. We were far enough from the house to talk in a normal voice.

“Jocelyn, don’t be mad if I tell you that I don’t know exactly what I want to talk about. The county police are arresting Abel Carson. I don’t think he’s the one.”

“Nor do I!”

“And Mike has gone up to be with Constance and Barney is out like a light next to an empty Scotch bottle. Nothing makes sense to me, and the reason I have come to you, I suppose, is because you’re the only one I don’t completely understand. That’s not a good word. I’ll try again. Your motives are a little foggy to me.”

“I don’t think I know what you mean,” she said in a small voice.

“Put it this way. Suppose you are putting a jigsaw puzzle together. You are just starting. All the pieces are cut in a certain way except one piece. It has an odd contour. Naturally you wonder where it fits. The other pieces, at first glance, seem perfectly normal, but you know you’ll have trouble figuring out the one piece that seems to have strayed in from another puzzle.”

“May I ask what started this?”

“Certainly. Mike and Sara told me of all the little tensions between the local inhabitants. They missed one that I caught. The little relationship between you and Wallace, Point two, you wept the other night. What are you like on the inside, Jocelyn? What do you think about?”

In a small voice she said, “I’m very simple, actually. I fell in love with an American and married him. He died. I’m lonely. I guess I’m not the sort of woman who can adjust to a manless life. I still worship the memory of Henry Geral, but I have to fight against the urge to be too sweet to every attractive man I meet. There is nothing between me and Barney Wallace. He’s attractive. I guess he has sensed that I like him. He has been careful to be quite distant with me. The perfect employee. But a few times I have seen him looking at me.”

“What are you going to do with yourself? What is the rest of your life going to be like?”

There was pain in her voice. “I don’t know, Allan. I don’t know. I think I’d be happier without all the money. I’m middle-class British. You know. Cottage and children and a kitchen-garden and flour to the elbows. I think I will probably go back.”

“Who is your nomination for the office of murderer?”

“I haven’t been able to think about it. Every time I start to think, I see the way Jeana looked and I force myself to think of something else. I’m restless, Allan. Let’s walk. What time is it?”

“Around three.”

She slid out and stood, pale in the fading moonlight. I walked beside her down the road toward the club. I glanced back. The blue car was a larger shadow, vague and indistinct. Our steps kicked up small puffs of dust which settle immediately in the airless night.

Suddenly I felt incredibly weary. It had been too long and too difficult a day. I had walked too far. I lagged behind and she turned. “What’s the matter?”

“Bushed. Absolutely. I’ve got to sit down or fall down.”

Her laughter was as silver as the moonlight. “Sissy! There’s a log over there in the shadows. Sit down while I walk off some of this restlessness.”

I stumbled through the weeds in the shallow ditch, sat down gratefully on the log and leaned my back against the bole of a tree, my legs outstretched.

She went far down the road, turned and came slowly back. I looked through the leaves overhead at the distant stars. She didn’t speak to me as she walked by, her chin lifted, as though she too looked at the stars. In the distance I heard the throaty coughing of an outboard motor and suspected that Mike was returning from the Garsons. A distant bird made a sad, fading sound, a diminishing tremolo.

I leaned my head back against the rough bark and closed my eyes, I couldn’t remember having been so tired...

I sat upright, every muscle tense, realizing I had been asleep for a few moments, not knowing what had awakened me. I blundered out into the road. I could see no sign of Jocelyn. Fear chilled me. At that moment, without my realizing it, the choice between Sara and Jocelyn was made. The ice in my throat made my fear for Sara when she went down after Jeana a minor emotion.

In the distance there was a small crackling in the brush. I ran up the road toward it, cursing the blackness of the night.

Heavy bodies thrashed in the shallow ditch. I couldn’t see. I went down into the ditch, hearing the grunting pants that could have been made by an enraged animal. In the road, at the edge of the shadows was a woman’s shoe, on its side.

I caught hold of a leg and dragged the person back toward the road. In the moonlight I saw Jocelyn’s face and someone’s arm was tight around her throat. I grasped the arm. It was thick and firm. It was only by exerting all my strength that I was able to pull the arm away from Jocelyn’s throat. Jocelyn was unconscious. Possibly dead. The arm slipped out of my fingers and a quick figure bounded away toward the shadows. By throwing myself full length across Jocelyn’s prone figure, I managed to catch a thick ankle in my fingers. The unknown person fell heavily. I fought for wrists while nails tore at my face, searching for my eyes, and a blocky knee caught me in the pit of the stomach, driving the wind out of me.

I released one wrist and, bunching my fist, clubbed whoever it was in the side of the head with a force that nearly broke my hand. All resistance stopped. I dragged the person back out into the moonlight. The moment I released my hold, she — for by then I knew it was a woman — tried to roll back into the shadows.

Knowing she was conscious, I picked her up roughly and turned her around so that the moonlight slanted across the fury-twisted and bestial face of... Alice Malone!

She tried to pull away and I said, “I’ll hit you again if I have to.” I wanted to let go of her and see how Jocelyn was, but I didn’t dare release her.

Jocelyn stirred and sat up, one hand at her throat. Her voice was rusty, as though something had been broken in her throat. “Who...”

“Sweet little Alice Malone! Can you get up? I can’t let go of her.”

Shakily Jocelyn stood up, walked over and slipped her foot into the shoe. She said, “I heard a noise. I tried to turn. I managed to scream once as her arm went around my throat. She pulled me down into the road and dragged me back into the ditch.” There was a dark spot on the shoulder of the stained whim dress. With a note of hysteria in her voice, Jocelyn said, “Why I think she bit me! On the shoulder!”

Like lightning, Alice Malone lifted her wrist, lowered her head and sank her teeth into the back of my hand. I slapped her so hard that it tore her teeth loose and dropped her flat in the dust.

I yanked her up, twisted both her arms behind her and said, “She’ll be good now. Come on. Back to your house.”

When the lights clicked on the living room of Jocelyn’s house, I shoved Alice Malone into a chair and said, “Stay right there. Don’t move.”

In the public fancy, plump girls are supposed to be good sports. Jolly. A lot of fun. Alice Malone sat there and looked at us. Her chubbiness was like some form of cancerous growth covering the lean wildness of an animal. Jocelyn looked at her, shuddered and turned away.

In a voice that was tight with fury, Alice Malone said, “Not this time. But the next time. Or the next. There’ll be other times, you foreign slut!”

“Call Vincent,” I said to Jocelyn. “There be some police there. Tell ’em to come on over.”

Jocelyn hurried to the phone. I stood with my hands jammed deep in my pockets and looked down at what I had thought was a cheerful, slightly stupid little girl.

“You tried to kill her,” I said.

“Yes. I tried to kill her. She took the only thing I ever had. She took him away from me and then came back here to sneer at me and lord it over me.”

“But why all the games, Alice? Why the hay rake and the poisoned liquor and all that nonsense?”

She didn’t answer. She said, I thought about it for a long time and any other way of doing it was no good. I had to feel her go. I had to feel her get limp under my hands.

“The padded cell for you, my chicken,” I said.

She laughed. “You think I’m crazy? I had a reason. She married Henry. Even after she knew about me, she married Henry. He told her about me. He wrote me that he told her about me. And then he died, She killed him. He was going to leave her and come back to me and she killed him. She came here to sneer at me. The next time, I will kill her.”

At that moment someone bounded up the porch steps and hurried into the room. Roger Malone. He wore a checked sport jacket, faun trousers and a white silk scarf. He glanced at me, looked over at Alice and hurried to her. “Darling,” he said, “I’ve been looking for you for an hour. I woke up and you were gone. I’ve been worried. I’ve been to every place where there was a light. You weren’t at Carsons or at Leos...”

“Your wife tried to murder Jocelyn tonight,” I said. “The police will be here soon.”

He turned on me, his bored expression gone. “Kill Jocelyn! Why?”

“Because she still loves Henry Geral, stupid.”

Roger straightened his shoulders. “She loves me! I’m her husband!”

Alice got up out of her chair, almost lazily, bunched her plump fist and smashed Roger square in the mouth, nearly knocking him down. She sat down again and said, “Get away from me, you comic opera character! You’ve never come within six feet of me without making me sick to my stomach. Get out!”

It wasn’t pretty to watch the disintegration of Roger Malone. The blood ran down his chin. He made helpless motions with his hands. To believe one moment that your unattractive wife is completely in love with you — and to find out the next that she finds you absurd and even repulsive.

The tears showed on his smooth brown cheeks. He turned and ran blindly out of the room. I heard him stumble on the steps and he was gone.

Alice looked at me. “Too bad it wasn’t Jocelyn at the bottom of the lake today. But that would have been too easy. Jeana was lucky. She died only suspecting. She would have learned if she’d lived. She knew how it was going to come out. She knew how he was. That’s why she wouldn’t let him touch her money. He’s got it now. If I could have killed Jocelyn, it would have helped Jeana. Then she wouldn’t have been able to creep into Jeana’s bed. Now she will.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I demanded.

She laughed. “Oh, they were a pretty couple! Didn’t you ever see them go off the high board together. A picture of grace. Jeana and Barney the loveable kids. Side by side. Right down to the bottom, hand in hand and then up again into the sun. Henry was the only one who has ever known what I’m like.”

“He wouldn’t touch her money!”

She laughed again. “Who told you that? Jocelyn? After I told her about what he said to me, she told me about last year in Florida, about the way he forged her name on a check.”

Jocelyn had heard the last part of the conversation. She stood frowning at Alice. “What on earth are you talking about?”

Alice shut her mouth firmly. It was obvious that she would say nothing further. And she didn’t.

VII

In another half hour it would be dawn. The air was cool. I stood on the porch of the Vincent place with Mike beside me. He had arrived at Carsons in time to make his weight felt and talk the authorities into assigning a guard to Abel Carson and letting him sleep in his own bed and make any necessary statements in the morning.

The small study was in use again. They had taken me first, then Jocelyn and at last, Alice Malone. No one could find Roger. Her father, Dennis Kemp, sat in the living room with his head in his hands.

“It won’t be as bad as it looks,” Mike said.

“How so?”

“It isn’t widely known. Her mother went off the beam. Died insane. She’ll be put away somewhere. I feel sorry for Dennis. At least it is somewhat better than prison. Maybe with shock therapy...”

I nodded. “Sometimes it works out.”

“I was just thinking, Al. When she released that car, she was trying to rub Jocelyn out. She didn’t give a damn whether or not you got it too.”

“Looks that way,” I said. But it didn’t feel just right. It didn’t fit right. There were too many loose ends.

“I ought to get back over and tell Abel that he’s clear,” Mike said.

“You’ll wear that outboard motor out tonight.”

“No, I’m traveling in style. I’ve got Abel’s boat.”

“Stick around for a while and see how they make out with her, Mike,” I said.

He nodded agreement. The sky was beginning to turn grey in the east. We heard heavy voices and the fainter sound of Alice’s answers.

There was the sound of footsteps. I turned and saw Alice walking meekly beside a weary-looking trooper. They went up the stairs.

One of the men with the heavy faces walked out onto the porch, spat over the railing, scratched a kitchen match on his blunt thumbnail and lit a cigarette. He yawned and scrubbed the back of his neck with his knuckles.

“Everything’s all cleaned up, I suppose?” Mike asked.

The man looked at him without speaking, snorted and walked back in. “Come in here a minute, Kemp,” we heard him say.

The study door closed behind Dennis Kemp. The voices continued.

Mike said, “These boys must get overtime pay. They’re making it hard for themselves.”

“They tried to make it too easy, picking on Abel Carson.”

“I’m glad it dropped right into their laps. Otherwise it would have been hard to pry Abel out from under. I got my lawyer out of bed. He’ll get here in the morning. Abel was too damn mad and proud to call a lawyer.”

“What did Constance say?”

“She was either laughing or crying most of the time. Sara located some sleeping pills and those settled her down. When she wakes up, the world will be okay.”

It took them nearly a half hour to finish with Dennis Kemp. They called Mike and me in at the same time. Mike could barely hide his disgust.

I said, “What games are we playing now?”

The older of the two shook his head sadly. “I wish to hell we knew. I know both you men are upset over Carson and think we’re making a mistake.”

“Are making a mistake?” Mike bellowed. “What the hell goes on? Now you know who it was.”

The man clucked sadly. “We thought we did. Now we don’t know. The babe’s father knows that she’s gone off the beam. He’s broken up about it. But he’s just as positive that she didn’t play any of the games that have been going on around here. The clincher is that he had his arm around her waist at the time the car took the leap into the lake. I’ve seen liars for years. Kemp isn’t one.”

“And I suppose Abel Carson is?” Mike said in a dangerous tone.

“Either he is, or we’re dead wrong from the beginning. And that doesn’t look likely. This Malone attack is something new and different. She told us that all this trouble at the lake made a perfect cover for her. She knew that she had proof that she hadn’t done any of the other things. Thus, had she gotten away with murdering Mrs. Geral, she would never be suspected. And she does have pretty good proof that she had nothing to do with the rest of the trouble. Good enough for us. She slipped out of her house, intending to come over here to this side of the lake and sneak into the Geral place and choke the Geral women to death in her bed. She same along and found her walking along the road by herself. She didn’t know you were around, Jarra. Except for you, the Geral woman would be cooling fast at this point.”

“Where does that leave us?” I asked.

“Just where we started. Carson has got to be it. I can see the point when the Malone girl says that all this trouble was her golden opportunity. If she hadn’t been caught, the murder would have been just another link in the chain of screwy incidents.”

Mike started to ask a question and I said, “Shut up a minute!”

He jumped and I could feel him looking at me. But I was on the track of, an idea. I said, “I haven’t got this clear in my mind yet, but follow me through on this and check it with me. Suppose somebody wanted to buy the whole place around here for some good reason. We don’t care what reason. Suppose they force somebody to sell. We’ve been making the mistake of looking too hard at the present and the past, and not at the future. Once somebody sold out, the lake would be worthless and they’d all sell. But there would be one thing that couldn’t be concealed. The eventual ownership! In other words, no matter who bought the lake property up, whether through proxies or out in the open, it would be pretty damn evident that they had created all the trouble in the beginning, wouldn’t it?”

The study was very quiet while they mentally chewed the idea. The man in the dark suit said, “That seems to make sense, Jarra.”

“Then the next step is that since the eventual ownership and use couldn’t be concealed, the whole idea is worthless. Everybody forced to sell would have a fat damage suit against the eventual owner.”

“I’ll go along with that,” Mike said.

“Then the whole thing is a blind. A cover up. A wonderful cover up because it perfectly concealed motives. A smoke screen. And we couldn’t see through it.” My voice got higher as I grew more excited.

“I’ll be back in less than an hour,” I said. I jumped up and hurried, out. They made no move to stop me.

I parked the blue ear beside the club, hurried into Wallace’s place. He still snored on the couch. I sat him up on the edge of the bed and slapped him, forehand and backhand until he began to mumble.

I brought a pitcher of water from the kitchen and dashed it into his face. He spluttered and swung his arms and looked around him wildly. “What the hell goes on?” he said thickly.

“Wake up, Barney! Come on, boy! Rise and shine!”

He tried to collapse again, but, I pulled him up. He awakened a bit more, peered at me and said, “Why don’t you go away?”

“Because the police will be around soon. After you.”

Muscles bunched along the line of his jaw. “You been drinking?” he asked.

“No. I want a little dough from you, Barney. About one hundred thousand bucks.”

“Give me a cigarette.” I lit it for him and he lifted it to his mouth with a shaking hand. “You must be nuts,” he said.

I pulled a chair over, sat down and said, “Okay, I’ll give it to you slow. Marriage cramped your style. You got married because you thought her money would enable you to live a life of ease. But the babe had character. She knew what easy money would do to you. You couldn’t get your paws on any of it. Not a dime of it. No, you had to work for a living and you were just as bad off after marriage as you were before. Worse, because you couldn’t play around with the girlies and you had to support her.

“One day you realized that if she died, you’d get the money. She must have had guts to make you her heir. But she did. You began to wonder about a nice safe way to kill her. Particularly after that bad check incident in Florida.”

His eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about? What bad check?”

“You remember, Barney. When you signed her name to it. She told Alice Malone after Alice told Jeana about the bad check.” Barney’s lip curled and there was a look of contempt on his face.

“Keep talking,” he said. “I like to hear fairy stories.”

“You and she dived together. You are good. So was she. High board stuff. You knew her habits. You thought about it. If only she could dive by herself and get stuck on the bottom one fine day, you’d be dear of marriage and lousy with money. It wasn’t long after that you saw that rusting hay rake on the bank up at the other end of the lake and thought what a fine tiling that would be for her to get caught on. But it would be rough on you if you dumped it in where she dived and it worked. The first guy they’d sweat would be you. And that would be pretty unfortunate.

“Then you got a brainstorm. You knew the terms of the Geral will. You could blow up a dust storm of suspicion by setting off a chain of screwy accidents and making it look as though somebody was trying to force everybody to sell out. You wouldn’t be suspected of that, because, if you were successful, it would put you out of a job. When you flew Abel Carson to Syracuse, you mailed your anonymous letters.

“It was well planned. You dumped the car off the cliff over at Leo’s knowing that it would keep you busy either repairing it or trying to get it out while you were hoping that Jeana would spit herself on the rusty iron teeth of that rake. You dumped the rake in the night before, taking Carson’s boat to do it. You were afraid to be around and watch Jeana get it.

“It didn’t have to be foolproof. All you needed was a good chance of her getting it. If her diving habits, which you knew so well, didn’t kill her, the next accident, or the one after it, would. Maybe something to do with the plane as a last resort. Plane crashes are usually fatal.

“But you were in luck. She did swoop down on her first leap off the high board and impale herself on that rusty iron. Her dough is yours now, Barney. No more bowing and scraping for the upper classes.”

He took a long, deep drag on the cigarette, the ring of burning paper moving a full half inch toward his lips. He had a good face. Browned. Weather wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, smile wrinkles around the generous mouth.

He said, “Bud, you better stay away from those movies.”

“The reaction isn’t right,” I said quickly. “You ought to be throwing punches at me for accusing you of such a thing. Instead you sit there and talk about movies.”

“I should hit you because you’ve gone nuts?” His voice was getting steadier, and his bands were not shaking as badly. I was losing the edge.

Softly I said, “If that was all I had to go on, Barney, I might begin to believe that you’re free and clear.”

It was an odd look be gave me. He didn’t turn his eyes in their sockets. He turned his whole head, the eyes rigid, the lines around the month deeply etched.

“More fairy stories?” he asked, but there was a hoarseness in his tone that hadn’t been there before.

“Sure, Barney. More fairy stories. You know what makes fingerprints? Grease. Body oils that cling to the ridges. Grease isn’t soluble in water. The prints you left on the brake lever of that little sports car weren’t touched by the water.”

His face showed nothing. I looked down at his hand and saw that he had tightened his fingers on the short cigarette butt, compressing it flat.

“You came here to make a deal?” he asked.

I tried not to show what. I felt, “Yes.”

“Then get the hell out! The wheel and the brake lever of that crate were wiped clean twenty minutes after it came out of the water.”

The silence grew in the room. The butt burned his fingers and he dropped it, stepped on it. Fragments of grey smoke still hung in the air. The room smelled of illness, of liquor, of the scent of fear. I could see him slowly tighten. He had said a great deal more than he had intended to say. His eyes narrowed.

I stood up quickly and backed away. He relaxed a little and I know then that he had been planning to jump me. I waited him out. Waiting is better than talk sometimes.

“How much?” he whispered. His eyes were nearly closed. The face was still a mask. The face of a nice, cleancut young man, with a lazy, goodnatured mouth, brown capable hands.

“How do I get it?”

“You have to wait until the estate is cleared. Two, three months. How much?”

“How much do you get?”

“Three, four hundred thousand. Maybe less.”

“One hundred thousand and I want a guarantee right now.”

“What does that mean?”

“Write out a confession and you’ll get it back when I get the dough, Wallace.”

He smiled softly and easily. “Never!”

I pulled the 38 free and held it on him. I backed a few steps more and reached for the phone without taking my eyes from him. “Pop guns yet,” he said.

“Right now, Wallace, I phone the police over at Owen Vincent’s. With the leads I have, they can tie it to you. And I swear you tried to bribe me to keep my mouth shut.”

He stood up. “I get it now, Jarra,” he said. “You’re the boy hero. You give me all this psychology and solve the case. Well, you’re wrong. You think I did it for the money, don’t you? You’re wrong.” He took a step toward me.

“Move back and sit down, Wallace.”

He took another step. “I did it because she cheated me. Big talk about money. I didn’t want to be married. She bought marriage and then she didn’t pay off. She talked about my character.” He took another step. His voice was going higher with each sentence. He had an odd, almost gleeful look on his face. Maybe all murderers are mad. Wallace was certainly mad.

“I told you to sit down.”

“I was a colonel, Jarra. I flew lead ships. I had a London uniform that cost me seven hundred bucks. Colonel Barnard Wallace. You wouldn’t understand about that. I moved around with the real class, Jarra. Not with a bunch of plumbers like there is on this lake. She did this to me. She made me no better than a chauffeur for these punks. Me!” He stepped closer, tapping himself on the chest, his shoulder’s squared.

“Sit down!” I yelled.

“I took flak in the shoulder, Jarra, and brought the ship back with blood running off my wrist. You think I care about your popguns? I figured it right, you know. I figured this deal so that when I killed Jeana, it would look like an accident that went wrong. I didn’t know you and that British wench were in front of the car. I wish you hadn’t moved so fast. I’d be sorry about her, you know. I’m going to spend some time with her, Jarra. Lots of time.”

He was a psycho. It broke right through the mask of that young, goodlooking face and for a moment he looked like Alice Malone. Funny that a guy like that could look like the little fat girl. But he did. My back was against the wall near the phone. I had to do it quick. He would reach me in another two steps. He seemed completely unsonscious of the gun in my hand. The safety was thumbed off. I couldn’t risk the shoulder. He might dive into it. I didn’t want him dead. A smashed knee would be plenty.

I dropped the muzzle and tightened my finger. He jumped me and I knew, as the gun cracked, that the slug had gone down into the floor.

It was like catching a sack full of bricks. He hit me with knees, elbows, shoulders. My head smacked back against the wall and the room spun. It was my fault for letting him get so close. But I had wanted him to keep talking.

I brought the gun around hard, slamming it against his head over his ear. He dropped onto his hands and knees and, as I tried to kick him, he pulled my legs out from trader me. A hard fist hit me under the eye and he tried to twist the gun out of my hand. I rolled hard, in the direction of his twist, and pulled the gun under my chest.

I heard him scramble up and I swung the gun around, but not fast enough. An enormous shoe swung out of the mist and my head exploded. Somebody shouted in the distance. My face was wet. Footsteps going away. Fast. The room was full of fat grey spiderwebs. I sat up, shook my head. They faded a little. I was in the rolling barrel at Coney. The room was a barrel and it tried to roll me up onto the wall. I wanted to be sick.

Beyond the fat grey spiderwebs, the automatic glistened, blue black. I started to crawl to it and the rolling room pitched me onto my side. I reached out and gathered it in. Had to get out of the room. Had to get out into the air. The door was open. The world outside was a hundred shades of grey, and the lights in the room looked pale and weak. The grass was wet against my face, and I went up the door-frame like a ladder until I had my back against it.

A roar shook the world. A continuing roar. It hurt my cars. My vision cleared. A man was running toward me. It seemed to take long minutes to identify the roar. I left the support of the door, and wobbled drunkenly toward the lake shore. The huge doors of the barnlike structure beyond the club were open. Dawn was a pale grey. The muffled sound of the roar aimed to flat fury as the silver seaplane same out of the makeshift hangar.

It began to pick up speed. Stupidly I lifted the automatic and emptied the clip at it. It was a hundred yards away and moving fast. I could just as well have thrown a handful of gravel.

A bulky man in a dark suit was beside me, staring at the plane and panting. “Come over... after you,” he gasped. “We... began to... figure like you did. He... did it?”

“Yes and there he goes,” I said bitterly.

The silver plane arrowed down the lake, beginning to achieve lightness, grace. Suddenly darksuit grabbed my arm. I didn’t see it for a moment.

Grey against grey. A slim boat, angling out toward the path of the plane. Foam flying up from the bow. Foam diminishing as it climbed up onto the step, began to plane.

Seaplane and boat. Parallel lines meet in infinity. Not these lines. They weren’t parallel.

I stopped breathing and watched. Barney Wallace must have seen it at the last moment. The seaplane jumped, but settled back down. Crazy collision of toys on a grey livingroom rug. Trick photography. They do this with mirrors. Wing turning, spinning, flashing gold in the first pale rays of the morning sun. Then a hot-white flash, bright as the sun, a moving flare that at last stopped and we could hear the distant hiss of the water quenching the gasoline flames.

The flare was gone. I exhaled slowly and became conscious of the steady monotonous stream of curses from the man at my side.

I wiped my face with the hack of my hand and looked stupidly down at the dark smear of, blood.

VIII

It was afternoon of the following day. I had to leave in forty minutes in order to catch the bus.

We were filled with the intense and lethargic weariness that comes with reaction, Mike, Sara and I sat on the sundeck. My bag was already in the blue car. Mike and I had just finished the long argument about whether or not he’d pay for my services. After he had said that unless I let him pay me, he’d send an anonymous money order to our office, I accepted his substantial check.

Mike was blue. Sara was cool and distant.

I sighed and said, “So Signal Lake becomes a test tube for fish.”

“With both Mat Momser, blast his soul, and Roger Malone selling out, what else?” Mike said wearily.

“I’m not sorry,” Sara said suddenly.

Mike jumped and looked at her. “Eh?”

“I said I’m not sorry. I couldn’t ever swim in this lake again without drinking of Jeana Wallace. And of the horrible way that Barney Wallace and Dennis Kemp died.”

“Funny about Dennis,” Mike murmured.

“Well,” I said, “his little world had blown up in his face. While I was talking to Wallace, you people figured out what was what. You and he were on the dock next to the boat you had borrowed from Abel Carson. When you heard the shots and saw the plane, he was a little quicker than you were, Mike. And he had a different idea.”

I glanced at my watch and stood up. I shook hands with Mike and said, “Drop in on me when you hit the big town. You too, Sara.”

As Mike drove the little blue car up the drive I looked back. Sara stood under the trees, the sunlight dappling her face so that I couldn’t see her expression. But the goodby had been as I had expected. A firm, impersonal handshake. Sisterly. A scrubbed, warm, platonic handshake.

We didn’t say much on the way down to Hendreson. The events at the lake were too recent for conversation. There wasn’t anything to say.

The bus wasn’t in sight. Mike let me off in front of Burden’s Drugstore. I waved at him as he drove back toward the lake. With the departure of the law and the press, Hendreson had settled back into its usual summer apathy. Nothing to do but stand and listen to the big Victorian houses rot.

The buxom and pimply miss was still behind the counter, this time mixing herself a thick milkshake — with eggs. The same fly, or one of his cousins, buzzed helplessly in the dangling sticky tape. The cardboard grin of the fair lassies was in the usual place.

She glanced up. “Hello there.”

“Hello to you.”

“Say, you really got in on something up there, didn’t you, mister? I been cutting out the stuff in the Syracuse paper and pasting it...”

The screen door banged flatly behind me and the girl stopped. Her face froze and she banged a second glass of water down beside me as somebody slid up onto the neighboring stool.

“You didn’t say goodby,” Jocelyn said accusingly.

I grinned at her. “Remember? I’m just a symbol.”

“Are you?” I saw in her eyes what she meant and felt the distant thud of my pulse.

“I thought you and your mother were going back to England?”

“We are,” she said. “In a week.”

It was as though we had been over the conversation before, had practised it. I knew my cues perfectly. “But you’ll be back?”

“In six months.”

“No more weeping, then?”

“No more weeping.”

“You’ll call me when you get to New York?”

“Mike gave me the phone number.”

The aged bus rattled to a stop in front of the drugstore. The horn blatted. I picked up my suitcase. Jocelyn and I looked at each other. No kiss. No handshake. No banalities.

I looked into her odd dark eyes for a long moment, turned and hurried out.

The bus driver spat out into the dust and swung the door shut. I hurried to an empty seat and got one quick look into the drugstore.

Jocelyn sat at the counter. She didn’t look toward the smeared windows. The bus pulled away. In a funny kind of way Jocelyn was with me. I knew I’d have to get used to it. She was going to be with me from here on in.

Content

John D. MacDonald
Deep Death

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII