“What happened. A trucker reported it at about one thirty. A lumber truck. He saw the car lights. They were still on. Maybe cars went by and didn’t see the lights, but he sits high. He pulled off and set his blinkers and walked back. Then he ran back to the truck and came right to the barracks in Dowellburg. The ambulance was called over from Dain City, eight miles west, and when they saw it was a bad head injury — Doc Greer was there by then too — it made the most sense to run him right down to the city. I radioed ahead so they’d know what was coming in. Here we are.” He pulled off the road. She got out with him and they walked up the shoulder of the road.
He stopped after about a hundred feet and turned and pointed back the way they had come. “What you’ve got is a big curve to the right. He started to lay the rubber down right here. From a measurement taking in the vehicle weight, grade, surface and climate conditions, we can come close to figuring speed. Call it seventy-five.”
He walked back along the shoulder. Vacation cars went by, churning the damp air. “Rubber stays on the road a long time,” he said. “You can see how he got carried over into the wrong lane and almost made it. Right here he went off onto the shoulder and it was soft. He ripped up the dirt and grass. It tipped the car over.”
He angled down the slope, pointing out gouges in the soil. “He came bouncing and rolling down here, sideways and maybe end over end. The doors sprang open and the woman was thrown out. She landed about here and the car rolled over her. There was never any doubt about her.”
Jane Ann shuddered and followed him toward the trees. “The man — your husband, he was about here, thrown out later, and the car stopped right here, right side up. This tree stopped it.” He sat on his heels and pointed to a raw gouge in the trunk of a big maple, a gouge about a foot above ground level.
“Could the woman have been driving. Officer?”
He looked up at her and came slowly to his feet. “No way to prove that one way or the other, Mrs. Foley. In the absence of proof, the law assumes the owner was operating the vehicle.”
“And the law assumes he was drunk?”
“Stan Stack at the Mountaineer said Mr. Foley had at least three drinks, and no sober man would come into this corner at that speed, Mrs. Foley. And as for the woman’s driving at that speed, she didn’t drink.”
“Did you know her. Officer?”
Surprisingly. Vernon Gyce blushed — suddenly and violently — and looked away and said, “I know who she was.”
It brought a more personal element into their conversation. When he looked at her again, his dark eyes were changed. There was a male awareness in them. It seemed to her a strange and unpleasant place in which to be found attractive. She knew that he was wondering about her, wondering how vulnerable an attractive wife was after her husband smashed himself up while hacking around after the local floozy. In the silence a long string of holiday cars went by on the road.
“You see,” she said. “I have to understand how this could have happened.”
“We get a lot of one-car accidents along this stretch. They push it too much and lose control.”
“I mean I have to understand why he was with Mrs. Mannix, and where he was going with her.”
“I guess I can’t help you there.”
“Maybe you can help me more than you realize. I assume that Mrs. Mannix was... had a bad reputation.”
“I wouldn’t want to say anything like that.”
“Officer, was she the sort of woman who would have gone to a motel with my husband?”
Gyce blushed again. “I guess you could say that.”
“Then, doesn’t it seem strange to you, or to anyone, that they should leave the Mountaineer together and come miles and miles down this road, when my husband already had a motel room in Hartsville?”
“Maybe she wanted to go for a ride and wanted to go fast — egging him on, sort of. She was crazy-acting. She didn’t have to drink to be drunk. She did a lot of weird things. You could never know what Shirl wanted to do next. She could be laughing and all, and suddenly take a dislike to you and cuss you out and walk off.”
“Couldn’t her husband control her?”
“He works off in the woods a lot. He didn’t know what happened until two days after. They live maybe half a mile from the Mountaineer. She married Ross Mannix when she was sixteen. Their kid is seven years old now. Once he was settled down for the night, and Ross away, she’d walk on down to the bar at the Mountaineer.”
“You seem to know a lot about her.”
“I was in Hartsville a year, then here for the last two. Work out the winters in these places where there aren’t many people, and you get to know them. Ross used to thrash her when she’d get out of line, but not lately.”
“What did she look like?”
“Well, small, and sort of Spanish- or Italian-looking. Dark, and a little on the chubby side. Bright clothes and a lot of bracelets and stuff like that. And a big, deep, loud laugh that surprised people.”
“I’m afraid I’m taking up too much of your time.”
“I should be getting back on tour, Mrs. Foley.”
“What if I want to ask you something else?”
“From four to four thirty I’ll be at the barracks. You can phone there if you want.”
They climbed the slope to the road and walked across to the sedan. He swung it around and headed back to the barracks, where Irene’s car was parked.
“Please think about something else, because maybe I’ll want to ask you about it,” she said. “My husband and I have used seat belts for so long that we latch them without thinking about them every time we get into the car. When people ride with either of us, we make them use the belts. But they were both thrown from the car.”
“I looked that car over. The belts weren’t used.”
“Don’t you think the whole story is strange?”
“What does your husband say, Mrs. Foley?”
“He can’t remember.”
The trooper’s mild smile was ironic as he let her out by her car.
She drove back and stopped at the same place and went down the slope by herself. She wanted to see it again, without the distracting presence of Trooper Gyce.
Suppose the accident had torn the wiring loose? Then the lights would have been off. The driver of the lumber truck would not have stopped. And Johnny would have died, right here, alone, before dawn came. Life seemed almost too precarious to her at that moment. Too chancy, too dependent on small things.
She touched the scarred trunk of the maple. In a few months the raw wood would heal itself. As she straightened up she saw a gleam of metal in the brush. She moved closer and saw that it was a hubcap. She crawled in and got it and brought it out. The look of it brought back the memory of the car — the day of choosing it, driving it home, the smell of newness. Johnny always teased her about the way she endowed pieces of equipment with personality characteristics — the surly refrigerator, the hysterical lawn mower, the smug coffeepot. The car had been a lady, quiet and slightly haughty. A horrid, clashing end for a lady who had always behaved so well... She took the hubcap back to Irene’s car and put it on the floor in the back. It would have seemed strangely thoughtless to leave it there, a poor return for gentle service.
She drove north toward Hartsville, anxious to see the one person who could probably tell her the most about that night when truth was turned upside down, when all the world began to relate strange lies about John Foley.
She found T. J. Arlington over at the north shore of Blind Rock Lake, supervising the construction of four lake-front cottages. He was a broad little man of about fifty, wearing khakis, work shoes and a red felt hat.
He talked to her by the tailgate of a muddy pickup truck while they drank coffee from a thermos jug out of plastic cups.