They walked over to Nancy’s little compact without looking at each other.
“I’d better drive,” he said.
She nodded and walked around the front of the car to get into the suicide seat.
“With you in a sec,” he said.
The gravel of the driveway crunched beneath his feet as he went to his sports car. He had no luggage. He had planned, upon his aunt’s sudden call this morning, to stop back at the apartment and pick up a few things after he met Nancy.
He kept a lightweight London fog in the MG. The coat lay on the front seat. He leaned across the door of the car and picked the coat up.
There was a small metal box lying on the seat. Frowning, he triggered the catch and opened the box.
He didn’t lift the money out right away, merely stood there touching it. Then with a jerk, his fingers closed over the sheaf of bills, scooped it out of the box, slipped it into the side pocket of his trousers.
He went back to Nancy’s sedan and slid under the wheel. He turned the key and started the car.
They dropped out of the driveway, wheeled around the edge of the lake. He felt a need to talk. But he did not say anything. Neither did Nancy, until the car turned away from the lake and burrowed into the woods.
“Got a cigarette?” she asked lightly. But there was a tautness in her voice.
He handed her the pack.
“Want one?”
“Please.”
She lit a cigarette for him, one for herself.
“What’s the agenda?”
She was resting her head against the seat back, smoking calmly, blowing the smoke in a cool stream.
His stomach writhed. This was not the Nancy he had known. There was now a cold-bloodedness about her, as if she had deliberately shut out of her mind all the guilty questions, doubts, and fears. The change alarmed him. It wasn’t like Nancy. And he shared it. A sort of hardening process had set in. In both of them.
“I won’t go back, Nancy.”
“The police usually dig out the truth.”
“I had a round with those small-town cops in Florida,” he said. “They had no evidence, but it was rough. The police here... they’ve got a lot more on me. The minute I’m jailed they’ll throw away the key.”
“I don’t know, Keith, you may be right. Whoever killed your aunt may get careless. The longer you’re missing, the greater the possibility of the real murderer’s tipping his hand.”
“Sure,” Keith said.
She hadn’t, he realized, quite understood that they weren’t going back, period. The implications of vanishing, of never again seeing familiar faces or surroundings were unreal to her. Maybe when the chips were down she’d regret her decision back there at the lake house. Probably would. He would have to watch, be prepared. Wait and see, he told himself. Take one thing at a time. Act as if there weren’t a screaming nerve in your body. Improvise. Regard everything and everybody as a potential enemy.
Even Nancy.
The dark sadness reached deeper inside of him.
Like a beetle, the little sedan stretched the distance between itself and the lake. The timberland fell behind. They met no traffic as they moved across the hills on the secondary road.
Finally the stop sign at the intersection with the primary road came into view.
Keith braked, quietly waiting for a heavy car and house trailer to trundle past. Then he gunned the engine and swung onto the highway.
Nancy was again lighting cigarettes.
“Don’t burn yourself,” she cautioned him. “Here.”
Without taking his eyes from the road, Keith took one hand from the wheel and let her put the cigarette between his fingers.
The highway was not of the best. A two-lane road a generation ago, it had been widened, patched, repaired until it was a crazy conglomerate of tar, asphalt, concrete.
Keith checked the dashboard. Plenty of gas; nearly a full tank. Temperature gauge showed the engine running cool. Generator operating properly. He held the car to an even fifty miles an hour. He could make more than two hundred miles before having to stop for gas. The countryside lay quiet. Traffic was light, and the day was perfect for driving.
He began to feel easier in his mind than at any time since he had walked into his aunt’s home this morning.
A big diesel rig chuffing from the opposite direction caught his attention. It might have been the glint of sun on glass, but it was not. Its headlights were on.
Keith touched his switch, blinked his lights. The truck blinked in reply.
The two vehicles drew abreast, and Keith gave the trucker a brief wave of his hand. The trucker perched in his cab, a grin on his face, returned the wave and was gone.
Nancy sat up. “What is it, Keith?”
He did not answer immediately. His eyes were searching, his body drawing itself up over the wheel.
A filling-station-garage-and-country-store appeared a quarter of a mile ahead. The weathered buildings lay well back from the highway. There was a hard-packed apron that offered ample room for a U-turn.
Keith toed the brake, steered off the highway, turned in a tight half circle.
He sat nerveless, waiting for a chance to fire the sedan into the farther highway lanes.
“Why are we turning around, Keith?” Nancy asked.
“You see that truck?”
“The one you waved to?”
“He was tipping off oncoming truck drivers and any other hep characters to trouble ahead.”
“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”
“A weight or license check. Or a state cruiser hiding behind a billboard with a radar whammy and a fresh book of speeding tickets. Or a roadblock. We’ll have to go back — until nightfall.”
“To the lake cottage?”
“Can you suggest a better place?”
8
Vallancourt got home from police headquarters late in the afternoon. Charles had the front door open before he reached it, and Mrs. Ledbetter had made it her business to be hovering nearby. As he handed Charles his hat, Vallancourt shook his head.
“Mr. Hibbs is in the study, Mr. Vallancourt,” Charles said.
“How long has he been here?”
“Five minutes or so When he arrived, I called the police station. You were on your way here. Mr. Hibbs said he would wait.”
He went quickly to his study. Ralph Hibbs was thumbing through a travel magazine. He let the heavy periodical fall to the desk.
“Anything at all, John?”
The question and the anxious eyes behind the glasses killed his faint hope that Hibbs might have heard something.
“Not yet.”
“Surely Nancy is too level-headed to get herself in trouble.”
“Nancy is in love. At least she thinks she is, which amounts to the same thing.”
“Are you sure she’s with Keith Rollins?”
“Every other possibility has been eliminated.”
“Maybe she’ll talk some sense into him.”
“Don’t remind me which of the runaways will influence the other, Ralph.”
“I didn’t mean...”
“Of course not.” Vallancourt walked to the window, looked out. Darkness was falling dismally. “There’s a breed of woman, Ralph, who can’t attach conditions to loyalty.”
“I can’t believe she would deliberately...”
“How about you, Ralph? You’ll have to make plans of your own, won’t you?”
“You mean about the agency?”
“Yes.”
“With so many other things on my mind, John, I hadn’t given it much thought. But you’re right, of course. I’m still running the biggest auto agency in this end of the state, and Dorcas Ferguson was a major stockholder. But right now the business doesn’t seem important. What about you, John?”
“I’m not sure. I haven’t had time to talk to Howard since this morning. I left word for him to come over when he felt he could leave Ivy.”