Howard Conway arrived a few minutes later. A look of gauntness had managed to attach itself to his robust frame today.
“How is Ivy, Howard?”
“You can imagine.”
“Anything I can do?” Hibbs asked.
“No, thanks, Ralph. She’ll live through the ordeal.” Conway lit a cigarette with jerky motions. “I don’t need to ask you if you’ve heard anything, John. It’s all over your face.”
“She’s with him somewhere. We’re sure of that. We’ve had the day to check the college, her friends — to turn the town over and shake it out.”
Howard’s face tightened. “Too bad we didn’t nail him this morning.”
“Now we have to be very careful,” Vallancourt said. “He won’t back into a corner pleasantly.”
“He’s hardly more than a boy...” Hibbs mumbled.
Conway regarded him coldly. “The trouble with you, Ralph, is that you view every situation with the same preconception.”
“But he wouldn’t...”
“He’ll run himself right into a stone wall if he’s pushed to it. And when his own destruction is inevitable, he’ll wreck everything he can lay his hands on. Do you agree, John? Isn’t that what’s sticking in your craw?”
“I’m afraid so,” Vallancourt admitted. There was a helpless silence. Then he said, “The roadblocks haven’t stopped him. It means he stole a car and got through. Or else he’s still in this area.”
“Stealing a car would be risky,” Hibbs argued.
“A poor swimmer won’t regard a river as much of a risk with a forest fire behind him,” Vallancourt said grimly. “Anyway, a switch of cars wouldn’t be difficult. Take your own used-car division, Ralph. Stalwart, clean-cut young man comes in, looks around. Would any of your salesmen refuse to let him try out a car?”
“No, but we’d report it stolen.”
“Sure,” Conway said, “in an hour or so. When it became clear he wasn’t coming back. After you’d inherited one secondhand MG.”
“Which puts the search on a nationwide basis,” Vallancourt said. “Let’s take the smaller bite first.”
“You think he’s still in the area?” Hibbs asked.
“Yes.”
“One chance in two,” Howard said.
“On the surface, yes. Actually, the odds are in our favor.”
“I don’t dig,” Conway said.
“I don’t believe he’d realize at first that a whole section of the state had been cut off by roadblocks. He’s under tremendous pressure. He wouldn’t start sorting out details right away.”
“So he spots a string of cars at a roadblock.” Conway ran his fingers through his untidy hair. “He sneaks a turnaround on a sideroad and slips back to town.”
“No,” Vallancourt said. “He wouldn’t do that.”
“Why not?” demanded Hibbs.
“Because, Ralph, the roadblock turns his pressures inside out. Now his brain starts exploding with details, real and fancied. Every pair of eyes that looks at the MG is filled with recognition, or suspicion. Everybody in sight is running for a phone to report his location. He wouldn’t dare venture back into town.”
“Stealing a car in the country wouldn’t be like going into a car lot.”
“Or walking city streets until he finds a car with the keys in it,” Conway said.
“But he can still pull a switch.” Vallancourt read the question in their eyes, and he gave them the painful answer: “Nancy’s car.”
Hibbs blinked. “Sure!”
“The sonofabitch,” Conway cried. “He may be three hundred miles from here by now!”
But Vallancourt shook his silvered head. “A switch occurred to me immediately. A description of Nancy’s car was sent out by the police. The only thing is, neither car has been spotted, in use or abandoned. The odds are that Nancy and Keith are still in the net.”
“In an area covering about four counties,” Conway said.
“Parked on a side road waiting for night?” Hibbs suggested.
“Waiting for night,” Vallancourt nodded. “But not on a side road, tavern, even a motel. No public place. A private place where he would feel safer.”
“His father’s apartment?”
“The police put Sam Rollins’s place under surveillance the first thing,” Vallancourt said, “along with the homes of Nancy’s friends.”
“He needs his attic room,” Conway said.
“His what?”
“Something Dorcas mentioned when she was planning to bring him here to live. One night at dinner she got pretty emotional about the poor darling’s lot in life.”
“Let’s get to this attic room, Howard.”
“It seems that Keith had a favorite spot back home, an attic room, where he would hide when his father decided to enforce his orders with a club, or life got too tough some other way.”
“We all occasionally need to close a door,” Ralph Hibbs said.
“Sure. Even a woman with the self-possession of a Dorcas Ferguson.”
Vallancourt came to quick attention. “She had such a place?”
“A cottage on the lake,” Conway said. “She never advertised the location. Would have defeated her purpose. It’s a kind of lodge. Now and then she’d take a day there to dig in the garden, or lie in the sun, or get drunk. Depended on her mood.”
“Did Keith know about the lodge?”
Conway paused with a cigarette lighter half raised. “Come to think of it, yes.”
Vallancourt’s eyes caught fire. “His querencia!”
Hibbs said blankly, “His what?”
“The other Sunday Nancy was talking to Keith on the phone. She laughed and said they’d picnic at ‘the querencia.’ I dismissed it at the time as some sort of new catch-phrase among the college set.”
Conway remembered his cigarette and lit it with a triumphant drag. “You’ve got it, John! We’ll corner the sonofabitch and make him sorry he ever walked through his aunt’s front door!”
“We’ll do nothing of the kind, Howard.”
Conway stared, and Hibbs sluiced moisture from his pale forehead with his finger. “We’d better call the police.”
Vallancourt caught him by the wrist. “We’ll not do that, either, Ralph. With Nancy there, the last thing I want is a posse of armed men and a battery of searchlights. Anyway, we’re not sure yet we’ve pinpointed the location.”
“All right,” Conway said on an unwilling note, “we’ll play it your way. Approach him nice and friendly. Talk Nancy away. Then let him look out.” He glanced at Hibbs. “You in?”
“Certainly, if I can be of help.”
“On my terms and conditions,” Vallancourt said in an iron voice. “Otherwise I go alone.”
The other two men nodded.
They rode in silence, Vallancourt holding the Continental to a fast, steady clip. Howard Conway had shucked his boredom; there was a pleasurable excitement working up in the man. An occasional uneasy rustling in the back seat reminded Vallancourt of Hibbs’s presence.
“Turn here,” Conway said intently.
The heavy car slued a trifle as it entered the right fork of the narrow county road. The countryside lay in a twilight hush through which the car’s rushing passage was a whisper.
The twilight was instantly transformed to black night as the Continental swooped down through the timber.
A graveled driveway flicked into view. Vallancourt touched the brakes.
“Not this one,” said Conway. “It belongs to the Harkleroads. They never get up from Florida until midsummer. We’re going to the upper end of the lake... Watch the curve when the road reaches the lake, John.”
The big car rocked. The lake was a limitless glass, unsilvered, mysterious. The hills made a broken black horizon against the deepening purple of the sky.