When they reached the lodge, Vallancourt recognized the two cars in the driveway.
Ralph did also. “Howard’s and Ivy’s,” he said. “So Howard’s run her down.” He seemed depressed.
They approached the cottage slowly. Howard Conway had come out on the porch and was waiting, gray and tired. His eyes, however, reflected annoyance.
“She’s in there drunk.” Conway’s heavy lips pulled themselves into a mockery of a smile. “Family skeleton, boys, secret of the country club queen. Once in a great while, when the accumulated pressures of living get too heavy for her, Ivy goes for the bottle. She’ll be fine in a day or so. She always is.”
“It isn’t news to me,” Hibbs said gently. “But I’ve never found it worth talking about.”
“Good old Ralph,” Conway said grimly.
“We were playing a long shot,” Vallancourt said, “coming out here.”
“Keith and Nancy?”
“Any sign of them having returned here?”
“Someone has been here.”
“Are you sure?”
“There are used dishes and a rumpled bed in the first bedroom off the hallway. Butts in an ashtray near the living-room couch. I started noticing after I’d found Ivy and calmed down.”
“Only the one bed mussed up?” Vallancourt asked with an effort.
“I think he spent the night on the living-room couch, John. They both smoked a lot. The butts in the bedroom ashtray show lipstick smudges. Those near the couch don’t.”
Vallancourt gave silent thanks. For the first time he began to realize that he was an old-fashioned father. If they had gone to bed together, did it really matter? All other factors excluded, they were in love with each other — or had been.
“I was searching the place when I heard your car,” Howard Conway said.
“As he must have heard Ivy’s,” Vallancourt said, taking himself in hand. “We can guess his choice of direction. Away from the lake road. An incoming car would present a threat.”
“He must have left fast,” Conway said, “before he found out that it was a lone woman driving the car.”
Hibbs looked around at the hemming hills. “He may be in shouting distance this minute.”
“Not necessarily. He’s got several thousand acres to hide in. It’s my opinion he’s long gone. If he’d stuck close, he’d have made a try for Ivy’s car.”
“But he likes cover,” Vallancourt said. He had been deep in thought. “A cottage. A motel room. An attic.” He started from the porch. Conway glanced inside the house, then fell in beside him.
“Ivy will be out for a long time,” Conway said. “She isn’t going anywhere, and I’m needed here like a boil on my secretary’s fanny. You staying, Ralph?”
Hibbs shrugged. “I’ve been with it this far, Howard. I’ll keep going.”
Vallancourt stopped at the top of the porch steps. “Let’s keep one thing in mind. If Keith’s taken shelter in an unoccupied cottage, we want him to know we’re coming. We have to move openly. Otherwise he may panic and do something foolish.”
Both men nodded.
“Think he’ll bargain?” Conway asked. “I don’t know. But I want him to have the chance to warn us off. I want talking room. As long as there’s talk, hotheads don’t fight.”
“Isn’t it stretching the law,” Hibbs asked, “giving him a chance to get away?”
“Nancy’s welfare is my law at the moment,” Vallancourt said.
“We need luck,” Conway said. “The motel man wasn’t very lucky.”
“He was luckier than he knows,” Vallancourt said grimly. “Keith didn’t lay a finger on the man until he became a threat... Keith might have killed him, but he didn’t. His overriding thought is to hide, to get away. No doubt he’s felt a sense of nemesis, a lack of choice in everything that’s been forced on him.”
“You sound as if you’re defending him!”
“We need to understand him, Howard, if we’re to keep from triggering him. He has a need to rationalize a rightness into everything he does. I want to direct the process until Nancy is safe.”
“He’s been under pressure quite a while now,” Ralph Hibbs said. “What if he’s slipped over the line?”
16
In the living room of the log cottage, Keith stripped a muslin dust cover from a big chair. He glanced at Nancy. In the gloom created by the shutters and the drawn blinds, her face and hair gave a blurred impression of loveliness with details obscured. He could look at her without enduring the sight of the changes in her.
“Might as well cradle it,” he said. “The chair’s for free.”
She came to the chair and sat down. He watched her, yearning.
“You don’t have to do it like a robot,” he said savagely.
“You offered me the chair, Keith.”
“And you’re so damn obedient!”
He turned away. His eyes stung; he was going to jelly inside, he thought. Time had grown teeth, grinding him to shreds. He wouldn’t break suddenly; nothing in him would snap He was just being picked to pieces, taken apart. Like a worm being cut into sections.
He looked over his shoulder at Nancy. She sat gripping the arms of the chair, head turned, staring at the floor.
Why in hell did I ever meet you? Keith thought. Then there would have been none of this almost-having, nearly-winning, having it end up slipping through my fingers.
“Big devil cat got your tongue?” he sneered.
She shook her head, bit her lip.
“Okay,” he said, making a flat gesture with his hand. “Okay, oh-oh-kay!”
He walked across the room and sat down on the floor, back against the wall.
“Anything special you’d like to hear? Want me to tell you what a hot-looking dish you are, doll?”
She looked at him then.
“Maybe you’d rather hear about me,” he said. “Cops all over the state looking for me. I’ve crowded the politicians out of the headlines today. They’re spending thousands of dollars this minute trying to find me. Cool, hey? My old man always said I’d make the grade. ‘You bastard,’ he’d say, ‘you’ll end up on the business end of a police bullet one of these days.’ Damn dutiful making your old man’s predictions come true. Don’t you think so, chick?”
“You’re convinced you have to go that way,” Nancy said.
“My God!” he said. “It talks! You see any alternatives?”
She turned her face away again. He snapped his fingers, hard, rapidly.
“Come on, doll, you can do better than that. You’re a sexy piece who happens to have brain to go with the equipment. Why don’t you give me a bookful of alternatives? Let me pick and choose.”
“Maybe there aren’t any, Keith. Not for you.”
“So I should be somebody else. Everybody else has alternatives.”
“Let me go, Keith,” she said like a little girl.
“Cut out? You? You’re the babe what came on the joyride of her own free will. I didn’t hold a gun to your head.”
“Let me go, Keith!”
“But I’ve got a gun now,” he said. “Full of bullets. Bang, bang, bang! They make holes in people and the blood runs out and they fall down dead.”
She raised herself from the chair. He watched her almost sleepily.
Nancy was reminded of a big black and white cat she had once had. It would crouch over a bug for endless minutes, only its tail twitching. The day the cat had killed a bird, she had asked her father to give it away. That night she had cried herself to sleep over her lost, loved, hated cat.
She took a step from the chair, then another. She was halfway across the room.
Magically, he was standing before her, blocking her way.
“What’s the rush, doll? The party’s just starting. In another couple of days it’ll really jazz. We’re bound to snag a crate by then. We’ll go crashing out.”