“Instead, I arrived a few seconds early and you had to leave the cashbox in Keith’s car. Still, no harm done, you thought. The police would catch Keith and close the whole thing out in a matter of a few hours. The presence of the cashbox in his car would be taken to be plain stupidity on Keith’s part. Anyway, so long as Keith’s true relationship to Dorcas remained unknown, no one could pin a motive on you for the murder.
“Second detail to blow up in your face was your certainty that Keith would be caught. But he wasn’t. He kept fighting, dodging, stayed out of the hands of the police. He strung it out, and the more he strung it out the deeper I got into it. And I got to the truth, Howard. About Keith’s parentage, the reason for the fight that led to Dorcas’s death, the identity of the man who wanted Keith’s true parentage to remain unknown, the only woman who could have posed as Dorcas on a telephone.
“Everything building like a wall around you, Howard. Until the final detail that nails the lid on — with implications that nauseate me!”
Vallancourt’s face was iron.
“When we started checking lake cottages earlier today, it was you, Howard, who went to the rear of the cottage where Nancy and Keith were hiding. Nancy later came out that back door, the door through which they’d entered after Keith broke the lock. You couldn’t have missed that broken lock, Howard. You knew they were in there, and said nothing. You wanted them to stay.”
“Why would I want that, John?” Conway asked blindly.
“I think you meant to go back there later — alone,” Vallancourt said. “I think you were so deeply corrupted by what you’d already done that you intended for the police eventually to find a young murder suspect in that cottage who, in despair, had apparently killed himself. And — God help you! — if Nancy was still with him when you went back, I believe you could have nerved yourself to making it appear a murder-suicide pact. Right, Howard?”
Conway wiped his forehead.
“It’s a nice tale, John. But you spent too much of your life in countries where intrigue is a way of life. This isn’t a foreign country. Here, you have to have proof.”
“I don’t have to prove a thing, Howard. That’s the job for the police. I don’t think they’ll have much trouble. How long do you think Sam Rollins will hold out? And Ivy — you can’t delude yourself into thinking she’ll last very long when the questions start coming — and she has no scotch to fall back on.”
Howard Conway rolled over the porch railing. He struck the ground and was off and running toward the road, the hills, anywhere.
And then Conway stopped dead. Keith was coming along the road, toward the lodge.
“Keith!” Vallancourt shouted. “Howard Conway killed her. Do you understand? Howard is the guilty man, Keith. Take him!”
Keith stood with face raised toward the cottage for an instant, intently. Then he looked at Conway.
Conway scrambled about and started running in the opposite direction.
Vallancourt watched a young tiger gather himself and spring. He nodded soberly as Conway crashed to the road. No more mental block, Keith, to bar the final act of winning, Vallancourt thought.
Nancy was back at her father’s side. From below came the sounds of turmoil.
Nancy touched her father’s arm. “Dad...”
“Going rather well, isn’t it?” Vallancourt said. “Do you have a cigarette, dear?”
“Dad, there’s still that Florida thing...”
“Keith’s claim of innocence down there was the truth, Nancy, or he was acting drastically out of character. I’m not speaking of the first uncertainties and fears I sensed in him. I’m speaking of the basic stuff I’ve discovered in him, the material that survived the slings and arrows. Do I make sense?”
Her eyes were misty. “You make sense, dad.”
“But no more of this elopement nonsense. I want to give you away in style.”
“Oh, yes, daddy!”
“And Sam Rollins — don’t you think we ought to suggest to him a less hostile environment?”
“Whatever you say, daddy.”
Three months later, on a day in late summer, Vallancourt happened upon a wire-story squib with a Port Palmetto, Florida dateline.
A known degenerate, with a long history of sex offenses, had been picked up on a molesting charge and, to the surprise of Port Palmetto police officials, had confessed to the sex murder of Cheryl Pemberton.
Vallancourt cut out the squib, sealed it in an envelope, and addressed the envelope to Mrs. Keith Rollins at Niagara Falls.