“A stinking, lousy break,” Rollins said. He dropped into a leather chair and his face drooped. “A square shake for my kid, that’s all I’m after.”
“He’ll get one.”
“Like hell. It’s stacked against him. All the Ferguson heirs, the Ferguson interests. They’ll throw him to the wolves. Fat chance my boy’ll have of saving his skin, much less collecting a dime of his inheritance.”
So that was it!
Vallancourt’s teeth acquired an edge. He reminded himself that he was a civilized man.
“What is it that brings you to me, Mr. Rollins?”
“Your girl, of course. I’ll lay you six to one Keith tries to contact her. If we play it right, she’ll lead us straight to him.”
The study door sighed open. Charles said, “A call for you, Mr. Vallancourt.”
Vallancourt reached for the phone on the desk. “Yes?”
He listened.
His face went bloodless.
He said, “Thank you,” and hung up.
Rollins came sliding up from the chair, looking interested.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Mr. Rollins.”
“Now listen here! You can’t dismiss me like I was some kind of—”
“Get out of here, Rollins.”
When the door clicked, Vallancourt reached for the phone. He would start the search here and now, calling everyone she knew.
But his hunter’s instinct told him he already had the answer.
His caller had been Dean Hansbury. Nancy had attended none of her classes today. She had not arrived at the college this morning.
She must have gone to a rendezvous with Keith. Innocently, in the manner of that other girl in Port Palmetto, Florida.
6
As the MG growled deeper into the hills on the winding county road, Keith tried to keep out of his thoughts the picture of his aunt’s lifeless body.
The strange slow-motion quality was fading from his surroundings. A bird flitted normally across the path of the MG, and the details of the creature were not agonizingly clear.
The acuity of his senses in times of crisis was frightening. It was as if the phenomenon did not really belong to the dweller in his flesh. He had heard or read somewhere that soldiers under fire often experienced the same sharp appreciation of danger. He could not remember when he had experienced the feeling for the first time. He was nagged by a dark suggestion, that his father was somehow mixed up in it. The experience went a long way back, to the beginning of memory. As if he had been under fire since the birth of consciousness.
He braked the MG and took a steep curve under light acceleration. The car was a friendly tool in his hands. Below, the shallow valley rolled blue-green. Only the throaty tones of the car broke the silence.
The MG nosed up, framing the cloudless sky in the windshield. The crest of the hill swept past and the car began to drop.
She had felt so loose, so boneless... He bit his lip. Like a bundle of rags...
And when he had jerked his hands away, there had been a smear of red jelly on his fingertip.
The memory needled his face with a sweat which the rush of wind over the MG could not evaporate.
It was an out-of-kilter, Dali-like grotesquerie, this portrait held in memory. He could identify the wavering outlines of a crouching figure as his own. He had looked at her stillness and the smear of red on his finger, and he knew she was dead.
Then a scratchy needle on an invisible turntable brought forth sound. Voices belonging to Howard Conway and Jonathan Vallancourt.
He felt again the flowing movement of his muscles, the touch of drapery fabric against his cheek. He had stood behind that frail armor, not breathing, hearing Howard and Vallancourt come into the room.
If they would only leave the room for a moment, he had thought, he could slip out the window, re-enter the Ferguson living room from the rear of the house, pretend he had been looking for his aunt.
Oh, God, let them go away. Please make them go out for just a few seconds...
Instead, Vallancourt had jerked the drapery aside.
He shivered, remembering. And not remembering. For there was no real recollection of the next few minutes, merely a sense of motion. And an echo of Howard Conway’s astounded voice: “Police, John... Head him off!” The voice had been swallowed in the roar of the MG’s engine.
Keith lifted his hand from the wheel and wiped the sleeve of his checkered sports shirt across his face.
At least they hadn’t yet headed him off. He had been able to reach this lonely, little-used road. They didn’t know his destination, his reason for being here... unless Nancy had let it slip.
No, he thought. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t have. They won’t suspect I’m here.
He dared to think he might get away for good. It had happened. Men disappeared, changed their names.
The System was the thing you had to beat, not individuals. The System digested a man’s habits, appearance. It was electronic devices, test tubes, cameras, microfilmed files; it never rested, never slept. It picked up a man in one place and through simple routine discovered that his fingerprints matched those left a thousand miles away.
With the name-change, therefore, had to come a change in personality, habits. He had to find a steady job, live quietly in the endless shadow of the System, never let it touch him, never draw its attention.
A dense woodland threw a heavy blanket of shadow over the MG. The air was cooler. It felt good on his face.
“I can. I will,” he said to himself. “This won’t be like the other times when I’ve almost made the grade, only to see everything go sour.”
His stomach muscles quivered at the thought of failure, of letting the System net him. Failure now meant total destruction. They had that Cheryl Pemberton thing in Florida, and now the death of Aunt Dorcas...
The road coiled with the contour of the land, dropping gradually. Through a break in the timber he glimpsed the sapphire lake. A boarded-up summer cottage shot past, then another. Several such cottages were about the lake, but not in sufficient quantity to spoil its natural beauty.
The MG rushed past the timber line, and the splendor of the cold, silent, miles-long lake, embraced by the green hills, monopolized Keith’s view. He began to feel better.
My querencia, he thought with a bitter smile. He wondered if it was the right Spanish word. Querencia, the place where the bull feels strongest. The spot on the sand to which el toro, tortured by the blood-lusting olé from twenty thousand throats, returns time after time. The brave bull, Keith recalled, with the matador’s sword finally piercing his heart, will strive blindly to reach his querencia, his dying place.
Always the bull dies, he thought, alone on the bloody sand. Always.
He tried to shake the thought from his mind. A bull was a dumb animal, with no gift or chance for making a choice. He was born to die, his end planned before he dropped from the cow’s womb.
But a man was different.
Wasn’t he?
Opposite a flimsy pier and boathouse, a gravelled driveway lay tangent to the road. Keith braked the MG, nosing into the drive. With a brief spurt of crushed stone, the car rounded the curve; and there was Dorcas Ferguson’s lodge, a rambling, rustic building with a railed-in gallery across the front.
Parked near the house was a small sedan.
Keith stopped the MG behind the other car. He got out quickly. As he did so, he heard Nancy Vallancourt’s quick footsteps crossing the porch.
His throat tightened as he looked at her.
She ran to him, laughing in relief. And she took his hand, and leaned toward him, and kissed him lightly.