“Now the nearest doctor was in Manteo. I happened to know this, and I was near Rodanthe which is a good twenty miles from Manteo if not more. I saw how he was cut and I couldn’t imagine his living through a half-hour ride in a car. In fact if there’d been a doctor six feet away from us I seriously doubt he could have done the boy any good. I’m no doctor myself, but I have to say it was pretty clear to me that boy was dying.
“And if I tried to get him to a doctor, I’d be ruining the interior of my car for all practical purposes, and making a lot of trouble for myself in the bargain. I didn’t expect anybody would seriously try to pin a murder charge on me. It stood to reason that fellow had a criminal record that would reach clear to the mainland and back, and I’ve never had worse than a traffic ticket and few enough of those. And the gun had his prints on it and none of my own. But I’d have to answer a few million questions and hang around for at least a week and doubtless longer for a coroner’s inquest, and it all amounted to a lot of aggravation for no purpose, since he was dying anyway.
“And I’ll tell you something else. It wouldn’t have been worth the trouble even to save him, because what in the world was he but a robbing, murdering snake? Why, if they stitched him up he’d be on the street again as soon as he was healthy and he’d kill someone else in no appreciable time at all. No, I didn’t mind the idea of him dying.” His eyes engaged Mowbray’s. “What would you have done?”
Mowbray thought about it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I honestly can’t say. Same as you, probably.”
“He was in horrible pain. I saw him lying there, and I looked around again to assure myself we were alone, and we were. I thought that I could grab my pole and frying pan and my few other bits of gear and be in my car in two or three minutes, not leaving a thing behind that could be traced to me. I’d camped out the night before in a tent and sleeping bag and wasn’t registered in any motel or campground. In other words I could be away from the Outer Banks entirely in half an hour, with nothing to connect me to the area, much less to the man on the sand. I hadn’t even bought gas with a credit card. I was free and clear if I just got up and left. All I had to do was leave this young fellow to a horribly slow and painful death.” His eyes locked with Mowbray’s again, with an intensity that was difficult to bear. “Or,” he said, his voice lower and softer, “or I could make things easier for him.”
“Oh.”
“Yes. And that’s just what I did. I took and slipped the knife right into his heart. He went instantly. The life slipped right out of his eyes and the tension out of his face and he was gone. And that made it murder.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Of course,” the man echoed. “It might have been an act of mercy, but legally it transformed an act of self-defense into an unquestionable act of criminal homicide.” He breathed deeply. “Think I was wrong to do it?”
“No,” Mowbray said.
“Do the same thing yourself?”
“I honestly don’t know. I hope I would, if the alternative was leaving him to suffer.”
“Well, it’s what I did. So I’ve not only killed a man, I’ve literally murdered a man. I left him under about a foot of sand at the edge of the dunes. I don’t know when the body was discovered. I’m sure it didn’t take too long. Those sands shift back and forth all the time. There was no identification on him, but the police could have labeled him from his prints, because an upstanding young man like him would have had his prints on file. Nothing on his person at all except for about fifty dollars in cash, which destroys the theory that he was robbing me in order to provide himself with that night’s dinner.” His face relaxed in a half-smile. “I took the money,” he said. “Didn’t see as he had any need for it, and I doubted he had much of a real claim to it, as far as that goes.”
“So you not only killed a man but made a profit on it.”
“I did at that. Well, I left the Banks that evening. Drove on inland a good distance, put up for the night in a motel just outside of Fayetteville. I never did look back, never did find out if and when they found him. It’d be on the books as an unsolved homicide if they did. Oh, and I took his gun and flung it halfway to Bermuda. And he didn’t have a car for me to worry about. I suppose he thumbed a ride or came on foot, or else he parked too far away to matter.” Another smile. “Now you know my secret,” he said.
“Maybe you ought to leave out place names,” Mowbray said.
“Why do that?”
“You don’t want to give that much information to a stranger.”
“You may be right, but I can only tell a story in my own way. I know what’s going through your mind right now.”
“You do?”
“Want me to tell you? You’re wondering if what I told you is true or not. You figure if it happened I probably wouldn’t tell you, and yet it sounds pretty believable in itself. And you halfway hope it’s the truth and halfway hope it isn’t. Am I close?”
“Very close,” Mowbray admitted.
“Well, I’ll tell you something that’ll tip the balance. You’ll really want to believe it’s all a pack of lies.” He lowered his eyes. “The fact of the matter is you’ll lose any respect you may have had for me when you hear the next.”
“Then why tell me?”
“Because I feel the need.”
“I don’t know if I want to hear this,” Mowbray said.
“I want you to. No fish and it’s getting dark and you’re probably anxious to get back to wherever you’re staying and have a drink and a meal. Well, this won’t take long.” He had been reeling in his line. Now the operation was concluded, and he set the rod deliberately on the grass at his feet. Straightening up, he said, “I told you before about my attitude toward fish. Not killing what I’m not going to eat. And there this young man was, all laid open, internal organs exposed—”
“Stop.”
“I don’t know what you’d call it, curiosity or compulsion or some primitive streak. I couldn’t say. But what I did, I cut off a small piece of his liver before I buried him. Then after he was under the sand I lit my cookfire and — well, no need to go into detail.”
Thank God for that, Mowbray thought. For small favors. He looked at his hands. The left one was trembling. The right, the one gripping his spinning rod, was white at the knuckles, and the tips of his fingers ached from gripping the butt of the rod so tightly.
“Murder, cannibalism, and robbing the dead. That’s quite a string for a man who never got worse than a traffic ticket. And all three in considerably less than an hour.”
“Please,” Mowbray said. His voice was thin and high-pitched. “Please don’t tell me any more.”
“Nothing more to tell.”
Mowbray took a deep breath, held it. This man was either lying or telling the truth, Mowbray thought, and in either case he was quite obviously an extremely unusual person. At the very least.
“You shouldn’t tell that story to strangers,” he said after a moment. “True or false, you shouldn’t tell it.”
“I now and then feel the need.”
“Of course, it’s all to the good that I am a stranger. After all, I don’t know anything about you, not even your name.”
“It’s Tolliver.”
“Or where you live, or—”
“Wallace P. Tolliver. I was in the retail hardware business in Oak Falls, Missouri. That’s not far from Joplin.”
“Don’t tell me anything more,” Mowbray said desperately. “I wish you hadn’t told me what you did.”
“I had to,” the big man said. The smile flashed again. “I’ve told that story three times before today. You’re the fourth man ever to hear it.”
Mowbray said nothing.