“Certainly not!” The manager completed his rise as if a spring had been released.
“I’ll have to insist, Mr. Dalrymple.”
“It’s absolutely against our rules! I’m sorry, sir—”
“Would you rather I ask the police to take a look for me?”
“Police?” Dalrymple blinked. “Of course, if a crime has been committed — although I assure you, sir, no crime has ever been committed on these premises!—”
“I didn’t say it was.”
“What kind of crime?” the manager asked abruptly.
Tully hesitated. Then he shrugged. “Murder.”
Mr. Dalrymple went oyster-white. “How is the Lodge involved?”
“There’s a question as to whether or not a certain man and...” Tully licked his lower lip “...and the original of this photo visited the Lodge two years ago... together... or at least at the same time. If I can check it out here and now, Mr. Dalrymple, the police may never come into it at all. Of course, I can’t guarantee that. Do you let me see your register or don’t you?”
The manager stared at Tully for a long time. Tully withstood his calculating appraisal with indifference. A numbness was setting in, not so much a lack of feeling as a suspension of it.
“Well?”
Dalrymple’s glance wavered to Ruth’s photo, which was still on the desk between them. He sat down and began to scrutinize it very carefully. “This woman — I mean your wife, Mr. Tully — is she...?”
“Yes.” He almost started to add, But that was before I married her.
“Two summers ago, eh? I must say the face looks familiar... The trouble is, I see so many people come and go—” He rose again, handed the snapshot back to Tully. “What was the man’s name?”
Tully found himself able to say, “Cox. Crandall Cox,” without choking.
“Wait here, please.”
Dalrymple left, shutting the door emphatically behind him. Tully remained where he was. He had not shifted his position six inches since entering the office. He simply stood there, not thinking.
When the manager returned he had with him a dumpy gray-haired woman wearing old-fashioned gold-rimmed eyeglasses.
“Well?” Tully said.
“Well!” Dalrymple inhaled. He said quickly, “We had a Mr. and Mrs. Crandall Cox registered during the period you mentioned.”
“How long did they stay?”
“Three days.” The man gestured, and the gray-haired woman stumped forward; she had badly flat feet, Tully noticed, and then he wondered what difference that made, what difference anything made. “This is Mrs. Hoskins, one of our maids, Mr. Tully. Employed here fourteen years. Two years ago she worked the wing where Mr. and Mrs. — where this couple had their suite.”
“Suite,” Tully said.
“I remember them, all right,” the woman said. She had a flat-footed kind of voice, too, as if she had never learned to use it right. “He was the man took an afternoon nap with a cigarette in his hand and he burned the new couch in the suite, Mr. Dalrymple, you remember. He’d tied a real good one on—”
“Yes, yes, Mrs. Hoskins, thank you,” Dalrymple said.
Tully forced himself to take the photo of Ruth from the desk and across the room to Mrs. Hoskins.
“Is this the woman?”
Mrs. Hoskins adjusted her glasses and peered earnestly. “Looks like her. Yes, sir, I’d say she was the one. It’s been a long time, but I always remembered that couple real well even though they was here such a short time. Something about them two—”
“What?” Tully said.
“Well, for one thing, most of the guests the Lodge gets don’t drink so much. More refined, like.”
Dalrymple coughed nervously. Tully took the photo of Ruth from the woman’s worked-out fingers and replaced it in his wallet. He was surprised to find that his own hands were perfectly steady. “Do you remember anything else about them?”
Mrs. Hoskins became quite animated. “Oh, yes, sir! They were real lovey-dovey. Them two are honeymooners, I says to Mrs. Biggie — she was working that wing with me then. Mrs. Biggie says, ‘Whoever heard of honeymooners spending all their time getting tanked up?’ but I says to her, ‘It takes all kinds, and anyway I heard ’em smooching in there between drinks, like—’ not,” Mrs. Hoskins added hastily, “that I was listening or anything, but sometimes a maid can’t help—”
“All right, Mrs. Hoskins,” the manager said.
“I don’t suppose,” Tully said to the gray-haired woman, “you remember hearing the man use the woman’s first name?”
“I do indeed,” she said, beaming, “Ruth, it sounded like. The gentleman would say it over and over, like he liked it, too.”
“That’s all, that’s all, Mrs. Hoskins,” Dalrymple said. “Thank you.”
Tully drove away from the hotel sanely enough. But as the lights of the Lodge fell behind, his car seemed to take the bit in its teeth.
He sat like a spectator watching the mountain turns come up and past and away as if on film. Guard railings flashed by, one long blur. The Imperial’s engine seemed to gather its powers and streak forward...
A stabbing fear jolted Tully’s heart.
He jerked his foot from the accelerator in sheer reflex. And went limp and cold.
He drove the rest of the way at a crawl.
The house loomed remote, strange... still dark. He got out of the car heavily and let himself in.
As he trudged about turning on lights, the thought came to him that he had forgotten to eat anything. Without hunger he went into the kitchen, put together a sandwich, and sat munching.
The testimony of Maudie Blake might be suspect. But not that of the Lodge manager and the gray-haired maid.
And yet, Tully told himself, it doesn’t fit, it simply doesn’t fit. Ruth, even a single Ruth, spending three days at a resort hideaway with a man like Cox! Unless she was a sort of female Jekyll-Hyde...
The phone rang. Tully put aside the half-eaten sandwich and got up from the kitchen table and went to the wall extension.
“Yes?” He no longer had any real hope that the answering voice might be Ruth’s.
“Dave? Norma.” Norma Hurst’s voice was calmer than usual. Thank you, Lord, thought Tully, for small miracles. “I’ve been trying to get you.”
“I was out, Norma. Anything special?”
“No,” Ollie Hurst’s wife said, “it’s just that I haven’t had a chance to talk to you since the news about — since the news. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”
“No.”
Norma was silent. Then she said, “Dave, I want you to know we’re all with you. I just don’t believe Ruth could be involved in a thing like this. Or, if she is, it’s entirely different from the way it looks right now.”
“Thanks, Norma.”
He meant it. Unstable or not, Norma was a good egg. She might keep teetering on the brink of hysteria because of the brutal loss of her only child, but there was solid rock behind the thin edge.
“Norma... might I come over?”
“Oh, Dave, would you?”
“I mean now. I know it’s late — way past midnight—”
“I insist on it! I know what it means to be alone in the house where...” Norma stopped on a barely rising note. “Anyway, Ollie says he wants to talk to you — he didn’t get home till an hour ago himself. Have you had anything to eat?”
“Yes, of course—”
“What?”
In spite of himself, Tully grinned. “You’ve got me, sister. Half a sandwich of I-don’t-know-what.”
“You come right over, David Tully!”
He found a four-course buffet dinner waiting for him at the Hurst house, in spite of the hour.
Norma was tall and thin and long in the face, and her brown hair was dingy with neglect. Her charm had always lain in eyes of deep beauty and the quick warmth of her smile. The smile had died with the death of her little girl; the beautiful eyes had come more and more to resemble the eyes in photos Tully had seen of Nazi concentration-camp victims — socket-sunken, enormous, haunted and haunting. But tonight she seemed a part of the existing world; Ruth’s disappearance and predicament had apparently shocked her back to something like her old plain, friendly self.