“But you don’t even have a motive any more! Not with Sandra’s admission that she was the one who spent those three days at the Lodge with Cox.”
“I don’t have a motive I can prove yet, Dave, that’s true.” Julian Smith shook his head in distaste. “You make me say it. Ruth did go to Cox’s motel. That makes it pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that she knew him. Well, Cox’s relationships with women were strictly one thing. So I’ve got to work on the premise that not only your sister-in-law but your wife, too, was one of his ex-affairs—”
“No!” Tully’s face was purple. “No!” His fist came down with a crash on the Homicide man’s desk. “No, no, no!” His fist kept smashing at the desk impotently.
Smith said nothing more, letting him rage.
After a while, Tully stopped. A choked sound came out of his convulsed throat, and he turned on his heel and strode out of Smith’s office.
David Tully paused on the front steps of the municipal building to gulp the fresher air in mouthfuls and work himself back to some semblance of self-control.
He couldn’t blame Julian Smith. Julian wasn’t emotionally involved with Ruth. He had liked her (although now that he thought of it, Tully recalled that Ruth had always seemed to have reservations about Julian. Was it because she was concealing something unsavory about her past, and a policeman made her uncomfortable?). But he had to be a policeman first and a social being second. Julian had no choice.
His rage, Tully knew, had been directed not toward the Homicide man but to himself. He thought he had made peace with his love and faith; now he found himself doubting all over again.
As he stood there inhaling and exhaling, watching and not seeing the traffic go by, he found a thought pushing itself into the forefront of his consciousness. He tried to push it back; it would not stay pushed back.
If... if Ruth had had an affair with Cox, surely he knew all along that she was Ruth and that Sandra Jean was Sandra Jean? But the evidence seemed to indicate that Cox didn’t become aware of Sandra’s masquerade until a day or so before his death. Then the if was wrong. Cox didn’t know Ruth. He hadn’t known Ruth!.. Unless...
Unless he had originally known Ruth under some other name entirely.
It was possible.
If Ruth could be pictured as having somehow got herself to accept Cox’s love-making in some remote and hardly imaginable past, she could also be pictured — being Ruth after all — as having done so under a false name. It was more than possible. If and possible and false... Tully rested his forehead against the cool stone of the municipal building as his thoughts shattered into pieces that went flying off in all directions.
He started at a touch on his arm.
“Mr. Tully, you feeling all right?” It was a policeman in uniform, without a hat.
“Yes. Sure, Officer. I’m just going.” Tully straightened up.
“I came out looking for you. The lieutenant said you’d just left. There’s a phone call for you.”
“Here?” Who could that be? “Where, Officer?”
“I’ll show you.”
He followed the policeman back into the building. There was a table behind the desk sergeant’s wicket.
“You can take it here, Mr. Tully. I’ll switch you in.” The uniformed man sat down at the police switchboard. He said, “Just a minute, ma’am,” and plugged in.
Tully thought, Ma’am?
He picked up the phone on the table. “This is David Tully. Who—?”
“Dave! Norma Hurst.” It came into his ear all breathy, as if she had been running.
Tully became alert. “Norma? Something wrong?”
“I’m not sure. Mercedes Cabbott called. Ollie was out... She wanted Ollie... It was really you she wanted. She called trying to locate you.” Her sentences tumbled out. Was she having one of her spells again?
“Yes, Norma?” He forced himself to sound untroubled.
“I called all over trying to find you. Then I thought of Police Headquarters. Have they any news of Ruth yet?”
“Not yet, Norma.”
“They’re listening to us, of course. Aren’t they, Dave? I know they are. Can you come over here?”
“Well—”
“Wait, I think I heard Ollie’s car. I’ll tell him you’re coming over.”
“Norma...”
But she had hung up.
Ollie answered the door. The bald lawyer looked tired and preoccupied.
“Oh, Dave, come in. Norma says she caught you at Police Headquarters.”
Tully nodded. He stepped into the Hursts’ living room and said, “What’s all this about Mercedes trying to locate me? What does she want?”
“She wouldn’t say. Just said for me to find you and bring you to her place.”
“Ollieeeee?” Norma’s thin voice cut through the house. “Is that Dave?”
She burst into the living room with the power of a tornado-driven straw. Tully was shocked by her appearance. She wore a wrinkled dress. Her lank hair was uncombed. Her features seemed to have been honed to cutting edges overnight. Her eyes...
This was a bad one.
Tully kept himself from staring at her. And at Ollie. At times like this, Ollie went through his own brand of hell.
Norma’s nails dug into Tully’s hand. “Dave, you must hurry. You must find her quickly.”
“Yes, Norma. We’ll find her. Now stop worrying.”
Ollie slipped his arm about Norma’s thin shoulders. “You know we’ll do our best, hon. Haven’t I told you?”
She collapsed against her husband suddenly. “Mercedes will help you, Dave. She loves Ruth like a daughter. That’s why she called. I’m sure that’s why.”
“Maybe it would be better if Ollie stays here with you.”
“No, no, I’m fine. I’ll be just fine. That’s a promise. Ollie has to go with you, help however he can.”
From behind his wife’s head Ollie nodded slightly.
“Maybe you’re right at that, Norma,” Tully said.
Outside, Oliver Hurst mumbled, “It’s not good, Dave. I had to humor her. Maybe it’ll calm her down. I don’t dare cross her when she gets like this. Whose car’ll we take?”
“Mine,” Tully said. Ollie looked out on his feet.
They got into the Imperial and Tully headed it toward the hills.
“I don’t know,” Ollie said after a while, shaking his head. “For a while there this hassle about Ruth seemed to shake Norma back to her old self. Now... She’s worse than she’s been in months.”
“Why don’t you try taking her up to the old place, Ollie? The change may do her good.”
The “old place” was a Hurstism for an ancient log house some ten miles from town, deep in the foothills that had come down to Norma from her paternal great-grandfather. He had been an early settler, clearing the land, hewing the logs, digging a root-cellar and building the house with his own hands. It had been kept in a good state of preservation, and the Hursts had used it frequently as a weekend woodland retreat in happier days.
But Ollie Hurst shook his head. “It’s the one place she mustn’t go. Isolation is what she wants, a hole to crawl into. The psychiatrists told me to keep her strictly away from there. They want her to be with people.”
“That makes sense, I guess.”
“She was after me just this morning to take her up there. Reaction from a dream — a nightmare — she had during the night. Must have been a corker; it took me over an hour to quiet her down.”
“Nightmare about what, Ollie?”
“It seems she and Ruth were on a roller coaster. The thing kept going faster and faster. Suddenly a little girl — with no face — was in the middle of the track ahead of them on a tricycle. The roller coaster smashed into her, and the little girl wasn’t there any more. Then the coaster shot off the end of the track, tumbling through space, which was full of billions of stars. But it was also pitch-dark. Norma was all alone in just black nothing except stars. Ruth had vanished, too.”