“Where are you going?” Meecham said.
“To the house. Alice phoned and asked me to come. She said it was an emergency.”
“What kind of emergency?”
Carney gave a quick nervous laugh. “Any kind. Some people seem to jump from emergency to emergency, and other people like me just wait around to be useful after the fall.”
“What’s happened, Carney?”
“They’ve gone, that’s what happened. The two of them — Virginia and her mother.”
“When?”
“Just a while ago. They sent Alice out on some errand or other, and when she came back to the house they were gone. She phoned me right away and she tried to phone you and Paul too.”
“How did they leave?”
“In the new car. I should have known there was something funny about that car. It isn’t like Mrs. Hamilton to go out and buy something like that without shopping around. She’s not stingy, but she’s careful about her purchases — she hates to get stung.”
“Where did she buy the car?”
“Right off the showroom floor. You know that Kaiser Frazer branch out near the stadium. She and Virginia went there in a cab this morning, and Virginia drove the car home — a yellow Frazer sedan.”
“It’s gone now, of course?”
“Yes. Alice checked.”
“Why is she so sure they’re not coming back?”
“Because they left some money for her in an envelope, her salary and enough to get home on.” With a sound of anger she shook her head violently, like a wet spaniel shaking water off its ears. “How could they be so stupid? A middle-aged woman and her married daughter running away like a couple of children. Why? Why did they do it?”
“Figure it out.”
“No, I don’t want to. It... looks bad, doesn’t it?”
“As bad as possible.”
“Oh God, I’m tired. I’m tired of emergencies. I’m tired of playing the maiden aunt. When something goes wrong, call Carney. It’s been like that ever since I knew them. Well.” She took a deep breath. “Well, now something has gone really wrong and I can’t help them at all.”
Meecham turned left at the next corner. Part of the Barkeley house was visible at the end of the block, but most of it was hidden behind the evergreen hedge where Loftus had stood the first night. It seemed a long time ago.
He said, “Did you have any idea they were planning to leave?”
“No, but I thought something was in the wind. The new car, and then the telegram this morning.”
“What telegram?”
“From Willett, her son in Los Angeles. He wired his mother a thousand dollars. She had to go down to the Western Union office to get it. Now why should Willett have wired her that much money?”
“Because she asked him to.”
“She must have,” Carney said. “But why? She had a lot of money when she came. I remember asking her about Willett the night she arrived, and she said something about Willett being the same old Willett, that he was in a great stew because she was carrying so much cash.”
“How much is so much?”
“I can’t give you a definite figure, but I know she’s always carried very large amounts of cash. She was never afraid of being robbed, as I would be. On the contrary, it gave her a sense of security.”
He stopped the car in the driveway but didn’t get out. Instead, he said, “What happened to her money?”
Carney hesitated. She had taken off her glasses and was swinging them in a circle, one way and then another. “She gave it away, I guess.”
“To whom?”
“Well, to Virginia. She...”
“Virginia hasn’t a dime,” Meecham said. “She was trying to cook up a scheme with me to float enough cash to run away.”
“I don’t know, I just can’t reason things out. Nothing seems — well, sensible. Nothing seems sensible.”
“Not yet.”
They got out of the car and went toward the house, walking side by side and close together in curious intimacy, like mourners approaching a grave. But the grave was only Virginia’s patio, built for sun and summer but now dark and useless, the redwood chairs glazed with ice, the barbecue pit discolored by the soot of winter, and the plants dead in their hanging baskets.
Inside the house it was very warm but Alice and Barkeley still had their heavy coats on, as if in the stress of the moment they had both forgotten their personal comfort.
Alice looked ready to cry, but there was no sign of emotion on Barkeley’s face except for a kind of weary contempt.
He addressed Meecham. “Well, what do we do now, call the police?”
“Perhaps that’s the best idea.”
“I don’t want to, but I can’t think of any alternative.”
“You might try to catch up with them.”
“How?”
“We know they’re heading west, that’s the important point. From here as far as Morrisburg, Highway 12 is the only road west. At Morrisburg they can take 60 southwest. So the problem is to catch them before they reach Morrisburg.”
“I’ll get the car out,” Barkeley said. He was halfway to the door before he finished the sentence. It was the first time Meecham had seen him move quickly.
Carney had sat down and taken off her galoshes. “I won’t go along. Alice can, but I won’t. Like I said, I’m tired of emergencies.”
Meecham looked at Alice. “Do you want to come?”
“I’m not sure.”
“It will be safer if you stay here. The roads aren’t good and we’ll be speeding.”
She touched his sleeve, shyly. “It would be worse staying here wondering if anything’s happened to you.”
“Nothing will happen to me. I want you to stay here with Carney.”
“I... all right.”
“Well,” Carney said with an odd little smile. “So that’s the way it is, is it?”
Meecham nodded.
“Well, good luck to you both. Maybe you won’t need it as much as Carnova and I did, but you’ll need it.”
The last Meecham saw of her she was sitting with her right knee crossed over her left, her hand nursing her crippled foot. She looked old and bitter and hard, as if, in the role she’d played as maiden aunt, all the nieces and nephews had turned out bad and she had no faith or charity left.
The two men sat in the front seat. At first they were too tense to talk; they stared in silence at the road ahead while the windshield wipers clicked back and forth like metronomes. There was a light snow, not falling, but sweeping up and across the road in gusts, so that one moment there was nothing to be seen except whirls of white, and the next moment, in the lull of the wind, the air would be clear and everything seemed to be doubly visible — the billboards, the telephone poles, and the heavy piles of snow left at intervals on each side of the road by the snow plough after the last storm.
“They won’t get far in weather like this,” Barkeley said finally. “Virginia’s a terrible driver.”
“Virginia isn’t driving,” Meecham said.
“She must be. Her mother doesn’t know how.”
“They have a friend with them. A man called Hearst.”
Barkeley’s only reaction of surprise was to take a tighter grip on the steering wheel. “Who is Hearst?”
“He lives in the house where Loftus lived, he works for a detergent company, and he wants to go to California.”
“That’s not telling me much.”
“It’s as much as I definitely know. What I suspect is that he’s a very small-time chiseler, and that he knows something your wife and mother-in-law don’t want known. So they took Hearst along, not for the ride, but to get him as far away from town as possible.”
“What does he know?”
“As far as I can gather from the physical evidence — times, places, actions — there’s only one thing he can know. At the time Margolis was killed on Saturday night, Hearst was in his own house. So was Loftus.”