“I don’t want to get you involved.”
“I am involved. Now listen. There’s back stairs. They start from the back hall, outside the kitchen. Take your shoes off.”
She handled it like an expert. She went into the kitchen to create a diversion while I crept partway up the narrow staircase. She left the kitchen and walked noisily up the stairs. As soon as she passed me, I followed in her wake, stepping in her same cadence. I waited at the top, behind the door, while she went down the hall to her room. She opened her room door, looked back toward me and nodded. I moved silently down the hall and slipped into her room. She came in behind me, closed her door and locked it. She crossed the room and closed the blinds at the two windows. I felt weak and shaken. There was one overstuffed chair. I sat in it and lighted a cigarette.
After a few moments I was able to look around the room. It was an ugly room but she had worked hard on it. The high double bed dominated the room. The walls were an unhappy green. Two small lamps with opaque shades muted the ugliness. I could see through the half open door into a small private bath. She had a small corner bookshelf, a wrought iron magazine rack, a double hotplate atop a small cabinet for dishes. It distressed me that the life of Toni should be compressed into this characterless room. I imagined she dated often, she was certainly handsome enough. But there cannot be a date every night. There had to be the alone nights, washing out things, reading, doing her hair and nails, listening to the small coral-plastic radio. The closet door was ajar. Her clothes hung neatly racked, shoes neatly aligned on the floor. She moved over and closed the closet door. The room had a clean smell of her. Fragrant soap, touch of perfume, hint of starch and rustle.
She put an ash tray beside me, moved a straight chair over directly in front of me, and sat there, so close our knees nearly touched. She leaned forward and whispered, “Don’t even whisper loudly, Clint. She’d make me move out tonight if she knew I had a man in here.”
“All right. I’ll tell it from the beginning.”
“Not from the time you found her body. From the very, very beginning, the day you met her.”
There was a certain avidity in Toni’s dark eyes. She wanted to know all. So I told her all there was to tell. It took a long time. She would ask questions, not often. She looked almost sick when I told about getting the body into the car, about the way it had rolled down the little hill until the tree stopped it. When I told about the can and the thread, she said, “I don’t understand.”
“That was one of the cans I used to disguise the shape of her in the tarp. When I pushed it down into the tarp it tore that thread off her skirt. I didn’t see it when I threw the can into the back end of the car.”
“Can they prove it came from her skirt?”
“I’m sure they can. They have ways.”
We stopped talking as someone walked heavily down the hall right by her door. She asked a few more questions. She got up restlessly and walked around the room, touching things absently, straightening them. She sat on the bed, frowning beyond me. She looked at me and tried to smile, then blushed and looked away. Her blush underlined our nearness, the strangeness of the situation.
I went over and stood looking down at her. “Now do you think I should turn myself in?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“While they’re looking for me they won’t be looking for who really did it.”
“I know, but will they look anyway, after they have you?”
“I doubt it.”
“Somebody killed her, Clint.”
“I know that.”
“Mr. Raymond?”
“I don’t think so. There’s too much coldness there, under all that boyish good nature. Too much calculation. He wouldn’t do anything that stupid. Why should he kill her? He was perfectly confident that now and then she would jump into bed with him.”
“It’s all so... nasty,” she said, looking up at me.
“Right.”
“Clint, I don’t think you should turn yourself in yet.”
“So what do I do?”
She blushed more violently than before. “You can stay here tonight. Tomorrow I can find out how... how convinced they are. Somehow. If they aren’t completely sure, then you should go in. If they think they can... kill you, then you’ll have to go away. I can get you away somehow. I know I can.”
It could have been the way she said that. Or the way she looked. Or it could have been a lot of half noticed things adding up in my mind, to make a sudden startling total. Maybe it was merely what she was, and how she was, and who she was. And she was definitely somebody. She was Toni MacRae. She was superbly, uniquely herself. Anyway, it happened to me at that moment. Like, according to the books, it is supposed to happen to everybody.
One minute she was a handsome gal with a good mind, good taste, and far better equipment than average. All that one minute — and then she was suddenly Toni MacRae. Not a pastime, not a hobby, not a target for tonight. Toni. Part of my life. Most of my life. All of my life.
Love at first sight is too trite. When it comes it doesn’t creep. It pounces. It isn’t even love like I thought of love. It is something else. It is a necessity. It is a place in the road. You get there, turn oblique right, and take a road you never saw before.
She became, all of a sudden, Toni MacRae, indisputable, irreplaceable, unanswerable — as necessary to me as lungs, legs and blood. There is no other way to say it.
I stood there and stared at her. She was miracles. Lips, legs, eyes, breasts. All miracles, all precious.
She was still red. “Just because I say you can stay here doesn’t mean that...”
“I know.”
“What do you mean, you know?”
“All of a sudden, just like that, I know what you mean before you say anything. We could sit without words and carry on whole conversations. Your eyes are wonderful.”
“Too loud!” she hissed.
“Sorry.” I sat on my heels on the floor so I could look up at her face. I took her hand. She tried to pull it away and then let it rest in mine, unresponsive. “Toni,” I said. “Toni!”
“Too loud!”
“Look, it doesn’t make any difference if you lock me in your bathroom. Or if I sleep under the bed. One night doesn’t matter. We’ve got us ten thousand coming up.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“I told you, I’m not sure. How can we help not get married, Toni?”
“How can we help... what?”
“It’s an accomplished fact, anyway. So they stamp a paper for us for the file. Toni, Toni.”
She yanked her hand away. “Whatever this is, it isn’t funny, Mr. Sewell.”
“I know it isn’t funny. Toni, I started at the wrong place. I’m disorganized. Let’s start at a standard place. I love you.”
“Oh sure,” she said dubiously.
“All of a sudden. You just sat there, all of you, perfectly miraculous, and it came to me, like it fell on my head.”
“This is all just because...”
I rocked back on my heels. “Just because I’m going to stay here? It’s a fat line. I tell it to all the girls who hide me from the cops. You haven’t got any fire around here I can hold my hand in. I’ve outgrown crossing my heart and spitting. About the only way I can show sincerity is to go trudging out of here. Bake me a cake and bring it to the dungeon. They can’t electrocute Sewell. He has to get married. Suddenly I’m confident. Even Kruslov loves me.”
I unlocked the door, opened it and started down the hall. She caught my arm with astonishing strength and whirled me around. Her face was like chalk. She got me back into the room, locked the door, leaned against it and closed her eyes. Her color came back slowly. She opened her eyes and looked at me. She looked at me steadily and for a long time. I looked back. I looked back until the room misted out and there was nothing there but her eyes.