"Never!"

"So they reconstruct. Certainly some people know about the affair you had with him."

"Too many."

"You can"t explain the note away, and you can"t prove it wasn"t written yesterday or Friday, or prove he hadn"t come here recently. Hyzer gets a warrant. Your story about how you happen to have that gun is a little frail, without Lew around to back it up. So he was waiting when you came back from work alone last night."

"Thank G.o.d I didn"t!"

"You had a quarrel. You edged over to the corner of the house. The delay light went out. You felt around and found that handle and lifted it and hit him in the skull and knocked him down. You didn"t know you"d killed him. You went into the house. When you found the body this morning, you tried to lie your way out of it, bluff your way out of the jam."

"But n.o.body would really believe that I could ever..."

"There"s something missing. How did he get here?"

So she went on a casual stroll in the quiet neighborhood. The jeep was four doors away, parked behind the overgrown ma.s.ses of Cuban laurel in the side yard of a boarded-up house. The guard chain across the drive had been unhooked and rehooked. So I had to go into the dead pocket again, holding my breath, and finger the keys out. She took another stroll and came back and said that one of them fit the ignition, and she had left the keys right there.

The jeep was proof he had arrived alone to visit a woman who had threatened to kill him if he ever came around again. He did. And she did.

"Now what, Travis? Now what do we do? Wait until dark and then take-"

"Dark is too long to wait. Somebody can get impatient. And nervous."

So we had to take the gamble. Plan it first and then take it. A sickening gamble, because moving the body was prime meat for any prosecuting attorney. No jury would ever understand why we did it.

Eleven.

I DROVE her VW out of the driveway and parked on the far side of the street. The big banyans made dark shade. A fat lady in red pants knelt three front yards away, troweling her weeds. A household gas truck on special Sunday delivery went by and turned at the next corner. By then she had time to move the Buick to the mouth of her narrow sheltered driveway, so I beeped the horn twice as prearranged, meaning that there was no pedestrian or vehicular traffic.

I drove east, and looked in the rear-view mirror and saw her come out and turn west. She had won the argument about the cars. She reminded me that I had told her I was conspicuous, all by myself. And in the white convertible I was doubly memorable, and too many people had seen me in it. Certainly, a lot more people knew her by sight, but not in the big floppy broad-brimmed hat she took from the back of her closet, or in the huge mirrored sungla.s.ses she had bought long ago and seldom worn. In the very ordinary-looking VW and with the tweed cap which her second husband had left behind and never came after, I was not likely to be either recognized or remembered. I had asked her three times if she was sure she could handle the constant awareness of the body directly behind her, and she finally said she planned not to think about it.

The place she had described to me was perfect. She had drawn a map, and I had repeated the directions after her until I knew just how to find it. As she was taking the more direct route, she would be there first. Neither of us would make the last turn unless the highway was empty in both directions.

Out Alternate 112 to where it joined 112 proper. North about four miles, and then turn left and go west on County Line Road. You can tell the turn by the deserted gas station on the corner. Gra.s.s is growing up through the cracks in the cement near where the pumps were. It was there, as promised, and I made the turn.

Go about five miles, maybe more, and there is a gradual curve to the left. After the road straightens out again, you"ll see a place on the left where there was a house. Now there"s just a chimney and foundation.

There was no traffic in either direction when I got there, so I turned into the overgrown drive and around behind the house site and then, as she had described, I drove on sand tracks through palmetto and scrub pine, past a marsh, and saw, ahead of me, the pond she had described, and caught a glimpse of the white car beyond the saw gra.s.s at the far end of the pond.

She was fifty feet from the car, sitting on the trunk of a fallen pine, looking at the pond.

"Any trouble at all?" I asked her.

"None. You?"

"Nothing. You better show me the place first."

She seemed slack and dispirited. "Sure," she said, getting to her feet. "It"s over here."

The place was a hundred feet further. It was an old sinkhole. All this land was once the bottom of the sea. Marl and fossils and limestone. Fresh water runs down through the limestone in great underground rivers. Sometimes the underground chambers will collapse after dry cycles, and the land will sink. This was an old sinkhole, the fractures concealed by coa.r.s.e brush and sizable trees.

She took me to the place she had described, a marl slope, a sun-pale sculpturing of eroded limestone, a brushy pit five feet deep with a dark irregular hole at the bottom of it, at one end of the pit. The hole was about a yard across. I went down into the pit and knelt and looked down into the hole. There was a smell of coolness and dampness. I picked up a piece of limestone bigger than my fist and dropped it into the hole. I heard it hit the side, and in a second or two heard a smaller sound as it hit again. Then there was an almost inaudible thud a long time later.

"Donny timed it with a stopwatch once."

"Donny?"

"My husband. The young one that got killed. He used a stopwatch and figured out that per second per second thing. I remembered the figure he told me. Three hundred and six feet. He figured in the time for the sound to come back up. He was a real nut about math. Is it... a good place for what you want?"

"Do many people come here?"

"n.o.body, as far as I know. I started going with Donny when we were both sixteen. We wanted a place where we could get away from people. We"d come out here on our bikes and bring picnics. Donny found this hole one time. I came here a lot after he died, before I got married again. I never brought Greg here, or anybody else. I still come here when... when I feel down. It"s so quiet. I don"t think about anything. I just walk around and listen to the quiet, and sit and listen. And I feel better then."

"Why don"t you go for a walk right now, Betsy. I"ll take care of it."

"Can"t I help somehow?"

"No. No thanks."

I had to put the top down on the convertible to get him out. I couldn"t move the car any closer. I wrapped the old sheet around him and stood him against the rear fender, on his crooked legs. I squatted and let him tip forward onto my shoulder, and as I stood up with him, the pressure forced gas through his voice box, a ragged croak that chilled me. Though he folded slightly, there was enough rigor to make him feel like a clumsy log.

The weight made me take short jolting steps, and the effort and the heat of the early afternoon brought out the sweat. It seemed a very long way to the pit. I dropped him on the edge, stood on the nnd of the sheet and rolled him into the small pit.

In the unlikely event he was found, a police lab could make a spectroscopic a.n.a.lysis of the paint on the old sheet and compare it to the paint used somewhere in Betsy"s cottage, and prove it identical.

I went into the pit, straddled him, picked him up by the waist and slid him headfirst into the hole. Listened. Heard the remote, softened thud. Same impact as going off the roof of a thirty-storied building, if the young husband"s math had been accurate.

"I"ll never be able to come back here again," she said. I looked up and saw her standing up on the rim of the small pit, outlined against blue sky and small white clouds. The big brim of the hat shaded her face, and the big mirrors of the sungla.s.ses were like the eyes of some giant insect.

"You shouldn"t have watched."

"It wouldn"t be fair not to, somehow. Like not sharing bad things along with the good parts." We went back to the cars and the pond. I gathered twigs and dry gra.s.s and small dead branches and built a small hot fire. I burned the sheet and the map she had drawn and the fragment of the old letter to Arnstead. I took the jack handle out of the Buick, scrubbed it in the wet muck at the edge of the pond, then held the end that had been stained in the fire for a while. I put it in the VW and told her to remember to put it back under the house, just as before.

"Can we stay here for a few minutes, Trav? Can you stay with me for a little while?"

"If you want. I have to clean that back seat off anyway."

"I forgot. I"ll do it."

I protested, but she insisted. She got the bottle of strong cleaner she had brought along, and the stiff brush and the roll of paper towels. She scrubbed the few small stains away, scrubbed all of the back seat area and the rug on the floor, making a mingled smell of ammonia and kerosene. There were enough embers left to catch the paper towels ablaze. She put the hat and gla.s.ses in the VW and roamed back to the log and sat looking at the pond. I sat near her, in front of the log, leaning back against it. A kingfisher hovered, wings blurred like an oversized hummingbird, then dropped and splashed and lifted away with a small silver fish in his bill.

"There"s breem in the pond. Donny used to catch them. Travis, it"s like we killed Lew."

"I know." And I did know exactly how she felt. Plan and execution. Terror and disposal of the body and a slack, sick relief.

"We fixed it so whoever killed him - won"t ever get caught-"

"Maybe not for him. They"ll be nailed for killing Baither."

"Does it have to be the same people? Or same person?"

"The odds favor it."

She was quiet for a long time. I tilted my head back and looked up at her, saw for an instant a look of a private anguish which changed at once to a small forced smile.

"Betsy, I think he had gone too far down whatever road he..."

"Not Lew., I... was remembering Donny. I was working waitress when they told me. He was driving back from the construction job he was working on that summer when he got killed. We were saving money. He was going to go to Florida State. They hadn"t wanted him to get married so young, and we ran up to Georgia. We had ten months married, only. I dropped the whole tray of dishes. They had to give me a shot finally. I went sort of crazy, I guess."

"It can happen."

"We were such dumb crazy kids, coming out here all the way on the bikes, fooling around and getting each other all worked up, saying we wouldn"t really do it, and getting closer all the time. There"s a song or saying or something. "She lost It at the Astor." I lost it over there on a blanket under that pine tree, on the bed of soft needles, hanging onto him and crying, not because it hurt but on account of feeling sweet and sad and strange. Getting all over mosquito bites. There was a woodp.e.c.k.e.r way up the tree over us, and I watched him hopping around and turning his head this way and that way and then rapping and knocking that tree. Going home I felt so weak and sick and dizzy I nearly fell off that dumb blue bike. Then I turned seventeen and my aunt died and I had to go up home, but I wanted Donny so bad I thought I could die of it. And I came back and we got married."

Her eyes filled, and then she gave herself a little shake, tossed her hair, smiled brilliantly and said, "Well, I guess we shouldn"t be taking the chance of being seen out here, huh?"

We walked toward the cars. She was being someone else, and it took me a few minutes to identify the role. Another one of the games Betsy played. Heroine in a movie of intrigue, suspicion, sudden death. Brave and pert in the face of danger. Ready to help with the schemes and plans.

"I guess we have to worry about that black jeep now, Travis."

"Not by daylight. It isn"t a clear and present danger, the way it was before."

"You want me to go right home in my own car."

"I saw some stores open in that shopping center."

"Woodsgate."

"Stop there and do some shopping. Have you got money with you?" She had. She looked puzzled.

I said, "Mrs. Kapp, you left your house at noon or a little before on that Sunday. Please tell the court where you went."

"Oh. Sure. I see. And I should look around for somebody I know and make sure I say h.e.l.lo and say something they"ll remember, and be... kind of happy and normal and all."

"Exactly. And I"ll go back to the motel."

"Travis, darling. Please don"t leave me alone in the house too long. I"ll be okay for a while, but I think I"ll start imagining I hear things. Somebody brought Lew there and killed him there while we were in bed. Somebody knew what they were going to kill him with. It has to be crazy people who hate me for some reason."

I took hold of her hands. "Listen. n.o.body hates you. It"s a part of a pattern. Somebody is hooked on misdirection. They"re blowing smoke, laying false trails. They had that note Lew got from you. So they could quietly take a look around your place while you were working, to see the best way to set it up. I don"t think he was killed there. It would be too clumsy and difficult. I think they took that jack handle away, killed him with it and brought the body and the weapon back. Then they saw my car there. Knew it was the car I was driving. Knew I was mixed up in the whole thing, and I think they were a little nervous about my being with you."

"Why-?"

"Because of things you might be able to tell me that would make the pattern clearer?"

"What things?"

"We don"t know yet. Maybe you"ve already told me, but it didn"t mean anything to either of us. At least not yet."

"But... why didn"t they just find someplace to put the body where it wouldn"t be found? Like we did."

"All I can do is make a guess. I think that if Arnstead disappeared suddenly and for good, the pattern might look a little more distinct to Sheriff Hyzer, and he might go after somebody a h.e.l.l of a lot more logically suspect than you."

Her eyebrows went up. "Then what we"ve done will make that happen!"

"It might help, if my guessing is any good lately. And some person or persons unknown are going to wonder just what the h.e.l.l happened."

"And come around and try to find out? I don"t want to go back there alone. Please!"

She needed time. There would be a series of delayed reactions, little tremors on the psychic seismograph. Reality was an uncomfortable intruder in her garden of make-believe, and she needed time to trans.m.u.te death-stink, rigor mortis, and the dusty eyes of the one-time beloved into the product of the special-effects man in a suspense cinema. So I told her to do her shopping and then come to the motel, to drive around to the side, park by the Buick and come to Unit 114. Her relief was evident.

She drove out first. There was a place you could stop and see the road in both directions. From time to time I had heard the distant drone of infrequent traffic. I heard her accelerate, heard the rackety little engine fade into the afternoon silence.

Kingfisher came back. The small fire was dead. I kicked the larger charred pieces into the pond, kicked sand over the ashes. I broke a pine branch off and retraced my steps to the sinkhole and the pit, brushing out those footprints so deep they were obviously those of a man carrying a heavy burden. I checked the edge of the hole and found some tan threads from his jacket caught on the limestone. I balled the threads and dropped them into darkness.

They used you, Lew, baby. And if Lennie Sibelius hadn"t persisted, hadn"t tricked you into revealing the way that envelope of mine could have been planted in the Baither house when you were otherwise occupied in the shed, you might still be one of Hyzer"s faithful. But once you"d been opened up, it was only a question of time until Hyzer would get under your guard and find out the name of the woman who decoyed you. And a man hooked on uppers is too erratic. The original idea of planting that envelope was too fancy Lew, baby. A spur-of-the-moment idea that made more problems than it solved. It turned you into a problem, and now I"ve turned you into another kind of problem for somebody. For Henry Perris, perhaps. And Lilo, and Hutch and Orville, maybe. Patterns emerging.

So you"ve got a nice deep black hole for the long long sleep, down there with your hairy wallet and your dirty pictures, and your fond photo of your neglected horse.

I stopped beside my rented car and decided that there was a reasonable possibility I might get picked up again. So I went through the pockets, just in case. Found what I had forgotten, the Polaroid print of my night-running girl, Lillian Hatch alias Lilo Perris. All that merry sensuality and that tough little jaw. Hair askew, and the hard little mouth recently bed-softened. A flash shot. She stood facing the camera, weight on the right leg, left knee bent, right fist on the right hip, muscular belly sucked in. Hard high conical b.r.e.a.s.t.s, the nipples fully erect. Spreading curly black pubic thatch, glossy and vital in the wink of the camera light, with the big pale weight of pudenda faintly visible through the whiskery thicket. I examined the background of the interior shot. It did not reveal much, as it was too shadowed. I could make out a corner of a bed, the edge of a table with a thin line of smoke rising from an ashtray improvised from a Planters Peanuts can. An object on the wall behind her which I couldn"t identify. It was partially obscured by her head. A round thing with radiating spikes, like a child"s drawing of the sun.

I did not want to destroy the picture, and I felt uncomfortable keeping it on me. I finally put the convertible top up and knelt on the rear seat and partially unzipped the rear window. There was a deep enough fold in the dacron canvas to slip the photograph in and zip it back up.

I drove out to the mouth of the sandy curving tracks and after making certain County Line Road was empty I gunned it out and headed for Cypress City. There are a lot of places I never want to go back to.

Twelve.

I PARKED IN my motel slot and went into the room. The phone light was blinking. I went out the other door and up the interior walkway past the pool and the small careful rock gardens to the rear entrance to the lobby.

There were two slips in my box. One was the message Betsy had left. The other said to phone Deputy Sheriff Cable. I took the slips back to the room. Some fat children were wallowing and whooping in the pool. Every year there seems to be more fat children, and they seem to be noisier.

I phoned the sheriff"s office. Cable wasn"t in. The dispatcher said he"d relay my message to Cable and he would probably get in touch with me. I said to tell him McGee was at the motel.

I saw the cruiser arrive a few minutes later, so I went to the door and said howdy to him as he got out of the car.

"Care to come in, Billy?"

"Don"t mind if I do."