Beware the Young Stranger (6 page)

“She wasn't like that, Keith. Not at all.”

“Don't I know it? All my life she did for me, for my mother, for that louse of a father of mine. If it hadn't been for Aunt Dorcas, we'd have gone hungry plenty of times. My old man with his rotten liquor and his big deals that never paid off … Always Aunt Dorcas was a kind of fairy godmother to us.

“The old man … Being married to Dorcas Ferguson's sister gave him a leg up on a pretty soft life. He could be a country club bum instead of a saloon rummy.”

“Keith.”

“No, I've got to say it, Nancy. The way I got so put out with her this morning, just because she wasn't there. As if she'd ever failed me! The way she came to my rescue after that Florida nightmare, and afterward, in my home town. God, I hope she forgives me, wherever she is.

“All the time I was swearing at her, she was lying in the living room dead.”

“Keith. Don't. No more, darling.”

He raised his head slowly. “I decided to go into the living room and wait for her. That's when I found her.”

She took his hand and held it protectively.

“Then I heard them coming, Nancy, Aunt Ivy's husband and your father. All of a sudden I realized the spot I was in. So I really corned the whole deal off. I hid.”

“Oh, Keith!”

He ground the cigarette under his heel, savagely. “Your father found me, skulking behind the drapes. All I could think of was making a break for it. I lost my head—what there is of it.”

An early jay berated them from a nearby sapling. Water whispered against the pier and boathouse.

“I'm in real trouble this time, Nancy.”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we are.”

“Not we!”

“Why not?”

“Nancy, I can't involve you in this. You've got to go back.”

“Did you do it, Keith? Look at me and tell me. Did you?”

“As God is my witness, I loved Aunt Dorcas. I didn't lay a finger on her.”

“Then how can I turn my back on you?”

“You've got to.”

“You don't understand,” she said softly. “You're everything that has meaning for me. Keith?”

“You're crazy, Nancy,” he said in a hoarse voice. But a part of him was wildly rejoicing. He sat struggling with himself.

“I'm not being altogether unselfish,” he heard Nancy say. He wished she would get up and leave, now, while he could still let her go. “If I turned my back on you at the first sign of trouble, Keith, what would I think of myself? Keith, this is so new to you, isn't it? Having someone … You don't know how to react, do you?”

“I should have passed up the lake and kept going,” he muttered.

Her hand slipped from his arm. She uttered a shaky laugh. “If I were swimming naked, you'd hesitate to get your feet wet. Jump in, bud, there's water enough for two.”

Without moving any other part of his body, he thrust out his hand. “Keys,” he said.

“Keys?”

“To your car. We'll leave the MG. They'll be looking for it.”

The keys clashed. His hand closed over them. He got to his feet and brushed off the seat of his pants.

They walked over to Nancy's little compact without looking at each other.

“I'd better drive,” he said.

She nodded and walked around the front of the car to get into the suicide seat.

“With you in a sec,” he said.

The gravel of the driveway crunched beneath his feet as he went to his sports car. He had no luggage. He had planned, upon his aunt's sudden call this morning, to stop back at the apartment and pick up a few things after he met Nancy.

He kept a lightweight London fog in the MG. The coat lay on the front seat. He leaned across the door of the car and picked the coat up.

There was a small metal box lying on the seat. Frowning, he triggered the catch and opened the box.

He didn't lift the money out right away, merely stood there touching it. Then with a jerk, his fingers closed over the sheaf of bills, scooped it out of the box, slipped it into the side pocket of his trousers.

He went back to Nancy's sedan and slid under the wheel. He turned the key and started the car.

They dropped out of the driveway, wheeled around the edge of the lake. He felt a need to talk. But he did not say anything. Neither did Nancy, until the car turned away from the lake and burrowed into the woods.

“Got a cigarette?” she asked lightly. But there was a tautness in her voice.

He handed her the pack.

“Want one?”

“Please.”

She lit a cigarette for him, one for herself.

“What's the agenda?”

She was resting her head against the seat back, smoking calmly, blowing the smoke in a cool stream.

His stomach writhed. This was not the Nancy he had known. There was now a cold-bloodedness about her, as if she had deliberately shut out of her mind all the guilty questions, doubts, and fears. The change alarmed him. It wasn't like Nancy. And he shared it. A sort of hardening process had set in. In both of them.

“I won't go back, Nancy.”

“The police usually dig out the truth.”

“I had a round with those small-town cops in Florida,” he said. “They had no evidence, but it was rough. The police here … they've got a lot more on me. The minute I'm jailed they'll throw away the key.”

“I don't know, Keith, you may be right. Whoever killed your aunt may get careless. The longer you're missing, the greater the possibility of the real murderer's tipping his hand.”

“Sure,” Keith said.

She hadn't, he realized, quite understood that they weren't going back, period. The implications of vanishing, of never again seeing familiar faces or surroundings were unreal to her. Maybe when the chips were down she'd regret her decision back there at the lake house. Probably would. He would have to watch, be prepared. Wait and see, he told himself. Take one thing at a time. Act as if there weren't a screaming nerve in your body. Improvise. Regard everything and everybody as a potential enemy.

Even Nancy.

The dark sadness reached deeper inside of him.

Like a beetle, the little sedan stretched the distance between itself and the lake. The timberland fell behind. They met no traffic as they moved across the hills on the secondary road.

Finally the stop sign at the intersection with the primary road came into view.

Keith braked, quietly waiting for a heavy car and house trailer to trundle past. Then he gunned the engine and swung onto the highway.

Nancy was again lighting cigarettes.

“Don't burn yourself,” she cautioned him. “Here.”

Without taking his eyes from the road, Keith took one hand from the wheel and let her put the cigarette between his fingers.

The highway was not of the best. A two-lane road a generation ago, it had been widened, patched, repaired until it was a crazy conglomerate of tar, asphalt, concrete.

Keith checked the dashboard. Plenty of gas; nearly a full tank. Temperature gauge showed the engine running cool. Generator operating properly. He held the car to an even fifty miles an hour. He could make more than two hundred miles before having to stop for gas. The countryside lay quiet. Traffic was light, and the day was perfect for driving.

He began to feel easier in his mind than at any time since he had walked into his aunt's home this morning.

A big diesel rig chuffing from the opposite direction caught his attention. It might have been the glint of sun on glass, but it was not. Its headlights were on.

Keith touched his switch, blinked his lights. The truck blinked in reply.

The two vehicles drew abreast, and Keith gave the trucker a brief wave of his hand. The trucker perched in his cab, a grin on his face, returned the wave and was gone.

Nancy sat up. “What is it, Keith?”

He did not answer immediately. His eyes were searching, his body drawing itself up over the wheel.

A filling-station-garage-and-country-store appeared a quarter of a mile ahead. The weathered buildings lay well back from the highway. There was a hard-packed apron that offered ample room for a U-turn.

Keith toed the brake, steered off the highway, turned in a tight half circle.

He sat nerveless, waiting for a chance to fire the sedan into the farther highway lanes.

“Why are we turning around, Keith?” Nancy asked.

“You see that truck?”

“The one you waved to?”

“He was tipping off oncoming truck drivers and any other hep characters to trouble ahead.”

“Trouble? What kind of trouble?”

“A weight or license check. Or a state cruiser hiding behind a billboard with a radar whammy and a fresh book of speeding tickets. Or a roadblock. We'll have to go back—until nightfall.”

“To the lake cottage?”

“Can you suggest a better place?”

8.

Vallancourt got home from police headquarters late in the afternoon. Charles had the front door open before he reached it, and Mrs. Ledbetter had made it her business to be hovering nearby. As he handed Charles his hat, Vallancourt shook his head.

“Mr. Hibbs is in the study, Mr. Vallancourt,” Charles said.

“How long has he been here?”

“Five minutes or so When he arrived, I called the police station. You were on your way here. Mr. Hibbs said he would wait.”

He went quickly to his study. Ralph Hibbs was thumbing through a travel magazine. He let the heavy periodical fall to the desk.

“Anything at all, John?”

The question and the anxious eyes behind the glasses killed his faint hope that Hibbs might have heard something.

“Not yet.”

“Surely Nancy is too level-headed to get herself in trouble.”

“Nancy is in love. At least she thinks she is, which amounts to the same thing.”

“Are you sure she's with Keith Rollins?”

“Every other possibility has been eliminated.”

“Maybe she'll talk some sense into him.”

“Don't remind me which of the runaways will influence the other, Ralph.”

“I didn't mean …”

“Of course not.” Vallancourt walked to the window, looked out. Darkness was falling dismally. “There's a breed of woman, Ralph, who can't attach conditions to loyalty.”

“I can't believe she would deliberately …”

“How about you, Ralph? You'll have to make plans of your own, won't you?”

“You mean about the agency?”

“Yes.”

“With so many other things on my mind, John, I hadn't given it much thought. But you're right, of course. I'm still running the biggest auto agency in this end of the state, and Dorcas Ferguson was a major stockholder. But right now the business doesn't seem important. What about you, John?”

“I'm not sure. I haven't had time to talk to Howard since this morning. I left word for him to come over when he felt he could leave Ivy.”

Howard Conway arrived a few minutes later. A look of gauntness had managed to attach itself to his robust frame today.

“How is Ivy, Howard?”

“You can imagine.”

“Anything I can do?” Hibbs asked.

“No, thanks, Ralph. She'll live through the ordeal.” Conway lit a cigarette with jerky motions. “I don't need to ask you if you've heard anything, John. It's all over your face.”

“She's with him somewhere. We're sure of that. We've had the day to check the college, her friends—to turn the town over and shake it out.”

Howard's face tightened. “Too bad we didn't nail him this morning.”

“Now we have to be very careful,” Vallancourt said. “He won't back into a corner pleasantly.”

“He's hardly more than a boy …” Hibbs mumbled.

Conway regarded him coldly. “The trouble with you, Ralph, is that you view every situation with the same preconception.”

“But he wouldn't …”

“He'll run himself right into a stone wall if he's pushed to it. And when his own destruction is inevitable, he'll wreck everything he can lay his hands on. Do you agree, John? Isn't that what's sticking in your craw?”

“I'm afraid so,” Vallancourt admitted. There was a helpless silence. Then he said, “The roadblocks haven't stopped him. It means he stole a car and got through. Or else he's still in this area.”

“Stealing a car would be risky,” Hibbs argued.

“A poor swimmer won't regard a river as much of a risk with a forest fire behind him,” Vallancourt said grimly. “Anyway, a switch of cars wouldn't be difficult. Take your own used-car division, Ralph. Stalwart, clean-cut young man comes in, looks around. Would any of your salesmen refuse to let him try out a car?”

“No, but we'd report it stolen.”

“Sure,” Conway said, “in an hour or so. When it became clear he wasn't coming back. After you'd inherited one secondhand MG.”

“Which puts the search on a nationwide basis,” Vallancourt said. “Let's take the smaller bite first.”

“You think he's still in the area?” Hibbs asked.

“Yes.”

“One chance in two,” Howard said.

“On the surface, yes. Actually, the odds are in our favor.”

“I don't dig,” Conway said.

“I don't believe he'd realize at first that a whole section of the state had been cut off by roadblocks. He's under tremendous pressure. He wouldn't start sorting out details right away.”

“So he spots a string of cars at a roadblock.” Conway ran his fingers through his untidy hair. “He sneaks a turnaround on a sideroad and slips back to town.”

“No,” Vallancourt said. “He wouldn't do that.”

“Why not?” demanded Hibbs.

“Because, Ralph, the roadblock turns his pressures inside out. Now his brain starts exploding with details, real and fancied. Every pair of eyes that looks at the MG is filled with recognition, or suspicion. Everybody in sight is running for a phone to report his location. He wouldn't dare venture back into town.”