"I have a prior commitment."

"If you mean little Mr. Alex Kincaid, I can pay you better than he can. Not to mention fringe benefits," she added irrepressibly.

"That college grapevine is working overtime. Or is Dolly the source of your information?"

"She's one of them. I could tell you things about that girl that would curl your hair."

"Go ahead. I've always wanted curly hair."

"Why should I? You don't offer a _quid pro quo_. You don't even take me seriously. I'm not used to being turned down flat, by the way."

"It's nothing personal. I'm just the phlegmatic type. Anyway, you don't need me. There are roads going in three directions-.Mexico, the desert, or Los Angeles--and you have a nice fast car.

"I'm too nervous to drive any distance."

"Scared?"

She nodded.

"You put up a good front."

"A good front is all I have."

Her face looked closed and dark, perhaps because the sunlight had faded from the room. Only her hair seemed to hold the light. Beyond the slopes of her body I could see the mountains darkening down.

"Who wants to kill you, Helen?"

"I don't know exactly. But I've been threatened."

"How?"

"Over the telephone. I didn't recognize the voice. I couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman, or something in between." She shuddered.

"Why would anybody threaten you?"

"I don't know," she said without meeting my eyes.

"Teachers do get threatened from time to time. It usually isn't too serious. Have you had a run-in with any local crackpots?"

"I don't even know any local people. Except the ones at the college, of course."

"You may have a psychoneurotic in one of your cla.s.ses."

She shook her head. "It's nothing like that. This is serious."

"How do you know?"

"I have my ways of knowing."

"Is it anything to do with Dolly Kincaid?"

"Perhaps. I can't say for sure. The situation is so complicated."

"Tell me about the complicated situation."

"It goes a long way back," she said, "all the way back to Bridgeton."

"Bridgeton?"

"The city where I was born and raised. The city where everything happened. I ran away, but you can't run away from the landscape of your dreams. My nightmares are still set in the streets of Bridgeton. That voice on the telephone threatening to kill me was Bridgeton catching up with me. It was the voice of Bridgeton talking out of the past."

She was unconscious of herself, caught in a waking nightmare, but her description of it sounded false. I still didn't know whether to take her seriously.

"Are you sure you're not talking nonsense out of the present?"

"I'm not making this up," she said. "Bridgeton will be the death of me. Actually I've always known it would."

"Towns don't kill people."

"You don't know the proud city of my birth. It has quite a record along those lines."

"Where is it?"

"In Illinois, south of Chicago."

"You say that everything happened there. What do you mean?"

"Everything important--it was all over before I knew it had started. But I don't want to go into the subject."

"I can't very well help you unless you do."

"I don't believe you have any intention of helping me. You're simply trying to pump me for information."

It was true. I didn't care for her as she wished to be cared for by someone. I didn't entirely trust her. Her handsome body seemed to contain two alternating persons, one sensitive and candid, one hard and evasive.

She rose and went to the gla.s.s wall that faced the mountains. They had turned lavender and plum, with dark nocturnal blue in their clefts and groins. The entire evening, mountains and sky and city, was inundated with blue.

"_Die blaue Stunde_," she said more or less to herself. "I used to love this hour. Now it gives me the mortal shivers."

I got up and stood behind her. "You're deliberately working on your own emotions."

"You know so much about me."

"I know you're an intelligent woman. Act like one. If the place is getting you down leave it, or stay here and take precautions. Ask for police protection."

"You're very free with brilliant suggestions not involving you. I asked for protection yesterday after I got the threatening telephone calL The Sheriff sent a man out. He said such calls were common, and usually involved teenagers."

"Could it have been a teenager?"

"I didn't think so. But the deputy said they sometimes disguise their voices. He told me not to worry."

"So don't worry."

"I can't help it. I'm afraid, Lew. Stay with me?"

She turned and leaned on my chest, moving her body tentatively against me. The only real feeling I had for her was pity. She was trying to use me, and using herself in order to use me.

"I have to run along," I said. "I told you at the start I have a prior commitment. But I'll check back on you."

"Thanks so much!"

She pulled away from me, so violently that she thudded like a bird against the gla.s.s wall.

chapter 7.

I drove downhill through deepening twilight toward the Mariner's Rest Motel, telling myself in various tones of voice that I had done the right thing. The trouble was, in the scene I had just walked out of, there was no right thing to do--only sins of commission or omission.

A keyboy wearing a gold-braided yachting cap who looked as though he had never set foot on a dock told me that Alex Kincaid had registered and gone out again. I went to the Surf House for dinner. The spotlit front of the big hotel reminded me of Fargo and all the useless pictures I had ordered from him.

He was in the dark room adjoining his little office. When he came out he was wearing rectangular dark gla.s.ses against the light. I couldn't see his eyes, but his mouth was hostile. He picked up a bulky manila envelope from the desk and thrust it at me.

"I thought you were in a hurry for these prints."

"I was. Things came up. We found her."

"So now you don't want 'em? My wife worked in this sweatbox half the afternoon to get 'em ready."

"I'll take them. Kincaid will have a use for them if I don't. How much?"

"Twenty-five dollars including tax. It's actually $24.96."

I gave him two tens and a five, and his mouth went through three stages of softening. "Are they getting back together?"

"I don't know yet."

"Where did you find her?"

"Attending the local college. She has a job driving for an old lady named Bradshaw."

"The one with the Rolls?"

"Yes. You know her?"

"I wouldn't say that. She and her son generally eat Sunday buffet lunch in the dining room. She's quite a character. I took a candid picture of them once, on the chance they'd order some copies, and she threatened to smash my camera with her cane. I felt like telling the old biddy her face was enough to smash it."

"But you didn't?"

"I can't afford such luxuries." He spread out his chemicalstained hands. "She's a local inst.i.tution, and she could get me fired."

"I understand she's loaded."

"Not only that. Her son is a big wheel in educational circles. He seems like a nice enough joe, in spite of the Harvard lahde-dah. As a matter of fact he calmed her down when she wanted to smash my Leica. But it's hard to figure a guy like that, a good-looking guy in his forties, still tied to his old lady's ap.r.o.n-strings."

"It happens in the best of families."

"Yeah, especially in the best. I see a lot of these sad cookies waiting around for the money, and by the time they inherit it's too late. At least Bradshaw had the guts to go out and make a career for himself." Fargo looked at his watch. "Speaking of careers, I've already put in a twelve-hour day and I've got about two hours of developing to do. See you."

I started toward the hotel coffee shop. Fargo came running after me along the corridor. The rectangular dark gla.s.ses lent his face a robotlike calm which went oddly with the movements of his legs and arms.

"I almost forgot to ask you. You get a line on this Begley?"

"I talked to him for quite a while. He didn't give too much. He's living with a woman on Shearwater Beach."

"Who's the lucky woman?" Fargo said.

"Madge Gerhardi is her name. Do you know her?"

"No, but I think I know who he is. If I could take another look at him--"

"Come over there now."

"I can't. I'll tell you who I _think_ he is under all that seaweed, if you promise not to quote me. There's such a thing as accidental resemblance, and a libel suit is the last thing I need."

"I promise not to quote you."

"See that you don't." He took a deep breath like a skin diver getting ready to go for the bottom. "I think he's a fellow named Thomas McGee who murdered his wife in Indian Springs about ten years ago. I took a picture of McGee when I was a cub reporter on the paper, but they never used the picture. They never play up those Valley cases."

"You're sure he murdered his wife?"

"Yeah, it was an open-and-shut case. I don't have time to go into details, in fact they're getting pretty hazy at this late date. But most of the people around the courthouse thought he should have been given first degree. Gil Stevens convinced the jury to go for second degree, which explains how he's out so quick."

Remembering Begley's story about his ten years on the other side of the world, the other side of the moon, I thought that ten years wasn't so very quick.

The fog was dense along Shearwater Beach. It must have been high tide: I could hear the surf roaring up under the cottages and sucking at their pilings. The smell of iodine hung in the chilly air.

Madge Gerhardi answered the door and looked at me rather vaguely. The paint on her eyelids couldn't hide the fact that they were swollen.

"You're the detective, aren't you?"

"Yes. May I come in?"

"Come in if you want. It won't do any good. He's gone."