A Touch of Death (12 page)

I switched on the light again. “Where?” I whispered.

She took my hand and directed the beam. It splashed against one of the white cupboards at the end of the sink, moved slightly again, and came to rest on the end of it. I saw it then. A big ring hung from a nail driven into the wood, a ring filled with a dozen or more of the old, unmarked, and useless keys that a house accumulates in its lifetime—extra car keys, cellar-door keys, trunk keys, front-door keys, and keys to nothing at all. While I stared, she lifted it down.

I held the light for her while she snapped the ring open, slid off three of the keys, and put the others back on the nail. She held the three in the palm of her hand for a moment, looked up at me in the reflected glow of the light with that cool, serene smile of hers, and dropped them into her handbag. I thought of $120,000 hanging there in plain sight among a bunch of discarded and useless junk. She was a smart baby.

The urge to hurry was getting to me again. There could have been two of them out there. One would miss the other, and start looking. Or he might work the gag out of his mouth.

I grabbed her arm and went through the dining room. In the short hallway that led to the stairs I gave her the flashlight. “Make it as fast as you can,” I said. “Throw some shoes and a dress in a bag or grab ‘em under your arm. Lets get out of here.”

I watched her go up the stairs. She turned at the top, and the light was gone. I tried to stand still in the darkness so I could listen, but my feet kept moving. I had the cop’s flashlight in my pocket, but didn’t take it out. I didn’t need a light; all I wanted to do was get out of there.

Why didn’t she hurry? She’d been gone a week. What was she doing? Standing in front of a closet full of clothes trying to make up her mind what to wear? Did she think she was going to a dance? I cut it off coldly, forcing myself to realize she’d hardly had time to walk down the hall to her bedroom yet. I waited, shifting from one foot to the other.

Minutes dragged by. At last I saw the beam of light cut through the darkness above me and turn at the head of the stairs. She was coming down. She had a small overnight bag in her hand and had on shoes instead of the fur-trimmed slippers. I grabbed the bag and fell in behind her, hustling her along.

We hurried back through the kitchen and down the stairs. The heels of her shoes clicked on the concrete floor of the basement. We turned and started toward the window. In another minute we’d be in the open and on our way.

I saw it out of the corner of my eye, and went prickling cold all over. In one motion I grabbed her arm, snatched the flashlight out of her hand, and shut it off. I jammed it in my pocket and put my hand over her mouth before she could even cry out or gasp at the suddenness of it. We remained locked together and suspended in the darkness and I felt her turn her head and look toward the windows. She saw it too. She stiffened.

It was another flashlight, outside. The beam hit the first window. It probed through dirty glass and screen and cobwebs to spatter weakly against the basement wall behind us. She moved a little, and I realized I still had my hand over her mouth. I took it away. The light dropped a little. It hit the floor not five feet away. Then it went out.

I breathed again. Pulling her by the arm, I began backing up. After two or three steps I turned and cut toward where the furnace should be. We had to get behind something. I felt the solid metal of it against my side just as the light snapped on again in front of the second window, the one I had broken. I pulled her quickly after me and we were behind the furnace.

I looked around the edge. Light splashed against the window, steadying up on the place where I had broken the glass. I was squeezing her arm. If it was another cop, he might come in. He’d see the tape and broken glass and realize someone had forced a way in there.

The screen was being drawn back. The window rose.

We couldn’t get out. The light was swinging across the basement now, and if we tried to run back he’d see us. Our only chance was to sweat it out, trying to keep the furnace between us and him. The light was pointed down. He dropped in on the concrete floor. He lost his balance and fell. The light dropped and rolled, coming to rest with its beam reflected off the whitewashed wall. I stared. I was looking at high-heeled shoes and a pair of nylon-clad legs that had never belonged to any cop in the world.

She reached for the light and for an instant I saw her face. It was Diana James.

I felt Mrs. Butler start beside me. Then, strangely, she pushed up against me, as if she were scared. She clung to me, gripping my arm. I was too busy to think about it. I didn’t know what it was until it was too late.

Diana James was straightening up, reaching for the flashlight. Then, abruptly, Madelon Butler pushed away

from me and walked out into the open. I tried to grab her, but it was too unexpected. She picked up the light and shot it right into the other’s face.

“Really, Cynthia,” she said, “I would have thought you’d have better sense than to come here yourself.”

Cynthia? But there wasn’t time to wonder about that. The whole thing was like trying to watch the separate stages of an explosion and knowing all you were ever going to see was the end result and that all in one piece. Diana James straightened in the merciless glare of the light, her eyes going bigger and bigger in terror. Her mouth tried to form something, but just opened and stayed there.

It was at exactly this moment that I felt the lightened weight of my coat and knew why she had pressed up against me in the dark. I lunged for her, still knowing there was nothing I could do, that I was just trying to catch pieces of something that was happening all at once.

She shot. The gun crashed. It roared and reverberated back and forth across the concrete-walled sound chamber of a basement where I’d been afraid of the tapping of her heels against the floor. Before I could grab her, she shot again, the sound swelling and exploding against my eardrums with almost physical pain. In all this madness of noise I saw Diana James jerk around, one hand going up to her chest, and then spill forward onto the floor like a collapsing column of children’s blocks. Just as I reached Madelon Butler and got my hands on her, the light tilted downward and splashed across the fallen dark head and the grotesque swirl of skirt and long legs and arms already still.

Silence rolled back and fell in on us. It was like a vacuum. I could hear it roaring in my ears. I grabbed her. “You—” I said. But there were no words. Nothing would come out. I had an odd feeling I was merely standing there to one side watching myself go crazy. I tried to shove her toward the window.

“Here’s your gun,” she said calmly.

I didn’t even know why I took it. I threw it, and heard the clatter as it hit a wall and fell to the floor.

“Get out that window!”

But she was gone. The flashlight snapped off and I was in total darkness, alone. I swept my arms around madly and felt nothing. Somehow I remembered the other flashlights in my pocket. I clawed one out and started to switch it on, but some remnant of sanity stopped me just in time. We had less than one chance in a thousand of getting out of there now before the whole town fell in on us, and we wouldn’t have that if we showed any light.

I started groping toward where the window should be. Maybe she was already there. Light flared behind me. I whirled. “Turn that out!” I lashed at her. Then I saw what she was doing. It was the ultimate madness.

It wasn’t the flashlight. She had struck a match and was setting fire to the mountainous pile of old papers and magazines beside the coal bin. An unfolded paper burst into flame. I leaped toward her. She grabbed up another and spread it open with a swing of her arm, dropping it on the first. I slammed into her and beat at the flames. It was hopeless.

Another caught. The fire mounted, throwing flickering light back into the corners of the basement and beginning to curl around the wooden beams above us. I fell back from it.

“Run!” I shouted.

She went toward the window. I pounded after her. I stumbled over something. It was the small traveling case I had set down. Without knowing why, I grabbed it up as I bounced back to my feet and lunged after her. I boosted her out the window. I threw the bag out. Then I knelt beside Diana James. I touched her throat, and knew it made no difference now whether we left her there or not. She was dead.

We ran across the black gulf of the lawn. The night was still silent, as if the peace of it had never been broken by the sound of shots. At the gate I looked back once. The basement windows were beginning to glow In a few minutes the house would be a red mountain of flame.

We shot out the gate and across the pavement. As we plunged into the path by the power line I heard a siren behind us, somewhere in town. Somebody had reported the shots.

I could hear her laboring for breath, trying to keep up. She stumbled in the dark and I yanked her up savagely by her arm. I wished she were dead. I wished she’d never been born, or that I had never heard of her. She had wrecked it all. I didn’t even know any more why I was dragging her with me. Maybe it was pure reflex.

I had the keys out of my pocket before we reached the dense shadow under the trees where we’d left the car. I threw the bag in and began to punch the starter while she was running around to the other side and climbing in. The ceiling light flicked on and then off again as both doors closed, and in that short instant of time and in all the madness some part of my mind was still clear enough to grasp the awful thing I hadn’t noticed until now, until it was too late.

She didn’t have her purse.

Her hands were empty. She had left the purse back there in the house. Tires screamed as we shot ahead down the hill. I ground on the throttle, peering ahead into the lights for the turn that would come flying back at us. She didn’t have the purse. I saw the turn just in time. We slammed into it and threw gravel over into the field as we skidded around, and then we were straightened out again.

The highway was coming up now. No cars were in sight. We hurtled onto it, headed south. I was raging.

She’d killed Diana James and brought the cops down on us. All the roads would be blocked inside of an hour. And the big, final, most horrible joke of all was that the thing I had been after all the time, the thing that had got me

into this, was gone. I thought of those three keys fire-blackened and lost forever in the ashes of the house. Even the thousand dollars in cash was gone. We had nothing. We were wanted by all the police in the country, and didn’t have enough money to hide ourselves for a week.

She took a cigarette out of the breast pocket of the robe and lit it, and leaned back in the seat. “You appear to be unhappy about something,” she said.

“You little fool!”

“Didn’t you appreciate the funeral pyre for your charming friend?” she asked calmly. “I thought it rather

a nice touch. Something Wagnerian about it.”

“You stupid—”

I choked. It was no use. It was beyond me. I could only watch the highway flying back at us in the night. And watch the rear-view mirror for cars behind us. Where would they try to block us? Beyond that next town? Or before?

“You are provoked, aren’t you?”

I found the words at last. “Don’t you realize yet what you’ve done?” I raged at her. “You might as well have called them on the phone and told ‘em where we were. We’ve got about a chance in a million of getting away. And on top of that, you went off and left the thing we came back for.”

“Oh,” she said easily. “I see now what’s bothering you. You mean the keys?”

“Where did you leave the purse? Not that it matters

now.”

“I didn’t leave it,” she said. “It’s in that bag.”

I felt suddenly weak. Then I remembered that the only reason I had picked the bag up back there in the basement in all that confusion had been the fact that I’d stumbled over it. I felt even weaker. It was nearly a minute before I could even talk.

“All right. But look. By this time your whole lawn is full of cops. They’ve got radio cars. And there are only four highways out of Mount Temple. They’re all going to be plugged. We may not get past the next town.”

“Quite right,” she said. “We don’t even go to the next town. About six miles ahead, just before you go down into that river bottom, a dirt road turns off to the right. It runs west about ten miles and crosses another country road going south.”

“How far south can we get on it?”

“I’m not sure. But there are a number of them, and by switching back and forth we should be able to go over a hundred miles before we have to come back on a highway. And they can’t watch them all.”

It was our only chance, and it might work. I could feel the beginnings of hope. And at the same time I was conscious of a terrible yearning to get off that highway before it was too late. The six miles were a thousand. I rode on the throttle. We blasted on into the tunnel the lights made. We came around a long curve and I saw the taillights of a car far ahead. I slowed a little, hating it. We couldn’t pass anybody at that speed. It might be a cruising cop.

Minutes dragged by while we crawled along at fifty-five. “We’re getting near,” she said. I slowed, watching the mirror. Another car was behind us, but it was far back. We swung around another curve, and I saw the signboard. Nobody was in sight when we made the turn. I sighed with relief. The tension was off, for a while, anyway.

Then it rolled up from behind and caught me, the instant I relaxed. The tension wasn’t off. And maybe it never would be.

She had pulled the trigger, but I was in as deep as she was. I’d been there, it was the gun I was carrying, and I had helped her to escape. And if they ever caught us, it’d just be my word against hers. That was nice, wasn’t it? A jury would take one look at the two of us, and hang me without going out of the room. I felt sick.

It was a narrow gravel road, very rough and full of right-angled turns going around cotton fields. After a mile or two we went up over a slight rise and plunged into a dense forest of pine. There were no houses, no lights anywhere. I stopped.