Night Walker (12 page)

Henshaw licked his lips. His voice was somewhat shrill when he spoke. “You’re hardly in a position to criticize anybody else’s professional conduct—”

“Take it easy, Doc.”

“I have told you: I do not like to be called Doc!”

“Don’t get mad, Doc,” Young said softly. “I’m just trying to make sure we understand each other, Doc.”

Henshaw again moistened his lips with his tongue. “I — I understand,” he said shakily. “You’re doing me an injustice, but — I understand. I’ll be careful.”

Young stepped back, and watched the doctor go into the room and pull the door shut. He stood there for a moment longer and a sentence from the conversation drifted unwanted through his mind:
You’re hardly in a position to criticize anybody else’s professional conduct.
Young shivered, took his hand from the gun in his pocket, finding it sweaty, and turned away.

From his own room — the room he had come to think of as his — he could hear the voices next door, Elizabeth’s high and breathless at first, gradually becoming calmer. The thick walls of the old house prevented him from making out what she was saying. Presently the voices died away, the door opened, and he heard Henshaw come along the hall.

The doctor entered the room and set his bag on the dresser. “Now you, Mr. Young,” he said.

“Never mind me,” Young said. “I’m doing fine. How is she?”

“She will be all right when she wakes up.”

“And when will that be?”

“Two or three hours, perhaps longer since you indicated that she did not get much sleep last night.”

“Let’s take a look,” Young said.

Henshaw shrugged and together they moved quietly into Elizabeth’s room. The girl was lying peacefully in the bed. Her breathing seemed deep and even. Her face was pale, but not as pale as it had been; she was never, Young reminded himself, a really robust-looking girl. He was helplessly aware that she could be dying before his eyes and he would not know it; and when he glanced at the man beside him he saw that Henshaw knew this too and was amused by it.

“She’s all right, Mr. Young. I give you my word. I would not harm her.”

Elizabeth stirred at the whisper and made a little sound and was still again. The two men glanced at each other guiltily and moved on tiptoe out of the room. Young closed the door gently. They did not speak again until they were downstairs.

Young cleared his throat. “How about some coffee? I never got to finish mine.”

“All right, Mr. Young.” When they were seated in the little booth in the kitchen, the doctor studied his companion for a moment and said, “You seem to have taken the bit in your teeth, Mr. Young. I don’t suppose there’s any harm in your being out of bed if you feel up to it, if you take things easy; but I advise you not to over-exert yourself for a while yet.”

“All right, Doctor Henshaw.”

The older man looked down into his coffee cup. “She was mine until you came,” he said abruptly. “It was the most wonderful thing in my life, Mr. Young. I — I have never been very popular in that way; my family is a good one, as good as any around here, but there was never much money and I had to work very hard to get through medical school. For a not very brilliant man without financial support to get through medical school — The others had time for girls, but I did not. And the internship, and starting in practice, and building it up year after year, and then the war came along and I was sent out to the West Coast, where I was put to treating, not wounded soldiers, not even soldiers with colds and venereal disease, but their dependents! Sniveling children and complaining women for four years, free, while everything I had built here fell apart; and when I returned the younger doctors who had been overseas were already back and doing very well at the expense of the practice I used to have... Well, I am making a living again, and I
suppose I should not complain. Certainly I do not ask you to sympathize. I merely want you to understand what it meant to me that — that a girl like Elizabeth could even look at me. I just want you to know why — I did what I did. I have told Elizabeth. I think she understands. I do not expect her to forgive me.”

Young said, “Can you blame her? But you might be wrong. She forgives easy.”

“It no longer matters, does it?” Henshaw said. “I seem to have lost her anyway.” There was silence between them for a while. At last the doctor looked up. “How much do you know, Mr. Young?”

Young moved his shoulders. “Enough, I think.”

“I should like to hear your conclusions.”

Young said, “Well, I was told a pretty complicated story when I arrived here. I was told that she had shot her husband and called you, and you had disposed of the body for her. When I saw him alive last night, naturally my first thought was that both of you had been lying. I figured you must both have been playing ball with him, keeping him hidden, feeding me this line of tripe to keep me quiet; she because he’s her husband and you because — well, maybe he was blackmailing you, having caught you playing around with his wife. Something like that. That was my first idea.”

“It was wrong,” Henshaw said.

Young said, “That’s right, it was wrong. Her hysterics put me on the right track. When I tried to
figure out what hit her so hard this morning, Doc, I came on a funny thing. She’d been perfectly all right — a little tired and upset, but all right — until I mentioned Larry Wilson’s name. Before that, we had both been talking about the guy who had shot at me, but we’d each been taking for granted that the other knew who it was. Yet she’d been a couple of steps behind me when the shot was fired, well back in the hall. I decided that she’d never seen the guy at all. She had thought it was somebody else entirely!”

Henshaw had started to drink from his cup; now he put it down again gently. “Who, Mr. Young?”

“Why, you, Doc,” Young said. “She’d thought it was you. You see, we were about to run out on you. It probably bothered her; she probably felt guilty about leaving you, cold, like that. Suddenly a gun goes off in our faces, I’m lying there bleeding — a little, anyway — and somebody takes off across the lawn. Naturally Elizabeth jumped to the conclusion that it was you; that you’d suspected something, sneaked back to keep an eye on us, and lost your head when you saw us about to run away together. Why shouldn’t she think that —
if she had no idea her husband was alive?
”

He looked across the table at the older man. Henshaw would not meet his eyes. Young stood up abruptly, pushed his way out of the booth, and took his coffee cup to the stove and refilled it.

“You’re kind of a louse, aren’t you, Doc?” he said softly, without looking around. “To let her go all this time thinking she was a murderer! It’s no wonder she blew her top when I let slip it was Wilson who shot at me last night!”

Henshaw said, “I have told her I was sorry. I have tried to explain the circumstances—”

“Circumstances!” Young said.

“How did you guess?”

Young said, “Damn it, the person who shoots a man might make a mistake about his being dead. But the person who buries him can be damn sure!” He drew a long breath. “If Wilson was alive, that made you a liar, Doc. You never dumped him out in the Bay with a mooring chain about him. They don’t get up out of six fathoms of water and come back to shoot off guns. He never went over the side at all, did he, Doc?”

He swung about, but Henshaw did not look up. The doctor studied the dregs of his coffee and said quietly, “I am, after all, a physician, and one always likes to check on a preliminary diagnosis before — taking any drastic action. You can imagine my emotions upon discovering that Larry was alive. The bullet had merely stunned him and caused him to lose some blood. Naturally, I couldn’t — couldn’t push a living man over—”

Young said, “Hell, there was no reason why you
should! But why in God’s name didn’t you come roaring back to tell her the good news?”

The doctor seemed to shrink a little at the question. Then he got up slowly, picked up his bag, and turned to face Young. “I was afraid,” he said. “I — I have worked too hard and too long for — for what little position I have managed to attain. When I brought him back to consciousness he would not let me tell her, Mr. Young. He was very pleased with the knowledge that she thought him dead by her hand. He is a terrible, ruthless, and vengeful young man; he not only threatened me with scandal, as you suggested, but he promised to implicate me in his own dirty undercover game if I ever told anyone he was alive. And as you know, these days one hint of disloyalty can absolutely ruin the most respectable — The very fact that I was involved with his wife — I could not face it, Mr. Young. I simply could not face it, after all I have been through to get where I am. It may not seem like much to you, or to anybody else, but I have worked hard for it....”

He stood outside the front door watching Henshaw’s coupé pull away, and he remained there for a while after the car had gone out of sight. It was a pleasant day, with a steadily freshening southeasterly breeze. One of the local fishing boats was running down along the opposite shore of the river, slipping through the water at surprising speed with very little fuss, a characteristic of these long and narrow hulls. Young watched it idly, feeling empty and planless. Presently Elizabeth would wake up and they would make another attempt to get away from this place, but he discovered that he had lost faith in the notion. He could not see them together anywhere but here....

A glint of light on the water well to one side and astern of the distant fisherman brought him out of this gloomy reverie. The sun had not yet swung around to this quadrant; there were glittering reflections out toward the estuary now, where the southeasterly breeze was kicking up a brisk chop in the path of the light, but there was no obvious cause for any bright
glints at this point in midstream well up in the calmer waters of the river. Young considered the spot that had caught his eye with the half-focused attention he had learned at sea, not concentrating on the one point but ready to pick up anything distracting anywhere within his field of vision; so that when the phenomenon occurred again he was prepared for it. It was closer this time but still over half a mile away, just a brief disturbance in the water opposite the wooded point upstream where the river, narrowing, curved out of sight. It might have looked like the splash of a breaking wave or a rising fish — to anyone but a man who, some time ago when periscopes had been a matter of concern to a lot of people, had become very well acquainted with the behavior of waves and fishes.

Young walked quickly into the living room and picked up the binoculars that were still lying on the table there. He carried them back to the front door. It took him a minute to adjust the eyepieces for his vision; another minute passed before he could pick up the curious, recurring splash in the field of the lenses, much closer to shore now.

The range was still fairly long — he estimated nine hundred yards — and it was hard for him, weak and out of practice, to hold the heavy binoculars steady on the target. He braced himself against the door jamb and drew a long breath and held it; and so
managed at last to get a good look at the small object — rhythmically appearing and almost disappearing — that was the head of a swimmer doing an inconspicuous breast stroke toward the point up the river.

As Young watched, the distant swimmer broke into a rapid crawl for half a dozen strokes and stood up abruptly in shoal water some distance from shore, standing there for a moment resting in the head-down, hands-on-knees attitude of the winded athlete. The range made recognition difficult, even through the glasses, but the light was good and he had no trouble distinguishing a green satin bathing suit that, while scanty enough, included one item more than a man would have found necessary.
Why, the damn little mermaid!
he said to himself silently. As he watched, the girl squeezed the short red hair back from her face and leaned sideways to pound the water out of one ear. Then she gave a quick uneasy glance in his direction, as if remembering that she was standing in plain sight of the distant house, and ran ashore and disappeared among the trees and tall grasses on the point.

Young lowered the glasses, nodding slowly to himself, although he could not have said why he did so. He glanced at his watch and looked around. The front step was certainly no place to wait, even sheltered by the screen. He did not think she could have spotted
him with the unaided eye at the distance, but from now on the advantage would be all hers. She could make her approach from any direction... Somehow he found himself quite certain that she would come here. When he had last seen her, she had been aboard her little sloop, heading out toward the Bay through the morning mist. She must have put in at some cove along the shore out of sight and made her way back here on foot to where she could swim the river; she had not gone to all that trouble just to get home. He wondered what had brought her back, but there was no way of knowing, or even guessing. The dining room was the best location from which to look out for her, he decided; from the corner windows there he could cover the upstream side and the front of the house without exposing himself. The other two sides would have to go unguarded; of course, it was not a matter of guarding the place from attack — one red-haired kid in a two-piece bathing suit could hardly constitute a real danger — but of observing what she was up to. He stationed himself in the corner by a large dark sideboard and glanced at his watch; three minutes had passed since she had disappeared. It would be a mile around the cove by the shortest route. He frowned, estimating what speed a barefooted girl could be expected to make through the woods. Two knots at best, he thought, give her half an hour. He settled down to wait.

It took somewhat less time than he had expected, because she was taking less care than he had thought she would. At eighteen minutes he caught sight of her again. She was three-quarters of the way around the cove, running openly along the beach down there. Perhaps she was counting on the trees to shield her from the house as she came below it, but they were not thick enough to keep Young from catching the flash of the green bathing suit, a shinier and more brilliant green than the foliage. He could follow her progress quite plainly despite the wire mesh of the window screen through which he was looking.