Night Walker (9 page)

Shocked, she swung about to face him. “Honey,” she said in a dangerous voice, “honey, don’t you start sniping at me, too! I got enough of that from my
real
husband and his darn old family to last me — If they had just let me alone; if they hadn’t always acted as if they were sure I was going to disgrace the whole stupid tribe —” She checked herself abruptly, and turned back to the mirror, and passed her hand beneath the hair at the nape of her neck. When she spoke, her voice was flat and expressionless. “It’s too long?”

He said, extremely embarrassed now, “Elizabeth, I’m no judge—”

“Honey, for heaven’s sake!” she breathed. “You’ve just called me a murderess and a tramp. You’re afraid I’m going to poison your soup and you’re ashamed of the way I look, on top of it. Don’t start getting coy now, hear?”

“It’s too long,” he said. “Either cut it off or put it up in some way.”

“It’s funny,” she said softly. “I can remember Ma telling me that when she was young the real wild girls in town were the first to cut their hair off. Now you’re a tart if you wear it too long... Anything else?”

“What?”

“Anything else you’d like to criticize, while you’re in the mood?” Her voice was low and taut.

He hesitated, but there was no sense in holding back, now that he had started. “Sure,” he said. “Your fingernails.”

“What’s the matter with them?” she demanded, glancing down. “They’re clean, aren’t they? Oh, you mean this old polish... I reckon you think this negligee’s pretty crummy, too, and the house is a mess... I declare, the way a man can sit around in last week’s pajamas with an inch of beard on his face and call a girl sloppy because she’s got a spot on her dressing-gown! Honey —” Her voice ran out abruptly. She drew a long breath, like a sigh, and looked at herself in a mirror with an expression of distaste. “Honey,” she said softly, “take me with you.”

He did not realize at once what she had said, since she had seemed to be talking more to herself than to him. Then he looked at her quickly, and watched her come toward him. To his dismay, she went to her knees beside the bed, taking his hand in hers.

“Take me with you, David,” she said. “I shouldn’t ever have come here. Take me out of here. Please!”

“But—”

“You’ll need me,” she whispered. “We’ll be Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, hear? We’ll go — somewhere. Nobody will think anything of it, except the Decker girl, and what can she do except get mad? I’ll just be taking you away somewhere to convalesce from your accident. It’ll look just as if we’d made up and gone away on a second honeymoon, kind of; as if I’d forgiven you for last summer and taken you back, as if you’d changed your mind and decided you hadn’t made such a bad mistake after all, family or no family.”

He said, “Elizabeth—”

Then she was on her feet again, making the awkward movements of rising seem easy and graceful; and her voice was prosaic when she spoke:

“Think it over, honey. There’s also the money; it’s a joint account and I’ve still got his power of attorney that he made out for me once when they were sending him to the Pacific for something or other to do with ships.”

Young said, “I wouldn’t touch a cent of that bastard’s—”

Elizabeth smiled. “Now you’re being silly. You’ve taken his name and his home, you’ve been eating his food; you’ve kissed his wife. Why get high-minded about the money? It’s — it’s no good to him any longer, is it?”

Young looked at her; and she waited. The soft but direct light from the open window made her look young and expectant and quite lovely. As you got to know a girl, Young reflected, the details that had first jarred on you no longer seemed very important. It occurred to him, rather shockingly, that he now knew this girl better than he knew any other person in the world. He knew her fears and he could guess at her ambitions; he knew how to make her laugh and how to make her cry. She probably knew as much about him. By accident she had found her way closer to him than anybody had managed in a long time; even though he did not fully trust her, she was the one person in years that he had felt free to talk to.

You could put it nicely, he thought, and say that they seemed to get along well together because they suited each other; or you could make it ugly and say that they damn well had better get along because they knew too much about each other not to. Either way, they got along, and he knew suddenly that they always would, because neither of them would ever expect too much of the other. They would always make allowances. Both of them knew that there was not a great deal to expect. Between them was the unspoken understanding that they were both second-rate people who, in some important respects, had failed themselves.

They made a nice pair, Young thought grimly: a
pretty, somewhat shopworn young wife turned murderess and a big, somewhat beat-up young Naval officer turned — He did not finish the sentence, pushing the ugly word back into the darkness out of which it had come. He looked at the girl standing above him, and thought,
Why not?

“Hell,” he said, “It’s a deal.”

She nodded, and said in a practical voice, “Don’t say anything to Bob when he comes. He — wouldn’t understand.”

Young thought that this was very likely; and he was wryly amused to discover that, now that he had committed himself, the thought of Bob Henshaw — bald and middle-aged though he might be — gave him a pang of jealousy. Elizabeth flushed a little under his regard. Suddenly he was aware of a warm feeling of sympathy for her, and he thought,
Poor kid, she must have been lonely as hell here, to take up with that old goat.
The thought of going away with her began to take shape in his mind, not unpleasantly.

He said, looking up at her, “You don’t know what I look like. You’ve never seen my face.”

“I’ll like it,” she said. “If I don’t, I can always — close my eyes, like this.” Smiling, she bent down and kissed him full on the mouth.

The screaming annoyed him. Here he was risking his damn life, working his fool head off with the ship likely to go any minute now, and he had to listen to that! So the guy was hurt; who wasn’t? Did he want to get out or didn’t he? What the devil was
he
expected to do about it, knock off for five minutes to sympathize? He was doing his goddamn best; the bastard might at least have the decency to appreciate it and keep his goddamn big mouth shut... Then he was in the water, as it always happened, with fuel oil in his mouth and his hands hurting like nothing had any business to hurt. The great blazing hulk of the carrier drifted down on him inexorably in the moments before, jolted and rocked and shattered by a fresh series of explosions, she rolled over and went down stern first.

But the screaming continued still, a nasty, breathless, whimpering noise now. It seemed to come from a long way off, and he listened to it, still angered by it, for what seemed like a long time before he understood that he was making it. He fought his way
upward through heavy layers of sleep and took control of himself and stopped it.

He lay afterward, wet with perspiration, waiting for the pounding of his heart to subside. Then the ceiling light came on above him, without warning, shockingly bright. He had opened his eyes instinctively at the click, and so looked directly into the sudden blaze of illumination; in the moment of blindness that followed he was aware of someone rushing toward the bed. The thought of the pistol under the pillow crossed his mind as he shoved himself up; but before he could reach for it, she was crouching beside him, touching him, clearly identified and no danger.

“Honey,” she gasped, “honey, what’s the matter, what happened?”

“I’m sorry, Elizabeth,” he said, embarrassed at having awakened her at this hour and in such fashion. “I just had a nightmare. It’s a bad habit of mine.” He managed to laugh. “You just don’t know what you’re letting yourself in for —” Then he checked himself, because she was no longer looking at him. She had sunk down to kneel beside the bed with her head on her folded arms; and her breath was coming in great sobs. “Elizabeth!” he said, startled.

He regarded her with concern and remorse. He could think of nothing to do about it, however, but caress her hair gently as she knelt there beside him,
her body shaken by the ragged violence of her breathing. Presently she stirred under his touch and, as if sensing the nature of his thoughts, gave a minute shake of her head without looking up.

“Honey, I’m all right... not crying... just all out of breath from running up that darn — those darn stairs!”

He could not help laughing at this anticlimax; yet it was still pleasant to know that there was somebody in the world who cared enough to come running when he made a fool of himself in the middle of the night. He glanced at the electric clock on the dresser, which read one-fifteen.

“What were you doing downstairs at this time of night, anyway?”

It was an idle question; but she was suddenly quite still and tense under his hand, so that touching her became suddenly awkward, and he took the hand away.

“Why,” she said, her face still hidden and her voice muffled, “why, I — I couldn’t sleep, honey. I went down to —” She paused, and went on quickly: “— to get a drink. I forgot to get a prescription from Bob and I’m all out of the pills. Sometimes a stiff drink—”

Her voice trailed off unconvincingly. A little time passed in silence. At last he reached over and tilted her face up to the harsh overhead light. Her eyes would not meet his. He looked at her, noting for the
first time how she was dressed: in pale pink slacks of some kind of quite thin gabardine material and a pink nylon sweater with short sleeves. There was a single strand of pearls at her throat, he saw, and the soles of her sandals, visible as she knelt there, were damp.

She grew restless under his gaze and made a quick, furtive attempt, with one knee, to shove something out of sight beneath the bed, without looking down. He leaned over and picked up the object: a long, five-cell flashlight.

“I — I was outside,” Elizabeth said.

“Uhuh.”

“Don’t look at me like that, honey,” she whispered. “I can’t bear to have you look at me like that.”

She was making much more of a scene of it than it had seemed at first to deserve; the knowledge frightened him. He said harshly, “At least play it straight, sweetheart. Don’t phony it up. You can’t tell how I’m looking at you, with these damn bandages.

“Oh, you fool!” she cried. “Bandages! Do you think I can’t tell from your eyes what —” Her voice failed again. “I didn’t want you to know,” she whispered presently. “That’s why I lied.”

“It’s a fairly common reason for lying.”

“I — I heard a noise,” she said.

“Sure, you heard a burglar in the kitchen, so you got all dressed—”

“It was a boat,” she said.

“A boat?” He did not understand at once.

“Out there.” She indicated the window with a movement of her head. “I didn’t want you to know because — because I was afraid you’d want to do something about it. I was curious, so I got dressed and sneaked down to look. Then you started to scream. I thought — I was afraid somebody had got into the house. I ran all the way up the hill from the beach; and you try doing that some night in the dark! Look at my slacks!” She showed him a knee dirtied by a fall. “I thought somebody was killing you, or something! I declare, it really worried me. Heaven knows why!”

He looked at her for a moment longer, oblivious to her resentment, not really seeing her now. “A boat,” he said softly, and pulled back the covers to get out of bed.

“Honey,” she said, “honey, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the one... There are always boats anchoring in the cove. Why, it’s a favorite spot; all the yachtsmen around here know it. It doesn’t have to be the one Larry—”

Young swung his feet to the floor. “Could you read the name?”

“No. It was too dark.”

“It is still there?”

“I suppose so, honey. They came ashore. There’s a kind of public beach and launching place in there
where you can drive a trailer down to the water; a strip of county land between our property and the Merediths’, up the river. Their dinghy’s still there, as far as I know. I was on my way over to look at it when... You don’t believe I’m telling you the truth, do you, David?”

It had not occurred to him to doubt her further. Now he looked at her sharply, disturbed by the question; but there was no time to waste in determining what lay behind it. He went quickly to the closet and found an old dressing gown of Larry Wilson’s, and a pair of battered loafer shoes that were a little too small. He spoke over his shoulder.

“Did anybody meet them?”

“I didn’t see anybody,” she said. “I just woke up suddenly like you do and heard them rowing ashore. It seemed kind of late for anybody to be rowing, so I got up and looked. I saw the boat in the cove, and the dinghy. They pulled it up on the sand and walked up the road—”

“How many of them?”

“Two. Don’t ask me to describe them, honey. I haven’t the tiniest idea, what they look like—”

She checked herself abruptly. In the silence, the faint click and creak of rowlocks came clearly into the room. Young stepped quickly toward the window, but realized that the light in the room would silhouette him clearly for anyone on the river to see; he turned
toward the switch, and knew that this would not do, either: the sudden darkening of what was probably the only lighted room in the house would be enough to alert any watcher.

He moved swiftly out into the hall and through the next door on the same side, finding himself in a room which, even in the dark, gave an impression of extreme femininity and utter untidiness. As he felt his way toward the window, he had a brief stifling sensation of pushing his way through a spider web of discarded, intimate, fragile garments; they hung from the doorknob and from the door itself, every article of furniture he touched seemed to be littered with them; he could even feel them underfoot. There was a confusing odor of cosmetics both fresh and stale. He reached the window and looked out, aware of Elizabeth beside him.

It was a clear night outside, with enough light for him to make out the graveled drive, a dim circle against the dark grass of the lawn, that reached to the still darker trees and bushes of the hillside. Over and through the trees, the river had a sheen like polished metal. A lighted window in a cottage on the far bank cast a long, almost unwavering reflection across the water. Closer, a yellow anchor light burned near the masthead of the small power cruiser in the cove. Somehow, the light was a letdown. It seemed unlikely that people on a secret and unlawful mission
would announce their presence by burning the lights required by the rules of the road at sea, any more than a fleeing bank robber would let himself be delayed by an unfavorable traffic signal.