Beware the Young Stranger (14 page)

“John! It's Nancy!”

Vallancourt had already whirled and begun to run.

She had come out of the trees near Hibbs. Slipping, falling, she slid down the embankment formed when the road was cut.

Hibbs reached her first. But Vallancourt shouldered him aside and took her in his arms.

“Nancy, Nancy,” he said. He held the trembling form very tightly. She sighed.

After a moment, he held her away from him, looking at her hard and long. That was when Nancy began to sob. So he pressed her against him once more, murmuring to her, as he had done when she was a little girl in trouble.

She shook herself, raised her face, even managed a faint smile. “I'm okay, dad.”

“He didn't harm you,” Vallancourt said. “No, he didn't.”

“There's so much to explain, daddy, to try to make you understand …” She touched her father's lean cheeks with her fingertips, turned to the other two men. “And you two … it's so good to see you.”

“By God, if he had done anything to you,” Conway began.

But Ralph Hibbs simply nodded and set about furiously wiping his eyeglasses.

“How long since you got away from Keith, Nancy?” Vallancourt asked.

“I was with him until a few minutes ago.”

“Where?”

“The house back there. That log one. We heard you coming. I thought for a while he was going to yell at you, order you away. Then he decided to lie low.”

“He's as cunning as a damned stoat,” Conway growled.

“He forced me to remain quiet,” Nancy said. “After you'd gone by, he let go of me and I managed to get out the back door. I fastened it with the hasp and padlock he'd broken to get in. As I ran from the cottage, I heard him smashing a window.”

A breeze off the lake stirred her blonde hair. She seemed older than when Vallancourt had seen her last.

“Dad … what I did I did willingly. I went to him because of what I felt for him … and I had to leave him because of the same feeling.”

“We don't have to talk about it now, darling.” Vallancourt glanced at Conway and Hibbs. “Take her back, and wait for me at the Ferguson cottage.”

He gave her a quick smile and vaulted up the embankment.

“Alone, John?” Hibbs asked anxiously.

Vallancourt nodded and plunged into the trees and made for the rear of the log cottage. Fifty yards up the hillside a fault had ruptured the earth, thrusting a spiral of granite upward. He began a hunter's noiseless ascent. Then he was looking down, surveying the lay of the land.

Keith at last admitted to himself that he was bushed. He had to rest. He lowered himself to a bed of pine needles and lay on his stomach, gulping air.

He wanted to close his eyes and stay there forever. But closing his eyes was no good. When he did, Nancy's face materialized. How she had looked at him that last time. He shook his head, wincing.

After a while he sat up. Got to get moving again.

He rose, backhanding sweat from his face, thinking of his long circling flight across the face of the hill. He had intended to go straight across, but the steep spine of shale near the ridge had turned him back. From a distance it had looked rough but climbable. Up close, it had loomed perpendicular.

He raised his eyes. Should be able to start upward again, he thought.

He started climbing, working out the stiffness that had settled in his muscles during the pause.

Still no sounds of pursuit, he told himself gratefully. They must have found Nancy. Or she found them.

Okay, Mr. John Vallancourt, have your damn reunion. You've got back everything that matters to you. No more worries, no fears. You can call the state fuzz, the county fuzz, the city fuzz. Tell them where the bull crap is. Mark it on a map for them. Then sit back and watch the fun. God damn you, Vallancourt!

He reached a small clearing where the spreading arms of giant oaks formed a natural arbor. As he took his fourth step into the clearing, a shock rippled over his body. He set his foot down like a man in a dream, with impossible slowness.

A man was standing at the edge of the clearing, to his left—Vallancourt.

“I've been waiting for you, Keith,” Vallancourt said, as if Keith were merely late for a golf date.

Keith stood very stiff and still.

“How did you get up here?”

“Walked.” Vallancourt's tone was conversational. “I figured you'd made your try across the ridge, and the shale cliff would turn you back. In that case you'd have to swing around this way. So I came here on a straight line, and here we are.”

“You think you're so great,” Keith said thickly.

“Not at all. But when you've done a little hunting you learn your terrain and the instincts of your quarry.”

“I don't like being quarry,” Keith said. “I don't like it one damn bit. I don't like hunters. I don't like you.”

“I don't blame you, Keith.”

Keith was silent. Suddenly he said, “Hunters carry guns. Have you got a gun?”

“I've a dozen very fine guns at home,” Vallancourt said. “And I'm reasonably good at using them.”

“Too bad you didn't bring one with you.” Keith's eyes were roving. He looked very much like an animal, standing there, at bay.

“Why bring something I'd have no intention of using, Keith?”

“That's tough, old man. I've got a gun.”

“I know.” Vallancourt stood there impeccable, unwinded, not a hair out of place. Tricky! Tricky as hell! Damn him.

“You know?” Keith said. “The hell you do.”

“Of course. The gun you took from the motel proprietor.”

“And you came anyway? You're a fool!”

Vallancourt did not flinch. “It's your folly we ought to be discussing, Keith. Besides, I'm not really running any risks.”

“You think I wouldn't use the gun on you just because you're Nancy's father?” Keith snarled.

“Being Nancy's father has nothing to do with it. I simply don't believe you're the kind who'd use a gun on a friend.”

“Friend! Are you kidding, Vallancourt?”

“Would I come here unarmed, knowing you have a gun, if I didn't trust you?”

“You can't trick me!”

“And how could I trust you,” Vallancourt asked patiently, “if I didn't have some measure of belief in you?”

“You're a liar!”

“Nancy believed in you, Keith.” Vallancourt took an easy step forward.

Keith bolted.

“Keith!” Vallancourt called. “You mustn't! I want to help you!”

Keith began dodging among the trees. Vallancourt launched himself. He ran easily, with the long stride and kick of the professional runner. The distance between them began to shorten.

Keith glanced over his shoulder. Seeing how near Vallancourt was, he gave a short, angry cry and wheeled to one side. His feet slipped on pine needles, and he lost a tick of time. Then he was upright, meeting Vallancourt's rush squarely.

His full young weight was behind the fist that he hurled at the chiseled face under the silver hair. But the fist never met anything. Instead he lurched off-balance, floundering to keep from falling.

He whirled about to look for Vallancourt. His fist lashed out a second time.

A steel vise clamped on his wrist. He heard Vallancourt's quick hard breath, felt the impact of the older man's surprising strength.

The pull on his wrist carried Keith forward. His body slammed against Vallancourt's hip. He felt the ground give beneath his feet and saw the treetops pinwheel against the blue sky. The earth slammed against his back and shoulders, smashing the breath out of his lungs. He tried to rise.

Vallancourt's knee hit him in the groin. He fell back, nothing real for the moment except the pain. Helplessly, he felt the gun being jerked from his pocket. Then the weight lifted from him. Keith crawled to his feet, lashed out feebly.

“You don't know when you're licked, do you?” asked the quiet, friendly voice.

Useless now. He had the gun … Keith stood with arms dangling, slobbering breath.

Vallancourt made no move with either his hands or the gun.

“Son, you have one hell of a fine physique and a lot of potential, but you lack the training,” Vallancourt said. “I was a Marine field commander in the war, and I keep in shape. No, Keith. Stand easy.”

Keith panted, “This isn't the end. You haven't got me down there yet. It's a long way from here to the lodge.”

“The way back is as long as you want to make it, Keith.” Vallancourt studied Keith intently. “Yes, you have a great deal of her in you.”

“Her? What you are talking about? Who?”

“Your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Dorcas Ferguson,” Vallancourt said.

Keith glared at him.

“You won't believe it on such short notice,” Vallancourt said, “but it's true. Your real father was killed in a hydroplane accident before he and your mother could marry. She loved you too much to give you away. She gave birth to you in another city and left you with Maggie and Sam Rollins. All these years she's cared and provided for you. I'm sure she didn't know the full story of the relationship between you and Sam. He cowed Maggie to silence and put on a front when your mother, in the guise of aunt, was around.

“But as she grew older, I'm convinced Dorcas came to realize the wrong she had done you. Your mother, in your time of greatest need, brought you here, and I'm positive that only her death stopped her from telling you and the world that she, not Maggie Rollins, was your mother.

“I know you didn't kill Dorcas Ferguson, Keith, and that's why I've gone to all this trouble to talk to you.

“You can keep running. Or you can come off this hill and take hold of your future—start acting rationally. Which will it be? It's up to you. I'm going back to the lodge.”

Vallancourt glanced at his hand, raised his arm, and threw the gun in a high, flashing arc. It vanished from sight with a crash.

Before the sound died, Vallancourt was walking rapidly down the hillside.

18.

They were waiting for him on the porch of the Ferguson cottage.

“You didn't nail him,” Howard Conway said with disappointment.

“Aren't you glad?” Vallancourt smiled.

“What do you mean?” Ralph Hibbs asked.

“Go inside, Nancy,” her father said.

A glance at her father's face was enough. Nancy went into the lodge.

“I mean that the case is still open. A fugitive is still at large. There's still the chance that he'll stop a police bullet and close the book on the Dorcas Ferguson murder.” Vallancourt smiled. “Except for one thing. I know who the murderer is—and his name isn't Keith.”

Conway and Hibbs exchanged puzzled glances.

“I suspected Keith was innocent quite early,” Vallancourt said. “In fact, when the cashbox from Dorcas's study turned up in Keith's car. He was not carrying the box when he broke out of the house. That means it had been put in his car beforehand. It simply wasn't reasonable that Keith would kill her, lug the cashbox out, then return to her lifeless body.

“So it looked very much as if the cashbox was a plant, and Keith the victim of a frame-up—the sacrificial goat being offered up by the real killer to save his own skin. At the time, of course, my principal concern was not Keith's innocence or guilt, but getting Nancy back before she came to harm.

“The morning of her death, Dorcas phoned Keith to come to her home. I'm convinced she was going to tell him the truth about their relationship—that she was his mother.

“When he got there, he found her dead. She had been dead only a short time. Someone had preceded him there. Obviously the murderer. And the murderer, having been informed by Dorcas that she had summoned Keith, and why, had used those few minutes to set his stage. He was desperate. He had nothing to lose at that point, and his neck to save.”

“Ralph,” Conway said, “you went by Dorcas's house early that morning.”

“Even if Ralph did,” Vallancourt said, “it was too early, some time before she was killed. At the time of her death Ralph was selling a car to a customer.”

“That's true,” Ralph Hibbs exclaimed. “I remember mentioning it to you, John.”

“And it would have been a silly attempt at an alibi if it weren't true,” Vallancourt said. “Too easily checked.”

Howard Conway moved to the edge of the porch and leaned against the railing. “So where do we go from here?”

“Police headquarters, Howard. We'll have a matron sober Ivy up.”

“Damned poor joke,” Conway said.

“Yes, it was. But it's not on Keith any longer, Howard,” Vallancourt said. “I don't think you intended to kill Dorcas, but she's no less dead. And to have framed Keith … Did you think your own hide worth the lives of a boy and girl, Howard?”

“Afraid you've lost me on the curve, John.” But Conway was beginning to sweat.

“Then let's take it from the beginning,” Vallancourt said. “You tried to talk Dorcas out of revealing the truth about Keith. Your motive was obvious. If the whole world knew she was his mother, she might then leave everything she had to him. And that would freeze out Ivy, her sister—your wife. You'd counted on that inheritance. So you argued, and she wouldn't listen, and you lost your head and shoved her, and the edge of the table got in the way—and there you were, with a dead woman on your hands.

“You were on a very hot spot, Howard. Keith was due to arrive momentarily. But … the boy was already under suspicion of the nastiest kind of murder—that Florida business. Why not let Keith pay for the crime? Make it appear that Dorcas, the doting aunt, had become suspicious of his part in the Florida rape-murder, disillusioned. That he'd knocked her down when confronted, killed her, stolen money from her study, and fled.

“Sam Rollins was the only other person, aside from you and Ivy, who knew the truth about Keith. You figured that, if it ever came to that, you could buy Sam's silence.