The Long Ride (9 page)

“Neither had I,” she said. “I’d gone along all my life, skidding off from the marriage entanglement at the last minute perhaps a dozen times, and always glad, later, that I had. Not that I didn’t love each one of them in a certain way. I think I did, a little bit anyway. But never enough to settle down and say this will be it with this particular prince charming. But Edwin was different. You don’t call a man sixty-four years old with a beautiful white mustache and child’s eyes a prince charming. He was a good deal more. I married him.”

“Just like that.”

“Just like that.”

“Where did you meet him? And how? And what did he do?”

“He was an English professor. I met him at a party in Chicago. He was teaching at Iowa State. I was a buyer for a large department store in Chicago, and he’d come into the big city to relax before the next term started. He had great dignity and a fine, razor-sharp mind, yet an ability to reflect on things. I was tired of the job. He was tired of living alone. He’d lost his wife a few years before. They hadn’t had children. So—it just happened. We got married and I went back to live in an old, very wonderful white house with him. It was very nice.”

John shook his head. “It doesn’t sound right, somehow. I don’t mean that critically. I just don’t see it.”

“I think it was very good while it lasted. I liked the books, the contentment, the hard winters around us, snug in that old house, with the fire in the fireplace, a little wine, talking about literature. I hadn’t got to college. I was born in England, brought here when I was two, orphaned in Arizona when I was fifteen. I got jobs and moved around. There wasn’t a chance for college. But I read a great deal and thought about things, and Edwin believed I thought sensibly.”

“I’m sure of that.”

“But,” she said, “the intellectualism wore thin. At least for me. After the newness wore off, Edwin retreated to what he’d known before I came along. Evenings, he’d go to his desk, wearing the elbows out of that invariable tweed jacket, reading and studying and working over his students’ papers. Finally, after two years, I said, ‘You don’t need me.’ And he said, ‘I love to have you here. It’s very comfortable when you are. But not if it’s not enough for you.’ It was agreeable. That’s when I went to New York. He insists on sending me a check every month, though I didn’t ask for it. He does quite well with royalties from the texts he’s written and edited and his income from the college. I think it was a fair bargain, both ways. I hope so.”

He nodded, looking at her. He saw her in better perspective now. But he still did not know if she might be involved with Wells, or with Garwith, or both. Perhaps in the same unreasonable fashion she’d been involved with the man she’d married, she might be involved in this. She intimated she didn’t need money. Maybe she simply needed excitement. He did believe that, above and beyond her fine sensual attraction, Edwin, the aging English professor, had found a strong attraction in her mind too. Put this with the good face, the rich body, and you had a good deal of woman, a very good deal.

“All right,” she said, “now you. You lived in a university town too. Edwin and I were in Lafayette twice—he had a friend on the Purdue faculty. Does it hurt to talk of that? Your home, life? I mean, because of your wife? I won’t press if it does.”

“No,” he said. “It’s all right.” And he realized that now, with Margaret Moore, it was all right to talk about it for the first time since Maggie had been killed in that accident in Washington. Whatever Margaret Moore was, whether or not she was involved with this, she had a strong way of relaxing a man, because she was, unconsciously, so complete a woman. “Well, I’d still be in Lafayette if—” He shrugged. “It was a good life.”

“You hadn’t grown tired of it at all, in other words?”

“Not at all,” he said softly. “Nice town, nice family, nice business.” It was easy, he found, to mix the lie with the truth. It hadn’t been Lafayette, and he hadn’t been in business—but it had been a good life…

“You loved your wife very deeply, didn’t you, John?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you still?” she asked directly.

He looked at her, flushing a little, as her eyes examined him carefully. “In memory, yes.”

She suddenly smiled. “Did you have a nice house in Lafayette?”

“Yes,” he said. “We did.” And they had owned a nice house, he thought. The quiet Anacostia neighborhood, far out from downtown Washington. Washington had been too hot in the summer, often too cold in the winter. But he’d been glad to give up the field work and settle into the routine of the Washington office. The quiet of the home, evenings. Now and then a sitter for the boys and dinner at the Wharf; perhaps a drink at the old-fashioned, ornate bar in the Willard; Sundays, often, driving down through Alexandria, enjoying the golden Virginia countryside, stopping wherever suited them. Maggie had owned a child’s eagerness to enjoy every minute. He remembered how they’d stopped one Sunday in a little town called Blackstone and bought the boys ice cream sodas in a corner drugstore and watched the citizens amble lazily down the main street. He lit a cigarette and tasted his beer. “Lafayette,” he said, “is a very pretty town.”

“Where did you live? Near the campus?”

He was back with the present quickly. He looked at her eyes and said, “We lived in the Hills and Dales District in West Lafayette. Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” she said. “Beautiful homes there.”

He nodded. “We were able to get an older home on Forest Hill Drive. I had my business on the east side, on Kosuth.”

He thought her eyes flickered faintly, but it was only, he thought, imagination because he was now trying very hard to be careful.

“Advertising,” she said. “Did you like that?”

“That’s what I trained for at I.U. after the war. I started out thinking that I was going to be an engineer. I grew up in a little town near Lafayette, and I was around Purdue some—an engineering college primarily—you know that. So I just naturally thought I’d be an engineer. I started in it, and then I enlisted in the Army. After basic they sent me back to Indiana, at Bloomington, to study engineering for a while. I was really no good at it. After the war, I switched to advertising. I liked it, yes. I still like it.”

“What did you do in the war?” she asked.

“What an awful lot of other men did.” He smiled, and now he was telling the entire truth. “Enlisted as a private, knocked around camps for a while, along with that short-lived AST Program, then went overseas with the infantry as a rifleman. I worked up to squad leader, mostly because I stayed alive. Came home after the war ended, put my uniform in a trunk and haven’t seen it since.”

“Not like our friend, Mr. Wells?”

“I’m afraid not.”

She nodded, smiling a little, studying her glass. Then the steaks arrived. “My God,” Margaret Moore breathed, “they look beautiful! “

“Indeed,” he said, relaxing again, not knowing how much he had to worry about her, but simply glad to be with her, the two of them in that small leather booth, cutting into the best-looking steak he’d seen in years.

Suddenly he heard a familiar, but startling, sound. He looked up and saw, coming in, Miss Kennicot followed by a beaming Mrs. Landry. The sound was Miss Kennicot laughing. She was roaring, red-faced with exertion, coming down on them with flashing eyes and large display of white teeth.

“There you are!” she shouted, as the other diners looked up. “Now wasn’t that naughty of you to run off and not even tell us where you were going! My goodness, steaks! Well, they told us at the hotel this was the best restaurant in town. And I just knew we’d find you two naughty children when we couldn’t find you at the hotel. Didn’t I say that to you, Mrs. Landry?”

“Yes, dear,” Mrs. Landry said happily, “you did.”

“My goodness,” Miss Kennicot said, laughing, “aren’t you two ashamed of yourselves running off from us like this!” She looked at John with gleaming eyes. Then she looked at Margaret Moore. In that second, her laughing stopped, and a vicious cloud of anger flashed visibly across her face as she stared accusingly at Margaret Moore. But then she laughed again, and in a moment she and Mrs. Landry pressed themselves into the booth.

After checking the menu carefully, Miss Kennicot noted that she rarely ate steaks. (“Now the price of these here—now that’s what I’d call
quite
firm!”) She really preferred soups, she said, and small sandwiches and things made out of eggs. But since steak was the specialty, and since John and Margaret Moore had ordered them, she was just going to go ahead. Mrs. Landry also ordered a steak and attacked it with relish. Miss Kennicot, seeing the beer glasses before John and Margaret Moore, ordered a beer too.

And long after everyone else had finished his steak, she was letting hers get cold, finishing the last drops of one bottle of beer with ceremonious tippings of the bottle and tastings. John was startled to realize that she actually seemed to be getting tipsy. She ate only a little of her steak then. And when they returned to the hotel, she laughed all the way back, weaving a little, finally grabbing John’s arm and hanging on to him across the lobby, up in the elevator, right down the hall to the door of the room she shared with Mrs. Landry.

John, when everyone had gotten into his respective room, returned to the lobby. He spoke briefly with the desk clerk, who had nothing new to report, then reported to Ray Hannah in Loma City from a public booth in the lobby.

Ray Hannah said, “Okay, John. And I’ve got a little more on Margaret Moore now. She was married to an English professor at Iowa State. Lasted a couple of years and dissolved about eleven months ago. Before that she was buyer for a store in Chicago. That’s all I’ve got yet.”

“All right, Ray,” John said, relieved to find that much was working out, as he had thought it would. “And I don’t think I’ll be in touch with you from hereon. I’ve got the hotel staff alerted, the local men covering the hotel, now I’m talking to you. It’s getting too much like a circus. We can’t afford it. I’m going to play it closer from now on.”

“Okay, pal. And good luck.”

When he’d returned to his room and lay in bed, looking at the flat bars of light on the ceiling coming from the street lights through the tilted Venetian blinds, he thought of Margaret Moore, just across the hall, also alone, perhaps looking at a similar pattern across her ceiling. A driving pain of loneliness went through him. He wished he could get up and cross that hall.

Then he thought of Miss Kennicot, also across the hall. He remembered how she’d clung to him on the way back, so hard he could still feel her fingernails pressing into his forearm.

“Lord,” he whispered, and got up suddenly, making certain his door was locked. Then he returned to bed, laughing softly, feeling the tensions ease a little because of the laughter. Down the hall was Harry Wells, a known murderer. Also Allan Garwith, possibly just as potentially dangerous. Yet he’d gotten up to check the door to make sure it was locked against Miss Kennicot! “Lord, Lord,” he whispered again, laughing long and hard, trying to keep the sound muffled, grateful for that ability to laugh. Then he fell into a sudden and deep sleep.

CHAPTER

At eight o’clock the following morning, the sky was clear, the sun was shining and there was a faintly cool breeze. Mrs. Landry, Miss Kennicot, Margaret Moore, Harry Wells and John Benson had assembled at the station wagon in front of the hotel with their baggage. Harry Wells again volunteered to load the bags. John Benson helped him. The job was finished by eight-ten. The Garwiths had not yet appeared. Harry Wells, though he packed the baggage carefully, was visibly nervous.

At eight-twenty, Mrs. Landry said, “Well, I’m just worried that they haven’t come down. I just hope that poor boy isn’t feeling badly again.”

Casually John said, “Want me to check?”

“Yeah,” Harry Wells said, voice cold and rasping, “check.” He leaned against the station wagon, looking up toward the fourth floor. He lit a cigarette. He’d bought a new wick for his lighter at the cigar counter early this morning.

“Mr. Benson—I mean, John,” Miss Kennicot said quite loudly, “I’ll go along. I mean, I’m concerned too.” Nervous laughter, and then: “Anyway, ‘A merry companion is as good as a wagon.’ Lyly, of course. And I shall try to be merry!” Solid booming laughter now, while Harry Wells looked at her angrily, then stood staring upward again.

“Fine, Miss Kennicot,” John said smoothly. “We’ll go up together.”

Miss Kennicot strode with him up the front steps of the hotel, saying, “And just no more of that Miss Kennicot business, John. Vera. I insist. After all, we are boon companions now, on this adventure of ours. ‘Distinct as the billows, yet one as the sea.’ J. Montgomery. And perhaps there’s more truth in that than meets the eye.”

“I wouldn’t wonder, Vera,” John said, as they boarded the elevator. “I’ll have to say you show a wonderful ability to find a quotation for every occasion. I think that’s making our trip very pleasant, Vera.”

“Oh, John!” Miss Kennicot breathed. She reached out and squeezed his left bicep tightly. He tried not to wince. Her face was blushing, he saw, and she was suddenly quite nervous. The hand that had pinched his arm flew back to her purse and started twisting the catch open and shut rapidly, making loud clicking sounds. Her eyes were frozen on him. “John, John,” she said. He was relieved when they got to the fourth floor.

They walked down the hallway. He knocked on the Garwiths’ door, and Cicely opened it. Her eyes were red.

“We were a little worried, Mrs. Garwith,” John said.

“Yes, I know we’re late,” Cicely said. “But Allan—” She motioned a hand at Allan Garwith lying on the bed, dressed, but quite motionless, his eyes closed.

“He isn’t feeling well again?” John asked.

“Yes, and I’m so worried. Allan,” she said, moving to him. “Won’t you let me call a doctor, please?”

“I don’t want a doctor,” he said, keeping his eyes closed. “I just need a little time to lie here. I’m all right. It’s the damn altitude.”

“Allan, if you’d just let me—”

“No. Just let me lie here a little while. I’ll be all right.”