But in the week before the ship sailed there was one thing I had to do before I left for good. I flew to New Orleans. First, I spent two days in the public library, going back through the newspaper files. There was no further mention of the case after the latter part of February; it was apparently headed for oblivion, unsolved—not if she had done it, of course, but how.
The police were almost certain now that she had left her hotel in New York that night of 13 November and flown to Miami under the name of Mrs. Wallace Cameron. Then they’d lost her trail in Miami. The night clerk at the Dauphine remembered he’d given Chapman a letter when he checked in, and that Chapman had asked for a cab and gone out somewhere within a few minutes after arriving, but whether it had been to meet her nobody would ever know. Had she come to kill him? Or to taunt him with something guilty in his past that eventually drove him mad?
Three handwriting experts were convinced that the signatures on the two checks and the receipts were forgeries, while Coral Blaine and Lundgren were just as strongly convinced the man they had talked to could have been no one but Chapman. Police had followed my trail back and forth across Florida, and while they had a dozen different versions as to my age and the color of my hair and eyes, the composite picture was that of Chapman, just as she had said it would be. The only things the witnesses were certain about were the wrong things, the ones I’d deliberately planted.
Chapman Enterprises was being liquidated by his father. Coral Blaine was gone from Thomaston. The whole senseless tragedy was complete, except for how, and that was unanswerable. But they did know who had been responsible for it all, because she had admitted it—the rejected and embittered woman who had been his mistress.
I rented a car and drove up-state, buying the flowers at one of the towns along the way. The name of the little community was Bedford Springs, but it wasn’t on any of the highway maps, and all I knew about it was that it was some fifteen miles from Thomaston.
I’d puzzled for a long time as to why she’d wanted to be buried in a backwoods churchyard in Louisiana when her family would be in Cleveland. Then I’d finally decided perhaps something good had happened to her in Bedford Springs at some time in the past. I’d understood her coming to San Francisco, where she’d been married to Forsyth, and the trip down to Stanford, and what she was doing in those last few days when she knew it couldn’t go on any longer.
It was late afternoon when I found it. It was miles off the highway, and there wasn’t any town at all, just a white frame church set under some oaks in gently rolling country of small farms and hardwood and pine. There weren’t even any houses near it. It was late April now, and all the trees were fully leaved. I got out of the car in front of the church and walked down to the little cemetery that was fenced and appeared to be well-tended. Across the back of it was a row of slender arbor vitae and beyond that a wooded ravine and tall trees, and off to my right about a half-mile a man was plowing on the side of a sandhill with a mule. There was no sound at all except that of the birds and the trickling of water somewhere in the rave.
I found her grave, and put the flowers on it, and looked around, thinking it was one of the most remote and beautiful places I’d ever seen. Then suddenly I knew why she had remembered it in that final hour of her torment in the hotel room in San Francisco, and what it had represented to her. Peace. Just peace. It hit me without any warning, as it had in the El Prado bar, and I started crying. I couldn’t help it.
* * *
I sat in the car and stared across the railroad tracks at the cotton gin. On the side of it was a large sign that said: CHAPMAN ENTERPRISES. The day I ever felt any guilt for him, I thought—that would really be the day. I’d never owned any part of her for an hour, and she’d given him all of herself for six years and then he’d thrown her away as if she were something you merely bought and used like an expendable item of inventory.
The town was as familiar as if I’d lived in it for years. The street names clicked and fell into place in my mind as I drove across it. I found her house and parked in front of it in the lengthening shadows of the elms. It was a two-story white frame with a neat lawn and some nasturtium beds in front, only four blocks from the center of town. When the weather was nice she sometimes walked to work. I got out of the car.
Somehow it wasn’t late afternoon now, but early morning, and I could see her ahead of me in the sunlight with that beautiful walk she had and the erect, patrician slenderness and the smartness that must have appeared so out of place in this little farming town, and the sleek dark head, complete with the shallow saucer of a hat slanted across the side of it, the one she’d worn the night she came back from New York. And, somehow, even though I was behind her I could see the fine blue eyes that were almost but not quite violet and their nearly unshakable self-possession and poise, and the cool and ineffably feminine humor in them as she leaned her chin on her laced fingers that afternoon in Key West and asked, And what other personality problems do you have, Mr. Hamilton, besides shyness? And the same eyes filled with the sheen of tears as she shook her head there in the hotel room in San Francisco. No, Jerry. It’s too late. Our fine pink flamingo is made of concrete, and I can’t carry it any longer. But you let me have it, and I’ll find a place to put it down.
This was the square, in the center of town. I turned, right at the corner, and walked along the south side of it, facing the entrance to the courthouse where sparrows fluttered about the eaves. How many thousand times had she stepped along this walk, on Monday mornings and Saturday nights and the white noons of southern Augusts? The doorway was between Barton’s Jewelery Store and the Esquire Shop. I went up the stairs where the slender heels had tapped, and turned right in the corridor at the top. The etched glass of the doorway bore the gold-leaf legend: CHAPMAN ENTERPRISES. I pushed it open and went in.
The brown-haired woman in the ante-room looked up pleasantly, and asked, “Yes, sir. May I help you?”
The inner door was closed. I crossed to it and pushed it open. Mrs. English was watching me with a puzzled frown. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “Where you looking for someone?”
There were the three desks, and the safe, and the water cooler, and all the steel filing cabinets, and to the right the two windows looking out into the square. At the third desk, near the door going into his private office, a brown-eyed girl with a little dusting of freckles across her nose was busy at her typewriter. She looked up questioningly.
The large desk in the center was hers. I crossed to it, and touched it with my hands. Barbara Cullen had quit typing now, and was staring at me, and I was aware that Mrs. English had got up and was standing in the doorway.
“Could I help you?” Barbara Cullen asked.
In the slow unfolding of horror I seemed to be standing outside myself, watching what I was doing but without any power to control or change a movement of it. I might still get away, if I ran now without opening my mouth, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. I stood there, merely feeling the desk with my hands. Then I crossed the room to Chapman’s office, and went inside. Opening the center drawer of his desk, I lifted out the pencil drawer and turned it upside down to stare at the little card that was taped to the bottom of it.
Right to thirty-two, left two turns to nineteen—
Both girls were in the doorway behind me. They gasped, and when I turned they looked frightened and started to back away.
“Who are you?” Barbara Cullen asked nervously. “What do you want here?”
I went back to the large desk in the center of the room and stood behind it, looking out at the square. Mrs. English retreated to the ante-room. Barbara stood as far away as she could, staring at me. The silence stretched out and tightened across the room.
I gripped the edge of the desk. God, there must be something left of her, somewhere. She’d sat here for six years, with her bag in that lower left-hand drawer, touching this, putting papers in that basket, picking up the phone— She’d sat here, where I
was standing now, and when she glanced up she looked out that window at spring sunlight and the slow eddying of traffic in winter rains and high-school football rallies and funeral processions and the blue October sky.
I stared down at the whitening knuckles of my hands. “Barbara,” I said, “it wasn’t her fault. You’ve got to believe it. Some way, I’ve got to make them understand—”
She cried out. I looked up then, and her eyes were widening with horror. “How did you know my name?” she asked. But it wasn’t that. It was the voice; she’d already recognized it.
”Sit down, Barbara,” I said. “I won’t hurt you. But I’ve got to tell somebody. I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t let her go on lying there taking all the blame, when it was my fault. I could have saved her. She couldn’t help herself—”
I heard Mrs. English dialing, out in the ante-room, but I went on talking, faster now, the words becoming a flood. All that time in Mexico hadn’t meant a thing; you never whipped it or drove it away. You merely drove it underground, into your subconscious, where it could fester beyond your reach.
When the men came up the stairs and into the room behind me I was still talking, and Barbara was listening, but the look of horror on her face was giving way to something else. Maybe it was pity.
Charles Williams, All the way
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