Girl out back

  It was a problem, an assignment you were handed and told to work out on the spot and under pressure; my mind was ice cold and very clear, shored off from everything as I concentrated on it. The boat was a deeper clot of shadow some ten feet away. I swam over to it, moving clumsily in my clothes and shoes. Catching the gunwale with one hand, I oriented myself with the dark shore-line, and began kicking back the way we had come. In a few minutes, just outside the cove, I could reach bottom with my feet. I waded in, pulling the boat.

  Landing it beside the log, I stood alongside it while water ran out of my hair and clothing. Stripping the cuff-links from my shirt, I dropped them in the pocket of my jacket, which was still across his valise. I slipped off the tie and shirt, wrung them out, rolled them together, and tossed them on to the bank. Then I stepped out of the trousers, squeezed as much of the water from them as I could, and stepped out on the ground myself. I put the trousers down with the shirt and tie. I emptied the water out of my shoes, wrung out the socks and put them with the other clothing, and put the shoes back on. Then, going back and forth on the log, I removed the valise, my jacket and hat, and the three pails from the boat, placing them near the pale blur of the shirt which I could see fairly well in the darkness. I went up to the cabin. Just outside the door and a little to one side, where he had dropped them, I felt around for the spinning rod and the big bass on its stringer. I couldn’t find either of them. I oriented myself, and tried some more. That was odd. He’d dropped them both right here. Then I understood. When he came back for the bandage and the crutch, he’d moved them. But where? I had to have that rod.

  Well, obviously, he would have taken it inside the cabin. I straightened and was about to go in when I stopped. How in the name of God was I going to find anything in there without a light? My cigarette lighter was down there in my trousers, soaking wet. It would be hours before it would work. Well, he had matches in there somewhere; I just had to find them. I stepped inside and groped my way toward the rear, bumping into a chair. The noise it made as it fell to the floor was startling and all out of proportion in the stillness. I went on until I felt the stove, and then stopped, trying to visualize the exact layout. Nearly all the back wall was covered with shelves, as I remembered, but the matches should be on the end near the stove. I moved, holding my hands before me. I touched the edge of a shelf and began sliding my hands along it. Something fell to the floor and broke. I cursed. I knocked something else over, but it remained on the shelf. I was beginning to be nervous and apprehensive now. It might take an hour to find his box of matches. Then I grunted. I had felt them. It was a large cardboard box, slid partly open. They were the big kitchen ones.

  I struck one, and the instant it flared he came flying back at me from a dozen directions at once, from the dirty, syrup-smeared dishes and the unmade bed and from the piles of cheap and pathetic magazines. The poor, lost, futile. . . .

  Stop it!

  I coldly sealed him out and swung around, searching for the lamp. It was on the big packing box that had the oilcloth on it. I lit it, replaced the chimney, and looked around in the dim yellow light. There was the rod. It was in the corner by the chest of drawers, where the rifle and shotgun stood. The stringer was on the floor beside it. The bass was gone. Well, naturally, he would have thrown it back in the lake so it wouldn’t smell up the place.

  I was about to go across to pick up the rod when I became conscious of something sticky under my shoe. I looked down. The thing I had knocked off the shelf and broken was a syrup pitcher, and I was tracking syrup all over the cabin. I swore, whispering harshly in the darkness. Damn the rotten luck. Well, I’d clean it up later; I had to come back, anyway. There were some torn-up comic books in the wood-box beside the stove. I ripped some pages off one, cleaned the syrup from my shoe, and stuffed the paper in the stove. Setting two matches on the floor just to one side of the door where I could find them next time, I picked up the rod, blew out the lamp, and went out.

  It was two or three minutes before my eyes became accustomed to the darkness again. I went down to the boat and put the rod in. It still had a small spinner attached to the line. I felt around under the forward seat until I located his tackle box. It was a metal one, with a tray that hinged upward when the lid was raised. Opening it, I set it on the bottom grating between the midships and after seats. Placing my shoe near one end of the tray, I stepped down, putting part of my weight on it. I felt it bend a little, and then the box upset, spilling lures about the bottom of the boat and under the grating. Taking off my shoes. I set them out on the log and shoved off with the oar.

  I paddled until I was headed outward, and then cranked the motor. Idling down to slow speed, I pointed the bow straight across toward the weed beds along the other shore. When I was nearly half-way across I stood up and dived over the side. I came up, and the boat was drawing away, a diminishing shadow on the dark surface of the water as the motor kept up its thrumming sound in the night. It was swinging to the right, I thought. It didn’t matter much where it hit something and came to rest, but I hoped it wouldn’t double back and run me down.

  I got my bearings and started swimming back to the cove. When I waded out of the water and sat on the log to put my shoes on I tried to judge where it was now. It sounded as if it were on the other side, and it didn’t appear to be moving. Probably it had already plowed into the pails. That was fine.

  I stepped ashore, picked up the valise, and returned to the cabin, hurrying now because I wanted to get away from here. Lighting the lamp again, I put the clothes back in one of the drawers of the chest, and shoved the valise under the bed where he’d got it. I located a paper bag and picked up the shattered glass of the syrup pitcher. I soused his dish towel in the water pail, wrung it out, and mopped up the syrup, dropping the towel in the bag when I had finished. What else. Oh, yes—the plate I had used for an ash-tray. I scraped the butts into the bag, wiped the plate with a handful of paper from the wood-box to remove the rest of the ashes, and put the paper in the fire-box of the stove. Better burn all that, I thought. I stuck a match to it, and then shoved in the carton the money had been in, and the waxed paper that had been used to wrap that hidden under the house. When it had all burned down and gone out, I pulverized the ashes with the poker and replaced the lid. I put the blackened pieces of hardware from Haig’s suitcase in the paper bag, shoved the table back where it had been, and looked around. What else? There was nothing to indicate I had ever been here.

  Of course, I had left footprints out there in a few places in the hard earth of the yard and in the trail, but it didn’t matter, even though my shoes were larger than his. Nobody would be looking for footprints. What had happened to him would be perfectly obvious. He’d stumbled over the tackle box, fallen overboard wearing that gun-belt and gun, and had drowned when the boat plowed on and left him. An autopsy would bear it out.

  I picked up the paper bag, blew out the lamp, and went out. When my eyes were accustomed to the darkness again, I walked down to the lake about fifty yards above the cove, and threw the bag out into the water. The hardware and broken glass were heavy enough to make it sink. Picking my way through the dark trees, I went back down to the cove.

  I rolled my shirt, trousers, and socks into a bundle and knotted the tie around it. Putting on the jacket and the hat, I picked up the crutch, the three pails and the bundle of wet clothing, and started down the lake through the timber. It was slow going and it was farther this way because I had to follow the shore-line to keep from being lost. Brush scratched my legs, and it required intense and constant alertness to keep from running into tree trunks. The sound of the outboard motor grew fainter behind me. I stopped once to tear the padding from the crutch and dispose of it under a log. A few hundred yards farther along I threw the forked sapling itself into the water. I was conscious that I was tiring, but had no conception of the passage of time. It could have been twenty minutes or it might have been hours that I’d been wrapped in this furious concentration, impervious to
everything except this Problem I was working on. Nothing else existed, or could exist until I was through with it.

  I stumbled into an open space and realized I had reached the camp-ground. I swung left, located the road, and in another minute was standing beside the station wagon. The moves remaining in the Problem were dwindling rapidly now, being checked off one by one. I fished the keys from the pocket of my jacket and unlocked the door. Grabbing a flashlight from the glove compartment, I hurried out to where I had hidden the can of gasoline and refueled the car. I replaced the registration certificate. Lifting out the suitcase, stripped off the jacket and wet shorts, and dressed in the slacks and sports shirt I’d had on before.

  Like an operating team making a sponge count, I spread out the wet clothes and checked to be sure I hadn’t lost anything. It was all there—shirt, tie, socks, trousers, cuff-links, lighter, pocket-knife, wallet, bogus credentials, the sodden remains of the warrant, the brown paper bag containing the ten dollar bills, and even the drowned and mushy package of cigarettes in my shirt. I tossed the paper bag in the suitcase, and put the wallet, knife, and lighter in the pockets of my slacks. Rolling everything else back up in the shirt, I stowed the bundle in the rear of the car.

  I took out the knife and pried the lids off the three pails. So oblivious was I to everything but the closing moves of the Problem I scarcely even recognized the paper bundles as money as I hurriedly transferred them to the suitcase. When the pails were empty I put the jacket in the bag on top of the bundles, closed the bag, and stowed it in the car alongside the wet clothes, pulling the blankets and the kapok life-belts over it. Picking up the flashlight and the three pails, I walked back to the edge of the water. I sailed the lids out into it. Then I filled the three pails with water so they would sink, and threw them as far as I could out into the lake. I turned the light on my watch. It was waterproof, and still running after its two immersions in the lake.

  It was eight seventeen. The Problem was solved, and all I had to do was go home. I switched off the light and stood there for a moment as the tenseness uncoiled along my nerves. It had been a rough assignment with tremendous pressure and no margin for error, but I hadn’t missed a move. I knew that. It was perfect.

  Then, suddenly, I became conscious that something had changed. I turned my head with a puzzled frown, wondering what it was. I hadn’t heard anything; all about me was the vast silence of the swamp.

  Wait. That was it! It was the silence itself. All this time I had been listening to the thin, faraway drone of the outboard motor without consciously hearing it, and now it had stopped. The motor had run out of fuel at last.

  I fought it, but the concentration was all gone now and it was too terrible and too graphic to be denied. It was as if he hadn’t died an hour ago, but right now—at this exact instant as the motor made its final revolution and became quiet at last and all movement and life and sound were gone forever from that dark and brooding channel before his cabin.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Ward?”

  It all came up then. I whirled and fell to my knees with my hands in the edge of the water and made a horrible retching sound as I heaved and suffocated with the sting of vomit in my nostrils. When I was wrung out and weak I moved a little and washed my face, and then lay back on the ground, still shaking.

  Don’t be so damned dramatic, I told myself coldly. You knew beforehand it wasn’t going to be any picnic, didn’t you? You’re not that stupid.

  But there wasn’t any way I could have known he was going to say that. He just didn’t know whether I could swim or not, and he wanted to help me.

  After a while, when some of my strength returned, I went back to the station wagon and drove out of the bottom.

  Thirteen

  I had only two gallons of gasoline. Trying to get all the way home on that would be too risky, and there probably wouldn’t be anything open at Hampstead, so I drove back to Exeter and filled up. It was a few minutes past ten when I got home, fervently glad I had the place all to myself.

  People were still up in several nearby houses. I drove on into the garage and closed the overhead door. There was a smaller side door that faced the kitchen porch. I went around to the front of the house and let myself in. I turned on a light in the kitchen, drew the curtains, and brought the suitcase and bundle of clothes in through the back.

  Turning on the oven in the kitchen range, I spread the wet trousers and the the on the back of a chair before it. The shirt was hopelessly stained with the mushy cigarettes. It would never do to put it in the laundry; according to the best traditions of the mystery story, employees of laundries spent ninety per cent of their time searching for evidence of crimes. Well, I knew several ways to circumvent these sterling but over zealous citizens. I dumped the cigarettes into the sink, rinsed out as much of the stain as possible, and tore off the buttons, which I threw in the refuse can, the one in the house. Then I tore the shirt into handy-sized polishing cloths, saturated them with some of Reba’s floor wax, and threw them in the garbage can behind the house.

  I went upstairs to the bathroom. With a pair of kitchen shears I cut the black identification folder into scraps and flushed it down the john. The soggy warrant followed it, and then the drowned cigarettes. I took off my shoes and put them on shoe trees to dry naturally in the closet. I put the hat away. Donning a pair of slippers and combing my hair, I went back downstairs and turned the trousers and tie before the oven. When they began to feel merely damp, I broke out Reba’s ironing board and electric iron and pressed them carefully. I slid the trousers neatly on to a hanger, added the jacket, and went back to the bedroom. I put the suit away where it had been and hung the tie back on the rack. I was the only living person who knew Special Agent Ward had ever existed, and now the last trace of him was gone.

  I’d saved the best part until last. Taking the suitcase, I went downstairs to the den, drew the curtains over the small windows, and switched on the reading lamp beside the big chair. I dragged over my trunk and emptied it of the accumulation of books and papers and old clothes I’d never quite got around to throwing away. Then I hunted up a pad and pencil and opened the suitcase.

  I piled it on the floor first, separated into individual stacks of hundreds, fifties, twenties, tens, and fives, writing down the amounts printed on the bands and hoping Cliffords had been correct in his count. He hadn’t, but it was even better. The total when I added it came to $103,500. I added the $2,800 still in the paper bag.

  That made a grand total of $107,300. I stared at it and whistled softly. It was all mine, and nobody on earth knew I had it. I wondered if anybody else in all history had ever pulled off a coup this size entirely alone and without even the suspicion of one other human being. When you stopped to examine it, the thing must be without parallel. It wasn’t solely that there was no reason anyone should suspect I had it; there wasn’t even anybody to miss it. That was what made it fantastic. There was absolutely no link between Haig and Cliffords, and none between Cliffords and me, and both Haig and Cliffords were dead. . . .

  If only he had run. I wanted him to! That’s the way I meant it.

  I fought down the sick spasm. It passed in a moment. There would be others, plenty of them, but they would pass too. Time didn’t wound all heels; it was still the other way around. The only saving grace of cliches was that they were true. It would never go away, of course, but you could live with it if you were being paid enough according to your individual sense of values. Mine, perhaps, would raise more than one eyebrow among the Good Housekeeping crowd, but then I wasn’t asking them to live by them; I was merely doing so myself.

  I got up to find cigarettes and came back to stare at the pile of money again, excitedly making plans. I’d hold on here for another six months. By that time they would have given up in this area and stopped watching it. Let’s see, that would be in February. I’d take it to Florida and put it in several safe deposit boxes. Cash—that is, currency—was always unusual in any kind of business transacti
on and likely to attract attention, so I would open several scattered checking accounts, add to them gradually, and eventually consolidate them. I’d lie low until mid-summer, at the very bottom of the season, studying the west coast and the Keys for a good location to buy into a marina in a small way or start one of my own. And once I had a business established it would be easy to convert increasing amounts of currency into investments or use it to enlarge the operation. It was just a matter of going slowly.

  I put it into the bottom of the trunk and covered it with the old clothing I’d taken out—ski things I hadn’t used for years, a dinner jacket, a uniform, and a couple of double-breasted suits. It would be safe here. They never went into my things, and I had the only key, anyway. I replaced the books and papers, locked the trunk and moved it back against the wall. The key I put into my wallet.

  I went back up to the kitchen, made a sandwich, and opened a can of beer. Carrying them into the living-room, I loaded the gramophone with arias from Eugene Onegin and Boris Godunov. The house was too quiet. After a while I switched it off and went upstairs. I took a shower and lay down naked on the bed. Her note was still pinned to the pillow. I crumpled it and threw it on the dresser, wishing she would come back. A fight would be better than this intense silence. I switched off the light. The moon had come up now and its soft light was slanting in under the honeysuckle about the window.

  It hit me without warning. I rolled my face down into the pillow and locked my arms around it, shaking and sick and trying not to make any sound. The picture was a long time going away. There was something stark and forever lost and terrible about it, the boat lying motionless there in the moonlight between the dark walls of the trees as if it were waiting for him to come back and get it.