In Cold Pursuit Page 2

  A new doctor was tried, but he and his predecessor could not agree as to whether this was true anorexia nervosa or, as so often happened in medicine, a close and deluding resemblance. As Jenny’s hostility toward her father was implacable under a surface civility—she suspected rightly that he had been the moving force in having Beardsley investigated—the next best choice was to remove her from the battlefield.

  The Actons considered their nearby relatives and a few close friends, but they were all too old, or had sufficient problems of their own, or viewed Jenny’s behavior with such severity that it was doubtful whether any good could be accomplished. Except for Mary Vaughan, whose twenty-six was not so very far removed from Jenny’s eighteen. She had met Jenny on occasional trips East for family weddings and funerals, so that she would not be a complete stranger, and Santa Fe would be a total change from New York.

  Mary had realized that any rehabilitation would be a considerable challenge—not unlike walking on water, she thought when she met her cousin at the airport—but she had left her job and she had the time to be friendly chauffeur and cunning cook. She made no mention of Brian Beardsley; if Jenny wanted opinions or advice she would ask for them, and until then either was useless. She prepared dishes like eggs Benedict and chicken Tetrazzini and casseroles with calories numbering in the thousands, and at the end of this first week Jenny’s weight had stayed stable and Mary had gained two pounds.

  . . . I’ll swim night and day in Juarez, she thought, and turned over and went finally to sleep. But her dreams were not pleasant—Al Trecino was in one of them, bearing down on her in his fisherman’s sweater—and when, at some unnameable hour, she heard what might have been a car and then the imperative barking of a number of neighborhood dogs, she got up and closed and locked her low-set windows on the chilly, rain-smelling air.

  In the morning, it was a minor annoyance to discover that for the third time in the last two weeks a Great Dane puppy newly introduced down the road had made off with her newspaper. He was an engaging animal, frequently not answering to the name of Samuel, and Mary had not been able to bring herself to the point of complaining and possibly getting him tied up. When Jenny, who liked to do the Jumble, came back from her fruitless search and said, “Can we get a paper on the way?” Mary vaguely said yes, if they saw a place, although she had no real intention of stopping for anything once they were under way.

  Books, sandwiches to eat in the car as a six-hour drive did not allow for a delaying restaurant lunch even if a restaurant existed without long detours, cold drinks to be nestled in ice in a styrofoam cooler. Mary found herself infected by a superstitious need to hurry, like a burglar knowing that the return of the homeowners was imminent, and wasn’t helped by the fact that Jenny had reverted to her detached state and was doing none of the running around. She sat leafing through a magazine in the living room; somehow even her long black hair looked bored.

  “Would you take the bags out to the car,” said Mary a little briskly, “while I lock up?”

  She had considered and decided against telephoning either the Taylors or the Ulibarris, who were her closest neighbors in this fairly isolated area, with the false information that she would be in Palo Alto for a month. When Brian Beardsley came to the house, and Mary was increasingly sure that he would, it seemed somehow wiser for him to be confronted with a blank wall.

  Last check: stove off, ashtrays innocent, no faucets dripping. She had already arranged to have the newspaper suspended. Mary locked the front door, carried the books and sandwiches to the car where Jenny was waiting, got in, switched on the ignition. Fifty yards down the road, almost invisible in a weaving of tree shadows, a blue car also came to life. The man in it, grainy-eyed from watching, put the car into gear.

  3

  ...HE had stared, thunder-struck, at the spindlelegged girl who came out of the house at seven-thirty, wind tugging at the straight dark hair that fell well below her shoulders as she began to saunter along the road-edge, head bent, obviously looking for something.

  Had that eternity of hours been for nothing? Had shock and pain . . . ?

  No. He refused to be wrong, and everything else fitted. He sat rigid in his nest of shadows, watching and listening, forcing this new factor into place. It wasn’t difficult. The woman he was going to execute lived alone—he knew that—and she had listened to the late news, become afraid to spend the night by herself, and recruited a young friend or relative to stay with her. It was fortunate that he hadn’t yielded to his impulse at dawn.

  In a matter of moments, the skinny dark-haired one emerged from behind screening lilacs in the next driveway and strolled back the way she had come. The man in the car had already noted that the gate with a wagon-wheel set in it was a gate in name only; it brushed open, a tiny but essential point of corroboration.

  The door closed behind her. Five minutes later it opened again, and this time it was the object of his vigil who came out.

  For seconds he heard his blood in his ears, a dangerous swish, swish. Short fair hair that cupped her head in a ruffle, as described. The rest of her he observed for himself: slender body, a little over average height, in a green and white dress. A flash of silver plucked off one wrist by the sun as she walked to the car in the driveway at the side of the house, carrying what looked like a cooler. It was a crisp walk, definite, as opposed to her companion’s.

  The walk of someone who made decisions quickly. Glance through the window at a mortally injured woman seeking asylum, flick out the light, lock the door.

  With the rushing sound dying out of his ears and an iciness taking over, he realized in the course of the next fifteen minutes that he was watching preparations for a trip. The fair-haired girl—she was younger than he had expected, and he did not use her name in his brain because it was too soon, it might undermine his control—reappeared with some light-colored garments over her arm, bent into the car with them, went around to the trunk and unlocked it and lifted the lid. Her companion presently trudged out with two suitcases which she hefted inside without apparent difficulty, slamming the lid down again. The fair girl, burdened with a brown paper bag and some books, came out for the last time, locked the door, and proceeded to the car.

  He had had time to envision a number of possibilities, including flight, and in fact, partly by chance, he had made one move about that. He had not, however, thought in terms of a passenger—or was she going to drop this one off at her own home, now that her purpose had been served?

  He did not lose sight of the car ahead, even though it was overlaid briefly now and then by the vision of his wife’s face, so masked in blood that only her teeth and the white of one eye—the other was puffed shut —were visible. The hair he hadn’t dared to touch was stiff and crusted.

  He still didn’t know all of it. He had arrived at his driveway the evening before to find a police car with its roof-light flashing and a deputy in conversation with the driver of a strange pick-up whose headlights were pouring into the trees. Three streets over, the driver had stopped for a woman, obviously the victim of a bad beating. He wasn’t familiar with this area and in fact had gotten himself lost, but although she seemed to be in a state of shock the woman had managed to give him her name and her address for the ambulance he was able to summon on his CB radio. She had appeared overcome by fresh terror at the sight of her own driveway, and had only stammered repeatedly, “A boy. He tried to . .

  She hadn’t said anything at all to the ambulance attendant, it was later learned, because she had lapsed into unconsciousness.

  They had told him which hospital, and he had reached her in time because forms were still being filled out. Her voice was barely audible, with dazed gaps in it, but he pieced together the facts that she had been outside calling the cat when she was attacked, that she had fought off a knife-assisted attempt at rape, that she had run.

  “I don’t know where . . .” but there was a rickety bridge over an irrigation ditch, and then a house with nobody home, and next
to it a house with a wagon-wheel set in the gate—“I thought it would be latched, but it wasn’t, and I fell down . . . and she wouldn’t let me in. She looked out the window and turned off the light . . . she locked the door. So I—” He felt as though his face must be as dark with blood as hers. “What was she like?”

  She couldn’t seem to grasp what he wanted, because she was wandering through her story like an obedient child and it confused her to be halted. He pressed her, a part of him knowing that this was tantamount to wringing the last few drops out of a sponge, refusing to stop, and she closed her good eye and said, “Young . . . short hair, very blonde.” A faltering and effortful gesture with a hand near her own head, a slow welling of tears from under her eyelids. “She locked the door.”

  They had taken her away to surgery then, and come back not much over an hour later to tell him that they were sorry; there had been too much internal bleeding and she hadn’t made it.

  The doctor conveying this information had studied his face. “Don’t blame yourself for not being at home when it happened. Even if you’d rushed your wife in at once, the damage was done . . . Here, you’d better let me give you something—”

  He had turned away from that sop, furiously disbelieving. Hadn’t made it—his wife, while he was being eyed furtively by emergency room patients with nothing more wrong with them than bandaged fingers or arms in improvised slings.

  He had talked to a city detective then, and made the discovery, not new to countless victims, that there was always an element of official doubt in attempted rape. For example, his wife had known that he would be working late. The detective was sorry to have to ask this question, but it would be vital to their search for her killer. Had they friends aware that she would be alone? Sometimes an evening visit, by invitation or not, was misconstrued, got out of hand . . .

  He had restrained himself, already hoarding his hatred because it was clear that the police knew nothing of that failed bid for sanctuary. He pointed out that they had been living in the city for less than a month, and that he did not think that his wife’s garb of jeans and one of his old shirts with the sleeves rolled up could be considered provocative. He was spared any more by the entrance of an officer with a wallet incredibly dropped at the scene—during the struggle? Somehow entangled with the knife?

  The wallet belonged to a boy out on bond, awaiting trial for the stabbing of a tourist who had declined to give him a cigarette on demand. A factor as incalculable as lightning, and as random in its choice of victim.

  He was free to go home then. The cat, Dietrich, was waiting for him on the front step, sneezing reproachfully, and he did not seize it up and hurl it with back-breaking force against a tree. He let it in, instead, and fed it with a curious gentleness. Without even a glance at the clock he telephoned his sister almost calmly to tell her what had happened, and firmly overrode her suggestion that she and her husband come around at once. He said that he couldn’t bear the house at the moment, but would be all right if he went off for a day or two by himself.

  Because otherwise the pair of them would take it in turns to be with him every minute, and he could not have that.

  His sister had a key to the house, and would undoubtedly be called upon to do whatever had to be done in these instances, and she also had an observant eye. He took a suitcase from the bedroom closet and thrust his shaving kit and some clothes inside, leaving three hangers conspicuously bare and a bureau drawer a little open.

  At one point, thinking of a lamp-lit face snapped into darkness, he found himself humming.

  His stomach reminded him that he had had nothing to eat since lunch, and he took his ossified dinner from the oven and ate it ravenously before he sat down in the living room with a map of the city spread before him on the coffee table. Dietrich, who had made himself an untidy bed in the yellow knitting, opened his eyes warily at the crackle of paper and then squeezed them tightly shut to render himself invisible; needlessly, because he had been observed without interest.

  Three streets over, the driver of the pick-up had said, so here—the tracing finger followed the marked irrigation ditch and paused—was the only place it could be. Sleep now, arid then . . . ? But he could not sleep until he had seen and identified the house with the wagon-wheel gate.

  He had the night to himself at this hour, and he found the house easily. It was as dark and tranquil as if nothing had happened there; evidently the woman slept, unperturbed. A sudden eruption of barking drove him away somewhat prematurely, but he had accomplished most of his auxiliary mission. Back in his own living room, he took a copy of the city directory from the bookcase and looked up 843 Hounslow Road.

  He set the alarm clock then, to allow himself a few hours of sleep. The police knew the name^of his wife’s assailant, but he had found and would undertake the punishment of her real murderer.

  According to the directory, Mary Vaughan.

  They were nearly a mile beyond the outskirts of the city when the engine checked, checked again, slowed, and died. Although the symptoms were unmistakable, Mary gazed incredulously at the gas gauge needle standing on zero before she switched off the ignition. She usually took an automatic look at the gauge when there had been any length of time between service-station stops; this morning, with the clear recollection of having the tank filled and the oil and battery checked the day before, she hadn’t.

  Into the enormous and final silence of a car travelling fifty-five miles an hour and then standing immovable, Jenny asked curiously, “What do we do now?”

  All that barking in the night, thought Mary suddenly. Someone had drained her gas tank. It had happened to her once before, and she had meant to buy a cap with a lock, but things not done in the heat of the moment seldom did get done. She had considered, that other time, keeping a reserve can of gas in the trunk, but then envisioned a rear-end collision in which she and the car would go up in a sheet of flame.

  “I walk back to a gas station,” she said, “and you stay here with the doors locked. It can’t be even a mile.”

  “No, thanks,” said Jenny, speedily undoing her seat belt. “We both walk back.”

  They locked the car. The morning which had felt pleasantly cool was chilly in the blasting wind on the highway, the pebbly shoulder had a faint tilt. It was going to seem a very long walk, thought Mary when they had accomplished perhaps a fifth of it—but here, unmistakably slowing, came one of the vehicles she had half-hoped for: a Volkswagen van, legendary Samaritan of the road. Was it going to turn in at the official-looking building just ahead?

  It wasn’t. It honked imperatively at a car bumper starting to nose out from under firs and pulled up on the shoulder. The driver, a blond giant with wavy golden hair and a headband, leaned across a girl holding a baby on her lap and glanced from Jenny to Mary. “You in trouble, ma’am?”

  Mary explained about her gas, and the boy said cheerfully, “We can give you enough to get you to Belen. That your car up there? Hop in.”

  Belen, Spanish for Bethlehem. Mary could feel Jenny’s doubt like an actual touch on her arm, but she looked at the scrubbed girl in the Levi shirt, the round-eyed baby, the Irish setter wagging sportively around in the back. She said, “Thank you very much.”

  Ten minutes and two dollars later, New York-bred Jenny was still disapproving. “They could have robbed us, and then killed us.”

  “The baby didn’t look very dangerous,” said Mary mildly.

  “A baby would be the perfect ploy.”

  In view of the theft of her gas, it did not seem the moment to remark that Southwesterners, generally speaking, were quick to respond to people in distress. Mary said instead that with their ringless fingers and casual clothes and unimposing car they scarcely had the appearance of prime targets for robbery in any case.

  Jenny, half-turning, made a detached inspection of the simple dress that looked made to order, the bracelet that was an unadorned arabesque of silver, the clear hazel-eyed profile. “You do,” she said.

 
; Once back on the road, after the detour for gas and a lock for the tank, Mary began to feel light-hearted and holiday-minded; the ease with which they had gotten through that difficulty seemed an omen. The sun was warmer now, and they would reach the motel in plenty of time for a reviving drink—for her; Jenny was paradoxically prim in that area—and a swim before they did anything else.

  But she realized presently that it was going to be a very long trip. Jenny asked duty questions—“What are those trees? Was that a roadrunner? Are those the same mountains or new ones?”—but otherwise seemed content to maintain a silence reinforced by her huge sun-glasses. For the first time she could remember, Mary regretted the lack of a radio.

  At Socorro, so-named because it was here that a half-starved Spanish expedition had been provided with food by Indians, it seemed time for a sandwich and something to drink. Jenny undid her seatbelt, angled a long bony arm backward, and produced both. She said with a surprised glance at a label, “This isn’t diet.”

  “No.” Mary gave her a curious glance. “I can’t understand why you want it to be.”

  This was the closest approach she had made to the situation, and she considered it not only fair but conspicuous by its absence: not to notice someone in Jenny’s wasted condition counting calories was like pretending not to see a flowing red beard, grown overnight.

  “I like the taste of it,” said Jenny, but she had actually hesitated.

  She was a neat passenger. She turned presently to tuck the empty cans and wadded-up sandwich bags into the cooler for future disposal. She said casually when she turned back again, “That blue car has been behind us for a long time.”