he’d already been arrested?”

“Yes. That’s right. And that’s when he told me why. I mean, about the money.”

I stared at her unbelievingly. “You mean he was under arrest at the time? And these F.B.I, men just stood there and let him tell you all about it? I thought a prisoner wasn’t allowed to talk to anybody but his lawyer. . . .” Here was old Barney Blackstone again.

“No,” she replied. “There was only one F.B.I, man, and he wasn’t really there. He’d hurt his leg when they were out there digging up the money, and Mr. Cliffords was making him a crutch.”

“Then you didn’t see him at all?”

“No. I was only there a few minutes.”

“Oh,” I said. “Cliffords just told you he was under arrest? But he was wandering around alone.”

“That’s right, Barney. You see, he had to take the crutch and some bandages out there where the F.B.I, man was hurt. He couldn’t walk.”

“Oh,” I said again, frowning. “Well, I suppose. . . . Aw, I don’t know.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was thinking of what you told me about him. That he was a little—you know. He might have just dreamed it up. Or got it from one of those comic books.”

“No,” she said. “He was telling the truth, all right.”

“How do you know he was?

“I saw the man’s coat there on the bed, when we went in to wrap up the fish. And Mr. Cliffords showed me some of the money, in a paper bag.”

Well, it was a good try, I thought. But it wouldn’t have worked, anyway; she didn’t have to be able to prove it. Just whisper it down a well. Roughly half the F.B.I, agents in the State would be down there looking for Cliffords in another few hours. The other half would be looking for me. If they weren’t already.

“What were you doing up there?” I asked. We might as well talk; that’s what we’d come out here for.

She puffed on the cigarette and tapped ashes out of the window. “Well, sometimes when I do an errand for him I take the stuff on up there, just for the boat ride and to get away from that camp for a few minutes. And then, he pays me.”

So that’s why she had had that other twenty.

“And George and I’d had a—well, a fight. He’d gone off to town. That was a little while after I’d got back from Exeter. I had to get away from the place or go crazy. Maybe I was a little scared, too; he can be pretty mean sometimes, and I didn’t want to be there when he came back if I could help it. So, anyway, when it was late in the afternoon and Mr. Cliffords still hadn’t come down to get his glasses. . . .”

“Glasses?”

She nodded. “The poor old soul can’t read a word without ‘em. He’d dropped his old ones and one of the lenses had come out. He thought he had a spare set, but when he went to look . . .”

I closed my eyes. They could kill you, but did they have to do this first?

“. . . anyway, he found out he’d lost the spare ones so he came down Monday morning and asked me if I’d pick him up another set in Exeter. You remember, when I called you that was where I was going. They have his prescription there at the Berg Brothers.”

You had to admit it. Purely as a work of art it was perfect. There wasn’t a flaw, or a superfluous brush stroke. It had all the cold and functional beauty of a cobra coiled to strike.

“What did George think about it?” I asked.

“Oh, he doesn’t know about it yet. Unless he heard it in town.”

I kept my face perfectly still. “You mean you didn’t tell him?”

She shook her head. Her eyes were moody. “No. We had a fight, like I told you. We haven’t spoken since”

Don’t hope yet, I thought. I was almost afraid to breathe. “How about the other people you told? The ones who knew him, I mean? I bet they were surprised to know he had that money all the time.”

“The people in Hampstead wouldn’t know him,” she said. “I haven’t told anybody but you.”

I was limp, and wanted to put my head and arms down on the steering wheel and just rest. But what now? There was no way I could stop her from telling somebody else, and the instant she breathed one word