Go home, stranger - By Charles Williams Page 0,18

first of these is that it is quite definite now that your husband was not headed for Waynesport at all—that is, not for the city itself—but for the, country around Counsel Bayou, some thirty-five miles southwest of here on the ship channel. He apparently drove right through the city, stopping just long enough, to mail the letter to you. The service-station attendant referred to in the previous report believes it was around three-thirty P.M. When he stopped there for gasoline. That was nearly a hundred miles north of Waynesport, a good two hours drive for anyone pulling a boat. And the only other person who can remember seeing him states that just at dusk he was thirty-five miles down the ship channel below the city. Since we already know he did not register at any Waynesport hotel on that night, this appears likely.

The witness, a girl living at a tourist camp and fishing resort on Counsel Bayou, states that she saw the boat and car parked momentarily just across the highway from a roadhouse named the Counselor about a quarter mile from her cabin. She says there was one man in the car and that he was apparently doing nothing except sitting there looking at the front of the inn. After she had driven past she happened to glance into the rear-view mirror and see him start up. He followed her a short distance down the highway and turned off onto an old dirt road leading into the timber as if he were going camping or fishing. To this date I have found no one who saw him after that time.

Along the other line of search, I have turned up nothing at all. I mean, of course, the attempt to find someone who knew Mr. Conway and what the business was that brought him down here. In spite of the fact that it was your impression that he is from this area and that his family has lived here for a long time, no one recalls any member of the four Conway families living in the county who in any way answers his description. I have talked to nearly all of them personally, visited the police and some of the county officers, and questioned a number of men who served on county draft boards during the war, and so far have had no success at all. This is extremely odd in view of the general background he obviously had from your description of him as a man of considerable education and culture and who must necessarily have come from a family of some means, if not prominence. If it were not for the fact that he was obviously quite familiar with this section, I would say that you had probably been mistaken in believing he came from here.

I am going back down the channel today to make more inquiries around and beyond Counsel Bayou, and will advise you of further developments.

Very truly yours,

WALTER L. MCHUGH

Reno looked up from the last page and she was watching him anxiously. “What do you think?” she asked.

“That it’s a little funny Mac didn’t have a picture of him,” he said. “How come?”

“I didn’t have one.”

“Isn’t that a little odd? No picture at all?” She nodded. “I asked him a number of times to have some photographs made and he always said he would. But he kept putting it off. And there were no snapshots because neither of us owned a camera.”

“But you met him in Italy. So he must have had a passport.”

“I couldn’t find it. I looked everywhere.”

Reno stared thoughtfully through the windshield. “In that case, he either destroyed it or took it with him. And if he took it, he must be leaving the country.”

“Yes,” she said wretchedly. “I’ve thought of that.”

Suddenly she hunched forward with her hands over her face, shaking as if with a violent chill. “I’m sorry,” she whispered in a moment, her voice taut with horror. “It keeps coming back. The gun—and the glass breaking—and the car turning over.”

Reno waited until she had recovered. “Now, about that telephone call from Mac,” he reminded gently.

“Oh.” She took the cigarette he offered and held it mechanically between her fingers, forgetting it. “It was the same day he wrote the second report. In the afternoon. Of course, I hadn’t received the report at that time, but he told me what was in it and asked me some questions. They were rather odd, the things he asked, but he didn’t explain except