you, and you could have got away. I tried to, but I couldn’t. I thought I owed him that, in spite of what he did. Maybe I was wrong, but I think I’d still do it the same way. I don’t know how to explain—”
“You don’t have to,” I said. “You were telling the truth all the time. That’s the only thing that matters.”
She stared up at me. “Why does it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I did know. It was the only thing I knew, or even had room for in my mind. I wanted to shout it out to her, or sing it, but I kept my face blank and lit a cigarette for myself.
“I’m sorry about it,” I said gently.
She didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “It’s all right. He didn’t have a chance, anyway. I think they knew he was in the house, and anything we tried would have failed.”
The ash was growing long on her cigarette. She glanced at it dully and cast her eyes about for a tray. There was one made of half a milk can in the rack on the bulkhead above the bunk. I reached it down and held it for her. She tried to smile. Just looking at her made my breath catch in my throat. I squatted on my heels with my back braced against the other bunk and my face on a level with hers.
“Why hadn’t he ever told you?” I asked.
“Ashamed, I think. He wasn’t a criminal, Bill. He wasn’t even dishonest. There was just too much of it, and it was too easy, and no one would ever know.”
“It’s too bad,” I said. “It’s a dirty shame.”
She turned her face a little, and her eyes met mine squarely. “You know I must have suspected it, don’t you? Nobody could be stupid enough not to guess there must be more to it than he told me. I did suspect it. I can’t deny it. I was cheating when I told you what he told me, because I was afraid it wasn’t the truth, or not all the truth. But what could I do? Tell you I thought my husband was lying? Did I owe you more than I did him? Doesn’t eight years of time mean anything, or the fact he had never lied to me before, or that he’d always been wonderful to me? I’d do it again. You’ll just have to think what you will.”
“If you’re selecting a jury,” I said, “I’ve already formed an opinion. I’ll tell you about it, some day.”
What some day? We had about five left, if we were lucky.
“Wait, Bill,” she whispered. “You don’t know all of it yet. When you do you’ll think I’m a fool. You see, he wasn’t on his way down there when he crashed. He was coming back.”
I realized I’d forgotten that. “I know. To Sanport.”
“Not to Sanport. To somewhere on the Florida coast, where he was going to destroy the plane and disappear. Don’t you see? He was leaving me.”
I got it then. “And you’d have gone on to Honduras, thinking he would be there? And when he wasn’t, you’d have been certain he was dead? Down somewhere in the Gulf, or in the jungle?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she smiled a little bitterly. “But I wasn’t the one he wanted to convince. He was just trading me, you see—”
“Oh.” I really saw it at last. “So if Barclay and his men had managed to follow you down there, they’d give him up as dead, too. That was what he was after.”
She nodded.
“Maybe it gets easier as you go along,” I said.
“He was scared. He’d been hunted too long, and I guess it does things to you.”
“But running out on you? Deserting you, leaving you stranded in a foreign country?”
“Not quite stranded, if you mean money,” she said. “You see, it wasn’t in the plane. I thought it was, but it was in a bag of his I was supposed to bring down with me. None of it’s clear-cut, Bill. He was leaving me, and he had to double-cross his friend who bought the plane, but he wanted me to have the money. Maybe he thought it was just sort of a ball game. I was being sacrificed to advance the runner to second.”
And maybe the money was a way of buying off his conscience, I thought, but I said nothing. Macaulay was a little mixed up for me.
Suddenly her eyes were full of tears