“But what are we going to do?” she cried out piteously. “What can we do now. Isn’t he—?” I could see in her eyes the question she couldn’t ask.
“He’s dead,” I said bluntly, trying to get it on the line so we could look at it and know where we had to start.
“But you couldn’t help it, Jack! You couldn’t! Wouldn’t they see you had to do it, that you were trying to protect me?”
I shook my head, not wanting to do it, but knowing there wasn’t room enough for even one of us in that fool’s paradise. I hadn’t done it because I had to. I’d done it because I’d lost my head, gone completely wild when I saw him start for her. No jury on earth would ever believe I’d had to shoot an unarmed man twenty pounds lighter and fifteen years older than I was just to keep him from hurting her or to defend myself. I could have stopped him with one hand. And if by any stretch of the imagination they could ever manage to swallow that, there was still the fact that I was in his house, where I had no business, and that she was his wife. I gave it up and tried to close my mind on it. There wasn’t any way out in that direction.
I fought at the numbness in my mind like a drunk trying to sober up enough to think. The trails ran outward from here in all directions, crossed and crisscrossed and tangled, and if we took any of the wrong ones we were finished. We couldn’t run without being fugitives the rest of our lives. I couldn’t go back to town and report it, because no matter how you tried to dress it up as something else, it was going to come out as murder. But wait! Suppose, I thought, grabbing at everything, suppose I had been fishing out there and had heard her screaming and had come to help and found him beating her. I’d tried to stop him and he’d got the gun out and in the fight over it I’d killed him. I was a deputy sheriff and I’d be within the law in butting into something like that. Would it work? Maybe, I thought. And then I thought of her on the stand and the district attorney tearing her to pieces the way I’d seen them do it. A woman as beautiful as she was, and her husband killed by another man under peculiar circumstances? He’d start to tie it up into a triangle killing before he’d finished looking at her legs. Had she ever seen me before? Was she sure she hadn’t? Wasn’t it rather odd that a man who hadn’t been fishing for months should suddenly go four times in two weeks and to the same place every time, even neglecting his job to run off up there? I was beginning to think a little more clearly now, and in my mind I could see the succession of witnesses and the facts. And wasn’t it a little odd, also, that I had sold all my fishing gear to the station agent at New Bosque because I’d given up the pastime, and then two days later I was up the lake again with a rented outfit, a cane pole and live bait, according to the testimony of the fishing-camp proprietor, and this in spite of the testimony of the other witnesses that I hadn’t used an outfit like that since I was a boy in grammar school? And consider this other strange coincidence, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the fact that somehow this man was always up the lake fishing on just the days that this woman’s husband happened to be away at the store. Are you sure now, Mrs. Shevlin, that you never saw this man before in your life? No, I thought. That isn’t it; we’d just be walking right into their arms.
I thought I had her quieted down, but now she started shaking again and pushing back on my chest with her hand. She got to her feet, swaying unsteadily, and then ran off the porch before I could stop her and started across the clearing toward the boat landing. “Doris!” I called out. “For God’s sake!” I ran up behind her and caught her arm but she didn’t even notice I was there. I gave up trying to stop her then; maybe if we got