went to the kitchen to mix another drink. After he had gone out the door I looked across at Dinah and said, “I hope you didn’t mind my suggesting that. I mean, there’s no reason you have to get dragged into it.”
The gray eyes crinkled up in a smile. “I don’t mind at all. I’d love it.”
She puzzled me a little. I hadn’t paid much attention to her, under the circumstances, with that thing this afternoon eating away at the back of my mind and the rest of it in a whirl from trying to cope with all this other mess, but still I was conscious of something a little disturbing about her each time she got mixed up in my thoughts. The different sides of her you saw didn’t add up to anything you would normally expect, and it made you wonder where she had come from and what made her operate. Small, chic, and smooth, completely feminine and disturbingly good-looking with the clear skin and slender face and the hair like polished copper rings, she looked like the classic example of what you would collect if you had the true collector’s spirit and plenty of money, but when you looked at her again you were aware of the vitality and the restlessness and the audacious spirit in the eyes. You got the idea in a little while that she took excitement the way some people took drugs, and you wondered how she liked this bird-in-a-gilded-gun-collection existence she was living now.
Buford came back in a minute with the drinks. As he handed me mine he asked, “Where did you say this Shevlin lives, Jack? How far up the lake?”
“It must be about twenty miles up from the store,” I said. “There’s not much of anything except swamp above where he is.”
He looked thoughtful for a minute. “That’s over the county line, I think. Most of that swamp is in Blakeman County.
I shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference. I don’t think that anyone will ever take the trouble to look into whether I went a little beyond the line without knowing it.”
“No. I guess not. Well, here’s luck.” We drank, and then got back to the question of money. I asked for five thousand again. He insisted he couldn’t get hold of it on short notice, especially without attracting attention, but that he could put his hands on three thousand in a safe-deposit box at the bank the first thing tomorrow morning.
“O.K.,” I said. That would do. After all, I had originally planned on having to do it on the two hundred odd I got for my fishing equipment.
I stood up. “I’ll see you in the morning. It’ll be better if you bring up this Shevlin job in front of the others. But then, you know how to handle it.”
He nodded. “Leave it to me.” He got up from the sofa and held out his hand. “I won’t be able to tell you good-by tomorrow, so here it is. Good luck.” He paused, and then went on quietly, with his eyes directly on mine. “And remember, I’m buying a one-way trip. Don’t come back, or we’ll both be in trouble.” It wasn’t until later that I knew just how he meant that.
I didn’t go directly home. I was too restless to go back to the house. And in a way, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself, I knew that I was a little afraid. Ever since eleven o’clock this morning I had been going at a full run and my mind had been furiously intent on this problem, to the exclusion of everything else, but what was it going to be like when I lay down in the darkness with the problem solved and the movement stilled, with Shevlin putting his hand up to his chest in that terrible gesture and turning to look at me as his knees gave way under him and he started to fall? Was that what I would see when I tried to close my eyes? Or would there be nothing?
I turned and drove out north of town, past the lake where we used to swim in summers a long time ago when I was a boy. The bathhouse was gone now and the lake was filled with weeds, but as I sat there in the car in the summer night I could see the dazzling sunlight and hear the splash and the laughter as the sixteen-year-old Jack Marshall did a