there, and we spread the papers on the bed and read them. The story was on the front page now, and growing.
“OFFICER BELIEVED VICTIM,” the headlines said. They hadn’t found either of the boats yet, but already the stories were full of the conjectures that I had hoped for, built on just the fact that I was still missing and that Shevlin’s cabin was deserted and his boat gone. Dozens of men were searching the swamp now, and I was sure that by tomorrow morning they’d find the boats, which should clinch it. There was no mention of the grand-jury investigation. It was good news, all of it. I felt better and the strain was beginning to go away. It had been a good job.
There was another thing, though, that we hadn’t outrun. Just before dawn I awoke suddenly, sweating and scared, and she was screaming in her sleep. I got her calmed after a while and lay awake until daylight smoking cigarettes and thinking.
Twenty-two
When the first gray light began to filter through the drawn Venetian blinds I got up and dressed. She was sleeping all right now, quite peacefully, with a hand beneath her cheek and the dark hair swirled across the pillow. It was cooler now inside the room, and I gently pulled up the sheet without disturbing her. It was only a bad dream, I thought; she’ll get over it.
In the early dawn the empty canyon of the street was almost cool; yesterday’s heat was dead, and today’s was waiting to be born. A street-cleaning truck went by, swishing water, and I could smell the dust being overrun and drowned the way it is in the first large drops of rain. This is the only time of day, I thought, when a city is ever beautiful.
The final editions of the morning papers were on the stands. I bought them and hurried into a coffee shop full of white tile and chrome and sat down at the counter. The story sprang out at me from the front pages, apparently getting bigger by the hour.
“SWAMP SEARCHED FOR BODY,” I read.
“MURDER CLUE IN DISAPPEARANCE.”
“VIOLENCE FEARED.”
They had found the boats. Wild with eagerness, I tore into the stories:
With the discovery late yesterday afternoon of an abandoned, bloodstained boat, identified as that which J. B. Marshall, 27, deputy sheriff of Devers County, had rented for the trip into the swamp area in the upper reaches of Stowe Lake to make an arrest, hope was rapidly dwindling that the missing officer might be found alive. Wayne Buford, Devers County sheriff, revealed to newsmen at a late hour last night that evidence found in and about the boat indicated there had almost certainly been a struggle and that the young deputy may have been murdered by the man he had gone into the swamp to arrest. He cited the ominous fact that the boat had been carefully hidden and that the bloodstains found on the seat and on the upper shaft of one of the oars had been hastily scrubbed at in an effort to obliterate them.
“But,” the sheriff added grimly, his face haggard from the strain of the continuing 24-hour search, “the most significant and terrible of all the evidence is that missing anchor. I have been informed by the proprietor of the fishing camp that this boat was equipped, like all the others, with a fifteen-pound concrete anchor and some twelve or fifteen feet of rope. With the anchor gone and the rope cut, just recently and with a sharp knife, we have no choice but to believe…”
I sipped the coffee, hardly noticing it in my excitement. It was even better than I had hoped. And Buford was terrific. He should have gone on the stage, I thought.
“—the utter hopelessness of the search in the light of this almost inescapable conclusion. Nobody knows just how many thousands of acres of waterway—lake and swamp and sloughs—there are up there, and it would take more than a lifetime to do a thorough job of dragging all of it for a weighted body lying on the bottom somewhere in the mud. However, we are not giving up. That boy was well liked by all of us, and we will not abandon the search while there is any remote possibility that he is still alive. And the manhunt for Shevlin, or Farrell, is being pushed by every officer in the state.”
The story went on with a lot more of Buford. He reconstructed the whole thing as