He opened it and got a glass. “Quite a deal about that sheriff, wasn’t it?” he asked.
I’m a celebrity now, I thought. But, anyway, a dead one. “Yeah,” I said casually. “Probably never find his body, either.”
He shook his head. “Not a chance, in that place. I been up there fishing a couple of times. But, say, that babe was a looker, wasn’t she?”
What was he talking about? “Babe?” I asked.
“Yeah, that guy’s wife. A real pipperoo.”
“Wife?” I asked stupidly. What the hell, was Louise mixed up in it now?
“The sheriff?”
“No,” he said. “The other one. The man that killed…his wife’s picture is there on the front page.”
I could feel my skin congeal inside the sweaty clothes. Somehow I got the paper out from under my arm and unfolded it, trying to keep my face still while the bar swam around me in a slow and horrible eddying of black mirrors and mahogany and white-jacketed barmen.
I knew what it was even before I looked. For some crazy reason, the thing she had said about the watch came back to me. “I went right over there and looked at it to see what time it was and didn’t put it on.” I had stood right there in the cabin day before yesterday, taking a last look around, and had looked right at the picture sitting there on the mantel beside the clock—the clock I had even noticed was stopped—and I had never even seen it.
“A honey, huh?” It was the barman.
Somehow I managed it. “Yeah,” I said. “A honey.” I had to get out of there. But I couldn’t run like that. I might get him suspicious. Somehow I managed to dig a dollar out of my pocket and put it on the bar, to give him something to do besides just standing there looking at me. They had given it a full two columns. “sought,” the caption said. “Mrs. Roger Shevlin, beautiful young wife of man sought in swamp killing.” Good God Almight, I raged, they didn’t have a picture of him—only twenty thousand of them scattered in every law-enforcement office in the South—so they had to run hers!
I gulped at the beer, almost drowning myself to get it down so I could get out of there. Fortunately I had swallowed it before my eyes had started wildly down the front-page story alongside the picture, for then I got the second jolt—
as law enforcement officers of the adjacent county swung into the search for the body and the escaped killers. According to Sheriff Carl C. Raines of Blakeman County, Marshall may have been overpowered and killed in the cabin itself or nearby, and Shevlin and his wife may quite possibly have disposed of the body in the other direction, above the cabin, before they fled.
I tried to put the glass down without rattling it against the wood. So now Raines was mixed up in it, and thought she had helped to kill me, and he was looking for them both! Buford had called the warning, and I hadn’t paid any attention. He had told me that the upper end of the lake was in Blakeman County. I had even known it myself, but hadn’t thought it was important. But now—
Buford covering my tracks behind me was one thing, but having Raines sniffing at the trail was something entirely different. He wasn’t just going through the motions.
Somehow I got out of the bar. Heat rolled up and hit me as I went through the door, and I had to remember where I was to get my directions straight. The beauty shop was up the street toward the left. But what was I going to do? I thought of her sitting there, with that ragged hair already causing the girls to notice her, and with everybody looking at the picture on the front page. I’ve got to do something, I thought agonizingly. But what? I had to wait for her to come out; if I went in there to get her, that would attract attention. And if I got her back to the hotel, then what? Dye her hair? How did you disguise a woman?
The heat was beginning to make me weak, and I felt sick. This was the last intersection now, and I leaned against the lamp pole waiting for the light to change. The beauty shop was the fourth door from the corner and I stopped in front of it, not knowing what to do next. People