and she was shoving me into it. I was naked, and it had never occurred to me, and probably not to her, that there was anything odd about her undressing me and pushing me into the streaming water.
“Hot,” she said. “As hot as you can stand it, and then cold.” The water beat down and I could feel the dirt and caked blood and sweat going away and my nerves unwinding, and then I was conscious that she had disappeared. She was back in a minute, holding a glass in her hand. “Drink this,” she said. She turned her head as I stepped from under the water. I took the glass and drained it in three large swallows. It burned going down and exploded into warmth and life in my empty stomach.
I had turned off the water and was rubbing myself with a towel. She returned in a minute and handed me a pair of shorts around the partition of the shower stall. “When you get them on, come outside and we’ll get the other things.”
I slipped them on and went out and looked at my face in the mirror as at somebody I’d never seen before. It was haggard and sunken-cheeked, black with beard, and the cut place on my head was ugly, inflamed and still encrusted with clotted blood. I went into the bedroom and she was taking clothes out of a suitcase on the bed. “They’re his,” she said. “He keeps this bag here for trips to the city.”
Then she was gone again. I couldn’t keep up with her. I heard something rattling in the kitchen and then she came back for me once more, while I was putting on the shoes. She had me by the arm and was seating me at the table. While I was eating the piece of cold steak and drinking the milk she pulled up a chair and sat down, not across from me but just around the corner of the table at my left. She had her hand on my wrist and was talking, very fast.
Her voice was quiet, but still full of that tremendous urgency which seemed to have hold of her now as well as of me. “I’ve done nothing but think about it since I heard the news, about nine o’clock. Just think about it, and pray you’d come, that you could get here. And now you have!”
“Wait,” I interrupted. What was she talking about? And through all the numbness I was conscious there was something I had to know. “How did they find him? How did they know?”
“Find him? Oh. All I heard was what was on the radio. Something about an outboard motor they couldn’t find. He was supposed to be repairing it for the man down there at the store, and it wasn’t there. So they got to thinking about some oil that was on the lake.”
I guess it doesn’t matter now, I thought. There wasn’t any way I could have known the motor wasn’t his. It just wasn’t meant to be. That had ruined it, that and not seeing the picture of her sitting there in front of my face, but what good was there in torturing myself with it now?
Dinah was still going on, her eyes shining, touching me with her fingers. The white, gleaming kitchen and this lovely copper-haired figurine of a girl with her unstoppable torrent of speech were all mixed up now in the endless movement of the whirlpool. What was she talking about?
“I even went down and had the car serviced and filled with gasoline. We won’t have to stop at all for over two hundred miles. My clothes are packed and I’ve got over two thousand dollars in cash in my bag, and I took the money out of your wet suit, too. We’ll leave your old wet clothes right there where he’ll see them, and the muddy shoes, and he’ll know. Don’t you see, Jack? He can’t say anything, or tell anybody. He’ll know you’re gone and that I’ve gone with you and he can’t do anything about it and he’ll have to cover up for us, because he’s afraid to have you arrested. He was going to try to kill you in that swamp if you came back. And I would have killed him, if he had. And now you’re here and we can go, and he’s still down there looking for you.”
I began to get it, even through the numbness in my mind.