The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,39

What is it?”

“My name is Stuart Rogers. I’d like to talk to you for a minute.”

“You’re the man who called me this morning.” It was a statement, rather than a question.

“Yes,” I said, just as bluntly. “I want to ask you about your father.”

“Why?”

“Why don’t we go over in the shade and sit down?” I suggested.

“All right.” She reached for the camera. I picked it up and followed her. She was about five feet eight inches tall, I thought. Her hair was wet at the ends, as if the bathing cap hadn’t covered it completely, and tendrils of it stuck to the nape of her neck. It was a little cooler on the porch. She sat down on a chaise with one long smooth leg doubled under her, and looked up questioningly at me. I held out cigarettes, and she thanked me and took one. I lighted it for her.

I sat down across from her. “This won’t take long. I’m not prying into your personal affairs just because I haven’t got anything better to do. You said your father was dead. Could you tell me when he died?”

“In nineteen-fifty-six,” she replied.

Hardy had showed up in Miami in February of 1956. That didn’t allow much leeway. “What month?” I asked.

“January,” she said.

I sighed. We were over that one.

The brown eyes began to burn. “Unless you have some good explanation for this, Mr. Rogers—”

“I do. I have a very good one. However, you can get rid of me once and for all by answering just one more question. Were you present at his funeral?”

She gasped. “Why did you ask that?”

“I think you know by now,” I said. “There wasn’t any funeral, was there?”

“No.” She leaned forward tensely. “What are you trying to say? That you think he’s still alive?”

“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. He is dead now. He died of a heart attack on the fifth of this month aboard my boat in the Caribbean.”

Her face was pale under the tan, and I was afraid she was going to faint. She didn’t, however. She shook her head. “No. It’s impossible. It was somebody else—”

“What happened in nineteen-fifty-six?” I asked. “And where?”

“It was in Arizona. He went off into the desert on a hunting trip, and got lost.”

“Arizona? What was he doing there?’.’

“He lived there,” she replied. “In Phoenix.”

I wondered if I’d missed, after all, when I’d been so near. That couldn’t be Baxter. He was a yachtsman, a seaman; you couldn’t even imagine him in a desert environment. Then I remembered Music in the Wind. She hadn’t acquired that intense feeling for the beauty of sail by watching somebody’s colored slides. “He wasn’t a native?” I said.

“No. We’re from Massachusetts. He moved to Phoenix in nineteen-fifty.”

Now we were getting somewhere. “Look, Miss Reagan,” I said, “you admitted the description I gave you over the phone could be that of your father. You also admit you have no definite proof he’s dead; he merely disappeared. Then why do you refuse to believe he could be the man I’m talking about?”

“I should think it would be obvious,” she replied curtly. “My father’s name was Clifford Reagan. Not Hardy—or whatever it was you said.”

“He could have changed it.”

“And why would he?” The brown eyes blazed again, but I had a feeling there was something defensive about her anger.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“There are several other reasons,” she went on. “He couldn’t have lived in that desert more than two days without water. The search wasn’t called off until long after everybody had given up all hope he could still be alive. It’s been two and a half years. If he’d found his way out, don’t you consider it at least a possibility he might have let me know? Or do you think the man who died on your boat was suffering from amnesia and didn’t know who he was?”

“No,” I said. “He knew who he was, all right.”

“Then I believe we’ve settled the matter,” she said, starting to get up. “It wasn’t my father. So if you’ll excuse me—”

“Not so fast,” I snapped. “I’m already in about all the trouble one man can get in, and you can’t make it any worse by calling the police and having me thrown in jail. So don’t try to brush me off till we’re finished, because that’s the only way you’re going to do it. I think you’d better tell me how he got lost.”

For a moment I wouldn’t have offered much in the way of odds that