The sailcloth shroud - By Charles Williams Page 0,40

she wasn’t going to slap me across the face. She was a very proud girl with a lot of spirit. Then she appeared to get her temper in hand. “All right,” she said.

“He was hunting quail,” she went on. “In some very hilly and inaccessible desert country ninety or a hundred miles southwest of Tucson. He’d gone alone. That was Saturday morning, and he wasn’t really missed until he failed to show up at the bank on Monday.”

“Didn’t you or your mother know where he was?” I asked.

“He and my mother were divorced in nineteen-fifty,” she replied. “At the same time he moved to Phoenix. We were living in Massachusetts. He had remarried, but was separated from his second wife.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. Go on.”

“The bank called his apartment, thinking he might be ill. When they could get no answer, they called the apartment-house manager. He said he’d seen my father leave on Saturday with his gun and hunting clothes, but he wasn’t sure where he’d planned to hunt or how long he intended to stay. The sheriff’s office was notified, and they located the sporting-goods store where he’d bought some shells Friday afternoon. He’d told the clerk the general locality he was going to hunt in. They organized a search party, but it was such an immense area and so rough and remote that it was Wednesday before they even found the car. It was near an old trace of a road at least twenty miles from the nearest ranch house. He’d apparently got lost while he was hunting and couldn’t find his way back to it. They went on searching with jeeps and horses and even planes until the following Sunday, but they never did find him. Almost a year later some uranium prospectors found his hunting coat; it was six or seven miles from where the car had been. Are you satisfied now?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not quite the way you think. Have you read the paper this morning?”

She shook her head. “It’s still in the mailbox. I haven’t gone after it yet.”

“I’ll bring it,” I said. “I want you to read something.”

I went and got it. “I’m the Captain Rogers referred to,” I said as I handed it to her. “The man who signed himself Brian in the letter is the same one who told me his name was Wendell Baxter.”

She read it through. Then she folded the paper and put it aside defiantly. “It’s absurd,” she said. “It’s been two and a half years. And my father never had twenty-three thousand dollars. Nor any reason for calling himself Brian.”

“Listen,” I told her. “One month after your father disappeared in that desert a man who could be his double arrived in Miami, rented a big home on an island in Biscayne Bay, bought a forty-thousand-dollar sport fisherman he renamed the Princess Pat—”

She gasped.

I went on relentlessly. “—and lived there like an Indian prince with no apparent source of income until the night of April seventh of this year, when he disappeared. He was lost at sea when the Princess Pat exploded, burned to the waterline, and sank, twenty miles off the Florida coast at port Lauderdale. And again, no body was ever found. His name was Brian Hardy, and he was the one who sent you that book to be autographed. Slightly less than two months later, on May thirty-first, Brian Hardy came aboard my ketch in Cristobal, using the name of Wendell Baxter. I’m not guessing here, or using descriptions, because I saw a photograph of Hardy, and this was the same man. And I say Hardy was your father. Do you have any kind of photograph or snapshot?”

She gave a dazed shake of the head. “Not here. I have some in the apartment in Santa Barbara.”

“Do you agree now it was your father?”

“I don’t know. The whole thing is so utterly pointless. Why would he do it?”

“He was running from somebody,” I said. “In Arizona, and then in Miami, and again in Panama.”

“But from whom?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I was hoping you might. But the thing I really want to know is this—did your father ever have a heart attack?”

“No,” she said. “Not that I ever heard.”

“Is there any history of heart or coronary disease in the family at all?”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

I lighted a cigarette and stared out across the sun-drenched blues and greens over the reefs. I was doing just beautifully. Apparently all I’d accomplished so