of the stress she had been carrying. It was not pleasant laughter, and it did not make the house ring. Instead it echoed dully through the room, and then came back to hang heavily between them.
“I think,” Rose said finally, “that it’s time we had a look at that embankment. If there is a cave there, I think we should know about it. I think the whole town should know about it.”
“You look if you want,” Jack said softly. “Frankly, I’d rather not know.”
Jack Conger arrived In his office early that morning, before any of the staff had gotten in. When they arrived, at eight thirty, they found his office door closed and the red light above it lit. All of the staff except Sylvia Bannister respected the warning light.
Sylvia ignored it.
She walked into the inner office without knocking. Jack looked up but did not speak.
“Bad night?” Sylvia said sympathetically.
Jack put down his pencil and leaned back, rubbing his eyes. “It depends on what you call a bad night If you call lying to the whole town, lying to the chief of police, asking your oldest daughter to lie too, getting no sleep, and then topping the whole thing off with making yourself look like a fool to your wife—if you call that a bad night, then I suppose I had a bad night Otherwise it was fine.”
Sylvia sat down. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
“No,” Jack said irritably, “I don’t. I want to be left alone, to try to get my head straightened out. If that’s all right with you.”
He was already staring again at the piece of paper on the desk in front of him, and chewing on the end of the pencil, so he couldn’t see the look of hurt that came into Sylvia’s face. She stood up and smoothed her skirt.
“Of course,” she said coolly. “I’m sorry I bothered you.” She left the room, and when Jack heard the door close he looked up again, looked helplessly at the door through which the woman had just passed. He wanted to call her back. He didn’t.
He worked for an hour, writing and rewriting, and when he was finished he read what he had written. Then he crumpled the pages and threw them into the wastebasket.
It had been an editorial, and when he had finished writing it and reread it he realized that it could as easily have been written by Martin Forager as himself. He had attacked the police chief, even suggested that perhaps it was time Ray Norton was replaced. He had demanded some answers about what had really happened to Anne Forager. And he had suggested, but in terms that denied then: own content, that it was time for the citizens of Port Arbello to form a lynch mob. He had not, of course, used that term. He had called instead for a “protective association,” but it amounted to the same thing. In short, he had written a hypocritical, self-serving editorial, designed to undermine the police chief and at the same time entrench Jack Conger as a concerned citizen. Jack Conger realized that he was trying to throw Ray Norton off a trail that Ray Norton didn’t even know he was on. A trail that could lead only to Sarah, who couldn’t possibly be considered responsible for anything she might have done. He retrieved the editorial from the wastebasket and read it once more. He decided, objectively, that the editorial had served its purpose very well.
He burned it in the wastebasket and picked up the telephone. It was time to talk to Charles Belter.
Dr. Charles Belter listened carefully to everything Jack Conger told him. It took more than three hours for Jack to put it all together for the doctor, and several times he had to backtrack, going over a point several times, filling in background or amplifying. Dr. Belter listened patiently, interrupting as little as possible; he felt it was important to listen not only to what was being said but also to how it was being said, and in what order. The mind tended to attach priorities to things, Dr. Belter knew, and often much could be learned not from the points being made, but from the order of the points and their relative importance to the person making them. When Jack finished Dr. Belter leaned back, his hands folded comfortably over his ample stomach.
“So you don’t know whether or not there really is, or was, a cave?” he said.