rid of it.
“Don’t you think we ought to see Mrs. Harshaw, Harry?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We’d better go now.”
I stopped in the driveway by the side porch, and the Negro girl let us in. She said yes, Mrs. Harshaw was in and she’d see us. We went in, and she was in the living room, pale and red-eyed and dressed in a housecoat and slippers. I thought she was over-doing it a little with the weeping until I noticed she had a bad head cold. That helped her to look like the grief-stricken widow.
They had already taken him to the mortuary, and the funeral was to be on Wednesday. We expressed our sympathy and said what a fine man he’d been, and between sessions of sniffles she told us how it had happened. Apparently he had got up for something, because she had heard him out in the hall and just as she was about to call out to him and ask if anything was wrong she heard him fall. He rolled all the way down the stairs in the living room.
“Oh, it was horrible,” she said pitifully, and I’d have felt sorry for her if I hadn’t known better. “Going down the steps in the dark, trying to get to him, I fell myself before I got to the bottom.” She slipped the housecoat down a little and showed us the bruise on her shoulder. “Somehow I got to the phone and called the doctor, but when he got here it was too late.” She started crying again. She made me sick.
Well, she finally outlasted him, I thought. The whole works is hers now—probably a hundred thousand or more. I wondered if she’d sell out and leave. Probably, I thought. She could keep a whole stable of boy friends now, like a riding academy or a stud farm, and it’d work out better in a city.
Her sniffling got Gloria started. We left in a little while and I drove her home. I went back to the rooming house and tried to sleep in the afternoon, but it wasn’t any good. I kept having a nightmare about trying to run uphill out of a river bottom with a dead man shackled to my leg. I’d wake up covered with sweat and shaking.
When would they find him? That was beginning to get me now. I hadn’t thought about that part until now that I was getting a taste of it. What about the waiting? I thought everything was all right, and that they’d go for it, but how did I know? What if I’d forgotten something? I wouldn’t know until they found him and held the inquest. Every time I thought of that cold-eyed Sheriff I’d get scared. It was going to be great. I could see that. And if it went on very long I’d be crazy.
After it was dark I drove downtown and tried to eat. My mouth was dry and everything tasted like straw. I got in the car and drove out to the abandoned sawmill, stopping on the road for a while to be sure I wasn’t followed. The rain had stopped during the afternoon and now the stars were out. I parked beside the sawdust pile and got the bundle of clothes out of the trunk, went over all of it with the flashlight looking for laundry marks and cutting them out, and then carried the stuff down to the bottom of the ravine. Scooping out a hole in the bottom of the sawdust slide, I shoved them in, clothes, purse, shoes, everything, and covered them up. Then I went up a little way and started another slide. They were well buried, and as time went by more and more would fall down on them. Maybe, I thought if she stayed around here, she’d keep it sliding down. The place made me think of her, and remembering that night made me uncomfortable. Hating her didn’t make any difference. Maybe that was what she’d meant by saying I’d always come back. It was so easy to remember the last time.
The funeral was Wednesday afternoon, and they still hadn’t found Sutton. I couldn’t seem to sleep at all now. I’d doze off for a few minutes and then wake up sweating and scared. I wondered how much longer I could take it.
Gloria and Gulick and I ordered a big floral piece for the funeral, and we all went, of course. Everybody in the county seemed to be