she said, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you. I’ve been trying to all week, but I want to tell you now.”
“We’ll go somewhere afterwards and talk,” I said. “Then you can tell me, if you think you have to.”
“Yes. I have to. It’s about Sutton.”
I stared ahead into the lights, trying to keep my face still. “Sutton’s dead. Nothing matters about him any more. Nothing at all. You believe me, don’t you, honey, that it doesn’t matter now?”
“This does, Harry. I’ve got to tell you. You see, I thought all week that he had gone away. Because— Well, you see, I gave him that five hundred dollars. After you told me not to. I took it out there and begged him to leave. So now it’s going to take us that much longer.”
I reached out and patted her hand. “It’s all right,” I said. “It doesn’t make any difference.”
It was a strange thing for her to say, I thought. Why bring up that one part of the whole mess, if we were going to ignore it? I should have got it then, but I didn’t, for we were turning in the driveway and I didn’t think about it any more. I stopped by the side porch and we got out. The light was on and as we rang the bell and stood there waiting I looked at her, thinking how pretty she was. She had on a yellow summer dress with big fluffy bows or something on the shoulders, and her stockings were some dark shade. She seemed to like dark-colored nylons—
I was staring. I couldn’t say anything, and the skin on the back of my neck was tightening up into gooseflesh like frozen sandpaper. I got it now, when it was forever too late.
It was what she was wearing on her feet. They were wedgies. They were wedgies with grass straps.
21
Dolores Harshaw came to the door then and let us in. I was numb. I was operating on pure reflex, trying to keep going and cover up. Somewhere far off I could hear them giving it the how-nice-you-look and what-a-lovely-dress routine while the wreckage fell all around me and I could see what I had done. There was no escape. There wasn’t any way to go back, so all I could do was walk the rest of the way into it and pray. It was all dangerous now, and I knew it, but I wondered if she did. We were standing hip-deep in gunpowder and she might not have any more sense than to reach for a match. I’d killed Sutton, and she was the only one on earth who knew it. Did she realize what that meant? All the time I’d thought it was Gloria, and Gloria didn’t know anything. She was standing there in the magazine with us, and no matter what happened I had to be sure she was out before it blew up.
There was too much of it and it was coming at me too fast to see the whole picture at once. Crazy pieces of it kept flashing up in the sick confusion of my thoughts, and then they’d be gone and there’d be something else. There was Harshaw. I didn’t have to wonder any more why he’d had a heart attack and fallen down the stairs at a crazy hour like that. Had he just happened to catch her coming in at three in the morning barefoot and naked except for a dress half torn off by the underbrush and stuck to her with the rain, or had she done it deliberately? Nobody would ever know, and they couldn’t touch her. Maybe he had given her that bruise on the shoulder, or maybe she’d got it when she fell over us back there in the shack. But what difference did It make? She knew I’d killed Sutton and I had to shut her up, but how?
And now I knew why Sutton had waited all that time to put the squeeze on me. He hadn’t even been there at the fire; or at least he hadn’t seen me. She’d told him. When I’d given her the brush-off, she’d merely gone back to him, and because there wasn’t any other way to get even with me she’d told him the whole thing. And now he was dead because he thought he could cash in on it, and she knew I’d killed him, and why.
“Don’t you feel well, Mr. Madox?”
I tried to come out of