I know I’ll never get my hands on it, the same as I know I’ll never have the nerve to take a chance and run. Of course she probably wouldn’t do anything. A dozen times I’ve almost made it. I get in the car and think that all I have to do is drive, and keep on driving, and the chances are she wouldn’t do a thing. Why should she? She’d only get herself in trouble for abetting a crime and withholding evidence, and I’d be gone, and when they did get me back all she’d have would be a corpse with a shaved spot on his head and a couple of them on his arms, and that wouldn’t be of much use to a woman who needs them living.
I know a way to make her talk, and I’ve tried it twice, and asked her, and she told me everything except where that statement is, and I know that if she wouldn’t tell me then she’ll never tell me. It was a good idea, but it didn’t work, and I’ll never try it any more because the second time she stopped right in the middle of gasping, “Oh, God, please, please, darling, please,” and got out of bed and went downstairs naked and when she came back holding her hands behind her I didn’t know it was an ice-pick she had until she had put it through my neck. It went in a little off center and missed the jugular vein by a good three-quarters of an inch, and came out under my ear. A little iodine fixed it up and it didn’t even get infected, but I never tried that again. She was in a position of strength, as lawyers say, and she wouldn’t tolerate work stoppage or breach of contract in mid-term.
She did tell me about the silver money clasp. When Gloria went out there in the afternoon she had the five hundred dollars in it, and when Sutton saw it he demanded it as well as the money. And then he told Dolores about it, and showed it to her, and she wanted it. He wouldn’t give it to her, though, and she’d left it lying there on the table, intending to slip it into her purse when he wasn’t looking. And if I hadn’t just happened to pull the purse around that final inch, looking behind it for the ash-tray—but I never go much beyond that with it. You can take just so much might-have-been.
She’d been really scared, of course, when she went back a little after daylight that morning to get her stuff and found Sutton dead. She knew, because the stuff was gone, that I’d found the money clasp and thought it was Gloria, but she also knew I’d get wise to my mistake sooner or later, and that I’d have to kill her to cover it up. So she had written out that statement as soon as she got back to the house, plus a letter to the lawyers to tell them where to find it—along with her will—in case of her death. The only thing she had to do then was to make sure I read a copy of it before I got my hands on her.
Gloria had no choice but to believe what she told her. After all, I didn’t deny it. She gave me every chance to say it wasn’t true, and I couldn’t even look at her. And to make it worse she already knew I had changed somehow and even seemed to avoid her from the very night Harshaw died. Naturally, she had no way of knowing it was also the night Sutton died, and that he was what was on my mind, and I couldn’t tell her.
Not that I know what she really thinks, or that I’ll ever know. We work together from nine until five and she is very efficient and does a beautiful job and she says, “Yes, Mr. Madox,” and “No, Mr. Madox,” and in her eyes there’s nothing but polite reserve and behind that nothing but blankness, an impenetrable wall of it. Beyond that— Who knows? Maybe there’s no feeling at all, not even contempt. Probably there’s only a big calendar pad of so many months, so many more weeks, and days, and hours, that she has left ahead of her until she can put the last penny back and balance the books and be free.
And I can’t even help her. I’ve got plenty of money, enough to put it all back at once, and I love her enough to want to give her the only thing she probably lives for—the day she can tear the last page off that calendar and go away forever—and I can’t shorten her sentence one day. Dolores knows too well just how much is left and how long it will take. But even if I could help her, she wouldn’t accept it. It’s something she has to do.
But that still isn’t the terrible part of it, the thing that will drive me crazy some night if I don’t find some way to quit thinking about it. The final, ghastly joke of the whole thing is that she’s paying back five hundred dollars she doesn’t even owe, and there isn’t any way in the world I can tell her. It’s the five hundred I took out of Sutton’s wallet that night. So how can I stop her?
But in the final analysis her sentence will soon be over, and I’m the one who is doing life. In a little over two months now she’ll be free and can walk out of the office for the last time and go on with a life of her own. I think she and Eddie Something date a lot now that he’s home from college, and nothing is hopeless or irrevocable when you’re twenty-one. I’m the one who couldn’t make it. I had a try-out in the big leagues, but I didn’t have the stuff, and they sent me back. I’ve found my own level again, and I’m living with it.
Maybe it’ll be better when she’s gone, and maybe it’ll be worse. At least I get to see her now. I ask her if she knows where this paper is, or that paper, and she says, “Yes, Mr. Madox,” and I look at her, thinking of that morning a little less than a year ago, in this same office, when I saw her for the first time, very fresh and lovely and looking like a long-stemmed yellow rose, and I have to fight down that almost unbearable longing to cry out to her and ask her if she ever thinks of it, or remembers it, or the day Spunky was lost and I held her face in my hands and kissed her, or the night on the bridge when she said she loved me.
But I never ask it. There’s no need to, because I know what she would say.
“No, Mr. Madox.”