surprised him, for he hadn’t even thought about it in years, and now that he did the best answer he could give her was that aside from mutual respect, he didn’t think there had ever been any. From the onset of puberty both had grown up in a totally male environment where self-sufficiency was a prerequisite to survival—the one at sea and the other in a succession of military schools and the locker rooms of college jocks—so it would never have occurred to either of them that young men really needed anybody. As a girl, of course, she couldn’t believe this or understand it, and he had despaired of trying to explain it to her.
He stood for another minute or two, his face impassive, feeling somehow lacking that there didn’t seem to be anything to say or do. Then he lifted one hand in a slight gesture that might have been a farewell and turned and walked back to the car. The sun was coming up now, and he remembered the line from Ecclesiastes. A hamfisted ex-jock quoting the Preacher, he thought; the old man would say he’d gone fruit.
Executed? What in hell had Crowder meant by that? And by whom? Then he shook his head impatiently. Racking his brains was a sheer waste of time until he could talk to somebody who had the answers. He drove back to town.
He’d better get a place to stay. The chances were he’d be here all day, and he should try to get some sleep before he made the drive back. Upcoming on the right was the Conestoga Motel, which seemed as likely a prospect as any. He swung in and stopped under the porte cochere in front of the office. Beyond the glass wall a row of slot machines lay in wait for the tourist with the patient inevitability of snares in a game trail, and a woman with blue-white hair sipped coffee and flipped through a newspaper at the desk. She looked up with a smile as he entered. Yes, there was a vacancy.
“And a king-size bed, if you’d like one,” she added, with a not entirely objective appraisal of his size.
“Fine.” He began filling in the registration card while she plucked a key from the pigeonholes behind her.
“How long will you be staying, Mr.—”
“Romstead,” he replied. “Just one day, probably.”
“Oh.” As the boy in the service station had, she glanced up sharply and appeared on the point of saying something, but did not. “I see.” The smile was still there, but something had gone out of it; it was now straight out of the innkeeper’s manual. He passed over the American Express card, wondering at this seemingly unanimous response to the name around here. Well, the old man had never been one to blush unseen, even in larger places than Coleville, and whatever his hangups might have been, awe of community opinion wasn’t one of them.
He signed the slip and went out with the key. Room 17 was on the ground floor at the rear of the U which enclosed the standard small swimming pool and sun deck with patio furniture and umbrellas. Several of the cars parked before the units were being loaded now as travelers prepared to hit the road again.
The day’s heat was beginning, but the room was cool, dim behind the heavy green drapes, smelled faintly of some aerosol gunk masquerading as fresh air, and was wholly interchangeable with a million others along the concrete river. He dropped the bag on a luggage rack and switched on a light. Sitting on the side of the bed, he reached for the thin directory beside the telephone. It covered the whole county, rural subscribers and the other small towns in addition to Coleville, but there was no Gunnar Romstead in it, no Romstead of any kind. Unlisted phone, he thought. The yellow pages revealed there were two mortuaries in town, but no monument works or stonecutter. The stone no doubt had come from Reno then, but he could probably find out from the sheriff’s office and see if there were any accounts to settle.
He shaved and showered and came out of the bath scrubbing himself vigorously with the towel, a heavy set figure of a man with haze-gray eyes, big, beat-up hands, and an all-over leathery tan except for a narrow strip about his middle. He ran a comb through the sun-streaked blond hair without noticeably improving an indifferent haircut, shrugged, and tossed the comb back into