Charles Williams - Girl Out Back

“I won’t see you again?”

“Don’t ask me to,” she said. “I don’t think I can trust you.”

“Did you want to?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything. She turned the station wagon around and drove off without looking back.

When the sound of her car had died away, I took the twenty-dollar bill from my pocket. It was exactly like the other two, brand new, with that line of stain along the edge. And it had been right there on the counter, almost under his hand. I shuddered.

Flicking the lighter, I touched flame to one corner and watched it burn. I ground the ash to powder in the rut and pushed sand over it.

There may be more of you, boys, I thought; but don’t count Godwin out altogether. He has a number of assorted talents, and you can see he doesn’t care how he uses them.

When I got back to the store, Ramsey was in the office. He was as quiet and as courteous as ever, and the call was merely a routine follow-up, but in a little while I began to be afraid of him.

It did no good to remind myself that I’d committed no crime except that of withholding information, and that that wasn’t remotely susceptible to proof because nobody else knew I even had the information. He scared me, anyway. It was the questions.

Why? I wondered. What exactly is there about a trained investigator that frightens you when somebody else asking the same questions would merely be a nuisance or a bore? It took me several minutes to isolate it, and when I did it was absurd—at first glance. It’s simply that he’s listening to the answers.

It’s no more than that. In this antic bedlam of two billion people yakking all at the same time sixteen hours a day, a man who listens to the answers to his own questions can scare you. The tip-off is the complete, utter, absolute lack of any response at all to anything you say. He doesn’t have time to respond; he’s too busy listening. You say something. It doesn’t merely rattle on his eardrums and cause him to say Har, har, that’s a good one, or Say, that’s too bad, or Well, I’ll be damned. He absorbs it. There’s no other word for it. He closes himself around it with the terrible silence and the impersonality of quicksand engulfing an unwary animal, and when he does, it’s irrevocable. There’s no use trying to tell him something else six months later, because he knows what you said the first time. And in the end, of course, if you’re guilty of something, he kills you with simple mathematics. It’s easy to make two answers jibe. Try ten thousand.

Then, I reflected, a tape-recorder should have the same effect. No. Not necessarily, but the reason for that was obvious. It was a matter of conditioning. In the twentieth century we accepted the miraculous as commonplace in the Machine, but we still expected Man to talk more than he listened. When he didn’t, it was unnerving.

Well, I thought, shaking off the apprehension, I can still beat them. Simply because there is no longer any link at all between the inner track, where I’m operating, and the outer track where they are.

But a few minutes later when he stood up, gravely shook hands, and said, “We appreciate your co-operation very much, Mr. Godwin,” I wondered.

One of us was a sucker. Which one?

Nine

I sweated it out all day Saturday, fighting my impatience, and didn’t go back to the lake until Sunday. I had to be very careful now; any unusual behavior could be dangerous. Jessica watched me load the tackle in the car late Saturday night, and we spoke to each other for the first time in forty-eight hours.

“Do you really want to go fishing again?” she asked tentatively.

“Oh, I don’t really fish,” I said. “I wreathe garlands in my hair and chase nymphs through the woodland aisles. Great for the waistline.”

She turned away.

“And if you catch one,” I added, “it beats a cold shower all to hell.” The next time she married she might have better luck in finding somebody she could tease and get away with it.

I spent another night on my monastic rack in the den and left before dawn, picking up some breakfast, a thermos of coffee, and a sandwich at an all-night café on the way out of town. It was still short of sunrise when I turned off State 41 on to that access road into the upper lake and wound my way through the dim and lofty hush of the timber. It was slow going, because the road was almost non-existent, and in those two short miles the utter futility of it came home to me with a finality no longer to be denied. This was farcical. If I lived to be two hundred, I’d never succeed in locating it like this. You simply couldn’t grasp the immensity of the place until you were out here trying to visualize finding something the approximate size of a suitcase not merely lost in it but deliberately hidden. It was hopeless this way. He had to show me where it was.

Sure, I thought. That would be the day. He might not go back to it for six months, and there was less than one chance in a million he’d do it when I happened to be around.

What, then? Just give up? Before I’d even tried? No, there had to be a way to do it; eventually I’d come up with it. I drove out of the ruts and hid the station wagon before I arrived at the end of the road. On Sunday some fishermen might come in here, and there could always be one who might recognize it.

However, there were no cars at the camping area yet. I cut off through the timber, paralleling the lake shore, and before I reached the point I heard an outboard motor sputter and start. It should be his, I thought. When I came out to the water’s edge where I could see the long reach in front of his cabin, a skiff with a solitary figure in it was going around the bend at the upper end. I went on up and sneaked a glance at the cove. His boat was gone, all right. I watched the clearing for a moment, just to be sure, but I had it all to myself.

I went around to the shed first. The two packages of tens were still there in the cereal carton; he apparently hadn’t even discovered the twenties were gone. I replaced them and went into the cabin, looking aimlessly around and goaded by the futility of it. It wasn’t here; I knew that, so what did I expect to find? An idea, I thought. I had to have some kind of plan. Nothing occurred to me. The place was just as it had been the other time, with the same general untidiness and sloppy housekeeping. There were more dirty dishes, most of the plates showing a residue of syrup in them. I remembered the three one-gallon cans of it I’d looked in before, and decided he must eat syrup on everything.

I went out, and around in back, stooping to peer under the cabin. It was more than two feet off the ground, and I could see all the way through. There was no indication the ground had ever been dug up. I was wasting time; why did I persist in looking around here when it could be anywhere in fifty square miles? Maybe that was the reason; the rest of it was so hopeless I didn’t want to start.

I caught sight of something about fifty yards to the rear of the cabin in the edge of the timber, and walked back to it. It was his garbage dump, a small pile of empty tins and broken jars, old magazines, and ashes from the stove. I located a stick and began moving the litter enough to see the ground beneath; if you were going to bury something in the earth this would be a good way to camouflage it afterward. But there was no evidence the ground had ever been disturbed. I probed all around with the stick and found it solid everywhere. I sighed wearily and began pushing the cans and bottles back the way I had found them. Then I stopped suddenly, staring at something on the ground.

I bent and picked it up. It was a piece of fire-blackened metal, small and vaguely cup-shaped. I recognized it instantly. It was the corner reinforcement off a cheap leather or fiber suitcase. I poked around with the stick some more. Within a few minutes I had scraped up parts of both the clasps, the lock, and one of the rings through which the end of the handle had fitted. Here was the final bit of proof, I thought—if I had needed any more. This was probably what was left of Haig’s famous suitcase.