Charles Williams - Go Home, Stranger

“Didn’t believe you?” he asked angrily. “Don’t they know you’ll make the same statement on the stand? And that if Vickie knew who you were and why you were there, what they call a motive is nothing but eyewash?”

“Yes, I know, Pete. But consider the way they’re looking at it. They have only my word for it. And they can still claim Miss Shane didn’t know who I was or didn’t believe it when she was told. And there’s all the other evidence. The only thing I really hoped was that they’d start looking into it from the angle of Conway’s—or Counsel’s—disappearance, before it’s too late, but I don’t know . . .” Her voice trailed off hopelessly.

She’s right, he thought bitterly. It might raise a reasonable doubt, at the trial itself, but the only way I’ll ever clear Vickie for good is to find the man who did it.

He turned away from his bleak contemplation of the ship channel and looked at her. “Let’s forget my troubles for the moment, Pat,” he said. “You were going to tell me how you got mixed up in this. And who is this other man who disappeared?”

“Two other men,” she corrected.

“Two?” he asked incredulously. “Who were they? And when?”

She crushed out her cigarette in the ash tray. “One of them was my brother.”

“When?” he asked again, very softly, but he was afraid he already knew.

“The last word I ever received from him was a post card mailed from Waynesport on May ninth.”

Thirteen

He said nothing for a moment as he sat looking at the neat and well-ordered and utterly terrible beauty of the way the pieces could fit together. The two men in the cruiser almost had to be strangers in this area—nobody here had ever turned up missing. But, still, he thought, there could be a hundred other explanations.

“Look, Pat,” he said. “It’s probably just a coincidence. Maybe he went on somewhere else. And just hasn’t written yet.” Yet, he thought. It had been three months.

“No,” she said quietly. She looked at him and her face was calm, perfectly controlled, but he could see the infinite unhappiness in the eyes. “There’s more. There’s no way to escape it. But the awful thing is why? Why? There’s no reason he should have come here. He’d never been here before in his life. Why should he take Griffin’s boat? Why did it explode? What were they trying to do out there?”

“Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” he said gently. “What makes you so sure he was on board?”

She stared directly at him. “Something I overheard them say. A word I’m beginning to hate.”

“What word?”

“Robert.”

“I must be slowing up,” he said wearily. “I should have guessed that one.”

“Yes. How on earth could just one person—” She stopped and looked at him hopelessly. “What is it, Pete? Where is he? Is he dead? Is he still here?”

“I don’t know. The thing that puzzles me most, though, is how there could have been only one Robert Counsel. He must have been triplets, at least.” He shook his head. “But go ahead.”

“To begin with,” she said, “my name isn’t Lasater. It’s Devers. Patricia Devers. And I’m not from Ohio. I’m from Chicago. My brother’s name was Carl, and the man who was killed with him was Charles Morton, but Carl always referred to him as Chappie.”

“Was he an old friend of your brother?” Reno asked.

“Not exactly. He was somebody he knew in the Army during the war. He was from New York.”

“I see,” Reno said thoughtfully. “But how did they happen to come down here?”

“I’ll get to that in a minute, Pete. But first, when Carl came back from the Army in 1946, he was changed somehow. I don’t know exactly how to put it, but his attitude toward everything, and especially his job, seemed to be different. He lost that job, and I don’t know how many more, and when I would try to talk to him about it all I’d ever get was an impression he was just waiting for some big deal or that he considered work a stupid pastime for suckers. I don’t like to say all this, Pete, but it’s part of it and I can’t leave it out. Six years is a long time to readjust to civilian life.

“And then in April of this year he received a letter from Italy. I think it was from a girl he knew when he was there with the Army. Anyway, it was addressed in a girl’s handwriting.”

Reno stared thoughtfully. “He was in Italy during the war?”

“Yes, Africa, and then over there. Anyway, a day or two after this letter from Italy, he received one from this Charles Morton in New York. Carl became strangely excited, and for two or three weeks he wrote a lot of letters. He got another one, air mail, from the girl in Italy, and several from Morton.

“It was around the third or fourth of May when Morton arrived from New York to see Carl. He stayed over night with us. There was a great deal of talk in Carl’s room, and that’s when I heard them mention the name Robert.

“The next day,” she went on, “Carl asked to borrow my car for a trip down to the Gulf Coast. They were going fishing, he said. He’d quit his job too. I let him have the car anyway. There was no point in arguing about it; it was so like him to quit a job for the slightest reason.

“They left that night. I received a couple of post cards from him from various places on the way down, and one last one from Waynesport. Two weeks went by before Mother began to be really worried about him. I still didn’t think anything was wrong, but to soothe her I wrote to the police at Waynesport and several other cities along the coast, giving them the information on the car and descriptions of Carl and Charles Morton.

“They all answered promptly and tried to be of help in any way they could, but there was absolutely no trace of the men or the car. They’d just vanished. Mother began to be frantic, and I had to have the doctor for her. It was about this time I began to have that awful feeling about it myself. I don’t know what it was exactly, except that I knew somehow they hadn’t been going fishing at all and that something terrible had happened to them. I began to think about those letters, but when I went through Carl’s room they weren’t there—any of them. That was odd, in itself, for he always just threw letters in a drawer of his desk. And there was another thing. A gun, an Italian pistol he had brought back as a souvenir, was gone too.

“I had read about the odd explosion on a fishing boat somewhere down here on the Gulf, but at the time it happened, on the tenth, I hadn’t received Carl’s card and didn’t even know they were down here. There’d only been a few lines about it in our paper, anyway.

“Then one night while I was lying awake and worrying it just hit me, all at once. I almost went crazy between then and daylight, trying to remember exactly where the explosion had been, and when. I didn’t have a class that morning, so I went to the public library and looked it up. When I found it, I was scared—more scared than I’d ever been in my life.

“I didn’t tell Mother. I called the Waynesport police from a pay phone and asked if the two men had ever been identified. They said no, and wanted to know who I was. I told them they had the information on the car in their files, and asked them to check on it. They came back and said it couldn’t be Carl and Morton because no such car had ever been picked up or even seen. And naturally, if they had been killed in the explosion the car would still be there wherever they’d left it to get aboard the boat. I didn’t press it any further, but I did see there was one flaw in that.”

“Yes,” Reno said. “There’s one, anyway.”

“That’s right,” she went on. “The car could have been stolen when they didn’t come back. We never heard any more. After school was out I came down here. I didn’t use my own name or say what I was looking for because by then I was convinced that there was something terrible behind all this.”