Waltz Into Darkness (42 page)

Half
heeding her, he glanced around him at the walls, and even upward at
the ceiling, as though he felt them closing in upon him.

"Let's
get out of here," he said in a choked voice, pulling at his
collar. "I can't stand it any more."

"It's
not here it's been discovered. It's in Mobile. We're as safe here as
we were before it was discovered. They didn't know we were here
before. They still don't know we're here now."

He
wanted to put an added move, an extra lap, even if a fruitless
unneeded one, between themselves and Nemesis, looming dark like a
massing cloudbank on the horizon.

She
sighed, giving him a look as if she found him hopeless. "There
goes our evening, I suppose," she murmured, more to herself than
to him. "And I was counting on wearing the new wine red
taffeta."

She
clapped him reassuringly on the arm. "Go down and get yourself a
drink; make it a good stiff one. You need that now more than
anything, I can see that. There's a good boy. Then come back, and
we'll see how you feel by that time, and we'll figure it out then.
There's a good boy." And she added, quite inconsequentially,
"I'll go ahead dressing in the meantime, anyway. I did want to
show them that wine-red taffeta."

In
the end they stayed for the time being. But it was not her reasoning
that kept him, so much as a fascinating horror that held him in its
grip now. He was waiting for the next Mobile newspaper to arrive at
the tobacco shop, and knew no other way of obtaining it than by
remaining close at hand, here where they were.

It
took five days, though he prodded the shopkeeper almost continuously
in between.

"Sometimes
they send 'em, sometimes they don't," the latter told him. "I
could write and hurry them up, if you'd want me to."

"No,
don't do that," Durand said rather hastily. "It's just
that-- I find nothing to do with myself down here. I like to get the
news of the old home town."

Then
when it came, he didn't have the courage to examine it there in the
store, he took it back to her and they searched for it together, she
holding the sheets spread, his strained face low on her shoulder.

"There
it is," she said crisply, and narrowed the expanse with a sharp,
crackling fold, and they read it together.

.
. . Bruce Dollard, a renting agent, who has had charge of the
property for the past several years, has informed the authorities of
one instance in which the occupants gave abrupt notice of departure,
quitting the house within the space of a single morning, with no
previous indication before that day of intending to do so.

The
proprietor of a tool shop has identified a shovel found in the cellar
of the house as one that he sold to an unidentified woman some time
ago, and it is thought the purchase of this implement may well aid in
fixing the approximate time of the misdeed.

Other
than that, there have been no further developments, but the
authorities are confident of bringing to light new . . . .

"Now
they know," he said bitterly. "Now there can be no
denying it any longer. Now they know."

"No
they don't," she said flatly. "Or it wouldn't be in here
like this. They're guessing, as much as they ever were."

"The
shovel--"

"The
shovel was in the house, long after we left. Others could have used
it, who came after us."

"It
gets worse, all the time."

"It
only seems to. They want to do the very thing to you they are doing:
frighten you, cause you to blunder in some way. In actuality it's no
whit worse than it was before it was found."

"How
can you say that, when it stands there before you in black and white
?"

She
shook her head. "The barking dog can't bite you at the same
time; he has to stop when he's ready to sink his teeth in. Don't you
know that when they do know, if they do, we will never know they
do? You are waiting for a message that will never reach us. You are
looking for news that will never come. Don't you know that we're safe
so long as they keep on mentioning it? When they stop, that's the
time to look out. When sudden silence falls, the danger has really
begun."

He
wondered where she got her wisdom. From hard-won experience of her
own? Or had it been born in her blood, as cats can see in the dark
and avoid pitfalls?

"Couldn't
it mean that they've forgotten?"

She
gave him another capsule of her bitter 'wisdom, sugared with a hard,
wearied smile.

"The
police? They never forget, lovey. It's we who will have to. If we
want to live at all."

He
brought in three papers the next time. Three successive ones, each a
day apart, but that had come in all together. They divided them up,
went to work separately, hastily ruffling them over page by page, in
search of what they were after.

He
turned his head sharply, looked at her half frightened. "It's
stopped! There's not a word about it any more."

"Nor
in these either." She nodded with sage foreboding. "Now the
real danger is beginning. Now it's under way."

He
flung the sheets explosively aside, rose in instant readiness, so
much under her guidance had he fallen in these things. "Shall we
go?"

She
considered, made their decision. "We'll wait for one more
newspaper. We can give ourselves that much leeway. They may already
know who, but I doubt that they still know where."

Another
wait. Three days more this time. Then the next one came. Again
nothing. Dead silence. Brooding silence, it almost seemed to him,
as they pored over it together.

This
time they just looked at one another. It was she who rose at last,
put hands to the shoulders of her cream satin dressing robe to take
it off. Coolly, unhurriedly, but purposefully.

"Now's
the time to go," she said quietly. "They're on to us."

He
was still baffled, even this late, at the almost sixth sense she
seemed to have developed. It frightened him. He knew, at least, it
was something he would never attain.

"I'll
begin to pack," she said. "Don't go out any more. Stay up
here where you are until we're ready."

He
shuddered involuntarily. He sat on there, watching her, following her
movements with his eyes as she moved about. It was like--observing an
animated divining rod, that walked and talked like a woman.

"You
went about it wrong," she remarked presently. "It's too
late to mend now, but you may have even hastened it, for all we know.
Singling out just the Mobile papers each time. Word of things like
that can travel more swiftly than you know."

"But
how else--?" he faltered.

"Each
time you bought one, you should have bought one from some other place
at the same time, even if you discarded it immediately afterward. In
that way you divide suspicion."

She
went on into the next room.

Even
that there was a wrong and a right way to go about, he reflected
helplessly. Ah, the wisdom of the lawless.

She
came back to the door for a moment, pausing in midpacking.

"Where
shall it be now? Where shall we go from here?"

He
looked at her, haunted. He couldn't answer that.

56

They
came to a halt in Pensacola, at last, for a little while, to catch
their breaths. They had now followed the great, slow, curve the Gulf
Coast makes as far as they could go along it, heading eastward,
always eastward. By fits and starts, by frightened spurts and equally
frightened stops, some long, some short, they'd followed their
destiny blindly. New Orleans, then Biloxi, then Mobile, then
Pensacola. With many a little hidden-away place in between.

Now
Pensacola. They couldn't go any farther than that, along their
self-appointed trajectory, without leaving the littoral behind, and
for some reason or other, probably fear of the unknown, they clung to
the familiar coastline. From there the curve dropped sharply away,
past the huddle of tin-roofed shacks that was Tampa, on down to the
strange, other-language foreignness of Havana. And that would have
meant cutting themselves off completely, exile irrevocable beyond
power to return. (Returning ships were inspected, and they had no
documents.) Nor did they want to cut inland and make for Atlanta, the
next obvious step. She was afraid, for reasons of her own, of the
North, and though that was not the North, it was a step toward it.

So,
Pensacola. They took a house again in Pensacola. Not for grandeur
now, not for style, not to feel "really" married, but for
the sake of simple, elementary safety.

"They
spot you much easier in a hotel," she whispered, in their
rain-beaten, one-night hotel. "They nose into your business
quicker. People come and go more, all around you, carrying tales away
with them and spreading them all around."

He
nodded, bending to peer from under the lowered window shade, then
starting back as a flash of lightning limned it intolerably bright.

They
took the most remote, hidden, inconspicuous house they could find, on
a drowsing, tree-lined street well out from the center of town. Other
houses not too near, neighbors not too many; they put heavy lace
curtains in the windows, to be safer still from prying eyes. They
engaged a woman out of sheer compulsion, but pared her presence to a
minimum; only three days a week, and she must be gone by six, not
sleep under their roof. They spoke guardedly in front of her, or not
at all.

They
were going to be very discreet, they were going to be very prudent
this time.

The
first week or two, every time Bonny came or went from the house in
daylight, she held her parasol tipped low as she stepped to or from
the carriage, so that it shielded her face. And he, without that
advantage of concealment, kept his head down all he could. So that,
almost, he always seemed to be looking for something along the ground
each time he entered or left.

And
when a neighbor came to offer a courtesy call, as the custom was,
laden with homemade jellies and the like, Bonny held her fast at the
door, and made voluble explanations that they were not settled yet
and the house was not in order, as an excuse for not asking her in.

The
woman went away, with affronted mien and taking her gifts back with
her unpresented, and when next they sighted her on the walk she made
no salutation and looked the other way.

"You
should not have done that," he cautioned, stepping out from
where he had listened, as the frustrated visitor departed. "That
looks even more suspicious, to be so skittish."

"There
was no other way," she said. "If I had once admitted her,
then others would have come, and I would have been expected to return
their calls, and there would have been no end to it."

After
that once, no others came.

"They
probably think we live together," she told him, once, jeeringly.
"I always leave my left glove off, now, every time I go out, and
hold my hand up high, to the parasol-stick, so that they cannot fail
to see the wedding hand." And punctuated it: "The filthy
sows!"

Mr.
and Mrs. Rogers had come to Pensacola. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers had taken
a house in Pensacola. Mr. and Mrs. Rogers-- from nowhere. On the way
to--no one knows.

57

This
time he did not tell her; she guessed it by his face. She saw him
standing there by the window, staring out at nothing, gnawing at his
lip. And when she spoke to him, said something to him, his answer,
instead of being in kind, was to turn away, thrust hands in pockets,
and begin to pace the room on a long, straight course, up and down.

She
understood him so well by now, she knew it could be nothing but the
thing it was.

She
nodded finally, after watching him closely for some moments. "Again
?" she said cryptically.

"Again,"
he answered, and came to a halt, and flung himself into a chair.

She
flung from her irritably a stocking she had been donning upward over
her arm in search of rents. "Why is it always that way with us?"
she complained. "We no sooner can turn around and draw our
breaths, than it's gone again, and the whole thing starts over!"

"It
goes, with anyone," he said sombrely. "It's the one thing
you can't hold and yet use at the same time."