all of August establishing residence in Nevada.'
'Now I know you're mistaken. Roy was in Europe all that lime.'
'I suppose you have letters and postcards to prove it?'
'Yes, I do,' she said with a relieved smile.
She went into another room and came back with a handful of mail tied with a red ribbon. I riffled through the postcards and put them in chronological order: Tower of London (postmarked London, July 18), Bodleian Library (Oxford, July 21), and so on down to the view of the English Gardens (Munich, August 25). Bradshaw had written on the back of this last card:
Dear Laura:
Yesterday I visited Hitler's eyrie at Berchtesgaden--a beautiful setting made grim by its associations--and today, by way of contrast, I took a bus to Oberammergau, where the Passion Play is performed. I was struck by the almost Biblical simplicity of the villagers. This whole Bavarian countryside is studded with the most stunning little churches. How I wish you could enjoy them with me! I'm sorry to hear that your summer has turned out to be a lonely one. Well, the summer will soon be over and I for one will be happy to turn my back on the splendors of Europe and come home. All my love.
Roy
I sat and reread the incredible message. It was almost word by word the same as the one Mrs. Bradshaw had shown me. I tried to put myself in Bradshaw's place, to understand his motive. But I couldn't imagine what helpless division in a man's nature, what weary self-mockery or self-use, would make him send identical lying postcards to his mother and his fiancee.
'What's the matter?' Laura said.
'Merely everything.'
I gave her back her documents. She handled them lovingly. 'Don't try to tell me Roy didn't write these. They're in his writing and his style.'
'He wrote them in Reno,' I said, 'and shipped them for remailing to a friend or accomplice who was traveling in Europe.'
'Do you _know_ this?'
'I'm afraid I do. Can you think of any friend of his who might have helped him?'
She bit her lower lip. 'Dr. Godwin spent the late summer traveling in Europe. He and Roy are very close. In fact Roy was his patient for a long time.'
'What was Godwin treating him for?'
'We haven't discussed it, really, but I expect it had something to do with his excessive--his excessive dependence on his mother.' A slow angry flush mounted from her neck to her cheekbones. She turned away from the subject. 'But why would two grown men collaborate in such a silly letter-writing game?'
'It isn't clear. Your husband's professional ambitions probably enter into it. He obviously didn't want anyone to know about his previous, bad marriage, or his divorce, and he went to great lengths to keep everything quiet. He got off a similar set of European postcards and letters to his mother. He may have sent a third set to Lelitia.'
'Who _is_ she? _Where_ is she?'
'I think she's here in town, or was as recently as last Friday night. She's very likely been here for the last ten years. I'm surprised your husband never gave it away, even to someone as close as you.'
She was still standing over me, and I looked up into her face. Her eyes were heavy. She shook her head.
'Or maybe it isn't so surprising. He's very good at deceiving people, living on several levels, maybe deceiving himself to a certain extent. Mother's boys get that way sometimes. They need their little escape hatches from the hothouse.'
Her bosom rose. 'He isn't a mother's boy. He may have had a problem when he was younger, but now he's a virile man, and I _know_ he loves me. There must be a reason for all this.' She looked down at the cards and letters in her hand.
'I'm sure there is. I suspect the reason has to do with our two murders. Tish Macready is the leading suspect for both of them.'
'_Two_ murders?'
'Actually there have been three, spaced over a period of twenty-two years: Helen Haggerty on Friday night, Constance McGee ten years ago, Luke Deloney in Illinois before the war.'
'Deloney?'
'Luke Deloney. You wouldn't know about him, but I think Tish Macready does.'
'Is he connected with the Mrs. Deloney at the Surf House?'
'She's his widow. You know her?'
'Not personally. But Roy was talking to her on the telephone shortly before he left here.'
'What did he say?'
'Simply that he was coming over to see her. I asked him who she was, but he was in too great a hurry to explain.'
I got up. 'If you'll excuse me, I'll see if I can catch him at the hotel. I've been trying to catch him all day.'
'He was here, with me.' She smiled slightly, involuntarily, but her eyes were confused. 'Please don't tell him I told you. Don't tell him I told you anything.'
'I'll try, but it may come out.'
I moved to the door and tried to open it. The chain delayed my exit.
'Wait,' she said behind me. 'I've remembered something-- something he wrote in a book of poems he lent me.'
'What did he write?'
'Her name.'
She started into the other room. Her hip bumnped the doorframe, and Bradshaw's cards and letters fell from her hands. She didn't pause to pick them up.
She returned with an open book and thrust it at me a little blindly. It was a well-worn copy of Yeats's _Collected Poems_, open to the poem 'Among School Children.' The first four lines of the fourth stanza were underlined in pencil, and Bradshaw had written in the margin beside them the single word, 'Tish.'
I read the four lines to myself:
Her present image floats into the mind--
Did Quattrocento finger fashion it
Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind
And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
I wasn't certain what they meant, and said so.
Laura answered bitterly: 'It means that Roy still loves her. Yeats was writing about Maud Gonne--the woman he loved all his life. Roy may even have lent me the Yeats to let me know about Tish. He's very subtle.'
'He probably wrote her name there long ago, and forgot about it. If he still loved her, he wouldn't have divorced her and married you. I have to warn you, though, that your marriage may not be legal.'
'Not legal?' She was a conventional woman, and the possibility jarred her. 'But we were married in Reno by a judge.'
'His divorce from Tish,' I said, 'is probably voidable. I gather she wasn't properly informed of Bradshaw's action. Which means that under California law he's still married to her if she wants it that way.'
Shaking her head, she took the book of poems from my hands and tossed it with some violence into a chair. A piece of paper fluttered from between the leaves. I picked it up from the floor.
