“Barnaby won't kill anyone,” he said.
“But if he doesn't get his money, we're sure not going to get ours, and then all of this has been for nothing.”
His voice got ugly, and he snapped, “I told you to shut up! We have not lost her, and she hasn't drowned.”
They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the sea, to the wind, hoping to hear a girl crying…
At last, he called out, “Gwyn!”
They got no answer.
“Gwyn!”
Penny joined him: “Where are you, Gwyn?”
Groves set off southward along the beach, examining the deepest shadows close in to the cliff.
Back at the Kettle and Coach, the Barnaby-Aimes party had finished their dinner, finished dessert and the bottle of wine, and they had all returned to the cocktail lounge, which was as crowded and noisy as it had been earlier in the evening. Now, however, neither Will nor Elaine Barnaby enjoyed the hustle and bustle. It seemed to both of them that the second call they'd been expecting was long overdue.
Will looked at his watch: 11:04. If the kid had held up this long, if the Groves hadn't been able to drive her over the brink in two or three hours, then the success of the entire plan might be up in the air.
At quarter past eleven, Mrs. Aimes said, “It's so rowdy in here. Why don't we all go back to our place, for a nightcap?”
Edgar Aimes looked at Barnaby inquiringly.
“I don't know—” Will said. He looked at his watch again and said, “I'm expecting another call here, and I don't want to miss it. It's a rather important — business thing.”
“At this hour?” Lydia asked.
Elaine said, “Isn't it ridiculous, Lydia? But I'm sure you have the same problem with Edgar. When you manage to get a man like this to go out for an evening, he simply can't let go of the business reins and really relax.”
Lydia sighed and nodded, slipping easily into the role of the proud but beleaguered wife, which Elaine had led her to. She said, “I know only too well what you mean.”
Barnaby said, “Well, if you women wouldn't find so many ways to spend what we make, we'd not be turned into business zombies, and we'd be able to relax.”
Lydia smiled at Elaine. “He has the same line that Edgar always uses. I just ignore it.”
Elaine laughed and said, “I always try to have a comeback, but I think you're right. Let's ignore him.”
Edgar Aimes, having picked up on the ample clues that the Barnabys had given him, and far more observant of such things than his wife, called the waiter and ordered another round of drink. He said, “Well, it may be rowdy, but I'm really enjoying myself tonight.”
Lydia said, good-naturedly, “If I'd drunk all that you have, so far, I imagine I'd be feeling good too.”
Aimes laughed and patted his wife's hand. “I promise you won't have to carry me home, dear.”
“If I had to, I wouldn't.”
Barnaby looked around the cocktail lounge and said, “You hardly ever see this place full of so much life.”
“Full of noise, you mean,” Lydia Aimes said.
Barnaby looked at his watch again: 11:24. What in the hell was keeping Groves' call from coming through?
TWENTY-FIVE
The manor attic was extremely dusty, hung thick with cobwebs in all its corners, unused except for a circular area that had been swept clean around four, large steamer trunks. All of these black, oblong, metal boxes were large enough for Gwyn to curl up in, all were latched, though unlocked. She put her flashlight down on the seat of an easy chair that was not dusty and did not seem to belong up here, directing the beam on the trunks. Then she finished throwing open the latches, lifted the four lids, and began to go through the contents.
She found the rest of Ben Groves' personal belongings, a lot of his clothes and a couple of cases of professional stage makeup. She found similar cases of makeup for the girl, a great deal of women's clothing, and nice costume jewelry. She also found four fat, well-maintained scrapbooks bound in leatherette and stuffed with clippings and she was instantly sure that these were the things that she had hoped to find, even though she had not been able to define their existence, beforehand.
She went back to the easy chair, lifted the flashlight out of the way, and she sat down with the books.
For a moment, she could not bring herself to open them, as if this last act would seal the theory of a hoax, as if she were not already sure and could turn back the clock. Then, with the help of the flashlight, she opened the scrapbook which bore the number One, and she began to read…
They met back at the stone steps in the cliffside, after he had gone south along the beach and she had walked north, and neither of them was leading the girl.
He said, “No luck?”
“Obviously.”
She sounded as weary as Gwyn Keller had been during these last two days, as if she too had been drugged.
He said, “Did you walk in close to the cliff? The shadows there are so damned dense that she could easily hide in them — and there might even be caves to the north, just as there are to the south. She could have found a cave and crawled back into it, out of sight.”
“I thought of that,” Penny said. She sat down on the stone steps, massaging her neck with both hands. “But there weren't any more caves — just shadows.”
He looked out to sea, wiped a hand across his brow to pull off a film of perspiration, and he got a hand slick with re-liquified chicken blood. He wiped that on his trousers and said, “I simply don't buy that other thing.”
“Other thing?”
“Suicide. I don't think she drowned herself, yet—”
“Perhaps we drove her too far.”
Without responding to her, he walked down to the water's edge, hunkered and dipped his hands in the frothy seawater that washed over his feet, scrubbing the blood from between his fingers. That had been a good trick: the fall down the steps, the blood. He had spent two years as a Hollywood stuntman at one time, and he knew how to make that sort of thing look realer than real. He had practiced the fall a hundred times before Gwyn had arrived at the manor house. The blood had been contained in a small, thin, plastic bag which he had taken out of his pocket when her back was turned, tucked into his cheek. During the fall, he had bitten the bag open and let the blood spill out, as if it were his own. Very real. Neat. The only problem was that, now, even when he'd splashed a lot of water in his face, he could taste the damn blood. He would have given anything, just then, for a glass of only slightly diluted mouthwash…
Though he couldn't have that, he felt much better when his face was clean, and the cool water seemed to have cleared his mind as well. He thought again about the possibility that Gwyn was floating, dead, in this same sea, perhaps quite nearby, but he rejected it at once. And, simultaneously, he realized there was another possibility…
He went back to Penny and said, “Let's go back to the house. She might have avoided us in the woods, somehow, and then gone back into the house when she saw us come down here.”
“I don't think we're ever going to find her,” Penny said. “At least, not in time.”
He pulled her to her feet and kissed her once, quickly. “Cheer up, love. We'll find the little bitch. And we'll win this yet.”
The first scrapbook recounted — through dozens of newspaper clippings from their hometown newspapers,
