“Great grief, Mary!” Heath exploded. “That louse tried to crack my skull! Do you realize what might have happened if he'd landed with that blackjack?”
“I didn't see any of it,” she said. “I only heard him ask you for a match, then—then you hit him.”
“Okay,” he said hotly. “Okay, if you don't believe me it's—”
He was still lying there, sprawled on the bank beside the road. They stopped so the headlights would play over him. Mary got out first. When they reached him they saw instantly that he was dead.
Blood was smeared on his face, thick and glistening in his hair. Heath knelt and thumbed back one of his eyelids.
When he looked up, Mary was staring at him, her face chalky, the knuckles of her right hand pressed hard against her mouth.
“I didn't hit him with anything, only my fist,” he said, his tone begging belief. “He was slugged later, after we left. Probably by someone who was in the car with him. He glanced down along the highway. The dead man's car was still there just as it had been.
“Well,” he said, a bit lamely, “somebody else killed him just the same.”
“Wherewhere's his blackjack?” Mary asked, staring down.
“It's gone, of course,” he told her. “Whoever slugged him took it.”
She turned and walked slowly back to the convertible. Heath started for the other car to take a look around, heard her open a door. Then a moment later he heard the thud as her body struck the ground.
He found her in a dead faint. The music box was tinkling a tune—a vaguely familiar tune. He saw that she'd taken up the flashlight, snicked it on, then dropped it. He caught the sure, placid throb of her pulse, his fingers on her wrist, after he'd lifted her and set her down inside the car. As he stood back he saw what had caused her faint—a bloody blackjack sticking from one of his gloves on the floor just beneath the open door of the coupe's glove compartment.
Suddenly the music box stopped playing and began giving with the clicking sound again. He put gloves and bloody blackjack into the glove compartment and slammed the door, glanced over at Mary. Satisfied she'd be all right in a few minutes, he turned away, hurried back to the dead man's car.
As he'd expected, it was empty. Nothing of importance there. He returned to the corpse, was on a knee searching its clothes when headlights of an approaching car sent a cloud of light above the highway. He went back and snapped off the convertible's lights, then pulled the corpse over the bank out of sight. He'd finished searching the dead man's pockets when the car passed.
He'd found nothing that would serve as identification, and was starting back to Mary when light from another car, approaching from the way they had come, loomed up. He stayed on his knees, waiting for it to pass on. The strong beam of light played over the hillside beyond the road, outlining great and small shadows as it whipped across trees and low-growing brush.
A moment before it swung back toward the highway he saw the face, lank, wide-eyed, staring at him from a clump of brush on the slope. His hand flicked out his gun. At the same moment the light jumped roadward and darkness covered the brush clump. After the car passed he thought he heard someone running up the hillside, but he couldn't be sure.
Returning to Mary, ready to tell her they'd have to take the corpse to Coverlee, explain things to the police, wondering how to convince her that he hadn't killed anybody, he heard the music box tinkle into another tune as the rhythmic clicking stopped. Before he reached the car its starter raked and the motor roared to life. He started to run for it, then stopped, a hurt grin moving his broad face as he watched its taillights wink out of sight down the highway.
“Well,” he said, a bit scared, a lot disgusted, “that's a dame for you.” He realized, a dead coldness gripping his spine, that Mary really thought he was a murderer.
The corpse had the keys to the other car in its pocket. He got them, loaded the dead man into the turtle- back, then drove down the highway, hoping to catch sight of the convertible before it reached the side road that led to McCulloch's Rest.
CHAPTER III
HEATH never caught up with Mary, but he didn't miss the sign to the right of the highway, a pointed board bearing the words,
McCulloch's Rest One Mile . It indicated a narrow, winding road with a napped rock surface.
He turned, onto it, driving carelessly, deep in thought as he worked to evolve a means of convincing Mary of his innocence. She'd called him impulsive, evinced fear of his losing his temper when he met her father. It angered him to think she believed he was the sort of person who went around smashing heads just for the hell of it.
It was easy to guess what had happened back on the highway. The goon had been sent out to crack him, maybe to get the music box. He'd failed, and somebody waiting in the car had got sore. There'd been an argument and a slugging.
He couldn't guess why the killer hadn't driven away, unless another car had picked him up. The man in the brush clump might have been the killer, might have been anybody—a farmer out hunting, a tramp who'd left the highway to avoid detection. Mary had probably found the bloody blackjack on the ground, then dropped it inside the car when she fainted. She'd had to reach inside the car for the flashlight.
Peculiar, though, the blackjack falling squarely into one of his gloves.
Two miles north of the highway he drove around a sharp turn and saw a lone lighted window ahead. The road narrowed suddenly. A few seconds later he was worming the car along a one-way drive, into the tight yawn of a steep-walled hollow.
The spread of level ground was not over forty feet from slope to slope. All at once the tower loomed up. A means of looking out of this place, he told himself.
The drive up to the house was on a slight slope. The house set in the middle of the little hollow. The reaching sweep of his headlights showed him a short ridge or fill spanning the hollow behind it.
