“It has its compensations, too,” he added. “We went to see Holly’s mother yesterday, in Mountain Grove. I imagined that she’d spent her life hating me. She hasn’t. She forgave me years ago. It’s good to be forgiven.”
“Has she had any word from Hilda?”
“Not recently. Hilda showed up there several weeks ago. She managed to convince her mother that she was the one who had become an actress and married-a wealthy man.” He was embarrassed by this reference to himself.
“Tell me, Ferguson, does Hilda know that you’re her father?”
“I’m not certain. Kate Dotery said she told her my name when Hilda was a young girl. The chances are that Hilda doesn’t remember.”
“If she does remember, it may explain the crime-I mean the crime she attempted against her sister. There’s no question she left her to burn.”
“I know, and it wasn’t her first attempt. She attacked Holly several times before, once with a butcher knife, once with a pan of hot grease. I think that’s the basic reason why Holly severed connections with her family. The butcher-knife episode occurred just a day or two before she ran away. She took off with a stocking salesman named Sperovich when she was sixteen. Holly’s had a hard life, too.”
There was nothing in his voice but sympathy, and an undertone of sadness. The jealousy and the rage, the desperate hopefulness, had burned out. He drove at a steady sixty toward whatever final revenge the past was going to take.
“Did you bring your gun, Ferguson?”
“I did. I don’t intend to use it, unless Gaines is there. I have no compunction for him.”
The highway climbed away from the sea among coastal hills. The hills were dark and barren. There was very little traffic. Ferguson let the long grade slow the car. He was driving mechanically.
“Do you believe this Speare is telling the truth? She’s actually there?”
“She’s there, all right. Speare had nothing to gain by inventing the story.”
“What am I going to say to her, Gunnarson?”
“Nothing that you can say will change the situation very much. Tell her you’re her father, you want to help her.”
“But what good can I do her?”
“We’ll be helping her simply by bringing her in.”
“And after that?”
“She’ll need the best criminal lawyer and the best psychiatrists your money can procure. They won’t be able to get her off, of course, but they can save her from the extreme penalty. No one with strong financial backing is ever executed.”
“Money again, eh?”
“Be glad you have it, for your daughter’s sake.”
“I don’t know. If it hadn’t been for my money, me and my money, Hilda would never have been born-never conceived. Or else she’d have had a father, a decent bringing-up.”
“How do you know? You can’t second-guess the past. All you can do is learn to live with it.”
“You have a good deal of understanding, Gunnarson.”
“More than I had a week ago, anyway. We all have.”
We were near the top of the grade. Ferguson had slowed to thirty-five or forty. A pair of headlights came up behind us rapidly. A low-slung car went by like a silver bullet. I caught a glimpse of a goggled, helmeted head.
“I think that’s Speare,” I said. “He may be planning to double-cross us. Can you drive faster?”
Ferguson pressed the accelerator to the floor. The heavy car gathered speed and soared over the crest of the hill. Below, the road curved back toward the sea. At the end of the curve a red sign flashed: JACK’S DRIVE-IN.
Speare’s silver car swung wide on the curve and almost went off onto the left-hand shoulder. I saw it pause, incredibly, like a bird in flight, and heard the screech of its brakes. A tiny skirted figure, black in the headlights, was running across the highway. She stopped in the middle, facing the weaving car with something in her hand. The something spurted fire. The car flung her off the road before I heard the shot, and slewed on for another hundred feet.
We got to her before Speare did. I knew her by the shape of her body. Ferguson went to his knees beside her. He touched her ruined head.
Speare came trotting, throwing off his goggles as he ran.
“I didn’t mean to do it. You saw her run out in the road. She tried to shoot me. I did my best to avoid her, but I couldn’t. You’re a witness, Bill.”
His eyes were headline black. He clutched my arm, babbling and shaking. People began to gather, like Martians dropped from the pierced sky.
Ferguson had the dead woman in his arms.
“Who is she? Do you know her?” somebody said.
He looked up at the Martians and their sky. A shudder went through him, violent and unwilled as the spasm that had engendered her. “She’s my daughter,” he said in a clear voice. “My daughter Hilda.”
The Highway Patrol found the gun in the ditch. It turned out to be Gaines’s revolver, and it held three empty shells and three loaded shells. A dentist from San Antonio, Texas, identified the charred jawbone Wills had dug out of the ashes. It was the jawbone of a man he had done some fillings for the previous May. The name on the charts and X rays was Larry Grimes.
Hilda’s second shot had not been aimed at me.
In due course the bones of her son were released to Adelaide Haines for burial. Wills attended the funeral, he told me later. He was interested in the fact that Mrs. Haines had paid thirty-five hundred dollars for a bronze casket with silver embellishments.
Wills followed her home after the service to ask her a few questions. She tried to buy him off with ten thousand dollars in cash. He found the rest of the money her son had left with her inside the case of her upright grand piano. He found also a first-class airline ticket to Rio de Janeiro, made out in the name of the Reverend Cary Caine.
As for the diamond brooch, the nurse who undressed Mrs. Haines in the psychiatric ward of the Mountain Grove Hospital discovered that she was wearing it pinned to her slip under her black mourning.
Ross MacDonald
Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.
