cupboard.'
'What in heller
'I was going to kill myself,' said Mr. Gibson without apology. 'Now I may kill somebody else.'
Paul stepped back and withdrew his hand as if from contamination. He turned and yelled at Rosemary. 'Did you call the police?'
She was vanishing into Paul's garage. 'Yes! Yfts! Hurry! Hurry!' she shouted.
Paul said, 'Got to tell Mama—get a shirt—' He leaped up on his porch. 'Don't go without me,' he yelled back over his shoulder. Mr; Gibson stood still. Rosemary was in the garage trying to start a strange car.
But the quiet neighborhood was still quiet. This crisis was like a dagger plunged into flesh that did not yet feel any wound. He, the cause, stood still and could smell lavender and feel the weight of the sun's heat. He experienced a moment out of time. He might as well have killed himself, for he knew he was lost. But also he was being bom again. He closed his eyes and turned his face to the caress of the light.
Then Paul's De Soto came bucking and plunging backward. It stopped and Rosemary swung the door and leaned out. 'Get in.'
Mr. Gibson went meekly, and climbed into the front seat as she shoved over. She seemed to be quite sure that Paul was coming to do the driving.
Paul came in an instant, buttoning a blue shirt over his naked chest. He shoved long legs under the wheel. 'Where to, Rosie?'
'The market,' she said decisively.
Mr. Gibson sat in the middle. He might as well have been a wax dummy.
'I called Jeanie to come home,' Paul said, speaking as if his teeth were ready to chatter. 'She's at her music lesson. Mama will be all right alone for half an hour. I'd just helped her to lie down. Didn't tell her why. Couldn't leave her with a shock. . . . What got into him?' said Paul angrily.
'I must have been crazy,' said Mr. Gibson quietly. It was the easiest thing to say. He was beyond horror and beyond pain.
'Pray it's in the market,' said Rosemary, 'and they've found it. Paul, do you know what it is? It is poison?'
'It's dangerous stufT, all right. As I told him—How did he get at it?' Paul demanded with that anger.
The ghost of Mr. Gibson explained, and Paul grimaced as if he had to hold his teeth clenched. There seemed a convention that Mr. Gibson could speak and be heard and yet not be considered quite solidly there. Paul was perspiring. The car went jerkily. It was only three blocks to the market. 'What are you doing home, Rosie?' Paul said in a nervous explosion.
'I wanted to talk to him. Alone. I didn't like — This is the first day Ethel's been . . .' They had turned the comer 'Look! A police car!'
If Mr. Gibson felt a twinge: it felt like simple wonder. What, he wondered, was going to happen next?
He tried to push at this wonder and make himself feel alive. What was he doing plunging around the streets—? Who was he? Who were these people, young, busy, pushing people . . . Rosemary thrusting both legs out of the car to the pavement of the market's parking lot and Paul yanking on the brake and tumbling out the other side.
Mr. Gibson sat for a moment, abandoned and strangely exposed, for both front doors of Paul's car were flapping, open. When he felt a stirring somewhere at the bottom of his being it was still remarkably simple. It was curiosity.
So he slid under the wheel and got, as nimbly as he could, out of the car. He limped rapidly after them into the market.
Chapter Xlll
Cure I know him,' The little checker girl was saying. She had black tangled hair, enormous dark eyes, and wore huge gold buttons in her ears. 'I always thought he was nice, you know what I mean? Sure, I saw him. Thafs him, isn't it? But I didn't see no green paper bag. It wasn't in with his groceries. He didn't have no green paper bag. See . . .' She moved closer to the tall policeman and looked up at him almost yearningly. 'We aren't busy so close to lunch. We never are. So I seen him come in. Right in that door. He didn't look good. He looked like he was sick or something. I seen his bare hands. If he had it, then he musta had it in his pocket. Did you look in his pockets?'
'Did you look in your pockets?' Rosemary flashed around and seemed to bear down upon him. (She wasn't anybody he knew.) Then the policeman seemed to be searching him while Mr. Gibson stood helpless as a dummy or a small child whose elders don't trust the accuracy of his reports.
The checker girl said, almost weeping, 'Why'd he want to do a thing like that? Gee, I thought he was nice. . . . I mean some customers aren't so nice, you know, but he was nice.' She used the past tense as if he had died. Nobody answered her.
'And listen,' she sobbed. 'I didn't put no green paper bag in with anybody else's stuff, either. Only been three or four people through my stand. It isn't here. Probably he never had no poison.' She peeked at Mr. Gibson fearfully.
'If it isn't here,' said Rosemary, tensely, 'it must be on the bus.'
'Wa-ait a minute,' the policeman said. ''Now—' His eyes were cold. They fixed upon Mr. Gibson as if he were an object and an obstacle. (One could tell that he was used to obstacles.) 'You are positive that you had this green paper bag with this poison in it when you got on the bus?'
'Yes, I am positive,' said Mr. Gibson with perfect composure.
'And when you got home?'-'
'It wasn't there.''
''You were emotionally upset?' the policeman said. ''You think you forgot it on the bus, then?'
