'I 'forgot' it,' said Mr. Gibson, 'because, I suppose, subconsciously I did not really want . . .' The words were coming out of him as from a parrot.
Rosemary took his arm rather roughly. 'T)o you want a stranger to die?' she cried at him.
The knife went in. 'No,' said he. 'No. No.'
'Well, then!' said Rosemary with a curious air of triumph. 'You see, it isn't true!'
Paul said, 'Wait a minute. What are the police doing?'
The policeman said, 'They are after the bus, all right. And we are broadcasting. I'll search this building thoroughly, now, just in case . . .'
'What do you think the chances ...?''
The policeman shrugged. He didn't think much of them. He was a sad man. He'd seen a lot of trouble. He did his
best and let it go at that. 'Whoever might find a bottle— looks like it's olive oil—might throw it away,' said he. 'Might take it home—use it. Who can say what people are going to do?'
Ethel can, thought Mr, Gibson, and for a moment feared he might whinny this forth nervously.
'Can't we find the bus?' Rosemary was urging.
'Gee, Rosie, I dunno,' said Paul. 'Are you sure he shouldn't be seeing a doctor . . .' Paul jittered.
Rosemary said, 'Hurry, hurry . . .'
The checker girl said, 'Oh gosh, I hope you find it! I hope nothing bad is going to happen!' She peered at Mr. Gibson from her eye corners. 'Look, you're all right now, aren't you?' She seemed to care.
Mr. Gibson couldn't answer. What was it to be 'all right,' he wondered, with a shadowy sadness.
Then they were back in the car, as before.
'Number Five. That is the bus that goes on out the boulevard?' asked Rosemar)'.
'Yes.'
'But how will we know which one? Did you notice any number on it?'
'No.'
'But the police could get the number of the right bus, couldn't they? Since they know the time you caught it downtown, the time you got off at the market.'
'Maybe.'
'Then, maybe they have caught it already. They must have. It's two fifteen.'
Rosemary was babbling! It was vocalized worry. Mr. Gibson was answering in monosyllables. Paul was driving the car. He wasn't driving it very well. The car jerked and jittered. The man was nervous. Mr. Gibson—so curiously removed from self by his ruination (which was complete) —found his senses able to perceive. He felt a resurgence of an old power. He was no longer cut off. Paul, he realized, shrank from him as evil. Paul was almost superstitiously afraid of a man who had intended to kill himself.
Mr. Gibson wondered if he ought to try to explain. The trouble was ... he could not now remember how it had gone, all his reasoning. He thought it odd to be sitting in the middle with the two of them so bent on preserving him from the doom of becommg a murderer. Doom ... ah yes, that was the word. Now he remembered. . .
'I was going to write a letter,' he said out loud. 'I was going to explain ... At least, I—'
'Well, don't!'' said Rosemary vehemently. 'Not now. Just don't talk about it. Whatever you thought, whatever it was, whatever it is. Now, we have to find that terrible stuff and stop it from hurting anyone. Afterward,' she said grimly, 'you can talk about it if you want to. Paul, can you drive faster?'
'Listen,' said Paul, nervous and sweating. 'I'd just as soon not wreck us, you know . . .'
Rosemary said, 'I know. I know,' and she pounded with her small female fists the side of Paul's car. 'But I am to blame for this' said Rosemary.
Mr. Gibson tried to protest but she turned and looked fiercely into his eyes. 'And you are to blame. We are to blame. That has to be true. I'll prove it to you. I'm tired' she cried. 'I am so tired—'
Paul said, 'Don't talk, Rosie. He must have been crazy. Let it go and say he was crazy.'
But Mr. Gibson had a strange feeling of solidity. He thought. Yes, of course, I am to blame.
The boulevard was a divided street. In the weedy center space there lay old streetcar tracks, now superseded by the bus line. The boulevard was lined with little low apartment buildings, arranged in the charming California style, around grassy courts, and in a gay variety of colors . . . pink ones, yellow ones, green ones ... all sparkling clean and bright in the light of this fine day. Like big beads on the pretty chain, there came from time to time the shopping centers. A huge food market, with banks of red and yellow and orange fruit along the sidewalk, its bulk like a mother hen beside its chicks—the drugstore, laundromats.
After ten minutes of going, the boulevard lost its center strip and became just a street curving off through residential patches into a long valley, where houses became smaller and shabbier and more countrified as the city frayed about the edges. Mr. Gibson, sitting in the middle, looked at all this scenery as if he had come upon a new planet.
They passed one bus going their way, and, after a while, another. Neither could be the right one.
It was Paul Townsend, now, who was doing the talking. 'Number Five turns around at the junction, I think. Let's
see. If you got off about one forty-five, then it would get to the end of its line around two forty or a bit after. We might meet the right bus, coming back. What is it now? Two thirty.'
