“And that’s when you hit him?”
“Yes. And when we were driving together, I think he was playing with his own navel.”
“This boy has a naval fetish,” Detective Landon said. “It may sound weird, but I can tell you from personal experience that people are weird. In my business, you see people as they really are.
“In addition, you’re his obsession. People with obsessions will go to any lengths to attain the object of their obsession. They behave compulsively, doing crazy things the rest of us can’t imagine doing. It’s not your fault, Penny. You just have to stay away from him. Since he’s wanted for murder, if we catch him, the problem will end. But don’t feel guilty about him.”
“I was feeling guilty,” Penny admitted. “I thought I might have led him on somehow.”
Detective Landon didn’t have any more questions. He replaced the drawing in his briefcase and put it in his car. He left them, telling them that they should call him if they had any contact with Alfred, or remembered anything else that might be pertinent.
After he drove away, Penny avoided Gary’s eyes. What did he think of the nude picture, or of her behavior at the Halloween party?
“Let’s go back to the campground,” Gary said.
To Penny, his voice sounded stiff. They rode in silence. Penny wondered if this would affect their relationship. She felt scared and sad at the same time.
“I need to take a walk,” Gary said when they got there.
Penny didn’t try to stop him. She went into the tent and bundled herself into the sleeping bag where she cried silently.
Gary walked fast, partly to keep warm, partly to get the devils out of him. He circled the campground, looking for a blue Ford Falcon as he went. He saw only one car that came close to matching that description. The owners were at a picnic table nearby, playing cards and drinking by the light of a lantern. That was not Alfred’s car.
After an hour of hard walking, Gary was exhausted-from the walk and from the activities of the day. He knew what he had to do. He walked back to their campsite and called to Penny from the door of the tent so that she wouldn’t be alarmed. She gave a soft response. He opened the flap and saw her face dimly lit by the light from his flashlight. She looked unhappy, and her face was streaked. He crawled inside and closed the flap. He couldn’t see her now. It was just as well.
“I have a story to tell,” he said. “I told you that when I was a second-semester senior in college I fell in love with a first-semester freshman. She was seventeen, like you were at the time of the Halloween party. That was in the days of segregated dorms. Girls lived in one set of dorms, boys in another. Our dorms were a mile apart. Girls couldn’t go upstairs in our dorm except during special events, and I don’t remember ever seeing a room in a girls’ dorm. When girls were allowed into our rooms, we had to keep the door open and four feet on the floor.
“With all the rules, you would think that life there would be pretty chaste. So perhaps it was especially bad that we found a way to shack up on weekends.”
Gary paused to let that sink in.
“Did she love you?” Penny asked, softly.
“She loved me physically, although not with her heart and soul, which perhaps makes her sin worse. But the point of this whole thing is, should she be tainted for life for what she did? Should I? Should you for what you’ve done? Who is to judge? All I want you to know is that I love you.”
There was silence for a few seconds. Then Penny said, “Give me a kiss.”
He kissed her and felt the wetness of her tears. He kissed them away. Her lips were soft.
She said, “Get undressed and come to bed.”
CHAPTER 19
“Did you get the feeling we were sliding downhill all night?” Gary asked the question as he crawled out of the small tent and braved the coolness of the morning. The singing of the birds had woken them up earlier than they would have liked.
Penny poked her head out and blinked at the morning sun. “We set the tent up on a slope, didn’t we?”
“Yup. If we do that again we’ll at least point our heads uphill.”
“Well, now that we’re up, we might as well get going. Fire up the stove and let’s have breakfast. Then animals, here we come.”
“And Old Faithful.” Gary didn’t say anything about what had happened last night, and Penny wasn’t about to mention it. That they were behaving like honeymooners again was enough for her.
For at least the tenth time, Alfred bemoaned the loss of his car. He had spent a second night sleeping in the small Falcon, and he was stiff and sore as a result. He had stayed in the campground closest to Old Faithful, figuring that he would be less conspicuous there than he would parked along the road somewhere. Park officials discouraged camping except in the campgrounds.
He ate breakfast in a cafe and then set up his observation post where he could see Old Faithful but not be seen by the tourists who gathered at the benches that served as a viewing location. He used the buildings of Old Faithful Village as shields. Scalding steam rose constantly from a number of fissures. This was a hotbed of volcanic activity. When Old Faithful did erupt, boiling water and steam rose into the sky in an awesome and terrible display of the power of nature.
Although he was not normally attracted to the outdoors, Alfred could watch Old Faithful all day. He pictured what was happening below ground to produce this spectacle, and it showed how puny mankind was in comparison to these forces. This made him glad, because it meant that the people in the world who were full of themselves weren’t so great after all.
Alfred had purchased a hunting knife before he came into the park. Knives weren’t traceable the way guns were, but they could be just as deadly. A knife didn’t go off unexpectedly. He kept it in a sheath on his belt and wore his jacket over it.
The animals were absent without leave. So were the geysers. Penny and Gary walked around Norris Geyser Basin, but nothing was erupting. Then they drove along a dirt service road for five miles, searching in vain for the elusive animals. They ate lunch during their search. Then they drove toward Old Faithful Village.
Alfred hadn’t dared desert his post to eat lunch, and hunger gnawed at his insides like a dog gnawing on a bone. The few potato chips he’d eaten didn’t satisfy him. Hunger made him grouchy. He had spent much of the trip being hungry. Now more than ever he was prepared to deal with Gary.
When he finally spotted Gary and Penny, they were headed not toward Old Faithful but toward the laundry at Old Faithful Village. It was dumb luck on his part that they didn’t see him, because he had been looking in the wrong direction. He ducked around a corner and contemplated his next move.
They were always doing laundry. They had done laundry the night he was with them. He had done laundry then, too, but nothing since. He was stuck with the clothes on his back, because he had left everything else in his car. It was just another reason to regret giving up his car.
The nomad life he had been leading was getting old. He was going to return to civilization. In order to do that successfully, he had to leave no tracks. That meant no witnesses. He had to kill Penny along with Gary. He hadn’t
