All the way

that now I had plenty of money, all I wanted to do was live like a beachcomber. I wore dungarees and swimming trunks and lived on tortillas and beans and drank nothing at all.

After a while I quit waking up with the cry frozen in my throat as she went over the bridge railing and fell down through the fog, and gradually I quit staring at darkness for hours on end with that thing running through my mind: why hadn’t I stopped her? She was caught in a blind obsession, not knowing—or perhaps not even caring—that if she killed Chapman it would destroy her. But I’d known it, hadn’t I? I’d been warned. And I’d failed her.

For the only time in my glib and cheaply cynical, wise-guy existence I’d really meant something that I said, and I hadn’t been able to make her understand it or believe me. I simply hadn’t tried hard enough. During those twenty minutes in the apartment that night I’d had the opportunity to stop this obscene and senseless waste of a woman who was worth a thousand of me, and I’d muffed it, and let her go on down the drain, and if I didn’t stop lying here at night thinking of how many years of my life I’d give just for one more chance at those twenty minutes I’d go mad. That was the thing I had to whip.

But it was going away. I was slowly whipping it. And even if the Mexicans heard me when I woke in the night, it didn’t matter. They didn’t understand English.

She had wanted to confess, there in that last hour, but it was evident that she was driven by an equally strong, or even stronger, compulsion to protect me for the rest of my life. She felt responsible for me. It was a sort of noblesse oblige. She was older than I was, and more intelligent, and she felt she had taken advantage of the fact that I had fallen in love with her.

I thought about guilt. That was the theme. She was going to kill Chapman and make it appear he had been destroyed by his own conscience and his haunting fear of the taint of mental illness. It had worked, and then she’d inevitably been destroyed by her overpowering burden of guilt. It went on, like a string of popping firecrackers setting each other off.

Except that here it stopped. I had no feeling of guilt for him, not any more. In the first place, I had a much more elastic conscience; it had been stretched considerably over the years to fit different shapes of situations. And I hated him, furthermore, for what he had done to her. And in the end, I hadn’t actually killed him anyway. Perhaps that was the final irony of it. She’d told me how to save myself.

Always hold on to that, she’d said. You didn’t do it. I did.

Three months passed, and I knew I was all right. It was all going away. The police couldn’t touch me, and I was safe in that epidemic infection of guilt. Marble shattered, but not rubber.

* * *

I went back to San Francisco in the spring, completed transferring the money from the safe-deposit box into three banking accounts, and booked a passage on a Grace Line freighter for the Canal zone. I knew now what I was going to do—go into business as a big-game fishing guide in the Gulf of Panama. I’d liked Panama, and there was a boatyard I knew there where I could have a magnificent sports fisherman built for much less than I could in the States, a real sixty-thousand-dollar job with the best of everything.

But in the week before the ship sailed there was one thing I had to do before I left for good. I flew to New Orleans. First, I spent two days in the public library, going back through the newspaper files. There was no further mention of the case after the latter part of February; it was apparently headed for oblivion, unsolved—not if she had done it, of course, but how.

The police were almost certain now that she had left her hotel in New York that night of 13 November and flown to Miami under the name of Mrs. Wallace Cameron. Then they’d lost her trail in Miami. The night clerk at the Dauphine remembered he’d given Chapman a letter when he checked in, and that Chapman had asked for a cab and gone out somewhere within a few minutes after arriving, but whether it had been to meet her nobody would ever know. Had she come to kill him? Or to taunt him with something guilty in his past that eventually drove him mad?

Three handwriting experts were convinced that the signatures on the two checks and the receipts were forgeries, while Coral Blaine and Lundgren were just as strongly convinced the man they had talked to could have been no one but Chapman. Police had followed my trail back and forth across Florida, and while they had a dozen different versions as to my age and the color of my hair and eyes, the composite picture was that of Chapman, just as she had said it would be. The only things the witnesses were certain about were the wrong things, the ones I’d deliberately planted.

Chapman Enterprises was being liquidated by his father. Coral Blaine was gone from Thomaston. The whole senseless tragedy was complete, except for how, and that was unanswerable. But they did know who had been responsible for it all, because she had admitted it—the rejected and embittered woman who had been his mistress.

I rented a car and drove up-state, buying the flowers at one of the towns along the way. The name of the little community was Bedford Springs, but it wasn’t on any of the highway maps, and all I knew about it was that it was some fifteen miles from Thomaston.

I’d puzzled for a long time as to why she’d wanted to be buried in a backwoods churchyard in Louisiana when her family would be in Cleveland. Then I’d finally decided perhaps something good had happened to her in Bedford Springs at some time in the past. I’d understood her coming to San Francisco, where she’d been married to Forsyth, and the trip down to Stanford, and what she was doing in those last few days when she knew it couldn’t go on any longer.

It was late afternoon when I found it. It was miles off the highway, and there wasn’t any town at all, just a white frame church set under some oaks in gently rolling country of small farms and hardwood and pine. There weren’t even any houses near it. It was late April now, and all the trees were fully leaved. I got out of the car in front of the church and walked down to the little cemetery that was fenced and appeared to be well-tended. Across the back of it was a row of slender arbor vitae and beyond that a wooded ravine and tall trees, and off to my right about a half-mile a man was plowing on the side of a sandhill with a mule. There was no sound at all except that of the birds and the trickling of water somewhere in the rave.

I found her grave, and put the flowers on it, and looked around, thinking it was one of the most remote and beautiful places I’d ever seen. Then suddenly I knew why she had remembered it in that final hour of her torment in the hotel room in San Francisco, and what it had represented to her. Peace. Just peace. It hit me without any warning, as it had in the El Prado bar, and I started crying. I couldn’t help it.

* * *

I sat in the car and stared across the railroad tracks at the cotton gin. On the side of it was a large sign that said: CHAPMAN ENTERPRISES. The day I ever felt any guilt for him, I thought—that would really be the day. I’d never owned any part of her for an hour, and she’d given him all of herself for six years and then he’d thrown her away as if she were something you merely bought and used like an expendable item of inventory.

The town was as familiar as if I’d lived in it for years. The street names clicked and fell into place in my mind as I drove across it. I found her house and parked in front of it in the lengthening shadows of the elms. It was a two-story white frame with a neat lawn and some nasturtium beds in front, only four blocks from the center of town. When the weather was nice she sometimes walked to work. I got out of the car.

Somehow it wasn’t late afternoon now, but early morning, and I could see her ahead of me in the sunlight with that beautiful walk she had and the erect, patrician slenderness and the smartness that must have appeared so out of place in this little farming town, and the sleek dark head, complete with the shallow saucer of a hat slanted across the side of it, the one she’d worn the night she came back from New York. And, somehow, even though I was behind her I could see the fine blue eyes that were almost but not quite violet and their nearly unshakable self-possession and poise, and the cool and ineffably feminine humor in them as she leaned her chin on her laced fingers that afternoon in Key West and asked, And what other personality problems do you have, Mr. Hamilton, besides shyness? And the same eyes filled with the sheen of tears as she shook her head there in the hotel room in San Francisco. No, Jerry. It’s too late. Our fine pink flamingo is made of concrete, and I can’t carry it any longer. But you let me have it, and I’ll find a place to put it down.

This was the square, in the center of town. I turned, right at the corner, and walked along the south side of it, facing the entrance to the courthouse where sparrows fluttered about the eaves. How many thousand times had she stepped along this walk, on Monday mornings and Saturday nights and the white noons of southern Augusts? The doorway was between Barton’s Jewelery Store and the Esquire Shop. I went up the stairs where the slender heels had tapped, and turned right in the corridor at the top. The etched glass of the doorway bore the gold-leaf