All the way

legend: CHAPMAN ENTERPRISES. I pushed it open and went in.

The brown-haired woman in the ante-room looked up pleasantly, and asked, “Yes, sir. May I help you?”

The inner door was closed. I crossed to it and pushed it open. Mrs. English was watching me with a puzzled frown. “I beg your pardon,” she said. “Where you looking for someone?”

There were the three desks, and the safe, and the water cooler, and all the steel filing cabinets, and to the right the two windows looking out into the square. At the third desk, near the door going into his private office, a brown-eyed girl with a little dusting of freckles across her nose was busy at her typewriter. She looked up questioningly.

The large desk in the center was hers. I crossed to it, and touched it with my hands. Barbara Cullen had quit typing now, and was staring at me, and I was aware that Mrs. English had got up and was standing in the doorway.

“Could I help you?” Barbara Cullen asked.

In the slow unfolding of horror I seemed to be standing outside myself, watching what I was doing but without any power to control or change a movement of it. I might still get away, if I ran now without opening my mouth, but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. I stood there, merely feeling the desk with my hands. Then I crossed the room to Chapman’s office, and went inside. Opening the center drawer of his desk, I lifted out the pencil drawer and turned it upside down to stare at the little card that was taped to the bottom of it.

Right to thirty-two, left two turns to nineteen—

Both girls were in the doorway behind me. They gasped, and when I turned they looked frightened and started to back away.

“Who are you?” Barbara Cullen asked nervously. “What do you want here?”

I went back to the large desk in the center of the room and stood behind it, looking out at the square. Mrs. English retreated to the ante-room. Barbara stood as far away as she could, staring at me. The silence stretched out and tightened across the room.

I gripped the edge of the desk. God, there must be something left of her, somewhere. She’d sat here for six years, with her bag in that lower left-hand drawer, touching this, putting papers in that basket, picking up the phone— She’d sat here, where I was standing now, and when she glanced up she looked out that window at spring sunlight and the slow eddying of traffic in winter rains and high- school football rallies and funeral processions and the blue October sky.

I stared down at the whitening knuckles of my hands. “Barbara,” I said, “it wasn’t her fault. You’ve got to believe it. Some way, I’ve got to make them understand—”

She cried out. I looked up then, and her eyes were widening with horror. “How did you know my name?” she asked. But it wasn’t that. It was the voice; she’d already recognized it.

”Sit down, Barbara,” I said. “I won’t hurt you. But I’ve got to tell somebody. I can’t stand it any longer. I can’t let her go on lying there taking all the blame, when it was my fault. I could have saved her. She couldn’t help herself—”

I heard Mrs. English dialing, out in the ante-room, but I went on talking, faster now, the words becoming a flood. All that time in Mexico hadn’t meant a thing; you never whipped it or drove it away. You merely drove it underground, into your subconscious, where it could fester beyond your reach.

When the men came up the stairs and into the room behind me I was still talking, and Barbara was listening, but the look of horror on her face was giving way to something else. Maybe it was pity.