Time passed. So, on the four streets, did the sparse cars, the sparse pedestrians. And so, in the bandstand, did the expectations of Gideon Jones, who had been tricked and traduced in the tradition of the past into recurrent jackassery. Not, I believed sincerely, that Beth had done this, then or now, in deliberate malice or cruelty or even indifference. She had merely submitted on impulse to circumstances that had arisen without her contriving. She had merely met someone else and gone another place, just as she had once met and married another man and gone to California. It was all done with a kind of pathological innocence in the most amiable way.
I stood up and walked across the bandstand to the other side, my steps a truncated series of hollow sounds on rotting boards. The last step brought the toe of my right foot into the space beneath the circular bench, and it made contact suddenly with something soft but substantial down there on the floor. I stood for a moment with breath and motion suspended, and then I breathed and backed away a step and bent down. There was something down there, all right, under the bench, and I touched reluctantly what felt like flesh. Soft flesh beneath my fingertips. Nose, eyes, mouth. Sinking down all the way onto my knees, I struck a match and looked at Beth beneath the bench, Beth’s face with open, empty eyes, and somehow I was not in the least surprised. The match burned my fingers, and I let it fall.
What did I think? Well, I thought that it was just like Beth, by God, to come to such a sticky end, and that she had surely come in amiable innocence to die with utter wonder that anyone on earth would wish her dead. I thought that it was too bad to kill her, and that whoever had done it should be ashamed of himself. I thought that now I would never have the chance to say good-by to her properly, never in this world. I thought that I had better get the hell away from there if I knew what was good for me.
I stood and turned and went, leaving her lying where she was, a long way in the end from Miami and Rio and Acapulco and places like that. I walked directly home, the precise route in reverse that I had come, and the cicadas were silent in the trees, and the sad summer night was sour. The house was dark, which signified that Sid was still involved with Rose Pogue and Zoroaster, unless she had returned and gone to bed already, which was unlikely. Going to bed was something I had in mind for myself, although it would be impossible to sleep, for I wanted to be there when Sid got back in order to practice the simple deception of being what I was not, an innocent husband at rest, and I might, by keeping my eyes closed and my breathing deep, avoid the ordeal of casual conversation or the now impossible demands of an interesting time.
I went upstairs and undressed in the dark and got into my side of the bed and lay there under a sheet thinking. My thinking, however, was not very clear or coherent, and the truth is that I didn’t know what to do, or if I had been smart or stupid in doing what I had already done. I knew that I should have reported Beth’s death to the police, of course, but anyone can see that this would have involved tricky explanations that I preferred to avoid if possible. I felt guilty about going off and leaving her alone on the hard floor of the bandstand in the darkness of Dreamer’s Park, and there was a thin little voice in my brain that kept saying I could at least have seen to it that she was taken somewhere and made comfortable for the night, but this was sentiment unrelated to circumstances or sense. It could hardly be expected that Beth would ever know or care that I had or hadn’t, and besides, considered from a particular point of view, it was a land of dirty trick she had pulled on me, anyhow. And not the first, either, although the last.
What I was in, plainly, was a mess. Someone had killed her, and I had walked into it full of gin and nostalgia with nothing more on my mind than a minor infidelity, and who had done it, for whatever reason, was something that might never be known if I became involved and placed at the scene, for it might be decided that I was as logical as anyone else could be, besides being convenient. If this developed, as it might, it would certainly be advisable to have some alternate suggestions in mind, and I tried to think of some alternates to suggest, but the best I could do on short notice was Wilson Thatcher, who wasn’t very convincing in the part.
More likely, I thought, it was someone with a good reason who had followed Beth here from wherever she had been, or most likely of all, it was a local glandular nut who had followed her to the park or had simply discovered her there by accident in the dark bandstand. Still, as I remembered
