“I’m not at all sure that I agree. Why should I?”
“For the same reason that you haven’t hung up. To keep me from going to the police.”
“I don’t even know who you are. Are you afraid to tell me your name?”
“You’ll know me when you see me, and that will be soon enough. Do you agree now to meet me? If you don’t, I’ll hang up myself, and you can take the consequences.”
There was a long silence on the line, and Sid had an uneasy feeling that there was a great deal of furious thinking going on at the other end, thinking that was probably not quite sane but crazy-crafty, and this turned out to be true from what was next said.
“I’ll meet you in one place only,” Sara said. “It must be there or nowhere.”
“Where is that?” Sid said.
“At the place where you say you saw me kill Beth Thatcher, and you must tell me right now where that place is.”
It was a neat and treacherous little trap, clearly one that Sid should have anticipated, and she cursed herself because she hadn’t. She felt at once triumphant and defeated, for it was apparent that she had been right all the way along, that the murder had truly been done somewhere besides Dreamer’s Park, and if she now said Dreamer’s Park, which was where it was supposed to have been done, she would give herself away as a liar, but she didn’t, of course, know where else to say. But Sara knew where else. That was equally apparent, and the little trap, however neat and deadly, was also a confession.
There was an even longer silence on the line now, but this time it was Sid who was doing the furious thinking. She explained afterward that it was like one of those odd psychological experiences in which someone in a great crisis is able to do something that would normally be impossible, like the man who picked up the safe that weighed five hundred pounds and threw it out the window of a burning building. Sid was not required to perform a physical feat, however. She was only required to know in an instant where Sara Pike had killed Beth Thatcher, and it was actually a little longer than an instant before she knew, but she knew soon enough. All of a sudden, she was hearing Cotton McBride say again that the wound had really been a sort of puncture with a little dirt around the edge, and immediately after that she was standing beside me in the cemetery, helping bury Beth again, and she was seeing now what she had seen then without really noticing, and what she saw was a metal vase for flowers with a spike on the bottom that you push into the ground to keep the vase from falling over. She had, she said later, an exhilarating and immediate feeling of absolute assurance.
“Surely,” she said assuredly. “I’ll meet you beside your brother Sherman’s grave.”
There was a third interval of silence. Then Sara’s voice, curiously flat and almost apathetic.
“Shall we say about eight o’clock?”
“Eight o’clock will be fine,” Sid said.
She hung up with a feeling of having done quite well. In fact, she didn’t know how she could have done much better.
“Sara’s guilty, as I thought,” she said to Millie. “We’re going to meet at eight o’clock.”
“I would almost swear,” Millie said, “that you said beside her brother Sherman’s grave.”
“It was a trick on her part. I had to name the place where Beth was killed in order to prove I was not lying about seeing it done, which in fact I was.”
“How the hell did you know the place? Did you know it all along?”
“No. It just came to me suddenly when I remembered about the puncture and the dirt and the little metal vases with spikes in the cemetery.”
“Oh. That explains everything nicely. A cemetery seems an odd place for Beth to have gone with Sara Pike, however. Why do you suppose she went?”
“Well, Gid said Beth was very sentimental in her own way, and I agree that she must have been. After all, she had gone seriously once with Sherman Pike, and she met Sara in the Kiowa Room, and undoubtedly it all came back nostalgically or something. It’s not so odd, really, that she went with Sara to visit Sherman’s grave, especially if Sara suggested it. There are a few people I have known who are dead and buried in different places that I would gladly visit if it were convenient.”
“That may be true, but I can think of many places that I would prefer to a cemetery as a place to meet someone who has killed once and might not be adverse to killing again. Especially at eight o’clock. Isn’t it beginning to get pretty dark then?”
“That’s only so much the better. I prefer that she not recognize me until she gets quite close.”
“Where, may I ask, am I supposed to be hiding all this time?”
“I’ve considered that. The Pike plot, as I recall, is right next to the Thatcher mausoleum, and the mausoleum’s just the place.”
“Oh, by God! If you imagine that I’m going to hide in a mausoleum at eight o’clock, you’re simply mistaken. Or any other time, for that matter.”
“Not in it. Behind it. It would be impossible to get in it, anyhow, for it’s naturally kept locked.”
“Well, behind it is bad enough, but I agree to hide there. What time shall we meet and go?”
“We had better go separately, I think, as a precaution. I’ll go there directly by the main entrance to the cemetery, but you had better slip in at the far side near the mausoleum so as not to be seen. It will entail some walking through a field, for there is no road approaching on that side. You must give yourself time enough to be in position shortly before eight.”
“I’ll be there,” Millie said. “You can count on me.”
CHAPTER 14
So there
