She didn’t finish that, probably couldn’t finish it even to herself for a long time. But, Mary realized with astonishment and admiration, in spite of what must have been her extreme shock when St. Ives changed character before her eyes, she was being deliberately elliptical for the police. She was pointing a way, so that they mightn’t all be detained here forever.
“I did think,” said Jenny steadily to the man she had fallen at least a little in love with, “that everything was all right when I heard an ambulance just a few minutes later.”
The effect on St. Ives was peculiar. Mary saw the moment when he believed her—and looked bitter and dispossessed, like a man who had had something precious snatched away from him. It wasn’t grief; it had nothing to do with grief. Was that why any compassion she felt for him was purely in the abstract? Because he had said “my wife” in the same tone he might have used to refer to his horse, or his car? He had been bereft, she couldn’t doubt that, but a part of that had been personal outrage.
The desk telephone rang, and the officer in charge answered it. He listened briefly, his dark gaze on Jenny and then on Mary, before he hung up; it might have been her imagination that made him look disappointed.
“So,” he said, contemplating them all, and it was clear that he didn’t know quite what to do with them, appetizing though they were. Daniel Brennan had paid his fines. St. Ives had resisted, but without sufficient violence. In that deserted area, the peace hadn’t been disturbed. Olfactory evidence to the contrary, Jenny was sober. It was true that a police car had been diverted on what proved to be an unnecessary errand, but that happened all the time.
He fixed his stare on Mary, who sat with her raincoat collar turned up around her throat—but that wasn’t remarkable, because from time to time she shivered, although he himself found the room quite warm. “You will wish to press charges?”
It was from her door, out of halfway comprehensible motives and a decision neither weighed nor studied, that a woman in need of help had been turned away. “No,” said Mary. “We had an argument, as I told you, but it was all a misunderstanding.”
She looked at St. Ives as she spoke, and saw that hatred, like love, was not so easily dispelled. He must have lived with his loathing like a new marriage bond for forty-eight hours, and along came a bony eighteen-year-old from the East, breaking it. Would he have a carry-over, a stubborn belief that she was still somehow involved?
She stood up. “May we go now . . . ?
She assumed that the police would escort the man she had known as Owen St. Ives back to his car, and that he would then turn it over to the place he had rented it from and resume his own blue car and get out of here; she didn’t care. She waited with Jenny while Brennan went to get his, aware of an occasional curious glance from the few passers-by at the sight of two Anglo women outside the police station at this hour, not caring about that either.
In the bluish glow, Jenny dragged her hair over her shoulder and studied the ends fiercely. “I did see Brian at the market this afternoon. I lied to you about that.”
“I know. I also—” began Mary, and stopped. Why pile pain upon pain? Jenny had saved them both, and been deceived, appallingly in the second case, by two men in a row. She would have quite enough to live with apart from the knowledge that Brian Beardsley had done his best to get her interred in a Mexican prison. Later, if it became necessary—but not now, when Jenny had taken such a physical and mental beating.
Brennan came back with his car, and held the door while Jenny wobbled into the back. He didn’t immediately hand Mary in. He said curiously, “Did you mind a great deal, about St. Ives?”
How noticing he was, when he had only observed them together at the police station. And had she minded, apart from that instinctive recoil in the car, as though she had received a lash? The haunting look of Spence—but something had made her back off from Spence at the last minute; not that there was a murderous bone in his body, but he hadn’t been for her.
“No,” said Mary, and Brennan took her hand contentedly. “You can’t go anywhere, because of your car. You’ll be here in the morning.”
“Yes, I will.” Whether it was fatigue or something else, Mary felt suddenly shy with him, as though they were meeting for the first time on this chilly dark alien street. And, in effect, they would be starting all over again. “I haven’t even thanked you yet, Daniel.” It tasted new on her tongue, and adventurous.
“We have, I hope, all the time in the world,” said Brennan.
The man whose real name turned out to be Wesley Hale did not have a carry-over of any kind. At some time before dawn, his northbound car crossed the median and flipped over, killing him instantly. Tragically, said the short newspaper account, he was to have attended the funeral later in the day of his wife, Charlotte, a recent murder victim. (See related story.) As there was no alcohol involved, it was the official surmise that he had fallen asleep at the wheel.
But of course the police had not seen his robbed and furious eyes.
Jenny had had an abrupt longing for her parents, and went home with a gained
