Rosie, who had never before been spoken to with real menace, understood at once and subsided into jerky, wide-spaced gasps. Sweet was uneasy with children at the best of times, and this specimen, with her tiny monkey face and big dark eyes, made him more nervous than most. He presented his back to her while he cut the telephone cord, then gave his attention to Mrs. Balsam’s navy blue handbag on top of a bookcase. Her car keys were in it; he pocketed them.
Was it possible that she was dead? Claude swore that he hadn’t touched her, hadn’t even seen her, and he was obviously telling the truth. But heart attacks could come on without Warning, and it was those nimble types w ho suddenly dropped in their tracks while the ones with whole lists of ailments tottered on forever.
The other set of car keys that mattered were in the handbag he had yanked off the niece’s wrist. Not replying to the hammering on the bedroom door, or the cried If you’ve hurt that child— She isn’t well, can’t you see that?” Sweet walked silently to the patio door, picked up the bag, returned with it to the living room. Under Rosie’s terrified stare, ignoring the timid advances of the dog who had had a kick aimed at her by Claude, he went rapidly through its contents.
The keys weren’t there; the girl must have them in a pocket, as he had tested both cars on his arrival and found them locked. Was it important? Sweet didn’t think so. There were other ways of preventing her from getting to a telephone too soon.
Claude appeared, jacket-cuff refastened, forearm held away from his body in a gingerly curve. Sweet scooped all the coins out of the niece’s change purse, shook the bag for any betraying clink of metal from the bottom, and said briefly, “Get in the truck.”
Claude gazed uneasily at the couch. “What about the kid?”
“She goes in the bedroom. As asked. Will you for Christ’s sake—”
Claude went out the front door fast, closing it behind him. Sweet walked to the couch and picked up the flinching, recoiling, corduroy-clad little figure. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, because he did not want the niece flying at him in response to panicked screams; he had involved himself in trouble enough.
The encounter under the patio light had been unavoidable, with time running out, but Sweet thought he could survive it easily. It was conceivable that he had been taken note of while working on Mrs. Balsam’s corral, but the blazer and slacks which Teresa had nagged him into buying, plus the raincoat, created a very different effect. With his beard shaved off he looked younger and more diffident. The niece could describe him to police as Anglo, average height, with brown hair and blue eyes, but how many men in the surrounding area, let alone the city, must that image cover?
And within a little more than two hours, Claude safely delivered to Patch and on his way out of the state, he and Teresa would be in Ojo Caliente with a swarm of her relatives who would swear if questioned that he had been there all evening.
He said evenly to the bedroom door, “I’m going to put the kid in there, so don’t give me any trouble and don’t come out for fifteen minutes.”
He turned the key in the lock, opened the door just wide enough to thrust the child through, closed it again and, covered by the girl’s frantically relieved, “Rosie. Don’t worry, everything’s all right,” relocked the door soundlessly. He knew where almost everything was in this house, and before he followed Claude out into the dark he collected a wooden-handled knife with a sharp three-inch blade.
“He frew a thing,” said Rosie, gathered up into safe arms, and Amanda, immeasurably grateful for this slight, warm weight, said, “But lie’s gone, and he won’t come back.”
Had she heard the very faint echo of the heavy front door a minute or two earlier, the departure of what she somehow was sure was the object-thrower, the black shape from the cellar? She waited tensely, and had to strain for the second exit: The man in the raincoat was quieter.
The car keys seemed to burn in her pocket, but victims of bank robberies usually obeyed their staying injunctions. Still listening to the night, Amanda put on Rosie’s socks, neglected before in her wild haste; the car would be bitterly cold at first, with every square inch of clothing a help. She was presently rewarded by the purring vibration of an engine, dimming, vanishing.
Only nine minutes had gone by, but she went at once to the bedroom door. It remained firmly locked.
Briefly and nonsensically—as if she could ever have trusted him in the first place,—Amanda’s eyes filled with tears at the perfidy of this. He was away in his car; he must have a continuing plan for his fugitive friend; he would undoubtedly have done something to the telephone, so why . . . ? Was he, in spite of her assurance to Rosie, intending to come back?
The Afghan, who did not like being alone when she knew there was company to be had, whimpered throatily at the door. Amanda said distractedly, “No, Apple,” and turned and looked around her.
Two hours ago—was it only that?—she had found this room tranquil and attractive. Now, seen through a fast blur which had to be blinked away, it might have adopted that appearance for purposes of entrapment. The two rectangular windows facing the road and set high in the wall on either side of the bed could not possibly be gotten through. The picture window opposite was flanked with narrow
