Vic handed him his shoes without a word. "Like me to drive you home?"
"I can drive myself," Ralph staggered around, trying to get his shoes on, and finally had to sit down to do it. Then he got up and stumbled toward the door.
Vic followed him and handed him his magenta-banded straw hat.
"G'night. I had a very nice time," Ralph said, running his words together.
"Glad you did. Don't forget. Don't say anything to Melinda about what I told you. Good night, Ralph." Vic watched him crawl into his open convertible and zoom off, skidding the car's rear end off the road and righting it again as he went on down the lane. Vic didn't care if he drove the car into Bear Lake. The sun was coming up in a bright orange glow above the woods straight ahead.
Vic heard no sounds from the bathroom now, which meant that Melinda was probably sitting on the floor, waiting for another attack of nausea. She did that whenever she got sick, and it was impossible to persuade her to move from the floor until she was sure the attack was over. Finally, he got up from his chair, went to the bathroom, and called, "Are you all right, honey?" and got a reasonably clear murmur that she was. He went into the kitchen and poured himself a cup of coffee. He loved coffee and it almost never kept him awake when he wanted to sleep.
Melinda came out of the bathroom in her robe, looking better than she had half an hour before. "Where's Ralph?"
"He decided to go home. He said to say good night and that he had a very nice time."
"Oh." She looked disappointed.
"I tucked the blanket around him, and he felt better after a while," Vic added.
Melinda came over and put her hands on his shoulders. "I think you were very sweet to him tonight."
"That's good. You said earlier you thought I was rude." "You're never rude." She gave him a kiss on his cheek. "G'night, Vic."
He watched her walk to her room. He wondered what Ralph was going to say to Melinda tomorrow. Ralph would tell her, of course. He was that type. Melinda would probably telephone him in a few minutes, as she always did when he left, if she didn't fall asleep first. He didn't think Ralph would tell her over the telephone, though.
Chapter 4
It was astonishing to Vic how quickly the story traveled, how interested everybody was in it—especially people who didn't know him well—and how nobody lifted a finger or a telephone to tell the police about it. There were, of course, the people who knew him and Melinda very well, or fairly well, knew why he had told the story, and found it simply amusing. Even people like old Mr. Hansen, their grocer, found it amusing. But there were people who didn't know him or Melinda, didn't know anything about them except by hearsay, who had probably pulled long faces on being told the story, and who seemed to take the attitude that he deserved to be hauled in by the police, whether it was true or not. Vic deduced that from some of the looks he got when he walked down the main street of the town.
Within four days of telling the story to Ralph, people Vic had never seen or at least never noticed before were looking at him intently when he passed them in his car—an old, well-kept Oldsmobile that was an eye-catcher anyway in a community where most people had much newer cars—and pointing him out with whispers to other people. He seldom saw a smile among the strangers, but all he saw was smiles among his friends.
During those four days he saw nothing of Ralph Gosden. On the Sunday after the dawn departure, Ralph had called Melinda and insisted on seeing her, Melinda said, and she had left the house to meet him somewhere. Vic and Trixie had picnicked alone that day on the shore of Bear Lake, and Vic had chatted with the boat-keeper there and arranged for Trixie to rent a canoe for all summer. When he and Trixie had come back to the house, Melinda had been there and all hell had broken loose. Ralph had told her what he had said. Melinda had screamed at Vic, "It's the most 'stupid—vulgar—idiotic' thing I've ever heard of!" Vic took her vituperation calmly. He knew she was furious probably because Ralph had shown himself a coward. Vic felt that he could have written their conversation. Ralph: "I 'know' it isn't true, darling, but it's obvious he doesn't want me hanging around any more, so I thought —" Melinda: "I don't care what he wants! All right, if you're too much of a coward to face up to him—" And Melinda would have realized, during their talk, that he must have said the same thing to Joel Nash.
"Does Ralph really think I killed McRae?" Vic asked.
"Of course he doesn't. He just thinks you're an ass. Or else out of your head."
"But he doesn't think it's funny." Vic shook his head regretfully. "That's too bad."
"What's funny about it?" Melinda was standing in the living room, her hands on her hips and her moccasined feet wide apart. "Well—I suppose you'd have to hear it the way I said it to find it funny."
"Oh, I see. Did Joel find it funny?"
"Apparently he didn't. Seems to have scared him out of town."
"That's what you wanted to do, wasn't it?"
"Well, yes, frankly."
"And Ralph, too. You wanted to scare him, didn't you?"
"I found them both terrible bores and terribly beneath you I think. So Ralph's scared, too?"
"He's not scared. Don't be silly. You don't think anyone would
