Melinda had no retort to that. She seemed restless and troubled, and there was an air of defeat about her as Havermal's stay in Little Wesley dragged on to a week. Havermal had exhausted everything there was to try. He had cruised the countryside around Wesley, Melinda said, in a radius of the distance a car could travel and still get to Ballinger in about thirty-five minutes. Vic did not know whether he had discovered the quarry or not—he must have used a map of the district, but Vic knew that some maps did not show the quarry—and this time Vic did not push his luck by asking Melinda if he had. It had rained heavily twice since Havermal had been in Little Wesley. There were rust stains on some of the flat rocks around the quarry where pieces of equipment had lain or were still lying. It would probably be hard to decide which stains were from blood and which from rust. It was incredible, Vic thought, that Havermal had not looked at the quarry by now, but perhaps he hadn't. He seemed to be spending a good half of his time cruising the roads, as Melinda said, and perhaps beating the underbrush for a body.
Havermal made one more call on Vic at the printing plant. He had nothing more concrete to throw at Vic than some critical statements that Don Wilson had made. "Don Wilson thinks he's got your number. He thinks you killed De Lisle, too. It's pretty funny when a guy with a strong motive in both cases happens to be the last guy two 'dead' guys are seen with," said Havermal.
"You mean you've found Cameron's body?" asked Vic, wide-eyed, but really Havermal didn't even inspire him to get any fun out of the interview.
"Yeah, we found the body," Havermal said, watching Vic so pointedly that Vic knew it wasn't so, but he followed through with an ingenuous:
"'Where'? Why didn't you say so?"
Insolently, Havermal made no answer, and after a few seconds went on to something else. When Don Wilson came up again, Vic said with a gentle smile:
"Don Wilson had better watch out. I could certainly sue him for libel, and I don't think he could afford it. His wife's very sweet, don't you think?"
"And dumb," Havermal commented.
"Well," Vic said, still affable, “I don't think you'll get much out of the people up here if you go around insulting them."
"Thanks," Havermal said in the tone of a honking goose.
"I'd like to thank you for one thing before you leave Little Wesley," Vic said, "and that is for showing me how solid the community is in—well, liking me. Not that I've even striven for the approval of the community or particularly craved it, but it's awfully nice to know it's there."
Havermal left not long after that, without even a parting shot at him. Vic picked up the two cigarette butts that Havermal had ground out on the floor and dropped them in his wastebasket. Then he went back into the printing room. He was in the middle of arranging a dried skeleton of an oak leaf and a flattened basket worm's cocoon in a graceful composition to serve as a colophon beneath one of Brian Ryder's poems.
Vic had another demonstration of community loyalty that evening. Hal Pfeiffer, editor of Wesley's 'New Wesleyan', called him to say that a detective named Havermal had been into his office to give a slanderous account of an investigation he had been making in regard to the Cameron case and the part in it "possibly" played by Victor Van Allen and his wife, had offered his story ostensibly at local news, and Mr. Pfeiffer had given him short shrift and had shown him the door.
"I've never met you, Mr. Van Allen, but I've heard about you,'' said Mr. Pfeiffer over the telephone. "I thought I'd tell you about this in case you were possibly worried about any such thing as this happening. The 'New Wesleyan' doesn't want anything to do with characters like Havermal."
Vic reported that to Melinda.
There was even a story from Vic's cleaners. When Vic went iii to pick up some clothes that were ready, Fred Warner, the manager, leaned over the counter and whispered that "that detective" had been in to have a look at any of Victor Van Allen's clothes that had been brought in lately. The detective had found a pair of trousers with blood on them, but Mrs. Van Allen had been with him, and she had explained, Warner said, that the trousers were stained with Vic's own blood, because he had cut his head one evening.
"The bloodstains were all on the back part of the pants," Warner said, chuckling, "on the top part. Easy to see it was a couple of drips from a head accident, but you should've seen how disappointed that detective was! He's a real bloodhound—just not a very good one, eh, Mr. Van Allen?"
And then Havermal suddenly left.
The whole town seemed to give a sigh of relief, Vic thought. People on the streets seemed to smile more, to smile at each other, as if to say that their solidarity had defeated one more detested outsider. Parties broke out. Even the Petersons invited Vic and Melinda to a party at which Vic met several people he had not met before, people who treated him with a great deal of respect. At this party—composed of people whom Melinda would ordinarily have tried to look down on—it first came to Vic's notice that Melinda was changing. She was not particularly warm or charming as she had been at parties after the De Lisle incident,
