“Mary didn’t hear threats,” I said. “They were warnings—about the curse. Gabrielle Collinson really believed in it, and thought enough of him to try to save him from it. I’ve been through that before with her. That’s why she wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t carried her off while she was too rattled to know what she was doing. And she was afraid on that account afterwards.”
“But who’s going to believe—?”
“I’m not asking anybody to believe anything,” I growled, walking on again. “I’m telling you what I believe. And while I’m at it I’ll tell you I believe Mary Nunez is lying when she says she didn’t go to the house this morning. Maybe she didn’t have anything to do with Collinson’s death. Maybe she simply went there, found the Collinsons gone, saw the bloody things and the gun—kicking that shell across the floor without knowing it—and then beat it back to her shack, fixing up that chills story to keep herself out of it; having had enough of that sort of trouble when her husband was sent over. Maybe not. Anyway, that would be how nine out of ten women of her sort in her place would have played it; and I want more proof before I believe her chills just happened to hit her this morning.”
“Well,” the deputy sheriff asked; “if she didn’t have nothing to do with it, what difference does all that make anyway?”
The answers I thought up to that were profane and insulting. I kept them to myself.
At Debro’s again, we borrowed a loose-jointed touring car of at least three different makes, and drove down the East road, trying to trace the girl in the Chrysler. Our first stop was at the house of a man named Claude Baker. He was a lanky sallow person with an angular face three or four days behind the razor. His wife was probably younger than he, but looked older—a tired and faded thin woman who might have been pretty at one time. The oldest of their six children was a bowlegged, freckled girl of ten; the youngest was a fat and noisy infant in its first year. Some of the in-betweens were boys and some girls, but they all had colds in their heads. The whole Baker family came out on the porch to receive us. They hadn’t seen her, they said: they were never up as early as seven o’clock. They knew the Carters by sight, but knew nothing about them. They asked more questions than Rolly and I did.
Shortly beyond the Baker house the road changed from gravel to asphalt. What we could see of the Chrysler’s tracks seemed to show that it had been the last car over the road. Two miles from Baker’s we stopped in front of a small bright green house surrounded by rose bushes. Rolly bawled:
“Harve! Hey, Harve!”
A big-boned man of thirty-five or so came to the door, said, “Hullo, Ben,” and walked between the rose bushes to our car. His features, like his voice, were heavy, and he moved and spoke deliberately. His last name was Whidden. Rolly asked him if he had seen the Chrysler.
“Yes, Ben, I saw them,” he said. “They went past around a quarter after seven this morning, hitting it up.”
“They?” I asked, while Rolly asked: “Them?”
“There was a man and a woman—or a girl—in it. I didn’t get a good look at them—just saw them whizz past. She was driving, a kind of small woman she looked like from here, with brown hair.”
“What did the man look like?”
“Oh, he was maybe forty, and didn’t look like he was very big either. A pinkish face, he had, and gray coat and hat.”
“Ever see Mrs. Carter?” I asked.
“The bride living down the cove? No. I seen him, but not her. Was that her?”
I said we thought it was.
“The man wasn’t him,” he said. “He was somebody I never seen before.”
“Know him again if you saw him?”
“I reckon I would—if I saw him going past like that.”
Four miles beyond Whidden’s we found the Chrysler. It was a foot or two off the road, on the left-hand side, standing on all fours with its radiator jammed into a eucalyptus tree. All its glass was shattered, and the front third of its metal was pretty well crumpled. It was empty. There was no blood in it. The deputy sheriff and I seemed to be the only people in the vicinity.
We ran around in circles, straining our eyes at the ground, and when we got through we knew what we had known at the beginning—the Chrysler had run into a eucalyptus tree. There were tire-marks on the road, and marks that could have been footprints on the ground by the car; but it was possible to find the same sort of marks in a hundred places along that, or any other, road. We got into our borrowed car again and drove on, asking questions wherever we found someone to question; and all the answers were: No, we didn’t see her or them.
“What about this fellow Baker?” I asked Rolly as we turned around to go back. “Debro saw her alone. There was a man with her when she passed Whidden’s. The Bakers saw nothing, and it was in their territory that the man must have joined her.”
“Well,” he said, argumentatively; “it could of happened that way, couldn’t it?”
“Yeah, but it might be a good idea to do some more talking to them.”
“If you want to,” he consented without enthusiasm. “But don’t go dragging me into any arguments with them. He’s my wife’s brother.”
That made a difference. I asked:
“What sort of man is he?”
“Claude’s kind of shiftless, all right. Like the old man says, he don’t manage to raise nothing much but kids on that farm of his, but I never heard
