Alone in the cabin, Kate discovered that the solitude and the country had once again enabled her to collect herself. She had enjoyed what Mollie Panter-Downes, an English writer on whom Kate rather doted, called “the ultimate luxury of the well-off—the ability to avoid one’s nearest and dearest at will.”
Last night had been particularly clear, with the stars brilliant in the sky. Kate had known those who took comfort from the stars, as though the possible existence of other worlds minimized the sufferings of this one. Kate did not agree. Awed by spectacle, she nonetheless paid, with Whitman, her whole devotion to this world:
The earth, that is sufficient,
I do not want the constellations any nearer,
I know they are very well where they are,
I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
Trips to the moon, which Kate had watched on television, left her unmoved. The hoisting of the American flag on the moon she considered easily the worst example of bad taste since the Albert Memorial.
Three months ago Max had walked up the dirt road and paused at the edge of her meadow, searching for a path. “Drive with me to Maine,” he had said. Of course, Kate thought bitterly, I naturally took it for granted that my presence was desired for its own sake, that I was as ever the one to whom all thoughts turn. Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it? But self-flagellation was not in order. Gerry Marston’s death could not in any case have been prevented; no one else had suffered since. However monumental her own misconceptions, they had done harm to no one.
At least here, alone, she had been able to determine on a course of action, and must now think of returning. Her eyes moved from the now overcast sky, past the trees now completely in foliage, to the road where Max had stood that day. For one ghastly moment Kate thought she was having a genuine hallucination. Then, with a tremor, she realized, whatever her problems, they were not chimerical.
Max stood in the dirt road surveying her meadow.
Their eyes could not, at that distance, meet; yet Kate felt them meet. No worry this time about changing my clothes, she thought. Her pants were grubby as ever, and her shirt, a discarded one of Reed’s, was tied up, leaving her middle bare. This she untied and tugged down around her hips in an act, she supposed, with some vestigial traces of the girding of one’s loins. Max began to walk toward the cabin.
“Where to this time?” Kate asked as she opened the door to him. The thought of locking it occurred momentarily, only to be abandoned. He could always get in if he wanted to. And sooner or later she would have to talk to Max. How like him to have adopted the ritual of talking here.
“I’ll sit at the table again,” he said. “You sit where you like, of course. Do you think we might have some tea?”
“All right.” Kate filled the kettle and put it on to boil. Waiting for it, she collapsed into her overstuffed chair and watched Max’s inevitable lighting of his cigarette, the crossing of his legs. Like Noel Coward, she had thought, all that time ago.
He waited until the cups of tea were prepared, his in front of him, hers clutched in both hands as she sat, her feet beneath her, in the large chair.
“When had you planned your little exposure?” he asked.
“Any time would have done,” Kate answered. “This as well as another, though it is hardly your style. Max.”
“What made you take it up again, Kate, in your maddening female way?”
“How did you know I had taken it up? I’ve mentioned it to no one.”
“No. I’m counting on the fact that you haven’t. Not even to Reed, I’ll dare say. Two fantastic tales are too many to spin inside one month, even to one’s beloved and, if I may say so, ridiculously indulgent husband. I knew because Herbert told me, indirectly, of course. A very small piece of information will reveal a good deal to the person who knows how to use it.
“Herbert,” Max went on, “was overcome with some impulse of fraternal feeling the other day. Perhaps you inspired it. We had dinner together at my club. He said how much he had enjoyed meeting you in Oxford, and how he had talked to you lately on the telephone. Oh, he didn’t tell me your questions, Herbert is too discreet for that, but it was clear enough you had not relented in your feverish interest in my birth. This seemed to indicate you’d got hold of some further information you wanted to ratify. Am I wrong?”
“No. Quite right. Have you come, Max, because it gives you pleasure to dote on what a fool I’ve been, and how easily you manipulated me? I gave you every opportunity, of course. You couldn’t have managed any of it without my eager help. I’ve tried to think where I first went astray. It was the portrait. That portrait made Whitmore so much more central, even in that house, than Cecily, who had died and removed the spirit. Do you think that’s it?”
“No doubt.”
“And after that I served all your purposes, from the identification of the body to the discovery of what I thought to be your mean and sinister motive.”
“But it was all so complete, Kate. You had your letters, it was all so neat and finished off, with binding all around the edges. How did it happen to unravel?”
“Why should I tell you? My fatal desire to tell stories has done damage enough.”
“Let’s say because this will be the last one you ever tell.”
Kate looked at Max. He had lit another cigarette, but barely sipped his tea. Was he noticeably less controlled? She must, at any rate, keep talking. She drew a cigarette from her pocket. “I won’t light it yet,” she said, as Max rose to his feet. “I’m still trying to give it up, as I told you last time.” She held the pack of matches in her hand, playing with it.
“A while ago,” she said, “just after you’d given me the letters, a student came to see me. At home. I often see my dissertation students in the summer if I’m around; it’s hard to deny them any consultation all during that time. Anyway, this young woman was one of those still searching around for a dissertation topic. She wasn’t anyone I had uppermost in my mind then. One tends to focus one’s attention on the students in one’s classes or preparing before one’s eyes for a crisis—an exam or essay.” Kate wove her story on, aware of the necessity of talking, of going on talking.
“She had come to see me with her mind made up about a topic she wanted to propose. ‘I want to write on Dorothy Whitmore,’ she said. I expect I must have grimaced because she asked me if I had some objection to the topic. ‘None that is important,’ I said. ‘No doubt I shy away from the subject because Gerry Marston was working on it.’ She and Gerry had been together in a seminar of mine. ‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘Gerry was writing on Cecily Hutchins. She’d gone absolutely clunkers about her. Always had adored that sort of crisp novel, but when she came upon Hutchins, she just raced through everything from start to finish. It was Gerry, though, who put me on to Whitmore at first. Whitmore was much more my style. Not so much upper-class attitudes and wit and the right wine with everything.’
“I laughed, naturally, in that superior and maddening way professors have, and said I happened to know she was wrong. Gerry had definitely been working on Whitmore. Indeed, I could hardly be more certain of it.
“The young woman stared at me in some astonishment. One does not flatly contradict a senior professor who may be the sponsor of your dissertation, even if she seems to have been going at it a bit hard and is manifesting the first signs of senility. Yet the young woman did continue to argue with me. The significance of that was slowly borne in upon me. If a student continues to argue with a professor, that student is pretty damn sure of her facts: I’d learned that early on.
“I told her, therefore, that I had perhaps been mistaken. We discussed Whitmore for a bit, and I told her what background material I thought she should look at. When she’d gone, I tried to think where I had got the idea so firmly in my mind that Gerry was working on Whitmore. I went back to my files, which I had not looked at since Gerry’s death: all her letters to me, her proposal and outline and bibliography were there. No doubt whatever. Her dissertation had been Hutchins from beginning to end. The only mention of Whitmore came in a reference to Hutchins’s friends and literary relationships.
“Don’t think that at this point I felt any more than mild confusion. Obviously, there had to be some reason for my assumption that Gerry’s passion had been for Whitmore. ‘After all,’ I thought to myself, ‘I direct a great many students; this was a simple, not impossible, not even unlikely mistake.’ But something had confirmed me in it. Not just the fascination of the portrait. Something else. Then, of course. Max, I remembered. It was that as yet unopened letter from Gerry at the Wallingford, proving Gerry was interested enough in Whitmore to have written Hutchins about her.”
Kate paused. She lit her cigarette and made something of a business of looking for an ashtray. She discovered one and brought it back with her to her chair.
“Why don’t you have a drink?” Max asked. “Are you still without anything but California wine?”
“I don’t want a drink, thank you. Those unopened letters had rather troubled me the first time I saw them. It seemed such a loose end in an otherwise neatly handled estate. You must have kept them out to camouflage Gerry’s letter—the letter supposed to have been from Gerry. You wanted my attention focused on Whitmore. Once that was clear, I compared the typing on that letter with Gerry’s letters to me about her dissertation. The Wallingford letter had been typed on a different machine. That might not, in itself, have been court evidence, but it went a long way with me. You write other people’s letters well. Max. How neatly you caught the bland tone of a well-mannered child writing to a famous author. And you succeeded in drawing my attention to the portrait, to Whitmore, and away from Cecily. Clean away from Cecily.”
“You know what Wilde said.” Max spoke now as though this were the sort of conversation dreamed about by aspirants to a world of style and high culture. “ ‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies. I have not got one who is a fool. They are all men of some intellectual power, and consequently they all appreciate me.’ A compliment to you, Kate.”
“No, it’s not,” Kate said bluntly. “You thought you had one who was a fool. Clearly I did not appreciate you. But I admit the quotation as nicely chosen at this moment. You think all those who disagree with you are fools, Max.”
“Do go on. Having compared the typeface according to the best rules of criminal investigation, what did you do next?”
“My governess used to do my hems. When I think of her now, that is how I always remember her. Being a woman of great neatness and conservative tendencies, in the best sense of the word, she would try to get out in one piece the thread with which the original hem had been sewn. She would try to catch it, and often it would break off. But sometimes the thread would come out perfectly and whole. She would wind it onto a piece of cardboard, feeling triumphant. This thread, Max, began to unravel in exactly the same way. Which reminds me, I’ve always meant to ask someone knowledgeable and devoted to the proper use of language: what is the difference between ravel and unravel, as in Shakespeare and the ‘ravell’d sleave of care’?”
“Go on with your story.”
It was an enormous effort not to show her fear. In refusing this digression. Max had told her much. There could be no question of his state of mind. For a moment she considered refusing to talk, but her only chance was if talk would distract him.
“What else is there to tell. Max? Nothing was left but the dissolution of my story. What an attractive story it was. And every piece of evidence, or what I chose to consider evidence, seemed to confirm it. Herbert was the one who showed me the folly of my ways. A few straight-forward questions and it became obvious that you were his real brother, not possibly adopted. He made clear, I blush to say, that adoption is a legal procedure and a matter of record. I asked if your mother might not have pretended to be pregnant: padding, travels, that sort of thing. It didn’t take Herbert long to explode that theory. Then I realized that Whitmore’s medical record would have mentioned if she’d had a child. It’s the sort of information doctors need.
“Oh, Max, how I admired the quickness of your responses. With what relief you must have heard that tale of your sinister parentage here, in this cabin, and realized that I had provided you with something you could not yourself have dreamed up; a safe motive. One, moreover, romantic and far-fetched enough to become mincemeat in the hands of any good defense lawyer. You could trust Reed and me to know that.
“I think of you, Max, those eight days at Raymond Brazen’s—were you really at Brazen’s, helping him with his book? That’s one of the many points I haven’t got around to checking.”
“Oh, yes, I was there. I did help him with his book. But he is old and could only work a few hours a day. Moreover, bless the man, he is a keeper of inconsiderable trifles and always has been; one of those who can’t throw anything away. He had paper that must have been many years old—old enough not to look the least new. The watermark worried me a bit; it might have been traced as an American paper. I put a bit in one of Whitmore’s letters about her shortage of paper and her gratitude for the American paper Cecily had left on a visit.”
“I think of you there, Max, writing those letters, copying that handwriting. You must have filched a few things from the Wallingford to copy from. Did you enjoy making those letters up? They were clever, Max. Damn clever. Except, as I realized later, Whitmore would never have wished for a boy that way or harped so on it. Women are not all as self-hating as you assume them to be; certainly not Whitmore.”
“I was amused at how easy those letters were to write. I almost became Whitmore, dashing them off before rushing about, sticking her nose in where she wasn’t wanted.”
“Like Gerry Marston.”
“Exactly like Gerry Marston.”
“Why did you kill her, Max? Do you mind telling me?”
“Why should I mind?”
Kate had sometimes wondered how brave she would be if actually faced with violence. One never knew. Either one would be able to draw upon resources of stamina or one would collapse. Apparently she would not collapse. Her mind, moreover, seemed to have been sharpened by fear, at least temporarily. What she doubted now was how long she could resist the debilitating effects of fear.
“You realize that I shall kill you,” Max said. “I must do that. But you will seem to have killed yourself.” Kate noticed that even now he used “will” and “shall” correctly. We die, she thought, upon a fine point of grammar, and just avoided, almost too late, the tempting release of hysterical laughter.
“I don’t in the least mind satisfying your curiosity,” he continued. “Curiosity is an overpowering human motive, more forceful often than sex or money; it has not only killed the cat. Yes, light your own cigarette. I am much stronger than you might suppose, but you are tall for a woman and not overweight. There is something too vulnerable about a man lighting a woman’s cigarette after he has threatened her life. Cecily and I quarreled. Before the wedding. She had asked me to come and see her not long before she left for England. She had always said that I would be her literary executor, that I would write her biography. It was an established fact. Everyone knew. I had long arranged my life to include it. It had been agreed upon. After all, we had the same background, more or less, the same attitudes. So I thought. But Cecily turned out, when I went up there, to have transformed herself into one of those wide-eyed liberals, the sort who thinks students should be allowed to rampage on campuses and interfere with the workings of government and business. It emerged that we no longer saw eye to eye on anything. I said that at least she had been a good wife to Ricardo. ‘Whatever do you think you mean by that. Max?’ she asked. ‘For many years I didn’t live my life, I lived his. I bought his ties, and arranged his sittings, and massaged his ego, and organized his exhibitions. Oh, I wrote, but only when Ricardo was elsewhere, attended to by other and younger women who gladly ran his errands and did his chores and were content to worship him. Perhaps I was a good wife, but only after I became, a good person, which was when we moved here permanently. Moved to the sea. After that, I didn’t care if Ricardo came or not and, perversely, he used more and more to come. Those were our happiest years, when I ceased caring if I was a wife at all, and was often alone. Max, how much of everything do you understand? Do you think writing my biography is going to redeem that conventional, conservative, lost world for you?’ ‘You were a friend of my mother’s,’ I answered. ‘I understand your life.’ ‘My God, Max,’ she said, ‘I don’t think you understand anything. You don’t even understand your mother.’
“We talked about everything then. Such conversations go from one thing to another, becoming worse and worse. Vietnam, Watergate, integration, women’s rights—we covered it all. In the end she actually asked me to leave. Not then—it was late at night—but first thing in the morning. She said she was glad we’d had this talk before it was too late. ‘How often,’ she said, ‘those who have affection for one another take for granted that they agree on important and fundamental things. You’re wrong for me, as literary executor and certainly as biographer. I shall make that clear in my will. I’ll write old thingybottom’—which is what she always called her lawyer—‘the changes.’ And that was all. The next morning I actually begged her to reconsider. She said there wasn’t that much rush; plenty of time when she returned from the wedding.
“As you know, she died in England. Her children were abroad with her. There was the chance she’d said something to them, but it was unlikely. Cecily’s charm had always been lost on her children. I think she had expended all there was in that way on Ricardo, whatever she chose to say later. I don’t know how much Cecily delighted in her children, although they were very successful: Thad and Roger are with excellent firms, and the daughter made a very good marriage. Dear me, I’m wandering. There was a chance no one knew she had changed her mind. Up to the house I went, renting a car at the Boston airport, in another name, of course, and driving. Yes, I learned to drive, long ago, but why tell anyone? The Hertz people make it beautifully easy, as they say in their advertisements. I called ahead, reserving a car for Mr. Browning, and it was there, I gave them cash; they gave me the keys. What could have been simpler? Before, I had stolen a driver’s license from a stranger.
“Cecily had drafted a new section to her will dealing with her literary remains; she left it in the top drawer of her desk. It was the first thing you saw when you opened it. And I was not the only one who had opened it. Your Gerry Marston had opened it also. She swore she hadn’t, swore she hadn’t broken in, had found the back door opened, had only meant to peek and go to the bathroom, and somehow landed in Cecily’s study. I found her looking at the portrait. A likely story.”
“Not unlikely,” Kate said. She herself had felt impelled to see Cecily’s house, hadn’t she? Hadn’t that been one of her reasons for going with Max in the first place?
“Did you talk to her?” Kate asked.
“Oh, yes, we talked. I didn’t accuse her of anything, or frighten her. I didn’t try to make her admit she’d looked in drawers. I quite charmed her, if you want to know. Told her I was Cecily’s literary executor and actually was interested in her theories and her work.”
“What makes you think she read the draft of the will?”
“Her surprise when I told her I was literary executor. Her—It was obvious. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to take a chance. And I couldn’t afford to trust her. I ought not to have been there; supposedly I was around the university, between classes. I had a class next day.”
“All that about the horse was nonsense, then?”
“Of course. My horsiness seemed to please you; it fit in nicely with Whitmore’s horsiness.”
“It wasn’t hard, I suppose, to get her out on the rocks.”
“Not particularly. Like you, she was longing to climb about on them. I joined her and pointed out something on the horizon. Then I hit her over the head with a rock. When she fell, I had to hold her head underwater. The tide was coming in, and did the rest. After that, I waited. The original will was prepared for probate. The lawyer informed me of what my duties would be. I knew then that it was all right. Except for the body.”
Kate kept her eyes steadily on him. He needed no questions to continue.
“I didn’t want a big brouhaha when the body was found. Nor did I want her to be missed, starting a big search from that end. In enticing you up there, my willing dear, to identify her, I took a chance. You might have been questioned anyway, once she was identified in that place, and this way I provided the groundwork for a perfectly natural explanation of her death. You didn’t like it, I could see that, but your fascination with the Whitmore portrait helped me. Oh, Kate, you tried so hard to trust me, but you didn’t. Not all my famous charm could change that. So when, finally, you came up with your wonderfully romantic story, quite worthy of the best in the Gothic novels, I was on to it like a shot. If Gerry Marston had been interested in Whitmore, as you so soon concluded, there was no way she could have possibly been a threat to me. You’ve seen that now. I quite enjoyed doing the letters, but I’ve told you that. I’ve told you everything, haven’t I? I’ve talked too long.”
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Kate said.
“Do you? If this were one of the movies our crazed youth feed upon, I would watch you. But I don’t care for that sort of thing. The window in there is too small and high for you to climb through. Close the door and be quick, do.”
She did, indeed, need to go to the bathroom, but beyond that she had needed the respite from his presence. Yet this was a mistake. Out of sight of him, she became more nervous. Ought she try the window after all? “Coming out?” his voice called. She opened the door and moved back to her seat.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” he asked. “No Scotch here anywhere?”
“None,” Kate said. “Did you drive here?”
“Oh, yes, I’ve rented another car. But perhaps I shall soon admit to driving, when it’s quite safe to do that, or perhaps I shall take very public driving lessons, at which I shall be inordinately stupid, and then I shall buy a car. I shall have more money now. You know, Kate, I’m not as well off as you suppose. When you drew all your lovely little conclusions about primogeniture, you were right. Herbert got the property, which was about all there was. I’ve already got an advance on this biography and a good contract. It will make money. Not, as you suppose, because it is about a woman, but because it is written well with true style and cynicism. I shall get reviews every bit as good as Malcolm Muggeridge’s. We are the wave of the future, he and I; not, of course, that we have met.”
She must keep him talking. That above all else was clear. “What are your plans?” she asked.
“To write the biography. To edit the rest, judiciously. And to expose the sealed Whitmore papers as spurious. I dare say any handwriting expert can help there. Let us only hope he is not clever enough to spot the real wielder of the pen.”
“I meant your plans for me.”
“I have a gun.” Max brought it out and rested it on the table. “You can buy them, easily. You liberals who always want to license guns can’t prevent that. If we all carried guns, and every crook and mugger knew it, there would be less crime.”
“Am I supposed to have bought this gun?”
“Certainly. They wouldn’t be able to trace it, but negative evidence is not conclusive. You’ve been gloomy lately. Taken to coming up here alone to brood. Worried about middle age, and the onrush of those who are younger. Disturbed, perhaps, by the death of a student.”
“Am I to leave a note?”
“No. All that will be surmised. I have thought it through. No one will know I have been here. My car is hidden in the trees, away from the road. It will be one of thousands of cars returned to Hertz at the end of this weekend. The clerk will not even glance at me as she processes it. Oh, I thought of other forms of death. But the simplest is always the best.”
“Unfortunately, there are no rocks.”
“It would hardly have done to repeat oneself.”
“And the old woman, Cecily’s neighbor. She hadn’t heard anything, or seen anything?”
“Of course not. But she is old and can be counted on to be forgetful, or to appear so. The lawyer had called me, as it happens, assuming I was still literary executor.”
“Murderers always think they will get away with it. But something unexpected turns up. I promise you, Reed will never believe your suicide theory. He has access to the most sophisticated of criminal investigations. Wouldn’t it be safer to let me live?”
“No. I know your sort. I’d never be safe again, or think I was, which comes to the same thing. Oh, if you gave your word, perhaps, but you wouldn’t. Would you promise?”
“To save my life? Of course. And keep it.”
“No. You wouldn’t mean it. It wouldn’t count as a promise. You would persuade yourself that I had killed one person and might kill another. One can serve only one life sentence; one would have said ‘die once,’ before you liberals removed the death penalty.”
With her eyes Kate measured the distance between them. If she began running wildly around, he could hardly shoot. One cannot be supposed to have shot oneself in the back. He had to be able to place the bullet where a suicide might have aimed it. That was on her side. She began to shift her weight in the chair.
“Don’t move,” he said. “My hope is to shoot you so that the wound looks self-inflicted, but if I must make it look like an intruder, I will. That is less to my purpose because it means that there is someone for whom the police are searching, but I will shoot you if you move.”
“My feet are asleep.”
“Stretch them in the chair.”
“What time is it, Max?”
“Look at your own watch. What time does it say?”
“Five.”
“What I have worked out,” Max said, rising, the gun in his hand, “is that you would not shoot yourself here, in the cabin. You would not want to soil it for Reed, who after all, as you told me the first day I came here, helped to build it and then bought it from Guy. You would walk deep into the woods. Then there would be one shot. Even if the local farmers noticed it, they would, put it down to someone shooting a varmint. Allowable without a license, in any season. Let’s walk out to the woods.”
Kate, as she rose, willed her body to move, willed herself to rush him, to kick out at him, to tackle him. Too late now to think of all those courses in self-defense which had seemed aimed, somehow, at another generation, in a different sort of life. She could not will her body into combat, or even into a sudden motion. No doubt if he threw himself upon her, she would find the will for defense. But the initiative for a kung-fu leap through the air was beyond her.
He walked surely as they plunged into the woods; he had a compass. “There is always a danger, in woods, of walking in a circle, particularly when the woods are all evergreens,” he said. “And I want to be able to get straight out. Immediately.” They walked so far that it seemed to Kate they must be about to emerge at the other side, but her sense of time was betraying her in all probability. He kept motioning her on whenever she turned back to look at him. Ahead of him, she felt safer. He would not shoot her in the back if he could help it.
It was then that the surge of energy which is said to come to animals just before they die in a trap reached Kate. Within one enormous rush of vitality, she realized, her only chance was to run fast into the woods, to take a chance of losing him. Almost as her muscles tensed for the burst he called, “Don’t run Kate, I will shoot.” But she ran anyway, veering off sharply to one side, hoping to get in back of him. And as she rushed, tripping over underbrush and banging into trees, she heard a shout and then the gun was fired. She was by no means certain if she had been shot, since she had run, the moment before, into a tree and been stunned.
“Kate,” Reed’s voice called. “Kate. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Kate said, and fainted.
“He’s certainly mad,” Reed said, sometime later, when she had achieved the house with the help of another man (what other man?) and Max, who had been knocked unconscious, had been carried off in an ambulance called by Reed at the telephone in the house of the woman down the road.
“I hope you paid her,” Kate said, worried.
“I gave her ten dollars,” Reed said. “Kate. Say hello to Guy. Between Guy and me, we overpowered him.”
“Yes,” Reed said, later still, when they were driving very slowly back to New York. “Of course I borrowed a police car, with flashing red light going like mad. We must have gone a hundred miles an hour. There’s many a frightened driver along the Taconic Parkway who will not be the same for days. We did it in just under an hour.”
“But how did you know?”
“Because, dear Kate, you are a woman of your word. Leo, with his blessed, wonderful athletics, called at three-thirty to say where were you? It was the last game of the season and you had promised to come, and he just wondered, weren’t you coming? ‘Did she say positively?’ I asked, not really worried yet. ‘Yes, I think so. All the other parents are here. But it doesn’t matter,’ Leo said. ‘I just wondered.’ But he had run all the way to Fifth Avenue, when his team was up, to telephone.
“The game had started at three, which meant you must have planned to leave the country by one-thirty, two at the very latest. I told myself you had left late, your watch had stopped, you had run into traffic, there had been an accident, but it wasn’t like you. You would have called or left a message for Leo. You don’t leave people hanging, certainly not Leo. And you obviously had to come home first. So I went into your study and there it was, all the sorry evidence. I’d never been really happy about that story; not really happy. Max wasn’t at home. That did it.”
“And Guy?” Kate asked, so tired she could scarcely form the question.
“I needed help. I didn’t want to shoot Max; that would have taken too much explaining. And Guy, in addition to being a revoltingly in-shape physical specimen, knew the cabin well and all its woody approaches. Not that we thought you would be in the woods; we decided to creep up on you that way. Then we heard him shout at you.”
“And his gun just went off?”
“It just went off when we tackled him. The bullet went into the air and fell to earth I know not where.”
“Imagine that,” Kate said.
Later still, as they drove slowly down the Saw Mill River Parkway, Kate, who kept falling asleep against Reed, woke up and said, “So you never really believed in my romantic story. I thought it such a satisfactory explanation. To which, you will remember, Gwendolen returned: ‘Yes dear, if you can believe him,’ and Cecily Cardew said: ‘I don’t. But that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer.’ Didn’t you think my story had a wonderful beauty?”
“What is she talking about?” Guy, who was driving, asked.
“No doubt it is a quotation,” Reed said. “It almost always is.”
“I do admire literary people,” Guy said.