8

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

8.28 P.M. EDT

The Tredway Tower had two lives, one lived by day, the other by night. Its day life was heavily populated, brightly lighted, highly purposeful, and animated by a thousand sounds—men sounds and machine sounds, sighs and shouts, clatter and clack, giggles and groans, door bangs and drawer bumps, whine and whisper, footsteps running, footsteps dragging, the life sounds of business.

The day life ended, except for the final mad rush of outpouring humanity, with the first stroke of the five o’clock carillon, or, if Mr. Bullard was in town and the carillon not rung, with the sweep of the second hand on the master clock that relayed the same moment to repeater clocks on all twenty-four floors.

As the day life flooded out, the night life ebbed in. Gray-faced women shuffled wearily in through the lobby, their eyes down and averted as if they sensed the incongruity of their presence in this great hall of glittering black marble and sculptured bronze. Reaching the back lobby, where marble and bronze gave way to behind-the-scenes gray paint, they clumped into the freight elevator. Finally, after a long and unprotested delay, they would be dispersed to the various floors of the building where, with brush and broom and mop and scrub bucket, they would begin their methodical erasure of the soil that the day life had left.

After the scrubwomen came the men janitors. As befitted their higher level in the social world of the Tower’s night life, they claimed the privilege of a momentarily later arrival. After the janitors came the maintenance men who, through such acts of skill as the replacement of light bulbs and the adjustment of flush valves in the washrooms, had raised themselves to the aristocracy of the Tower’s night life.

Normally, there was no overlap between the Tredway Tower’s day life and its night life. Except for an occasional late-staying day worker—who was called a “hold-up” until eight o’clock and a “sticker” if he remained later—the world of the night life was a world unto itself. It was not as drab as the casual glimpser might suspect. There were coffee percolators bubbling in the slop sink closets, cigarettes and occasionally good cigars in unlocked desks, and the big canvas bags, soft-stuffed with wastepaper, made a pleasantly rustling mattress for an occasional amatory adventure.

Tonight, however, there was neither bubble nor rustle and not a cigar was being smoked. There was at least one “sticker” on every floor of the building. Men had started coming back to their offices just before eight o’clock and now everything was in a turmoil. The head janitors were rushing around from floor to floor trying to reorganize cleaning schedules and placate annoyed scrubwomen. It couldn’t have happened on a worse night. Friday was the end of the week, the night when the once-a-week jobs were done.

The explanation that Mr. Bullard had died was widely used by the harried head janitors, but it had little effect upon the women. They all echoed the sentiments of Mrs. O’Toole, who, being the only Tredway scrubwoman of Irish descent, had logically assumed the role of spokeswoman. “If it’s a wake they’ve got to be holding, I’m thinking they could have found some place for it that wouldn’t be disturbing the work of those that have an honest living to earn.”

The only voice that might have registered a dissent was not heard. Anna Schultz, who had cleaned the Executive Suite for the last thirteen years, was sitting stolidly in the darkened back corridor of the twenty-third floor waiting for the meeting in Mr. Shaw’s office to break up. Her hopes had been raised several times when someone had come out, but that no sooner happened than someone else went in. Now there were half a dozen men from the lower floor who were waiting around in the hall and, even more discouragingly, Mr. Walling and Mr. Alderson had just come up and gone into Mr. Alderson’s office.

Anna accepted her misfortune placidly. The head janitor knew that there were a lot of “stickers” in the Executive Suite so he never argued about the hours of overtime that she got in. Some months, when Mr. Bullard had been in town a great deal, she picked up between twenty-five and thirty dollars extra. Now, filling her wait with lazy speculation, she wondered if the new president would be as good. If it was going to be that Mr. Shaw he was starting out fine. She’d get at least two hours of overtime tonight, maybe three.

8.31 P.M. EDT

Hardly more than a dozen words had been spoken since Don Walling had followed Alderson into his office. Now, watching the older man carefully, he felt an increasing awareness of the diffidence that he had sensed as soon as they had arrived on the twenty-third floor. He had expected Frederick Alderson to enter Shaw’s office immediately, an intention that Alderson’s first step after he got off the elevator had seemed to confirm, but then he had hesitated, turned, and gone into his own office with a gesture that asked Walling to follow him.

For the last two minutes, Alderson had been occupying himself with his notebook, writing so slowly that he seemed to be drawing the letters of the words.

Walling finally felt impelled to break the silence. “Shaw seems to have called in most of the major department heads.”

The remark touched a nerve-sprung trigger that released a short burst of words from Alderson. “Can’t see any point to it, no point at all.”

The poised assurance that Alderson had displayed on the way downtown had vanished completely, and Don Walling felt the imperative necessity for its quick return. “If you’ll pardon my saying so, Mr. Alderson, I think the point is rather obvious.”

“What?”

“Shaw’s making a running jump to get into the saddle. He’s called in everyone to let them know that the reins are in his hands.”

The words had part of the effect that he wanted them to have. Alderson’s face did harden with determination but the effort it required seemed more than should have been necessary. He stood up and said, “Let’s roll,” but the words were more mimicry than command and his stride was hesitant as he walked out of the office and crossed to Shaw’s door.

Don Walling, following close behind, saw Loren Shaw look up as Alderson opened the door.

“Oh, Fred! Good. Glad you’re here,” Shaw said pleasantly. “Oh, Don, too? Fine. Come in. Perhaps you can make a suggestion here.”

Van Ormand, the advertising and publicity manager, sat beside Shaw’s desk. He was wearing a white dinner jacket, making it clear that he had been called away from the Friday Dance at the country club.

“Van and I have a plan rather well sketched out, I believe, but it’s possible that there’s something we’ve missed,” Shaw said. “We’ll have a major story on the wire within an hour for the New York morning papers—Times and Herald Tribune. There’ll be a special story for the financial papers and a follow-up later for the evening and Sunday papers. The same basic story as the New York release but with a stronger company slant will be sent to all of the morning papers in our factory cities. There’ll be a shorter release for all the wire services. We’ll telephone the business editors of Time and Newsweek. That pretty much takes care of the first priority stuff. The monthly trade magazines have all closed so we have plenty of time there. Retailing Daily doesn’t publish tomorrow but we’ll have them all set for Monday.” Unexpectedly, his eyes flicked toward Alderson. “Anything I’ve missed, Fred?”

The question followed the rapid-fire recital so closely that Alderson was taken unaware and his only reply was a stumbling negative.

Don Walling, despite his growing apprehension, couldn’t help but regard Alderson’s bewilderment sympathetically for he, too, had been bowled over by the performance. Shaw had not once glanced at a note nor had he looked at Ormand for cue or confirmation. His tone had implied a thoroughly professional knowledge of the publicist’s craft.

Van Ormand gathered up his papers and left on the half gallop with a fervent, “Thank you very much for your help, sir,” for Shaw, a quick nod for Alderson, an even quicker one for Walling.

After the door had closed, Alderson said, “I hope Ormand isn’t handling this as if it were some publicity story.”

Walling winced. It was a pettish remark and made more so by Alderson’s manner. Again he could understand the origin because he, too, had been repulsed by Shaw’s coldly unemotional approach, but that was no excuse for Alderson’s lack of poise.

Shaw had taken a fresh handkerchief from his desk drawer and was pressing it between his slowly rubbed palms. “I’m quite confident that we can rely on Ormand’s judgment and good taste, don’t you think so, Don?”

The question at the end was another quick thrust. Don Walling hesitated, suspicious that it was an intentional effort on Shaw’s part to wedge him away from Frederick Alderson’s support. He made his reply as indirect as possible. “I can’t see that there’s actually much involved except sending out obituaries.”

Shaw nodded and added, “—in various lengths with the emphasis shifted to suit the editorial requirements of the different papers and magazines. Quite right. Did you have something other than that in mind, Fred?”

Again the question came unexpectedly, like the cracker on the end of an idly snapped whip. It was the third time that Shaw had done the same thing in the last two minutes and Don Walling was sure now that it was a calculated technique. He would be on his guard from now on.

“The news releases represent more of a task than one might suspect,” Shaw said. “I thought it best to reach Ormand and get him down here at once. When it first occurred to me I almost failed to do it, thinking that someone else would certainly have thought of it before I did. Apparently no one did.”

The technique had been varied now but the knife thrust was no less sharp. Don Walling hoped that Alderson wouldn’t attempt a reply and, fortunately, he didn’t.

“I’ve tied up a few other loose ends,” Shaw said, glancing at a sheet of paper that lay in front of him. “None of them of any great moment, but I’ll pass them along as a matter of information. The funeral will be Monday at four-thirty. I’ve asked that—”

Alderson interrupted with a sharply explosive bark. It was not an intelligible word, but no word could have expressed so well the same blend of astonishment and anger that Don Walling felt welling up within himself. It was an audacious presumption for Shaw to have jumped in and set the time of the funeral. He glanced at Alderson and, to his relieved surprise, saw that his jaw was firm and his hand steady.

“The funeral will be at two,” Alderson said grimly. The words were a thrown gauntlet, an unmistakable challenge.

Shaw touched the handkerchief to his lips as if he were checking the imperturbability of his expressionless mask. “At St. Martin’s?”

“Yes.”

“I see,” Shaw said, clearing his throat softly. “Perhaps I was misinformed. When I checked the church calendar I found that a wedding had been scheduled for two.”

Despite the effort that he had been making to keep from constantly watching Alderson’s face, Don Walling could not avoid a side glance. He knew from what had been said coming down in the car that Alderson had not checked with the church, because he had mentioned it as one of the things that remained to be done. He saw now that Alderson had been hit hard and felt the urge to say something that would give him a moment of recovery. The only thing he could think of to say was that the time of the funeral was an unimportant point that was hardly worth arguing, yet he was prevented from saying that because Frederick Alderson had clearly made it a major issue.

“Something can be done about the church,” Alderson said finally.

“Perhaps,” Shaw conceded graciously. “There was, however, another point that I had in mind. I believe I’m correct in assuming that the highest proportion of the older factory workers—those who might wish to attend the funeral—will be found on the seven to three shift. By having the funeral at four-thirty we’ll make it possible for them to be there.”

“That makes no difference,” Alderson snapped. “The factory will be closed.”

“For the day?” Shaw asked blandly.

“Yes, for the day!”

Walling had tried to catch Alderson’s eye before his reply but the older man’s anger had made him blaze back instantly, too fast to see the trap that he was stepping into. Only a few months before the president of the factory union had died and the vice-president, Max Hartzell, making a quick bid for popularity, had demanded that the day of the funeral be made a paid holiday for all factories. Paid holidays had been one of the most troublesome issues in previous contract negotiations and Avery Bullard, wary of giving more ground, had turned down the request. Hartzell had then carried the issue back to the union membership and, using its emotional content to the limit, had all but caused a walkout. In the end, the strike had been averted but Alderson should have realized, as Shaw obviously did, that a precedent had been established that could not be broken now without the danger of another serious flare-up.

“In view of the union situation—” Walling began, letting his voice drop then, hoping that it would be enough to jog Alderson’s memory.

Alderson appeared not to have heard him. He was staring at Shaw, his body immobilized by anger. “I suppose you were thinking of the money it would cost?”

“Not as a first consideration,” Shaw explained evenly. “My thinking was largely based on the point that Don just made—the union situation—although you are quite right, Fred, in suggesting that the cost is something that can’t be overlooked either. I happened to recall Mr. Bullard’s pointing out to the union that a paid holiday would represent a loss to the company of approximately $87,000. That figure, of course, was before the last wage raise. It would be somewhat more at the current rates.”

“I thought so,” Alderson said pointlessly.

Walling could not avoid a grudging admiration for the way that Shaw kept his face from reflecting, by even the faintest glimmer, any trace of the annoyance that he must be feeling.

“I also recalled,” Shaw went on, “Mr. Bullard’s argument to the union delegates that a paid holiday could hardly be considered mourning since the crowd at Joyland Park would unquestionably be larger than the crowd at the funeral.”

The roller coaster roared again in Walling’s mind and he heard the background screams of joy and laughter. Shaw was right. A holiday wouldn’t be a day of mourning, it would be a day of celebration. The cost would be a thoroughly unjustified expenditure of a large sum of money. On top of everything else, it would stir up a hornet’s nest with the union. What was the matter with Alderson? Couldn’t he see that? It was understandable that he had missed thinking about those things before, but now that he had thought about them there was only one possible decision. Shaw had already made it. Alderson had no choice except to confirm it, but it was plain that he wasn’t going to do so. He looked as if he were holding his breath and a purplish undertone was spreading slowly over his face.

“There’s another consideration,” Shaw went on. “It’s minor, perhaps, yet it seemed worth taking into account. The four-thirty time would make it more convenient to close the Chicago market display during the funeral period.”

Walling clenched his fists. The word “convenient” had been badly chosen and he found himself wishing that Shaw hadn’t used it. It made the meaning clear enough but instinct told him that it would only add to the anger that was already fogging Alderson’s mind.

“Convenient?” Alderson demanded with an acid bite. “That seems to be your attitude toward everything, Shaw—to make Mr. Bullard’s death as convenient as possible—for yourself. I think you’ll find some other ideas on that subject!”

Alderson’s rise and move toward the door was so unexpected and so rapidly made that Walling was caught off guard. He was only starting to stand as Alderson disappeared. His first thought was to follow, but Shaw stepped around from behind the desk and half blocked the way. It was impossible to push past him without obvious discourtesy.

Shaw’s voice showed a pronounced change, suddenly presuming an intimacy that had not been there before. “Don, tell me—am I wrong or did the old boy seem a little shaky just then? I know that he hasn’t been well but—you know him much better than I do, of course—what do you think?”

“Not too hard to understand. It’s only been a couple of hours since we heard of Mr. Bullard’s death.”

The use of the plural pronoun, grouping himself with Alderson, was only semiconsciously done but Shaw picked it up.

“Am I to take it that you share Fred’s disagreement with what I’ve done?”

“Not exactly.”

Shaw evidenced concern. “In what particular don’t you agree? Frankly, I saw no alternative to any of the decisions I made. The newspaper releases were obviously necessary and speed was of the essence. Right?”

Walling hesitated. Agreement was strangely disagreeable but disagreement was impossible.

“The time of the funeral and the holiday policy were both dictated by circumstances,” Shaw went on. “It’s conceivable, of course, that I may have overlooked some pertinent fact. If I have, I’d consider it a great personal favor if you’d call it to my attention. Have I?”

“I’m not arguing with you,” Walling heard himself say.

“But I don’t have your wholehearted support, do I? That’s something I’d hoped I could count on, Don—your support.”

It was a bold plea and Shaw, by the barest of margins, overdid it. Up to that point Walling had been battering back his instinctive dislike with the argument that Shaw had been right on every detail, that there was no possible ground on which he could be criticized for any action that he had taken or any statement that he had made. But now, suddenly, he saw what had been going on. The whole scene had been played by Shaw for his benefit. In the beginning he had suspected, but later overlooked, an attempt on Shaw’s part to split him away from Alderson. Every part of Shaw’s act—the pleasant mask, the resistance to anger, the whip-cracker questions, the invincible logic—all of it had been a calculated attack to show up Alderson in the worst possible light. The empty well from which Don Walling’s respect for Alderson had been drained, suddenly filled with sympathy for the old man.

“No suggestions?” Shaw asked. “No criticism?”

Walling paused, arguing with himself that there was neither point nor purpose in saying anything. It wasn’t his fight. The battle was between Shaw and Alderson. He was only a bystander. But the compulsion of inner honesty forced him. “Well, since you’ve asked me, I did have the impression that you were being a little rough on Fred.”

“Rough? I can’t imagine what made you think that.”

“You knew that he was closer to Avery Bullard, personally, than any of the rest of us. It’s only natural that he’d be hit a little harder—thrown off balance for a while. You may not appreciate what I’m trying to say, but—”

“Of course I appreciate it,” Shaw said hurriedly. “And I did my best to take that into account. I thought that would be evident to you. Surely you saw there was every reason why I might well have been annoyed by Fred’s obviously unfriendly attitude toward me—yet I did my best not to show it.”

“All right—skip it.”

“Wait, Don.” Shaw’s hand held his arm as he turned to the door. “I wish you wouldn’t feel that way—you particularly.”

“Why me particularly?”

“Because—well, Don, I’ve always felt that you and I shared a certain community of interest—unexplored, perhaps, but still something in common. I’ve been hoping that we might have an opportunity to work more closely together. Perhaps now we shall.”

“Perhaps.”

“Good.”

Shaw seemed overpleased and Walling felt the need to put a sharp limitation on whatever agreement Shaw might think he had been given. “As far as a community of interest is concerned,” he said slowly, “—the only interest I share with anyone is the best interest of the company.”

“Then we do have that in common. Oh, by the way, I wonder if you’d be good enough to give me a hand with a couple of things here tonight. There are still a number of people waiting to see me and—”

“So I noticed,” Walling broke in, making the tone of his voice add a question mark.

“It occurred to me that there were probably a number of matters waiting for Mr. Bullard’s early decision,” Shaw explained. “Handling them through the executive committee will necessarily slow down action so I thought it might be of some advantage to all of us if I made a fast survey of the situation tonight. That will give us the weekend to get squared away. Then we’ll have decks cleared for action on Monday.”

Shaw hesitated and then, as if he recognized the need for further justification, went on. “I’m turning up some rather critical situations. Were you aware that our shipments of gumwood from the southern mills are almost four weeks behind schedule? Schaeffer from Purchasing just informed me that Water Street will be out of gum in less than three weeks. Unless something is done immediately, we’ll be facing a shutdown. Did you know that?”

Lumber supply was far removed from Don Walling’s normal responsibility, but it happened that Jesse Grimm had mentioned the situation at lunch a few days before and now, as a counteraction of Shaw’s annoyingly smug voice-of-doom prediction, he got a mild pleasure out of being able to say, “I think you’ll find that Jesse has everything set for a switch to beech and birch. A contract has been placed for about a quarter of a million board feet with some of the northeastern mills.”

“That’s what I thought, too,” Shaw said with a sigh that offered a sharing of his own disillusionment. “Unfortunately, the orders were never placed. We have an option—that’s true—but the option hasn’t been exercised. It was held up by Purchasing, waiting for Jesse Grimm to get Mr. Bullard’s approval.”

Don Walling felt himself slump.

“Bit more serious than you thought?” Shaw asked with a faint smile. “Fortunately we have until Monday noon on the option so there’s still a chance to squirm out. I should talk to Jesse though. I understand he’s out of town.”

“Yes, down in Maryland,” Walling heard himself say, his voice sounding faraway and detached, his mind occupied with the contradiction of Loren Shaw … the more you disliked the man, the more right he proved himself to be!

“Would you know, by any chance, how to get in touch with Jesse?”

“I think Fred left a call for him with a message to call back.”

A smile rolled Shaw’s underlip. “If our good friend Mr. Alderson doesn’t object too strenuously, would you mind suggesting that Mr. Grimm talk to me as well?”

“I’ll tell him.”

It was a natural exit line and he stepped through the door.

“Oh, Don?” Shaw’s voice reached after him. “If you do have a few minutes to spare—?”

“Sorry. I’d forgotten. What needs doing?”

“If you wouldn’t mind, hop up and see how Miss Martin is coming along. I’ve started her sending telegrams to the out-of-town factories and branches. Just look things over, see how it’s going. All right, Morrison, come in.”

Morrison was one of the men waiting on the bench and Don Walling saw the look of eager subservience on the office manager’s face as he bounded to his feet and followed Shaw into his office. The king is dead, long live the king, Walling said to himself, and his mind reacted as if his mouth had been swilled with oil.

He was halfway up the stairs when a twinge of conscience reminded him that Alderson might be waiting for him in his office. Looking back he saw a path of yellow light falling out across the floor from the frosted-glass panel of Alderson’s closed door. Sympathy surmounted disappointment and he started down again, but with the first step he heard a sound above his head and looked up. Erica Martin was standing at the head of the staircase. The only light was the side light that came from the open door of her office and, her face and figure etched out of the darkness, made her seem a lost soul standing at the brink of a black abyss.

Quickly, doubling the steps, he was in front of her and, standing a step lower, was looking at her face. She stared past him, her eyes fixed on the door of Shaw’s office.

“Are you all right, Miss Martin?”

She reacted as if the sound of his voice had been the first warning of his presence. The flinch of her body started a flashing turn that carried her back into her office.

In the time of the half-dozen steps that it took him to follow her, she regained the veneer of composure and when she turned to face him her eyes were as clear-seeing as the stain of lost tears would let them be.

“Everything’s all right,” she said, glancing down at her desk to transfer the meaning from herself to the work she had done.

He saw the fan of carbon copies and, quickly reading the top one, realized how many times in these last few minutes she had been forced to repeat, over and over again, the mind-pounding acknowledgment of Avery Bullard’s death. His feeling was only the sympathy of transposition, unconsciously putting himself in her place, because there was no prior background of warmth between them, yet what he felt now was strong enough to make him reach out impulsively and place his arm across her shoulder.

Instantly, so fast that her act could only have been as completely impulsive as his own, she threw her body hard against his and her bent head drove itself into the saddle of his shoulder. Then, so close to him that it might have come from his own throat, he heard a shaking sob and a trembling cry of muffled anguish. His arm tightened and his mind flashed the memory of Mary on the night her father had died.

She broke away so quickly that there was only an instant between the beginning and the end, but it was long enough to transmute her blind grief into a frightened awareness of what she had unconsciously done.

“I—I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Walling, I—”

His hand, slipping across her back, found her forearm and he gripped it hard. “Don’t be—don’t be—I know how you feel—believe me, I do.” He felt himself fumbling, feeling that nothing that he could say would have any meaning. Yet there must have been a meaning for her. She looked up at him and he saw gratitude that he had never seen matched in any face other than Mary’s. Instinct told him that it was the moment to leave her alone and he did, closing the door softly behind him.

Standing at the head of the staircase he thought again, as he had thought so many times before, how strange it was that most people were so very different from what they seemed … and, stranger yet, that the qualities they tried so hard to hide were often more appealing than those they insisted on showing to the world at large.

The yellow path still slanted out from Alderson’s door and he hurried down, his mind conditioned to sympathy. His quick excuse to Shaw that Alderson was badly shaken by Avery Bullard’s death had gained validity in this last minute, but now it was a sympathy so close to pity that the last spark of hope was quenched. Fred Alderson could never be the president of the Tredway Corporation. That was clearly impossible.

But did Fred realize it … or was he still committed to the blind and hopeless course that he had insisted upon following in Shaw’s office?

The moment Don Walling opened the door, he knew that Alderson had accepted his defeat. The old man sat at his desk, slumped and starchless. Tension and anger had drained from his face and there was, instead, an expression of apologetic penitence.

“I’m sorry, Don. Made an awful mess of it, didn’t I?”

“I wouldn’t say that, Fred. You were—”

Alderson cut him off with a raised hand and the hand was trembling. “No, no—you were disappointed in me. Couldn’t help but be. I was disappointed in myself. Thought I could do it, but I couldn’t.”

It was an abject confession and Don Walling squirmed as he always did when he was confronted with weakness. “Fred, I know how you feel about Shaw and—”

“No, it wasn’t Shaw—it wasn’t Shaw at all. Don’t you see that, Don? I was ready for Shaw. I could have handled him. That wasn’t it. That’s where I made my mistake, thinking I was fighting Shaw. No, that’s not who I was fighting. I didn’t think you knew.”

“Fred, I—”

“No, don’t try to stop me. I want you to know. You have to know. You can’t help me if you don’t know. It was Avery Bullard I was fighting. I knew that when we came in downstairs—all the way up in the elevator. That’s why I went into my office—trying to convince myself that I could go through with it—but I couldn’t. You thought I was afraid of Shaw, didn’t you? No, that wasn’t it. That would have been easy—it’s easy to fight someone you hate. That’s the whole trouble—I couldn’t fight Avery Bullard. I never could.”

It sounded like the emotional gibberish of a second childhood and Don Walling had given up the attempt to find a serious meaning in it when Alderson suddenly went on. “This is what you have to know, Don—Avery Bullard doesn’t want me to be president. He doesn’t want me to be anything but what I am right now. No, wait—it’s true! If it weren’t true he would have made me executive vice-president—not just this last time, but the time before—when he gave it to Fitzgerald.”

Sympathy demanded a rebuttal. “But that was a part of the merger deal, Fred. Fitzgerald came in because—”

“No, Don, no—it’s true. Avery Bullard didn’t want me. I’ve worried about it—no, not because of myself—because he was holding off picking someone else. You see, he didn’t want to hurt my feelings, Don—passing me over twice. I was going to talk to him—to tell him that I didn’t really care—to go ahead and appoint someone else.”

A question forced itself to the front of Don Walling’s mind and, despite reluctance, he could not keep himself from asking it. “Fred, if Avery Bullard had appointed some one, who would it have been?”

Alderson clenched his hands. “That’s what I was afraid of—why I didn’t do it—why I never talked to him.”

“Would it have been Shaw?”

Don Walling felt the cruelty of the question yet, once asked, he sensed that it had been the right thing to do.

Alderson, like a child slapped out of an emotional tantrum, stared at him for a moment and then, slowly, his eyes seemed to clear. When he spoke, the overtone of delirium was gone from his voice. “Yes, it might have been—but not if I’d had a chance to tell Avery Bullard what I found out this afternoon.” He hesitated as if he were debating an explanation and then, apparently deciding against it, went on. “No matter what, Don, it can’t be Shaw. We mustn’t let that happen.”

Don Walling caught himself nodding in unconscious agreement.

“It has to be Jesse,” Alderson said. “That’s the only chance we have to stop him now.”

“Jesse?”

Alderson flipped open the notebook in front of him, twisting it so that Walling could read. In his copperplate script, Alderson had set down two opposing columns of names:

GRIMM	SHAW
ALDERSON	DUDLEY
WALLING	CASWELL

“That’s the way you think the vote would be, Fred?”

“Yes, I’d support Jesse and I’m assuming that you would, too—at least as against Shaw.”

Caution restrained Walling from a complete commitment. “Why do you think Dudley would vote for Shaw?”

“They’ve been thick as thieves these last few months. Haven’t you noticed that? Didn’t you see the way Shaw jumped in to take him out to the airport tonight?”

Don Walling nodded an acknowledgment, remembering that he had seen the Shaws in the Dudley’s party at the last Federal Club dance.

“And of course George Caswell would vote for Shaw,” Alderson went on.

“Why do you think that?”

“Because Shaw is Caswell’s man. He came in here on Caswell’s recommendation.”

“But Shaw came in with Parkington-McConnell when they made our management study. It was because of—”

“It was Caswell who talked Mr. Bullard into taking on that outfit. No, Shaw is Caswell’s man. Can’t count on anything there.”

“What about Julia Tredway Prince?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to figure out,” Alderson said slowly. “I don’t know where to put her.”

Walling looked at the notebook … three votes against three. “The way you have things lined up there, Fred, the deciding vote would be in her hands.”

“I know. That’s why—well, I thought I might stop in and see Mrs. Prince on the way home. As a matter of fact, I should do it, anyway. Remember that call I got this afternoon—Miss Martin calling me out of the executive committee meeting?”

“Yes.”

“That was from Mrs. Prince. Somebody called her from New York trying to buy some of her Tredway stock. That’s what I started to tell you a few minutes ago about Shaw. I don’t know for sure but—”

They were both startled at the sudden opening of the door behind them. It was Shaw.

“Good night, gentlemen,” Shaw said with forced pleasantry. “Presume I’ll see you both in the morning?”

“Good night,” Walling heard himself say automatically, and then there was the sound of Alderson’s repetition.

The door closed.

Without realizing it, Walling had been holding his breath.

“Do you suppose he was listening?” Alderson whispered after a silence.

“Wouldn’t have heard anything if he had. The door was closed.”

Alderson nodded but without assurance. “I suppose we might as well go ourselves. No more we can do now.”

Outside, waiting for the elevator, Don Walling glanced up the staircase. The light was out in Erica Martin’s office.

A scrubwoman came shuffling toward them, dragging her mop.

“Afraid we held you up,” Walling said apologetically.

“Coulda been worse,” she said amiably. “Anyway you’re the last. I had it later than this a lot of nights with him.” Her gray hand flicked a gesture up the staircase. “I guess anybody can go to the funeral, huh?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“When’s it going to be?”

Walling felt his breath catch and then he heard Frederick Alderson say, without hesitation, “Monday at four-thirty. St. Martin’s.”

“Ought to be a nice funeral, a big man like him,” she said, shuffling off down the dark corridor, her voice fading with her.

The elevator door opened. Luigi avoided their faces, turning his head so that his eyes were shielded. The door closed and the car plummeted down through the shaft.

As they stepped out Alderson glanced up at the clock. It was nine-ten. He turned back. “Luigi, what happened to the carillon at nine? I was listening for it but I didn’t hear it.”

“Mr. Shaw say to turn it off so it don’t ring,” Luigi said and closed the door.

Don Walling waited for Alderson’s reaction, but none came. They walked together out through the lobby and into the last of the dusk.

“I’d left word for Jesse that I’d be at the office until nine,” Alderson said mildly. “That’s why I wanted to be sure of the time.”

KENT COUNTY, MARYLAND

9.14 P.M. EDT

The last lingering loom of the twilight had faded from the sky as Jesse Grimm crested the hill from which he usually caught his first glimpse of Kinfolk Cove. Now he looked off into blackness and his mind rankled at the delay that had robbed him of the daylight. As he stared the night became translucent and he could see the dim masses of land and water. Memory filled in the detail—the thin line of Kinfolk Creek, the widening cove, the locust-fringed bar that ran out to the wharf. There were three pinpoints of light, one red and flashing, two yellow and steady. The red light was on the nun buoy that marked the channel off the shore. The yellow lights were the windows of the kitchen. One of them seemed to blink and he imagined that it was his wife stepping in front of the window to watch for him. Sarah had gone down in the middle of the week and he had gladly endured the days alone for the pleasure of knowing that she had wanted to go. That was the only thing that had ever worried him about moving to the Eastern Shore—whether Sarah would like it—and now she had proved that she did. There had been no way to let her know that he would be late tonight because they were still waiting for the telephone company to run its line down from the highway.

His lateness tempted Jesse Grimm to turn off without stopping at Teel’s Store, but he decided that it was worth the minute or two that it would take. Anyway, Sarah might have left word about something that she wanted him to bring down. She did that sometimes. She knew that he always stopped.

Teel’s Store was one of the unrecognized reasons that had made Jesse Grimm decide on Kinfolk Cove. He had found, in the nightly gatherings at the back of the store, an easy camaraderie that he had not known since his young machinist days in Pittsburgh, something that he had never found at the Federal Club.

When Jesse Grimm had first started coming to Kinfolk Cove, the Teel-store regulars had fallen silent when he came in, the traditional treatment accorded any stranger, but with the special reticence reserved for visitors who were reputed to have “city money.” The change in Jesse Grimm’s status from a stranger to an accepted Teel-store regular had come about—although he did not know it—from Jim Bishop’s spreading the word that “this Grimm fellow” had fixed the magneto on Tim Culler’s boat engine. Anybody could tinker a boat engine, but fixing a magneto was something else again. A magneto’s going bad had always meant taking the thing off and sending it to Chestertown, losing a couple or three days of crabbing. It was after Jim Bishop told the story about Jesse Grimm fixing Tim Culler’s magneto in no time at all that they started offering Jesse Grimm a coke case to sit on when he came into Teel’s Store. Then one night when Matt Teel had been fussing about all the ice cream that had melted because something had gone wrong with the freezing machine on his ice cream cabinet, Jesse had fixed that, too. After the ice cream had started getting hard again Matt had said, “Captain Jesse, it’s a mighty good thing you decided to come here.” After that everybody had started calling him “Captain Jesse.” Being an Eastern Shore “captain” was something like being a Kentucky “colonel,” only it meant more. The governor of Maryland couldn’t write up any kind of a paper that made the Teel-store regulars call a man “Captain Jesse.”

Jesse Grimm stopped his car back of the gas pumps, so Matt Teel wouldn’t come running out, and walked up the path. The gritty crunch of the oyster shells under his feet made a good sound in his ears. His nostrils tingled with the spicy scent of salt water and marsh grass that filled the soft sundown breeze.

“Well if it ain’t Captain Jesse!” Matt greeted him as soon as he stepped through the door. “Just talking about you—wondering if you were a-coming or if you weren’t a-coming.”

A voice out of the shadows called, “I knowed he was coming or I’da been fishing all week,” and a gale of appreciative laughter went up from the regulars. They had been joking about how Abe had better keep carpentering on Captain Jesse’s new shop if he ever wanted to get his wife’s washing machine running again.

“Don’t tell me that wife of yours has kept you working all week,” Jesse said.

Again the laughter rolled. Abe’s wife was one of the redheaded Connor girls and everybody knew she could do a lot of hell-raising when her washing machine wasn’t working.

“If I hadn’ta done it, she’da made me sleep down to the crab house—sweet as she is on Captain Jesse there,” Abe said. You couldn’t get ahead of Abe. He could give it back as good as it came.

Jesse’s laughter rang out with the rest—and it was laughter that no one in Millburgh had ever heard. Someone shoved a box toward him.

“No, can’t stay,” Jesse said. “Have to get down home or Sarah’ll have me sleeping in the crab house, too. Kind of late tonight. Got held up.”

“That’s what we figured,” somebody said.

There was a lull in the laughter and Matt Teel came up to him with a torn scrap of brown paper. “Telephone call came for you, Captain Jesse. You’re to call this man. Said up to nine he’d be at his office. After that you was to call him to home.”

The name on the paper was “Fredrik Allerton.”

Matt wasn’t much on spelling but he ran a good store. There wasn’t anything from roofing cement to dill pickles that you couldn’t buy at Teel’s Store.

Matt was looking at his watch. “Twenty after nine. Guess that means you’re to call to his home.”

Jesse started for the telephone. He had to pass Abe on the way. “You really been working, Abe?”

“Sure have, Captain Jesse. Got all them windows in, every last one.”

“Got the doors hung?”

Abe slapped his bony knee. “I told your wife that’s what you’d ask, but she said she was going to have them closet shelves of hers first or you and me was both going to get scalped—so I figured it better be closet shelves.”

Jesse led the laughter, pushing past Abe to get to the telephone.

Everyone sat in respectful silence while the operator tried to put the call through but there was no answer at Frederick Alderson’s residence in Millburgh.

“Guess it isn’t anything that can’t wait until morning,” Jesse said. “Got to get down home.”

Herb Tilligas followed him to the door. “Captain Jesse, you folks like a mess of soft crabs?”

“Sure would, Captain Herb.”

“I’ll be bringing ’em tomorrow.”

Jesse Grimm went out chuckling to himself … water pump on Herb’s boat must be acting up again.

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

9.21 P.M. EDT

Driving out North Front Street, Frederick Alderson had been telling Don Walling about his call from Julia Tredway Prince.

“You say that it was this man Pilcher who was trying to get the stock,” Don asked, “and that he’s a friend of Shaw’s?”

“Don’t you remember Shaw talking about him—the time we were discussing that price protection contract for Odessa Stores?”

Don nodded vaguely. “I still don’t get the point, Fred.”

“Can’t you see, Don—Shaw was trying to get his hands on more stock so that he’d have some extra pressure on Avery Bullard?”

“Because he thought he could force himself in as executive vice-president?”

“Of course. It wouldn’t have worked—not with Avery Bullard—but Shaw’s too much of a fool to realize that.”

“But why was he working through Pilcher?”

“That’s plain enough—to keep Julia from finding out what was going on. Shaw knows that she’s close to Avery Bullard—that she’d never do anything he didn’t want her to do. They were pretty close, you know—closer than a lot of people realize. I mean—well, I’ve just been thinking about that—wondering whether I really ought to try and talk to her tonight—so soon. Unless I miss my guess, she’s going to be pretty much broken up.”

Alderson leaned down to look at his watch in a stray beam of light that fell from the instrument panel. “Sort of late, too—maybe I’d better wait until morning to see her.”

They rode for a moment in silence and then Don Walling felt himself impelled to ask. “Do you think there is any chance, Fred, that Mrs. Prince might change her attitude toward the company now that Avery Bullard is dead—that she might sell her stock?”

Alderson hesitated. “I was thinking about the same thing. Yes, I’d better see her tonight. She’ll probably appreciate my stopping, anyway. It’s right up here in the next block, Don. Just drop me off. I can walk home afterward.”

They were already at the corner and Don Walling touched the brakes, pulling in toward the long white wall that guarded the old Tredway home from the street, stopping where the wall opened for the driveway.

Alderson started to get out and then, suddenly he was frozen into immobility.

Walling turned in quick alarm. “Fred, what’s the—”

Then he saw it. Loren Shaw’s car was already parked in the drive.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

9.09 P.M. CDT

The trained eyes of the airport porters watched the passengers coming in through Gate 9, expertly calculating their potentialities. Three made an almost simultaneous lunge for the handsome, prematurely gray man who was obviously the pick of the lot. The quickest-footed won and J. Walter Dudley handed over his checks.

Walt Dudley was not unaware of what had happened, nor was he surprised. It was a form of flattery to which he had long been accustomed. He liked it. It was worth that oversized tip that he would be honor-bound to bestow. He knew that it would be several minutes before the bags came in off the plane, so he sauntered toward the newsstand. An overheard crowd voice said, “No, that’s Eastern time. It’s only nine-fifteen here in Chicago.”

Nine-fifteen … the whole evening left … hotel room … alone. No, he would not call Eva Harding! That decision was made. He wasn’t even thinking about her. Anyway, the telephone booths were all in use. This time it was different … this time he meant it … this time he wouldn’t give in to himself. Why should he? What did it mean? Where could it lead? Nowhere but trouble. No, that wasn’t fair to Eva. She’d never cause him any trouble. It wasn’t fair to think things like that … made her sound cheap and common. The least he could do was to be fair to her. Eva would never cause trouble … no strings … no demands … nothing. That’s why it was so easy to break it off … but that’s why it was hard, too! But he had made the right decision … the only decision … never call her again.

The fat woman in the bright blue dress was backing out of the end telephone booth. It was empty … waiting …

He turned away, snapping his head around, and when his eyes focused he saw a girl who had just rushed into a man’s arms. Her lithe young body arched inward, reaching, and there was the mind-feeling of the soft crushing of her breasts and the hard backpress of her thighs. He walked quickly away, his eyes on the baggage counter.

The bags hadn’t come in yet and he stood in the long low-ceilinged corridor, looking out through the window at the endless yellow, yellow, yellow of the taxicabs sliding past. It was a good thing he had made his decision. It would be so easy … all he had to do was not say, “Palmer House”… say, “Thirty-two forty-four north—”

“Your bags, sir. Cab, sir?”

The dollar bill—“Thank you, sir, thank you very much”—and then another voice saying, “Where to, Mac?”

For a moment, he had a hard time answering “Palmer House.” It always annoyed J. Walter Dudley to be called “Mac.”

All the way down to the Loop he kept telling himself how much easier it was not to think of her than he had imagined it would be.

It was still two minutes before ten when he came into the lobby of the Palmer House … two minutes to eleven in Millburgh. He would get a good night’s sleep … store it up. There were two weeks of market ahead. But this market wouldn’t be so bad … more sleep. Yes, he’d made the right decision … no more losing sleep … no more of those never-sleeping nights with Eva … no more of …

“Check your mail, sir?” a bellboy said, eager to please.

“Yes, thank you—J. Walter Dudley.”

A sheath of white satin floated up the stairway to the Empire Room and the body within undulated with the steps … that man following her was a fool … wasn’t going to get a good night’s sleep. Eva had never wanted to come to the Empire Room … “It’s silly, darling, to be anywhere else when we can be here.” Silly … yes, silly … silly to be anywhere else when …

“Two telephone messages, sir. Which are your bags, sir?”

He pointed, stripping the little envelopes from the two messages that the bellboy handed him. CALL MR PEARSON AS SOON AS YOU GET IN. Pearson was the manager of the Chicago office. CALL MR SHAW IN MILLBURGH PA IMMEDIATELY

He placed the call to Loren Shaw as soon as he got to his room, without waiting to take off his hat, tipping the bellboy a dollar and acknowledging his salute while the call was going through.

After what seemed like an interminable delay, the operator said, “I’m sorry, sir, we are unable to locate Mr. Shaw. Shall I try again in twenty minutes?”

“Don’t wait twenty minutes, keep trying.”

Then he called Pearson, and it was from Larry Pearson that he learned of the death of Avery Bullard.

Less than an hour later a keen-eyed redcap in the Union Station spotted a handsome gentleman getting out of a cab, the kind of a gentleman who was usually good for a folding-money tip.

Sitting in Roomette 5, waiting for the train to start, J. Walter Dudley checked back over the fast moves that he made in the pellmell hour since he had talked to Larry Pearson. The meeting was all set … Pearson could handle it … cancel the appointments for tomorrow afternoon … hold the others until the funeral time was set … shift the Tuesday meeting to Thursday. Pearson would keep on trying to get Shaw … tell him that he was on the train.

The porter passed the open door.

“Porter?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Do we make any stops during the night that would give me time enough to make a telephone call?”

“No, sir. No stops that long, sir.”

It was all right. Even if he hadn’t talked to Shaw there was no question that getting back to Millburgh was the right thing to do. Too bad there wasn’t a plane tonight … but getting in at nine-forty-five in the morning wouldn’t be too bad. Everything was under control in Chicago … Pearson could handle it … and Eva would understand why he hadn’t called when she read about Avery Bullard’s death. She would be sure to see it in the morning paper.

MILLBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

11.40 P.M. EDT

Mary Walling lay waiting in the darkness, holding her own breath so that she could hear the sound of her husband’s breathing. It was soft and even-spaced and she decided that he must be asleep. She was alone now and free to think the thoughts that she had been afraid to think before because of the fear that he might read them in her face.

This had been one of those difficult evenings—the most difficult of all—when she had been forced to balance on the knife edge that separated hindrance from help. One moment Don would ask her opinion, but the next moment he would seem to resent her offering it.

There were times when Mary Walling found her husband a frighteningly mysterious man, when the strange processes by which his mind worked were completely beyond her understanding, yet the fear and the mystery and the lack of understanding in no way diminished her love. They only increased her desire to help him, to be more a part of him, to share his life more completely. That was why, again tonight, she lay awake in the darkness.

At the root of her difficulty was the fact that Don’s mind worked in such a different way from her own that she could never reconstruct the pattern of his thinking. Actually, as she often told herself, Don did not think—at least not in the sense that she thought of thinking. He disliked the orderly setting down of fact against fact, and seemed to instinctively side-step any answer that was dictated by pure logic and reason. He never seemed to study a problem with the intense concentration that she would have applied. Instead, he appeared to skitter about over its surface, snatching up disconnected facts here and there, jumbling them together in a mental tangle that lacked all semblance of order. Yet—and of this fact her intelligence had by now made Mary Walling acutely aware—the end result was often a brilliant flash of pure creative imagination of which her own mind could never have been capable. She had learned that lesson a hundred times. The last time it had been their house.

For years she had clipped house plans and details. They jammed two carefully indexed file drawers. A notebook bulged with meticulously made checklists, corrected and recorrected with every new idea that she had uncovered in her reading. Yet, when they had finally decided to build, it had been almost impossible for her to hold Don’s attention long enough to get him to study what she had done. He shuffled clippings so rapidly that she was sure he couldn’t have seen them. He turned the pages of her notebook so fast that reading would have been impossible. When he finally settled down to the drawing board, her files were neglected and the notebook was unopened. The fast sketches that he tossed off, one after another, drove her to almost unendurable exasperation. Any sketch that pleased her, any sketch that bore even a faint resemblance to something that she had liked and put in the clipping file, he perversely tore up. The sketches that he saved evidenced neither reason nor logic. She had almost, but not quite, driven herself to the ultimate extremity of suggesting that they retain an architect, when Don had sat down and, in an astoundingly short time, without a single false move, had designed a house totally unlike any house pictured in the clipping file, unlike any house that she had ever seen, and yet by some strange miracle it was exactly the home she had always wanted. When it was built all of those things in her unread notebook were there.

In the earlier years of her married life, Mary Walling had tried to explain the unexplainable by telling herself that Don was the “artistic” type, a conclusion that was supported not only by his art training and obvious ability as a designer, but also by her memory of her psychology courses in which she had been taught that the truly creative mind seldom indulged in purely deductive thinking. Unfortunately, there still remained the unexplainable corollary, recited in the same textbook, that the artistic creative mind was at the opposite pole from the type of mind that could fulfill the requirements demanded of the modern business executive. Don was most certainly successful in business, not only as a designer and inventor—which was explainable in terms of his creative ability—but also in other ways for which there was no ready explanation. Her own judgment of her husband’s oddly disparate abilities was admittedly subject to prejudice, but it had been confirmed time after time, most recently and vividly by the suit over the patents on a method of extruding a plastic coating on the steel tubing used for metal furniture. Prior to the suit, she was quite certain that Don had little if any knowledge of patent law. He had dragged home an armful of books and, anxious to assist him, she had volunteered to search out and index pertinent references. He had side-stepped the offer and, much to her concern, had idly leafed through the pages, not making a single note. Yet at the cocktail party at the Federal Club where the court victory had been celebrated, the senior partner of the Wilmington law firm that had handled the case for Tredway had cornered her and said, “Mrs. Walling, that husband of yours missed his calling. He has one of the best legal minds that I’ve ever encountered in a layman—superior, I might even say, to those of many of my own colleagues at the bar.” She had known that it couldn’t be completely true—the predominant characteristic of the “legal mind” was its capacity for the exercise of pure logic—yet there was enough truth to deepen the eternal mystery of what actually went on inside her husband’s brain.

Tonight, she had expected Don to return home in an extension of the mood in which he had left, fog-minded by the shocking impact of Avery Bullard’s death. Awaiting his arrival, she had stocked her mind with the things that she might say to assuage his grief. None of those things had been said. They had talked for over an hour and Avery Bullard’s death had not been directly mentioned. She knew that Don’s grief was still there but it seemed so deep-buried now that it could not be raised. She was not surprised—there had been other cases before where the same thing had happened—but acceptance did not supply understanding. When something important dropped into the clear quiet pool of her own mind, the surface was rippled for days. When that same heavy stone dropped into Don’s mind there was only the quick first splash that a falling rock made in stormy water and then the waves erased the splash. But she knew that the stone still lay heavy on the bottom of the pool.

They had talked tonight about who would be the new president of the Tredway Corporation, not in the orderly and coherent way that she wanted to talk, but in the disconnected way that was demanded by the oddly assorted scraps of his conversation. Pieced together, she had made out that Alderson was out of the race and that Grimm was to be elected, not because of any special qualifications that he possessed, but because he was the one candidate who could defeat Shaw. The votes for Grimm would be votes against Shaw.

How different all of this was, she thought, from the world of big business that she had pictured when she had studied business administration back at the university. In her student days she had thought of the large corporation as a highly organized functioning of economic law, administered by a race of supermen endowed with a combination of the characteristics of the Dean of the School of Business Administration, the Professor of Economics, and the Associate Professor of Statistical Analysis. She could still vividly recall, during the early years of her marriage, the difficulty she had experienced in trying to make what Don told her about the Tredway Corporation fit the pattern that her textbooks had laid out. The bits of evidence that she gleaned from his offhand remarks made the company appear to be a disorganized, fumbling, and decidedly inefficient enterprise. The major executives seemed to be a quite ordinary group of men, disconcertingly human in their limited capacity for high-order thinking and far too given to the man-on-the-street practice of basing decisions on hunch and intuition rather than upon scientifically established fact.

The confusing end point of all that she learned was the seemingly contradictory fact that the Tredway Corporation was undeniably successful. Furthermore, the executives of other corporations, whom she met occasionally, seemed in no way superior to the Tredway officers. Nevertheless, she had felt a certain justification of her opinion when Don had told her one night that Avery Bullard had retained a firm of management consultants to make a study of the corporation’s organization structure and management methods. Her vindication had seemed even stronger some months later when Loren Shaw, who had supervised the study, was employed by the company and made a vice-president. The circumstances had given her a predilection for liking Mr. Shaw and, in addition, she found him an interesting man. He was widely informed, had a keen mind, and a marked ability to think in a clear and logical manner. Despite the fact that she had no particular liking for Shaw’s wife, Evelyn, she had begun to think of the Shaws as potentially close friends when, to her surprise, she had suddenly been faced with the fact that Don disliked Loren Shaw intensely. She had thought at first that it might be because he disagreed with some of the recommendations that Shaw had made in the management consultant’s report, but that had not proved to be the case. Don had been in substantial agreement with most of the suggested changes. His dislike of Shaw was something else, another of those inexplicable things that happened inside that strangely unfathomable mind.

Now, lying in the darkness, she tried again to probe the mystery of Don’s feeling toward Loren Shaw. She was driven by no urgency of discovery because she knew that nothing she might conclude would have any effect on Don’s attitude. What made her pursue the subject again, after not having thought about it for a long time, was the still lurking fear—largely subconscious—that her husband’s dislike of Loren Shaw was a reflection upon herself because she found him an interesting man. She saw him rarely now, except at the larger parties, because they had long since allowed their social relationship with the Shaws to lapse, but, a few weeks before, at one of the Dudley’s big dinner parties, she had been seated next to Loren Shaw and had enjoyed the experience. At the very least, Loren Shaw’s wide-roving interest and the sharpness of his mind were clearly preferable to Jesse Grimm’s clamlike taciturnity, Fred Alderson’s piously unbroken preoccupation with the affairs of the company, or Walt Dudley’s perpetual desire to be the life of the party.

“Asleep?”

Don’s wide-awake whisper seemed as loud as a shout and she felt a moment of unreasonable embarrassment as if her privacy had been rudely invaded.

“No. Can’t you sleep, dear?” she asked.

“Not yet.”

The breaking of the stillness let the night sounds drift in through the open windows. She heard someone walking up the road whistling, adding incongruous trills and off-key variations to the scarcely recognizable melody of “Some Enchanted Evening.” Out of the stillness her ears picked up a sound that it had rejected before, the throbbing of the engine in the pumping station way up on Ridge Road, a distant bark in slow four-four time with a deeper rain-barrel cough on the downbeat.

“I didn’t know you were awake,” she whispered.

“Lot to think about tonight.”

“I know.” Reaching out, she found his hand and the hard grip of his fingers was a thrilling reassurance of the intimacy they shared.

“Can’t get Fred off my mind,” he said impatiently, as if the attempt had built a background of annoyance. “Don’t know why I can’t stop thinking about him.”

“Did you really want him to take the presidency, Don?”

“No, not that,” he said with sharp dismissal. “It’s just that—you know, it’s a pitiful thing to see a man like Fred want something as much as he wanted the presidency, and then sit there and watch him take that horrible beating—punch-drunk—groggy—like an old fighter that just doesn’t have it any more.”

“Did he ever have it, Don?”

“Sure. If it hadn’t been for Fred—” His voice cut off as if he had suddenly discovered that what he had planned to say was either unthinkable or unsayable. “Maybe he didn’t. I don’t know. It’s hard to separate him from Avery Bullard. They were so close you can’t figure out for sure what was Fred’s and what was Mr. Bullard’s. I guess that’s what I was thinking about really. You know, it’s an awful thing to let anyone come into your life and mean so much to you that when you lose them you lose yourself.”

Her flinch came so quickly that she could not prevent the shiver from running down her arm and into her hand.

“What’s the matter?” he asked in quick concern.

“Nothing, dear. I—”

“Something bothered you. What?”

“It doesn’t matter. I know you didn’t mean it that way. I’m just being silly.”

“Mean what?”

She made a laugh run ahead of her voice. “That you mustn’t let anyone else come into your life and mean so much to you that—”

His lips smothered the words. “Mary, you know I didn’t mean—”

Their lips parted just long enough for her to say, “Of course I know, but if I ever lost you—”

“Don’t worry, you won’t.” His voice was roughly male, more caressing than softness could have been.

She pulled back, feeling the warm glow that was spreading through her body. “No—no, Don, no.”

“No what?”

“Darling, please—I wasn’t tricking you into making love to me.”

“Why not?” His hand ran over her and she was trembling and vibrant. She pushed his hand away. “Go to sleep.”

“Why?” The word was a throaty bass note.

“No!”

The bass note was in his low laugh. “You’re being a very enticing little bitch.”

She reacted instantly. “What a horrible thing to—” and then she was struggling against his word-smothering kiss again until the struggle became its own defeat.

He lifted his lips to let her say, “Am I really as bad as that?”

“As what?”

“What you said.”

“What did I say?”

“You know.”

“Tell me,” he teased.

“I couldn’t”—but there was something that forced her lips to his ear and made her whisper the word.

“Yes, you are!” he said fiercely, twisting her body and crushing her to him. “Damn it, Mary, I wish there were some way to make you understand, once and for all, that I’ll never stop loving you.”

“I don’t want it to be once and for all,” she whispered. “I want you to keep telling me—over and over and over.”

She could feel his lips moving silently to the words “I love you” as he kissed her.

“Darling, if there’s any time when you don’t will you promise to tell me?”

“There never will be.”

“Promise me—there are so many times when I’m afraid. Darling, you’re such a mystery to me—I want to help you—I want to think the way you think—but when I’m close to you I can’t think—all I want is to be a part of you—”

And then she was a part of him through a timeless oblivion and when she could hear the night sounds again the sound that she heard first was his deep-sleep breathing.

She felt as if she were eternally awake, as if she could never sleep again, nor even want to sleep again. She knew now, as she had never known before, that there was nothing more important to him than she was. He had never wanted her as much as he had wanted her tonight … tonight of all nights.

11.56 P.M. EDT

Dwight Prince faced the necessity of making a decision, a prospect that he never found pleasant. He stood in the hallway facing the closed door of the bedroom that he usually shared with his wife. He was confronted with two alternative courses of action—he could either open the door or not open the door. If he chose the latter alternative, he would have to sleep alone in the front guest room. If he chose the former, he might find himself an unwelcome intruder. Julia had obviously wanted to be alone when she had gone flying up the stairs the moment that fellow Shaw was out of the house. But that had been an hour ago.

As usual, Dwight Prince let himself be guided by his instinct, which he had found to be more trustworthy than intelligence in all matters where Julia was concerned. He opened the door.

She had been lying on the bed, but the recoil of her body was so swift that she was in a sitting position before the door was half open.

It was his first thought that his decision had been the wrong one, for there was an embarrassed desperation in the way that she tried to stop the flow of her tears.

“I’m sorry, Dwight,” she gasped, catching up the fullness of her dressing gown and burying her face in its folds as if she dared not let him see her eyes.

Instinct told him to go to her and he did, sitting beside her, his arm tight around the curve of her thin waist, feeling the sobs that she was now choking into silence. The grief that she had stored since they had heard of Avery Bullard’s death, withheld from him and later from Loren Shaw, was still unspent.

“If you’d rather be alone—” he started to whisper.

Her hands dropped and her head flashed back. “Do you hate me, Dwight?”

“No. Why would you think that I did?”

“For feeling this way about Avery Bullard.” Her eyes were still avoiding his.

He waited, trying to think and then giving up the attempt. “It’s never been a secret that you were once in love with him—you told me that before we were married—so there’s no reason now why you should be afraid to let me see your tears.”

She turned to him and the tears that she had not been able to stop before had suddenly stopped. She kissed him then, desperately, forcing her strength to overpower his so that it was an act of her own doing.

The hall clock struck twelve but there was no answering sound from the carillon in the Tredway Tower.