Chapter 2

TRIP 84 of the Trans-Eastern Bus Line, Chicago to Boston, was running a half hour late. Well filled but not crowded, it was rolling smoothly on its last lap, and with Worcester behind, the passengers began to sit up and give attention to personal appearances, the women busy with their compacts and the men buttoning collars and readjusting ties.

In the window-seat three rows back on the right-hand side, Audrey Wayne felt her companion stir beside her and, without really looking at him, knew that he was sitting up and yawning. She had already examined herself in her compact mirror and was satisfied with what she had seen; now she sat relaxed and at ease, a tallish woman in a brown tweed suit, the jacket of which had been neatly folded and placed on the luggage rack to keep it from wrinkling. She had medium-blonde hair, softly waved and marked at one side with a still blonder streak which gave it a striking two-toned effect. Her face was on the narrow side, with high cheekbones, a full mouth, and dark lashes that gave a mysterious promise to her green eyes. She was twenty-six and sometimes looked older, and she was thinking now of the wonders of coincidence.

A week ago when she decided to leave California it had been her intention to save what she could on transportation by taking an air coach to Chicago, and the bus from there to New York. She would then have enough money left to live three or four months in some small apartment hotel with a reasonably good address while she looked for work in the television studios. Now, because of the man beside her, and more particularly a small newspaper clipping he carried, she was going to New York by way of Boston.

The air coach out of Los Angeles had been crowded, and at first she had paid no attention to her companion. When he spoke she replied without actually looking at him, but as the plane droned on she told herself it would be stuffy to sit beside a man all the way to Chicago without making some effort to be pleasant.

He had a bottle which he nipped on occasionally, but he was never fresh and seemed content to sit back and talk. He told her his name was Neil Garvin, that he was a piano player by profession, and that he was on his way to Boston. She asked if he had a job there and he said not exactly.

‘I’m going to see a couple of guys’, he said. ‘And do some collecting.’

‘Collecting?’

‘Yeah. For past favours. Also, I think I might take a look at a wedding.’

She saw then that he had a small clipping in his hand, and when he passed it to her she decided the paragraph had been cut from some syndicated column. All it said was that with the marriage Tuesday of Patricia Canning and Roger Armington, two of Boston’s oldest families would be united. She handed it back, oddly disturbed as her mind slid back across the years and memory sharpened.

‘Just happened to see it the day before yesterday’, he said.

She watched him take a swallow from the bottle and sit back. After about five minutes he spoke again, his voice remote.

‘You see, I was married to that girl once, a long time ago.’

She heard him distinctly but the statement was so preposterous that her mind rejected it as some misunderstanding on her part.

‘What?’

‘That girl’, he said. ‘We were married.’

She looked at him then, one part of her mind rejecting what he said, the other held by something in the cadence of his voice. Slender, dark-haired, about thirty, she thought, with a superficial handsomeness in spite of the angles of weakness about the mouth and chin. There was an unusual pallor in the hollow cheeks too, and somehow his suit seemed too big for him, suggesting that some illness had left him weakened and underweight.

‘More than six years ago’, she heard him say. ‘She was at one of those snooty finishing schools not far from Santa Barbara and I was playing in a small combo, working wherever we could pick up a date.’

His voice droned on and she tried to assimilate what he said, aware now that he was neither drunk nor irrational. He was saying that he had played for a dance at the school and had talked with Pat Canning at intermission. Later at one of the college proms he had seen her again, and had taken her home when her escort seemed too drunk to drive.

‘She wrote me,’ he said, ‘and I answered her. For kicks, mostly, at first. You could tell she was society, and loaded. I got a bang out of it because it turned out she really fell for me. She said she was eighteen. I’d drive up to this little town and she’d sneak out of the dormitory and we’d go for rides.’ He paused, seeing perhaps the doubt and incredulity in her gaze.

‘Maybe you don’t believe me’, he said. ‘Maybe I don’t look so sharp now. But six years ago it was different.’ He indicated his suitcase on the luggage rack. ‘I got plenty of her old letters to prove it.’

She answered quickly, afraid that he would stop or digress. ‘Why shouldn’t I believe you. What happened?’

He told her and she listened, her mind busy, following the progress of this odd romance of a rich and headstrong girl who was infatuated, and the man who was less infatuated than fascinated by the possibilities of the romance. He had never known anyone like her, and his own wishful thinking led him to believe that things might work out. Her ardour and inexperience excited him and his imagination conjured up many pleasant, if unrealistic, pictures of the future.

‘We got a licence,’ he said, ‘and then a few days later a friend drove her into Santa Barbara. We got married and started north in my car.’ He paused, his mouth twisting unpleasantly with the pressure of his thoughts.

‘The trouble was,’ he said, ‘the word got out, but quick. She had an uncle living on a ranch not far from the school. She had a cousin working in Hollywood. They wired the old man in Boston and got the authorities working on it. The uncle, the cousin, and the cops caught up with us in Frisco that evening.’

He grunted and said: ‘They read me page eight. They said Pat wasn’t eighteen like she said, but seventeen. That put me over a barrel; I couldn’t even argue. They could have put me away if they’d wanted publicity. They didn’t. They gave me a few bills for my co-operation and told me to blow. That was it. A few days later the marriage was annulled.’

The things she had heard stayed in Audrey Wayne’s thoughts a long time. Later when Garvin questioned her about herself she answered automatically, hardly knowing what she said. He found out she’d been a singer, and later a stock player at one of the studios; that she’d done some radio and a little television work, that she hoped to do better in New York.

‘Why not try Boston first?’ he said as the plane approached Chicago. ‘I could help you there.’

‘How?’

‘I know a guy. A big shot. Song writer. I hear he’s a musical director at one of the local stations. I don’t know if I could get you a job but I sure as hell could get you an audition.’

She made up her mind as the plane taxied to the unloading strip but not for the reason he assumed. She had no more faith in his ability to help her than she had in similar propositions made by other men in the past. Neil Garvin, she felt sure, had made the offer because he liked her and not because he expected any return favours, but her decision came from the earlier story he had told her, and the newspaper clipping she had seen. She made sure of one thing as they stood in the air terminal.

‘This cousin’, she said. ‘The one that helped break up your elopement. Was his name Elliott?’

Garvin gave her a strange look. ‘Yes’, he said. ‘I think it was.’

‘Jeffrey Elliott?’

‘That’s the guy. Big and blond and sort of tough looking. You know him?’

‘I did.’

‘Well, what do you know? A small world, hunh? Now how about you and me being bus-mates to Boston?’

She smiled. She said he’d talked her into it, but in her mind was the thought that it would not be much out of the way to go to New York by way of Boston. She could afford to waste a day or two; she might even get a look at the wedding.…

The hand on her arm snapped her reverie and brought her mind back to the moment and the passing New England countryside. She turned from the window and Garvin was grinning at her.

‘Nearly there?’ he asked. ‘I saw a sign that said something about Wellesley.’

‘Then it’s only a few more minutes.’

‘It hasn’t been too rough, has it? Considering the dough we saved.’

He stood up and handed her her neatly folded jacket. He pulled his trench coat down and fumbled in one of the pockets until he pulled out a flat, manila-wrapped package. She saw then that it was a large envelope which had been folded into a squarish shape and securely fastened with Scotch tape. She watched him tap it, saw the bright gleam in his narrowed dark eyes.

When he winked she knew she was expected to say something so she asked what it was.

‘It’s going to make me my fortune’, he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Check with me a month from now and see if I’m not right.… Do you know any hotels in Boston?’

‘I used to.’

‘A clean one. Respectable but cheap? We could get rooms at the same place. Maybe we could have dinner.’

She made no reply to this but watched him put the envelope back in his pocket, wondering why he spoke so often in terms of enigma, wondering how one could be a man’s constant companion for more than thirty hours and still know so little about what he was really like.