As sOON as we’d finished eating lunch, Evalina gave her mouth a dainty touch with her napkin, laid the cloth beside her plate, and folded her hands on the table. “Wade, you mustn’t go back to her.”
“I thought I went through all that with Kirk Hyder.”
“Kirk wasn’t there to watch Mr. Oldham’s face during the identification. Perhaps Kirk wouldn’t have seen anything anyway—it’s such an inscrutable face. A woman senses those things, Wade. Mr. Oldham has heard your voice before.”
“He should have told Kirk.” I dropped my napkin on the table and started to get up.
“No! Sit down, Wade!” A new quality was in her voice, nothing of harshness, but a sibilance that caused me to think that silk, in its way, is stronger than steel. “You’re going to hear me out, Wade!”
She waited until I was sitting again. She looked at her knuckles, white and work-worn, on the table. “For many years, Wade, I’ve been aware of your shortcomings. Do you know what’s kept me going these past years? Not the shortcomings, oh, no! There were times when I wanted to quit, go back to my father’s house. Times when there were too many creditors to face, too many problems for one person to solve. I was unequipped from birth for these past years, Wade, but I saw them through. Pride helped. Perhaps it’s a strange, perverse pride, but it helped.
“Yet pride alone was not enough. You were the reason, Wade. The thought that one day you would more than fill your father’s shoes and recover much of what has been lost. This was our home. This was where we belonged.
“I told myself your shortcomings were only temporary, that as you grew older you would learn to channel your energies properly. This was what kept me going. I could make my mind and body immune to the present as long as there was hope for the future.”
She stopped speaking as if she had run out of breath.
I looked away from the burning intensity of her eyes. I had no wish to hurt her. I knew she was wrong. It wasn’t hope for the future that had kept her going. It was hope that the past could be brought to life again.
She was trying to read my face. She was clutching the edge of the table and leaning toward me. “You’re picturing in your mind what you think is a noble thing,” Evalina said. “You’ll save this snip of mountain trash, this ex-wife of a criminal, this murderess. But have you considered what it will be like? You’ll have to have money to live. You’ll never dare let people know who you are, who she is, even if you succeed in getting her away. You’ll have to run. You’ll have to live in hiding. You’ll one day begin to think of what might have been. You’ll grow to hate her and wish you were rid of her.”
I sat without moving.
“I haven’t dissuaded you, have I, Wade?”
“I wish you wouldn’t try. I wish you could just accept it as something that has to be. Learn to think of yourself a little more, live for yourself. You have a future, too. You’ve done wrong in wrapping up your future in another person.”
“Why, Wade?” she cried. “Why do you insist on plunging ahead?”
“Because I know I’m right,” I said truthfully. “And I know she’s right. I know her too well to believe she’s guilty.”
“But do you know what she would do in a single moment of rage, of loss of self-control?”
“She learned self-control a long time ago. She doesn’t react like an animal. She’s worked and struggled too hard, she was too near her divorce, her freedom, to throw it away in a single moment.”
“But you can’t be sure! What you say may be true, but there is always the slim chance that you’re wrong.”
“I’ll have to take that chance.”
Evalina closed her eyes. Her head dropped. I reached the table and took her hand. It was icy.
“There is a choice you can make,” I said. “We shouldn’ be fighting. We belong on the same team.”
Her breathing sounded stifled. “Give me a moment. A chance to realize what I should have known before. You’re a man now. There comes a time to every man when he must stand alone.”
I stood up and pushed the hair back from her forehead with its fine, tired lines. “I’ll get in touch with you. I’ll send you money. As long as she stays out of his hands, Kirk Hyder will keep working on the case. Theres a fair chance he might find the real murderer, and we can return.”
“Do you have any money?”
“A little. Enough.”
“When do you leave?”
“Tonight.”
“You meet her then?”
“Yes,” I said, “right after dark at the old Stillman place.” “Take real good care of yourself, Wade.”
“I will. That’s a promise.”
She laid her face on her arms. I put my hand on her shoulder. There was a tearing sensation in my throat. I would have given an arm to have taken on myself what she was feeling.
I turned and quietly left the room.
When I went outside, I saw Josh Loudermilk’s dusty coupe standing in the driveway. Josh was lounging against the fender, picking his teeth with a sharpened goose quill. He removed his toothpick and grinned at me. “Kirk being bush hunting her out in the hills, he told me to be friendly with you today, Wade.”
“How friendly?”
“Thicker’n blood brothers. Closer to you than the skin on your back. Kirk ain’t all the way convinced yet that you’re lily clean. He figures I ought not to let you out of my sight. That being the case, we might as well make the best of it. Where we going?”
I shrugged. “To a movie, I guess.”
“Shucks, I done seen the one playing in town.”
“Then see it again.”
Dusk was darkening the earth when Josh and I came out of the movie. A wind from the north was freshening, piling thunderheads over the distant mountains. It might be a rainy, dark, dreary night. A perfect night for running, with water from the skies to wash away the traces.
“Stinking picture, wasn’t it?” Josh said. “Where do we eat?”
We ate in the Home Cooking Café, on the west side of the square. Spareribs, cabbage, corn bread. Washed down with bitter coffee.
“I can see why the cook here ain’t cooking at home no longer,” Josh said. But he ate everything in sight and was asking the waitress for more coffee when I got up to leave.
He sighed with disappointment at the interruption and followed me out. Every slap-slap of his feet grated on my nerves. Time was running out. I had to get rid of him soon.
On the sidewalk, he grinned and picked his teeth. “Any plans for a big night, Wade?”
“You want a girl?”
“Subject ain’t never far from my mind.”
“We’ll go to Timkin’s Hollow.”
The grin left his face. “Bad neighborhood.”
“If you’re afraid,” I said, “you can stay here.”
I got in my car, pulled off. His headlights flashed behind me. I drove to the east side of the square, and turned off on a side street. After half a dozen blocks, the street became a dirt lane. Another few blocks and it ran through a patch of woods.
I cut the ignition, letting the car buck to a stop in gear. Josh stopped behind me. I let the starter grind with the ignition off. Then I got out, a heavy five cell flashlight in my hand, standard equipment in cars that regularly traverse mountain roads.
I opened the hood and poked at the wiring. Curiosity drew Josh closer. “Maybe it’s the carburetor,” he offered.
I sighed, shook my head, turned—and hit him as hard as I could, using the flashlight for a club. I was aiming for his head, but he moved enough to catch the blow on his cheek. I plunged at him. He jerked back, trying to free his revolver from its holster. He used his free hand to grab my flashlight wrist, and I used mine to clutch his gun hand.
We wrestled back and forth for awhile. Then his hand jerked free, and a second later the gun went off.
I felt a tearing pain in my left temple, followed by the warmth of blood. I went sick, with the knowledge that I’d been shot; I stumbled backward. My senses tried to keep the world in focus and fight away the engulfing blackness.
Mixed with the roaring in my head was the distant sound of Josh’s voice: “Wade, I didn’t mean … You oughtta not have …”
I was falling. But I didn’t know when I struck.