Rest and Be Thankful (51 page)

Margaret turned to look at the house. “It needs lights. It needs voices. It needs people. Do you see what I mean?”

Sally and Jim could say nothing. The house answered for them.

“Think it over, Jim,” Margaret said. “It would suit me financially, you know. And then I could stop worrying.”

“It suits me financially too,” he said frankly. “I couldn’t manage to buy it back otherwise. But—”

“Good. We’ll talk about it tomorrow, shall we? Now I’m going to take some carrots to the corral, even if it is late. You know, Jim, I think I’ll learn to drive a car and borrow your trailer and take Golden Boy with me to New York. How would he look attached to a hitching-rail outside my apartment?” She laughed, gave a wave of her hand, and walked round the dark house to the kitchen garden.

“Do you think she really wants it this way?” Jim asked. He slipped his arm round Sally, his eyes still watching the house. Margaret was right. It needed people. That was one of the reasons why he had let himself sell it in the first place. “Does she mean it?”

Sally said slowly, “I usually can tell when Margaret doesn’t mean something. When she was talking to you I watched her face, and I listened to every inflection in her voice. And I could find nothing, except that she meant it.”

His arm tightened around her shoulders.

“Just a minute, Jim,” Sally said quickly. She reached up to kiss him quickly on the cheek, and then she left him, running towards the house. He watched the lights being switched on, one by one, in the hall, in the living-room, in the dining-room, bringing the house to life again. She must have run upstairs, for the light in the main bedroom suddenly blazed into the night. He smiled then, as he waited by the cottonwood-trees beside the creek.

She came running back to him, and as he caught her she said, “Look, Jim! That’s much better, isn’t it?” She was half laughing, half serious.

“Yes,” he said, but he looked only at her. “Yes,” he said again. And he kissed her.

Then, holding each other, silent now, they turned to look with one heart towards the house. Behind it the fields and hills had become formless shadows. The forests were lost in the solid blackness of the mountains. A faint light etched a line along the jagged edges of the peaks. Then that last sign of the invisible sun was gone, and the dark blue sky stretched over a sleeping land. The first stars glowed faintly down on shadows and silence.

Jim looked at Sally. Even she had become a shadow, something that might slip from his grasp, vanish into the darkness. He kissed her with a violence that startled her.

“Never leave me, Sally,” he said. “Never.”

For a moment the intensity in his voice frightened her. “Never,” she said. She reached up to kiss him, to seal that promise. “Oh, Jim! You do love me...”

“I love you,” he said.

Afterwards she might tease him that it had taken him three days to say these three words in that way. But not now. Now it was enough to walk, with his arm holding her, across the dark shadows to the welcoming house.

Helen MacInnes, whom the
Sunday Express
called ‘the Queen of spy writers’, was the author of many distinguished suspense novels.

Born in Scotland, she studied at the University of Glasgow and University College, London, then went to Oxford after her marriage to Gilbert Highet, the eminent critic and educator. In 1937 the Highets went to New York, and except during her husband’s war service, Helen MacInnes lived there ever since.

Since her first novel
Above Suspicion
was published in 1941 to immediate success, all her novels have been bestsellers;
The Salzburg Connection
was also a major film.

Helen MacInnes died in September 1985.

A series of slick espionage thrillers from
The New York Times
bestselling “Queen of Spy Writers.”

Pray for a Brave Heart

Above Suspicion

Assignment in Brittany

North From Rome

Decision at Delphi

The Venetian Affair

The Salzburg Connection

Message from Málaga

While We Still Live

The Double Image

Neither Five Nor Three

Horizon

Snare of the Hunter

Agent in Place

Ride a Pale Horse

Prelude to Terror

The Hidden Target

I and My True Love

Cloak of Darkness

Friends and Lovers
(January 2014)

Home is the Hunter
(February 2014)

“The queen of spy writers.”
Sunday Express

“Definitely in the top class.”
Daily Mail

“The hallmarks of a MacInnes novel of suspense are as individual and as clearly stamped as a Hitchcock thriller.”
The New York Times

“A sophisticated thriller. The story builds up to an exciting climax.”
Times Literary Supplement

“Absorbing, vivid, often genuinely terrifying.”
Observer

“She can hang her cloak and dagger right up there with Eric Ambler and Graham Greene.”
Newsweek

“An atmosphere that is ready to explode with tension... a wonderfully readable book.”
The New Yorker

The long-awaited return of the United States’ toughest special agent.

Death of a Citizen

The Wrecking Crew

The Removers

The Silencers

Murderers’ Row

The Ambushers

The Shadowers

The Ravagers
(February 2014)

“Donald Hamilton has brought to the spy novel the authentic hard realism of Dashiell Hammett; and his stories are as compelling, and probably as close to the sordid truth of espionage, as any now being told.” Anthony Boucher,
The New York Times

“This series by Donald Hamilton is the top-ranking American secret agent fare, with its intelligent protagonist and an author who consistently writes in high style. Good writing, slick plotting and stimulating characters, all tartly flavored with wit.”
Book Week

“Matt Helm is as credible a man of violence as has ever figured in the fiction of intrigue.”

The New York Sunday Times

“Fast, tightly written, brutal, and very good...”
Milwaukee Journal