I woke suddenly, cold and uneasy, and stared into the darkness. My heart was beating rapidly, and because I couldn’t hear Max snoring I was scared. I put my hand down to touch Veda, but my fingers moved into the little hollow where her head had rested and felt the warmth of an empty pillow. I remained still, feeling blood moving through my body in a cold surging wave.
“Veda?” I called softly and sat up. “Are you there?”
As I listened, I heard a movement in the other room. I slipped out of the bunk, groped frantically for the flashlight I kept under my pillow. I turned the beam on the lower bunk: it was empty. A board creaked outside as I jumped for my gun. The door leading to the outer room was shut. It had been ajar when we had gone to bed. I stood listening, the gun in my fist, the beam of the flashlight on the door. I saw the latch lift, and the door began to open. As I thumbed back the safety catch, the hair on the nape of my neck bristled.
Veda came in.
“What’s the matter? What are you doing?” My voice croaked.
She didn’t say anything, and came slowly towards me, her arms hanging limply at her sides. She seemed to float, rather than walk, and in her flimsy white nightdress she looked like a ghost.
She moved into the beam of the light and I saw her eyes were closed. She was walking in her sleep. The serene death-in-life of her face, the mystery of the sleeping body, moving in unconscious obedience to her dreaming mind made me start back. I could hear her gentle breathing. She looked very beautiful: more beautiful than I’d even seen her look before. She passed me, slipped into the bunk and laid down. For some moments I stood looking at her, then I went over to her and covered her gently. My hands were shaking and my heart banged against my ribs.
“It’s all right now, darling,” she said in a drowsy murmur. “We don’t have to worry any more.”
If I had been cold before, I turned like ice now, and as I went to the door my legs buckled. There was no sound coming from the outer room. I stood listening, afraid to go in, hearing the wind against the shack and stirring the trees outside. Then with an unsteady hand I threw the beam of the flashlight across the room on to Max.
He lay on his back in a puddle of blood that welled up from a red stain above his heart. In the middle of the stain something short and black was growing.
As if breasting a gale, I struggled over to him. She had driven a knife through his heart. He looked serene and happy. He had gone in his sleep, and I knew by the look on his face that death had been quick and easy for him.
I don’t know how long .I stood staring at him, but it was some time. This was murder! If they ever found him there’d be no chance for me unless I told them Veda had done it in her sleep; and who would believe me? She and I were alone with him. If I didn’t kill him, then she did. It was the kind of set-up Redfern would love. But she hadn’t murdered him! Even now she didn’t know he was dead. Maybe her hand had struck the blow, but that didn’t mean she had murdered him. It came to me then that I couldn’t tell her what she had done. I loved her too much to make her suffer as she would suffer if she knew. There was a chance I could get him away and bury him before she woke. I could tell her he escaped. I could tell her anything so long as it wasn’t the truth.
I leaned forward and pulled out the knife. More blood welled out of the wound.
I crept into the inner room and got my clothes. She slept peaceably now, a smile on her lips. I took my clothes into the other room and gently closed the door. Scared to light the lamp, I dressed hurriedly by the light of the flashlight, then I poured myself a drink. Not once while I was dressing did I look at Max. The thought of touching him gave me the horrors.
The drink helped me and I went over to the stack of tools that stood in a corner. As I picked up a spade, the whole damned stack came crashing to the floor.
I heard Veda call out. “Who is it?” Then the door jerked open and she stood there, her face white and her eyes startled, staring at me. I felt sweat running down my face and there was a tightness inside my head that bothered me.
“It’s all right. Stay where you are.”
“Floyd! What is it? What are you doing?”
“Keep out of this!” I couldn’t keep the fear out of my voice. “Go back to bed and stay there. Keep out of this!”
“Why, Floyd . . .” She was looking at the spade I held in my hand and her eyes widened. Then she turned swiftly to look at Max, but it was too dark to see him.
“What are you doing?”
“Keep out of this, Veda! Leave me alone.”
“What have you done?”
“All right.” I threw down the spade. “What else could I have done? Keep out of it. That’s all I ask you. Keep out of it and leave it to me.”
She walked to the lamp and lit it. Her hands were steady, but her face was as white as a fresh fall of snow. In the hard glare of the acetylene lamp the blood on Max’s shirt glistened like red paint.
I heard her stifle a scream. She stared at him for a long moment of time, then she said quietly: “We said no. Why did you do it?”
“Could you figure out any other way?”
“If they ever find him . . .”
“I know. You don’t have to tell me. Go back to bed. You must keep out of this.”
“No. I’m helping you.”
My nerves recoiled at the determination in her voice.
“Leave me alone!” I shouted at her. “It’s bad enough to handle him without you being here. Leave me alone!”
She ran into the bedroom and shut the door. I was shaking like a muscle dancer. Even another shot of Scotch didn’t help much. Without looking at Max, I went out into the darkness, clutching the spade.
It was beginning to rain. We hadn’t had any rain for weeks, and it had to pick this night. I looked around in the darkness. No lights showed, no sound came to me, but the rising wind. It was lonely and wild: the right spot for murder.
I went to the shed, put the spade in the back seat of the Buick, drove around to the shack door. It wouldn’t do to bury him anywhere near the shack. His last trip had to be a long one.
I went into the shack. She was dressed and bending over Max as I entered.
“What are you doing? What the hell are you doing?”
“It’s all right, Floyd. Don’t be angry.”
I went closer.
She had wrapped him in a blanket and had tied the ends together. He looked harmless now: a bundle of clothing going to the cleaners. She had done what I had been dreading to do.
“Veda!”
“Oh, stop it!” she said fiercely and stood away from me.
“I can manage now. You mustn’t have anything to do with this. I want you to keep clear of it.”
“I’m not staying here alone. And what does it matter? Do you think they’d believe I had nothing to do with it?”
We looked at each other. The frozen look in her eyes worried me.
“All right.”
I took his shoulders and she took his feet. As we carried him out of the shack I thought of his pale, thin, shabbily dressed sister.
Max is so wild. He might get into trouble
. Well, he wouldn’t get into any more trouble after this.
We drove across the foothills, through the rain and into the darkness. We had put him in the boot on the rubber mat, and I kept thinking of him and the way he looked when I had found him. Veda waited in the car while I dug. I worked in the light of one of the head-lamps and I felt her eyes on me all the time. We buried him deep. When he went into the hole the blanket slipped and in the light of the headlights we both looked into his dead face. I let go of him and stepped back. He thumped down in the wet soil, and was gone, but that dead face was with me then as it is with me now.
We spent a lot of time in the pouring rain, replacing the turf and stamping it down. If the rain kept up all night it would wash away the traces of the digging by the morning. I didn’t think they would find him.
We were wet and cold and very tired when we drove back. Neither of us could think of anything to say, so the drive back was in silence: There was blood on the floor to clear up and we both worked at it. We scrubbed the rubber mat in the boot, we looked carefully around for anything that belonged to him, and I found his limp wallet that had fallen under the table. There were some papers in it, but I didn’t feel like going through them just then and I put the wallet in my hip pocket. Finally we were through. Looking around the room, there was no trace of Max any more, yet the room was full of him. I could see him standing in the doorway, sitting at the table, smirking at us, lying back in the chair with his face bruised and bleeding, lying on the floor with the serene look in his eyes and the knife in his chest.
“I wish you hadn’t done it.” The words came out of her as if she could no longer keep them in. “I won’t say any more about it, but I’d give everything I’ve ever had if you hadn’t done it.”
I could have told her then. I wanted to, but I didn’t. I had made such a damned mess of my life, one thing worse didn’t matter; anyway, that’s the way I saw it then. With her it was different. She was going up; a thing like this could ruin her.
“We won’t talk about it. Let’s have some coffee; and you’d better change.”
While she was putting the kettle on, she said. “Will they come out here to look for him?”
“I don’t think so. No one knows he’s out here. They’ll look for him along the coast if they look at all. They won’t take much notice of his mother. He’s not Lindsay Brett.”
“Should we stay on here?”
“We have to.”
She gave a little shiver.
“I wish we could go. I keep feeling he’s still here.”
“I know. So do I. But we have to stay. There’s nowhere else to go. We’ve been safe here up to now.”
The dawn was coming up over the hills as we finished the coffee. I thought of the long day before us. Both with our secret thoughts. It came to me suddenly that it wouldn’t be the same again. She thought I had killed him; I knew she had. No, it wasn’t going to be the same again. Women are funny animals. You never know with them. Love between a man and a woman is a brittle thing. If ever she fell out of love with me, my life would be in her hands. Looking at her now I wasn’t sure if she had already fallen out of love with me. It worried me. It was another step down. Another low spot. It was down now all the time.
During the next three days everything we had built up between us crumpled away. It started with small things. We suddenly found we hadn’t much to say to each other; talking was an effort, but we made the effort, and living the way we did there was nothing to talk about at the best of times, except the things two people talk about when they are in love. Well, we didn’t talk about those things: we talked about the rain, and whether we had enough food, and would I get some more logs and would she fix a hole in my sock. She didn’t come into my bunk any more; and I didn’t want her to. She’d be undressed and in her bunk by the time I had made up the fire in the outer room. I didn’t have to torment myself by watching her take of her clothes, knowing the way she felt; there was no point in that. Once or twice I touched her and she suppressed a shiver, so I quit touching her. Max was with us twenty-four hours of the day. Neither of us could get him out of our minds. During those three days a tension began to grow that only needed a spark to touch it off. But there was no spark. We were both very careful about that.
At night when I had snuffed out the candle I kept thinking of her as she had seemed to float into the room with her eyes closed, looking beautiful. And below me, as she lay in the darkness, I knew she was thinking about me; imagining me sneaking out there to knife the little punk who had his hands tied behind him. I guessed the image kept growing the more she thought about it until I must have seemed to her to be some kind of monster.
I was turning all this over in my mind and feeling pretty low as I made up the fire for the night. She had already gone into the inner room and I could hear her as she undressed. I locked the front door, turned out the light and gave her a few more minutes before going in there. She was already curled up in her bunk, her back turned to me as I came in. That’s the way it was now: she couldn’t bring herself to look at me.
“Good night,” I said and rolled into my bunk.
“Good night.”
“Going down all the time,” I thought. “All low spots now. Veda slipping away from me like water through my fingers. Max’s dead face. Gorman jeering at me. Material for nightmares.”
I didn’t know how long I slept but I woke suddenly. Since Max’s death I had slept badly and the slightest sound would bring me upright in bed. I woke now to hear someone moving in the room. It was dark: I couldn’t see anything. The stealthy sound sent my heart racing and a chill up my spine. I thought of Max as I slid out of the bunk and I began to shake. More movements, the sound of even breathing, close: too close. I pressed the button on the flashlight.
I don’t know how I missed her in the darkness. She was standing right by me. Her eyes were closed and her black hair framed her face that was peaceful in sleep, and she looked lovely. I moved away from her, my heart racing. She had a knife in her hand; the knife I had used to make clothes pegs for her when Max had surprised us. I watched her touch the blankets in my bunk. I saw her raise her hand and bury the knife to the hilt in the blankets and mattress where but a second or so before I had lain.
“You’ll be all right now, darling,” she said, and a little smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “You won’t have to worry any more.”
She climbed back into her bunk, drew up the blankets, and settled down. Her breathing was as undisturbed and as even as a child’s in its first sleep.
I left her there and went into the outer room. The fire was dying down and I put on another log, careful not to make a sound. Then I sat before the fire and tried to stop shivering.
I didn’t sleep any more that night.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
WHEN THE sun came up behind the hills I went into the inner room to get my clothes. She had been up, for the blind was drawn and the window was wide open. I looked quickly to see if she was awake, and she was. She lay in the bunk, the blanket pushed back. They say love and hate are separated by the thickness of a hair. After what had happened last night my love for her had been badly shaken. I was scared of her, and that’s not far off hate. As I looked at her she turned her head. Her eyes were feverish.