Instead of being grateful, he looked sourly at me. “I’m appreciative of your help, Miss O’Hara, but we don’t want any more publicity than necessary.” He didn’t say it but the idea was: Scram.
“I already phoned a story to The Press,” I told him. “Besides, with the sheriff’s men here the newspapers will send reporters down like vultures. No policeman ever hid his light, Mr. Hilton.”
He was glaring at me. I went on, “So, you give me a break and I’ll try to give you one. That’s fair enough.” He seemed to waver, and I said, “Don’t forget that I’m a local product. I know a lot of gossip. And there is plenty of it in a place the size of Teneskium. And Mr. Delhart is our best topic.”
The idea got over. Hilton shifted his weight in the chair and picked up the cup of coffee Mrs. Larson had set before him. She was silent, standing by the stove but looking toward us. I smiled at her. She had always been a special friend of mine. When I was a kid she was the one I could run to for an afternoon cookie or for a lap to sob out my troubles in.
She didn’t smile back. She looked worried and anxious. I thought, so many people have looked just that way recently. All of these people connected with Delhart. Worried and anxious or worried and frightened, but never at ease. None of them. The scene I had tumbled into by the river yesterday afternoon had not been a beginning. It had started before that, before I had been aware of the existence of most of them.
Hilton was speaking. “We hope you will cooperate the best way possible, Miss O’Hara.”
“I’m still working for the Press,” I reminded him.
“Naturally.”
Since we seemed to have reached an understanding, I went to work. I said, “Did Jocko Bedford come personally?”
“The sheriff, yes,” Hilton said. He was being precise and secretarial again. He sat straighter in his chair and did very well at looking less tired and more efficient. “He’s questioning the men now.” He indicated the living room with a nod of his head.
“Questioning?”
Hilton looked at me oddly, and compressed his lips. “The sheriff is quite certain there has been a murder.”
It was an ugly word. I had thought of it, Hilton and I together had thought of it without saying it, I had said it aloud to the night editor of The Press. But hearing it spoken—at me—so baldly I could feel the brutality that Hilton felt when he spoke. The shock went clear to my shoes. I was not flattered because Jocko Bedford had the same hunch as I. Secretly, I was wishing for something less ghastly, something closer to the normal that I knew.
I said hastily, “Where did you find Mr. Delhart?”
“A quarter of a mile downstream,” Hilton said. “The current carried him until a fallen tree caught him.”
I knew now. He was trying to be blunt and brutal, trying to nauseate me, a mere woman, into running away from the story. It was a man’s way.
“And he was dead then?”
“Yes,” Hilton said. “He was dead. We left him and came for the police.”
That meant they had not wanted to touch the body, I thought. That meant Hilton or one of the others had admitted his belief that it was not an accident. “How was he killed?” I asked. I could be blunt too. I could be the calm reporter and take whatever he had to offer. So I thought.
Hilton leaned toward me. His expression was cold. “He was slashed. He was slashed with a heavy knife. He was nearly cut in two.”
I couldn’t take it. If I hadn’t been sitting I would have fallen. As it was I could feel the blood leave my face in a rush. Nausea took a good grip on my stomach. I could see it so clearly. I remembered those huge splotches of drying blood so well.
I must have been white to my hairline. Mrs. Larson stepped to me quickly and put an arm around me. “There, dear,” she said soothingly. But when I laid my head against her side I could feel her muscles shaking. I found her hand and squeezed it and straightened up.
“Can I use the phone?” I asked Hilton. That was as close as I could get to being the collected reporter again in such a short time.
“Certainly,” he said. He was very smug without showing it on his face. He stood up and I followed him into the study. I could tell he was smug by the way he walked. He had knocked me down but, being male, he didn’t take the advantage and kick me. He had waited too long. Now I was up again and I would stay that way. I made a face at his back. The first shock was over and I was feeling better. I had learned to come back fast in the army.
I sat at the larger of the desks and put my hand on the phone. “You have any ideas as to how it was done—or by whom?”
“A prowler,” Hilton suggested. He stood by the desk, a thin-lipped, owlish figure, again the personification of business despite his muddy and rumpled clothing. “A robber?”
I gave him a wobbly grin. “Tonight you were halfway human,” I said, “Don’t disappoint me now.”
He put his hands on the desk and leaned a little toward me. “Really, Miss O’Hara, what did you expect me to say?”
“Just what you did say,” I told him. “In other words, assailant unknown?”
“That’s good.”
I heard another siren quite close. “I thought the police were all gathered,” I said.
“I believe the sheriff said something about the Assistant County Prosecutor coming,” Hilton said. “It is probably he.”
Godfrey Tiffin, my pal! I picked up the phone and put my call through to Portland. The night editor seemed pleased even though I gave him the barest of facts. He was almost vehement about it.
I said, “I’d rather have a bonus,” and hung up.
The siren faded in and out, wound up to a last peak and exploded almost at the front door. Hilton threw a half smoked cigaret into a cold fireplace.
“You were very discreet, Miss O’Hara,” he said.
I felt a quick sympathy for him. Despite his mannerisms he seemed genuinely cut up. I said, “I suppose an employer-employee relationship can produce some very close ties. I’m truly sorry.”
Light glinted at me from his glasses and his mouth went thin and straighter than ever. “Hardly,” he said. His facial muscles worked a moment. “Frankly,” he almost spat out. “I hated his guts. He was a bastard!”
That from the precise Mr. Potter Hilton!
VIII
I JUST STARED stupidly at him. I got to my feet and pushed myself away from the desk. He came striding around it, toward me. Whatever I had expected of his character it was neither what he had just said nor what he said and did now.
He put his hands on my shoulders. His fingers were frighteningly strong. His face was not three inches from mine. It was all rather horrible, the hard, set line of his mouth and the distortion of his eyes through the thick lenses of his glasses. I fought to hold myself. I could not let him know I was frightened. He had given me the upper hand; it was up to me to keep it.
“Forget that,” he said harshly. His hands tightened on my shoulders as if he could force his will into my bones.
He released me suddenly and turned away. He walked to the center of the room and swung around. I could feel the bruises his fingers had left on my shoulders. I wanted to rub at them, but I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction.
“I’m upset,” he said in a gentler tone. “We say odd things when we are upset, Miss O’Hara.” He was not looking directly at me but off to one side. Again I felt that pity for him. I couldn’t explain it. He had been frightening and ruthless, a coldly passionate man, a moment ago. Yet there it was, pity.
“I won’t say anything unless I’m asked,” I said.
“You will hardly be asked.” He looked at me now, a small smile on his thin mouth. “I may as well tell you, Miss O’Hara, I rather expected this to happen.”
The front door slammed. There were footsteps in the hallway. Hilton nodded and left the room abruptly. I stood there alone, gaping after him. I was still standing in the same spot when the door opened again.
It was Jocko Bedford, the sheriff
of Teneskium County. He came in alone. He shut the door carefully, closing out a hum of noise above which I could hear Godfrey Tiffin’s sonorous and insistent voice.
“You’re one I been wanting to see, Addy,” Jocko said.
Jocko was an old time lawman. He wore a broad-brimmed hat and a cowhide vest and chewed a neat quid of tobacco. He was a lean, wrinkled man but the wrinkles were from sun and wind as much as age. Jocko was bowlegged too, and after all he had seen as much of the country from a horse as he had from the seat of a car.
He was a quick old man, and his presence was a break for me. I had known him all my life. He and my father had come across the mountains from the eastern Oregon cattle country together.
“That’s some rig, Addy,” Jocko said. He shifted his quid from one cheek to the other and looked about for a place to spit. He chose the fireplace and hit it squarely in the center. “If I was you I’d disguise myself better’n that.” He squinted his shrewd blue eyes at me. “Tiffin is out there and he’s after your hide.”
Godfrey Tiffin had been a prestige-filled senior when I was a sophomore at college. I had made a monkey out of him in debate one time, and previous to that had had the pleasure of chalking him up as my first rejected suitor. As a result he despised me. It was mutual.
“Can’t he forget?” I demanded angrily. “It all happened years ago.”
“He’ll crimp your stories, Addy,” Jocko said. “He’s sore because you phoned that murder story before we got the news.”
“I called him first,” I said. “And besides I didn’t phone a murder story. I …” I had to stop and think a minute. I had mentioned my suspicions but not in my story. “All I did was report the accident and disappearance,” I said lamely. “They must have jumped to conclusions. Anyway, the Press isn’t on the street yet.”
“On their news broadcast,” Jocko said mildly. “But you must have given ‘em the idea, Addy.”
“Maybe I did,” I said miserably. And I wasn’t so smart for having the same hunch about murder as Jocko. He had simply borrowed it from me by way of the Press newscast.
“How’d you know?” Jocko asked in his deceptively mild voice.
I was about to start the difficult job of explaining when someone hammered on the door. “The search party is starting, sheriff,” a voice called. I recognized Godfrey Tiffin.
“Join you outside,” Jocko called back. He said to me, “We’ll go into this later, Addy.”
He opened the door. I waited a moment and followed. The hallway was clear. But the front door was open and a squad of men were standing on the porch. The bright light revealed Godfrey Tiffin in all his glory. He was a tall, horsy young man with very prominent teeth and a balding head. His complexion was pasty and his eyes tended to bug. In fact the only things I had ever found attractive about him were his slim, expressive hands and his voice. He had a William Jennings Bryan voice and he knew it.
Tiffin was so busy being important that he failed to recognize me in my dilapidated costume. I was just as glad of it. I joined Matt Mulcahey, one of Jocko’s deputies. He was a big, round-faced Irishman, another lifelong friend. I grinned at him. He grinned back, and I felt better.
Jocko took the job of organizing the search party away from Tiffin. He sent all the deputies but Mulcahey back to the house, herded Tiffin and Hilton in front of him, and started off. Mulcahey and I brought up the rear.
We skirted the fishponds, following the gravelled pathway down the far side of them so that we reached the end of the path at the river and downstream from the dam. I felt less shaky now. It was partly due to Mulcahey’s assuring bulk alongside me and partly the feeling that the episode had resolved itself into a hunt for something definite. That the object of the search was a freshly killed man, a man I had spoken to only short hours before, I kept from thinking about. I clung close to Mulcahey and pretended we were seeking something inanimate, rather than the grisly result of a possible murder.
It worked fine, for a time.
“Heard about you, Addy,” Mulcahey said as we trotted along. “Still tomboying.”
“It will make a good story, Matt,” I defended myself.
“Tiffin says you’d do anything for a story, Addy.”
“Sure,” I said. “I killed him; I was hard up for news.”
Mulcahey sent a broad Irish chuckle into the night. “Seeing your name is O’Hara I won’t believe it. But Tiffin might.”
Tiffin would love to make me miserable.
We were going single file now. The gravel path had narrowed until tree branches could reach out and slap at us. The path stopped suddenly and a narrow deer trail dropped over the edge of the river bank. We all skidded down it, being snatched at and torn at by the ever-present brush. A spiky branch of Oregon holly took a firm grip on my trouser seat and for a moment the old panic gripped me. I gasped and grabbed Mulcahey just ahead of me. The light from his flash whipped around as my fingers caught his arm and jerked him sideways. He gave me a little tug and I parted company with the holly bush. I was glad for the supporting grip of his arm around my shoulders.
We plowed to a stop finally on a small beach at the edge of the tumbling white water river. I sagged against Mulcahey and waited for Jocko’s next move.
“It’s downstream,” Hilton said in his precise voice.
“All right,” Tiffin said testily. He swung his electric lantern and revealed himself clearly for a second. He wore riding pants and leather puttees, and instead of looking efficient and natty he only showed how spindly his legs were. An impulse to laugh replaced my shaky feeling. I was grateful to him for that.
Jocko said, “Let’s go then,” and they started downstream. Mulcahey and I brought up the rear as usual.
That was a nightmarish hike. The bushes slapped us and scratched us and twice we had to swing wide of the river and fight our way through nasty tangles of small, second-growth firs. Once we were ankle deep in icy water. Finally I heard blessed words from Hilton:
“About here, sheriff.”
“Gawd,” Mulcahey panted, “And we got to go back.”
I was past feeling squeamish at the thought of what lay ahead. I could even joke about it. I said, “Lugging a body,” cheerfully.
But no one paid attention to me. Jocko was flashing his light across the water. “Where?” he demanded.
“There’s a snag,” Hilton said. His voice came clearly over the dirge-like song of the river. Jocko was flashing his light and it caught white water, a slick, razor-edged black rock, drew in and held on an ugly looking dead tree. Black, leafless branches straggled into the air like the stiff, dead hair of some water witch. They rolled a little with the current, back and forth, in a horrible, steady rhythm. I hung onto Mulcahey more tightly.
“That’s it,” Hilton said.
We all stepped forward until the water lapped at our shoes. I felt a morbid curiosity as I strained for a view of Delhart’s body. The light rolled back from those gnarled, awful branches, back over the dead, rotting trunk to the shore. There was nothing. Those clawing branches rocked back and forth, empty talons holding nothing but the thick, black night.
“Wrong tree.” Tiffin said impatiently.
“No,” Hilton said. His voice was definite. There was a superior, snappish quality that Tiffin could not meet. After all, Hilton represented a millionaire’s estate, if not the man himself. That alone would command respect from Godfrey Tiffin.
“By God,” Jocko said. He went splashing into the water, holding onto the trunk of the tree with one hand. He bent down, water tugging viciously at his waist. He straightened and splashed back to us. There was something in his hand. “That river’s cold.”
“This,” he said, “looks like a piece of shirt.”
“Brown khaki,” Tiffin decided.
Carson Delhart had worn brown khaki that afternoon. I stepped forward a little more to see and hear better.
Tiffin said, “The current is strong. He could have been swept away …?” He made a question
of it, deferentially since he was addressing Hilton.
Hilton’s voice came distinctly. “We made a lashing of his belt and tied him—his body—to the trunk. He couldn’t have been washed away.”
• • •
I lost all track of time. After the sickening realization of what must have happened, we split into smaller parties and began that dogged search downriver. I stayed by Matt Mulcahey because with the disappearance of the body the terror and panic of the unknown struck me again. Someone or something must be loose in this dark forest. I could not see it any other way. A dead man did not release himself. Nor had Delhart killed himself.
I remember endless trudging through that beastly brush, fighting the lashing branches of the holly and buckbrush and everything else that grew there. My eyes were aching and strained from constantly looking into the water, trying to see by the feeble spot of my flashlight. Mud built up my boots, caking them with heavier and heavier layers until it was all I could do to drag my legs, let alone lift them over treacherous windfalls and the ropey vines of the ground cover. More than once Mulcahey picked me up and shook a little breath into me. He kept urging me to go back. I could laugh at that. As long as the darkness clung to us it would take more than discomfort to pry me loose from him.
It grew lighter at last. Dull grayness came up from the east, spreading across the sky and oozing down between the trees so that everything became shadowy and our lights were dull, useless blobs.
Occasionally someone would halloo from ahead of us or to one side. Each time we raced toward the sound, stumbling in our anxiety. And each time it was a false alarm. Finally it grew light enough for me to make out distinct patterns ten and fifteen feet away. I stopped by the river bank and told Mulcahey I was going to sit this one out.
“Don’t get lost, Addy.” His broad face was plastered with sweat and mud and streaked with daubs of blood from scratches. I shuddered to think I could look like that. I probably did.
Give Up the Body Page 6
