“Glad you reminded me,” he said, stopping the car.
She looked very startled. He grinned and began to kiss her. She didn’t struggle or respond in any way. He opened one eye and peeked. Her eyes were only an inch away and they were wide open and looked enormous. This was working out very well; his plan would have fallen apart if she had liked this. He let his lips brush over her chin and down the line of her throat.
“Bill,” she said, “there’s a car coming.”
He straightened, and she zipped to the far side of the seat like a released spring. He listened for the car, didn’t hear anything. He said, “You needn’t think I can’t reach that far.”
“A car will come,” she protested. “Maybe the gray sedan. Please let’s go.”
He had made a good beginning. If he rushed things she might get suspicious. He started the car and drove on again.
Holly said in an uncertain tone, “You haven’t said anything more about my plan.”
“I’m thinking about it,” he said, flicking a glance at her. “From a new angle.” She looked away, and he saw a large gulp go down her throat. If she was worried already, wait till he turned on the heat.
In another half-hour they reached the top of the pass and cruised by a snow field and coasted through the stone gateway to Yosemite National Park. He bought a ticket from the Ranger on duty and said he had no firearms. That gave him the idea of updating the plant inspection station trick.
“We passed a gray sedan on the way up here,” he said. “Couple of guys in it were taking pot shots at gophers or something up in the rocks. I don’t think that sort of stuff ought to be allowed.”
“We don’t allow it in the Park. Guns have to be sealed or broken down so they can’t be used. These two men are headed this way?”
“Yes. Their car looks as if it had been in an accident.”
The Ranger glanced at the left side of the convertible. “Didn’t have any trouble with them, did you?”
He couldn’t afford to get the Rangers in this. “No. No trouble.”
“We’ll make sure their guns are out of business,” the man said.
Bill drove on. Sealing their guns wouldn’t put Cappy and Domenic out of business, but at least it would delay them. On top of the delay caused by damage to their car, it ought to leave them far behind and give him plenty of time to work on Holly. He drove along a two-lane road for a few miles through mountain meadows and then plunged into forests where the road went native on him. Except for turnouts here and there it was only wide enough for one car, and it went squirming through the trees like an Indian trail. The Ranger had given him a map showing that this trail went on for about twenty miles. They were going to be the longest miles the girl beside him had ever traveled. He stretched out an arm and scooped her in.
She trembled and said, “Not on this road, Bill, please.”
“I’m not going off the road at twenty an hour, which is all I can make here. No drops to worry about, either.”
“I’m not quite used to you acting like this.”
“You’ll never get accustomed to it if I quit,” he said cheerily. He stopped the car and kissed her again. This time she began struggling. He lifted his head and put a little thickness in his voice and said, “You don’t think I can cruise around with a gorgeous kid like you and just think how swell you’d look across a checkerboard, do you?”
“I don’t know,” she gasped. “You ought to have some control. It’s not as if we were the least bit in love or anything.”
“What’s love got to do with it?”
“It makes things like this very different,” she said, as if blurting out a memorized lesson. “When you’re in love you want to do anything you can for the other person and…and making love is one of the ways, although of course it’s for yourself too and—”
“You make it sound like medicine. Now look. I haven’t decided about your plan yet. But if you’re going to act like this, I’ll tell you right now it won’t work. You better loosen up a bit.”
“I’ll…try,” she said weakly.
He kissed her a couple more times and got a very cold reaction; she squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced like a kid taking castor oil. As a mastermind who had planned it this way he liked that reaction. As a plain ordinary run-of-the-human-race man it annoyed hell out of him. He let her go finally and drove on, taking deep angry breaths.
She picked the wrong reason for his deep breathing, and said, “Do you often lose control like this?”
“Only,” he snapped, “when I’m with a girl.”
“Would it help get you back to normal if I told you about some of this wonderful country we’re driving through? For instance—”
“No,” he said, and reached for her.
She retreated to the farthest corner of the seat and said rapidly, “I’m going to tell you anyway and I bet it will help. That was the eastern face of the Sierras we climbed on our way to Tioga Pass. The eastern face is much steeper than the western face. After the Sierras were formed, the eastern face faulted and a huge mass of land dropped straight down leaving the eastern face very sheer.”
“That reminds me,” he said. “You’d look nice in something sheer.”
“No I wouldn’t! I’m much too skinny. Besides we were talking about mountains. Most of the rock here is granite. It—”
“It reminds me of you,” he said, gathering her in successfully this time.
She crouched inside the curve of his arm and talked rapidly. After a few miles she ran out of geology and looked around nervously for another subject. They were still winding down through the forest so that suggested botany. She reported that within Yosemite National Park were sixteen of the forty-three cone-bearing trees of California. Forty percent in this one little area, think of that! He thought of that and slowed for a second and kissed her and she went into high gear about ponderosa pines and incense cedars. If he had been making a serious pass at her he would have been ready to start a forest fire. She had a good defense with all that chatter. It was very difficult to get steamed up about a girl who tells you that the giant sequoia has fireproof bark which sometimes grows two
feet thick, and wood containing a lot of tannin, all of which discourages insects and helps the sequoia live to a ripe old age.
When you listened to that for a while you began to reach a ripe old age too.
He kept making little mechanical passes at her, however. She was so upset that she didn’t realize they were mechanical. They had quite a lively drive for the next hour. Then they left the virgin timber and hit a good two-lane road and made a long curve south and finally a tremendous view began opening up on the right. He drove into a parking area and looked out over Yosemite Valley. Old Mother Nature had really cut loose here. You could picture her bustling around like a woman rearranging a living room, draping a few thousand feet of waterfall here and pushing a mile-high cliff there and carpeting the place with a hundred-foot thickness of trees and then deciding maybe that mountain peak ought to be over in that corner and—
“It takes your breath away, doesn’t it?” Holly said.
She would be sorry she reminded him of business. He glanced around, saw that no other cars were in sight. “You take my breath away,” he said.
She saw the look in his eyes and began stammering that the big cliff on the left was El Capitan, seven thousand five hundred and sixty-four feet, and that the huge one in the distance was Half Dome, and then she ran out of words except for no and please don’t and stop. He went right ahead giving her a pretty complete mauling. She had a lovely body and it was lucky she didn’t like the pawing because with any encouragement he could have worked up a real interest in it. Even as it was, he had some trouble. One part of his mind coached him in a cool detached way while the other part acted like a cheering section.
He released her at last when she began to cry. She ought to have a clear idea, by now, of what she would have to take if she teamed up with him. And if that wasn’t enough to se
nd her bawling back to the first grade, here was something more.
“You know what?” he said. “I’m going to check out of this rat race.”
She choked off a sob and said faintly, “What exactly do you mean?”
“I mean this business of playing hide-and-go-seek with cops, and trying to nail Cappy and Domenic before they nail me. What’s the percentage in it?”
“I don’t understand you, Bill. The percentage is that you have a chance to clear yourself.”
“I can clear myself like a guy with a penknife can cut down all these trees. I’ve been kidding myself. This thing gets worse as I go on. I’m going to check out.”
“But you can’t!” she cried. “The police will be after you for murder. Those two men will keep on trying to kill you. So—”
“Let’s be sensible. The only cop who knows the score is that cowboy of yours. He can’t say too much because he’d look silly, admitting that I smacked him down and walked off the way I did. The cops in Reno may never connect me with the killing. That leaves Cappy and Domenic. If I quit giving them trouble, why should they spend their lives hunting me?”
“Bill, you’d never have an easy moment! You’d never know when something might go wrong. You couldn’t get a job and settle down.”
“Who wants to settle down in some dull job?”
“How are you going to live?”
“To start with,” he said, “there’s this car and about five thousand bucks.”
“It wouldn’t last forever.”
This was the place for the payoff line. “On top of that, I have a one-third interest in a jackpot of five hundred thousand bucks.”
“But that’s the money in the plane that crashed! How could you get it away from those two men? How—” She stopped, looked at him in horror. “You don’t mean you’d make a deal with them?”
“Why should they get it all? I have as much right to it as they have.”
“Nobody has a right to it. That’s stolen money. It—”
“Don’t go legal on me. If it’s a choice between taking stolen money or taking a murder rap, I don’t have to say eenie-meenie-miney-mo to pick which.”
“They’d kill you if you tried to make a deal!”
“Oh, I don’t know. I ease up to them and say, look, fellows, let’s call off the war. If anything happens to me, a friend of mine is going to mail a sealed envelope to the cops, and they’ll have the whole story. It may not pin the murders on you guys but it sure will wash out your chance of getting the gold out of the plane. So let’s make a deal. See, Holly? It works out nicely.”
She swallowed a few times, looking as if she were gulping down broken glass. “I don’t understand how it works out for me.”
“It works out swell. The two of us team up. You ditch this tour and we play it together. We take our share of the gold and head for South America. How’s it sound?”
Of course he knew exactly how it sounded. It sounded like a guy having a nightmare and offering to let her in on it. It sounded like a rat saying: let’s set up housekeeping in the sewer, honey. Judging by the look on her face it made her pretty sick.
“Bill,” she said in a choked voice, “I can’t answer that right away. Could we drive to the hotel and let me think about it as we go?”
“Think about it?” he said, putting a lot of surprise in his voice. “I don’t know what there is to think about. But just as you say.”
They drove silently down into the valley and through cathedral columns of trees toward The Ahwahnee, where the Treasure Trip party would be staying. At any other time the soaring cliffs and trees and waterfalls would have impressed him, but right now they just seemed like a lot of rock and wood and water that had got out of hand and run wild. For all he cared they could shove a few mountains into the place and bulldoze everything flat and make something useful out of it, like a parking lot.
The Ahwahnee was a huge rambling hotel, huddled under cliffs that made it look like a matchbox. He drove to the entrance and stopped the car and waited to see how many words Holly would use in calling him a heel. She got out of the car and asked him to wait while she checked at the reception desk to make sure the Treasure Trip bus hadn’t arrived yet. He shrugged. Maybe she wasn’t going to use any words. Maybe she was going to send out a bellboy with word that she didn’t want to see him any more.
In about ten minutes, however, she came out. Her face looked like a load of damp wash. “I want to make sure of one thing,” she said. “Are you really serious about this?”
He let out a flat laugh. “I don’t know anything more serious than wanting to stay alive and to get a cut of half a million in gold. What do you think?”
“I wish I could think that you’re just tired and discouraged. There have been times before this when you wanted to quit, you know.”
“Who’s quitting? I’ve just started to play this right, that’s all. What’s wrong with you? Are you stalling?”
“I can’t go with you, Bill.”
“You were all set to run off with me before I saw the right way out of this mess. I don’t get it.”
“I thought you needed my help. But this way you don’t.”
He took her hand. It felt as if she had been storing it in one of the local glaciers. “I don’t need your help,” he said huskily. “What I need is you, baby. We could have ourselves a time.”
Her hand trembled and she pulled it away. “I don’t see it like that,” she said. She gave him a fat white envelope, and added, “I wrote out a bill of sale for the car and had it notarized in the hotel. It’s in here. Your money is in here too. Goodbye, Bill.”
“I’ll never understand it,” he said. “I can’t see what you’ve got to lose.”
“Whatever it is,” she said, “I think I’ve already lost it.” She turned and hurried back into the hotel.
Well, that was that. Things had worked out exactly as he had planned. That was good. That was fine. He didn’t know why he should feel so rotten about it.
Fifteen
He sat outside his redwood cabin on the grounds of The Ahwahnee and thought how it would startle Holly if she found out he was a neighbor of hers. But she wasn’t going to find out, if he could help it. She was a smart kid and might ask why he couldn’t tear himself away. She might even figure out the right answer, and realize that he had tricked her into walking out on him. Then she might want to play tag with murder again.
She was close enough to murder as things were. Cappy and Domenic knew she had been helping him. They probably felt she knew too much about them and the killings and the sunken gold. If he managed to slip away from them, they might decide to get rid of Holly before taking up the chase again. So he was sticking around for a while. The convertible was hidden in a far corner of one of the hotel’s parking lots. That is, it was hidden from Holly, who had no special reason to look for it, but it was where Cappy and Domenic ought to spot it easily. It was bait set out to show he was at the hotel, and to coax Cappy and Domenic to wait patiently.
He was planning a disappointment for them. A day had already passed safely since Holly and he arrived in Yosemite Valley. After tonight and tomorrow and the next night, Holly would be leaving with the Treasure Trip tour. If the boys saw her leaving they might be upset, but they wouldn’t chase her. They would hang around waiting for him. He planned to give Holly a day’s start and then make a break for it in the convertible. If he got out of the Park in one piece he would buy a gun. For a change he was going to use it, too. He had given up those big ideas about making them talk and trying to clear himself. It was too risky. He was likely to make a mistake and let them knock him off. That wouldn’t be much of a loss but it would put Holly back in the middle again.
Getting in The Ahwahnee without Holly knowing had been easy. After she left him late yesterday afternoon he had driven the car to the parking lot and sat in it until he saw the Treasure Trip bus arrive. He waited until he was sure all of them had checked in and gone to their rooms, then went to
the hotel desk and asked for a room. He explained that he didn’t have a reservation but hoped someone with a reservation hadn’t shown up. The clerk checked his list and found that a man named William Wayne had not arrived with the Treasure Trip party to take the room reserved for him. Yes, the clerk said, that could take care of him. Bill thanked him and signed the register carefully: George H. Lawrence, of Santa Barbara, California.
He had figured on staying in his room nearly all the time, to avoid being spotted by Holly or members of her party. But by luck he had managed to get one of the cabins in a grove of big trees near the hotel. That gave him a chance to move around as much as necessary. He had told one of the bellboys that he had quarreled with the girl in charge of the Treasure Trip party and wanted to hang around, without letting her know, until it looked like a good time to make up with her. In order to pick the right time, of course, he needed to know what she was doing and who she was running around with. A story like that required a certain amount of proof to convince a bellboy, and he had handed over twenty bucks worth of it. The bellboy kept him well informed. Last night, for example, Bill had been able to trail Holly when she went for a walk with a few other members of the party, and make sure nothing happened to her.
There was only one flaw in his plan. If any cops came around looking for him, they wouldn’t have much trouble. But that was a minor point. If they trailed him to Yosemite it wouldn’t matter where he hid in the Park. There were only four routes out and there was a Ranger station at each gateway. He could never get by if they were watching for him.
He saw somebody coming down the winding path to the cabin colony. He kept close track of visitors, and watched carefully until he identified his bellboy.
The kid came up and said, “Evening, Mr. Lawrence. Did they bring you a good dinner?”
“Yes, it was fine. The tray’s in the cabin any time a waiter wants to pick it up. Is Miss Clark through dinner in the dining room?”
“She won’t be back for dinner.”
“How come?”
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