by Robert Bloch
— 2 —
The rain had been falling steadily for several minutes before Mary noticed it and switched on the windshield wiper. At the same time she put on the headlights; it had gotten dark quite suddenly, and the road ahead was only a vague blur between the towering trees.
Trees? She couldn’t recall a stretch of trees along here the last time she’d driven this way. Of course that had been the previous summer and she’d come into Fairvale in broad daylight, alert and refreshed. Now she was tired out from eighteen hours of steady driving, but she could still remember and sense that something was wrong.
Remember—that was the trigger word. Now she could remember, dimly, how she’d hesitated back there about a half-hour ago, when she came to the fork in the road. That was it; she’d taken the wrong turn. And now here she was, God knows where, with this rain coming down and everything pitch-black outside—
Get a grip on yourself, now. You can’t afford to be panicky. The worst part of it was over.
It was true, she told herself. The worst part was over. The worst part had come yesterday afternoon, when she stole the money.
She had been standing in Mr. Lowery’s office when old Tommy Cassidy hauled out that big green bundle of bills and put them down on the desk. Thirty-six Federal Reserve notes bearing the picture of the fat man who looked like a wholesale grocer, and eight more carrying the face of the man who looked like an undertaker. But the wholesale grocer was Grover Cleveland and the undertaker was William McKinley. And thirty-six thousands and eight five-hundreds added up to forty thousand dollars.
Tommy Cassidy had put them down just like that, fanning them casually as he announced he was closing the deal and buying a house as his daughter’s wedding present.
Mr. Lowery pretended to be just as casual as he went through the business of signing the final papers. But after old Tommy Cassidy went away, Mr. Lowery got a little bit excited. He scooped up the money, put it into a big brown Manila number ten envelope, and sealed the flap. Mary noticed how his hands were trembling.
“Here,” he said, handing her the money. “Take it over to the bank. It’s almost four o’clock, but I’m sure Gilbert will let you make a deposit.” He paused, staring at her. “What’s the matter, Miss Crane—don’t you feel well?”
Maybe he had noticed the way her hands trembled, now that she was holding the envelope. But it didn’t matter. She knew what she was going to say, even though she was surprised when she found herself actually saying it.
“I seem to have one of my headaches, Mr. Lowery. As a matter of fact, I was just going to ask if it was all right if I took the rest of the afternoon off. We’re all caught up on the mail, and we can’t make out the rest of the forms on this deal until Monday.”
Mr. Lowery smiled at her. He was in good humor, and why shouldn’t he be? Five percent of forty thousand was two thousand dollars. He could afford to be generous.
“Of course, Miss Crane. You just make this deposit and then run along home. Would you like me to drive you?”
“No, that’s all right, I can manage. A little rest—”
“That’s the ticket. See you Monday, then. Take it easy, that’s what I always say.”
In a pig’s ear that’s what he always said: Lowery would half kill himself to make an extra dollar, and he’d be perfectly willing to kill any of his employees for another fifty cents.
But Mary Crane had smiled at him very sweetly, then walked out of his office and out of his life. Taking the forty thousand dollars with her.
You don’t get that kind of an opportunity every day of your life. In fact, when you come right down to it, some people don’t seem to get any opportunities at all.
Mary Crane had waited over twenty-seven years for hers.
The opportunity to go on to college had vanished, at seventeen, when Daddy was hit by a car. Mary went to business school for a year, instead, and then settled down to support Mom and her kid sister, Lila.
The opportunity to marry disappeared at twenty-two, when Dale Belter was called up to serve his hitch in the army. Pretty soon he was stationed in Hawaii, and before long he began mentioning this girl in his letters, and then the letters stopped coming. When she finally got the wedding announcement she didn’t care any more.
Besides, Mom was pretty sick by then. It took her three years to die, while Lila was off at school. Mary had insisted she go to college, come what may, but that left her carrying the whole load. Between holding down a job at the Lowery Agency all day and sitting up with Mom half the night, there wasn’t time for anything else.
Not even time to note the passing of time. But then Mom had the final stroke, and there was the business of the funeral, and Lila coming back from school and trying to find a job, and all at once there was Mary Crane looking at herself in the big mirror and seeing this drawn, contorted face peering back at her. She’d thrown something at the mirror, and then the mirror broke into a thousand pieces and she knew that wasn’t all; she was breaking into a thousand pieces, too.
Lila had been wonderful and even Mr. Lowery helped out by seeing to it that the house was sold right away. By the time the estate was settled they had about two thousand dollars in cash left over. Lila got a job in a record shop downtown, and they moved into a small apartment together.
“Now, you’re going to take a vacation,” Lila told her. “A real vacation. No, don’t argue about it! You’ve kept this family going for eight years and it’s about time you had a rest. I want you to take a trip. A cruise, maybe.”
So Mary took the S.S. Caledonia, and after a week or so in Caribbean waters the drawn, contorted face had disappeared from the mirror of her stateroom. She looked like a young girl again (well, certainly not a day over twenty-two, she told herself) and, what was more important still, a young girl in love.
It wasn’t the wild, surging thing it had been when she met Dale Belter. It wasn’t even the usual stereotype of moonlight-on-the-water generally associated with a tropical cruise.
Sam Loomis was a good ten years older than Dale Belter had been, and pretty much on the quiet side, but she loved him. It looked like the first real opportunity of all, until Sam explained a few things.
“I’m really sailing under false pretenses, you might say,” he told her. “There’s this hardware store, you see—”
Then the story came out.
There was this hardware store, in a little town called Fairvale, up north. Sam had worked there for his father, with the understanding that he’d inherit the business. A year ago his father had died, and the accountants had told him the bad news.
Sam inherited the business, all right, plus about twenty thousand in debts. The building was mortgaged, the inventory was mortgaged, and even the insurance had been mortgaged. Sam’s father had never told him about his little side investment in the market—or the race track. But there it was. There were only two choices: go into bankruptcy or try and work off the obligations.
Sam Loomis chose the latter course. “It’s a good business,” he explained. “I’ll never make a fortune, but with any kind of decent management, there’s a steady eight or ten thousand a year to be made. And if I can work up a decent line of farm machinery, maybe even more. Got over four thousand paid off already. I figure another couple of years and I’ll be clear.”
“But I don’t understand—if you’re in debt, then how can you afford to take a trip like this?”
Sam grinned at her. “I won it in a contest. That’s right—a dealer’s sales contest sponsored by one of these farm-machinery outfits. I wasn’t trying to win a trip at all, just hustling to pay off creditors. But they notified me I’d copped first prize in my territory.
“I tried to settle for a cash deal instead, but they wouldn’t go for it. Trip or nothing. Well, this is a slack month, and I’ve got an honest clerk working for me. I figured I might as well take a free vacation. So here I am. And here you are.” He grinned, then sighed. “I wish it was our honeymoon.”
“Sam, why couldn’t it be?
I mean—”
But he sighed again and shook his head. “We’ll have to wait. It may take two-three years before everything is paid off.”
“I don’t want to wait! I don’t care about the money. I could quit my job, work in your store—”
“And sleep in it too, the way I do?” He managed a grin again, but it was no more cheerful than the sigh. “That’s right. Rigged up a place for myself in the back room. I’m living on baked beans most of the time. Folks say I’m tighter than the town banker.”
“But what’s the point?” Mary asked. “I mean, if you lived decently it would only take a year or so longer to pay off what you owe. And meanwhile—”
“Meanwhile, I have to live in Fairvale. It’s a nice town, but a small one. Everybody knows everybody else’s business. As long as I’m in there pitching, I’ve got their respect. They go out of their way to trade with me—they all know the situation and appreciate I’m trying to do my best. Dad had a good reputation, in spite of the way things turned out. I want to keep that for myself and for the business. And for us, in the future. Now that’s more important than ever. Don’t you see?”
“The future.” Mary sighed. “Two or three years, you said.”
“I’m sorry. But when we get married I want us to have a decent home, nice things. That costs money. At least you need credit. As it is, I’m stretching payments with suppliers all down the line—they’ll play ball as long as they know everything I make goes toward paying off what I owe them. It isn’t easy and it isn’t pleasant. But I know what I want, and I can’t settle for less. So you’ll just have to be patient, darling.”
So she was patient. But not until she learned that no amount of further persuasion—verbal or physical—would sway him.
There the situation stood when the cruise ended. And there it had remained, for well over a year. Mary had driven up to visit him last summer, she saw the town, the store, the fresh figures in the ledger which showed that Sam had paid off an additional five thousand dollars. “Only eleven thousand to go,” he told her proudly. “Another two years, maybe even less.”
Two years. In two years, she’d be twenty-nine. She couldn’t afford to pull a bluff, stage a scene and walk out on him like some young girl of twenty. She knew there wouldn’t be many more Sam Loomises in her life. So she smiled, and nodded, and went back home to the Lowery Agency.
She went back to the Lowery Agency and watched old man Lowery take his steady five percent on every sale he made. She watched him buy up shaky mortgages and foreclose, watched him make quick, cunning, cutthroat cash offers to desperate sellers and then turn around and take a fat profit on a fast, easy resale. People were always buying, always selling. All Lowery did was stand in the middle, extracting a percentage from both parties just for bringing buyer and seller together. He performed no other real service to justify his existence. And yet he was rich. It wouldn’t take him two years to sweat out an eleven-thousand-dollar debt. He could sometimes make as much in two months.
Mary hated him, and she hated a lot of the buyers and sellers he did business with, because they were rich, too. This Tommy Cassidy was one of the worst—a big operator, loaded with money from oil leases. He didn’t have to turn a hand, but he was always dabbling in real estate, sniffing the scent of somebody’s fear or want, bidding low and selling high, alert to every possibility of squeezing out an extra dollar in rentals or income.
He thought nothing of laying down forty thousand dollars in cash to buy his daughter a home for a wedding present.
Any more than he thought anything about laying down a hundred-dollar bill on Mary Crane’s desk one afternoon about six months ago, and suggesting she take a “little trip” with him down to Dallas for the weekend.
It had all been done so quickly, and with such a bland and casual smirk, that she didn’t have time to get angry. Then Mr. Lowery came in, and the matter ended. She’d never told Cassidy off, in public or in private, and he never repeated the offer. But she didn’t forget. She couldn’t forget the wet-lipped smile on his fat old face.
And she never forgot that this world belonged to the Tommy Cassidy’s. They owned the property and they set the prices. Forty thousand to a daughter for a wedding gift; a hundred dollars tossed carelessly on a desk for three days’ rental privileges of the body of Mary Crane.
So I took the forty thousand dollars—
That’s the way the old gag went, but this hadn’t been a gag. She did take the money, and subconsciously she must have been daydreaming about just such an opportunity for a long, long time. Because now everything seemed to fall into place, as though part of a preconceived plan.
It was Friday afternoon; the banks would be closed tomorrow and that meant Lowery wouldn’t get around to checking on her activities until Monday, when she didn’t show up at the office.
Better still, Lila had departed, early in the morning, for Dallas—she did all the buying for the record shop now. And she wouldn’t be back until Monday either.
Mary drove right to the apartment and packed; not everything, just her best clothes in the suitcase and the small overnight bag. She and Lila had three hundred and sixty dollars hidden away in an empty cold-cream jar, but she didn’t touch that. Lila would need it when she had to keep up the apartment alone. Mary wished that she could write her sister a note of some kind, but she didn’t dare. It would be hard for Lila in the days ahead; still, there was no help for it. Maybe something could be worked out later on.
Mary left the apartment around seven; an hour later she halted on the outskirts of a suburb and ate supper, then drove in under an OK USED CAR sign and traded her sedan for a coupé. She lost money on the transaction; lost still more early the next morning when she repeated the performance in a town four hundred miles north. Around noon, when she traded again, she found herself in possession of thirty dollars in cash and a battered old heap with a crumpled left front fender, but she was not displeased. The important thing was to make a number of fast switches, cover her trail, and wind up with a junker that would take her as far as Fairvale. Once there she could drive further north, maybe as far as Springfield, and sell the last car under her name; how would the authorities trace down the whereabouts of a Mrs. Sam Loomis, living in a town a hundred miles from there?
Because she intended to become Mrs. Sam Loomis, and quickly. She’d walk in on Sam with this story about coming into the inheritance. Not forty thousand dollars—that would be too large a sum, and might require too much explanation—but maybe she’d say it was fifteen. And she’d tell him Lila had received an equal amount, quit her job abruptly, and gone off to Europe. That would explain why there was no sense inviting her to the wedding.
Maybe Sam would balk about taking the money, and certainly there’d be a lot of awkward questions to answer, but she’d get around him. She’d have to. They’d be married at once; that was the important thing. She’d have his name then, Mrs. Sam Loomis, wife of the proprietor of a hardware store in a town eight hundred miles away from the Lowery Agency.
The Lowery Agency didn’t even know of Sam’s existence. Of course they’d come to Lila, and she’d probably guess right away. But Lila wouldn’t say anything—not until she contacted Mary first.
When the time came, Mary would have to be prepared to handle her sister, keep her quiet in front of Sam and the authorities. It shouldn’t be too difficult—Lila owed her that much, for all the years Mary had worked to send her through school. Perhaps she could even give her part of the remaining twenty-five thousand dollars. Maybe she wouldn’t take it. But there would be some solution; Mary hadn’t planned that far ahead, but when the time came, the answer would be ready.
Right now she had to do one thing at a time, and the first step was to reach Fairvale. On the scale map it was a distance of a mere four inches. Four insignificant inches of red lines from one dot to another. But it had taken her eighteen hours to get this far; eighteen hours of endless vibration, eighteen hours of peering and squinting in headlight glare
and sunlight reflection; eighteen hours of cramped contortion, of fighting the road and the wheel and the dulling, deadly onslaught of her own fatigue.
Now she had missed her turn and it was raining; the night had come down and she was lost, on a strange road.
Mary glanced into the rear-view mirror and caught a dim reflection of her face. The dark hair and the regular features were still familiar, but the smile had gone and her full lips were compressed to a taut line. Where had she seen that drawn, contorted countenance before?
In the mirror after Mom died, when you went to pieces—
And here, all along, she’d thought of herself as being so calm, so cool, so composed. There had been no consciousness of fear, of regret, of guilt. But the mirror didn’t lie. It told her the truth now.
It told her, wordlessly, to stop. You can’t stumble into Sam’s arms looking like this, coming out of the night with your face and clothing giving away the story of hasty flight. Sure, your story is that you wanted to surprise him with the good news, but you’ll have to look as though you’re so happy you couldn’t wait.
The thing to do was to stay over somewhere tonight, get a decent rest, and arrive in Fairvale tomorrow morning, alert and refreshed.
If she turned around and drove back to the place where she made the wrong turnoff, she’d hit the main highway again. Then she could find a motel.
Mary nodded to herself, resisting the impulse to close her eyes, and then jerked erect, scanning the side of the road through the blur of rainswept darkness.
That’s when she saw the sign, set beside the driveway which led to the small building off on the side.
MOTEL—VACANCY. The sign was unlit, but maybe they’d forgotten to switch it on, just as she’d forgotten to put on her headlights when the night suddenly descended.
Mary drove in, noting that the entire motel was dark, including the glass-front cubicle on the end which undoubtedly served as an office. Maybe the place was closed. She slowed down and peered in, then felt her tires roll over one of those electric signal cables. Now she could see the house on the hillside behind the motel; its front windows were lighted, and probably the proprietor was up there. He’d come down in a moment.
