Chapter 10
THE freeway to island groves was bolts of black ribbon unrolled in the darkness, the strips pinned by bright-lighted exit ramps and direction signs.
Connice drove at sixty. The little car shivered at this speed, and its quivering reminded Alan of his own. He had been racing along at speeds that were no good for him, on roads he knew nothing about. And like the little Fiat, he was about to shake to pieces, to come unstuck.
Stillness lay thickly over the night-quieted roadway. He sat with his head back, feeling the familiar, melancholy exhaustion that seemed part of his being by now. He closed his eyes, listening to the pound of the engine, the racing tires on the pavement.
There was an eeriness about this darkness, as if he were returning to an alien place of his greatest unhappiness, as if he were consciously going back into a place from which he'd never escape again.
Connice slowed and with panic grabbing at his belly, Alan sat up, looking around. "What's the matter?" he said. "Island Groves turnoff just ahead."
"Already?" He shivered.
She glanced at him. "I wish you'd change your mind, Alan."
"I have, a hundred times."
"Then come back with me. This is a fool thing to do. It's no good. It's like putting your head in the gas chamber."
He shook his head. The car shivered as she whipped it onto the exit ramp, leaving the freeway. "No. I either go in all the way, or all the way out, Connice I can't go on like this."
"No. I suppose not."
"You know I can't."
"I just hope, I guess. That's all. You've been nicer the last two times I've seen you than ever before, than all the times before. Despite all the trouble, I've loved you like this. I can't help that." She tried to laugh. "And sooner or later, I will run out of fresh clothes for you."
He took her hand, squeezing it tightly. "There's never been anyone like you, doll. It's just taken all this to show me."
"like I always say, it's an ill wind " Connice tried to keep her voice light, but she failed. She could not do it. She was deeply troubled, and she couldn't hide it.
Alan nodded toward the darkness ahead. It was less than two blocks to his house now. This was close enough, too close.
She braked the car down, coming to a halt in the deepest shadows. She cut the engine. They sat for some moments holding their breath, scanning the dark, afraid to trust even the night.
A car passed at the end of the block, its lights glowing for the short passage of time. Connice gasped and clutched Alan's arms.
"It's all right," he whispered.
"The hell it is. If they see you, they'll kill you. Have you thought about that?"
"Yes."
"What will I do when I get the itch after they kill you? Who'll scratch it for me then?"
He smiled, kissing her lips lightly. "You'll find somebody," he teased.
She drew away. "That just proves it. You don't know much about women, bub."
"No?"
"Women want what they want not just anything that will scratch an itch."
"Well, what do you know? You learn something all the time."
She inhaled sharply. "No wonder you got your face battered up, a smart guy like you."
Alan kissed her again, his lips barely touching here this time.
"Please don't go," she said. "Stay with me."
"We can't hide forever. Sooner or later, they'd trace me to you. You know that. We've got to be free, Connice, or we don't have any life at all."
"I've been happy with what I've had."
"You've just had the itch."
He moved to get out of the car and she clung to him. "Let me hear, Alan. For God's sake. I can't stand not knowing."
He nodded. "I'll call you. I swear I will. But you must go now before somebody accidentally sees you here with me. They must not catch you with me, or see you with me, or know about you at all. If they do, I'll have nowhere to go."
She moved her head, agreeing at last. Her eyes were blurred with tears, but she shook them away. Her hair battered against her shoulders.
She watched him get out of the car. "You will come back?" she begged. "If you get hot, or hungry, or tired or need a change of clothes."
He nodded, waving to her. She started the engine, stepped on the gas and whipped away in the darkness. He stood watching her, feeling abandoned, more lost and alone than ever, and he could not say why.
Connice was all the way to the corner before she switched on the lights of her little car ...
Fear walked with Alan in the darkness.
Alan paused at the corner. Night breeze riffled the hair on his forehead, put a chill in his bones.
He searched the street carefully before he crossed it. He had to see, and not be seen. There was a chance of somebody out walking a dog, even at this unlikely hour.
Nothing moved along the street.
He crossed it, going halfway along the block to the alley that ran behind his own house.
Here he paused again, searching all the crannies of the alley. He held his breath, listening for the faintest whisper of sound. Yet there was none. He had the sense that he was being watched, but told himself this was foolish. It was his nerves, acting up.
They were ready to snap. He grinned sourly. If anyone were to speak his name, or if there were movement suddenly, he'd yell and never stop yelling.
He entered the alley, moving cautiously through the stillness.
The alley was narrower than he remembered, with garbage cans and hedges and doorways. The shadows were fearful. The only light filtered from the pallid gleam of corner street lamps.
He went pace by pace through the obscuring shadows. A cat cried somewhere and he stopped, holding his breath. He felt the fearful banging of his heart. Every breeze-stirred limb was an apparition in the dark.
He searched the deep shadows on both sides of the alley. Staked-out police could hide there, or sleepless neighbors prowling could be in deeper shadows. He could take no chances.
The darkness on both sides of him were like tall walls. The somber dark was inscrutable.
He glanced upward, seeing the cloud-frosted night sky. It was lighter up there, clearer, but he was secured to this darkness by fear and unreasoning injustice.
He slowed, reaching the corner of Tess Simpson's yard, next door to the house where he had lived for six months, trying to find himself again.
He exhaled. He'd found himself all right, out in the somber dark, frightened and alone.
A single light glowed wanly in Tess Simpson's house.
Alan stepped into her yard, the crisp grass crunching under his sandals.
He stared at the wan ring of light through her rear door. He fumbled with a problem that had not occurred to him until this moment.
He wanted to talk with Tess, he had to, and yet how could he get to her without frightening her so she would scream the neighborhood down on them?
He paused, feeling sick. There was no answer, no assurance. He would just have to take his chances.
There was no guarantee that Tess would want to talk to him under any circumstances, even if she had finally decided that he was not Sheram's killer.
He was at her back steps. He pressed close in the shadows and counted slowly to a hundred. He searched the overcast dark as he counted, but nothing moved.
He saw the light burned in her hallway, palely illuminating her kitchen.
He rapped on the back door, sharply. The sound rattled through the stillness, cannon-loud, it seemed to him. Enough to waken the neighborhood.
Only nothing happened inside Tess Simpson's house. The stillness persisted, unbroken.
Feeling sick, Alan rapped on the door again. The sound was louder this time, more frantic, like a drumbeat, alerting every neighbor.
Nothing happened in Tess's house. There was no answer. He touched the knob and found the door unlocked.
Frowning, he hesitated. All he had to do was walk in there and waken Tess unexpectedly. Her screams would bring Sevidge and Renner down on him for sure.
Still, once he was in the half-lighted kitchen, he could call to her without being heard all over Summit Street.
He stepped in through the door and started across the kitchen. He took only one step when his sandal struck something. It was like a bundle of sheets, heavy clothing a body.
Alan lunged backward.
He stared down at Tess. She lay sprawled like a rag doll on the polished floor of her kitchen. A pool of blood stained its glistening surface. A knife sprouted from between Tess' thin shoulder blades.
He did not have to touch her to know that she was dead.
Time passed in a terrible slowness. Afterward, he never knew how long he had remained, numbed, staring down at her body on that floor.
When he could finally move at all, it seemed to him there was no longer any sense in it, and he didn't want to move. He wanted to sink, to the floor beside Tess' angular body with the knife in it and admit that he was as dead as she was.
The one woman who could swear that he was not the man she'd seen running from his house, and from Sheram's house the night of the murder, she had been eternally silenced. His chance was gone.
He leaned against the table, exhausted, breathing through his mouth as if he had run a long way.
He heard the police cars.
He trembled slightly, involuntarily, but he did not react in surprise. He was beyond astonishment now. He believed in any evil thing that happened to him.
They came swiftly. He heard them from the front in the night silence and he heard others racing in both ways along the alley.
They were bottling him up in here with the latest corpse.
And this didn't surprise him, either. It was all like a part of a game. You fit all the pieces together and it formed a perfect frame with his face inside.
How could anyone know he was in here with Tess's body?
How could they have waited until he walked in and found her before they alerted the police?
Alan shuddered.
Contrary to all logic, this last bit made the first sense of anything that had happened to him since Sheram's death.
Somebody did know what he did, and where he went.
In that darkness out there tonight, somebody had stood silently in deep shadows and watched him come along the alley and enter this house.
Somebody who had planned the whole frame from the first.
The killer.
This made sense. Wait until he was in the house with Tess's body, call the police. Somebody had called the police on him before, and they would go on doing it until he was trapped and beyond aid.
Only now was no time to think about it. It was too late for thinking. He had to move. He had to get out of this house without being seen by the police who were parking their cars out front and racing cruisers both ways along the alley.
He had to do it, only it was impossible.
Still, it was better to be caught out there in the dark somewhere than in this room with this corpse.
Something caught at his heart, and he stared at the knife in Tess's back. He was certain the police would be able to prove it was a knife from his kitchen. The killer was taking no chance on his slipping the noose this time.
Alan stepped back, pressing against the wall. He wasted no more time. He heard voices on the walk out front. The cruiser lights illumined the alley. He had one chance. They may not yet be looking for a killer out in the dark.
It was the last chance remaining to him.
He slithered through the door, went down the steps and crouched in the darkness at the corner of the house. The cruisers were converging on this yard in the alley.
A bloated hibiscus clump made deep shadows near the line of his own property.
Alan crouched low and ran into the shadow of the bush. He saw the police and detectives in the glow from car lights in the front yard. He heard Tess's doorbell ringing.
Tess wasn't going to answer. Momentarily, police would be coining around the corners of her house, seeking a way inside.
He knelt low and crawled to the side of his own house. He inched along it toward his own back door. It seemed to him the cruiser lights parked in the alley made daylight of his yard and Tess's.
He heard the men over there, the detectives in the rear. They ran forward and tried the back door. They found it unlocked, shouted the news, and then Alan saw them go inside. They were silent for a stunned moment, and Alan knew what they'd found. Alan crouched shivering in the grayed darkness. He felt in his slacks pocket. Nothing. Then he remembered the key he stashed in the milk box outside the rear door.
It seemed to him that the last place they'd search for Alan Taylor at this moment was in Alan Taylor's own house, next door to the scene of the latest murder.
He found the key and pressed hard in the shadows, unlocked his door, and let himself inside.
He moved cautiously through the house that had lost all its familiarity or warmth. It was just another strange house in a subdivision where he did not belong.
It smelled musty and abandoned, the way Alan felt.
He found a jacket in his bedroom and slipped it on over his shirt. He put on socks and a dark pair of shoes. He did not know why he did these things. Perhaps for no better reason than that it was better to keep moving.
Every light glowed now in Tess Simpson's house. Standing in the darkness, he stared at the men prowling the house and the yard, striding across lighted places, walking in the shadows, shouting to each other.
Gradually, the entire neighborhood came to life. Lights burned in almost every house along Summit Street. When the ambulance came screaming with siren open and red light winking, people poured out to the walk, sleep-stunned, excited.
Alan glimpsed Renner and Sevidge in a lighted room at Tess's house. He retreated a step, involuntarily.
He heard the ambulance groan to a stop out front. Then the attendants ran up the walk and entered the house.
More and more people straggled from their homes to the walks and yards, out into the street.
Technicians from the police labs arrived and went to work in Tess's kitchen.
Alan retreated into the darkest part of his house. But fear was chewing at him again. Reflected light made his own house illuminated. There was no place to hide.
It occurred to him that the knife that killed Tess had come from this house. The police wouldn't know this at once, but soon they'd find it did not belong to Tess, and they would fan out.
Sevidge would think about the knives in Alan Taylor's house. It was the way Sevidge's mind worked. Then it would occur to him that Alan had returned, tried to get Simpson to say something that would clear him of murder, and failing, killed her.
This was the way Sevidge's mind worked, too.
Alan knew this without hearing the gray-faced detective speak. It was as if he could follow the convoluted direction of Sevidge's thoughts and that led straight to this house.
Alan breathed raggedly.
He had to get out of there. He had cleverly backed himself into a cul-de-sac.
The police and lab men would be working over there until dawn, at least.
Once Sevidge sent hunters into his house looking for proof that the knife belonged there, he would go the whole way, simply from habit. He would have them search the place. Even if Sevidge didn't believe Taylor was in there, he would search the place because that was the way his mind ran.
Alan crouched there in the darkness, trying to force his mind to think clearly.
It occurred to him again that the killer knew his movements, had probably seen him enter Tess's house earlier. Did this mean it was one of the neighbors? That made some kind of sense, even when Alan couldn't find a motive for the weird actions. Maybe a twisted mind could find its own reasons.
Anyhow, once the police kept him in this house until daybreak, he had no chance at all of getting out. He was then trapped, and a Sevidge search squad would turn him up.
He stared through the windows at the people flooding into the street and the yard outside Tess's house. They were all intent on what was there.
Alan breathed deeply, watching the crowd. The street was alive with people, and all interest was centered on the police, next door. If he had one chance of getting out of this house, and out of Island Groves, this was it.
He went carefully through the house to the rear door again. He stared out into the darkened yard, then let himself out the door. He angled away from the lighted cruisers in the alley. He heard people shouting from the street, and lights flared on in houses along the alley.
He kept walking through the yards until he reached the far corner of the alley. Then he turned toward the shopping center. Someone shouted something behind him.
The sound struck him like a rock in the small of his back. He didn't look over his shoulder. He braced himself and when they yelled again, Alan ran.