There was cake, but Carol didn't want any. It was the brown-colored spicecake that Therese had often had at Richard's house. They put everything back, into the valise that held the cartons of cigarettes and the bottle of whisky, with a painstaking neatness that would have annoyed Therese in anyone but Carol. "Did you say Washington was your home state?" Therese asked her. "I was born there, and my father's there now. I wrote him I might visit him, if we get out that far." "Does he look like you?" "Do I look like him, yes--more than like my mother." "It's strange to think of you with a family," Therese said. "Why?" "Because I just think of you as you. Sui generis." Carol smiled, her head lifted as she drove. "All right, go ahead." "Brothers and sisters?" Therese asked. "One sister. I suppose you want to know all about her, too? Her name is Elaine, she has three children and she lives in Virginia. She's older than I am, and I don't know if you'd like her. You'd think she was dull." Yes. Therese could imagine her, like a shadow of Carol, with all Carol's features weakened and diluted. Late in the afternoon, they stopped at a roadside restaurant that had a miniature Dutch village in the front window. Therese leaned on the rail beside it and looked at it. There was a little river that came out of a faucet at one end, that flowed in an oval stream and turned a windmill. Little figures in Dutch costume stood about the village, stood on patches of live grass. She thought of the electric train in Frankenberg's toy department, and the fury that drove it on the oval course that was about the same size as the stream. "I never told you about the train in Frankenberg's," Therese remarked to Carol. "Did you notice it when you--" "An electric train?" Carol interrupted her. Therese had been smiling, but something constricted her heart suddenly. It was too complicated to go into, and the conversation stopped there. Carol ordered some soup for both of them. They were stiff and cold from the car. "I wonder if you'll really enjoy this trip," Carol said. "You so prefer things reflected in a glass, don't you? You have your private conception of everything. Like that windmill. It's practically as good as being in Holland to you. I wonder if you'll even like seeing real mountains and real people." Therese felt as crushed as if Carol had accused her of lying. She felt Carol meant, too, that she had a private conception of her, and that Carol resented it. Real people? She thought suddenly of Mrs. Robichek. And she had fled her because she was hideous. "How do you ever expect to create anything if you get all your experiences second hand?" Carol asked, her voice soft and even, and yet merciless.


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Carol made her feel she had done nothing, was nothing at all, like a wisp of smoke. Carol had lived like a human being, had married, and had a child. The old man from behind the counter was coming toward them. He had a limp. He stood by the table next to them and folded his arms. "Ever been to Holland?" he asked pleasantly. Carol answered. "No, I haven't. I suppose you've been. Did you make the village in the window?" He nodded. "Took me five years to make." Therese looked at the man's bony fingers, the lean arms with the purple veins twisting just under the thin skin. She knew better than Carol the work that had gone into the little village, but she could not get a word out. The man said to Carol, "Got some fine sausages and hams next door, if you like real Pennsylvania made. We raise our own hogs and they're killed and cured right here." They went into the whitewashed box of a store beside the restaurant. There was a delicious smell of smoked ham inside it, mingled with the smell of wood smoke and spice. "Let's pick something we don't have to cook," Carol said, looking into the refrigerated counter. "Let's have some of this," she said to the young man in the earlapped cap. Therese remembered standing in the delicatessen with Mrs. Robichek, her buying the thin slices of salami and liverwurst. A sign on the wall said they shipped anywhere, and she thought of sending Mrs. Robichek one of the big cloth-wrapped sausages, imagined the delight on Mrs. Robichek's face when she opened the package with her trembling hands and found a sausage. But should she after all, Therese wondered, make a gesture that was probably motivated by pity, or by guilt, or by some perversity in her? Therese frowned, floundering in a sea without direction or gravity, in which she knew only that she could mistrust her own impulses. "Therese--" Therese turned around, and Carol's beauty struck her like a glimpse of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Carol asked her if she thought they should buy a whole ham. The young man slid all the bundles across the counter, and took Carol's twenty-dollar bill. And Therese thought of Mrs. Robichek tremulously pushing her single dollar bill and a quarter across the counter that evening. "See anything else?" Carol asked. "I thought I might send something to somebody. A woman who works in the store. She's poor and she once asked me to dinner." Carol picked up her change. "What woman?" "I don't really want to send her anything." Therese wanted suddenly to leave. Carol frowned at her through her cigarette smoke. "Do it." "I don't want to. Let's go, Carol." It was like the nightmare again, when she couldn't get away from her. "Send it," Carol said. "Close the door and send her something."


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Therese closed the door and chose one of the six-dollar sausages, and wrote on a gift card: "This comes from Pennsylvania. I hope it'll last a few Sunday mornings. With love from Therese Belivet." Later, in the car, Carol asked her about Mrs. Robichek, and Therese answered as she always did, succinctly, and with the involuntary and absolute honesty that always depressed her afterward. Mrs. Robichek and the world she lived in was so different from that of Carol, she might have been describing another species of animal life, some ugly beast that lived on another planet. Carol made no comment on the story, only questioned and questioned her as she drove. She made no comment when there was nothing more to ask, but the taut, thoughtful expression with which she had listened stayed on her face even when they began to talk of other things. Therese gripped her thumbs inside her hands. Why did she let Mrs. Robichek haunt her? And now she had spread it into Carol and could never take it back. "Please don't mention her again, will you, Carol? Promise me."


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Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 15 CAROL WALKED barefoot with little short steps to the shower room in the corner, groaning at the cold. She had red polish on her toenails, and her blue pajamas were too big for her. "It's your fault for opening the window so high," Therese said. Carol pulled the curtain across, and Therese heard the shower come on with a rush. "Ah, divinely hot!" Carol said. "Better than last night." It was a luxurious tourist cabin, with a thick carpet and wood-paneled walls and everything from cellophane-sealed shoe rags to television. Therese sat on her bed in her robe, looking at a road map, spanning it with her hand. A span and a half was about a day's driving, theoretically, though they probably would not do it. "We might get all the way across Ohio today," Therese said. "Ohio. Noted for rivers, rubber, and certain railroads. On our left the famous Chillicothe drawbridge, where twenty-eight Hurons once massacred a hundred--morons." Therese laughed. "And where Lewis and Clark once camped," Carol added. "I think I'll wear my slacks today. Want to see if they're in that suitcase? If not, I'll have to get into the car. Not the light ones, the navy-blue gabardines." Therese went to Carol's big suitcase at the foot of the bed. It was full of sweaters and underwear and shoes, but no slacks. She saw a nickel plated tube sticking out of a folded sweater. She lifted the sweater out. It was heavy. She unwrapped it, and started so she almost dropped it. It was a gun with a white handle. "No?" Carol asked. "No." Therese wrapped the gun up again and put it back as she had found it. "Darling, I forgot my towel. I-think it's on a chair." Therese got it and took it to her, and in her nervousness as she put the towel into Carol's outstretched hand her eyes dropped from Carol's face to her bare breasts and down, and she saw the quick surprise in Carol's glance as she turned around. Therese closed her eyes tight and walked slowly toward the bed, seeing before her closed lids the image of Carol's naked body. Therese took a shower, and when she came out, Carol was standing at the mirror, almost dressed. "What's the matter?" Carol asked. "Nothing." Carol turned to her, combing her hair that was darkened a little by the wet of the shower. Her lips were bright with fresh lipstick, a cigarette between them. "Do you realize how many times a day you make me ask you that?" she said. "Don't you think it's a little inconsiderate?" During breakfast, Therese said, "Why did you bring that gun along, Carol?" "Oh. So that's what's bothering you. It's Harge's gun, something else he forgot." Carol's voice was casual. "I thought it'd be better to take it than to leave it." "Is it loaded?" "Yes, it's loaded. Harge got a permit, because we had a burglar at the house once."


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"Can you use it?" Carol smiled at her. "I'm no Annie Oakley. I can use it. I think it worries you, doesn't it? I don't expect to use it." Therese said nothing more about it. But it disturbed her whenever she thought of it. She thought of it the next night, when a bellhop set the suitcase down heavily on the sidewalk. She wondered if a gun could ever go off from a jolt like that. They had taken some snapshots in Ohio, and because they could get them developed early the next morning, they spent a long evening and the night in a town called Defiance. All evening they walked around the streets, looking in store windows, walking through silent residential streets where lights showed in front parlors, and homes looked as comfortable and safe as birds' nests. Therese had been afraid Carol would be bored by aimless walks, but Carol was the one who suggested going one block farther, walking all the way up the hill to see what was on the other side. Carol talked about herself and Harge. Therese tried to sum up in one word what had separated Carol and Harge, but she rejected the words almost at once--boredom, resentment, indifference. Carol told her of one time that Harge had taken Rindy away on a fishing trip and not communicated for days. That was a retaliation for Carol's refusing to spend Harge's vacation with him at his family's summer house in Massachusetts. It was a mutual thing. And the incidents were not the start. Carol put two of the snapshots in her billfold, one of Rindy in jodhpurs and a derby that had been on the first part of the roll, and one of Therese, with a cigarette in her mouth and her hair blowing back in the wind. There was one unflattering picture of Carol standing huddled in her coat that Carol said she was going to send to Abby because it was so bad. They got to Chicago late one afternoon, crept into its gray, sprawling disorder behind a great truck of a meat-distributing company. Therese sat up close to the windshield. She couldn't remember anything about the city from the trip with her father: Carol seemed to know Chicago as well as she knew Manhattan. Carol showed her the famous Loop, and they stopped for a while to watch the trains and the homeward rush of five thirty in the afternoon. It couldn't compare to the madhouse of New York at five thirty. At the main post office, Therese found a post card from Dannie, nothing from Phil, and a letter from Richard. Therese glanced at the letter and saw it began and ended affectionately. She had expected just that, Richard's getting the general delivery address from Phil and writing her an affectionate letter. She put the letter in her pocket before she went back to Carol. "Anything?" Carol said. "Just a post card. From Dannie. He's finished his exams."


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Carol drove to the Drake Hotel. It had a black and white checked floor, a fountain in the lobby, and Therese thought it magnificent. In their room, Carol took off her coat and flung herself down on one of the twin beds. "I know a few people here," she said sleepily. "Shall we look somebody up?" But Carol fell asleep before they quite decided. Therese looked out the window at the light-bordered lake and at the irregular, unfamiliar line of tall buildings against the still grayish sky. It looked fuzzy and monotonous, like a Pissarro painting. A comparison Carol wouldn't appreciate, she thought. She leaned on the sill, staring at the city, watching a distant car's lights chopped into dots and dashes as it passed behind trees. She was happy. "Why don't you ring for some cocktails?" Carol's voice said behind her. "What kind would you like?" "What kind would you?" "Martinis." Carol whistled. "Double Gibsons," Carol interrupted her as she was telephoning. "And a plate of canapes. Might as well get four Martinis." Therese read Richard's letter while Carol was in the shower. The whole letter was affectionate. You are not like any of the other girls, he wrote. He had waited and he would keep on waiting, because he was absolutely confident that they could be happy together. He wanted her to write to him every day, send at least a post card. He told her how he had sat one evening rereading the three letters she had sent him when he had been in Kingston, New York, last summer. There was a sentimentality in the letter that was not like Richard at all, and Therese's first thought was that he was pretending. Perhaps in order to strike at her later. Her second reaction was aversion. She came back to the old decision, that not to write him, not to say anything more was the shortest way to end it. The cocktails arrived, and Therese paid for them instead of signing. She could never pay a bill except behind Carol's back. "Will you wear your black suit?" Therese asked when Carol came in. Carol gave her a look. "Go all the way to the bottom of that suitcase?" she said, going to the suitcase. "Drag it out, brush it off, steam the wrinkles out of it for half an hour?" "We'll be a half hour drinking these." "Your powers of persuasion are irresistible." Carol took the suit into the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub. It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first lunch together. "Do you realize this is the only drink I've had since we left New York?" Carol said. "Of course you don't. Do you know why? I'm happy." "You're beautiful," Therese said. And Carol gave her the derogatory smile that Therese loved, and walked to the dressing table.


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She flung a yellow-silk scarf around her neck and tied it loosely and began to comb her hair. The lamp's light framed her figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the misty rain that morning. "How about some perfume?" Carol asked, moving toward her with the bottle. She touched Therese's forehead with her fingers, at the hairline where she had kissed her that day. "You remind me of the woman I once saw," Therese said, "somewhere off Lexington. Not you but the light. She was combing her hair up." Therese stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she could never say exactly what she wanted to say. "Early one morning when I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain," she floundered on. "I saw her in a window." She really could not go on, about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door, wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican Press. "My little orphan," Carol said. Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when Carol said it. "What does your mother look like?" "She had black hair," Therese said quickly. "She didn't look anything like me." Therese always found herself talking about her mother in the past tense, though she was alive this minute, somewhere in Connecticut. "You really don't think she'll ever want to see you again?" Carol was standing at the mirror. "I don't think so." "What about your father's family. Didn't you say he had a brother?" "I never met him. He was a kind of geologist, working for an oil company. I don't know where he is." It was easier talking about the uncle she had never met. "What's your mother's name now?" "Esther--Mrs. Nicolas Strully." The name meant as little to her as one she might see in a telephone book. She looked at Carol, suddenly sorry she had said the name. Carol might some day--A shock of loss, of helplessness came over her. She knew so little about Carol after all. Carol glanced at her. "I'll never mention it," she said, "never mention it again. If that second drink's going to make you blue, don't drink it. I don't want you to be blue tonight." The restaurant where they dined overlooked the lake, too. They had a banquet of a dinner with champagne and brandy afterward. It was the first time in her life that Therese had been a little drunk, in fact much drunker than she wanted Carol to see.


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Her impression of Lakeshore Drive was always to be of a broad avenue studded with mansions all resembling the White House in Washington. In the memory there would be Carol's voice, telling her about a house here and there where she had been before, and the disquieting awareness that for a while this had been Carol's world, as Rapallo, Paris, and other places Therese did not know had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did. That night, Carol sat on the edge of her bed, smoking a cigarette before they turned the light out. Therese lay in her own bed, sleepily watching her, trying to read the meaning of the restless, puzzled look in Carol's eyes that would stare at something in the room for a moment and then move on. Was it of her she thought, or of Harge, or of Rindy? Carol had asked to be called at seven tomorrow, in order to telephone Rindy before she went to school. Therese remembered their telephone conversation in Defiance. Rindy had had a fight with some other little girl, and Carol had spent fifteen minutes going over it, and trying to persuade Rindy she should take the first step and apologize. Therese still felt the effects of what she had drunk, the tingling of the champagne that drew her painfully close to Carol. If she simply asked, she thought, Carol would let her sleep tonight in the same bed with her. She wanted more than that, to kiss her, to feel their bodies next to each other's. Therese thought of the two girls she had seen in the Palermo bar. They did that, she knew, and more. And would Carol suddenly thrust her away in disgust, if she merely wanted to hold her in her arms? And would whatever affection Carol now had for her vanish in that instant? A vision of Carol's cold rebuff swept her courage clean away. It crept back humbly in the question, couldn't she ask simply to sleep in the same bed with her? "Carol, would you mind--" "Tomorrow we'll go to the stockyards," Carol said at the same time, and Therese burst out laughing. "What's so damned funny about that?" Carol asked, putting out her cigarette, but she was smiling, too. "It just is. It's terribly funny," Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night. "You're giggly on champagne," Carol said as she put the light out. Late the next afternoon they left Chicago and drove in the direction of Rockford. Carol said she might have a letter from Abby there, but probably not, because Abby was a bad correspondent. Therese went to a shoe repair shop to get a moccasin stitched, and when she came back, Carol was reading the letter in the car. "What road do we take out?" Carol's face looked happier. "Twenty, going west." Carol turned on the radio and worked the dial until she found some music.


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"What's a good town for tonight on the way to Minneapolis?" "Dubuque," Therese said, looking at the map. "Or Waterloo looks fairly big, but it's about two hundred miles away." "We might make it." They took Highway 20 toward Freeport and Galena, which was starred on the map as the home of Ulysses S. Grant. "What did Abby say?" "Nothing much. Just a very nice letter." Carol said little to her in the car, or even in the cafe where they stopped later for coffee. Carol went over and stood in front of a juke box, dropping nickels slowly. "You wish Abby'd come along, don't you?" Therese said. "No," Carol said. "You're so different since you got the letter from her." Carol looked at her across the table. "Darling, it's just a silly letter. You can even read it if you want to." Carol reached for her handbag, but she did not get the letter out. Sometime that evening, Therese fell asleep in the car and woke up with the lights of a city on her face. Carol was resting both arms tiredly on the top of the wheel. They had stopped for a red light. "Here's where we stay the night," Carol said. Therese's sleep still clung to her as she walked across the hotel lobby. She rode up in an elevator and she was acutely conscious of Carol beside her, as if she dreamed a dream in which Carol was the subject and the only figure. In the room, she lifted her suitcase from the floor to a chair, unlatched it and left it, and stood by the writing table, watching Carol. As if her emotions had been in abeyance all the past hours, or days, they flooded her now as she watched Carol opening her suitcase, taking out, as she always did first, the leather kit that contained her toilet articles, dropping it onto the bed. She looked at Carol's hands, at the lock of hair that fell over the scarf tied around her head, at the scratch she had gotten days ago across the toe of her moccasin. "What're you standing there for?" Carol asked. "Get to bed, sleepyhead." "Carol, I love you." Carol straightened up. Therese stared at her with intense, sleepy eyes. Then Carol finished taking her pajamas from the suitcase and pulled the lid down. She came to Therese and put her hands on her shoulders. She squeezed her shoulders hard, as if she were exacting a promise from her, or perhaps searching her to see if what she had said were real. Then she kissed Therese on the lips, as if they had kissed a thousand times before. "Don't you know I love you?" Carol said. Carol took her pajamas into the bedroom, and stood for a moment, looking down at the basin. "I'm going out," Carol said. "But I'll be back right away."


Therese waited by the table while Carol was gone, while time passed indefinitely or maybe not at all, until the door opened and Carol came in again. She set a paper bag on the table, and Therese knew she had only gone to get a container of milk, as Carol or she herself did very often at night. "Can I sleep with you?" Therese asked. "Did you see the bed?" It was a double bed. They sat up in their pajamas, drinking milk and sharing an orange that Carol was too sleepy to finish. Then Therese set the container of milk on the floor and looked at Carol who was sleeping already, on her stomach, with one arm flung up as she always went to sleep. Therese pulled out the light. Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale-white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered. "Go to sleep," Carol said. Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol's hand move on her shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol's fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol's lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly, the length of her body. Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol's hand that slid along her ribs, Carol's hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow. While a thousand memories and moments, words, the first darling, the second time Carol had met her at the store, a thousand memories of Carol's face, her voice, moments of anger and laughter flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was pale-blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself. She saw Carol's pale hair across her eyes, and now Carol's head was close against hers.


And she did not have to ask if this were right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect. She held Carol tighter against her, and felt Carol's mouth on her own smiling mouth. Therese lay still, looking at her at Carol's face only inches away from her, the gray eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if they retained some of the space she had just emerged from. And it seemed strange that it was still Carol's face, with the freckles, the bending blond eyebrow that she knew, the mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it many times before. "My angel," Carol said. "Flung out of space." Therese looked up at the corners of the room that were much brighter now, at the bureau with the bulging front and the shield-shaped drawer pulls, at the frameless mirror with the beveled edge, at the green patterned curtains that hung straight at the windows, and the two gray tips of buildings that showed just above the sill. She would remember every detail of this room forever. "What town is this?" she asked. Carol laughed. "This? This is Waterloo." She reached for a cigarette. "Isn't that awful." Smiling, Therese raised up on her elbow. Carol put a cigarette between her lips. "There's a couple of Waterloos in every state," Therese said.


Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 16 THERESE WENT OUT to get some newspapers while Carol was dressing. She stepped into the elevator and turned around in the exact center of it. She felt a little odd, as if everything had shifted and distances were not quite the same. She walked across the lobby to the newspaper stand in the corner. "The Courier and the Tribune," she said to the man, taking them, and even to utter words was as strange as the names of the newspapers she bought. "Eight cents," the man said, and Therese looked down at the change he had given her and saw there was still the same difference between eight cents and a quarter. She wandered across the lobby, looked through the glass into the barber shop where a couple of men were getting shaves. A Negro boy was shining shoes. A tall man with a cigar and a broad-brimmed hat, with Western shoes, walked by her. She would remember this lobby, too, forever, the people, the old-fashioned looking woodwork at the base of the registration desk, and the man in the dark overcoat who looked at her over the top of his newspaper, and slumped in his chair and went on reading beside the black and cream-colored marble column. When Therese opened the room door, the sight of Carol went through her like a spear. She stood a moment with her hand on the knob. Carol looked at her from the bathroom, holding the comb suspended over her head. Carol looked at her from head to foot. "Don't do that in public," Carol said. Therese threw the newspapers on the bed and came to her. Carol seized her suddenly in her arms. They stood holding each other as if they would never separate. Therese shuddered, and there were tears in her eyes. It was hard to find words, locked in Carol's arms, closer than kissing. "Why did you wait so long?" Therese asked. "Because--I thought there wouldn't be a second time, that I wouldn't want it. But that's not true." Therese thought of Abby, and it was like a slim shaft of bitterness dropping between them. Carol released her. "And there was something else--to have you around reminding me, knowing you and knowing it would be so easy. I'm sorry. It wasn't fair to you." Therese set her teeth hard. She watched Carol walk slowly away across the room, watched the space widen, and remembered the first time she had seen her walk so slowly away in the department store, Therese had thought forever. Carol had loved Abby, too, and she reproached herself for it. As Carol would one day for loving her, Therese wondered? Therese understood now why the December and January weeks had been made up of anger and indecision, reprimands alternating with indulgences. But she understood now that whatever Carol said in words, there were no barriers and no indecisions now.


There was no Abby, either, after this morning, whatever had happened between Carol and Abby before. "Was it?" Carol asked. "You've made me so happy ever since I've known you," Therese said. "I don't think you can judge." "I can judge this morning." Carol did not answer. Only the rasp of the door lock answered her. Carol had locked the door and they were alone. Therese came toward her, straight into her arms. "I love you," Therese said, just to hear the words. "I love you, I love you." But Carol seemed deliberately to pay almost no attention to her that day. There was more arrogance in the tilt of her cigarette, in the way she backed the car away from a curb, cursing, not quite joking. "Damned if I'll put a dime in a parking meter with a prairie right in sight," Carol said. But when Therese did catch her looking at her, Carol's eyes were laughing. Carol teased her, leaning on her shoulder as they stood in front of a cigarette machine, touching her foot under tables. It made Therese limp and tense at the same time. She thought of people she had seen holding hands in movies, and why shouldn't she and Carol? Yet when she simply took Carol's arm as they stood choosing a box of candy in a shop, Carol murmured, "Don't." Therese sent a box of candy to Mrs. Robichek from the candy shop in Minneapolis, and a box also to the Kellys. She sent an extravagantly big box to Richard's mother, a double-deck box with wooden compartments that she knew Mrs. Semco would use later for sewing articles. "Did you ever do that with Abby?" Therese asked abruptly that evening in the car. Carol's eyes understood suddenly and she blinked. "What questions you ask," she said. "Of course." Of course. She had known it. "And now--?" "Therese--" She asked stiffly, "Was it very much the same as with me?" Carol smiled. "No, darling." "Don't you think it's more pleasant than sleeping with men?" Her smile was amused. "Not necessarily. That depends. Who have you ever known except Richard?" "No one." "Well, don't you think you'd better try some others?" Therese was speechless for a moment, but she tried to be casual, drumming her fingers on the book in her lap. "I mean sometime, darling. You've got a lot of years ahead." Therese said nothing. She could not imagine ever leaving Carol either. That was another terrible question that had sprung into her mind at the start, that hammered at her brain now with a painful insistence to be answered. Would Carol ever want to leave her? "I mean, whom you sleep with depends so much on habit," Carol went on. "And you're too young to make enormous decisions. Or habits." "Are you just a habit?" she asked, smiling, but she heard the resentment in her voice. "You mean it's nothing but that?" "Therese--of all times to get so melancholic."


"I'm not melancholic," she protested, but the thin ice was under her feet again, the uncertainties. Or was it that she always wanted a little more than she had, no matter how much she had? She said impulsively, "Abby loves you, too, doesn't she?" Carol started a little, and put her foot down. "Abby has loved me practically all her life--even as you." Therese stared at her. "I'll tell you about it one day. Whatever happened is past. Months and months ago," she said, so softly Therese could hardly hear. "Only months?" "Yes." "Tell me now." "This isn't the time or the place." "There's never a time," Therese said. "Didn't you say there never was a right time?" "Did I say that? About what?" But neither of them said anything for a moment, because a fresh barrage of wind hurled the rain like a million bullets against the hood and windshield, and for a moment they could have heard nothing else. There was no thunder, as if the thunder, somewhere up above, modestly refrained from competing with this other god of rain. They waited in the inadequate shelter of a hill at the side of the road. "I might tell you the middle," Carol said, "because it's funny--and ironic. It was last winter when we had the furniture shop together. But I can't begin without telling you the first part---and that was when we were children. Our families lived near each other in New Jersey, so we saw each other during vacations. Abby always had a mild crush on me, I thought, even when we were about six and eight. Then she wrote me a couple of letters when she was about fourteen and away at school. And by that time I'd heard of girls who preferred girls. But the books also tell you it goes away after that age." There were pauses between her sentences, as if she left out sentences in between. "Were you in school with her?" Therese asked. "I never was. My father sent me to a different school, out of town. Then Abby went to Europe when she was sixteen, and I wasn't at home when she came back. I saw her once at some party around the time I got married. Abby looked quite different then, not like a tomboy any more. Then Harge and I lived in another town, and I didn't see her again--really for years, till long after Rindy was born. She came once in a while to the riding stable where Harge and I used to ride. A few times we all rode together. Then Abby and I started playing tennis on Saturday afternoons when Harge usually played golf. Abby and I always had fun together. Abby's former crush on me never crossed my mind--we were both so much older and so much had happened. I had an idea about starting a shop, because I wanted to see less of Harge.


I thought we were getting bored with each other and it would help. So I asked Abby if she wanted to be partners in it, and we started the furniture shop. After a few weeks to my surprise, I felt I was attracted to her," Carol said in the same quiet voice. "I couldn't understand it, and I was a little afraid of it--remembering Abby from before, and realizing she might feel the same way, or that both of us could. So I tried not to let Abby see it, and I think I succeeded. But finally--here's the funny part finally--there was the night in Abby's house one night last winter. The roads were snowed in that night, and Abby's mother insisted that we stay together in Abby's room, simply because the room I'd stayed in before hadn't any sheets on the bed then, and it was very late. Abby said she'd fix the sheets, we both protested, but Abby's mother insisted." Carol smiled a little, and glanced at her, but Therese felt Carol didn't even see her. "So I stayed with Abby. Nothing would have happened, if not for that night, I'm sure of it. If not for Abby's mother, that's the ironic thing, because she doesn't know anything about it. But it did happen, and I felt very much as you, I suppose, as happy as you." Carol blurted out the end, though her voice was still level and somehow without emotion of any kind. Therese stared at her, not knowing if it was jealousy or shock or anger that was suddenly jumbling everything. "And after that?" she asked. "After that, I knew I was in love with Abby. I don't know why not call it love, it had all the earmarks. But it lasted only two months, like a disease that came and went." Carol said in a different tone, "Darling, it's got nothing to do with you, and it's finished now. I knew you wanted to know, but I didn't see any reason for telling you before. It's that unimportant." "But if you felt the same way about her--" "For two months?" Carol said. "When you have a husband and child, you know, it's a little different." Different from her, Carol meant, because she hadn't any responsibilities. "Is it? You can just start and stop?" "When you haven't got a chance," Carol answered. The rain was abating, but only by so much that she could see it as rain now and not solid silver sheets. "I don't believe it." "You're hardly in a state to talk." "Why are you so cynical?" "Cynical? Am I?" Therese was not sure enough to answer. What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them. "It's letting up," Carol said. "How about going on and finding a good brandy somewhere? Or is this a dry state?"


They drove on to the next town and found a deserted bar in the biggest hotel. The brandy was delicious, and they ordered two more. "It's French brandy," Carol said. "Someday we'll go to France." Therese turned the little bowl of a glass between her fingers. A clock ticked at the end of the bar. A train whistle blew in the distance. And Carol cleared her throat. Ordinary sounds, yet the moment was not an ordinary one. No moment had been an ordinary one since the morning in Waterloo. Therese stared at the bright brown light in the brandy glass, and suddenly she had no doubt that she and Carol would one day go to France. Then out of the shimmering brown sun in the glass, Harge's face emerged, mouth and nose and eyes. "Harge knows about Abby, doesn't he?" Therese said. "Yes. He asked me something about her a few months ago--and I told him the whole thing from start to finish." "You did--" She thought of Richard, imagined how Richard would react. "Is that why you're getting the divorce?" "No. It's got nothing to do with the divorce. That's another ironic thing-- that I told Harge after it was all over. A mistaken effort at honesty, when Harge and I had nothing left to salvage. We'd already talked about a divorce. Please don't remind me of mistakes!" Carol frowned. "You mean--he certainly must have been jealous." "Yes. Because however I chose to tell it, I suppose it came out that I'd cared more about Abby at one period than I'd ever cared for him. At one point, even with Rindy I'd have left everything behind to go with her. I don't know how it was that I didn't." "And taken Rindy with you?" "I don't know. I know the fact that Rindy existed stopped me from leaving Harge then." "Do you regret it?" Carol shook her head slowly. "No. It wouldn't have lasted. It didn't last, and maybe I knew it wouldn't. With my marriage failing, I was too afraid and too weak--" She stopped. "Are you afraid now?" Carol was silent. "Carol--" "I am not afraid," she said stubbornly, lifting her head, drawing on her cigarette. Therese looked at her face in profile in the dim light. What about Rindy now, she wanted to ask, what will happen? But she knew Carol was on the brink of growing suddenly impatient, giving her a careless answer, or no answer at all. Another time, Therese thought, not this moment. It might destroy everything, even the solidity of Carol's body beside her, and the bend of Carol's body in the black sweater seemed the only solid thing in the world. Therese ran her thumb down Carol's side, from under the arm to the waist. "I remember Harge was particularly annoyed about a trip I took with Abby to Connecticut. Abby and I went up to buy some things for the shop.


It was only a two-day trip, but he said, 'Behind my back. You had to run away.'" Carol said it bitterly. There was more self-reproach in her voice than imitation of Harge. "Does he still talk about it?" "No. Is it anything to talk about? Is it anything to be proud of?" "Is it anything to be ashamed of?" "Yes. You know that, don't you?" Carol asked in her even, distinct voice. "In the eyes of the world it's an abomination." The way she said it, Therese could not quite smile. "You don't believe that." "People like Harge's family." "They're not the whole world." "They are enough. And you have to live in the world. You, I mean--and I don't mean anything just now about whom you decide to love." She looked at Therese, and at last Therese saw a smile rising slowly in her eyes, bringing Carol with it. "I mean responsibilities in the world that other people live in and that might not be yours. Just now it isn't, and that's why in New York I was exactly the wrong person for you to know--because I indulge you and keep you from growing up." "Why don't you stop?" "I'll try. The trouble is, I like to indulge you." "You're exactly the right person for me to know," Therese said. "Am I?" On the street, Therese said, "I don't suppose Harge would like it if he knew we were away on a trip, either, would he?" "He's not going to know about it." "Do you still want to go to Washington?" "Absolutely, if you've got the time. Can you stay away all of February?" Therese nodded. "Unless I hear something in Salt Lake City. I told Phil to write there. It's a pretty slim chance." Probably Phil wouldn't even write, she thought. But if there was the least chance of a job in New York, she should go back. "Would you go on to Washington without me?" Carol glanced at her. "As a matter of fact, I wouldn't," she said with a little smile. Their hotel room was so overheated when they came back that evening, they had to throw open the windows for a while. Carol leaned on the window sill, cursing the heat for Therese's amusement, calling her a salamander because she could bear it. Then Carol asked abruptly, "What did Richard have to say yesterday?" Therese had not even known that Carol knew about the last letter. The one he had promised, in the Chicago letter, to send to Minneapolis and to Seattle. "Nothing much," Therese said. "Just a one-page letter. He still wants me to write to him. And I don't intend to." She had thrown the letter away, but she remembered it, "I haven't heard from you, and it's beginning to dawn on me what an incredible conglomeration of contradictions you are. You are sensitive and yet so insensitive, imaginative and yet so unimaginative....


If you get stranded by your whimsical friend, let me know and I'll come after you. This won't last, Terry. I know a little about such things. I saw Dannie and he wanted to know what I'd heard from you, what you were doing. How would you like it if I had told him? I didn't say anything, for your sake, because I think one day you'll blush. I still love you, I admit it. I'll come out to you--and show you what America's really like--if you care enough about me to write and say so...." It was insulting to Carol, and Therese had torn it up. Therese sat on the bed with her arms around her knees, gripping her wrists inside the sleeves of her robe. Carol had overdone the ventilation, and the room was cold. The Minnesota winds had taken possession of the room, were seizing Carol's cigarette smoke and tearing it to nothing. Therese watched Carol calmly brushing her teeth at the basin. "Do you mean that about not writing to him? That's your decision?" Carol asked. "Yes." Therese watched Carol knock the water out of her toothbrush, and turn from the basin, blotting her face with a towel. Nothing about Richard mattered so much to her as the way Carol blotted her face with a towel. "Let's say no more," Carol said. She knew Carol would say no more. She knew Carol had been pushing her toward him, until this moment. Now it seemed it might all have been for this moment as Carol turned and walked toward her and her heart took a giant's step forward. They went on westward, through Sleepy Eye, Tracy, and Pipestone, sometimes taking an indirect highway on a whim. The West unfolded like a magic carpet, dotted with the neat, tight units of farmhouse, barn, and silo that they could see for half an hour before they came abreast of them. They stopped once at a farmhouse to ask if they could buy enough gas to get to the next station. The house smelled like fresh cold cheese. Their steps sounded hollow and lonely on the solid brown planks of the floor, and Therese thought in a fervid burst of patriotism--America. There was a picture of a rooster on the wall, made of colored patches of cloth sewn on a black ground, beautiful enough to hang in a museum. The farmer warned them about ice on the road directly west, so they took another highway going south. They discovered a one-ring circus that night beside a railroad track in a town called Sioux Falls. The performers were not very expert. Their seats were a couple of orange crates in the first row. One of the acrobats invited them into the performers' tent after the show, and insisted on giving Carol a dozen of the circus posters, because she had admired them.


Carol sent some of them to Abby and some to Rindy, and sent Rindy as well a green chameleon in a pasteboard box. It was an evening Therese would never forget, and unlike most such evenings, this one registered as unforgettable while it still lived. It was a matter of the bag of popcorn they shared, the circus, and the kiss Carol gave her back of some booth in the performers' tent. It was a matter of that particular enchantment that came from Carol--though Carol took their good times so for granted--seemed to work on all the world around them, a matter of everything going perfectly, without disappointments or hitches, going just as they wished it to. Therese walked from the circus with her head down, lost in thought. "I wonder if I'll ever want to create anything again," she said. "What brought this on?" "I mean--what was I ever trying to do but this? I'm happy." Carol took her arm and squeezed it, dug her thumb in so hard that Therese yelled. Carol looked up at a street marker and said, "Fifth and Nebraska. I think we go this way." "What's going to happen when we get back to New York? It can't be the same, can it?" "Yes," Carol said. "Till you get tired of me." Therese laughed. She heard the soft snap of Carol's scarf end in the wind. "We might not be living together, but it'll be the same." They couldn't live together with Rindy, Therese knew. It was useless to dream of it. But it was more than enough that Carol promised in words it would be the same. Near the border of Nebraska and Wyoming, they stopped for dinner at a large restaurant built like a lodge in an evergreen forest. They were almost the only people in the big dining room, and they chose a table near the fireplace. They spread out the road map and decided to head straight for Salt Lake City. They might stay there for a few days, Carol said, because it was an interesting place, and she was tired of driving. "Lusk," Therese said, looking at the map. "What a sexy sounding name." Carol put her head back and laughed. "Where is it?" "On the road." Carol picked up her wine glass and said, "Chateau Neuf-du-Pape in Nebraska. What'll we drink to?" "Us." It was something like the morning in Waterloo, Therese thought, a time too absolute and flawless to seem real, though it was real, not merely props in a play--their brandy glasses on the mantel, the row of deers' horns above, Carol's cigarette lighter, the fire itself. But at moments she felt like an actor, remembered only now and then her identity with a sense of surprise, as if she had been playing in these last days the part of someone else, someone fabulously and excessively lucky.


The Price of Salt -- Highsmith, Patricia -- d3477ce58404d2d159337a1eb92fe0db -- Anna’s Archive.9

She looked up at the fir branches fixed in the rafters, at the man and woman talking inaudibly together at a table against the wall, at the man alone at his table, smoking his cigarette slowly. She thought of the man sitting with the newspaper in the hotel in Waterloo. Didn't he have the same colorless eyes and the long creases on either side of his mouth? Or was it only that this moment of consciousness was so much the same as that other moment? They spent the night in Lusk, ninety miles away.


Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 17 "MRS. H. F. AIRD?" The desk clerk looked at Carol after she had signed the register. "Are you Mrs. Carol Aird?" "Yes." "Message for you." He turned around and got it from a pigeonhole. "A telegram." "Thank you." Carol glanced at Therese with a little lift of her brows before she opened it. She read it, frowning, then turned to the clerk. "Where's the Belvedere Hotel?" The clerk directed her. "I've got to pick up another telegram," Carol said to Therese. "Want to wait here while I get it?" "Who from?" "Abby." "All right. Is it bad news?" The frown was still in her eyes. "Don't know until I see it. Abby just says there's a telegram for me at the Belvedere." "Shall I have the bags taken up?" "Well--just wait. The car is parked." "Why can't I come with you?" "Of course, if you want to. Let's walk. It's only a couple of blocks away." Carol walked quickly. The cold was sharp. Therese glanced around her at the flat, orderly looking town, and remembered Carol's saying that Salt Lake City was the cleanest town in the United States. When the Belvedere was in sight, Carol suddenly looked at her and said, "Abby's probably had a brainstorm and decided to fly out and join us." In the Belvedere, Therese bought a newspaper while Carol went to the desk. When Therese turned to her, Carol was just lowering the telegram after reading it. There was a stunned expression on her face. She came slowly toward Therese, and it flashed through Therese's mind that Abby was dead, that this second message was from Abby's parents. "What's the matter?" Therese asked. "Nothing. I don't know yet." Carol glanced around and slapped the telegram against her fingers. "I've got to make a phone call. It might take a few minutes." She looked at her watch. It was a quarter to two. The hotel clerk said she could probably get New Jersey in about twenty minutes. Meanwhile, Carol wanted a drink. They found a bar in the hotel. "What is it? Is Abby sick?" Carol smiled. "No. I'll tell you later." "Is it Rindy?" "No!" Carol finished her brandy. Therese walked up and down, in the lobby while Carol was in the telephone booth. She saw Carol nod slowly several times, saw her fumble to get a cigarette lighted, but by the time Therese got there to light it for her, Carol had it and motioned her away. Carol talked for three or four minutes, then came out and paid her bill. "What is it, Carol?" Carol stood looking out the doorway of the hotel for a moment. "Now we go to the Temple Square Hotel," she said. There they picked up another telegram. Carol opened it and glanced at it, and tore it up as they walked to the door. "I don't think we'll stay here tonight," Carol said. "Let's go back to the car."


They went back to the hotel where Carol had gotten the first telegram. Therese said nothing to her, but she felt something had happened that meant Carol had to get back East immediately. Carol told the clerk to cancel their room reservation. "I'd like to leave a forwarding address in case of any other messages," she said. "That's the Brown Palace, Denver." "Right you are." "Thank you very much. That's good for the next week at least." In the car, Carol said, "What's the next town west?" "West?" Therese looked at the map. "Wendover. This is that stretch. A hundred and twenty-seven miles." "Christ!" Carol said suddenly. She stopped the car completely and took the map and looked at it. "What about Denver?" Therese asked. "I don't want to go to Denver." Carol folded the map and started the car. "Well, we'll do it anyway. Light me a cigarette, will you, darling? And watch out for the next place to get something to eat." They hadn't had lunch yet, and it was after three. They had talked about this stretch last night, the straight road west from Salt Lake City across the Great Salt Lake Desert. They had plenty of gas, Therese noticed, and probably the country wasn't entirely deserted, but Carol was tired. They had been driving since six that morning. Carol drove fast. Now and then she pressed the pedal down to the floor and held it there a long while before letting up. Therese glanced at her apprehensively. She felt they were running away from something. "Anything behind us?" Carol asked. "No." On the seat between them, Therese could see a piece of the telegram sticking out of Carol's handbag. GET THIS. JACOPO. was all she could read. She remembered Jacopo was the name of the little monkey in the back of the car. They came to a gas-station cafe standing all by itself like a wart on the flat landscape. They might have been the first people who had stopped there in days. Carol looked at her across the white oilcloth table, and sank back in the straight chair. Before she could speak, an old man in an apron came from the kitchen in back, and told them there was nothing but ham and eggs, so they ordered ham and eggs and coffee. Then Carol lighted a cigarette and leaned forward, looking down at the table. "Do you know what's up?" she said. "Harge has had a detective following us since Chicago." "A detective? What for?" "Can't you guess?" Carol said in almost a whisper. Therese bit her tongue. Yes, she could guess. Harge had found out they were traveling together. "Abby told you?" "Abby found out." Carol's fingers slid down her cigarette and the fire burned her. When she got the cigarette out of her mouth, her lip began to bleed. Therese looked around her. The place was empty. "Following us?" she asked. "With us?" "He may be in Salt Lake City now.


Checking on all the hotels. It's a very dirty business, darling. I'm sorry, sorry, sorry." Carol sat back restlessly in her chair. "Maybe I'd better put you on a train and send you home." "All right--if you think that's the best idea." "You don't have to be mixed up in this. Let them follow me to Alaska, if they want to. I don't know what they've got so far. I don't think much." Therese sat rigidly on the edge of her chair. "What's he doing--making notes about us?" The old man was coming back, bringing them glasses of water. Carol nodded. "Then there's the dictaphone trick," she said as the man went away. "I'm not sure if they'll go that far. I'm not sure if Harge would do that." The corner of her mouth trembled. She stared down at one spot on the worn white oilcloth. "I wonder if they had time for a dictaphone in Chicago. It's the only place we stayed more than ten hours. I rather hope they did. It's so ironic. Remember Chicago?" "Of course." She tried to keep her voice steady, but it was pretense, like pretending self-control when something you loved was dead in front of your eyes. They would have to separate here. "What about Waterloo?" She thought suddenly of the man in the lobby. "We got there late. It wouldn't have been easy." "Carol, I saw someone--I'm not sure, but I think I saw him twice." "Where?" "In the lobby in Waterloo the first time. In the morning. Then I thought I saw the same man in that restaurant with the fireplace." It was only last night, the restaurant with the fireplace. Carol made her tell completely about both times and describe the man completely. He was hard to describe. But now she racked her brain to extract the last detail she could, even to the color of his shoes. And it was odd and rather terrifying, dragging up what was probably a figment of her imagination and tying it to a situation that was real. She felt she might even be lying to Carol as she watched Carol's eyes grow more and more intense. "What do you think?" Therese asked. Carol sighed. "What can anyone think? Just watch out for him the third time." Therese looked down at her plate. It was impossible to eat. "It's about Rindy, isn't it?" "Yes." She put down her fork without taking the first bite, and reached for a cigarette. "Harge wants her--in toto. Maybe with this, he thinks he can do it." "Just because we're traveling together?" "Yes." "I should leave you." "Damn him," Carol said quietly, looking off at a corner of the room. Therese waited. But what was there to wait for? "I can get a bus somewhere from here, and then get a train." "Do you want to go?" Carol asked. "Of course, I don't. I just think it's best." "Are you afraid?" "Afraid? No."


She felt Carol's eyes appraise her as severely as at that moment in Waterloo, when she had told Carol she loved her. "Then I'm damned if you'll go. I want you with me." "Do you mean that?" "Yes. Eat your eggs. Stop being silly." And Carol even smiled a little. "Shall we go to Reno as we'd planned?" "Any place." "And let's take our time." A few moments later, when they were on the road, Therese said again, "I'm still not sure it was the same man the second time, you know." "I think you're sure," Carol said. Then suddenly on the long straight road, she stopped the car. She sat for a moment in silence, looking down the road. Then she glanced at Therese. "I can't go to Reno. That's a little too funny. I know a wonderful place just south of Denver." "Denver?" "Denver," Carol said firmly, and backed the car around.


Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 18 IN THE MORNING, they lay in each other's arms long after the sun had come into the room. The sun warmed them through the window of the hotel in the tiny town whose name they hadn't noticed. There was snow on the ground outside. "There'll be snow in Estes Park," Carol said to her. "What's Estes Park?" "You'll like it. Not like Yellowstone. It's open all year." "Carol, you're not worried, are you?" Carol pulled her close. "Do I act like I'm worried?" Therese was not worried. That first panic had vanished. She was watching, but not as she had watched yesterday afternoon just after Salt Lake City. Carol wanted her with her, and whatever happened they would meet it without running. How was it possible to be afraid and in love, Therese thought. The two things did not go together. How was it possible to be afraid, when the two of them grew stronger together every day? And every night. Every night was different, and every morning. Together they possessed a miracle. The road into Estes Park slanted downward. The snowdrifts piled higher and higher on either side, and then the lights began, strung along the fir trees, arching over the road. It was a village of brown logged houses and shops and hotels. There was music, and people walked in the bright street with their heads lifted up, as if they were enchanted. "I do like it," Therese said. "It doesn't mean you don't have to watch out for our little man." They brought the portable phonograph up to their room, and played some records they had just bought and some old ones from New Jersey. Therese played "Easy Living" a couple of times, and Carol sat across the room watching her, sitting on the arm of a chair with her arms folded. "What a rotten time I give you, don't I?" "Oh, Carol--" Therese tried to smile. It was only a mood of Carol's, only a moment. But it made Therese feel helpless. Carol looked around at the window. "And why didn't we go to Europe in the first place? Switzerland. Or fly out here at least." "I wouldn't have liked that at all." Therese looked at the yellow suede shirt that Carol had bought for her, that hung over the back of a chair. Carol had sent Rindy a green one. She had bought some silver earrings, a couple of books, and a bottle of Triple Sec. Half an hour ago, they had been happy, walking through the streets together. "It's that last rye you got downstairs," Therese said. "Rye depresses you." "Does it?" "Worse than brandy." "I'm going to take you to the nicest place I know this side of Sun Valley," she said. "What's the matter with Sun Valley?" She knew Carol liked skiing. "Sun Valley just isn't the place," Carol said mysteriously. "This place is near Colorado Springs."


In Denver, Carol stopped and sold her diamond engagement ring at a jeweler's. Therese felt a little disturbed by it, but Carol said the ring meant nothing to her and she loathed diamonds anyway. And it was quicker than wiring her bank for money. Carol wanted to stop at a hotel a few miles out from Colorado Springs, where she had been before, but she changed her mind almost as soon as they got there. It was too much like a resort, she said, so they went to a hotel that backed on the town and faced the mountains. Their room was long from the door to the square floor-length windows that overlooked a garden, and beyond, the red and white mountains. There were touches of white in the garden, odd little pyramids of stone, a white bench or a chair, and the garden looked foolish compared to the magnificent land that surrounded it, the flat sweep that rose up into mountains upon mountains, filling the horizon like half a world. The room had blond furniture about the color of Carol's hair, and there was a bookcase as smooth as she could want it, with some good books amid the bad ones, and Therese knew she would never read any of them while they were here. A painting of a woman in a large black hat and a red scarf hung above the bookcase, and on the wall near the door was spread a pelt of brown leather, not a real pelt but something someone had cut out of a piece of brown suede. Above it was a tin lantern with a candle. Carol also rented the room next to them, which had a connecting door, though they did not use it even to put their suitcases in. They planned to stay a week, or longer if they liked it. On the morning of the second day, Therese came back from a tour of inspection of the hotel grounds and found Carol stooped by the bed table. Carol only glanced at her, and went to the dressing table and looked under that, and then to the long built-in closet behind the wall panel. "That's that," Carol said. "Now let's forget it." Therese knew what she was looking for. "I hadn't thought of it," she said. "I feel like we've lost him." "Except that he's probably gotten to Denver by now," Carol said calmly. She smiled, but she twisted her mouth a little. "And he'll probably drop in down here." It was so, of course. There was even the remotest chance that the detective had seen them when they drove back through Salt Lake City, and followed them. If he didn't find them in Salt Lake City, he might inquire at the hotels. She knew that was why Carol had left the Denver address, in fact, because they hadn't intended to go to Denver. Therese flung herself in the armchair, and looked at Carol.


Carol took the trouble to search for a dictaphone, but her attitude was arrogant. She had even invited trouble by coming here. And the explanation, the resolution of those contradictory facts was nowhere but in Carol herself, unresolved, in her slow, restless step as she walked to the door now and turned, in the nonchalant lift of her head, and in the nervous line of her eyebrows that registered irritation in one second and in the next were serene. Therese looked at the big room, up at the high ceiling, at the large square, plain bed, the room that for all its modernness had a curiously old- fashioned, ample air about it that she associated with the American West, like the oversized Western saddles she had seen in the riding stable downstairs. A kind of cleanness, as well. Yet Carol looked for a dictaphone. Therese watched her, walking back toward her, still in her pajamas and robe. She had an impulse to go to Carol, crush her in her arms, pull her down on the bed, and the fact that she didn't now made her tense and alert filled her with a repressed but reckless exhilaration. Carol blew her smoke up into the air. "I don't give a damn. I hope the papers find out about it and rub Harge's nose in his own mess. I hope he wastes fifty thousand dollars. Do you want to take that trip that bankrupts the English language this afternoon? Did you ask Mrs. French yet?" They had met Mrs. French last night in the game room of the hotel. She hadn't a car, and Carol had asked her if she would like to take a drive with them today. "I asked her," Therese said. "She said she'd be ready right after lunch." "Wear your suede shirt." Carol took Therese's face in her hands, pressed her cheeks, and kissed her. "Put it on now." It was a six- or seven-hour trip to the Cripple Creek gold mine, over Ute Pass and down a mountain. Mrs. French went with them, talking the whole time. She was a woman of about seventy, with a Maryland accent and a hearing aid, ready to get out of the car and climb anywhere, though she had to be helped every foot of the way. Therese felt very anxious about her, though she actually disliked even touching her. She felt if Mrs. French fell, she would break in a million pieces. Carol and Mrs. French talked about the State of Washington, which Mrs. French knew well, since she had lived there for the past few years with one of her sons. Carol asked a few questions, and Mrs. French told her all about her ten years of traveling since her husband's death, and about her two sons, the one in Washington and the one in Hawaii who worked for a pineapple company. And obviously Mrs. French adored Carol, and they were going to see a lot more of Mrs. French.


It was nearly eleven when they got back to the hotel. Carol asked Mrs. French to have supper in the bar with them, but Mrs. French said she was too tired for anything but her shredded wheat and hot milk, which she would have in her room. "I'm glad," Therese said when she had gone. "I'd rather be alone with you." "Really, Miss Belivet? Whatever do you mean?" Carol asked as she opened the door into the bar. "You'd better sit down and tell me all about that." But they were not alone in the bar more than five minutes. Two men, one named Dave and the other whose name Therese at least did not know and did not care to, came over and asked to join them. They were the two who had come over last night in the game room and asked Carol and her to play gin rummy. Carol had declined last night. Now she said, "Of course, sit down." Carol and Dave began a conversation that sounded very interesting, but Therese was seated so that she couldn't participate very well. And the man next to Therese wanted to talk about something else, a horseback trip he had just made around Steamboat Springs. After supper, Therese waited for a sign from Carol to leave, but Carol was still deep in conversation. Therese had read about that special pleasure people got from the fact that someone they loved was attractive in the eyes of other people, too. She simply didn't have it. Carol looked at her every now and then and gave her a wink. So Therese sat there for an hour and a half, and managed to be polite, because she knew Carol wanted her to be. The people who joined them in the bar and sometimes in the dining room did not annoy her so much as Mrs. French, who went with them somewhere almost every day in the car. Then an angry resentment that Therese was actually ashamed of would rise in her because someone was preventing her from being alone with Carol. "Darling, did you ever think you'll be seventy-one, too, some day?" "No," Therese said. But there were other days when they drove out into the mountains alone, taking any road they saw. Once they came upon a little town they liked and spent the night there, without pajamas or toothbrushes, without past or future, and the night became another of those islands in time, suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute. Or perhaps it was nothing but happiness, Therese thought, a complete happiness that must be rare enough, so rare that very few people ever knew it.


But if it was merely happiness, then it had gone beyond the ordinary bounds and become something else, become a kind of excessive pressure, so that the weight of a coffee cup in her hand, the speed of a cat crossing the garden below, the silent crash of two clouds seemed almost more than she could bear. And just as she had not understood a month ago the phenomenon of sudden happiness, she did not understand her state now, which seemed an aftermath. It was more often painful than pleasant, and consequently she was afraid she had some grave and unique flaw. She was as afraid sometimes as if she were walking about with a broken spine. If she ever had an impulse to tell Carol, the words dissolved before she began, in fear and in her usual mistrust of her own reactions, the anxiety that her reactions were like no one else's, and that therefore not even Carol could understand them. In the mornings, they generally drove out somewhere in the mountains and left the car so they could climb up a hill. They drove aimlessly over the zigzagging roads that were like white chalk lines connecting mountain point to mountain point. From a distance, one could see clouds lying about the projecting peaks, so it seemed they flew along in space, a little closer to heaven than to earth. Therese's favorite spot was on the highway above Cripple Creek, where the road clung suddenly to the rim of a gigantic depression. Hundreds of feet below, lay the tiny disorder of the abandoned mining town. There the eye and the brain played tricks with each other, for it was impossible to keep a steady concept of the proportion below, impossible to compare it on any human scale. Her own hand held up in front of her could look Lilliputian or curiously huge. And the town occupied only a fraction of the great scoop in the earth, like a single experience, a single commonplace event, set in a certain immeasurable territory of the mind. The eye, swimming in space, returned to rest on the spot that looked like a box of matches run over by a car, the man- made confusion of the little town. Always Therese looked for the man with the creases on either side of his mouth, but Carol never did. Carol had not even mentioned him since their second day at Colorado Springs, and now ten days had passed. Because the restaurant of the hotel was famous, new people came every evening to the big dining room, and Therese always glanced about, not actually expecting to see him, but as a kind of precaution that had become a habit. But Carol paid no attention to anyone except Walter, their waiter, who always came up to ask what kind of cocktail they wanted that evening. Many people looked at Carol, however, because she was generally the most attractive woman in the room.


And Therese was so delighted to be with her, so proud of her, she looked at no one else but Carol. Then as she read the menu, Carol would slowly press Therese's foot under the table to make her smile. "What do you think about Iceland in the summer?" Carol might ask, because they made a point of talking about travel, if there was a silence when they first sat down. "Must you pick such cold places? When'll I ever work?" "Don't be dismal. Shall we invite Mrs. French? Think she'd mind our holding hands?" One morning, there were three letters--from Rindy, Abby, and Dannie. It was Carol's second letter from Abby, who had had no further news before, and Therese noticed Carol opened Rindy's letter first. Dannie wrote that he was still waiting to hear the outcome of two interviews about jobs and reported that Phil said Harkevy was going to do the sets for the English play called The Faint Heart in March. "Listen to this," Carol said. "'Have you seen any armadillos in Colorado? Can you send me one, because the chameleon got lost. Daddy and I looked everywhere in the house for him. But if you send me the armadillo it will be big enough not to get lost.' New paragraph. 'I got 90 in spelling but only 70 in arithmetic. I hate it. I hate the teacher. Well I must be closing. Love to you and to Abby. Rindy. XX. p. s. Thank you very much for the leather shirt. Daddy bought me a two-wheel bike regular size that he said I was too small for Christmas. I am not too small. It is a beautiful bike.' Period. What's the use? Harge can always top me." Carol put the letter down and picked up Abby's. "Why did Rindy say 'Love to you and to Abby'?" Therese asked. "Does she think you're with Abby?" "No." Carol's wooden letter opener had stopped halfway through Abby's envelope. "I suppose she thinks I write to her," she said, and finished slitting the envelope. "I mean, Harge wouldn't have told her that, would he?" "No, darling," Carol said preoccupiedly, reading Abby's letter. Therese got up and crossed the room, and stood by the window looking out at the mountains. She should write to Harkevy this afternoon, she thought, and ask him if there was a chance of an assistant's job with his group in March. She began composing the letter in her head. The mountains looked back at her like majestic red lions, staring down their noses. Twice she heard Carol laugh, but she did not read any of the letter aloud to her. "No news?" Therese asked when she was finished. "No news." Carol taught her to drive on the roads around the foot of the mountains, where a car almost never passed. Therese learned faster than she had ever learned anything before, and after a couple of days, Carol let her drive in Colorado Springs.


In Denver, she took a test and got a license. Carol said she could do half the driving back to New York, if she wanted to. He was sitting one evening at the dinner hour at a table by himself to the left of Carol and behind her. Therese choked on nothing, and put her fork down. Her heart began to beat as if it would hammer its way out of her chest. How had she gotten halfway through the meal without seeing him? She lifted her eyes to Carol's face and saw Carol watching her, reading her with the gray eyes that were not quite so calm as a moment ago. Carol had stopped in the middle of saying something. "Have a cigarette," Carol said, offering her one, lighting it for her. "He doesn't know that you can recognize him, does he?" "No." "Well, don't let him find out." Carol smiled at her, lighted her own cigarette, and looked away in the opposite direction from the detective. "Just take it easy," Carol added in the same tone. It was easy to say, easy to have thought she could look at him when she saw him next, but what was the use of trying when it was like being struck in the face with a cannon ball? "No baked Alaska tonight?" Carol said, looking at the menu. "That breaks my heart. You know what we're going to have?" She called to the waiter. "Walter!" Walter came smiling, ardent to serve them, just as he did every evening. "Yes, madame." "Two Remy Martins, please, Walter," Carol told him. The brandy helped very little, if at all. The detective did not once look at them. He was reading a book that he had propped up on the metal napkin holder, and even now Therese felt a doubt as strong as in the cafe outside Salt Lake City, an uncertainty that was somehow more horrible than the positive knowledge would be that he was the detective. "Do we have to go past him, Carol?" Therese asked. There was a door in back of her, into the bar. "Yes. That's the way we go out." Carol's eyebrows lifted with her smile, exactly as on any other night. "He can't do anything to us. Do you expect him to pull a gun?" Therese followed her, passed within twelve inches of the man whose head was lowered toward his book. Ahead of her she saw Carol's figure bend gracefully as she greeted Mrs. French, who was sitting alone at a table. "Why didn't you come and join us?" Carol said, and Therese remembered that the two women Mrs. French usually sat with had left today. Carol even stood there a few moments talking with Mrs. French, and Therese marveled at her but she couldn't stand there herself, and went on, to wait for Carol by the elevators. Upstairs, Carol found the little instrument fastened up in a corner under the bed table.


Carol got the scissors and using both hands cut through the wire that disappeared under the carpet. "Did the hotel people let him in here, do you think?" Therese asked, horrified. "He probably had a key to fit.". Carol yanked the thing loose from the table and dropped it on the carpet, a little black box with a trail of wire. "Look at it, like a rat," she said. "A portrait of Harge." Her face had flushed suddenly. "Where does it go to?" "To some room where it's recorded. Probably across the hall. Bless these fancy wall to wall carpets!" Carol kicked the dictaphone toward the center of the room. Therese looked at the little rectangular box, and thought of it drinking up their words last night. "I wonder how long it's been there?" "How long do you think he could have been here without your seeing him?" "Yesterday at the worst." But even as she said it, she knew she could be wrong. She couldn't have seen every face in the hotel. And Carol was shaking her head. "Would it take him nearly two weeks to trace us from Salt Lake City to here? No, he just decided to have dinner with us tonight." Carol turned from the bookshelf with a glass of brandy in her hand. The flush had left her face. Now she even smiled a little at Therese. "Clumsy fellow, isn't he?" She sat down on the bed, swung a pillow behind her and leaned back. "Well, we've been here just about long enough, haven't we?" "When do you want to go?" "Maybe tomorrow. We'll get ourselves packed in the morning and take off after lunch. What do you think?" Later, they went down to the car and took a drive, westward into the darkness. We shall not go farther west, Therese thought. She could not stamp out the panic that danced in the very core of her, that she felt due to something gone before, something that had happened long ago, not now, not this. She was uneasy, but Carol was not. Carol was not merely pretending coolness, she really was not afraid. Carol said, what could he do, after all, but she simply didn't want to be spied upon. "One other thing," Carol said. "Try and find out what kind of car he's in." That night, talking over the road map about their route tomorrow, talking as matter-of-factly as a couple of strangers, Therese thought surely tonight would not be like last night. But when they kissed good night in bed, Therese felt their sudden release, that leap of response in both of them, as if their bodies were of some materials, which put together inevitably created desire.


Patricia Highsmith CHAPTER 19 THERESE COULD NOT find out what kind of car he had, because the cars were locked in separate garages, and though she had a view of the garages from the sunroom, she did not see him come out that morning. Neither did they see him at lunchtime. Mrs. French insisted that they come into her room for a cordial, when she heard they were leaving. "You must have a stirrup cup," Mrs. French said to Carol. "Why I haven't even got your address yet!" Therese remembered that they had promised to exchange flower bulbs. She remembered a long conversation in the car one day about bulbs that had cemented their friendship. Carol was incredibly patient to the last. One would never have guessed, seeing Carol sitting on Mrs. French's sofa with the little glass Mrs. French kept filling, that she was in a hurry to get away. Mrs. French kissed them both on the cheek when they said good-by. From Denver, they took a highway northward toward Wyoming. They stopped for coffee at the kind of place they always liked, an ordinary restaurant with a counter and a juke box. They put nickels into the juke box, but it was not the same as before. Therese knew it would not be the same for the rest of the trip, though Carol talked of going to Washington even yet, and perhaps up into Canada. Therese could feel that Carol's goal was New York. They spent the first night in a tourist camp that was built like a circle of tepees. While they were undressing, Carol looked up at the ceiling where the tepee poles came to a point, and said boredly, "The trouble some idiots go to," and for some reason it struck Therese as hysterically funny. She laughed until Carol got tired of it and threatened to make her drink a tumbler of brandy, if she didn't stop. And Therese was still smiling, standing by the window with a brandy in her hand, waiting for Carol to come out of the shower, when she saw a car drive up beside the large office tepee and stop. After a moment, the man who had gone into the office came out and looked around in the dark area within the circle of tepees, and it was his prowling step that arrested her attention. She was suddenly sure without seeing his face or even his figure very clearly that he was the detective. "Carol!" she called. Carol pushed the shower curtain aside and glanced at her and stopped drying herself. "Is it--" "I don't know, but I think so," she said, and saw the anger spread slowly over Carol's face and stiffen it, and it shocked Therese to sobriety, as if she had just realized an insult, to herself or to Carol. "Chr-rist!" Carol said, and flung the towel at the floor. She drew on her robe and tied the belt of it. "Well--what's he doing?"


"I think he's stopping here." Therese stood back at the edge of the window. "His car's still in front of the office, anyway. If we turn out the light, I'll be able to see a lot better." Carol groaned. "Oh, don't. I couldn't. It bores me," she said with the utmost boredom and disgust. And Therese smiled, twistedly, and checked another insane impulse to laugh, because Carol would have been furious if she had laughed. Then she saw the car roll under the garage door of a tepee across the circle. "Yes, he's stopping here. It's a black two-door sedan." Carol sat down on the bed with a sigh. She smiled at Therese, a quick smile of fatigue and boredom, of resignation and helplessness and anger. "Take your shower. And then get dressed again." "But I don't know if it's him at all." "That's just the hell of it, darling." Therese took a shower and lay down in her clothes beside Carol. Carol had turned out the light. She was smoking cigarettes in the dark, and said nothing to her until finally she touched her arm and said, "Let's go." It was three thirty when they drove out of the tourist camp. They had paid their bill in advance. There was no light anywhere, and unless the detective was watching them with his light out, no one had observed them. "What do you want to do, sleep again somewhere?" Carol asked her. "No. Do you?" "No. Let's see how much distance we can make." She pressed the pedal to the floor. The road was clear and smooth as far as the headlights swept. As dawn was breaking, a highway patrolman stopped them for speeding, and Carol had to pay a twenty-two dollar fine in a town called Central City, Nebraska. They lost thirty miles by having to follow the patrolman back to the little town, but Carol went through with it without a word, unlike herself, unlike the time she had argued and cajoled the patrolman out of an arrest for speeding, and a New Jersey speed cop at that. "Irritating," Carol said when they got back into the car, and that was all she said, for hours. Therese offered to drive, but Carol said she wanted to. And the flat Nebraska prairie spread out before them, yellow with wheat stubble, brown- splotched with bare earth and stone, deceptively warm looking in the white winter sun. Because they went a little slower now, Therese had a panicky sensation of not moving at all, as if the earth drifted under them and they stood still. She watched the road behind them for another patrol car, for the detective's car, and for the nameless, shapeless thing she felt pursuing them from Colorado Springs.


She watched the land and the sky for the meaningless events that her mind insisted on attaching significance to, the buzzard that banked slowly in the sky, the direction of a tangle of weeds that bounced over a rutted field before the wind, and whether a chimney had smoke or not. Around eight o'clock, an irresistible sleepiness weighted her eyelids and clouded her head, so she felt scarcely any surprise when she saw a car behind them like the car she watched for, a two-door sedan of dark color. "There's a car like that behind us," she said. "It's got a yellow license plate." Carol said nothing for a minute, but she glanced in the mirror and blew her breath out through pursed lips. "I doubt it. If it is, he's a better man than I thought." She was slowing down. "If I let him pass, do you think you can recognize him?" "Yes." Couldn't she recognize the blurriest glimpse of him by now? Carol slowed almost to a stop and took the road map and laid it across the wheel and looked at it. The other car approached, and it was him inside, and went by. "Yes," Therese said. The man hadn't glanced at her. Carol pressed the gas pedal down. "You're sure, are you?" "Positive." Therese watched the speedometer go up to sixty-five and over. "What are you going to do?" "Speak to him." Carol slacked her speed as they closed the distance. They drew alongside of the detective's car, and he turned to look at them, the wide straight mouth unchanging, the eyes like round gray dots, expressionless as the mouth. Carol waved her hand downward. The man's car slowed. "Roll your window down," Carol said to Therese. The detective's car pulled over into the sandy shoulder of the road and stopped. Carol stopped her car with its rear wheels on the highway, and spoke across Therese. "Do you like our company or what?" she asked. The man got out of his car and closed his door. Some three yards of ground separated the cars, and the detective crossed half of it and stood. His dead little eyes had darkish rims around their gray irises, like a doll's blank and steady eyes. He was not young. His face looked worn by the weathers he had driven it through, and the shadow of his beard deepened the bent creases on either side of his mouth. "I'm doing my job, Mrs. Aird," he said. "That's pretty obvious. It's nasty work, isn't it?" The detective tapped a cigarette on his thumbnail and lighted it in the gusty wind with a slowness that suggested a stage performance. "At least it's nearly over." "Then why don't you leave us alone," Carol said, her voice as tense as the arm that supported her on the steering wheel... "Because I have orders to follow you on this trip. But if you're going back to New York, I won't have to any more.


I advise you to go back, Mrs. Aird. Are you going back now?" "No, I'm not." "Because I've got some information--information that I'd say was in your interest to go back and take care of." "Thanks," Carol said cynically. "Thanks so much for telling me. It's not in my plans to go back just yet. But I can give you my itinerary, so you can leave us alone and catch up on your sleep." The detective looked at her with a false and meaningless smile, not like a person at all, but like a machine wound up and set on a course. "I think you'll go back to New York. I'm giving you sound advice. Your child is at stake. I suppose you know that, don't you?" "My child is my property!" A crease twitched in his cheek. "A human being is not property, Mrs. Aird." Carol raised her voice. "Are you going to tag along the rest of the way?" "Are you going back to New York?" "No." "I think you will," the detective said, and he turned away slowly toward his car. Carol stepped on the starter. She reached for Therese's hand and squeezed it for a moment in reassurance, and then the car shot forward. Therese sat up with her elbows on her knees and her hands pressed to her forehead, yielding to a shame and shock she had never known before, that she had repressed before the detective. "Carol!" Carol was crying, silently. Therese looked at the downward curve of her lips that was not like Carol at all, but rather like a small girl's twisted grimace of crying. She stared incredulously at the tear that rolled over Carol's cheekbone. "Get me a cigarette," Carol said. When Therese handed it to her, lighted, she had wiped the tear away, and it was over. Carol drove for a minute, slowly, smoking the cigarette. "Crawl in the back and get the gun," Carol said. Therese did not move for a moment. Carol glanced at her. "Will you?" Therese slid agilely in her slacks over the back seat, and dragged the navy-blue suitcase onto the seat. She opened the clasps and got out the sweater with the gun. "Just hand it to me," Carol said calmly. "I want it in the side pocket." She reached her hand over her shoulder, and Therese put the white handle of the gun into it, and crawled back into the front seat. The detective was still following them, half a mile behind them, back of the horse and farm wagon that had turned into the highway from a dirt road. Carol held Therese's hand and drove with her left hand. Therese looked down at the faintly freckled fingers that dug their strong cool tips into her palm. "I'm going to talk to him again," Carol said, and pressed the gas pedal down steadily.


"If you want to get out, I'll put you off at the next gas station or something and come back for you." "I don't want to leave you," Therese said. Carol was going to demand the detective's records, and Therese had a vision of Carol hurt, of his pulling a gun with an expert's oily speed and firing it before Carol could even pull the trigger. But those things didn't happen, wouldn't happen, she thought, and she set her teeth. She kneaded Carol's hand in her fingers. "All right. And don't worry. I just want to talk to him." She swung the car suddenly into a smaller road off the highway to the left. The road went up between sloping fields, and turned and went through woods. Carol drove fast, though the road was bad. "He's coming on, isn't he?" "Yes." There was one farmhouse set in the rolling hills, and then nothing but scrubby, rocky land and the road that kept disappearing around the curves before them. Where the road clung to a sloping hill, Carol went round a curve and stopped the car carelessly, half in the road. She reached for the side pocket and pulled the gun, out. She opened something on it, and Therese saw the bullets inside. Then Carol looked through the windshield, and let her hands with the gun fall in her lap. "I'd better not, better not," she said quickly, and dropped the gun back in the side pocket. Then she pulled the car up, and straightened it by the side of the hill. "Stay in the car," she said to Therese, and got out. Therese heard the detective's car. Carol walked slowly toward the sound, and then the detective's car came around the curve, not fast, but his brakes shrieked, and Carol stepped to the side of the road. Therese opened the door slightly, and leaned on the window sill. The man got out of his car. "Now what?" he said, raising his voice in the wind. "What do you think?" Carol came a little closer to him. "I'd like everything you've got about me--dictaphone tapes and whatever." The detective's brows hardly rose over the pale dots of his eyes. He leaned against the front fender of his car, smirking with his wide thin mouth. He glanced at Therese and back at Carol. "Everything's sent away. I haven't a thing but a few notes. About times and places." "All right, I'd like to have them." "You mean, you want to buy them?" "I didn't say that, I said I'd like to have them. Do you prefer to sell them?" "I'm not one you can buy off," he said. "What're you doing this for anyway, if not money?" Carol asked impatiently. "Why not make a little more? What'll you take for what you've got?" He folded his arms. "I told you everything's sent away. You'd be wasting your money." "I don't think you mailed the dictaphone records yet from Colorado Springs," Carol said.


"No?" he asked sarcastically. "No. I'll give you whatever you ask for them." He looked Carol up and down, glanced at Therese, and again his mouth widened. "Get them--tapes, records or whatever they are," Carol said, and the man moved. He walked around his car to the luggage compartment, and Therese heard his keys jingle as he opened it. Therese got out of the car, unable to sit there any longer. She walked to within a few feet of Carol and stopped. The detective was reaching for something in a big suitcase. When he straightened up, the raised lid of the compartment knocked his hat off. He stepped on the brim to hold it from the wind. He had something in one hand now, too small to see. "There's two," he said. "I guess they're worth five hundred. They'd be worth more if there weren't more of them in New York." "You're a fine salesman. I don't believe you," Carol said. "Why? They're in a hurry for them in New York." He picked up his hat, and closed the luggage compartment. "But they've got enough now. I told you you'd better go back to New York, Mrs. Aird." He ground his cigarette out in the dirt, twisting his toe in front of him. "Are you going back to New York now?" "I don't change my mind," Carol said. The detective shrugged. "I'm not on any side. The sooner you go back to New York, the sooner we can call it quits." "We can call it quits right now. After you give me those, you can take off and keep going in the same direction." The detective had slowly extended his hand in a fist, like the fist in a guessing game in which there might be nothing. "Are you willing to give me five hundred for these?" he asked. Carol looked at his hand, then opened her shoulder strap bag. She took out her billfold, and then her checkbook. "I prefer cash," he said. "I haven't got it." He shrugged again. "Ail right, I'll take a check." Carol wrote it, resting it on the fender of his car. Now as he bent over, watching Carol, Therese could see the little black object in his hand. Therese came closer. The man was spelling his name. When Carol gave him the check, he dropped the two little boxes in her hand. "How long have you been collecting them?" Carol asked. "Play them and see." "I didn't come out here to joke!" Carol said, and her voice broke. He smiled, folding the check. "Don't say I didn't warn you. What you've gotten from me isn't all of it. There's plenty in New York." Carol fastened her bag, and turned toward her car, not even looking at Therese. Then she stopped and faced the detective again. "If they've got all they want, you can knock off now, can't you? Have I got your promise to do that?"


He was standing with his hand on his car door, watching her. "I'm still on the job, Mrs. Aird--still working for my office. Unless you want to catch a plane for home now. Or for some other place. Give me the slip. I'll have to tell my office something--not having the last few days at Colorado Springs--something more exciting than this." "Oh, let them invent something exciting!" The detective's smile showed a little of his teeth. He got back into his car. He shoved his gear, put his head out to see behind him, and backed the car in a quick turn. He drove off toward the highway. The sound of his motor faded fast. Carol walked slowly toward the car, got in and sat staring through the windshield at the dry rise of earth a few yards ahead. Her face was as blank as if she had fainted. Therese was beside her. She put her arm around Carol's shoulder. She squeezed the cloth shoulder of the coat, and felt as useless as any stranger. "Oh, I think it's mostly bluff," Carol said suddenly. But it had made Carol's face gray, had taken the energy out of her voice. Carol opened her hand and looked at the two little round boxes. "Here's as good a place as any." She got out of the car, and Therese followed her. Carol opened a box and took out the coil of tape that looked like celluloid. "Tiny, isn't it. I suppose it burns. Let's burn it." Therese struck the match in the shelter of the car. The tape burned fast, and Therese dropped it on the ground, and then the wind blew it out. Carol said not to bother, they could throw both of them in a river. Carol was sitting in the car, smoking a cigarette. "What time is it?" Carol asked. "Twenty to twelve." She got back in the car, and Carol started immediately, back down the road toward the highway. "I'm going to call Abby in Omaha, and then my lawyer." Therese looked at the road map. Omaha was the next big town, if they made a slight turn south. Carol looked tired, and Therese felt her anger, still unappeased, in the silence she kept. The car jolted over a rut, and Therese heard the bump and clink of the can of beer that rolled somewhere under the front seat, the beer they had not been able to open that first day. She was hungry, had been sickly hungry for hours. "How about my driving?" "All right," Carol said tiredly, relaxing as if she surrendered. She slowed the car quickly. Therese slid across her, under the wheel. "And how about stopping for a breakfast?" "I couldn't eat." "Or a drink." "Let's get it in Omaha." Therese sent the speedometer up to sixty-five, and held it just under seventy. It was Highway 30. Then two seventy-five into Omaha, and the road was not first class.