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 her 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 café 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.

Chapter Nineteen
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
the 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 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 sixtyfive
and over.
“What are you going to do?”
“Speak to him.”
Carol slacked her speed as they closed the distance. They drew
alongside 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 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’scar. Carol walked slowly toward
the sound, and thenthe detective’s car came around the curve, not
fast, but his brakesshrieked, and Carol stepped to the side of the
road. Therese openedthe door slightly, and leaned on the window
sill.
The man got out of hiscar. “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’vegot about me—dictaphone tapes and
whatever.”
The detective’s browshardly rose over the pale dots of his
eyes. He leanedagainst the front fender of his car, smirking with
his wide thin mouth.He glanced at Therese and back at Carol.
“Everything’s sentaway. I haven’t a thing but a few notes. About
times and places.”
“All right, I’d liketo have them.”
“You mean, you want tobuy them?”
“I didn’t say that, Isaid I’d like to have them. Do you prefer
to sell them?”
“I’m not one you canbuy off,” he said.
“What’re you doingthis for anyway, if not money?” Carol
asked impatiently.“Why not make a little more? What’ll you
take for what you’vegot?”
He folded his arms. “Itold you everything’s sent away. You’d
be wasting yourmoney.”
“I don’t think youmailed the dictaphone records yet from
Colorado Springs,”Carol said.
“No?” he askedsarcastically.
“No. I’ll give youwhatever you ask for them.”
He looked Carol up anddown, 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 hiscar to the luggage compartment, and
Therese heard his keysjingle as he opened it. Therese got out of
the car, unable to sitthere any longer. She walked to within a few
feet of Carol andstopped. The detective was reaching for
something in a bigsuitcase. When he straightened up, the raised
lid of the compartmentknocked his hat off. He stepped on the
brim to hold it fromthe wind. He had something in one hand
now, too small to see.
“There’s two,” hesaid. “I guess they’re worth five hundred.
They’d be worth moreif there weren’t more of them in New
York.”
“You’re a finesalesman. I don’t believe you,” Carol said.
“Why? They’re in ahurry for them in New York.” He picked
up his hat, and closedthe luggage compartment. “But they’ve got
enough now. I told youyou’d better go back to New York, Mrs.
Aird.” He ground hiscigarette out in the dirt, twisting his toe in
front of him. “Are yougoing back to New York now?”
“I don’t change mymind,” Carol said.
The detectiveshrugged. “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 quitsright now. After you give me those, you
can take off and keepgoing in the same direction.”
The detective hadslowly extended his hand in a fist, like the
fist in a guessinggame in which there might be nothing. “Are you
willing to give mefive hundred for these?” he asked.
Carol looked at hishand, then opened her shoulder strap bag.
She took out herbillfold, and then her checkbook.
“I prefer cash,” hesaid.
“I haven’t got it.”
He shrugged again.“All 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 inhis hand. Therese came closer. The man was
spelling his name.
When Carol gave himthe check, he dropped the two little
boxes in her hand.
“How long have youbeen collecting them?” Carol asked.
“Play them and see.”
“I didn’t come outhere to joke!” Carol said, and her voice
broke.
He smiled, folding thecheck. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
What you’ve gottenfrom me isn’t all of it. There’s plenty in New
York.”
Carol fastened herbag, and turned toward her car, not even
looking at Therese.Then she stopped and faced the detective
again. “If they’ve gotall they want, you can knock off now, can’t
you? Have I got yourpromise to do that?”
He was standing withhis hand on his car door, watching her.
“I’m still on the job,Mrs. Aird—still working for my office.
Unless you want tocatch a plane for home now. Or for some
other place. Give methe slip. I’ll have to tell my office
something—not havingthe last few days at Colorado Springs—
something moreexciting than this.”
“Oh, let them inventsomething exciting!”
The detective’s smileshowed a little of his teeth. He got back
into his car. Heshoved his gear, put his head out to see behind
him, and backed thecar in a quick turn. He drove off toward the
highway.

Carol telephoned from a hotel inOmaha. Abby was not at
home, and Carol left amessage that she would call at six o’clock
that evening, whenAbby was expected. Carol said it was of no
use to call her lawyernow, because he would be out to lunch until
after two by theirtime. Carol wanted to wash up, and then have a
drink.
They had OldFashioneds in the bar of the hotel, in complete
silence.
Therese asked for asecond when Carol did, but Carol said she
should eat somethinginstead. The waiter told Carol that food
was not served in thebar.
“She wants somethingto eat,” Carol said firmly.
“The dining room isacross the lobby, madame, and there’s a
coffee shop—”
“Carol, I can wait,”Therese said.
“Will you please bringme the menu? She prefers to eat here,”
Carol said with aglance at the waiter.
The waiter hesitated,then said, “Yes, madame,” and went to
get the menu.
While Therese atescrambled eggs and sausage, Carol had her
third drink.
Finally, Carol said ina tone of hopelessness, “Darling, can I
ask you to forgiveme?”
The tone hurt Theresemore than the question. “I love you,
Carol.”
“But do you see whatit means?”
“Yes.” But that momentof defeat in the car, she thought,
that had only been amoment, as this time now was only a
situation. “I don’tsee why it should mean this forever. I don’t see
how this can destroyanything,” she said earnestly.
Carol took her handdown from her face and sat back, and
now in spite of thetiredness she looked as Therese always thought
of her—the eyes thatcould be tender and hard at once as they
tested her, theintelligent red lips strong and soft, though the
upper lip trembled theleast bit now.
“Do you?” Thereseasked, and she realized suddenly it was a
question as big as theone Carol had asked her without words in
the room in Waterloo.
In fact, it was thesame question.
“No. I think you’reright,” Carol said. “You make me realize
it.”

Carol went to telephone. It was three o’clock. Therese got the
check, then sat there waiting, wondering when it was going to be
over, whether the reassuring word would come from Carol’s
lawyer or from Abby, or whether it was going to get worse before
it got better. Carol was gone about half an hour.
“My lawyer hasn’t heard anything,” she said. “And I didn’t tell
him anything. I can’t. I’ll have to write it out.”
“I thought you would.”
“Oh, you did,” Carol said with her first smile that day. “What
do you say we get a room here? I don’t feel like traveling any
more.”
Carol had her lunch sent up to their room. They both lay
down to take a nap, but when Therese awakened at a quarter to
five, Carol was gone.
Therese glanced around the room, noticing Carol’s black
gloves on the dressing table, and her moccasins side by side near
the armchair. Therese sighed, tremulously, unrefreshed by her
sleep. She opened the window and looked down. It was the
seventh or eighth floor, she couldn’t remember which. A streetcar
crawled past the front of the hotel, and people on the sidewalk
moved in every direction, with legs on either side of them, and it
crossed her mind to jump. She looked off at the drab little skyline
of gray buildings and closed her eyes on it. Then she turned
around and Carol was in the room, standing by the door,
watching her.
“Where have you been?” Therese asked.
“Writing that damned letter.”
Carol crossed the room and caught Therese in her arms.
Therese felt Carol’s nails through the back of her jacket.
When Carol went to the telephone, Therese left the room
and wandered down the hall toward the elevators. She went down
to the lobby and sat there reading an article on weevils in the
Corngrower’s Gazette, and wondered if Abby knew allthat about
corn weevils. She watched the clock, and after twenty-five
minutes went upstairs again.
Carol was lying on the bed, smoking a cigarette. Therese
waited for her to speak.
“Darling, I’ve got to go to New York,” Carol said.
Therese had been sure of that. She came to the foot of the
bed. “What else did Abby say?”
“She saw the fellow named Bob Haversham again.” Carol
raised herself on her elbow. “But he certainly doesn’t know as
much as I do at this point. Nobody seems to know anything,
except that trouble’s brewing. Nothing much can happen until I
get there. But I’ve got to be there.”
“Of course.” Bob Haversham was the friend of Abby’s who
worked in Harge’s firm in Newark, not a close friend either of
Abby’s or Harge’s, just a link, a slim link between the two of
them, the one person who might know something of what Harge
was doing, if he could recognize a detective, or overhear part of a
telephone call, in Harge’s office. It was worth almost nothing,
Therese felt.
“Abby’s going to get the check,” Carol said, sitting up on the
bed, reaching for her moccasins.
“Has she got a key?”
“I wish she had. She’s got to get it from Florence. But that’ll
be all right. I told her to tell Florence I wanted a couple of things
sent to me.”
“Can you tell her to get a letter, too? I left a letter to you in a
book in my room. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. I didn’t know
you were going to have Abby go there.”
Carol gave her a frowning glance. “Anything else?”
“No. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”
Carol sighed, and stood up. “Oh, let’s not worry any more. I
doubt if they’ll bother about the house, but I’ll tell Abby about
the letter anyway. Where is it?”
“In the Oxford Book of English Verse. I think I left it on top of
the bureau.” She watched Carol glance around the room, looking
anywhere but at her.
“I don’t want to stay here tonight after all,” Carol said.

Half an hour later, they were in the car going eastward. Carol
wanted to reach Des Moines that night. After a silence of more
than an hour, Carol suddenly stopped the car at the edge of the
road, bent her head, and said, “Damn!”
She could see the darkish sinks under Carol’s eyes in the glare
of passing cars. Carol hadn’t slept at all last night. “Let’s go back
to that last town,” Therese said. “It’s still about seventy-five miles
to Des Moines.”
“Do you want to go to Arizona?” Carol asked her, as if all
they had to do was turn around.
“Oh, Carol—why talk about it?” A feeling of despair came
over her suddenly. Her hands were shaking as she lighted a
cigarette. She gave the cigarette to Carol, and lighted one for
herself.
“Because I want to talk about it. Can you take another three
weeks off?”
“Of course.” Of course, of course. What else mattered except
being with Carol, anywhere, anyhow? There was the Harkevy
show in March, Harkevy might recommend her for a job
somewhere else, but the jobs were uncertain and Carol was not.
“I shouldn’t have to stay in New York more than a week at
most, because the divorce is all set, Fred, my lawyer, said so
today. So why don’t we have a few more weeks in Arizona? Or
New Mexico? I don’t want to hang around New York the rest of
the winter.” Carol drove slowly. Her eyes were different now.
They had come alive, like her voice.
“Of course I’d like to. Anywhere.”
“All right. Come on. Let’s get to Des Moines. How about
you driving a while?”

Chapter Twenty
In Sioux Falls, Therese stopped the car in front of the hotel they
had stayed in before, the Warrior Hotel. It was nine-thirty in the
evening.
Carol had got home about an hour ago, Therese thought. She
was to call Carol at midnight.
She took a room, had her bags carried up, then went out for a
walk through the main street. There was a movie house, and it
occurred to her she had never seen a movie with Carol. She went
in. But she was in no mood to follow the picture, even though
there was a woman in it whose voice was a little like Carol’s, not
at all like the flat nasal voices she heard all around her. She
thought of Carol, over a thousand miles away now, thought of
sleeping alone tonight, and she got up and wandered out on the
street again. There was the drugstore where Carol had bought
cleansing tissues and toothpaste one morning. And the corner
where Carol had looked up and read the street names—Fifth and
Nebraska streets. She bought a pack of cigarettes at the same
drugstore, walked back to the hotel and sat in the lobby,
smoking, savoring the first cigarette since she had left Carol,
savoring the forgotten state of being alone. It was only a physical
state. She really did not feel at all alone. She read some
newspapers for a while, then took the letters from Dannie and
Phil, that had come in the last days at Colorado Springs, out of
her handbag and glanced over them.
I saw Richard two nights ago in the Palermo all byhimself
[Phil’s letter said]. I asked about you and he said he wasn’t writing
to you. I gather there has been a small rupture, but Ididn’t press for
information. He was in no mood for talking. And we arenot too
chummy lately, as you know. … Have been talking you up toan
angel named Francis Puckett who will put up fiftythousand if a
certain play from France comes over in April. Shall keepyou posted,
as there is not even a producer yet. … Dannie sends hislove, I am
sure. He is leaving soon for somewhere probably, he hasthat look,
and I’ll have to scout for new winter quarters or find aroommate. …
Did you get the clippings I sent you on Small Rain? Best,Phil.
Dannie’s short letter was: Dear Therese, There is a possibility I
may go out to the Coast at the end of the month to take ajob in
California. I must decide between this (a lab job) and anoffer in a
commercial chemical place in Maryland. But if I could seeyou in
Colorado or anywhere else for a while, I would leave alittle early.
Shall probably take the California job, as I think it hasbetter
prospects. So would you let me know where you’ll be? Itdoesn’t
matter. There are a lot of ways of getting to California.If your friend
wouldn’t mind, it would be nice to spend a few days withyou
somewhere. I’ll be in New York until the 28 of Februaryanyway.
Love, Dannie.
She had not yet answered him. She would send him an
address tomorrow, as soon as she found a room somewhere in the
town. But as to the next destination, she would have to talk to
Carol about that. And when would Carol be able to say? She
wondered what Carol might already have found tonight in New
Jersey, and Therese’s courage sank dismally. She reached for a
newspaper and looked at the date. February fifteenth. Twentynine
days since she had left New York with Carol. Could it be so
few days?