Free Girl Out Back by Charles Williams Page B

myself.
    “You don’t want anything else?” he said.
    I stopped and turned, looking into the bleak hatchet face from a distance of about two feet. “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Why?”
    “I just wanted to be sure. That’s all right, ain’t it?”
    “I guess so,” I said.
    I went on out and crossed the sun-drenched clearing to my cabin. The argument about the motors was a phony. He probably hadn’t even sheared a pin, or if he had he’d done it on purpose for an excuse to sneak back. He was spying on her. Or on me.
    I wondered why. Did it have something to do with the thing that’d brought me out here? Or did he simply believe she was the thing? It might figure that way, to a mind like Nunn’s, and the way he’d acted all along seemed to bear it out.
    Well, if he wasn’t sure he was keeping her at home, that was his hard luck, not mine. I had other things to think about, such as the fact that while this whole thing might have appeared to be mildly goofy to begin with it was now completely insane.
    You had all these pieces of evidence. They interlocked. You put them all together, and you had the answer. So what was it?
    One of the great police organizations of the world was shaking down North America trying to find the loot from a bank robbery, while some dreamy birdbrain in his second childhood was serenely buying comic books with it.
    Move over, Cliffords, I thought. I’ll bring up an armful and we’ll trade. Dibs on Superman.

Six
    I cut the motor and came to rest beneath dense overhanging foliage along the bank. It was a little after one p.m. I had come over a mile, I thought, since entering the mouth of the winding waterway up which Cliffords had gone with his boat, and I could as well be lost in some remote back country of the Amazon drainage. No sound broke the stillness of midday. The channel, about a hundred yards wide at this point, materialized out of the timber a quarter of a mile behind me and disappeared around another bend just ahead.
    I opened the tackle box and unfolded the large map of the county. Here was the channel I was on; it was the easternmost arm of the lake, next to the highway and roughly paralleling it at a distance varying from two to three miles. I was about—say, at this point on it. Now. There was the access road coming in from the highway. It turned off the road a mile or so south of that tricky S-bend.
    I sat still for a moment, frowning thoughtfully at the map without actually seeing it. What the devil was it? I shrugged, and lit a cigarette. It didn’t matter. Now, here. The dirt road, merely a thin line on the map, dead-ended on this channel. I glanced at the scale at the bottom of the map and estimated the distance. Say another four miles. And beyond it somewhere was the shack Cliffords lived in. She’d said a mile or two; I wondered if she had ever been up there herself.
    I put the map back in the box and took the ten-dollar bill out of my wallet. It was an old one, creased and limp from the thousands of hands it had been through and like any one of a million others except for that narrow stain along the edge at one end. I compared it with the twenty. The stain was exactly the same color, a reddish shade of brown, and it was on only that one place. Why never anywhere else? There was one very good answer to that, I thought, and the picture it brought to mind made my skin prickle with excitement. Wherever it had been to pick up that discoloration, there had been a lot of it, stacked in bundles so that only this edge was exposed to the contaminating agent. You didn’t need a doctorate in physics to realize that a mere handful of banknotes, thrown loosely into a box or something, seldom stood on end of their own volition or stuck straight out from the side with no support. I moistened a finger and rubbed it along the stain; it smudged slightly and a faint trace of it came off. It was the same stuff.
    Then I snorted. Precise chemical analysis by the Godwin