Free Killing Cousins by Fletcher Flora Page B

guided.
    At the head of the stairs, Quincy and Willie rested a few seconds, catching breath for the descent, and then they started down, Quincy still ahead and bearing the brunt of the weight as it naturally took on a momentum of its own in his direction. Willie was aware that Quincy had arranged this deliberately out of consideration for her, and she was sorry that she had complained about having to load the bags and the spade. They were about half way downstairs and going along very well, in spite of Howard’s perverseness, when a bell began to ring suddenly, which was rather disconcerting, to say the least, and they stopped and put Howard down and listened, and it turned out to be, as they had both feared, the bell at the front door.
    “Well,” Willie said, “if this isn’t the worst kind of imposition. All day long no one has come at all, not a single person, and now all of a sudden here is someone at the door just when he couldn’t be less welcome.”
    “Who do you suppose it is?” Quincy said.
    “I haven’t the least idea. Do you think I should go down and find out?”
    “Perhaps you should. We can’t afford to take the chance that it may be someone who will hang about outside if there’s no answer.”
    Willie walked around Howard and Quincy and down the stairs and the hall to the door, which she opened a crack to see and talk through. Quincy listened intently, but could not hear what Willie was saying, or what was said to her, but he hoped that it was judicious on Willie’s part, whatever it was, and it must have been, he was relieved to note, for she closed the door shortly and came back to the foot of the stairs.
    “It was only a man asking where the Bowsers live,” she said. “Fortunately, it’s in the next block, and he’s gone down there. I was afraid for a moment that it might be Mother Hogan come to see if Howard had returned.”
    “It’s high time, in my opinion, that Howard was leaving. Turn off the lights in the hall and the living room, Cousin. We’ll have to do the best we can in the dark.”
    Willie turned off the lights and came back and took up her end of Howard, Quincy doing the same with his end, and they got the rest of the way downstairs and back through the hall and into the kitchen to the door leading directly into the garage. The darkness added to their difficulties, but they arrived without accidents, except that Quincy backed into the corner of a cabinet, and cursed a little, and Howard was bumped sharply against the jamb of the kitchen-garage door. Howard did not curse or care, of course, and a minute later he was deposited safely in the wagon beside the bags and the spade. Quincy went back upstairs for the typewriter and was down again in another minute.
    “Now we must back the wagon out and get started,” he said. “You go outside through the small door, Cousin, and be certain that no one is passing when I open the big one. It would spoil things if the Buick were seen by someone who might remember it.”
    Willie followed directions, knocking on the big door from outside to indicate that the coast was clear, and Quincy quickly opened the door and backed out the wagon and closed the door again. When he resumed his seat behind the wheel, Willie was beside him. It did not matter if the wagon was seen, since it was not supposed to be gone, and so Quincy turned on the lights and backed out of the drive in a normal way. Driving down Ouichita Road in the direction away from town, he was shortly on a gravel road, and shortly thereafter on a dirt road that would take them along the back limit of his maternal uncle’s farm. The road was deserted and the night was dark and all aspects of the venture, he thought, were favorable. The bumping of Howard among the bags and the spade made a comfortable kind of sound in his ears.
    “You’ll have to admit,” he said, “that everything has gone admirably under my direction.”
    “I do admit it,” Willie said, “and I only wish I