III
One phrase made Colby descend alive into hell, where he remained for seven days and nights: “I—uh—I think I know Grahame.”
In seven days he aged five years, and all the time he spent desperately in an effort to seem exactly as usual. The phrase might mean anything or nothing. Nesbit might know everything, or nothing at all, or he might merely be suspicious. It depended on the colored boys, perhaps; but mostly it depended on how well he knew Grahame.
Colby was seeing him now and then, and he was waving abstracted, meaningless greetings and disappearing amid the tinny rumblings of his ancient car.
Colby tried to assure himself that he was safe. There was no evidence anywhere to prove him a murderer. If the colored boys had had a tale to tell—and most likely they had not—there might be suspicion of him, but he could never be convicted. After he had burned the boots worn the day of the murder, even footprints from the stream edge cast in plaster would not incriminate him. Nesbit could not find proof that he was a murderer. There was no proof!
He lay awake at night, staring at the moonlit rectangle of his window, going over and over his plan in search of a flaw in it; but he found none. There was no flaw in his plan.
Then he remembered Nesbit’s heavy, dull-witted patience, and how he had hanged Jud Harris two years after his first wife’s murder. It had taken him two years to solve that crime, but he had done it. If he believed Colby had murdered Grahame, he would keep on working until he had an air-tight case, if it took him ten years.
In the meantime all that Colby could do was to behave in a perfectly natural fashion. Nesbit might know nothing. He had said that he thought he knew Grahame. He might have meant just that. It might have been pure coincidence. He was acting exactly as any man would act who had known a fellow townsman vaguely for years, and one day had picked him up in a car and talked to him for half an hour or so. His nod of recognition would change to a wave of the hand thereafter. That was all. That was how Nesbit was acting; but that was also how he would act if he were suspicious.
Colby watched the moonlight wax nightly to full brightness and begin to wane again, lying awake in the darkness while the curtains at his window flapped idly in and out of the window sill according to the vagaries of the chilly night breezes.
He would have given one of—no, he would give half of the thousand-dollar bills set in behind the horrible chromo above his washstand, if he could find out what Nesbit meant by saying that he thought he knew Grahame when he saw him with Colby.
That one thing made Colby’s nerves grow taut and jangling. For seven nights he lay awake and stared at the idiotically garnished rectangle that let in the moonlight. For seven nights that one phrase fretted at his nerves. During the day he went about his business under the horrible, the overwhelming strain of acting exactly as usual, and at night the problem banished sleep.
If Nesbit had known Grahame as a bootleg operator, he would have watched the man closely. Going hunting with Colby, it would have occurred to him that something else was in the wind. He might have cranked up his car to find out. He might have thought of Grahame as intending to make a cache of liquor near Culpeper. He might have gone out on the concrete road just to look about, to see if there were signs of heavy trucks turning off on the dirt side roads.
If he was out scouting around on Grahame’s account, he would know that Grahame did not leave Culpeper in the car of an acquaintance. He might have known from the beginning that Colby lied. That possibility put dark circles under Colby’s eyes, and hollowed his cheeks a little, and after a few days made his hands the least bit clumsy. One of his customers—a motherly, meddling person—commented sympathetically that he did not look well. Colby cursed her frantically in his heart, while he was beaming at her and assuring her that there was nothing wrong except too much Sunday dinner.
But he looked carefully in his mirror that night, and told himself to stop worrying. There was no sign of anything wrong. Nesbit had shown no suspicion. Colby and Grahame together had probably faded entirely from his mind.
That same night, however, Colby lay awake despairingly in his bed with the cold night air in his nostrils, watching the weaker rays of the waning moon strike through his window upon the elaborately figured wall paper, move slowly across to the washstand, reflect upward from the china basin, and make wavy lines of feeble light upon the atrocious chromo behind which he had hidden his booty. He had taken off the paper backing of that picture and had gummed the bank notes beneath it.
It was near dawn, then, and he had not slept at all.
If Nesbit knew that he had lied, and knew Grahame, the detective might have made inquiries in Richmond. He might have learned that Grahame was not to be found. He would know, of course, that a man in Grahame’s business makes his deals with cold cash, and carries it on him. He might couple that fact with Grahame’s disappearance, and have a case to work on in his clumsy, patient fashion. If so, his patience would lead him to devise a trap for Colby.
The trap appeared on the eighth morning. No one but Colby would have recognized it as a trap. It was the most innocent-appearing of envelopes, bearing no return card, and mailed in Richmond the day before. It was addressed to Grahame, in care of Colby.
Colby took it from the mail rack in the front hall as he came down for his breakfast. He felt the blood draining from his face as he stared at it. His knees shook horribly as he retreated to his room in panic-stricken haste.
There he sat on his bed and gazed unseeingly at nothing, while the blood drummed in his ears. After a long time he realized that he was staring at the hopelessly inartistic picture which hid his booty—“Playmates,” it was called, showing an impossibly benevolent St. Bernard dog with a little girl in an impossibly starched pink dress.
Colby swallowed nothing whatever, and tried to fight down utter terror. Nobody knew that Grahame was coming to Culpeper. Nobody would have dreamed of writing to Grahame in his care, except Nesbit. It was a trap of Nesbit’s. No doubt he had asked that a watch be kept in the post office, to see what Colby did with the letter—to see if he remailed it or destroyed it—to see what effect it had.
With a feeling of panic, Colby realized that he was already showing an effect. His face was ashen. His hands were shaking. If he arrived late at his business, Nesbit would assuredly notice that.
He rubbed his face desperately with a rough towel until the color came back to it. He went down the stairs, savagely making his knees serve him. He went out and set off briskly toward the store. If he acted naturally in every way, Nesbit would think he was mistaken. Nesbit was only suspicious. He couldn’t be more than suspicious.
He had gone three blocks when Nesbit passed him amid the tinny thunderings of his decrepit car. He turned heavy, indifferent eyes upon Colby, abstractedly waved a meaningless salute, and went on.
But Colby was ashen white and utterly limp behind him, and he could not but believe that Nesbit had noticed.
That day was torture. Three people remarked that he didn’t look well. Black blasphemy yammered in his heart as he assured them that it was a touch of indigestion, nothing more. He lived all day in deepest hell, and that night he cursed himself because he had not kept Grahame’s notebook. There would be addresses in it, to one of which he could forward the letter. Nesbit’s suspicions would follow whoever kept the letter; but Colby knew no one who would accept the mail.
Of course he knew better than to go to the stream bank and dig down for the notebook. Nesbit would have somebody watching there, night and day.
Colby’s terror was the deeper because he did not know what to do. He dared not destroy the letter, for that would confirm Nesbit’s belief. He did not dare open it, because that would be detected when Nesbit had it again. He did not dare hold it. The frenzied helplessness that he felt racked his already tortured nerves unbearably.
On the ninth morning after the murder he made his first panic-stricken move. To make Nesbit doubtful, to get rid of the letter, which he knew to be a trap, to gain time—anything!—he scribbled an address on the envelope and crossed out his own. The address was meaningless, written at random. He mailed the letter openly, so that he would be seen.
At noontime he saw Nesbit go into the post office, where he remained for a long time. Colby had a nervous chill.
He had made a mistake. He should have burned the letter, written another, and put it into a precisely similar envelope. It would not matter to whom his own letter was addressed. He should have gone to Richmond and mailed it in the central post office, at the busiest possible instant, when it could hardly be picked out for Nesbit. It would be assumed that he had remailed the trap letter to a proper address for Grahame. Nesbit’s trap would have been useless.
This story, as you see, is instructive. That is the proper thing to do with embarrassing letters—burn them.
Colby had made a mistake; and four days later his hands were shaking uncontrollably as he stared down at a little white envelope in his fingers. It was the letter addressed to Grahame. A rubber-stamped notation with a penciled correction on the envelope showed that some postal clerk had been zealous in the effort to keep a piece of mail with no return card out of the dead letter office.
The notation read, in rubber-stamped characters, “Return”—in pencil, “to previous addressee”—and in rubber-stamped letters again, “For Better Address.”