He looked at the post mark. The place was two hundred miles east. Not on the railroad lines, as far as he could recall. That should narrow down the possibilities considerably.
One word from the letter was repeating itself in his mind, like a musical note struck again and again until it becomes unendurable.
Bay. Bay. Bay. Bay.
The memory came of a hot afternoon fifteen years ago. It was just before they were married. They were sitting on the edge of a ramshackle little pier. He remembered the salt smell, and the faintly fishy, dry-wood smell of the splintery old planks.
"Funny," she had said, looking down into the green water, "but I always used to think that I'd end up down there. Not that I'm afraid of it. I've always swum way out. But even when I was a little girl I'd look at the Bay—maybe green, maybe blue, maybe gray, covered with whitecaps, glittering with moon-beams, or shrouded by fog—and I'd think, 'Tansy, the Bay is going to get you, but not for years and years.' Funny, isn't it?"
And he laughed and put his arms around her tight, and the green water had gone on lapping at the piles heavy with seaweed.
He had been visiting with her family, when her parents were still alive, at their home near Bayport on the southern shore of New York Bay.
The narrow corridor suited itself to its victim's most cherished fear. It ended for her in the Bay, tomorrow midnight.
She must be heading for the Bay.