For Taigue would buy that confession at any price. And I would sell it for only one price—
My life.
And so I sat there in my lonely cell, through the gray daytime hours and through the dark nights, waiting for Taigue.
I thought often of Julia. In spite of myself I thought of her, and in spite of myself I kept hoping that she would continue to elude the country-wide search which Marriage Enforcement Headquarters had instigated the morning of my arrest.
I thought of her not as Taigue's vase of flowers, but as the pale girl who had said "I do" with me at the mass-wedding ceremony; as the lovely girl who had lingered in the hive passageway, waiting for me to carry her across the threshold; as the unforgettable girl who had been my wife for a dozen precious hours.
But most of all, I thought of her as the deceitful woman who had intended to use me as an instrument in the ghouls' exploitation of the Cadillac Cemetery.
As she had used Betz and Kester before me.
I had her whole modus operandi figured out. Her system was simple. When a cemetery sentry applied for a wife, she simply notified an available sister-ghoul, entered her application along with the sentry's, and then altered the resultant data cards so that they came out of the integrator in the right combination. It took a lot of know-how, but she hadn't worked at Marriage Administration Headquarters three years for nothing. She hadn't taken the job in the first place for nothing, either.
Being a senior sentry, I had rated her personal supervision. I had no idea as to what wiles she would have employed to make me voluntarily neglect my duty to Cadillac; but I had an uncomfortable suspicion that they would have worked.