Beware the Young Stranger

10

Keith didn’t like the looks of the proprietor. The motel had seemed made to order, an older one, clean, inexpensive. Not a fancy place, and not a seedy dump a rat would run to, either. Just an everyday, run-of-the-mill motel. The kind of place he’d told the taxi driver he wanted for himself and his sister.

“Say you had car trouble?” the proprietor said.

Keith nodded, looking at the registry card he was signing. Why was the old bird quizzing him? The story he had told was perfectly plausible: He and his sister... driving downstate... car trouble... the need for an overnight repair.

“I guess you want adjoining rooms,” the lanky, wrinkled man said.

“If you have them.”

“Sure.” In a wise tone.

Keith let his breath out cautiously. This map-cheeked character with the granite eyes... did he think he’d spotted a couple of college kids shacking up for the night?

He handed the man the card. The eyes shifted. It made Keith want to reach across the registry desk in the dingy office and tap the old man on the chest and ask him what the hell was bugging him. Instead, Keith jammed his hands into his pockets.

“You’ll have to sign a card of your own, honey,” the man said, smiling at Nancy.

Keith pictured himself backhanding the old punk, wiping that wet, wise smile off the withered lips.

Nancy bent over the card. The eyes met Keith’s across her shoulders. The eyes turned stonier, and the old man got two keys from a pegboard behind the desk.

“Just the one bag?” he asked.

“Oh, yes,” Keith said. “Left the rest of the luggage in the car. It’ll be locked in the garage until the mechanic gets started on it tomorrow morning.” He reached down and picked up the bag. It was heavy. Her trousseau kit, Nancy had called it when they’d planned the elopement.

The heft of the bag, the sight of her blonde head bent over the registry card, caused an ache to spread through him. He was almost overcome by a feeling that it was useless to keep running. They were unreal people stumbling through a nightmare. Cold, greasy hamburgers for their dinner. Her compact abandoned on the other side of town. A ride on a municipal bus. A taxi to here. We’re making progress like a turtle backing his rear into a pot of water the cook has got boiling, he thought.

“This way,” the motel man said. Keys in hand, he started around the waist-high desk.

“Newt?” a shrill female voice called.

The man glanced with irritation at the open doorway beyond the desk. “Heather,” he called toward the living quarters, “we got...”

“I have to go out, Newt. None of those crummy friends of yours while I’m gone, hear? I’ll only be...”

A woman appeared in the doorway. She was thin and sallow, an arrangement of slats in clean, threadbare clothing. “Oh.”

“You never give me a chance to tell you,” her husband said. “This is Mr. and Miss Lonergan, Heather. They’re staying the night. I’m putting them in three and four.”

The woman glanced at Nancy’s left hand.

Keith looked frankly into the narrow face with its pinched mouth and anxious eyes.

“We’re not from the college, ma’am,” Keith said with a forced smile. “Brother and sister, on our way down-state because of sickness in the family. Our car broke down and we can’t get it fixed until tomorrow morning.”

“Sure. Well, you’ll rest easy here. We have a nice place.” She brushed by Newt, took Nancy’s bag, and led the way outside.

Keith glanced over his shoulder as he followed the woman across the parking area. Old Newt was standing in the doorway. Stiffly, watching.

The woman opened a door, switched on a light. A small, commonplace room was revealed.

“There, now,” the woman said. “The young lady can have this number three. New print curtains, see? Like them, miss? I work my fingers to the bone keeping this place up. If I had to depend on that sorry husband of mine... Here’s the bathroom. And a nice big closet. My father built this place, you know. When he and mama passed away, I made up my mind I’d keep it as nice as they left it. Respectable, too. We don’t take in the trash some of the older motels do nowadays.”

She crossed the room, threw a bolt. “This is your room, young man.”

Keith followed her in. “Fine.”

“I’m glad you like it.” She moved about quickly, like a sparrow. “I own up, when I first saw you two, I thought to myself, uh-uh, a pair of those college hellions. They do try to register here, you know. But I took one look at you, young man—”

“Why, thank you,” Keith said. And get the hell out, he thought.

He looked through the window. Old Newt was still in his doorway, watching.

The woman paused as she started from the room. “Oh. We always collect in advance.”

“I paid your husband.”

“Oh, excuse me. By the way, you’ll find extra blankets in the bottom drawer of that bureau. Nights still get chilly this time of year.”

“Thanks very much.” Get out!

Finally, she left.

He shut the door behind her, leaned against it. Nancy was standing in the middle of the room, looking at him.

“Keith.” She took a couple of steps toward him, noticed his change of expression, came to an indecisive halt. “You’re very tired, aren’t you?”

“No,” he said, “I’m not a damned bit tired. I can last for days. Weeks. I know how not to get tired.”

She was turning slowly toward her own room, stricken. He felt a savage frustration. Something was happening between them. It had begun back there on the lake when Vallancourt’s car had almost cornered the compact. It was getting worse. It was all that suspicious sonofabitch Newt’s fault.

“Nancy...”

She shivered. Then she came across the room deliberately, put her arms about him, stood thigh to thigh against him.

“The only way you can hurt me, Keith, is to close the door against me.”

“I don’t understand why you bother with me.”

“Why try?”

“I need to. I want to. If you were a plain Jane or a cripple, I might understand. But you could have your pick.”

“Why do you keep running yourself down, Keith?”

He passed the back of his hand across his forehead. “You mix me up. Worse than hell, Nancy.”

“Everything is mixed up right now. But we’ve reason for hope.”

“Give me one.”

She stood looking up into his face. “You really don’t know how to hope, do you, Keith? You just know how to survive.”

“I’ve made it for twenty-two years,” he mumbled.

“Then you can keep on doing it.”

“Nuts,” he said.

“All right, I’ll give you another. You think whoever killed Dorcas Ferguson is lying on a bed of roses while you’re loose? While the case remains wide open?”

“His nerve won’t break. I’m on the run. Why should he walk in and confess?”

“I didn’t mean that, and you know it. But he’s trying to cover up a murder. He’ll make a slip. As long as the investigation goes on, we’ve plenty of reason for hope.”

Outside, a rough-running old car started with a backfire.

Keith slid away from Nancy.

“Kill that light!”

She jumped for the wall. He eased up to the side of the window.

He saw an old sedan leaving the parking area. It stopped at the street’s edge, and in the light of the street lamp he saw that the woman Heather was driving. She got the bucking jalopy into the street and disappeared.

Keith glanced back to the office of the motel. Newt was still standing in the doorway.

“That old guy suspects something!”

“Keith...”

“Damn it, don’t use that patronizing tone to me, Nancy! I tell you, he thinks we’re up to something. He’s a canny louse, living off a woman who does all the work.”

“Keith, you’ve got to control these suspicions.”

“I know what I’m talking about. I could feel it in the old man. That Newt and my father... They carry the same stink in their eyes.”

Across the parking area, Newt had come to life. He was at the telephone, dialing quickly.

Keith pushed Nancy aside. As he burst out of the cabin, she ran after him, caught his arm. “Keith!” she said in a sharp whisper. “You mustn’t!”

He shook her loose without taking his eyes off the lighted window of the office. Newt was acting furtive. Any fool could see it. There could be only one reason why. The old man had given his wife time to get out of harm’s way...

Newt spun about, guilt written all over his cunning face.

“What the devil...”

Keith jerked the phone from his hand.

Newt stood staring as Keith lifted the phone to his ear.

“You sure you want it that way, Newt?” a voice said. “The whole ten bucks on Sandy-boy in the fourth tomorrow at Gulfstream? Well, it’s your dough, but if your wife finds you’ve been laying more bets...”

In a panic, Keith let the phone drop on its cradle, killing the voice.

Newt was pressed against the wall, studying Keith nastily.

“Boy, who’d you think I was calling? The cops, maybe?”

“Forget it,” Keith muttered. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean anything.”

“You acted like you meant plenty, busting in here this way. You know, you look damned familiar to me. You ever do time at Prison Farm Four? Nah, that ain’t where I seen you...” Newt stopped, his mouth slack. He went mud-colored. He tried to recover, to move nonchalantly across the office toward the sanctuary offered by his apartment.

But, Keith was there, grabbing a handful of sleazy shirt-front.

“Okay, let’s hear it. Where have you seen me before?”

“Boy, I ain’t. I swear.”

Keith pulled the man up on tiptoe. “You’re a liar. You’ve seen my face on every TV newscast today, in the newspaper. Isn’t that it?”

Newt swallowed, his Adam’s apple jerking. “Boy, why didn’t you just stay in that cabin? I had my mind so set on calling the bookie soon as my old woman was out of here, I wouldn’t of remembered you from Adam...”