Do Evil In Return

17

She left the motel at sunrise the next morning and by eight o’clock she was at the California border. Here, inside a bridgelike structure were three gates guarded by state inspectors in uniform.

Charlotte slipped into the empty middle lane and stopped. At the gate on her left a woman with four children and a dog were standing beside an old station wagon with a New Jersey license. They were all, including the dog, eating cherries out of a box as if their lives depended on it.

Between bites, the woman registered her complaint. “You can take cherries from Wyoming to Idaho. You can take cherries from Idaho to Oregon. But you can’t take cherries from Oregon to California. No. California, They take cherries from you.”

“Madam,” the inspector said, “we’ve gone into that already. We did not take any of your cherries. We gave you the privilege of eating the cherries here at file border.”

“I paid for those cherries and there’s no reason why I shouldn’t take them with me. It’s a free country. Just who does President Truman think he is? Either he steals my cherries, or he forces my kids to eat them so fast they maybe’ll get the colic.”

“It is not President Truman, madam. It’s the fruit fly. These diagrams on the wall here illustrate the life cycle of the fruit fly...”

“Fruit fly. Now I’ve heard everything. Hurry up, Tommy, Janet... Not one of us moves an inch till all those cherries are eaten. Fruit fly. Next maybe you’ll start searching my dog for fleas. Maybe the dogs in California don’t have fleas. They got butterflies, maybe, gold butterflies... Hurry up, Tommy.”

The little boy addressed as Tommy, after a sly glance at the inspector, cautiously slipped half a dozen cherries down the front of his shirt. He caught Charlotte’s eye and instantly assumed an expression of unassailable virtue.

Charlotte turned away, suppressing a smile. She noticed then, for the first time, the car that had stopped at the third gate. It was Easter’s car, but Easter wasn’t in it. He was standing beside a poster, watching her. She didn’t look at him. She looked at the poster. It showed how many millions of dollars of damage a pair of fruit flies could do.

He said, “Cute kid, that Tommy.”

“Are you following me?”

Easter shook his head. “If that isn’t just like you, Charlotte — there’s one main north-south highway and you think everyone behind you is deliberately following you.”

“I don’t think everyone is. Just you.”

“My dear Charlotte, I have to get home, too. I was hoping 101 would be big enough for both of us.”

An inspector approached, opened the back door of the car, and glanced around. “Any citrus fruits, lemons, oranges, limes...?”

“No fruit at all.”

“How about that box of cherries you bought at Grant’s Pass?” Easter said. “Cherries are teeming with fruit flies.”

“I didn’t buy any cherries,” Charlotte told the inspector. “This man is just trying to delay me.”

“I have to check up anyway,” the inspector said. “May I have your trunk keys, please?”

She handed him the keys, and he went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk.

“See you later,” Easter said, and climbed back into his car. He honked the horn as he went past, and waved his hand at her.

She kept the speedometer at seventy-five for the next hundred miles, but she didn’t catch up with Easter. She didn’t even know why she wanted to, except to prove to him that though she was a woman she was just as efficient and skillful a driver as any man.

She gave up the attempt at Eureka where she had to stop for gas and for lunch. She ate at a hamburger stand. She was amazed at herself for trying to overtake Easter, and at all the other rather childish things she’d said and done since she met him. The poise, the self-control, that she’d cultivated for years seemed to slip away when she was with Easter, leaving her as gauche as a high-school girl, quick to blush, quick to be angered or take offense.

If I can’t catch up with him, Charlotte thought, I will lag away behind. I will make him wonder what’s happened to me. No, no, that’s absurd. I mustn’t even think of such a thing. I must be myself, not this half-aggressive, half-coy female. I will drive home in the ordinary way, as if Easter didn’t exist. I should be home by five.

It was nearly eight when she turned into her driveway.

In the headlights of the car the overhead door of the double garage loomed, a blank wall of white. The door was closed, and she’d left it open. Fear alerted her senses, quickened her imagination. The night wind, which only a moment ago had felt fresh against her skin, now seemed to have a treacherous softness about it. A laughing bird taunted her from his perch on a telephone wire.

She had left the garage door open and now it was closed. It was puzzling, but there was no reason to be afraid. She tried to convince herself that anyone could have closed it — Lewis, Miss Schiller, the postman, a child playing in the neighborhood, perhaps even Easter, trying to startle her as he’d startled her when he stepped from behind the tree at Sullivan’s — but common sense told her that none of these was a real possibility. Easter was no cruel practical joker and neither Lewis nor Miss Schiller had any reason to come here, knowing she was away. The child, the postman — she had thought of them only because she wanted quite desperately to believe that the closed door meant nothing, held no secrets.

She left the headlights on. As she walked towards the garage she remembered Easter’s picture of Violet’s face lathered with death-foam. But the sea is far away, she thought, not even visible at night like this; and I can swim. I can swim a mile if I have to.

It was the first time since she’d become involved in the case that she was afraid of physical violence directed against herself. Her vague diffuse fears (of Easter, of the old house on Olive Street) had synthesized into something so tight and compact it could fit on the point of a needle and pierce her spine.

The door was unlocked and, she saw now, not even fully closed. There were three or four inches of space at the bottom, as if someone in urgent haste had slammed the door down and it had bounced up a little and stuck there.

She had to strain to open it, breathing hard, her whole body tensed, braced against attack. But there was no attack, no one in the garage at all. Only a car, parked on the right side where Lewis always parked his — a small convertible with the top up.

She turned on the ceiling light and walked over to the front of the convertible. It was a blue Ford. She had seen many of them on the streets, but she didn’t know anyone who owned one and she could think of no reason for the car to be parked in her garage. It had been driven at high speed — gray and yellow blobs of insects splattered the windshield and the headlights and a small dead bird was caught in the chromium grillwork. She felt the hood of the engine with her hand; it was cold. The car had been standing there for some time.

A Ford convertible, the kind of car Eddie was said to have bought. But Voss and Eddie were miles away by this time, perhaps already out of the country, as they had planned. “It’s better climes for Eddie and me.”

She got into the front seat and turned on the dashboard fights. The ignition key was gone; the car had been left there to stay in her garage. There was no way of getting rid of it except to push it upgrade by herself, which was impossible, or to call the Auto Club for a tow truck.

She turned sideways to step out of the car and a glint of metal on the back seat caught her eye. She leaned over the edge of the seat and saw that Voss and Eddie had reached their better climes.

They were curled up on the floor like a pair of lovers in a fatal embrace. Voss’s head was buried against Eddie’s chest; there was nothing to show how he had died. But Eddie’s face was upturned, pinned against the door, and on his forehead two neat dark holes had been bored. Death had come to him more easily than to Violet. He looked peacefully asleep except for the extra eyes on his fore head.

On the seat lay an ordinary jackknife with the large blade pulled out, a knife like the one Eddie had used the previous night. He’d taken it out of his vest pocket, and flipped the blade open and cleaned his fingernails while Voss was talking. The knife lay now on the back seat of the car, a childish, impotent weapon of defense against the swift certainty of a gun. Eddie had had no chance to use the knife; its blade was unstained, gleaming blandly in the light of the garage.

She stumbled out of the car, half paralyzed, not by the shock of seeing wo dead bodies, but by the realization that there was no way now that she could get rid of the car and he bodies. They were hers, they were hanging from her neck like the mariner’s albatross. A scream died in her throat.

Outside, the bird was still laughing at her from the telephone wire.