“No trace? No idea where she went?”

Joe fiddled with his fingers. His whole pitch, maybe his whole life, depended on his next words, and he was reluctant to say them.

“Come on,” she said at last. “You got something—what is it?”

“Well, it ain’t much. I don’t know what to think of it.”

“Don’t think. Just tell. I’ll think,” she said sharply.

“Might not even be true.”

“For Christ’s sake!” she said angrily.

“Well, I talked to the last guy that seen her. Guy named Joe, like me—”

“Did you get his grandmother’s name?” she asked sarcastically.

“This guy Joe says she loaded up on beer one night an’ she said how she’s going to come back to Salinas an’ lay low. Then she dropped out of sight. This guy Joe didn’t know nothing more.”

Kate was startled out of control. Joe read her quick start, the apprehension, and then the almost hopeless fear and weariness. Whatever it was, Joe had something. He had got the breaks at last.

She looked up from her lap and her twisted fingers. “We’ll forget the old fart,” she said. “You’ll get your five hundred, Joe.”

Joe breathed shallowly, afraid that any sound might drag her out of her self-absorption. She had believed him. More than that, she was believing things he had not told her. He wanted to get out of the room as quickly as possible. He said, “Thank you, ma’am,” but very softly, and he moved silently toward the door.

His hand was on the knob when she spoke with elaborate casualness. “Joe, by the way—”

“Ma’am?”

“If you should hear anything about—her, let me know, will you?”

“I sure will. Want me to dig into it?”

“No. Don’t bother. It isn’t that important.”

In his room, with the door latched, Joe sat down and folded his arms. He smiled to himself. And instantly he began to work out the future course. He decided to let her brood on it till, say, next week. Let her relax, and then bring up Ethel again. He did not know what his weapon was or how he was going to use it. But he did know that it was very sharp and he itched to use it. He would have laughed out loud if he had known that Kate had gone to the gray room and locked its door, and that she sat still in the big chair and her eyes were closed.

Chapter 46

SOMETIMES, BUT NOT OFTEN, a rain comes to the Salinas Valley in November. It is so rare that the Journal or the Index or both carry editorials about it. The hills turn to a soft green overnight and the air smells good. Rain at this time is not particularly good in an agricultural sense unless it is going to continue, and this is extremely unusual. More commonly, the dryness comes back and the fuzz of grass withers or a little frost curls it and there’s that amount of seed wasted.