She was warm and yielding. He found himself trembling. She whispered something against his face, her voice husky, almost drowsy. He spoke then, staccato, the words ripped off short with tension and urgency. “We won’t go back. You’re right. We’ll leave Skip where he is. And to hell with him.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Skip stood in the shadows beside the back door for several minutes, listening. When he had first emerged from the shrubbery and stolen toward the porch it had seemed as if a sound reached him, not the sort of sound somehow that he connected with the bouncing and yapping of the dog upstairs. But now that he had waited and listened there was nothing; the house was empty and still and something in its stillness had the feeling of death about it.

Skip went into the screened porch, passing the tubs and the washing machine, on into the kitchen, then the hall. The door of Stolz’s room stood open, and for a moment this startled him; but then, thinking back, he couldn’t remember whether it had been closed or shut when they had fled from the house. He went into Stolz’s room and pushed the door shut, not quite catching the lock. Stolz’s room was his objective. Mulling things over in the diner, it had occurred to him that finding the money behind the canned dog food might have a different meaning than the one he had put on it.

Old Mrs. Havermann might have hidden the money in the kitchen before she’d thought of putting the new locks on Stolz’s room. After the new locks were installed, she could have reclaimed the treasure from the cupboard and returned it to Stolz’s room—somewhere they hadn’t thought to look. Skip remembered looking under the bed, but not in it.

Could the money have been carefully hidden between the covers, or under the mattress, spread out thin so it made no bulge or wrinkle?

He meant to find out.

Skip went to the bed and stripped back the covers, pulled them off into a heap on the floor. Nothing. He lifted the mattress at the head of the bed. Beneath the mattress were the springs, not enclosed like box springs but the older coil type, so that Skip could see through them to the floor. There was a little dust on the floor, some rolls of cottony fuzz, and that was all. Skip dropped the mattress into place. His conviction that the money must be in Stolz’s room was beginning to weaken.

He was careful about touching anything which would retain a print. He’d forgotten the rubber gloves, left them on the shelf back of the car seat along with Eddie’s.