“No, it was the right thing to do.” She lay down close to Eddie and tucked her head against his chin, and he saw the fluff of her hair against the dying twilight.

He pulled up her face, kissed her, forgot the tiredness and began to stroke the soft line of her back beneath the slip she’d kept on as a nightdress. Then the discomfort of his own guilt intruded. “I’ve got to go back and see what’s happened to him.”

She pulled away, rose on an elbow. “What? What did you say?”

“I’ve got to go back.” Eddie’s brown eyes, so brown they seemed black, were thoughtful in his dark, square face. “It’s this way. Skip and I—well, we were always a team. Always together! We never let each other down.”

“I’ll bet he’s let you down plenty of times,” Karen said in sudden anger. “I’ll bet he’s tricked you and left you out on a limb over and over again.”

Eddie sat up; he felt irritated and insulted. Still, he couldn’t blame Karen for being upset; she was young and inexperienced. He controlled the rush of angry words. “This is what I planned, why I planned it. Now look. We were going to sleep here tonight, weren’t we?” Karen nodded; he went on: “So if I slip out and drive back to L.A. during the night, get back here by daylight, who’s going to know about it, and what difference will it make?”

Karen had moved away to sit crouched at the foot of the bed. Inside the rayon slip she looked slim as a child, frail, defeated. Her skin glowed with a white shine under the dim light from the window high in the storeroom wall. “Please don’t go. Oh, please, Eddie! Stay here with me. Or if you want, tomorrow we can go on somewhere else.”

The tone was so desperate, so pleading, that Eddie almost relented.

As if sensing that he was on the verge of giving in, Karen rushed on: “If you go anywhere near that house, the police will grab you. I’ll bet they’d grab you if you drove by a block away and even looked over at it.”

“I wouldn’t go out to your place,” Eddie said. “What I’d better do, the first thing to do, is check with Skip’s uncle.”

“You can do that over the telephone!”

“I don’t know the number.”

“Well, you know Skip’s name!” Her voice grew higher, shriller, with every word she spoke.