Mrs. Mosby exclaimed with pleasure and surprise. There wasn’t a lazy bone in the girl’s body. She was young and pretty, the truckers would be attracted. Mrs. Mosby made plans to keep them here—and then noticed the absence of Eddie. “Now where’d he take himself off to?” She peered out through the front windows. “Car gone, too, huh?”

“He went over to see a friend,” Karen said stumblingly. “Last night. He . . . didn’t come back.”

Mrs. Mosby studied Karen, saw that tears were just under the surface and that the girl was terribly frightened and upset. Had a fight, she concluded from her own experience, remembering the long ago years when she had been a bride, easily hurt and dismayed. “Well, we’ll just go ahead and have breakfast, and he’ll show up. You scold him good when he comes. Make him eat crow. Ain’t every young fellow has as pretty a wife as you.”

They ate. The food was hearty and filling. Mrs. Mosby emptied her change bag into the cash register, unlocked the front door, and the place was open for business.

Karen worked as if afraid to stop. She scrubbed up all the out-of-the-way spots, stacked canned goods in the storeroom, tidied the soaps and brushes beneath the sink. She seemed determined to keep her hands occupied, to keep thought, introspection, and self-concern at bay.

At about eleven-thirty Mrs. Mosby went back home to attend to her husband’s wants. During this time Karen was alone in the café. A trucker came in with an L.A. morning paper. He left it when he finished eating. Karen read it in panic. Her description was boxed on the front page now, in large black type. Mrs. Havermann’s death had been attributed to heart failure brought on by asphyxiation. Murder. A man identified as the intruder in her home had been found dead of gunshot wounds in a car some distance from the Havermann house. Reading this, Karen had an almost unbearable surge of relief, thinking Skip was dead and Eddie would know it and come back—but the paper’s account continued, to say that the dead man had been identified as a middle-aged ex-convict named Thomas Ranigan, commonly known among his criminal associates as Big Tom.

His fingerprints matched the bloody ones found in the dead woman’s room and on her person. The police were now trying to trace Ranigan’s movements on the night of the murder and to account for the accomplices who must have quarreled with him and shot him.