17

I didn’t say anything for quite a spell; just lay still where I was wondering where that violin music had gone to and why I couldn’t smell the perfume no more.

Finally, I said, “Just what are you talking about, Amy?” And I was just a little relieved when she told me,just a little, because it could have been a lot worse.

“I’m talking about those two men you killed. Those, well, pimps is the word, I believe.”

“Pimps?” I said. “What pimps?”

“Stop it, Nick. My reference is to a certain night when you and I returned to Pottsville on the same train. Yes, I know you didn’t see me, but I was on it. I was curious as to why you’d be going to the river at that time of night, dressed in your very best clothes, so I followed you . . .”

“Now listen,” I said. “You couldn’t’ve followed me wherever I went. It was doggoned dark that night that—”

“It was very dark for you, Nick. For a man who’s never been able to see well at night. But I don’t suffer from that handicap. I followed you quite easily, and I saw you quite clearly when you killed those two men.”

Well . . .

At least it was better than her knowing I’d killed the other two. It didn’t tie me up with Rose in a way that I couldn’t very well get out of. Which Amy would have known was the case if she knew I’d killed Tom Hauck. And which was still the case even if Amy didn’t know about it.

For a minute or two, I almost wished I was running off with Rose and thirty thousand dollars plus, and t’heck with Amy. But my thinking that was just almost and I didn’t even almost it very long. Rose just naturally took too much out of a fella, she was too demandin’ and possessive, and she didn’t have much of anything to give him back. She was one heck of a lot of woman, but when you’d said that you’d said it all. A lot of woman but a god-danged flighty one. A woman who was apt to lose her head just when she needed it most, like she had with Uncle John.

I rolled over and took Amy into my arms. She swam up against me for a moment, pressing every soft warm inch of herself again me, and then she kind of moaned and pulled away.

“Why did you do it, Nick? I told you I’d accepted it, and I have, but—why, darling? Make me understand why! I never thought you could kill anyone.”

“I never thought I could neither,” I said. “And I can’t rightly say why I did it. They were just one more god-dang thing I didn’t like, that I particularly didn’t like. I’d been letting them go, like I let so many things go, and finally I thought, well, I didn’t have to. There were a lot of things, most things, that I couldn’t do nothing about. But I ‘could’ do something about them, an’ finally . . . finally I did something.”