Go Home Stranger by Charles Williams

Author:Charles Williams [Williams, Charles]
Language: fra
Format: epub
ISBN: 9782869302587
Publisher: Rivages
Published: 1980-01-02T07:00:00+00:00

Eleven

She was not at the car when he arrived. He looked at his watch and grunted. It was 12:30. Ten minutes went by while he fretted impatiently. When she did arrive she was hurrying and out of breath.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized. “I had some business that took a little longer than I’d expected.”

“It’s all right,” he said shortly, as they got in the car.

They were both deep in thought and spoke little during the drive back. She thanked him quietly and went into her cabin.

Reno changed into fishing clothes and went down to the float with rod and tackle box to pick out a skiff. There was no whisper of breeze and the bayou lay flat and glaring like polished steel between the walls of trees. The sun beat relentlessly on his back and shoulders, and before he had rounded the first turn his clothes were dripping with perspiration. There was no other boat in sight. When he came abreast the arm of the bayou that ran off toward the north, he turned in. The channel was narrower here.

He looked back over his shoulder from time to time to check his course, keeping as close as possible to the bank and the overhanging trees to take advantage of the shade. He could be a thousand miles from civilization here, he thought.

He had no definite plan, nor any idea of what he might find. He was drawn merely by the fact that all the information he uncovered led him more surely in the direction of Max Easter. Suppose Counsel’s dead, he thought. It almost had to be Easter who killed him. He had the motive. He was here on the bayou, and he’d been waiting a long time.

He stopped pulling the oars for a minute and looked out through the trees as he lit a cigarette, conscious of a nagging dissatisfaction that he could not escape. There were two weak places in this line of reasoning. In the first place, he didn’t know Counsel was dead. It was just a guess, even if a good, logical one. And secondly, he was no nearer to answering the most baffling question of all and the one that had to be the key to the whole thing: what had Counsel come back for? Not just to see if Easter would kill him—that was a cinch.

He shook his head and took up the oars again. At least he could get a good look at the big man at close range. And if it developed he hadn’t come back from town yet . . . His eyes were tough as he thought of the houseboat. Easter, or somebody, hadn’t been squeamish about shaking down his cabin. It could work both ways.

He pulled steadily, and in about twenty minutes he came to the first fork in the waterway. He took the left-hand channel, as Gage had directed, and mentally noted an old snag as a landmark for the return trip. It would be easy to get lost up here.

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