She shivered suddenly, and Howard reached into the back of the car, fished out a camel’s-hair coat, and came quickly around to put the coat about Sally’s shoulders. He let his hand remain on her shoulder and to Ellery’s amazement her hand came up and rested on his, tightening, tensing the leather across her knuckles.

  “And then,” said Sally, looking steadily into Ellery’s eyes, “and then I fell in love with Howard and Howard fell in love with me.”

  The phrase, They’re in love, kept repeating itself stupidly in his head.

  But then order came, and things dropped magically into place, and Ellery was astounded only by his own blindness. He had been wholly unprepared for this because he had been so sure he understood the nature of Howard’s neurosis. His analysis had convinced him that Howard hated Sally, hated her because she had stolen Howard’s father-image. What he had failed to take into account, obviously, was the cunning and complex logic of the unconscious process. He saw now that it was precisely because Howard hated Sally that he had fallen, in love with her. She had come between him and his father. By falling in love with her, he took her away from his father—not in order to have Sally, but to regain Diedrich. To regain Diedrich, and possibly to punish him.

  Ellery knew that Howard and Sally knew nothing of this. Consciously, Howard loved; consciously, he suffered the torments of the guilt which was the consequence of his love. It was probably because of this guilt that Howard had concealed, concealed; concealed his relationship with his father’s wife even as he begged Ellery to come to Wrightsville to help him; tried to conceal it again when Sally herself wanted to come to Ellery with the truth. If not for Sally, Howard would never have come.

  That’s the way it looks to me, Ellery thought, and it makes sense, but this is over my depth; I can’t fish in these waters, I haven’t the equipment. I must try to get Howard receptive to a first-class psychiatrist, lead him there by the hand, and then go home and forget the whole involved business. I mustn’t tamper, I mustn’t tamper, I may do Howard serious injury.

  Sally’s was a different, simpler case. She loved Howard, not as a roundabout means to an antipathetic emotional end, but for himself. Or perhaps despite himself. But if her case was simpler, the remedy there was even more difficult. Happiness with Howard was out of the question; his love was spurious; with the accomplishment of its object the counterfeit would reveal itself for what it was. And yet…How far had it gone?

  Ellery asked: “How far has this gone?”

  He was angry.

  Howard said: “Too far.”

  “I’ll tell it, Howard,” said Sally.

  Howard said again: “Too far,” and he sounded hysterical.

  “We’ll both tell it,” said Sally quietly.

  His lips worked and he half turned away.

  “But I’ll start, Howard. Ellery, it happened this past April. Dieds had flown down to New York to see his lawyers about something, on business…”

  Sally had found herself irritatingly restless. Diedrich would be gone for several days. There was work she might have done in Low Village, but unaccountably she found no taste for it that day. And they really wouldn’t miss her…

  On impulse Sally had decided to jump into her car and drive up to the Van Horn lodge.

  The lodge was higher in the Mahoganies, near Lake Pharisee, in summer a favorite vacation ground for the well-to-do. But in April it was deserted. There would be no deliveries, but food supplies were kept in the lodge the year round, stored in quick-freeze lockers. She could stop on the way and buy bread and milk for a couple of days. It would be cold, but there was always a mountain of cut firewood; and the fireplaces were wonderful.

  “I’d felt the need to be alone. Wolfert was always grim company. Howard was…Well, I wanted to get off by myself. I told them I was driving into Boston to do some shopping. I didn’t want anyone to know where I was going. Laura and Eileen were there to take care of them…”

  Sally had driven off, fast.

  Howard said huskily: “I saw Sally leave. I’d been messing around in the studio, but…Well, father’s going away, and Sally’s leaving me alone with Wolfert…I felt I had to get away, too. I suddenly thought,” Howard said, “of the lodge.”

  Sally had just carried an armful of firewood into the lodge when Howard filled the doorway. Around them was the silence of the woods. They had stared at each other for a long, long time. Then Howard had crossed the room, and Sally had dropped the logs, and he had taken her in his arms.

  “I don’t remember what possessed me,” Howard mumbled. “How it happened. What I was thinking. If I was thinking anything at all. All I knew was that she was there, and I was there, and that I had to put my arms around her. But when I did, I knew I loved her. I’d loved her for years, I just knew that.”

  Did you, Howard?

  “I knew it was Fate that took me to the lodge when I thought all the time she was on the road to Boston.”

  Not Fate, Howard.

  Sally said: “I was sick,” and she was sick as she said it. “I was sick and I was well, too, more alive than I’d ever been in my lifetime. Everything was spinning around, the cabin, the mountain, the world. I closed my eyes and thought, ‘I’ve known this for years. For years.’ I knew then that I’d never loved Diedrich, not really, not the way I loved Howard. I’d mistaken gratitude, tremendous feelings of indebtedness, hero worship, for love. I knew it then, in Howard’s arms, for the first time. I was frightened, and I was happy. I wanted to die, and I wanted to live.”

  “And so,” said Ellery dryly, “you lived.”

  “Don’t blame her!” cried Howard. “It was my fault. When I saw her I should have turned and run like a rabbit. I made the break. I wore her down. I was the one who made the love, who kissed her eyes, stopped her mouth, carried her into the bedroom.”

  Now we show the wound, now we pour salt on it.

  “He’s been punishing himself like that ever since it happened. It’s no use, Howard.” Sally’s voice was very steady. “It’s never just one; it’s two. I loved you and I allowed myself to be carried away by you, because for the moment it was right. Right, Howard! Only for the moment, but for the moment it was right. For the rest of time…Ellery, there’s no justification for it; but that’s what happened. People should be stronger than Howard and I were able to be. I think we were both caught off guard; there are times when you are, no matter what defenses you’ve built up beforehand. And it wasn’t a momentary thing, a bad thing in itself. I did love him; he did love me.” She said: “We still love each other.”

  Oh, Sally.

  “It was completely irrational. We didn’t think; we felt. We stayed in the lodge overnight. The next morning we saw it as it was.”

  “We had two choices,” muttered Howard. “To tell Father or not to tell Father. But we hadn’t talked long before we saw that we didn’t have two choices at all. We had only one choice—and that’s no choice.”

  “We couldn’t tell him.” Sally clutched Ellery’s arm, “Ellery, do you see that?” she cried. “We couldn’t tell Dieds. Oh, I know what he’d have done if we’d told him. Being Dieds, he’d have given me a divorce, he’d have offered to settle a fortune on me, he wouldn’t have uttered a single word of complaint or anger; he’d have been…Dieds. But Ellery, he’d have died inside. Do you see that? No, you can’t. You can’t know what he’s built up around me. It’s not just a house. It’s a way of living, it’s the rest of his life. He’s a one-woman man, Ellery. Dieds never loved a woman before me; he’ll never love another. I’m not saying that boastfully; it really has nothing to do with me, what I am, what I’ve done or not done. It’s Dieds. He’s chosen me as his center and he’s revolved his whole reason for being about me. If we’d told him, it would have been a death sentence. Slow murder.”

  “It’s a pity,” began Ellery, “that—”

  “I know. That I didn’t think of all that the day before. I can only say…I didn’t. Till it was too late.”

  Ellery nodded. “Very well, you didn’t. It happened, and you two decided to keep it from him. Then?”

  “There’s more to it than that,” said Howard. “There’s what we owe him. It would have been bad enough if I’d been his real son and he’d met Sally under normal circumstances, when she was an adult, and married her. But—”

  “But you felt that he’d created you where without him you’d have been nothing, and Sally felt the same way,” said Ellery, “and I quite understand all that. But what I want to know is: What did you do about it? Because it’s obvious you did do something about it, and what you did only made a worse mess. What was it?”

  Sally bit her lip, deeply.

  “What was it?”

  She looked up suddenly. “We decided then and there that it was over. That it must never be revived. We must try to forget it. But whether we forgot it or not, it must never under any circumstances happen again. And above all, Diedrich must never know.

  “It’s never happened again,” Sally said, “and Dieds doesn’t know. We buried it. Only…” She stopped.

  “Say it!” Howard’s shout rang over the lake, startling birds everywhere; they rose in clouds, wheeling away and up and disappearing.

  For a moment Ellery thought something disastrous was going to happen.

  But the color of convulsion faded out of Howard’s face and he thrust his hands into his pockets, shivering.

  When he spoke, Ellery could hardly hear him.

  “It worked for a week. Then…It was being in the same house with her did it. Eating at the same table. Having to put on an act twelve hours a day…”

  You could have gone away.

  “I wrote Sally a letter.”

  “Oh, no.” Oh, no!

  “A note. I couldn’t talk to her. I had to talk to somebody. I mean…I had to say it. I said it on paper.” Howard suddenly choked up.

  Ellery shaded his eyes.

  “He wrote me four letters in all,” said Sally. She sounded small and faraway. “They were love letters. I’d find them in my room, under my pillow. Or in the make-up drawer of my vanity. They were love letters and from any one of them a child could have told what had happened between us that day and night at the lodge…I’m not telling the exact truth. They were franker than that. They told everything. In detail.”

  “I was crazy,” said Howard hoarsely.

  “And of course,” said Ellery to Sally, “you burned them.”

  “I didn’t.”

  Ellery vaulted from the car. He was so angry he wanted to walk back through the woods, down the white road, past the sheep and cows and bridges and fences the forty-five miles back to Wrightsville, to pick up his things and head for the station and take a train back to New York and sweet sanity.

  But after a moment he walked back to the car.

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t burn them. Just what did you do with them, Sally?”

  “I loved him!”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “I couldn’t! They were everything I had!”

  “What did you do with them?”

  She twisted her fingers. “I had an old japanned box. I’d had it for years, since my school days. I’d bought it in an antique shop somewhere because it had a false bottom and I could keep my secret best picture of—”

  “Of Diedrich.”

  “Of Diedrich.” Her fingers became still. “I’d never told anyone about the false bottom, not even Dieds, I thought it would sound too silly. I kept jewelry in the box proper. Well, I put the four letters in the false bottom. I thought they’d be safe there.”

  “What happened?”

  “After the fourth letter I came to my senses. I told Howard he must never write another. He never did. Then…a little over three months ago…it was in June…”

  “We had a robbery at our house,” laughed Howard. “A little old robbery.”

  “A thief broke into my bedroom,” Sally whispered, “one day when I was at the hairdresser’s in town, and he stole the japanned box.”

  Ellery touched his eyelids with his two forefingers. His eyes felt hot and grainy.

  “The box was jammed with expensive jewelry—things Dieds had given me. I knew that’s what the thief had been after, and he’d simply picked up the whole box and made off with it, not knowing there was something in the false bottom I’d have given every diamond and emerald in the box to get back. And burn.”

  Ellery said nothing. He leaned on the car.

  “Of course, Dieds had to be told.”

  “He called in Chief of Police Dakin,” Howard said, “and Dakin…”

  “Dakin.” That shrewd Yankee, Dakin.

  “…and Dakin after weeks and weeks managed to round up all the missing jewelry. In various pawnshops—in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, Newark—a piece here, a piece there. But there were all sorts of conflicting descriptions of the thief—he was never caught. Father said we were,” Howard laughed again, “lucky.”

  “He didn’t know how Howard and I waited, waited, for that japanned box to turn up,” said Sally tensely. “But it didn’t, it didn’t. Howard kept saying the thief had thrown it away as being of no value. It sounded reasonable. But…suppose he hadn’t? Suppose he’d found the false bottom?”

  A cluster of swollen clouds swam up over the lake. They had dark hearts and they looked against the sky like great microbes viewed against a blue field in a microscope. The lake swiftly darkened and some drops of cold rain fell, stippling the water. Ellery reached for a coat and thought irrelevantly of the hamper.

  “It was worrying about those letters that brought on this last amnesia attack,” Howard muttered. “I’m sure of it. The weeks passed and the box didn’t turn up and everything seemed all right and all the time I felt as if I were being eaten through by acid inside. The day I went into New York for the Djerens exhibition I was just looking for something to take my mind off things. I didn’t give a damn about Djerens; I don’t like his work—he’s like Brancusi, and Archipenko, and I’m strictly a neoclassical boy. But he was an escape. You know what happened.

  “It’s a funny thing that I snapped before the blow fell, and since I’ve been all right.”

  “Let’s stick to the line,” said Ellery tiredly. “I take it the thief’s got in touch with you. Was it Wednesday?”

  It must have been Wednesday; he recalled thinking that something serious had happened on the day before his arrival.

  “Wednesday.” Sally was frowning. “Yes, Wednesday, the day after Howard saw you in New York. I got a phone call—”

  “You got a phone call. You mean the caller asked for you? By name?”

  “Yes. Eileen answered and then said some man wanted to talk to me, and—”

  “Man?”

  “Eileen said it was a man. But when I got on the phone I wasn’t sure. It might have been a woman with a deep voice. It had a funny sound. Hoarse, whispery.”

  “Disguised. And how much did this man-woman ask for the return of the letters, Sally?”

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “Cheap.”

  “Cheap!” Howard glared at him.

  “I imagine your father would pay a lot more than that, Howard, to keep those letters from being published. Don’t you?”

  Howard did not reply.

  “That’s what he—or she—said,” said Sally drearily. “He said he’d give me a couple of days to raise the money and that he’d phone again with instructions about how to get it to him. He said if I refused, or tried to double-cross him, he’d sell the letters to Diedrich. For a lot more.”

  “And what did you say to that, Sally?”

  “I could hardly talk. I thought I was going to be stupid and faint. But I managed to hold on to myself, and I said I’d try to raise the money. And then he hung up. Or she.”

  “The blackmailer called again?”

  “This morning.”

  “Oh,” said Ellery. Then he said: “Who answered the phone this time?”

  “I did. I was alone.”

  The rain was falling hard now on the lake, and Howard said peevishly, “You’d better put the top up, Sally.” But Sally said, “Not much is coming through the trees; it’s just a shower,” and then she looked at Ellery and said, “Howard had gone into town this morning to get a copy of the architect’s Museum plans—he’d driven in just after Dieds and Wolfert. I…had to wait until How got back. Then we…talked and then I brought you your breakfast.”

  “What instructions were you given this morning, Sally?”

  “I didn’t have to bring the money myself. I could send a representative. But only one person was to come. If I told the police, or tried to have somebody watch the meeting, he’d know, he said; he wouldn’t show up, the deal would be off, he’d contact Dieds at his office.”

  “Where is this meeting to take place, and when?”

  “In Room 1010 at the Hollis Hotel—”

  “Oh, yes,” murmured Ellery. “And that’s the top floor.”

  “—tomorrow, Saturday, at two P.M. Whoever brings the money will find the door to 1010 unlocked; he said to walk right in and wait there for further instructions.”

  And now they were both looking at him with such a concentration of anxieties that he turned aside again. He walked to the edge of the lake. The rain had stopped; the clouds had marvelously vanished; the birds were back; there was a fresh wet feel to the air.

  Ellery came back.

  “I take it you’re intending to pay.”

  Sally looked bewildered.

  “Intending to pay?” growled Howard. “You don’t seem to get it, Ellery.”

  “I get it. I also have a thorough acquaintance with blackmail and blackmailers.”

  “But what else can we do?” cried Sally. “If we don’t pay, he’ll take the letters to Diedrich!”

  “You’ve quite made up your minds that you’ll do anything to keep Diedrich from finding out?” They didn’t answer. Ellery sighed. “That’s the diabolical thing about blackmail, isn’t it? Sally, do you have the twenty-five thousand?”