In Cold Pursuit
and recruited a young friend or relative to stay with her. It was fortunate that he hadn’t yielded to his impulse at dawn.In a matter of moments, the skinny dark-haired one emerged from behind screening lilacs in the next driveway and strolled back the way she had come. The man in the car had already noted that the gate with a wagon-wheel set in it was a gate in name only; it brushed open, a tiny but essential point of corroboration.
The door closed behind her. Five minutes later it opened again, and this time it was the object of his vigil who came out.
For seconds he heard his blood in his ears, a dangerous swish, swish. Short fair hair that cupped her head in a ruffle, as described. The rest of her he observed for himself: slender body, a little over average height, in a green and white dress. A flash of silver plucked off one wrist by the sun as she walked to the car in the driveway at the side of the house, carrying what looked like a cooler. It was a crisp walk, definite, as opposed to her companion’s.
The walk of someone who made decisions quickly. Glance through the window at a mortally injured woman seeking asylum, flick out the light, lock the door.
With the rushing sound dying out of his ears and an iciness taking over, he realized in the course of the next fifteen minutes that he was watching preparations for a trip. The fair-haired girl—she was younger than he had expected, and he did not use her name in his brain because it was too soon, it might undermine his control—reappeared with some light-colored garments over her arm, bent into the car with them, went around to the trunk and unlocked it and lifted the lid. Her companion presently trudged out with two suitcases which she hefted inside without apparent difficulty, slamming the lid down again. The fair girl, burdened with a brown paper bag and some books, came out for the last time, locked the door, and proceeded to the car.
He had had time to envision a number of possibilities, including flight, and in fact, partly by chance, he had made one move about that. He had not, however, thought in terms of a passenger—or was she going to drop this one off at her own home, now that her purpose had been served?
He did not lose sight of the car ahead, even though it was overlaid briefly now and then by the vision of his wife’s face, so masked in blood that only her teeth and the white of one eye—the other was puffed shut —were visible. The hair he hadn’t dared to touch was stiff and crusted.
He still didn’t know all of it. He had arrived at his driveway the evening before to find a police car with its roof-light flashing and a deputy in conversation with the driver of a strange pick-up whose headlights were pouring into the trees. Three streets over, the driver had stopped for a woman, obviously the victim of a bad beating. He wasn’t familiar with this area and in fact had gotten himself lost, but although she seemed to be in a state of shock the woman had managed to give him her name and her address for the ambulance he was able to summon on his CB radio. She had appeared overcome by fresh terror at the sight of her own driveway, and had only stammered repeatedly, “A boy. He tried to . .
She hadn’t said anything at all to the ambulance attendant, it was later learned, because she had lapsed into unconsciousness.
They had told him which hospital, and he had reached her in time because forms were still being filled out. Her voice was barely audible, with dazed gaps in it, but he pieced together the facts that she had been outside calling the cat when she was attacked, that she had fought off a knife-assisted attempt at rape, that she had run.
“I don’t know where . . .” but there was a rickety bridge over an irrigation ditch, and then a house with nobody home, and next to it a house with a wagon-wheel set in the gate—“I thought it would be latched, but it wasn’t, and I fell down . . . and she wouldn’t let me in. She looked out the window and turned off the light . . . she locked the door. So I—” He felt as though his face must be as dark with blood as hers. “What was she like?”
She couldn’t seem to grasp what he wanted, because she was wandering through her story like an obedient child and it confused her to be halted. He pressed her, a part of him knowing that this was tantamount to wringing the last few drops out of a sponge, refusing to stop, and she closed her good eye and said, “Young . . . short hair, very blonde.” A faltering and effortful gesture with a hand near her own head, a slow welling of tears from under her eyelids. “She locked the door.”
They had taken her away to surgery then, and come back not much over an hour later to tell him that they were sorry; there had been too much internal bleeding and she hadn’t made it.
The doctor conveying this information had studied his face. “Don’t blame yourself for not being at home when it happened. Even if you’d rushed your wife in at once, the damage was done . . . Here, you’d better let me give you something—”
He had turned away from that sop, furiously disbelieving. Hadn’t made it—his wife, while he was being eyed furtively by emergency room patients with nothing more wrong with them than bandaged fingers or arms in improvised slings.
He had talked to a city detective then, and made the discovery, not new to countless victims, that there was always an element of official doubt in attempted rape. For example, his wife