“In the note that you left you said that you had had a peculiar idea and were going to check it out. I take it that this involved the stone?”
“It involved the whole mess,” I said, “so I guess the stone figures in, somehow. I am not at all sure how.”
“Will you start at the beginning and tell me about it?”
“What about this urgent business of yours?”
“I want to hear everything that happened to you first. All right?”
“All right. Where are we going, anyway?”
“Just driving for now. Please, tell me everything, from the time you left my place through today.”
So I did. I talked and I talked and the buildings all ran away after a time and the grasses rushed up to the roadside, grew taller, were joined by shrubbery, tentative trees, an occasional cow, boulders and random jack rabbits. Hal listened, nodded, asked a question every now and then, kept driving.
“Then, say, right now, it looks to you as if I’m driving from the wrong side of the car?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Fascinating.”
I saw then that we were nearing the ocean, moving through an area dotted by summer cottages, mostly deserted this time of year. I had gotten so involved in my story that I had not realized we had been driving for close to an hour.
“And you’ve got a bona fide doctorate now?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Very strange.”
“Hal, you’re stalling. What’s the matter? What is it that you don’t want to tell me?”
“Look in the back seat,” he said.
“Okay. It’s full of junk, as usual. You should really clean it out some-“
“The jacket in the comer. It’s wrapped in my jacket.”
I brought the jacket up front and unrolled it.
“The stone! Then you had it all along!”
“No, I didn’t” he said.
“Then where did you find it? Where was it?”
Hal turned up a side road. A pair of gulls dipped past.
“Study it,” he said. “Look at it carefully. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Sure looks like it. But I never really scrutinized it before.”
“It has to be it,” he said. “Believe that I just found it in the bottom of a trunk I hadn’t unpacked till now. Stick to that.”
“What do you mean, ‘Stick to that’?”
“I got into Byler’s lab last night and took it from the shelf. There were several. It’s just as good as the one he gave us. You can’t tell the difference, can you?”
“No. but I’m no expert. What’s going on?”
“Mary has been kidnaped,” he said.
I looked over at him. His face was expressionless, which was the way I knew it would be if something like that were true.
“When? How?”
“We’d had a misunderstanding and she had gone home to her mother’s, that night you stopped over … ”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Well, I was going to call the next day and try to smooth things over. But the more I considered it the more I kept thinking how much nicer it would be if she called me first. I’d have some sort of little moral victory that way, I decided. So I waited. I came close to phoning a number of times, but I’d always put it off just a little longer-hoping she would call. She didn’t, though, and I had let it get fairly late. Too late, really. So I decided to give it another night. I did, and then I called her mother’s place in the morning. Not only was she not there, but she hadn’t been there at all. Her mother hadn’t even heard from her. I figured, okay, she has good sense. She had had second thoughts, didn’t want to turn the thing into a family issue. She had changed her mind and gone to stay with one of her girl friends. I started calling them. Nothing.
“Then, between calls,” he went on, “someone called me. It was a man, and he asked if I knew where my wife was. My first thought was that there had been an accident of some sort. But he said that she was all right, that he would even let me talk to her in a minute. They were holding her. They had held her for a day to make me sweat. Now they were going to tell me what they wanted in return for her release, unharmed.”