John D MacDonald – Travis McGee 10 The Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper

After a little while we all went inside. Tom went up and looked at her and came back and said she was sleeping. He sat for a moment, glancing at his watch.

“Nice to meet you, Travis. Just… sorry that it had to be… to be…” His voice thickened and his mouth twisted, and he suddenly buried his face in his hands. Biddy hurried to him and shyly, hesitantly, put her hand on his shoulder.

“Tom. Please, Tom. It will work out.”

He sighed and straightened up and dug in his pocket for a handkerchief. His eyes still streaming, he said in a husky voice, “Sure, honey. It will all be peachy dandy by and by.” He mopped his eyes and blew his nose. “I apologize for myself too. See you around.” She followed him out and I heard him saying something about getting home late. The car door slammed. He drove out. She came back into the two-level living room. Her eyes looked moist.

“He’s… quite a guy, Travis.”

“Little tough to go back to the office and sell stocks and bonds, I guess.”

“What? Oh, he hasn’t done that in a long time now. Over two years. He started his own company.”

“Doing what?”

“It’s called Development Unlimited. It’s sort of a promotion company. They do a lot of land-syndication things. I don’t really know how it works, but it’s supposed to be a wonderful idea for people in high tax brackets, like doctors and so on. They pay a lot of interest in advance when they buy the land, and then they sell it later for capital gains. Tom is very clever at things like that. And they set up shares in apartment houses and do something very clever about depreciation and losses and cash flow and all that. He tried to explain it to me, but I have no head for that kind of thing. I guess he’s doing well because he has to go out of town a lot and arrange deals in other places too. To have Maurie the way she is makes… his success so kind of hollow. He is really a marvelous human being.”

“He seems to be.”

She wanted to show me her studio and her paintings. But she was making too obvious an effort to entertain me. The shine had gone out of her day. I said I should be getting along. I wrote out my address for her and told her to send me the name of the man who had bought the Likely Lady when she went through her mother’s papers.

We stood out by my car and told each other we hoped we’d see each other again someday. Maybe we did hope so. Hard to say.

I got back to the Wahini Lodge at three. I stretched out on the bed and told myself that it had to be the end of the obligation, if there was any. I had taken a good look. It was a sorry little situation. Prognosis bad. When you can’t identify the disease, the prognosis is always bad. And two nice people, Tom Pike and Bridget Pearson, were stuck with it. Maybe if Maurie could knock herself off in such a way that Tom wouldn’t blame Biddy and she wouldn’t blame him or herself, they might be able to make a life. A lot of widowers have married kid sisters and enjoyed it.

The restlessness was back in full force. I didn’t want to go home to Lauderdale. I didn’t want to stay where I was. And I couldn’t think of anywhere to go. I felt like a bored kid on a rainy day. Maurie kept sliding into my mind and I kept pushing her out. Go away, woman. Have a nice sleep.

I went into the bathroom. I glanced at my toilet-article kit atop the pale yellow formica of the countertop, and my random restless thoughts were gone in an instant, and I was totally focused, the back of my neck feeling prickly and cool.

Caution is like the seat belt habit. If you are going to -use seat belts, then you’d better make it automatic by latching your belt every single time you get into the car. Then you stop thinking about the seat belt and you do not have to make any decisions about seat belts because you are always strapped in.

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