Mary Nunez couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell us anything on which I could base a reasonable guess at Collinson’s reason for sending for me. She knew, she insisted, nothing about them except that Mrs. Carter didn’t seem happy–wasn’t happy. She–Mary Nunez–had figured it all out to her own satisfaction: Mrs. Carter loved someone else, but her parents had made her marry Carter; and so, of course, Carter had been killed by the other man, with whom Mrs. Carter had now run away. I couldn’t get her to say that she had any grounds for this belief other than her woman’s intuition, so I asked her about the Carters’ visitors.
She said she had never seen any.
Rolly asked her if the Carters ever quarreled. She started to say, “No,” and then, rapidly, said they did, often, and were never on good terms. Mrs. Carter didn’t like to have her husband near her, and several times had told him, in Mary’s hearing, that if he didn’t go away from her and stay away she would kill him. I tried to pin Mary down to details, asking what had led up to these threats, how they had been worded, but she wouldn’t be pinned down. All she remembered positively, she told us, was that Mrs. Carter had threatened to kill Mr. Carter if he didn’t go away from her.
“That pretty well settles that,” Rolly said contentedly when we had crossed the stream again and were climbing the slope toward Debro’s.
“What settles what?”
“That his wife killed him.”
“Think she did?”
“So do you.”
I said: “No.”
Rolly stopped walking and looked at me with vague worried eyes.
“Now how can you say that?” he remonstrated. “Ain’t she a dope fiend? And cracked in the bargain, according to your own way of telling it? Didn’t she run away? Wasn’t them things she left behind torn and dirty and bloody? Didn’t she threaten to kill him so much that he got scared and sent for you?”
“Mary didn’t hear threats,” I said. “They were warnings–about the curse. Gabrielle Collinson really believed in it, and thought enough of him to try to save him from it. I’ve been through that before with her. That’s why she wouldn’t have married him if he hadn’t carried her off while she was too rattled to know what she was doing. And she was afraid on that account afterwards.”
“But who’s going to believe–?”
“I’m not asking anybody to believe anything,” I growled, walking on again. “I’m telling you what I believe. And while I’m at it I’ll tell you I believe Mary Nunez is lying when she says she didn’t go to the house this morning. Maybe she didn’t have anything to do with Collinson’s death. Maybe she simply went there, found the Collinsons gone, saw the bloody things and the gun–kicking that shell across the floor without knowing it–and then beat it back to her shack, fixing up that chills story to keep herself out of it; having had enough of that sort of trouble when her husband was sent over. Maybe not. Anyway, that would be how nine out of ten women of her sort in her place would have played it; and I want more proof before I believe her chills just happened to hit her this morning.”
“Well,” the deputy sheriff asked; “if she didn’t have nothing to do with it, what difference does all that make anyway?”
The answers I thought up to that were profane and insulting. I kept them to myself.
At Debro’s again, we borrowed a loose-jointed touring car of at least three different makes, and drove down the East road, trying to trace the girl in the Chrysler. Our first stop was at the house of a man named Claude Baker. He was a lanky sallow person with an angular face three or four days behind the razor. His wife was probably younger than he, but looked older–a tired and faded thin woman who might have been pretty at one time. The oldest of their six children was a bowlegged, freckled girl of ten; the youngest was a fat and noisy infant in its first year. Some of the in-betweens were boys and some girls, but they all had colds in their heads. The whole Baker family came out on the porch to receive us. They hadn’t seen her, they said: they were never up as early as seven o’clock. They knew the Carters by sight, but knew nothing about them. They asked more questions than Rolly and I did.