The sheriff and Rolly had arrived while I was reading it. Feeney’s face was as white and set as Cotton’s.
Vernon bared his teeth at the marshal, snarling:
“You wrote that.”
Feeney grabbed it from my hands, looked at it, shook his head, and said hoarsely.
“No, that’s her writing, all right.”
Cotton was babbling:
“No, before God, I didn’t. I planted that stuff on him, I’ll admit that, but that was all. I come home and find her like this. I swear to God!”
“Where were you Friday night?” Vernon asked.
“Here, watching the house. I thought–I thought he might– But he wasn’t here that night. I watched till daybreak and then went to the city. I didn’t–”
The sheriff’s bellow drowned the rest of Cotton’s words. The sheriff was waving the dead woman’s letter. He bellowed:
“Below Dull Point! What are we waiting for?”
He plunged out of the house, the rest of us following. Cotton and Rolly rode to the waterfront in the deputy’s car. Vernon, the sheriff, and I rode with Fitzstephan. The sheriff cried throughout the short trip, tears splashing on the automatic pistol he held in his lap.
At the waterfront we changed from the cars to a green and white motor boat run by a pink-cheeked, tow-headed youngster called Tim. Tim said he didn’t know anything about any bootleggers’ hiding places below Dull Point, but if there was one there he could find it. In his hands the boat produced a lot of speed, but not enough for Feeney and Cotton. They stood together in the bow, guns in their fists, dividing their time between straining forward and yelling back for more speed.
Half an hour from the dock, we rounded a blunt promontory that the others called Dull Point, and Tim cut down our speed, putting the boat in closer to the rocks that jumped up high and sharp at the water’s edge. We were now all eyes–eyes that soon ached from staring under the noon sun but kept on staring. Twice we saw clefts in the rock-walled shore, pushed hopefully in to them, saw that they were blind, leading nowhere, opening into no hiding-places.
The third cleft was even more hopeless-looking at first sight, but, now that Dull Point was some distance behind us, we couldn’t pass up anything. We slid in to the cleft, got close enough to decide that it was another blind one, gave it up, and told Tim to go on. We were washed another couple of feet nearer before the tow-headed boy could bring the boat around.
Cotton, in the bow, bent forward from the waist and yelled:
“Here it is.”
He pointed his gun at one side of the cleft. Tim let the boat drift in another foot or so. Craning our necks, we could see that what we had taken for the shore-line on that side was actually a high, thin, saw-toothed ledge of rock, separated from the cliff at this end by twenty feet of water.
“Put her in,” Feeney ordered.
Tim frowned at the water, hesitated, said: “She can’t make it.”
The boat backed him up by shuddering suddenly under our feet, with an unpleasant rasping noise.
“That be damned!” the sheriff bawled. “Put her in.”
Tim took a look at the sheriff’s wild face, and put her in.
The boat shuddered under our feet again, more violently, and now there was a tearing sound in with the rasping, but we went through the opening and turned down behind the saw-tooth ledge.
We were in a v-shaped pocket, twenty feet wide where we had come in, say eighty feet long, high-walled, inaccessible by land, accessible by sea only as we had come. The water that floated us–and was coming in rapidly to sink us–ran a third of the way down the pocket. White sand paved the other two thirds. A small boat was resting its nose on the edge of the sand. It was empty. Nobody was in sight. There didn’t seem to be anywhere for anybody to hide. There were footprints, large and small, in the sand, empty tin cans, and the remains of a fire.
“Harve’s,” Rolly said, nodding at the boat.