Said casually. “As you say, it doesn’t amount to a damn. Thanks a lot, Harlan. See you—”

“Hey, hold it,” I said. It was too late. I heard the phone click as he hung up.

I sat on the side of the bed and lit a cigarette. Reading was out-of the question now, and sleep was impossible. A bundle of laundry on the seat beside me—why the hell had he been interested in a stupid thing like that? Something about the way he had said, “Uh-uh,” told me that was exactly what he’d been hoping to learn.

Try again, I thought. Go back over the whole thing. Everybody’s missed it so far—everybody but Purvis. Look. Secondary road, with practically no traffic on it, this joker comes up behind you going very fast, drunk as a skunk, passes, cuts in— Why? Well, obviously, because he was too drunk to drive. But if he was that drunk and driving that fast, why hadn’t he crashed before? It would be thirty miles back to any place he could have got that kind of a bun on, unless he was carrying his supplies with him. No. That wasn’t an answer. It was luck. Coincidence. A drunk can smash up anywhere. It was just the bounce of the ball that it happened to be me he’d leaned on.

You’re still missing it, I told myself. That’s exactly the way everybody else has figured it from the beginning, but Purvis is looking at it from a different angle altogether. He’s got a bundle of laundry mixed up in it. Why? Because it was lying in the seat. It was in a white bag— I stopped then and sat very still on the side of the bed. Was that where we’d all gone off the track? Taking it for granted Cannon was drunk? Maybe he hadn’t been. Suppose he’d crashed me deliberately? And then somebody had killed him, caved his head in while he was lying unconscious in the wreck?

No, hell, I thought. It was too fantastic. But was it? I knew something that even Purvis didn’t know—but probably suspected. Mrs. Cannon was out there at the lake that evening. Suppose Cannon had been looking for her, believing she was out there with somebody. Maybe he came out of the swamp road behind me, trying to get a look at who was in the car. He caught up with me, with his headlights splashing against the back of the car, and saw I was alone.