“What’d you say?”

I looked at it. “Nothing,” I said.

She was a dream, all right, and she was the same one. I was almost positive of that. The light had been pretty poor, there under the trees, but as he said himself if you’d ever seen her once you’d remember her.

“Well?” he asked.

It was just a hunch, but I played it. “Toothsome,” I said. “But I never saw her before.”

2

He picked his hat off the floor and stood up. “Well, that’s about it. Thanks for sparing the time.”

“Not at all,” I said.

When he was gone I took a quick shower and lay down on the bed with a cigarette. It burned down to the end and I lit another as the sun went down and twilight thickened inside the room. It was all crazy, but several things stood out like moles on a bubble-dancer. The first was that for some reason he didn’t think Cannon had been killed in that wreck. Not in the wreck itself, or as a result of it. Why? A man goes off the road and crashes at sixty miles an hour and when they sift him out of the wreckage with his head knocked in you wonder if he died of gastric ulcers? No. Purvis believed he had been murdered after the crash. But still he wouldn’t admit it.

Maybe, though, the latter was understandable, if you looked at it correctly. He had somebody in mind, but you didn’t go around making irresponsible statements like that until you had some proof to back them up. The police had already written it off as a traffic fatality, so he’d have his neck out a mile. The slandered party could sue the insurance company.

The next thing that stuck out was that it wouldn’t make any difference at all as far as the insurance company was concerned whether he’d died in the wreck or been murdered by somebody after the wreck—unless the beneficiary of the insurance policy was involved in the murder. If somebody else tagged him out they still had to pick up the tab, as far as I knew. The beneficiary would no doubt be his widow. Therefore, he had his eye on Mrs. Cannon. That tied in perfectly, because it was Mrs. Cannon he kept asking about. He couldn’t understand why I’d never seen her the whole time I was there, why she’d never come to the hospital. I was one up on him in that department. After looking at the picture, I was pretty sure I knew why she hadn’t. She didn’t want to come anywhere near me because she was afraid I might recognize her.

No, I thought; at best it was just a guess. That might be it, or it might not. I’d never thought about it particularly while I was in the hospital, and just assumed she was overcome with grief and didn’t want to be reminded of the wreck any more than she had to.