He smiled back sympathetically, but behind it I could see that he was
wishing that I'd stop harping on a dead subject. "I sincerely wish I
could be of help," he said. In that he was sincere. But somewhere,
someone was not, and I wanted to find out who it was.
The impasse looked as though it might go on forever unless I turned away
and left. I had no desire to leave. Not that Phil could help me, but
even though this was a dead end, I was loath to leave the place because
it was the last place where I had been close to Catherine.
The silence between us must have been a bit strained at this point, but
luckily we had an interruption. I perceived motion, turned and caught
sight of a woman coming along the road toward us.
"My sister," said Phil. "Marian."
Marian Harrison was quite a girl; if I'd not been emotionally tied to
Catherine Lewis, I'd have been happy to invite myself in. Marian was
almost as tall as I am, a dark, brown-haired woman with eyes of a
startling, electricity colored blue. She was about twenty-two, young and
healthy. Her skin was tanned toast brown so that the bright blue eyes
fairly sparked out at you. Her red mouth made a pleasing blend with the
tan of her skin and her teeth gleamed white against the dark when she
smiled.
Insultingly, I made some complimentary but impolite mental observations
about her figure, but Marion did not appear to notice. She was no
telepath.
"You're Mr. Cornell," she said, "I remembered you," she said quietly.
"Please believe us, Mr. Cornell, when we extend our sympathy."
"Thanks," I said glumly. "Please understand me, Miss Harrison. I
appreciate your sympathy, but what I need is action and information and
answers. Once I get those, the sympathy won't be needed."
"Of course I understand," she replied instantly. "We are all aware that
sympathy is a poor substitute. All the world grieving with you doesn't
turn a stitch to help you out of your trouble. All we can do is to wish,
with you, that it hadn't happened."
"That's the point," I said helplessly. "I don't even know what
happened."
"That makes it even worse," she said softly. Marian had a pleasant
voice, throaty and low, that sounded intimate even when talking about
something pragmatic. "I wish we could help you, Steve."
"I wish someone could."
She nodded. "They asked me about it, too, even though I was not present
until afterward. They asked me," she said thoughtfully, "about the
mental attitude of a woman running off to get married. I told them that
I couldn't speak for your woman, but that I might be able to speak for
me, putting myself in the same circumstances."
She paused a moment, and her brother turned idly back to his tractor and
fitted a small end wrench to a bolt-head and gave it a twist. He seemed
to think that as long as Marian and I were talking, he could well afford
to get along with his work. I agreed with him. I wanted information, but
I did not expect the entire world to stop progress to help me. He spun
the bolt and started on another, lost in his job while Marian went on:
"I told them that your story was authentic--the one about the bridal
nightgown." A very slight color came under the deep tan. "I told them
that I have one, too, still in its wrapper, and that someday I'd be
planning marriage and packing a go-away bag with the gown shaken out and
then packed neatly. I told them that I'd be doing the same thing no
matter whether we were having a formal church wedding with a four-alarm
reception and all the trimmings or a quiet elopement such as you were. I
told them that it was the essentials that count, not the trimmings and
the tinsel. My questioner's remark was to the effect that either you
were telling the truth, or that you had esped a woman about to marry and
identified her actions with your own wishes."
"I know which," I said with a sour smile. "It was both."
Marian nodded. "Then they asked me if it were probable that a woman
would take this step completely unprepared and I laughed at them. I told
them that long before Rhine, women were putting their nuptial affairs in
order about the time the gentleman was beginning to view marriage with
an attitude slightly less than loathing, and that by the time he popped
the question, she'd been practicing writing her name as 'Mrs.' and
picking out the china-ware and prospective names for the children, and
that if any woman had ever been so stunned by a proposal of marriage
that she'd take off without so much as a toothbrush, no one in history
had ever heard of her."
"Then you begin to agree with me?"
She shrugged. "Please," she said in that low voice, "don't ask me my
opinion of your veracity. You believe it, but all the evidence lies
against you. There was not a shred of woman-trace anywhere along your
course, from the point along the road where you first caught sight of
the limb that threw you to the place where you piled up. Nor was there a
trace anywhere in a vast circle--almost a half mile they searched--from
the crack-up. They had doctors of psi digging for footprints, shreds of
clothing, everything. Not a trace."
"But where did she go?" I cried, and when I say 'cried' I mean just
that.
Marian shook her head very slowly. "Steve," she said in a voice so low
that I could hardly hear her over the faint shrill of bolts being
unscrewed by her brother, "so far as we know, she was never here. Why
don't you forget her--"
I looked at her. She stood there, poised and a bit tensed as though she
were trying to force some feeling of affectionate kinhood across the gap
that separated us, as though she wanted to give me both physical and
mental comfort despite the fact that we were strangers on a ten-minute
first-meeting. There was distress in her face.
"Forget her--?" I ground out. "I'd rather die!"
"Oh Steve--no!" One hand went to her throat and the other came out to
fasten around my forearm. Her grip was hard.
I stood there wondering what to do next. Marian's grip on my arm relaxed
and she stepped back.
I pulled myself together. "I'm sorry," I told her honestly. "I'm putting
you through a set of emotional hurdles by bringing my problems here. I'd
better take them away."
She nodded very slowly. "Please go. But please come back once you get
yourself squared away, no matter how. We'd all like to see you when you
aren't all tied up inside."
Phil looked up from the guts of the tractor. "Take it easy, Steve," he
said. "And remember that you do have friends here."
Blindly I turned from them and stumbled back to my car. They were a pair
of very fine people, firm, upright. Marian's grip on my arm had been no
weaker than her sympathy, and Phil's less-emotional approach to my
trouble was no less deep, actually. It was as strong as his good right
arm, loosening the head bolts of a tractor engine with a small
adjustable wrench.
I'd be back. I wanted to see them again. I wanted to go back there with
Catherine and introduce them to her. But I was definitely going to go
back.
I was quite a way toward home before I realized that I had not met the
old man. I bet myself that Father Harrison was quite the firm, active
patriarch.