—I’m the only living human being that can take care of her.
“Let her go!”
“I can’t—” He spoke aloud at last, saying what most men have said about a woman one day—and most women about a man: “I happen to love her…”
He got up and ordered a hotel car, hurrying a little as he got in with the sense that it might be too late. He drove quickly to Chimney Rock and up the mountain to the restaurant, as far as the car could go. As he began the climb a thought dogged his steps.
—Up toward nothing or perhaps toward a life of future misery and unhappiness, of other Carleys.
He stopped at a turning, and looked at the starlight, and started on again counting Eighty-one, Eighty-two, Eighty-three. After that he stopped counting.
When he reached the top at last he was frantic with worry. All his self-control, all his restraint, all that made him a forceful person had left him as he mounted those last steps and came out into the open sky. What he had expected to see he could not have said.
What he saw was a girl eating a sandwich.
She was sitting with her back against one of the iron posts that supported the rail.
“Is this Roger?” she demanded. “Or do my eyes deceive me?”
He leaned against the rail, panting.
“What are you doing up here?” he asked.
“Enjoying the stars. I’ve decided to become an eccentric—you know—like Garbo. Only my stuff will be mountain tops. When we finish this picture I’m going to Mount Everest and climb—”
“Make sense!” he interrupted. “What did you come up here for?”
“To throw myself over, of course.”
“Why?”
“For love, I guess. But I happened to have this sandwich with me—and I was hungry. So I thought I’d eat first.”
He sat down across from her.
“Are you interested in anything that’s happening down below in the mere world?” he enquired. “If you are, you might as well know that they got Carley.”
“Who did?”
“The process server—the one that had been looking for him. It was a tough break. If he’d kept hid till midnight he couldn’t have been served—Statute of Limitations, or something.”
“That’s too bad. How did it happen? How did they find where he was?”
“Guess.”
“I can’t—it wasn’t you.”
“Good God, no! It was the Panzer girl.”
She thought a minute.
“Oh, so that’s what she was waiting for.”
There was silence for a moment on top of the rock.
“Why on earth did you think I’d do a thing like that?”
“I didn’t after I thought. Excuse me, Roger.”
“But I did have Mr. de Luxe looked up.”
“What did you find out?” Her query was detached, impersonal.
“Nothing much—except there wasn’t any girl who killed herself about him. A certain Josephine Jason he was engaged to found she had pleuro-cancer—that means the lining of the lungs are gone—and she crashed on purpose. You can’t blame Carley.”
“Oh, I’m so tired of Carley, Roger. Couldn’t we let him alone for awhile?”
He smiled to himself in the darkness.
“What changed your mind—the sandwich?”
“No, I guess it was the rock.”
“Too high for you?
“No—it seemed somehow like you. After I got up on top it seemed as if I was standing on your shoulders. And I was so happy doing that, I didn’t want to leave.”
“I see,” he said ironically.
“I somehow knew you wouldn’t let me. I wasn’t a bit surprised when you came up the steps.”
He grabbed her hands and pulled her to her feet.
“All right,” he said. “Come on. We’ll go back to the hotel—I’m worried about the little Panzer—let’s see where she is.”
She followed him down the steps; at the bottom, as he dismissed the hotel car and they got into his, Atlanta said:
“No, it doesn’t seem to matter about him any more.”
“It matters about everybody.”
“He can probably take care of himself, I mean.”
When they reached the hotel and found what had happened—that Carley Delannux had somehow locked the process server in his room in a state of bruised coma and driven off, Atlanta said:
“You see? He’ll be all right. Maybe they won’t catch him this time.”
“Won’t catch him—they’ve caught him. If you’re served with one of these writs and don’t show up, you’re a fugitive from justice. Anyhow, let Rasputin solve his own problems. I’m worried about what he left behind him—this girl. We didn’t pass a car or a person between here and Chimney Rock—and there’s no bus.”
Atlanta guessed suddenly.
“She’s on the lake. I chose Chimney Rock so she chose—”
But he was already running toward the boathouse.
They found her an hour later, drifting very quietly in the moonlight of a small cove. Her face upturned, seemed placid and reconciled, almost as if surprised at their presence—in her hand, like Sesame of the Lilies, was clutched a bunch of mountain flowers—much as Atlanta’s hand had clutched a sandwich half an hour ago.
“How did you find me?” she called from her canoe.
As the launch sailed alongside, Roger said:
“We wouldn’t have—if I hadn’t had some portable flares with me. You’d be drifting still.”
“I decided I didn’t want to go overboard. After all, I’ve got my certificate now.”
Long after Roger had gotten her a taxi, and pressed on her the money to go back to her people in Tennessee for awhile—long after he and Atlanta became one of the many untold legends of Lake Lure, the best kind, and he had left her outside her door—he walked down through the arcade past the little shops of the mountaineers and up to the post office, where there was nothing beyond save the bottomless black pools that were rumored to hold black secrets of reconstruction days.
There he stopped. He had heard in the lobby what he had not wanted Atlanta to hear tonight—that what was left of Carley Delannux had been picked up at the foot of Chimney Rock an hour ago.
It was sad that the season of Roger’s greatest happiness was ushered in by this tragedy of another man, but there must have been something in Carley Delannux that made it necessary for him to die—something sinister, something that had lived too long, or had been too long dead on its feet, and left corruption in its wake.
Roger was sorry for him; he was a slow-thinking man but he knew that what was useful and valuable must not be sacrificed to that. It was good to think of Atlanta, who meant starlight to so many people, sleeping safely in a room a hundred yards away.
