The Pledge (46 page)

He conjured up possibilities. Suppose she was not there — what then? Was he to stand there and wait until dawn? Or go back to the prison? Had he remembered everything correctly? Did she say to turn left? Could he be sure of that? Suppose something had happened on the long drive down here? And where would she be parked? Where he walked now, the forest was so close to the road that a car could not park without blocking the road. But hadn't she said that she had already selected the parking place? She must have. She'd driven up and down the road sufficient times to pick a spot, but when she said half a mile, had she measured the distance, or was she guessing at the distance? And now he had lost count of his steps. How many — four hundred, or was he already in the five hundreds? Shouldn't he be seeing Molly's car now? Moment by moment, he expected a car from the prison to come tearing down the road, or a police car, lights flashing.

But the road remained dark. He tried to read the face of his watch. She had said one o'clock, but that had not been meant as a specific point in time. It was not “I'll be there at one A.M. on the nose.” He had taken care not to leave the prison ground before two or three minutes after twelve, and now it was only twelve thirty-five. Perhaps he was not to expect her until one, in which case he would have to hide somewhere by the road. Had he read his watch right? Did he dare strike a match, the better to read his watch?

And then he saw the car, parked in a small enclave, just enough space to hold a single car; and then before he could test the reality or inquire, she was out of the car and had flung her arms around him and was kissing him and sobbing and trying to speak at the same time. “Oh, my darling, my dear, wonderful darling, and you're so wise and wonderful, and I was dying a thousand deaths waiting here and thinking of every horrible possibility, but you came because I knew you would come and I prayed to the Blessed Virgin and swore I'd light a hundred candles even if I don't believe in anything except Bruce Nathaniel —”

“And cops and stuff. Come, Molly, let's go.”

“Just tell me that you love me — just once.”

“I love you and you make miracles, and I can't believe any of this, and please, let's get the hell out of here.”

“Yes, yes. There's a little lever under the seat, and move it back if you need more room, and you drive because I can't even think straight.”

Bruce, his heart still hammering, his hands shaking, managed to ask “Which way?”

“Straight on, and then we hit Two nineteen, and then we go south to White Sulphur Springs, west on Sixty, and we're home free. And we're going to make it.”

His hand was shaking, and his glasses had clouded. He took them off to wipe them.

“Let's go,” Molly said.

“Honey, you drive. I don't know what's wrong with me, but you drive, please.”

“All right. Sure. I can imagine what you've been through these past few days, with your imagination, seeing yourself in prison — but you're not going to prison, not ever again. Slide over. I'll walk around.”

“I love you. Thanks, baby. Later, we can switch. Are you tired?”

“I'm just fine,” Molly said, skipping around the car and climbing into the driver's seat. “I stayed the night at Charlottesville, so utterly exhausted that I slept till noon. And I want you to understand that this is a class Buick we got here, first rate and three quarters full of gas. We won't break down.”

She pulled the car out onto the road, switched on the lights, and rolled along at forty-five miles an hour. “Just nice and easy,” she said. “We are not going to speed, and we are not going to stop or be picked up.”

Bruce suddenly burst out laughing. He couldn't stop. “Yes,” he admitted to Molly, “I'm sort of hysterical. You know, we have this little country place on Indian Lake, and when I was a kid, Mother said something about wishing she had black-eyed Susans on our place, and there was a field next door owned by a kind of unpleasant character, and I took a shovel and basket, and very early one morning I dug up a clump and replanted it on our place. I was so filled with guilt. I was properly trained, Molly, and I had never stolen anything in my life until that black-eyed Susan caper came along. Would you believe, I went to this character and offered to pay him? And now we've pulled off a prison break just as smooth as silk, and we're going to outrun the cops and be in Chicago before they know what we're doing, wearing some silly disguise — when do we try that?” He was laughing through everything he said, unable to stop chuckling. “It's crazy. It's absolutely crazy. I'm a respectable news writer.”

“Your book,” Molly said, “is running away with itself. Top of the
Times
nonfiction best-seller list. Scribner did a whole window display, and Westbrook Pegler denounced the store and denounced you and thought it would be a good idea to throw a brick through both of you. He called you ‘another commie rat,' and Sylvia says we can sue him, but if we're going to be in Mexico, I don't really see how that's going to work.”

“How do we get to Mexico?”

“All in good time. There are any number of ways, but I guess the easy way is to take a streetcar across the border at El Paso. There are at least a hundred people down there who've taken refuge, most of them in Cuernavaca, and I know some of them, so there'll be people we can talk to until you learn some Spanish.”

He was still chuckling. “Just as crazy,” he decided. “But it's all sort of demented, isn't it?”

“I have a thousand dollars in cash in my purse, and there's more where that came from. We're not exactly rich, but we've got some resources. Sylvia has power of attorney, so we can get money when we need it. It's in my name, so they can't tie it up.”

She was high as a kite. He reached out to touch her, running a hand along her thigh. He was so tired, and all this was so much like a dream. The scent of her perfume; the sound of her voice; he had dozed and he awoke with a start.

“Where are we?”

“We just passed Lewisburg. We're on U.S. Sixty, headed for Charleston.”

“I was dreaming. We'll be early when we get to Charleston.”

“About five in the morning, I would think. I turn in the car at the airport. We'll have some breakfast — and then off to Chicago.”

“I feel rested. Do you want me to drive?” he asked.

“Oh, no, baby. You've been through enough these past few days. Just lean back and rest and sleep if you want to.”

He fell into a doze again, thinking how wonderful it was to be loved and cared for by this bold, confident woman, so resourceful and so ready to meet any situation life might present. He had given a year of his life to defend her honor and indeed his own as well, and that made him proud, and in that fuzzy land between sleep and wakefulness, he lived over his meeting with her, their dates and trials and small triumphs —

“Bruce!”

Her cry awakened him, blinking and then instantly awake as he saw in the distance the flashing lights of police cars. Molly increased her speed.

“Molly, slow down!” he cried. “We'll bluff it out — we'll talk!”

The car was hurtling toward the police cars, seventy and seventy-five and eighty miles an hour. It was happening too fast. Everything was too fast, and the memory of it was a jumble of his cries and Molly's desperation, and then they shot through the opening between two police cars, and then Molly swerved to avoid a third police car, angled into the road and invisible until they were upon it. The car skidded wildly, spun around, and then slammed into a tree.

He regained consciousness in a hospital room in Charleston. He had suffered a bad concussion. When he was able to speak, he asked about Molly, and he was told that she was dead. She had died instantly of a broken neck when the car hit the tree.

The following day, Sylvia Kline and Bruce's father, Dr. Bacon, arrived at the hospital in Charleston. They found Bruce in his room, seated in a chair and staring morosely at the floor. Death and grief are difficult walls to break through. Bruce recognized them with a nod but no words. His head was bandaged. He had been cut around his scalp and had lost blood, but there was no fracture and he was free to leave the hospital.

Bruce rose and Dr. Bacon embraced him. The doctor had seen enough grief and death to know that words were not much use on such occasions. Sylvia's eyes were full of tears. She had to speak to him, but her voice broke when she tried. She walked to the window and wept, her back to Bruce and his father. Finally, Bruce said, “It's as all right as it will ever be, Sylvia, so don't cry anymore. I had it out with myself, and I can live with it.” He fought back his own tears. “I can live with it.”

“I saw the x rays,” Dr. Bacon said. “Molly died instantly. There was no pain.”

“Where is she?”

“Here at the hospital. In the morgue.”

“They won't do an autopsy?”

“No reason to. And certainly not without your permission.”

“I want to see her.”

“Are you sure?” the doctor asked worriedly.

“Yes, I'm sure.”

“We've made arrangements for the body to be taken to Boston. I've spoken to her family,” Dr. Bacon said.

Sylvia turned to them, trying desperately to control her tears. “I must tell you,” she said. “I'm your lawyer. I pleaded with her not to do this. I begged her. I want you to believe that, Bruce. I should have stopped her. I should have stopped her.”

“I should have stopped her,” Bruce said. He put his arms around Sylvia, holding her thin body to him. “It's over. It's done.”

He dropped back into his chair. He was very tired and his head hurt. “What do we do now?” he asked.

“If you can think of such a thing as good news today … what I mean is that I spoke to the Federal prosecutor in Washington this morning, and they're dropping that insane business with the Soviet defector. They have no case and they know it won't wash, and if only I could have told that to Molly —” She broke down completely now, crouched in a chair, sobbing.

“If you want to see Molly?” Dr. Bacon asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want to come, Sylvia?”

She shook her head.

They went down to the pathology room. Molly's body was in a cold locker, covered by a white sheet. Bruce folded the sheet back. Strangely, there were no cuts on her face, just a single bruise, and her head rested on a cushion of the red hair. Her eyes had been closed. For a long moment, Bruce stared at her, and then he bent over and kissed her brow. It was cold as ice. He walked over to one of the lab stools, sat down, and began to cry. From the time he was ten or eleven years old, his father had never seen him cry. Now he stood and watched his son weep. The pathologist and his two assistants pretended not to notice.

“I'm all right,” Bruce said after a moment or two. “I can hold it back if I have to. I'll have the rest of my life to deal with it.”

“No,” his father said. “Time takes care of it. Time takes care of everything, believe me.”

“You talk to the loved ones,” Bruce said bitterly. “That's what a surgeon does. He talks to the loved ones. Oh, Jesus, why am I taking it out on you?”

“Because I'm here.”

They went into the hospital cafeteria, where his father ordered coffee that Bruce couldn't drink. He thought, I am closed, closed all over. He tried to drink the coffee, and he couldn't. “Do you know, Dad,” he said to his father, talking like a small boy explaining and begging to be forgiven for what he had done, “they weren't after us at all. The police cars. They had set up the road block because there had been a robbery and a shooting here in Charleston. At the prison, they never knew I was gone until the call from the hospital here.”

“Molly couldn't know that.”

“Why did I agree?”

“I think because you loved her.”

“God help me.” He pushed the coffee away. “Let's go back to the room. I have to talk to Sylvia. What do I do about Molly?” He couldn't say “her body.”

“I took care of that.”

“Yes — you said you did.”

Back in the hospital room, Sylvia had composed herself, and she said to Bruce, speaking very precisely, “There are no charges against you, Bruce. I telephoned Mr. Demming, and he said that your departure from the prison, while unusual, was in no way illegal.” She spoke very formally, fighting for self-control. “I also took care of the car. It was totaled. I informed the Hertz people of that fact. We have reservations for the five o'clock flight to New York out of Kanawha Airport. That's only two miles from here, so there's no great hurry.”

“There was a United States marshal supposed to pick me up at the prison?”

“He never came. They called that off.”

“So it was all for nothing.”

Sylvia shook her head dumbly.

“All for nothing, all pointless.”

Two days later, Molly was buried in St. Augustine Cemetery in South Boston. Father Paul O'Hara took care of things, and afterward everyone gathered in the Carlino home, where Bruce found himself loved and embraced by Molly's sisters and her mother, and no words of blame were spoken. Bruce got himself a little drunk and wept his own tears. He was still weak and uneasy on his feet, and he was grateful when Father O'Hara drew him into a corner and instructed him to sit for a while and rest.

“You've been through a hell of a lot,” O'Hara said. “Life and death and the loss of a beautiful woman who would set any man's heart on fire. All the saints abandoned you, and God was out to lunch.”

“Yes,” Bruce answered after a moment, “you could say that, although it's a bit curious, coming from a priest. I wish to hell you could comfort me or that anyone could, but that doesn't seem to be your line of work.”

“No, I'm not much good in that line, and in a few weeks I'll stop being a priest and marry Bernadette, who's almost as beautiful as her sister Molly.”