The Snare

3. THE COURSE

3. THE COURSE She got the letter in the mail the following week and it said: "I know you'd be glad to stop by Ellis Candies on Coliseum & St. Mary & carry pkg. to the Wilsons over near Amelia because you used to live over that way." And there was nothing else in the envelope but a folded piece of paper and an address for the Wilsons. At Ellis Candies the gray-dressed little old Greek or Italian or anyway foreign-looking woman handed out a parcel to her and at the Wilsons' she was left standing for a short while on the porch of an ordinary house with a gray-painted front porch. It was one of those houses (she stood noticing) that were looked down on about fifty years before as being scarcely apartment sized and very middle class, but which were bought up later for careful refurbishing or were held on to by those who had inherited them or had always lived in them, as good solid property which was increasing enormously in value. Once thought small, they were large enough in present times to house a small family and be cut up into two or three efficiencies, and to have a number of separate entrances. Then the door opened. The man, like the house, was one of many. Julia said: "Hello, Mr. Wilson," and held out the parcel, which was small enough to hide in her own hand. "Name?" the man asked. He looked at the doormat she stood on. "Wilson," she repeated. "No, yours." The words came up from where she 244 Elizabeth Spencer 245 stood, as though, like smoke, they had floated down, then risen uncertainly upward. "It's Garrett, isn't it?" She nodded slowly as his hand received from hers, then turned away. Dropped it like a snake, she thought, and on the steps heard the door close softly, felt the chill finger of fear touch her spine. The sun fell hot on that very area of flesh and warmed it. Suddenly reassured, she moved away in a coil of slowly unspiraling joy. So that was all, then. Maybe they wouldn't ask her any more. Or at least not for a while. It was Saturday. Her day off. She went and bought a paper and sat down. Ted Marnie, now connected by the police to the murder of an unknown man whose body had been found in a swamp eight years before and identified (by a button, a thread sewing the button, and a broken and badly reset wrist on the corpse, among other evidence) as Ted Marnie, was being flown back to New Orleans for questioning . The police would also search for and bring to the city for questioning the one-time night-club performer Jake Springland, who had been Mamie's accomplice in several small filling station robberies at the time of the supposed murder. New Orleans readers would remember the many bizarre facts about the case, which had created widespread interest and speculation at the time. The woman Wilma Wharton, Mamie's common-law wife, was being searched for, though a friend of hers had anonymously called up the newspaper and said that she had died in Texas two years ago. Julia put her coffee cup down empty. She looked around her. This was the same cafe, or one just like it, she had sat in so many years ago when the police suspected Jake of having murdered Ted Mamie. And it was hot again. If only Tommy Arnold would wake up and 2 4 6 T H E S N A R E come, she thought. It was his by-line she was missing. It was him she wanted to see. She imagined he was sitting across from her so thoroughly she could hear what he was saying: "You're getting your kicks from some crazy idea that you can reevoke part of your life that's over and done with, kid. And you can't do that . . . even you ought to know better, you're smart enough." "But suppose it does start up again, all by itself, starts over, only transformed. Not less but more alive. More. Forevermore." "It can't be, kid." "You mean, chuck it?" "I mean dump it. You're going in for the nonworld." "Suppose that's where the joy is?" "It isn't. Period." "If only my job were not so...