Dead Low Tide by John D. MacDonald

stopped it in mid-flight. I couldn’t read the odd expression in her eyes. She wassilent for what seemed a long time. Then she drank deeply, lowered the glass, and said, “Poo. He’s just trying to make a real thing out of that job of his.”
    “Jack Ryer thinks it was murder, too.”
    She flared right up over that. “Who cares what he thinks? He thinks he’s too damn good for us.”
    “And I think it was murder, too, Mary Eleanor. And by now, I’d guess nine-tenths of the town thinks so.”
    “I hate this terrible dusty little old town and I’m getting out of it, too. I’m going away just as soon as I can. And stay away. You’ll see.”
    The sun was all gone and there were no clouds to make a sunset. Just a vague red glow way out there at the horizon, with the blues and grays moving in on us. Something chased bait a hundred feet from shore, and they flashed in panic, like new silver dollars thrown flat and hard so that they skipped.
    “He’ll ask you, Mary Eleanor, where you two went last night, and so on.”
    “How do I know where John went? We’d go out together when we had to, when there were people and places where we had to be together. Other times I never knew, and I gave up telling him where I was going.”
    The maid came out, and said, “O.K. I’m going now, m’am?”
    “Goo’night, Ephaylia.”
    “You be all right, m’am?”
    “I’ll be all right.”
    The maid gave me an obscure and opaque glance, and left. Mary Eleanor held her glass out with childish imperiousness. I fixed her drink and took it back to her and sat again on the wall. I was puzzled.
    “Mary Eleanor, you made it sound as if you and John were very close until he started acting—odd. Now you make it sound as if you weren’t getting along.”
    “Don’t think too much, Andy. That’s what gets people in trouble. How much can I trust you, Andy?”
    “If you hadn’t already decided to, you wouldn’t ask that.”
    “You’re too smart about me, honey, I think.”
    “Get to it, Mary Eleanor. Why did you call me over here?”
    “Don’t be cross with me. Please, dear. I looked all over the house, Andy. All over. It’s something I lost. I won’t tell you what it is. Maybe John took it. Maybe he took it and put it in his desk down at the office. Go look in his desk down there, Andy, honey, and find it for me.”
    “Oh, great! Find something when I don’t know what to look for.”
    “Oh, it’s a brown envelope. So big.” She made the size of an eight-by-eleven envelope with her hands. “Addressed to me. Mailed from Miami some time ago. It’s addressed to me so you know it’s mine, and I want it.”
    “You want me to go snuffling again. Is that it?”
    “Just for me. For Mary Eleanor. Sad widow girl.”
    “No. I got into this somehow and I am now detaching myself as carefully as possible, and I am not going into his desk for even a yellow pencil.”
    “You look in there and find it and bring it to me.”
    “No.”
    “I’ll give you—five hundred dollars. You go right now and look and here’s his keys.” She threw them at me. I caught them. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe I could make a good impression on Wargler by turning them over to him. I tossed them on the table with a mental note.
    “Bring it to me when you find it, and don’t peek.”
    She was beyond reason. I wondered how much she had managed to soak up since awakening. The husky belts she had taken since I’d been there hadn’t done her much good. The empty glass rolled out of her hand and broke on the terrace floor and she giggled. She swung her legs out of the barwa chair and stood up, took two wobbling rubber-legged steps and lurched at me and clung, saying softly, “Oooo, Andy. Old Andy going round and round. Sit still.”
    “You better go to bed.”
    “Take me to bed, old Andy. Carry. Never make it with everything all tippy.”
    I picked her up—a very light-weight package. She clung to me and called out the turns. There was just