Anger flowed into George’s mind, like a rider swinging with practiced ease onto his mount – it was as if he’d been preparing for this moment for weeks and, now it had arrived, he was more than ready to perform whatever duties were required. He stepped onto the trail, but before he could speak the sinewy man sprang to his feet, and made an awkward, hobbling lunge toward George and slashed with the knife, drawing a line of hot pain across his abdomen. A second stroke sliced his forearm. Panicking, George flung himself forward and grappled with the man, locking onto the wrist of his knife-hand. They swayed together like drunken dancers and careened through the bushes and out onto the bank. His opponent was strong, but George, much the larger of the two, had leverage on his side – he turned the man and secured a hold from behind and rode him down onto his knees at the brink of the pool. The knife went skittering along the bank and, as the man sought to retrieve it, George moved atop him, using his weight to flatten him out, and forced his head underwater. He surfaced and twisted his neck about, offering a view of his grizzled cheek, grimacing mouth, and a mad, glaring eye that glittered through a webbing of wet hair. His fetid odor enveloped them both. He grunted and gulped in air; then his head went under again and his struggles grew spastic, frantic, churning the water. He reached back with his left hand, trying to claw George’s face, and George latched his fingers behind the man’s neck and pushed down harder, his eyes fixed on the opposite side of the pool. He spotted Sylvia in a half-crouch at the verge of the bushes, but took no salient notice of her. Spasms passed through the man’s flesh, lewd convulsions like those of a lover nearing completion. George kept pushing down on his neck, making sure. Finally he rolled off the body and lay panting beside it. The moonlight had brightened. His stomach throbbed. He sat up to inspect the wound: it appeared superficial. The cut on his forearm was more worrisome. If the man hadn’t been impeded by injuries, George thought, then he might be the one who lay motionless. His hands shook. A placid current set the dead man’s head to bobbing. George imagined fish nibbling at the eyes and thought to pull the body from the water, but wasn’t moved to act. The smell of the man was on his skin, nauseatingly thick. Sylvia kneeled beside him, saying words he couldn’t make sense of. The sight of her confused him on a fundamental level, disordered all his certainties. He wanted to look away, but her insistent stare held him. She spoke again, her tone fretful, and he said, ‘I’m all right.’
She slapped him. ‘The other one’s getting away!’
He cast about, but saw no one.
‘Here!’ She pressed the dead man’s knife into his hand, its blade frilled with red. Resting on his palm, it had an incomprehensible value.
‘It’s only Edgar,’ he said.
‘Edgar? The one who was holding Peony captive? And that . . .’ She gestured at the body. ‘That was Snelling?’
‘I don’t know who he was.’ George set the knife down on the grass. ‘But Edgar’s no threat. He’s harmless on his own.’
‘But he wasn’t on his own, was he? He must have talked his friend into having a little adventure. Told him there was a nice piece over this way and suggested they fetch her back. Do you call that harmless?’ She left a pause and, when he kept silent, she said, ‘If you won’t do something, I will.’
She snatched at the knife, but George closed his hand on the hilt and creakily came to his feet, feeling light-headed and feverish, moved not by an urge to seek out Edgar, but by the desire to stop her talking.
Edgar was not difficult to track. After they had walked the trail for several minutes, George heard a voice nattering on at a conversational volume. Thirty feet farther along they reached a creosote bush – many of its leaves were stripped away and it threw a complicated shadow across the ground – Edgar sat at the center of this shadow, like an innocent young demon with a moony face summoned by a magical design. He picked at a spine in his heel, noticed them and grinned sheepishly, as if he had been caught at something naughty.
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ he said, apparently addressing himself. ‘Leave ’em alone, I said.’
George hunkered down in front of him. ‘Where are the Snellings?’
Edgar was thinner than before, his cheeks hollowed, his belly flab reduced. He nodded, as if listening to an invisible someone responding to his chiding. George yelled at him to gain his attention and repeated his inquiry.
‘Peter’s dead,’ Edgar said. ‘And Sandra’s took ill. That’s why me and Tony come. To see if you had medicine.’
Sylvia made a disparaging noise.
‘If that was your purpose,’ George said, ‘why did Tony try to kill me?’
Edgar puzzled over this. ‘I reckon because you surprised him. He didn’t know you from Adam.’
‘You could have said something, couldn’t you? You could have told him who I was.’
He fingered his ratty hair. ‘I reckon you surprised me, too.’
