Nothing In Her Way Read Online Free Page A

back.”

Three
    I didn’t get much sleep that night. There were too many questions going around in my mind trying to mate with answers that weren’t there, and I was busy with twenty-three years’ accumulation of Cathy Dunbar Belen Lane. That was a large order of just one girl, I thought. Wasn’t it enough for one lifetime? Did we have to go around again?
    If she was mixed up in something dangerous, was it any of my business any more? Who was this Donnelly, and what did he want? She’d only shrugged him off when I’d asked her. “A cheap hoodlum,” she said indifferently. “He has some stupid idea I owe him money.”
    Then she turned and smiled charmingly in Bolton’s direction. “I do think it’s cute, though, the way he impresses Mr. Bolton.” If she got the knife in you, don’t think she wouldn’t turn it. She despised people she could walk on.
    His face was red with impotent fury. “I tell you, Cathy, the man’s dangerous. He’s as deadly as nitroglycerin. He’s not all there.”
    “I agree with you, dear,” she said sweetly. “If he thinks he’s going to collect money from me, he’s certainly not all there.”
    Bolton didn’t add up at all. When you dipped into him, you came up with both hands full of nothing. It was easy enough to write him off as a coward, the way she did, but something said it wasn’t that simple. Why? There wasn’t anything you could put a finger on, for God knows his face and his voice had been rotten with that cringing before Donnelly. Maybe, I thought wearily, as I gave it up, he’s read Donnelly’s clippings and I haven’t.
    It was strange, the way you couldn’t escape from the past. Or was it the past? Maybe she was the thing I could never get away from. I lit another cigarette and tried to think objectively about it. Of course I hated Lachlan; but why was it always intensified when I was with her? Just how often had I thought about him during the past two years?
    No, I thought, that’s not right. I’m just trying to blame her for something I’ve got the same way she has. It’s all tied up with both of us and we’re all tied up with it and each other, and we always have been.
    When she was four and I was six it was a white-nosed bear with a terrible voice and flashlights for eyes that made her tell stories and get into trouble. I believed it about the bear. She convinced me. It wasn’t that I lacked sophistication in the matter of bears, for I had seen them, in the Sierra Madre, with my father and hers; it was just that her bear was very real. You could almost see it yourself when she told you about it, and if it had flashlights for eyes—well, stranger things had happened. Stranger things had happened to her, anyway.
    It was a long way back to those days when we were a couple of imaginative and bilingual kids playing with real Indians and imaginary bears, when the construction firm of Dunbar & Belen had built a lot of bridges and dams in the republics south of the Rio Bravo. That was before the firm had become Dunbar, Belen & Lachlan, and then had become nothing at all with the devastating suddenness of a dam going out. That was what it had been, a dam. And when it collapsed, it took Dunbar and Belen. It didn’t take Lachlan.
    It was a long time before the whole story was pieced together, and when it was, it didn’t matter very much. Dunbar was dead—he died two years after they were released from prison—and while my father was still alive, he never seemed to take much interest in the fact. It wasn’t that there had been any loss of life in the disaster; as they said afterward, that was their only piece of luck. It hadn’t killed anybody. It had just cost them their company and their good reputations and two years of their lives.
    Lachlan was the junior member of the firm, both in years and in seniority. He had been in residence on that job in Central America, in charge, with a second in command by the name of Goodwin. Of course, Dunbar and my father