Highways in Hiding | Page 9

said glumly. "Please understand me, Miss Harrison. I
appreciate your sympathy, but what I need is action and information
and answers. Once I get those, the sympathy won't be needed."
"Of course I understand," she replied instantly. "We are all aware that
sympathy is a poor substitute. All the world grieving with you doesn't
turn a stitch to help you out of your trouble. All we can do is to wish,
with you, that it hadn't happened."
"That's the point," I said helplessly. "I don't even know what
happened."
"That makes it even worse," she said softly. Marian had a pleasant
voice, throaty and low, that sounded intimate even when talking about
something pragmatic. "I wish we could help you, Steve."
"I wish someone could."
She nodded. "They asked me about it, too, even though I was not
present until afterward. They asked me," she said thoughtfully, "about
the mental attitude of a woman running off to get married. I told them
that I couldn't speak for your woman, but that I might be able to speak

for me, putting myself in the same circumstances."
She paused a moment, and her brother turned idly back to his tractor
and fitted a small end wrench to a bolt-head and gave it a twist. He
seemed to think that as long as Marian and I were talking, he could
well afford to get along with his work. I agreed with him. I wanted
information, but I did not expect the entire world to stop progress to
help me. He spun the bolt and started on another, lost in his job while
Marian went on:
"I told them that your story was authentic--the one about the bridal
nightgown." A very slight color came under the deep tan. "I told them
that I have one, too, still in its wrapper, and that someday I'd be
planning marriage and packing a go-away bag with the gown shaken
out and then packed neatly. I told them that I'd be doing the same thing
no matter whether we were having a formal church wedding with a
four-alarm reception and all the trimmings or a quiet elopement such as
you were. I told them that it was the essentials that count, not the
trimmings and the tinsel. My questioner's remark was to the effect that
either you were telling the truth, or that you had esped a woman about
to marry and identified her actions with your own wishes."
"I know which," I said with a sour smile. "It was both."
Marian nodded. "Then they asked me if it were probable that a woman
would take this step completely unprepared and I laughed at them. I
told them that long before Rhine, women were putting their nuptial
affairs in order about the time the gentleman was beginning to view
marriage with an attitude slightly less than loathing, and that by the
time he popped the question, she'd been practicing writing her name as
'Mrs.' and picking out the china-ware and prospective names for the
children, and that if any woman had ever been so stunned by a proposal
of marriage that she'd take off without so much as a toothbrush, no one
in history had ever heard of her."
"Then you begin to agree with me?"
She shrugged. "Please," she said in that low voice, "don't ask me my

opinion of your veracity. You believe it, but all the evidence lies
against you. There was not a shred of woman-trace anywhere along
your course, from the point along the road where you first caught sight
of the limb that threw you to the place where you piled up. Nor was
there a trace anywhere in a vast circle--almost a half mile they
searched--from the crack-up. They had doctors of psi digging for
footprints, shreds of clothing, everything. Not a trace."
"But where did she go?" I cried, and when I say 'cried' I mean just that.
Marian shook her head very slowly. "Steve," she said in a voice so low
that I could hardly hear her over the faint shrill of bolts being
unscrewed by her brother, "so far as we know, she was never here.
Why don't you forget her--"
I looked at her. She stood there, poised and a bit tensed as though she
were trying to force some feeling of affectionate kinhood across the gap
that separated us, as though she wanted to give me both physical and
mental comfort despite the fact that we were strangers on a ten-minute
first-meeting. There was distress in her face.
"Forget her--?" I ground out. "I'd rather die!"
"Oh Steve--no!" One hand went to her throat and the other came out to
fasten around my forearm. Her grip was hard.
I stood there wondering what to do next. Marian's grip