He put in a call to Cunningham from his hotel room.
The maid answered and he decided Nancy must be at work.

Jeb cautioned him not to be too hopeful and then, ignoring his own advice, said excitedly, "But it does sound good.
A woman named Lisa who tells nobody anything about herself.
That courtyard picture with the same initials".

"I'm not exactly jumping up and down with enthusiasm.
I'll call you in a day or so".

On the highway he relaxed and enjoyed the drive over Lake Pontchartrain and along the coast.

Gulf Springs was ten miles inland -- more of a quaint old coast town than those along the beach made garish by tourist attractions.

He checked into a motel and drove downtown.
The courthouse was a white-stucco building minus the customary dome.
Instead of the usual straggling privet hedges and patches of bare dirt in most small-town squares, the building was hemmed in by a semitropical growth of camellias and azaleas and a smooth lawn the improbably bright-green shade of florist's grass.

He figured his best bet was a call on the sheriff.
A clerk in the outer office took him in to Sheriff Carruthers, a big, paunchy man with thick, white hair and a voice with a senatorial resonance which suggested he should be running for higher office.

Seated in front of the desk, Hank said, "I'm looking for some information with very little to go on, Sheriff".

He explained the background of the case, ending with the tenuous clue which had brought him to Gulf Springs.

The sheriff's swivel chair tilted back.
"So you're looking for a woman who married a man who might have lived here a year ago and might have been poisoned.
If there was such a person, I'm afraid she got away with it.
Pity we don't know more about him.
I think the best bet is to go through the society columns of last year and see if any of the grooms match with the obituaries a little later.
It'll be a tedious job, but if you want to try it, the old newspaper files are in the basement here in the county supervisor's office".

"Maybe the society editor would remember a good-looking out-of-town bride".

"That's an idea.
Mrs. Calhoun has been society editor here for twenty-five years.
The editor says that marriages may be made in heaven, but weddings are made in Mrs. Calhoun's columns.
She's the one who decides which wedding is to get the lead space in the Sunday paper and all that".
He smiled.
"Once, when the editor was just out of the hospital from a gallstone operation, Mrs. Calhoun and the mother of the bride went out to his house and fought it out beside his bed.
She'd be sure to remember any bride who was vague about background.
She'd have made a great scientist dedicated to tracking down heredity and environment.
She'd also remember if the groom died later".
He stood up.
"I wish you good luck, but please don't dig up too tough a case for me this close to election.
If you find out anything, come on back here and we'll get started on it".

Tracking down Mrs. Calhoun was like trying to catch up with Paul Revere between Lexington and Concord.
It turned out that she also sold real estate, cosmetics, and hospital insurance.
The wearying trek stretched into the afternoon -- from newspaper plant to insurance office to her house and back to the newspaper, where he found her at five o'clock.

She was a large woman with a frizzled gray poodle cut and a pencil clamped like a bit between her teeth while she hunted and pecked on an old typewriter.
It took a couple of minutes to run through her various businesses and get down to the one he wanted.

"Last year?
Well, I do remember one.
From Baton Rouge.
Married a man named Vincent Black.
I remember her because she didn't want her picture in the paper.
First bride like that I've seen in twenty-five years".

"What reason did she give"?

"Said she had a breaking-out on her face -- some sort of allergy -- and none of her old pictures was good enough.
I didn't see her till several days later at the wedding, and her face looked like it had never had a blemish on it.
But, of course, you couldn't see too well through the veil".

"Was her name Lisa Carmody"?

"Now how in hell would I remember that"?

"Never mind.
I can look it up.
Do they still live here"?

"I think they moved away shortly after they were married.
He was a salesman for something or other and must have been transferred.
I'm sure it'll be in the files.
We usually run a social note when somebody moves away".

He stood up and thanked her.

"Have they inherited some money or something"?
She asked with a reportorial gleam in her eye.

He said vaguely, "Well, it is a little legal matter, but nothing like that".

He hurried across to the courthouse and caught the sheriff just as he was leaving.

"Sounds like what you're after", he said when Hank had finished.
"Come on, let's hurry down before they lock up for the day".

In the basement the sheriff took him to a small, dingy office occupied by a tall, thin man informal in rolled-up shirt sleeves.

"Mr. Ferrell Hirey Lindsay, chairman of the board of supervisors.
Mr. Ferrell is a private detective, Hirey.
Wants to look up something in the newspaper files, so don't lock him in here".

"Sure", said Hirey.
"I'll just leave the door open.
It latches when you close it, so stay as long as you like".

Carruthers crossed the room to a metal door with an open grillework in the top half.
He pulled it open.
"Now don't shut this door.
It won't open from inside.
Before we built the new jail, we used to keep prisoners in here overnight sometimes when the old jail got too crowded.
Hirey treats himself a lot better than we do prisoners.
They were a sight more comfortable than the ones in the jail with the cold air from Hirey's air conditioner coming through the grille".

He walked past the sheriff into a windowless room with shelves full of big, leather-bound volumes from floor to ceiling all around the walls.
A metal table and four chairs stood in the center.

"They're all here, back to 1865", Carruthers told him.
"It's all right to smoke, but make sure your cigarettes are out before you leave.
And, of course, you know not to take clippings".

"I'll leave the air conditioner on for you, Mr. Ferrell", said Hirey.
"Don't forget to turn it off and close the door good so it'll latch".

Hank thanked them and promised to observe the rules.
When they had gone, he stood for a minute breathing in the mustiness of old paper and leather which the busily thrumming air conditioner couldn't quite dispel.

Chapter fourteen

In a tour around the stacks, he found that the earliest volumes began on the left and progressed clockwise around the room.
An old weakness for burrowing in records rose up to tempt him.

It was, indeed, all here -- almost a century.
From reconstruction to moon rockets.
But he pulled away from the irrelevant old volumes and walked around to the newer ones.

Last year's volume was at the top a couple of inches below the ceiling.
Near it was a metal ladder on casters attached to the top shelf.
He pulled it over, climbed up, and lifted out the big volume, almost losing his balance from the weight of it.
He staggered over and dropped it on the table.

Since Mrs. Calhoun remembered only that the marriage had been in the spring, he started to plod through several months.
He tried to turn right to the society page in each one, but interesting stories kept cropping up to distract him.
At last he found it in the paper of April 2.

It told him little more than Mrs. Calhoun had remembered, stating that it had been a small, modest wedding compared to some of the others.

There was a marked contrast in the amount of information on bride and groom.
Mr. Black's life was an open book, so to speak, from his birth in Jackson, Mississippi, through his basketball-playing days at L.S.U. and his attainment of a B.A. degree, which had presumably prepared him for his career as district sales manager for Peerless Business Machines.

The one line on the bride said she was Miss Lisa Carmody from Baton Rouge.
No mention of New Orleans.

Hank was beginning to feel sharp concern for Mr. Black.
If Mrs. Black was who he thought she was, Mr. Black's Peerless selling days might well be over.

Now for their exodus from Gulf Springs.
This time the search took twice as long, cutting down on his extra reading, for he had to pick through several columns of one- and two-line social notes in each issue.
He found it in the edition of May 15.
The item said Mr. and Mrs. Black had moved to Jackson, his home town -- so the lovely Lisa had been with him a year ago.

Next on his program was a call to the Jackson office of Peerless Business Machines to find out if Vincent Black was still with them -- or, more specifically, still with us.

He glanced at his watch, saw it was only seven, and decided to indulge his weakness now.
For the next hour he scrambled happily up and down the ladder, sharing the excitement of reporters who had seen McKinley's assassination, the Iroquois Theater fire in Chicago, and the Hall-Mills trial.

In the middle of the stock market crash, he heard a slight noise in the outer office.
He turned around, saw nothing, and decided it must be a mouse.
Something else distracted him, yet there was no sound, only tomblike silence.
Then he knew it was not sound, but lack of it.
The air conditioner was no longer running.

He jumped up and turned around to see the metal door closing.
It clanged shut as he sprang toward it.

He pressed his face against the grille.
"Who's there"?

The light shining through the grille dimly illumined the office beyond -- enough for him to see there was no one there.
Then he heard the outer door closing.

"Hey, come back", he shouted.
He thought it must be some damn janitor or cleaning woman puttering around, figuring that Hirey had gone off and forgotten to turn off everything and lock up.

Then the faint beginnings of fear stirred in his mind.
Unless he was stone-blind, the person who'd just left couldn't have missed seeing Hank through the open door of the brightly lighted room.
And even if he'd somehow missed seeing him, he wouldn't have gone off and left the light on and door open in the file room.

Whoever it was had meant to shut him up in here, had followed him and waited till the courthouse and square were deserted.
But why?
To search his room at the motel?
To come back later and kill him after the stores had closed around the square and everybody had left?
No, they could kill him just as easy right now.
Nobody could hear what was going on in this underground vault.

Then he heard it and smelled it -- the steady hissing, the dread, familiar pungency of gas escaping.
It must be coming from an upright heater against the far wall in the supervisors' office.

Until now, Lilac Gaylor and Lila Kingsley had been like an anagram which he could unscramble at his own pace and choosing.

Except for those minutes in her room, he had lost touch with her as a reality.
Gaylor's obsession and Cunningham's chimera-chasing reminiscences had mesmerized him into thinking of Lila and Lilac, separately or together, as a legend.
They kept drifting apart and merging again in his mind like some minute form of life on a microscope slide.