The Boy Who Followed Ripley by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online

telephone was: “Driving a friend home. Back by midnight probably. T.” Tom left it on the third step of the stairs, where Heloise would be sure to see it.

3
    T om wanted to see Frank’s “little house” tonight, and on the road he put the request casually. “Can I see where you’re living? Or would that bother Madame Boutin?”
    “Oh, she goes to bed around ten! Sure, you can see it.”
    They were just then entering Moret. Tom knew the route now, made the left turn into the Rue de Paris and slowed for number 78 on the left. There was a car parked near the Boutin house facing Tom. Since the street was empty of traffic, Tom pulled over to the left to park, his headlights lit the front of the parked car, and Tom noticed that the license plate ended in 75, which indicated a car registered in Paris.
    At the same time, the car’s headlights came on at their brightest into Tom’s windshield, and the Paris car backed quickly. Tom thought he saw two men in the front seats.
    “What’s that?” Frank asked, sounding a bit alarmed.
    “Just what I was wondering.” Tom watched the car back into the nearest turn on the left, then pull out and roll away at a good speed. “Paris car.” Tom had stopped, but his lights were still on. “I’m going to park around the corner.”
    Tom did so, in the still darker and smaller road in which the Paris car had made its turn. Tom put out his lights, and locked three doors with the buttons after Frank had got out. “Maybe nothing to worry about,” Tom said, but he felt a little worried, imagined that there might be one man, or two, lurking in Mme. Boutin’s garden now. “A torch,” Tom said, getting his from the glove compartment. He locked the driver’s door, and they walked toward the Boutin house.
    Frank took the long key from his inside jacket pocket, and opened the gates of the driveway or carriage entrance into the garden.
    Tom tensed himself for a possible fistfight just inside the gates—which were only about nine feet high, not difficult to climb even with their spikes at the top. The front gate would have been even easier.
    “Lock them again,” Tom whispered as they both went through.
    Frank did. Now Frank had the flashlight, and Tom followed him as he walked between grapevines and some trees that might have been apple toward a small house on the right. Mme. Boutin’s house on the left was quite dark. Tom heard no sound at all, not even that of a neighbor’s television. French villages could be deadly silent by midnight.
    “Watch out,” Frank whispered, indicating with the torch a cluster of three buckets that Tom should avoid. Frank pulled a smaller key out, opened the door of the little house, switched on the light, and handed Tom his torch back. “Simple, but it’s home!” Frank said gaily, closing the door behind him and Tom.
    It was one not very big room with a single bed, a wooden table painted white, on which lay a couple of paperback books, a French newspaper, ballpoint pens, a mug of half-finished coffee. A workman’s blue shirt hung over a straight chair. At one end of the room was a sink and a small wood-burning stove, a wastebasket, a towel rack. A brown leather suitcase, not new, rested on a high shelf, and below the shelf a rod about a yard long served for clothes-hanging, and Tom saw a couple of pairs of trousers, jeans, and a raincoat.
    “Bed’s more comfortable than this chair to sit on,” said Frank. “I can offer you Nescafé—made with cold water.”
    Tom smiled. “You don’t have to offer me anything. I think your place is quite—adequate.” The walls looked freshly whitewashed, maybe by Frank. “And that’s pretty,” Tom said, noticing a watercolor on a piece of white cardboard (the cardboard that came at the bottom of writing paper tablets) propped against the wall on Frank’s bed table. The bedside table was a wooden crate on which stood also a red rose with some wild flowers in a glass. The watercolor was of the gates they