Make Haste to Live

In Candlewood, New Mexico, newspaper owner Crystal Benson fears that her past has come back to haunt her. Hearing strange sounds at night and sensing that someone is watching her, she asks Lafe, Candlewood's kindly sheriff, to issue her a gun. To John "Hack" Hackenthal, her daughter Randy's boyfriend, she gives an envelope containing $4,000, mysteriously asking him to keep it safe in case Randy needs it. While visiting archaeologist Josh Blake, the man she loves, at an abandoned Indian cliff dwelling he is studying, Crystal puts off answering his marriage proposal, but will not explain why. After Randy and Hack report that a strange man has been following them, Crystal uses the dictating machine in her office secretly to compose a letter to Randy, asking her forgiveness for what is to come and explaining the following: Nineteen years earlier, at her first dance, Crystal, whose real name is Zena Hale, is swept off her feet by the charming Steve Blackford. Despite her mother's warning that he is a mobster, she marries Steve and lives with him in high style in a big house in Riverside, California. However, Steve's increasing abusiveness and his involvement in gangland slayings and other criminal activities frighten her, and after the death of her mother, she leaves. With the help of her friend, Mary Rose, the pregnant Crystal escapes California and the henchman Steve has following her, changes her name and starts a new life. Later, she learns that Steve is being tried for the murder of a woman. No one believes his story that a prostitute he brought home stumbled on explosives that he kept in the closet and was accidentally killed, and prosecutors presume that Crystal is the dead woman. Afraid for her baby, Crystal does not want to give up her new life by reappearing in her old one. Although she assumes that Steve will somehow clear himself, as he and his mobster friends have done in the past, she asks Mary Rose to testify that she is alive, but Mary Rose's testimony is not strong enough to get Steve acquitted. The uncertainty it throws on the case influences the judge to lessen his sentence from the death penalty to twenty years imprisonment. Crystal eventually settles in the small town of Candlewood and prospers, keeping her early life secret, even from Randy, whom she is trying to protect. In her office, Crystal ends the letter, saying that Steve was released from prison ten days earlier and she is sure that he has found them. Crystal has barely finished, when Steve, bitter and openly looking for revenge, breaks into the office. He was able to track her down, he says, through a magazine photograph taken at a rodeo, in which she appeared in the background. When Randy shows up, Steve introduces himself as Crystal's brother, and the defeated Crystal, fearing for their safety, feels compelled to go along with his story. As Steve insinuates himself in their lives, he begins demanding large sums of money. Randy, who is trying to decide her true feelings for the unsophisticated, but stable Hack, finds Steve fascinating and Crystal becomes alarmed by his influence over her. All Crystal's efforts to outwit Steve are ineffective, as he has spent years planning her demise. Josh knows Crystal is, as he puts it, "living under a shadow," but she is too terrified to confide in him. In desperation, she does ask Josh, who is licensed as a pilot, secretly to charter a plane, so that she and Randy can make a quick and quiet escape. He reluctantly agrees, but also has a word with Lafe, who remarks that "shadows have names and fingerprints." Meanwhile, Steve robs the safe of a nearby mine, killing Gus, the elderly watchman, and allowing the blame to fall on a young man, Rudolfo Gonzales. Unable to prove Rudolfo's innocence without revealing the rest of her past, Crystal feels torn. On the night she is supposed to leave, Steve follows her, as she drives toward the airplane runway. By telling him that she has hidden money, Crystal lures Steve to the cliff dwelling and considers pushing him into a bottomless pit, but loses her nerve. Shrewdly, he guesses her intentions and begins chasing her through the rooms of the dwelling. Outside the dwelling, he loses his footing on a ledge and falls to his death. Trembling, Crystal runs out to the road, where Josh, Randy and Hack find her. Lafe is also there and tells her that he has learned about Steve's criminal record and has cleared Rudolfo.