Ernie MacGrath came within a quarter of an hour of Ben’s call. He was a stocky, capable-looking man with dark hair and very strong hands. He and Ben had played high school football together and they still saw each other fairly often. Ernie was a City Detective on the Woodley force.
He listened patiently while Ben talked, stopped him now and then to clarify some point. When he was through Ernie asked:
“Has Carolyn ever blacked out mentally?”
Ben was startled. “Good Lord, no! You’re thinking of amnesia, aren’t you?”
“Has she had any head injury lately? Even an apparently trivial bump will sometimes do it.”
“Not that I know of,” Ben said. “Of course—”
“Of course what?”
“She’s alone all day. She could have hit her head, I suppose, and never bothered to tell me about it.” He was appalled by this new thought. “She might be wandering somewhere in the woods, not knowing—” He jumped up. “She doesn’t even have a coat, Ernie. Can you get some men to help look for her?”
Ernie nodded. “It isn’t too satisfactory at night, but we can try. We can make a thorough check of the neighbors, too.” He went to the phone. Before he picked it up he looked at Ben with a hard professional look and said, “I’m going to ask you something, Ben, and I want a straight and honest answer. Did Carolyn have any reason to leave you?”
Ben took his head. “Johnny Pettit asked me the same thing. The answer is no. We were happy. There was nobody else for either of us.”
Ernie continued to look at him for a moment, as though weighing the truth of what Ben said. Then he said, “Okay,” and made his call, asking for all available men to be sent. “Better send the lab boys, too. I’m not sure yet what this is going to be.” There was a pause while he listened to a voice on the other end. “Apparently not,” he said, “But I’m going to make a closer check now.”
He hung up and turned to Ben. “You’d better call your wife’s folks. They might just have heard something, and any way, they ought to know what’s going on. I don’t suppose your mother—”
“She’s halfway to Hawaii now. She and Gladys took off last week.” He was rather glad his mother was gone. Her only contribution to this situation would be a species of weak hysteria, leading to a departure for somewhere else to preserve her health. She had avoided most of the crises of life that way, just as she avoided winter. Ben bore her no rancor on that account and was simply grateful that his father had left enough money to allow her to do it. But Carolyn’s folks were going to be enough to deal with.
He got the long-distance operator, put the call in, and waited. Ernie had gone off. Ben could hear him moving around in the other rooms. The wait seemed interminable. He lighted a cigarette and leaned his head against his hand, distantly aware of how awful he felt but not thinking much about it.
The Pittsburgh number rang and Carolyn’s father answered.
Ben had thought, I will be calm and not alarm them. But his voice burst out uncontrollably with a raw edge of fear, asking:
“Have you heard from Carolyn?”
They had not.
It was a bad few minutes, possibly the worst of the evening so far.
Carolyn’s mother got the phone and said shrilly, “Gone? What do you mean, Carolyn’s gone?” Ben tried to soothe her. He explained that he had a good friend on the police force and that the friend thought it was a temporary amnesia and they would soon find her. But Carolyn’s mother said in a queer gasping voice heavy with horror and reproach, “Somebody’s got her. I’ve been afraid of this ever since you moved to that lonely house in the country. Somebody’s taken her, Ben.”
He tried to say that that was silly, that the house wasn’t lonely, and that women lived safely all along the road. But she wasn’t listening. She kept saying, “—sex fiend, some sex fiend has her, just like that poor girl on the North Side.” Her husband said, “Now, Martha, it isn’t like that at all. We had a terrible case down here just recently, Ben, and that’s why—”
Ben turned white and looked at Ernie, who had come back into the hall. “She thinks a sex fiend has Carolyn,” he said.
Ernie motioned him aside and took the phone. Ben went blindly into the living room and sat down. A coldness came over him and the lights dimmed and the room got dark. With abnormal clarity he heard Ernie’s voice saying, “—no signs of violence at all. She would certainly have put up some kind of a fight. No sign of illegal entry, nothing touched in the house. We’ll find her all right, don’t worry. Most missing persons turn up okay.”
There was some more in the same vein, and then silence, and then a hand came out of the dark with a little glass in it and Ernie said, “Come on, boy, drink this.”
He drank it and the darkness went away. He looked at Ernie and said, “It couldn’t be a sex fiend, could it?”
Ernie said, “Let’s put it this way. I don’t think so, but as of right now I just don’t know.”
He hauled Ben up out of the chair.
“For Chrissake, make yourself some coffee and a sandwich. You’re dying on your feet. I’m going next door and talk to your friends. Mrs. Pettit may have noticed something.”
Ben stumbled into the kitchen. Ernie went out the front door and disappeared. Moving in a fog, Ben managed to get hot water and instant coffee together in a cup and scrabble up some odds and ends of food. He did not want to eat. But he knew Ernie was right and he choked it down anyway and made more coffee. He forced his mind to be an almost perfect blank. He did this because he knew he had to.
Ernie came back, shaking his head. Johnny Pettit was with him.
“Mrs. Pettit was gone from about midmorning to about three-thirty in the afternoon. She saw Carolyn when she came back from driving you in, but she didn’t see her again and she didn’t notice anything unusual after three-thirty. No strange cars, no people hanging around, nothing like that. The kids were out playing, but they didn’t see anything either. So that doesn’t help much except maybe to narrow down the time. Let’s work on that angle for a while. You can help there, Ben. What about these dishes?”
“They were there when I came in,”Johnny said. “Just like that.”
Ben nodded dully. “Lunch dishes. She hates dishes in the sink. She does the breakfast things right after she gets back from town.”
Ernie counted them. “One cup and saucer, one plate, odd dishes that probably held leftovers. All right, we can say she didn’t leave the house until after lunch. Say twelve-thirty. Now what about the other end of it? We know she wasn’t here at five-ten when your office called.”
“It must have been earlier than that. Much earlier. She always has everything ready for dinner before she leaves at four-thirty, so it won’t take forever when we get home.” He tried to think. “Meat loaf. She was going to have that tonight. It would have been in the oven.”
Ernie opened the oven door. It was empty and cold. He looked in the refrigerator. The package of meat was there, unopened.
“Then,” he said, “we can figure that Carolyn hadn’t even begun to think about dinner. Perhaps we’d be safe in saying that she left the house somewhere between twelve-thirty and three-thirty. Now, Mr. Pettit, you said you found this back door open. Do you mean standing ajar or do you mean in the sense of being unlocked?”
“It was shut,” Johnny said. “I tried the front door, but it was locked. I tried this one and it opened. It wasn’t locked.”
“Does Carolyn habitually leave the door unlocked?”
“She isn’t the scary type,” said Ben. “And to tell you the truth, we don’t worry too much about prowlers out here. I think it’s left unlocked as a matter of convenience. You know. You go outside and the thing slams shut on you—you know.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ernie. “Well, get your coat, Ben. You can ride with me.”
Cars had begun to pull into the drive. Suddenly the place was full of uniforms. Ernie talked to the men and to the two others who came in the Mobile Crime Laboratory, a compact little truck that looked like a milk wagon only it was painted dark. Johnny Pettit said he would go along too. Ben put on his coat and went out. The policemen sorted themselves into two groups, with three men left over. One group went down to the stream bed and spread out, their flashlight beams dancing and slashing through the dark. The second group crossed the road and dispersed into the section of picturesque but brushy and partly wooded land directly across from the Forbes place. Ben got into Ernie’s car and sat shivering, hearing very little of what Johnny was saying. The three policemen got back into the cars in which they had come and drove off.
“They’ll make a house-to-house check,” Ernie said. “We’ll take this side of the road from here to the highway.”
He started the car, and they went from house to house asking for Carolyn.
It was a strangely disjointed trip. There were many starts, many stops, many stumblings up different kinds of walks. Dogs ran out and challenged them. Doors opened and faces appeared in them and voices spoke. Some of them Ben knew. Some of them he wasn’t sure whether he knew or not. Most of them were strangers. The houses all looked different, not at all the familiar houses he drove past every day. The stretches of land in between looked darker and wider. He began to think they were not on Lister Road at all. When, years or hours later, they reached the highway and turned back, it seemed impossible that so many people could live on the same street in the same neighborhood and never notice when one of their number vanished from among them.
There was another thing, too.
“Look at them,” he said bitterly, pointing to the erratic lights that danced in the back yards all along the road.
Some of the men and boys and even a few of the more active and curious women had joined the search. Most of them seemed merely excited, like people watching a fire which does not concern them. He could hear loud juvenile voices shouting and laughing among the dark hedgerows. Dogs barked and bayed.
“My God,” said Ben, “you’d think it was a coon hunt.”
“What do you care,” Ernie said, “as long as they find her.”
And how will they find her? Ben thought. Alive or dying or already dead?
He grasped the handle of the door. “Let me out. I’m going to look for her.”
He flung the door open. Instantly Johnny leaned over from the back seat and caught his shoulders. Ernie slammed on the brake. He was going slow to begin with and the car stopped almost at once. He too caught Ben and held him.
“I need you at the house,” he said. “You couldn’t do anything out there that isn’t already being done.”
He and Johnny got the door closed and locked, and they drove on. Ben stared out the window. He did not say anything more. When they got back to the house one of the lab men said that a woman named Grace Vitelli had called and that was all.
They did not find Carolyn, alive or dead.
The house-to-house check turned up nothing. The search was called off until daylight and the policemen left. Ernie stayed. He gave Ben, who was not a drinking man, three stiff ones in quick succession and sent him to bed. Just before he went to sleep Ben heard Ernie talking quietly on the phone. Then he passed into a dark place where fear and loneliness tormented him and Carolyn was somewhere just out of sight.
He woke and the dream was still with him, more dreadful than ever in the light of day.
By noon they had completed the search of the neighborhood and given up. There was no sign. No word had come from anyone. The lab men had found no fingerprints on or around the back door but Carolyn’s, Ben’s, and Johnny Pettit’s. There were no suspicious prints inside. There were no bloodstains. There were no evidences of any prowler. Apparently, without provocation or violence, Carolyn Forbes had simply ceased to exist.
Ben went down to the police station with Ernie McGrath. In a room of the grimy three-story brick building from which he could see the courthouse two blocks away he made out a report for Missing Persons. He gave a full physical description of Carolyn, including the fact that she had no history of amnesia or mental blackouts. Ernie had already verified this with Carolyn’s doctor. Ben supplied pictures of Carolyn to both Missing Persons and later a reporter from the Woodley paper, for whom he also answered a number of questions. Ernie said that a five-state alarm would be sent out immediately and that all other customary steps would be taken by the interested department. Ernie himself had to get back to his regular job.
“There isn’t much more I could do anyway,” he said. “But I’ll keep in touch. If anything comes up, let me know right away.”
Ben thanked him. Then, holding his sanity doggedly in both hands, he settled down to wait.
By day, at home or at the office, he was never out of earshot of the phone. By night he slept or dozed beside it on the couch. He grasped avidly at every mail and listened for the steps of delivery boys from Western Union. His work suffered badly. He was unable to keep his mind on it for more than a few minutes at a time, but he went through the motions because he did not know what else to do with himself. He did not eat much. He looked at people without really seeing them and talked to them without really knowing what he or they were saying. He had a curious feeling of suspension, as though he had been hung like a test object in a vacuum and was waiting for the shock that would either save or destroy him.
At eight thirty-seven on the evening of the third day, which happened to be the eleventh of November, it came.
The telephone rang.
His name was Albert William Guthrie. Everybody called him Al, and sometimes, in certain moods, the Bull. He was busy taking potatoes out of grocery sacks and putting them into two peck baskets. He did it slowly, as though he were enjoying it, and every little while he would reach over to the dirty drainboard of the sink and pick up the bottle that stood there and drink out of it. He was drunk. He had been drunk for days, and after numerous climbings and fallings he had reached a plateau where he could keep going indefinitely as long as he didn’t quit. He felt good. He liked what he was doing. He liked what he was going to do. He smiled and talked to himself about it. The sun shone in on him through the unwashed window. It was a nice day for the eighth of November.
When he had finished with his potatoes, Al got up and dusted his hands together and wiped them on a towel, leaving brown smears of earth. He went into the front room and got his jacket. He was not quite thirty, better than six feet tall, with an inelegant but very powerful build. His neck was long and his head was long and narrow so that his heavy features seemed too large for his face. His hair was light, almost blond, thick and wavy. He was proud of it. His eyes were blue, peering with a shallow brightness from under lids that looked perpetually swollen.
He picked up his two baskets of potatoes and went out.
He walked across the hard bare ground in the yard, a distance of perhaps twenty-five feet, to the ramshackle garage. Here he had to put his baskets down to open a door, a clumsy batten construction that had to be propped open with a brick. Otherwise it was liable to blow shut with a bang, jarring the little wooden bar into place and locking you in the garage. Al had paid close attention to details like this since he had moved in six days ago. He propped the door carefully, kicking the brick to make sure it wouldn’t shift. Then he turned and took a brief last look at the layout.
He didn’t see how it could be better.
The house stood by itself between a vacant double lot and the shallow channel of Chance’s Run. It was the traditional four-room house, two rooms up and two down, and what little plumbing there was, was in the cellar. Al had grown up in one exactly like it in Butler, Pennsylvania. It had some broken-down pieces of furniture in it, pretty sad but enough to get by on. Al had rented it from the owner, an old Italian man who lived a couple of blocks away. He had told the old man his name was Harper, and when the old man asked him suspiciously what a single fellow wanted with a furnished house he had told him his wife was coming back from West Virginia, where she had gone to visit her sick mother. He had paid a month’s rent in advance.
It was the last house on the long winding street. An old Polish couple lived in the next one beyond the double lot. They didn’t speak hardly any English. The old man worked night trick in the mill and slept all day. The old woman practically never came out of the house. The blinds were kept drawn all the time except in the kitchen, so the wallpaper wouldn’t get faded. Al knew the Polish pretty well. The old woman would scrub and scrub all day until the floors glittered and every last thing in the house was so clean you were afraid to look hard at it for fear you’d smudge it. Between that and cooking up big pots of stew and baking bread she wouldn’t have any time to wonder what the neighbors were doing.
In summer it would have been tougher. People lived on their porches and in their bitty garden patches, and there were always kids roaming around. But all that was over for this year. He wished the straggling shrubs along the fence still had their leaves on for a better screen, but you couldn’t have everything.
On the other side of the run there was nothing but a hillside with some blight-killed elms and some scrub maple and a lot of brush. A single track ran in a cut high up on it. The only regular traffic was the junction train that took the yard men to work. There wasn’t anything in front of the house but the street and the curving stream and more of the hillside. In back of it the streets angled off so there was nothing too close there, either. Al had spent many hours finding the right place. It looked as though this one was made to order.
It was going to have to be good enough. Because now he was on his way.
A surge of intense excitement came over him, knotting his belly, stringing tight the muscles of his arms and thighs. He picked up the two baskets and put them into the back part of his middle-aged sedan, on the floor. He was shaking and his loins were hot. It was a good feeling, a proud feeling. His eyes shone with it. Maybe I’ll go back in and get the gun, he thought. Maybe I’ll decide to kill somebody right now. He swung his big fists in the air and enjoyed the idea. But he didn’t go back for the gun. He had made his plans. Maybe I’ll kill them, he thought, but I’ll say when. And they’ll jump, by God, they’ll jump when I tell ’em.
He pulled an open pint bottle out of his jacket pocket and drank from it. The whiskey burned in his mouth and down his throat. He caught a deep breath and wiped his mouth and put the bottle out of sight under the front seat. Then he opened the double doors and hooked them back and went jolting away down the rutted alley. It was nineteen minutes after twelve.
From South Flat, where the house was, he had to drive clear across town to reach Lister Road. The mood of exhilaration he was in stayed with him, but it changed, becoming darker and harder as the sense of forward movement gripped him. He had wasted too much time. Now he wasn’t going to waste any more. Now things were going to be settled once and for all.
All the way over he could see Lorene in the back of his mind. It was funny, how that was. In front of him he could see the street and the traffic lights, the people crossing at the intersections. And at the same time he could see Lorene so clear and plain that even the little soft reddy-gold hairs on her forearms showed. It made him crazy to see her like that. It made him stamp his feet and twist his head, unable to sit still while he waited for the damned red lights. It made him not want to wait for them. He hated anybody telling him what to do, making him stop when he wanted to go and go fast. Slobs, he thought, looking at the people blocking the street while he sat. Goddamn slobs, what have they got to do that’s so important?
Nothing. Nothing like what I’ve got to do.
He passed Courthouse Square on the south side, so that the building was interposed between him and the office of Ben Forbes. But he looked that way and smiled, a smile of incalculable malice.
You’re the smart boy, he thought. All right, let’s see if your stinking little lawbooks have the answer to this one.
And you, Lorene. You wait around. I’ll hold you by your pretty red hair and make you wish you’d never been born.
You’ve got it coming.
And so has he. I’ll make him sweat. By
God,
I’ll make him sweat.
Lister Road was quiet. It was a snotty-looking road. There were thirty-five-mile speed-limit signs all the way along to keep the peasants from going through too fast. That was the kind of a thing that always made him want to do seventy just to show them. But he held it down. This was one time he didn’t want anybody to notice him.
He had been up and down the road before at different odd times. It had pleased him to drive past the houses he was interested in, spying on them, learning all he wanted to know, and the people inside never guessing it. He passed the house that had Pettit on the mailbox and looked into the garage as he went by. You could see it easy from the road. They had two cars and both of them were gone. Rich bitches. So that was all right.
The next house was
the
house. Ben Forbes’ house.
Something happened that Al hadn’t been looking for. He got such a rush of blood to the head that he was almost blind. God damn it, he thought. God damn it, I ain’t going to fool around, I’m going to kill ’em. Kill every damn one of ’em. That’s what they need, after what they’ve done to me. Blow their goddamn guts out.
The car slewed onto the berm, throwing gravel.
The noise startled him. For a minute it sounded like shots hitting the fenders. He set his teeth and wrenched the wheel. The car straightened out. He could see the road again. He could see Lorene, too, the way she had looked that time when she told him he couldn’t ever come near her again. “Never again,” she said, “you hear that? Never.” Screaming at him. Snotty as hell. Swelled up like a toad with her own importance.
That’s what
he
taught her, that bastard Forbes.
Al’s head was pounding. He needed a drink. He had needed one bad before but never like this. He thought he would die if he didn’t get one. He drove along the road, and when he came to a place where there were no houses on either side he slowed down and fished the bottle from under the seat and gulped at it the way a drowning man gulps air. The liquor hit him like a big fist. It dazed him for a minute and then it took hold and steadied him.
I got it figured, he thought, looking at the brown fields and the bare trees with the sun on them. This is the way. There’s always time for the other if they push me into it. Always time.
Slowly and sedately he turned the car around and drove back, feeling as though he were made of iron.
The doctor’s house on this side of Forbes’ was set lower in a dip of the ground and there were trees between. The way the two houses were built you couldn’t see what was going on at Forbes’ back door from the doctor’s place at all. Pettits could, but there was nobody home. Al approached the Forbes driveway. And now he was cool and strong, not excited at all. Everything was right, everything was his way. There was not even a car in sight on the road when he turned in.
He pulled all the way to the back, letting the car roll easy. Then he set the brake and got out. The motor was still running. He tilted the seat forward and lifted the baskets of potatoes from the floor in the back, making sure that the hinge of the wide door caught right so it would stay open. Carrying a basket in each hand, he went to the kitchen door, which was set in the back wall of the house so as not to show from the road.
He set the baskets down and knocked.
She opened the door.
She looked at the baskets by his feet and then she smiled and shook her head and said, “No, I don’t need—”
He hit her on the jaw. He could knock a big man out with one punch if the man was set up for it. He caught her as she sagged down. There was still no one in sight on the road. He hauled her fast to the car and hustled her onto the floor in the back, and now his head was hot and pounding again and his hands shook because he knew he had to hurry. Hurry. The tape was all ready on the seat. Tear it. Over the mouth. Around the wrists. Around the ankles. Christ, she’s squirming around, didn’t I hit her hard enough? Hit her again. Hit—Good. That’s good. Now the blanket.
Now.
He was halfway into the car before he remembered the potatoes. He ran back to the door. It was standing open, and he struck the flat edge of his hand behind the knob and yanked it shut. Then he picked up the baskets, shoved them onto the floor in the front, and backed out of the drive, onto the quiet peaceful empty road.
And it was as easy as that.