He opened his eyes. His lids felt as if they were lined with particles of glass. He could make out virtually nothing of his surroundings, unable to focus in the darkness.
Jess closed his eyes again and tried to think. He did not know how long he had been lying there in the darkness. It seemed that it might have been several days. Or perhaps it had only been one. The dank vault in which he lay was silent and had no light. His moments of consciousness had been few and disconnected. Jess tried to force himself to remember anything he could. His mind felt as dark and empty as this chamber in which he lay imprisoned.
He allowed his unwilling brain to relax. As he did, an image popped into the darkness. Evy. Wielding a wrench above his head. Her eyes glittering with an insensible fury.
He remembered now. But he still had no understanding of it.
Why?
But before he could analyze the awful deed, he was assailed by his physical discomfort. He felt a throbbing in his head, and his bladder ached from the need to urinate. Despite the sickening stench in the room, hunger twisted his stomach. He jerked at his bound hands in a fit of impotent fury.
When is she coming back?
On the floor above him he could hear sounds, occasional movements. Then, silence.
Jess raised his torso slightly to try to move his head into a more comfortable position. His neck felt as if it were ready to snap from resting too long at an unnatural angle. The indignity of his situation enraged him. He did not care how much it might hurt; he wanted to
sit up. He needed to lean against a wall, remove his face from the dirt. With a furious effort he began to drag himself toward the wall that he knew was behind him. He noticed a strip of light at the top of the stairs where the bottom of the door didn’t quite meet the floor. He kept his eyes on it as he dragged himself backward.
A sharp pain in his chest arrested him. A rib, he thought. Broken loose, and sharp as a saber inside him. It must have happened when he fell down the stairs. With renewed care he pushed himself back. It couldn’t be much farther. He could sense the wall looming behind him. He gave himself another shove. His body met with something behind him, stiff and bolster-shaped.
Jess wiggled his fingers around. Dimly, as if from miles away, he recognized the little remaining sensation in them. Groping behind him, his enfeebled fingers explored the bolster and then stopped. They met the unmistakable shape of their own image.
Jess let out a strangled cry of fear as his fingers deciphered the contours of a human hand. Insensible to the pain, the price in precious strength it exacted, Jess flipped himself over.
Straining his eyes, he could make out the corpse staring up at the ceiling, the huge gash on its head blackened, the feet apart, the hands seized up in death.
Agony still lingered on the slack-jawed face, but the eyes of William Emmett were blank and empty, the ghost of the publisher fled at the startling moment of death.
Despair and incredulity mingled in Jess’s distorted
wail. “Oh, my God! Bill!” he cried through the cloth in his mouth.
He gaped in disbelief at the specter before him. The body was beginning to bloat in the dampness of its underground tomb. Jess suddenly felt as if he were being smothered by the revolting smell that it gave off. He rolled away from the body and lay on his back, trying to draw in breath through his gagged mouth. He stared up at the ceiling, unconsciously mimicking the posture of the dead man.
She killed him. She killed Bill.
Jess tried to absorb this undeniable fact that now assaulted him. He wondered what it meant for him. An involuntary shudder racked his body. He looked again at the corpse and then jerked his eyes away. He felt as if he were falling through space, separated from everything that was solid, that made sense to him. One thought ran through his mind, over and over again. She was mad. She had killed Bill Emmett, and she was mad. With an animal strength born of an exquisite fear, Jess began to struggle against his bonds, twisting and grinding them against the dirt floor, desperately trying to loosen them, even a fraction of an inch, from his limbs.
Suddenly, a swathe of light and an audible clatter electrified his senses. The cellar door was open. Jess could hear scraping and the unconscious mutterings of someone at the top of the stairs. He began to shake his head, as if he could will it back. His eyes were trained on the staircase. As he watched, Evy appeared in the weak bath of light, descending the steps slowly, weighted down by the giant metal washtub she was carrying.
She came down about three steps, her thin arms shaking visibly from the weight of the large tub. Water lapped up over the edges and splashed on her chest, dampening the front of the sweater she wore.
Evy did not look down at her captive, who lay rigid on the floor, following her progress with wide, unblinking eyes. She turned around and placed the tub on the step above her. Then, slowly, she backed down the stairs, lifting the brimming tub gingerly from stair to stair. When she finally reached the bottom, she lifted it up with one last heave and placed it on the dirt floor of the cellar, not far from where Jess lay. Satisfied, she turned to look at her prisoner.
“Everyone’s missed you today,” she said pleasantly.
Jess stared from the girl’s placid, vacant face to the tub, which stood not far from his head.
She’s going to drown me.
Evy sighed, then sat down on the edge of the bottom step, her body taut. Clearly, she was not resting but only lighting, like a moth. “They can’t figure out where you are. Naturally, I can’t tell them.”
Evy shifted her weight and glanced over at Jess. His eyes swiveled automatically toward the corpse of William Emmett, which he could now make out more clearly in the illumination filtering down from the top of the stairs.
“Oh,” she said knowingly. “You found Mr. Emmett.” Evy shook her head. “I always kind of liked him. Boy, he had a lot of life in him. He didn’t go right off. He was moaning and groaning down here. It took him a lot longer than I thought. An old guy like that.”
Jess stared at her, his eyes registering all the horror of her matter-of-fact reminiscences of the old man’s horrible death. Evy appeared affronted at his look.
“Well, don’t look at me like that,” she said sharply, getting up. “It’s not my fault he was slow. Besides, after what you’ve been doing, you have no right to look at me that way.”
Jess stared at her bland expression in disbelief. He watched her uncomprehendingly as she leaned over him and pushed his hair back from his temples. He tried to pull away, but she clamped a hand down on his shoulder and examined the bruises on his head where she had hit him. The discolored bump was tender to her touch. Jess winced. Even in the stinking basement her breath had a sour odor as she bent over him.
“That’s some lump,” she observed. Then she straightened up and looked at him appraisingly.
“Yeah,” she went on disjointedly, “everybody’s wondering about you. They’re looking for you. The problem is that they’ve all got their eyes on her now. They’re watching her every minute. Now, that’s no good. I don’t want there to be a lot of fussing going on. Nice and normal. That’s how I want it. So I can get at her.”
Maggie,
he thought.
But why?
Jealousy? For a moment he remembered Maggie’s suspicion. And why did she kill Bill Emmett? Jess felt his brain reeling as he tried to make sense of what the girl was saying. All he could be sure of was that Maggie was in danger. And that his own life might end at any moment.
“I’ll figure out a way,” Evy assured him. “I already got an idea.” Evy began to pace in front of him. Jess tried to
follow her with his eyes, but she began to circle him.
“You can’t figure it out, can you?” Evy taunted him. “You’ve been just lying down here not knowing what’s going on. You thought I liked you, didn’t you?” Evy hunkered down and squatted in front of him. “Well, what if I did?” she cried, her voice shrill with anger. “That didn’t matter to you. You went off with her anyway. You didn’t care. You went and slept with her.”
The girl stood up abruptly and walked over to the washtub. She began to drag it closer to him. Jess watched her straining back as she struggled with the unwieldy tub. Pitted against it, she wore an expression at once pathetic and determined. It was a look he recognized on her. One that had often aroused his pity before. He had never had any idea about her. Never known what terrible thoughts bedeviled her, twisting her mind.
“There,” she said. Apparently satisfied with the new location of the washtub, Evy straightened up and gazed at it for a moment. Then she turned to Jess. “This is for you,” she said.
A sickening sensation of awe and fear churned inside of him as he looked into her pale eyes.
She can’t really be doing this.
Hunching over and pulling up his knees, Jess tried to crawl away. Evy started to laugh. Suddenly he felt her arms locked through his elbows, her legs straddling his body. Jess thrashed back and forth, trying to shake himself free of her. She clung to him tenaciously, with a strength that shocked him.
“Hey,” she crooned, gripping him tightly. “What’s the matter? I’m just going to give you a bath.” She
dropped him heavily to the dirt floor and reached for a towel that was hanging from the waist of her skirt.
His chest heaved as he tried to catch his breath, glaring up at her. He felt a giddy relief that she did not mean to drown him. At the same time he shuddered at the thought of her hands touching him. Evy bent over and dunked the towel into the tub. Then she leaned toward him and tried to wipe his face with it. Jess jerked himself away from her. The water splashed out over the edges. Her balance was upset by his abrupt movement. She grabbed at the tail of his shirt, but he twisted away from her, wrenching his torso so hard that he could feel a muscle sprain. She kicked out at him angrily, grazing his side.
“All right,” she snarled, “be filthy.” She hurled the wet towel at him and it smacked him hard in the side of the face. Then she started up the stairs.
“You don’t want me to take care of you. You’d rather be filthy. I should have known that. After what I saw you do with her. Well, that’s the last thing I’ll do for you. You can rot down here. You can just die as filthy as you are now.”
He saw her legs and ankles moving up the stairs. When she reached the top she screamed back down, “Rot down there!” She slammed the cellar door shut. Once again, Jess lay in the darkness, gasping for breath, his body alive with pain. He gazed over at the corpse of William Emmett, her last words still ringing in his ears.
19
For three days the sky had been threatening. Storm clouds rolled up on one another like tanks, amassing for an assault, turning the sky over the island to an ever-deepening gray. In the late afternoon the wind had begun its intermittent gusting and whistling. Now, as Maggie stood in the early evening darkness before the silent church at the end of Main Street, she felt the first drops of rain.
Three agonizing days had passed since Jess’s disappearance. For Maggie, their torturous unwinding had been like a slow-motion nightmare. Each day she went into the office, only to escape the terrible silence that engulfed her at home. Jack Schmale dropped by every day to fill them in on the search for Jess. Each time she saw his worried face in the doorway, Maggie jumped, her heart thudding with hope and fear. Had he found Jess? Had he not found him? Did he know who she really was?
A thousand times she wished that she had made her past no secret when she first arrived. Now her fears for Jess were compounded by the certainty that if Jack Schmale had uncovered her background, there would be no doubt in the mind of anyone that she was
responsible for Jess’s disappearance. But Jack’s visits to the
News
offices were marked by no revelations. His terse reports did little to alleviate the gloom and frustration that permeated the atmosphere. Grace’s angry mutterings and drawer-slammings were interspersed with fits of weeping. Evy was often too jumpy and distracted to work. Maggie observed them warily. She knew they blamed her. She had overheard Grace talking to Jack.
“What about
her?
” Grace had demanded.
“We’ve been watching Thornhill’s,” Jack explained patiently.
“She was trying to run away. Why was she in such a hurry to leave if she didn’t know something happened to Jess?”
“Why was she stopping here to say good-bye to him?” Jack replied.
Maggie walked away from the conversation. It didn’t really matter what they thought. Jess was gone.
At night, her dreams woke her. Sister Dolorita loomed before her, castigating her, black eyes mad with rage. Bolting from her bed, bathed in sweat, she passed the remainder of her nights in a chair, rocking herself. The mornings found her listless, able to function at only the barest level.
She did not know what had become of him, or why, but she had the absolute conviction that if she had left Heron’s Neck that first day, or never come at all, he would still be here, safe from harm.
The wind was more insistent now, and the rain pelted her from all directions. It streamed down her
face and under the collar of the old slicker she wore, which she had found in a Thornhill closet. Her head was bare, and she had no umbrella. For a few moments she stood there shivering, her head bowed to the wrath of the storm. Finally she decided to move.
She looked up behind her at the massive oak doors of the wooden church. Carved into a wooden scroll above the doors were the words “Come Unto Me…”
“And I will judge you, and punish you, and see that you have no peace,” she said angrily. She turned toward the street to resume the aimless wandering that had become her pattern for the last few nights. It was better than being alone in her empty house. There she would doze off in a chair, felled by exhaustion, only to dream of Willy barking, or Jess at the door. For a few moments the light, fitful slumber would be sweet, and then she would suddenly leap up from the chair, reality tearing through the blissful fantasy. She would fall back in her chair, heart thumping, wide awake, with misery at her elbow, like a valet, waiting to dress her in its gloomy garb.