The Dark Country Page 5

  There were more details, like the fishing knife that had cut him accidentally, in the tackle box of the boat locker at the harbor, stained with his own blood. Again she hoped it would turn out to be the same type as the girl's. But already she had the feeling; she knew. It always worked out.

  Finally she lowered her head. When she raised it again, the office was alive with activity. The Chief was snapping his fingers, spitting orders into the phone, hustling his men out the door. She rubbed her eyes.

  "You did it, doll," he said. He winked at her.

  She rose unsteadily.

  "You're not leaving yet," he said. He sounded surprised.

  "I have to," she said. "I've got a plane to catch. To Denver. They need my help. A child was strangled there last month and they don't have any leads, none at all."

  "Hold it right there," said the Chief.

  He left the office for a moment. She heard a muffled conversation, the sound of a locker clanging open. She thought she felt the ground begin to shift under her feet, far beneath the floor and the concrete foundation of the building, but she pushed it out of her mind.

  "Here you go." The Chief thrust a carton of Lucky Strikes into her hands. "You know you deserve a hell of a lot more," he told her. "And you know I know it, too. Don't you, babe?" He reached into his coat for a check. It was already made out. He tried to fold her fingers around it.

  "You know me better than that, Jack," she said. She pushed his hand away.

  They walked together down the hall.

  "Don't you even want to see him?" said the Chief.

  "Who?"

  "The creep. Aren't you curious, at least? Or is it already over for you?" She hesitated.

  The Chief led her into a darkened room. When her eyes had adjusted she made out a row of seats, and a pane of glass that took up most of one wall. She reached for a cigarette with shaky fingers.

  He stopped her hand. "Two-way mirror," he said.

  She looked through to the man on the other side. He was seated at a table in a straight-backed chair. Tweed jacket, rust-colored wool tie loosened at the collar. He was being questioned by two detectives. His expression was serene and self-assured, as always. Even more confident than she remembered, in fact.

  But that will change soon enough, she thought.

  "That's him," said the Chief. "That's Claiborn."

  Well, so long, Ronnie, she thought. Do you even remember me? You'll probably never know. If you do find out, you should be grateful, for in a way I've saved you. I've stopped you from treating anyone else the way you treated me so long ago. In a sense I've helped you, more than you know, more than you'll ever know. In the darkness, she blew him a kiss.

  She went back out into the hall. The Chief walked her to the lobby.

  "I reckon it's so long, then, till next time," he said. "Can't truthfully say I hope to need you again, Polly. It's always good to see you, though, you know that. What's next for you now? After Denver, that is?"

  She sorted through her purse for her notebook.

  "Oh, there was a kidnapping back in Rochester," she said. "And that terrible business in Kansas. And then, let me see, there was that funny drowning down in Malibu. Have you heard about that? I don't know if I can schedule them all. Chances are I'll be out to the Coast to see you again soon enough. Just wait and see."

  The police station was now busy with noisy activity, switchboards and teletypes banging away full force.

  "Listen," he said, "I could call the press in for you—set it up in a few minutes. All it takes is a couple of phone calls. That way you'd at least get some publicity out of this." When she didn't say anything, he said. "But I guess you don't need it, do you? And knowing you, Poll, I'd guess you don't want it, either."

  "Justice," she said, "is its own reward. That and being able to do a favor for an old friend. ..."

  She walked to the street. The night was coming fast. As she stood at the curb waiting for her police escort, she thought she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. But it was only the persistence of the vision: a lonely figure scrabbling down a hillside, frightened by the sudden realization of what he had done. She saw him clearly now for only an instant, like the glimmer of the first star of evening that disappears when you stare too long at it.

  He was young, a poor Mexican or Puerto Rican by the looks of him, and his trousers were filthy with mud as she had said. She had told the truth about that part. But that was all. He had no car waiting, no apartment to go to; his shirt was blue denim,

  though it was almost too wet and dirty to be sure. She wondered idly where he was going. Did he know? Up or down the state, did it matter? He would be caught sooner or later for something else. That was always the way. As he turned to run, his ankles sinking deep into the mulch of the graveyard, she caught a fleeting glimpse of his eyes, dark and quick in an intelligent, utterly terrified face.

  She closed her eyes, trying to shut it out.

  When she opened them, a patrol car was pulling to a halt in front of her.

  She reached for the handle. She was startled by how cold it was to her touch.

  The young lieutenant climbed out to help her. He tipped his hat.

  "Where to?" he said.

  Where? Let's see. There's that bastard of a salesman in Denver, she thought. And there's my old teacher, retired and living in Rochester. And the boy who moved to Kansas, or at least he had been a boy then, like her in his teens when he had tried to rape her that night. And after that . . .

  She was aware of her hand on the door. The cold of the metal was seeping into her fingers, spreading up her goose-fleshed arm, grasping for her chest, seeking to grip her heart with a deathlike chill. She concentrated, focusing her attention. She snatched her hand away.

  And then she felt the rumbling. She felt it first in her feet and then in her entire body. My God, she thought, is it the whole street?

  "What . . . what is that?" she asked the officer. "Pardon, ma'am?"

  Now the vision was upon her again, fiercer than ever this time. She saw the gray clouds, the heavy soil bubbling and roiling and breaking up through the dark greenery, and then the long, glistening scratchings of the dead awash in the storm as they descended the hills. It was as if the world were being burst apart from within, from its most secret and hidden depths.

  The officer was touching her, shaking her shoulder.

  "Ma'am?" he was saying.

  She forced the image to stop. Now, she thought. It grew fainter and faded. It seemed to take a long time. Too long.

  "Wh-what? Oh, Billy. It was nothing, nothing at all. I thought I had forgotten something. I just had a bad moment there, that's all. . . ."

  And she got into the car and rode without speaking all the way to the airport, waiting for the earth-moving machines to come in and finish it. But they never did.

  DAUGHTER OF THE GOLDEN WEST

  At the school were three boys who were best friends. Together they edited the campus newspaper, wrote or appeared in plays from time to time, and often could be seen huddled together over waxed paper lunches, over microscopes in the biology lab, sometimes until dark, over desks leafed with papers most Saturdays, elbow to elbow with their English Department advisor, and even over the same clusters of girls gathered like small bouquets of poppies on the steps of the cafeteria, joking and conning and in general charming their way through the four long years. Almost four years.

  Don and Bob were on the tennis squad, Don and David pasted-up the Buckskin Bugler feature pages, Bob and David devised satirical skits for the annual Will & Prophecy Class Assemblies, and together they jockeyed for second, third and fourth positions in their graduating class—the first place was held inexplicably by one of those painted-smile, spray-haired secretary types (in fact she was Secretary of the Senior Class) named Arnetta Kuhn, and neither separately nor en masse could they dislodge, dissuade, distract, deflower or dethrone that irritating young woman from her destiny as Valedictorian, bent as she had been upon her goal s
ince childhood, long before the boys had met, a target fixed in her mind as a step-

  ping stone to a greater constellation of goals which included marrying the most promising young executive in Westside Hills, whoever he might happen to be, and furnishing him and a ranch-style home yet to be built on South American Street with four dishwater-haired children and a parturient drawerful of Blue Chip Stamps. And so it went.

  Until May, that is: the last lap of the home stretch.

  Until Bob disappeared.

  In the Formica and acetate interior of the mobile home in Westside Hills Court, Don of the thick black hair and high white forehead, lover of Ambrose Bierce and master of the sweeping backhand, and David, the high school's first longhair, collector of Marvel comics and articles on quantum physics, commiserated with Mrs. Witherson over cans of sugar-free cola (it was the only kind she had, now that Bob was gone), staring into their thumbnails and speaking softly in tones that were like a settling of throttled sighs over an as yet unmarked grave. It was a sad thing, surely, it was mysterious as hell, and most of all, each thought secretly, it was unfair, the most unfair thing he could have done.

  The trophies, glassed certificates and commendations Bob had earned reflected around Mrs. Witherson, bending the dim, cold light into an aurora behind her drooped, nodding head.

  "Maybe he ran off with . . . With some kind of woman. The way his father did."

  Instantly regretting it, a strange thing to say, really, Mrs. Witherson closed a shaking hand around the water glass and tipped it to her lips. The sherry wavered and clung, then evaporated, glistening, from the sides; she had taken it up again weeks ago, after the disappearance, and now the two were concerned about her as if by proxy. For Bob had told them, of course, of the way she had been for so long after the loss of his father. He had been too small to remember him, but he had remembered the fuming glasses and shaking hands, he had said, and now his friends remembered them, too, though they did not speak of these things or even look up as she drank.

  "I thought—" Bob's father was killed in the war, David started to say, but stopped, even without Don's quick glance and furtive headshake.

  "He had. So much. Going for him." Bob's mother drained

  the glass, gazing into it, and David saw the tip of her slow, coated tongue lap after the odor of nonexistent droplets along the lip. "You all know that." And it was a larger statement than it sounded, directed beyond the trailer to include and remind them all, whoever needed to be reminded of the essential truth of it, herself, perhaps, among them.

  They jumped, all three of them. The telephone clattered with an unnatural, banshee urgency in the closed rectangle of the trailer. The Melmac dishware ceased vibrating on the plastic shelf as Mrs. Witherson picked up the receiver. She took it unwillingly, distastefully, between the circle of thumb and finger.

  David pushed away from the unsteady, floor-bolted table and chewed the inside of his mouth, waiting to catch Don's eyes.

  "Mm-hm. Ye-es. I see."

  It might have been an invitation to a Tupperware party. A neighbor whose TV set was on the blink. A solicitation for the PTA, which could have accounted for the edge in her voice. But it was not; it was not. They both knew it without looking at each other, and were on their feet by the aluminum screen door seconds before Mrs. Witherson, white-faced, dropped the receiver. It swung from the coiled cord, dipping and brushing the chill linoleum floor.

  The lieutenant at the police station wrote out the address of the county morgue and phoned ahead for them. They drove in silence, pretending absorption in traffic lights. It was really not like the movies. An official in a wrinkled white smock showed them three 8 x 10's and there was not much talk, only a lot of nods and carefully avoided eyes and papers to be signed. Don stepped into a locked room and returned so quickly that he must have turned on his heel the instant the sheet was lifted. During that brief moment and through the miles of neon interstices after David did not think of the photographs.

  What was left of Bob had been found by a roadside somewhere far out of town.

  And it was "just like the other two," the attendant said.

  They drove and did not stop even when they were back in Wcstside. Don took corner after corner, lacing the town in sinuller and smaller squares until each knew in his own time

  that there was nowhere to go and nothing to be said. David was aware of the clicking of the turn indicator and the faint green flickering of the light behind the dashboard. Until he heard the hand brake grind up. The motor still running. Without a word he got out and into his own car and they drove off in different directions.

  David could not face his room. He hovered through the empty streets around his house for half an hour before his hands took over the wheel for themselves. He found himself in the parking lot of the Village Pizza Parlor. He drifted up next to Don's car and slipped inside, leaving the keys in the ignition.

  Don was hunched to the wall, dialing the pay phone. David sidled over to a table in the corner and climbed onto the bench across from Craig Cobb, former star end for the Westside Bucks and Student Council football lobbyist.

  "Hey, listen, Don told me about Bob and, hey, listen, I'm sorry."

  David nodded and shuffled his feet in the sawdust.

  Craig's lip moved over the edge of the frosted root beer. He probably wanted to pump David for details, but must have dimly perceived the nature of the moment and chose instead to turn his thick neck and scrutinize the player piano in the corner, now mercifully silent.

  Don returned to the table.

  "My mother's going over to stay with Mrs. Witherson tonight," he said, sliding in next to Craig. Then, meeting David's eyes for the first time in hours, "Craig here tells me we ought to talk to Cathy Sparks."

  They looked at each other, saying All right, we're in something now, and we're in it together, and we both know it, and Craig glanced from one to the other and sensed that they were in something together, and that it was about their best friend who was dead and no one knew why, and he said, "R'lly. He went out with her, y'know."

  That was wrong. Bob hadn't been going with anybody last semester. If he had, they would have known. Still, the way Don's eyes were fixing him, David knew there was more to hear.

  Craig repeated the story. "No, see, it was just that weekend. Saturday." Right, that was the last time they had seen Bob. He

  had been working on that damned Senior History paper. "I was washing my car, right? And Robert pulls in next to me, the next stall, and starts rollin' up the windows and so I ask him, you know, 'Who're you takin' to the Senior Party?' An' he says he doesn't know yet, and so I say, 'Goin' to any good orgies tonight?' and he says, 'What d'you know about the new girl?' I guess, yeah, I think he said he gave her a ride home or something. I got the idea he was goin' over to see her that night. Like she asked him to come over or something. You know."

  The new girl. The one nobody had had time to get close to, coming in as she had the last month or six weeks of school. A junior. Nobody knew her. Something about her. Her skin was oiled, almost buttery, and her expression never changed. And her body. Dumpy—no, not exactly; it was just that she acted like she didn't care about how she looked most of the time; she wore things that covered her up, that had no shape. So you didn't try for her. Still, there was something about her. She was the kind of girl nobody ever tried for, but if somebody asked somebody if he'd ever gotten anything off her, you would stop what you were doing and listen real close for the answer.

  "So maybe you'll want to talk to her. She's the last one to see him. I guess." The football player, unmoving in his felt jacket, glanced nervously between them.

  David stared at Don, and Don continued to stare back. Finally they rose together, scraping the bench noisily against the floor.

  "Only thing is, she'll be pretty hard to find, prob'ly." "Why's that?" asked David.

  "I heard she moved away soon as the school year was over."

  Later, driving home, taking the long way, t
hinking, David umembered the photographs. The way the body was mangled. ( ut off almost at the waist. He tried, but this time he could not >-<-( it out of his mind.

  So they did a little detective work the next day. Bob's mother had not seen him after that Saturday morning, when he left for the library to work on his research paper. No

  one else had seen him after that, either. Except Craig. And maybe, just maybe, the girl. So.

  So the family name was in the phone book, but when they got there the apartment was up for rent. The manager said they had moved out the 12th, right after finals.

  So they stopped by the school.

  The Registrar's office was open for summer school and Mrs. Greenspun greeted them, two of her three favorite pupils, with a warmth undercut by a solicitous sadness of which she seemed afraid to speak. It was like walking into a room a second after someone has finished telling a particularly unpleasant story about you behind your back.

  Yes, she had received a Call, she said, a call asking that Cathy's grades be sent along to an out-of-town address.

  "The young lady lives with her older sister, I take it," confided Mrs. Greenspun.

  David explained that he had loaned her a book which she had forgotten to return.

  "Of course," said Mrs. Greenspun maternally. And gave them the address.

  It was in Sunland, a good hour-and-a-half away.

  David volunteered his old Ford. They had to stop once for directions and twice for water and an additive that did not keep its promise to the rusty radiator. In the heat, between low, tanned hills that resembled elephants asleep or dead on their sides under the sun, Don put down the term paper. They had picked it up from Mr. Broadbent, Bob's history teacher, and had put off turning it over to his mother. They had said they were going to read it but had not, sharing a vague unease about parting with the folder.

  It was only the preliminary draft, with a lot of the details yet to be put in, but it was an unbelievable story.

  "He was really into something strange," muttered Don, pulling moist hair away from the side of his face.