Chaingang

9

WATERTON, MISSOURI

“Aw—,” he said, the moment she came to the door.

“Hi,” she said, almost before she got the door open, and they were in each other's arms, hugging on the porch. “Thanks for coming,” she said gratefully, into his shoulder and neck. “Come in.” Her voice was softer as they broke the clench and moved inside the house.

“I must have sounded like an idiot when you phoned."

“No."

“You threw me. It doesn't take much,” she told him. When she answered the phone, he had said—"Does the name Quasimodo ring a bell?” Part of their old banter. He'd told her she was supposed to reply, “I can't place the face, but I still remember the bad hump.” One of their old faves. But the strange voice and wacky opening line had thrown her into abject silence. He'd had to pry conversation out of her.

“I had no idea—you know—about Sam."

“That floors me, Royce. A town like Waterton. I was so sure everybody would know by now."

“I might as well have been on another planet.” He gestured in the vague direction of Waterworks Hill. “I'm up there in my own little world. I haven't read a paper or heard any news for three or four weeks. I wouldn't know if war had been declared."

“I don't know what to do. I'm not sure why I'm picking on you, but—"

“That's okay. I'm glad you did. I don't know what I can do, but if you need some help—you know—um...” He spread his hands.

“I just thought maybe you'd have some ideas. Something we hadn't thought of. I can't sit here doing nothing. I've talked to everybody. Marty Kerns says nobody saw Sam. He just ... disappeared.” Royce nodded grimly.

“Hmm. Wow,” he said, and made a humming noise of condolence and befuddlement. He had no idea what to say to her.

For her part, she was instantly sorry she'd called him. He seemed irritated that she'd bothered him with her problem after all these years—and he seemed rather ... dirty. Or perhaps she'd built him up in her mind. Royce had been a big jock in school, but he'd gone down the junk road. She was wary of him, and he could read it on her face.

“I'm really glad you thought to call, Mary.” He felt scuzzy and in need of personal grooming. God—he hadn't thought of being “well groomed” in a long time. She was looking at his roughshod appearance, and he knew he wasn't measuring up.

“It's just that I'd heard something—” she looked down “—some gossip about you doing detective work or something. You know—when you were away from town those years. Sam said you had joined the CIA...” She trailed off.

“No!” He smiled, coldly, instantly on guard. “I heard that bullshit too. CIA. Jeezus!” He laughed humorlessly. “Not me, kid."

“So that was why, you know, I thought about calling you...” She let it drop. It felt like it was pointless for them to waste any more of each other's time. She looked tired, but Royce's maleness reacted to her, as he always had. She was a lovely woman, even without makeup, and she was clearly out of it.

“I'll help any way I can, Mary. I thought when I got the note that Bobby was gone.” They were now uncomfortable as strangers.

“Bobby?” She had no idea what he was talking about.

“Bobby Bartel. Didn't you know he has cancer?"

“You're kidding,” she said, dumbly.

“Uh-uh. Heard it a couple months ago from Lyle Garner. You remember Lyle?"

“Sure.” She nodded. Sam and Mary had been married for nearly fifteen years, and it had been sixteen years since she'd been involved with any part of Royce Hawthorne's world.

When Sam Perkins left Waterton to go to college out East, he'd made a new set of friends and locked on to the business track. When he returned, the kids who'd stayed around their hometown were still involved with one another's lives, the Waterton-Maysburg sports rivalry, and Friday night brew parties. Sam told her early in the resumption of their dating that he'd left all of that behind. He didn't mean it in an unkind way; it was merely a fact of maturing. Mary agreed, and had been pleased to grow along with her childhood beau.

Royce typified the kids they'd hung out with in high school. He hadn't changed much: a rugged Marlboro man sort of party guy. He'd been stuck back in his Waterton letter-sweater days, memorizing Coach John's playbook, and pretending he was going to be drafted by the Cowboys.

“JoAnne James is dead, you know?” she heard him say, and she shook her head.

“My God. I hadn't heard."

“She and her husband and two or three kids, living down in Florida. I believe she was shot and they never solved the case.” They sat quietly for a moment. “Do you know about Hal Stahly?” he asked, after a bit. She looked blank. “He's in Vegas. Struck it rich in the auto parts business. Gale Strickland told me he'd lost about a hundred pounds and was married to Helen Swoboda. Used to be a cheerleader at Maysburg."

She smiled and listened to him run down the catalog of their onetime classmates. Royce was tall, rangy, his looks spoiled by a nose that had run up against a number of hard objects over the years. He still had all his hair (though it needed washing), and a jock's flat stomach, but his eyes were cloudy, squinting against the light, and he seemed to have acquired a few nervous habits, like he had a dozen itches at once and couldn't decide which to scratch first.

He was something of a shock to her system after so many years. One of the strange components at work was the strong attraction she'd always felt when she was in Royce's company. Who can explain these things? Her subconscious gave her a guilty nudge as she recalled their silly nicknames for each other. She called him “Buns,” and he called her “L.D.,” for Legs Diamond.

The notion that she might in some way even identify those kinds of feelings was such anathema to her that Mary felt a momentary stab of irritation as it drifted through to the surface of her awareness. She pushed it away, concentrating on Sam, and trying to decide what she should do next in searching for him.

Sam and Mary had grown up in the same block, one of the classic next-door romances that blossomed at puberty, and there'd never been any question that one day they'd be married. They were steadies from eighth grade through senior high, and would have wed then, but Mary stayed in Waterton when Sam was attending the University of Maryland.

While Sam was away getting his B.A., she and Royce had become close. He was spontaneous, carefree, funny—and in some off-the-wall ways he was tremendously appealing. Women probably wanted to mother him, or thought they could change his ways. Men, of course, considered Royce the ideal buddy. She knew that he was a great deal more complex than he appeared to be. But that was old news.

Sam Perkins had become more than a husband to Mary—as their marriage became, perhaps, overly comfortable. He'd become like a brother. Royce, bless his damn heart, had made her take a subconscious glance at that.

“What's the deal?” he asked her, in his most serious and quiet tone. She remembered how he could be.

“How do you mean?"

“I mean Sam. Was there trouble between you?"

“No."

“No money problems? Health problems?"

“Absolutely none. He was very happy.” She was suddenly defensive. “Good health. We both worked at it. He was great. His business was wonderful."

“You guys weren't having, you know, personal problems?"

“Uh-uh.” She was surprised he'd even ask her.

“From what you say, he just ceased to exist one Friday morning, Mary. People don't vanish like that—the parked car and all. Unless he was kidnapped—and who'd want to do that? Or ... he decided to leave."

“I would have known. Something happened to him."

“Okay."

“He parked the car at the office—in back. When he got out, somebody probably pulled up beside him or honked at him. That's what I think. He got in the car with them. And then something happened to him. That's the way he disappeared."

“Mm."

“The one who kidnapped him might be waiting for some reason before they ask for money. Waiting to see if the police or FBI can ... you know, uncover their tracks."

“So you think he was kidnapped?"

“That's the way it looks to me."

“Pretty soon you'll get a demand for ransom money if that's what happened."

“Right.” It had been a big mistake to call him. “That's what the cops and FBI think, too."

“You called the Feds?"

She nodded. “Yeah."

“Well—” He wanted to tell her about himself and that he was one of the good guys. At that moment he felt very sad for her, and without thinking, he took one of her hands and held it in his. He had big, rough hands. Laborer's fingers. But he was no laborer, sitting there at the kitchen table in his beat-up leather bomber's jacket and faded jeans, looking as if no time at all had gone by. She took her hand away and got up to put coffee water on, wondering if he'd done lines. “So—if the FBI is on the case, that's good. Right?” He was trying to reassure her, she supposed.

“I guess. They didn't act very interested. These two guys came to town and talked to me here at the house, and they tape-recorded me and asked a bunch of stuff. The same things I'd told Marty Kerns. They said, ‘We'll be in touch,’ and that was the last I heard from them. I've called a couple of times since. The last time I had to call back three times to get an agent on the phone, that's how they returned my calls."

He just looked at her. She supposed he'd had to get half-stoned to come talk to her. She thought of Sam's name for him. “The Junkie,” he'd always called Royce if his name came up, and not unkindly. Now here he sat: her old junkie lover of once upon a time.

Mary Perkins awoke frightened, off kilter, out of synch like a worn film or a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie, and she had to work to fight back the edge of whatever it was that felt so intensely like desperation, shouting herself awake with a loud, unladylike curse of frustration.

Her shout was like an echo in this house without Sam Perkins. The weight of worry for her missing husband came and rested on her, reinserting itself into her consciousness, prodded by Royce's perfectly natural questions about the state of their marriage.

Half of her mind continued to sort options, stack and measure possibilities; size up the paucity of solid information she'd been able to gather about the why of his disappearance. The other half worked to nag her with worst-case scenarios, in which fictional mistresses and torturous plots nudged the dark convolutions of her thoughts.

It was the most obvious of the possibilities if you could look at their childless and increasingly platonic marriage objectively—which she couldn't. Never mind that it had been Sam, not Mary, who'd been adamant about concentrating on career, not kids, in the early years of their marriage, and then sunk himself deeper into his work. Or that it had been Sam who'd found romance too much of a bother.

The picture of this man, successful—no, make that suddenly rich—but stuck with a boring and prosaic existence, kept poking her in the imagination. Suppose this man decides to vanish? It happens. He creates another identity, building up a new persona to help cover his tracks. Maybe his is the sort of profession where his work takes him frequently to neighboring towns, and in one of these, far enough from home that he is sure to be unknown there, he becomes John Jones.

He wears a wig. A mustache. Obtains a birth certificate and carefully builds a life that will leave no paper trail. John Jones buys on credit. His wallet begins to fill with plastic rectangles that give his fictitious life identity. He buys a car, which he keeps secreted in the garage of a rental house. He's a salesman on the road for an out-of-town company, so his neighbors seldom see him. But John Jones keeps his lawn mowed, his sidewalks shoveled, his leaves raked—and the people who maintain his life for him always get their money up front. Cash, perhaps, or maybe John opens a small bank account. If he wants to make the effort, he can even take a driver's test and get a driver's license under the new identity. He does everything but pay his taxes, this fellow, but John Jones will cover his tracks so that even the IRS will lose the trail.

Perhaps the house John rents is only a temporary shelter. His intermediate link, a safehouse, his hiding place. This will be the place he runs to when he appears to vanish from the face of the earth. The rent is paid, the lawn is going to seed, the larder is stocked. He has only to settle down and stay out of sight for a few months. Watch a lot of TV. Read. Exercise. Count his money. When the trail is cold, John Jones's neighbors will learn that his company is transferring him, and this persona will now also disappear.

Maybe he has the cosmetic surgery next. Flies to the Cayman Islands, or wherever his offshore bank is. And there, in time, a new and untraceable identity is built.

When you start this kind of stuff, every newly imagined step of the plot feeds on distorted reality. You recall statements out of context, twist meanings, analyze preoccupations and idiosyncracies with a jaundiced perspective. You can get crazy with it.

Mary Perkins realized this kind of thinking was stupid and nonproductive, but alone in the sunny house, she'd found that she'd built a wall of such scenarios, and at the moment all she could do was sit in the middle of it and look out.

She felt her husband's name shudder through her like a cold chill. Sam.

Royce Hawthorne was driving down North Main, the main drag of their little village, heading northwest in the direction of the river. The street ended where Willow River Road and North Main and the busy Market Road all converged at the floodgates.

It never failed to amaze him, how a burg of six hundred and some souls could always have busy traffic on its main streets, but half of the population farmed, and farmers run the road. A lot of the tiny agri-communities also came into town on their way across the river to Maysburg, or on the way back home.

He found his access blocked by a work crew that stretched from the sidewalk in front of the State Farm agency over to General Discount's front door. He could see a line of trucks and cars and RVs of every description lined up on Market, and he knew where they were all going. Market became Jefferson Street there at the three corners, and everybody was angling around to get at the bank's drive-up window.

A fellow party-hearty he knew slightly flashed a big smile at him, and pretended to subtly masturbate the handle of his shovel. One more layabout easing through the workday on those nice hefty county wages.

He wheeled into Dr. Willoughby's parking lot and hung a left on Cotton Avenue, cutting back around the block to edge his way into the line of traffic. When his turn came, he eased across Jefferson, pulling into the large lot that faced the small cluster of overpriced office space that called itself Riverfront Park. He'd always loved that. There were a dozen or so expensive “suites” and “executive spaces,” the big parking lot that the bank and Waterton Drug used for their customers, and a little manicured circle of fescue and Bermuda grass with a couple of concrete bench-and-table setups. All within .22 range of the river, hence Riverfront Park.

He nursed an Oly Light, paper propped on the wheel in front of him, back to the offices, and angled the rearview so he could watch the door of Drexel Commodity Futures.

For once his timing was okay, and after about forty minutes he saw Dave in the doorway speaking to someone, and he was out of the car and moving.

“Yo."

“Hey, Royce. I was just about to get back to you, babe. Sorry!” Big lying smile on his face.

“Yeah. Uh-huh. Dave. We got to talk, hoss."

“Oh, um—wow!” He glanced furtively at his wrist. “I've got to see this guy, babe. Let me call you tonight."

“What the fuck you pulling on me, man?” He couldn't help it. He was totally torqued. “We've got a deal."

“Absolutely. Not here,” he begged him with his tone and eyes, pleading Royce to go away. “Not the time or place."

“How many times I gotta phone?"

“You don't understand, Royce."

“That's right.” His throat felt so dry.

“I'm in a helluva bind.” Drexel spoke quietly. “I can't come up with it. I just got hosed."

"You the one don't understand. You don't do that. You don't fuck this kind of a deal over. You got to come up with it!"

“I'm into other people, too. Royce. I'm in a world of trouble. I ... I got in over my head."

“How dare you tell me that shit. You let me stick my dick into something this heavy and you tell me you're over your head? What the fuck is wrong with you?” He was trying to whisper, and it was coming out like a whine. He could see the deal dead in Drexel's yuppie eyes. “Sell your fucking house, and cars. You got to get me out from under this."

“It's gone. I've already mortgaged my house. I'm down the tubes, Royce. I just got in too deep. Listen—I'll call you tonight. I'll explain—"

“You can't explain shit. You can't explain your way out of something like this, bud. Get real."

“Well, it ain't happening,” he said, in mock tough guy. Hawthorne wanted to throw him up against the wall of the building. It ain't happening. Drexel turned, starting off. No good-bye.

“You got some set of balls on you for a fucking wimpy, no-dick pussy!" He was out of control. Fuck it.

He shrugged with his body and his face. “I'm—"

“Yeah. I know. You're sorry. You're that, all right. Fuck.” He didn't know what to do next. Go in the bank and try to move the weight in there? First Bank of Waterton was notoriously loose in their SBLs, and after all—wasn't he a small businessman? It wouldn't be like he didn't have the collateral.

He watched David Drexel get into his big car. Money in the bank. It couldn't have gone south like this. Jeezus—how much bad luck does somebody have to have?

He turned the corner of the bank, walking, nodding hello to people he'd known all his life. Would P. J. Thatcher, the State Farm man, come to his funeral when Happy and Luis finished with him? he wondered as he passed the insurance office. He needed somebody who had some serious bucks to get him temporarily off this dangerous tenterhook.

He saw Myrna Hyams at a desk and opened the door to Perkins Realty.

“Hi.” She'd been with Sam for a long time and wore her concern on her face.

“Hi, Myrna. I don't guess you've heard anything new?"

“Not a word."

“Does everybody in town know he's disappeared, do you suppose?"

“They will tomorrow. I gave Jake at the Weekly Dispatch the details just a while ago. They put the paper out tomorrow.” The Weekly Dispatch was printed in Maysburg, and this would be big news—a pillar of the community missing.

“Did you get those telephone bills ready?” Mary had told Myrna that he was “helping the family” look for Sam.

“Yes, sir,” she said, glumly. “I couldn't think of anything I haven't already said. I just can't imagine what has happened to Mr. Sam."

He couldn't think what to say, so he just shook his head by way of commiseration. Royce wondered who'd look for him if he disappeared.

Mary Perkins was working her way back down North Main with the handbills. She went in Judy's, the town's most popular cafe, and spotted a woman she knew.

“Hi, Francie."

“Howdy, Mary,” a heavyset woman said from behind the cash register, a look of condolence immediately wrinkling her plump, friendly features with concern. “It's awful about Sam. Have you heard any news?"

“No.” Mary showed the woman a stack of pages she'd just run off across the street at the bank. “Would you all mind handing these out for me?” They were reward announcements that showed Sam's photograph, followed by a photocopy of the account of his disappearance that had run in the Weekly Dispatch that morning.

“Of course not. I'll make sure they get handed out myself,” Francie assured her, glad to help. “I sure hope Sam's okay.” She had clearly written him off.

Mary thanked her and left, working her way on down North Main. She, too, had a very bad feeling now. She'd already caught herself several times as she spoke of her husband in the past tense. Too much time had gone by.

She worked her way down the block, leaving more of the reward handbills at General Discount, the doctor's office, and O'Connor GMC Motors. She'd parked their car on Maple, and she went back to rest a minute and regroup. The plan was to get more posters and work her way on out South Main. She unlocked the car, got in, and looked at Sam's likeness from a recent photo.

REWARD

A substantial cash reward will be paid to anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of Sam Perkins, 33, of 911 South Main in Waterton, who has been missing since the morning of Friday, October 5, when he was believed to have been abducted from the parking lot of Perkins Realty.

Anyone having information as to his disappearance or his present whereabouts should contact Martin W. Kerns, Chief of Police, Waterton Office of Public Safety, 555-9191 or 555-3017.

Mary's own number had been added to the newspaper account. She only just now noticed that the pasteup had not been trimmed of all its extraneous information. There was a filler line that the paper had run across the bottom, and she'd left it on. In tiny print at the bottom of the announcement it read:

“Support the Maysburg Eagles!"

Mary forced herself into action and started the car, pulling around the corner and parking halfway down the block. She gathered up a big armful of handbills and went in the first building down at the corner, Wilma's Hair Salon.

Kristi Devere was cutting someone's hair, and there was another lady under a dryer. Mary couldn't place the woman she was working on, but the woman acted like she knew Mary. She asked Kristi if she could leave some of the posters of Sam, and was turning to leave when the woman said, in a well-meaning tone, “I know exactly what you're going through, dear."

“Oh.” She had no idea who the woman was. A pleasant-looking bottle blonde of mysterious years, but clearly on the high side of middle age.

“I lost my Stanley and I didn't think I was ever going to get over it. Thirty-five years.” Kristi stopped and looked at her customer. “It's terrible to have a husband killed."

“Nobody knows that, Clarisse,” Kristi said gently.

“Of course they don't. But you know, if your husband gets Alzheimer's or something, and he's elderly, or in bad health, or he has a stroke—you know—” She needed to talk about it.

“Sure.” Mary wanted to get moving. Clarisse? Not Clarisse Pendleton? Must be. She vaguely remembered her husband had been killed in a car accident. A drunk driver.

“We had our kids grown and out of the house. Doing well. Our grandchildren were healthy. We had our financial situation—you know—comfortable. I mean, we weren't wealthy...” Huge diamonds flashed on an expressive, wrinkled hand.

“Mm-hm."

“I couldn't go in a room in the house without seeing something of Stanley's. I finally had to just box up everything and have Goodwill get it. All his beautiful suits. I couldn't stand it. I cried every time I came in the house. I couldn't fix a meal. I'd open the refrigerator and just break down. I'd find some little note or something in one of my purses. My heart broke ten times a day. You know—you lose someone to cancer, it's awful. But everyone loses loved ones to heart disease, cancer, things like that. To have something like this—"

“Bye bye, Mary,” Kristi said. “Good luck, hon.” Giving her a chance to thank them both and quickly start out the door.

“Holidays are the worst—” she could hear the woman call out to her back as the door mercifully closed.