Summitt

Chapter Eight

It took Selby almost a week to find something that related to the word “waves.” He had spent most of that time driving around the countryside looking for clues or leads to what Shana could have meant by “waves” or “screaming birds” or “tunnels” or “hornets.”

In the afternoon he picked up Davey at school and they searched until dusk, Davey watching the fields and roads with a map on his knees.

Selby had called Summitt City twice, but Clem Stoltzer had no news of Jarrell. But he had promised to keep in touch and let Selby know when and if he heard from his brother.

Selby had been to East Chester to talk to the detective handling his daughter’s case, Sergeant Burt Wilger. He had met the county district attorney, Jonathan Lamb, and a deputy DA, a young woman who had been introduced to him as Dorcas Brett, but who was referred to by the DA as Kelly. Wilger had questioned Selby about his daughter’s friends and acquaintances, her hobbies and interests, what homes she slept over at, where she spent her time after school, whether or not she hitchhiked, used drugs or marijuana or alcohol.

The sergeant briefed Selby on their progress to date. “We’ve checked the sexual deviates we got sheets on. And flushed out some neighborhood PTs — Peeping Toms — and characters who get it off exposing themselves — weirdos we haven’t been able to bust so far. Blanks in that area. And nothing on the perpetrator’s car. But there’s something screwy about the time, Mr. Selby. Lieutenant Eberle told me he’d mentioned this to you.”

Wilger, a thin young man with sparse hair and worried eyes, cleared his throat. “Your daughter got out of a car — or was pushed out — at Pyle’s Corner in Muhlenburg. That’s what she told Nurse Redden. She wasn’t sure what time that was. Which is understandable. But we got a fix on the time from a witness, a Mrs. Elvira Swabel. She’s an old lady and she lives there at Pyle’s Corners, right across the street from a storefront church. Your daughter got out of the car in front of that church, it’s called the Tabernacle of the Golden Flame. The preacher is a local piney, Ollie Jessup. But the church was empty that night, there were no services. But Mrs. Swabel was sitting at her window, her apartment is over a hardware store. She saw your daughter walk to the Mobil station at the other corner and buy a candy bar from an outdoor vending machine. There was enough light at the station for her to see everything pretty clear.”

“Did she get a look at the car?” Selby had asked him. “Did she notice what color it was?”

“No, the street in front of the tabernacle was too dark. But she saw your daughter start up Fairlee Road around ten o’clock, give or take a few minutes. The point is, Mr. Selby, your daughter didn’t get to Little Tenn for another three hours and that trailer camp is only a mile or so from Pyle’s Corners. So we’d like to know where she was those hours between ten and one. It could be important. Dr. Kerr doesn’t want us to question her yet, but I thought maybe you could help us.”

“I’ll talk to her, Sergeant.”

On that same day Selby found the link to the “waves” — on a back-country road about a dozen miles from Muhlenburg. The sound came to him as he crested a dirt road between the small towns of Embryville and Buck Run.

He stopped the car in open country. Meadow stretched on either side, broken by patches of sunlight and shadow. The woods burned with fall colors, but the fields were still green and hard in patches from summer.

The silence was almost complete, heavy and drowsing, but when the wind changed he heard faint echoing sounds that shook the ground gently.

Selby drove to the top of the hill and stopped again. Below him spur tracks branched out from a small switching yard. It was a marshaling area for local ranchers; beef herds were shipped here from Texas to be fattened for eastern markets. A pair of diesel locomotives were shunting cattle cars around the yard. The noise echoed from the low hills, traveling in muffled waves over the meadows.

Selby marked his map with a penciled line from Fairlee Road to Buck Run and Embryville.

At home, Mrs. Cranston told him that Miss Culpepper from the library had called, she had the material he wanted. Someone from Las Vegas also called, a Jerry Goldbirn. And their insurance man, Jay Mooney.

Shana’s bedroom door was closed, but he could hear her talking on the phone. She had been no help in his search. She had listened to the tape but insisted she couldn’t remember saying anything about tunnels or birds. She had no idea what any of it meant.

She became impatient when Selby pressed her about the outbursts in the growling and obviously assumed voice — “Hell is alone—” and “I am worse than men... more barbarous in revenge... hatred in my heart...”

She refused to discuss this with him, either retreating into apathetic silences or erupting in anger and running off to her room.

Dr. Kerr had told him to expect this kind of behavior, but Selby wasn’t prepared for her reaction when he asked her about her despairing “Mommy, my hand hurts, it’s evil, I hate it...”

She shouted, “You wouldn’t understand, you never did, you were always outside of us.”

This was true enough, but it had been a hurtful attack — he had, in fact, been an outsider, although his wife Sarah and mother-in-law Tishie pretended he wasn’t. Or simply hadn’t made a point of it.

In a way being “outside” had been a source of strength to Selby. Better outside than trapped inside the rigidity of St. Ambrose, the unyielding, arid atmosphere of his grandparents’ home in Davenport. Sure, being part of them he’d tried, and squandered energy, to understand them and at times to defend them.

He’d never been a joiner, he disliked labels. Being outside of Sarah’s faith had permitted him to accept it without pressure, and therefore to support it. Her convictions hadn’t necessarily reflected his, and because he wasn’t required to champion them out of any unexamined loyalty he’d always been comfortable with them.

Since Sarah’s death he had tried to keep their past free from wear and distortion by not living in it. He had made lists of things to try not to think of again, posting these areas with off-limits signs. His warnings included certain beaches, the colors of the hills above the place they lived in Spain, and some streets in New York and a bar on Samson Street in Philadelphia where they had gone when they were first married...

But now everything was baited with hurtful memories, even Shana’s troubled voice on the tapes... “a time to serve and to sin...”

That was from the Bible, he’d thought, but it wasn’t in the hymn of Ecclesiastes he checked that began, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up which is planted...”

“... a time to serve and to sin” wasn’t in those lines, but reading the verses reminded him of proverbs that Sarah had quoted with teasing gravity to Davey and Shana. “... her children rise up and call her blessed, for in her tongue is the law of kindness.”

In searching for the source of “Hell is alone...” and “I am... more barbarous in revenge...” he had gone through Sarah’s college notebooks, finding not what he was looking for but only a memory of her straight shoulders at a typewriter and the frowns and smiles that accompanied the clatter of her thoughts being put on paper.

He knocked on Shana’s door and heard a whispered rush of words. Then she raised her voice and asked him to come in.

She sat on the side of her bed, one bare foot resting on top of the other, and a robe pulled loosely over her pajamas. She said, “I know I’m not supposed to be talking to anybody. But what difference does it make?”

He said, “Dr. Kerr wants you to rest as much as possible.”

“Rest for what? I’m not in class, I don’t even have homework to do.”

Her room needed tidying up; an empty glass and a half-eaten sandwich were on a tray on the floor; her wastebasket was full of crumpled tissues.

The bruise on her cheek had swollen; her whole face was now disfigured and discolored. They had used to tease her about her enthusiasm for showers and shampoos, her shelves of talcum and cologne, the closets with the separate racks for sweaters and rows of jeans with horseshoes stitched in daisies on the pockets. But now her hair was tangled in coarse strands, and it looked as if she had been picking at the bandage on her hand — the gauze strips were shredded and soiled.

But her small face looked vulnerable and troubled. Her pitiful girlishness seemed to be asking him for some kind of trust, or sympathy. Still, she wouldn’t let him touch her. She stiffened if he came near her, or put out a hand to her.

Selby could feel the rebuke in her tense shoulders and tightly locked hands. Since the night he had carried her from Barby Kane’s trailer there had been this barrier between them.

“There were a couple of things we should talk about, Shana. You feel up to it?”

“Sure, it’s okay. That’s what everybody’s doing now, talking and talking about it. Charlotte told me Josey said I rode my bike on Fairless only because I like to hear the mushroom workers in the trucks whistling at me.” Her voice was low, but the words came so fast they nearly blurred together. “The detectives asked everybody at school if I smoked grass and cut classes. Even Charlotte keeps hinting about what it was like and was he handsome. So we might as well talk about it too. What’s the difference?”

“Well, to make an obvious point, I’m your father and that isn’t going to change. So you’re stuck with that, which is one way to look at it, if you want to.”

He tried to keep his tone calm but he didn’t quite understand her resentment and her seeming distrust of him. He knew what pain was, and he guessed he wanted her at least to give him credit for that.

Right now he only knew what Dr. Kerr had told him, and what he had learned from Nurse Redden and the detectives. Shana had been driven to a house in the country, over roads she wasn’t familiar with, and there — in a room with a water-stained ceiling and a stone fireplace with a deer’s head hung above it — she had been bound to a cot and beaten and repeatedly raped.

But Dr. Kerr had advised him not to press her for details.

Selby told her what he’d heard that afternoon at the switching yards near Buck Run, but she shrugged and said, “I’ve told you, I don’t know where I was, daddy. Maybe I heard some things, but maybe I just imagined them.”

“When you got out of the car at Pyle’s Corners, do you remember what you did?”

“I’m not sure. Just part of it.”

“Do you recall buying a candy bar at the Mobil station?”

“Did I do that?”

“A woman who lives across from the church saw you. You walked to the gas station. It was raining, but there was light enough for her to see you.”

“I remember eating something sweet. So I guess I did buy a candy bar. What difference does that make?”

“The woman told the police it was ten o’clock. But you didn’t get to Barby’s for another three hours. Sergeant Wilger suggested we talk about it, and see if we could fill in that gap.”

She was staring down at her clenched hands. “It was raining. I know that. But I’m not sure about anything else. I just walked up Fairlee to Barby’s.”

“But that wouldn’t take three hours.”

“Maybe I stopped, rested. I don’t know.”

“Did you go somewhere else before you went to Barby’s? Were you with anybody else?”

He saw a flash of anger in her face. Her eyes had narrowed. “If you believe that, I can’t help it.”

“Shana, I’m trying to help you. I know a little about how you felt that night, try and believe me. If we talk it over maybe we can find some answers. You say it was raining. Did you try to find someplace that was dry? Did you go inside anywhere?”

She nodded slowly. “I was in a car. I remember the sound of the rain on the roof.”

He said quietly, “Who was driving, Shana?”

“Nobody was driving. It was on the side of the road and I got into it to get out of the rain.”

“And you sat all alone in an empty car on Fairlee Road for three hours?”

“It wasn’t on Fairlee Road. It was parked off the road in some kind of clearing.”

“You sat there for three hours?”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“Okay, okay, I heard you. There’s no reason to shout, Shana. But I don’t understand it.”

“I tell you everything I know, then you look mad and say you don’t understand. So what’s the point of talking?”

“I’m sorry if I upset you. But I still don’t understand. Why didn’t you come home after it happened?”

She swung around and stared at him. Her eyes were bright with tears. “I wanted to think, can’t you understand that? As long as I stayed in that car alone, what happened belonged to me and nobody else. I wanted to be sure of every thought I had, everything he did to me and why he did it, and why he hated me so much he needed to hurt me.”

“Why are you wasting your sympathy on that damn psychopath?”

“Because he was part of it,” she shouted. “There were two of us that night. I know what I did and what I felt, but I’ve got to understand why he did it, what it meant for him.”

“Shana, Dr. Kerr wants you to forget that part of it, for now anyway.”

“Does he? Well, it didn’t happen to him. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t ever want to wonder about it. That’s why I stayed in that car. Because after I called you, I knew it wouldn’t belong to me anymore. It would belong to everybody, to Dr. Kerr and the police and all my friends at school. They could make up their own stories about what happened and it wouldn’t be mine anymore, and there would never be the one single truth ever again.”

She was crying but her face was tight with anger. “But I know what happened. I’ll never be afraid to think about it. No matter what anybody says, I’ll know the truth. You can’t help me, and nobody else can either.”

After dinner Selby returned jerry Goldbirn’s call. A secretary at the casino told him Mr. Goldbirn was in Aspen but would be back in his office the following afternoon. Would he care to leave a message?

Davey came in with the county map and spread it on the coffee table near the fire.

“I heard Shana shouting when you were in her room.” Davey looked at him, the flames reflected on his soft wavy hair. “Is she going to kill herself or something?”

Selby said sharply, “Where’d you get that idea? Did she say something to you?”

“Not about killing herself, dad, but she’s mad all the time.” He sighed. “Everything’s my fault, no matter what I do. Yesterday she cut a picture out of the sports page, the whole top of the page, and when I asked her about it, she blew up and told me to mind my own business.” He sighed again. “When I asked her if she wanted to shoot some baskets with Normie and me, she started crying and said she never wanted to see him again, or me either.” He said gloomily, “People who act... well, who act like that...”

Selby patted his son’s shoulder. “We’ve just got to be patient with her.” He paused. “What kind of picture did she cut out of the paper?”

“It was something about a sports car show, that’s all I saw... Did she remember anything about those diesels and railroad cars, dad?”

“No.”

“Well, if she’d ever cool off” — Davey pointed to the map — “we could ask her about this.” Davey traced a line on the map. “The Embryville road turns off at the Stoneville grade school. The night it happened, Stoneville had a soccer game with Upland Country. I know a guy there, Jimmy Cox, he’s in fifth grade, that’s how I know. I mean, I called him.”

“Yes?”

“Well, those kids playing soccer would have been yelling and screaming. It could’ve sounded like birds or something, couldn’t it, dad?”

“Sure. At a distance, it might have sounded like flocks of shrill birds. It’s worth checking...”

“Dad, do you really think Shana will be okay?”

“Of course I do, Davey.”

But the truth was that Selby wasn’t sure of anything now. He knew Shana was deeply afraid, deeply upset. He knew that, and not much else. And he didn’t know where to look for help, for the truth. And worse, he didn’t know where to turn his eyes to avoid it.

The next morning Selby put his father’s diaries in the car and drove to Muhlenburg and picked up the information Miss Culpepper had collected for him. A spinster with white hair and a straight back, Miss Culpepper and Sarah had been close friends. Selby had asked her to check the library for material relating to Harlequin Chemicals. Taking the request as a starting point, Miss Culpepper had put together a package of magazine articles (from Fortune and Time and Commentary and others) which embraced not only Harlequin and the Correll Group but touched on various publicly reported aspects of their relationship with the U.S. military and Congress.

Selby stacked the material on the rear seat of his station wagon and drove north out of Muhlenburg into the network of secondary roads leading toward Buck Run.

At the Stoneville school, three miles from the switching yards, he drove around the hockey and soccer fields. He traveled in widening circles then until he came at last to a road that cut through pasturelands and dead-ended on the White Clay Creek.

Twice that morning he spotted a dusty gray Ford on the road behind him. At a market outside Buck Run he bought a baked ham sandwich, a bunch of grapes and two cans of beer. The girl at the counter gave him some homemade horseradish in a twist of waxed paper. She recommended the barrel pickles her father put up. Selby said next time.

There were no cars at the gas pumps. A young man in jeans and a red wool shirt sat reading a paperback beside a rack of new tires.

“Not much business today,” Selby commented.

“Well, it’s early, truckers’ll be stopping by pretty soon for gas and lunch.”

“You do lube jobs?”

“Not much call for that, sir.”

“Take care,” Selby said and got into the station wagon and drove off. The gray Ford had been parked in the service garage beside the market, but Selby hadn’t been able to get a good look at the driver. It was a man with a newspaper in front of his face.

Selby stopped on the Buck Run road in the shade of a big maple tree and ate the ham sandwich with horseradish and drank one of the beers. The breezes stirred the leaves and blew them against his windshield where they stuck in yellow and brown patterns. A herd of Holsteins, black and white like huge dominoes, huddled together in the lee of a barn.

Selby watched the road behind him in the rear-view mirror. It was flat and empty and curved out of sight through a grove of black locusts.

Selby opened his father’s diaries and glanced through them. It was frustrating to study the cramped handwriting and not be able to wring some truth or significance from it.

The diaries were in three parts: the time in Korea, the time in the army stockade and hospital, and the time in California with his wife and Jarrell.

Three names were prominent in the Korean period: the chief, the major and a lieutenant named Kraager, all with the 916th Counter-Intelligence Section, a unit attached to the 7th Division. In the Chinese spring offensive, Jonas Selby mentioned the Kwach-on Reservoir, the retreat to Munsan-ni — the battle of the hills, the 1st Marines on Bunker Hill and the 3rd Division with Belgian and Greek Allied units on Big Nori and Kelly Hill... the 7th on the Triangle and a ROK Division on Whitehorse Hill.

It seemed unreal to drink beer on a dusty country road in Pennsylvania and read about those distant battles and to realize that the people living there now, farmers working the soil, children bicycling to school, had probably never heard of those place names coined by PR officers and war correspondents for American radio networks and newspapers. Arrowhead Hill and Heartbreak Ridge and Old Baldy — what did Koreans call them today?

In that phase there was evidence of a young man who had looked at the world in a wistful, innocent way. His father had listed the names of railroads and trains he must have ridden or seen or heard about — the Monon and the Nickel Plate, the Wabash and Southern Pacific, the Santa Fe, the Pennsy’s Broadway and the New York Central’s Twentieth Century. The “Q” (the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy) and the Boston and Maine’s Owl, the Baltimore and Ohio and the Erie and the Soo...

Jonas Selby had written down the words to The Legend of John Henry — “I’ll die with my hammer in my hand...” And John Henry’s shout of defiance to the steam drill — “How are you, Mr. Steam Drill? I’m talking to you.”

There were notes about cattle drives and railroad corrals — laments of young men — “The hills are all climbed, the creeks are all past...”

It seemed of a piece. Except why had his father copied out the words of The Bonnie Earl of Murray? “Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands / Oh where hae ye been? / They hae slain the Earl of Murray / And hae laid him on the green.”

But one thing was clear... Jonas Selby had been involved in something that frightened him. It was scattered throughout the entries over a period of several months. “I’ll pay for it — we all will.”

Then came Jonas Selby’s court-martial. And a one-word entry that read: “Nailed!”

The diary stopped there for almost five years. It resumed in the army hospital in Colorado, where he met his wife, Rita — Jarrell’s mother...

The Holsteins were drifting out from the shelter of the sprawling barn; the wind had eased off. Some were lumbering across the field toward Selby’s station wagon. Others were drifting down to the locust trees where the road curved out of sight.

That’s where the gray Ford must be parked, he guessed, just out of sight around the bend.

Having played violent games much of his adult life, Selby’s protective instincts had become honed to a fine, reflexive edge; his peripheral vision was automatic, and his awareness of his terrain was near-reflexive.

On offense or defense the rules were the same: if you didn’t have a healthy built-in paranoia you stood an excellent chance of winding up in a basket typing your memoirs with your nose, since it was computed that the energy created by a pair of two-hundred-pound men running into each other at full speed (coaches liked to mention this) could overcome the inertia of a twenty-ton block of steel and jolt it one full inch from the point of impact.

If you were blind-sided by that crunch, the physical penalties would be extreme, and they didn’t usually get you any sympathy. No one was sorry for fools, and if you weren’t paranoid about protecting yourself, that’s what you were, a damned fool...

He checked the rear-view mirror, started the car and drove away from the staring cows. At the first curve he floored the accelerator. The station wagon picked up speed rapidly and the tires raised a screen of dust behind it. At the first curve he cut the motor and coasted off the road into a hedge of beech trees. He could hear the sound of an approaching car in the country silence. When the gray Ford shot past, there was too much dust for him to see the driver, but he got what he wanted — the car’s license number. Thanks to that old acute football-field vision.

In Buck Run he stopped at a drugstore and called the insurance man Jay Mooney’s office. Mooney’s secretary told him Jay was at lunch but asked if she could help. Selby explained that someone had nicked his fender in a supermarket lot in East Chester but left only a license number on a piece of paper under his windshield wiper. No name or address. He asked her if she would find out who the driver was.

Mooney’s secretary said she would be glad to take care of it.

That evening Selby looked through the material he had collected from Miss Culpepper, trying to find the connection between Harlequin Chemicals and his father and brother. George Thomson (Tomaso) had started a garbage and waste recycling plant on the Schuylkill River years ago, but had sold the controlling interest to a conglomerate called the Correll Group. George Thomson had served in Korea. That was mentioned in several of the articles.

Harlequin Chemicals had grown and prospered enormously after its takeover by the Correll Group.

There were profiles of Simon Correll in Fortune and several other periodicals, detailing his wealth and entrepreneurial genius.

The Correll Group had offices in a dozen major cities and extensive ties to the major sources of power throughout the world, the military, of course, and energy, science and industry. A story in Newsweek mentioned that Correll often cited an incident in London involving a stricken dog and a blind woman as turning his energies to the world’s needs for more tranquil, more safe living spaces, more rational and sustaining human environmental systems, free of abhorrent and perverse chance.

None of it meant a damn thing to Selby, or related to what he was concerned with. At least so far as he could see...

He made himself a drink and stirred the fire. There’d been a fireplace in the house where Shana had been taken, a deer’s head over the mantel. The man had played loud music on a record player, he’d shouted at her and some of it seemed like poetry. She’d told the nurse that much...

The phone rang. It was Jay Mooney. “Dammit, Harry, why are you trying to screw me up? Don’t you know I can’t mess with those people at City Hall? I depend on those cops... every insurance man does... for accident reports, hit-runs, makes on plates, like you asked Annie for. That bull about getting your fender nicked could’ve got my ass nailed to the floor. Your story’s a crock. They wanted to know why I’m checking up on one of their own people, Lieutenant Gus Eberle. Harry? You still there?”

“Sure, Jay.” Mooney was a bit drunk, his words were slurred together, fused with righteous anger and whiskey. “So it was Lieutenant Eberle tailing me around,” Selby said.

“Didn’t you hear me? Eberle and Slocum run that shop, close, I can’t afford a hassle with them. Annie called the Motor Bureau with that plate number. I got a call back from Slocum, that’s right, the captain himself. He wants to know who’s running checks on Eberle and why. I lied, Harry. Told him Annie’d got a digit misplaced, that it was a mistake. You got to cover for me. Forget you asked us to check out that plate. Okay?”

“Sure, Jay. But I’d appreciate some background on Captain Slocum and Eberle first.”

“Some of it’s common knowledge, Harry. Slocum’s a mean sonofabitch. He’s rich, which should tell you something. Owns condos over in Avalon and a high-rise in Atlantic City. But look, Harry, I can’t get involved. You understand? Those people are real sons of bitches—”

Davey came in from the foyer with a large book that Selby recognized as a volume produced by the County Historical Society. As Davey knelt beside the coffee table and opened the book Selby said to Mooney, “Could we have lunch tomorrow?”

“I told you, Harry, I can’t get mixed up in this. You’re either a team player or a fink at the Hall. Oh, hell, know a place called the Bluebonnet on the Mercer Pike? Say around one o’clock?”

When Selby hung up, Davey said, “Can I show you something?”

He opened the book and flipped the pages. “I got to thinking while I was trying to sleep, dad. About tunnels. I figured a tunnel had to go under something, like the railroad tunnel near Doylestown, or under something like maybe sewers or something. But everything around here is wells. I mean, that’s where the water comes from, wells and those water rams. Right?”

Selby watched Davey turning the pages of the book. Smart boy. Only nine... “So, what did you find out, Davey?”

“A tunnel doesn’t always go under something. It could go over something, too. And then I remembered the bridge over the White Clay Creek. Look, dad...” He pointed to a faded black-and-white photograph. “It’s about five miles from the Stoneville school and it’s on the same road as the switching yards in Buck Run. I bet that’s the tunnel Shana’s trying to tell us about. What do you think, dad?”

“I think, Davey, I’ve got myself one smart kid. We’ll check it out.”