The End of the Night

Eight

By ten o’clock on Sunday morning, July 26, the provisional headquarters of the FBI team assigned to the Wolf Pack case had been transferred from Nashville to Monroe. The FBI had come into the case as a result of the previous kidnap-murder near Nashville. Several agents remained in the Nashville area locking up the details of that investigation. The Special Agent in Charge was Herbert Dunnigan, a tidy, tailored, rather nondescript-looking man with graying auburn hair and a very slight stammer. He arrived by plane at the Monroe airport along with four agents just twenty minutes before the three more agents he had requested arrived from Washington headquarters.

He took over three offices on the third floor of the Monroe National Bank Building, adjacent to the offices occupied by the small FBI staff resident in Monroe. He called in city, county and state law enforcement officials and made it quietly clear to them that he was in charge of the case. He requested their co-operation, and stated that any information released to the press would be released through him.

Herbert Dunnigan, as a roving specialist in kidnap cases, was the first to admit that this case was far outside the usual pattern of such crimes. No one was taking a cold risk for fat profit. This was like trying to shoot mad dogs.

And, in talking to the local officials, he had felt considerably less brisk and confident than he had sounded. Of late he had begun to feel that his public personality was like one of those movie sets where only the fronts of the buildings are erected. But the two-dimensional fronts were tilting and sagging in a high wind, and Herbert Dunnigan was racing back and forth, out of sight of the camera, strengthening the braces, tightening the guy wires.

He had gone into the bureau right from law school, back when it had seemed a bold and satisfying adventure. But over the years he had tired of both bureaucracy and violence. The criminals were always the same — vicious, stupid, subhuman. The victims were uniformly hysterical, or irreparably dead. The newspaper people were tiresome and repetitious. Violence had so little meaning. It was a little area of decay in the great soft body of society, a buildup of pressure, and then a gaseous belch.

By the time he had begun to question the wisdom of what he was doing with his life, there were Ann and the kids and the house in Falls Church and the increasing comfort of seniority, and the prospect of retirement. So he had accepted the nagging feeling of waste and boredom as a part of his life. When he was not on a field assignment, when he was working civil service hours in the Statistical Analysis Division, Domestic Crime Section, he had the time to make fine reproductions of Early American furniture in the tidy workshop in the basement of the brick house in Falls Church. Sometimes, as he worked, he thought of the other life he could have lived. In that life he was a lawyer in a small Southern city, working on civil cases and estate work, serving on boards and committees, taking an active interest in local politics.

He asked Sheriff Gustaf Kurby to wait in his temporary office while he made certain that his people were establishing the proper routines, setting up the communications net, analyzing the obsolete roadblocks, evaluating the police work already accomplished.

He went back and closed his office door and sat at his desk and looked at Sheriff Kurby. Another showboat sheriff, with the displaced ranch hat and the inlaid ivory grips on the inevitable .38 Special, and the big, bland, meaty, political face.

Dunnigan tapped the Sunday paper on his desk and said, “You took the ball and ran with it, Sheriff.”

“Murder day,” the sheriff rumbled. “Gus Kurby day.”

The big man looked indolent, smug, content. Dunnigan felt a sharp twinge of annoyance. “Are you as stupid as you’ve acted, Sheriff?”

Kurby shifted in his chair to face Dunnigan more directly. “Let’s have your professional opinion, mister.”

“Let’s assume these people can read. We haven’t made them yet. Now they read that a pair of hot-pants country kids can pick them out of a lineup, and those kids have given a detailed description. Let’s assume they have a little sense left. What do they do, Sheriff?”

“Kill the girl and bury her deep. Ditch the car. Split up and run.”

“You surprise me, Sheriff. Will you surprise me some more by admitting you’ve made a mistake?”

“No,” Kurby said. His eyes were unexpectedly shrewd and aware. “You come in with your slide rule and see one side of it, Dunnigan. It’s a good safe bet the girl was dead before the papers were on the street this morning. It would fit the pattern. Agreed?”

“I’ll go along with that.”

“A little over three months from now a hell of a lot of people in Meeker County are going to go behind the green curtains and pull the little levers. Kurby is a name they should remember, but you have to keep reminding them. They’ve got short memories. This will put me in for four more years, Dunnigan.”

“And if it’s at the girl’s expense?”

“Don’t look as if you tasted something bad. This will be a fifth term. I’m not a politician who happened to get to be sheriff. I’m a law man who has to mess with politics. This is a big county, Mr. Dunnigan. I’ve fought like an animal for a big budget. There isn’t a dime of it goes to waste. You won’t find a cleaner county in the state. Monroe has exploded way beyond the city limits. Satellite communities all over hell and gone. It’s all my baby, and I mean to keep on taking care of it, keeping the sharpshooters out, keeping the lid on. So I had to get to be a legend, sort of. Hell, that’s why that Craft kid called me. He feels he knows me. If some hungry boy beats me at the polls, the organization will be shot. He won’t know law work. I do. I’ve built up the finest lab this side of the state capital. This is one murder, Mr. Dunnigan. One stolen girl. There’s almost exactly a million people in Meeker County. So don’t use hard words unless you know the whole picture.”

“My job is to...”

“Hold it one minute. We aren’t so far apart in age. Let’s you hold it one minute and give a little thought to how you’d handle things if every four years you had to get voted back into your job by a lot of people who pay your budget out of taxes. Would that change the way you handle your job?”

Dunnigan looked at Kurby’s knowing grin and found himself liking the man, liking him very much. He grinned back. “Okay, Sheriff. It just shouldn’t be an elective office.”

“I could do a better job if it wasn’t. Now it’s your baby. I got in there, front and center, while I had the chance. Now anything you want, we’ll do our damnedest to do it for you, and do it right.”

Under Dunnigan’s direction, the investigation proceeded swiftly and logically. It was poor country for effective roadblocks. There were too many secondary and tertiary roads. It could be assumed that, through luck or cleverness, the Buick had slipped through one of the holes in the net. The possibility that they had holed up inside the roadblock area was not entirely discounted, but the chance was considered sufficiently remote to permit disbanding the roadblocks.

Scores of tips came in. The Buick, containing people matching the description, had been seen in forty different places, heading in every possible direction. These tips were reassigned to appropriate agencies to be checked out. As it seemed logical that the criminals might travel by night and hole up by day, state police in three states ran a motel and cabin check.

The autopsy on Crown was completed, showing that either the knife wounds or brain injuries were in themselves of sufficient gravity to cause death. Measurement of the abdominal wounds showed that a rather small-bladed knife had been used, a blade about four inches long and a half inch wide, with one sharp edge, possibly a switchblade.

Howard Craft and Ruth Meckler were brought in and questioned again by Dunnigan and his people. They had told their story so many times that the facts had begun to be obscured by fantasy. Through adroit questioning the known facts were isolated. Additional fragments of description were pried out of the memories of the young pair. A commercial artist, following the pair’s corrections and changes, tried to come up with pictures that would satisfy them. They were quite satisfied with the rendition of the husky one, and a little less satisfied with the drawing of the balding one with glasses. The other two would not come through. The two usable drawings were sent by wire transmission to thirty cities in the Southwest, with an urgent request for help in identification.

Of the dozens of photographs of Helen Wister available, Dunnigan selected the one he thought most satisfactory. The pictures were spread out on his desk.

“She is a beautiful girl,” Dunnigan said.

“A one-time queen of the Dartmouth Winter Carnival, I understand,” the agent standing at his elbow said. “A blond doll. With the faintly chilly look. A lady.”

“A lady in bad company. Use this one,” Dunnigan said. “Ask the wire services to use this one exclusively. Feature it. Get TV coverage. I don’t think anybody will ever see the lady alive again, but there is a ten thousand-to-one chance.”

When the Buick had braked hard, one tire had stubbed and chattered on the road, leaving, in black rubber, the distinctive tread pattern of a Goodyear Double Eagle, sharp enough to indicate low wear. It was not a tire that would come on the car, so either the owner had had the tires installed before taking delivery, or he had worn out the original set and replaced them. In any case, it was a potentially valuable clue.

In mid-afternoon the car was identified, almost beyond doubt. It had been stolen on Friday evening in Glasgow, Kentucky, from a bowling alley parking lot. It was a dark-blue ’59 Buick with low mileage, owned by a plumbing contractor. He had Goodyear tires installed before delivery. The car had been left unlocked, with the keys behind the sun visor. The plate number was put on the teletype circuits immediately, plus the more positive description of the vehicle.

Acting on emergency instructions, the Glasgow police made a street by street search of the area adjacent to the bowling alley, expanding the area until they found an abandoned red-and-white Chevrolet with Arkansas plates, the car which matched the description of the one involved in the Nashville killing.

Specialists went over the car with great care. The steering wheel and door handles had evidently been hastily wiped clean. The car had been driven hard and far and fast, with the oil at too low a level. The bearing surfaces were badly scored, the car sluggish and noisy. There was half a fresh thumbprint on the rear-vision mirror. In the rear ash tray were several cigarette butts clotted with a heavy, dark-red lipstick. There was an empty tequila bottle under the front seat with many prints smeared and overlapping, and a few relatively distinct ones. A small smear of lipstick on the neck of the bottle matched the lipstick on the cigarette butts. Wedged in the front ash tray was an empty folder of book matches from a motel in Tupelo, Mississippi. An agent was sent immediately to Tupelo.

By eight o’clock on Sunday night, Herbert Dunnigan went to the Grill Room of the Hotel Riggs for dinner, accompanied by a young agent named Graybo.

Dunnigan felt weary but reasonably content. “It’s beginning to unravel,” he said.

“There’s still no identification.”

“There will be. We’ll find out where the Arkansas Chev was stolen, and we’ll find the Ford wagon they took from that tile salesman, and that’ll give us a little more, just like the Chev did. And the motel in Tupelo will give us a little more, I hope. And when we make one of them, we’ll get a lead to the others, and then we’ll know all of them.”

“Do you think they’ve split up, sir?”

“Perhaps. But I don’t think it will make any difference in the long run. Somehow I don’t think they have.”

“Why not?”

“They’ve taken crazy chances. They think they’re invulnerable. Maybe one will get nervous and drop off. I think we’ll take them in a package.”

“It’s all so... pointless.”

“It’s all for kicks, Graybo. Four misfits. Unbalanced people, full of hostility. Something tipped the lid off. Maybe an accident. Maybe the tile salesman was an accident. And that set them off. From then on, what could they lose?”

“That was back last Tuesday, sir. And they’re still out there. It’s funny to think of them out there tonight. I wonder what they’re like. I wonder what they’re saying to each other. Unless we can get them — they’ll do something else.”

“Probably.”

“So that means there’s somebody walking around not knowing he’s going to run into those four.”

“You’ve got an active imagination, Graybo.”

The young agent colored. “I was just thinking out loud.”

“Don’t apologize. Imagination can be valuable. Police work can take you only so far. Then a good guess can be worth all the rest of it.”

“Sir, are you going to be able to talk to Kemp?”

“Who? Oh, the boy friend.”

“He’s been hanging around all day.”

“It won’t do any good. I... I guess I can spare the time.”

An agent named Stark came swiftly toward the table. Both men looked alertly at him as he sat down. “Bert, I think we’ve made the burly boy. Phoenix came through. We’ve got a good correlation on two print classifications, but it’ll take visual comparison to check it out. They’re wiring a mug shot we can check with the kids. He’s small-time. Ninety days last year for assault. Robert Hernandez. Unskilled laborer. The only thing that doesn’t seem to match up is the age. He’s only twenty, but Phoenix says he looks older. No address of record. No record of other convictions.”

“It sounds good enough so I think we should go ahead right now and check it out with the regional Social Security office and get...”

“I started that ball rolling, Bert.”

“Good enough!”

An hour passed before Dunnigan remembered Dallas Kemp. He checked and found out that Kemp was still waiting, so he had him brought in.

When Dallas Kemp finally met Herbert Dunnigan, he felt a sharp sense of disappointment which he hoped was not apparent to Dunnigan. Kemp was shrewd enough to realize that — perhaps through the conditioning of television and its all-wise, all-powerful heroes — he had expected to meet some sort of father image, some idealized, personalized version of law and order radiating supreme confidence.

But this was a rather clerical-looking man, not large, obviously weary, obviously troubled. He had an indoor pallor, nicotine stains on his fingers. The slight suggestion of a stammer contributed to the impression of ineffectualness.

“Sit down, Mr. Kemp. I c-can’t give you much time. I suppose you want reassurance. About the only assurance I can give you is that we’ll take them. Sooner or later. I don’t know what that’s worth to you.”

Dallas Kemp sat in the chair beside the desk. He sat down slowly. Ever since it had happened he was aware of performing all physical acts slowly and carefully. He felt as though any hasty movement would destroy his control, and he would fly into small pieces, or begin yelling and be unable to stop.

“You see,” he said, “we quarreled. The last time I saw her, we were scrapping.” He paused. “That isn’t what I meant to say to you.”

“I can see how that makes it worse for you.”

Kemp felt grateful to the man. He hoped the tears would not flood his eyes again. They were always there, a slight stinging sensation — always in readiness.

“I’m an architect.”

“I know. A good one, I’ve been told.”

“I like form and order. Grace and dignity.” He looked at his large hands, flexing the long fingers. “I can’t fit what’s happened into any frame of reference — into anything I know, Mr. Dunnigan. I guess I wanted to see you because I want to be told everything is going to be all right. I guess you can’t tell me that.”

“I could, but what would it mean?”

“I want to do something. It’s been twenty-four hours. I can’t just wait and wait. I want to be given something to do. Something that will help.”

“This isn’t a movie, Kemp. No chance for the hero to outwit the bad guys and rescue the girl. You have to wait. We all have to wait.”

“Do you know anything at all? Is there anything you know that you can tell me?”

Dunnigan hesitated, then handed Kemp a picture. It was on unusual paper, limp, glossy, yellowish.

“This is one of them,” Dunnigan said. “The two kids made a positive identification.”

The photograph was composed of tiny lines, as on a television screen. Some of the fines had not printed properly, but the face was clear enough, two shots, full face and profile.

It was a beast face, empty, unreachable, merciless.

Kemp tasted the sickness in his throat as he swallowed. “This — is one of them?”

“They beat and kicked and stabbed a stranger to death, Kemp. For no reason. What would you expect one of them to look like?”

“I... don’t know. Like this, I guess.” He handed the picture back. He smiled. It was a grimace of tension, not a smile. “There isn’t much Helen... or anybody could say to that kind of a person. She’s so outgoing. I’d thought that... if she had a chance to talk to them... but...”

“Get hold of yourself!”

“I... thanks.”

“It’s been twenty-four hours, Kemp. There’s no point in trying to kid you. Pray she’s alive. Pray they’ve kept her alive. They might do that. But if we get her back alive, she won’t be in good shape. Face that at least.”

“All right. But... damn it, it’s such a jungle thing. It’s out of the dark ages. A thing like that shouldn’t happen to her.”

“In this day and age? Because we’ve got plastics and television and tailfins and charity drives? Human nature doesn’t change, Mr. Kemp. There’ll always be animals around, walking on their hind legs, looking just like you and me. You could have gone your whole life understanding that. But now you’ve had your nose rubbed in it.”

The phone rang. Dunningan picked it up and put his palm over the mouthpiece. “All we can do is wait,” he said. “Try to get some sleep.”

As Kemp closed the door behind him, he heard Dunnigan say, “Too bad, George. That lead sounded good to me too.”

It was a hot weekend over most of the country, with no news of any special interest to compete with the Wolf Pack story. Routine drownings and traffic deaths and drab political announcements, national and international.

There had been mounting interest and coverage of the story prior to the Crown murder and the Wister kidnaping. The pump was primed. The Monroe violence had the proper ingredients — a slain, unsuccessful suitor, a wealthy and beautiful blonde abducted, a woman in slacks wielding a knife, a country road, eyewitnesses.

And so, suddenly, it was BIG. There was a lot of Page One space to fill. A lot of air time. A lot of television time. A lot of people aching to get into the act.

Any fool could look at a map of the country and trace a line from Uvalde to Tupelo to Nashville at Glasgow to Monroe. Tuesday through Saturday. And any fool could project that line into the densely populated Northeast and make a guess — as good as anybody’s — as to where they were going. Newspapers featured that map — and pictures of Helen Wister.

Look out for the Wolf Pack. Keep your eyes open. Look for the car.

In summer the crazies are in full bloom. Helen Wister was seen in Caribou, Maine, tied to a tree, being whipped by three burly men. A motorist, too frightened to stop, reported this. Helen Wister was seen in Miami, being forced, weeping, into a motel on the beach.

Three boys in Danville, Virginia, taking a short cut to a swimming hole, did find a dead blonde. But she was two weeks dead, and she had been half again as old as Helen Wister. It was a local problem.

Over thirty neurotic, semi-psychotic women presented themselves to police authorities across the country, claiming earnestly to be Helen Wister. The eldest was in her seventies. Once upon a time she had claimed to be Amelia Earhart.

The insane avalanche of false clues made the isolation and investigation of the potentially valid ones almost impossible. Hysterical types demanded police protection. Mystics and visionaries knew exactly where to find the Wolf Pack.

In the city of Monroe, all day Sunday, the idle boobs rode around in their cars, gawking. They gawked at Arnold Crown’s service station, and bought until the underground tanks were empty. A police guard kept them from turning into the driveway of the Wister house, or parking in front. They would park as close as permitted and get out and stare at the house. Some worked their way around to the lawn behind the house, trampling the flowers. A few parked and stared with endless, empty, idiot patience at Dallas Kemp’s office and living quarters. But by far the favorite spot was the place on Route 813 where Crown had been killed. Two accidents occurred, one serious, where you turned off the pike onto 813. They parked up and down the road for two hundred yards in both directions. They climbed up into the sagging barn and looked out. They took hay as souvenirs, and grease-streaked grass out of the ditch, and fist-sized stones. “Hey, Mary Jane, maybe this was one of the rocks they clunked him with, hey?”

Finally one too many climbed into the loft, The barn sighed and sagged, slowly at first, as the women went shrill with terror, and with a gentle rending sound and a thumping of timbers, it collapsed. A three-year-old named Walter James Lokey III was crushed to death. There was one broken back, eight broken legs, three broken arms, several less important fractures, and dozens of sprains, bruises and abrasions. Ambulances howled through the noonday heat. A police guard was posted to keep people away. But throughout the afternoon they kept coming and trying to steal splintered pieces of the barn.

At midnight on Sunday, Dr. Paul Wister sat alone in the kitchen of the silent house. His mind moved slowly, aimlessly, heavy with misery. He asked the eternal, unreasonable Why — and there could be no answer. He had given his wife sedation. He envied her the loss of awareness.

The kettle boiled. It boiled for some time before he became aware of it and got up and fixed himself the cup of instant coffee. Paul Wister did not look at all like the public conception of a fine surgeon. He was a big man, with a heavy torso, a large head, big reddish, chapped-looking hands. He moved ponderously, somewhat awkwardly. His eyes were a clear, impenetrable porcelain blue. He had a clipped way of speaking, a rusty, abrupt, shocking guffaw of a laugh. Those who did not know him thought they detected something comical about him, a Colonel Blimpishness, a slowness of mind. Those who knew him well — and there were very few — knew of the sensitivity and the dedication and the subtle, ranging mind. They knew that the pseudo-military brusqueness was his wall against a trivial world. He had to be a strong and tireless man to be able — for example — to work steadily for eight hours, repairing all the miraculous intricacies of a human hand, making it useful again, something that could hold, grasp and turn. He was a devout man, respecting the living materials that yielded to his skills. The big red hands, clumsy with cups and keys and neckties, were steady and quick and certain under the bright, hot lights of the operating room. His hobbies — for which he had too little time — illustrated the textures of his mind. He collected jade, and his knowledge of it was encyclopedic. This had led him into a study of the history of China and the Chinese peoples. He had learned the twenty thousand basic, symbolic ideographs of the printing style, used from the third century until the Communist revision of the language in 1956, and he had translated early poetry into English, two volumes of which had been published by a university press under a nom de plume. And he had kept abreast of the literature and technical advances in his profession. His energies were vast.

He sat in the kitchen of his home and thought about his daughter. He was a realist, a man of sentiment without sentimentality. He saw how easy it was to abuse himself for not giving her more of his time, yet it would have been artificial and unsatisfying to have done so. The relationship had been loving and good. He knew that genetically and emotionally they had had good luck with her, and he knew that luck is a factor with children. The twin boys were going to present far more serious problems.

Yet, realist that he was, he could not completely ignore the superstitious feeling that in some way he was at fault. This was his small ship, and he was captain, and someone had been lost, so it was his fault. Paul Wister knew that life is an almost excessively random affair. Health and love and safety are not earned. They are not rewards for behavior. They are part of the luck that you have or you don’t have. When you have it, in your blind human innocence you think you have earned it. And when it is gone, you feel you have offended your gods.

He sipped the steaming coffee and he thought of the things that had happened to others — so abrupt, so cruel, so meaningless. The Stallings family. Ard Stallings had been head of surgery at Monroe General. A lovely wife named Bess. Two teen-age children, a boy and a girl, bright and popular. For them it was as though a wall had suddenly been breached, releasing disaster. Ard had been walking in the woods with Bess. A stray bullet, never traced, had struck his right hand at a devilish angle, inflicting maximum damage. Paul Wister had operated three time, nerve grafts, muscle transplants. But he could not put the cleverness back. That had been the beginning. The boy was driving back from a dance with his date. A truck driver fell asleep. The boy and his date were killed. The truck driver suffered a sprained wrist and superficial lacerations. Bess had a cervical biopsy, a diagnosis of malignancy. Radical surgery was too late. It had spread. The only good thing about it was its speed. She died in a hard, dirty way, but it was quicker than most. Father and daughter went away. They were fleeing from disaster, but it was their appointment in Samarra. Their turismo left the highway in the mountains east of Mexico City. Ard Stallings was thrown clear. The girl died with the other passengers. Three months later, in the basement of the house in Monroe which was listed with the real-estate people, Ard injected himself with a lethal dose of morphine. He left no note. There was no one to leave a note for. From the time the bullet struck his hand until the night of his suicide, it was only thirteen months. It was as though there had been a magic circle around them, protecting them. And when the bullet struck, the circle was gone, and the blackness came in upon them. They were gone as though they had never existed. People clucked and shook their heads. Terrible bad luck for those folks.

You could ask a man of God about it, Paul Wister thought. You could ask Why. would say it is God’s will. He would speak of a pattern we cannot see or understand. So do not try to understand. Just accept.

This, he told himself, is the ultimate sophistry. Life is random. Luck is the factor. The good and the evil are struck down, and there is no cause to look for reasons. There is a divine plan, but it is not so minute and selective that it deals with individuals on the basis of their merit. Were that so, all men would be good, out of fear if nothing else. Those unholy four could have gathered up a tart in front of a bar. They happened to take Helen. It was chance. No blame can be assessed. And any living thing is the product of a series of intricate accidents — 46 chromosomes in each living cell — the stupendous roulette wheel of fertilization. So even as a man cannot accept the cold knowledge that all his uniqueness, all his magical identity, is the product of chance, he will not accept disaster as the other side of the casual coin. He must look for a pattern. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. He gave Helen her special identity, her soul, her heart, the shape of her mouth, in a random genetic pattern. And He can take it away through another accident, and in that sense it is an offense against Him to demand in a puny and indignant way that any pattern be made clear, or even to demand that there be a pattern, discernible or not.

He thought about his daughter as the coffee grew tepid. Obviously she had jumped or fallen from the moving vehicle. Laymen believe serious injury comes only when the brittle integrity of the skull is cracked. But far more deaths occur when the skull is intact. The brain is a jelly, massively supplied with blood. A hard blow, as against an asphalt road, can do many fatal things. A few small subdural bridging veins can be torn by the abrupt movement of the mass of the brain within its bony carapace. The small subdural hemorrhage can grow slowly, exerting increasing pressure until in turn that pressure closes off other small veins by compressing the thin walls. When the dwindling supply is stopped, those starved portions of the brain die, and slowly death comes to that portion which controls the heart or the lungs.

Perhaps, he thought, if it happened that way, that would be the best thing for her. As the slow pressure built, she would be like a person drugged. She could not know what was happening to her.

He had thought of her as the Golden Girl, and he had been able to reach beyond the demands of his parental pride to see that she was a special thing in the world, a prideful, honest girl, with faults mat time would cure — such as her sometimes infuriating stubbornness, and her rather obvious rudeness toward pretentious people, and her extreme patience with those empty ones who demand of you your time and your attention, and waste it, thus wasting and spending the only truly valuable thing in life.

Though his emotions recoiled from the thought with an almost explosive anguish, he could accept the cold supposition that she was already dead. It was a hellish waste. But life had a habit of wasting the best of itself.

He rinsed the cup and turned out the lights and walked slowly to the bedroom, unknotting his tie as he went. He paused, quite surprised, just inside the bedroom door and said, “What are you doing up, honey?”

Jane Wister, in a pale-gray robe, sat in the chaise longue near her dressing table. It was a big room, a bedroom-sitting room, with space for her desk, comfortable chairs, a shelf of his books, a big glass door that opened onto a miniature terrace.

“I guess you didn’t give me enough.”

“How long have you been awake?” he asked, walking over to her.

“I don’t know. A half hour. Maybe more.” Her voice was listless.

“What are you doing? What’s that you’re looking at, Jane?”

She made a childish, instinctive effort to cover what she held with her hands, and then handed it to him. It was a folder of photographs, made like a visible file index, with overlapping glassine slots for the pictures. She had several of them, each covering different parts of their lives. This was all of the children.

He sat on the arm of the chaise where the light was better, and flipped it open at random to a picture. It was in color. Helen, a knobby twelve, stood with another girl, grinning and squinting into the camera. They each held tennis rackets and, in prominent display, tiny trophy cups.

“Remember?” Jane said. “They spelled Wister wrong on her cup when they had it engraved later. Wester, they had it. And she was furious.”

He closed the folder. “Why do this to yourself, honey?”

“I lay there, remembering everything. So I got up... to look at these. That’s all. I just wanted to look at them. I haven’t looked at them for a long time, dear.”

“Don’t do this to yourself.”

“She’s smiling in every one. You never had to tell her to smile for the camera. You never had to tell her.”

“Jane, Jane, Jane.”

Her face twisted. It was an expression like anger. She closed her hand into a fist and she struck her husband on the thigh as she said, “She was so joyous! So damn joyous! When she was little, even. She’d either be laughing, or so mad she was purple. And always running. No whining, no sulking. She was...”

And then she was beyond words. Dr. Wister dropped the folder on the floor and held his wife in his big, strong, clumsy arms. He could not comfort her. He endured the awkwardness of his position until the first storm of her anguish had passed and she had exhausted herself.

He went to the bathroom and brought her back another capsule and a glass of water. Her face looked stained and gray under the light.

She hesitated. “Will this put me so far under you won’t be able to tell me if... they find out anything?”

“No. I can wake you easily,” he lied.

“Are you going to take anything? You should sleep too, darling. You look terribly tired.”

“I took one,” he said, lying again.

She took the capsule and drank half the water. He put the glass aside and took her hand and helped her up. He took her robe and she got into bed. He bent over and kissed her on the forehead. He prepared slowly for bed. He went over and stood by her. She was breathing slowly and deeply.

“Jane,” he said softly. She did not stir. “Jane!” he said in a louder tone. There was no response. He went to his dressing room and put on a robe and went back to the kitchen and turned on the burner under the kettle. It was nearly two o’clock.

While Dr. Wister sat in the kitchen of the house where his wife and his sons slept, Dallas Kemp sat at the drafting table in his studio, working, driving himself. He and Helen had planned that after they returned from the wedding trip, they would live at his place. And then, in a year or two, they would begin to build a place of their own. They had talked about the kind of house they would like, an enclosure for their love.

“I’ll make like a difficult client,” she had said to him. “Light and space and air, yes. But I don’t want to be on display. I don’t want people gooping in at me. I don’t want a huge place, because I’ll have to be taking care of it, and I can only mop so many floors before I begin to feel futile. But I want a part of the house to have... scope. A big feeling of space. And I want part of it to be... cozy. Isn’t that a hell of a word? And I want it to be a place where children can romp, but also where they have their own place, shut off but not too much. And it better be sort of flexible, because once I start having kids, I might like it well enough to have scads.”

“How about materials?”

“Oh, nice things to touch and look at. Rough, hairy textures. Wood and stone and stuff. I want to be able to hang a pot in the fireplace and sit on the floor. That’s what I don’t like about a lot of these glossy, new houses, made of miracle plastics and things. They’re not sit-on-the-floor houses. See? I’m a difficult client.”

“Difficult? You’re impossible.”

“You’re the bright architect. Whip me up a dream, boy.”

Ever since they had talked, he had been working out the problems in the back of his mind. He decided that a hillside house would be best. The hill should be abrupt, but not necessarily high, and overlooking an emptiness of vista where nothing could suddenly rise up and stare in at them. Then, with glass, he could give her all the light and sun and space she craved, and with a big cantilevered deck in front of it, nobody could stare up into the house.

After he had left Dunnigan’s temporary office, he had gone home and started to work, sketching front and side elevations, balling them up and discarding them until he was close to what he wanted. He had secretly located a two-acre hillside tract south of the city and had paid thirty per cent down and signed a mortgage deed for the balance. It was to be his wedding present to her.

Now he was working on the floor plan. The house would be on three levels. He knew it was good. When he worked on something good he got a special feeling in the pit of his stomach. This could be a gem. This could be the best thing he had ever done.

He worked with a special dedication, a unique intensity. Without bothering to clarify it in his mind, he felt that it was an affirmation. If he worked well enough, and hard enough, then they would one day live together in love in this place taking shape and form on his drawing board. If he did not do it well, she was lost forever. It was his incantation, his offering. It was the only thing he could do which would bring her back. She would have to come back to a place so special. Any other outcome was inconceivable.

And so, deep in the fury of concentration, he was not quite sane. But he was using himself utterly, and that was all he could do.

A bright, round, flawless sun came up out of the Atlantic on the twenty-seventh day of July. An enormous and stationary high pressure area covered all of the Northeast and the Middle Atlantic states, and reached as far west as Illinois. Vacationers congratulated themselves on having selected that segment of the summer which included these perfect days. Those whose vacations were over wished they had waited. Those who had not yet gone, hoped the weather would hold.

The newspapers which thudded against front doors and were stuffed in rural tubes, dropped in heavy bundles on street corners, inserted in store-front racks, yelped and thumped and yammered about the Wolf Pack. The early commentators said, with mock regret, that the criminals were still at large. On buses and subways, over breakfast tables and lunch counters, around office water coolers and factory Coke machines, the nation talked about the Wolf Pack and Helen Wister.

“It’s a terrible, terrible thing. Her poor parents. — If a guy was going to steal him a blonde, he couldn’t do better, hey, Barney? — Mark my words, when they capture those fiends, they’ll find they have been drinking alcohol, Mary. — You know, that’s the kind of deal Bugsie would pull, he had the nerve. — This is another example of the accelerated decay of public morals, gentlemen. — The broad with the knife, that’s the one for me, Al. I go for the mean, gutsy ones. — You can’t tell me it wasn’t all planned between her and those thugs. I’ll bet you she paid them to kill that boy friend of hers on account of he was blackmailing her with that architect. Had enough money, didn’t she? Didn’t put up any fight, did she? Well?

The sun climbed high and bright toward noon. Four hundred and thirty miles north-northeast of Monroe, up in the western end of the state of Pennsylvania, was the small resort community of Seven Mile Lake. The whole south shore of the lake was a long strip of tawdry honky-tonks — ice-cream stands, boat rentals, shooting galleries, lunchrooms, cabins, cottages, beer joints. It was the height of the vacation season. Jukes whined and thumped. Boats roared up and down the lake, towing water-skiers. The pebbly beaches were half paved with the baking, simmering flesh of the sunbathers. Squalling children dropped ice cream in the dust.

In the middle of the commercial area were the Lakeshore Cottages, managed this season by Joe Rendi and his wife, Clara. They handled the rental of the cottages and operated the small ice cream and sundries store at the roadside, on a percentage basis. Joe got up, surly as usual, at eleven. He went down the street for breakfast and then walked slowly back to the store. There were no customers at the moment. Clara was washing glasses.

“What the hell was the night bell last night?” he demanded.

“You heard it? You mean you really heard it? Tanked on beer so bad you snore like a walrus couldn’t sleep in there too, and you heard it?”

“Cut the goddam comedy. What was it?”

“I rented number four, that’s all.”

He sat down heavily on the stool and stared at her. “Oh, great! Oh, fine and dandy and nifty! You rented number four. Bully for you! And tomorrow comes those people for all the way up to Labor Day and a hunnert twenny-fi dollars a week and a fifty-dollar deposit we got already and you can say sorry, we’re full up.”

“So you’re so smart, why didn’t you get up?”

“It wasn’t so hot, I’d clout you in the mouth one, Clara.”

“If you’re so smart, how’d you get us stuck in a deal like this, working like a dog all summer and for what?”

“So the take is little, so you cut it down.”

“So I increase it, wise guy. Somebody has to get smart around here.”

“So how do you increase it?”

She straightened up with her hands on her hips. “One night only. He swore it. I believe him. Just before dawn, he rang the bell. Two couples, he said. Twenty-five bucks, and they’ll leave tonight, he said. It don’t go on the books, Joe. This one is all ours. I’ll clean it up before the Shoelockers get here tomorrow. Honest to Christ, stop looking so confused. And don’t think you’ll get aholt of that money. You can twist my arm right the hell off, and I won’t tell you where it is.”

“Suppose they don’t get out?”

“He said they would. A nice-talking fella, he is. I had him sign a card. He didn’t want to look at number four first. I tore up the card already. So what skin is off you.”

“They better get out,” Joe said darkly.

“They will! They will! They will!”

“So stop yelling at me, can’t you?”

“Go fix the lock on number eight. It’s loose. All it needs is a screw driver, and they can’t do it themself for some reason.”

Joe Rendi walked by number four on his way to fix the lock. A dark-blue Buick was parked close beside the side steps, heading out. The blinds were closed. The place looked very still. What a way to use a vacation, he thought. Drive all night, sleep all day. Twenty-five bucks is twenty-five bucks. She could have got thirty, maybe.

It was one of the big cottages. There were six big ones and eight little ones. The big ones had a sitting room, bathroom, screened porch and two bedrooms and a tiny kitchen in one corner. The little ones had but one bedroom. They were old, flimsy frame cottages, dressed up for summer in new paint — bright yellow with bright-blue trim and red front doors.

Number four was silent throughout the long, hot day. Children yelped in the dusty areas between the cottages. Insects keened in the afternoon heat. The noise of fast boats was unending.

Later, as the dusk deepened, neon came on, up and down the strip, and day noises faded as the night sounds began.

At eight-thirty, when it was dark, Joe Rendi got nervous about number four. He strolled back there, wondering if he would have to remind them of their promise to check out. He stared, turned and hurried back to the store.

“Hey, they’re gone!” he said.

“Who’s gone, stupid?”

“The people in four.”

“They said they’d go, din they?”

“Yes, but...”

“Go to Schiller’s, see can you buy a box of sugar cones off that robber. I’m almost outa cones here.”

“Okay! Okay!”

“Now who’s yelling? Here’s two dollars. Don’t stop for a beer.”