Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 18, No. 5, May 1973

The Girl in the Penny Arcade by Donald Olson

Compassion, frequently one’s ruling emotion, may also coincidentally reveal a personal vulnerability.

Under the roller rink a string of refreshment booths, reeking of popcorn, hamburger, beer, and similar amusement park essences, opens upon a promenade lined with green benches. Estelle Thurman, sitting with her husband on one of the benches, has observed that cotton candy is by far the most popular of the gastronomic horrors sold at these booths and she chooses to regard this frothy confection as a symbol of universal longing, a promise of delectable enjoyment which, like life itself, melts all too quickly into nothingness.

This is not the sort of notion she would dare impart to her husband; Guy is not what you would call a man of thought and that musing look on his face cloaks nothing deeper than a gross wistfulness as he watches the cute young girls in hip-clinging jeans parade upstairs to the roller rink, from which is issuing visceral music of a generation Estelle makes no pretense of understanding.

Behind them is the penny arcade and beyond that, the rides; in front of them is the lake ringed with flares that will be lighted at ten o’clock. The annual fireworks display has been advertised for the same hour although Estelle, from past experience, knows this is a lie; greedy for every holiday nickle it can squeeze from the crowd, the park management will not climax the day’s events until midnight at the earliest.

Over Guy’s protests, they will remain, because only by preserving these rituals of the past can Estelle pay homage to the memory of little Barry. Even now her copper-colored eyes search among the children, picking out a thatch of blond hair, a pug nose, a slightly faun-like pair of ears that remind her of her dead son.

Her first glimpse of the girl interrupts this morbid preoccupation, for compassion is the ruling emotion of Estelle’s nature and the pitiful appearance of the girl makes an immediate impression on her. A certain blankness of expression and timidity of movement, and the way she holds one skinny arm before her as if feeling her way among unseen obstacles, suggest the girl might be blind; but then a youngster crosses her path waving a candied apple and the girl pauses, her gaze following the bright bobbing object, and Estelle decides she is not blind but merely defective.

Sloppy huaraches, a sleazy green blouse and pink corduroy slacks give the girl the look of a refugee from some natural disaster who has dressed herself out of a Red Cross grab bag and now wanders dazed and forlorn among throngs of the dispossessed, looking for someone to whom she might belong. Indeed, she seems to be tagging along behind a family group who may or may not be aware of her but who pay no attention as she stands gaping while they munch hot dogs at one of the counters.

Estelle soon loses sight of her in the crowd and is left to ponder the injustice of a child as bright and winning as Barry having to die when the world is so full of hopeless ones.

“I’m tired of this place,” Guy says, getting up. “Let’s move around.”

The lake is dismally uninviting in the grayness of dusk, so they wander up to the penny arcade where the musk of sweating youth and the shelves of junky unattainable prizes and the slam-bang clamor of blinking, popping, rat-a-tat-tating games of chance do not offend Estelle, for this was Barry’s favorite haunt on those Fourth of July excursions. There’s the sharpshooter game he loved to play, the iron hand that tested his strength, the wax medium who told his false fortune, the booth where he mugged for two-bit snapshots which even now are enshrined among a dozen other photos in Estelle’s purse, her precious pictorial record of Barry’s ten years on earth.

Between the machines of chance, Estelle glimpses the strange girl’s face once more, pale, rapturous, framed by lank ribbons of dirty brown hair.

“I’m going to the Men’s,” Guy says with a nudge, telling her to wait there for him. She nods absently, all her attention focused on the girl, who is now lingering over one of the machines. Estelle moves closer. It’s the machine displaying slick-skinned smiling faces of film stars, male and female, which will pop out, autographed, at the insertion of a coin and the pressing of a button.

The girl fishes out a coin and slides it into the machine, pushes a button. Nothing happens. No picture drops into her waiting hand. Once more she presses the button, and again, and finally, trembling with frustration, she paws at the glass-shielded faces with white bony fingers.

Furious, Estelle rushes forward to help.

“Let me try, dear. This the one you want?”

Close up, the girl’s eyes remind Estelle of a flowering plant called Job’s Tears that bloomed in her grandmother’s garden, bluer than violets but somehow sad-looking, perhaps because of its name.

Estelle jabs the button with no better results. Truly angry now, she sets her purse on an adjoining machine and, literally embracing the photo machine, she tries to shake it into action, the world once more reduced to symbolic terms: helpless victim against evil management.

My gosh, she thinks, maybe the kid used the wrong coin. She reaches for her purse — and finds it gone. Three laughing nuns jam her against the machine and not until they’ve passed does she realize that the girl, too, is gone.

When Guy comes back he finds Estelle quizzing the family the girl had been following. The woman answers lackadaisically, wary of this frail copper-eyed woman who has cornered her in this bedlam, but the small girl pipes up: “She ain’t with us. We don’t even know her.”

The man says, “Saw her down by the rink. Some goofy teenager.”

Guy demands an explanation; she tells him what happened.

“What do you mean, took it? Grabbed it out of your hand?”

“I set it down for just a—”

“Are you nuts? In this place?” Yet he seems maliciously pleased with what happened. “Feeling sorry for every freak you see, good, hope it learns you a lesson. Well, come on, might as well report it. Fat chance it’ll do any good.”

“All Barry’s pictures. Every one. Oh, Guy, I’ve got to get them back. I can’t lose them. They’re all I’ve got left.”

His reply is lost in the noise of the crowd and, anyway, she is crying too hard to hear.

In the following days she grieved for the loss of the pictures almost as intensely as she had grieved for the loss of the boy himself, all her energies absorbed by the emotion to the point where she could handle only minimal household duties. Together with a mind-wilting heat wave, this freshness of grief quite immobilized her and she would sit in the swing on the front porch gazing sightlessly over the unwatered boxes of geraniums and petunias to the empty street, over which the maple leaves seemed to cast shadows as thick and black as boiling-hot tar.

Then a strange and disconcerting thing happened. As she sat there one afternoon listlessly fanning herself with an unread magazine, she saw the odd girl from the penny arcade, dressed in the same shabby clothes, trudging down the street toward the house.

That the girl should pop up in this neighborhood filled Estelle with confusion and foreboding. Her first impulse was to scurry inside and lock the door, and this was such a strong impulse she would surely have yielded to it had the girl not by now come close enough for the object in her hand to be recognized. The purse!

Suddenly giddy, Estelle had to grip the chain from which the swing was suspended and cling tightly to it as she watched the girl come down the sidewalk and up to the porch, where she stood looking up at Estelle with those vivid, empty, flower-like eyes.

“You’re the girl in the penny arcade, aren’t you?” was all Estelle could think to say. The girl nodded.

“You’ve brought the purse back.” Estelle slowly released her grip on the chain. “Well, that was nice of you. Very nice. You’d better come up here out of the sun before you melt.”

Obediently, the girl came up onto the porch and sat down beside Estelle on the swing, but this proximity was somehow unwelcome to Estelle; she was not quite ready for it and she got up, saying, “You must be parched. I’ll bet a glass of ice-cold lemonade would just hit the spot. Be back in a jiffy.”

The girl hadn’t spoken a word, and though she looked perfectly harmless sitting there on the swing, Estelle remembered the vanishing act in the penny arcade. “I’ll put the purse inside.” When she moved to take it, the girl hugged it to her thin chest. Estelle laughed uncomfortably. “Okay. Lemonade first. Thanks for guarding it so well. My husband swore I’d seen the last of it.”

No recriminations seemed the best way to handle it. All that mattered was that she get it back.

She brought out a pitcher and two glasses and some glazed doughnuts. The girl hadn’t moved. This time, Estelle sat down in the green wicker chair. The girl raised her glass to her lips.

“My poor geraniums,” said Estelle conversationally. “I guess they need a drink, too.”

At this, the girl would have poured her lemonade into the flower box had Estelle not stopped her with a startled cry.

“They don’t like lemonade. Too acidy. I’ll water them later.” She tried to keep her eyes off the purse pressed snugly against the girl’s hip. “You haven’t told me your name. I’m Estelle Thurman.”

The girl reached into her pocket and handed Estelle a very grubby-looking card. It said: I am mute. Nothing more; no name, no plea for funds. The utter simplicity, the cruel baldness of the message quickened Estelle’s sympathy.

“I’m so very sorry, dear. Would you like some more lemonade? And don’t be afraid of the doughnuts.” Having said this, she was at a loss. Of course it occurred to her, not being a complete simpleton, that the girl might be a phony, and yet she wouldn’t really have cared one way or another, being the sort of person who looks beyond the obvious trickeries for those shadowy sick impulses of the soul that prompt them; in other words, the possibility of deceit did not undermine her compassion but only added an element of melancholy to it. If it were all a trick, she would play along.

“You’re a dear precious child for finding my purse and bringing it back to me. I’m going to give you a reward!”

She watched for some answering signal of complicity, but the blue-flower eyes were unreadable, the eyes of a born spectator, remote and uninvolved.

Once more Estelle jumped up and went inside, and when she came back she held a ten dollar bill in her hand. “See? Like I said, a reward. May I have the purse now, please?”

The exchange was made. Estelle settled back and then, realizing she had been sweating like an invalid with a high fever, she swabbed delicately at her forehead and eyelids with a handkerchief.

Victory was brief; the instant Estelle opened the purse to put the handkerchief away she saw that the album of pictures was not there. The money was there, astonishingly, as were the cosmetics, a receipted gas bill, pen and memo pad, a roll of candy, credit cards — but not the pictures.

She tried to smile at the girl. “There was a little white leather album, you must have seen it. Pictures of my little boy who died. Now, honey, you may not understand, but those pictures were very precious to me. More than the money or anything else. I must have them back.”

Holding her glass in both hands, like a child, the girl drained the last drop, then sucked on a sliver of ice.

“Did you see the pictures, dear?”

She nodded, her expression still not so much solemn as remote.

“Do you have them with you?”

The girl calmly sucked on the ice. Estelle began to sweat; her face grew red. “Goodness me, I’m beginning to think you’re a naughty little blackmailer, honey.” Her voice developed an edge, sharp but not cutting. “Okay, then. If you insist on victimizing a poor mother who’s lost her little boy, I suppose there’s nothing I can do about it. The way of the world, alas.” This plaintive lament was lost on the girl. Estelle took out five dollars. “Here. Take this, and give me the pictures.”

The girl didn’t move, not even an eyelid. Estelle quivered with rage. Tears stung her eyes. “You take it. You take this money and give me back my pictures. Give them back — or I’ll go right in the house and call the police.”

To her dismay, the girl instead drew the ten dollar bill from her pocket and held it toward Estelle. Estelle gasped. “I don’t want that! I gave you that. Because I thought you were a good, decent, honest girl. That was a reward. But it’s the pictures! It’s Barry I want back. They’re all I’ve got left. Please, please give them back.”

The girl upended the glass but the last piece of ice stuck to the bottom and wouldn’t slide down into her open mouth. That horrid feeling of giddiness was taking possession of Estelle again and she knew she ought to go in and take a heart pill, only she didn’t dare let the girl out of her sight.

“Tell me the truth. Do you have the pictures?”

This time the girl shook her head, but too quickly. Was she lying? There was no way to tell.

“Then who has them? Tell me—” but that was absurd; the girl couldn’t tell her anything. A sudden inspiration; she opened the purse and took out the little gold pen and memo pad. “Here. Write it down. Who has my pictures?”

The girl picked up the pen and wrote something. Estelle grabbed the pad.

“Dominus? Someone named Dominus has my pictures?”

A quick nod, and this time Estelle was positive she detected a trace of slyness. Oh, it was all too maddening. Her head began to ache and the lemonade which had tasted so refreshing going down seemed in danger of coming up again. She was afraid she was going to be sick in front of the girl, and with a murmured apology, rushed inside to the bathroom.

When she returned to the porch the swing was still gently rocking back and forth, but it was empty. The girl was gone.

Estelle had to lie down after that; with tight-shut eyes she reflected upon the encounter and the depths of human iniquity; extortion, kidnapping, murder — the world was full of it. War, cancer, and broken shoelaces; death and despair, and all you’re given is a choice of miseries. Paralyzed by hopelessness, she felt needles of terror doing curious things to her heart. Once she gave a convulsive jerk, sensing that someone had entered the house.

Someone had, but it was only Guy. “Where the hell’s supper?”

“What?”

“Supper. Din-din. The evening meal, dopey.”

Was it that late? Had she dozed? “Guy, listen. The funniest thing happened. Look. I got my purse back.”

He examined it carefully, as if it couldn’t possibly be the same one. She told him the circumstances of its return and all about the missing pictures, a detail that seemed to please him, if anything. A beast would have shown more sympathy toward its own mate.

“You got the important things back, so quit moaning. And put some grub on the table, will you? I’ve got to go out tonight.” He was an insurance salesman and made frequent evening calls.

“Please, Guy. Not tonight.”

“No choice.”

“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”

“What are you scared of? The big bad wolf?”

She didn’t know what she feared. The funny way her heart was acting; the storm that wouldn’t break; some phantom of the unforeseen lurking in the bottom of the night? Fear is as undefinable as love and must be taken on faith.

“Dominus,” she murmured, for she could not get that peculiar name out of her mind. “Have you ever heard of a name like that?”

“If you’d ever studied anything besides cake-mixing you’d know it was Latin, stupid. Means master. Lord or master. Like I’m your dominus, see? So hightail it into the kitchen and get busy.”

The idea of spending the evening alone was so intolerable she called Maggie Dakin, one of her neighbors, to come and sit with her.

“Sort of queer, seems to me, honey,” sly Maggie hinted. “All this night work. Thought the newer fellows had to do that.”

“I really don’t know.” Estelle had never thought about it. Since Barry’s death her emotional resources had been expended entirely upon his memory. It would not have been too great an exaggeration to say that Guy had been sacrificed, in a manner of speaking, in order to give Barry’s ghost what substance it had.

Dissatisfied with so vague a response to her feeler, Maggie probed no further into the subject of Guy’s domestic truancy, and finding Estelle’s manner too withdrawn for even the most casual exchange of gossip, she soon made up a story about having a pie in the oven and quickly escaped.

Which is how the setting sun looked to Estelle, rather like a juicy pie, swollen and bubbly, which had been left in the oven too long and was in danger of running over. The streets were empty, as if everyone were hiding less from the heat than from some impending calamity. The storm, when it broke, would come as suddenly as the bursting of a concealed bomb. Left alone now at the mercy of her own unbalanced affections, Estelle longed for that explosion.

The laundromat was a dreary, dilapidated hole in the wall, last surviving enterprise in a defunct shopping center in a decaying section of town. Estelle went there only because it was the nearest one to home. Tufted with whiskers of green grass, the parking lot was littered with great chunks of broken asphalt. Inside the laundromat, half the machines were broken, the lavatory dirty, the walls a pattern of cracked plaster, and the sour air as repugnant to Estelle as the ragged scandal tabloids littering a cigarette-burned table beside a tom orange couch. Nor were the patrons, transients and hippies mostly, any less depressing.

She was pleased to find only one other person there, but when she saw who it was she nearly dropped her bundle of laundry. It was the mute girl!

This time Estelle could think of nothing to say, no suitable word of reproach or recognition. The girl seemed not to expect one and yet she didn’t appear at all surprised to see Estelle. She might almost have been expecting her this night.

No indeed, thought Estelle, I shan’t say a word. Two can play the same game. So she proceeded to load her laundry into a machine without addressing a single word to the girl. When that was done she sat down on the orange couch and pretended to read one of the tabloids, but all the while it was as if she were waiting for something to happen. When it did, she seemed to know it without lifting her eyes from the print; she could sense the girl’s distress and, though she struggled not to respond to it, she looked up.

The girl’s machine had stopped before its cycle had hardly begun and the wretched child stood looking at it in a state of hopeless confusion.

Well, too bad, thought Estelle. That was my first mistake and I’m not about to repeat it.

Yet her heart was not made of stone and she was constitutionally incapable of ignoring someone in trouble? She tossed the paper aside and got up.

“For goodness sake, child, take them out and put them in another machine. That’s all you have to do. This one’s given up the ghost. Here, I’ll help you unload it.”

Not until she had pulled several wet garments from the machine — dungarees and T-shirts mostly — did she notice something odd. With a violent shudder, she dropped what she was holding. It was spattered with bloodstains.

She looked sharply into the girl’s face and found it still as remote as the dark side of the moon. In a faint voice she said, “Put them in another machine,” adding, almost automatically, “you’d better use more detergent.”

Estelle would have fled from the place at once had her own laundry not been thrashing away inside another machine. As it was, she went to the door and stood looking out into the ill-lit parking lot. How far away the nearest houses looked; they might have been on another planet. Her heart was working like a bad engine, racing, then sputtering as if about to stop, then recovering with ugly throbbing pulsations.

Never in her life had she been so relieved as when she saw a pair of headlights coming toward her across the parking lot, even though the vehicle itself when it came into view was hardly prepossessing — a battered van, its peeling green paint enlivened with wildly-painted flowers, stars, and symbolic designs she couldn’t interpret.

The driver, an even less prepossessing sight, jumped down and strode cockily into the laundromat. He was black-bearded, young, wearing sandals, dungarees, and a blue tunic open upon his hairy bare chest where a silver medallion glittered under the fluorescent lights.

What happened next brought on a seizure of giddiness worse than any Estelle had yet suffered, for the man walked straight up to the girl and whispered something to her. The girl started making hand signals in that language of mutes which had always fascinated Estelle but which now merely sharpened her anxiety.

The man turned and looked at Estelle.

When he came toward her, she backed against the plate-glass window, one hand sliding up to her throat. He smiled as he approached, raising his hand in what was obviously some sort of occult gesture of greeting.

“I am Dominus,” he said, as if confirming something he assumed Estelle already knew.

Her eyes flitted toward the machine, knowing it hadn’t completed its cycle. She tried to appear unperturbed.

“Sorry about the pictures.” His voice was as compelling as those wild dark eyes.

“Pictures?”

He laughed. “Pictures she crooked from your bag.”

“Oh. Those pictures. Yes. Well...” Then, refusing to be cowed by a pair of hippies, she straightened her shoulders. “She said you have them.”

He caressed his beard. “The myth of property causes all our hassles.”

“But they’re nothing to you. Didn’t she tell you? They’re all I’ve got left of my little boy. Every picture I had of him. Every likeness.” She tried without success to keep the emotion out of her voice. “Please. May I have them back?”

He shrugged. “Okay by me. But she’s the one. Listen, Estelle — okay if I call you Estelle? — this kid’s got a real bummer of a hang-up. Well, you know that.” He leaned toward her, so close the touch of his beard on her cheek felt like a tiny electrical shock. His tone was archly seductive. “She’s got this weird thing about photographs. Collects ’em. Thousands. Crooks ’em, buys ’em, anything. It’s freaky, Estelle. They’re more real to her than people. You know why?”

She shook her head.

“Because they can’t talk. They’re like her. Mute.”

Estelle remembered the look on the girl’s face in the penny arcade, the anguish, the way her fingers pawed at the photos behind the glass. Sick, sick...

“But if she has so many, what would those few matter?”

“They all matter. Every one of ’em. She feels safe when she’s with ’em.” His hand, dry and warm, and hairy like an animal’s, pressed hers. “Would you swap?”

“Swap?”

“She might do that, you know. You got another photo?”

“Another? No.”

“Aw, come on, Estelle. You must have one of your husband.”

“No.” It was the truth, she didn’t. “Not a one.”

“That’s tough.” He deliberated. “Hey, listen. I’ve got an idea. My camera’s in the van. A picture of you in exchange for the others. Okay?”

His manner was so playful she couldn’t be afraid of him. She even giggled. “Ransom?”

His eyes flickered; he gave her a mock villainous scowl. Guy would never believe all this. “Your pictures are at the farm. We’ll take you back with us.”

“Oh, no. Don’t bother. You can send them.”

He wouldn’t listen to her arguments, and when her laundry was ready he insisted on putting it in the dryer for her. “We’ll have you back here by the time it’s done.”

“But I can’t just go off and leave it. Someone might steal it.”

He gave her a coaxing smile. “Chance it, Estelle. For the pictures.”

When they were ready to go she made one last attempt to assert herself. “I’ll follow in my car. I certainly can’t leave it here.”

“It’ll never get through them back roads, Estelle. Look at the gook on this crate of ours. Up to the windows. Come on, baby, be a sport. Quicker we get started, quicker you’ll be back.”

Insane, to leave her laundry and her car and go off into the night with these weird creatures, and it was awful being shut up in the back of the van on a campstool, no idea where she was, no idea where she was going. She kept telling herself not to worry. They were just kids, really; wild, maybe, and the girl was a bad case, no doubt about that, but nothing actually bad could happen. Not this close to home.

Presently she felt the van lurch off the road; branches scraped the sides.

When they stopped, Dominus turned and spoke to her for the first time since they’d started. “You can get out here, Estelle. It’s a good place to take the picture,” he said.

“Is this the farm?”

“Almost.”

“Can’t we wait till we’re there?”

“Now, do like I say, Estelle.” He got out and opened the side door and reached for her hand.

When she saw that he was holding an honest-to-goodness camera she relaxed somewhat, but they were in the wilderness, not a light to be seen, nothing but underbrush and overhanging trees and croaking frogs. It smelled dank and the ground was oozy like a swamp. She stepped gingerly as he drew her away from the van and deeper into the trees. She began to cry, at first soundlessly, then with bursting, frantic sobs.

“Now, cut that out, Estelle, baby. You want your picture taken blubbering like an idiot? Course not. You stand right there, okay? Right up against that big ole tree.”

Estelle looked toward him but he was only a dark blur, and then, so unexpectedly that she cried out, the flashbulb exploded, splashing the trees with moon-colored light. After that she couldn’t see a thing, not even a shadow; she didn’t know he was anywhere near her till his hands, dry and warm, and hairy like an animal’s, touched her throat.