Chaingang

6

WATERTON

Mary Perkins, only half-awake, first wondered if it had all been a bad dream, hoping that it had and she'd be able to shake herself out of this darkly imagined history. But the knowledge that it was real, Sam being missing, came and enveloped her in its cold arms, and she shivered, reluctantly getting out of bed, and struggling into her housecoat.

It was not cold enough to turn the heat on yet, but the October night air had turned chilly, and she went to the bathroom, peed, looked at her badly tousled reflection, and drew the bedroom curtains open. She was still in their house at South Main and Park, and her husband was still gone.

Her reflection in the bathroom mirror had been no help. Normally Mary Perkins was an extremely attractive woman, but at that moment, in her eyes she closely resembled the Bride of Frankenstein. Her hair was standing straight up, as if shocked by a mad scientist, and sans makeup, she looked wan in the rude light. The rumpled sheet she'd clung to in the night had impressed deep sleep lines into her face, and they crisscrossed the right side of her cheek and forehead like ancient knife scars.

One morning—it would be a week tomorrow—Sam had taken a shower, dressed in his charcoal suit and red and black rep silk tie, eaten a nonbreakfast of half a glazed donut, a juice glass of OJ, four cups of coffee—black—and, suitably caffeine-wired, had kissed her and headed out the door. Presumably for work.

That was last Friday morning at roughly seven twenty-five A.M. He was invariably the first one there. Myrna Hyams, the elderly receptionist-secretary, was always on time at eight-thirty, when the office would officially open for business.

Sam was successful as only you can be when you're the “real estate man” for a small agri-community. His was, in fact, one of only two local agencies, and he'd just finished putting together an incredible deal for several of the local farmers. He was a great provider, well liked by all, and his health had been generally excellent.

But the preceding Friday morning he'd left the house, driving down Main, northbound, turning left on Maple Avenue and going around behind the block of buildings in which Perkins Realty was situated between Ed's Gulf Station and P.J. Thatcher's State Farm office, and parked their car. Somewhere between the time he'd locked the car door and started to unlock the back door of his office, Sam had disappeared.

She'd called the office, worried, when he hadn't returned home that evening, and got the standard recording. She went over and asked Owen Riley's wife, Alberta, would she mind running her down to see if Sam was working, late and had forgotten to call? She saw the office dark, assumed he'd become involved in a deal somewhere, and had Alberta run her back home. But when he hadn't shown up by ten-thirty, she was on the telephone calling the police and every hospital within fifty miles.

A guy out East she didn't know, someone named Lenny who'd gone to school with Sam, had phoned and left word for him to return the call. She didn't tell the caller anything.

She phoned the Waterton chief of police, Marty Kerns, at home. Tried the regional highway patrol unit out at Satellite J. Called all over town, phoning everybody she could think of. Nobody had seen Sam that day.

Around midnight Myrna Hyams's party line cleared up and Mary learned that Sam had never made it in to work.

“Myrna, how is it you never called the house to ask if he was ill?” she'd asked, rather more pointedly than she'd intended.

“I just assumed he was out showing properties or something. And then when he hadn't shown up by late afternoon, I did try to phone, but your line didn't answer."

“I'm sorry, Myrna. I went to get groceries about three-thirty."

“So I just assumed maybe he'd had to run you somewhere or something. I guess I did wrong. I should have called—"

“No. That's perfectly—"

“I should have called back. Did you call the hospitals?"

“It was the first thing I thought of. He's probably okay. I better get off the line in case he'd try to phone. I'll let you know if I hear anything. You do the same, okay?"

“Sure, Mary. I will. Call me when you find out something. Please?"

“Course I will. Sorry to phone so late. I'll let you know."

The women hung up. Neither of them had thought to mention—was Sam's car out in the parking lot? Later Myrna would admit that she'd stayed so busy with paperwork, she never thought to look around for his vehicle. In the morning the police noticed his car, and it became an official investigation.

Saturday and Sunday Mary Perkins had stayed close to the phone. But when he was still missing on Monday, she started reaching for straws: phoning the FBI for one thing, and then getting in the car and starting her own hunt.

By midweek she'd been everywhere she could think of, asking around, asking friends, casual acquaintances, Sam's beer-drinking buddies of old, anyone she could think of who might have remembered seeing Sam on Friday morning. She stopped in every merchant's on North Main: First Bank of Waterton, O'Connor Motors, the doctor's office, Judy's Cafe. She went back down South Main to Wilma's and Joe Threadgill's and Dale's Tires. Nobody had seen Sam.

Mary had worn out her welcome with the local cops, and she could tell Marty Kerns hadn't learned a thing. The FBI had blown her off, and everybody else sort of shrugged and said—"We're doing everything we can. He's gone up in smoke and we can't figure out what happened to him."

After six days of it, she was very tired and very worried. She'd slept “like the dead,” as her deceased mother used to say, and yet she felt as if she'd been up for thirty-six hours straight. Exhausted, red-eyed, and sick to her stomach with fear, she picked up the phone and called her old boyfriend.