Looking for Rachel Wallace

29

By seven thirty the next morning I was on the road. I had a flashlight in my hip pocket, a short prying tool stuck in my belt, my packet of floor plans in my shirt pocket, and my usual jackknife and gun. Susan kissed me goodbye without getting up, and I left without hearing any more wildebeest remarks. I walked up Marlborough to the Mass. Ave. Bridge along a quiet and narrow lane, one plow-blade wide, with the snow head-high on either side of me. Below the bridge the Charles was frozen and solid white. No sign of the river. Memorial Drive had one lane cleared in either direction, and I turned west. I had learned to walk some years ago at government expense when I had walked from Pusan to the Yalu River and then back. I moved right along. After the first mile or so I had a nice rhythm and even felt just a trickle of sweat along the line of my backbone.

It was shorter than I thought. I was on Trapelo Road in Belmont by ten forty-five. By eleven I was standing two houses away from the English place, across the street. Now if I found Rachel Wallace, I wouldn’t have to walk back. The cops would drive me. Maybe.

The house was three stories high. Across the front was a wide veranda. A long wing came off the back, and at the end of the wing there was a carriage house with a little pointed cupola on top. Mingo probably parked the family Caddies in the carriage house. There was a back door, which led through a back hall into the kitchen, according to Julie. Off the back hall there were back stairs. The veranda turned one corner and ran back along the short side of the house, the one without the wing. Big french doors opened out onto the library, where I’d talked with English before. The yard wasn’t as big as you’d expect with a house like that. Last century when they’d built the house there was plenty of land, so no one had wanted it. Now there wasn’t and they did. The neighbor’s house was maybe fifty feet away on one side, a street was ten feet away on the other, and the backyard was maybe a hundred feet deep. A chain-link fence surrounded the property, except in front, where there was a stone wall, broken by the driveway. There was no sign of the driveway now and very little of the fence in the high snow. It took me nearly two and a half hours of clambering about through snowbanks and side streets to get all of the layout of the grounds and to look at the house from all sides. When I got through, I was sweaty underneath my jacket, and the shoulder rig I was wearing chafed under my left arm. I figured it was better than walking ten miles with the gun jiggling in a hip holster.

There were people out now, shoveling and walking to the store for supplies, and a lot of laughter and neighborly hellos and a kind of siege mentality that made everyone your buddy. I studied the house. The shutters on the top-floor windows were closed, all of them, on the left side and in front. I strolled around the corner and up the side street to the right of the house. The top-floor shutters were closed there, too. I went on down the road till I could see the back shutters.

I knew where I’d look first if I ever got in there. That was the only detail to work out. Julie had told me there was a burglar alarm, and that her mother had always set it before she went to bed. Going in before Mom went to bed would seem to be the answer to that. It would help if I knew who was in there. Mingo, probably. I saw what looked like his tan Thunderbird barely showing through a snowdrift back by the carriage house. There’d be a maid or two probably, and Momma and Lawrence. Whoever was in there when the storm came would be in there now. There were no tracks, no sign of shoveling, just the smooth white sea of snow out of which the old Victorian house rose like a nineteenth-century ship.

I thought about getting in. Trying the old I’m-from-the-power-company trick. But the odds were bad. English knew me, Mingo knew me. At least one of the maids knew me. If I got caught and they got wise, things would be worse. They might kill Rachel. They might kill me, if they could. And that would leave Rachel with no one looking for her the way I was looking for her. Hawk would find her eventually, but he wouldn’t have my motivation. Hawk’s way would be prompt though. Maybe he’d find her quicker. He’d hold English out a twenty-story window till English said where Rachel was.

I thought about that. It wasn’t a bad way. The question was, How many people would I have to go through to hang English out the window? There were probably at least five people in there—Mingo, English, Momma, and two maids—but the whole Vigilance Committee could be in there sharpening their pikes for all I knew.

It was two o’clock. Nothing was happening. People like English wouldn’t have to come out till April. They’d have food in the pantry and booze in the cellar and fuel in the tank and nothing to make winter inconvenient. Did they have a hostage in the attic? Why hadn’t there been some kind of communication? Why no more ransom notes or threats about canceling the books or anything? Had they been snowed out? I didn’t know any of the answers to any of the questions, and I could only think of one way to find out.

At two fifteen I waded through the snow, sometimes waist-deep, and floundered up to the front door and rang the bell. If they knew me, they knew me. I’d deal with that if it happened. A maid answered.

I said, “Mr. English, please.”

She said, “Who may I say is calling?”

I said, “Joseph E. McCarthy.”

She said, “Just a moment, please,” and started to close the door.

I said, “Wait a minute. It’s cold, and we’ve had a blizzard. Couldn’t I wait in the front hall?”

And she hesitated and I smiled at her disarmingly but a bit superior, and she nodded and said, “Of course, sir. I’m sorry. Come in.”

I went in. She closed the door behind me and went off down the corridor and through a door and closed it behind her. I went up the front stairs as quietly as I could. There was a landing and then a short left turn, then three steps to the upstairs hall. Actually there were two upstairs halls. One ran from front to back and the other, like the cross of a capital T, ran the width of the house and led into the wing hall.

I had the general layout in my head. I’d spent most of my time in front of yesterday’s fire looking at Julie’s diagrams. The stairway to the attic was down the hall in a small back bedroom. The house was quiet. Faintly somewhere I could hear television. There was a smell of violet sachet and mothballs in the small bedroom. The door to the stairs was where it should have been. It was a green wooden door made of narrow vertical boards with a small bead along one edge. It was closed. There was a padlock on it.

Behind me I heard no hue and cry. The maid would be returning now to say that Mr. English didn’t know a Joseph E. McCarthy, or that the one he knew wasn’t likely to be calling here. I took my small pry bar from my belt. The padlock hasp wasn’t very new, and neither was the door. The maid would look and not see me and be puzzled and would look outside and perhaps around downstairs a little before she reported to English that Mr. McCarthy had left. I wedged the blade of the pry bar under the hasp and pulled the whole thing out of the wood, screws and all. It probably wasn’t much louder than the clap of Creation. It just seemed so because I was tense. The door opened in, and the stairs went up a right angle, very steep, very narrow treads and high risers. I closed the door and went up the stairs with hand and feet touching like a hungry monkey. Upstairs the attic was pitch-black. I got out my flashlight and snapped it on and held it in my teeth to keep my hands free. I had the pry bar in my right hand.

The attic was rough and unfinished except for what appeared to be two rooms, one at each gabled end. All the windows had plywood over them. I took one quick look and noticed the plywood was screwed in, not nailed. Someone had wanted it to be hard to remove. I tried one door at the near end of the attic. It was locked. I went and tried the other. It opened, and I went in holding the pry bar like a weapon. Except for an old metal frame bed and a big steamer trunk and three cardboard boxes it was empty. The windows were covered with plywood.

If Rachel was up here, she was back in the other room at the gable end. And she was here—I could feel her. I could feel my insides clench with the certainty that she was behind that other door. I went back to it. There was a padlock, this one new, with a new hasp. I listened. No sound from the room. Downstairs I could hear footsteps. I rammed the pry bar in under the hasp and wrenched the thing loose. The adrenaline was pumping, and I popped the whole thing off and ten feet across the attic floor with one lunge. There was saliva on my chin from holding the flashlight. I took the light in my hand and shoved into the room. It stunk. I swept the flashlight around. On an iron-frame bed with a gray blanket around her, half-raised, was Rachel Wallace, and she looked just awful. Her hair was a mess, and she had no make-up, and her eyes were swollen. I reversed the flashlight and shone it on my face.

“It’s Spenser,” I said.

“Oh, my God,” she said. Her voice was hoarse.

The lights went on suddenly. There must have been a downstairs switch, and I’d missed it. The whole attic was bright. I snicked off the flashlight and put it in my pocket and took out my gun and said, “Get under the bed.”

Rachel rolled onto the floor and under the bed. Her feet were bare. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs, and then they stopped. They’d spotted the ruptured door. It sounded like three sets of footsteps. I looked up. The light in this room came from a bare bulb that hung from a zinc fixture in the ceiling. I reached up with the pry bar and smashed the bulb. The room was dark except for the light from beyond the door.

Outside, a woman’s voice said, “Who is in there?” It was an old voice but not quavery and not weak. I didn’t say anything. Rachel made no sound.

The voice said, “You are in trespass in there. I want you out. There are two armed men out here. You have no chance.”

I got down on the floor and snaked along toward the door. In the light at the head of the stairs was Mingo with a double-barreled shotgun and English with an automatic pistol. Between them and slightly forward was a woman who looked like a man, and an ugly, mean man at that. She was maybe five eight and heavy, with a square massive face and short gray hair. Her eyebrows came straight across with almost no arch and met over the bridge of her nose. They were black.

“Give yourself up,” she said. There was no uncertainty in her voice and certainly no fear. She was used to people doing what she said.

From the dark I said, “It’s over, Momma. People know I’m here. They know I was looking for Rachel Wallace. And I found her. Throw down the weapons, and I’ll bring her out and take her home. Then I’ll call the cops. You’ll have that much time to run.”

“Run?” Momma said. “We want you out of there and we’ll have you out now. You and that atrocious queer.” Mingo had brought the shotgun to the ready and was looking into the room.

I said “Last chance,” and rolled right, over once, and came up with my gun raised and steadied with my left hand. Mingo fired one barrel toward where I had been, and I shot him under the right eye. He fell backwards down the stairs. English began to shoot into the room—vaguely, I guess in the direction of my muzzle flash, but panicky and without much time to aim. He squeezed off four rounds into the dark room and I shot him, twice, carefully. One bullet caught him in the forehead and the second in the throat. He made no sound and fell forward. He was probably dead before he landed. I saw Momma start to bend, and I thought she might keel over, but then I realized she was going for the gun, and I lunged to my feet and jumped three jumps and kicked it away from her, and yanked her to her feet by the back of her collar. There was a little bubble of saliva at the corner of her mouth, and she began to gouge at my eyes with her fingers. I held her at arm’s length—my arms were longer than hers—and looked down at Mingo in a tangle at the foot of the stairs. He was dead. He had the look. You see it enough, you know.

I said, “Mrs. English, they’re dead. Both of them. Your son is dead.”

She spat at me and dug her fingernails into my wrist and tried to bite my arm. I said, “Mrs. English, I’m going to hit you.”

She bit my arm. It didn’t hurt, because she was trying to bite through my coat, but it made me mad. I put my gun away, and I slapped her hard across the face. She began to scream at me. No words, just scream and claw and bite and I hit her with my right fist, hard. She fell down and began to snivel, her face buried in her son’s dead back. I picked up English’s gun and stuck it in my pocket and went down the stairs and got Mingo’s shotgun and jacked the remaining shell out and put that in my pocket and went back up the stairs.

Rachel was standing in the doorway of the room, looking at the carnage and squinting in the light. She had the gray blanket wrapped around her and held with both hands closed at the neck.

I walked over to her and said, “Okay, Jane Eyre, I got you.”

Tears began to run down her face, and I put my arms around her, and she cried. And I cried. In between crying I said, “I got you. I got you.”

She didn’t say anything.