Manhunt. Volume 1, Number 12, December, 1953

The Insecure by R. Van Taylor

She was there in the house when — one by one — her family began to disappear.

Kay had finally gone to bed. But sleep was impossible. She lay there in the darkness of the bedroom, wide-eyed, listening for the sound of the car, for the metallic click of a key in a lock, for the sound of his voice. All she heard was the ticking of the clock which seemed in a panic to unwind itself.

She snapped on the bed lamp.

It was after two.

She looked across at Joe’s bed. The emptiness of it was unreal. Unreal — that was the word for the entire night. It were as if this night had been cut loose from its moorings of simple, routine, everyday reassurances and had drifted away from her, leaving her stranded in a void of frightening questions and increasing uncertainty.

She had to do something.

Of that much she was certain.

She got up and slipped into a robe, then tip-toed to the door of the nursery.

The sight of a six-year-old son and a baby girl of sixteen months were reassuring things. Comforting things. Solid stepping stones across a night that had turned into quicksand. She tucked the blanket carefully about Judy. At the side of Mike’s bed she picked up the Mars Special — a battered veteran of many solar flights.

Strange, she thought. When we were children we were afraid of reality and escaped into a world of make-believe. And then, we we grew to be adults, we built a dike about our world of reality, and when a break appeared in that dike, fear flooded in.

She returned to the bedroom and went to the blinds and opened them. She looked at the Davis home across the way. As this feeling in her grew she covered her shoulders with her hands as if to ward off the cold.

Abruptly she cast off the last shackle of indecision. She went back to the bed and reached for the phone on the stand. She dialed. In a moment, through the blinds, she saw a light come on in the house next door.

A man’s voice answered.

Then she said, “Frank, this is Kay. I hate to bother you but I’m worried about Joe. He hasn’t come home.”

“Hey! That’s no good, is it?” Frank said.

“I can’t imagine where he could be. I kept dinner on the table until nine. I... I kept thinking that if he had to work late he would call me, but he never did. Finally I called the office, but I didn’t get any answer.”

“Imogene and I will come over,” Frank said.

“No, you don’t need to do that,” Kay said. “It’s just that I don’t know what to do.” Her hand tightened on the phone. “I thought about calling the hospitals, but if he had been in a wreck they would have been sure to find his identification and notify me.”

“We’ll be over in a minute,” Frank said. He hung up.

Kay replaced the phone. The phone. There was something solid. A direct line to reality. And the Davises. Good friends. Sandbags. Sandbags with which to repair the dike.

Frank and Imogene arrived in less than five minutes, Frank with his pajama tops stuffed into his trousers and Imogene with a housecoat wrapped over her nightgown.

“Kay, dear!” Imogene said, putting her arm around her. “Why didn’t you call us sooner?”

Kay tried to smile. “Well, I... I kept thinking he would come in.”

“You poor thing. I know you’re just worried sick.”

“One thing we can be sure of,” Frank said, grinning too much. “We know he’s not out with another woman — not with the kind of homework he’s got.”

“Not funny, Frank,” Imogene said. “Kay doesn’t need bum jokes; she needs help. Think of something.”

“I’ll tell you, Kay,” Frank said, “I could go out and look for him, but it would be pretty pointless. There’s just no place you can look for a fellow like Joe. I’m not trying to scare you, but I think maybe it would be a smart move to call the police. Why don’t you let me do it?”

Kay felt herself tense. Frank was talking sense, of course. It was simple and obvious. And yet, she felt a hesitation that she did not fully understand. Perhaps it was because once that she called the police she would be admitting to herself that her existence was insecure.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll call them.”

“Frank can call them,” Imogene said. “Let’s you and I go back to the kitchen and put on the coffee pot. The children all right?”

In a minute or so Frank came back to the kitchen and told them that the police were sending someone. Then they sat around the kitchen table and drank coffee and talked about everything except what was important. In less than thirty minutes two uniformed policemen arrived. Frank brought them into the kitchen and poured them coffee. They were polite men with trained efficiency. The one named Monohan asked the questions.

Missing person’s name? Joseph W. Scott... Age, 34. Height, 6'1". Weight, 185 pounds. Brown eyes; dark brown hair. Occupation, Industrial Engineer. Employer. Last seen wearing. Driving car, license...

“Happily married?” Monohan asked.

“Very,” Kay said.

“Has Mr. Scott seemed worried about anything recently?”

“No.”

“Does he usually carry large amounts of money on him?”

Again Kay felt the cold wind when there was none. “No,” she said.

As Monohan and the other policeman left, he told her that they would notify her the moment they had any information. He was enough of a realist that he did not mention the trite advice of not worrying and Kay appreciated this, because realism was what she felt she needed. She needed every solid thing she could grasp.

“There’s no use of you staying any longer,” she told Frank and Imogene. “Thanks — thanks so very much for what you’ve already done.”

“Chin up,” Frank told her.

“If you need anything, call,” Imogene said. “I’ll be home all day tomorrow. Come over, if you wish. Or, I’ll come over here.”

“I’ll be all right,” Kay said.

“It will work out okay,” Frank said. “Chances are that we’re excited over nothing. Joe will probably show up soon and have a simple explanation for the whole thing.”

“Yes,” Kay said. “I feel that way, too.”

She looked in on Mike and Judy again, then went back to bed. As she lay there the questions that Monohan had asked her begun to gnaw at her. It wasn’t the questions themselves — it was the abstractions they suggested. Seeds of doubt that sprouted and grew into unreal plants. She tried to kill these plants by recalling all the solid things that had come to her support during the night. The telephone. The Davises. Her children. The police. Yet, her feeling of unreality clung to her.

In the morning, she told Mike that daddy had gone on a trip. It seemed to be the simple solution to hold down alarm. Shortly after she had finished feeding Judy, Imogene came over again and stayed almost until eleven.

At fifteen minutes after twelve, Kay called Mike for lunch. He had been playing with his train on the back porch. She called him twice but got no answer. She stepped to the door leading to the back porch and saw that he was not there.

Her first thought was that he had gone outside. But the screen door was still hooked. She was sure that he had not passed through the kitchen for she would have seen him.

“Mike?” she called again.

The only thing she heard — and she was sure that it was her imagination playing a trick on her — was the ticking of the bedroom clock, as it had ticked last night.

“Mike!”

She half ran to the nursery. Judy was in her play pen. But Mike was nowhere in sight.

“Mike!”

The front door was still locked. It didn’t seem possible that he could have gotten outside. Yet, he was nowhere in the house. It was strange. Unreal.

“Mike!”

The panic in her voice startled her. She tried to tell herself that there was a simple explanation for his disappearance. Perhaps he had gotten outside somehow. Perhaps he had gone to Imogene’s.

She went into the bedroom and called Imogene. She heard the phone ring a half a dozen times before she reluctantly hung up.

She went outside and looked around the house, then cut across the back yard to Imogene’s. She called Imogene and knocked on the door until her hand hurt. The house seemed dead. This entire neighborhood which she had known so intimately for the past five years suddenly became a stranger.

She went back to her house, feeling an acute sense of loss which she did not understand. But one thing she did understand. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong. And she needed help.

She went to the phone again. This time she dialed the police. She got no answer.

She dialed again and stood there, feeling a heavy nothing pressing against her. The clock was unbearable. She threw it onto the bed and covered it with a pillow, but it ticked on.

She dialed the operator.

“Operator,” she said, “I’m trying to get the police but they don’t answer. Would you please ring them for me.”

“I’m sorry,” the operator said. “That number has been discontinued.”

A wave of confusion flashed through Kay.

“You must have misunderstood me,” she said. “I want the police.”

“I’m sorry,” the operator said. “That number has been discontinued.”

Kay’s hand went to her throat. “But that’s absurd! Surely you haven’t understood me. I said the police. The police!”

“Just a moment, please,” the operator said. “I’ll connect you with Information.”

“Information,” another voice said.

“I want the police,” Kay said.

“I’m sorry,” Information said. “That number has been discontinued.”

“But—”

Kay dropped the phone as she had the sensation of being crushed by nothing. It frightened her and she wanted to run. She wanted to grab up Judy and run before the dike gave away completely. She wanted to run to a simple explanation.

She ran to the nursery.

Then she was frozen still by the sound of her own scream.

Judy was not there.

She started to scream again, and then she realized that someone was knocking on the front screen door.

It’s Joe! she thought. At last! She hurried through the house to the front door.

But it was not her husband. Mrs. Norbert, Kay’s next-door neighbor, stood there. And with her were a policeman and a woman whose dark blue dress was fashioned along the same general lines as the policeman’s uniform.

“Is it about my husband?” Kay asked.

“The poor thing,” Mrs. Norbert said softly.

The policeman shook his head. “Maybe you’d better take over, Sue,” he said to the woman in the uniform-dress.

Kay stared at Mrs. Norbert. “What is it? What are these people doing here?”

“You say it was a delivery boy who called you over here?” the policeman asked.

“Yes,” Mrs. Norbert said. “From the grocery store. He took Kay’s groceries in the back door, like he always does, and she was sitting right in the middle of the kitchen floor, moaning and crying to herself. He ran over to get me.” She lowered her voice. “Kay didn’t even know who I was.”

“Is this the first time anything like this has happened?”

Mrs. Norbert glanced at Kay, and then looked quickly away. “It’s the first time for anything this bad,” she said. “But... well, Kay hasn’t been quite right ever since her husband and children were drowned out at the lake last month. A boat turned over with them, and Kay was the only one who got out of the water alive.”

Kay felt the scream starting in her throat. She tried to choke it back but could not.

“The poor thing,” Mrs. Norbert said again. “I was with her all morning, helping her clean the house, and she was perfectly all right. I went back to my house just a few minutes before the delivery boy came running over to get me.”

The woman in the uniform-dress opened the screen door and stepped inside. She was smiling pleasantly as she took Kay’s arm, but her grasp was firm and her fingers were very strong. “We’d like you to come with us now, Mrs. Scott,” she said.

There was a sudden dull ache behind Kay’s eyes, and the sickening realization came to her that Mrs. Norbert was right. She remembered now; Mrs. Norbert had helped her with the housework, and she had gone back to her own house only a few minutes ago. But that had been before all these horrible things had happened. How could that be? How could all those things have taken place in only a few minutes?

How?

God, she thought. What’s happening to me?

The woman in the uniform-dress pulled her gently toward the door. “Come along, dear,” she said.