The Fiend

(20)

Howard Arlington woke up at dawn in a motel room. Seen through half-closed eyes the place looked the same as a hundred others he’d stayed in, but gradually differences began to show up: the briefcase Virginia had given him years ago was not on the bureau where he always kept it, and the luggage rack at the foot of the bed was empty. When he turned his head his starched collar jabbed him in the neck and he realized he was still fully dressed. Even his tie was knotted. He loosened it but the tightness in his throat didn’t go away. It was as if, during the night, he’d tried to swallow something too large and too fibrous to be swallowed.

He got up and opened the drapes. Fog pressed against the window like the ectoplasm of lost spirits seeking shelter and a home. He closed the drapes again and turned on a lamp. Except for the outline of his body on the chenille bedspread, the room looked as though it hadn’t been occupied. The clothes closet was empty, the ashtrays unused, the drinking glasses on the bureau still wrapped in wax paper.

He couldn’t remember checking into the motel; yet he knew he must have registered, given his name and address and car license number, and paid in advance because he had no luggage. His last clear recollection was of Virginia standing in the Brants’ patio saying she didn’t want a child any more: “We no longer have anything to offer a child... How cruel it would be to pass along such an ugly thing as life. Poor Jessie... She will lose her innocence and high hopes and dreams; she will lose them all. By the time she’s my age she will have wished a thousand times that she were dead.”

He’d quarreled with Virginia and he was in a motel. These were the only facts he was sure of. Where the motel was, in what city, how he’d reached it and why, he didn’t know. He spent so much of his life driving from one city to another and checking in and out of motels that he must have acted automatically.

He left the room key on top of the bureau and went out to his car. On the front seat there was an empty pint bottle of whiskey and a hole half an inch wide burned in the upholstery by a cigarette. Fact three, he thought grimly, I was drunk. He put the bottle in the glove compartment and drove off.

The first street sign he came to gave him another fact: he was still in San Félice, down near the breakwater, no more than four miles from his own house.

The lights in the kitchen were on when he arrived. It was too early for Virginia to be awake and he wondered whether she’d left them on, expecting him home, or whether she’d forgotten to turn them off. She often forgot, or claimed to have forgotten. Sometimes he thought she kept them on deliberately because she was afraid of the dark but didn’t want to admit it. He parked his car beside hers in the garage, then crossed the driveway and walked up the steps of the back porch. The door was unlocked.

Virginia was sitting at the kitchen table with the big retriever lying beside her chair. Neither of them moved.

Howard said, “Virginia?”

The dog opened his eyes, wagged his tail briefly and perfunctorily, and went back to sleep.

“At least the dog usually barks when I get home,” he said. “Don’t I even rate that much anymore?”

Virginia turned. Her eyes were bloodshot, the lids blistered by the heat of her tears and surrounded by a network of lines Howard had never seen before. She spoke in a low, dull voice.

“The police are looking for you.”

“The police? Why in heaven’s name did you call them in? You knew I’d be back.”

“I didn’t. Didn’t know, didn’t call them.”

“What’s going on around here anyway? What have the police got to do with my getting drunk and spending the night in a motel?”

“Is that what you did, Howard?”

“Yes.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Why should I have to prove it?”

She covered her face with her hands and started to weep again, deep, bitter sobs that shook her whole body. The dog rose to a sitting position and put his head on her lap, watching Howard out of the corner of his eye, as if he considered Howard responsible for the troubled sounds.

He blames me for everything, Howard thought, just the way she does. Only this time I don’t even know what I’m being blamed for. Did I do something while I was drunk that I don’t remember? I couldn’t have been in a fight. There are no marks on me and my clothes aren’t torn.

“Virginia, tell me what happened.”

“Jessie... Jessie’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Nobody knows. She... she just disappeared. Ellen took her a glass of water about ten o’clock and that’s the last anyone saw of her except—” She stopped, pressing the back of her hand against her trembling mouth.

“Except who?” Howard said.

“Whoever made her disappear.”

Howard stared at her, confused and helpless. He wasn’t sure whether she was telling the truth or whether she’d imagined the whole thing. She’d been acting and talking peculiarly last night, standing in the dichondra patch saying she was a tree.

She saw his incredulity and guessed the reason for it. “You think I’ve lost my mind. Well, I wish I had. It would be easier to bear than this, this terrible thing.” She began to sob again, repeating Jessie’s name over and over as if Jessie might be somewhere listening and might respond.

Howard did what he could, brought her two tranquilizer pills and poured her some ice water from the pitcher in the refrigerator. She choked on the pills and the water spilled down the front of her old wool bathrobe. Its coldness was stinging and shocking against the warm skin between her breasts. She let out a gasp and clutched the bathrobe tightly around her neck. Her eyes were resentful but they were no longer wild or weeping.

“So the police are looking for me,” Howard said. “Why?”

“They’re questioning everyone, friends, neighbors, anyone who knew — who knows her. They said in cases like this it’s often a relative or a trusted friend of the family.”

“Cases like what?”

She didn’t answer.

“When did she disappear, Virginia?”

“Between ten and eleven. Ellen tucked her in bed at ten o’clock, then she took a sleeping capsule and went to bed herself. Dave was out looking for you. Ellen said she’d locked the back door but when Dave came back it was unlocked. He checked Jessie’s bedroom to see if she was sleeping. She was gone. He searched the house, calling for her, then he woke Ellen up. They came here to our house. We looked all over but we couldn’t find Jessie. I called the police and Dave set out for Mary Martha’s house, using the path along the creek that the girls always took.”

“Kids have run away before.”

“The only clothes missing are the pajamas she was wearing, a bathrobe and a pair of slippers. Besides, she had no motive and no money.”

“She had the twenty dollars I gave her the other night.”

“Why, of course.” Virginia’s face came alive with sudden hope. “Why, that would seem like a fortune to Jessie. We’ve got to tell—”

“We tell no one, Virginia.”

“But we must. It might throw a whole new light on everything.”

“Including me,” Howard said sharply. “The police will ask me why I gave the kid twenty dollars. I’ll tell them because I was sore at you and wanted to get back at you. But will they believe it?”

“It’s the truth.”

“It might not strike them that way.”

She didn’t seem to understand what he was talking about. When he spelled it out for her, she looked appalled. “They couldn’t possibly think anything like that about you, Howard.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a respectable married man.”

“Coraznada State Hospital is full of so-called respectable married men.” He took out a handkerchief and wiped his neck. “Did the police question you?”

“Yes. A Lieutenant Gallantyne did most of the talking. I don’t like him. Even when I was telling the truth he made me feel that I was lying. There was another man with him, a Mr. MacPherson. Every once in a while they’d put their heads together and whisper. It made me nervous.”

“Who’s MacPherson?”

“Dave said he’s a lawyer.”

“Whose lawyer?”

“Mrs. Oakley’s.”

“How did Mrs. Oakley get into this?”

“I don’t know. Stop bullying me, I can’t stand it.”

She seemed on the verge of breaking up again. Howard got up, put some water and coffee in the percolator and plugged it in. After a time he said, “I’m not trying to bully you, Virginia. I simply want to find out what you told the police about last night so I can corroborate it. It wouldn’t be so good — for either of us — if we contradicted each other.”

She was looking at him, her eyes cold under their blistered lids. “You don’t care that Jessie has disappeared, do you? All you care about is saving your own skin.”

“And yours.”

“Don’t worry about mine. Everybody knows how I love the child.”

“That’s not quite accurate, Virginia,” he said quietly. “Everybody knows that you love her, but not how you love her.”

The coffee had begun to percolate, bubbling merrily in the cheerless room. Virginia turned and looked at the percolator as if she hoped it would do something unexpected and interesting like explode.

She said, “Where did you go after you left the Brants’ last night?”

“To a liquor store and then down to the beach. I ended up at a motel.”

“You were alone, of course?”

“Yes, I was alone.”

“What motel?”

“I don’t remember, I wasn’t paying much attention. But I could find it again if I had to.”

“Ellen told the police,” she said, turning to face him, “that you were jealous of my relationship with Jessie.”

“That was neighborly of her.”

“She had to tell the truth. Under the circumstances you could hardly expect her to lie to spare your feelings.”

“It’s not my feelings I’m worried about. It is, as you pointed out, my skin. What else was said about last night?”

“Everything that happened, how we quarreled, and the funny way you talked to Jessie as if you were half-drunk when you only had two beers; how you tore off in the car and Dave tried to find you and couldn’t.”

“I didn’t realize what loyal friends I had. It moves me,” he added dryly. “It may move me right into a cell. Or was that the real objective?”

“You don’t understand. We were forced to tell the whole truth, all of us. A child’s life might be at stake. Gallantyne said every little detail could be vitally important. He made us go over and over it. I couldn’t have lied to protect you even if I’d wanted to.”

“And the implication is, you didn’t particularly want to?”

She was staring at him in incredulity, her mouth partly open. “It still hasn’t come through to you yet, has it? A child is missing, a nine-year-old girl has disappeared. She may be dead, and you don’t seem to care. Don’t you feel anything?”

“Yes. I feel somebody’s trying to make me the goat.”

Between four and seven in the morning Ellen Brant slept fitfully on the living-room couch beside the telephone. She’d dreamed half a dozen times that the phone was ringing and had wakened up to find herself reaching for it. She finally got up, washed her face and ran a comb through her hair, and put on a heavy wool coat over her jeans and T-shirt. Then she went into the bedroom to see if Dave was awake and could hear the telephone if it rang.

He was lying on his back, peering up at the ceiling. He turned and looked at her, the question in his eyes dying before it had a chance to be born. “There’s been no news, of course.”

“No. I’m going over to the Oakleys’. I want to ask Mary Martha some questions.”

“The lieutenant will do that.”

“She might talk to me more easily. She and her mother freeze up in front of strangers.”

“What’s it like outside?”

“Cold and foggy.”

She knew he was thinking the same thing she was, that somewhere in that cold fog Jessie might be wandering, wearing only her cotton pajamas and light bathrobe. Biting her underlip hard to keep from breaking into tears again, she went out to the garage and got into the old Dodge station wagon. The floorboard of the front seat was covered with sand from yesterday’s trip to the beach. It seemed to have happened a long time ago and in a different city, where the sun had been shining and the surf was gentle and the sand soft and warm. She had a feeling that she would never see that city again.

She backed out of the driveway, tears streaming down her face, warm where they touched her cheeks, already cold when they reached the sides of her neck. She brushed them angrily away with the sleeve of her coat. She couldn’t afford to cry in front of Mary Martha, it might frighten her into silence, or worse still, into lying. She had seen Mary Martha many times after an emotional scene at home. The effect on her was always the same — blank eyes, expressionless voice: no, nothing was the matter, nothing had happened.

Mary Martha answered the door herself, first opening it only as far as the chain would allow. Then, recognizing Ellen, she unfastened the chain and opened the door wide. In spite of the earliness of the hour she was dressed as if for a visit to town in pink embroidered cotton and newly whitened sandals. Her pony-tail was neat and so tightly fastened it raised her eyebrows slightly. She looked a little surprised to see Ellen, as though she might have been expecting someone else.

She said, “If you want my mother, she’s in the kitchen making breakfast.”

“I prefer to talk to you alone, Mary Martha.”

“I’d better get my mother’s permission. She’s kind of nervous this morning, I don’t know why. But I have to be careful.”

“She hasn’t told you anything?”

“Just that Mac was coming over with a soldier and we were all going to have a chat.”

“A soldier?”

“He’s a lieutenant. I’m supposed to remember to call him that so I’ll make a good impression.” Mary Martha looked down at her dress as if to reassure herself that it was still clean enough to make a good impression. “Do you want to come in?”

“Yes.”

“I guess it’ll be all right.”

She was just closing the door when Kate Oakley’s voice called out from the kitchen, “Mary Martha, tell Mac I’ll be there in a minute.”

“It’s not Mac,” the child said. “It’s Jessie’s mother.”

“Jessie’s—?” Kate Oakley appeared at the far end of the hall. She began walking toward them very rapidly, her high heels ticking on the linoleum like clocks working on different time schedules, each trying to catch up with the other. Her face was heavily made up to look pink and white but the gray of trouble showed through. She placed one arm protectively around Mary Martha’s shoulders. “You’d better go and put the bacon in the warming oven, dear.”

“I don’t care if it gets cold,” Mary Martha said. “It tastes the same.”

“You mustn’t be rude in front of company, lamb. That’s understood between us, isn’t it?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Off you go.”

Mary Martha started down the hall.

“But I want to talk to her,” Ellen said desperately. “I’ve got to. She might know something.”

“She knows nothing. She’s only a child.”

“Jessie’s only a child, too.”

“I’m sorry. I really am sorry, Mrs. Brant. But Mary Martha isn’t supposed to talk to anyone until our lawyer arrives.”

“You haven’t even told her about Jessie, have you?”

“I didn’t want to upset her.”

“She’s got to be told. She may be able to help. She might have seen someone, heard something. How can we know unless we ask her?”

“Mac will ask her. He can handle these... these situations better than you or I could.”

“Is that all it is to you, a situation to be handled?”

Kate shook her head helplessly. “No matter what I said to you now, it would seem wrong because you’re distraught. Further conversation is pointless. I must ask you to leave.” She opened the heavy oak door. “I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Brant, but I think I’m doing the right thing. Mac will talk to Mary Martha. She feels freer with him than she would with you or me.”

“Even though he has a policeman with him?”

“Did she tell you that?”

“I figured it out.”

“Well, it won’t make any difference. Mary Martha adores Mac and she’s not afraid of policemen.”

But the last word curled upward into a question mark, and when Ellen looked back from the bottom of the porch steps, Kate was hanging on to the oak door as if for support.

When breakfast was over, Mary Martha sat on the window seat in the front room with the cat, Pudding, on her lap. She wasn’t supposed to get her hands dirty or her dress wrinkled but she needed the comfort of the cat, his warm body and soft fur, his bright eyes that seemed to be aware of so many things and not to care about any of them very much.

In a little while she saw Mac and the lieutenant emerge from the fog and come up the front steps. She heard her mother talking to them in the hall, at first in the low, careful voice she used when meeting strangers, later in a higher, less restrained and more natural voice. She sounded as if she was protesting, then arguing, and finally, losing. After a time the two men came into the front room alone, and Mac closed the door.

“Hello, Mary Martha,” Mac said. “This is Lieutenant Gallantyne.”

Still holding the cat, Mary Martha got up and executed a brief, formal curtsy.

Gallantyne bowed gravely in return. “That’s a pretty cat you have there, Mary Martha. What’s his name?”

“Pudding. He has other names too, though.”

“Really? Such as?”

“Geronimo, sometimes. Also King Arthur. But when he’s bad and catches a bird, I call him Sheridan.” She switched the cat from her left shoulder to her right. It stopped purring and made a swift jab at her ponytail. “Do you have any medals?”

Gallantyne raised his bushy eyebrows. “Well now, I believe I won a few swimming races when I was a kid.”

“I mean real medals like for killing a hundred enemies.”

The men exchanged glances. It was as if they were both thinking the same thing, that it seemed a long and insane time ago that men were given medals for killing.

“Lieutenant Gallantyne is not in the army,” Mac said. “He’s a policeman. He’s also a good friend of mine, so you needn’t be afraid of him.”

“I’m not. But why does he want to see me instead of my mother?”

“He’ll talk to your mother later. Right now you’re more important.”

She seemed pleased but at the same time suspicious. “Why am I?”

“We hope,” Gallantyne said, “that you’ll be able to help us find your friend, Jessie.”

“Is she hiding?”

“We’re not sure.”

“She’s an awfully good hider. Being so skinny she can squeeze behind things and under things and between.”

“You and Jessie play together a lot, do you?”

“All the time except when one of us is being punished.”

“And you tell each other secrets, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you promise each other never to reveal these secrets to anyone else?”

Mary Martha nodded and said firmly, “And I’m not going to, either, because I crossed my heart and hoped to die.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can keep a secret very well,” Gallantyne said. “But I want you to imagine something now. Suppose you, Mary Martha, were in a dangerous situation in a place nobody knew about except you and Jessie. You’re frightened and hungry and in pain and you want desperately to be rescued. Under those circumstances, wouldn’t you release Jessie from her promise to keep the name of that place a secret?”

“I guess so, only there isn’t any place like that.”

“But you have other secrets.”

“Yes.”

Gallantyne was watching her gravely. “I believe that if Jessie could communicate with you right now, she’d release you from all your promises.”

“Why can’t she comm... communicate?”

“Nobody’s seen her since last night at ten o’clock. We don’t know where she is or why she left or if she left by herself or with someone else.”

In a spasm of fear Mary Martha clutched the cat too tightly. He let out a yowl, unsheathed his claws and fought his way out of her grasp, onto the floor. She stood, very pale and still, one hand pressed to her scratched shoulder. “He hurt me,” she said in a shocked voice. “Sheridan hurt me.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean to.”

“He always means to. I hate him.”

“You can cry if you like,” Gallantyne said. “That might help.”

“No.”

“All right, then, we’ll go on. Is that O.K.?”

“I guess so.”

“Did you and Jessie ever talk about running away together? Perhaps just in fun, like, let’s run away and join the circus.”

“That would be plain silly,” she said in a contemptuous voice. “Circuses don’t even come here.”

“Times have changed since I was a boy. The only thing that made life bearable when I was mad at my family was the thought of running away and joining the circus. Did Jessie often get mad at her family?”

“Sometimes. Mostly at Mike, her older brother. He bosses her around, he’s awfully mean. We think a bad witch put a curse on him when he was born.”

“Really? What kind of curse?”

“I’m not sure. But I made one up that sounds as if it might work.”

“Tell it to me.”

“It should be said in a more eerie-like voice, only I don’t feel like it right now.”

Gallantyne pursed his lips and nodded. “Sounds pretty authentic to me just the way it is. Do you know any more?”

“That one,” she added anxiously, “isn’t so good, is it?”

“Well, it’s not so much a curse as a statement. Uncle Howard’s the nastiest man in town, period. By the way, who’s Uncle Howard?”

“Mr. Arlington.”

“Why do you think he’s so nasty, Mary Martha?”

“I don’t. I only talked to him once and he was real nice. He gave me fifty cents.”

“Then why did you make up the curse about him?”

“Jessie asked me to. We were going to make up curses about all the people we hate and she wanted to start with Uncle — with Mr. Arlington.”

“Who was next on the list?”

“Nobody. We got tired of the game, and anyway my mother came to pick me up.”

“I wonder,” Gallantyne said softly, “why Jessie felt that way about Mr. Arlington. Do you have any idea?”

“No, sir. That was the first day she ever told me, when we were at the playground with Mike.”

“What day was that?”

“The day my mother and I went downtown to Mac’s office.”

“Thursday,” Mac said.

Gallantyne thanked him with a nod and turned his attention back to Mary Martha. “Previous to Thursday, you thought Jessie and the Arlingtons were good friends?”

“Yes, on account of the Arlingtons were always giving her presents and making a big fuss over her.”

“Both of the Arlingtons?”

“Well—” Mary Martha studied the toes of her shoes. “Well, I guess it was mostly Aunt Virginia, him being away so much on the road. But Jessie never said anything against him until Thursday.”

“Let’s assume that something happened, on Wednesday perhaps, that changed her opinion of him. Did you see Jessie on Wednesday?”

“Yes, I went over to her house and we sat on the porch steps and talked.”

“What about?”

“Lots of things.”

“Name one.”

“The book Aunt Virginia gave her. It was all about glaciers and mountains and rivers and wild things. It sounded real interesting. Only Jessie had to give it back because it cost too much money and her parents wouldn’t let her keep it. My mother,” she added virtuously, “won’t let me accept anything. When Sheridan sends me parcels, I’m not even allowed to peek inside. She sends them right back or throws them away, bang, into the garbage can.”

Gallantyne looked at the cat. “I gather you’re referring to another Sheridan, not this one.”

“Cats can’t send parcels,” Mary Martha said with a faint giggle. “That’s silly. They don’t have any money and they can’t wrap things or write any name and address on the outside.”

Gallantyne thought, wearily, of the anonymous letter. He’d been up all night, first with the Brants and Mrs. Arlington, and later in the police lab examining the letter. He was sure now that it had been written by a man, young, literate, and in good physical health. The description fitted hundreds of men in town. The fact that Howard Arlington was one of them meant nothing in itself.

He said, “Mary Martha, you and Jessie spend quite a lot of time at the school grounds, I’m told.”

“Yes. Because of the games and swings and jungle gym.”

“Have you ever noticed anyone watching you?”

“The coach. That’s his job.”

“Aside from the coach, have you seen any man hanging around the place, or perhaps the same car parked at the curb several days in a row?”

“No.” Mary Martha gave him a knowing look. “My mother told me all about men like that. They’re real nasty and I’m supposed to run home right away when I see one of them. Jessie is, too. She’s a very good runner.”

Perhaps not quite good enough, Gallantyne thought grimly. “How are you going to recognize these men when you see them?”

“Well, they offer you things like gum or candy or even a doll. Also, a ride in their car.”

“And nothing like this ever happened to you and Jessie?”

“No. We saw a mean-looking man at the playground once, but it was only Timmy’s father, who was mad because Timmy missed his appointment at the dentist. Timmy wears braces.”

One corner of Gallantyne’s mouth twitched impatiently. So Timmy wears braces, and he has a mean-looking father and I am getting exactly nowhere. “Do you know the story of Tom Sawyer, Mary Martha?”

“Our teacher told us some of it in school.”

“Perhaps you remember the cave that was the secret hide-out. Do you and Jessie have somewhere like that? Not a cave, particularly, but a special private place where you can meet or leave notes for each other and things like that?”

“No.”

“Think carefully now. You see, I and a great many other people have been searching for Jessie all night.”

“She wouldn’t hide all night,” Mary Martha said thoughtfully. “Not unless she took lots of sandwiches and potato chips along.”

“There’s no evidence that she did.”

“Then she’s not hiding. She’d be too hungry. Her father says he should get a double tax exemption for her because she eats so much. What’s a tax exemption?”

“You’ll find out soon enough.” Gallantyne turned to Mac, who was still standing beside the door as if on guard against a sudden intrusion by Kate Oakley. “Have you any questions you’d like to ask her?”

“One or two,” Mac said. “What time did you go to bed last night, Mary Martha?”

“About eight o’clock.”

“That’s pretty early for vacation time and daylight saving.”

“My mother and I like to go to bed early and get up early. She doesn’t — we don’t like the nights.”

“Did you go to sleep right away?”

“I must have. I don’t remember doing anything else.”

“That seems like logical reasoning,” Mac said with a wry smile. “Did you get up during the night?”

“No.”

“Not even to go to the bathroom?”

“No, but you’re not supposed to talk about things like that in front of strangers,” Mary Martha said severely.

“Lieutenant Gallantyne is a friend of mine.”

“Well, he’s not mine or my mother’s.”

“Let’s see if we can change that,” Gallantyne said. “Ask your mother to come in here, will you?”

“Yes, sir. Only... well, you better not keep her very long.”

“Why not?”

“She might cry, and crying gives her a headache.”

“We mustn’t let that happen, must we?”

“No, sir.” Mary Martha executed another of her stiff little curtsies, picked up the cat and departed.

“She’s a funny kid,” Gallantyne said. “Is she always like that?”

“With adults. I’ve never seen her in the company of other children.”

“That’s odd. I understand you’re the old family friend.”

“I’m the old family friend when things go wrong,” Mac said dryly. “When things are going right, I think I must be the old family enemy.”

“Exactly why did you invite yourself to come with me this morning, Mac?”

“Oh, let’s just say I’m curious.”

“Let’s not.”

“All right. The truth is that Kate Oakley’s a very difficult and very vulnerable woman. Because she is difficult, she can’t ask for or accept help the way an ordinary vulnerable person might. So I’m here to lend her moral support. I may criticize her and give her hell occasionally but she knows I’m fond of her.”

“How fond?”

“She’s twenty years younger than I am. Does that answer your question?”

“Not quite.”

“Then I’ll lay it on the line. There’s no secret romance going on between Kate Oakley and myself. I was her father’s lawyer when he was alive, and when he died I handled his estate, or rather the lack of it. I am officially Mary Martha’s godfather, and unofficially I’m probably Kate’s, too. That’s the whole story.”

“The story hasn’t ended yet,” Gallantyne said carefully. “Surely you’re not naïve enough to believe we can write our own endings in this world.”

“We can do a little editing.”

“Don’t kid yourself.”

Mac wanted to argue with him but he heard Kate’s footsteps in the hall. He wondered what her reaction would have been to Gallantyne’s insinuations: shock, displeasure, perhaps even amusement. He could never tell what she was actually thinking. When she was at her gayest, he could feel the sadness in her, and when she was in despair he sensed that it, too, was not real. Everything about her seemed to be hidden, as if at a certain period in her life she had decided to go underground where she would be safe.

He thought about the wild creatures in the canyon behind his house. The foxes, the raccoons, the possums, the chipmunks, they could all be lured out of their winter refuge by the promise of food and the warmth of a spring sun. There was no spring sun for Kate, no hunger that could be satisfied by food. He watched her as she came in, thinking, what do you want, Kate? Tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you if I can.

She hesitated in the doorway, looking as though she were trying to decide how to act.

Before she had a chance to decide, Gallantyne spoke to her in a quiet, confident manner, “Please sit down, Mrs. Oakley. We’re hoping you’ll be able to help us.”

“I hope so, too. I was — I’m very fond of Jessie. If anything’s happened to her, it will be a terrible blow to Mary Martha. Do you suppose it could have been a kidnaping?”

“There’s no evidence of it. The Brants are barely getting by financially, and they’ve received no ransom demand. We’re pretty well convinced that Jessie walked out of the house voluntarily.”

“How can you know that for sure?”

“There were no signs of a struggle in Jessie’s bedroom, the Arlington’s dog didn’t bark as he certainly would have if he’d heard a stranger, and the back door was unlocked. It’s one of the new kinds of lock built into the knob — push the knob and it locks, pull and it unlocks. We think Jessie unlocked the door, accidentally or on purpose, when she went out. I’m inclined to believe that she unlocked it deliberately with the intention of returning to the house. Someone, or something, interfered with that intention.”

He paused to light a cigarette, cupping his hands around the match as though he were outside on a windy day. “We’ll assume, then, that she left the house under her own power and for a reason we don’t know yet. The two likeliest places she might have gone are the Arlingtons’ next door, or this house. Mrs. Arlington claims she didn’t see her and you claim you didn’t.”

“Of course I didn’t,” she said stiffly. “I would have phoned her mother immediately.”

“What I want you to consider now is the possibility that she might somehow have gotten into the house without your seeing her, that she might have hidden some place and fallen asleep.”

“There’s no such possibility.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I am. This house is Sheridan-proof. My ex-husband acquired the cunning habit of breaking in during my absences and helping himself to whatever he fancied — liquor, furniture, silver, and more liquor. I had a special lock put on every door and window. When I go out or retire for the night, I check them all. It would be as much as my life is worth to miss any of them.”

“Jessie knew about these locks, of course?”

“Yes. She asked me about them. It puzzled her that a house should have to be secured against a husband and father... No, Lieutenant, Jessie could never have entered this house without my letting her in.”

That leaves the Arlingtons, he thought, or someone on the street between here and the Arlingtons’ house. “Would you call Jessie a shy child, Mrs. Oakley?”

“No. She has — had quite a free and easy manner with people.”

“Does that include strangers?”

“It included everyone.”

“Have you had any strangers hanging around here recently?”

She gave Mac a quick, questioning look. He responded with a nod that indicated he’d already told Gallantyne about the man in the green coupé.

“Yes,” she said, “but I never connected him with Jessie or Mary Martha.”

“Do you now?”

“I don’t know. It seems odd that he’d show himself so openly if he were planning anything against Jessie or Mary Martha.”

“Perhaps he wasn’t actually planning anything, he was merely waiting. And when Jessie walked out of that house by herself, she provided what he was waiting for, an opportunity.”

A spot of color, dime-sized, appeared suddenly on her throat and began expanding, up to her ear tips, down into the neckline of her dress. The full realization of Jessie’s fate seemed to be spreading throughout her system like poison dye. “It could just as easily have been Mary Martha instead of Jessie. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Think about it.”

“I won’t. It’s unthinkable. Mary Martha wouldn’t leave the house without my permission, and she’d certainly never enter the car of a strange man.”

“Some pretty powerful inducements can be offered a child her age who’s lonely and has affection going to waste. A puppy, for instance, or a kitten—”

“No, no!” But even the sound of her own voice shouting denials could not convince her. She knew the lieutenant was right. She knew that Mary Martha had left the house without permission just a few nights before. She’d run over to Jessie’s using the short cut across the creek. Suppose she’d gone out the front, the way she often did. The man had been parked across the street at that very moment. “No, no,” she repeated. “I’ve taught Mary Martha what it took me years of torment to learn, that you can’t trust men, you can’t believe them. They’re liars, cheats, bullies. Mary Martha already knows that. She won’t have to find it out the hard way as I did, as Jessie—”

“Be quiet, Kate,” Mac said in a warning tone. “The lieutenant is too busy to listen to your theories this morning.”

She didn’t even glance in his direction. “Poor Jessie, poor misguided child with all her prattle about her wonderful father. She believed it, and that fool mother of hers actually encouraged her to believe it even though she must have been aware what was going on.”

Gallantyne raised his brows. “And what was going on, Mrs. Oakley?”

“Plenty.”

“Who was involved?”

“I must caution you, Kate,” Mac said, “not to make any statements you’re not able and willing to substantiate.”

“In other words, I’m to shut up?”

“Until you’ve consulted your attorney.”

“All my attorney ever does for me is tell me to shut up.”

“Rumors and gossip are not going to solve this case.”

“No, but they might help,” Gallantyne said mildly. “Now, you were going to give me some new information about Jessie’s father.”

Kate looked from Gallantyne to Mac, then back to Gallantyne, as if she were trying to decide which one of them was the lesser evil. “It can hardly be called new. It goes back to Adam. Brant’s a man and he’s been availing himself of the privilege, deceiving his wife, cheating his children out of their birthright. Oh, he puts on a good front, almost as good as Sheridan when he’s protesting his great love for Mary Martha.”

“You’re implying that Brant is having an affair with another woman?”

“Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“Virginia Arlington.”

Both men were watching her, Mac painfully, Gallantyne with cool suspicion.

“It’s true,” she added, clenching her fists. “I can’t prove it, I don’t have pictures of them in bed together. But I know it’s a fact.”

“Facts, Mrs. Oakley, are often what we choose to believe.”

“I have nothing against Mrs. Arlington, I have no reason for wanting to believe bad things about her. She’s probably just a victim like me, hoodwinked by a man, taken in by his promises. Oh, you should have heard Sheridan in the heyday of his promises... But then you very likely know all about promises, Lieutenant. I bet you’ve made lots of them.”

“A few.”

“And they weren’t kept?”

“Some weren’t.”

“That makes you a liar, doesn’t it, Lieutenant? No better than the rest of them—”

“Please be quiet, Kate,” Mac said. “You’re not doing yourself any good or Jessie any good.”

He touched Gallantyne lightly on the arm and the two men walked over to the far corner of the room and began talking in whispers. Though she couldn’t distinguish any words, she was sure they were talking about her until Gallantyne finally raised his voice and said, “I must ask you not to mention Charlie Gowen to anyone, Mrs. Oakley.”

“Charlie Gowen? I don’t even know who—”

“The man in the green coupé. Don’t tell anyone about him, not your friends or relatives or reporters or any other policeman. As far as you’re concerned, Charlie Gowen doesn’t even exist.”