The Vanished

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Roxbury was a small town like a thousand, five thousand other small towns spread across the United States-a little more rustic, perhaps, because of its location, but otherwise predictably conventional. It was situated in the thickly wooden foothills of the Klamath Mountains, east and a little south of Eureka; there was a single street bisecting it into equal halves and extending for three blocks, and that was called Main Street and had everything on it that you would expect to find on Main Street, U.S.A. The village looked quiet and sleepy, and the towering giants of the Redwood Empire, which ringed it majestically, gave it an atmosphere of bucolic tranquillity.

I got in there a few minutes past two on Friday afternoon, and it was cool and cloudy, the countryside lushly green and water-jeweled from a recent rain. I had been on the road for something like six hours, including a brief stop in Ukiah for lunch, and I was tired and cramped as I drove along Main Street. The car had not overheated on the drive, but a rattling sound had developed somewhere, in a location I could not pinpoint. It failed to surprise me much.

At the far edge of town, I found a motel called the Redwood Lodge. It had eight cabins set into a rough horseshoe shape, with number one and number eight at the points of the shoe; they were spaced far apart and partially hidden from one another by redwoods and heavy forest growth. In the near-center of the shoe was a large office-and-residence, of the same design as the cabins and fronted with a jungle of ferns.

I stopped in, and a guy who looked a little like Frank Lovejoy rented me number five for eight dollars a night; I was his first customer all week, he said, things were pretty slow this time of year, big rain and all keeps the people away from the scenic areas. He took me out to the cabin personally; it was two rooms and a shower bath, with beamed ceilings and a false fireplace and mountain-cabin furnishings. I asked the guy how you got to Coachman Road, and he told me and wished me a pleasant stay and left me to my own devices.

I changed into a pair of slacks and a light jacket, and got back into the car and continued east and found Coachman Road without difficulty. It was a narrow, humped lane winding upward through heavy copse of redwood and pine, paralleling a small stream swollen by the winter rains. I went about a mile, and a post mailbox appeared to the left; you could just make out the numerals 2619 on the side of it. Beyond the box, an open gate gave on a sideless wooden platform spanning the creek. On the opposite bank a clearing had been cut in the trees and there was a white frame house on it, and a small barn, and a bare front yard containing a Dodge pickup half as old as I was and the bones of a couple of mid-Depression Fords. The hood on the pickup was raised, and a big guy dressed in blue coveralls had his head inside the engine compartment. He pulled it out when the loose boards of the platform protested the weight of my car, and watched me drive up and park on one side of where he was.

I got out and went over to the Dodge. There was an old, battered toolbox open on the ground by the front fender, and beside it, on a piece of grease-marked canvas, were the components of a two-barrel carburetor. The cool, crisp air smelled of conifers and damp vegetation and oil and machinery corrosion.

The guy was about forty, and he had a face like a rubber mask-or a dead man. The lips were thick and bluish-red, the skin had the look and consistency of dried tallow, the eyes were black pouched pits filled with vacuousness. He had thick, muscle-bunched shoulders and hands like the jaws of a scoop shovel. He was watching me curiously, neither friendly nor unfriendly, those empty, bottomless eyes as immobile as a snake’s.

I put a smile on for him. ‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Howdy,’ ponderously, atonally.

‘Is this the Emery place?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you Mr. Emery? Daniel Emery?’

‘No, Mr. Emery he went into Eureka today.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘My name’s Holly. I work for Mr. Emery.’

‘Well, I’m glad to meet you, Holly.’

‘Mrs. Emery, she’s up at the house if you want to see her.’

‘I’ll do that, thanks.’

‘Sure,’ Holly said.

He turned, dismissing me, and got his head inside the engine compartment of the pickup again. I watched him working in there with a box-head wrench for a moment, and then I moved away and went toward the white frame house.

It was a shambling old structure with dull green shutters and a peaked roof and starched chintz curtains in the windows. There was a vegetable garden along one side, and some thin-vined climbing roses clinging like ivy to a trellis built against the right front wall. As I approached, the front door opened and a woman stepped out a few paces, staring at me.

She was very thin, very gaunt, with gray hair that seemed to grow in tufts on a sunken, colorless skull. A crooked witchlike nose protruded from the center of an angular face; above it were two small, lashless eyes with all the color long since faded out of them, and below were bloodless, almost nonexistent lips. Her calves and ankles, visible beneath the hem of an old-fashioned black skirt, were like white birch poles interwoven with the ugly blue threading of varicose veins. She wore an old gray sweater buttoned to her throat, and white ankle socks and dusty nurse-fashion oxfords, and she had about her a look of infinite weariness, infinite hardship-the way the pioneer women of the mid 1800’s must have looked after twenty or thirty years of plains life.

She said, ‘Yes? Was there something?’ She had a shrill, querulous voice, like the cry of a frightened crow.

‘Mrs. Emery?’

‘That’s right. What is it?’

‘I’d like a few words with you, if I may.’

‘About what?’

‘About your daughter-Diane.’

Her head jerked slightly, and her eyes seemed to lift in their sockets, darting, and again I was reminded of a frightened crow. She reached up with her right hand and gathered the material of her sweater tightly at her throat. ‘My daughter’s dead. She died, over in Germany, three months ago.’

‘Yes,’ I said gently. ‘I know.’

‘I don’t have none of her paintings. She never give us none of her paintings, if that’s what you want.’

‘No, that isn’t what I want.’

‘Some people come around here, wanted her paintings, but we never had none of them.’ There was a faintly bitter note in her voice, as if the fact that Diane had not given her mother and father any of her valuable art was as much of an injustice and as much of a tragedy as the girl’s death.

‘I’m not here about any paintings, Mrs. Emery,’ I said.

‘What is it, then?’

‘Do you know a man named Roy Sands?’

She did that lifting, darting thing with her eyes again, and her mouth disappeared completely in an ugly white slash, like a razor cut just before it starts to bleed. ‘That filth,’ she said shrilly. ‘He killed her, he killed my Diane girl.’

I stared at her. ‘What?’

‘He got her in the family way, and she destroyed herself on account of him, God have mercy. Him, that Army man, that filth.’

‘You’re certain he was the father of your daughter’s child?’

‘He said it, he come here and he said he was-coming around here, trying to say he was sorry.’

‘When, Mrs. Emery? When was he here?’

‘Just before Christmas, come spoiling Christmas, come just when Dan and Holly was putting up the little tree. He come and took coffee with us, saying he knew her, he knew our Diane, and then he told us he was the father of her baby and he was sorry, he was sorry they was both dead!’

‘Do you remember what day it was that he was here?’

‘Just before Christmas.’

‘Yes, but what day?’

‘Monday, day after church.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

Mrs. Emery looked at me, blinking, eyes darting. ‘Listen, who are you, mister? What’re you asking questions about him, that Sands, for?’

‘I’m trying to find him,’ I said. ‘He’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Yes, apparently soon after he was here.’

‘You a friend of his, mister?’

‘No, I’ve been-’

‘What you want here, mister?’

‘I told you, Mrs. Emery, I’m trying to find Roy Sands.’

‘I don’t know where he is, I don’t ever want to know where he is, that Army filth. We sent him packing, and he went, too, with his tail down like the dog he is-You listen here, I hope you never find him, I hope the good Lord put him down in hell for what he done to my little girl.’

‘Mrs. Emery-’

‘No, now you get out of here, I don’t want you here.’

‘Please, it’s important that I-’

‘Get out of here!’ she shouted. ‘You get out of here!’

She backed away, still clutching the sweater at her throat, a kind of wildness in her faded eyes now. I stood looking at her, indecisive; then I heard pounding steps behind me and Holly was there, the rubber mask pinched and tight and the vacuous pits radiating molten light in their depths.

‘What’d you do?’ he said. ‘What’d you do to Mrs. Emery?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything to her.’

‘Get out of here!’ the woman screamed at me. ‘Get out of here, go away, you, don’t you come back!’

‘You better do what she says, mister,’ Holly said softly, but his big hands hooked and curled at his waist and I knew that if I tried to linger, to reason with Mrs. Emery, he would jump me. Things could be very bad then, in a lot of ways. It was her property, after all.

I raised my hands, palms outward. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m going.’

‘Go on, then,’ Holly said.

I backed off a couple of steps and turned with the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. But he did not move from beside her. I walked away, slowly, and got into my car. I looked up at them, then, and they were still standing by the door to the white frame house, both of them looking down at me, this Holly with his jawlike hands still curled and Mrs. Emery still clutching her sweater at her throat.

I swung the car around and went over the platform, thinking: Poor Diane, poor genius. Maybe I can understand why death for you was preferable to coming home…