What Happened to Lisa?

Talmage Powell What Happened to Lisa?

Chapter I

The telegram arrived on Friday, posing a blunt question:

There was a Clearview number for me to call, and while I was waiting for the connection my mind went back to when I’d met Lisa. I’d been about ready for release from an army hospital, not caring much whether I lived or died. Then Lisa had given my life back to me.

She was tall, slender, dark-haired, with a strange kind of beauty. Her eyes never completely lost that haunted expression. It was as if a restlessness inside of her kept prodding her toward something she couldn’t name or would ever find.

I’d never brought myself to speak of marriage to Lisa. As I came to know her, I sensed that she had joined the nurses’ corps because the agony of war had made a deep and indelible mark on her. From unguarded remarks I gathered that she came of a family that counted its coin in six figures or better, while I was a hack reporter in civilian life, a lug. Yet right then I’d needed the fire and warmth of her. She’d sensed that as if it were her duty to get me again interested in living. Yet the way she responded could not have been motivated by duty alone.

When we’d gone our separate ways, we’d written occasionally — a letter, a post card, greetings at Christmas and Easter, some trifling gift to her on her birthday.

A nasal voice answered from Clearview. “Ollie Gardiner speaking.”

He was her fiancé. Her last card had informed me of her engagement. It had given me a case of the blues that had drifted me into a bar where I began to wonder, after the third or fourth bourbon, if maybe I hadn’t been a fool after all.

Gardiner kept right on talking in a voice like steam bubbling through mud, “You’re Steve Holloway? You got my wire?”

“Yes. But what makes you think Lisa might be here?”

“Isn’t she?” he said, a nasty suspicion in his voice. Something told me I was going to be very allergic to this Gardiner character. “She disappeared two weeks ago. She often rambled off for a day or two at a time. At first I figured this was just another of her moody streaks.”

Moody. So Gardiner interpreted her that way. But the word didn’t fit her. He’d interpreted as moodiness her reaction to life, her attempt to find a meaning somewhere for her existence.

I got the impression he was sweating during his pause. I was sweating a little myself. Two weeks.

“We couldn’t turn up a trace of her,” he said. “And then I thought of you. She was found of you once. I know you wrote occasionally — until I flatly told her the practice must stop.”

“You can rest your mind easy on that,” I said. “She hasn’t written recently, and no kind of impulse brought her here. Any reason she might have walked out on you?”

My suggestion brought a splutter, a terseness to his voice. “I’m quite sure she’d never take a walk on me, Holloway — unless her thinking got fouled up.” He hesitated, then added, “She hasn’t been exactly well since her mother returned from a European trip ill, and died three weeks ago. Her mother traveled a lot and Lisa was never very close to her, but the death upset Lisa. She imagined someone was trying to kill her. I didn’t know that until her father told me after her disappearance.”

A jolt of sickening fear hit me. Paranoid? Not Lisa, I told myself.

“I’m coming to Clearview,” I said.

“I don’t think that’s quite necessary, Holloway. We are doing everything—”

I slammed the receiver down.

I stood there a minute, sorting my thoughts. There’d been nothing on the teletype about her disappearance. Her old man and Gardiner were obviously keeping it quiet. There might be any murder of reasons for their doing that. And maybe some of the reasons weren’t quite kosher.

I called my boss, the ulcerous individual who holds down the city desk on our afternoon daily. It took some talking to convince him our sheet should send a man all the way to Clearview, but I did.

I went back up to my room, threw a few things into a Gladstone, and scrounged in the rear of a bureau drawer for a few of Lisa’s letters. I reread her last post card. Anything between the lines? Maybe. Maybe not. I tossed aside an old birthday greeting and opened an envelope that was postmarked Rogersville, instead of Clearview. The note sounded a little sentimental, as if she’d been spanking a bottle. I wouldn’t recognize her, it had been so many years since I’d seen her, the note read. She was enclosing a snap taken by one of those sidewalk photographers that catch you in action.

I looked at the print. It was fuzzy, crowded with people on the sidewalk. A woman who must have been Lisa was walking under a neon sign that read:

I jammed the letter in my pocket and went down to call the railway station...

A tightness crawled into my chest as I rode a taxi out to Lisa’s house, late that afternoon. The neighborhood was quiet, old, elegant, smug.

The taxi veered into a driveway bisecting a wrought-iron fence, and I got out to have my first glimpse of the solid mass of cream-colored brick where Lisa had spent most of the years of her life.

A Negro butler answered the door, showed me into a long living room. The grand piano with its loaded music rack reminded me of the times I’d danced with Lisa and listened to her soft, rich singing close to my ear.

Somebody cleared his throat, and I turned. Perry Admin Jones, Lisa’s father, had entered the room.

He was a short, stocky man who looked as if he carried great power in his thick shoulders. His head was as bald as a bird’s egg, tanned to the hue of leather. His eyes were the coldest gray I had ever looked at, in perfect keeping with his thin, sharp nose and steel-trap mouth. Everything about him radiated a restless, merciless fountain of raw energy.

“Gardiner phoned me you might show up, Holloway.” His eyes swept me up and down. So I was the guy who’d known Lisa better than casually during the closing days of the war. I wasn’t surprised that he didn’t like me worth a damn.

“Ollie made a mistake wiring you,” he said. “We can take care of our own affairs without any meddling from you.”

“Then I’ll have to get some answers some place else. I want to know where she got the idea that someone was trying to kill her.”

He eyed me with cold hatred, but my own mug must have looked as determined as his.

“A delusion,” he said reluctantly. “There’s no reason for anyone to kill her.”

“But she was sure someone had tried. She must have had a reason to think that.”

“Her mother’s death three weeks ago upset her. She confided to me that twice a car had tried to run her down. It was senseless, of course, but even the doctor I called in couldn’t convince her of that.” His voice sharpened as his control wore thin. “Now that you’ve pried the skeleton out of the closet, buy yourself a ticket to leave Clearview. We’re doing all we can.” He raised his voice to call to the butler, and I was shown out.

As I climbed back in the taxi an old thought came back to me, a thought I’d had in her presence once, the thought that she must have been an unwanted child. Jones was displaying none of the anxiety that might have been expected. Her mother had always traveled. That big brick house could have been pretty old and lonely for a girl who was rich, but starved for warm and generous feelings.

Talking with Jones, I had for the first time glimpsed behind that door that Lisa had always kept closed against me. The door behind which her strangeness, her quiet sadness lurked, even when a smile was on her lips.

At Police Headquarters I ran head-on into a wall of political pressure. Mum was the word, and they wanted no outside meddlers here either. A sloppy-dressed, lantern-jawed lieutenant in Missing Persons dismissed me with the curt statement that Lisa had walked from her father’s house two weeks ago to the day, had carried no baggage, but had cashed a good-sized check the morning of her departure. She’d last been seen in a restaurant where she’d had lunch. She’d walked out of the restaurant, turned the corner and pouf — no Lisa.

The cop was reaching for the phone even as I closed his door behind me. I would have given odds he was calling Perry Jones. They had the single sheet in Clearview bambozzled into silence, but they must have known that the story was out now.

A young, short, fat man was waiting for me outside the lieutenant’s office. He was wearing blue tropicals, but sweating anyway. The sweat gave his soft, round face a bluish-pink tinge.

“Steve Holloway?”

I nodded.

“I’m Ollie Gardiner.”

My allergy. And in my present mood I always broke out in a rash. His appearance matched his telephone voice. Obese, pompous. Irritatingly certain of himself and the inherent rightness of his position in his own restricted world.

“Don’t tell me,” I said, “that I’m meddling.”

“Well, I do think you might do Lisa more harm than good with a news story. We’re doing what we think is best. We’ve got a good private detective on the case.”

“Papa Jones didn’t tell me that,” I broke in.

He shifted from one foot to the other. “I just wanted to assure you that we’ll turn her up. I’ve swallowed about enough of her contrariness. I told her father this morning he’d better bring her to heel.”

I looked at him a moment, and he colored and backed away a step. I was picturing Lisa with this little grub. His fat, soft hands. I was seeing him waddle to her father with a petulant complaint every time she failed to salaam in his presence.

“How the hell did she ever get engaged to you?”

He bristled, as much as he dared. “It’s none of your business, of course, but she was fond of me. We grew up together, and her mother and father agreed a long time ago that our marriage was the natural and proper thing, for all concerned.”

“I guess old man Jones had a thousand little methods of his own of beating her down to that.”

“Damn you, Holloway! It’ll be to her advantage as well as mine. When we join the two families, we’ll be the real power in this town.”

In addition to his other failings, he was also a fool. It would not be he who would have Clearview under his heel, but Lisa’s old man — with Lisa like a weapon pointed at Gardiner’s lecherous soul.

A little more of his talk and I was afraid I’d lay my knuckles against his nose. I brushed by him.

It was still gagging on his presence when I went out on the sidewalk.

From the day of her birth, Lisa had been a flower struggling for existence in barren soil. Now she was gone, and I was glad. But she’d been afraid, too, and I knew I would never rest until I knew what had happened to her, that she was all right.

I spent the remainder of daylight gouging out bits of information about her. It wasn’t hard. Everyone in Clearview seemed to know her. A wonderful girl, they agreed. A certain strangeness about her that caused you to feel hushed in her presence. But you sensed compassion in her and she was often doing things for people. The poor knew her. As a kid she used to slip off to play with their urchins.

But I was unable to pry open a single crack in the blank wall surrounding Lisa’s disappearance.