Honeymoon for Three

by Alan Cook

  “He probably hid it in his trunk. He didn’t want to reveal too much about himself to you. People like him are very secretive. The note below the picture mentions your high school. That’s how we found your parents. There aren’t many Singletons living in Fenwick, Connecticut. It turns out that Alfred is something of an artist. Take a look at this.”

  He pulled a loose page out of the sketchpad and held it up. The pencil drawing was a very good likeness of the cheerleader picture, even to Penny’s smile.

  “When did he do that?” Penny asked.

  Detective Landon shrugged. “It could have been anytime since you graduated from high school. I have one more to show you.” He hesitated. “I’d rather not get it out in here with all these people around. Go ahead and finish your dinners. Then we’ll go outside, and I’ll show it to you there.”

  Penny hardly ate anything. What was so bad about this picture? She wanted to take the detective outside right now without Gary, but that was impossible. Gary, however, didn’t seem to have any trouble eating.

  While they ate, they talked about what Alfred might do next. Detective Landon was of the opinion that he would keep following them, if he could. He asked them where they were staying. When they told him they were camping, he said that the National Park Service was cooperating with the police. They would keep a watch on the campground. He wrote down their route for the rest of the trip in his notebook. He gave them a number where they could call him collect, any time, day or night.

  They paid their bill and went out of the restaurant. Detective Landon took them to his unmarked car, which was parked in a lighted area. He placed the briefcase on the top of the car, opened it, and pulled out another sheet from inside the sketchpad. He turned and held it up so they could see it.

  Penny gasped. It was a nude drawing of her. “I never posed for that.” She glanced at Gary. He was gazing intently at the picture.

  “He could have drawn your head with somebody else’s body,” Detective Landon said. “Maybe from a magazine like Playboy.”

  “No, that’s me.” There was the mole on her left breast, prominently displayed. Gary saw it too, so there was no sense trying to cover it up. “I haven’t told you everything.” Better to tell the truth than let Gary’s imagination soar. She proceeded to tell the story of the Halloween party when she was in high school. She admitted that she passed out from drinking and was naked when she came to. Alfred could have drawn her then. Or done something worse.

  “Your hair in this picture is shorter than it is in the cheerleader picture,” Detective Landon said. “More like it is now.”

  “He could have drawn the picture recently, based on his memory. When we were together, he mentioned my mole. He threatened to tell Gary about the mole and the Halloween party. That was his way of trying to make me do what he wanted.”

  “He’s obsessed with you,” Detective Landon said. “That’s obvious.”

  “He exaggerated your navel,” Gary said.

  Penny had noticed it, too. “Alfred likes navels.” For some reason, it was more embarrassing for her to talk about that than if he had touched her breasts. She knew her face had turned scarlet, but she struggled on. “When he took me to see the sunset at the campground, he…he…played with my navel.”

  “And that’s when you hit him?”

  “Yes. And when we were driving together, I think he was playing with his own navel.”

  “This boy has a naval fetish,” Detective Landon said. “It may sound weird, but I can tell you from personal experience that people are weird. In my business, you see people as they really are.

  “In addition, you’re his obsession. People with obsessions will go to any lengths to attain the object of their obsession. They behave compulsively, doing crazy things the rest of us can’t imagine doing. It’s not your fault, Penny. You just have to stay away from him. Since he’s wanted for murder, if we catch him, the problem will end. But don’t feel guilty about him.”

  “I was feeling guilty,” Penny admitted. “I thought I might have led him on somehow.”

  Detective Landon didn’t have any more questions. He replaced the drawing in his briefcase and put it in his car. He left them, telling them that they should call him if they had any contact with Alfred, or remembered anything else that might be pertinent.

  After he drove away, Penny avoided Gary’s eyes. What did he think of the nude picture, or of her behavior at the Halloween party?

  “Let’s go back to the campground,” Gary said.

  To Penny, his voice sounded stiff. They rode in silence. Penny wondered if this would affect their relationship. She felt scared and sad at the same time.

  “I need to take a walk,” Gary said when they got there.

  Penny didn’t try to stop him. She went into the tent and bundled herself into the sleeping bag where she cried silently.

  ***

  Gary walked fast, partly to keep warm, partly to get the devils out of him. He circled the campground, looking for a blue Ford Falcon as he went. He saw only one car that came close to matching that description. The owners were at a picnic table nearby, playing cards and drinking by the light of a lantern. That was not Alfred’s car.

  After an hour of hard walking, Gary was exhausted—from the walk and from the activities of the day. He knew what he had to do. He walked back to their campsite and called to Penny from the door of the tent so that she wouldn’t be alarmed. She gave a soft response. He opened the flap and saw her face dimly lit by the light from his flashlight. She looked unhappy, and her face was streaked. He crawled inside and closed the flap. He couldn’t see her now. It was just as well.

  “I have a story to tell,” he said. “I told you that when I was a second-semester senior in college I fell in love with a first-semester freshman. She was seventeen, like you were at the time of the Halloween party. That was in the days of segregated dorms. Girls lived in one set of dorms, boys in another. Our dorms were a mile apart. Girls couldn’t go upstairs in our dorm except during special events, and I don’t remember ever seeing a room in a girls’ dorm. When girls were allowed into our rooms, we had to keep the door open and four feet on the floor.

  “With all the rules, you would think that life there would be pretty chaste. So perhaps it was especially bad that we found a way to shack up on weekends.”

  Gary paused to let that sink in.

  “Did she love you?” Penny asked, softly.

  “She loved me physically, although not with her heart and soul, which perhaps makes her sin worse. But the point of this whole thing is, should she be tainted for life for what she did? Should I? Should you for what you’ve done? Who is to judge? All I want you to know is that I love you.”

  There was silence for a few seconds. Then Penny said, “Give me a kiss.”

  He kissed her and felt the wetness of her tears. He kissed them away. Her lips were soft.

  She said, “Get undressed and come to bed.”

  CHAPTER 19

  “Did you get the feeling we were sliding downhill all night?” Gary asked the question as he crawled out of the small tent and braved the coolness of the morning. The singing of the birds had woken them up earlier than they would have liked.

  Penny poked her head out and blinked at the morning sun. “We set the tent up on a slope, didn’t we?”

  “Yup. If we do that again we’ll at least point our heads uphill.”

  “Well, now that we’re up, we might as well get going. Fire up the stove and let’s have breakfast. Then animals, here we come.”

  “And Old Faithful.” Gary didn’t say anything about what had happened last night, and Penny wasn’t about to mention it. That they were behaving like honeymooners again was enough for her.

  ***

  For at least the tenth time, Alfred bemoaned the loss of his car. He had spent a second night sleeping in the small Falcon, and he was stiff and sore as a result. He had stayed in the campground closest to Old Faithful, figuring that he would be less conspi
cuous there than he would parked along the road somewhere. Park officials discouraged camping except in the campgrounds.

  He ate breakfast in a café and then set up his observation post where he could see Old Faithful but not be seen by the tourists who gathered at the benches that served as a viewing location. He used the buildings of Old Faithful Village as shields. Scalding steam rose constantly from a number of fissures. This was a hotbed of volcanic activity. When Old Faithful did erupt, boiling water and steam rose into the sky in an awesome and terrible display of the power of nature.

  Although he was not normally attracted to the outdoors, Alfred could watch Old Faithful all day. He pictured what was happening below ground to produce this spectacle, and it showed how puny mankind was in comparison to these forces. This made him glad, because it meant that the people in the world who were full of themselves weren’t so great after all.

  Alfred had purchased a hunting knife before he came into the park. Knives weren’t traceable the way guns were, but they could be just as deadly. A knife didn’t go off unexpectedly. He kept it in a sheath on his belt and wore his jacket over it.

  ***

  The animals were absent without leave. So were the geysers. Penny and Gary walked around Norris Geyser Basin, but nothing was erupting. Then they drove along a dirt service road for five miles, searching in vain for the elusive animals. They ate lunch during their search. Then they drove toward Old Faithful Village.

  ***

  Alfred hadn’t dared desert his post to eat lunch, and hunger gnawed at his insides like a dog gnawing on a bone. The few potato chips he’d eaten didn’t satisfy him. Hunger made him grouchy. He had spent much of the trip being hungry. Now more than ever he was prepared to deal with Gary.

  When he finally spotted Gary and Penny, they were headed not toward Old Faithful but toward the laundry at Old Faithful Village. It was dumb luck on his part that they didn’t see him, because he had been looking in the wrong direction. He ducked around a corner and contemplated his next move.

  They were always doing laundry. They had done laundry the night he was with them. He had done laundry then, too, but nothing since. He was stuck with the clothes on his back, because he had left everything else in his car. It was just another reason to regret giving up his car.

  The nomad life he had been leading was getting old. He was going to return to civilization. In order to do that successfully, he had to leave no tracks. That meant no witnesses. He had to kill Penny along with Gary. He hadn’t faced that problem before. He hated to do it, but he realized that once he killed Gary, Penny would be dead to him anyway.

  The police couldn’t prove he murdered the man in the grocery store. There shouldn’t be anything to connect that murder with the ones he was contemplating now. Even if the authorities hassled him about that one, he should get off. He would be able to start a new life with a clear conscience.

  He had to make a plan. He had to restrain his impetuosity. Until the time he saw them enter the laundry, he hadn’t considered the consequences of murdering Gary. If he did it out in the open, he would be arrested. That idea hadn’t bothered him before, but now that he had decided to forge a new life for himself, he needed to be much more careful.

  Alfred returned to the parking area, making sure he wasn’t visible from the laundry. He found the green Volkswagen. People were constantly coming in and out of here. A lot of tourists wanted to see Old Faithful. This might be a dramatic spot to commit a murder, but it was a very foolish one. He remembered that they planned to stay in Yellowstone for three nights. They had one night to go. They would undoubtedly stay in a campground.

  He had a map of the park, showing all the campgrounds. He had a pretty good idea where they might stay. He could also follow them because they wouldn’t recognize his new car. He had to do it carefully. On the narrow park roads, it would become obvious after a while if he followed them too closely.

  He got into his car and looked at his map of the park. As he studied the map, what he should do became clear. He would drive to West Thumb, which was a major intersection. The direction they took from there would determine where they were going to stay for the night. That way he wouldn’t have to follow them much, if at all.

  Alfred started the car and drove away, chuckling at his brilliance, until he remembered that he still hadn’t eaten lunch. He would have to tough it out until West Thumb. There would be a place to eat at West Thumb.

  ***

  Fishing Bridge Camp, northeast of West Thumb, was a rustic campground, with trees and aromas that spoke of the outdoors and the mountains. There was only one thing wrong with it, Penny discovered just after they started making an early dinner: bears.

  The seventeenth bear they had seen since entering Yellowstone came ambling through the campground, obviously looking for food. Gary grabbed the pot on the stove and they retreated to the car.

  No sooner had they started cooking again than bear number eighteen approached. He was headed for the car, itself, which cut them off from retreat. He put his paws on the front of it and peered into the open hood, which served as a storage area for the rear-engine VW. Gary banged on a pot to move him along. The bear walked away at a leisurely pace.

  “Do you think we’re ever going to be able to eat our dinner?” Penny asked. “Or are the bears going to eat our dinner? They seem to think we’re running a restaurant here.”

  Gary shrugged. “Eat fast and keep your eyes peeled.”

  They did, and no more bears intruded on their repast. That afternoon they had driven north and enjoyed spectacular views of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, including the upper and lower falls. The multi-colored cliffs of the canyon and the ferocity of the dashing waterfalls showcased nature in all its beauty, along with the aura of constant danger.

  It was still early when they finished eating. Not wanting to be outside in bear country and too pumped up from the sights of Yellowstone to go to bed, they drove back to see the canyon in the setting sun.

  ***

  After Penny and Gary passed Alfred at West Thumb, he followed their car. He stayed some distance behind them until he verified that they were going to Fishing Bridge Camp. He had plenty of time to kill. He wouldn’t actually do anything until late tonight when everybody in the campground was asleep. He was getting smarter.

  He drove along the park roads, glancing idly at a canyon and some waterfalls. It was pretty, but nothing to get excited about. Later, he stopped at the restaurant at Fishing Bridge and ate dinner there. He dawdled, drinking coffee, until after dark.

  He was acquiring a lot of patience. Patience was a virtue. It would soon pay off for him. When the last orange glow of the sun had dropped behind the hills, he drove into the campground. There was no chance that they would spot him in the dark if he inadvertently drove past their campsite. They wouldn’t recognize the car.

  He found a campsite for himself and parked the car there. Then he set out on foot to find their campsite. He wore his jacket with the hood up to keep warm. The moon was partly obscured by clouds and provided minimal light. He had found a flashlight in the glove compartment of the Falcon, but he only flicked it on occasionally to help him see into the depths of a campsite.

  The easiest way to find their site in the dark was to spot the green VW. After a half hour of tramping around the campground, he hadn’t seen it. Had he covered the whole campground? Or had they decided not to camp here, after all? He leaned against a pine tree to rest and think.

  A large black shape glided down the path. Alfred froze. It was a bear. Had it seen him? He tried not to breathe or do anything that would give himself away. The bear ambled along, taking its time. The way it walked, in a somewhat disjointed fashion, made it look clumsy, but there was no doubt about the strength of the muscles rippling under the brown fur. Alfred watched, scared and fascinated, as it disappeared into the dark. He was sweating, in spite of the cold.

  ***

  It had been dark for some time when Gary and Penny ret
urned to the campground. They parked the car at their campsite, got out their toilet articles, and cleaned their teeth at a restroom. They met in front of the building and started walking back to their campsite. Gary put up his arm to stop Penny. A bear walked by, not ten feet in front of them. They waited until the bear went on its way, and then returned to the tent.

  Gary said, “Are you sleepy yet?”

  “We could light the lantern and sit at the table, but it’s too cold to write postcards.”

  “Let’s go for a walk. That will keep us warm.”

  “What about the bears?”

  “They haven’t hurt us yet. They’re only after food.”

  “Okay, but if we turn out to be their food, it’s your fault.”

  ***

  The existence of one bear meant that there were bound to be more. Alfred kept looking over his shoulder as he resumed his patrol through the campground. Bears were just another reason he didn’t like the outdoors. He stepped as lightly as he could, hoping they wouldn’t hear him. Hoping he would hear them first. He would be glad when he was safely back in Los Angeles.

  It seemed like forever, but it was probably not more than another half hour before he spotted the Volkswagen. He surreptitiously shone the flashlight on it to make sure the car was the right color, because in the dark all cars looked black. He thought he had passed this way before, but it was hard to tell. All the campsites looked alike.

  Quiet encompassed the campsite of Penny and Gary. They must be in the tent with their arms around each other. That picture infuriated him. He wouldn’t think of it. Concentrate on what had to be done, he told himself. It was dark at almost all the campsites, especially the ones with tents. Lights shone in a few of the camper shells that sat on the backs of pickup trucks, but not many people were outdoors in the cold. Still, he had better wait until everybody was asleep before he did what he had to do.

  To pass some of the time until then, he would make sure he knew the route from here back to his car. He was getting tired of walking; in fact, he was getting downright exhausted, but he had to stay alert, and this was the best way to do it. It would soon be over.