Three to Be Read

by Philip Wylie

  “It isn’t like her,” Mrs. Yates insisted.

  Duff grinned rather soberly. “She isn’t herself, these days.”

  “She wandered off with somebody,” Mrs. Yates went on. “I didn’t see who. I’d wheeled into the kitchen to block a sweater, and she’d changed to that gorgeous brown dress she was to wear at the Fashion Parade today. She didn’t take the car and I don’t know who was to call for her. Scotty came by and they talked a while, and then he drove away and I had a glimpse of her standing out by the banyan. After that, somebody must have picked her up.”

  Marian, who had gone into the stair hall, now called, “She certainly is getting absent-minded! She didn’t even take along the hat that goes with the new brown rig!” Marian came, then, carrying a hat the color of Eleanor’s eyes, with canary-yellow trimming.

  It was not until then that Duff became alarmed. But alarm, when it appeared, was instant and formidable. She wouldn’t go without the hat. She was orderly. She was responsible. She had a good memory. And lately, she’d been almost vain; so much attention would have made anybody conscious of beauty. It was hard to imagine that Eleanor would barge away when somebody arrived to pick her up—without a hat that, obviously, was a main part of a planned costume for a very important social event.

  As he felt ice inside himself, Duff instantly dissembled. “Maybe Scotty knows about it.”

  He went to the phone and dialed. He got Scotty’s roommate and, presently, Scotty himself.

  “Hi, you phony Sherlock!” Scotty said.

  Duff frowned at the greeting and then realized that, as far as Scotty knew, his idea about the boxes had been mistaken and their trip to New York a blunder. He grinned tensely and asked about Eleanor.

  “No,” young Smythe answered. “I didn’t see the Queen depart. I had a little colloquy with her around three, and I blew. I left her among the Yates trees and shrubs.”

  Duff thanked him. He tried two members of the Orange Bowl Committee without success. He phoned the people who were sponsoring the banquet and asked if they had heard anything from Eleanor. They hadn’t. The family tried some of Eleanor’s closest girl friends.

  Nobody knew anything about her.

  “We’re probably going bats for nothing,” Duff said. “After all, she was terribly balled up with dates. Let’s eat.”

  Eight o’clock.

  No sign of Eleanor. Duff called a number Higgins had given him, and a sharp voice said, “Rolfe, here.”

  “My name is Allan Bogan. I live at the Yates house—”

  “Right. Where you calling from?”

  “There.”

  “Better use another phone.”

  “No. The thing is, Eleanor Yates has disappeared. I mean, she was due home over two hours ago—been missing since around four.”

  “Right. We’ll check.”

  Duff hung up, wild-eyed.

  “Who was that? The police?”

  Duff nodded. “Sort of.”

  Mrs. Yates began to cry a little.

  Duff nervously walked out on the porch. If they had seized her—if they had taken her away—who were “they”? Why had they done any such thing? Where had they taken her?

  There could be a reason. Weeks before, unsatisfied by his effort to convince the FBI that something was happening, she had gone to see Higgins without telling him. Since his return from New York, Duff hadn’t exchanged confidences with Eleanor or anyone else.

  Higgins had forbidden that. It was possible that Eleanor had found out something so final, so telling, that she’d been— What?

  “They” wouldn’t mind killing a girl. “They,” perhaps, were working to kill millions of people. You couldn’t even think, rationally, of what “they” might be planning.

  Duff paced back and forth on the porch. It was a warm evening, but not so warm as to explain the sweat that burst on his brow, soaked his shirt. Only fear could explain that.

  FIVE

  Four night-blooming-jasmine bushes which Duff had raised from cuttings blossomed along the edge of the veranda. Their perfume, so heady that some people cannot bear it, saturated the darkness and drifted downwind, exotic and sweet. When Duff noticed it, his attention came only in the form of a memory, a memory that Eleanor was very fond of jasmine. He tried to tell himself it was insane to imagine that, simply because she was missing, Eleanor had been kidnapped and perhaps killed by people whose very existence was shadowy.

  He paced the porch, wondering what else might have happened to her, what less-horrifying thing. She had last been seen in the big yard, by Scotty and her mother, over near the banyan. He stood at the porch rail and looked at the black arcades beneath the trunks of the great tree. Had somebody been concealed there?

  Suddenly, as if he had been told, Duff realized what had happened: Eleanor hadn’t previously known anything that had made her freedom on her existence a danger to “them.”

  What had happened was that she had heard something from the lawn, down near the banyan.

  He raced through the house, startling Mrs. Yates and the two children. “Be right back! Ten—fifteen minutes!”

  He picked up the flashlight. In the barn, he shouldered a ladder.

  Charles yelled, “Need me?”

  “No, Charley! Stay with your mother.”

  It was hard work moving through the jungle with the ladder. Time and again it hooked over trees and fouled up on boughs or vines so that he had to use his light, stop and maneuver. When, finally, he reached the sinkhole, he was panting heavily. He stood there, afraid to swing the beam of the electric torch. He shut his jaws and aimed the light down and around the edges. He didn’t see what he feared he would: a body. A girl’s body in a brown dress.

  The ladder splashed in the water. It was, he noticed, abnormally muddy. Plenty of time to settle since he had roiled it. In the water, he plunged for balance as his feet settled uncertainly. His torch circled the recesses. All he saw was water, rock and innumerable roots.

  A big moth flew through the light beam. He pushed forward under the rocky roof of the edge.

  There were fresh tracks. He was sure of that. He was surer still when he could no longer find the one print that had held his attention, the mark of the side of a shoe on a foot that seemed legless. “They” had been in the pit that afternoon, taking the boxes away. But how had they kept from being seen?

  Eleanor, because she had gone over to the banyan, must have heard a sound in the woods and gone to look. In daylight he could probably find the marks of her heels. She had gone to look. And that was that.

  Where was she now? Alive? A prisoner? He groaned and only the walls answered sepulchrally. His flashlight fell sharply on the stones and threw sharp shadows. The recess was deeper than he’d thought. He waded back. It seemed to turn at a projecting wall.

  Following the turn, Duff found a new feature of the sinkhole. An arch of limestone, shoulder-high, spanned some ten feet of water. He leaned and shone his light along its surface. The tunnel, half air and half water, led into the distance in a meandering line as far as he could see.

  Some hundreds of yards away in. that direction was the overgrown real-estate development where Harry Ellings had had his furtive rendezvous with the gigantic man. And beyond those cracked sidewalks, cabbage palms and broken lampposts was the old rock pit, now used as a dump.

  Sinkholes, if they held water, were sometimes connected, underground, with others.

  This one could communicate with the water in the rock pit. In that case, the value of the Yates land to anyone wishing to store desperate cargo was self-evident. Such cargo could be unloaded at night in the old quarry and dragged through this tunnel to the place where he stood. It could then be buried in the soft ooze. And no one watching the house or its surrounding grove of jungle trees would see a sign of coming and going. Duff peered again.

  Surely the boxes went out here that afternoon. Perhaps Eleanor also—

  He started into the opening and changed his mind. The tunnel might go to
the quarry.

  It might be a blind pocket. It might have a hundred forks and turns; he could get lost underground. It was not sensible, not even sane, to explore alone. Taking gasps of air, he yelled “Eleanor!” repeatedly. Nothing came back but echoes.

  He left the pit and raced toward the house. As he rounded the banyan tree he heard a distant siren.

  Mrs. Yates saw him enter and paled. “You’re wet!”

  “I’m all right. I was looking in that rock pit in the woods. Nothing. Don’t worry so, mother!”

  He changed to dry clothes as rapidly as he could. When he came down, Higgins, with two men in business suits whom he’d never seen and two cops, had just come in. Duff jerked his head at the FBI man and they went to the kitchen, where he told Higgins about the sinkhole.

  The men, soaking wet, yelling in the low, rocky passages, found a route to the quarry.

  They found ample signs that men had used it—often and for a long time. They found evidence that vehicles had driven up to the quarry at a point different from the one used by dump trucks. But no trace of Eleanor.

  Near midnight Higgins sat with Duff in the kitchen. Both were muddy to the waist.

  But Higgins had been on the telephone for twenty minutes. He gulped coffee now and wiped a sticky forehead with a sodden handkerchief.

  “Nothing!” he said to Duff. “No lead! Nothing new on the whole proposition. What we’ve got to do is go over it.”

  “Go over it!” Duff groaned. “What do you think I’ve been doing since it started?”

  Higgins ignored that. “I’ve got every man we have looking into everything they can think of! Mac—my chief—will be here soon. Reports will come in here. Now! Let’s go back to that day when you went upstairs to clean the rooms and you noticed Ellings’ closet was locked and you decided to pick the lock. You talk. I’ll ask questions. Start in!”

  Duff stared at the other man, wondering if this was a useful effort or merely a kindly attempt to keep his mind from the final happening. It didn’t matter. Either way, it was better than just being silent and frantic.

  Higgins and he covered every detail. McIntosh came and stayed a while, talked on the phone, issued orders, tried to comfort Mrs. Yates and Marian and Charles, and left.

  Higgins and Duff talked on, without effect. Sometime after three in the morning, Higgins stopped alternately sitting and pacing. “Bogan,” he said, “I know you can’t sleep.

  But I’ve got to. For me, it’s a job.”

  “I understand that.”

  “So I’m starting home. If you hit on anything else, let me know. If we can think of another thing for you to do, we’ll call you. This is rugged.”

  Marian was asleep in a chair in the living room. Charles was asleep on the cot in his mother’s room. And Mrs. Yates didn’t say a word when he looked in. He went upstairs. After a while he lay down. Through his mind rushed the events he had just so painstakingly discussed with the FBI man. Little by little, in the dark, they ran less swiftly. And after a time, Duff sat up, rubbing his hair, putting his feet on the floor. He had told himself, with a different mental tone, that no feverish attempt such as he was making could accomplish a thing. He reminded himself that he was a scientist, capable of concentration, attention, analysis.

  “What I ought to do, he thought, is take it like mathematics. Check back. Look for discrepancies. Things not included. Things not explained. Mistakes. Also, I should extrapolate. Imagine. He felt more detached, less frantic.

  There were several elements not satisfactorily accounted for. Little things. Why, for example, had the warehouse in New York been empty? And what had there been about it that had impressed him as meaningful, but that he had never called to consciousness? He had the answer to that, abruptly. The floor of that vast building had glittered faintly with the mica-like brilliance of such broken stone as is excavated in Manhattan. He’d thought of it as coming in from the streets on truck wheels. Actually, it could have come from excavating in the building. And they wouldn’t have wanted things stored there if they had wanted to dig.

  Before this instant, Duff realized, he had conceived of an assembled A-bomb as something in a huge case or a truck above ground. Why not bury it? The warehouse wasn’t far from Wall Street. An A-bomb going off there, even underground, would destroy the financial heart of New York City, of America.

  That was one thing. He could tell Higgins to have them tear up the floor of the place.

  Then, perhaps, they’d get tangible—and terrifying— evidence. That idea, a fresh idea, one in which he had confidence, excited him; his mind raced anew. But he saw the error of that. He had to think, not feel.

  The second idea he evolved had to do with Harry Ellings’ history. It was odd, in a way. He’d been a letter carrier. Developed varicosis—he had said. He limped a little and complained of leg pains. True. That could have been put on. Why? Because, Duff reasoned, a bad leg might have been a first step in training for a new job. If Harry had belonged for years to a secret underground, the organization might have wanted him to be in a trucking company, where freight could be forwarded secretly.

  It would be easier, Duff thought, and a great deal safer, to retrain an established underground member than to try to persuade some unknown mechanic to turn to treason. So, perhaps, Harry had feigned the bad leg, learned to be a mechanic and moved into Miami-Dade Terminal Trucking Company as part of a plan. That way Harry could retain his mask of ordinariness. The idea was strengthened, if not corroborated, by the existence of the quarry, the sinkhole and the connecting tunnel, and by Harry’s meeting with the huge man near the quarry.

  That pattern, while logical, seemed not to lead any further toward Eleanor. It took Duff more than an hour—an hour of slow, relaxed new thought. He had been turning over in his mind all he knew about the man seven feet tall. He had actually seen the man twice: one evening in New York, one night with Harry Ellings. The FBI also had reports on the man.

  Two different agents, on two different nights, had seen the man enter a place. But not come out. They’d lost him, both nights.

  Why nights? Did he come out only at night, because of his great stature, as Higgins evidently believed? Or could it be that there was something about his immense size which wouldn’t look natural in daylight? Could size be a kind of truck? Itself a ruse? The figure, menacing, looming, weird, had obviously perturbed even the sanguine G-men. Was that intentional?

  Could a man, Duff asked himself, who was, say, Duff’s own height—two and a half inches over six feet—add the balance? Special shoes, such as many very short men wore to increase their apparent height, would help. He might wear a wig, to, that increased the size of his head. But the man had been taller even than that, Duff thought. Stilts would do it—little stilts.

  Duff remembered the print in the mud. A shoe, laced over a wooden form from which a steel bar rose to a second shoe, would do it. The steel bar wouldn’t have to be very long, either. Nine or ten inches. And if a man so equipped fell over, as he might in a mucky place, the side of his shoe would be printed in the mud, and there would be no ankle for ten inches above it, but only a steel rod which mightn’t touch the mud at all. Then there would be left exactly such a print as Duff had seen in the mudbank.

  The possible meaning of that, in turn, was clear. He and the FBI had been searching for a giant. But the man they wanted, actually, was perhaps no taller than Duff. Size, and especially vast size, is the most conspicuous of all human characteristics. If a veritable giant was seen entering a building and then even a dozen merely tall men came out, no one would connect the first man with the others.

  Almost, then, Duff phoned Higgins. But Higgins was sleeping, and Higgins needed sleep. In a couple more hours he would telephone the G-man. Meanwhile, he would go on thinking, There might be still more that could be dredged up and made to mean something other than what he had supposed, until then.

  He tore open a new package of cigarettes, saw how his hand shook and forced himself to be cal
m again. By and by, it grew faintly light. He realized he had dozed a little when the thwack of the morning paper on the porch made him start. He went downstairs in stocking feet. It was light enough by then to read the headlines:

  Orange Bowl Queen Vanishes

  Police Search for Miss Eleanor Yates

  Kidnapping Feared

  Crank Suspected

  Duff couldn’t wait any longer. He dialed Higgins’ number, got a sleepy “Yeah?” and began to talk excitedly. Fifteen minutes later he hung up. He knew that he was close to tears, but only when he heard himself sniffle did he realize that fatigue, humiliation and a sense of incompetence had actually brought tears into his eyes.

  About the particles on the warehouse floor, Higgins had said, “Hunh! Interesting! I’ll pass it on to New York.”

  But about the idea that Harry Ellings’ entire life had been planned, the G-man was brief and cutting, “Good Lord! We’ve assumed it was that way for weeks!”

  A similar response greeted his theory about the huge man. “Did that just occur to you? We’ve been on the lookout for anybody of any size for a hell of a while!”

  Duff said wretchedly, “I shouldn’t have phoned.”

  “Oh, sure. That warehouse hunch is solid. And my alarm will let go in less than an hour, anyhow.”

  Nevertheless, Duff felt disappointed; he felt as he had ever since the beginning, foolish. The FBI and the police knew. They could and did think and act. And he chimed in afterward with his half-baked hunches. Bitterly, he started toward the porch, but he heard Mrs. Yates crying softly, and he went in to try to comfort her.

  Cars surrounded the Yates home, parked in the drive and on the lawns—police cars, press and radio cars, Orange Bowl officials’ cars and the cars of friends, neighbors, curious strangers. They had accumulated all day.

  Mrs. Yates and Duff were obliged to keep telling people that they had no idea where Eleanor might have gone, with whom or whether she could have been kidnapped. Because of the numbers “of people, the shock and the confusion, they had sent Marian and Charles to stay with friends.