The Cry of the Owl

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Where? Out here?” asked Greg.

  “Right here, I guess. I didn’t see anything.”

  “Well, tonight’s a good night for it,” Greg said cheerily. “Nice and black. Maybe something’ll happen.”

  “Not if you scare whoever it is away,” said the girl, laughing, talking just as loudly as the man.

  They didn’t want to find anybody, Robert thought. Who would? The man’s shoes clumped on the side porch. Greg was making a tour of the house. Robert was relieved to see that he had no flashlight. But he still might circle the basketball board. The girl was looking out of the window, which was open about ten inches. Greg returned from his circle of the house and entered by the kitchen door. The window was put down, then raised by Greg, a little less high than before, then Greg turned away. Robert walked from the basketball goal toward the house, toward the open window. He walked almost arrogantly, as if to prove to himself he had not been intimidated by having to take shelter for a few minutes. He stood exactly where he had stood before, on the other side of the tree and about three feet from the window. Bravado, he thought. Sheer bravado and foolhardiness.

  “. . . the police,” Greg was saying in a bored tone. “But let me have a look around first. I’ll sleep in the living room, honey, because it’s easier to run out than if I’m upstairs. I’ll sleep in my pants and shoes, and if I catch anybody—” Grimacing, he brought his big fists up in front of his face.

  “Want a nice piece of firewood as a bludgeon or something?” the girl asked in her soft voice, smiling, and it was as if the violence of his words had not penetrated her at all. Still, she was the sort of girl who would be smiling and casual when she was worried, Robert felt, and he liked that. She never looked nervous. He loved that. She said something else he couldn’t catch, but he was sure she was going into the living room to show Greg the piece of wood she meant. She had a black coal hod by the fireplace full of wood and kindling.

  Greg’s laughter came from the living room, loud and bold.

  Robert shrugged, smiling. Then he opened his overcoat, pushed his hands into his trouser pockets and walked with his head up away from the house and down the driveway.

  The girl lived on the Conarack Road, which led, after six straight but hilly miles, into Humbert Corners, where Robert supposed the girl worked. Robert went through Humbert Corners on the way to Langley, where he lived, a town very much bigger, on the Delaware River. Langley was known as a shopping center, the home of the largest used-car dealer in the district—“Red Redding’s Used Car Riots”—and also of Langley Aeronautics, which made parts for private planes and helicopters. Robert had been working there as an industrial engineer since the end of September. It was not a very interesting job, but it paid quite well, and Langley Aeronautics had been glad to get him, because he had come from a prestigious job in New York, with a firm that redesigned toasters, electric irons, radios, tape recorders, and nearly every gadget and appliance in the American home. Robert had brought an assignment with him from New York, the completion of a set of two-hundred-and-fifty-odd detailed drawings of insects and spiders, which a young man in France had begun for a Professor Gumbolowski. Robert’s friends the Campbells, Peter and Edna, had introduced him to the professor in New York and had insisted that Robert bring over his drawings of irises the evening he met him. The professor had brought some of the drawings for his book, for which he already had a contract with an American publisher. The young Frenchman who had started the drawings, and more than half finished them, had died. This in itself was enough to make Robert decline the assignment—not that he was superstitious, but the situation was vaguely depressing and he had had enough depression. He was also not enamored of insects and spiders. But the professor was enthralled by his iris blossoms, which Robert had drawn on a whim from flowers in his and Nickie’s apartment, and was sure he could complete the Frenchman’s drawings in the style in which they had been begun. Before the evening was over, Robert had accepted the assignment. It was certainly different from anything he had ever done before, and he was trying to create for himself a “different” life. He had separated from Nickie and was living in a hotel in New York, he was about to quit his job, and he was trying to choose a city to go and live in. The insect book might lead to other such assignments; he might like it very much or he might detest it, but at least he would find out. So he had come to Rittersville, Pennsylvania, a larger town than Langley, stayed for ten days and found nothing in the way of a job, and then he had come to Langley to investigate Langley Aeronautics. The town was dull, but he was not sorry he had moved from New York. Even though one had to take one’s old self along wherever one went, a change of scene was that much change, and it helped. He was to get eight hundred dollars when he completed the drawings, and he had until the end of February to finish them. Robert set himself four drawings per week. He drew from the professor’s detailed but rough sketches and from enlarged photographs the professor had given him. Robert found that he enjoyed the work, and it helped to pass the long weekends.

  Robert entered Langley from the east and drove past “Red Redding’s Used Car Riots.” Here were solid square blocks of hardtops and convertibles, illuminated in a ghostly way by street lights set in narrow paved lanes that ran among them. The cars looked like a vast army of dead soldiers in armor, and of what battles, Robert wondered, could each car tell? Of a crash that had been repaired, but the owner killed? Of a family man gone broke, so the car had to be sold?

  The Camelot Apartments, where Robert lived, was a four-story structure on the west side of Langley, only a mile from the plant where he worked. Its lobby was lighted by two table lamps that shone through philodendron boxes. A switchboard in the corner had been abandoned and never removed: Mrs. Rhoads had told him that she thought her “people,” after all, preferred private telephone lines, even if they couldn’t get messages taken for them. Mrs. Rhoads lived on the ground floor right, and she was usually in the lobby or her front sitting room, whose door was always open, when anyone went in or out. She was in the lobby when Robert came in, and she was pouring water from a lacquered-brass watering pot into a philodendron box.

  “Good evening, Mr. Forester. And how are you this evening?” she asked.

  “Very well, thank you,” Robert said, smiling. “And you?”

  “Good enough. Working late tonight?”

  “No, just driving around. I like to take a look at the countryside.”

  Then she asked him if he was getting enough heat in a certain one of his radiators, and Robert assured her that he was, though he hadn’t noticed anything about the radiator. Then he went up the stairs. There were six or eight apartments in the building, and there was no elevator. Robert’s apartment was on the top floor. He had not troubled to get acquainted with any of the other people—a couple of young bachelors, a girl in her twenties, a middle-aged widow who went to work very early—but he nodded and spoke whenever he encountered anyone. One of the young men, Tom Shive, had asked him to go bowling once, and Robert had gone. Mrs. Rhoads had the curiosity of the classic concierge as to who came and went, Robert felt, but she was good-natured, and he actually liked to feel there was someone in the house who cared, or who at least formed some opinion about his being alone or with someone, and whether he came in at five or seven-thirty P.M. or one in the morning. For about the same amount of money, ninety dollars per month, Robert might have found a medium-sized house to rent somewhere in the environs of Langley, but he had not wanted to be alone. Even the mediocre furniture of his two rooms was a comfort somehow: other people had lived here before him, had managed not to set the sofa on fire, had done no more damage than burning a cigarette streak in the bureau top, had paced the same dark-green carpet, and perhaps taken the trouble to notice, Wednesdays and Saturdays, that it had been vacuumed. Other people had lived here before him and gone on somewhere else, to lead perfectly ordinary and perhaps happier lives. He had a month-to-month arrangement with Mrs. Rhoads. He would not want to stay here more th
an a month or two more, he thought. Either he would take a house in the country or move to Philadelphia, where Langley Aeronautics had their main plant and did their assembling. He had six thousand in the bank, and his expenses were less here than in New York. He hadn’t yet received the bill for the divorce, but Nickie was handling that through her lawyers in New York. She was getting married again and had not wanted any alimony from him.

  Robert turned on the electric oven in his kitchenette, looked over the directions on a couple of packages of frozen food, then opened them and slid them into the oven without bothering with the preheating. He looked at his watch, then settled himself in his armchair with a pocket book on American trees. He read about “The Winged and Slippery Elms.” The flat, factual prose was refreshing.

  The inner bark of Slippery Elm twigs was formerly chewed for relief of throat ailments. The twigs are hairy but not corky. … Coarse, hard and heavy, it makes fence posts.

  He turned the pages with pleasure, and read on until a smell of scorching food made him jump up from his chair.

  2

  Ten days later, around the middle of December, Jennifer Thierolf and Gregory Wyncoop were having coffee in the living room of her house and watching a television program. It was a Sunday night. They sat on the secondhand Victorian sofa, which she had bought at an auction and spruced up with linseed oil and upholstery cleaner, and they were holding hands. It was a murder mystery, but not so interesting as most of the others they had watched in the same series.

  Jenny stared unseeing into the screen. She was thinking of a book she was reading, Dostoevski’s The Possessed. She did not understand Kirilov, at least not his last speech, a long one, but there was no use asking Greg about it. Greg had read the book, he said, but the question she might have asked him, though clear before dinner, now seemed nebulous to her. But she had no doubt that when she finished the book, or maybe a few days after she had finished it, she would be sitting in the bathtub or washing dishes one evening, and it would all become clear and inevitable.

  “What’re you thinking about?” Greg asked.

  Jenny, embarrassed, sat back and smiled. “Do I always have to be thinking about something? You’re always asking me that.”

  “As long as you’re not thinking about this g.-d. house again, or worrying about it—”

  “Don’t say ‘g.-d. house.’”

  “All right.” Greg leaned toward her, closed his eyes, and pressed his nose in her neck. A booming chord made him sit up and look at the screen again, but nothing was happening. “Anyway, it’s an old house and all old houses have funny noises in them. The attic creaks because the whole top part of the house moves in the wind, in my opinion.”

  “I’m not worried. You’re usually more worried about the house than I am,” Jenny said with sudden defensiveness.

  “About the noises? The outside ones, sure. I think there’s a prowler. Did you ask Susie if she’s seen anybody, like I told you to?”

  Susie Escham was a girl who lived with her parents in the next house from Jenny’s.

  “No, I forgot,” Jenny said.

  “Well, ask her. Nobody but a romantic like you would move into an isolated house like this, anyway. Come a real big snow, wires coming down and all that, you’ll be sorry.”

  “You think I didn’t see a few winters in Scranton?”

  “I think you didn’t live in a house like this in Scranton. I know you didn’t, because I’ve seen the house.”

  Jenny sighed, thinking of her parents’ snug, well-cared-for two-story house—all of brick and absolutely rigid in the wind, of course—in Scranton. She was twenty-three. She had quit college in her third year, and worked as a bookkeeper-secretary in a Scranton office and lived at home, until the end of last summer. Then she had wanted to do something all by herself, and she had debated going to Europe on the money she had saved versus going to San Francisco to live, and then she had decided to move to a small town, so she chose Humbert Corners. She had wanted a house all her own, an interesting house that she could decorate herself, a house that wasn’t fifty feet from someone else’s house, as her parents’ house was. This house she liked, in spite of its funny noises, which sometimes woke her up at night and frightened her.

  “The only thing to do with this house is get used to it,” Jenny said solemnly. “There’s nothing the matter with this house.”

  “O.K., Jenny, but you needn’t think I’m going to live here or in any house like this once we’re married. And I hope that’s before June.”

  “All right, I didn’t say you had to, but meanwhile I enjoy this house.”

  “I know you do, honey.” He kissed her cheek. “God, you’re such a kid.”

  She didn’t like that much. He was only five years older, anyway. “Here’s the news,” she said.

  In the middle of the news, there was a sound outside like a human cough. Jenny jumped, and Greg was instantly on his feet, his lanky figure racing to the kitchen for the flashlight that stood upright on the table. He recrossed the living room with it and opened the front door.

  “Who’s there?” he called loudly, flashing the light around the leafless forsythia, the six-foot-high spruce, along the driveway, down to the road. He turned the light in the other direction, finding nothing but the collapsed white fence and a bleak wooden lightpost with a broken-paned lantern crookedly atop it.

  “See anything?” Jenny asked, standing close behind him.

  “No, but I’m going to look.” He leaped down the front steps and went to the corner of the house, shone the light toward the back, then advanced more slowly, careful to look behind the tall hedge clumps that could easily have hidden a man. He moved in a line with the basketball board, so he could see if someone were standing behind it. He turned the light on the tool house and walked around it, even looked into it. Then he flashed the light suddenly down the drive and to either side.

  “Nothing. Not a thing,” Greg said as he came back into the house. The television was off now. A lock of his curly black hair hung over his forehead. “It did sound like a cough, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said firmly, but without emotion.

  He smiled at her seriousness and her unconcern, and it crossed his mind to spend the night here again. If they could only lie on the sofa together in pajamas—but he wouldn’t be able to sleep unless he made love to her, and they’d been over all that. They’d done it twice, and the agreement was to wait until they were married before they did it again. An informal, Jenny-like agreement that he might manage to break. But not tonight. Not with someone perhaps looking in on them, or trying to, through the living-room curtains. “I’ve got an idea!” he said suddenly. “Get a dog. I’ll get you a dog. A Doberman’s the best thing. A watchdog.”

  She leaned back against a sofa pillow. “I’m not home enough. I couldn’t bear to leave an animal alone here eight hours a day.”

  He knew it was hopeless. She could be persuaded about nearly everything, but he wouldn’t be able to persuade her about an animal, something she thought might suffer because of her. “There might be a dog at the pound that’d be damned glad of any home—rather than being put to death.”

  “Oh, let’s not talk about it.” She got up and went into the kitchen.

  He looked after her, puzzled, wondering if he’d thrown her into a bad mood. Her kid brother had died three years ago of spinal meningitis. Jenny had spent a lot of time at the hospital with him. It had impressed her strongly, too strongly. He ought never to say the word “death” to her.

  “Know what I feel like?” she called from the kitchen. “Some hot chocolate. Would you like some?”

  He smiled, all the worry gone from his face. “Sure, if you would.” He heard the milk splash into a saucepan, the click of the electric stove—which was the only modern thing about the house. He lit a cigarette and stood in the kitchen doorway, watching her.

  She was slowly stirring the milk. “You know what’s the worst crime a person can commit? I think.”
>
  Murder came to his mind, but he smiled and said, “What?”

  “To accuse somebody falsely of rape.”

  “Ha!” He laughed and struck his forehead. “What made you think of that?”

  “Something I read in the paper. Some girl accused somebody. They haven’t proved it yet.”

  He watched her, concentrating on the milk, looked at her young and solid body down to her flat black suede shoes that were neither quite childlike nor quite chic on Jenny, but something in between. He thought, if anybody ever raped her, he’d murder him, throttle him with pleasure. “Say, Jenny, you haven’t seen anybody around here, have you? You’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Of course I’d tell you. Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not being silly. You have so many secrets, little one. That’s what makes you such an exciting woman.” He put his arms around her from behind, and kissed the back of her head.

  She laughed, a slow, shy laugh, turned quickly and put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  They had the chocolate in the kitchen with some brown-edged cookies that they ate out of the box. Greg looked at his wristwatch and saw it was nearly midnight. He had to be up at six-thirty in order to get to Philadelphia by nine. He was a salesman of pharmaceuticals, and he had to use his car every day. His new Plymouth had twenty-one thousand miles on it already. He had an apartment over a garage on Mrs. Van Vleet’s property in Humbert Corners, only five miles from Jenny’s house, and the five miles seemed no distance at all when he came to see her in the evening, a positive pleasure after a day of a hundred and fifty or two hundred miles’ driving. Like Jenny herself—such a funny contrast to the stuff he sold all day, sleeping pills, wake-you-up pills, pills to get you off drinking, smoking, eating too much, pills to knock out certain nerves and stimulate others. The world was absolutely full of sick people, one would think; otherwise he’d be out of a job. “Holy smoke!” Jenny had said the first time he had opened his suitcase and showed her the stuff he peddled. Hundreds of bottles of pills of different colors and shapes, all labeled with made-up names, their unpronounceable ingredients listed. The only pills Jenny had in her medicine cabinet were aspirins, and she said she took those about twice a year, if she felt a cold coming on. That was what he liked about her, one of the things he liked about her—she was so healthy. It was unromantic, maybe, to like a girl because she was healthy, but it made Jenny beautiful and glowing. It gave her a tremendous edge over any girl he’d ever gone with or been in love with before. There’d been only two before, two girls in Philadelphia, and they’d both given him slow no’s when he proposed. Jenny made them both look sick by comparison. Jenny wanted children. They were going to start a family as soon as they got married. The mother of my children, Greg thought quite often when he looked at her. He could see her with their child of two or three or four, talking to it, treating it as if it were a real person even if it were doing something silly, laughing with it, above all being patient and good-natured, never getting angry. She’d make the world’s best mother, Greg thought.