The Cry of the Owl

by Patricia Highsmith

  “Because—we aren’t, and I thought making it clear would take a little of the melodrama out of the situation. Maybe it wasn’t necessary. But it can’t do any damage, can it?”

  “Damage how?”

  “Oh, Jenny, I don’t know. But the police usually want to know the particulars in a thing like this.”

  “What do you mean by ‘a thing like this’?” she persisted, not knowing herself where the questions came from or why, only that she had to ask them.

  Now Robert was frowning, annoyed or puzzled. “A man’s missing—presumably. The police don’t know me, the townspeople don’t know me. How do they know I didn’t knock him in on purpose and leave him in, to get rid of a rival?” He turned off the burner and poured coffee into her cup, then his. “I think he’ll turn up, after a binge, but meanwhile it’s not pleasant to be asked—to be suspected, maybe, of lying.” He sat down at the table with his coffee.

  “Did you feel they suspected you of lying?”

  “No. I don’t think so. Did you?”

  “I don’t know. They’re so noncommittal. But I didn’t think it was necessary to tell them all the details.”

  “What do you mean—just that we weren’t engaged?”

  “Yes,” she said positively, and she felt she had a point. “They aren’t interested in that. They’re interested in whether Greg was really sitting on the bank or not and whether he could walk up to the road.”

  “Yes, I know. I’ve tried to explain why I told them—why I said that about not being engaged, Jenny, and it makes sense to me. I’m sorry if it doesn’t make sense to you.”

  His tone was gentle, placating, but Jenny sensed a great hardness under it, a hardness that surprised her and hurt her. They weren’t engaged, that was a fact. Maybe they never would be. An emptiness filled her, a fear of sudden pain, and in her imagination she saw Robert hitting Greg hard with his fist, knocking him across the rocks and going after him a little way to make sure he fell into the deeper water.

  “What’s the matter?” Robert asked.

  “Nothing. Why?”

  “You looked so—”

  “I don’t understand you,” she said.

  Robert got up. “Jenny, what’s the trouble tonight? Tell me. You’re tired, aren’t you? This thing’s a strain.” He started toward her and stopped, let his outstretched hand drop. “What do you mean, you don’t understand me?”

  “Just that. You’re still a puzzle. It’s strange.”

  “Oh, Jenny! I’m about as much a puzzle as—as that pane of glass!”

  “That’s for me to say, isn’t it? I feel a puzzle.”

  “Jenny, are you trying to say you don’t believe what I told you about all this? I’ve told you every second of that night.”

  It was not really that that troubled her. She saw Robert was getting impatient, and she didn’t care now.

  “What are you trying to say?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But I’ll know—before long.” She watched his eyes narrow a little as he looked at her.

  Then he lit another cigarette and began walking around the kitchen. He circled the table and said, “I’ll take off, Jenny. Let you get some sleep.”

  She sensed boredom in him, and also anger and indifference, and she felt her resentment rise against all of this. “All right.”

  He looked at her.

  This was the nearest they’d ever come to quarreling. It was a quarrel, she realized. Most of it unspoken, only the little top part of it showing above the surface, uttered now. He was getting his coat. He put it on and came closer to her.

  “I’ll say good night, Jenny. I’m sorry if I spoke angrily to you.”

  She was suddenly sorry and ashamed of herself. “Oh, Robert, I didn’t mean to say anything angry to you. Honestly, I didn’t.”

  He smiled, touched his still swollen lip quickly with the side of his forefinger. “O.K., let’s forget it. Call me tomorrow if you hear anything, will you? Or tonight. It’s only ten-fifteen.”

  “Of course I will, Robert.”

  14

  Greg did not turn up the following day, Tuesday, or the next day. The Langley Gazette and even the Philadelphia Bulletin carried pictures of Greg, current and old photographs that his parents must have given the press. His parents had been interviewed. They were hopeful, they were praying, but they were more and more afraid that their son had been washed down the Delaware River.

  From Tuesday onward, Robert’s name was also in the newspapers. The fistfight was described, and its motivation stated: the jealousy of a jilted lover. Greg was blamed for starting the fight, Robert’s attitude was left to the imagination, and the average reader, Robert supposed, would assume that he was in love with Jennifer Thierolf and had taken Greg’s place as her intended.

  At the plant, Jack Nielson spoke to Robert on Tuesday morning. He had asked Robert Monday about his purple eye and his cut lip, and Robert had told him—making the story as light and funny as possible—that he had met up in the dark with an old boy friend of Jenny’s, a fellow bigger than he was. By Tuesday morning, Jack had read the story in the papers. Robert told him about leaving Greg sitting on the steep bank of the Delaware.

  “What happened is exactly what the papers say,” Robert said. “I must say, they’re not trying to slant it.”

  “What do you mean ‘slant it’?” Jack asked.

  “Well, it’d be so easy for them to say I knocked him into the water and won’t admit it.”

  “Um-m. Yes. But whatever goes into that river turns up again. Maybe in Trenton, maybe sooner, but a body turns up. Ask Schriever. Did he tell you—”

  “Yes, he told me,” Robert said. It was the story about the body of the old man that had washed up in Schriever’s back yard.

  “Don’t worry,” Jack said. “He may be hiding out with some friend just to get you in trouble. Or annoy you. If he’s the kind of a guy who starts a fistfight over something like this …” Jack wagged his head.

  “I haven’t any designs on Jenny,” Robert said. “It’s all so damned unnecessary.”

  “Well—I’ve heard about Wyncoop. He beat up a couple of other people who stole his girls, or something like that, didn’t he?”

  “Yes. News certainly travels, doesn’t it?”

  “In small towns,” Jack said, smiling. “What does Jenny think about this?”

  “Oh, I think she thinks Greg’s off on a binge.”

  During that week, the atmosphere changed. Greg did not turn up. The sirens on the river hooted and honked, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes late at night, waking Robert up. They weren’t necessarily looking for Greg, he told himself. The sirens usually sounded a couple of nights out of the week, but now they honked every night, and he imagined them part of the search for Greg. The papers had twice described the clothes he was wearing—a gray overcoat, a dark suit (how did anybody know what he’d been wearing, Robert wondered)—and having exhausted their sources of information about Greg, his parents and friends, they were reprinting what they had said: “We hope and we pray,” said Mrs. Wyncoop, her eyes shining with tears. “One of the best friends I ever had,” from Charles Mitchell of Rittersville, as if Greg were surely dead. Nothing happened at the plant, no more questions were asked, but Robert felt people were holding off, waiting to see what was going to happen, and he felt that nearly everybody, with the exception of Jack Nielson, secretly hoped that a body would be found in the river. Robert broke a date with Jenny on Thursday night, calling her up at six P.M. to say he had to put in some time on a job from the office, which was true, but Jenny was annoyed. Nickie, tipsy and cocky, had called Robert at five-thirty that day, saying, “Well, what’ve you got yourself into now, Bobbie? A little murder, maybe?” He had at last hung up on her, since, when he had tried to tell her what had happened, she had drowned him out with laughter. That night, the river horns hooted. It was not a good night for sleeping, and Robert took one of the Seconals, his first since Jenny had given them to him.

>   On Friday afternoon, Robert was called from his drawing table by one of the secretaries. Two gentlemen wanted to see him in the reception hall, the girl said with a smile and a lift of her eyebrows. She was Nancy, a blond girl who liked to kid with everyone.

  “Gentlemen?” Robert said, getting up. He knew.

  “No, they’re cops,” Nancy said. “Been paying your parking tickets lately?”

  Robert managed a smile.

  He walked across the drafting room, down the aisle between the long fluorescent-lighted tables. Lippenholtz and McGregor were standing in the glass-walled reception hall. They were the two of Monday night, Lippenholtz and McGregor. It was funny how the names stuck.

  “Good afternoon,” Lippenholtz said.

  “Good afternoon.”

  Lippenholtz looked around the empty hall as if to see if anyone might be within hearing, then said, “Well, the body hasn’t been found yet—if there is one at all—but we’re still looking and we think we will find one. Now what we’d like to have from you is an absolutely factual statement of what happened,” he said in a slow, persuasive voice. “This is manslaughter at worst. Wyncoop attacked you. We’ll take your word for that, because you and Miss Thierolf had a date at seven-thirty, and we know that Wyncoop is pretty fond of picking fights with people he doesn’t like. Well and good. What we want to know is, did you knock him in the river or not?” His voice was not much above a whisper.

  “I told you exactly what happened,” Robert said, also quietly. “I can’t add anything to it. He fell in for a minute and I pulled him out. After that, we didn’t fight. I left him sitting on the ground. Maybe he got up and walked right back into the river. I don’t know.”

  “What’re you nervous about?” asked McGregor.

  “Nothing.”

  “We talked to your former wife this morning, Mr. Forester,” said Lippenholtz. “She had some things to say about your—your personality.”

  Robert felt for cigarettes in his jacket pocket. “Such as what?”

  “Well, she said you were erratic. Liable to violence. Would you consider that true?”

  Robert shook out a match and tossed it into a sand pot by the elevator. “My wife’s apt to say anything about me. People who get divorces aren’t always on the best terms, you know.” The officers’ eyes were fixed on him, determined but not too intelligent eyes, Robert thought, which was so much the worse for him. “As for violence, Wyncoop came at me.”

  “Yes, but you didn’t possibly pick up a piece of wood and give him a real conk on the head, did you?” asked Lippenholtz.

  “It was a fistfight,” Robert said patiently.

  Lippenholtz nodded and glanced at McGregor. “How did you meet Miss Thierolf?”

  McGregor turned to a different page of his notebook.

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Robert asked.

  “It might have. Would you mind telling us?” asked Lippenholtz with an encouraging smile.

  Robert shrugged. “I don’t see what bearing—” He hesitated.

  “Miss Thierolf doesn’t care to say how you met either. Why not, Mr. Forester? We talked to her this morning. What’s secret about it?”

  Robert wondered how Jenny had reacted to the question. He wasn’t sure enough to say casually to Lippenholtz, “Through a friend. A girl named Rita.” Robert had never even seen Rita.

  “Your wife told us a story about a prowler,” Lippenholtz went on. “She said Wyncoop told her Miss Thierolf had a prowler for a while. Miss Thierolf heard him outside the house. Then when she met you, or you met her, the noises stopped. You didn’t possibly meet her by prowling around the house, did you?”

  “No,” Robert said.

  “Your wife said it was a possibility. Wyncoop—”

  “My former wife,” Robert said.

  “Yes. Sorry. She said Wyncoop wanted to know how you met Miss Thierolf, who told him through a friend of hers, and Wyncoop found out it wasn’t so.”

  Robert swung around to the sand pot and flicked his ashes into it. “You can thank my wife a lot for her kind words. And for keeping out of my life and all the rest of it.”

  “What’re you upset about?” Lippenholtz asked.

  McGregor was finding enough to write about to keep on.

  “I’m not upset, but I don’t like what you’re trying to imply. And what’s my former wife got to do with any of it?”

  “She knows you, Mr. Forester, and naturally we want to find out all we can about you,” Lippenholtz said gently.

  But they weren’t simply investigating, they were quizzing him with a slant, one he knew Nickie had put them onto. She wouldn’t hesitate to use the word “homicidal.” The seconds dragged on while the two men stared at him. “Are you looking in any hotels for Wyncoop?” Robert asked. “Under another name, of course.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Lippenholtz. “You’ve been under treatment for mental disorder, haven’t you?”

  That was Nickie again. Just as Robert started to answer, one of the draftsmen, Robert didn’t know his name, entered from the outside door, and they all glanced at him. Robert waited until he had walked out the other door into the drafting room. “I went to an analyst for a while when I was nineteen,” Robert said. “I went on my own. I wasn’t locked up anywhere. I went again about two years ago—no, a year ago. To a psychotherapist. For six weeks. I’ll give you their names if you like.”

  Lippenholtz only looked at him. “Your wife told us a story about your pointing a gun at her. She said you fired it and missed.”

  Robert took a deep breath, and then the first words of the sentence he had been going to say dissolved in his mind. “It’s true—true that I pointed a gun at her. An unloaded gun. The time I fired it was—I fired it into the fireplace on a different occasion. When my wife challenged me to.”

  “Challenged you to?” asked Lippenholtz.

  “I think she said I hadn’t the courage to fire it, or something like that.”

  “A hunting rifle,” said Lippenholtz.

  “Yes,” Robert said.

  “You don’t fire hunting rifles? You don’t go hunting?”

  “No.” Robert supposed Lippenholtz and McGregor did. “It was my wife’s gun. She goes hunting sometimes.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to have a loaded rifle in the house?”

  “Yes. My wife loaded it. She has the permit, not I.”

  Lippenholtz put one hand on the wall by the elevator and leaned on it, one foot crossed and propped on the toe. “That’s not the way we heard the story from your former wife, Mr. Forester.”

  Robert found himself staring at a hole in Lippenholtz’s thin, dark-blue sock just above the heel. He blinked and looked at Lippenholtz. “As I told you, I can’t help what my wife says.”

  “Miss Thierolf seems to know the story, too. She said you told her the gun was loaded, but that you didn’t fire it. What’re we supposed to believe, Mr. Forester?”

  “The truth is the way I just said it.”

  “What way?” asked Lippenholtz with an amused air.

  “The gun wasn’t loaded when I pointed it at my wife.”

  “Who’s lying? Miss Thierolf or your wife? Or both? Or you?” Lippenholtz laughed, three soft doglike yelps.

  “I told Jenny Thierolf it was loaded,” Robert said. “Naturally she told you it was loaded. My wife knows very well it wasn’t.”

  “Why did you tell Miss Thierolf it was loaded?” asked Lippenholtz, still smiling.

  “I don’t know. It makes a better story.”

  “Does it?”

  “My former wife seems to think so, too.”

  “Why did you tell Miss Thierolf the story in the first place?”

  It was like a bog. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s all pretty unclear,” said Lippenholtz, shaking his head as if Robert couldn’t be more suspect, whatever else came out about his past, and that they had him, whenever they cared to reach out and take him. “O.K., Mac?” Lippenholtz said to McGr
egor, who was still writing.

  “Yep,” said McGregor.

  “We’d like you to stay in town this weekend, Mr. Forester,” Lippenholtz said as he shoved himself from the wall. “So I hope you weren’t planning to go away. Something may turn up this weekend.”

  “I hope it does,” Robert said.

  McGregor rang for the elevator.

  “That’s all for now. Thank you very much, Mr. Forester.” With a nod, a little smile, a vestige of politeness, Lippenholtz turned away.

  “You’re welcome,” Robert said.

  Robert went back into the drafting room, started for his table, then veered away toward the men’s room in the far corner. For several minutes, the chaos of his thoughts resulted in nothing. Then Nickie entered his mind like a tangible image of danger. She’d do all she could against him, that was certain, and no use asking the old question why. Just count on it, he told himself. An angry impulse to call her left him as soon as it came. He wouldn’t be able to get a word in. Nickie would laugh at his concern, his anxiety, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to keep them out of his voice. He could write her, but he didn’t want anything on paper, even if nothing on the paper incriminated him or implied that he took what she told the police seriously. The mere fact of a letter would imply he took it seriously.

  He realized he was worried because he had begun to believe Greg’s body could be found in the river, that it might wash up tomorrow in somebody’s back yard, and who would believe that he hadn’t knocked him in on purpose, or at least done nothing about saving him when he fell in? Robert rubbed cold water across his eyes, trying to erase the expression he saw in the mirror. He looked at his watch. An hour and a half before he could call Jenny at five at her house. He supposed Philadelphia was out tomorrow, because that was leaving town. He had no heart for looking for houses, anyway.

  The rest of the afternoon his hand shook. Wasn’t it typical that Nickie interested herself so much in the little scandal he was in in Langley that she had taken the trouble to pass on to the police the fact that Greg didn’t know how she and Jenny had met, and that Greg thought he was the prowler who’d been making noises around the house? That she’d taken the trouble to say he’d been twice to head shrinkers, and probably said or implied that he’d been taken away to them in a strait jacket? Wasn’t it typical that she’d told them about the hunting rifle, with her own embellishments? Nickie had told so many of their friends about it, Robert knew she had finally come to believe it had happened the way she told it, that he had been in a rage at the time, that the gun had been loaded, that she had struggled and barely succeeded in pushing the barrel of the gun aside. Robert had noticed that she hadn’t told it to people who knew him quite well, or who liked him a little better than they did her, such as the Campbells. What had actually happened, with no one else present to hear—Nickie had one night told him he was too much of a psychopath to fire a gun unless he was killing a human, which accounted for his distaste for hunting. Then she had loaded the gun and stuck it in his hands and asked him if he had the courage to shoot her. Angry himself, Robert had taken the gun, pointed it into the fireplace, and fired—to get rid of the damned bullet, to make a loud noise that would be followed by at least a few seconds of blessed silence? He didn’t know why he had fired it, but he had. And no one had come knocking on the door from any other apartment in the building, nothing had happened at all, except that Nickie had been provided with a new fragment of a story. Nickie had found the mark the bullet had made in the back of the fireplace, and she liked to point it out to people. Robert remembered Ralph’s stiff figure bending over to look at the mark on the brick, on perhaps the second occasion Robert had seen him, before Nickie’s intentions with him were quite clear. “You fired it?” Ralph had asked. “Yes,” Robert said. “Into the fireplace. Do you think I’d fire a gun at my wife?” Nickie had been out of the room then. Was it funny or was it merely tedious? It was both, Robert thought. He had never known what Ralph really believed, and he had never cared. Should he start caring now, he wondered?