The Cry of the Owl

by Patricia Highsmith

  Jenny was swallowing the pills rapidly, washing them down with water from the red plastic tooth glass. When they were all gone, she worried for an instant that she might have taken so many she wouldn’t be able to keep them in her stomach. There was nothing to do about it now. She got the little collapsed package of Gillette double-edged razor blades from the top shelf of the cabinet, then went downstairs. She was suddenly inspired to write a note. She got a scrap of paper from a stack she used to write notes to the milkman on, found a stub of a pencil, and wrote, standing at the kitchen counter:

  DEAR ROBERT,

  I do love you. Now in a different way and much more deeply. Now I understand you and everything. I did not know until lately that you represented death, at least for me. It was foreordained. I do not know if I am glad or sorry, but I do know what has to be. …

  She looked up at a corner of the kitchen. It seemed so stark, what she had written. She should end it in a beautiful and gentle way, so that Robert would not think she was angry or sad, but all she could think of was “to cease upon the midnight with no pain.”

  Jenny opened the kitchen door. It was almost dark. Luckily, Susie always took fifteen minutes to fix her face or change her clothes or something, even when she said she was popping right over, but Jenny was not sure how much time had passed since Susie called. She turned around, started to go into the living room to finish her Scotch, then gave that idea up, but she went to the shelf underneath her record player and got Robert’s not quite finished sweater with the knitting needles still sticking out of the sleeve end. And with a peaceful smile on her lips, she picked up Robert’s “Lesser Evil” bird card and carried it with the sweater outdoors. When the kitchen door shut, it locked. Now the house was locked, the keys inside, and she would never go in again. Jenny walked carefully in the fringe of grass beside the driveway, because somewhere, somehow, she’d taken off her moccasins. Little stones hurt her feet, but soon came the thicker, dry-and-green-mixed grass of the meadow. Robert had stood out here. She turned to look at her kitchen window, the window Robert had so often looked at. The shutters made two rectangles of darkness, outlined by light. Then she went on until she was well out of the range of light that came from the upstairs part of the house. It looked as if she had left every light in the house on. In her left pocket she felt the paper box that held her razor blades. She must have taken them from the medicine cabinet, but she did not remember doing it.

  A car turned in at the driveway. Jenny sank down in the high grass, flattened herself out in the darkness, her cheek against the white sweater, her right hand gripping the bird card so that it was half folded. The car’s headlights were not on her, but she felt conspicuous in the light-colored robe. She put her face down in the grass, hating Susie, hating people. Susie’s car door closed with a brusque bang. She heard Susie knock, wait only an instant, then try the door.

  “Jenny? It’s Susie! Open up!” Bang, bang, bang on the door.

  She couldn’t get in, even through a window, Jenny thought. At some point today, she remembered distinctly, she had locked all the downstairs windows, wanting the air that was already in the house there, and not changed.

  “Jenny!” Susie’s voice was shrill and irritating. She was going round to the front door.

  Jenny spread her arms wide against the arms of the spread sweater. She and Robert and Death embraced the earth. Rap-rap-rap. That was the front-door knocker. How long could this go on, Jenny wondered. Jenny heard a bing! in her ears, and she seemed to be coasting on something, very smooth and fast. That was the sleeping pills, and she lifted her head and took a deep breath. Maybe Susie would call the police before the pills really took effect. Why hadn’t she turned out all the lights and driven somewhere in her car? She thought of going still farther back behind her house, but she was afraid if she stood up, she would be seen.

  “Jenny, it’s Susie!” She seemed to be calling up to the sky. “1 know you’re there! Let me in! Just say something at the window, will you?” Then after a long moment: “Jenny, are you alone?” Now she was rapping on the kitchen door again.

  A crow flew over, cawing. Late at night for a crow, Jenny thought. A crow was black. That was fitting.

  Susie’s voice came again, more distant now because of the ringing in Jenny’s ears. Her stomach gave a groan, and she saw a mountainside splitting, revealing a cave that was adorned with stalagmites and stalactites of white and pink and darker-pink color, like salmon. There was water, an underground river, with blind fish in it. The fish were white and not very big. A light boat glided over the surface, and then Jenny saw herself walking on the surface of the water. It was all black everywhere, and yet she could see. Then the water rose above her ankles, very cold but refreshing. She put out her hand and touched one of the cool, moist pink stalactites, touched the pure droplet at its tip, and held it for an instant on her fingertip until it flowed off. Jenny! The voice came from the extreme blackness in the depths of the cave. Jenny rolled to one side, feeling very heavy against the earth, as if her weight had increased ten times, and took the razor blades from her pocket. She pushed the paper from one of the blades and gave a slash at her left wrist with it. It was too dark to see, or her eyelids were closing, but she could feel warm blood flowing down her raised forearm, and then the wind blowing on it, making it cooler. She pushed her right sleeve back and gripped the blade as hard as she could, and did it crossways. Her arm yielded under the pressure. It was not as good as it might have been, but maybe it was enough, and she laid her head down and relaxed. She could feel the trickles every few seconds at both wrists. They flowed into the white sweater. The smell of the wool was in her nostrils, and she remembered that often while she was knitting it, she had lifted it to her nose, closed her eyes, until the smell itself seemed to be Robert.

  She saw Robert running up a staircase, two and three steps at a time. He wore dark trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He stopped and looked back, smiling, then he went on running up, leaping up and up. Jenny gave a little wailing cry, like a baby. Then Robert’s figure became a small, skinny boy in shorts, a blond little boy who stopped to grin at her with two big front teeth, and it was her little brother who had died.

  19

  Robert’s telephone rang a few minutes before midnight on Tuesday.

  “This is Ralph Jurgen,” the quiet voice said. “I’m calling to say that Wyncoop was registered for—for the last several days as John Gresham at the Sussex Arms Hotel in New York.”

  “Oh? He’s there now?”

  “No. He’s checked out. He checked out Sunday night, I know that.”

  “Oh.” Robert’s hand was tight on the telephone. “Does Nickie know where he is now?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me if she did.”

  “I know, I know. How long—”

  “Listen, Bob, I have to ask you one thing. I don’t mind if you tell the police. That’s why I called you, so you can tell them. But I don’t want my name mentioned as—”

  “Sure. All right,” Robert said.

  “You can understand that, can’t you?”

  “Yes, I understand that. Don’t worry, Ralph.”

  “That’s all I wanted to say. Goodbye, Bob.”

  Robert slowly put the telephone back in its cradle. He smiled. Then he clapped his hands once, loudly, over his head. “John Gresham!—Mr. John Gresham!” He lifted the telephone and dialed Jenny’s number. After several rings, he hung up and dialed it again, thinking he might have made a mistake. There was no answer at Jenny’s. He thought of calling Susie Escham, in case she was there, then decided not to. The news could wait until tomorrow. Robert put the telephone down, stood thinking for a few seconds, then picked the telephone up and called police headquarters in Rittersville.

  Detective Lippenholtz was not available. Robert hadn’t known before that his classification was detective.

  “I have an important message for him,” Robert said, and then told the
man what Ralph had told him.

  The man on the telephone asked how many days he had been at the Sussex Arms.

  “I don’t know, but it should be easy enough to find out. Just ask the hotel.”

  “Who is the friend who called you?”

  “I’d rather not give his name. He asked me not to.”

  “It’s important that we know, Mr. Forester. How’re we going to check—”

  “Ask the Sussex Arms what Gresham looked like. Isn’t that checking enough?”

  “Well, no. This friend of yours could have just seen somebody who looked like Wyncoop. Does your friend know Wyncoop?”

  “Yes. That is, I’m sure he’s seen him—probably talked to him.” But Robert wasn’t sure.

  The argument went on. Did Robert know the friend’s name, even?

  “Yes, I know his name, but I promised not to tell it. I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped.”

  “You’d be doing us a favor and yourself, too.”

  “But I wouldn’t be doing my friend in New York a favor.”

  The man on the other end of the telephone finally gave it up in a dissatisfied manner, and said he would pass the information on to Detective Lippenholtz.

  It must have occurred to him, Robert thought, that the friend in New York had been helping Wyncoop out. Lippenholtz would certainly suspect that. If it boomeranged on Ralph, thanks to Lippenholtz’s checking on Nickie, that was Ralph’s hard luck, Ralph who had probably known about Greg and his whereabouts for a whole week and three days.

  Robert went to bed, and after a sleepless hour got up to take a Seconal. The bottle wasn’t in the medicine cabinet. He went back upstairs to see if he’d left it on the night table, looked all around the little bedroom, then went down and looked in the kitchen. Finally, he searched the living room. He gave it up. It would reappear, he supposed, in some unlikely place that he’d put it in an absent-minded moment—like the refrigerator. But it wasn’t in the refrigerator. He went back to bed.

  The next morning shortly after nine, Robert beckoned to Jack Nielson to come out for a smoke in the back corridor. Smoking was permitted at the drafting tables, but for privacy and a chat, the employees preferred the back corridor where the fire stairs were. The corridor was gray and bleak and there was no place to sit down, but as Jack said, it was the only spot in L.A. where you didn’t feel like a goldfish. Robert told Jack the news he had heard last night from Ralph. Robert had meant to be very casual about it, but before he had his first sentence out, he was grinning like a small boy.

  “What do you know!” Jack said, smiling, too. “Hell, this’ll blow over in no time! The cops’ll find him. They’re bound to. Who was the friend in New York?”

  “I’m not supposed to say. You know—a guy with a pretty big job. Doesn’t want his name in the papers.”

  Jack nodded. “Just happened to see Wyncoop, or what?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m sure what he said is reliable.”

  “I’m going to call Betty right away and tell her,” Jack said.

  At a little after ten, Robert was called to the telephone. He was in conference with Jaffe and the head production engineer in Jaffe’s office when Nancy knocked on the door with the message, and Robert, knowing Jaffe hated interruption, asked if Nancy could take the number so he could call back. Nancy went out again, but in less than a minute, she returned.

  “It’s very urgent, they said.”

  Robert excused himself, embarrassed by Jaffe’s frown. It was no doubt the police, and Jaffe knew it.

  It was Lippenholtz.

  “Mr. Forester, we’ve checked with the Sussex Arms Hotel in New York, and their description of John Gresham tallies,” Lippenholtz said in his calm, slow voice. “That is, it resembles Wyncoop.”

  “Good. Do you know if the New York police are looking for Wyncoop at all? And if so, how hard?”

  “They’re looking,” said Lippenholtz. “But this isn’t exactly proof, Mr. Forester. If you could just give us the name of that friend of yours who—”

  “I explained to somebody there that my friend doesn’t want his name given.”

  “Not even if we promise to keep it out of the papers?”

  “Not even then, I’m sure.”

  Lippenholtz grunted. “Has this got anything to do with your wife? Your former wife?”

  “Not that I know of. No, it hasn’t.”

  Another grunt. “Mr. Forester, we had a piece of bad news this morning. At least, you probably haven’t heard it. Or have you?”

  “No. What?”

  “Jennifer Thierolf was found dead around eight o’clock this morning by the—”

  “Jenny?”

  “She took an overdose of sleeping pills. The milkman found her on the lawn back of her house this morning. She’d been dead three or four hours, the doctors said. She left a note.”

  “My God,” Robert said. “I tried to call her last night around—around—”

  “Want to hear the note?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘Dear Robert, I do love you. Now in a different way and much more deeply. Now I understand you and everything,’” Lippenholtz read in an expressionless voice. “‘I did not know until lately that you represented death, at least for me. It was foreordained. I do not know if I am glad or sorry, but I do know what has to be.’ … Do you know anything about that, Mr. Forester?”

  “About what?”

  “About what she means. When did you see her last?”

  “Monday. Monday night.”

  “How was she then?”

  “She seemed—depressed, I guess. She said she didn’t want to see me any more.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know why unless—unless she’d started to think I—to think I’d killed Greg.”

  “You’re stammering a lot, Mr. Forester,” Lippenholtz said sharply. “She took three bottles of pills. There were three bottles empty in the bathroom, anyway. Do you know how she got three bottles of Seconal?”

  “Well—one she took from me. I missed it only last night. I thought I’d mislaid it and couldn’t find it. She got the bottle for me. From her doctor, she said. I suppose that’s where the others came from.”

  “These bottles don’t have any doctor’s name or any prescription number on them. They’re pretty big bottles, the kind her boy friend would have among his stuff, and we think that’s where they came from.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s possible,” said Robert automatically, thinking, what did it matter now where they came from? He remembered that his bottle had had no label on it. Why hadn’t he asked Jenny about that?

  “It’s also very interesting, Mr. Forester, that the Escham girl says Jenny Thierolf told her how you met her. Prowling around her house. Is that right?”

  “Yes,” Robert said.

  “Why didn’t you admit it before? Eh? What’s the matter, Mr. Forester?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  Robert hung up. He started back to the drafting room, his head down, and bumped into the swinging glass door with his forehead. Nancy was coming in. Robert stepped back.

  “Hi-i,” Nancy said.

  Robert watched her, glanced at her plump derrière disappearing fast down the corridor. He pushed the glass door open with his hand, and walked toward his table. He stood there by his bright fluorescent lamp, blinking.

  “What’s up, Bob?”

  Jack Nielson’s hand was on Robert’s arm.

  Robert looked at him and said, “Jenny’s dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Sleeping pills.” Robert started to drop into his chair, but Jack pulled at his arm, and passively Robert walked with him toward the reception hall.

  Jack rang for an elevator. “We’ll get some coffee. Or a good stiff drink,” Jack said. “Who’d you hear it from?”

  “The police just called. It happened this morning. Early this morning.”

  They took Jack’s car. Robert paid no attention where
they were going. Then he found himself in a bar, a cup of black coffee and a jigger of what looked like Scotch beside the coffee, and Jack opposite him with a cup of coffee, too.

  “Drink ’em both,” Jack said. “You’re pale as hell.”

  Robert sipped at both the coffee and the Scotch. He suddenly remembered he had been supposed to go back to the conference in Jaffe’s office. Robert pulled his hand down his face and laughed, then all at once his eyes were full of tears.

  “Go ahead,” Jack said. “What the hell.”

  “It’s the note,” Robert said between his teeth. He clasped his hands between his knees. “Jenny wrote a note. She said I was death.”

  “What? Say that again?”