The Cry of the Owl

by Patricia Highsmith

  “She said, ‘I didn’t know until now that you represented death,’” Robert said in a whisper. “She was always talking like that, talking about death. Did I ever tell you—she used to talk to me about her little brother who died, died at twelve, or something like that, of spinal meningitis. Jenny said she had to keep thinking about death till she wasn’t frightened of it any more. In a funny way—” He looked at Jack’s tense, frowning face. “Do you follow me? Can you follow me?”

  “Yes,” Jack said, but rather vaguely, signaling with a raised finger for another Scotch.

  “And when I first met her, I remember she said, ‘I don’t know what you stand for, but someday I will.’ That was when I—I was standing outside her house. That’s how I met her. It’s true. I met her by prowling around her house.” Robert shut his eyes and drank the rest of the jigger of Scotch.

  Jack was frowning, puzzled, as if what he had said didn’t make sense. “By prowling around her house? What do you mean?”

  “Just that. One day she saw me. One evening. That’s how we got acquainted. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard. Greg—”

  “Yes,” Jack said. “I guess it was Greg. An anonymous call I had—about a month ago. I didn’t know whether to mention it to you or not, so I didn’t.”

  “So, you had heard.” Robert gave a quick smile, and touched the glass of the newly arrived Scotch. How had Greg found out Jack was a friend of his, Robert wondered. Maybe through Jenny. And what did it matter?

  “The voice on the phone said he was a friend of Greg’s,” Jack said. “He said he thought I ought to know my friend Bob Forester was a—a nut and that he looked through girls’ windows watching them undress and that’s how he met Jenny Thierolf. I remember I said ‘Go to hell’ and I hung up. I thought maybe it was a friend of Greg’s, sure, and I thought, well, under the circumstances, Greg’s probably spreading all the stories he can against you.”

  “Well—it’s true. Except that I always watched Jenny in the kitchen. Cooking. She gave me such—” He couldn’t talk any more, but it was not because emotion was choking him up. He felt very calm, even numb.

  “What?” Jack prompted.

  Robert took a breath and looked into Jack’s long, serious face. Jack’s expression was still puzzled, maybe a little wary. “I was depressed last winter, and she made me feel better. She looked so happy herself. I saw Greg visiting her a couple of times and I thought—she’s a happy young girl going to get married. I’d swear I wouldn’t go back to see her, and then I would. I must have gone six or eight times. And finally, she saw me one night. I apologized—funny as that might sound. I thought she was going to call the police, but she didn’t. She invited me in for a coffee.” Robert gave a shrug and a smile. “You might say, she was very happy until she met me. Until she decided I represented death.”

  Jack shook his head quickly, rubbed at the short hair on the top of his head. “But I know she was in love with you. Anyone could see that. As I listen to you, it’s like listening to a fantasy. Are you telling me the truth, Bob, about that prowling? I mean, spying?”

  “Yes. It’s true.”

  “Well”—Jack sat back, and took a sip from the water glass by his coffee cup—“you don’t have to tell anybody else about it. I wouldn’t, if I were you. What’s the need?” Jack concentrated on lighting a cigarette.

  Robert sensed that Jack’s attitude toward him had changed, radically and permanently. People who looked through other people’s windows were creeps—whether they watched girls undressing or watched them frying chicken. “I’ve just told the police,” Robert said.

  “Oh-oh. Well, what the hell? What’s it got to do with Greg, after all? Greg’s alive. If you—” Jack stopped.

  There was a silence. Neither of them looked at the other.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Jack asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you ever go to bed with Jenny?”

  “No,” Robert said. “Why?”

  “Because it would make it that much more intense, I suppose. For her. She seemed so young. She was very much in love with you, wasn’t she?”

  “I suppose so. I wasn’t. I tried to make that clear—always. I’m not trying to justify myself, Jack—”

  “I know.”

  “But I should have known. Known better. I should never have let her see me after we met that time, that first night. I really didn’t care to see her again, but she looked me up. She came to the plant, looking for my car, followed me home one night.” Robert shut his eyes, sick of his own voice and his words.

  “And what happened?”

  “She spent the night. The drinks went to her head, only two drinks, I remember, and she didn’t want to go home, so she slept on my downstairs couch. It happened a few more times, and then Greg noticed, of course, noticed she wasn’t home. Then came Greg’s attack on me. You see, Jack?”

  Jack nodded slowly.

  “I should have cut it off, but I didn’t. I insisted that we see each other less, but I still didn’t cut it off. Jenny looked so unhappy. But I did cut it off at one point, when I was living in Langley, before I moved to the house. I said that I didn’t want to see her again, that it was best we didn’t. I’d been trying to talk her into marrying Greg.”

  “And then?”

  Robert rested his forehead against his hand. “Then—a few weeks later was when she came to the plant and followed my car to my house.”

  “I see.”

  Did Jack see? I never made her any promises, Robert wanted to say, but the whining, self-justifying words shamed him. “I’d better get back,” Robert said, reaching for his money.

  “Don’t go back today, don’t be silly,” Jack said. “Call Jaffe up. Or I’ll speak to him for you.”

  “No, I’ll face Jaffe.”

  Robert faced Jaffe with a short statement about a “personal crisis,” which he delivered bluntly and stiffly, like a man who has nothing more to lose. Robert was quite sure his job was lost already, and he supposed the correct thing to do was send in a letter of resignation.

  By noon, Robert was home. He took off his jacket and tie and fell down on the red couch. He lay there for several hours, until it began to get dusk. He had not slept, and yet it seemed that nothing had gone through his mind, not even the boring repetitions of events and conversations that usually plagued him. He might as well have been dead, and hours like these told as much about death as anything the living would ever know, he felt. He drove to Langley for the newspapers. He bought the Inquirer as well as the Langley Gazette. The story of Jenny was on the front pages of both, and the Gazette had a photograph. Robert looked over the stories as he sat in his car. Jenny had died with his sweater in her arms and his “Lesser Evil” bird card in one hand. The suicide note was printed in full and in italics. Set amid the journalese, it sounded poetic, tragic, yet somehow unreal. On page two of the Gazette was a picture of Susie Escham, her eyes closed with tears and her mouth open, telling her story of calling on Jenny just before ten last night and getting no answer. Susie also had said that Jenny “admitted to me three days ago that she met Robert Forester because he was prowling around her house. That’s what Greg [Wyncoop] said all along. I think Jenny was afraid of Robert, and that’s why she killed herself.” Robert set his teeth and started his car.

  The telephone was ringing when he went into his house. He did not answer it. He sat down and read through both newspaper stories carefully. Both stories retold the Forester-Wyncoop fistfight of Saturday night, May 16th, and said that Wyncoop had now been missing for ten days. There had been time, of course, for the newspapers to state that Wyncoop had been reported seen in New York, but evidently that story wasn’t considered reliable enough to print.

  The telephone was ringing again. He couldn’t go on not answering it, he supposed. And if it were the police, they’d simply come over to find him.

  “Hello,” Robert said in a hoarse voice.

  “This is Naomi Tesser, Bob.”
<
br />   Robert stiffened. “How are you?”

  “We just saw the papers, Dick and I. And I—How are you, Bob?”

  “How am I?”

  “Well, I can imagine. We’re both so shocked by all this. Jenny was sort of a strange girl, so moody—even gloomy sometimes, we knew that.”

  He waited.

  “Meanwhile—has there been any news about Greg?”

  “Greg,” Robert said. “They say he was seen in a New York hotel a couple of days ago.”

  “Really? Seen by whom?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well—I know this isn’t a good time to talk to you.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “And—gad, that Susie Escham, she doesn’t help, does she?”

  “If you’re talking about what she said about how we met—that’s true.”

  “True? You mean, what Greg said, too?”

  “Yes, and I’m tired of lying about it. What’s the purpose now, anyway?”

  “But—you mean, that’s why Jenny was afraid of you?”

  Naomi’s new fear, her new attitude, meshed nicely with her belief that he had killed Greg. “Yes, I suppose that’s part of it. Do you mind if I hang up now, Naomi? Please? Thank you.” He put the telephone down on her “Wait!”

  The news was going to be around in no time, he thought. The fact that he’d met Jenny by prowling, and that Greg had been seen in a New York hotel, but the first item was going to travel faster and harder. He took a couple of aspirins and made a pot of fresh coffee.

  A call from Jack and Betty Nielson came around nine. They wanted to know if he was all right, and if he would like to come over and spend the night at their house. Robert thanked them and said no. Then Nickie called. Nickie expressed her sympathies in regard to Jenny’s death, and it sounded almost proper, yet her tone was sarcastic. And it didn’t sink into him. He listened, answered politely, and then stopped, holding the telephone.

  “Nothing else to say, Bobbie? Are you there? Come on, Bobbie, aren’t you talking? Feeling guilty, maybe?”

  He put the telephone down gently. Then he lay on the red couch again. He was in pajamas and robe now, and the headache was worse, sleep was far away, and he wanted to postpone the tedious hours of lying awake in bed upstairs. The papers had said Jenny’s parents were coming up tomorrow to take the body back. He thought of them cursing him and blaming him.

  It was a deathly night. Robert lay in bed for an hour or so, then went down to the kitchen to try some hot milk with Scotch in it, by way of getting to sleep. It was not yet midnight. He stood leaning against the refrigerator with the cup in his hand, sipping it slowly. Then as he moved to take the cup to the sink, there was an explosion at the front of the house. Robert dropped to the floor. He lay wide-eyed and motionless for an instant. It had been a gunshot, he thought, not a firecracker or the backfire of a car. Somebody was moving around the house now, he supposed, probably looking through another window to see if the shot had got him, maybe the kitchen window right behind him. Without moving, he tried to feel if he had pain anywhere, blood anywhere. Why had he dropped to the floor? A reflex from Army training?

  Robert heard nothing outside the house.

  Slowly, he got up, a plain target in the brightly lighted kitchen with its two windows, and clicked off the light switch by the door. Then he went into the dark living room. There was no light in the bedroom upstairs. The windows showed nothing but blackness, as there was no street light for several yards. Robert went to the front window, to the right of the door, where the bullet must have come from. Looking into the kitchen from here, he could see the vague white bulk of the refrigerator. The living-room window was open four inches. Robert stooped and looked out. All seemed silent and black. Black, round clumps of bushes, the black form of a tall tree—and those he might not have seen if he had not known they were there.

  Greg, he wondered, or one of Greg’s friends? Robert turned the living-room light on, and walked slowly to the coffee table for a cigarette. He should tell the police, he supposed, if it really was a bullet shot. He went into the kitchen and tried to find the hole. The front of the refrigerator showed nothing. Robert looked at the wall on either side of it. Then he looked at the living-room wall near the kitchen. Nothing. He picked up the telephone, called the Rittersville police, and reported the incident. The man on the other end of the telephone sounded merely annoyed. He asked if Robert had found any bullet hole, then if he was sure it had been a gunshot. Robert said yes.

  The officer said he would send somebody over.

  It was more than Robert had expected.

  About an hour later, a pair of police officers arrived. They asked Robert the time the shot had been fired—midnight, Robert thought—and from where. Robert had not touched the window that was slightly open. But they could not find the bullet. Logically, it should have hit the refrigerator or the wall above it, but there was no bullet hole.

  “On a quiet night, backfire can sound pretty loud, you know,” said one of the officers.

  Robert nodded. No use telling them, he thought, that he had a pretty good idea Greg had fired the shot, if they couldn’t guess that themselves. The officers seemed to know who he was—“You’re the Forester who knew the Thierolf girl,” one of them had said when they came in. It would take Lippenholtz, Robert supposed, to connect Greg with the gunshot. Maybe. These two looked like classic flatfeet making a routine visit because of somebody’s complaint about a strange noise.

  “Is Detective Lippenholtz on duty tomorrow, do you know?” asked Robert.

  “Lippy?” The officer looked at his friend.

  “Yeah, I think so. Nine o’clock? Eight?”

  The officers left.

  Robert went up to bed, not caring now whether he slept or not. There was not much left of the night.

  The next morning, with a cup of coffee in his hand, he took a look at the kitchen by the light of day. He pulled the salad bowl a few inches forward to the center of the refrigerator top, and then he saw the bullet, embedded nearly its whole length in the dark wood. It had probably knocked the bowl back against the wall, Robert thought, and he remembered that last night one of the policemen had pulled the bowl forward to see the wall behind it, then shoved the bowl back. Well, now he had it. Robert pulled at the bullet, but it wouldn’t come out.

  He put the bowl on the seat beside him in his car, and drove to Rittersville. A traffic policeman he inquired of directed him to the main headquarters. Here Robert found a sergeant behind a desk in a room with a wide door. Robert gave his name and had to spell it for the sergeant, who wrote it down. Then the sergeant took a closer look at the bowl and remarked casually, “Thirty-two.”

  “When is Lippenholtz due in?” Robert had asked for him when he came in. It was eight-thirty.

  “I don’t know,” said the sergeant. “Any time between now and twelve. He’s out on a job.”

  “Thanks.” Then Robert walked out, leaving the well-seasoned and domestic-looking salad bowl on the sergeant’s desk. Exhibit A. Exhibit B might be himself, he thought.

  Greg probably thought he had got him with that one shot. Robert had dropped to the floor and lain still for several minutes. Greg must have looked through the window, waited a few seconds, then run. Robert hadn’t heard a car. Maybe Greg didn’t have a car. It would be hard for him to get one, unless he stole one, and that would be dangerous. Nickie, of course, could have lent him one, but he didn’t think Nickie would be that foolhardy. It was possible, Robert thought, that one of Greg’s friends had fired the shot. Charles Mitchell of Rittersville, for instance. But Greg himself was much more likely. Who but Greg would be angry enough to try to kill him?

  20

  Robert was in no state to do any work that day, nor would he be tomorrow or the next day, he knew. As he drove from Rittersville to Langley, Robert decided that he should speak to Jaffe this morning and tell him he thought it best to resign. He would make it official with a letter. He would also write a lette
r of resignation and apology to Mr. Gunnarote of Arrobrit, in Philadelphia. And then, Robert supposed, everyone would think he was retreating because of guilt, and let them. By this morning, Naomi Tesser would have told at least a dozen people that he had met Jenny Thierolf by prowling around her house, and the people she told would tell lots more. The story was intolerably dreary to Robert by now, but it would be very fresh and fascinating to others. It would either corroborate a rumor people had heard or it would come out of the blue, but now it would be a fact, because Robert Forester himself had admitted it.

  He was ten or fifteen minutes late in getting to Langley Aeronautics, and all the tables were manned as he walked in. Many people looked up, Robert greeted several with “Good morning” or with “Hi.” He felt less self-conscious than he had yesterday morning, than he had all the mornings since Tuesday of last week. He saw Jack Nielson get up from his table and come toward him. Robert took off his trench coat, put it over his arm, and started for his locker.

  Jack looked him over with a worried expression on his face. He motioned toward the back corridor.

  Robert shook his head. “I want to talk to Jaffe,” Robert said softly, when Jack had reached him. The men at the tables around them all kept their heads down. “I don’t know why I’m locking this coat up.”

  “Tell him you want the rest of the week off,” Jack said. “My God, that’s understandable.”

  Robert nodded. He turned toward his table again, in the direction of Jaffe’s office.

  “Bob.” Jack was beside him again. He said in a whisper, “I think a plainclothes cop was here a couple of minutes ago. I saw him talking to Jaffe in the hall. I’m not sure, but—” He stopped.

  “O.K. Thanks.” Robert felt suddenly sick. He dropped his coat across the back of his chair.

  “What’s the matter? Are you O.K.?” Jack asked.

  “I’m O.K.,” Robert said.

  Now heads were lifting around them.

  “If you’re taking off today, let’s have a coffee at the Hangar or something before you go.”