John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  "Doreen, darling, believe me, you came along at just the right time. You are important to the Church because with you I can relax. All my worries are eased. I sleep at night. I am using you, dear little heart, to keep myself sane and alive. I'm using you, for the good of the Church, and that is what is sinful."

  She hugged him, clamping those strong farm-girl fingers into the flesh of his shoulders.

  "I love you, I love you, I love you so much, Joe!" she cried.

  "I know," he said comfortably, and with great care he reached out to pour them some more red wine. The memory of Patsy Knox's fierce and angry eyes slid through his mind, leaving a residue, a taste of staleness. The tape had ended, leaving only the whispering hum of the air conditioning. A car moved slowly down the street, the glow of headlights appearing briefly against the draperies. When she rose up to drink her wine, her blonde hair lay in a tangle across her eyes. She peered through the hair at him, a small once-wary creature in a thicket, now conditioned to the ways of the captor.

  He felt as if he were on the verge of some great new truth, but it turned to nothing when he tried to put it into words. Each one, in her own time, is the very best of them all, he thought.

  And that does not have much meaning. It will come to an end.

  There will be a final one a last lady and I will not know at the time that she is indeed the last one. This one could be the last one. A dear child. No regrets.

  Roy Owen found the County Line Motel at noon on Monday, the eighth day of August. It was three miles west of the small city of Lakemore, and on the north side of the road. It was an old motel with no more than thirty rooms, a single-story structure in the shape of a U with the open end of the U facing the two-lane highway. It was a block building covered with pink stucco, and had a red tile roof. The pink was faded and cracked, an-d there were many broken tiles. There was a patch of brown grass on one part of the roof. Parking was inside the U, the cars facing the narrow roofed walkway which ran all the way around the interior of the U. There were two vans, a pickup and a step van parked in front of the units.

  The office was oven hot. An overhead fan spun and buzzed at high speed. The woman was standing behind the high counter, weight on her forearms, dark hair hanging toward the magazine she was reading. When she heard the twang of the screen-door spring she straightened, tossing the sheaf of hair back, giving him a welcoming smile. She was a lean sun browned woman with a hard shelf of brow, a crinkled and pleasantly simian smile, very dark eyes. Her shoulders gleamed with perspiration. He guessed she was about thirty.

  "Can I help you?"

  "Have you got a single room?"

  She nodded and put the registration card and a ballpoint pen in front of him.

  "Twelve dollars plus tax. Just one night?"

  "Is number sixteen vacant?"

  She tilted her head and looked at him with a puzzled expression.

  "It's empty, yes. You can have it if you want it. The wall unit is working okay in that one, at least. The one in here rusted out a month ago and it's been an oven in here ever since.

  The postage stamps get all stuck together. The rooms are pretty much all alike. Why do you want that one?"

  He couldn't think of any lie that made any sense at all.

  "There was a woman who stayed in that room three months ago."

  "Oh boy, I thought I'd heard the last of that. After the police and that old boy with the scar, I thought that was the end. The mysterious Miss Olan. What good could it do you staying in that room anyway?"

  He spread his hands in a hopeless shrug.

  "I don't have any idea at all. Maybe it's only because I know how she thinks, how she reacts to things. I've been married to her nine years this month, and I hired that investigator with the scar. I couldn't get down here sooner."

  She turned his card around and looked at the name he had printed.

  "Of course. Owen. I remember now they said that was her real name. Mrs. Owen. It makes a person feel strange to have somebody come into your motel and use a false name. She was supposed to be some kind of a journalist or a writer."

  "Supposed to be and she was. Trying to get some kind of new angle on the Meadows family for that magazine Out Front."

  That's what I found out later."

  "She was on assignment. It wasn't any kind of free-lance thing. She used to work for newspapers using her maiden name, Linda Rooney. Everybody called her Lindy."

  She tossed her dark hair back, an impatient gesture, and she gave him a strange, flat, challenging look.

  "Okay, your wife is missing and that is too bad, but bad things can happen in this world to pretty little women who don't stay where they belong."

  "You sound angry. Did you quarrel with her?"

  "No. We don't have enough customers I can afford to quarrel with any of them, friend. I found out later she had lied about her name and I guess I do not appreciate people lying to me no matter what the reason. And maybe I've got some kind of old-timey feeling about a woman roaming around the countryside leaving her little kid at home."

  He was puzzled.

  "She talked about Janie?"

  "Not a word. She didn't act as if she had a kid or a husband. I saw in the paper about the little girl. Jeanie, is it?"

  "Janie. She's six, staying with Lindy's mother."

  "And so everybody thinks she's just fine. Having a ball. That arrangement is okay with you, Mr. Owen?"

  He smiled and shook his head.

  "I get the feeling we're quarreling about something, but I don't know what."

  She seemed to pull herself back from the edge of an inexplicable irritation with him. Her smile was wry. She combed her fingers back through her dark hair and said, "Don't mind me. It gets too hot in this office without the air conditioning. Look, your Lindy was certainly a cute little person. A petite blonde. I think I could get a lot of mileage out of being a little blonde person." She tilted her head, studied him.

  "I guess you two must have made a great-looking little couple."

  "You keep talking about her in the past tense. Is that because you feel sure something happened to her?"

  "Lots of women want to get away from their kids for good."

  Before he had a chance to answer in anger, defending Lindy, the step van pulled up by the office door and a man in gray coveralls came in and put a key on the counter.

  "Peggy, that damn shower water doesn't hardly go down the drain at all.

  You have to stand in it up to your ankles. It's still running out in there."

  "Thanks, Lew. I'll get Fred to check it out. Everything else okay?"

  "Fine. See you next time around."

  "Be looking for you."

  As the man was climbing into his truck, she turned quickly to Roy, and said, "I don't know if anything happened to her.

  And I think it's a natural way for me to speak about her. She was here. Right. Just as Lew who just left was here. And when she was here she was a neat-looking little blonde person.

  Okay. I don't think you should read anything into the way I use the past tense or any other tense, okay?"

  "Okay, sure. I'm sorry. I know why I'm jumpy. But I don't know why you are so damn cross. I never had to go looking for anybody before. The man I hired said it was a waste of time to come here. But... I guess I have to do everything I can. I don't know whether I should be with Janie up in Hartford. Maybe that would be best for her right now. But someday she's going to want to know that I did everything possible to find her mother. And I don't know why I have to keep justifying myself to you."

  Her faint smile was bleak.

  "I'm not asking you to justify anything, Mr. Owen. If you decided to look for your wife, that's your business, isn't it."

  His smile was rueful.

  "So I should be looking. You could say I'm entitled. But I don't know how. Did you have any particular impressions of her? Please, I need all the help I can get."

  "She was a type we don't get here much."

 
"How so?"

  "Well... two-hundred-dollar silk blouse. Italian shoes.

  Heavy gold chain. Expensive luggage. Which direction did you come in from? Did you come right down off the Interstate and over here through Lakemore?"

  "I came up on the Interstate but I went the other way first, over through the Meadows Center, and then turned around and came back through the town, maybe ten miles from where I turned around."

  "What you have to know, to see what I mean, is the history.

  When the Meadows Center was real small and little, before they began building the Tabernacle, the Interstate wasn't finished through here, and people came to the Center north or south on U.S. Route and turned off onto the state road that runs right by here. So that made for a lot of business for us. The county and the city encouraged the Meadows Center people.

  We didn't realize they were going to turn into what is practically another city. Now all the pilgrims and tourists come down the Interstate and turn east and stay over there in the Meadows Center motels and eat over there and shop over there. This side of town is drying up and blowing away. You and your wife would be the kind of people who'd stay over there at the Center. That driver who just left his key, Lew, he stays here because he saves a few dollars and we keep it clean. Our customers used to be able to eat right across the road over there, but it's been boarded up so long now there's weeds up to your hip pockets. Some people say that bringing all that money and traffic to this area is a real good thing for everybody. I don't know. I really don't. The last two fairly nice restaurants in Lakemore folded last year. A lot of the stores went out of business. And we can't seem to get far enough ahead to replace this rotten broken air conditioner!"

  "So your impression was that Lindy didn't belong here."

  "I wasn't all that curious about her. She came and went at odd times in that rental car. When Dolly was sick she works maid for us I made up number sixteen a couple of times but your wife didn't leave anything around that gave me a clue. But I didn't feel like prying. Even if I had wondered about her, I couldn't open people's private stuff no matter what. I didn't give a damn what she did."

  "Most people like Lindy. It just seems strange to me..."

  "Don't let it worry you what I think or didn't think, okay?

  You want to ask me questions, I'll answer them as best I can."

  "I really appreciate that. The man I hired to look into it, Mr. Hanrahan, in a written report he told me Lindy had been seen in an old red pickup truck with a driver who wore a big black beard. When I asked him about that on the phone he said it turned out to be somebody who gave her a ride for hire over to the Center when her rental car wouldn't start. He said it had no significance at all."

  "I guess it didn't. I got her the ride, actually. He's not a dangerous person. People call him Moses. When you head toward town from here, the third place on your left is a yellow house with green trim. That's Mrs. Holroyd's place, and Moses lives out back of her barn in a yellow school bus he fixed up.

  Moses is very handy and he's strong as a bull. People who have odd jobs they need done, they get hold of Moses. He does a cash business. He's kind of buggy on religion. I mean he'll quote things to you from the Bible for almost no reason at all.

  But there's a lot of that going around lately. When a person wants to get hold of Moses, they phone Mrs. Holroyd and she goes out to the barn and tells him or leaves a message for him.

  The police, Sheriff Dockerty himself, he looked into it and, like I told him, it was because I got a ride for... your wife."

  "Her car broke down?"

  "On a Friday morning, the last Friday she was here. She came into the office very upset. She had an appointment to see somebody over at the Center. They were coming out from Lakemore to fix her car but it would take too long. Could she borrow one? I didn't have one to lend. Fred was out somewhere hunting down some kind of a valve for the plumbing. I asked her if maybe she shouldn't phone and change the appointment and she said it had been too hard getting the one she had. Then I remembered Moses and I told her if she didn't mind somebody pretty strange in a terrible old red pickup, maybe I could arrange something for her. She said she didn't mind at all, but please hurry. Moses was at Mrs. Holroyd's and he came by ten minutes later. I walked her out to the pickup and introduced them and she told him what she wanted. Drive her in, wait for her, bring her back. He nodded and away they went. I guess it was eleven o'clock by then. He dropped her off back here at two o'clock, a little bit after. She came into the office and I gave her the envelope the car repair people had left for her. She told me she had given Moses fifteen dollars and she was worried about whether it was enough. I told her it was enough. She seemed relaxed. She drove out soon after that and came back at about seven o'clock in the evening. She parked outside the door there and came in and asked me if there'd been any calls for her. When I said no, she seemed depressed.

  Right after that she made a long-distance call on her credit card."

  That was to me. Friday night. What did she do Saturday?"

  "She went out early Saturday morning and I don't remember seeing her again until I saw her drive in past the office alone at dusk Saturday night. On Sunday Dolly told me in midmorning that number sixteen was empty. The key was on the bureau.

  Her car and luggage were gone, and I didn't think anything of it. She'd paid through Sunday, and there wouldn't be any unpaid phone charges because you can't call long-distance from the rooms except through the switchboard and I place the call."

  "Did she make many other long-distance calls?"

  "All on a telephone credit card, to New York City. Maybe there were five or six while she was staying here."

  "Did she make any on Saturday, her last day here?"

  "Well, she tried. Several times, but I don't think she got through. I mean, the calls were so short I thought the other end was probably busy, or nobody home."

  "Who did she have the appointment with?"

  "Somebody in the Administration Building. Moses saw her go in there. That's all anybody seems to know. I don't think she would have told Moses. He isn't the sort of person you chat with, you know. I don't think he's retarded, but he isn't really. normal. Kids make fun of him. These days they seem to dump people out of asylums, right out on the street. A friend of mine was in New York last month and she told me about seeing lots of weird people wandering around the sidewalks, making gestures and talking to themselves. Do you want to pay by cash or credit card?"

  "Visa?"

  "Sure. Just let me know by noon tomorrow if you're going to stay longer. Here's the key, but if you want ice the machine is broken. If you come here to the office, I can let you have some from our refrigerator."

  "I'm sorry if there was something I said that upset you."

  "Believe me, please, nothing you said upset me."

  "Then it was something between you and Lindy."

  "Enjoy your stay," she said, and wheeled and went through the doorway into the living quarters beyond the office.

  He parked in front of sixteen and carried his suitcase in. The room was stifling. He experimented with the air-conditioner controls until he found a reasonable compromise between noise and cooling. The room contained a chest of drawers, a small desk, a straight chair, an overstuffed wing chair, a double bed, two windows looking out on woodsy scrubland behind the motel. Sixteen was in the base of the U, one of the rooms furthest from the highway. His front window looked out at the grille of his rental car. There was a small closet alcove with hangers permanently affixed to the clothes bar, a small bath with tub and shower, scarred sink and toilet with a cracked lid, and two towels halfway between bath size and hand size. There was a grass rug in the room and bolted to the wall a framed lithograph of big-eyed Spanish-looking children.

  He removed his shoes and stretched out on the bed, fingers laced behind his head. The room was beginning to cool off.

  The ceiling was made of twelve-inch squares of patterned white fiberboard. Above the foot of th
e bed was a curious yellow stain on the ceiling the shape of a dog's head, defacing three of the white squares.

  She was here, he thought. Right here like this, looking up at the dog's head and wondering how it happened, just as I am wondering.

  Once again he had the conviction Lindy was dead. It came at unexpected times, with no warning. As before, it made his eyes sting and his breath catch. He had tried to keep it from happening when he had gone over to Lindy's mother's place to tell Mrs. Rooney and his daughter about his plan to come down here and look around. But it had happened then and they had all clung to each other, weeping. He did not like to cry, or to even think of himself crying. He guessed that it was due to his always being smaller than his classmates. In the roughest games, they had never been able to make him cry.