John D MacDonald - One More Sunday

by One More Sunday(Lit)

  The night before he had talked long-distance to Margaret Rooney after his interview with Hanrahan. She had sounded very depressed. He had talked to Janie. She said she had a new friend. Her name was Princess Jones and nobody could see her except Janie. She wore a little gold tiara with emeralds on it, lace dresses and shoes with high golden heels. She would introduce him to her when he came home, but he would have to promise to pretend he could see her.

  So Lindy was dead and it was a hell of a waste. There was no one to blame for the delay in reporting it. Her editors had not become alarmed until he had phoned them about not hearing from her.

  So he knew everything about her and at the same time very little about her. She was nearsighted and wore soft contacts.

  She'd had a full scholarship to Vassar and had graduated with honors. She was an only child. She slept in short flannel nightgowns summer and winter. She drank spritzers. Anything stronger made her ill. She made a point of doing things well, regardless of her own likes and dislikes. And so she cooked well and had kept the house clean and her daughter healthy and tidy. When she was a child a lawn chair had collapsed under her and pinched off almost half the little finger of her right hand. She carried that hand half curled into a fist. In her touch-typing she used the stub of that finger for the 'p', the ';' and the' ?". There was a typing callus on the end of that stunted finger. She wrote a sturdy and durable prose, and when moved could write in an effective and luminous style. She was afraid of air travel. She liked large thick white towels. She had a knack of sitting without random motions or nervous habits, and she had a direct, level, challenging stare many found disconcerting. She was shrewd with money, a canny bargainer.

  She played to win, and became cross when beaten at games.

  She was a skeptic, researching everything she heard that she did not believe. She became huge with Janie, reminding Roy of a penguin in the way she walked, leaning back to balance the load. She could thrive on six hours' sleep a night.

  She kept her weight right at or close to a hundred and five pounds.

  He guessed he did not really know her because they had never solved their sexual puzzles. When there was a mutual satisfaction, it was more by accident than design. He had tried 8z to talk about it to her but there was a primness in her that made her change the subject as soon as she could. He had always felt that in some deep and secret way she disapproved of him, of his maleness and his hungers. It was a wall between them which they managed to ignore most of the time. When he looked deeply into her eyes, before she looked away he would sometimes think he saw a stranger back in there, someone he did not know and would probably never meet.

  He wondered if her repressed sexuality was the reason for her truly impressive energies. He had never seen her felled by exhaustion except after the long ordeal of birthing Janie. He felt certain those energies had not led her into someone else's bed. She would have thought it unpleasant, tacky and dishonest. Untidy at best.

  "Lindy is dead!" It was an experiment, to say it aloud for the first time. Tears ran out of the corners of his eyes, blurring the dog-head image on the ceiling. He wondered if the tears were real and true, or if he was crying at the idea of himself losing her. He thumped the bed with his right fist, as hard as he could.

  He got up, wiped his eyes and slowed the air conditioning. The room was cool enough. The sky was a milky blue. The sun shadows out behind the motel had soft edges. He could see a plume of dust rising and decided there was a dirt road back there beyond the trees, paralleling the highway. He could see, beyond the trees and dust, part of the roof of a barn. The rest of the roof had blown off or fallen in.

  He wondered at his own unfairness in feeling an annoyance, an anger at Lindy for subjecting him to these waves of sour realization. He was glad he no longer had to feel guilt about resenting her work because it had separated them. It had been only a partial separation. He could have kept on living with that arrangement indefinitely merely by not thinking about it too much or too often. By disappearing she had opened up areas in his head he did not care to deal with or think about.

  What will happen to me now? What will my life be like? What should I do with my life and my daughter's life? What is it going to be like, being a single parent? Can I give her enough security, enough sense of herself as a whole person? And the presence of this special problem, this special small person in the center of his life, made all his other questions seem trivial and self-consciously awkward. Have I been happy? Has this been a happy life? Have I ever felt a genuine joy? Moments of it, sure. New bike, new car, new bride. A very good guess on the direction a stock would take, and good timing in buying or selling, outguessing the market.

  But, in truth, I was never a joyful person, and neither was Lindy. Maybe that was the trouble with us. Two earnest little people trying mechanically for wild delights. Janie has a capacity for joy. She can run and sing all day. I doubt Lindy ever did. I'll have to ask Mrs. Rooney what Lindy was like when she was little. Strange how Lindy never reminisces, and neither does Mrs. Rooney. Something wrong there. Something about Lindy's father. Something unpleasant that makes a wall across the past. I cannot let Janie lose that sense of joy, that ability to live without doubt or reservation.

  The phone rang, startling him. It could only be Hanrahan.

  Nobody else knew he would be here in this particular room at the County Line Motel. He answered with a feeling of dread and hope.

  "Hi," a woman said, her voice husky.

  "Who is it?"

  "Me. Up here at the office switchboard. Peggy Moon. After I got through crying I realized I owed you better than I gave you before. An explanation, at least."

  "About Lindy?"

  "Sort of. Yes and no. Mr. Owen, a person can have wounds that seem to be all healed and then that person finds out that they aren't, and it is sort of... discouraging. I mean, how long is it supposed to take to grow up?"

  "I don't think I understand."

  "Let me work my way up to it, okay."

  "Want me to come up there?"

  "Oh, God, no! I can talk over the phone about it, I think. In person, never."

  "About "it"?"

  "My mother was a very pretty woman too. When I was about fifteen I began to wonder if she had been as pretty as I remembered, and so I got the old pictures out. She was really beautiful. So okay, why I was so shitty to you, Mr. Owen, your Janie got me to thinking about me when I was six. I guess they were trying to hide it from me or break it to me gently or something. First they said to me that my mom had gone away on a little trip. And then they said she was staying longer than she'd planned. But after school started the kids told me she was gone for good. She had been seeing a man. His name was Lester Moyers and he owned the Lakemore Lodge. He had been trying to sell it. She had been seeing him in the afternoon at one of the cottages at the Lodge. He was divorced. He sold the Lodge for cash money and they went away together. The big kids at school talked dirty about her. I tried to kill them all.

  I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe she would ever go away and leave me, forever. She had held me and hugged me and rocked me and read me to sleep. Her hair always smelled so sweet. She called me Punkin. Oh, damn it, here I go again. Give me a minute."

  "You don't have to tell me..."

  "Shut up. I owe you. Okay. She never came back. She never wrote. Nobody that she knew ever saw her again. Not to this day, and that, my friend, was twenty-five years ago. So I know what Janie is going through. Little kids don't know from voluntary. Right? In my mind that Moyers man tied her hand and foot and drove her away in his red Studebaker, and he wouldn't let her get in touch with me and tell me how much she missed me, how much she loved me. I'm telling you all this for Janie's sake. Your wife should have stayed the hell home where she belonged. She just didn't realize how very precious she was to the kid. And to you. It meant more to her to be out in the world roaming around, feeling important. I grant you it is a different situation, but Janie is feeling just what I felt. A terr
ible kind of... desolation. Empty. Unloved. Sick at heart. It's worse than people dying, I think, because you don't know where they are at all in the world."

  "I... I'm sorry. I didn't mean to... inflict anything on you."

  "You didn't. Not really. It's been with me ever since I read about it in the paper and the police were here and your detective was here. It took the lid off. I thought the package was empty by now, but it wasn't. Don't be sorry. I was sorry I acted like I did and so I had to tell you. Like I said before, enjoy your stay."

  On that same Monday morning Eliot Erskine lay prone near the crest of a ridge about eight miles southwest of the first exit south of the Lakemore exit on the north-south Interstate. He was in the heavy shade of a clump of longleaf pine. This time he had brought the spray and killed off the ants which had been stinging him from time to time on prior visits. From the ridge he could see the irregular blue patch of Burden Pond twelve hundred yards away, and beyond it on the far shore the dingy white of the old double-wide mobile home parked permanently among the big live oaks. The two vehicles were near it in the shade, a dark blue Ford van with heavily tinted windows and a yellow VW Rabbit convertible.

  The spotting scope was positioned on its low tripod, and with the sixty-power lens, Erskine could see the vehicles and the trailer as though they were but sixty feet away. He was a stolid, persistent man, a professional who had become accustomed to the boredom of stakeouts. The idea was to make yourself as inconspicuous as possible and as comfortable as possible, and wait. His car was a half mile behind him, parked near a bridge. He had a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and a thermos of cold Tab.

  It had taken him several years to finally decide to leave the Atlanta force. He had been good out there on patrol. He knew it and they knew it. He had the citations to prove it, and the special letters in his file. But when you get to be a certain age and have a certain amount of rank and seniority, then they pull you in off the streets and put you in a room indoors all day, reading things and writing things that don't seem real, don't seem as if they have ever happened to anyone. He had never married. He had no small talk. He found it difficult to make friends. But he had reached the point where he realized they were going to keep him indoors in a room for fifteen more years and then retire him on a pension. He did not think he could stand that.

  He began looking for work during his time off. Too many jobs seemed to involve walking around warehouses all night, turning a key in a time clock. Or standing in a shopping mall jewelry store all day. Or riding around a big campus in a gray patrol car. He decided there should be some good money involved. He had watched a lot of big money made in ways he did not entirely understand. It seemed to him that a good piece of money would make the retirement manageable. A man with a little money, a careful man, could travel and look at what the world was like lately. You didn't have to approve of it just see what it was like.

  Three years ago he was hired by the Security Section of the Meadows Center, hired by a stone-eyed man who had once been with the FBI, and approved for employment by a big lazy-looking man named Finn Efflander, provided his credentials checked out. The most difficult part of it was explaining to them why he had wanted to leave the Atlanta police. The stone-eyed man was named Rick Liddy. Two weeks after he went to work, Erskine went to Liddy with a handwritten list of the deficiencies in the security arrangements, and where they could be tightened up without any additional expenditure of money or any additions to the staff. Liddy took it without comment and a week later he made Erskine a supervisor charged with keeping things firm and tight, with the privilege of picking his own hours.

  Erskine was a fair-skinned man with small pale eyes and a big chest, big thighs, pale freckled fists. He could have been thirty-five or fifty-five.

  There was movement in the distance, and he turned quickly to look through the scope. The door had swung open and the woman had come out first, going down the two steps, laughing as she turned to look back up at the man. He brought them into sharper focus. She wore a little white tennis outfit, with red ruffles under the short skirt. Her companion put the padlock through the loop of the hasp, snapped it shut and tested it, then came down the two steps and took her in his arms. He turned her and pressed her back against the side of the mobile home, kissing her.

  Erskine saw a scrub jay fly down to the dry mud edge of Burden Pond, look in every direction and then dip to drink.

  When he looked back at the couple, the kissing had stopped and she was opening the driver door of the yellow Rabbit.

  It had taken him the first three weeks of February to track them to their hideaway. The hundred-and-eighty-acre piece had been willed to the Church by an old woman who had been born there in the farmhouse long gone. She had died at ninety-five, and the double-wide had belonged to her grandson. The big towers of Southway Power marched across the land, and the grandson had negotiated a drop line, transformer and take-off for the house trailer, in return for the easement.

  Erskine had followed one or the other of them, until finally he located the last gate. When they left one day, one at a time, he picked the padlock on the gate and drove in and down to the trailer, following the tracks, picked that padlock as well, and found the lovemaking spoor of the two of them, and the little electric heater still warm. That same day he located the spot on the ridge for the stakeout, reported his find and went back with the voice-actuated tape recorder and planted it under the floor near the wide bunk, and hid the mike in a dark, dusty corner.

  They were frisky in March and April. And, thinking they were totally alone, sometimes on bright warm days they would come outside and make love on a blanket on the grass, or atop the old picnic table when the grass was wet. There was a lot of laughter on the tape, giggles and slaps. He took dozens of pictures of them on the blanket, using his Pentax with fast film, a sandbag to steady the twelve-hundred-millimeter lens. When he had a half dozen which showed both their faces in the same frame, along with some specifics of whatever they were doing at the time, he stopped bringing the camera, and stopped coming to the ridge when they were there. The bugs of summer kept them inside.

  Today he was there because he had decided enough was enough. The man walked over to the Rabbit and bent to talk through the open window to the woman behind the wheel.

  Through the scope, from his posture, Erskine guessed they were quarreling again. The laughing times were over. They were well into the scuffling which, he thought, marked the beginning of the end.

  The little yellow car drove away. Erskine made careful note of the precise time. The man stretched and yawned. The little Rabbit kicked up dust behind it as it scurried down the two miles of private road, occasionally lost from his view in the rolling country. It stopped out by the private gate and moved, stopped again, and then went on, turning left on State Road 454, heading toward the interchange and the Interstate north.

  The man walked down to the edge of the small lake. He picked up a stone and threw it out into the water. At last he drove away in the van, following the dirt road she had taken, the only road out of the property.

  Erskine made note of the time, and then walked down the slope and around the pond. The double-wide was up on blocks. He wiggled under it, between two of the piles of blocks, and aimed his pocket flash at a battery-operated tape recorder perched atop a spare block. He backed the tape up a few revolutions, put it on playback, and the woman said, '... I know your problem, pal. I know it maybe better than you do.

  Let's go, huh?" Then there was the sound of footsteps and the slam of the door, the rattle of the hasp and lock. He rewound the tape and put the cassette in his shirt pocket. He wormed back out from under the trailer, taking the small recorder with him. He went inside and retrieved the microphone and short length of wire.

  Before he left and relocked the door behind him, he stood and looked around the main room of the trailer. It had a sad and tawdry look about it, as do all rooms, somehow, of loveless love or sudden irritable murder, or child abuse, or solitary
suicide. The cop life had taken him into too many rooms with this flavor.

  As he walked back to pick up the scope and thermos and can of insect spray, he thought with satisfaction that it was very nice not to have had to go get court orders, and very nice not to have to triple-check every move you made so no little smartass lawyer with a mustache could make you look like a fool on the stand.

  But he knew he was going to miss the pond, miss looking at the birds and the wind riffles and, on the calmest days, the reflections of the live oaks and the clouds. He wished he could own a piece of land exactly like that.

  He clambered over the final fence and got into the fierce heat of his car. The wheel was almost too hot to touch. A bird came booming out of the brush just as he got up to speed, the bird moving too fast for identification. It hit the metal just above the middle of the windshield with a sickening thud, and when he looked back in the rearview mirror he saw the feathers filtering down like snow. It made him feel bad. It made him wish he had gotten to that point of intersection with the bird in flight a little earlier or a little later, not at that precise exact moment.

  Victims, he thought, were birds and animals and people who arrived at the wrong place at the wrong time, usually in too big a hurry.