by Jay Brandon
She wasn’t in either of the restaurants. Both proprietors seemed to be expecting him this time, as if he were a cop making rounds. He even questioned the waiter he knew, but he hadn’t seen Carol. Daniel didn’t know if his description was sufficient to distinguish her from any other blond white woman the waiter might have seen that day. The waiter didn’t seem to take the questioning very seriously.
He returned to his own shop, slowly, because it was the last place to go and an admission that he couldn’t find her. The note he had left for her looked forlorn hanging on the door. A comer of it had already begun to curl up as if it were an artifact that had hung there untouched for years.
For the next hour he just jittered—sitting, rising, pacing, staring out the window. Gradually he was giving more thought to the other idea that had occurred to him: that Carol had left him. That last night’s reception had left her old life calling her, and their coldness to each other afterward had been the last straw. This morning’s kindness had only been a way for her to slip away gracefully, with that ease he so admired. It hadn’t been much of a fight but maybe it hadn’t taken much, after she’d seen her old friends. He never had believed that she would try very hard to save their marriage if trouble came. A year of living together had brought them closer but hadn’t entirely assuaged his mistrust. They were too different to belong together: That was something he knew and she wouldn’t admit, but she must be aware of it too. Maybe she hadn’t worried about their differences as much as he did because she wasn’t as troubled by the thought of breaking up. Maybe it was something she just intended to play along with as long as it amused her and no longer. Last night’s party had reminded her how much nicer her life had been before him. It seemed to him now, sitting alone in his shop with black night encroaching on every side, that even after a year of marriage the two of them had not coalesced into a couple. The main threads of their lives were still separate: separate work, separate friends.
But would she have left him this way, knowing he would wait there and worry? It didn’t seem likely. But maybe she gave him credit for knowing when it was over. Maybe she expected him to give up and go home and when he did he would find half-empty closets and a farewell note.
In a way these thoughts were comforting. They offered a much more pleasant alternative to the other images that had been assaulting him: of Carol in the backseat of a car being driven out into the country, struggling and pleading but with no one to hear; of men with knives and ropes and loose, malicious grins; of Carol crying silently, trying to be brave, her only hope that Daniel was doing something to save her.
He shook himself out of his trance and looked at his watch. It was eight o’clock. He had been sitting on this stool for half an hour, sunk into hopeless inaction. There was one thing he should do, at least, should have done an hour ago. He found a phone book and called the police.
When the police dispatcher came on the line Daniel had to clear his throat. He hadn’t spoken for hours. He thought he must sound like a nervous criminal himself, calling in a bomb threat.
“I want to report a—I don’t know what, a missing person, I guess.”
“Yes, sir. And what is your name?” The dispatcher sounded like a middle-age man. His voice had a brisk efficiency designed to calm the frightened and to elicit as much information in as short a time as possible. Daniel felt slightly reassured just by the official tone. He gave his name and address and the shop’s location.
“All right, sir. Now, who is the missing person and when and where did you last see him or her?”
“My wife. I don’t know exactly when she disappeared. She was supposed to meet me hours ago and she hasn’t shown up.”
There was a short pause and the question was repeated. “And when did you see her last?”
“About—it must’ve been three-thirty, four o’clock.”
“Today. Just this afternoon.” The dispatcher’s voice had gone a little flat.
“Yes.” Daniel explained the street fair, emphasizing the very small area in which Carol had disappeared. “But it’s all over now,” he concluded. “Everyone’s packed up, all the stores are closed. There’s no place for her to—”
“Sir,” the dispatcher interrupted. “We can’t accept a missing persons report until the person hasn’t been seen for twenty-four hours. That’s just standard. You understand, before a whole day has passed there are just too many other explanations—just a missed connection, or the person visiting someone else, or . .”
Or that she’s left me and I just don’t know it yet, Daniel filled in for him silently. He understood the policy, all right. He wasn’t yet sure himself if she was really missing. “But it’s not her missingness I’m worried about.” His voice was rising both in pitch and volume. He was losing the police, just as surely as if his phone connection were fading away. “It’s what might have happened to her. This is a bad neighborhood after dark. She wouldn’t be out there on purpose. The only way she’d still be gone is if she’s hurt, or someone’s taken her. If you wait a whole day before you investigate—”
“We’ll take steps before then, Mr. Greer. We’ll alert our officers in the area to the possible kidnapping or—”
“Kidnapping, that’s right. That’s what it must be. Her father is Raymond Hecate. Did I mention that?”
There was a pause. “No, sir, you didn’t. I’ll send a car to look over the neighborhood.”
“Tonight? Now?”
“Yes, sir. In the meantime, why don’t you try your home?”
“I’ve called there, no one—”
“Yes sir, but I mean go there to check. You never know—”
He was suggesting the good-bye note and the missing clothes Daniel had thought of earlier. What was funny was how well the dispatcher’s suggestion meshed with Daniel’s own suspicions, but it had nothing to do with him. The dispatcher would be obliged to make the same subtle suggestion to anyone who called in such a report: Maybe your wife has just left you. Even in the happiest marriage, if one spouse turned up missing, that’s what an outsider would think. That’s how they’d have to proceed. “I will then,” Daniel said.
“Good. And give us another call tomorrow afternoon if you haven’t heard from her by then.”
“Yes, all right.”
Before he hung up the dispatcher’s tone turned kindly again. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Mr. Greer. They have a way of turning up.”
Daniel read the newspapers. He knew the way some of them had of turning up: naked in a field, bound and gagged and three days dead. He was not comforted.
But the police dispatcher had set his mind more firmly on the other track. He looked out at the empty street and the images that came to him now were of Carol somewhere else in the city, safe, having a drink with someone, wondering if he had found her note yet. She’d be thinking of him, her memories already slightly skewed and beginning to solidify into their final form, the memories that would occur to her occasionally years from now, of a youthful experiment that failed. He gave her credit, she’d be sad tonight. She wouldn’t be ready to laugh it all off.
Tears blurred his vision. He found paper and pencil and left her a new note on the glass case, just saying he’d gone home. That was the best thing to do. She obviously wasn’t coming back there. He hadn’t convinced himself she had left him voluntarily—though it was, all things considered, a comforting idea—but home was still the best place to go. If she had been in an accident and taken to an emergency room, the hospital would try to contact him at home.
He had one last ugly duty, though. When he left the shop this time he took a powerful flashlight. The alley wasn’t nearly so frightening when he entered it this time, and that wasn’t just because the flashlight’s beam dispelled the shadows. He would have almost welcomed someone attacking him, physical danger coming at him head-on. Deep in his mind, beneath the speculations and rationalizations, was the reptile brain that doesn’t speculate, that knows what it knows. In that part of his m
ind he was certain someone had hurt his wife. Banked down there as well was an animal fury clawing for release. The heavy flashlight wasn’t just a torch; it was a club. His hand was white from gripping it. Yes, a mugger would have been welcome just then.
But the alley was quiet. Daniel approached the first dumpster he came to. There was a small stirrup on the side, designed to catch the lifting arm of the garbage truck that came by periodically. Daniel steeled himself for a moment, then climbed up and peered inside.
The dumpster wasn’t half full. It held mostly paper. A sprinkling of glass glittered in his flashlight’s beam. Luckily the restaurants were on the other side of the street and used different dumpsters, so the smell from this one wasn’t too terrible. He climbed up over the edge and eased himself down, afraid of what his feet would find. Crouching, he swept the papers aside. Glass tinkled. Heavier objects slid aside. Tentatively he pushed at it harder.
There was nothing. He kicked through all the trash until he was satisfied there was no body, then he hauled himself out and went to the next one. He had to check them all. That’s where you always read about victims being discarded, and one of the dumpsters would have been the logical place to dispose of Carol if someone had killed her here in this alley when she came to the car. But his search revealed nothing. He trudged back to his car, bits of paper clinging to his shoes.
There was no message from Carol there. The engine roared to life, breaking the silence. Daniel put the car in gear, and just as he did he had a terrible sense that he was abandoning her. He kept his eyes in the rearview mirror as he drove slowly away, as if he might see her running after him, calling out. His brake lights lit the alley garishly. He paused for a moment at the mouth, then pulled out into the street, leaving her behind.
There was no note waiting for him at home. The house appeared unchanged since he and Carol had left it this morning. He called her name hopefully, but if she’d been there she would have turned on the front porch light. He snapped it on as he came in.
The front room, at the left end of the house next to the garage, was a small living room, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, perfectly nondescript until Carol had started arranging it. Plants grew from a clutter of stands just inside the front window beside the door. The antique coffee table in front of the sofa was where she would have left a note, but the only thing on the table was the morning’s paper.
The living room extended back to an even smaller dining room, the window of which looked into the large backyard. The doorway in the dining room led to the right into the kitchen. The back door was there, and another window into the yard. The kitchen was a bright room even at night. It had been rather grim when they’d first bought the house, with stained walls and scarred floor. But the new linoleum they’d laid themselves had brightened it considerably, and painting the walls and cabinets pale yellow had completed the transformation. Daniel went hastily through the empty kitchen out the other door, into a hall that ran the width of the house. Doors in the hall gave onto a bathroom to the left, a bedroom on the right, the master bedroom also on the right, on the front comer of the house, and finally the hall ended at the third bedroom, which was the back comer. Daniel went through all the rooms snapping on the lights. Light seemed to throw the silence into bold relief, making it something active rather than passive. Daniel deliberately made more clatter than was necessary.
He ended in the master bedroom, the room filled with their waterbed. That had been their only major purchase together so far. They had both been over thirty when they married, they had their own furniture, but Carol had said they needed a new bed for a new marriage.
He opened the closet door. Rods on each side of the closet held hanging clothes, packed in tight. He stepped inside and pulled the string that turned on the bare bulb. Clothes filled the space all the way back to the wall. He stepped on something firm but yielding and jumped back hastily, but it was only a shoe. The floor of the closet was littered with shoes, as always. Nothing seemed to be missing from the closet. Suitcases were stored on the shelves above his head, and they were still there.
Next he went through the dresser drawers and then the bathroom Not even her toothbrush was missing. He was searching almost frantically at the end, to find anything she might have taken, anything to tell him she’d been there since this morning. But there was nothing. If she had walked away, she hadn’t come back there first.
Soon he was standing in the doorway of the master bedroom. They had painted this room themselves too, a gray that seemed bright in the morning but dim and cozy at night. Squinting, he could picture the room as it had been when they’d first moved in, empty of furniture, newspapers spread on the floor, and Carol laughing with a dab of paint beside her nose.
He stumbled out of there and back down the hall. From the kitchen he could hear a thumping noise. When he walked into the kitchen a high-pitched whining replaced the thumping. Through the glass louvers of the back door he could see Hamilton staring in at him. He hadn’t been fed today. Hamilton Burger—Carol had named him, more or less, after the district attorney on Perry Mason—Ham for short, was the Doberman Carol’s father had given her when she had announced her engagement. Unspoken but obvious had been the implication that she was moving into a dangerous neighborhood with an unreliable character. In the year and a half since then the dog had grown from a cute puppy with legs too long for him into a ninety-pound beast with a chest a foot wide and a frightening growl. Inside he was still a baby, but only his owners knew that. Even Carol’s old man wouldn’t go near the dog anymore, on his rare visits to the house.
Daniel opened the back door and Ham put one diffident foot inside. He wasn’t a house dog and knew it. But he must have been starving. Daniel knelt and scratched between and around the dog’s pointed ears.
“She’ll come back for you,” he muttered.
He fetched the hubcap-size food dish from the back patio and half filled it with Gravy Train and warm water, then added a can of Alpo on top. Hamilton’s whines rose in pitch as he watched this operation, and when Daniel finally set the food in front of him on the patio, the big dog ate as he always did, as if this were the last food in the world and someone was planning to snatch it away from him at any moment.
In the next two hours Daniel picked up the phone four times. Each time the dial tone assured him it was still working. The last two times he started to dial Carol’s parents’ number but hung up instead. When he finally did call the Hecates he was almost relieved when there was no answer. He didn’t think she would have gone home to them, and if they’d received a ransom note they’d be home, waiting for a call.
Finally he called her friend Jennifer. The only reason she was home on a Saturday night was that she was obviously having a party. The noise almost overwhelmed her voice when she came to the phone. Daniel was embarrassed. There were probably a lot of Carol’s old friends there, so in a matter of minutes there would be a rumor circulating that Carol had finally left that dork she’d married.
On the other hand, maybe Carol was already there among them. He didn’t ask Jennifer that directly, but told her he and Carol were supposed to meet somewhere and had failed to connect, and he wondered if Jennifer had heard from her.
“Tonight? No, uh-uh.” Which was the answer he expected in any case. “And I’ve been right here by the phone too. Why don’t you just go home, guy, she’ll show up there.”
“Will she?” Daniel said.
The background noise diminished as if Jennifer had closed a door. “That’s kind of a funny response,” she said after a pause.
He and Jennifer had never been anything approaching friends, and he didn’t trust her now to tell him the truth even if she had heard from Carol. In turn he couldn’t bring himself to tell her the truth. But he came close: “If you hear from her, Jennifer, tell her—Just tell her to call me at home.”
“I will,” Jennifer said, and paused again. “Listen, is something—Have you tried calling her parents?” Daniel didn’t
even answer that.
“Yeah, I guess that was kind of a joke. Well, if she turns up here—”
“Thanks,” Daniel said, and that was all he said before hanging up, because his throat was tightening up.
For the next hour he paced, and had a drink as well. It turned out to be a strong one because his hand wouldn’t stop pouring. He kept picturing Carol back in the neighborhood of the pawnshop. He knew how unlikely that was. Even if the worst had happened, that meant she’d been taken somewhere else. But he kept picturing her stumbling down that damned dark alley, bruised and bleeding, her purse gone so she didn’t have keys to the shop or change for a phone. He paced faster, until momentum seemed likely to burst him right through the walls of his house. When he couldn’t stand it anymore he raced out to his car and went speeding back toward the pawnshop. It was a fifteen-minute drive he did that night in ten by running red lights and speeding on the freeway. If a police car had started pursuing him, he would have led it to the pawnshop with him. That was probably what kept police at bay: his desire for them.
The area around his pawnshop was dark and deserted. The two restaurants had closed, leaving his own shop the only brightly lit building on the block. Light still poured out its plate-glass window onto the sidewalk. From the street he could see his last note still lying on the countertop with no new note near it. He stopped there only for a minute, then drove to the end of the block and around into the alley. He put his headlights on high beam and slowly drove the length of it. The beams were like spotlights, throwing a sharp line high on the walls of the buildings on either side. Always he seemed to catch movement out of the comers of his eyes, as if something lurked there just outside the circle of light, some slithering creature that moved faster than the car or higher than the beams of the headlights could reach. Daniel rolled down the window so he could hear better. The night air drifted in, cool and yet pungent He drove five miles an hour, slower than a fast walker.
