The Man in the Net

by Patrick Quentin

  Just after eleven Leroy ran down through the meadow, stripping off his clothes, and jumped into the creek too. He was triumphant about his fishing expedition. He had caught three bass and Vickie had only caught one.

  “And we were up at dawn. And I rowed. And … you should have seen the fish I almost caught. You could see it in the water. Boy, it was three feet long, I bet.”

  As the other children crowded around him, wide-eyed and impressed, the sense of peace enlarged in John.

  It was later, almost when it was time for him to leave, that it all went bad. Emily and Angel were lying with him in the sun on the creek bank. Emily suddenly said, “I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell John the secret.”

  “No,” cried Angel. “No, no, you’re not.” She hurled herself with savage fury at her older sister, beating at her with her fists. “It’s my secret. It’s my secret first.”

  “It isn’t either.”

  “It is. It is.”

  The other kids all came out of the water and stood tensely around. John pulled the little girl off her sister. She struggled wildly in his arms. Her face, round and puffy with anger, glared up at him.

  “You’re not—you’re not going to know the secret. You’re mean and wicked. You hit your wife.”

  “Angel!” Emily had jumped up and was trying to grab at her sister again in John’s arms. “Don’t you dare … Don’t you dare …”

  “He did,” screamed Angel. “He hit his wife. He beats his wife up. Timmie said so. Timmie saw. She came into the room with a great big beat-up eye and she said so. My husband hit me, she said, and Timmie …”

  Bleakly thinking: So it’s got to the children now, John put her down. He glanced at Timmie. Timmie was squirming in agonized embarrassment. Suddenly he twisted round and started running away from them through the tall weeds.

  Emily, John’s passionate advocate, was crying, “It isn’t true. I hate them. I hate Timmie. I hate Angel …” John went after Timmie. He found him behind a pine tree, lying on his face in the grass, sobbing. He knelt down by the boy’s side and put his hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s all right, Timmie.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to tell them. Then I thought maybe if I told Angel a secret she’d tell me hers and I asked her and she said maybe if I told mine first. And I told and she wouldn’t tell me anyway. And I didn’t mean to …”

  “Okay, Timmie. Let’s forget it. Come on.”

  But the boy wouldn’t come. Lost in some child’s nightmare of treachery performed, he just lay on the grass, whimpering and kicking his toes against the ground.

  John went back to the others. They were all awkward and shame-faced. The spell was broken. The shadow of Linda had stepped among them.

  He left soon and walked back to the house.

  And there was Linda, as brisk and bright as ever. She had his lunch ready and sat with him while he ate, not eating herself, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching him from behind the sunglasses, and talking with a rather hectic casualness about trivialities.

  She came up with him while he changed and packed an overnight bag.

  “You don’t mind driving yourself to the station, do you? I won’t be needing the car while you’re away anyway. And …” She raised her hand to the glasses. “I don’t want to go through the village like this. I don’t want them to talk.”

  That was the nearest she got to any reference to what had happened until she was standing by the car, waiting for him to drive off.

  Then, suddenly, she said, “John, promise me one thing, please. It’s all right with Bill. I swear I’ll be all right. I’ll do everything if it’s Bill. But don’t go to anyone else. I mean, if he isn’t there or anything … please.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “And, John …”

  “Yes.”

  “About Steve. You were right. What I said last night— it was a lie. I don’t know what got into me.”

  “It’s all right, Linda. Well, see you tomorrow evening.”

  “Yes, tomorrow. Goodbye, John.”

  “Goodbye.”

  And she’d stood outside the kitchen door, smiling and waving as he swung the car down the drive …

  The conductor had already called the station and Brad had pulled their suitcases down from the rack. When the train stopped and they climbed out, John saw the old black sedan still parked where he had left it. Vickie was there too with the Careys’ Buick. They joined her and she kissed them both.

  “Well, John, is the great deed done?”

  “It’s done.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Linda will understand, I’m sure. If you feel like it, come over, both of you, later. Father’s been off in Springfield and Mother stayed with me last night, two lorn females together. But he’s just got back and he’s whisked her off again. So do come.”

  John drove home, trying not to think about Linda any more. What was the point of tormenting himself with speculations? He would know soon enough. In the village, he stopped off at the post office. He was expecting the monthly Art Review which should have a criticism of his show and he knew that Linda, without the car, probably wouldn’t have picked up the mail. Several of the villagers were lounging around inside. As he went up to his box, he nodded and said, “Good evening.” No one answered. His box was right by the window where Mrs. Jones was arranging a stamp book. He smiled at her as he took out his letters. For a moment she glanced right through him and then turned back to the stamps, and gradually he began to realize that the atmosphere was not just neutral, it was antagonistic. So news of the episode at the Careys’, distorted into God knows what, had spread through the village already. To Stoneville, he wasn’t just the slightly comic outsider any more. He was—what? The wife-beater? The degenerate city interloper?

  As he walked out again to his car, the silence seemed to follow him like a threat. It didn’t matter, he told himself. He’d made no effort of friendship toward the village, any more than he had toward the Carey set. All he’d ever asked was to be left alone. But, as he climbed into the car and started off again, the memory of the rejection clung on, cold and faintly sinister. It was as if an invisible Linda had slipped into the car with him. Because this was all Linda, of course. The man they’d rejected hadn’t been he himself—the real John Hamilton. They didn’t even know him. It had been the image of John Hamilton which Linda had built up in their minds.

  He was driving through the woods now. The road dipped down a hill and then up again to the corner. He turned it, passed over the wooden bridge and, suddenly dreading his wife, swung up the drive and parked outside the kitchen door.

  Linda wasn’t in the kitchen. He passed through it, calling “Linda”. Then he moved into the living-room and stopped dead. The room was in total chaos. All his pictures were off the walls; all the records and boxes of tapes had been pulled out of the cabinet. The floor was a wild litter of them. Half the records were smashed and the pictures had been ripped savagely to and fro as if by a knife. Even the phonograph turn-table and amplifier and the tape recorder had been swept off the shelf and lay on their sides, spewing broken tubes.

  As he stood there, gazing down at the confusion, it seemed to John as if this had happened before or rather as if something which he’d always half known would happen but had kept from admitting to himself had happened at last. And the dread became horror as an image came of Linda wielding a knife, Linda trampling on the records, Linda, her face wild, contorted, gibbering—a maniac’s face. He closed his eyes as if the vision were actually there in front of him.

  And then suddenly he could feel her presence in the house or rather the presence of her madness. It seemed to permeate the air, infecting it, like a poisonous gas.

  Where is she? he thought. I’ve got to find her. I’ve got to go and face …

  That was when he saw his typewriter. It was usually kept out in his studio, but it was on a table in a corner, and propped on it was a piece of paper. He threaded
his way through the ruin of records and canvases to the table. He picked up the message. It was all typed, even the signature.

  YOU NEVER THOUGHT I’D DO IT, DID YOU? WELL, THAT’S WHERE YOU FOOLED YOURSELF, AT LAST I’VE FOUND THE COURAGE TO ESCAPE. SO—FIND YOURSELF ANOTHER WOMAN TO SLAVE FOR YOU, TO STICK PINS IN, TO TORTURE. FIND ANOTHER ONE IF YOU CAN. IT’S A CINCH YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME. BAD LUCK TO YOU—FOR EVER.

  LINDA

  7

  SHE HAD gone. He stood looking at the note, not reacting to the insane, distorted spite of the words, just registering the fact that she had left him. But dimly behind the shock, his reasoning processes were working. Why had she typed the note? He never remembered her having typed anything. He hadn’t even known she could type. Why had she taken the trouble to go out to the studio and bring the typewriter here and … ? The image of her, mad, gibbering, plunging around the room with a knife came back. And he thought: She hasn’t really gone. This note is just another devious trick. She’s still here somewhere—in the house.

  He picked his way through the havoc on the havoc, thinking, almost impersonally: She’s destroyed the pictures. Later I’ll be murderously angry. But what he felt now wasn’t anger; it was fear, a sliding miasmic fear that somewhere—upstairs maybe—madness was lurking, crouched in a corner to spring.

  He went into the dining-room. Nothing. No one. Then he went up the stairs. It’s our bedroom, he thought with blinding certainty. But, when he went into the bedroom, she wasn’t there and the door of the closet was open. He could see into it to his suits and her dresses hanging there. No one was in the closet.

  He investigated the other rooms. Then, with a sudden jitteriness, he thought of the pictures in the studio. He ran out through the kitchen door, across the lawn, serenely dappled with the evening shadows of the apple trees, and into the studio. The pictures stacked against the wall hadn’t been touched, nor had the one on the easel. That was something. But Linda wasn’t there.

  So she really had gone—without the car? Without any clothes? He went back to the bedroom and started to ruffle through the clothes in the closet. Yes, her new green dress was gone and her grey suit—several other dresses, too. And the new suitcase which she kept on the top shelf wasn’t there. She’d gone. She’d walked out of the house with a suitcase.

  He sat down for a moment on the bed. The feeling of evil, of infection, was still there. Was it perhaps he who was going mad—who was imagining all this? She had stood there by the car, watching him steadily, telling him, surely with sincerity, that she was all right, that she was ready to co-operate. “Anything’s all right with Bill. I’ll do anything Bill says.’' She had waved when he had gone. How could the plunge have happened from that—to this, to the frenzied chaos of destruction downstairs and that note with its appalling slashes of spite? Even if she’d drunk everything in the house, she’d never …

  He got up from the bed and hurried down to the living-room. The bottle of gin and the bottle of bourbon were still there on the bar-table. Their levels hadn’t lowered. He picked them up, pulled out the stoppers and took a swig from each of them. No, they hadn’t been diluted. She’d had a bottle hidden upstairs. He ran upstairs again and started with a kind of wild concentration to search everywhere. At last, under blankets in one of the drawers of the linen closet, he found a bottle of gin. He pulled it out. It was still half full. She must have drunk at least half a bottle before she left. But—there was another bottle perhaps in the cow-barn?

  He stood looking at the bottle automatically and then automatically bent to put it back where he had found it. As he did so, he saw—what was it?—a postcard lying where the bottle had been. He picked it up. It was a view of wooded mountains and a lake. Lake Crawley, Manitoba, Canada. He turned it over. It was addressed to him. His mind functioning clumsily, he read the message. It said:

  This is the life. Why don’t you drop those paint brushes and fly up for a few days? Best to Linda …

  Bill MacA.

  Bill MacAllister. Only just believing it, he looked at the postmark. It had been mailed five days before. Then it must have come, say, three days ago. Linda must have picked up the mail that day and, with her sly, neurotic terror of everything connected with Bill MacAllister, hidden the postcard from him. So she’d known all along that Bill wouldn’t be in New York. She’d known it when he’d thought he had at last won his victory over her; she’d known it when she’d stood by the car. “Promise me one thing, John. If for any reason, Bill isn’t there …” The whole capitulation had been rigged. It had been yet another of her fantastically complex betrayals.

  He went back into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed, dropping the postcard on to the floor. He felt exhaustion sliding up through him like the tentacles of some blood-sucking vine. She’d sent him to New York knowing he couldn’t achieve his purpose, and then, now that he had come home—this.

  He leaned back against the pillows and lit a cigarette. He knew this was the greatest of the many crises of his married life, the moment for which he should have strength in reserve, but the paralyzing torpor had him in its grip. She’d gone with a suitcase, without the car, and with no money. Or did she have money? Could she have been planning this for months and hiding money away? But where could she have gone? To New York? With him reinstalled at Raines and Raines, earning a big salary, yes. But not this way. Never in a million years. And surely she wasn’t planning to go back to the small town in Wisconsin where she’d been born and where her parents had both died five years ago just after he’d married her. No, not to New York. Not to Wisconsin. Where? Where was there for her to go? Nowhere.

  But if she’s mad! he thought. If the tension in her had finally snapped … ! Slashing the pictures, smashing the records, rushing upstairs, packing the suitcase, starting off on foot—going where? Nowhere—thumbing a ride from any car that passed. The panic image of her, mad and wandering around the countryside, brought him a synthetic vitality. He must call the police.

  But the “police” in Stoneville was Steve Ritter. There was Linda again, distorting everything, making it impossible. If he called Steve Ritter, if he had to admit to Steve, and through Steve to the whole village, that Linda had slashed his paintings, and run off, insane! Suddenly he thought: What’s the matter with me? Of course she hadn’t gone off like that. She’d gone to one of her “dear, dear friends”, the Carey set. That would be it, of course.

  He could see her dramatic arrival at the old Careys’ or the Morelands’.

  “Darlings, I’ve done the most terrible thing. How can I begin to explain? I’ve left him. I couldn’t bear it any more. If only you knew … Oh, Mr. Carey … or Oh Roz …”

  Yes, that was it. She could even have walked over to the young Careys’ while Vickie was on her way to the station.

  He was so certain of it that everything seemed bearable again.

  He hurried downstairs and rang the Careys. Vickie answered the phone.

  “Hi, John. We’re waiting for you. Come over, both of you.”

  “Then Linda isn’t with you?” John was surprised at the steadiness of his own voice.

  “With us? Why, no. I haven’t seen her since the other night. As a matter of fact, I was planning to call, but I didn’t get around to it. There’s nothing wrong, is there?”

  John thought of the party line. “I’ll come over if I may.”

  “Of course, but …”

  “I’ll explain when I see you. Vickie, I wonder if you or Brad would call the Morelands and your parents and ask if she’s with them. I’d rather not do it myself after the other night. …”

  “I’ll do it right now.”

  “Thanks, Vickie. I’ll see you.”

  He put down the receiver. If she wasn’t at the Morelands’ or the Careys’, he’d have to tell Vickie and Brad the truth, of course. Although for years now it had become almost second nature to him to cover up for Linda, he knew things had gone far beyond that point. And Vickie and Brad would be all right. A
t least they wouldn’t treat his confidence as salacious gossip to be spread around as quickly as possible. He was sure of that. Maybe they might help; between them, the three of them might even find Linda before any scandal broke. If she wasn’t at the old Careys’ or the Morelands’ …

  But she must be, he thought as he hurried through the kitchen out to the car, because, if she wasn’t at the Morelands’ or pouring out her tale of woe over the Careys’ dining-table, then … Once again the horror image came —the blank, dead eyes in the mad face, the dazed figure wandering at random, clutching a suitcase. He suppressed it and, as he swung the car down the drive, he thought of Steve Ritter. Could what she’d claimed about Steve actually have been true, after all? Could she conceivably have run away with him? It’s like a disease. No, she’d even admitted that had been one of her perverse alcoholic’s lies. But, even if it hadn’t been true, Steve Ritter was a staunch admirer, as, for that matter, were most of the people in the village. Perhaps the hostility to which he’d been submitted at the post office had something to do with this. Linda might have been just scared enough that the Carey set would be too sophisticated to swallow whatever story it was she now wanted to be swallowed. Instead she might have “taken refuge” with one of the people in the village and was using them for her audience. It didn’t seem probable—not with Linda’s snobbishness and her desire to be adored but respected by those she considered “beneath” her. But she’d done something. It might just have been that.

  Instead of taking the short route to the Careys’ past the Fishers’ empty house and down the hill through the woods, he turned left along the road toward Stoneville. He wouldn’t ask Steve outright. The situation was too delicate for that. But he needed gas. He could stop off at the gas-station and see how the land lay.