The darkness had come. When he reached the little ice-cream parlor about half a mile out of the village, the neon lights were burning inside and the raucous blare of a juke-box sounded. He stopped by the gas pump. It was Mrs. Ritter who came out of the screen door, thin and dowdy with her greyish hair straggling over her forehead. Betty Ritter, soured by her husband’s neglect, old before her time, was the misanthrope of the village. If there was one person in Stoneville who wouldn’t be up on the gossip, it would be Betty Ritter. She filled his gas tank, treating him surlily but no more so than usual. When she came up to the front of the car and started wiping the windshield with a dirty rag, John said:
“Is Steve around?”
“Steve? He just went out on a call. Just a couple of minutes ago.” Mrs. Ritter snorted. “Steve Ritter the Stoneville police officer! That still makes me laugh. There’s only one character ought to be arrested and locked up around here and that’s Steve Ritter. Want me to charge this, Mr. Hamilton?”
“Yes, please.” John felt his nerves tautening. “You mean he’s out on a police call?”
“Don’t ask me. That’d be the day when Steve tells me what he’s up to. Buck was in just now babbling out some story or other about the kids. It was Steve he was telling. I was busy with a customer and didn’t pay much attention. Then the phone rang. Steve answered it and then went off in the car. He took Buck along with him, so I guess whatever it is, at least it isn’t monkey business this time.” Betty Ritter laughed and then, for a moment, paused by the car window, watching him from sardonic, faintly malicious eyes.
“My, you look jittery, Mr. Hamilton. What’s the matter? Got a guilty conscience? Murdered your wife or something?”
8
HE DROVE through the village. Lights gleamed in the windows of the store. A couple of cars were parked under the huge sugar maples outside the post office. A boy and girl were sitting on the porch of one of the clapboard houses. Someone was standing, smoking a cigarette, by the side of the church near the door to the basement Assembly Rooms where the town meeting was going to be held. When? Tomorrow. His anxiety accelerated by what Mrs. Ritter had told him, John had half expected a scene of unnatural bustle, indicating disaster. But everything was as quiet as usual, as pretty as a Christmas card out of season—New England in summer.
If someone had found Linda wandering on the highway, he told himself, Steve would never have taken Buck with him. The police call couldn’t be anything to do with Linda. It was just a coincidence.
He swung the car past the church, up the hill and down. Soon the north shore of Lake Sheldon gleamed at his right, ghostly grey in the early summer darkness. The sound of the bull-frogs’ croaking vibrated in the air. He could just make out the diving raft the township had put in the year before. The lake! he thought. It’s a cinch you’ll never find me. The words from Linda’s note seemed to be blazoned across the windshield in front of his eyes. What if she’d jumped into the lake and killed herself? No, not with a suitcase. Whatever had happened to her, however mad she had become, she wouldn’t pack a suitcase to commit suicide. Or—would she? Was that any madder than slashing the pictures, stamping on the records, typing the note when she’d never typed before and had had to go out to the studio to bring in the typewriter? How could he tell any more what she might or might not have done?
The first anesthesia of shock was wearing off. Sitting at the wheel, his body felt as brittle as glass which the anxiety, fermenting inside him, might at any minute splinter into fragments. To steady himself, he made himself believe that Vickie would have located her. She would have called and Linda would be at the Morelands’ or the old Careys’, weeping probably, full of remorse, the fit of hysteria burned out. “Oh, how could I have done it to him? I don’t know what got into me.”
Soon he had skirted the lake and was driving into the Careys’ gravel parking area. All the downstairs lights in the house were on. As he got out of the car, the door opened.
“Is that you, John?”
He saw Vickie on the threshold. Then she was hurrying toward him. She took both his hands.
“John, dear, isn’t she back?”
He said, “Did you call?”
“Yes. I called Father. She wasn’t there. And the Morelands don’t answer. They must have gone to the movies.”
She was drawing him into the house. In the hall she glanced up at him, her eyes flashing to his face for a second and then flashing quickly away as if whatever she saw was too intimate to be scrutinized.
“You need a drink.” She took him into the living-room. “Brad, fix John a drink.”
All the french windows were open on to the terrace. Brad, who had changed from his city clothes into a sports shirt and slacks, was standing by the bar. He made a drink and brought it to John, his eyes flicking to his and then, like Vickie’s, away. Does it show that much? thought John, taking the drink. It must. It had been the same way with Betty Ritter.
Brad said, “Sit down, John. Sit down.” And, as John sat down on a long sofa, “Vickie called Dad and the Morelands.”
“John knows,” said Vickie.
Brad sat down on the arm of the sofa. Their concern for him, their lack of prurient curiosity and their desire to help were obvious. It returned to John some sense of normalcy. These were sensible, nice people. Once he’d told them, the quality of nightmare would go.
He said, “When I got home, she wasn’t there—and she’d left a note.”
He hadn’t really stopped to think how it would sound when he told what had happened. He was, of course, conscious of the great gulf between the Linda he knew and the Linda the Careys had been presented with, and dimly he realized that somehow the gulf would have to be bridged. But at first he just blurted out what had happened —the note, the slashed pictures, the broken records, the missing clothes and the suitcase. It was only gradually that their reaction began to dawn on him.
It was Brad who broke in first. There was no hostility in his tone; there was no feeling of hostility from either of them. The quality in his voice was one of sheer incredulity.
“But Linda, John! Linda writing a note like that, destroying your pictures? It can’t be Linda.”
“She’s so gentle,” said Vickie. “Can you imagine Linda hurting a fly? And she—she loves you so much. You’re her whole life. And your pictures—why, they’re almost sacred to her. She’s said so over and over again.”
“Sure,” cut in Brad. “She was over here the day after the reviews came in on your show. Maybe you didn’t know. I’ve never seen anyone so indignant. To hell with all critics, she said. He’s going to be a great painter. She— she just couldn’t have …”
His voice trailed off. John looked from one of them to the other. They weren’t accusing him of lying. They just couldn’t believe it had happened. And suddenly he could see the Linda he didn’t know, the Linda who moved through a room when he wasn’t there, coming to the Careys’ after the bad reviews, acting the outraged champion of misunderstood genius, and then, in another role, the woman in love. “John—he’s my whole life.” Of course they’d react this way. What he was telling them was just as improbable to them as if he’d said he’d seen old Mr. Carey dancing the mambo naked on the church steps with Betty Ritter.
The nightmare quality wasn’t fading; it was growing.
Somewhere he had to make a beginning. He said, “She didn’t sound that crazy about me the other evening, did she?”
“But you’d fought.” Vickie was watching him, frank, bewildered. “Anybody would have had a fight over something as drastic as the decision you two had to make. A fight like that doesn’t count. Besides, she’d had a drink. She admitted it. She wasn’t herself and, right away after she’d said those things, she was desperately sorry. Anyone could have seen that.” She glanced quickly at her husband. “John, please don’t think we’re not believing you. We know it’s happened if you say it’s happened. But it can’t be like that.”
Now that the time had come, he
felt, absurdly, a sense of betrayal. This would do it. When he’d finished telling them, this would be the end of Linda with the Carey set, the end of any chance they might have had to find a workable life for themselves in Stoneville. Some vestigial part of him, some ingrown loyalty, prompted: Don’t do it to her. Don’t take away what little she has got—even if she’s got it on false pretenses. But he knew there was no sense in thinking that way. They were all washed-up in Stoneville anyway, and it was all washed-up between Linda and him too. He’d not actually realized it until that moment. But he saw it clearly then. Now, after she’d done that to the pictures, whatever happened, however it explained itself away, the irrevocable break had come. He was through with her forever.
He took a pull at the drink, not looking at either of them. Then he brought it out.
“You don’t know Linda. Nobody knows her except me. At least I don’t think they do. I’ve done my best to see that they didn’t. You got a glimpse of her the other night. But only a glimpse. You see, the other reason I went to New York was to consult a doctor. She’s sick. She’s been sick for years.”
He started to tell them, not everything, not the most intimate, the most sordid details, but enough. He knew, as he talked, that he was saying far less than the truth, but surely it would be coherent to them—the tale of insecurity, the compelling urge to compete, the failures, the constantly heavier drinking, the dream-world which more and more took the place of any reality. His only worry, at first, was the fear that they would think he was demanding their pity, that he was picturing himself too emphatically as the suffering one, the good-intended, loyal husband who had sacrificed so much of himself for a cause that was virtually lost from the beginning. And yet, as he talked, as they sat watching him, their faces carefully arranged, polite, with no expression, he began to realize that he wasn’t making contact.
Was it as difficult as this then for people to grasp the infinite complexities of an alcoholic’s make-up? If they didn’t have any personal experience of one, or only knew one as the Careys knew Linda, was the elaborate front of normalcy so convincing that it seemed more real than the truth? Gradually, as he went on, he felt less and less confidence; his words stumbled over each other, and then, at the last, as he felt the gulf between them growing wider and wider, he stopped.
Their faces were still as polite as they had been before. They were still carefully avoiding each other’s eyes, watching him with a kind, alert determination to be just. And yet, although they were trying at all costs to conceal it, he could feel their embarrassment, particularly Brad’s, and he knew they hadn’t believed him or, at best, they thought he was ignobly exaggerating, trying to get his point of view in first, because his relations with Linda had been unsatisfactory and he was scared now of what might have happened.
It was Brad who spoke. The quality of his voice was very slightly changed. “So the other night, when she was here, you hadn’t hit her at all?”
Wearily thinking: I did hit her later, John said, “I hadn’t hit her. She’d fallen down because she was drunk and it’s the drinking she wants to hide more than anything.”
“But she admitted she’d had a drink.”
“One drink, yes. Just because she knew you’d realize something was wrong. That was her complicated way of covering up.”
“So to keep us from knowing she was on a drinking jag, she was ready to lie and accuse you of having hit her?”
“Sure. That wouldn’t phase her for a minute.” Be careful. Don’t put it that way. It sounds bitter. It’ll only antagonize them more. “But maybe it went deeper than that. You see, when she’s drunk, when she so desperately needs to make a heroine of herself, she usually wants to make a villain out of me, too. Probably that was it. She wanted you all to hate me.”
There was a long flat pause. Then Vickie said, “So all we know about her, all she’s ever said or done here is an act?”
“More or less, I’d say. Almost everything she does or says is an act.”
“Then—is this an act too? Is she just pretending to have run away, to – to scare you or punish you or something?” There was no trace of sarcasm in Vickie’s voice, but that question, coming from her, made everything he’d tried to explain seem completely preposterous.
“If she’d been here or at your father’s or at the Morelands’, it could have been an act. But now … She’s never been this violent before. Maybe once she’d committed herself to my consulting a psychiatrist she got panicked. She couldn’t face … (But she knew Bill MacAllister wasn’t going to be there) Maybe …”
The exhaustion was in full control again. What was the use? What did it matter anyway? It wasn’t his business to convince the Careys. His business was to find Linda.
“But if she’s gone”—it was Vickie who spoke—“where would she have gone to?”
“There isn’t any way I know of.”
He hadn’t gone so far as to admit his dread of insanity and suicide. He was glad now. If they’d had to swallow that on top of everything else!
Brad said gruffly, “We’d better call the state troopers.” “But if it is just an act.” Vickie was watching John now. “If she—she got mad and slashed the pictures and then got scared, maybe, and ran off in the woods. Think of it, Brad. The scandal and everything for her, if it’s only something like that. Couldn’t we try to find her ourselves?”
“At night?” asked Brad. “In the woods? Do you know how many thousands of acres of woods there are around here? You’d need search parties even in the daytime.” He got up, lit a cigarette and started pacing the room. Suddenly he turned back to John. The friendly, easy quality which he’d shown in New York and on the train was gone. His eyes were registering not antagonism exactly but an obvious desire to disassociate himself from a situation in which he could no longer be comfortable.
“Why don’t you call your house? Maybe she’s back.”
“Yes,” said Vickie.
“If she isn’t and if she isn’t back by morning, then call the troopers.”
“Yes,” said Vickie. “That’s it. Yes.”
The phone rang. Brad almost ran to answer it.
“Yes … Yes … No, she isn’t here, but John’s here. Do you want to talk to him? … Okay, wait a moment.”
He turned, cupping the receiver. “It’s Gordon. He tried your house, got no answer and called here.”
“Is Linda… ?”
“He didn’t say.”
John crossed the room and took the phone from Brad, who, taut and uneasy, remained at his side. Gordon Moreland’s voice, high, fancy and glacial with dislike, said, “John? Is that John?”
“Yes.”
“Is Linda with you?”
“No, she isn’t.”
“Where is she?”
John felt the anxiety like a clenched fist in his stomach. “She isn’t here right now.”
“But you know where she is? That’s what we want to know.”
“No,” he said. He had to. “No, I don’t.”
“Then you’d better come here right away and join us. Us—and Steve Ritter.”
The police call! “Where are you?”
“I’m calling from the first house I got to. Steve and Roz are at the village dump. That’s where Steve wants you.”
“The dump?”
“You know where it is?”
“Yes. But what is it? What’s happened?”
“You’ll know when you get here. Right away, Steve says, as quickly as possible.”
John heard the receiver click at the other end.
When he told the Careys, Vickie wanted to come with him, but the thought of them on top of Steve Ritter and the Morelands was too much. They were nice about it and sympathetic. They had never stopped being nice and sympathetic. It was worse, almost, than if they’d come out with what was in their minds. Brad didn’t go out with him to the car, but Vickie did.
“Let us know, John, if you need us….”
If he needed them! If Linda wa
s lying out there on the dump….
He swung the car recklessly out of the drive. The dump was about a mile away from the lake up a little track off the highway. The world for him was now completely a world of nightmare. Linda was lying on the dump. What have you been up to? Murdering your wife or something? No, it couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. How could Linda be lying … ?
As he approached the turn-off to the dump, he saw cars ahead of him at the side of the road with their parking lights on. He stopped his car beside them and jumped out.
“John … John . .
He heard children’s voices, strangely muffled, calling his name and two grotesque shapes ran toward him into the dimly illuminated semi-circle made by the cars’ parking lights. They were round and cumbersome, topped with weird, onion like domes of plastic that sprouted antennas—Buck and Timmie in their new space-suits.
“We found it, John,” panted Buck excitedly. “We were exploring the Earth.”
“With our space-suits,” said Timmie.
“We explored the dump. We were scientists from Mars exploring the dump and …”
“John?” Steve Ritter’s voice—deep, faintly threatening—sounded from somewhere down the dark track. “John? Is that you, John?”
He started up the track with the bizarre children scampering around him. The darkness seemed to engulf him. Fireflies, winking and bobbing under the great shadowing branches of the trees, added to the illusion of fantasy.
“Here, John. This way.”
A flashlight beam sprang out of the darkness, high up at an odd angle. He turned left toward it and stumbled over cans and bottles which slithered away under his feet.
“Up here, John.”
He started scrambling up the treacherous pile of heaped refuse. Dimly now he could make out figures above him and the glowing tip of a cigarette. Just as he reached them, the flashlight went out.
“The kids found it, John.” Steve Ritter’s voice sounded deliberately, menacingly casual. “Timmie told the Morelands. Buck told me. Then Mr. Moreland called me. He thought we ought to investigate. Didn’t seem right, he said, the way the kids described it.”
The Man in the Net Page 7
