by John Dunning
The car backed into the road and drove away south. Dulaney stood still, his nerves tight, until the sound of the engine faded away.
He picked his way into the clearing and looked into the car. Kendall had left the ignition key and some clothes for him on the front seat. He changed quickly, rolling his prison grays into a ball and stuffing them under the seat. He opened the trunk and there were his papers from the hotel: just inside the box, his notebook. He opened the notebook and found a hundred-dollar bill and a note from Kendall.
Jack,
If you’ve made it this far, I’m glad. I think we will have a lot to talkabout when we see each other again. I’m sorry I was such a rotten friendbut maybe I can make it up. I’m going to tell you what I know.
If you read this in time, check into the Franklin Hotel in Sacramento.Use the name Jerry Sellers and I’ll try to call you tonight. If not, I knowwhere you’re going and I’ll see you there.
The car’s full of gas and I’ve left you some money for the trip.
Marty
A vision of Kendall’s face wafted up from the trunk. Dulaney had a sinking feeling as he listened to the breeze. Then he heard the baying of the dogs.
( ( ( 8 ) ))
HE didn’t stop in Sacramento. Kendall would call and then move on, and if they were lucky they’d meet at Holly’s house in Pennsylvania. He had a need now to get there, and this was stronger than his other needs, to find Kendall and to hear what he’d say.
He drove through the day. Slowed by hairpin curves on both sides of Donner Pass, he felt his spirits rise as he crossed into Nevada.
On the other side of Reno the car broke down.
He got his papers out of the trunk. Somewhere ahead he would mail them to himself, at general delivery in Sadler, Pennsylvania.
He pushed ahead on foot.
( ( ( 9 ) ) )
SHE drew him on. Her face billowed out of the clouds at sunset and her voice beckoned him across the black wasteland. He walked on the edge of the highway, the great U.S. 6 that stretched across Nevada to Denver and points east. A million galaxies lit up the road. Ten billion worlds showed him the way.
A cowboy took him into Elko with its neon-lit whorehouses and its honky-tonk gambling parlors. There was a prewar gaiety to the town, a striking contrast to the tense, embattled climate of the coast. The next bus didn’t come through till nine in the morning, so he bought another canteen in an all-night gas station, filled it with water, and pushed on into the night.
He had rid himself of his papers and now carried only the canteens, slung over one shoulder. Time was no factor. He had slipped into that meditative state that enabled him to stop the clock and shut his mind to anything that turned him from his purpose. If his muscles ached, he wouldn’t feel them. He wouldn’t be bothered by the pain in his feet, or think of food. He was young and powerful, with deep stores of energy that had never been tapped.
Ghosts rose out of the desert.
When they were ten years old Tom had cut their hands and tied them together for an hour. They were blood brothers now. He thought of Holly and heard Tom say, Don’t beat yourself up over something that couldn’t be helped. She was never really mine.
A car came past, slowing as if to pick him up. He hoped he’d get a ride as far as Wells, where he could jump a train, maybe a cattle car going to market in Chicago. But suddenly he cringed as he heard that engine with the sticky valve. Maybe just chance: might be thousands of cars on the road like that, but he braced himself for whatever might come. Then the car went on, and he saw little more of it than a black shape going by.
He caught a ride and walked the last two miles into town. A pale rosy glow had begun in the east.
At a gas station he filled his canteens and headed over to the train yard. As he reached the corner he heard that car again. The ping of its engine caught his ear almost too late, but he looked up to see a black ’35 Ford swing into the next block. He got a glimpse of two men, dark shapes seen from behind.
And a license plate from the state of New Jersey.
He walked across the road and squatted in the bushes. He waited for a long time but the car didn’t come around again.
An hour later he hopped a train, heading east.
( ( ( 10 ) ))
THE train took him to the stockyards in Denver and another train took him on across Kansas.
In Missouri he saw the effects of war. Long lines of trucks, and troops marching beside the road. He turned north and caught a ride into Illinois. He thought of the Carnahans as he trudged through the darkness, and the thought of her lightened his step and helped him forget that he had not stopped: that he had slept only briefly in the cattle car across Utah.
He had little hope of catching a ride before daylight. But his luck had turned and a salesman with a car full of dresses took him into Pennsylvania.
He walked up Keeler Avenue with his heart pounding hard and his knees buckling with fatigue. He knew her house: Tom had taken a picture on a trip here in 1939. It was a cracker box, Holly had said: respectable enough as long as the paint held up, but shabby now in hard times. There was a giant elm in the yard with a swing hanging from its lowest branch; a fence separating the house from its neighbor to the west and a hedge to the east. But the hedge was dying and the swing gone, a rotted remnant of rope the only trace of it. The front yard was deep in weeds and around the side a window was broken.
The house was abandoned. She was gone.
He clumped up on the porch, walked to the edge, and looked down the far side. The grass was parched, littered with cans and broken glass. The windows were so murky he could see nothing of the inside from the porch.
She was gone, though. Now he would have to find her.
Common sense told him what to do next. He bought some clothes, took a room, shaved, got a shower, rested, and ate.
Five hours later he walked through Keeler Avenue looking and feeling like a new man. He talked to everyone he met and knocked on every door but no one knew where she’d gone. The neighbor across the fence was not home; the neighbor across the hedge had not seen her in many weeks.
He went to her church. The minister had known her most of her life but had not seen her since January. She had always been a loner: long periods of absence were not unusual, and he had never known her to have a confidante or a best pal. She sang like an angel but never stayed around for social activities or Bible studies. The minister hoped she was a believer but you never could be sure. She had always been something of a mystery.
Her life had been full of tragedy. “I heard she had a fellow but he died at Pearl Harbor,” the minister said. Dulaney wondered if there’d ever been another fellow, before Tom, someone she might turn to in a bad moment. “She did have a boyfriend years ago. It was very serious. They had grown up together and everyone knew they’d marry. But he got killed in an automobile accident. Horrible thing, plowed his car into a trailer truck, went underneath, and took his head off. That’s what I mean by tragedy. It’s been a string of things, starting with her sister.”
Dulaney had never heard about a sister. “What happened to her?”
“Swimming accident at the lake when she was ten. Holly nearly drowned trying to save her. Their mother never did get over it and Holly always took the blame on herself. Makes you wonder—doesn’t it?—why God picks some people to suffer like that.”
“Yes it does,” Dulaney said. “It really makes you wonder.”
He walked up Main Street. Everyone knew her and no one had seen her.
Early that evening he was back on Keeler Avenue. Lightning flicked above the trees and thunder rumbled over the earth. He thought of Kendall and wondered where he was, and what he’d do when he arrived and found the house deserted. Move on, most likely: maybe head for Chicago where there might be radio jobs he could do. He wouldn’t wait around long. And neither can I, Dulaney thought. But I don’t know where to go.
He went around the house and climbed the steps to the back door. It h
ung loosely on its hinges, the wood splintered and smashed. He stepped into a musty kitchen littered with trash. The remnants of a dining table were pushed into a corner and three half-broken chairs were scattered about. There was an icebox, its door open, with tongs hanging on a board beside it and an ice pick on the floor. The sink had no modern plumbing: just a rusting hand pump, with brown streaks where the tile had chipped away. He touched the pump and it squeaked and gave off a puff of dust.
Across the hall someone had ransacked her bedroom. Pictures stripped from the wall, the floor covered with papers, the bed destroyed, pillows and mattresses cut open and thrown about. Everything was pulled out of the closets—dresses, shoes, a coat. He picked up one of her dresses and held it while his eyes scanned the room. He saw a map pinned to the wall—a road map of New Jersey—and a picture in a broken frame. He recognized a young Carnahan with a woman who had undoubtedly been Holly’s mother. He found a magazine, Metronome, with articles on the Goodman, Ellington, and Casa Loma bands, and he carried it for a while with the dress.
He crossed to the window and looked out. Lights were now on in the house across the fence but he had no reason to imagine that whoever lived there would know where she had gone. He felt a deep turn into despair as he began to pick up her things and put them in some kind of order.
Her books were pretty well ruined: cheap editions of Thomas Wolfe and Henry James, Djuna Barnes, Katherine Anne Porter, and Emily Dickinson.
In the parents’ room he found a treasure: a picture of Holly, torn and weather stained, but it lifted his spirits for a moment. He tucked it into the least damaged of her books, the Dickinson, wrapped that in a piece of tablecloth to keep the rain out, and put it in his pocket.
For once in his life he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to spend days here, fixing the house up and making it whole. But there wasn’t anything left to save.
He moved into the front room and there in the fireplace, hidden under a pile of ashes, he found the remnants of an envelope. As if she had thrown a pile of papers in the fire and a few singed fragments remained. Magazines. Bills. Junk. One piece got his attention: just a newspaper headline and a small bit of type:
RADIO ACTOR MISSING FIVE YEARS
March Flack, British Air Thespian, Disappeared in June 1936
There was part of a picture—an eye, a cheek, an officer’s cap—but no text remained. He pulled it out to save and under it found a charred piece of notepaper with a chilling line in Holly’s hand: Don’t you people have any conscience?
That line kept playing in his head. He thought of it now as he finished his search of the house.
There wasn’t much more to see. A basement at the bottom of a creaky stair. A coal room with an outdoor entry. A crawl space that ran deep under the house, dank-smelling, with an earthen floor.
He went next door, to talk to the neighbors across the fence. Bill and Maude Potter were in their early thirties, working people who had come to Sadler just last year. They had not known Holly well. A few pleasantries, an occasional word passed, then she was gone, they had no idea where. Potter had hardly seen her, yet his was a typical working-class, male-dominated household, and he did the talking. The woman stood in the kitchen doorway, a little girl of ten clutching her dress, saying nothing until Dulaney turned to leave. “Tell him about Hartford, Bill,” she said suddenly.
Potter seemed annoyed and said there was no truth to it.
“Then tell him and let him decide.”
It was the little girl who had told them about Hartford.
“Her name is Holly,” Mrs. Potter said. “That’s one reason they became such friends, because they had the same name.”
“She’s got a bad habit, though,” Potter said. “She fibs too much.”
But the woman persisted. The child had told them about Hartford after Holly disappeared, last December or January. Sometimes in the early evenings little Holly would crawl through the fence and they’d sit on the porch eating the apple pie that Holly baked in her kitchen. On this one night she had heard about Hartford.
“What do you think she meant? Was she talking about the city up in Connecticut? Is that where she went?”
Potter scoffed. “Who knows what she meant? Maybe she didn’t say any of that stuff at all.”
“Bill, you can’t send him away like that,” Mrs. Potter said. “Holly honey, let’s go back and get you ready for bed.”
With his wife and child gone, Potter was more reasonable. He offered a drink and Dulaney took a small one to break the ice. They sat and talked baseball. Ten minutes later Mrs. Potter returned.
“Bill doesn’t like to encourage her if she’s been lying to us.” She looked at her husband. “But I think we’ve got to tell him about Hartford.”
Hartford wasn’t a city. It was a man’s name.
The light was on in Holly’s kitchen that night, and the child had climbed to the landing and looked in through the glass. Holly was sitting at the table and there was a man in the room with her. A scary man who talked in a low voice and never smiled.
There had been a threat hanging over that room. Potter sneered but the child could sense such things. “I know that for a fact,” Mrs. Potter said. There was a threat in the room. “Argue with me if you want to, but that’s what she said and I believe her.”
The man wore a dark suit and his tie was knotted tight at his neck. He had taken off his hat, but that act of good manners made him no kinder to Holly, who sat huddled at the table across from him.
Mrs. Potter paused.
Potter leaned into the light. “Well, go ahead, tell him the rest now.”
Mrs. Potter sighed. “The man was blind.”
Potter looked at Dulaney. “Did you ever hear such a bunch of cock-and-bull? A blind bogeyman came and scared her away.”
The man was blind, but when he left he walked straight out of the room, as if he knew it well. Outside, down the front porch, and into his car.
“A blind man driving a car,” Potter said.
“What made her think he was blind?”
“He wore a blind man’s glasses,” Mrs. Potter said. “Dark . . . black glasses, even at night.”
The child had gone into the room. Holly saw her but seemed incapable of speech. Her eyes were watery, her hands trembled, she was in pain. “Some children are sensitive,” Mrs. Potter said. “They know these things.”
I wanted her to feel better, little Holly said. She climbed into Holly’s lap, hoping to make her feel better, and Holly crushed the child against her and held on as if for dear life.
I’m sorry you feel bad.
My father died, Holly said.
Dulaney felt the shock of it. He stared at Mrs. Potter.
Little Holly asked if her father had been old.
No, she said. Hartford killed him.
Then she seemed to get hold of herself. She smiled at the child as if she had only then realized where she was.
You’ll have to go, sweetheart. I’m not myself tonight.
“The next day she was gone. No one’s seen her since.”
( ( ( 11 ) ) )
HE stood on her porch in total darkness with the sound of the rain heavy around him. The lights had gone out next door: the Potters were in bed by ten and both houses, shrouded by trees, had gone instantly black. In a while he sat against the front door but the wait was miserable. A cold wind blew the rain across the porch and soon he was slick with it. He kept thinking Kendall would turn up, but this seemed far less likely as the night went on and the rain got worse.
He had no clear idea where Holly had gone and no good way of finding out. The map on her wall matched the license plate of that ’35 Ford, but little New Jersey is plenty big when you’ve got to walk it searching blind. Kendall was still his best bet. But if he didn’t show up tomorrow . . . The thought trickled away. Dulaney didn’t know what would happen tomorrow.
Sometime after midnight he gave it up and went back to his room. He hung his wet clothes over the radi
ator and fell into bed, intending to sleep only a few hours. But he was still tired from his long journey and he fell at once into the sleep of the dead. He awoke with a start. It was midmorning at least: nine o’clock by the clock in his head, and he jerked himself into his clothes and checked out. The rain had stopped but the sky remained overcast, and now, as he turned into Keeler Avenue, the house was as empty looking as ever. Kendall wasn’t coming: the thought that he was adrift, with damn few clues and a whole country to search, sobered him sharply.
But he climbed to the porch and sat there, and as the hours crept by he tried to devise some plan. He would go to New York and try to get a line on Carnahan, beginning at the place where he’d worked two years ago. At the same time he would track Kendall through his radio connections. But this was an idiot’s plan and he spent the rest of the day trying in vain to improve it. At five o’clock he decided to leave Kendall some kind of message, hope he found it, and move on.
Again he went in through the back way. He had seen a pencil in the kitchen, but now as he stood over the sink he was aware of all the shortcomings of what he’d been thinking. Where would he leave such a note, so that only Kendall would see it? There was no place, so there could be no note. He would wait another hour, then move on alone, now truly cast adrift, as solitary as those continental explorers four hundred years ago.
He turned away from the kitchen window and his eyes drifted back through the house, as if the spirit of Holly could rise up from those dim shadows and tell him something. Suddenly he froze. Someone had been here. Something, he couldn’t say what, had been moved. Then he saw what it was, a swirl of papers kicked aside, the ice pick that had lain almost in the center of the room gone, then seen a moment later where it had clattered against the door. Signs of a struggle, continuing into the back rooms. And there was Kendall, thrown into a corner, his hands clawlike, clutching nothing. The rope that had strangled him was still around his neck.
