Beyond This Point Are Monsters

by Margaret Millar

  “Why do you suggest that?”

  “If what she really wanted was to keep Ruth’s name out of the proceedings, she would have called Mr. Ford, not me. I’m only a witness, he’s running the show.”

  “Maybe she called him, too.”

  “Maybe.” He ran his left hand around the scalloped rim of the steering wheel as though it were a bumpy road he’d never explored before. “I think she was trying to make sure I didn’t say anything against her son. She had to believe—and to make other people believe—that Robert was perfect.”

  “What could you have said against him, Leo?”

  “He wasn’t perfect.”

  “You were referring to something specific.”

  “Nothing that should make any difference to you now. It was over before you even knew the Osbornes existed.” He added, after a time, “It wasn’t even Robert’s fault. He just happened to be the boy next door. And Ruth—well, she happened to be the girl next door, only she was push­ing forty and afraid of growing old.”

  “So the gossip about them was true.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “I started to, many times, only I never went through with it. It seemed cruel. Now—well, now I know it’s neces­sary, cruel or not. I can’t afford to let you believe Mrs. Osborne’s version of Robert. He wasn’t perfect. He had faults, he made mistakes. Ruth turned out to be one of the bigger mistakes but he couldn’t have foreseen that. She was pretty appealing in her role of defenseless little woman, and Robert was a setup for her. He didn’t even have a girl friend to stand in the way, thanks to Mrs. Os­borne. She’d managed to get rid of all the girls who weren’t good enough for him, and that meant all the girls. So he ended up with a married woman nearly twice his age.”

  Devon sat in silence, trying to imagine the two of them together, Ruth seeing in Robert another chance at youth, Robert seeing in her a chance at manhood. How often did they meet, and where? Beside the reservoir or in the grove of date palms? In the mess hall or bunkhouse when there were no migrants working on the ranch? In the ranch house itself when Mrs. Osborne went to the city? No mat­ter where they met, people must have seen them and been shocked or amused or sympathetic—the Estivars, Dulzura, the ranch hands, perhaps even Mrs. Osborne before she shut her eyes tight and finally. Mrs. Osborne’s references to Ruth had all been similar and in the same tone: “Robert was kind to the poor woman . . .” “He went out of his way to be neighborly . . .” “It was pitiful the spectacle she made of herself, but Robert was always patient and understand­ing.”

  Robert—kind, patient, understanding and neighborly. Very, very neighborly.

  Devon said, “How long had it been going on?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think a long time.”

  “Years?”

  “Yes. Probably ever since he came back from school in Arizona.”

  “But he was just seventeen then, a boy.”

  “Seventeen-year-olds aren’t boys. Don’t waste sympa­thy on him. It’s possible that Ruth did him a favor by distracting him from his mother.”

  “How can you say such a terrible thing so calmly?”

  “Maybe it’s not so terrible. Maybe I’m not so calm.” But he sounded calm, even remote. “When Estivar was on the witness stand this morning he blamed the school for teach­ing Robert prejudice and keeping him away from the Esti­var family. I don’t believe it was prejudice. Robert simply had something new in his life, something he couldn’t afford to share with the Estivars.”

  “If you knew about the affair, why didn’t you try to stop it?”

  “I did. At first Ruth denied everything. Later we had periodic fights, long and loud and no holds barred. After the last one she packed a suitcase and set out on foot for the Osbornes’. She never got there.”

  “Then nothing was planned about her running away with Robert?”

  “No. I think it would have been a real shock to him to look out and see her heading for his house with a suitcase. But he didn’t see her. It had started to rain heavily and he was in the study catching up on his accounts. Mrs. Osborne was in her bedroom upstairs. Both rooms faced west, away from the river, so nobody was watching it, nobody knew the exact time of the flash flood, nobody saw Ruth try to get across. She was small and delicate like you, it wouldn’t have taken much to knock her off her feet.”

  Small and delicate . . . “You remind me of someone back home,” Robert had told her at their first meeting. “Some­one nice—or she used to be. She’s dead now. A lot of people think I killed her.”

  “Leo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Her death was an accident?”

  “According to the coroner.”

  “And according to you?”

  “To me,” Leo said slowly, “it seemed a crazy way to die, drowning in the middle of a desert.”

  the house at 3117 ocotillo street was built in the California mission style, with tiled roof and thick adobe walls and an archway leading into a courtyard. The arch­way was decorated with ceramic tiles and from the top of it hung a miniature merry-go-round of brass horses that twitched and pranced and chimed against each other when the wind blew.

  The inner court was paved with imitation flagstones and lined with shrubs and small trees growing in Mexican clay pots. The orange of the persimmon leaves, the pink of the hibiscus blossoms, the purple of the princess flowers, the crimson of the firethorn berries, all seemed lusterless and pale compared to the gaudy high-gloss paint on their containers. The word WELCOME printed on the mat out­side the front door looked as though nobody had ever stepped on it. Devon’s sandals sank into the thick deep velvety pile until only their tops were visible, crossed straps like two X’s marking the spot: Devon Osborne stood here.

  She pressed the door chime. Her arm felt heavy and stiff like a lead pipe attached to her shoulder.

  “I don’t know what to believe,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t told me any of it.”

  “Sometimes it’s easy to make a hero out of a dead man, especially with the help of his mother. Well, I can’t com­pete with heroes. If I have to cut the opposition down to size in order to win, I’ll do it.”

  “You mustn’t talk like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “She might hear you.”

  “She only hears what she wants to. Anything I say isn’t likely to be included.”

  A gust of wind blew across the courtyard. The horses on the tiny merry-go-round danced to their own music. Royal petals escaped from the princess flowers, and bam­boo clawed and scratched at the living-room window.

  The drapes were open and most of the room and its contents were visible. Side by side along one wall were the special possessions Mrs. Osborne had taken with her from the ranch house—the mahogany piano and the antique cherrywood desk. Both were open, as if Mrs. Osborne had played a tune and written a letter and disappeared. The rest of the furniture had come with the house, and Mrs. Osborne hadn’t bothered to change any of it—a pair of flowery wing chairs facing each other across a backgam­mon table, a glass-fronted bookcase, and on the walls oil paintings of someone’s childhood, remembered rivers, clear and sweet, emerald meadows, golden forests of ma­ple.

  Leo had walked around to the side of the house to check the garage. He returned looking irritable and wor­ried, as though he suspected fate was about to pull another trick on him, that wheels were in motion he couldn’t stop and booby traps set in places he didn’t know.

  “Her car’s here,” he said. “You’d better try the door.”

  “Even if it’s unlocked we can’t just walk in.”

  “Why not?”

  “She wouldn’t like it.”

  “She may not be in a position to like or dislike it.”

  “What does that mean?
”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Leo, are you suggesting she might have—”

  “I’m suggesting we make an attempt to find out.”

  The knob turned easily and the door swung inward, slowed by its own weight and Devon’s reluctance. As the door opened, a draught of air blew several of the papers off the desk. Leaning over to pick one up, Devon saw that it was covered with printing done with a thick-tipped black marking pen. There were sentences and half-sen­tences, single words, phrases, some in English, some in Spanish.

  Reward Premio (Remuneracion? Ask Ford)

  The sum of $10,000 will be paid to anyone furnishing information

  (No, no. Keep it simple.)

  On October 13, 1967

  Robert K. Osborne, age 24, blond hair, blue eyes, height 6’1” weight 170

  (More money? Ask Ford)

  Have you seen this man? (Use 3 pictures, front, side, 3/4)

  ¿

  !Atencion!

  Please help me find my son

  Devon stood with the paper in her hand, listening to the sound of Leo moving around the dining room and the kitchen. She wondered how she could tell him that this wasn’t to be the last day after all. Mrs. Osborne intended to offer another reward and the whole thing was going to start over again. There would be still another round of phone calls and letters, most of them patently ridiculous, but some reasonable enough to raise faint new hopes. The lady who claimed to have watched Robert land in a flying saucer in a field near Omaha needn’t be taken seriously, yet some consideration had to be given to reports that he’d been seen working as a deckhand on a yacht anchored off Ensenada, picking up a suitcase at the TWA baggage-claim department at Los Angeles International Airport, drinking rum and Coke at a swish bar in San Francisco, running an elevator in a hotel in Denver. All reports within reason had been checked out. But Valenzuela said, “He’s not working or drinking or traveling or anything else. He lost too much blood, ma’am.”

  Please help me find my son.

  Devon put the sheet of paper back on the desk very carefully as if it were contaminated material. Then she followed Leo into the kitchen. The room had been used recently. There was a pot of coffee on the stove, the heat turned low under it, and on the work counter of the sink half a head of lettuce, two slices of bread curling a little at the edges, and an opened jar of peanut butter with a knife stuck in it. It was an ordinary table knife, blunt-tipped and dull-edged, but it may have reminded Mrs. Osborne, as it did Devon, of another more deadly knife, and she had fled the memory.

  “It looks as though she started to make a sandwich,” Leo said, “and something interrupted her—the doorbell maybe, or the telephone.”

  “She told us she was too tired to eat, that she wanted just to rest.”

  “Then we’d better check the bedrooms. Which is hers?”

  “I don’t know. She keeps changing.”

  The front bedroom had a window on the courtyard protected by iron grillwork and framed with bougainvillea blossoms that fluttered in the slightest breeze like bits of scarlet tissue paper. It was fully furnished, but it had an air of abandonment about it as though the people who really belonged there had long since left the premises. The closet door was partly open and inside were half a dozen large neatly stacked cartons with Salvation Army printed in red marking pencil on each one. Devon recognized the printing as her own and the cartons as those she’d packed with Robert’s stuff and given to Mrs. Osborne to deliver to the Salvation Army.

  The other bedroom was occupied. Its sleeper lay face down across the bed, her body wrapped in a faded blue silk housecoat. Her arms were bent at the elbows and both hands were pressed against her head as if they were trying to protect the places where the hair was thinning. On the bureau was a Styrofoam wig stand holding the orderly curls Mrs. Osborne showed to the public. The blue hat she’d worn in court had fallen or been thrown on the carpet and her ribbon knit dress hung limply across a chair like an abandoned skin.

  Both windows were shut tight. Suspended in the still air was the faint sour odor of regret, of little sins and failures mildewing in closets and damp forgotten corners.

  “Mrs. Osborne,” Devon said, but it sounded wrong, as if this silent helpless woman was a stranger with no right to the name.

  “Mrs. Osborne, answer me. It’s Devon. Are you all right?”

  The stranger stirred, disclaiming the identity, protest­ing the invasion of her privacy when Devon leaned over and touched her temple and felt the pulse in her thin white wrist. The pulse was slow but as steady as the ticking of a clock. On the night table beside the bed there was a half-empty bottle of yellow capsules. The label identified them as Nembutal, three-quarter grain, and the prescriber as the Osbornes’ family doctor in Boca de Rio.

  “Do you hear me, Mrs. Osborne?”

  “Go—way.”

  “Did you take any pills?”

  “Pills.”

  “How many pills did you take?”

  “How—? Two.”

  “Is that all? Just two pills?”

  “Two.”

  “When did you take them?”

  “Tired. Go away.”

  “Did you take them when you came home at noon?”

  “Noon.”

  “You took two pills at noon, is that right?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  Leo opened the windows, and the incoming air smelled of a forgotten harvest, overripe oranges whose thickened pockmarked skins covered pulp that had gone dry and fibrous. Mrs. Osborne turned over on her side, knees bent and hands over her head like a fetus trying to ward off the pain of birth.

  “If she’s leveling with me, she took only a hundred milligrams,” Devon said. “The stuff should be wearing off pretty soon. I’ll stay with her until it does.”

  “I’ll stay too if it will help.”

  “It won’t. She’d be upset if she woke up and found you here. You’d better go back to the courthouse and tell Mr. Ford what happened.”

  “I don’t know what happened.”

  “Well, tell him as much as you do know—that she’s all right but she won’t be able to testify, at least not this afternoon.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ford addressed the bench.

  “Your Honor, the testimony of this witness, Ernest Valenzuela, has presented a number of problems. Since he is no longer employed by the sheriff’s department, the files on the case are not available to him. However, I ob­tained permission for Mr. Valenzuela to refresh his mem­ory by going over the files in the presence of a deputy and making notes for his appearance here today. I also ar­ranged for a deputy to bring into the courtroom certain reports and pieces of evidence which I consider vital to this hearing.”

  “These reports and pieces of evidence,” Gallagher said, “are they now in your possession?”

  “Yes, your Honor.”

  “All right, proceed.”

  Valenzuela took the oath: the testimony he was about to give in the matter now pending before the court would be the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

  Ford said, “State your name, please.”

  “Ernest Valenzuela.”

  “Where do you live, Mr. Valenzuela?”

  “209 Third Street, Boca de Rio.”

  “Are you currently employed?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where and in what capacity?”

  “I’m a salesman with the America West Insurance Company.”

  “How long have you held your present position?”

  “Six months.”

  “Before that, what was the nature of your employ­ment?”

  “I was a deputy in the Boca de Rio division of the sheriff’s department of San Diego County.”

 
“For how long?”

  “Since 1955 when I got out of the army, a little more than twelve years.”

  “Describe briefly the situation in the sheriff’s depart­ment in Boca de Rio on Friday, October thirteen, 1967.”

  “The boss, Lieutenant Scotler, was on sick leave and I was in charge.”

  “What happened that Friday night, Mr. Valenzuela?”

  “A call came in from the Osborne ranch at a quarter to eleven asking for assistance in searching for Mr. Osborne. He’d gone out earlier in the evening to look for his dog and failed to return. I picked up my partner, Larry Bismarck, at his house and we drove out to the ranch. By this time the search for Mr. Osborne had been going on for about an hour, led by Mr. Estivar, the foreman, and his son, Cruz. Mr. Osborne hadn’t been located but there was consider­able blood on the floor of the mess hall. I immediately phoned headquarters in San Diego and asked for rein­forcements. Meanwhile my partner had found small frag­ments of glass on the floor of the mess hall and part of a shirt sleeve caught on a yucca spike just outside the main door. The shirt sleeve also had blood on it.”

  “Did you take any samples of blood?”

  “No, sir. I left that to the experts.”

  “What did the experts do with the samples of blood they collected?”

  “Sent them up to the police lab in Sacramento for anal­ysis.”

  “This is the usual procedure?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And at a later date you received a report of that analy­sis?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ford turned to the bench. “Your Honor, I hereby sub­mit a copy of the full report for you to read at your conven­ience. It is, naturally, detailed and technical, and in the interests of saving time—not to mention the taxpayers’ money—I suggest Mr. Valenzuela be allowed to give in his own words the facts essential to this hearing.”