The Vanished

by Bill Pronzini

  Silence.

  ‘Goddamn it, Holly, did you?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he muttered.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told you. He caused Miss Diane to die. I heard him tell Mr. and Mrs. Emery what he done, and Mrs. Emery she started screaming for him to leave and Mr. Emery was all excited and took to drinking like he does, and when that guy left I just went after him. I had to do something. The Emerys, they’re just like my folks, they been real good to me. Miss Diane was real good to me, too, before she went away. I couldn’t just let that guy walk away without doing nothing.’

  ‘Where did you jump him? Here at the motel?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, where?’

  ‘I followed him in the truck. I offered him a ride.’

  ‘You took him somewhere?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘To Hammock Grove.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘A picnic place out at the end of Coachman Road.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘I hit him a few times.’

  ‘You beat him up.’

  ‘Yeah. He wasn’t tough at all.’

  ‘What did you do then?’

  ‘I left him there. I drove away.’

  ‘Was he alive?’

  He stared up at me. ‘I never killed nobody.’

  ‘You’re sure he was alive?’

  ‘I told you, didn’t I?’

  ‘Was he unconscious?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Where did you leave him?’

  ‘In Hammock Grove.’

  ‘Where in Hammock Grove?’

  ‘By the bridge.’

  ‘What bridge?’

  ‘There’s this bridge goes across a little creek,’ Holly said. ‘When you first come in to the picnic area.’

  ‘All right. What time of day did all this happen?’

  ‘In the afternoon.’

  ‘What time?’

  ‘I dunno. It was still light out.’

  ‘And afterward you went home, back to the Emery farm?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Do the Emerys know what you did?’

  ‘No, I never told nobody.’

  ‘And you never saw Sands again?’

  ‘No,’ Holly said. ‘Can I get up now? My head hurts.’

  I kept my hands on the chair back. ‘Get up, then.’

  It took him several seconds. He stood, finally, swaying a little, as if he were very dizzy. He said, ‘You hurt me plenty.’

  I did not answer.

  He moved then, away from me, into the bathroom. I watched him running water into the basin, as I had done, washing the blood from his face. He did not look into the mirror. He picked up the same towel I had used and buried his face in it, and then threw it down again and came out into the main room, blinking at me.

  ‘What you going to do?’ he said. ‘You going to take me to the police?’

  I just stared at him.

  ‘I don’t like to be locked up. I can’t stand that.’

  ‘You can’t go around jumping people like you’ve been doing.’

  ‘I won’t do it no more.’

  ‘How do I know you won’t?’

  ‘Well, I won’t.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, ‘get out of here.’ I was near exhaustion now, and even if I wanted to take him in I did not think I was capable of it. I would pass out before we got halfway to the City Hall, with him docile or not. ‘Go on, Holly, go home.’

  ‘You won’t come bothering Mrs. Emery no more, will you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I won’t come around there any more.’

  ‘I got nothing against you now,’ Holly said. ‘You beat me, and nobody ever done that before. You’re a tough guy.’

  He staggered over to the door and got it open and looked at me with that pathetic, battered rubber mask; then he went out into the night, pulling the door shut behind him.

  I moved directly to the light switch and put the room in darkness. I sat on the bed and took the rest of my clothes off and lay back with the blanket over me, trying to think; but it was no good, it was just no good.

  I let sleep wash over me, wrapping the throbbing pain in it. Tomorrow I could think, tomorrow…

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  I awoke to a consummate aching stiffness of every muscle in my body.

  It was after nine and there was sunlight in the room, shining dustily in long, pale shafts on the bare redwood floor. I lay for a time with my eyes closed against the light, very still, listening to the hammering of surf within the confines of my skull. It began to ebb, finally, and I allowed the blankness upon which I had been concentrating to be filled by returning thoughts of last night.

  It seemed like a particularly vivid dream instead of a fragment of reality, the way the events surrounding the knife episode a few months ago had later seemed. I tried to hate Holly again, but that was as useless as it had been last night; he lived in a kind of primitive, simplistic world where everything was black or white, without shading, and if the sanctity of the cave and its dwellers was threatened in any way, you fought as savagely as you knew how to protect those who protected you. There was no way to hate someone like that. Maybe, in some ways, his world was just a little better than ours; it was certainly less grim.

  I went over the conversation I had had with Holly, examining again what he had told me. It was the truth, of that I was fairly certain. I did not think he would have known how to lie about something like that. He had then, as he’d said, picked up Roy Sands following the visit to the Emery farm on the twentieth of last month; then he had driven him out to this Hammock Grove and leaned on him and left him there unconscious. I was willing to accept that without disputation.

  But then what?

  Holly had sworn that Sands was alive when he’d left, and I believed that, too. Sands had come back here to the Redwood Lodge later to pick up his belongings, hadn’t he? And yet, if he was hurt, why hadn’t he gone to the police to press charges against Holly? Or to a doctor-who in turn would have notified the authorities because of the nature of those injuries? If he had done either, the cops would have had his name on record. So what had Sands done after coming out of it? Well-had he come out of it at all? Holly had just left him there, unconscious, and maybe he had been hurt worse than Holly thought, had had a concussion or some such, remained comatose, perhaps died of exposure…? No, if that were the case, the body would have been found by this time-unless Hammock Grove was the kind of summer picnic area no one ever went to in the winter, and it had been less than a month since December 20-oh Christ, if he had died out there, how could he have picked up his stuff and gone up to Eugene? I was thinking in pointless circles.

  I swung my feet out of bed and got up gingerly and took a couple of experimental steps that seemed to work out all right. In the bathroom I tried the mirror again and it was not as bad as I expected; the swelling was gone from the one eye, and the left side of my face, under the red-orange streaks of the Mercurochrome, had begun to scab already. The cut on my cheekbone ached painfully, and I thought about taking the bandage off to apply some more antiseptic; but that did not seem like such a good idea, remembering that flap of skin, and I decided I would be wiser to leave it alone.

  I knew I was going to have to see a doctor sometime today, to have the cut and the other abrasions looked at, and I did not relish the thought. Still, it had to be done and I accepted that. I did not see any point in making a report to the local cops; if I did that, I would have to give them Holly’s name-and no purpose would be served in having the poor bastard jailed. He was all right as long as no one bothered the Emerys, and who was going to bother them now?

  I used a little more of the Mercurochrome on my upper lip and the side of my face, and on my scalp, and combed my hair, and ran the toothbrush around inside my mouth a couple of times; there was no sense in trying to shave or wash. I wondered what Cheryl would say when she saw me, and then I knew
she would take it all right after the initial shock; she was not like Erika. I would have had to put up with a lecture from Erika, but there would be no lecture from Cheryl. The difference between the two of them was like night and day.

  There was one of those instant-coffee dispensers in the room, and I made myself a cup and drank it, sitting on the desk chair. I had no desire to frighten hell out of some waitress in a local café coming in the way I looked, and I was not in any mood for breakfast anyway. The thing that had been nagging at me while I had eaten supper the previous evening was back and stronger than ever, nurtured by the revelation that Holly had jumped on Roy Sands the way he had on me. It was all starting to come together, I could sense that: the answer was here in Roxbury, and it was very close.

  I finished my coffee and gathered up the bloodstained clothing. Then I soaked the towel both Holly and I had used in cold water and got down stiffly and washed the dried blood from the floor where he had lain, where both of us had spattered fluid walking back and forth. When I straightened again, I was breathing asthmatically and my arms and legs felt weak. I wadded everything together and took it out into the fresh clean morning air and dumped it into the trunk of my car.

  I slid under the wheel, then, and swung around to the right of the office. There was a dark green Pontiac pulled up in front of number seven; Jardine had finally gotten another customer. Well, maybe things were starting to look up for everybody now.

  I drove out to Coachman Road and onto it, passing the Emery farm and seeing no one out and around. I wanted to have a look at Hammock Grove before I saw a doctor; there might be nothing to learn out there, but I was still fresh out of other possibilities.

  A couple of miles further along Coachman Road, the firs and redwoods seemed to grow thicker and there was less sunlight filtering through the ceiling of leaves and branches overhead. I had the window down, and the smell of the woods filled the car with a kind of spicy redolence that was a narcotic for the pulsing ache in my head.

  Around a sharp bend I came upon a very narrow paved road leading off to the left, and a wooden sign at the junction, reading: HAMMOCK GROVE, and below that: PICNICKING • CAMPING • HIKING. I turned along there, and it was like following a tunnel through the imposing giant trees; it made you feel very small, very vulnerable, passing at the feet of some of nature’s most beautiful creations.

  I traveled a quarter of a mile, and then I could see the picnic area spread out in a grotto of sorts, with parking spaces and small stone barbecues and heavy redwood picnic tables and benches. There was a thick double-link chain stretched across the road between two posts at the entrance to the grounds. Beyond that the road twisted and turned and looped back on itself throughout; like the picnic areas and facilities, it was covered with leaves and pine needles and loose topsoil, a result of the heavy winter rains. When spring came, there would be a forestry crew in to clean and rake it out for the influx of weekend Thoreaus and all their screaming multitudes.

  I parked nose-up to the chain and got out and stepped over it, letting my eyes make a slow ambit of the area. The bridge Holly had mentioned was on the left, an arched, log-railed affair that spanned a wide, rocky creek; there was a quick stream within its banks now, although I suspected that it would be completely dry during the summer. It hugged the base of a steep, rounded slope grown with wood ferns and spindly firs that formed the left-hand boundary for the grove; deeper in, it hooked around to run beneath a couple of other wooden bridges through the general middle of the grotto-and behind me, it made the curve with the slope to disappear well back among the redwoods.

  Except for the raucous cry of a jay somewhere high in one of the trees, it was very quiet. Cool and damp, too, with very little wind. I walked over toward the bridge and looked into the creek, and there was nothing for me to see except rocks and leaves and cold rushing water. There was nothing in the immediate vicinity of the bridge, either; the wind-swept foliage had long since taken care of any traces.

  I scuffed through the leaves near the bridge, for no particular reason, but nothing of interest lay beneath the soft, wet covering. I saw that one of the foot trails which cross-hatched the grounds led to a large brown building with green-latticed entrances on either side: the rest rooms. I walked over, thinking that if I had been Sands and I had woken up from a beating in a place such as this one, I would have made for these rest rooms first thing-looking for water, towels, a mirror to check the damage.

  There was a brand-new padlock, undisturbed, on the door marked MEN, and none of the frosted windows had been broken or tampered with. I made a turn of the building and looked in at the side designated WOMEN; nothing there, either, except that the padlock was a little rustier. Well, Sands had not made for the rest rooms then, because even if he had found them locked, he could have broken a window to get inside or shouldered one of the doors open without too much trouble.

  What had he done, then?

  The most logical answer was that he had staggered off down that same road up which I had just driven, and either walked or gotten a ride back to the Redwood Lodge. And if that were the case, I was only wasting my time out here.

  I went back and stood at the foot of the bridge. That intuitive sense was working again, and it kept insisting that there was something here for me, something important, and that all I had to do was keep looking in order to find out what it was. I glanced off to my left, and there was an extension of the path coming from the rest rooms; it curved over to run concurrent with the road for some little way. Behind me were two picnic tables set on either side of one of the stone barbecues, and across the bridge in front of me was the slope. The base of it, at the bank of the creek, was fairly level, and contained a path that paralleled the stream in both directions.

  The back of my neck felt cold, and I put my right hand up to touch my damaged face. The fingers became immobile. My damaged face, oh Christ, my damaged face! Something dark nudged my mind, and the coldness increased, damaged face, and I was moving up and across the bridge before I even considered it. I looked to the right, deeper into the open grove; then I went off to the left, walking slowly, alternating my gaze with the side of the slope and the creek, not seeing anything, moving on instinct.

  The path led me well around the slope and then, gradually, away from it, still paralleling the meandering stream. I stopped and glanced back, and I could not see the picnic grotto or the road or my car from where I was; the trees grew thickly here, and the ground was completely carpeted with wet, aromatic leaves.

  I started walking again. Up ahead, beside the stream, was a huge fire-gutted redwood stump. I stopped once more, looking at it, and my eyes shifted then to a cluster of large, porous rocks at the low creek bank just beyond the stump. There were several of them, bunched closely together, and I stared at them and kept staring at them. Something wrong there, something wrong…

  And I had it: the biggest of the rocks, maybe three feet in circumference, was bleached gray along the top and stained a much darker color along its bottom surface, as if that part of the rock had lain in the acid soil for a long time before being recently uprooted and partially revolved.

  I went over and stood by the cluster, and there was a kind of leaden nausea in the pit of my stomach. I knew what I was going to find, had known from the moment there by the bridge. It took me a scant two minutes to shoulder the rocks out of the way, to uncover the shallow grave which had been dug beneath them-and the ugly, decomposing thing which lay within it.

  Roy Sands was no longer among the missing.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The side of his head had been crushed by a blow from some heavy, blunt instrument-very probably the stained and rusted tire iron which lay alongside the body. The condition of his clothes, his flesh, the nesting presence of insects-God!-told me that he had been in there for some time, and even though there was not much left of the face for positive identification, I had no doubt at all that it was Sands.

  The nausea came boiling up into my throat,
and I turned away and walked stiffly to the blackened redwood stump. I leaned against that and dragged air into my lungs, and momentarily the feeling passed. A couple of blackbirds chattered in a slender thread of sunlight nearby, and then flew off together; it was very still again.

  The whole sick business began to take shape in my mind. I knew beyond a doubt now the nature of the thing that had been nagging at me, the thing I had failed to consider because there had been no reason for considering it, the thing that had been subconsciously bothering me all along with its lack of rhyme or reason, its alien presence in the pattern of events as I had uncovered them.

  I had been able to find no reason why Sands would have gone to Eugene, Oregon, and that was because he had never gone there. He had not sent those wires, had not been the man who checked into the transient hotel, he was dead then, he was dead and buried under those rocks behind me. The entire thing with Eugene had been a red herring, a fact I had finally guessed when I touched my face there by the bridge. Sands had been beaten by Holly, and it was incontrovertible that such a beating would have left his face as swollen and discolored and marked as mine; but neither the hotel nor the Western Union clerk had mentioned Sands as having looked battered and broken-a fact they could not have helped but notice despite a hat and a muffler and a coat with a turned-up collar, a fact one or both would have related to me.

  So it was not Sands they saw, it was his murderer, the guy who had come in here after Holly left.

  It had to be that way. You could figure it, and it was simple now: the guy had done the killing and buried the body, after first taking Sands’ motel key off the corpse, his wallet, and any other identification which might have been there. Then he had returned to the Redwood Lodge, slipped into Sands’ unit, and packed everything in the single suitcase. In his own car he had driven up to Eugene, and on Tuesday night, the twenty-first, he had sent those wires and he had registered at the Leavitt Hotel. Later that evening, or the next morning, he had simply walked out, leaving the suitcase there with Sands’ stuff in it.