by Unknown
Twenty minutes later Andy was sitting on his bed at home when the ambulance siren sounded somewhere up the hill. His wife put out her hand to see if he was there. “Andy?”
“Yes?”
She went back to sleep until the town alarm sounded, four long blasts for a police emergency.
Andy dressed again and once more took his revolver from the bureau drawer.
“What time is it?” His wife turned over at the clicking sound as he refilled the chamber of the gun.
“Almost half-past three.”
“It isn’t right, a man your age.”
“Someone has to go.” In the hall he phoned the police station for instructions.
This time Andy drove, as did the other deputies. Cars clogged the street where lights were on in all the houses, and people stood outdoors, their coats over their nightclothes, and watched the ambulance drive off. They told one another of the shots they took for granted to have been the backfires of a car.
Doc Harrington drove up. Black bag in hand, he went into the house. Andy followed on his heels. Both men stepped carefully around the bloodstains in the front hall.
The woman was hysterical. “They took our little boy. They killed his father and they took our little boy.” She kept crying out for someone to help her; anyone. The Chief of Police and Tom, who was in the room with them, tried to calm her down. She couldn’t say who “they” were.
When Doc appeared and commanded that someone get a neighbor woman in to help him, Tom started to leave. Andy caught his arm.
“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Tom said. “She says the boy’s been kidnapped. More like a neighbor’s got him, but I’m going to organize a search. If we don’t find him it’ll be the State Police, and after that the F.B.I.”
“The kid’s not here?”
“Maybe you can find him. I’ve been from basement to roof.”
Room by room Andy searched the house. The child’s bed had not been slept in much that night. You couldn’t really tell, the things a youngster took in bed with him. The window was open just a little and it was hard to raise it higher. The back door to the house was open and Andy would have said the kid had gone that way because on the back steps was a woolen monkey, its ears still frosty damp with spittle.
Andy got a flashlight from the car and joined the other deputies, Tom, Murph, and Frankie among them. They went from house to house to ask if anyone had seen the child. No one had and the mother’s cry of kidnapping had gone the rounds.
They searched till dawn. By then the State Police were in the town; the Chief cordoned off the house and set a guard. The house was quite empty. Doc Harrington had given the woman an injection and driven her himself the eight miles to the hospital.
The men, chilled to the bone, were having coffee at the station house when old Mrs. Malcolm, on her way to early Mass, stopped by to say she’d heard a noise that sounded like a kitten’s mew at the bottom of her well. The well had long been dry and she’d had it boarded up after the Russo dog had fallen in and died there. But the kids kept coming back. They pried loose the boards and played at flushing “Charlie” from his underground hideout.
Tom and Andy were already in the Malcolm yard when the fire truck arrived. With their own hands they tore away the boards that weren’t already loose at the well’s mouth. The shaft was dark, but there were steps at least halfway down the shoring. It was decided, however, to put a ladder down.
Tom, again making himself the boss, said he was going down. The others linked themselves together, a human chain, to keep the ladder from striking bottom. The depth was about thirty feet. Andy was the signalman. He reported every step Tom took, and he cried out the moment Tom’s flashlight discovered the child on the rocks heaped at the bottom of the dry well.
“He’s sleeping,” Tom shouted up. “He’s sleeping like a little baby.”
“He can’t be, falling that far down. Be careful how you lift him,” Andy said.
Tom steadied the ladder among the rocks, draped the limp child over his shoulder, and started up. The firemen went back to the truck for their emergency equipment. Andy kept up a singsong cautioning: a kid was just a little thing, it got hurt real easy. Tom was too large a man for such a job, and he ought to have more patience.
“Will you shut your damned mouth up there?” Tom shouted. “I’m coming up the best I can.”
He’d got past halfway when the boy recovered consciousness. At first he squirmed and cried. The men crowded in to watch. Andy begged them not to block the light.
“Just keep coming easy,” Andy crooned, and to the child, “There’s nothing you should be a-scared of, little fella. You’re going to come out fine.”
Then—it was at the moment Tom’s face moved into the light—the child began to scream and beat at him with fists and feet, and a rhythm of words came out of him, over and over again, until no one who wasn’t deaf could mistake what he was saying: “My dad, my dad, you shot my dad!”
Tom tried to get a better hold of him, or so he claimed when he got up, but the child fought out of his grasp. Tom caught him by the leg; then the ladder jolted—a rock displaced below. The child slipped away and plummeted silently out of sight. That was what was so strange, the way he fell, not making any cry at all.
Tom lumbered down again. He brought the child up and laid him on the ground. Everyone could see that he was dead, the skull crushed in on top.
Andy searched the wrists anyway and then the chest where the pajamas had been ripped, but he found no heartbeat, and the mouth was full of blood. He looked up at Tom who stood, dirty and sullen, watching him.
“I didn’t want to let go of him. I swear it, Andy.”
Andy’s eyes never left his face. “You killed him. You killed this baby boy.”
“I didn’t, Andy.”
“I saw it with my own eyes.” Andy drew his gun.
“For God’s sake, man. Murph, Frankie, you saw what happened!”
They too had drawn their guns. The Chief of Police and the State Troopers were coming up the hill, a minute or two away. The two firemen coming with the resuscitator were unarmed.
Tom backed off a step, but when he saw Andy release the safety catch he turned and ran. That’s when they brought him down, making sure he was immediately dead.
MARGARET MILLAR
___________________
1915–1994
MARGARET MILLAR is best known as the wife of Kenneth Millar, better known to the reading public under his pseudonym Ross Macdonald. But remembering her that way ignores her excellent literary suspense career—and the fact that with The Invisible Worm (1941), she published several years before her husband did. A native of Kitchener, Ontario, Millar immigrated to California with her husband and spent the bulk of her time in Santa Barbara, which proved a fitting, sunny locale for a number of her books that explored the psychological underpinnings of crime and, in particular, crimes affecting domestic situations and the inner lives of women.
Millar’s 1955 novel Beast in View, in which an invalid woman is increasingly harassed by terrifying phone calls, won the Edgar Award for Best Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and she was nominated for the same award two years later for Stranger in My Grave, a disquieting account of a young woman oppressed by marriage and a domineering mother who finds emotional freedom after a dream of her own death. The Fiend (1964) is an empathetic account of a pedophile, a risky subject few other than Millar could pull off with any success, while Banshee (1983) is one of Millar’s most emotional works, dealing with the disappearance of a young girl named Princess. All told Millar published twenty-five novels, the bulk of them crime fiction; a memoir; and a posthumous short story collection, The Couple Next Door (2004). She was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1983.
It was from Millar’s posthumous story collection that I discovered “The P
eople Across the Canyon,” first published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1962. In it she takes familiar feelings of insecurity and curiosity and mixes them with something more sinister when a family moves across the way from the Bortons, who instantly rue the loss of privacy and then grow more suspicious of their new neighbors as time wears on. But nothing compares to the twists in store when their daughter, Cathy, takes a shine to the new family, giving Millar a chance to comment, brilliantly, on the dark side of aspirational desire and wish fulfillment.
THE PEOPLE ACROSS THE CANYON
___________________
THE FIRST time the Bortons realized that someone had moved into the new house across the canyon was one night in May when they saw the rectangular light of a television set shining in the picture window. Marion Borton knew it had to happen eventually, but that didn’t make it any easier to accept the idea of neighbors in a part of the country she and Paul had come to consider exclusively their own.
They had discovered the site, had bought six acres, and built the house over the objections of the bank, which didn’t like to lend money on unimproved property, and of their friends, who thought the Bortons were foolish to move so far out of town. Now other people were discovering the spot, and here and there through the eucalyptus trees and the live oaks, Marion could see half-finished houses.
But it was the house directly across the canyon that bothered her most; she had been dreading this moment ever since the site had been bulldozed the previous summer.
“There goes our privacy.” Marion went over and snapped off the television set, a sign to Paul that she had something on her mind which she wanted to transfer to his. The transference, intended to halve the problem, often merely doubled it.
“Well, let’s have it,” Paul said, trying to conceal his annoyance.
“Have what?”
“Stop kidding around. You don’t usually cut off Perry Mason in the middle of a sentence.”
“All I said was, there goes our privacy.”
“We have plenty left,” Paul said.
“You know how sounds carry across the canyon.”
“I don’t hear any sounds.”
“You will. They probably have ten or twelve children and a howling dog and a sports car.”
“A couple of children wouldn’t be so bad—at least Cathy would have someone to play with.”
Cathy was eight, in bed now, and ostensibly asleep, with the night light on and her bedroom door open just a crack.
“She has plenty of playmates at school,” Marion said, pulling the drapes across the window so that she wouldn’t have to look at the exasperating rectangle of light across the canyon. “Her teacher tells me Cathy gets along with everyone and never causes any trouble. You talk as if she’s deprived or something.”
“It would be nice if she had more interests, more children of her own age around.”
“A lot of things would be nice if. I’ve done my best.”
Paul knew it was true. He’d heard her issue dozens of weekend invitations to Cathy’s schoolmates. Few of them came to anything. The mothers offered various excuses: poison oak, snakes, mosquitoes in the creek at the bottom of the canyon, the distance of the house from town in case something happened and a doctor was needed in a hurry . . . these excuses, sincere and valid as they were, embittered Marion. “For heaven’s sake, you’d think we lived on the moon or in the middle of a jungle.”
“I guess a couple of children would be all right,” Marion said. “But please, no sports car.”
“I’m afraid that’s out of our hands.”
“Actually, they might even be quite nice people.”
“Why not? Most people are.”
Both Marion and Paul had the comfortable feeling that something had been settled, though neither was quite sure what. Paul went over and turned the television set back on. As he had suspected, it was the doorman who’d killed the nightclub owner with a baseball bat, not the blonde dancer or her young husband or the jealous singer.
It was the following Monday that Cathy started to run away.
Marion, ironing in the kitchen and watching a quiz program on the portable set Paul had given her for Christmas, heard the school bus groan to a stop at the top of the driveway. She waited for the front door to open and Cathy to announce in her high thin voice, “I’m home, Mommy.”
The door didn’t open.
From the kitchen window Marion saw the yellow bus round the sharp curve of the hill like a circus cage full of wild captive children screaming for release.
Marion waited until the end of the program, trying to convince herself that another bus had been added to the route and would come along shortly, or that Cathy had decided to stop off at a friend’s house and would telephone any minute. But no other bus appeared, and the telephone remained silent.
Marion changed into her hiking boots and started off down the canyon, avoiding the scratchy clumps of chapparal and the creepers of poison oak that looked like loganberry vines.
She found Cathy sitting in the middle of the little bridge that Paul had made across the creek out of two fallen eucalyptus trees. Cathy’s short plump legs hung over the logs until they almost touched the water. She was absolutely motionless, her face hidden by a straw curtain of hair. Then a single frog croaked a warning of Marion’s presence and Cathy responded to the sound as if she was more intimate with nature than adults were, and more alert to its subtle communications of danger.
She stood up quickly, brushing off the back of her dress and drawing aside the curtain of hair to reveal eyes as blue as the periwinkles that hugged the banks of the creek.
“Cathy.”
“I was only counting waterbugs while I was waiting. Forty-one.”
“Waiting for what?”
“The ten or twelve children, and the dog.”
“What ten or twelve chil—” Marion stopped. “I see. You were listening the other night when we thought you were asleep.”
“I wasn’t listening,” Cathy said righteously. “My ears were hearing.”
Marion restrained a smile. “Then I wish you’d tell those ears of yours to hear properly. I didn’t say the new neighbors had ten or twelve children, I said they might have. Actually, it’s very unlikely. Not many families are that big these days.”
“Do you have to be old to have a big family?”
“Well, you certainly can’t be very young.”
“I bet people with big families have station wagons so they have room for all the children.”
“The lucky ones do.”
Cathy stared down at the thin flow of water carrying fat little minnows down to the sea. Finally she said, “They’re too young, and their car is too small.”
In spite of her aversion to having new neighbors, Marion felt a quickening of interest. “Have you seen them?”
But the little girl seemed deaf, lost in a water world of minnows and dragonflies and tadpoles.
“I asked you a question, Cathy. Did you see the people who just moved in?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Before you came. Their name is Smith.”
“How do you know that?”
“I went up to the house to look at things and they said, Hello, little girl, what’s your name? And I said, Cathy, what’s yours? And they said Smith. Then they drove off in the little car.”
“You’re not supposed to go poking around other people’s houses,” Marion said brusquely. “And while we’re at it, you’re not supposed to go anywhere after school without first telling me where you’re going and when you’ll be back. You know that perfectly well. Now why didn’t you come in and report to me after you got off the school bus?”
“I didn’t want to.”
“That’s not a satisfactory answer.”
Satisfactory or not, it was th
e only answer Cathy had. She looked at her mother in silence, then she turned and darted back up the hill to her own house.
After a time Marion followed her, exasperated and a little confused. She hated to punish the child, but she knew she couldn’t ignore the matter entirely—it was much too serious. While she gave Cathy her graham crackers and orange juice, she told her, reasonably and kindly, that she would have to stay in her room the following day after school by way of learning a lesson.
That night, after Cathy had been tucked in bed, Marion related the incident to Paul. He seemed to take a less serious view of it than Marion, a fact of which the listening child became well aware.
“I’m glad she’s getting acquainted with the new people,” Paul said. “It shows a certain degree of poise I didn’t think she had. She’s always been so shy.”
“You’re surely not condoning her running off without telling me?”
“She didn’t run far. All kids do things like that once in a while.”
“We don’t want to spoil her.”
“Cathy’s always been so obedient I think she has us spoiled. Who knows, she might even teach us a thing or two about going out and making new friends.” He realized, from past experience, that this was a very touchy subject. Marion had her house, her garden, her television sets; she didn’t seem to want any more of the world than these, and she resented any implication that they were not enough. To ward off an argument he added, “You’ve done a good job with Cathy. Stop worrying . . . Smith, their name is?”
“Yes.”
“Actually, I think it’s an excellent sign that Cathy’s getting acquainted.”
At three the next afternoon the yellow circus cage arrived, released one captive, and rumbled on its way.
“I’m home, Mommy.”
“Good girl.”
Marion felt guilty at the sight of her: the child had been cooped up in school all day, the weather was so warm and lovely, and besides, Paul hadn’t thought the incident of the previous afternoon too important.
