The Watcher

by Dolores Hitchens

  CHAPTER TWO

  LATER, LARRY got up and took a couple of glasses from the shelves and poured them full of beer. He took them back to the bed and then he and Molly lay there, his arm under her, lifting their heads now and then to sip.

  “How’s it going at home?” he asked.

  “Oh . . . about the same. Just, Uncle Florian’s up and around again.”

  “Is he going to let you in tonight?”

  “Yes. That’s a relief.”

  “He’s quite a guy.”

  The silence drifted in again, a stillness compounded of the night, the empty boatyard, the faint faraway slap of little waves at the edges of the float. On the ceiling Molly could see a spider, a daddy longlegs, poised motionless in a faint web of shadow. The breeze shivered the blanket scraps that served as window curtains.

  There was no need to ask Larry how things were with him. She knew. He hadn’t any folks, any family at all. Two years ago he had run away from an institution in Minneapolis, an orphanage run by some very religious people whose religion had somehow not taken with Larry. He’d hitchhiked West, with stopovers in El Paso and Phoenix. He’d washed dishes in a Los Angeles beanery, finally drifting down to the Newport—Balboa Bay area and the job with old man Warren. He helped around the boatyard during the day, slept on the premises as a watchman at night; and he took things as they came. He didn’t worry, as Molly did, because he was under age and their love was out of bounds, they were breaking the law, and if her parents learned of it the disgrace might kill them.

  He was not particularly afraid of juvenile authorities. He had never attracted their attention. He looked older than he was; he could, and did, pass for twenty. He thought that the orphanage people must have given up trying to trace him long ago.

  He crawled from the bed again and brought the pretzel bag, opened it, dumped the pretzels on the blanket, then refilled the glasses with beer. This time he didn’t lie down; he sat beside her with his legs crossed, munched pretzels, looked at her. He was not a talkative boy.

  She said, “What kind of job are you doing for Warren now?”

  “The same thing, the schoolteacher’s boat. Finishing up the painting.”

  She caught his free hand in hers, spread the blunt, stocky fingers. “Uh-huh. Green and white.”

  He grinned at her, his teeth shining.

  She pressed his palm to her cheek. “He works you too damned hard.”

  Larry laughed at the idea.

  “When shall we go to Laguna?”

  He shrugged. “Go tomorrow if you want.”

  “Will the paint job be done?”

  “Probably not. It doesn’t matter. The teacher hangs around here, keeps wanting little changes. Let Warren listen to him.” He grinned suddenly. “Today he got to talking to me. About myself. How long had I been here, where was I from, had I made any friends. What I did with my time.”

  Molly’s head lifted sharply. “What?”

  “He didn’t mean anything. Just gabbing. Lots of people ask stuff like that.”

  “But he’s a teacher in the high school,” Molly said in fright. “He’s around kids your age all the time. He’ll know you’re not twenty. He’ll report you!”

  “For what? To stick me back in junior high?” He cracked a pretzel between his teeth and chewed it, his eyes mocking her.

  “He’ll tell somebody. He’ll talk about you,” Molly insisted, her eyes dark with apprehension.

  He set the beer on the floor, brushed crumbs from his palms, bent towards her, framing her face with his hands. “Nobody’s going to spoil it. I love you and you love me. We’re going to get married as soon as we can. As soon as I get a better job, as soon as you can leave your folks.” He kissed her with his hard young mouth.

  She wanted to believe. The moment held them in breathless intimacy. She tried to dismiss the teacher, Mr. Freitag, from her mind. The image persisted. She knew Freitag well, she’d been in his history classes, remembered him as a pontifical, somewhat bitter, and opinionated man. Not the sort to be kindly curious about a stray kid hired to slap paint on his cruiser.

  She caught Larry’s wrists. “Stay out of his way.”

  “Okay. Tomorrow we go to Laguna and have a picnic.”

  “In our secret cove.”

  Their eyes held, love burning in them like a light.

  At the mailbox Arnold was fooling with the hinged slot. “There’s something stuck in there. Hasn’t gone all the way down.”

  Curt had been thinking about going home. Pretty soon a cop car would come around, the cops would want to know why they were still out on the streets. Expecting trouble. He looked idly at the box. “Leave it alone.”

  “Say, it just moves up and down with this thing, it’s stuck against that inside wall.” He was squinting into the dim interior. “I’ll bet I could get it out.”

  “Afraid not,” Curt said. “Or haven’t you heard about robbing the mails?”

  “I just want a look at the name and address,” Arnold persisted. “Get me a little thin stick or something.”

  “Let it drop.”

  “No, I’m going to have a look.”

  Curt glanced uneasily up and down the street. The liquor store was the only shop still open in the vicinity. Under the street lamps, the sidewalks stretched off emptily. Lights shone in a lot of windows, but blinds were drawn. The far-off roll of the surf was the only sound on the night wind. “Okay, do it now and get it over with.”

  “I’ve got to have something. My hand won’t go in this thing.”

  Curt found a scrap of metal, some sort of strap off a case of liquor, and they fished with that, finally fished out the letter and took it off under the nearest light.

  Arnold read what was on the envelope, and whistled between his teeth. Curt’s face had tightened. “Put it back.”

  “Hell, I’ve got it out, I’m going to read it.”

  “Leave it alone,” Curt said urgently.

  Arnold was already busy with the flap. He drew out the single typewritten sheet. His hands were shaking a little now with nervousness, with the knowledge of his own mischief. He read slowly, swallowed hard—some of the words were a little beyond his vocabulary but he got all there was to get. Somebody was making a confession of murder. Three murders.

  He thrust the page and envelope suddenly at Curt, but Curt jerked back, his heels slipping, scrambling for balance. Letter and envelope spiraled to the ground. “Hey! Cut it out!”

  Arnold’s face twisted and he giggled with nervous tension. “You want to see it, don’t you?”

  “I saw it. I read it when you did.”

  “What’ll we do about it?”

  Curt looked down at the sheet, fluttering a little under the brush of wind. “It’s going to have your fingerprints on it.”

  “On paper?” Arnold objected.

  Curt hesitated, unsure. He tried to recall all he had read, mostly in crime comics, about prints. “I think so.”

  “Hell, I’ll wipe them off.” Arnold jerked out a handkerchief, bent to pick up the sheet, then straightened without touching it. His long bony face seemed suddenly immature. “Or look, suppose we just burned it, put a match to it. Nobody would know.”

  “He might.” Curt pointed to the letter; the gesture summoned the writer into the night beside them, almost visibly, and Arnold’s throat worked over the lump of fear he was trying to swallow. “He could be watching us now. Let’s just stick it back where it was.”

  Arnold picked up the sheet by a corner, gingerly, his hands shaking. He brushed the sheet with the handkerchief, turned it, brushed it again. Then, holding the sheet between his teeth, he worked on the envelope. Getting the page back into the envelope by holding both of them through the handkerchief took some frantically awkward effort. He made no attempt to reseal the flap. He dropped the letter into the box, worked the lever several times, and announced to Curt that the thing was gone.

  “Let’s dig out,” Curt whispered. The street seemed suddenly full o
f movement, shadows, and whispering noises.

  “Yeah. I’ll see you.” Arnold almost sprinted, his long legs carrying him swiftly away towards home.

  Curt walked quickly in, the other direction. He felt filled with the uneasy thud of his own heart; he couldn’t throw off the sensation of being observed, of eyes drilling into him from the dark. As he walked he watched and listened, but could not pin the sensation to anything concrete. He crossed to another block, then down a side street to an alley. He felt compelled to go faster and faster, until finally he was running.

  In the dark attic apartment he fumbled hurriedly for the lights.

  “Mom?”

  No answer. Well, he hadn’t expected her to be here anyhow.

  He went into the miniature kitchen, drew water in a glass, drank thirstily. The little room, crowded under its sloping ceiling, smelled of coffee and stale food. Its window, a sparkling pane not more than two feet square, looked out over the bay. Curt switched off the light and leaned on the sill to look.

  The view, day or night, always quieted some question within him. There were the Newport hills, far up the bay, marked now by a rim of lights. There was the water, a blue shimmer under the sun, a black mirror after dark, somehow alive, a living thing that tied it all together, the houses hugging its rim and the people in them, drawn there to be beside the bay. The water had been there in the beginning, the beautiful bay all alone; and now the houses had crowded about it, hemming it in a row of stucco and brick and white clapboard. Some day the bay would be alone again. When The Thing went off. When all of the houses would be blown away. There would be floating rubble, a border of broken trash, for a little while. In Mr. Freitag’s history classes Curt had absorbed a chilling conception of man’s fragility in the face of time. Man and his works perished. Mr. Freitag worked hard to impress on his students how all was apt to perish in a nuclear Armageddon.

  Usually when Curt stood here to muse on the town, the people hugged in close to the fringe of water, he felt that some answer long sought had been supplied. Nothing mattered. He and his mother and the attic apartment and the difference between them and the rest of the people didn’t matter. They didn’t matter because everything was going to be blown up anyway.

  Tonight he was disturbed by the memory of the letter.

  It was hard to look at the border of lights and to think impersonally as usual: Enjoy yourselves, suckers. It won’t be long anyhow.

  Somebody out there wasn’t fitting the pattern. Someone wasn’t living here to enjoy the water, own a boat, keep a nice home with its own private pier, bask in the summer sun, play bridge or drink frosty highballs or swim. Somebody out there was playing God.

  Somebody out there was crazy.

  The cold conviction of insanity settled in Curt, and he moved uneasily away from the window. He passed through the other room to the room where his bed was, a cot under the sloping eaves. At the head of the cot was another window, set into a dormer. Curt stripped off his clothes, got into pajamas, stretched out belly-down, reached under the cot and brought up a pair of worn binoculars. He inched himself into the window embrasure and fitted the glasses to his eyes.

  Things jumped at him from the dim shadows: a stalking cat in an alley, a hibiscus bush glowing with dim bloom, an open garage with a workbench under a drop light, the shining tools arrayed as if for action. God, suppose I see him——

  The thought of the murderer down there brought the dry taste of fear into Curt’s mouth. He swept the glasses intently over the familiar scene; it had the empty look of strangeness. Even things long known, like Lottie Tomlinson’s lighted window, the loom sitting there under the light, the yarns spread ready for weaving—even this was strange. And then, jerked into his mind from the depths of shock, came a name.

  Edith Tomlinson.

  The first name in the letter.

  Curt dropped the glasses from his eyes. His face took on a blank, incredulous look. An uncomprehending half-smile touched his mouth.

  That little kid. Two years behind him in school. Blonde. Skinny. Freckles on her hands, eyes like copper coins, a puckered, rosy mouth. Always smelling like peanut butter. Lottie Tomlinson’s little sister, the two of them orphans, living together, Lottie making a precarious living with the loom.

  In the dark, Curt shook his head. A new knowledge filled him, shook him. He knew how Edith Tomlinson had died.

  Somebody down there wasn’t just handing out death from an insane sense of justice. Somebody was really crazy as a coot.

  Because the letter was a lie.

  He put the glasses to his eyes again, swept the dark scene with angry intensity. And now he had another shock. From the depths of the shadowy courtyard by Lottie’s window, a face looked up at him. Too far to know, it was simply a pale mask with smudges for eyes, a slash for a mouth. But from it he sensed a gaze, answering his own.

  He jerked the glasses from his eyes as if in doing so he removed himself from the other’s observation. Then he took a second cautious look without the binoculars. Without them, there seemed nothing at all down there in the distance except the dark, the lighted window like an illuminated postage stamp, beyond it the blocks facing the bay and the big dark water and the far-off rim of hills.

  He tried to persuade himself that the face had been something he’d imagined.

  He slid back out of the window embrasure, put the glasses on the floor under the cot, turned on his back, and lay looking at the ceiling. A faint light fanned in under the door from the outer room. The apartment seemed to brim with silence. Curt wished suddenly that his mother would come home.

  In her little kitchen Lottie Tomlinson poured boiling water into the cup with the instant coffee, replaced the kettle on the stove, went back into the studio.

  The loom waited by the window, the empty warp a reproach. She took the coffee to the middle of the room and stood there to drink it. She was a small slim girl, just past twenty; dark-haired where the younger sister had been fair, but with the same coppery-brown eyes under thick lashes, the rosy mouth. She would have been a beauty with fifteen more pounds on her.

  She studied the array of wool on the table with lackluster eyes. There were two shades of turquoise pulled out, one brilliant, the other grayed. She frowned over the choice. It was a time to be careful, to use all the taste and judgment she possessed. Not every day an order fell from the blue, hand-woven draperies for a ten-room house throughout.

  She looked at the wool, and the familiar, rebellious grief tore through her. What did the work matter? Why should she care? What was life good for any more?

  A throttling lump burned in her throat, tears she didn’t want to shed. I’m cried out, I’m cried out. Let it be enough. The cup shook in her hands.

  I’ve got to forget you, little one. I’ve got to forget that you lived just fifteen years. That you never went to dances, never had a beau, because I thought there was so much time. That I didn’t weave you the Mexican belt, nor let you wear lipstick, nor buy you those crazy sandals with the bells. That I took you for granted, scarcely even seeing you, my bratty little sister—because of course there was plenty of time.

  And then suddenly there wasn’t any.

  She felt her face start to crumple. God, God, please let me forget Edie! I’ll die if I don’t!

  Blinded, she stumbled into the kitchen, rinsed the cup under the tap, set it on the sink, then stood there gripping the edge of the drain and fighting away the tears.

  I can’t cry all over those damned drapes.

  She returned at last to the other room, to the loom, where she sat down and turned her eyes on the turquoise wool and tried to force herself to make a choice.

  As if it mattered.

  In the next street the last mail truck rattled on its way, headlights gleaming. At the corner it squealed to a stop and the driver hopped out, jingling his keys, dragging the sack beside him. He opened the bottom of the box and began to remove the small accumulation of letters.

  CHAPTER THREE


  CAPTAIN MATTHEWS, a barrel-shaped, crew-cut man in a tan suit, looked with utter hatred at the letter spread beside its crumpled envelope on the desk before him. His state of mind could be gauged by the density of the cigar smoke in the small office. The smoke was thick and had a roiled look. Roiled, that was, for just nine-fifteen in the morning.

  Across from Matthews, Detective Archer sat stiff-faced, tapping his thumbs together in his blue-serge lap. They’d reached a temporary block in the argument: Was the letter, or not, an idiot’s trick to needle the police?

  Matthews was convinced the thing was a fake. Archer doubted.

  “Look, we know”—Matthews stuck out his slab of a chin, pinned Archer with icy gray eyes—“we know the Carrol kid died of a skull fracture, knocked down in his own cement driveway by his dad, backing the family car from the garage. The kid’s mother and little sister were right there. The kid ran after the pup, the car hit him. He never regained consciousness. My God, you can’t believe this nut when he claims he killed him!” Matthews scratched his jaw, breathing heavily.

  Archer pursed his mouth and looked at a picture on the wall. The picture showed the finish of a sailing race, Snipe Class, all manned by local kids. The captain’s kid had finished second and there was an inked arrow over a scrap of sail in the picture. “I don’t see how he could have killed the Carrol boy. But I’m not closing my mind to it, either.”

  Matthews did something with his mouth that wasn’t quite a smile but resembled one to the extent that his lips drew back and his teeth showed. “Now, the Barbara Martin thing, the eighteen-year-old. She died of an incomplete abortion and old Doc Tatum is serving time right now for doing a poor job and getting caught at it. You claiming this nut had a hand in that?” Matthews thumped the paper with his fist.

  “Might be the one who got her pregnant,” Archer said with a touch of prim disapproval.

  “That’s not the same as killing her. They don’t usually die of that.” Matthews showed his teeth again, almost a leer, studying Archer’s prissy expression.