I looked at him and said, “I'm surprised he didn't take them with him.”
“He could have taken a handful,” Levy said. “The jar's half-empty, so there's no telling who took what. They also found a high school yearbook back there, lying open on the bed. 1973. Withrow. Couldn't have been the woman's, so it might have belonged to your boy. And there's a painting on the wall in there with his initials on it—H. L.”
“Could I take a look?” I said.
“Sure.”
We edged past the forensic men, who were packing up their evidence kits, past the overturned kitchen table, and through the door into the bedroom at the rear of the trailer. Cal Levy flipped on the overhead light. There was a small mirrored bureau on the left wall and a double bed on the right. The window that Haskell had used to make his escape was set beside the bed.
“Picture on the south wall,” Levy said, reading from a notepad. He pointed to the rear wall of the trailer.
It was a watercolor sketch of the Overlook, framed and matted by an expert hand. Everything was spongy and melting in the drawing—the trees, the bridge, the statue—like an Oldenberg sculpture, as if the work, as Hack Lord saw it, was just so much wax held too close to a fire. Maybe the fire inside his own violent mind. It gave me a chill to look at it and then to look at the bed and to think that that's what must have been in his head as he lay there beside Effie Reaves.
A girl with a face like a child's drawing of mother, that's what Aamons had said. Another woman who had, in fact, been old enough to be his mother—a death-mother who had fed him drugs and God only knew what kind of twisted love. Neat symmetry, like the two drawings of the Overlook. So neat, it unnerved me.
“Where's the yearbook?” I said.
Levy glanced at his notes. “They put it on the bureau.”
I walked over to the bureau and examined it.
It was Haskell's, all right. And it was open to the page of his senior picture. He'd had a bull neck even then. Coal black hair and those heavy-lidded eyes. He looked young and tough and handsome in that picture. But that was before the tattoo and the speed and Effie Reaves.
I flipped to the rear of the yearbook and found him again, looking tough in the front row of the wrestling team picture. And again, paradoxically, in an art club photograph. Still looking tough. He'd been a complicated boy. A true Capricorn, as Miss Moselle had described him.
I looked again at the picture on the wall. Benson Howell had said that Hack and his kind wanted to be caught, that that was why they left clues and sent notes to the police. And the drawing and the yearbook picture were certainly giveaways to anyone who could read their meaning. He'd signed his name to each and, by means of the drawing, marked a path that could be traced to Twyla Belton. In fact, he'd been leaving a trail of evidence behind him for better than two years—a trail that had been lying cold until I happened across it. It had been an accident on my part, a concatenation of my own instincts and Kate's dogged research and a good deal of luck. But I had found the trail and, in some irrational way, I'd begun to feel responsible for it and for him, as if I'd been chosen “it” in a game far older and more grave than hide-and-seek. It was up to me now. Somehow, I felt I knew that and felt, as well, that he was out there, somewhere in the night, waiting almost eagerly to learn whether I had the skill to match him move for move.
18
THEY WERE waiting for me when I got back to the library at half-past nine that night. Miss Moselle and her gray-haired friends in their dowdy print dresses and high-topped shoes. Leon Ringold, sitting in one of those orange chairs with his feet barely skimming the rug and a look of smug impatience on his face. And, of course, my girl Kate. Best of all, my girl Kate. Who came rushing around the circulation counter to greet me as I came through the door.
I gave her a big hug and whispered, “God, I'm glad to see you.”
“Me, too,” she said and kissed me on the lips.
I looked over her shoulder. “Why the reception?”
“They were worried about you, Harry,” she said under her breath. “Miss Moselle heard about Effie Reaves's murder on the news and they decided to stay here until they found out if you were all right. Even Leon.”
“I'm touched,” I said. And meant it.
I looked over her shoulder again at that odd crew of little old ladies and grinned. They'd smiled as one when I'd come through the door. And when Kate had run up to me, they'd turned away as one and started sorting through catalogue cards and stamping overdue books. It was low-grade sentimental comedy, but damn sweet and satisfying.
“I'm all right,” I proclaimed to one and all. “And thanks for worrying.”
“I must say Harold,” Miss Moselle said without looking up from her pile of index cards. “You lead an exciting life. Perhaps a little too exciting?”
“After today,” I said, “I think I might agree with you.”
******
It was like a family gathering. All of us sitting around one of those huge varnished oak tables, sipping tepid coffee and discussing what we were going to do about the family problem. Because that's what Haskell Lord had become to them—a family problem.
I hadn't wanted it that way. But what are you going to do? I asked myself, as I sat there planning strategy with seven old ladies and a fussy little man with the well-scrubbed face of a freshman advisor. They were involved whether I'd wanted them to be or not. They'd been involved from the start, working through whatever grapevine they'd established over the years. They'd known before I did why Ringold wanted to hire me. They'd known about Leo Sachs and about Twyla Belton. And now about Haskell Lord and Effie Reaves. Picked it up and transmitted it to one another the way plants are said to transmit the slightest vibrations. A kind of Brownian movement of gossip and rumor that was impossible to defeat. So I quit trying to fight it and accepted the fact that, whether I liked it or not, my little old ladies were involved in the case.
I gave them a bowdlerized account of what had gone on that day, from Norris Reaves Auto Repair Shop to Pop Warner's Trailer Park. And they took it all, murder and mayhem, with a stoic calm. That surprised me a bit, although at that point I don't know why I should have been surprised. Those seven old ladies were probably tougher than, say, your average professional football team. And Jessie Moselle was the toughest of the lot.
“We're all librarians here, Harold,” she said when I'd finished telling them about what I'd found in the Reaves woman's trailer. “We haven't seen much of life, outside of what a few great minds have written about it. And certainly nothing as terrible as what you've described. But I think there is a certain courage that comes with education, don't you? Not a physical courage, like your own. But an intellectual one. And it is our library and our patrons that this man has been preying on. I don't think any of us will tolerate that.”
“No, indeed,” another old lady said.
“So we want to help,” Jessie Moselle said. “In any way we can. After what you've told us, I'm not so sure that Haskell Lord himself wouldn't want us to help you stop him.”
“It seems odd to me,” Leon Ringold said, “that he would have killed this older woman. After the Belton girl I would have expected someone younger.”
“I don't think he's through, yet, Leon,” Jessie said daintily.
Ringold blanched. “You're not serious?”
“I'm afraid she is,” I said. “The Reaves killing simply doesn't fit the pattern we've been developing with the books. The whole motive for killing younger women like Twyla was to deflect the sexual and emotional rage Lord felt for the older ones like Effie Reaves and his mother. To kill them instead of committing matricide. I think we have to look upon what happened this afternoon as an unplanned homicide. Either Haskell Lord was so stoned on speed that he lost his mind entirely, or something the Reaves woman said or did pushed him over the edge. According to Pop Warner, the guy who runs the trailer park, they'd had a bad fight two weeks ago and Effie'd thrown Haskell out. Maybe that's what triggered it.”
/>
“So the defaced art books have nothing to do with Ms. Reaves?” Ringold said. “She was not his intended victim?”
“I don't think she was,” I said. “But I wouldn't say that the books had nothing to do with her. Judging from the sketch that was found in the trailer, Haskell was apparently something of an artist himself before he met Effie Reaves a couple of years ago. And he was a body-builder, too. After he got hooked on speed and on Effie, I'm guessing that both skills went down the drain. Since the pictures he cut up were a sort of melding of physical and artistic excellence, it's possible that cutting them up and cutting up Twyla Belton was Haskell's way of getting back at the Reaves woman and at his mother for what they'd done to him.”
“Like Samson and Delilah,” Miss Moselle said.
“And now that he's killed her,” Ringold said. “What can we expect?”
I shook my head and said, “I honestly don't know.”
Nobody said anything for a moment.
“What are the police doing about this!” Ringold said nervously. “Shouldn't we have some protection here at the library?”
“They've got an A.P.B. put on Haskell in the city and in the county,” I said. “But you may be right. It might not be a bad idea to get some police protection for the ladies here at the library. He has to be feeling an enormous guilt for killing Effie Reaves—that is, if he's feeling anything at all. My guess is he's going to find someone to blame it on. And in his state I just don't know who that will be.”
“I think it would be selfish to make the police guard our library,” Miss Moselle said. “We must look after ourselves. And allow the officers to concentrate on searching for this man.”
Ringold looked at her the way he'd looked at his office door on Monday morning, with a kind of hapless, disgusted resignation. He was licked and he knew it.
“We shall hold the fort, Harold,” Jessie Moselle said stoutly. “Have no fear of that. And you must go out and find this fellow and stop him.”
******
Kate Davis had been uncharacteristically quiet during our round-table discussion. When we got out to the parking lot, I asked her why.
“You've had a pretty hard day, Harry,” she said. “Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“I guess that depends on what it is.”
We got into the car and when she didn't say anything for a long moment, I started to worry. Kate was not a secret-keeper. At least, she didn't keep them for long. It went against her own liberated code of honor. Everything on the surface, everything out in the open. Even the uncertainties and the unanswerables. The things that my generation of lovers usually slid past with a smile or a kiss, the way we slide past the forgotten words of an old song. So if she were keeping quiet, it had to be for a fairly good reason—something she wanted to spare me or didn't want to admit to herself after that dreadful, violent day.
“What is it, Kate?” I said. “What do you want to say?”
She scrunched down on the car seat, pulled her coat around her neck, and propped her knees on the dash. “I did some research of my own on our six ladies today. And I'm stumped. A couple of them look vaguely like Twyla. And all of them are interested in art—that's why they took the books out in the first place. What I need is a solid clue. Some indisputable link between Haskell and the girls. But I don't know what it is. I guess that's part of what's bothering me. I guess I'm frustrated. The police are keeping an eye on all six girls just in case.”
“That's good,” I said.
“After I finished with my ladies, I started thinking about what Howell told you, so I went up to Withrow to talk with Hack's teachers. He was a pretty scary fellow, all right. Even in high school. More interesting, though, is what the assistant principal, a man named Rogers, told me. I only talked to him for a minute—he had a meeting to go to—but he said that Hack's been seen hanging around the Withrow gym and track.”
“Recently?” I said.
“Right up until a couple of weeks ago.”
“That is interesting,” I said half to myself. Withrow was only a stone's throw from the Lord home—close enough for a family visit. In fact, after being kicked out by Effie Reaves, Hack might not have had anywhere else to go but home. Of course, that would mean that Jake or his mother or both of them had been lying to me about not having seen Hack in better than two years. An innocent enough lie, to be sure. But a lie. I decided to take another look at the Lord home in the morning and, perhaps, do a bit of research on Mother Lord and her polite son. It wouldn't hurt to check in with Gerald Arnold, either. A man who knew a good deal about speed freaks and where they hung out.
“Rogers said that Hack looked like death itself,” Kate said suddenly. “Terrible hollows under his eyes. Emaciated. Extremely nervous.”
“He's a speed freak, Kate.”
“I know,” she said.
I looked at her face. Her blue eyes looked stunned and fearful. And I realized all at once that that was what she'd been holding back—the terrible fact that she could be as scared as I'd been in that barn or when I leaped off the metal stoop of Effie Reaves's trailer. She was terrified and she didn't want to admit it.
“Bad day, huh?” I said.
She nodded. “I know it sounds stupid. I know it's just a racket that I'm playing with my child. But when I heard about what happened to the Reaves woman, I guess I realized that Haskell Lord was a pretty dangerous man.”
“Came as a surprise, did it?”
She made a face at me. “You're being a critical parent again,” she said and didn't sound amused. “Look we all have our own ways of adapting to stress. I tend to sulk, that's all. To withdraw. That's all it is, Kate.” She slapped herself on the thigh. “You're just behaving like an adopted child.”
Sometimes I think that the chief problem with psychotherapy is that it teaches us to regard all feelings as problematical. I didn't tell Kate that. But I did tell her how I'd felt when I was sitting on the john in that service station—too scared to move or to think.
“Well you had a good reason to be frightened,” she said.
“While you, Kate Davis, girl detective, don't?”
She made another face. “All right, so I'm scared. Does that make you feel better?”
I pulled her to me and she laid her head on my chest.
“We'll get him, Kate,” I said. “We'll get him. I promise you.”
She laughed spiritlessly. “Promise?” she said. “You're a born rescuer, Harry.”
“That doesn't sound so hot,” I said.
She laughed again, this time with pleasure, and kissed me on the lips. “In your case, it's terrific.”
******
Late that night, with the wind shaking the windows and a little music playing faintly on the Globemaster, we made love. Not furiously, as we had the night before. But gently, slowly, as if we were both acknowledging what that day had cost us in energy, as if we were both being a little tender, a little solicitous of our wounds and weaknesses.
It wasn't as raw and exciting as it had been the night before. But it was sweeter. I knew when we'd finished and she was lying in my arms, her hair damp and her breath warm on my chest, that I was falling in love with her. It was ludicrous after all of her talk, after all of the warnings she'd been giving out. Still I could feel it inside me like an afterglow. Not just a sexual satisfaction but a gratitude, if that's the word. A pleasure in her pleasure and in her presence. In her face and in her body and in what she had done for me.
Kate Davis, I said to myself.
I held her tightly, cupping her breast in my hand and listening to the sound of her breathing as it slowed into sleep. And then I was asleep, too. And that terrible day was finally over.
19
SHE WAS up before I was on that Friday morning. Fixing eggs and bacon in the little cubicle that the realty company calls a kitchen. Humming old songs. And just generally acting spry and domestic. At eight-thirty, she popped her head through the bedroom door and announced that breakfast w
as served. Then she served it. On a black tray that I used to hold a couple of potted geraniums. The eggs smelled like geraniums and potting soil. We dined au naturel. And when we finished, I rolled over on the blanket and ran my fingertip across her breasts and down that flat, downy belly. Her eyes grew soft and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me on top of her.
“You know this could get to be a habit,” she said.
She ran her hand down my belly.
Then there wasn't any sound but the Globemaster and the soughing of the mattress springs and the sounds of our love-making.
******
“I used to live in an apartment on Ohio Avenue,” Kate said, as we lay together afterward watching the sunlight spill through the bedroom windows. “It was right after my divorce and I was all bent out of shape and terribly unhappy. This was a big apartment, with fifteen-foot ceilings and no soundproofing. Every noise that the neighbors made washed through it like the sounds of a sea. Have you ever read The Enormous Radio? That's what it was like. I heard all the squabbling and cursing, all the bickering that I'd lived with for three years. All the ways Ed and I had failed before I lost my nerve and left him. And it weighed on me, Harry, because I was really in love with him. Married fresh out of high school. Sweethearts at the ripe age of eighteen. My God, there can't be love that's much more intense than that.
“Anyway, I was sinking. Alone in that cave with all those voices battering at each other. And then, one night, I heard the creak of a bedspring from upstairs. You know, the old-fashioned kind of bedsprings that look like something you might distill liquor with? And it squeaked and it squeaked, until I realized that whoever was living above me was making love. After awhile I stopped listening and started wondering who it was up there making the noise. Because he had a real nice sense of rhythm. Now slow. And then so fast the springs started to sing like a tea kettle.”
Final Notice Page 14
