There was a pause.
“Well,” said Louise impatiently.
“Don’t you know?” said Barbara.
“Know what?”
“He was arrested this afternoon. He was taken down to the Eleventh Precinct.”
“Why?” demanded Louise. “What were the charges? Drugs?”
“Drugs,” said Barbara, “that was part of it.”
“What else? What else?” Louise persisted frantically.
“Something about Verity, and Verity’s brother—I forget his name.”
“Jonathan. What about Verity? What about Jonathan?”
“I don’t know. Mrs. Hawke, I have to go. I’m going down and see if I can’t see Eric. He was real upset this afternoon. Real upset with all those police in here. And there was a private detective too. Good-bye, Mrs. Hawke,” Barbara concluded. “I’ll tell Eric you called.”
Barbara hung up. Louise continued to hold the receiver against her ear. After a few moments, she broke the connection, and dialed Eric’s number again. After fifteen rings, she gave up. As she replaced the receiver, she heard the noise of wheels on the gravel driveway. Louise tensed but did not rise to look out of the window. She heard car doors slam, and footsteps on the gravel. Then, more ominously, she heard tinny mechanical voices—such as those that are emitted from a radio dispatcher.
There was a knock at the front door. She dialed Eric’s number again, and listened to the ringing signal for a long while.
The knock at the front door was repeated. Louise hung up the telephone and went to the front window and peered out. The front light was off and she could see no more than the figure of a policeman standing at the front door. She saw him raise his arm, and a moment later the loud echoing of his knocking filled the hallway and rattled the door of the study.
Louise dropped into the chair behind the desk, and drew the collar of her sable coat tightly against her throat. After a little, the knocking left off, and she heard footsteps retrace their path back to the police car. She heard voices. Then she became acutely aware of the silence in the darkened mansion. The snow was flung blindly against the windowpanes, and with a sudden gust of wind, the casements shook. Louise was very cold.
Then more car doors slammed, and more footsteps pounded on the gravel, and knocking commenced not only on the front door, but on the French windows in the living room, and at the kitchen door in the back. Louise sat very still, staring through the darkened panes of the French doors into the dense evergreen foliage that closely bordered the house. And quite without warning, there appeared, in that limited vista, the prowling curious face of a policeman, the badge of his cap gleaming faintly.
The doors were unlatched, and as the policeman slowly pushed them open, Louise felt the icy draft of the winter evening blow in upon her. Flakes of snow swirled inside and brushed coldly against her face and the sable coat she held wrapped so tightly about her.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael McDowell was born in 1950 in Enterprise, Alabama and attended public schools in southern Alabama until 1968. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in English from Harvard, and in 1978 he was awarded his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Brandeis.
His seventh novel written and first to be sold, The Amulet, was published in 1979 and would be followed by over thirty additional volumes of fiction written under his own name or the pseudonyms Nathan Aldyne, Axel Young, Mike McCray, and Preston MacAdam. His notable works include the Southern Gothic horror novels Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980) and The Elementals (1981), the serial novel Blackwater (1983), which was first published in a series of six paperback volumes, and the trilogy of “Jack & Susan” books.
By 1985 McDowell was writing screenplays for television, including episodes for a number of anthology series such as Tales from the Darkside, Amazing Stories, Tales from the Crypt, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He went on to write the screenplays for Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988) and The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), as well as the script for Thinner (1996). McDowell died in 1999 from AIDS-related illness. Tabitha King, wife of author Stephen King, completed an unfinished McDowell novel, Candles Burning, which was published in 2006.
Dennis Schuetz was born in 1946 in Parkersburg, West Virginia. He graduated from West Virginia University and later moved to Boston, where he attended the Orson Welles Film School and began to write fiction. He collaborated with Michael McDowell on six novels (the two “Axel Young” books and a series of gay-themed mysteries published under the name “Nathan Aldyne.”) For the last ten years of his life, Schuetz worked for the Massachusetts Department of Public Works. He died of a brain tumor in 1989.
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