I said, ‘Doc Buckles is a good man, even if there are a lot of things outside his powers. But I can take you to somebody whose power has never failed. He healed me when Doc couldn’t, and every night he heals all those who come to him, no matter what their affliction.’
The man on the table looked at me with his mouth open, his eyes half closed. ‘What kind of story is that?’ he said.
‘It’s the truth,’ I cried out, ‘and Doc Buckles here will bear witness to it. Go on and ask him.’
Doc leaned across his desk. ‘Aaron Menefee,’ he said to me, ‘I want you to keep out of this, and to keep your healing friend out of this. You don’t know who you’re talking to here, so I’ll tell you. His name’s Vern Byers, and he’s half crazy and all bad. He killed the cop that put the bullet into him, and then in cold blood he killed the doctor that bungled taking it out, probably because there was a gun at his head when he was doing it. You don’t want to go playing spooky games with anybody like this, Aaron. You want to keep your mouth shut, and trust you’ll see the sunrise tomorrow morning, if you’re lucky!’
Vern Byers looked at Doc with eyes like burning coals in his white face. ‘You old goat,’ he said. ‘So you were covering up for somebody all the time!’
‘No,’ I said, ‘he wasn’t. It’s just that he doesn’t know about the kind of healing that comes from the inside.’
‘I don’t care what kind of healing it is! You bring that guy to me right now!’
‘You’ll need faith, Brother Byers,’ I told him. ‘Do you think you can be healed?’
‘I’ve got to be healed! You hear that? I’ve got to be healed! Here,’ he said, and when he pulled open his coat I could see the nasty-looking gun strapped to his chest. He took out a wallet and shuffled money from it into a big wad. ‘Here’s a thousand dollars cash. That’s right. Don’t look so dumb about it; just stick it in your pocket. That’s for this doctor of yours to come out here, and you can tell him there’s another thousand waiting for him when he gets here. Is that a deal?’
‘Brother Byers,’ I said, ‘the Healer won’t take payment for his work. But if this is a Faith Offering it ought to do just fine.’
‘Call it what you want, but get him here quick. I’ve got only a couple of hours before they block off every highway out of this state, and I’m not waiting around to see that happen. And here,’ he said very slowly, his eyes half closed again, ‘is what you don’t tell the guy you’re sending. This fat quack was right. I killed the one who put my legs wrong like this, and I’ll kill any man who takes my money and can’t put them right for me. I swear that on my mother’s grave.’
He was done with me then, and the other man, the one with the gun at my back, pushed me along out of the house and into the car and then got into the seat alongside me. I was a little upset driving that way with a gun pointing at me, but I made good time in the camping grounds anyhow.
The man got out of my side of the car almost on top of me, the gun pushing into my ribs, and when I went into the tent he just stood outside, and I knew that gun was aimed my way every second of the time. The Healer was there at the table with Charles M. Fish and the others, and I walked straight up to him without flickering an eyelash.
‘Healer,’ I said, ‘there’s a man outside who needs your help for a friend of his.’
‘At this hour?’ said the Healer. ‘It must be mighty serious, Brother Menefee.’
‘It’s all of that, Healer,’ I told him, the others all gawking at me, ‘and maybe you can judge of that from the Faith Offering that was made. And,’ I said, laying the wad of bills in his hand, ‘there’s more waiting where that came from.’
The Healer looked at the roll, and you could see his eyes lighting up with gratitude for his power. Then he handed the money over to Charles M. Fish. ‘Brother Fish,’ he said, ‘you add this to the tally, and if I don’t miss my guess it’ll make it just about one of the biggest nights we ever had.’
Then he got up from his chair and clapped me right on the shoulder. ‘And you say there’s another such Offering waiting for me, Brother Menefee?’
‘There is. But there’s sort of a worrisome thing about all this, Healer.’
‘And what might that be?’
‘Well, it might be that this Brother Byers who needs your power is short on faith. I put it to him straight, but the way he spoke up I couldn’t figure whether it was yes or no. He’s a sinner all the way, Healer, and aimed straight for perdition right now, but whether or not he’s working up real faith in his time of trouble I can’t say.’
The Healer laughed right out loud, so that I felt my face turning beet-red. ‘You’re young and willing, Brother Menefee,’ he said to me, ‘but you’re real ignorant of these things. Otherwise you’d know that anyone who makes the kind of Faith Offering you just turned over to me is set and ready for my power to enter him. Now, where is this poor unfortunate?’
‘Back in town,’ I said, ‘the other side of Cincinnati. But his friend’s right outside waiting to take us to him.’
When we walked out of the tent the man was there, but with his hand in his pocket now, so that I knew the gun was in it and still aiming at me. I wished I could let the Healer know about this, but it seemed a mite risky right then. He and the man got into the front of the car, the Healer behind the wheel, but when I started to get into the back, the Healer held me off with his hand out of the window and slammed the door against me.
‘It’s kind of you, Brother Menefee,’ he said, ‘but I don’t figure to need your company along on this mission.’
And before anybody could do anything about it he had gunned the big car into a fast start and was heading for the highway.
I stood there with my jaw slack in my head, watching the taillights going off down that road, knowing that when they dipped a little they had hit the highway and turned on to it, and seeing them get smaller and smaller until finally they blinked out like little stars in the first light at morning time. And all that while I was praying as hard as I could that Vern Byers’s faith would bear up under the coming trial, the way the Healer figured it.
Not that I’d become a doubter, whatever happened. A man’s got no right to question what is meant.
You Can’t Be a Little Girl All Your Life
It was the silence that woke her. Not suddenly – Tom had pointed out more than once with a sort of humorous envy that she slept like the dead – but slowly; drawing her up from a hundred fathoms of sleep so that she lay just on the surface of consciousness, eyes closed, listening to the familiar pattern of night sounds around her, wondering where it had been disarranged.
Then she heard the creak of a floorboard – the reassuring creak of a board under the step of a late-returning husband – and understood. Even while she was a hundred fathoms under, she must have known that Tom had come into the room, must have anticipated the click of the bed-light being switched on, the solid thump of footsteps from bed to closet, from closet to dresser – the unfailing routine which always culminated with his leaning over her and whispering, ‘Asleep?’ and her small groan which said yes, she was asleep but glad he was home, and would he please not stay up all the rest of the night working at those papers.
So he was in the room now, she knew, but for some reason he was not going through the accustomed routine, and that was what had awakened her. Like the time they had the cricket, poor thing; for a week it had relentlessly chirped away the dark hours from some hidden corner of the house until she’d got used to it. The night it died, or went off to make a cocoon or whatever crickets do, she’d lain awake for an hour waiting to hear it, and then slept badly after that until she’d got used to living without it.
Poor thing, she thought drowsily, not really caring very much but waiting for the light to go on, the footsteps to move comfortingly between bed and closet. Somehow the thought became a serpent crawling down her spine, winding tight around her chest. Poor thing, it said to her, poor stupid thing – it isn’t Tom at all.
/> She opened her eyes at the moment the man’s gloved hand brutally slammed over her mouth. In that moment she saw the towering shadow of him, heard the sob of breath in his throat, smelled the sour reek of liquor. Then she wildly bit down on the hand that gagged her, her teeth sinking into the glove, grinding at it. He smashed his other fist squarely into her face. She went limp, her head lolling half off the bed. He smashed his fist into her face again.
After that, blackness rushed in on her like a whirlwind.
She looked at the pale balloons hovering under the ceiling and saw with idle interest that they were turning into masks, but with features queerly reversed, mouths on top, eyes below. The masks moved and righted themselves. Became faces. Dr Vaughn. And Tom. And a woman. Someone with a small white dunce cap perched on her head. A nurse.
The doctor leaned over her, lifted her eyelid with his thumb, and she discovered that her face was one throbbing bruise. He withdrew the thumb and grunted. From long acquaintance she recognized it as a grunt of satisfaction.
He said, ‘Know who I am, Julie?’
‘Yes.’
‘Know what happened?’
‘Yes.’
‘How do you feel?’
She considered that. ‘Funny. I mean, far away. And there’s a buzzing in my ears.’
‘That was the needle. After we brought you around you went into a real sweet hysteria, and I gave you a needle. Remember that?’
‘No.’
‘Just as well. Don’t let it bother you.’
It didn’t bother her. What bothered her was not knowing the time. Things were so unreal when you didn’t know the time. She tried to turn her head toward the clock on the night table, and the doctor said, ‘It’s a little after six. Almost sunrise. Probably be the first time you’ve ever seen it, I’ll bet.’
She smiled at him as much as her swollen mouth would permit. ‘Saw it last New Year’s,’ she said.
Tom came around the other side of the bed. He sat down on it and took her hand tightly in his. ‘Julie,’ he said. ‘Julie, Julie, Julie,’ the words coming out in a rush as if they had been building up in him with explosive force.
She loved him and pitied him for that, and for the way he looked. He looked awful. Haggard, unshaven, his eyes sunk deep in his head, he looked as if he were running on nerve alone. Because of her, she thought unhappily, all because of her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Sorry!’ He gripped her hand so hard that she winced. ‘Because some lunatic – some animals—!’
‘Oh, please!’
‘I know. I know you want to shut it out, darling, but you mustn’t yet. Look, Julie, the police have been waiting all night to talk to you. They’re sure they can find the man, but they need your help. You’ll have to describe him, tell them whatever you can about him. Then you won’t even have to think about it again. You understand, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I knew you would.’
He started to get up but the doctor said, ‘No, you stay here with her. I’ll tell them on my way out. Have to get along, anyhow – these all-night shifts are hard on an old man.’ He stood with his hand on the doorknob. ‘When they find him,’ he said in a hard voice, ‘I’d like the pleasure—’ and let it go at that, knowing they understood.
The big, white-haired man with the rumpled suit was Lieutenant Christensen of the police department. The small, dapper man with the mustache was Mr Dahl of the district attorney’s office. Ordinarily, said Mr Dahl, he did not take a personal part in criminal investigations, but when it came to – that is, in a case of this kind special measures were called for. Everyone must cooperate fully. Mrs Barton must cooperate, too. Painful as it might be, she must answer Lieutenant Christensen’s questions frankly and without embarrassment. Would she do that?
Julie saw Tom nodding encouragement to her. ‘Yes,’ she said.
She watched Lieutenant Christensen draw a notebook and pen from his pocket. His gesture, when he pressed the end of the pen to release its point, made him look as if he were stabbing an insect.
He said, ‘First of all, I want you to tell me exactly what happened. Everything you can remember about it.’
She told him, and he scribbled away in the notebook, the pen clicking at each stroke.
‘What time was that?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘About what time? The closer we can pin it down, the better we can check on alibis. When did you go to bed?’
‘At ten thirty.’
‘And Mr Barton came home around twelve, so we know it happened between ten thirty and twelve.’ The lieutenant addressed himself to the notebook, then pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Now for something even more important.’
‘Yes?’
‘Just this. Would you recognize the man if you saw him again?’
She closed her eyes, trying to make form out of that monstrous shadow, but feeling only the nauseous terror of it. ‘No,’ she said.
‘You don’t sound so sure about it.’
‘But I am.’
‘How can you be? Yes, I know the room was kind of dark and all that, but you said you were awake after you first heard him come in. That means you had time to get adjusted to the dark. And some light from the street lamp outside hits your window shade here. You wouldn’t see so well under the conditions, maybe, but you’d see something, wouldn’t you? I mean, enough to point out the man if you had the chance. Isn’t that right?’
She felt uneasily that he was right and she was wrong, but there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but it wasn’t like that.’
Dahl, the man from the district attorney’s office, shifted on his feet. ‘Mrs Barton,’ he started to say, but Lieutenant Christensen silenced him with a curt gesture of the hand.
‘Now look,’ the lieutenant said. ‘Let me put it this way. Suppose we had this man some place where you could see him close up, but he couldn’t see you at all. Can you picture that? He’d be right up there in front of you, but he wouldn’t even know you were looking at him. Don’t you think it would be pretty easy to recognize him then?’
Julie found herself growing desperately anxious to give him the answer he wanted, to see what he wanted her to see; but no matter how hard she tried she could not. She shook her head hopelessly, and Lieutenant Christensen drew a long breath.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘then is there anything you can tell me about him? How big was he? Tall, short, or medium?’
The shadow towered over her. ‘Tall. No, I’m not sure. But I think he was.’
‘White or colored?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘About how old?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Anything distinctive about his clothes? Anything you might have taken notice of?’
She started to shake her head again, then suddenly remembered. ‘Gloves,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘He was wearing gloves.’
‘Leather or wool?’
‘Leather.’ The sour taste of the leather was in her mouth now. It made her stomach turn over.
Click-click went the pen, and the lieutenant looked up from the notebook expectantly. ‘Anything else?’
‘No.’
The lieutenant frowned. ‘It doesn’t add up to very much, does it? I mean, the way you tell it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Julie said, and wondered why she was so ready with that phrase now. What was it that she had done to feel sorry about? She felt the tears of self-pity start to rise, and she drew Tom’s hand to her breast, turning to look at him for comfort. She was shocked to see that he was regarding her with the same expression that the lieutenant wore.
The other man – Dahl – was saying something to her.
‘Mrs Barton,’ he said, and again, ‘Mrs Barton,’ until she faced him. ‘I know how you feel, Mrs Barton, but what I have to say is terribly important. Will you please listen to me?’
‘Yes,’ she sa
id numbly.
‘When I talked to you at one o’clock this morning, Mrs Barton, you were in a state – well, you do understand that I wasn’t trying to badger you then. I was working on your behalf. On behalf of the whole community, in fact.’
‘I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about it.’
‘I see. But you understand now, don’t you? And you do know that there’s been a series of these outrages in the community during recent years, and that the administration and the press have put a great deal of pressure – rightly, of course – on my office and on the police department to do something about it?’
Julie let her head fall back on the pillow, and closed her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you say so.’
‘I do say so. I also say that we can’t do very much unless the injured party – the victim – helps us in every way possible. And why won’t she? Why does she so often refuse to identify the criminal or testify against him in cases like this? Because she might face some publicity? Because she might have started off by encouraging the man, and is afraid of what he’d say about her on the witness stand? I don’t care what the reason is, that woman is guilty of turning a wild beast loose on her helpless neighbors!
‘Look, Mrs Barton. I’ll guarantee that the man who did this has a police record, and the kind of offences listed on it – well, I wouldn’t even want to name them in front of you. There’s a dozen people at headquarters right now looking through all such records and when they find the right one it’ll lead us straight to him. But after that you’re the only one who can help us get rid of him for keeps. I want you to tell me right now that you’ll do that for us when the time comes. It’s your duty. You can’t turn away from it.’
‘I know. But I didn’t see him.’
‘You saw more than you realize, Mrs Barton. Now, don’t get me wrong, because I’m not saying that you’re deliberately holding out, or anything like that. You’ve had a terrible shock. You want to forget it, get it out of your mind completely. And that’s what’ll happen, if you let yourself go this way. So, knowing that, and not letting yourself go, do you think you can describe the man more accurately now?’
The Specialty of the House Page 24
