The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  The corral was on the east side of the house, perhaps a hundred feet away. When she had gone half the distance Amanda turned the flashlight on, and at once caught a flash of iridescence as Drougette, standing patiently near the gate, swung her head around. There looked to be enough water in the barrel to last until morning with the addition of the pail’s contents. Amanda found a stick, broke the ice, and poured, remarking, “I’d sip this if I were you, it has to do you all night,” to keep herself company in her little ring of brightness surrounded by dark. Fortunately, as she had no idea where her aunt would keep wire cutters, there was a bale of alfalfa already open, and after a dubious appraisal of it—how much did Drougette eat at one meal?—she threw the whole thing into the corral. The mare addressed herself to it at once. Amanda put away a thought of having given her far too much, with resulting heaves or staggers or some other equine ailment, and stood for a moment in the friendly presence, listening to the night.

  Had the dog pack, if the Afghan was actually with it, moved out of hearing range, or was it just that the wind had shifted? Neither; there was the full range of barks again, but certainly fainter. Amanda tried to strain Apple’s baritone out of the rest, but it was useless at that distance. She called anyway, and by the time she got back to the house the telephone which had been allowed to ring twelve times had fallen silent.

  Justin Howard replaced the receiver. Amanda had won their standoff, hands down, and he was both disappointed and annoyed that he couldn’t tell her so. He supposed that she and Jane Balsam were doing some late Christmas shopping in concert, although Mrs. Lopez had mentioned other pressing arrangements and it wasn’t like Amanda to forget a promise.

  He was at a cocktail party, the kind where he wasn’t sure what he was drinking except that it contained ice which kept bumping into his teeth. Could it be artificial ice? The hosts, whom he had never met before, were professional magicians, and the room into which he had excused himself to telephone was full of blow-ups of their act. A pair of unperturbed doves cooed and chortled in a cage, on the surface of which stood an upended black top hat with a lifelike white rabbit peering out of it. Around its neck was hung a hand-lettered card with enticingly tiny print: “For heaven’s sake, where did you come from?”

  Justin sieved another gloomy swallow out of his glass. (This was wine, or some illegitimate relative.) He tried Amanda’s house again: nothing. He looked up and then dialed her neighbors; this time he would leave his name and a message, something he had been prevented from doing before by the frantic feminine spate bewildering his ear.

  But the Lopez phone rang emptily too, as if it had joined the conspiracy. Justin took another swig of the innocuous liquid, and the door opened and the very pretty girl who had brought him here, the girl with whom he had thought he could forget all about Amanda Morley, came in and cried, “Justin, hurry up, that funny little man in the jeans and sneakers is going to stand on his head and do ‘Casey at the Bat.’ ”

  In plays, there always seemed to be French windows for such emergencies. There were none here, and Justin followed her.

  Maria Lopez, who toiled intermittently in her vegetable garden and hung out great quantities of laundry every day, was almost unrecognizable in a suave cream pantsuit, blue eye makeup and a cloud of Chanel 19. In one hand she carried a small suitcase; cradled against the other shoulder was a mass of red-and-white plaid blanket, out of which Rosie’s small face peeked before she buried it again.

  Amanda, who knew this to be a shy expression of pleasure, said, “I know you’re in there, Rosie Lopez,” and held out her arms, and the transfer was effected. Maria said rapidly, setting down the suitcase, “She’s had her dinner, of course. I brought her pajamas and her vitamins and a few other things. We wouldn’t do this to you, Amanda, what with your aunt and everything, but we’d never get seats tomorrow.”

  Don’t worry about it,” said Amanda as a horn sounded outside.

  “Oh, and a man called looking for you just before we left.”

  Amanda suffered a certain stricture of breath while looking casual. ’Did he leave his name?”

  “No. Well, I don’t think I gave him a chance,” said Maria, apologetic and edging toward the door at a second impatient blast of the horn. “I mean, I thought it was going to be you when the phone rang, and then when he asked if we knew where you were I went into this song and dance about having expected you back much earlier because of plane time and so on.”

  She tickled her daughter under the chin, adjured her to be good, and stretched up to give Amanda a quick cheek kiss. “I can’t thank you enough. Merry Christmas and we’ll see you soon. . . .”

  Justin, thought Amanda when she had closed the door after her own injunction to have a nice trip; who else, when she had shut herself into a self-imposed nunnery for a month? She carried her blanket-wrapped burden to the couch, plopped it down, said to its owl-eyed inhabitant, “I’m going to put you to bed in a minute, Rosie, but first I have to make a telephone call.” She had last seen Justin at a post-Thanksgiving party at her house, which might be a lazy way to repay a number of obligations but was also a convenient one. She couldn’t even remember who it was who had brought the Navy captain with whom she found herself closeted in a corner as the evening grew later.

  She was astonished when she discovered that the hand she couldn’t see was toying with her right earring, sending it gently swinging—and across the room, Justin, who must have been regarding her for some time, lifted his glass to her in a salute, put it down, and went quietly out.

  Amanda caught up with him in her front hall, decorated mostly with an old-fashioned coat rack and a chest now piled with overflow garments. “Weren’t you even going to say goodnight?”

  “You were busy.” Only to someone who knew the perfect civility of his usually mobile face was Justin very angry indeed, almost angry enough to wear an approximate topcoat home if he couldn’t find his own in a hurry.

  “Just because I spend fifteen minutes with a guest—”

  “Fifty-five. Do you know what the trouble is, Amanda?” After some fairly ruthless treatment of overlapping sleeves, Justin had found his coat and was putting it on. “We’ve known each other too long, on and off. There are no more surprises—well, yes, there’s one, thanks to your maidenly upbringing, but you’ve gotten bored.”

  He glanced past Amanda. “Here comes the fleet,” he said, and grazed her temple with a kiss and departed without another word.

  Later, attempting sleep first on one side and then the other, Amanda had to acknowledge that there was a tiny element of truth in Justin’s accusation, except that it wasn’t boredom; it was a sense of ease and comfort. She had been catching occasional glimpses of him for a couple of years—he was the nephew of a friend of Mrs. Balsam’s—but although it was only within the last few weeks that they had actually discovered each other as independent entities, the groundwork of trust was there. Still, how would she have felt if Justin had spent an hour tête-à-tête with the female equivalent of a Navy captain?

  She was not a teenager, to congratulate herself upon having provoked jealousy, and it was a question of manners as well. She tried to reach Justin the next day, without success, and like most frustrated apologies this one withered and died and was replaced with a little defensive anger of her own. He could have joined them in the corner, after all; he had a formidable presence when he chose, and there would have been no earring-twiddling going on under his stare. Moreover, he had dropped his bomb at a point where she had to go back and be hostess to six remaining guests.

  But now, thought Amanda dialing, they could start all over again. She would ask lightly, “Were you looking for me, by any chance?” and then she would tell him about her aunt. No, she wouldn’t tell him anything. He wasn’t home.

  Amanda put the receiver back. Her mind must have included the strong probability of Justin’s getting into his car at once and coming here, because she felt suddenly very flat—but there on the couch was Rosie, torn betw
een sleep and a grave astonishment at these strange surroundings. She did not demur at all about being scooped up for bed, only asking in a breathy whisper against Amanda’s neck if she could have a banana, accepting a tangerine instead, and eating it with drowsy relish while, in the guest room, Amanda undressed her and put on the pajamas from the suitcase.

  It was a pretty room, with white-painted furniture and chintz in marigold colors at the low-set windows. Rosie, whose crib was in much smaller quarters shared with her older sister, was bemused, and pointed at the other twin bed and gazed questioningly at Amanda.

  Would she sleep there? Yes, if the Afghan hadn’t returned in an hour or so; with the door open she would be able to hear the scratchings, plaintive cries, and finally the stentorian barks with which the dog announced herself. Meanwhile, Rosie had gotten tangerine juice everywhere, including a little in her hair, and Amanda took her into the bathroom.

  This was her aunt’s; the guest bath was across the hall and off the plant room, which had been chosen for that purpose because of its exposure. The basin was occupied by a tube of toothpaste. Amanda opened the cabinet above to replace it, and stared.

  Did a stroke sometimes have a precursor? Yes; she had read somewhere that people could suffer very small ones, causing subtle personality changes, without even being aware of the fact. Mrs. Balsam, a relatively lighthearted housekeeper when her husband was alive, had turned into something of a martinet after his death —“Like Englishmen in the jungle, I suppose,” she had explained apologetically to Amanda—and she would never ordinarily have rummaged through her medicine cabinet this way, toppling bottles and vials and tubes.

  Not that there was all that much there, because she was not a believer in panaceas for all occasions. Aspirin, the blood-pressure pills which she took only sporadically because they had side effects, deodorant, nonprescription eyedrops, sunscreen, rubbing alcohol, capsules for the hay fever to which Mrs. Balsam was prey, and something of which only a small red cap remained.

  Amanda handed the damp washcloth to Rosie, said, “I’ll be right back,” and crossed the hall and snapped on the light in the other bath. This medicine cabinet contained far less, only the overnight amenities which a thoughtful hostess would provide, but the effect of a frantic, uncaring search was the same.

  She felt a flash of compassion and guilt. When had she seen her aunt last? Two weeks tomorrow, when they had gone to see a group of touring aboriginal dancers, woolly-haired and ashy-gray, whose crouching prowl with knees lifted high, accompanied only by a strange clacking instrument and culminating in a leap, was enough to bring a chill to the spine.

  Mrs. Balsam, coming back for a drink at Amanda’s house afterwards, had seemed her usual self—“How would you like to have one of those running after you in a bad temper?”—but then Amanda herself had been somewhat preoccupied for a month. It occurred to her now that her aunt might have been taking a medication more dramatic than she cared to admit to, something in, say, the nitroglycerine class, and become panicky when she mislaid it.

  In the other bathroom, Rosie was sitting on the floor and applying the washcloth industriously to her perfectly clean feet; was this out of deference to the guest room, or some association with hospital-bed baths? Amanda tucked her in, opened one window a cautious few inches, remembered her own spotlit feeling out in the dark with Drougette and drew the flowery curtains together. She was about to turn out the light when Rosie sat up in alarm and said, “Where my raggie?”

  Luckily, Maria Lopez had remembered even in her haste to pack the strip of frayed and knotted cloth, no-colored from countless washings, which had once been the pink satin binding of a crib blanket and was now Rosie’s cherished sleeping companion. Amanda put this dubious talisman into the small hand, said goodnight, and left the door half open so that light from the hall streamed reassuringly over the foot of the bed. Then, although she was not fanatically tidy by nature, and certainly not in someone else’s house, she straightened the contents of both medicine cabinets.

  It was consciously the erasure of something warped, which she wished she hadn’t seen at all.

  The man in the shelter was ignorant of the jostling and toppling he had done in his one excursion out of hiding here. That had been obscured from him by his rage at the fact that he had found no antibiotic for his flaming, throbbing hand; no painkiller other than aspirin, to which he was dangerously allergic.

  He had been driven precipitately below again, clutching a tube of antiseptic cream from which the cap had fallen loose, by the rumble of some heavy vehicle approaching the house. It wasn’t an ordinary car, and it threw him into a frenzy of fear. Suppose the old woman had discovered somehow that he was here, suppose the dog had sniffed him out?

  The cut, a deep jagged tear inflicted by barbed-wire two nights earlier, had infected at once. Climbing and then descending the ladder had been agony, and seemed to have extended the area of red around the puffed-out heel of his hand. If all went as planned he would be out of here tomorrow afternoon, but he couldn’t bear this pounding, suppurating thing that long; he was beginning to have a terror of gangrene, of being shut up here with his own smell, of ultimately losing his hand.

  The shelter was very cold. The electric heater had worked for only two or three hours, so he had spent most of his time stretched out in a lower bunk, blanket huddled around him. Now, by an association of ideas, it occurred to him that penicillin and other antibiotics were often kept in a refrigerator.

  The old woman had to go to bed sometime. After his single expedition to the upper regions he thought he could find the refrigerator in the dark, and if in spite of all his caution she woke up and came out and found him, she was, after all, an old woman.

  Chapter 4

  There was nothing about her to suggest that by the middle of Christmas week Ellie Peale’s name would feature in newspaper headlines, her face flash out of television screens. The pose used, a three-quarter view in which she gazed questioningly at the camera, seemed to indicate her own surprise at such a turn of events.

  She was nineteen; small, five feet one inch, and slender, a hundred pounds, with brown eyes and darker brown hair. Her scrubbed appearance in the photograph was not the accident of being caught unprepared; she had a soap-and-water cleanness that was lively rather than prim, and a fastidious modeling to her mouth. She lived at home with her mother and stepfather, but like most of her contemporaries looked forward to an apartment of her own or at least a shared one. Hence her job at the Speedy-Q, a dim and not very successful little convenience store which sat by itself on a country road, suffering from the lack of an adjacent gas station or hamburger place.

  Harvey Sweet was surprised and mildly amused to discover, early in December, that his half brother seemed to be developing a crush on the girl. Although it was closer than the nearest shopping center, he and Teresa patronized the Speedy-Q only in cases of vital necessity because of the inflated prices, but he went in one evening for a dozen eggs and a better look at Ellie Peale.

  His vague recollection was correct: She was nothing more than a high-school kid, who might have been passable given pompoms and a short cheerleader’s skirt instead of her tailored beige shirt and brown slacks. He remarked jauntily as she rang up the price for the eggs that they weren’t golden, just plain white, and was taken aback at the coolness of her glance above the distant little smile she gave him. She was suddenly not a yearbook stereotype but a girl who had been spoken to familiarly and didn’t much care for it.

  He advised Claude at the first opportunity that he was wasting his time. “I know that type. They’re not pretty, so they make the first move and cut you dead.”

  He was aware as he spoke that it was that very remoteness and clear, dark-eyed pallor—the armor of a young girl working late and usually alone, although he did not recognize this—that was challenging to Claude. Still, Sweet reflected to himself after delivering his seasoned counsel, Ellie Peale was at least single; there was no husband to erupt with a shotg
un.

  There was a moral involved here as well. In spite of the frequent quarrels after which Teresa stormed back to her parents, or he hit her and walked off to spend morose, beer-drinking days with friends, Sweet was faithful to his vivid shrew, and disapproved strongly of any involvement with married women.

  By the time Christmas week arrived, he had forgotten the whole thing.

  There was always stepped-up activity for the police at this time of year: more parties and consequently more traffic accidents; shoplifters, the inevitable break-ins where householders had piled presents around a tree clearly visible through a front window, purse-snatchings and occasional assaults in the parking lots of shopping centers open late.

  That was the expected. Early on Wednesday evening, however, came a report that two prisoners had escaped from the state penitentiary and were believed headed for Albuquerque. As one of them had relatives in the North Valley, local deputies assisted the state police in the setting up of roadblocks there. When an excited call came in from a man who had just witnessed the abduction of a girl clerk from a convenience store on Quivira Road, there was some delay in getting a car to the scene. (It did not facilitate matters that the caller had a slight speech impediment which, at this time of night, might have been interpreted as something quite different.)

  By this time the manager had arrived for his routine closing-up, and was able to give the police Ellie Peale’s name and address. The contents of the cash register were apparently intact—a distinct oddity, as scarcely a week went by without the holding-up of a convenience store somewhere in the city.

  The witness, a dapper and entirely sober Mr. De La O, proved to be scarcely that at all. He had just pulled up in front, he said, when the door opened and a black girl came running out and leaped into the passenger side of a car with its exhaust pipe sending out steady pulses of gray.