The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  And there was no one else.

  They passed the church with its hidden, unstirring occupant—and then her car, looking almost prehistorically dead in its snowy shroud. With the drifting and powdering of white, no one could guess at the state of its tires.

  The pickup jolted sharply as one wheel struck whatever it was that Amanda had hit earlier. The hitherto voiceless man let out a harsh strangled protest, and Dickens swung his head to glance across at him. “Okay, hang on, we’ll get you something.”

  That peculiar rigidity, with its suggestion of crouch: Was he a drug addict; had he killed Ellie Peale in some disoriented frenzy? Or—for the first time Amanda remembered the two ransacked medicine cabinets— was it possible that she had managed to harm him before she died, featherweight though she was?

  With startling suddenness the headlights reached out to a familiar stretch of rail fence, the quenched black glimmer of windows, a snowed-over dark blue Volkswagen Rabbit. For the second time that night, Amanda had arrived at Mrs. Balsam’s house.

  In the instant before Dickens cut the ignition, she had a feeling of total unreality. It seemed incredible, in her present circumstances, that she had ever come here with the simple notion of feeding the dog and the horse; that, even entrusted with the forgotten Rosie, she had cooked her dinner, watched the televised news, said goodnight without a qualm to tall, erect Colonel Robinson while all this was gathering around her. (But there had been a moment of real fear before she found the light switch inside the front door; had the very air carried a warning?)

  Apple was letting off a volley of deep-throated barks. “Out,” said Dickens tersely, holding the door open on his side and jerking his head at Rosie. “Leave her here.”

  “I can’t. She has to go to the bathroom,” said Amanda, equally curt, and it was true that Rosie had begun some anxious fidgeting. She’s only two.”

  “ . . . Okay, said Dickens with obvious distaste. He leaned past Amanda as she got out, addressing the other man. “Come on.”

  As a safeguard, in case she could put her hand on a weapon in the house? Of course she could; any kitchen was full of them. The drawer where she had found the flashlight for her expedition to the corral also had contained skewers, a roasting fork, all-purpose scissors. Useless, even if they would allow her into the kitchen, with a child as pawn.

  At the front door, Dickens produced a ring of keys which Amanda supposed were a duplicate of her aunt’s, found the right one without difficulty, did not have to feel for the light switch. This casual almost-ownership was a ridiculous thing to register a tiny Hare of rage at, and it certainly didn’t matter that one off-white wall now wore a jagged splash of yellow-brown or that a smashed mustard bottle had leaked the rest of its contents onto the gray-blue rug.

  After her first horror at having to sort out three people the Afghan came forward in a hostessy rush, dancing first to Amanda and then to Dickens, keeping well away from his companion. The bulbs on the miniature Christmas tree caught a current of air and made curtsies in rose and pink and silver. Amanda turned her head and gazed inescapably at the man who had risen nightmarishly out of the floor.

  Inevitably, because the black girl’s glimpse of him in the convenience store had been alarmed and fleeting, he bore only a passing resemblance to the artist’s sketch. There was a certain flattening to the opaque-skinned features, but his mouth was almost arrogantly defined, his face pointed rather than oval. He wore jeans and a denim jacket. His long dark eyes stared back at her as intensely as a strange animal’s.

  He held his right hand, the clear cause of his concentrated stillness, curved stiffly in front of him, elbow out as though supported by an invisible sling. The flesh was swollen and inflamed and glazed-looking, suggesting a red-hot throb which would have made Amanda wince if it had been anyone else. Had Ellie Peale used her teeth in her desperation, or had he encountered a scorpion or black widow in the cellar?

  “Come on, make it snappy,” said Dickens edgily, and Amanda removed her magnetized glance and followed him along the hall, accompanied by Apple. He entered Mrs. Balsam’s bathroom ahead of her, made a swift inspection of the medicine cabinet, took out and pocketed the safety razor and packet of blades. His frightening gloves—from a surgical supply store?—fitted him as tightly and shinily as healed burns.

  An icy little breath was seeping from behind the locked door of Mrs. Balsam’s bedroom, where the window stood wide, but Dickens’ attention was elsewhere as he stepped back to let Amanda pass. “Hurry up,” he said. “And fix your face.”

  Fix her. . . P Amanda could scarcely believe she had heard that. He was nervous, she thought, perching Rosie; he had been forced out of his usual poise, and he wasn’t used to it. It was not a cause for elation. Perhaps out of that enforced physical closeness in the phone booth, she was beginning to develop what was almost a rapport with Dickens, and something told her that there was a new core of fury in him which might erupt all over her as surrogate.

  And she knew now why they were all here.

  It was some time since she had seen Rosie in the light, and a fresh worry assailed her as she washed the small face and hands, rapidly, because she did not want to be ordered out of here. The child’s huge dark eyes seemed to have retreated, her always peaked features looked wizened. Rosie, who had survived in a cocoon of protection—

  Her forehead didn’t feel hot. Still, Amanda reached into the cabinet for two aspirins to drop into her pocket, in case of emergency, and was confronted by her own reflection.

  Her top-piled hair had continued to escape fringily. Only a ghost of her lipstick remained. Heavy dust picked up in the church had somehow become transferred to her face, emphasizing her pallor and the eyes which were at present her only real color; she might have been an evacuee from some natural disaster, and that did not fit in with Dickens’ plan.

  Too bad, thought Amanda, and realized on the heels of that that there were two of them, that Dickens might just be vengeful enough to spit on his handkerchief and — She used soap and water, toweled her face dry, said urgently to Rosie, “They aren’t going to hurt us, but don’t cry, they don’t like it,” and opened the door. She was just in time: Dickens was starting along the hall, his face set.

  “I have to get Rosie’s pills,” said Amanda quickly. “They’re in the guest room.”

  Because he would have only contemptuous dismissal for vitamins, and how long before (don’t look at any other possibility) would they be released and safe? As it was, another echo of distaste came from Dickens, but after a second’s hesitation he walked to the guest room door, again entering first.

  Amanda went at once to the small suitcase. With a businesslike economy that made her heart sink, Dickens straightened the scarcely disturbed covers on the near twin bed, erasing the fact that Rosie had slept there. The Afghan had bustled in, convinced that she was a member of a happy group, and Amanda cast a glance of despair at the delicate golden face that came dipping inquisitively into the suitcase. Apple was a fast and wiry jumper. If she had been of another breed, the kind ready to attack on command—but she was not. Having discovered that there was nothing edible among Rosie’s scanty belongings, she was nosing affectionately at Dickens’ hand.

  It wasn’t only affection, Amanda realized, dropping the bottle of vitamins into her coat pocket as she stood up; it was expectation as well. Apple was looking to Dickens for her dinner because at some previous time he had fed her. He was of course—it fell neatly into place, very late—the man who had returned her to Mrs. Balsam and refused a reward.

  And hadn’t there been something about repairs to the corral, so that he would know the quickest and easiest point at which to let the mare out? Wonderment at the delay in her own recognition brought Amanda’s gaze up from the dog to Dickens’ eyes, blue, a little narrowed, watching and aware.

  But he considered Mrs. Balsam as good as dead. It would certainly not cross his mind to telephone the hospital and perhaps learn—

  Apple backed pr
ecipitately into her shins. “Your— that man seems to have an infected hand,” said Amanda, pretending not to have caught motion in the hall behind Dickens. “I have streptomycin and codeine at home.”

  She did, as legacy of a severe attack of tonsillitis. Like the feigned necessity for calling the Lopezes, it was a desperate time-gaining maneuver, a delay in Dickens plan for her—and the man in the doorway, speaking for the first time, said abruptly, “Then let’s go there.”

  His voice was heavy and soft and edgeless, like condensed fog. Dickens looked hard at Amanda and walked out of the guest room. From the far end of the hall there was some urgent muttering and then the unmistakable impact of a fist smashing against the wall, a statement of rage and pain.

  Dickens came back, his face tight. “[ warned you once, but I’ll warn you again.” His icy stare shifted to Rosie and stayed there for a deliberate heartbeat or two. “If you don’t have that stuff, all hell is going to break loose.”

  It did not need embroidering. “I have it,” said Amanda.

  In the living room, she had a long tense moment alone with the other man, who paced without speaking in a kind of lithe shamble, before the other part of the house went dark and Dickens appeared with her handbag and the keys to the Rabbit. Mrs. Balsam’s bag, from which he had taken them, was nowhere to be seen— was he afraid that a cleaning woman might come in the morning and wonder why her employer had gone off without it?

  Apple had given up on Dickens, now glancing around him and moving purposefully in the direction of the front door, and raised a fringy paw to scrape remindingly at Amanda’s coat. The dog was unaware of any perfidy, and her eyes glowed with trust. She had been all day without food, and Amanda remembered the water bowl in the kitchen as being empty too. “Can’t I at least feed—?”

  “No,” said Dickens, a short chop of sound, and once again, as she had known he must, took Rosie from her and nodded at the denim-clad man. “He rides with you.”

  Rosie did not struggle over the transfer; unaware of impending separation, she simply turned her small questioning face to Amanda, whose throat closed before it would allow her to say steadily, “We’re going for a ride, Rosie. We’re going to my house.”

  Dickens had a finger on the light switch. He did not ask directions, as if that would allow Amanda to lead him on a wild-goose chase or even to the house of the man to whom she had tried to send a distress signal. He said only, “I’ll be behind you, all the way. Better be careful not to lose me.”

  He plunged the living room into darkness then, and Amanda walked out into the night ahead of both men, hearing Apple’s disappointed whimpers as the door closed with finality. The Volkswagen’s windows had to be cleared of snow, and that was left to her, but in less than two minutes she was in the driver’s seat, hands wet and burning with cold because at some unrememberable point she had lost her gloves, with Ellie Peale’s murderer beside her.

  When he had said goodnight to Amanda’s friend Williams, Justin proceeded to his kitchen to make himself the most delicious meal that occurred to him in his extremity: a fried egg sandwich. He felt as if he had not eaten in two days.

  He had been half right in his latest surmise, he reflected, disinterring a small iron pan with the resultant shrieking collapse of every other cooking vessel he owned; Mrs. Balsam was away. It was reassuring to know that Amanda was safely under cover, in this weather, but there was something undeniably flat about receiving the information secondhand. To an ear in the inveterate habit of attaching flesh and blood to disembodied voices, Williams had sounded tall, correct, and well dressed. (But would he have expected Amanda to take up with a rude threadbare dwarf?)

  Butter to sizzle; presently, egg. A familiar feeling was beginning to steal over Justin, but he ignored it and pressed two slices of bread down into the toaster; white, which he bought occasionally under the censorious regard of shoppers with brown or black loaves. Amanda was also of the whole-wheat persuasion, although where liver pate and transparent rings of onion were concerned her principles fell by the wayside.

  Amanda. For just a second she seemed to look at him out of the air: copper-brown hair which she wore in a variety of ways, very clear and noticing greenish eyes, long vertical dimple in her right cheek when she smiled. It was warming but odd that she had thought to relay a message to him on the evening when he had discovered her to be an absolute necessity, but hadn’t been able to tell her so or find out whether she felt even remotely the same way about him.

  He assembled his sandwich, distributing a little ketchup here and there along with salt and pepper. And the inevitable happened: Ravenous hunger had turned into the full and leaden feeling of having eaten far too much. He took a single bite, had to chew interminably to force it down his throat, deposited his handiwork in the garbage, and went morosely to bed.

  Chapter 12

  I’ll be behind you, all the way.

  Amanda had never driven the Rabbit, and would have felt a certain hesitance with a strange dashboard and a different response even by herself on a dry sunlit road. Under Dickens’ stark threat, her hands had a tendency to shake, and after she had located the windshield-wiper knob she got into reverse with a noise that suggested gear-stripping, wobbled her way into first, skidded going out of the driveway because the accelerator pedal was a livelier one than her own. The pickup’s headlights began to follow steadily.

  Which of them had the knife used to slash her tires? It could not be the murder weapon, because no sane man . . . and there went that argument.

  She had known when she saw the grotesque hand of the man beside her that she was to be recruited as driver in an enforced change of plan. Had they found their bolthole closed, or been alerted by something on the police radio? Whichever the case, there was an element of safety in this particular dividing. The authorities by now might be thinking in terms of a body rather than a captive, but would they be looking for Ellie Peale’s killer in the company of a woman?

  Amanda, glancing up at the headlights in the rearview mirror, discovered that she did not even want to think about the police at the moment. Would she dare, in the unlikely event of meeting a patrol car, slew deliberately toward it and stake everything on one fast burst: “This is the man who murdered Ellie Peale and the truck behind me has a kidnapped child in it”?

  No, she would not. No officer would act instantly on such a wild declaration—she could envision being asked for her driver’s license and registration—and she believed implicitly Dickens’ statement that he would mislay Rosie if he felt threatened. He was hanging well back, and once they were off this stretch of road he would be able to dart off into the night if he chose. And, approaching it from the front, she had never seen the pickup’s license plate.

  . . . Here was the crossroads, and the telephone booth where she had listened helplessly to Justin’s acceptance of her and Rosie’s safety and well-being. If she had known then that the man in the passenger seat was incapable of driving away at a signal from the flashlight . . . ? Even now, with the memory of that savage impact of fist against wall, she would not have risked it.

  Ahead and below were the scattered streetlights of the town center, a quarter-mile of small businesses, bars and eating places, tiny library, police and fire stations. Having grown somewhat more accustomed to the car, Amanda reached for the pack of Mrs. Balsam’s cigarettes on the dashboard, shook one free, lit it with a match from the accompanying folder. At once, the man who had been staring silently out the side window swung his head and said in his strange voice, “Put that out. I’m allergic.”

  Allergic. Having stopped a young girl’s heart with a knife, and so recently helped cram her body back into hiding, he was troubled by secondhand smoke. Accumulated hatred and rage boiled up into Amanda’s throat. “What a shame. Open the window,” she said, and defiantly lifted her cigarette again.

  Instantly, it was snatched from her with such force that its core struck the inside of the steering wheel, scattering bright fragments into her
lap. A smell of burning wool arose. After one lightning glance downward she kept her eyes on the road while she slapped at her coat, but the car had taken a sharp little veer.

  “Watch it,” said the man conversationally with a backward jerk of his head. “He doesn’t like that kid.”

  Amanda didn’t answer him. She had drawn a deep trembling breath and was saying calmingly to herself that smoking (like ingesting certain food dyes and nitrites and saccharine, and being exposed to asphalt and standing at curbside in big-city rush-hour traffic and drinking the water in some places) was not really a good idea, and that from cutting down she intended to stop completely.

  But under the personal governance of this near-animal?

  The traffic light at which she would turn left in the direction of her house blinked from yellow to red. The center might have looked festive an hour ago, but its Christmas decorations had been thriftily turned off, except for a little tree in a hardware store window, and its overhead ropes of tinsel and stars were extinguished by the snow. The town was not quite asleep, however; on the near corner, the door of Shelley’s Bar and Grille started open and then fell shut, as though someone inside were saying protracted goodnights.

  These men need me, at least right now, realized Amanda suddenly, and not with a noticeably black eye or a cut lip. As the door of the bar opened and a man and woman emerged, she reached for the cigarettes and matches. “I’m driving you because I have to, but that’s all,” she said steadily. “I didn’t have to tell you that I have medicine for your hand, and I am going to smoke this cigarette.”