. . . She had a very pale pink linen scarf, but as Rosie was given to putting her talisman in her mouth the texture would be unacceptable. The satin binding on her white wool blanket was also white, but it would have to do. With her nail scissors, hands tending to shake, Amanda severed an approximating length, tied two knots in it close to one end so that it bore some resemblance to the tangled original, and crumpled it instinctively into her pocket as fast, hard footsteps crossed the front hall. When Dickens appeared in the doorway she was tying one low fur boot.
“I didn’t tell you to take all night about it ”
There was a near-intimacy about his sharpness, but for just a flash there had been something in his gaze so frightening that to keep herself from identifying it Amanda said the first thing that came into her head. “He’s making you do this, isn’t he? You don’t even seem to like him very much.”
In the telephone booth there had been too little space for him to hit her; here, with the bed between them, there was too much, but the same impulse was there. “Mind your own goddamned business,” said Dickens in a tight snarl, and although it should have had a ludicrous ring under the circumstances it did not. He jerked his head at her. “Get going.”
All of Amanda’s nightmares had to do with extreme heights—and this, waking, was the high diving board with no water in the pool, the dizzying lip from which there was no hope of a broken fall because the cliff curved inward. She walked stiffly ahead of Dickens into the living room, concentrating on the child in the telephone chair.
“Look, Rosie.” She was bright about it, drawing the white satin ribbon from her pocket as triumphantly as if they were alone. She had to be bright, because a buried memory was beginning to stir; she could feel it growing an icy frill around her ribs. “Raggie. I washed and ironed him.”
On any other occasion it would have been as impossible to deceive the child in this matter as to soothe a bereaved mother by offering an alien infant, but Rosie’s need for comfort was so desperate that she hesitated for only a second before putting out a wondering hand. While Amanda held her breath, because this was of paramount importance, she fingered one of the snowy knots, her haggard little face absorbed, and put it testingly in her mouth. At an incredulous snicker from the killer she snatched it out again, flinching against the chair back.
Amanda spun, her control snapped. “You savage. ”
Che next few seconds went by so fast that she was not even sure who was responsible for what. The flat face sharpened with rage, the long eyes blazed as though matches had been lit in them, he came out of the doorway at her. Dickens, also in motion, barked a single odd-sounding syllable. An end table went crashing, carrying a lamp and an ashtray with it, Amanda’s thigh met a bookcase corner with astonishing pain—and suddenly everything stopped, and she was standing there with her heart knocking coldly in her throat.
Ellie Peale had said something like that just before she died, observed the pounding blood, and there had been no one to restrain the man who was like a wolf leaping out of its cage. Dickens might be acting under duress of some kind—there was no mistaking the barely contained anger that had been emanating from him, unconnected with Amanda—but in a moment of crisis he was in command.
That he had intervened was not, she recognized, steadying herself unobtrusively against the bookcase because her legs had gone boneless with reaction, reassuring in the least; he was taking care of her as he would take care of a pack animal which was the only means to safe ground. She made herself look at him, as if by doing so she could escape from that other balked stare, and his eyes flashed steadily back at her, more icily warning than anything he could have said.
And from the corner of the chair came a series of snuffling gasps. Rosie knew the punishment for crying —one side of her face was still slightly swollen—but the explosion of violence had been too much for her.
Amanda reached her and picked her up as Dickens made a purposeful move, but he was only retrieving the toppled lamp, which was now flaring crazily down the room at the Christmas tree, and the ashtray. There had been a single cigarette end in it; he picked that up too and rubbed a sprinkle of ash into the rug with his shoe.
So that the room should look calm and orderly when—
“Okay,” said Dickens, and now he did walk toward her. “Hand her over.”
Amanda’s arms tightened helplessly, because they were about to go out into the night again, she with the man who moments ago would have killed her with his hands, injury or not; Rosie with Dickens, who didn’t like children and had a low threshold of annoyance.
She said over the tumbled dark head cradled against her shoulder, “You’d better keep it in mind that this child is known to half the doctors and nurses in Albuquerque.”
So that if you think there was a hue and cry over Ellie Peale . . .
Dickens exhibited his white and wintry teeth as he took Rosie from her, carelessly, as if she were a bundle of draperies destined for the cleaner. “You keep it in mind,” he said, and snapped off the lamp.
There was clearly no need for communication between the two men; they had taken care of that while Amanda, dispatched to her bedroom, was fashioning the ribbon talisman now clutched so tensely in Rosie’s fist. Amanda smiled at her, her mouth feeling as stiff as canvas, but in return got only a dubious flicker, as for a stranger whose intentions had not yet been determined. How long before the child would trust anyone again?
In the hall, Dickens paused alertly, staring at the Irish wool scarf hanging from the coatrack. “Put that over your head,” he ordered.
Because they were in Amanda’s territory, and top-gathered hair would make a distinctive silhouette in the unlikely event of other headlights washing through the Volkswagen? To reach the scarf she had to pass a small round mirror, recessed in pottery like a miniature well, and at once the memory which had been lying in wait reached out and struck at her.
Eyes. Not mirrored but seen across a steel examining table on which crouched her miniature black poodle— twelve years ago, thirteen? He had been hit by a car, but glancingly, and because the only evidence of dam age was a trickle of blood from one nostril, Amanda, knowing nothing of the internal injuries sustained when there was no massive bone structure as a shield, had thought he would be all right and have learned his lesson and never go near the road again. She did register the fact that the poodle, usually a dramatic trembler in these antiseptic surroundings, did not even quiver when one of his lower eyelids was pulled down.
The vet had said calmly, “Okay, William,” after a long look, and injected the contents of a syringe under the passive black wool. William had subsided gently under Amanda’s fingers, on his way to death although she didn’t know it then.
But that look: detached, dispassionate, for a creature about whom the ultimate and necessary decision had been made. All these years later, in her bedroom doorway, a man she had never seen until tonight had turned it upon her.
Somehow or other, Amanda got the scarf knotted under her chin. She noted in a lunatic way that for all its feathery appearance it was quite scratchy. The murderer who was to companion her opened the front door, the hall light was extinguished, they went out into the bitter dark.
A few miles away, hours later than if broken promises had not been involved, the van in which Ellie Peale had been conducted to her death was being towed under police supervision from its hiding place by the river.
Chapter 15
The young Archibeque boys had no business being at the river. A first cousin of theirs had drowned in it that summer, swimming in an innocuous depth of water that masked a deep hole, and they had given solemn undertakings to stay away from the area at ail seasons. They honored their undertakings as a rule because Ray Archibeque’s reaction to disobedience did not take the form of reproachful lectures about mutual respect but was, instead, fast and physical.
Against this, on an afternoon of Christmas vacation, had to be balanced the fact that a friend of the boys had recently trapped a badger
at the river, and that their father would be safely pinned to the dwindling supply of Christmas trees which, at this late date, he was selling at reduced prices. At three o’clock, Donald, nine, and Ruben, twelve, made a quiet exit riverwards.
With them they took their dog, Rusty, a freckle-faced, yellow-eyed animal who would have looked thoroughly at home in sled harness. The dog was delighted when he discovered the goal of the expedition; he often went by himself to chase squirrels or the half-wild cats abandoned as kittens, and on lucky days roll luxuriously on a putrescent carcass.
It was he who discovered the van. The afternoon was sharpening and the light beginning to dim when Donald and Ruben called him, having seen no badger tracks or indeed tracks of any kind. Instead of coming, Rusty bolted after a fugitive rustling in the underbrush, and could presently be heard doing some furious scratching. When the boys caught up with him, he was christening the front wheel of a vehicle in the immemorial fashion of his kind.
Donald confined himself to the comic strips in the evening paper. Ruben often read the front page, and looked at the televised local news, and there was frequent mention of a light-colored van in some connection with a crime.
This van was gray, and had certainly been well draped with brush and matted leaves in an isolated spot.
They had nothing for purposes of writing down the license number, and discussed and argued over it on the way home until it became a mishmash of letters and numbers. They found their father in a thunderously bad mood, preparing one of his difficult widower’s dinners and demanding, “Okay, let’s hear it, where you kids been?”
“Over at Pete’s,” said Donald, smooth and inventive although he was the younger.
So that was one thing to be recanted, right there, if they decided to say anything about their discovery.
Both boys were allowed to stay up late on nonschool nights, and at ten-thirty Ruben could bear it no longer. He had no sense of civic responsibility, but one of excitement and anticipation of his name in the papers: “Ruben Archibeque, 12, of 8821 Grove Circle, led police . . .“A trapped badger was as nothing beside this.
He forced a reluctant Donald out of bed, because in some mysterious way his brother could sometimes blunt their father’s temper, and padded into the living room and placed himself in front of the lighted television set. “Dad? Will you promise not to hit us if we tell you something?”
A can of beer came down in dangerous slow motion. “I have something to hit you for?”
“I don’t think we should tell him. He’ll hit us anyway,” said the practiced Donald.
Archibeque glared at him, drank, and squeezed the empty can into aluminum pleats. “I knew you kids had been up to something. So? I’m waiting.”
He looked capable of vaulting out of his chair, in spite of his exaggeratedly patient posture, and Ruben hastily offered the evening newspaper, folded to a story on the lower left side of the front page. “We went looking for the van at the river and I bet anything we found it,” he said, and then, to further bury the three dangerous words, “It’s this kind of light gray and it’s locked and it was all covered up with branches and stuff and it has a New Mexico license plate.”
The tale of actually searching for the van, like boy detectives, was so preposterous that it succeeded. Archibeque, who had started galvanically at the mention of the river, sank back in his chair, his dumbfounded gaze swiveling slowly from Ruben to Donald, who, briefed at the last minute, was wearing an expression of pride and virtue.
Long, chancy seconds went by before Archibeque glanced down at the paper, glanced up again, asked, “Whereabouts at the river?”
. . . Wallet with driver’s license, the required glasses, gold cigarette lighter which had been the last anniversary present from her husband: proof, as if it had been required, that Mrs. Balsam had not planned a departure. But her Rabbit was gone—with whom at the wheel, and what vehicle accompanying or following it?
Justin abandoned thought. For lack of anything better to do with it, he thrust the handbag back into hiding and took the time to stuff towels into the glassless space in the patio door before he switched off the lights and let himself out. Apple had had notions of going with him, and her sorrowful cries carried a little way into the dark.
The two sets of tracks led to the town center, but there he lost them in a sudden welter as though a party had broken up somewhere. A left turn at the first traffic light would lead him ultimately to Amanda’s house; Justin persevered instead to the darkened volunteer fire station. At the back, as he had hoped, was the small police station, its lights swallowed up by drawn Venetian blinds.
The dispatcher on duty—even in his distraction it struck Justin that he looked like a heavily moustached Mona Lisa—put aside a thick volume on real-estate practice and listened attentively, although his gaze had lingered over the deep fresh scratch on Justin’s wrist. At the mention of Mrs. Balsam he frowned, held up a staying finger, and pulled open a drawer. “There was something on her in the day report.”
Justin lit a cigarette, his hand surprising him with a slight unsteadiness. The dispatcher scanned the sheet in front of him, shook his head in silent disgust at something, flipped it over. “Here we are. At one-nineteen, patrol car two responded . . .” He trailed off, evidently feeling that the official entry was not for Justin’s ears, read briefly, and glanced up. “Mrs. Balsam was found unconscious outside her house and taken by ambulance to the hospital,” he said. “It looked like a stroke to the attendant.”
Justin listened to the few details in blank astonishment. A natural disaster had never occurred to him in connection with Amanda’s lighthearted, energetic aunt, although now that he thought about it he remembered Amanda, not a nagger, raising her eyebrows occasionally over Mrs. Balsam’s brisk plying of the salt shaker at lunch or dinner. Hypertension?
Plus the discovery that she had unwarily left a door unlocked and become the victim of malicious mischief? The smashed mustard jar would be in keeping, if a semiliquid substance would have stayed dampish that long, and so might the severing of the telephone cord. Justin had not opened any drawers; for all he knew, they might have disclosed all kinds of unpleasantness.
But this theory did not explain the concealment of Mrs. Balsam’s handbag, unless the parcel-delivery service girl who had found her had put it there for safekeeping, and car theft did not come under the head of mischief. Much more urgently, where was Amanda?
The dispatcher, watching with his Mona Lisa eyes, pushed the telephone across. “Maybe she’s home right now,” he suggested.
Justin dialed with a sense of futility. Still, he gave Amanda time to wake out of a deep sleep, peer at the clock, and walk from her bedroom to the living room at a snail’s pace before he hung up.
A call came in. The dispatcher swung his chair around, did some alert jotting, and then pressed keys and spoke into a transmitter, relaying an address and a string of numbers. When he turned back to Justin he was tolerant but brisk.
Women of all ages were eccentric, his shrug and spread hands implied, and young women changed their minds with frequency. What more likely than that Miss Morley had borrowed her aunt’s car with her own out of commission? He did not actually say that Amanda had decided to rejoin her male companion of earlier that evening, but the possibility was clearly on the air. So was his desire to get back to his real-estate book.
Justin contained himself. He said that he had every reason to believe that his fiancee (he had boldly identified Amanda as such in order to obtain a hearing at all) had done no such thing, and that under all the circumstances he was extremely worried about her. Would the dispatcher at least put out a description of the car along with a request that Amanda call him at once?
Small-town police forces did this kind of thing routinely, and after all Mrs. Balsam was a resident. The dispatcher made a few good-tempered notes. Justin did not know the Volkswagen’s plate number, so with a queer wrench at his heart he added what her driver’s license said of Amanda
but did not really describe her at all: five-feet-six, brown hair, hazel eyes. The child in question was about two.
“May I—” an urgent notion had entered his head “—use the phone again? It’s just possible that my fiancee is at the hospital.”
He didn’t believe it, he didn’t believe any of the suggestions offered to him, particularly that of Amanda haring off after Williams with little Rosie Lopez in tow, but here he might happen upon a trace of her and gain some enlightenment about Mrs. Balsam at the same time.
“Help yourself,” said the dispatcher, furtively sliding his hook closer. “Might be quickest to call Ace Ambulance and find out where they took her.”
It turned out to have been St. Swithin’s. By firmly establishing himself once more as Amanda’s fiance, Justin learned that Mrs. Balsam’s condition was somewhat improved although still guarded; she had, in fact, been able to send a communication to her niece, to whom the nurse at the other end of the line had spoken.
“When?” asked Justin, stunned and staring at the man across the desk.
“Oh, I’d say about fifteen or twenty minutes ago.”
“At her house?” Idiotic; where else could they have reached her?
“I would assume so. It’s the number she left with us, anyway.”
“Did Mrs. Balsam say—” began Justin, and was interrupted with a certain crispness: “I’m afraid you’d have to ask Miss Morley about that.”
Justin thanked the nurse and hung up. Unnecessarily, because her voice had quacked clearly around the small office, he said, “She’s home. They just talked to her.”
The dispatcher tore his sheet of notes from the desk pad, crumpled it, and dropped it into a wastebasket.
All’s well that ends well,” he said cheerfully, and had his book open before Justin reached the door.
That simple? The invasion of the house taking place long before Amanda got there, the innocent-looking telephone going unnoticed until much later? No. It was a measure of his state of mind that Justin remembered only now the unanswered ringing on Mrs. Balsam’s line all evening.
The Menace Within Page 13
