The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  Amanda herself—inexplicably not answering her own telephone a few minutes ago, or had she silenced it after a long day containing a severe shock?—would explain it to him in a further few minutes. Still, he felt as tense as before, and it took a sudden sharp skid at the traffic light to ease his foot on the gas pedal. He drove the rest of the way with heightened awareness, because these were exactly the circumstances in which a heifer or other large animal would come blundering into his path.

  Were the fresh furry-edged tire tracks ahead of him the ones that had left Mrs. Balsam’s house? The local population was not limited to Amanda and Williams, however much it might feel that way—but the tracks separated at Amanda’s empty circular driveway. One vehicle had entered at the far end. There was not a single light showing.

  Amanda here, just long enough to talk to the nurse at Saint Swithin’s, and gone again.

  A conflagration of rage and something else sprang up in Justin’s abused stomach. He reminded himself, slamming his door so hard that the car rocked, of the serene occupancy suggested by those two gold windows at Mrs. Balsam’s house. False, so that perhaps this black and sleeping shape . . .

  He had left his headlights on, and this time, on his way to the spare key which Amanda kept in the trough of a birdfeeder hanging outside the living room window, he made a fast examination of the footprints in the snow. One isolated set belonged to a man; the other scuffled trail, as if made by two people in single file, showed the occasional sharp indentation of a woman’s high heels where they had not been dragged over.

  Amanda, almost certainly Williams, and another man.

  Justin located the key, wiped it free of snow and birdseed, and fitted it into the lock. The click of metal almost blotted out a sound from within that turned him cold: a kind of broken gasping, not quite crying. He opened the door, knew where to find the hall light switch, and stood staring down at Rosie Lopez.

  Chapter 16

  Claude. Late, and as if it could help her, Amanda’s brain had identified the single sharp syllable with which Dickens had stopped that deadly rush in her living room. Necessity had jarred it out of him and the response had been instant, so it was the killer’s real name.

  She wished her brain had let it alone. Anyone might ciaim that he had returned from an absence to find his van stolen, but how many Claudes could be found in the immediate vicinity of any given crime? And the natural conclusion to that—

  Amanda would have thought it impossible for fear to actually stop her ears, but in that herded walk to the car she caught only the echo of a wail from Rosie and then Dickens’ voice, savage: “Okay, okay, I’ll get the damned thing.”

  The rag, she thought; the essential talisman. With it, able to pretend that it was the real link to her parents and home and safety, Rosie might fall exhaustedly asleep, not rasping dangerously at Dickens’ nerves. Light from the hall flooded briefly out onto the snow as Amanda half-turned, and there in the doorway was the child in that hard and careless grip, the length of white satin dangling from her fist.

  “Here.” Claude thrust the Volkswagen keys at her so roughly that they seemed momentarily like something else and she stepped instinctively back, off-balance, sliding in the snow. “In,” he said, “fast, and then I’ll tell you where to go.”

  Amanda slid in behind the wheel, the corner of her eye observing the rapid dark shape of Dickens depositing his burden in the pickup. He had entered the driveway from the far end, so that once more she was presented with the plateless front of the truck. Before the discovery of the body in the church she would have found that reassuring; now it seemed only automatic deviousness, as much a part of Dickens as his clear eyes or disarming smile.

  His headlights sprang on, an implacable dazzle: She would have to back out. She turned the key in the ignition, knowing that this was the last leg of the journey, the last—

  Abruptly, without warning, her body became one long tremble, the gearshift and floor pedals felt as strange and terrifying as the controls of a jumbo jet. She had trouble with her breathing. She turned her head away from the merciless flare of light and said with effort, “I don’t—think I can drive.”

  “You’ll drive if you want to see that kid again.” The foggy voice wasn’t any more threatening than a surgeon’s might have been, announcing an inoperable cancer. “Up to the corner and then left.”

  Amanda pulled air into the very bottom of her lungs, let it out slowly, got the car started and hacked. Her hot rush of hatred had a steadying effect, and she registered the fact that one or both of these men knew the valley, although she had never seen either of them before, so that there was no chance of saying that a road was torn up and picking an alternate route of her own.

  To where, and what good would it do anyway?

  She shut that reflection off, realizing it to be as dangerous as lying down to rest in a blizzard. Beside her, Claude spoke only to give last-second, monosyllabic directions: “Go straight.” “Bear right.” Behind her, his headlights like the hugely magnified eyes of some deadly insect, cruised Dickens.

  They were proceeding roughly south, keeping away from the main roads on which, even at this hour and in this weather, there would be a certain amount of traffic. Would they risk the bus terminal, with its departures for ail points? Amanda slid a glance across, and thought that at least a part of the killer’s pain must have been psychosomatic; his right hand, instead of being held rigidly away from him, now rested on his knee.

  He would be able to put it in his pocket. Denims were common enough, and his coatlessness on a cold and snowy night could be explained by the overheating of most terminal buildings; he might have checked it, or left it with a companion. The neatly blocked dark blond wig was transforming. How likely was it in any case, more than forty-eight hours after Ellie Peale had been forced into a van, that the police would be monitoring points of exit?

  It all added up to a reasonably safe escape for Claude and also for Dickens, who could pick his moment to deposit Rosie on a bench and vanish, if there were no witness. Then Amanda must not get near the terminal, she—

  The night was suddenly alive with a two-noted warble, rising into a more imperative siren. In the icy and echo-carrying air it was impossible to tell its direction. Claude twisted in his seat and said, “Get into that driveway, fast. Lights off,”

  Dickens had fallen back at once. Amanda obeyed, turning in between bordering poplars, heart thumping in a mixture of terror and hope. A second emergency vehicle burst into sound and then both died, blocks away to the east and north: an accident, frequent in this area even when the roads were clear. Claude relaxed out of his tensity. “Move. Blink your lights.”

  The house to which the driveway belonged slept tranquilly. Amanda backed and turned, forcing away another wave of trembling, and signaled with the headlight knob. Dickens had found a driveway of his own, and in moments the pickup was sending its warning stings after her.

  How far now? Or rather, how long?

  “Left,” said Claude as they approached a wide fourway stop, and then, when Amanda was in the middle of the intersection, “No, right!”

  She turned the wheel, but not fast enough for him. He seized it, and instinct sent Amanda’s foot to the brake. The snow was not innocuous here; ice had formed in traffic-melted spots and the car went spinning, carrying the night with it. A stretch of adobe wall reeled by and the snow-sculpted bark of an immense cottonwood trunk loomed through the windshield before she got the Rabbit to a halt.

  Incredibly, Claude swore at her. Amanda did not bother to reply that the skid had been his fault. Chest still thudding, she glanced into the rearview mirror to await Dickens’ reaction to this apparent rebellion.

  They were alone, in a matter of seconds, the pickup with Rosie in it had vanished.

  The light gray 1972 Chevrolet van now reposing in the police garage was registered to Claude Eggen, 281a Sevilla, in the northwest quadrant. It said nothing to the naked eye, and an exhaustive examination would
wait until morning. What did not wait was a warrant entitling the police to knock at Eggen’s door in the small hours and search the premises if this should be indicated.

  In view of the nature of the crime and the extensive publicity, plus an editorial in that evening’s newspaper taking the authorities to task for the initial delay, the warrant wasn’t difficult to obtain. The state police had assisted the sheriff’s department from the second day on, and a unit went along as backup.

  In summer, Sevilla Road was green with fields of grapes and patches of chili, its small houses deep in cottonwood shade. Less lovely sights obtruded from the snow: tractors that looked as if they had never run, a broken and dangling swing, a shack which seemed composed of tar paper and aluminum foil. Detective Carroll, in charge tonight, had made inquiries here the year before in connection with the vandalizing of a local school and remembered the atmosphere as tightly buttoned-up: These were hard-working people, it said, who kept out of trouble by minding their own business.

  Two hundred-eightv-one was a cut above the rest, recently painted white cement block with, as their headlights showed, unfortunate pink scrollwork around the door. The mailbox said Patterson. The next mailbox, at the head of a long narrow driveway, said 281a and nothing else.

  The very small house at the end of it, evidently a rental unit, was as totally dark as its neighbors. The driveway continued around one end to what was, in the headlight dazzle, a backyard containing a number of vehicles. The deputy with Carroll got out and walked to the rear of the house; Carroll approached the front door and knocked, even though the unflawed snow was suggestive.

  Deputy Garcia came back, swinging his heavy flashlight. “He’s got four heaps and a kind of garage setup back there,” he reported. “Looks like he fixes them up and sells them.”

  Which might explain a bothersome point: Unlike most people, Eggen was not identified exclusively with a single vehicle.

  A brief conference with the state police officer followed. They had the warrant and the back door was a flimsy one; equally, the law was full of loopholes and Garcia volunteered that he knew a woman named Claude, in which case . . . The numbering would seem to indicate that the Pattersons were the landlords of 281a, and Carroll and the deputy presented themselves under the ornamental pink scrollwork of the house next door.

  Mrs. Patterson, announcing her unhurried arrival by a series of switched-on lamps, proved to be a widow in her trim and well-preserved fifties. She had the fawn-gold hair widely adopted by women of her age, and either slept in her makeup or had taken time to apply it.

  She was indeed the landlady of 281a. Informed of the warrant, she widened her round brown eyes and said, “Oh, but that’s ridiculous. For one thing, Mr. Eggen’s been in Denver for the past couple of days, his sister’s very ill there. He had a friend call me to lock up the house because he left in a terrible hurry.”

  “Did you know the friend?” inquired Carroll.

  “No, and I didn’t ask. Why should I?” demanded Mrs. Patterson, tweaking a fawn-gold curl into place and looking flinty at the same time. “It’s my property, it’s to my interest to protect it. Furthermore, if you’d ever met Cl— Mr. Eggen, you’d know how absurd this all is. He’s a very quiet young man, and very polite.”

  Unlike present company. Something going on there, wondered Carroll? It seemed unlikely, in view of their ages and the police artist’s sketch, but it needed only a quick dip into famous-crime annals to document how many women, often pretty ones, attached themselves as cheerfully as lemmings to men of dubious if not downright sinister appearance.

  This woman had undoubtedly read the newspapers and looked at television—barring infants and the blind, no one in the city could have been entirely immune— and had any faint wonder or uneasiness wiped out by the ailing sister in Denver. People tended largely to believe what they wanted to, particularly if there was a personal relationship involved.

  “Let’s have a look at his place,” said Carroll.

  “Of course, I don’t really know him all that well,” said Mrs. Patterson, walking down the driveway with the three men. She had fallen into step with the state policeman, and her quilted robe under a coat swished around the high-heeled boots for which she had exchanged her slippers. “I’m away all day, I’m a realtor, and weekends are especially busy.”

  Her defensiveness was now cautiously for herself, Carroll noted, and she began to slip into the past tense. “He was quiet, as I said, and paid his rent on time, and I mean what more can you ask? He wasn’t one of those men with a steady procession of lady friends coming and going—”

  That and its implication lay eloquently on the night air as they reached the house and Carroll used the key she had given him and opened Claude Eggen’s front door. In spite of five years on the Chicago police force before coming to New Mexico, he had never lost his nape-prickling curiosity upon entering the private domain of a suspected killer. The beam of Carcia’s flashlight centered on a light switch, and he snapped it on.

  Some places gave themselves away by their very contradiction: Carroll remembered the appalling state of the apartment belonging to an antiseptic woman school principal, and the tenderly cared-for collection of tiny glass and china animals owned by art unemployed cab driver who had wrecked his ex-wife’s house with an axe. At first glance, and in contrast, Eggen’s dwelling said nothing at all.

  The ten-by-twelve living room (Mrs. Patterson informed them with unjustified pride that she rented the place furnished) contained a blue couch and two small armchairs, one blue, one brown; a television set on a stand; and a magazine rack holding several copies of an automotive publication. A single small table was bare of anything except a lamp, its shade retaining dusty cellophane pleats.

  The kitchen opening off to the left was tidy except for a frying pan with congealed grease on the stove and, in the sink, a dried and crusted dinner plate, knife, and fork. On the counter beside it, obvious breakfast utensils reposed in a rubber drainer. In this sector of his life, Eggen was nothing if not neat.

  Garcia, the state policeman, and Mrs. Patterson had proceeded into the bedroom and Carroll joined them there, bothered by this strange featurelessness. They had been assuming all along that the abduction of Ellie Peale was the result of a growing obsession which had finally slipped its leash, a spur-of-the-moment action without heed to consequences—but, consciously or otherwise, the man who lived here appeared to have erased his personality.

  The bedroom was papered in a close pattern of gray and white diamonds. The brown-blanketed bed against one wall was made, the table beside it held a cheap clock-radio. (Eggen was clearly not a smoker, there wasn’t an ashtray in sight.) The rest of the space was largely taken up by a bureau and a chest of drawers. Astonishingly, there was a framed photograph on the bureau.

  It was in color. An attractive, blue-eyed woman whose hair and makeup and dress were an echo of twenty years ago smiled proudly into the camera, her arm through that of a handsome clear-featured boy in graduation cap and gown. Unless the girl witness, Beryl Green, suffered from myopia, the boy could not possibly be Eggen. But the small overalled child in the foreground, gazing up with a blunted profile?

  Garcia had opened the closet door with a practiced thumb and forefinger on the shank of the knob, although it seemed certain that Ellie Peale had never been here. Eggen did not possess an extensive wardrobe: One hanger was occupied by a gray sports coat and slacks, a second by a heavy plaid wool shirt, a third by a raincoat in need of cleaning.

  Behind Carroll, standing in the middle of the room with a landlady’s all-seeing eye, Eggen’s erstwhile champion said crossly, “I had this room papered just before he came in, and he’s gone and smeared it.”

  But the very small cloud on the gray-and-white wallpaper over the bed, at the height and arm-reach of a supine man, wasn’t a smudge. Up close, it was penciling, and it sent a chill through the seasoned Carroll. The state police car carried a camera and it would have to be used, the print time-dated
and witnessed, to record this embryo horror until the wallpaper itself could be lifted off.

  The tiny writing was arranged like a problem in addition, and Eggen had commenced with the simple, besotted equation of third-graders and then gone on to anagrams of two names:

  EP-CE

  Pal

  Gal

  Plague (This when his date invitation had been turned down?)

  Leap

  Chapter 17

  “Hello, Rosie,” said Justin to the tear-tracked little face with terror dying out of it. “Remember me? Amanda’s friend.”

  Rosie bobbed her head fractionally. Her eyelids looked alarmingly swollen.

  Justin crouched down beside her, slowly, so as to give no possible cause for new fright. “Amanda isn’t here, is she?”

  The bob became a decisive wag. “All gone,” said Rosie out of a hoarse throat, and although Justin had heard her apply this locution to lost toys or people departed on shopping errands it had a very final sound in combination with her tears. And the prints of high heels in the snow only went one way.

  I don’t believe it, said Justin harshly to himself, but he picked up the child, unresisting, a strange piece of satin ribbon dangling from her fist, and looked first into the living room—empty, quiet, with a Christmas tree shining at him—and then went through the rest of the house, turning on lights with dread. Relief swarmed through him at the discovery, of Amanda’s wet calf pumps in her bedroom: She had changed into flat heels. The manicure scissors on the bed had obviously been used to carve out the object which Rosie clutched.

  A washcloth was called for—the child’s face was a glistening embodiment of distress—but it would have to wait. Justin headed for the living room and the telephone, getting confirmation from Rosie on the way that there had been two men with Amanda. Had they hurt Amanda? He got a doubtful no.