The Menace Within

by Ursula Curtiss

  The enigmatic-eyed dispatcher already had all the background information but events in this area would fall under a different jurisdiction. Justin called the sheriff’s department and went through the whole business again. Because of the lack of any sign of violence in the house the voice at the other end was inclined to be skeptical. Amanda was well over eighteen, and missing people were generally missing of their own volition although family and friends were reluctant to accept it.

  Look, ” said Justin, his own voice hardening, “I know this girl, and she would never under any circumstances leave a child of two alone in a pitch-black house. To hell with this, give me the sheriffs home number and I’ll call him and after that I’ll call—”

  He was told hastily to calm down. He repeated the description of the car registered to Jane Balsam, and added that if they had thoughts of sending anybody to the house he wouldn’t be there; he was going to try following the tire tracks himself, taking Rosie Lopez with him.

  This led to strong official demurs. They didn’t know Justin, surely he would understand that, and in the absence of the parents or an official guardian the child should be placed under the care—

  “Take me to court,” said Justin, and clapped the receiver down. His car would scarcely have had time to get cold, but he went rapidly back to Amanda’s bedroom for a blanket to wrap Rosie in, taking the pillow as well: Bundled up on the back seat, she might sleep.

  A harried compassion made him spend fifteen seconds with washcloth and towel. Then, with a feeling of surrealism—Lucy Pettit’s apartment, Mrs. Balsam’s house, and now Amanda’s—he switched off the lights and carried Rosie out to his car. “Raggie,” she said surprisingly to him, exhibiting her peculiar trophy as he improvised her bed, and Justin, finally recognizing this as a companion piece to the knotted cloth in Mrs. Balsam’s guest room, said, “Raggie. Right;”

  The tire tracks bore south, angling at times to keep away from a main road to the east. An occasional horse moved in a snowy field, the only break in the sleeping stillness. Justin shut his mind to everything but the earlier progress in his headlights, puzzled over a split-up into driveways fifty yards apart with no footprints in either place, continued following.

  And arrived at a wide four-way stop, with some wild skidding evident. One vehicle had turned west, the other east. Which had carried Amanda?

  “Where did he go, where has he taken that child?” asked Amanda fiercely. She had to school her voice so that it wouldn’t shake. To have been goaded about like an animal for all these hours and then lose Rosie completely—

  “Making arrangements,” said Claude briefly. Clone at once, but blazing through Amanda’s brain like a rocket, was a sly and secretive tuck of the mouth corner she could see in the light from the dashboard. “We call him in ten minutes and he’ll tell you where to pick her up.” He consulted his watch, somehow elaborately. Get going.”

  A night of instructions like repeated rasps; skin so subjected might begin gently to bleed. But for just a moment Claude had been entertained—at what? Scarcely his own situation, so it had to be hers.

  Amanda put the car into gear, straining over this new element. He had mocked at Rosie’s rag, but that association had to be long gone. The rag, gripped with all the strength of which Rosie was capable when Amanda had been forced to give her to Dickens. Was it really likely that she would have dropped it, her sole comforter, in the course of the few steps to the front door?

  Outside, Dickens had said loudly and furiously that he would “get it” upon Rosie’s wail—but she would have cried out if she were pinched suddenly, creating an excuse for the reopening of the door. Amanda had seen her clearly framed there, but what about the seconds when her attention had been distracted by Claude?

  “Take a right,” he said beside her.

  Amanda swung the wheel automatically, looking at the unmarked white road before her, coming up to something else in her own mind. Why, at this point, would Dickens have continued to burden himself with a child for whom he had only strong dislike and contempt when there was an obvious place to leave her? On the other hand, he had been carrying something when he walked so speedily around his truck, and in that short space of time there wasn’t—

  Yes, there was. Amanda’s lined raincoat, hanging ready to his hand in the hall. Lightly crushed, carried just so, it would have passed in the dark for a human weight. Minutes ago at the intersection Claude had distracted her a second time, so that, the pickup vanished into the night, she should think herself in even deeper thrall.

  And thus lose sight of the fact that she was driving to her death, that she was alive only because a suitable site had not yet been reached.

  It was one thing to have recognized the seal set upon her by Dickens in her bedroom doorway; it was another now that the abstract was becoming real. Again Amanda’s lungs did not seem to be getting enough air, and it was with difficulty that she managed what would have been the normal thing to say if she were still deceived: “Isn’t it about time to find a telephone booth?”

  If she had had any smallest doubt about her reconstruction of events it would have been dissipated by Claude’s extreme glibness. “There’s one up ahead, about a mile.”

  A spasm of actual nausea quivered through Amanda’s stomach. She did not travel this road often, but she remembered a picnic area with benches and trestle tables under trees but no toilet facilities, so that it might be weeks or even months before—

  Slow the car enough to jump out and commence a blind and hopeless run in the snow? Try to engineer an accident which would involve only the passenger side of the car? A racing driver might have attempted it; Amanda knew that she could not. Even in this extremity her sense of survival was too strong for inexpert aiming at a tree or a telephone pole.

  Far ahead, well past the picnic area in this crystal air —in fact at a main junction—were tiny, shifting Christmas lights. No, not Christmas lights, but pinpoints of red being blanked out occasionally as if by intervening figures. “You’d better open your window,” said Amanda with an air of defiance, staking everything on a diversionary tactic of her own, “because I’m going to smoke a cigarette. Incidentally, there’s somebody behind us.”

  Claude twisted as she reached for the cigarettes and matches on the dashboard. Her foot went down on the accelerator, not in a sudden burst of speed which might cause a skid but in a steadily building pressure, and he turned back at once, saw the distant roadblock, and ripped a few savage words at her as he snatched the keys out of the ignition.

  The car continued to travel, weaving and slewing as Claude lunged across Amanda and reached the headlight control, sending them into darkness. He kicked at her ankle and found the brake. For a matter of seconds he was engaged with the wheel, jerking the hood away from a fence of railroad ties black against the snow, and Amanda’s trembling hands found the folder of matches deposited in her lap, struck one and held it to the others, thrust it wildly at the face now as close to hers as it had been to Ellie Peale’s.

  She got the door open in the middle of his shriek of rage and pain, and with the car still rolling wrenched herself free of his weight and the floor pedals and went pitching out and down to the road. Even with the snow as cushion the impact dizzied her. She staggered upright and began to run, hearing behind her the slam of the Rabbit’s door.

  And here came Dickens, bearing down on her with the cruel white-gold flare of high beams. He was shouting at her. Her whole life experience shriveled to the scope of hours, the tears she had not allowed earlier pouring down her face, Amanda reached the guard rail on the bridge that crossed an irrigation ditch, swung herself terrifiedly over it, and dropped.

  She had never looked consciously at the ditch when she drove over it—it was simply there, like the mountains and the far cottonwoods—and it was deeper than she would have guessed. Her ankle gave and she went plummeting down one steep side on her back, her head arrested by sudden agonizing contact with a rock or an iron tree root. Above her,
as if in fury gone mad, a horn was blaring.

  And she had been wrong, and ruined everything, because when the nightmarish noise had stopped, clods of snowy dirt were disturbed on the ditch bank and a triumphant voice reduced to a mutter by the rush of blood in her ears was laying, “I’ve got her. I’ve got Rosie. . . . Amanda. Are you all right?”

  It was Justin she had fled from moments ago, Justin who was now sliding a cautious arm under her shoulders and attempting to lift her to a sitting position. Amanda lifted her bursting, throbbing head cooperatively, and, to the accompaniment of a chopped-off siren and what turned out later to have been a warning shot from the police, went for a short time completely to pieces.

  Somewhere in this process there was a shattering collision of metal, followed by shouts. “There goes my car,” observed Justin.

  He was correct. At the sight of Amanda’s running, stumbling figure with the Rabbit beyond, he had swung his car broadside, plucked Rosie from the back seat, leaned in to send that signaling echo of horn to the roadblock ahead while his bright lights beaconed into the night. Claude Eggen, slewing the Rabbit around and hearing a siren come to life, had rammed the obstructing car. He had been apprehended with his wig badly singed and melted.

  Tow trucks were sent for. A deputy drove Justin and Amanda to the house which she had left with Dickens’ pronouncement upon her. En route, he phoned in the location of the church in which Ellie Peale’s body reposed, and then a description of the man whom Mrs. Balsam would identify, still by means of printing, as a shaven Harvey Sweet.

  Before Amanda gave the statement which would have to be elaborated in detail, before she drank the coffee Justin made and laced heavily with rum—mystifyingly, he was at the same time supplying himself with Port du Saint which he tucked anyhow into rolls—she put Rosie to bed in her tiny guest room. She said, leaving the door propped wide so that the child could not wake to darkness but only a golden twilight, “They’re all gone, Rosie, they really are.”

  And presently, to Justin in the living room, “I know he won’t come back, but will you stay?”

  Justin simply looked at her.

  Late in the morning, Amanda learned that a button corresponding to the others on Ellie Peale’s bloodied shirt had been disinterred from one of the split seats in Claude Eggen’s van. Astonishingly, he and the man she could never think of as anything but Peter Dickens were half brothers. Had the mere fact of looks been a leverage, growing over the years?

  She put that firmly out of her mind, and went with Justin to see her aunt, bringing nightgowns and bed jackets, books and cologne, flowers and liqueur-centered cherries. Mrs. Balsam’s brilliant eyes, no longer burning with messages but absorbed with the process of recovery, went from one face to the other. She still could not manage many sounds, but she said what was unmistakably intended to be, “Good.”

  The team of men going meticulously through her house had discovered the trap door to the bomb shelter under the apparently unflawed carpeting in the area described to them. Amanda had firmly declined an invitation to go down the ladder; illogical although she knew it to be, it seemed to her that little wisps of horror might still linger there.

  “Shelter?” she said later to Justin, who was scrupulously measuring for glass to be replaced in the patio door. “Shelter?”

  Justin studied her, let his steel tape whistle back into place, and clipped on the Afghan’s leash—not easy, because with friends restored she was a silky and importunate bustle. He was aware of the dark breath of last night touching Amanda. He said conversationally, “Do you realize that without even being married yet we have acquired a child and a dog?”

  Rosie, still hollow-eyed but engrossed in a banana of which Apple wanted a piece, swiveled her great gaze briefly back and forth.

  “Working models only,” said Amanda.