I Want to Go Home

by Frances Lockridge

  He looked at his watch again, and she looked at hers. He made it ten of eleven, he told her. Her own watch agreed.

  “We pull out at 12:01,” he told her. “See?” He pointed to the time-table: Ash Fork, Lv. 12:01. She nodded. “You know,” he said, “I never understand why railroads pick odd times. Here we leave Los Angeles at 12:01. Leave Ash Fork at 12:01. Why not just noon? Or midnight, or whatever it is. Why the oh-one?”

  It was nonsense, intended to divert her. She found it succeeding. She got up, then, and they went to the end of the car and down the steps to the platform. Along the length of the train, porters in white jackets were standing beside doors. Several other people had got off and were walking up and down. Jane Phillips and Roger Montrose walked up and down beside the shining train. It was good to be walking. The air was crisp, almost cold; it had a sharp freshness.

  For a few minutes it was fine, exhilarating. Then she began to feel chilly. It was much cooler here, so much higher up. He saw her shiver slightly.

  “Look,” he said. “You’re cold. Why don’t we go to the Harvey lunchroom over there”—he pointed—“and get a cup of coffee?”

  “I—” she said. “All right. But I think I’ll get a coat first. D’you mind?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Get your coat. I’ll wait for you.” He looked at his watch again. “Of course,” he said, “we haven’t got all the time in the world, you know.”

  She said she knew; she promised to hurry. She got back on the train, walked along it to her car. As she passed windows on the way forward, she saw that Montrose was walking along the train, keeping pace with her. She went into her room and—the train started! She looked out, surprised, hardly taking it in, and saw Montrose standing on the platform, not running for the train, and not looking surprised. He looked—he looked very angry. His round, open face did not look either round nor open, and it did not look innocent. He was looking at the train as if, about something, he was suddenly very furious. And he was not furious at being left behind because—and this she realized at first only dimly, realized only after she had urgently, motioned him to run for it—he did not need to be left behind. He could, quite easily, have made the steps of the nearest car by running, even by walking quickly.

  She kept looking out of the window even after he had disappeared; even after she knew that the Chief was not making one of those false starts trains so often seem to make, but was rolling east with purpose. She looked at her watch. It was only two or three minutes after eleven. It was—something was wrong. She rang and, when the porter came, she asked him the time. He hauled a gold watch from somewhere under his white jacket.

  “Twelve four, miss,” he said. “Twelve four, jest.”

  “But—” she said, and he began to smile and nod at her.

  “Mountain Time, miss,” he said. “We changed over back there a ways. Back around Seligman, miss.”

  “But then,” she said, “then we don’t stop in Ash Fork for—” she calculated. “For an hour and ten minutes or so?”

  “No mam!” the porter said. “No mam. Not the Chief, miss. The Chief don’t stop nowhere that long, miss.”

  She thanked him and let him go. She sat down on the made-up berth and looked at the darkness going by outside; at the mirrored room in the window, at her own image mirrored. And, quite suddenly, she was frightened.

  She was frightened, first, at something she had not known she heard—at something the man who called himself Montrose had said. He had been on a DE, he had said. And then he had talked of planes taking off from his ship. Her mind had gone so quickly into the past, run so quickly back to George, that she had not been conscious of hearing this, but now, with an effort, she could bring it up. “One of the little babies, like ours” he had said, and had clearly meant an escort carrier, a “baby flat-top.” And—DE’s were not baby flat-tops. DE’s were destroyer escorts, and a very different breed. Not in its haziest dreams, not when that central area of the Atlantic, beyond shore-based planes, was the most filled with submarines and most annoying, had the Navy thought you could fly a plane off a destroyer escort. She doubted if you could, conveniently, even get a plane on a destroyer escort.

  It was a little slip, unless you had been in the Navy. If you had been in the Navy—anywhere, in the softest shore billet imaginable—you could not make that slip. And, as she thought that, her mind went back to a pawnshop window and to a Naval Reserve insigne lying in it, with other buttons. If you wanted to make the acquaintance of a former WAVE officer on a train, if you wanted a warranty of some kind, a pawnshop proprietor could sell it to you. And if you wanted details of an Atlantic action—well, you could read about it in the newspapers.

  And—if you wanted to trick a young woman off a train, and see that she stayed off long enough to miss it, you could juggle Pacific Time and Mountain Time together, with the aid of a Santa Fe time-table, and come up with something you could make look like an innocent error. Even after you had made the victim of your trick miss the train, you could plead innocence, plead boyish confusion, if that was to your advantage. She got a time-table out of her bag and looked at it. The Chief reached Seligman at 10:10; it left at 11:12. But actually, it left two minutes after it arrived. She had not been thinking of this, and had not set her watch forward. Neither, of course, had Montrose, although not because he was not thinking of it. So, when they reached Ash Fork, apparently on time, both watches agreed they had reached it at 10:47. The time-table, to be sure, made things clear; it showed the train arriving at Ash Fork at 11:47 and leaving fourteen minutes later. But Montrose—or whatever his name was—had not let her see that. He had kept his thumb over the arrival time, so that his nail indicated the time of departure, 12:01, in light face type. It was a very natural position for the thumb, she found, trying it. No one, unforewarned, would suspect trickery.

  You don’t suspect it, she thought; you don’t believe it. It can’t be, because it doesn’t happen. All sorts of things happen, good and bad. You are happy and unhappy, rich and poor. People you love die. In war they are killed; even without war, sometimes they are killed. But there is no foreseeable pattern to any of these things, no understandable pattern. What happens to you is not planned by anyone; no one is, in any real sense, plotting against you. Sometimes you and someone else may want the same thing, and then the other person—and you yourself—think how this desired thing can be obtained, and this may work to your detriment, or to the other person’s detriment. But that is not the same thing, she thought; that is not intentional, continuing.

  I don’t believe this, she thought. I won’t believe it. And as she thought it hard, with almost a kind of desperation, she knew that she did believe it. Then she was afraid.

  It was a strange kind of fear. It was not a fear of any specific thing—not of being hurt, or even of being killed. It was not the fear she had felt, always, when her duties required that she fly. That fear had been understandable, you could get your mind around it. You could keep it in its place, in a certain part of your mind. This was different. This, in a sense, suffused your mind. For that moment, secure in the safe small compartment of the hurrying train, there was room for nothing else in her mind except this fear—this fear which was more like a kind of intense unhappiness than like real fear. Her mind ached, holding this shapeless terror.

  It is like a child’s fear of the dark, she thought. It is formless. My mind is filled with little formless fears. Somebody has called them that, she thought, and then, quite suddenly, she remembered that O’Neill had called them that in The Emperor Jones. She remembered reading about them, and trying to think how they would be on the stage and, although she could not quite visualize them, feeling even as she read a kind of uneasiness, of insecurity, which was the more disturbing because it, like the threat which caused it, was intangible. You’re defenseless, she thought. You’re alone. She looked at nothing, and found that she was listening anxiously and knew that, if there were a sudden, inexplicable sound, she would scream.


  Unexpectedly, that thought brought her out of it, or almost out of it. The fears went off to the periphery of her mind, into the shadows. This is ridiculous, she thought. What am I thinking about? She tried to shake her mind free entirely of the shadowy fears; tried to reason it out. Montrose had, quite possibly, been not a plotter but the victim of his own innocent confusion; he had had an angry expression because he had missed the train. Probably all the car doors had been closed, and he had had no chance to run for it. The hotel had made a mistake, the taxicab had really broken down, the men in the Chevrolet had merely been trying to help. And—But then it broke down. It broke down quite simply, rather absurdly, because Montrose did not know the difference between a destroyer escort and an escort carrier. It was as simple as that, and as special. He had been playing a part, and he had not known the lines. He might have been playing a part just to get to know me, she thought, and then she shook her head. The part was too apt. It made sense because he did know me, she thought; because he knew about me, knew I’d been in the Navy. That was why his impersonation had worked up to a point, and why it might be expected to work.

  All right, she thought, it isn’t formless anymore. It is unbelievable, incomprehensible, but it isn’t formless. Somebody doesn’t want me to go home. Somebody is trying to stop me. It isn’t something I’m making up. It is something real. The fears aren’t formless in themselves. They have a form, but I can’t see the form. She felt that her mind had a cover on it, tightly; as if she were beating herself against the cover. I’ve got to do something about it, she thought. I’ve got to do something.

  The first obvious thing to do was to be very careful, she thought. Either there were a good many people in the plot, or the plotter had a good many agents. Since she knew she had never, until that evening, seen the man who called himself Montrose—since she had never before seen the two men in the Chevrolet—the theory that they were merely agents seemed the more probable. She would have to be on guard against other persons she had never seen before, since they might also be agents. The safest thing was to see as few people as possible. Therefore, the best thing was to remain in the safe little box of her bedroom.

  What else can I do? she wondered. If I could get somebody to help me—Then she thought of Ray Forrest, and was faintly surprised at the ease with which the thought came into her mind. It was almost as if it came on a familiar channel. I wish Ray were here, she thought. He could help me. But he doesn’t even know about any of this. She considered that, and decided it was not strictly true. He knew about the hotel’s mistake, about the taxicab and the men who offered to give her a lift. These things had meant nothing to her, and hence could not have to him, until this new business had come up. If he knew about this new business, he would want to help.

  It was difficult to see how, already a long way off and getting farther off every time the wheels went around, he could do very much, but it would help if he knew. Somebody ought to know, she thought. This way I could just—disappear. Nobody would know where to start looking. I wish I could call Ray up and tell him, she thought, and then realized what she could do.

  She pressed the porter’s call button and, after only a moment or two, said, “Come in, please,” when he sounded the buzzer on her door. He came in and said, “Yes mam?”

  “I wonder if I could get off a telegram tonight?” she said. “I mean, if I wrote it now, could you get it sent some place we stop? It’s rather important.”

  “Yes mam,” the porter said. “I sure can, mam. You wait just a minute.” She waited a few seconds. He came back with a pad of yellow blanks. “You jes write it down, miss,” he said. “I’ll see it gets off.”

  She thought a moment. She did not want to be too explicit. She did not want to have to explain things to the porter, or be made to feel that she ought to. She wrote Ray’s name and address in Los Angeles, and then:

  “Still trying to get home but funny things keep happening. Almost got left in Ash Fork.” She looked at what she had written. “Wish you were here,” she added, and then “Love” and her name. Maybe, she thought, giving the pad back to the porter, it would have been simpler just to write: “Having terrible time, wish you were here.” She gave the porter two dollars and he said, “Thank you, mam. Good night, mam.”

  She felt relieved, then, and sleepy. She locked her door behind the porter and began to undress.

  The porter went back to his folding seat at the end of the car. He put the Western Union pad back in its rack. Somewhat later, he went forward to the dormitory car. He would send the message from Albuquerque in the morning. Meanwhile, it was safe enough in the rack.

  Buy Foggy, Foggy Death Now!

  Four

  Detective Captain M. T. Heimrich, New York State Police, was a square man, not very tall, and at the moment—which was 10:17 A.M., on Tuesday the sixteenth of September—he appeared to be partially asleep. He was sitting in a wooden chair and was facing toward the uniformed captain in charge of the barracks a little ways outside of Brewster. The uniformed captain wondered how anyone, even Heimrich, could appear to be so comfortable in so uncomfortable a chair. Heimrich opened his eyes partially and said that that washed it up.

  “Not that it wasn’t quite proper to have us look into it,” he said. “Naturally. Can’t let things like that go unattended to. Nevertheless, he was kicked by a horse.”

  “Good,” the uniformed captain said. “That is, I mean—”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “Better a horse than another man.” He stood up, and he did this without any sign of hurry, but also without any preliminary motions. “Better neither, of course. I’ll be getting along, then.”

  “All right, Mer—” the uniformed captain began, and stopped because Heimrich’s eyes, entirely wide open now, entirely gray and expressionless, were regarding him. “All right, captain,” the uniformed man said. “Thanks for having a look at it. Yes?” The question was to a middle-aged, somewhat clerical, patrolman who opened the door and looked like a man with a message.

  “There’s a kid here says his grandma’s being poisoned,” the patrolman says. “Wants to talk about it.”

  “Who?” the uniformed captain said.

  “Name of Meredith,” the patrolman said. “Arthur Meredith. About eighteen, I’d guess. Funny-looking guy.” He paused to consider this. “No shape to his face, sort of,” he said.

  “Have—” the uniformed captain began, and then stopped. “Hell,” he said, “that’ll be old Susan’s grandson. All right, I’ll see him.” The patrolman withdrew. The uniformed captain looked at Heimrich.

  “How’s to stick around?” he said. “Probably nothing. But the Merediths are—well, they’re big people around here.”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said. “Got a lot of money?” He did not wait for confirmation. “Sure,” he said. He went over and sat on a window-sill, with his eyes half closed. He looked comfortable even on a window-sill, the uniformed captain thought, somewhat resentfully.

  Arthur Meredith was tall and gangling. He seemed to have only partial control of his arms and legs. He was scowling. He seemed angry and determined, and at the same time oddly uncertain. He sat down in the chair Heimrich had occupied and looked extremely uncomfortable.

  “I’m Arthur Meredith,” he said. He was belligerent, almost as if he expected someone to deny that he was Arthur Meredith. “Somebody’s trying to poison Susan.”

  “Susan?” the uniformed captain repeated.

  “Father’s step-mother,” the boy said, still with resentment. “Everybody calls her Susan. Somebody’s feeding her arsenic.”

  “Who?”

  “Anybody,” the boy said. “I wouldn’t put it past any of them. They’re all—after something.” There had been a marked pause in mid-sentence.

  “Who are all of them?”

  “Father and mother. Well—not mother, I guess. Cousin John. Cousin Elliott. Grace. How do I know?”

  “Naturally,” Heimrich said from the window. His eyes were only parti
ally open. “How do you know, Mr. Meredith? Any of this?”

  Arthur Meredith looked at him.

  “You a cop?” he said. He was rude, the rudeness seemed intentional.

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said. “Oh yes, Mr. Meredith. What makes you think Mrs. Meredith is being poisoned?”

  “She says so,” the boy told him.

  “Is she ill?”

  “She’s old,” the boy said. “She doesn’t get out of bed much. Hasn’t for months. Sure she’s sick.”

  “She has a doctor?”

  “Sure. What’d you think?”

  “I thought she’d have a doctor,” Heimrich said. His voice was even, unperturbed. “Has she told the doctor of this—suspicion?”

  “How do I know?”

  “She told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And wanted you to come to us?”

  “What else would I do?” the boy demanded. “Just let her die of it? Let somebody get away with it?”

  “Naturally not,” Heimrich said. “Did she suggest you come to us?”

  “She said, ‘You tell somebody, Artie. You tell somebody.’ Who else?”

  As he quoted, the boy imitated a voice—imitated a voice and the expression on a face. Both the voice and the face were very old; it was, momentarily, as if a very old woman had taken the place of the boy. But the boy made no point of this; he seemed almost unconscious of it. He did make it very real. Heimrich’s eyes opened more widely and it was several seconds before they again half closed.

  “Well,” the boy said, and he was still angry about it, “who else?”

  Nobody else, Heimrich told him. They were the people to tell.

  “So what do you do?” the boy said.

  Heimrich’s eyes remained almost closed.

  “See if somebody is poisoning Mrs. Meredith,” he said. “Stop it if they are. Arrest anybody who is.” He opened his eyes. “Naturally,” he said, and half closed them again. “Who’s the doctor? Local man?”

  Dr. Fremont Hardy was not a local man. He was just leaving his offices off Park Avenue when Heimrich walked into them. The doctor was apparently in his late thirties. He looked tired, and at first he was abrupt. When Heimrich identified himself, Dr. Hardy merely looked at him, and waited, making no offer to enter into discussion.