The car they put me in could not move out until the ambulance was out of the way. So I saw the professional gentleness with which they eased the two women into the ambulance. I saw Cathie Perkins rolling her head from side to side, her eyes wide and blank. But Meg was without motion.
Cathie survived a severe concussion, so severe her memory was impaired for a long time. But in time she recovered, and married a man in his middle years and bore his children.
We followed the ambulance as it moved so slowly and cautiously through the forest shadows of the old logging road, and then down out of the morning hills, down into the city. We followed the high constant scream of the sirens, and it seemed to me that every face was turned toward us and every face wore the same expression.
xiii
It was a small wound. It had taken a tiny bite out of the top of the collar bone and been deflected up at a small angle, and ripped out through the muscle. It was not enough to cause shock, yet by the time they brought me in, I was gray, trembling, sweating profusely, icy cold and unable to think clearly.
The damn fools would not tell me whether she had died yet. They kept giving me their medical smiles and saying she was fine. They had dressed the wound. They were giving me plasma for shock. I lost patience with them. I pulled the needle out of my arm and got off the table and started away to find her, but as I reached the door the room lurched, tilted and blurred, and I felt the cold tile floor smack my cheek just as the world faded from gray to black.
I awakened into a drugged nighttime, into an underwater feeling, where each thought was a massive labor to create, and once it had been made tangible, drifted like a heavy fog in a slow current, nudged its way past me and was gone.
“You hear me, Fenn? You hear me okay?”
I raised fifty-pound eyelids and looked at the moon face of Dr. Sam Hessian. “Help me get up, Sam,” I mumbled.
“You lie still. You’re giving these good people too much trouble around here. Can you understand what I’m saying?”
“Help me up.”
He reached and pressed one finger against the back of my head, high on the left side. “The slug went into her right there.”
“Watching her,” I said laboriously. “Frozen. Damn fool thing. Could have taken him—taken him easy.”
“Shut up! It went in here. Made a little radial fracture like a BB will do to a window.” The finger began to move up and over the crown of my head. “Traveled under the scalp, boy.” He traced the line down across the right side of my forehead, down the right temple, close to the eye. “All the way along this line.” His finger touched my cheekbone. “Hit the bone here and was deflected out through her cheek. Can you hear me? She’s resting. Pulse, respiration, everything checking out fine.”
I held my eyes open with a monstrous effort, staring at him. “Lying,” I said.
“It’s the truth! I swear it by—by my county pay check.”
I was holding onto the bottom rung of a ladder suspended in space. It was very tiring. I closed my eyes and let go.
Angela Frankel and Herman Deitwaller were as sure-fire candidates for murder in the first as you could ever hope to find, and after a courtroom circus which made and unmade some minor political reputations, and after the usual ritualistic legal delays, they were sent on their delayed way to join McAran, Kostinak and Morgan Miller. But before it was over for them, Deitwaller disclosed their plan of operation. In appropriate coveralls, he was the one who had been assigned to check over the presses in the basement of the Hanaman Building, and leave the timed explosive charge Miller had brought to their rendezvous, the heavy and lethal tool box found in the hiding place inside the apparent load of lumber on the station wagon, found resting on the broad dark staining where Kelly had bled. The proximity of the Hanaman Building to the Merchants Bank and Trust Company guaranteed a maximum confusion at the bank and in the street, enough to make Brint believe the bank job might have worked.
No one directly involved in that final violence on that summery Monday morning in that abandoned hamlet in the hills can properly describe the concentrated attentions of the national news media. It did not last long. The world moves, and news fades as quickly as the retinal image of a flash bulb. But Johnny Hooper has observed that while it was going on, it was like being trapped in a burning fireworks factory along with ten thousand starving ducks, after having been rolled through an acre of poison ivy. As Albert Einstein once observed, the ideal news photographer should come from a very large family where the battle for nourishment and attention precluded any possibility of learning taste, sensitivity or manners. The gatherers of our news shout so many simultaneous questions, they never hear the answers. So the odd role Meg played in the whole affair was lost, because it was too intricate to be told loudly, and in the absence of any other plausible explanation, they inferred she had been kidnapped and that made it easier for both of us. The national coverage made much more of the ingenuity of the hiding place in the station wagon than of the emotional involvements.
With our national compulsion to find Huck Finns in every walk of life, Willy Danielson emerged as a national hero, grinning into a hundred lenses, showing up on television programs carrying “my girl” in his big hands, quickly learning to give the right Aw shucks quality to the scripts they made him memorize, and doing nothing to contradict the stirring legend that when the men in command had decided the only thing they could do was let the criminals leave with the girl, Willy had begged for the chance to show his skill, had shot the gun out of Deitwaller’s hand, had killed Kostinak and Miller micro-seconds later, and would have nailed the remaining two if the girl hadn’t fled directly toward him. His cold, jolly, sniper’s smile enchanted millions, and when a heroic script was written for him, he turned his leave of absence into a permanent resignation, quietly divorced his wife, and moved into the congested nasal passage world of serial television, where the scripters taught him to hit the “o” in option at fourteen hundred yards—offhand.
An agile promoter put the appropriate parcels of land together, improved the logging road, set up a ticket booth, a parking area, a refreshment stand, hired a cast, dressed them appropriately, and re-enacted his version of the seige and slaughter six times a day all summer long, and quit right after Labor Day with a substantial profit. Five shots had been fired in that barn to which McAran had run. In the new production, enough blanks were fired to make it sound like an infantry fire fight.
Three sturdy and lovely young hill girls played the parts of Angela, Meg and Cathie. They screamed enthusiastically, and the scantiness of their clothing was enhanced by strategic rips in the fabric.
For me there were two endings, or two beginnings.
Meg recovered more slowly than the doctors anticipated. There was a listlessness about her. Several times I tried to tell her that the whole thing had been my fault, that she wouldn’t have been in danger if I’d refused to ask her to lead us to McAran, but she wasn’t interested in whose fault it was. She had bad dreams, many of them based on that moment when Cathie had tried to run and Miller had struck her down. Meg tired easily. She seemed remotely affectionate, but more out of a sense of duty than desire. Outwardly, except for the star-shaped scar on her cheek, she was unmarked.
One day in late September I suggested we leave the kids with somebody and drive up to Keepsafe the next day, if it was nice. “If you’d like to,” she said indifferently. I don’t know why I wanted to take her up there. I knew it might hurt her. I think I wanted to shock her back to life.
So we went up. The paint of the abandoned concession stand was fading, the green wood warping. We parked the car on an empty street paved with bottle tops and filter tips. She got out of the car and looked at the deserted place. The summer throngs had shuffled the grass flat and carved countless messages in the weathered wood.
She pointed to the foundation where a house had been. “That was where we lived.” She turned and stared at the house where she and Cathie had been held captive. “That wa
s the Belloc house. I cried when they moved to Ironville. So did Mary Ann. She was my best friend, the only girl my age I knew.”
She walked toward the house and I followed her, slowly. She leaned against a gate post and stared at the front door.
“I didn’t know him at all,” she said wonderingly. As I was about to speak I suddenly realized she was talking about Dwight. I remained silent. Sam Hessian had told me it would be a good thing for her when she could bring herself to talk about him.
“He was just like the rest of them. I’d come looking for him, to help him. I’d had trouble finding out where he might be. They yanked me inside and they were all yelling at me. The woman hit me. I turned toward him, starting to cry because I was confused, and he hit me in front of them. And I told myself it was what prison had done to him, but I knew it was a lie. I knew nothing had ever changed him. He had always been just the same, and I had always been able to pretend he was somebody else, because I needed that somebody else—who didn’t exist. That’s when the somebody else died, the day before he did. The person Larry killed, I’d known him only one day, so I couldn’t mourn him. Mary Ann and I played in that attic. We cut the ladies out of an old Sears Roebuck and pasted them on a cardboard and had big tea parties. Dwight went up there once and tore all their heads off, all their pretty heads clean off.”
I came up behind her and put my hand on her waist. She moved away in instinctive, hurtful rejection. She looked beyond the house.
“I’d like to go up the mountain, Fenn.”
“Do you feel well enough?”
“The path isn’t too steep. We don’t have to climb fast.”
The trail was obscure. Squirrels cursed us, and jays sounded the alarm. There was no view until we reached the top. Most of the top was a huge gray rounded stone, like the back of some incredible lizard. From there we had the illusion of looking straight down into the village. Our car was a beetle in the dust, shiny in the sunlight.
“It’s cooler up here,” I said.
“Always.”
She walked to the other side of the summit, to a place where the stone had fallen away so as to form sitting places. She sat and looked toward Brook City. I sat next to her on a lower place, half-facing her. I looked at her calm profile.
“I used to know that all the glamor of the world was down there, Fenn. I would grow up and go down there and be a great lady. I would give my own tea parties.”
“Please, darling,” I said, and my voice was husky.
She looked down at me with a puzzled expression. “All little girls have those thoughts and dreams. I wanted to be the—center of something. I wanted to be terribly needed. So there would be a lot of things I could do. But my children need me. I can be sure of that, at least. I thought Dwight did, but I was wrong. So, I’m not complaining, dear. I can make do.”
She smiled. Something which had been trapped and tied within me moved then with a terrible, gasping strength, and broke free, flooding, spilling, choking me. I ground my face against her skirt, and heard my voice saying, “Help me. Help me. Please help me.”
When I could look at her, my tears blurred the look of a startled wonderment on her face. She said, “But—you don’t really need anyone. You’re so—complete, dear. I’m glad you can love me in your own way, but you’ve never wanted me to—give more than a little. It’s always made you uncomfortable—even a little thing like me telling you I love you. I’m used to—making do with what I have.”
One word hit me harder than all the others. “Complete!” I said. “Without you—I’m nothing. All the world has been turning to ice. You’re the only warmth. Nothing else is worth a damn. I just can’t—can’t—”
And then her arms and her warmth were around me. I talked for a very long time. Some of it, I guess was incoherent. In the most special sense, I had never talked to my wife before. In another sense, I had never talked to another person—I had never let anyone see inside me. I had never known how many defensive layers there were until I stripped them all down, one after another. It was a brutal therapy, emotionally exhausting.
When it was over, we knew each other. I saw all the love revealed in her eyes, and in the shape of her mouth, a luminous confrontation, so that I could not get enough of looking at her. There are no cold men or cold women. There are only people so lonely, so frightened, they hide all which can be hurt.
When it was done, we were like lovers soon after they have first met. There was a feeling of celebration and anticipation. She reached under the twisted roots of an ancient pine which grew out of the rocks, and found the treasure of her childhood. The box was intact, but rusted shut. I pried it open.
I held my hand out and she gave me the treasures, one by one. A spotted sea shell. An oriental coin. A tarnished button with a green glass jewel. Some fragments of red ribbon. A disintegrating bit of notebook paper, with a small girl’s printing in ink which had faded so I could just manage to read it.
She looked at me with a considerable pride.
“See?” she said. “I love you. It was for you all along, waiting right here for you. And for all the rest of our lives, you are going to have to remember this date, and always give me something, because maybe this is the day we met.”
The other part of it came a week later, in Larry Brint’s office.
“I can’t see it, Fenn,” he said, shaking his head in a troubled way. “The place is beginning to come back to life. Two plants re-opening, and they’ll be breaking ground for the brand-new one next month. And Davie Morissa is wearing Kermer’s shoes, and it’s going to work out just about right for everybody, so by the time you’re set to take over this desk, you ought to be in a position to do more with it than I’ve ever been able to do.”
“I’m sorry, Larry.”
“The way everything turned out, you’re completely acceptable to the Hanaman group, Skip Johnson, everybody. You can’t give up this kind of a deal, boy.”
“I have to.”
“You’re giving up your security.”
“That money that was impounded, the money found in the locked glove compartment of McAran’s car is finally being released to Meg. Kowalski had to put up a hell of a fight to get it. The net she’ll get will be about two thousand.”
“Enough to retire on, obviously.”
“Enough so we can go away and look around for a place where we’ll feel like settling down.”
“I have to say you don’t look worried. Fenn, tell me. I know you’re sort of an idealist-type fella. Is it because you’re fed up with the kind of compromises and deals we have to make here in Brook City to give the people as much law as we can afford?”
I shrugged. “That’s bothered me. I guess it always will. I’ll find it wherever I go. There’ll be more of it some places and less of it at other places. I’m able to live in a world I can’t change.”
“Is it because you told her it was you killed McAran?”
“I told her that. We both think we understand it. We can live with it. It isn’t the easiest thing in the world to live with, but we can manage. It wouldn’t drive us away from here. I told her a lot of things, Larry.”
“Then why the hell do you think you have to leave?”
“I don’t think it will sound like much of a reason to you.”
“Try me.”
“I’m turning into another kind of person, Larry. It isn’t easy. It’s making me happier than I’ve been. I’m learning—emotional honesty. But all the old grooves and habits are here. They slow me down. It’s worth it to both of us to have every aspect of our life as new to us as—as this is. Maybe I won’t be as good a cop as before. Meg seems to think I’ll be a better one. But we have to find out somewhere. Can you accept that?”
“I have to, I guess.” He sighed. “I’ll write the references you want.”
“One month from now okay?”
“It will be okay, Fenn. The city fathers will return to you exactly fifty per cent of what you’ve put in the pension fund, out of
the kindness of their hearts, so you better apply soon. They move slow in the Treasurer’s office.”
Halfway to the door I stopped, turned and looked at that worn, schoolmaster’s face. “Thanks, Larry.”
“For what?”
“For a lot of things, but right now, thanks for not putting it on a personal basis, for not asking me as a personal favor to you to stay on.”
“I thought of it. What would you have said?”
“Do you think I ought to tell you?”
“Probably not, Fenn. Probably not. One answer would tempt me, and the other answer wouldn’t make either of us feel any better.”
Dockerty caught up with me as I was going down the wide stairway. He looked like a man on his way to an embassy reception. “What are you smirking about, old boy?” he asked me. “That’s a lecher’s look if I ever saw one. You must have something tasty lined up. It isn’t like you, you know.”
“Very tasty,” I said.
“And with no prejudice against a policeman?”
“A little maybe. But I can talk her out of it. I’m on my way to phone her.”
“Who is this idiot creature you’re seducing, Lieutenant?”
“My wife.”
After ten seconds of silence he sighed and said, “I’ll make no comment about her taste, old friend. But yours is beyond reproach.”
About the Author
John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel The Executioners, which was adapted into the film Cape Fear. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.
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