The Fiend

by Margaret Millar

  “We’ll discuss the structure of the nervous system some other time. Where is Charlie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, wiping her eyes with the back of one hand. “I’ve been looking for him ever since Miss Albert called to tell me he’d been at the library.”

  “You’ve been looking where?”

  “Up and down Jacaranda Road.”

  “Why Jacaranda Road? You must have had a reason. What is it?”

  She took a step back, as if dodging a blow.

  “You’ve got to answer me, Louise.”

  “Yes. I’m trying—trying to say it in the right way.”

  “If it’s a wrong thing, there’s no right way to say it.”

  “I’m not sure that it’s wrong. There may be nothing to it except in Charlie’s imagination and now mine. I mean, he gets so full of worry that I start to worry, too.”

  “What about?”

  She hesitated for a long time, then she spoke quickly, slur­ring her words as if to make them less real. “There’s a child living at 319 Jacaranda Road, a little girl named Mary Martha Oakley. Charlie swears he’s never even talked to her and I believe him, but he’s afraid. So am I. I think he’s been watching her and—well, fantasying about her. I know this isn’t good be­cause a fantasy that gets out of control can become a fact.”

  “How long have you known about the girl?”

  “Two days.”

  “And you didn’t level with me.”

  “Charlie asked me not to.”

  “But you’re leveling now, in spite of that. Why?”

  “I want you to tell me how it was the—the other time. I’ve got to know all about it, how he acted beforehand, if he was quiet or moody or restless, if he stayed away from the house on nights like this without telling anyone. Did he talk about the girl a lot, or didn’t he mention her? How old was she? What did she look like? How did Charlie meet her?”

  Ben went over to the sink and tore off a couple of sheets of paper toweling. Then he wiped the coffee off the table, slowly and methodically. His face was blank, as if he hadn’t heard a word she’d said.

  “Aren’t you listening, Ben?”

  “Yes. But I won’t do what you’re asking me to. It would serve no purpose.”

  “It might. Everybody has a pattern, Ben. Even strange and difficult people have one if you can find it. Suppose I learned Charlie’s pattern so I could be alert to the danger signals—”

  “It happened a long time ago. I don’t remember the details, the fine points.” Ben threw the used towel in the wastebasket and sat down again, his hands pressed out flat on the table in front of him, palms down. “If there were danger signals, I didn’t see them. Charlie was just a nice, quiet young man, easy to have around, never asking much or getting much. He’d had two years of college. The first year he did well; the second, he had trouble concentrating—my mother suspected a love affair but it turned out she was wrong. He didn’t go back for the third year because my father died. At least that was the ac­cepted reason. After that he went to work. He held a succession of unimportant jobs. One of them was at a veterinary hospital and boarding kennels on Quila Street near the railroad tracks. Every day the girl walked along the tracks on her way to and from school. Charlie used to chase her away because he was afraid she’d get hurt by a train or by one of the winos who hung around the area. That’s how it began, with Charlie trying to protect her.”

  Louise listened, remembering the reason Charlie had given her for wanting to find out the name of the people who lived at 319 Jacaranda Road: “I must tell those people they’ve got to take better care of their little dog unless they want it to be killed by a car or something.”

  She said, “How old was the girl?”

  “Ten. But she looked younger because she was so small and skinny.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  “No.”

  “What color was her hair, and was it short or long?”

  “Dark and short, I think. I only saw her once, but I re­member one of her front teeth was chipped from a fall.”

  “Though it may seem like a terrible thing to say, Ben, all this sounds very promising.”

  “Promising?”

  “Yes. You see, I’ve met Mary Martha. She’s a plump, pretty child with a long blond ponytail, quite mature-looking for her age. She’s not a bit like that other girl. Isn’t that a good sign? She doesn’t fit the pattern at all, Ben.” Louise’s pale cheeks had taken on a flush of excitement. “Now tell me about Charlie, how he acted beforehand, everything you can think of.”

  “I saw no difference in him,” Ben said heavily. “But then I wasn’t looking very hard, I’d just gotten married to Ann. Charlie could have grown another head and I might not have noticed.”

  “You’d just gotten married,” Louise repeated. “Now Charlie’s about to get married. Is this just a coincidence or is it part of the pattern?”

  “Stop thinking about patterns, Louise. A whole battery of experts tried to figure out Charlie’s and got nowhere.”

  “Then it’s my turn to try. Where did you live after the wedding?”

  “Here in this house. It was only supposed to be a temporary arrangement, we were going to buy a place of our own. Then Charlie was arrested and everything blew up in our faces. I didn’t have enough money left to buy a tent, but by that time it didn’t matter because I had no wife either.”

  “And now Charlie and I will be living in this house, too.” Louise was looking around the room as if she were seeing it for the first time as a place she would have to call her home. “You still don’t notice any pattern, Ben?”

  “What if I say yes? What do I do then?”

  “You mean, what do we do? I’m in it with you this time.”

  “Don’t say this time. There isn’t going to be a this time. It happened once, and it’s not going to happen again, by God, if I have to keep him in sight twenty-four hours a day, if I have to handcuff him to me.”

  “That won’t be much of a life for Charlie. He’d be better off dead.”

  “Do you suppose I haven’t thought of that?” he said roughly. “A hundred times, five hundred, I’ve looked at him and seen him suffering, and I’ve thought, this is my kid brother. I love him, I’d cut off an arm for him, but maybe the best thing I could do for him is to end it all.”

  “You mean, kill him.”

  “Yes, kill him. And don’t look at me with such horror. You may be thinking the same thing yourself before long.”

  “If you feel like that, your problems may be worse than Charlie’s.” She looked a little surprised at her own words as if they had come out unplanned. “Perhaps yours are much worse because you’re not aware of them. When something happens to you, or inside yourself, you’ve always had Charlie to blame. It’s made you look pretty good in the eyes of the world but it hasn’t helped Charlie. He’s already had more blame than he can handle. What he needs now is confidence in himself, a feeling that he’ll do the right thing on his own and not because you’ll force him to. You spoke a minute ago of handcuffing him to you. That might work, up to a point. Perhaps it would prevent him from doing the wrong thing but it wouldn’t help him to do the right one.”

  “Well, that was quite a speech, Louise.”

  “There’s more.”

  “I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

  “Listen anyway, will you, Ben?”

  “Since when have you become an authority on the Gowen brothers?”

  She ignored the sarcasm. “I’ve been trying to do some figuring, out, that’s all.”

  “And you’ve decided what?”

  “Charlie’s problem wasn’t born inside him. It doesn’t belong only to him, it’s a family affair. Some event, some relationship, or several of both, made him not want to grow up. H
e let you assume the grown-up role. He remained a child, the kid brother, the baby of the family. He merely went through the motions of manhood by imitating you and doing what you told him to.”

  She lapsed into silence, and Ben said, “I hope you’ve fin­ished.”

  “Almost. Did you and Ann go on a honeymoon?”

  “We went to San Francisco for a week. I can’t see what that—”

  “How soon after you got back did the trouble happen be­tween Charlie and the girl?”

  “A few days. Why?”

  “Perhaps,” she said slowly, “Charlie was only trying, in his mixed-up way, to imitate you by ‘marrying’ the girl.”

  Jessie had turned off her light and closed her door tightly to give her parents the impression that she’d gone to sleep. But both her side and back windows were wide open and she missed very little of what was going on.

  She heard Virginia and Howard quarreling in the patio, and later, the gate opening and slamming shut again, and Howard’s car racing out of the driveway and down the street. Virginia started to cry and Dave took her home and then set out in his car to look for Howard. Jessie lay in the darkness, staring up at the ceiling and wondering how adults could get away with doing such puzzling things without any reason. She herself had to have at least one good reason, and sometimes two, for everything she did.

  Shortly before ten o’clock Ellen paused outside Jessie’s door for a few seconds, then continued on down the hall.

  Jessie called out, “I’m thirsty.”

  “All right, get up and pour yourself a glass of water.”

  “I’d rather you brought me one.”

  “All right.” Ellen’s voice was cross, and when she came into the bedroom with the glass of water she looked tired and tense. “Why aren’t you ever thirsty during the day?”

  “I don’t have time then to think about it.”

  “Well, drink up. And if you need anything else get it now. I have a headache, I’m going to take a sleeping capsule and go to bed.”

  “May I take one, too?”

  “Of course not. Little girls don’t need sleeping capsules.”

  “Mrs. Oakley gives Mary Martha one sometimes.”

  “Mrs. Oakley is a—Well, anyway, you close your eyes and think pleasant thoughts.”

  “Why did Howard and Virginia have a fight?”

  “That’s a good question,” Ellen said dryly. “If, within the next fifty years, I come up with a good answer, I’ll tell it to you. Have you finished with the water?”

  “Yes.”

  Ellen reached for the glass, still nearly full. “Now this is the final good night, Jessie. You understand that? Absolutely final.” When she went out she shut the door in a way that indicated she meant business.

  Jessie closed her eyes and thought of butterscotch sundaes and Christmas morning and flying the box kite with her name printed in big letters on all sides. Her name was away up in the air and she was flying up in the air to join it, carried effortlessly by the wind, higher and higher. She had almost reached her name when she heard a car in the driveway. She came to earth with a bang. The descent was so real and sudden and shocking that her arms and legs ached and she lay huddled in her bed like the sur­vivor of a plane wreck.

  She heard a man’s footsteps across the driveway, then Vir­ginia’s voice, sounding so cold and hard that Jessie wouldn’t have recognized it if it hadn’t been coming from Virginia’s back porch.

  “You didn’t find him, I suppose.”

  “No,” Dave said.

  “Well, that suits me. Good riddance to bad rubbish, as we used to say in my youth, long since gone, long since wasted on a—”

  “Talk like that will get you nowhere. Be practical. You need Howard, you can’t support yourself.”

  “That’s a wonderful attitude to take.”

  “It’s a fact, not an attitude,” Dave said. “You seem ready to quarrel with anyone tonight. I’d better go home.”

  “Do that.”

  “Virginia, listen to me—”

  The voices stopped abruptly. Jessie went over to the window and peered out through the slats of the Venetian blinds. The Arlingtons’ porch was empty and the door into the house was closed.

  Jessie returned to bed. Lying on her back with her hands clasped behind her head, she thought about Virginia and how she needed Howard because she couldn’t support herself. She wondered how much money Virginia would require if Howard never came back. Virginia had a car and a house with furniture and enough clothes to last for years and years. All she’d really have to buy would be food.

  Without moving her head Jessie could see the half-open door of her clothes closet. In the closet, in the toe of one of her party shoes, were the two ten-dollar bills Howard had pressed into her hand. Although she would miss the money if she gave it back to Virginia, it would be a kind of relief to get rid of it and to be doing Virginia a favor at the same time. Twenty dollars would buy tons of food, even the butterscotch sundaes Virginia liked so much.

  Once the decision was made, Jessie wasted no time. She put on a bathrobe and slippers, fished the two bills from the toe of her party shoe and tiptoed down the hall, through the kitchen and out the back door.

  Moving through the darkness in her long white flowing robe, she looked like the ghost of a bride.

  (19)

  The illuminated dial on his bedside clock indicated a few min­utes past midnight when Ralph MacPherson was awakened by the phone ringing. He picked up the receiver, opening his eyes only the merest slit to glance at the clock.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Kate, Mac. Thank heaven you’re there. I need your help.”

  “My dear girl, do you realize what time it is?”

  “Yes, of course I realize. I should, I was asleep too when the pounding woke me up.”

  “All right, I’m hooked,” Mac said impatiently. “What pounding?”

  “At the front door. There’s a man out there.”

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know. I came downstairs without turning on any lights. I thought that it was Sheridan, and I was going to pretend I wasn’t home.”

  “You’re sure it’s not Sheridan?”

  “Yes. I can see his shadow. He’s too big to be Sheridan. What will I do, Mac?”

  “That will depend on what the man’s doing.”

  “He’s just sitting out there on the top step of the porch mak­ing funny sounds. I think—I think he’s crying. Oh God, Mac, so many crazy things have happened lately. I feel I’m lost in the middle of a nightmare. Why should a strange man come up on my front porch to cry?”

  “Because he’s troubled.”

  “Yes, but why my porch? Why here? Why me?”

  “It’s probably just some drunk on a crying jag who picked your house by accident,” Mac said. “If you want to get rid of him, I suggest you call the police.”

  “I won’t do that.” There was a silence. “It gives a place a bad reputation to have police arriving with their sirens going full blast and all.”

  “They don’t usually—Never mind. What do you want me to do, Kate?”

  “If you could just come over and talk to him, Mac. Ask him why he came here, tell him to leave. He’d listen to you. You sound so authoritative.”

  “Well, I don’t feel very authoritative at this hour of the night but I’ll try my best. I’ll be there in about ten minutes. Keep the doors locked and don’t turn on any lights. Where’s Mary Martha?”

  “Asleep in her room.”

  “See that she stays that way,” he said and hung up. One Oakley female was enough to cope with at one time.

  In the older sections of town the street lights were placed only at intersections, as if what went on at night between corners was not the
business of strangers or casual passers-by. The Oakley house was invisible from the road. Mac couldn’t even see the trees that surrounded it but he could hear them. The wind was moving through the leaves and bough rubbed against bough in false affection.

  From the back seat Mac took the heavy flash-and-blinker light he’d kept there for years in case of emergency. A lot of emer­gencies had occurred since then but none in which a flashlight was any use. He switched it on. Although the beam wasn’t as powerful as it had been, it was enough to illumine the flagstone path to the house.

  The steps of the front porch were empty and for one very bad moment he thought Kate had imagined the whole thing. Then he saw the man leaning over the porch railing. His head was bent as though his neck had been broken. He turned toward the beam of the flashlight, his face showing no reaction either to the light or to Mac’s presence. He was a tall, heavily built man about forty. He wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt, both stained with blood, and he kept one hand pressed against his chest as if to staunch a wound.

  Mac said, “Are you hurt?”

  The man’s mouth moved but no sound came out of it.

  Mac tried again. “I’m Ralph MacPherson. Mrs. Oakley, who lives in this house, called me a few minutes ago to report a man pounding on her door. That was you?”

  The man nodded slightly though he looked too dazed to un­derstand the question.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “My dau—dau—”

  “Your dog? You’ve lost your dog, is that it?”

  “Dog?” He covered his face with his hands and Mac saw that it was his right hand that was bleeding. “Not dog. Daughter. Daughter.”

  “You’re looking for your daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “What makes you think she might be here?”

  “Her best—best friend lives here.”

  “Mary Martha?”

  “Yes.”

  Mac remembered his office conversation with Kate about Mary Martha’s best friend. “You’re Jessie Brant’s father?”

  “Yes. She’s gone. Jessie’s gone.”

  “Take it easy now, Brant. How did you hurt yourself?”