“Well, I think getting her car repaired was more important to her. She was very proud of that car, and it was going to take a while to get the part that was needed and have it installed, and I was impatient to get on home.”
“Were you with her constantly that whole afternoon?”
“Yes I was, until she left me at the bus station.”
“You didn’t see her speak to anyone, or do anything, while you were with her? I mean, she didn’t meet anyone, or see something, that you didn’t know about? I mean—I’m getting this kind of confused—but what I’m trying to find out is, for example, maybe while your back was turned, or, pardon me, you might have had to go to the Ladies’ or something, maybe she met somebody who, let’s say, asked her for a date or something.”
“No, I don’t think so. There was…yes, now that I think of it, there was a very brief period, ten minutes or so, while I left her in the waiting room to go and use the telephone. I wanted to call my friend Larry to tell him that we would be late. But I don’t think Diana met anybody. She was just sitting there in the waiting room, reading.”
“What was she reading, Miss Trombley?”
Miss Trombley will meditate a moment and say, “Oh, just a magazine or something. No, it wasn’t; I think it was a newspaper.”
“Please try to remember,” you will say. “This could be important.”
“Well, yes, I’m almost certain it was a newspaper.”
“You don’t know which newspaper?”
“No.” Susan Trombley will shake her head, but then her eyes will light up and she will snap her finger and point it at you. “Hold on now! I don’t know what newspaper she was reading, but I just remembered—maybe this is important—I just remembered that whatever newspaper she was reading, she must have seen something that startled her, or upset her, or, I mean, really grabbed her, because when I came back from my telephone call, she was sitting there holding that newspaper, and her face, her face looked like this—” Miss Trombley will ape an expression of astonishment—“and I remember asking her what she was reading and telling her she looked like she’d seen a ghost, but she just put me off, saying it was just a story about an accident or something. Hey! You know, maybe that’s a clue. Why didn’t I think to mention that to those other detectives? How did you get it out of me?”
“I’m different,” you will say, and reach for the check.
Second stop: Garfield, New Jersey. At the Gillihan Porsche agency, you will identify yourself, state your business, and say you have only one question: would they happen to know what newspaper would have been in their waiting room on June 16 of the previous year? The dealers will consult one another and their secretary and their cashier and will conclude that, unless some customer had left behind some other newspaper, it was either the New York Times or the Passaic Herald-Star, or both. You will groan inwardly over the prospect of having to comb through a thick issue of the New York Times in search of some clue, but the cashier, a bright-eyed lass who probably never misplaces a nickel or penny, will save you from this ordeal by remembering, at the last moment, that their subscription to the Times had lapsed for a period of three weeks during that month.
You will drive then to the offices of the Passaic Herald-Star and ask to look at the back issue for June 16 of the previous year. You will spend almost an hour poring over it with the fine comb of your eye.
ELKS TO FÊTE WIVES WITH CHICKEN BARBECUE. Would Diana have developed a sudden craving, perhaps, for chicken barbecue, and have run afoul of an Elk? Unlikely.
PASSAIC COUPLE CELEBRATE FIFTIETH. Would she have wished to help Mr. and Mrs. Dominick Pastorello commemorate their golden anniversary, and have been abducted back to the Old Country by one of their sons? No.
“DEAR ABBY: Here’s a new one for you. Every summer my husband and I take our kids for a two-week camping trip. My idea of camping is just to loaf around and enjoy the air and the sunshine, but my husband’s idea is to take long hikes. The kids love to go with him, and I feel left behind, but try as I might, I can’t work up the enthusiasm for hiking. Sign me, STUMPED.” “Dear STUMPED You ‘stumped’ me too, because I’m the same way.”
Did Diana, perhaps, develop a sudden desire to go camping or take a hike? Possibly, but you will remember, G, that Susan Trombley has said that whatever Diana had been reading left an expression of astonishment on her face.
YANKS STOP SOX IN SIXTH. NICKLAUS TIES TREVINO IN SECOND DAY. MOTORCYCLE WEEKEND PEACEFUL. RAINY WEEK AHEAD, FORECASTERS SAY. EAST PASSAIC HIGH GRADUATES 457. COUNCIL CHARGES MAYOR TAKES KICKBACKS. ROTARIANS SCHEDULE STRAWBERRY COOK-OUT.
Good grief, you will think. New Jersey! Of all places to be stuck in….
E. PASSAIC MAN REVEALS AGE REGRESSION EXPERIMENTS.
10
“I’ve given it up,” P.D. Sedgely will tell you. “It was taking up too much of my time; it was interfering with my job. I’m a schoolteacher, a simple schoolteacher, first and last. The day arrived when I realized that I could not go on, fooling around with the ‘occult,’ as it were, endlessly following up paths that led nowhere. I grew tired of trying to prove that any of my subjects had genuinely existed in previous incarnations. For a while I became more interested in teleportation—the ability of the mind to ‘travel’ to distant places—but that, too, was a time-consuming hobby. I have given it all up, sir. I have erased all my tapes. I have sold my tape recorder. I am a simple schoolteacher.”
You will show him the photograph. “Did you ever meet this girl?”
He will study the photograph. He will not answer your question. He will ask you a question, “Are you a relative of hers?”
“No,” you will say. You will smile. “Like yourself, I am a simple schoolteacher. This girl has been missing since last June. I told her father I would find her. I am trying to. Did you by any chance happen to meet her, last June?”
The man will look startled at your news, and then mumble to himself, “Day Whittacker….”
“Pardon me,” you will say, and tap the earpiece of your aid. “I am hard of hearing. Did you utter, perhaps, the expletive, ‘Gee Whillicker’ or something?”
“No,” he will say. Then, “Yes,” he will say, “I was just saying Gee Whittacker, I mean, I’m sorry to hear that some poor girl is missing. But no, I’m sorry, I never met her.”
“I see,” you will say. “I have simply been following up various leads, certain ideas that occurred to me. I am sorry to have bothered you. This girl, Miss Diana Stoving, was known to have been reading, on the day she disappeared, the June 16th issue of the Passaic Herald-Star, which, as you may recall, carried an item about yourself. It merely occurred to me that she might have read that item and become interested in you. She was a girl with a wide variety of interests, particularly in the off beat and perhaps also in the occult. Of all the items in that issue of the newspaper which might have attracted her, the piece about you seemed, to my mind, the most promising. I am sorry if I have put you out.”
“That’s quite all right,” he will say. “I understand. You say the poor girl has been missing ever since she was here? I mean, ever since that day in June of last year?”
“Yes. Her family, her poor father and mother, have heard not a word, have not laid eyes on the poor girl ever since.”
“Too bad,” he will say. “You haven’t been able to find any trace of her?”
“I am a simple schoolteacher, like yourself. I am not a professional detective. The authorities have abandoned the search. I am the only hope.” You will say these last words with dramatic emphasis, and then, with even more dramatic emphasis, you will add, “And you, Mr. Sedgely, are my only hope.”
Clearly, you will have nonplussed him. “But I said—” he will begin to protest, but perhaps he is, as you will have surmised and gambled, a man of conscience. “Won’t you come in?” he will invite.
“Gladly,” you will say.
Yes, he will confess, Diana had been to see him. He will tell you as much as he can remember about
her visits with him, but it will only be with considerable reluctance, after much probing on your part, that he will reveal the figure of, the identity of, Day Whittacker, who is not an expletive after all.
Perhaps because you will be playing the “simple schoolteacher” to the hilt, G, you will open up his locked closets. But all he can remember to tell about this “Daniel Lyam Montross” is that he had been born in the Connecticut village of Hadleytown or Bodleytown or Dudleytown—yes, it was, he thinks, Dudleytown—and that he had met a violent end some seventy-odd years later out in some western state, Oklahoma or Missouri or one of those, he can’t remember which. But his tapes are erased. His tape recorder has been sold. He cannot play back for you the recording he had made of Day Whittacker as this “Montross” being questioned by Diana Stoving. He is sorry that he had ever fooled around with the matter. He is even sorrier that he had given Diana Stoving the power to put Day Whittacker into a hypnotic trance simply by telling him to go to sleep. He has been disappointed, and even slightly hurt, that they had been so ungrateful to him as to disappear without any further communication. They could at least have sent him a postcard occasionally, couldn’t they? But no, he does not feel any guilt. “Blame me, if you wish,” he will conclude, “for having rediscovered Montross in the first place in the person of Day Whittacker, but I can hardly be blamed for whatever two impetuous young people take it upon themselves to do with their lives.”
You will glance at your wristwatch. It will be getting close to suppertime. “May I take you to dinner?” you will ask him. He would be delighted. You will take him to dinner, at a good Passaic restaurant, and you will say to him, “Tell me all you know about reincarnation.”
You are by nature a doubting man, G, given to detachment and mistrust; a proper intellectual, you hold with Euripides that man’s most valuable trait is a judicious sense of what not to believe. But although you are so thoroughly the ungullible skeptic, you are not close-minded or intolerant. Your first reaction to the staggering possibility of my metempsychosed reexistence within the bones and brain of Day Whittacker will not be incredulity but impartial curiosity and an unwillingness to dismiss, out of hand, the sheer possibility of it all. It will be as if, after hearing about flying saucers for years, you have finally caught a glimpse of one yourself; instead of rushing to have your eyes examined, you begin taking notes and drawing diagrams. The modestly doubting scholar’s approach.
What will disturb you much more than the supposition of my transmigration is the sudden intrusion of this kid, Whittacker, into what you will have begun to conceive as a private matter between Miss Stoving and yourself. For days now, you will have had her photograph; it will have been the last thing you look at before turning out the light in various motels between Arkansas and New Jersey; you have, in a way, you will tell yourself, come to fall in love with her, and come to see yourself as her White Knight riding to the rescue. Now, suddenly, you will have to reckon with this upstart adolescent.
Although you and P.D. Sedgely will have hit it off so well together, getting along splendidly like the brotherly simple-school-teachers that you are, you will not get along very well, at all, with Mr. and Mrs. Charles J. Whittacker. Your tweedy, seedy appearance has persuaded Sedgely that you are indeed a simple schoolteacher like himself. Your tweedy, seedy appearance will give Mr. and Mrs. Whittacker to think you some kind of nut. The last thing they could accept is that you are a detective, but you will seem to hint that you might possibly be able to find out something about the whereabouts of their boy, and Mrs. Whittacker, at least, will be interested; Mr. Whittacker, it will seem, couldn’t care less; he has convinced himself that the boy is a no-good thankless bum, or, worse, a draft-dodger, and has all but written him off.
Mrs. Whittacker will be even more interested when you show her the picture of Diana, for then she will remember that Diana, in the guise of a Life reporter, had appeared at their home just a day or two before poor Day disappeared, although it had never occurred to her to make any connection. Had this girl, who was, after all, a “grown-up” (“I mean she was a college graduate?” Mrs. Whittacker will say/ask), lured her poor boy off into a life of sin or something? Her poor boy certainly wouldn’t have done any harm to the girl? He was a kind and gentle boy….
Mrs. Whittacker will show you the one communication they have had from Day since his disappearance, the postcard, postmarked in July from Torrington, Connecticut. The Whittackers had been in touch with the chief of police of Torrington, but he couldn’t find anything, so they had surmised that Day had simply mailed the card there on his way to some other place. Also, Mrs. Whittacker will inform you, a friend of theirs had sent them a clipping from the Rutland, Vermont, Herald in November, about a woman whose name was given as Mrs. C. Day Whittacker who had been shot in the woods and was in Woodstock Hospital, and “Chuck, my husband, called them up there at the hospital to try and find out if the woman’s husband might possibly be our Day, but this doctor he spoke to said it wasn’t?”
Mr. Whittacker will interrupt in disgust, “Jane, what’re you wasting your time with this guy for? He doesn’t give a damn about Day. He’s only interested in that girl.” And he will stalk out of the room to get himself a beer in the kitchen.
Alone with her, you will say apologetically, “I’m sorry if I’m wasting your time, Mrs. Whittacker, but—”
“Oh, that’s all right?” she will say wearily.
You will ask her to tell you about Day, what sort of person he was. You will get a rather glowing picture of what a nice and kind and talented boy he had been. Had he ever taken drugs? Certainly not. Had he ever been in trouble? No. Never arrested? No. Ever had any emotional problems? No, well, there was only one time, when he was twelve years old, that he had tried to hang himself in the bathroom. Hang himself in the bathroom? Why? Figure it out for yourself. His father had barged in on him, and he pushed his father out and locked the door and tried to hang himself from the shower-curtain rod with his belt, but the curtain rod broke and his father busted down the door and let that boy know in no uncertain terms that he had better think twice before pulling a stunt like that again. And they had never had any more trouble with him along that line. In fact, Day was such a good boy that he paid for a new shower-curtain rod out of his own earnings as an odd-job boy for the neighbors.
“Mrs. Whittacker, would it be all right, would it inconvenience you too much, if I asked to have a look at Day’s things?”
“His things?” she will say.
“Yes, his room, his possessions, his notebooks or whatever….”
“Well—” she will hesitate. It will be clear she is reluctant to let this grown-up beatnik character go prying around in her boy’s stuff, and she will wish her husband hadn’t gone off like that and left her to make her have to be the one to deny your request. “He hasn’t got so awful much?” she will offer as an excuse, but when you assure her, Anything, anything at all, she will relent and take you back to the room which had been Day’s. She will not leave you alone with it, but stand in the doorway, as if guarding so you will not steal any of this humble junk or otherwise desecrate it.
Quickly, like the art historian plunging through the Fogg Library in search of the one essential fact, you will examine his things: his high school yearbooks, his scrapbook, his small library, his clothing and Scouting equipment, his odds and ends, his miscellany of memorabilia. A typical New Jersey teenager, you will think at first, you who have been teaching them for years in your Winfield classes. But then you will begin to piece together an image of a kid who is not all that typical, after all; a young man of unusual interests, of stronger desires, of different chemistry, of, perhaps, deeper loneliness.
You will find nothing related to reincarnation, no trace of “Daniel Lyam Montross,” nothing about hypnosis. Almost all of his stuff is oriented around The Great Outdoors: camping and back-packing and woodcraft. And about trees: his collection of bark samples, his scrapbooks of leaves, his books on forestry and woods m
anagement.
There is only one thing which will really catch your eye: in an issue of his high school literary magazine, Reflections, there is an article which he had written, in the tenth or eleventh grade: “A Visit To A New Jersey Ghost Town,” which begins, “Most kids think of ghost towns as false-fronted old saloons and such out in the Wide West mining areas, but do you know that we’ve got at least three authentic ghost towns right here in New Jersey? Last weekend, I had a very interesting overnight camp-out, all by myself, in one of them, the village of Tavistock, which isn’t really completely a ghost town, because according to the last census there are a grand total of ten (10) people somewhere within the incorporated township (although I didn’t see any of them). The history of this town-that-is-no-more-a-town is interesting….” The article goes on to give a brief history of Tavistock, followed by an hour-by-hour record of Day’s short sojourn there, his interests focused mainly on identifying old trees rather than old buildings, and concludes, “Spending the night in a ghost town isn’t as scary as spending the night in a cemetery (and I’ve done both). A ghost town isn’t really dead. It’s just sort of gone some other place for a while.”
Well well, you will think. If a wealthy girl who is interested in old roads meets a Boy Scout who is interested in old towns, then you’ve got a real combination…even if she’s three years older.
But why, you will be wondering, was she so interested in this “Daniel Lyam Montross”? Was he just a “vehicle”?
11
See our hawk-eyed Gumshoe tippy-toeing (yes, G, you will be wearing crepe-soled boots) through the woods, down the old Dark Entry Road, his one good ear straining, his aid turned up so high that were a fly to alight upon it and let a fart, it would sound like unto, verily, a thunderclap. The woods, late in March, will yet have patches of snow in shady places; nothing yet will be in bloom and the birds will not have come back from the south. Dudleytown will be as still and quiet as death.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 1 Page 69