IN THE hallway we noticed the phone, off the hook. Uncle Robert picked it up, and was startled by the sound of sobbing coming over the wire.
It was my aunt, a rather hysterical woman. Mark’s horse, she said, had returned, riderless, to the stable. She was sure something had happened to him. Was he alright? Was he there with us?
Uncle Robert soothed her, assured her
that Mark was with us, quite uninjured, then called him to the phone to convince his mother.
There was no answer, other than the eerie cry of a distant whippoorwill.
Mark had vanished, left abruptly—after collecting, Adelia remarked in a covert tone of disappointment, only the money-half of their little bet. We’d phone and tease him about that when he reached home, she laughingly said…
But an hour later, my aunt called back. Mark had not arrived. When she called again frantically around midnight, a search was instituted. Toward morning they found his body.
He was lying, all crumpled up, where his little bay mare had thrown him when she fell. A quick examination showed that his right leg had been broken in two places; but mercifully, he had not had to lie there suffering all night. A blow on the temple, when his head struck a rock, had killed him —instantly, the coroner said.
Mark had been dead all that time. The coroner jeered at the fantastic account we told of his saving Bill Saunders’ life, then collecting that bet from Adelia. A case of mass-hypnotism, he called it, induced by the fact that we were all so anxious for Mark’s presence to complete our little-hoax about the shot-tower ghost. He quoted the illusion of the Indian rope-trick as an example; how a group of people in broad daylight can be made to “see” a small boy climb a rope rising in midair, and disappear before their very eyes. “Psychic residue” and “ectoplasmic replica” were terms he had never heard... nor did anyone ever hear of them again from Uncle Robert’s lips. He and Shadrach were thereafter conspicuously silent, exchanging a long look, whenever the supernatural was mentioned. And as for me, the cry of a whippoorwill at dusk still makes me shiver uncontrollably…
For, there was one little item that the coroner could not explain. There was a crumpled five-dollar bill in my Cousin Mark’s dead hand when they found him— a worthless piece of currency, printed by the Southern Confederacy in 1864.
Night Court
BOB waited, humming to himself in the stifling telephone booth, his collar and tie loosened for comfort in the late August heat, his Panama tilted rakishly over one ear to make room for the instrument. Through it he could hear a succession of female voices: "Garyville calling Oak Grove thuh-ree, tew, niyun, six... collect . . "Oak Grove. What was that number "Thuh-ree, tew...”
He stiffened as a low, sweetly familiar voice joined the chorus: "Yes, yes! I... I accept the charges... Hello? Hello! Bob?"
Instinctively he pressed the phone closer to his mouth, the touch of it conjuring up the feel of cool lips, soft blond hair, and eyes that could melt a steel girder.
"Marian? Sure it’s me!... Jail? No! No, honey, that’s all over. I’m free! Free as a bird, yeah! The judge said it was unavoidable. Told you, didn’t I?” He mugged into the phone as though somehow, in this age of speed, she could see as well as hear him across the twenty-odd miles that separated them. "It was the postponement that did it. Then they got this new judge—and guess what? He used to go to school with Dad and Uncle Harry! It was a cinch after that... Huh?”
He frowned slightly, listening to the soft voice coming over the wire; the voice he could not wait to hear congratulating him. Only, she wasn’t. She was talking to him— he grinned sheepishly—the way Mom talked to Dad sometimes, when he came swooping into the driveway. One drink too many at the country dub after his Saturday golf...
"Say!” he snorted. "Aren’t you glad I don’t have to serve ten to twenty years for manslaughter... ?”
"Oh, Bob.” There was a sadness in his fiancee’s voice, a troubled note. "I... I’m glad. Of course I’m glad about it. But... it’s just that you sound so smug, so... That poor old Negro...”
"Smug!” He stiffened, holding the phone away slightly as if it had stung him. "Honey... how can you say a thing like that! Why, I’ve done everything I could for his family. Paid—his mortgage on that little farm! Carted one of his kids to the hospital every week for two months, like..." His voice wavered, laden with a genuine regret. "Like the old guy would do himself, I guess, if he was still... Marian! You think I’m not Sony enough; is that it?” he demanded.
THERE was a little silence over the wire.
He could picture her, sitting there quietly in the Marshall’s cheery-chintz living room. Maybe she had her hair pinned back in one of those ridiculous, but oddly attractive, "horse-tails” the teen-agers were wearing this year. Her little cat-face would be tilted up to the lamp, eyes closed, the long fringe of lashes curling up over shadowy lids. Bob fidgeted, wanting miserably to see her expression at that moment.
"Well? Say something!"
The silence was broken by a faint sigh. "Darling... What is there to say? You’re so thoughtless! Not callous; I don’t mean that. Just... careless! Bob, you’ve got to unlearn what they taught you in Korea. You’re... you’re home again, and this is what you’ve been fighting for, isn’t it? For... for the people around us to be safe? For life not to be cheap, something to be thrown away just to save a little time...”
"Say, listen!” He was scowling now, anger hardening his mouth into ugly lines. "I’ve had enough lectures these past two months—from Dad, from the sheriff, from Uncle Harry. You’d think a guy twenty-two years old, in combat three years and got his feet almost frozen off, didn’t know the score! What’s the matter with everybody?” Bob’s anger was mounting. "Listen! I got a medal last year for killing fourteen North Koreans. For gunning ’em down! Deliberately! But now, just because I’m driving a little too fast and some old creep can’t get his wagon across the highway...”
"Bob!”
"... now, all at once, I’m not a hero, I’m a murderer! I don’t know the value of human life! I don’t give a hoot how many people...”
"Darling!"
A strangled sob came over the long miles. That stopped him. He gripped the phone, uncertainty in his oddly tip-tilted eyes that had earned him, in service, the nickname of
"Gook.”
"Darling, you’re all mixed up. Bob... ? Bob dear, are you listening? If I could just talk to you tonight... ! What time is it? Oh, it’s after six! I ., . I don’t suppose you could drive over here tonight...”
The hard line of his mouth wavered, broke. He grinned.
"No? Who says I can’t?” His laughter, young, winged and exultant, floated up. "I’ll burn the road... Oops! I mean...” He broke off, sheepishly. "No, no; I'll keep ’er under fifty. Honest!” Laughing, he crossed his heart—knowing Marian so well that he knew she would sense the gesture left over from their school days. "There’s so much to talk over now,” he added eagerly. "Uncle Harry’s taking me into the firm. I start peddling real estate for him next week. No kiddin’! And... and that little house we looked at... It’s for sale, all right! Nine hundred down, and...”
"Bob... Hurry! Please!” The voice over the wire held, again, the tone he loved, laughing and tender. "But drive carefully. Promise!”
"Sure, sure! Twenty miles, twenty minutes!”
He hung up, chuckling, and strode out into the street. Dusk was falling, the slow Southern dusk that takes its time about folding its dark quilt over the Blue Ridge foothills. With a light, springy step Bob walked to where his blue convertible was parked outside the drugstore, sandwiched between a pickup truck and a sedan full of people. As he climbed under the steering wheel, he heard a boy’s piping voice, followed by the shushing monotone of an elder:
"Look! That’s Bob Trask! He killed that old Negro last Fourth-o-July...’’
"Danny, hush! Don’t talk so loud! He can hear...”
"Benny Olsen told me it’s his second bad wrack...”
"Danny!�
��
"... and that’s the third car he’s tore up in two years. Boy, you oughta seen that roadster he had! Sides wiped a truck and tore off the whole...”
"Hmph! License was never revoked, either! Politics! If his uncle wasn’t city commissioner...”
Bob’s scowl returned, cloudy with anger. People! They made up their own version of how an accident happened. That business with the truck, for instance. Swinging out into the highway just as he had tried to pass! Who could blame him for that? Or the fact that, weeks later, the burly driver had happened to die? From a ruptured appendix! The damage suit had been thrown out of court, because nobody could prove the collision had been what caused it to burst.
Backing out of the parking space in a bitter rush, Bob drove the convertible south, out of Gareyville on 31, headed for Oak Grove. Accidents! Anybody could be involved in an accident! Was a guy supposed to be lucky all the time? Or a mind-reader, always clairvoyant about the other driver?
AS THE white ribbon of highway unreeled before him, Bob’s anger cooled. He smiled a little, settling behind the steering wheel and switching on the radio. Music poured out softly. He leaned back, soothed by its sound and the rush of wind tousling his dark hair.
The law had cleared him of reckless driving; and that was all that counted. The landscape blurred as the sun sank. Bob switched on his headlights, dimmed. There was, at this hour, not much traffic on the Chattanooga Road.
Glancing at his watch, Bob pressed his foot more heavily on the accelerator. Six-fifteen already? Better get to Marian’s before that parent of hers insisted on dragging her off to a movie. He chuckled. His only real problem now was to win over Marian’s mother, who made no bones of her disapproval of him, ever since his second wreck.
"Show me the way a man drives a car, and I’ll tell you what he's like inside... " Bob had laughed when Marian had repeated those words. A man could drive, he had pointed out, like an old-maid schoolteacher and still be involved in an accident that was not legally his fault. All right, two accidents! A guy could have lousy luck twice, couldn’t he? Look at the statistics! Fatal accidents happened every day...
Yawning, at peace with himself and the lazy countryside sliding past his car window, Bob let the speedometer climb another ten miles an hour. Sixty-five? He smiled, amused. Marian was such an old grandma about driving fast! After they were married, he would have to teach her, show her. Why, he had had this old boat up to ninety on this same tree-shaded stretch of highway! A driver like himself, a good driver with a good car, had perfect control over his vehicle at any...
The child seemed to appear out of nowhere, standing in the center of the road. A little girl in a frilly pink dress, her white face turned up in sudden horror, picked out by the headlights glare.
Bob’s cry was instinctive as he stamped on the brakes, and wrenched at the steering wheel. The car careened wildly, skidding side-wise and striking the child broadside. Then, in a tangle of wheels and canvas top, it rolled into a shallow ditch, miraculously right-side up. Bob felt his head strike something hard—the windshield. It starred out with tiny shimmering cracks, but did not shatter. Darkness rushed over him; the sick black darkness of the unconscious; but through it, sharp as a knifethrust, bringing him back to hazy awareness, was the sound of a child screaming.
"Oh, no ohmygodohgod..." Someone was sobbing, whimpering the words aloud. Himself.
Shaking his head blurrily, Bob stumbled from the tilted vehicle and looked about. Blood was running from a cut in his forehead, and his head throbbed with a surging nausea. But, ignoring the pain, he sank to his knee and peered under the car.
She was there. A little girl perhaps five years old. Ditch water matted the soft blond hair and trickled into the half-closed eyes, tip-tilted at a pixie-like angle and fringed with long silky lashes. Bob groaned aloud, cramming his knuckles into his squared mouth to check the sob that burst out of him like a gust of desperate wind. She was pinned under a front wheel. Such a lovely little girl, appearing out here, miles from town, dressed as for a party.
A sudden thought struck him that he knew this child, that he had seen her somewhere, sometime. On a bus? In a movie lobby... ? Where?
He crawled under the car afraid to touch her, afraid not to. She did not stir. Was she dead? Weren’t those frilly little organdy ruffles on her small chest moving, ever so faintly... ? If he could only get her out from under that wheel! Get the car moving, rush her to a hospital... ! Surely, surely there was some spark of life left in that small body... !
Bob stood up, reeling, rubbing his eyes furiously as unconsciousness threatened to engulf him again. It was at that moment that he heard the muffled roar of a motorcycle. He whirled. Half in eagerness, half in dread, he saw a shadowy figure approaching down the twilight-misted highway.
THE figure on the motorcycle, goggled and uniformed as a State Highway Patrolman, braked slowly a few feet away. With maddening deliberateness of movement, he dismounted, flipped out a small report-pad, and peered at the convertible, jotting down its license number. Bob beckoned frantically, pointing at the child pinned under the car. But the officer made no move to help him free her; took no notice of her beyond a cursory glance and a curt nod.
Instead, tipping back his cap from an oddly pale face, he rested one booted foot on the rear bumper and beckoned Bob to his side.
"All right, buddy...” His voice, Bob noted crazily, was so low that he could scarcely hear it; a whisper, a lip-movement pronouncing sounds that might have been part of the wind soughing in the roadside trees. "Name: Robert Trask? I had orders to be on the lookout for you...”
"Orders?” Bob bristled abruptly, caught between anxiety for the child under his car and an instinct for self-preservation. "Now, wait! I’ve got no record of reckless driving. I... I was involved in a couple of accidents; but the charges were dropped... Look!” he burst out. "While you’re standing here yapping, this child may be... Get on that scooter of yours and go phone an ambulance, you! I’ll report you for dereliction of duty!... Say!” he yelled, as the officer did not move, but went on scribbling in his book. “What kind of a man are you, anyway? Wasting time booking me, when there still may be time to save this... this poor little... !”
The white, goggle-obscured face lifted briefly, expressionless as a mask. Bob squirmed under the scrutiny of eyes hidden behind the green glass; saw the lips move... and noticed, for the first time, how queerly the traffic officer held his head. His pointed chin was twisted side-wise, meeting the left shoulder. When he looked up, his whole body turned, like a man with a crick in his neck...
“What kind of man are you?” said the whispering lips. "That’s what we have to find out... And that’s why I got orders to bring you in. Now!”
"Bring me in... ?” Bob nodded dully. “Oh, you mean I’m under arrest? Sure, sure... But the little girl!” He glared, suddenly enraged by the officer’s stolid indifference to the crushed form under the car. "Listen, if you don’t get on that motorbike and go for help, I... I’ll knock you out and go myself! Resisting arrest; leaving the scene of an accident... Charge me with anything you like! But if there’s still time to save her..."
The goggled eyes regarded him steadily for a moment. Then, nodding, the officer scribbled something else in his book.
“Time?” the windy whisper said, edged with irony. “Don’t waste time, eh?... Why don’t you speed-demons think about other people before you kill them off? Why? Why? That’s what we want to find out, what we hare to find out... Come on!” The whisper lashed out, sibilant as a striking snake. "Let’s go, buddy! Walk!”
Bob blinked, swayed. The Highway Patrolman, completely ignoring the small body pinned under the convertible, had strode across the paved road with a peremptory beckoning gesture. He seemed headed for a little byroad that branched off the highway, losing itself among a thick grove of pine trees. It must, Bob decided eagerly, lead to some farmhouse where the officer meant to phone for an ambulance. Staggering, he followed, with a last anxious glance
at the tiny form spread-eagled under his car wheel.
Where had he seen that little face? Where... ? Some neighbor’s child, visiting out here in the country... ?
"You... you think she’s... dead?” he blurted, stumbling after the shadowy figure ahead of him. "Is it too late... ?”
The officer with the twisted neck half-turned, swiveling his whole body to look back at him.
"That,” the whispering voice said, "all depends. Come on, you—snap it up! We got all night; but there’s no sense wastin’ time! Eh, buddy?” The thin lips curled ironically. "Time! That’s the most important thing in the world... to them as still have it!”
Swaying dizzily, Bob hurried after him up the winding little byroad. It led, he saw with a growing sense of unease, through a country cemetery... Abruptly, he brought up short, peering ahead at a gray gleam through the pines. Why, there was no farmhouse ahead! A fieldstone chapel with a high peaked roof loomed against the dusk, its arched windows gleaming redly in the last glow of the sunset.
"Hey!” he snapped. "What is this? Where the hell are you taking me?”
The highway patrolman turned again, swiveling his body instead of his stiff, twisted neck.
"Night court,” his whisper trailed back on a thread of wind.
"Night court!” Bob halted completely, anger stiffening his resolve not to be railroaded into anything, no matter what he had done to that lovely little girl back there in the ditch. "Say! Is this some kind of a gag? A kangaroo court, is it? You figure on lynching me after you’ve... ?”
HE GLANCED about the lonely graveyard in swift panic, wondering if he could make a dash for it. This was no orderly minion of the law, this crazy, deformed figure stalking ahead of him! A crank, maybe? Some joker dressed up as a highway patrolman... ? Bob backed away a few steps, glancing left and right. A crazy man, a crackpot... ?
Half in Shadow Page 5