Vanish in an Instant

by Margaret Millar

  “You’re idealizing Loftus,” he said. “It will be harder for you if you don’t face reality.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Not tonight, perhaps, but next week, next year. You’ll go on with your life, working, meeting new people. But you’ll never meet a living man who’ll be as perfect as your image of a dead man. So you’ll have to change that image, cut it down to size.”

  She turned and stared at him. “What are you getting at, Mr. Meecham?”

  “Loftus was human. He had bad qualities as well as good qualities.”

  “You could never shake my faith in him.”

  “I can,” Meecham said. “I think I have to.”

  “Try. Go ahead and try.”

  “Did he ever tell you about Birdie?”

  “Birdie?” A pulse began to pound in her throat, and she put her hand over it to hide it. “Who was—Birdie?”

  “She was his wife.”

  “No. No, he never had a wife.”

  “He married her about two years ago. They were diver—”

  “Please,” she said. “Please. Don’t.”

  “They were divorced—there was trouble over his mother, I believe—and later Birdie was killed in an auto accident out West.”

  For almost a whole minute she didn’t speak or move. Then, with a sudden furious sweep of her hand, she thrust all the dishes off the drainboard into the sink. The crash split the air, and little pieces of glass sprayed out of the sink like water from a fountain.

  Some of the glass struck her but she didn’t flinch or even notice. She just turned and walked away from the whole mess, looking very composed.

  Pausing in the doorway, she said to Meecham in a cold flat voice, “Your fifteen minutes are up. Good night, Mr. Meecham.”

  20

  Eight o’clock, and a church bell was ringing out a Christmas carol, alternately brash and wispy, as the wind carried the tune like a temperamental choir boy.

  O Little Town of Bethlehem. As he passed the church Meecham sang with the bells, a nervous obsessive singing that had nothing to do with music but was only an expres­sion of disquiet. People were gathered on the church steps, huddled protectively in groups to withstand the force of the weather and of other groups. O Little Town.

  Two blocks beyond the church he saw, in the glare of his headlights, a woman walking alone down the street. She was limping, heading into the wind with her coat and scarf flapping uselessly behind her like sails torn from a mast. Meecham pulled over to the curb. The woman turned abruptly, glanced at the car through her horn-rimmed glasses, and then began walking again with the springy uneven steps of someone accustomed to walking on ice.

  Meecham drove ahead a few yards, stopped the car and leaned across the seat to open the window nearest the curb.

  “Carney.”

  She came closer, blinking away the moisture from her wind-whipped eyes. Her cheeks and her chin and the tip of her nose were red and shiny with cold.

  She said, “Give me a lift?”

  “Hop in.” He opened the door and she got into the car. Leaning back in the seat she held her mittened hands against her face to ease the aching of the cold.

  “I’m freezing.”

  “You look it.”

  “I couldn’t get a cab so I decided to walk.” Her glasses had steamed up from the heat of the car so that she looked blind. She made no attempt to take off the glasses or wipe them; she seemed content, for the moment, to see nothing, to rest behind the fog like a ship at anchor.

  The car moved ahead with a spinning of the rear wheels.

  “Where are you going?” Meecham said.

  “To the house. Alice phoned and asked me to come. She said it was an emergency.”

  “What kind of emergency?”

  Carney gave a quick nervous laugh. “Any kind. Some people seem to jump from emergency to emergency, and other people like me just wait around to be useful after the fall.”

  “What’s happened, Carney?”

  “They’ve gone, that’s what happened. The two of them—Virginia and her mother.”

  “When?”

  “Just a while ago. They sent Alice out on some errand or other, and when she came back to the house they were gone. She phoned me right away and she tried to phone you and Paul too.”

  “How did they leave?”

  “In the new car. I should have known there was some­thing funny about that car. It isn’t like Mrs. Hamilton to go out and buy something like that without shopping around. She’s not stingy, but she’s careful about her pur­chases—she hates to get stung.”

  “Where did she buy the car?”

  “Right off the showroom floor. You know that Kaiser Frazer branch out near the stadium. She and Virginia went there in a cab this morning, and Virginia drove the car home—a yellow Frazer sedan.”

  “It’s gone now, of course?”

  “Yes. Alice checked.”

  “Why is she so sure they’re not coming back?”

  “Because they left some money for her in an envelope, her salary and enough to get home on.” With a sound of anger she shook her head violently, like a wet spaniel shaking water off its ears. “How could they be so stupid? A middle-aged woman and her married daughter running away like a couple of children. Why? Why did they do it?”

  “Figure it out.”

  “No, I don’t want to. It—looks bad, doesn’t it?”

  “As bad as possible.”

  “Oh God, I’m tired. I’m tired of emergencies. I’m tired of playing the maiden aunt. When something goes wrong, call Carney. It’s been like that ever since I knew them. Well.” She took a deep breath. “Well, now something has gone really wrong and I can’t help them at all.”

  Meecham turned left at the next corner. Part of the Barkeley house was visible at the end of the block, but most of it was hidden behind the evergreen hedge where Loftus had stood the first night. It seemed a long time ago.

  He said, “Did you have any idea they were planning to leave?”

  “No, but I thought something was in the wind. The new car, and then the telegram this morning.”

  “What telegram?”

  “From Willett, her son in Los Angeles. He wired his mother a thousand dollars. She had to go down to the West­ern Union office to get it. Now why should Willett have wired her that much money?”

  “Because she asked him to.”

  “She must have,” Carney said. “But why? She had a lot of money when she came. I remember asking her about Willett the night she arrived, and she said something about Willett being the same old Willett, that he was in a great stew because she was carrying so much cash.”

  “How much is so much?”

  “I can’t give you a definite figure, but I know she’s always carried very large amounts of cash. She was never afraid of being robbed, as I would be. On the contrary, it gave her a sense of security.”

  He stopped the car in the driveway but didn’t get out. Instead, he said, “What happened to her money?”

  Carney hesitated. She had taken off her glasses and was swinging them in a circle, one way and then another. “She gave it away, I guess.”

  “To whom?”

  “Well, to Virginia. She . . .”

  “Virginia hasn’t a dime,” Meecham said. “She was try­ing to cook up a scheme with me to float enough cash to run away.”

  “I don’t know, I just can’t reason things out. Nothing seems—well, sensible. Nothing seems sensible.”

  “Not yet.”

  They got out of the car and went toward the house, walking side by side and close together in curious intimacy, like mourners approaching a grave. But the grave was only Virginia’s patio, built for sun and summer but now dark and useless, the redwood
chairs glazed with ice, the bar­becue pit discolored by the soot of winter, and the plants dead in their hanging baskets.

  Inside the house it was very warm but Alice and Barke­ley still had their heavy coats on, as if in the stress of the moment they had both forgotten their personal comfort.

  Alice looked ready to cry, but there was no sign of emo­tion on Barkeley’s face except for a kind of weary contempt.

  He addressed Meecham. “Well, what do we do now, call the police?”

  “Perhaps that’s the best idea.”

  “I don’t want to, but I can’t think of any alternative.”

  “You might try to catch up with them.”

  “How?”

  “We know they’re heading west, that’s the important point. From here as far as Morrisburg, Highway 12 is the only road west. At Morrisburg they can take 60 southwest. So the problem is to catch them before they reach Morris­burg.”

  “I’ll get the car out,” Barkeley said. He was halfway to the door before he finished the sentence. It was the first time Meecham had seen him move quickly.

  Carney had sat down and taken off her galoshes. “I won’t go along. Alice can, but I won’t. Like I said, I’m tired of emergencies.”

  Meecham looked at Alice. “Do you want to come?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It will be safer if you stay here. The roads aren’t good and we’ll be speeding.”

  She touched his sleeve, shyly. “It would be worse staying here wondering if anything’s happened to you.”

  “Nothing will happen to me. I want you to stay here with Carney.”

  “I—all right.”

  “Well,” Carney said with an odd little smile. “So that’s the way it is, is it?”

  Meecham nodded.

  “Well, good luck to you both. Maybe you won’t need it as much as Carnova and I did, but you’ll need it.”

  The last Meecham saw of her she was sitting with her right knee crossed over her left, her hand nursing her crippled foot. She looked old and bitter and hard, as if, in the role she’d played as maiden aunt, all the nieces and nephews had turned out bad and she had no faith or char­ity left.

  The two men sat in the front seat. At first they were too tense to talk; they stared in silence at the road ahead while the windshield wipers clicked back and forth like metronomes. There was a light snow, not falling, but sweeping up and across the road in gusts, so that one mo­ment there was nothing to be seen except whirls of white, and the next moment, in the lull of the wind, the air would be clear and everything seemed to be doubly visible—the billboards, the telephone poles, and the heavy piles of snow left at intervals on each side of the road by the snow plough after the last storm.

  “They won’t get far in weather like this,” Barkeley said finally. “Virginia’s a terrible driver.”

  “Virginia isn’t driving,” Meecham said.

  “She must be. Her mother doesn’t know how.”

  “They have a friend with them. A man called Hearst.”

  Barkeley’s only reaction of surprise was to take a tighter grip on the steering wheel. “Who is Hearst?”

  “He lives in the house where Loftus lived, he works for a detergent company, and he wants to go to California.”

  “That’s not telling me much.”

  “It’s as much as I definitely know. What I suspect is that he’s a very small-time chiseler, and that he knows some­thing your wife and mother-in-law don’t want known. So they took Hearst along, not for the ride, but to get him as far away from town as possible.”

  “What does he know?”

  “As far as I can gather from the physical evidence— times, places, actions—there’s only one thing he can know. At the time Margolis was killed on Saturday night, Hearst was in his own house. So was Loftus.”

  “So was . . .? No. No, that’s impossible.”

  “He was watching Loftus because he was jealous of him. Hearst is a traveling man, away from home all week on business. He had time to hatch plenty of suspicions about his wife and Loftus, not without some justification. On Saturday night Mrs. Hearst left the house about 7:30, met Loftus out on the sidewalk on his way home after din­ner downtown, and then went on to a hockey game. That’s her story, but Hearst didn’t believe it. He was pretty sure she intended to meet Loftus somewhere in the course of the evening. He could have followed his wife, of course. But Hearst is a lazy, half-hearted man; it was easier for him to stay right in the house and keep an eye on Loftus. I believe that’s what he did. He spied on Loftus and Loftus didn’t go out.”

  “You have no proof of that.”

  “No, it’s merely an opinion,” Meecham said. The word reminded him vividly of the scene between Lily Margolis and her cousin, Loesser, a few hours before: “I will not be quiet, George. I have a right to my opinion.” “Keep it an opinion, then.” “Very well. In my opinion, Virginia Barke­ley killed my husband in a jealous rage!”

  He said aloud, “We may never know the truth of what happened. Maybe there isn’t any whole truth about any­thing, just a lot of versions, of different colors and different flavors, like ice cream, and you pick the most palatable. Cigarette?”

  “Not while I’m driving.”

  Meecham lit one for himself, cupping his hands over the lighter so that its sudden glare wouldn’t distract Barkeley’s eyes from the road. The wind was slackening, and the flakes of snow had become larger, coagulating with mois­ture into thick fluffy whirls that clung stickily wherever they fell. The windshield wipers had lost their rhythm. They jerked, slowed, stopped, and went on in wild haste, like a hunted man.

  Meecham spoke again. “As Carney put it, nothing seems sensible. Loftus was an intelligent young man with a con­science, yet he accepted money to confess to a murder he didn’t commit and fabricated enough circumstantial evi­dence to back it up—his bloodstained clothes, his knowl­edge of the inside of Margolis’ cottage, what kind of knife was used, where it was kept, the temperature of the room, the number of times Margolis was stabbed, and so on. He couldn’t have fabricated all that evidence without help.”

  “Whose help?”

  Meecham didn’t answer.

  “You mean my wife’s help,” Barkeley said. “Don’t you?”

  “It seems—logical.”

  “But the blood on his clothes—how could Loftus have managed that? The Sheriff himself said that it wasn’t rubbed on, it was splattered there from a wound, a quart or more of the stuff.”

  “That’s one of two things I hope to find out soon. Where did the blood come from and where did the money go?”

  “You think my wife knows.”

  “It’s very possible.”

  “You might as well make that a definite opinion, Mee­cham. You seem to have opinions about everything.”

  “I don’t pick them off trees,” Meecham said. “They’re flung into my lap.”

  “No opinions about me yet?”

  “None.”

  “That’s odd. I had quite a time-honored motive, you know. My wife was Margolis’ mistress.”

  “I don’t think she was.”

  “Very polite of you to say so, anyway.”

  “It’s not politeness. I’m taking Lily Margolis’ word for it. Margolis had a real love—that’s her phrase—but it wasn’t Virginia.”

  “The degree of Virginia’s unfaithfulness hardly matters, does it?”

  “I thought you’d be interested.”

  “Yes, I am,” Barkeley said quietly. “I’m disappointed, too, that she didn’t get any happiness out of all the grief she’s given the rest of us. You’d think somebody would get something out of it. But no, Margolis is dead, and Virginia is running away, and I’m running after her, reluctantly and without hope. If I find her, what then? What t
hen?” he repeated. “I just don’t know.”

  Neither did Meecham. The next hour seemed as impon­derable and remote as the next year.

  They were passing through a small town identified by a sign over the railroad station door as Algonquin. A layer of fresh snow hid its ugliness like frosting on a soggy cake.

  “Morrisburg is only another thirty miles,” Barkeley said. “We won’t catch them.”

  “We might.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He was wrong. Meecham spotted the bright yellow Fra­zer about a half-mile beyond Algonquin. Its hood was half- buried in a pile of snow left by a snow plough at the side of the road. A tow truck was parked in front of the Frazer, its red blinker going off and on like a buoy light to warn the approaching traffic.

  Barkeley parked his car a few yards beyond the tow truck and Meecham got out and walked back.

  A gray-haired angry-looking woman sat behind the wheel of the truck, her arms folded aggressively across her chest. A teen-aged boy in leather cap and windbreaker was busy with a shovel digging away the snow from the Frazer’s bumper.

  “Need any help?” Meecham said.

  The boy looked up and shook his head. “Nope.”

  “A nasty thing to have happen to a new car like that.”

  “Not much damage done. Didn’t hit nothing except snow.”

  The woman in the truck cranked down the window and stuck her head out. “What’s he want, Billy?”

  “Nothing.”

  “He ain’t one of those insurance fellows?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Just think,” the woman said bitterly. “Just think, if your father’d stayed home tonight where he belongs. But no. Not him. He had to go and . . .”

  “Oh, for heck’s sake, Mom, stop crabbing.”

  The woman’s lips continued moving, but no one heard what she said because she’d closed the window again.

  Meecham asked the boy, “Anyone hurt in the accident?”

  “One of the women was riding up front and got her head bumped on the windshield. Nothing much.”

  “Where are the people now?”

  “They’re waiting for the car at my Dad’s place, about five hundred yards up the road. We got a garage and a hamburger stand.”