The Girl in the Attic

by Ed Gorman

  Then the man seemed to find his manners. He quit staring and a smile split his face. "Looks like you had car trouble."

  "We sure did," Sally said.

  That's when she noticed all the squawking in the rear of the van.

  She glanced over her shoulder to find several wire cages in the back seat. Inside were plump white chickens. The air was alive with dust and feathers.

  "Raise poultry," the man explained. "Taking them to town for tomorrow morning's market." He stuck out a hand calloused from work and browned by the sun. "Cletus Olsen is my name."

  "Sally Baines, Cletus." She put a proud arm around Jamie. "And this is my daughter, Jamie."

  Once again, a curious look narrowed Olsen's eyes. He seemed unable to keep himself from staring.

  A tractor went by, honking, breaking Olsen's concentration. Olsen honked back. He put the car in gear and pulled away.

  For Sally, the ride was more thrilling than anything you could find on a carnival midway. She liked the steep hills and looking down at the rich valleys with pines lining the distant horizon. White farmhouses and big red barns looked snug against the rich green pastureland. She liked the sight of cows grazing on the sides of hills and horses playing in long grasses. The morning haze was only now burning off the land and there was just enough of it to give everything the aura of a magical kingdom.

  "It's so beautiful here," Sally said.

  "God's country," Olsen replied, with just a hint of smugness. "Lived in the city for a few years when I was a young man, but I sure was glad to get back here."

  "Oh, where did you live?" Sally asked, glad of a chance to contribute to the conversation.

  "Dailey City."

  Sally almost laughed, not maliciously, but just because the reference struck her as gently comical, something Floyd the barber might say on "The Andy Griffith Show." Last night she'd come across the name of the town on a map. Dailey was a city in name only. Its population was 20,000 or something like that. The way Olsen talked you'd think he'd moved to Chicago. But then, Sally reasoned, if you grew up in tiny Haversham, Dailey probably did seem like a full-fledged city. She was probably just being patronizing.

  "So you went back to your farm?" Sally said.

  "No, actually, I moved right into Haversham, where I ran a repair shop." Once more his gaze wandered over to Jamie. "Till all the trouble started—with the hotel and all—and I couldn't deal with all the press people and the like. That's when I moved out to the acreage my uncle left me and started raising chickens."

  Now his dark eyes were fixed on Jamie. Sally could see her daughter squirm under Olsen's scrutiny. She touched Jamie's arm, hoping to reassure the girl that everything was all right.

  Sally was about to ask what "trouble" Olsen had referred to when Jamie jumped up in her seat and cried, "Look! A wrecker!"

  In the parking lot of a small diner tucked into a grove of fir trees sat a wrecker with a Shell logo on its doors.

  "Phil Waldron," Olsen said. "Runs the Shell station." This time when he looked at Jamie, it was in a paternal way. He even smiled. Jamie visibly relaxed with him for the first time. She smiled back. "You've got good eyes. You ever hunted?"

  "Hunted?" Jamie laughed. "What would I hunt in the city?"

  "Well, a lot of city folks come out here hunting. Too many, sometimes, if you want to know the God's truth. You've got a good eye."

  Obviously, Olsen was inflating Jamie's skills—sighting a red wrecker in front of a white diner at midday was hardly evidence that they were in the presence of a budding Daniel Boone but Sally was grateful that the man was trying to make amends for the way he'd kept staring at Jamie.

  Olsen pulled his van in next to the wrecker and said, "Be right back."

  With that, he opened the door, hopped down, and went inside the diner. The place was a converted boxcar, or gave that appearance, anyway. Pepsi signs were displayed prominently outside. Inside, she could see several men at a counter and the edge of an old, colorful jukebox lifting records from their slots to the turntable. The process was jerky, robotic.

  They sat in the van; heat baked the roof. The awful odor of grease from a grill lay heavy on the sluggish air.

  Jamie said, "Wow, he sure was looking at me strange."

  "Ly."

  "Ly?"

  "Strangely. He was looking at me strangely."

  "Oh, yeah, right. Well, he was."

  Sally decided not to pretend otherwise. "Yes, he was, but that doesn't mean anything. I have the feeling you reminded him of someone. Have you ever done that, honey? Seen someone who looks familiar but you can't place them, so you just stare at them?"

  "Yeah, last summer at the swimming pool I saw this girl I thought I knew—so all afternoon, whenever I got the chance, I watched her. It turns out we went to second grade together, but she'd put on all this weight." Jamie made chipmunk cheeks. "She was humongous! That's why I didn't recognize her."

  "Well, then you know what I'm talking about."

  "It still kind of scared me, though."

  "I don't blame you. Nobody likes to be stared at."

  "I just wish our car could be fixed and we could get back on the Interstate."

  Sally sighed. "I guess my plans to show you the countryside haven't worked out very well, have they?"

  They didn't say anything for a time. Jamie stuck her head out the window, obviously hoping for a breeze.

  Sally sat with her head back against the seat. The chickens squawked, thrashing against the wire cages, feathers flying.

  Jamie said, "I don't know why, Mom, but suddenly I have this urge for a chicken sandwich."

  "Very funny."

  Jamie's tone changed suddenly, from playful to—what? Alarmed. "Mom, don't look right away, but slowly let your eyes drift over to the far window in the diner."

  "What's wrong?"

  "Just do it, Mom. But slowly, so they won't realize it."

  "Who won't realize it?"

  There was no reason to feel alarmed—it was broad daylight, they were sitting outdoors, they could pick up a phone and call the local police if they needed to—but a shiver passed through Sally Baines as she sat there.

  She raised her head from the seat and slowly let her eyes wander to the window her daughter had described.

  Immediately she saw what Jamie was talking about.

  In the window, trying to hide behind a soiled white curtain, stood Cletus Olsen and another man. The other man appeared to have something wrong with one eye; it appeared to be dead, blind. Olsen was pointing at the van. Or, more specifically, at somebody in the van. Sally had no doubt about whom he was pointing to: Jamie.

  "You see, Mom? You see?"

  "Yes, honey."

  "Why are they pointing?"

  "I don't know."

  "It's kind of scary."

  Sally tried to be the reassuring parent. "It's just the way people in small towns act sometimes. It's called xenophobia."

  "Xeno . . . what?"

  "Xenophobia. It means fear of strangers."

  "They're afraid of us? We're afraid of them!"

  "Well, maybe we're all guilty of a little xenophobia, then." She sat up straight, fanned herself with her hand, and decided she was contributing to the mood of the moment far more than was healthy. "Look, here's what we'll do. We'll get the car towed and fixed. We'll find a nice little restaurant in Haversham, and then we'll sit there and drink Cokes and have hamburgers while our car is being worked on. Then we'll get back on the freeway and drive to the nearest big town. We'll check into a nice motel and then find a theater in a shopping mall that's playing the newest super hero movie, and that's how well spend the night."

  "Buttered popcorn?"

  "Jamie," Sally said. "Don't take advantage of my good mood."

  "But other kids get to eat buttered popcorn."

  "Honey, if it was real butter I wouldn't mind. But it's just chemicals." She paused. "But you can have a box of Good and Plentys."

  Jamie said, "Yea, like TH
AT doesn’t have a bunch of chemicals." She got THE LOOK. "But I guess that's a pretty good tradeoff."

  Ahead of them the diner door banged shut. Cletus Olsen was back. Without getting in the van, he said, "Why don't you give me your keys. I'll give you a lift the rest of the way into Haversham. Waldron'll go get your car."

  Jamie nudged her mother, whispered, "Do you trust him with your keys?"

  Obviously Olsen was aware of Jamie's whisper. He had started staring at the girl again.

  Sally, embarrassed by her daughter's rudeness and rattled by Olsen's strangeness, said, "Thank you, Mr. Olsen. I appreciate that."

  She handed him the keys.

  When Olsen left to take the keys inside the diner to Waldron, Jamie said, "I don't trust that guy. I really don't."

  Sally was about to say something when the diner door opened again and Olsen came back.

  He got in the van, started the engine, and backed out of the parking lot.

  Just as they were turning back onto the road, Sally saw, in the rear view mirror, the curtain fluttering in the diner window.

  The man with one blind eye was watching them again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1

  Sally's first reaction to the downtown area of Haversham was that she'd stepped back in time.

  On all four sides of a rolling green town square, complete with bandstand, war memorials and duck pond, were a variety of retail stores that looked much as they must have been in the forties. Green awnings covered many windows; signs advertising specials were all done neatly in red ink on white butcher paper; and on green park benches placed approximately in front of every other store sat older men in suspenders and white shirts and panama hats, sucking on pipes, playing checkers, or fanning themselves with rolled-up newspapers. A frisky little brown-and-white terrier roamed one side of the square. A pretty young woman pushed a stroller with places for two babies—her twins. A girl about Jamie's age stood awkwardly on the corner while a boy obviously tried to make conversation with her. "How beautiful it all is," Sally said.

  Cletus Olsen expressed surprise. "You really mean that? Most city folks find it pretty boring, actually."

  Jamie shot her mother a secret look that consisted of tilting her head and rolling her eyes—meaning that Jamie found the town boring.

  "Just look at the cars," Sally said, disregarding her daughter. A 1963 green Ford Falcon. A 1958 blue-and-white Plymouth, complete with tail fins. A 1967 tan Buick that looked nearly as formidable as a tank. "And they're all so well-preserved."

  They rode on.

  After a few minutes, Olsen pulled his van into the Shell station and said, "Phil'll be along in a few minutes and can have a look at your car. Meanwhile, you should probably get yourselves some lunch. The cafe ain't much to look at, but it serves a mighty decent meal. At least by my standards." Olsen's tone was a bit defensive, as if he expected Sally to argue with him.

  When Sally took her eyes from the steeple of a beautiful white Methodist church, she saw that Olsen's gaze had once more settled on Jamie.

  Sally slid her arm protectively around her daughter's shoulder. "Come on. The lunch idea sounds like a good one."

  "Yeah, especially if they've got french fries."

  "I'm sure they do," Sally said.

  "And malts."

  "That sounds like a well-balanced meal—fried foods and whole milk with a lot of sugar in it!"

  Olsen, who was looking at Sally now and smiling, said, "I think you city folks make too much about dairy products. I've eaten a couple 'a eggs a day for most of my life, and it sure doesn't seem to have affected me bad."

  Olsen sort of swelled up inside his bib overalls. Sally thought he might thump his chest Tarzan style.

  Sally put out a hand. Olsen was obviously startled. Apparently, around Haversham, women didn't shake hands. That would be the exclusive Provence of men. "I thank you very much for the ride, Mr. Olsen," she said.

  Then she noticed he was staring at Jamie again. Now she was getting angry.

  "Come on, Jamie, let's go to the cafe."

  They had turned to start down the sidewalk when Olsen said, "If Phil can't get your car fixed right away, you'll maybe have to put up in the hotel for a few hours."

  "The hotel?"

  Olsen nodded. "The Royal Hotel." His brows knit; his mood had shifted rapidly. He looked concerned about something. "Remember I mentioned some trouble?"

  Sally nodded.

  "Well, that's where it happened. Back in the days when it was known as the Edmonds." Then he laughed. "But, hell's bells, that was a long time ago. Everything's fine now, and it's mostly forgotten 'cept for superstitious old coots like me."

  His eyes touched Jamie's lightly and with some humor. "You have yourself a good time this afternoon and make sure your mom here feeds you a lot of french fries."

  With that, he got back up into his truck and pulled away.

  2

  The sounds of a Jerry Vale record came through the wall from the room next to Hanratty's.

  The reporter lying on the bed had to smile to himself.

  An entire generation of comics found Vale guilty of excess syrup in his songs. So they made fun of him.

  The Haversham oldies station apparently found the Italian singer more than acceptable. It seemed that every third song was a Vale ballad.

  Hanratty patted the chest of his button-down white shirt for his pack of cigarettes. Then he realized he'd left his smokes over by the telescope. He got up, a big man of six-four who could have improved his melancholy, auburn-haired good looks by losing fifteen pounds, and went over by the window.

  Automatically, his brown eyes looked to the street below. Watching Haversham was sort of like watching a painting. No matter how many times you looked at it, nothing much moved.

  He didn't pay any special attention to the blond woman and the young girl until his mind registered the fact that the woman's clothes were fashionable big city items.

  Then he put an eye to the telescope and began watching them.

  She was very pretty, the woman, but while his first impulse was sexual, his second and more lasting impression—watching her blue eyes, the slightly nervous way she had of smiling, and the gravity of her bearing—was that this was exactly the sort of woman he used to seek out back in his New York and Los Angeles days.

  She probably drove a Volvo, liked Robert de Niro movies, knew at least three arcane things about the painter Matisse, and would confess after the first night of lovemaking that she really hadn't had much luck with men in her life. She would say this not so much with self-pity as with a kind of quiet resignation and a tentative hope that perhaps this man might be different.

  And Hanratty always had been different for them, for this type of woman, and for two, three months—their affairs had been wonderful—gentle fun, tender passion. But then one of them always fucked it up, he got scared or she got scared, and then it always ended, the first part of the breaking up noisy with recrimination and blame, the second part solemn and sad, expressed more in looks than words; by then they would be beyond words.

  Hanratty was thinking about all this—eager now to meet the woman, already contriving ways in which such a meeting might take place—when he noticed the girl.

  He set the scope for a closer look at the child. When he got his look, he felt a cold sheen of sweat start on his back. His stomach knotted as it hadn't since the days when he'd been in the clinic kicking the coke.

  The woman—obviously the girl's mother—led them slowly down the sidewalk, taking in what seemed to be every detail of the street. Obviously she was taken by the place, much as Hanratty had been when he'd first seen it.

  Until he'd known all the facts about what had happened here.

  And what was waiting to happen again.

  Still astonished by the resemblance, he stayed on the scope, following the pair as they completed their circle of the town square and entered the cafe, disappearing inside.

  Hanratty immediately
went over to the dresser and dug through his shoebox of press clippings. He wanted to get a good look at Anne Edmonds again, to make sure that what he thought he'd just seen was in fact true. He held up the clipping of Anne's face and compared it to the mental picture he'd retained of the girl just now with her mother.

  There could be no mistaking the resemblance between these two girls.

  They might have been twins.

  3

  When she heard the strains of "The Young and the Restless" coming from Room 423, Carlotta Mullins stopped her mopping, tried to straighten out a back bent from forty years of being a cleaning woman in this hotel, and proceeded briskly as she could down the hall to a room that had been vacated just an hour ago. This was a room with a television where Carlotta could catch up with the goings-on of her favorite soap opera.

  Carlotta opened the door of Room 429, made sure nobody was looking, and went inside.

  Last night's tenant had smoked cigars. The air was foul with the smell. But that was better than what she'd found in this room a year ago. Carlotta, a devout Methodist, did not approve of magazines displaying nude bodies; even less did she approve of magazines that showed nude bodies doing things together. A tenant had left such a magazine behind. Carlotta had looked through it, scarcely able to believe what she was seeing. Even by today's standards, the magazine was filth. She showed it to the other cleaning woman, who was equally outraged, and who took it, she said, out to the trash, where she burned it. Since then, Carlotta had always done a quick check for such magazines. But she'd never found one again, and if she felt some slight trace of disappointment, that was probably because she wanted the Lord to use her again as a means of throwing out such filth.

  On today's episode of the soap, there was a problem with incest, with what could possibly be homosexuality, with what was certainly adultery, and with what might prove to be murder.

  Carlotta sat in the overstuffed armchair with her brown oxfords up on the bed, eating one of the three Snickers she always kept in the pocket of her housedress and fanning herself with her hand. Even though the air conditioning was on, the temperature was still in the high seventies in here.