Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  The B.C.T.’s “chairman and founder,” David Hogue, was quoted as noting that the vote “declared this group’s acceptance of its duty to serve as a protective watchdog for the whole of southern Indiana, in the absence of other properly concerned organizations. Bedford may be the limestone capital of the world and may have provided stone for the Pentagon and the Empire State Building, but the proper place to build a pyramid is in Egypt. If they want to do it there, we won’t fight it, but anywhere in southern Indiana and they’ve got a battle on their hands.”

  The B.C.T. also elected officers at their meeting. Among them, as a “committee member with responsibility for project evaluation,” was Frank Pynne.

  I got my little panel truck from the parking lot and headed toward Bloomington. Town ended abruptly and I started looking for dirt roads. The first possibility was called to my attention by a red Ford Fiesta turning sharply onto the highway ahead of me from the right. It came out of the road mouth and I saw there a mailbox with large red-orange letters spelling Pynne.

  I didn’t get much of a look at the driver. The car was filled in the back with cardboard boxes. Nothing seemed to be gained by my chasing it. There aren’t many vehicles my van can catch. I turned up the driveway.

  After a considerable drive I came to a clearing and the Pynnes’ “log cabin.” They don’t make them like they did in Abe Lincoln’s day. Double glazed windows, television antennae, solar panels. This one even had a front door instead of a bearskin flap.

  I could see no cars and suspected I had only myself to talk to, but I pounded heftily on the door knocker, a cast-iron affair in the shape of a tree. Nobody answered.

  I tried the door. It was locked.

  I walked around the house. I couldn’t tell how much of the surrounding land belonged to the Pynnes, because the trees gradually thickened into a wood without benefit of fences. But there was a conspicuous air of rural pursuits, with much cultivation and a sizable chicken run. I saw no chickens, however.

  Nowhere from the building could I see either another house or even a cultivated field.

  I had a look through the windows. The curtains were drawn and revealed an interior with sparse furnishing. What there was looked comfortable enough.

  There didn’t seem a lot more I could do. I got into my van and drove back to the roadside. I turned west and around the next bend I found another mailbox, with painted initials S.A.D. There was no road by it, but on the other side a gravel track led down a slight hill and I could just make out a small frame structure through a grove of trees.

  I pulled across the highway into the track, assuming that S.A.D.’s S and D stood for Sharon Doans.

  Chapter Five

  The gray board building was peaked like a chapel and looked old, far more a product of age than the log building I had just come from. A yellow VW Beetle stood on the gravel loop driveway and I parked behind it.

  I walked toward the front door.

  As I did so, it suddenly opened and inside the screen door a short woman appeared, hands on hips, framed in the doorway.

  She was a startling figure, with red hair that fell in a divided waterfall across both her shoulders to below her waist. She wore a faded denim jacket and skirt, orange fishnet tights and navy-blue sneakers. On her belt there was a large hunting knife slotted into a holster.

  Whatever I had expected, this wasn’t it.

  “You want me?” she asked.

  “Are you Sharon Doans?”

  “I am.”

  I took a step closer. “I was told you know Priscilla Pynne.” She didn’t deny it. “I would like to ask you a few questions about her. I’ve come down specially from Indianapolis. If it is at all possible, I’d appreciate it.”

  She wrinkled her nose and dropped her arms. “Oh hell. Come on in.”

  The inside was one large open room. Near the window next to the J front door were a couple of wicker chairs and a table. She pointed, me to one of the chairs, then suddenly, stood in front of me again in the posture she’d appeared in the door with.

  “Does this look active yet attractive?” she asked.

  “Oh yes,” I said. Or frightening. Depends on how you take it.

  “O.K. Good.”

  She took off her hair.

  “Excuse the rig-out,” she said, waving the red wig. “I do lots of bits and pieces to make a living and sometimes it’s book covers for this series of romantic novels.” She pointed to a drawing board standing in a distant corner next to a table, a floor-to-ceiling mirror and an assortment of artist’s paraphernalia.

  “I’m on a book cover now. The book’s about an unconventional woman who finds true love in the arms of a butcher.”

  “Many women do,” I said.

  “You really think so? I just haven’t known that many butchers.” She made it sound as if she’d been slightly irresponsible. “But I kind of thought maybe a woman who liked knives . . .” She patted the handle of the weapon at her waist absently. Then scratched under the base of the brown bun which had been revealed when the wig came off. “Hang on a sec.”

  She walked across the room and put the red wig carefully on the back of a chair. When she came back, she said, “I do most of my own modeling. I model a little bit for other people, so I figure why not for myself too.”

  “Why not indeed.”

  “Phew!” she said, and she dropped heavily into the other wicker chair. “I like to dress up anyway. I’ve got a big basket of clothes back there, all kinds of stuff. I get a charge out of it. And any other stuff I need, I borrow from stores in town. They’re really helpful that way with people doing art around town.”

  “Do you read the books?”

  “Enough to get the feel of them. Covers have to relate to what’s inside.”

  “Then there are some pretty lively insides around.”

  Seriously she said, “The world’s a modern Babylon.” She looked up at me. “You wanted to talk about Cilia, but who are you?”

  “A friend of hers has hired me to look for her.”

  “Hired?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then you’re not a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I’m going to make it breaktime and have a smoke. You want one?”

  “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”

  “I don’t mean a cigarette. I mean a joint.”

  “I don’t joint either,” I said.

  “Too old, or what?”

  “Too old,” I said.

  On the table in front of us was a small pottery bowl and in it there were four fusiform home-rolls. The table also bore an ashtray and a brick with a hollow full of stick matches. She took one of the cigarettes, striking a match on the side of the brick, and made herself comfortable.

  She waved the cigarette at me. “It’s good for you, you know.”

  “Delta-l-THC and its metabolites have too long a biological half-life to suit me,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The active ingredients stick around in the body for too long.”

  “I hadn’t heard that one before,” she said. She thought. “But it sounds good rather than bad to me. Hey, do you mind if I write it down?”

  I didn’t, and she got up and brought over a piece of paper and a pencil. I repeated the chemical name for her.

  “Wow!” she said. She leaned back. “I’m a little-bit person,” she said. “I draw a little bit, I model a little bit. I like to write, so I write a little bit. Only I haven’t got any imagination, so I just write down the stuff that happens to me, and the stuff that interests me.” She drew on her cigarette. “So what did you want to know about Silly, then?”

  “Silly?”

  “Cilia. Priscilla Pynne.”

  “I see. I understand that you were perhaps her best friend.”

  She considered that. “I don’t know about best or not. Who said ‘best’?”

  “Sheriff Dunlap.”

  “You’ve been talking to Jeanna?”

 
“Yes.”

  “She’s been filling you up with a lot of idle gossip about me, I suppose.”

  “We didn’t talk much about you, Miss Doans. Apart from what I’ve said, she suggested that more recently there might have been some trouble between you and Mrs. Pynne and that I should ask you about it.”

  “Ooooh.” She waved her cigarette irritatedly. “It’s not worth . . .” But she settled to tell it. “A couple of months ago there was this big party.”

  “Was that Billy Boyd’s party?”

  “You know about that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jeanna again, I suppose. All right, so Billy was making this big gesture with this party, inviting everybody he knew, even people he didn’t like who’d been maybe friends of his mother’s, right? But Billy’s a stirrer, right? Now, I love him like . . . like a brother. I do. But he enjoys causing trouble, and so at this party he had a whisper to Silly and she came out to the garage and found me and Frank—that’s her husband—in the middle of a friendly little kiss.”

  She made a face and vibrated her hands to show mock horror.

  “Well, would she stay and find out what it was about? No. She just walked away and left the party.” Shrug.

  “What was it about?”

  “Frank took me out there to talk about her. He was real worried about her. He knew she spent a lot of time here watching me draw and talking to me. She even modeled for me sometimes. I think underneath that cold exterior she liked dressing up even more than me.”

  I thought about asking whether Priscilla Pynne smoked with her, but, pre-empting my question, Sharon Doans said, “No, Silly hated this stuff.”

  I smiled and nodded, conceding that I had been wondering.

  She waved the butt at me. “Makes you perceptive,” she said, but her selling was soft. “Silly had a bad time with drugs sometime before she came here. She dropped out of college and a year or two later she OD’d in New York. They got her back together, and sent her home for Christmas.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Springfield, Massachusetts. And that train ride was when she met Frank. Isn’t it romantic?”

  I kind of preferred the butcher, but I’m funny that way.

  “Anyway, the party. Frank was just sort of saying thanks for the help when Silly walked in, and for a change she acted out her name. When I figured out what happened and who it was, I went to try to find her, but she had already gone. Then I saw Billy watching me with that bushy little smirk of his. I said, ‘You sent her out there, you evil little bastard.’ Oh, sorry,” she said, covering her mouth. “I’m a little bit foulmouthed too.”

  “Let me know when it shows so I can cover my ears.”

  “He said, ‘I cannot tell a lie,’ and then he said, ‘but it’s not exactly a cherry tree I cut down, is it?’ ”

  She watched my reaction to this. I smiled, and nodded gently.

  “Well, I thought that was pretty funny, right off the cuff, you know,” she said. “I wrote that one down, even though it couldn’t be farther from the truth.”

  I nodded yet again. I didn’t know whether I was an oil donkey or a junkie.

  “Anyway, then he said, ‘And she didn’t even say thank you. Oh well, maybe she’ll find some other way to show her gratitude.’ ”

  “And you think that their running off together might have been tied to her finding a way to show her gratitude.”

  “If I know Billy—and do I know Billy!—Silly is busy showing her gratitude at this very moment.” She laughed at that. “But seriously,” she said, “Silly shouldn’t have left because of anything to do with what happened at the party. There wasn’t anything in it.”

  “But you think she might have left because of it?”

  “It might have helped her make up her mind.”

  “But it had been brewing?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about her. Not to understand her. I know she’d had a rough time here, especially the first year. She was depressed from being so isolated and with nobody around she knew. She got some pills from Andy Kubiak at first, but, lately she’s seemed better. I do a little bit of acting, amateur stuff at the theater, you know? And she came down there with me and helped backstage with makeup and costumes. But she wasn’t really happy.”

  “How long have the Pynnes been here?”

  “Two and a half, three years. Something like that.”

  “And Mr. Pynne?”

  “What about him?”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Strong sort of guy. Knows what he wants. Short-tempered and kind of restless, though. I think he’s looking for mountains to climb.”

  “Or pyramids?”

  “Hey, you know about that.” She cocked her head. “Are you pretty sharp or are you stringing me along already knowing this stuff I’m telling you?”

  “I’m pretty sharp,” I said.

  She snorted. “Anyhow, he’s not the easygoingest guy I’ve ever known. Though he’s loosening up a little lately.” She waved the remains of her cigarette. “He’s started smoking again. When he came here, he was as much against it as Silly, from his time in Nam, but nowadays—”

  “He was in Vietnam?”

  “Yeah. Came out, went to college, then graduate school and now here. He’s one of the ones that used it, getting himself together like they used to say the Army did.”

  “Except he is restless.”

  “Just wanting to push on for new things. He wants to be rich and he wants to be a daddy. And he thinks Silly is a prize bitch for walking out on him.”

  “Do you think Mrs. Pynne will come back?”

  She thought for only a moment. “No. I’d bet she never comes back. She’s away. She’ll stay.”

  “Do you think she’s been planning it for a long time?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t love Frank and maybe the more she became her own person, the more important that was.”

  “She told you she didn’t love him?”

  “Oh, the marriage was sort of one of convenience from the beginning. He helped her get back together and she gave him the pretty, housified wife that was part of his idea of how things should be.”

  “But no children?”

  “He wanted them. She was holding out. Maybe that pushed her too.”

  “But you don’t think she and Boyd had planned to leave for a long time?”

  “Naw,” she said. “Billy wouldn’t have planned.”

  “Not at all?”

  She shook her head dismissively.

  “But running away takes money. He’d have had to arrange that.”

  “Billy always carried cash. Hundreds, at least.”

  “Would that have been part of his appeal to Mrs. Pynne?”

  She mused. “Could be. I hadn’t thought about it, but Frank is tight as a tick. She wouldn’t have had any money of her own.”

  “And the appeal from Boyd’s side?”

  “Oh, the chance to crack the Ice Queen. He’d have jumped at that.”

  “The Ice Queen?”

  “That’s his pet name for her. She didn’t exactly walk around radiating warmth and friendliness. But he’ll melt her good, believe me. And then he’ll leave the screwed-out hulk and wander home.”

  “You assume Boyd will be coming back?”

  “Hell, yes. In fact, I’m surprised he’s been away this long. Guess there’s a little more to Silly than I thought.” She looked at me slightly wickedly. “I look forward to hearing about it.”

  “You’re in his confidence, then?”

  She suddenly went quiet, and her face lost its animation.

  “Miss Doans? Are you all right?”

  Eventually she said, in a throaty whisper, “I was thinking about Billy. I . . . I’m a little bit bad, you know. I don’t care enough what . . . Well, when he tries, Billy makes me . . . makes me feel better. It’s just I miss him. I’ll be glad when he’s back. He’s a laugh, Billy.”

  I sat and w
atched her.

  She looked back. “I bet you don’t make a girl feel small either, do you, mister? Not even a little bit of a little-bit girl.”

  “Not intentionally,” I said.

  “I didn’t think so. Look, with all my other little bits I’m a little bit of a whore. Are you maybe a tomcat, like my absent friend? Would you keep me company for a while?”

  It was terribly quiet, there in the forests of Brown County.

  I said, “I don’t think I’d be able to provide what you’re really missing.”

  “You might help me forget for a while.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “But you have work to do,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re going to go do it?”

  “Yes.”

  “O.K.,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to apologize for.”

  “O.K. I guess I better get back to work too.”

  We both got out of our chairs. She went to get the red wig and then carried it back to the door. “Anything else I can tell you?” she asked.

  I said, “I would like to talk to Frank Pynne. I’ve been to the house, but he isn’t there. I saw a car pulling out of the driveway which might have been him. It turned toward Bloomington. Would you know how I might go about getting in touch with him?”

  Her head jumped back, as if I had slapped her. “Look, mister, I don’t know what goddamn Jeanna Dunlap has been saying to you. Frank Pynne may have been around here a few times for a smoke and a shoulder to cry on since he got deserted, but that doesn’t mean I keep track of his movements every day or have his phone number tattooed over my heart.”

  “Sheriff Dunlap didn’t say a thing about you and Mr. Pynne, except what I told you before.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Well, I could tell you a thing or two about her, you know? She used to turn on too, did she tell you that?”

  “No.”

  “That was before she got herself elected sheriff, but she’s been in this room high as a cloud. You better believe it.”

  “I only asked because as a friend of the family it seemed you might know how I could phone him or get a message to him. That’s all.”

  She breathed heavily before me. “Oh shit,” she said, and threw the red wig onto her head. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I feel a little bit in pieces, that’s all,” she said. “Ah, hell. I don’t know.” She adjusted the wig. “How do I look? Great, huh?”