Missing Woman

by Michael Z. Lewin

  “Sandwich?”

  “Thanks, no,” I said.

  She poured coffee into two mugs and added cream to both. She pushed one toward me and picked the other up. She stood for a moment. “Let’s go through to the living room,” she said. “More comfortable there.”

  “All right.”

  I followed her into a small immaculate front room. It had a couch and a leather armchair with an end table next to it. There was a small sideboard, a TV, some shelves. On the wall there were framed photographs of what seemed to be formal occasions, but the light was too. dim for me to see clearly.

  I made for the armchair, but Weddle moved suddenly to interpose herself.

  “No! That’s my chair,” she said.

  I stepped back from it.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry. It’s very rude of me. But it was my father’s and I like to sit there.”

  “Quite all right,” I said.

  “The couch is comfortable.”

  I sat on the couch.

  “You found Priscilla Pynne, then?” she asked after she gulped a bit of coffee and put her mug on the table next to her chair.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Was Frank pleased or displeased?”

  “I haven’t told him yet.”

  “Do you think she’ll be coming back?”

  “No, I wouldn’t think so.”

  I looked at my watch. It was ten past eleven.

  “I don’t know what’s keeping David.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I haven’t offered you anything stronger than coffee.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “No, go on. I have some bourbon and some gin.”

  “No.”

  “And some wine. There’s a vineyard near here. Possum Trot Vineyards, and they produce a nice red wine.”

  “Possum Trot?”

  “It’s really very nice.” She got up quickly.

  “I haven’t finished my coffee yet,” I said.

  She went to the sideboard and opened a lower door. She took out a wineglass. I watched. Her hand seemed to shake slightly. She put the glass down, then went to another compartment for the wine. It was an unopened bottle.

  “Please,” I said. “Don’t open a bottle.”

  “No, I want some too,” she said. She found a corkscrew and opened the bottle. She filled the glass and brought it to me.

  “And you?” I said.

  “Oh God.” She trotted back to the sideboard and took out another glass. She filled it, spilling some of the wine as she did.

  She paused with her back to me.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yes, oh yes,” she said. She turned sharply back toward her chair, glass in hand, and spilled some more. “I just don’t know where David can be.”

  “If I’m in your way, I can easily wait outside,” I said.

  “Oh no. Certainly not.” She raised her wineglass to me. “Here’s to your success,” she said.

  “What success?”

  “Finding the Pynne woman, of course.”

  She waited.

  I put my coffee down and took up the wineglass. I gestured toward her with it, and sipped.

  Before I swallowed, I made sure she drank from her glass.

  Better than its name. Possum Trot red.

  “So what is finding Priscilla Pynne going to do to the case, Mr. Samson? Does it help, or does it make it all open and confusing?”

  “Oh, it helps,” I said. “It helps a lot.”

  “Oh?” I sensed she was trying to sound casual. “How?”

  I hesitated, tempted to tell her what I thought. The fact that she wanted to know was interesting.

  She said, “David will tell me anyway.”

  I said, “I think finding Priscilla Pynne will be the difference between finding out for sure who killed Boyd and maybe never knowing.”

  “Good heavens. Was she involved?”

  “She had nothing to do with it at all.”

  “Oh,” she said. Still straining to sound casually interested, rather than as if my words meant the world to her. “So how can that be so important?”

  “Because Boyd was killed the same night she left.”

  “But—but you said she didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  I tried the wine again and waited to see if she would prod me to further explanation.

  “What is the significance of that?” she said.

  “The significance is in asking why Boyd should be killed that particular night. Why not some other night, if Priscilla Pynne herself had no knowledge of what was happening to him.”

  She didn’t give me the answer.

  “Because the killer wished it to be assumed that they disappeared together,” I said.

  I paused, but she didn’t have anything to contribute.

  “A distraction,” I said. “A smoke screen. If Priscilla never returned or if Boyd’s body was never found, then the questions could never be completely answered, whatever people might think.”

  She was still silent. Though, despite the dim light, I sensed that Betty Weddle was growing pale.

  “But,” I said, “that raises a new question. Who knew Priscilla Pynne had left home? And more precisely, who knew it early enough to use the fact? Who knew quickly enough to get to Billy Boyd and kill him?”

  “Who?” she asked, but not as weakly as I expected. She put her wineglass down.

  “Frank Pynne knew first,” I said. “On the Sunday morning. But he called two people right away. One was Jeanna Dunlap. He called her at seven thirty-four a.m., according to the sheriff’s log. But if Frank had killed Boyd, he wouldn’t have called Jeanna so early, because he wouldn’t want people on his wife’s trail quickly enough to be able to find her.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “So there’s Jeanna. Frank also called David Hogue. And as far as I know, they were the only two people who knew that Priscilla Pynne was gone by, say, eight a.m.”

  Betty Weddle nodded. “Except for one thing,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I knew Priscilla Pynne was gone,” she said. “And I confess.”

  “What?”

  “I killed Billy,” she said. From a lacquered box on the table next to her chair she took a substantial automatic pistol. “There comes a time,” she said, “when you have to stand up and be counted.”

  She pointed the pistol at my head.

  Chapter Thirty Six

  I was fed up with people pointing guns at me. This made twice in one day. I decided to rush her. I thought if I acted immediately, she would be taken by surprise.

  Before I made a move, she fired.

  The bullet snicked my ear.

  “I know how to use this thing,” I heard her say when the crashing inside my head quieted down.

  I looked at the blood on my hand after I took it away from my ear.

  “I’m a little rusty. I wasn’t aiming to hit you. I just wanted you to hear the bullet go past.”

  “I think you’ve made your point,” I said. Despite myself, my will to control what part of the situation I could, I felt my heart accelerate. I felt my limbs go wobbly. All for the second time in the day.

  I just wanted to be somewhere else. Forget it all, lady. Sorry I bothered you. Just let me go home and go to sleep and we’ll call it quits. O.K.?

  “I can’t for the life of me see any way out of this except to kill you,” she was saying.

  I tried to think of something cogent to explain another option.

  I managed “Don’t,” but the sound that came out had a kind of strangled quality.

  “I don’t want to!” she said emphatically. “But there’s no other way. I’ve got to protect my interests. What I’ve got to decide is how best to do it.”

  We sat for a few minutes.

  As my head cleared, I began to see that she was nearly as
agitated by all this as I was. Which puzzled me.

  “Is it all right if I have my drink?” I asked.

  She nodded. Her head moved, but the gun didn’t.

  I had a choice between coffee and wine. I took the coffee. I watched her nervousness. It calmed me.

  “Why did you kill Boyd?” I asked.

  She chuckled. “There comes a time when you have to stand up and be counted.”

  She had said that before.

  “I thought you were friendly with him.”

  She stared at me.

  “The will,” I said. “It includes you.”

  “Oh yes.” As if remembering something terribly distant. “That— that wasn’t quite what it seemed. It was . . . I don’t know what it was.”

  “A way to make David Hogue jealous?”

  “Leave David out of it,” she snapped.

  “You started seeing Billy around the time Dave was planning to marry Billy’s mother, didn’t you?”

  “What of it?”

  “Or was your relationship with Billy a way to gain access to Ida Boyd? I’d have thought you a far more likely candidate to murder her.”

  Everyone had concentrated on the one coincidence of Billy’s mother dying just before she drew up her will. But she had also died before getting a chance to marry Dave Hogue.

  But the woman holding the gun on me began to shake with anger. “No! I didn’t do that!”

  She glared. She glowered. Her cheeks grew pink.

  “But maybe I should have,” she said, almost as if she thought of killing for the first time. “She was no way good enough for David. He was going to sacrifice himself to save that land. It mattered that much to him. It mattered . . .” She paused to think. “It mattered more than anything.”

  I watched her now, nearly interested enough to forget my own predicament.

  “Maybe I should have,” she mused. Then, more harshly, “Except that Billy saved me the trouble.”

  “Billy did?”

  “He killed her. Yes.”

  “How do you know?”

  Belittlingly she said, “Has it occurred to you to ask how Billy knew his mother was going to make her will?”

  “Yes. I asked Dave. He thought Ida might have told him.”

  “I told Billy,” Betty Weddle said. “My intention was for him to talk her out of it. I thought he could stop it that way. But instead, he killed her.”

  “You presume,” I said.

  “I presume nothing! I saw him,” Weddle said.

  “You saw him kill his mother?”

  “I didn’t see him do it,” she said. “But from my desk, the same day I told him, I saw him walk up to the house when he claimed he was with Sharon Doans. He wore a navy-blue anorak with the hood up.”

  “If that’s all, it might have been somebody else,” I said.

  She sneered. “There aren’t two men his size around here. And he opened the door with a key. And he didn’t want to be seen going in, and I know that because he didn’t just drive up to the house. He drove Sharon’s car and parked it around the corner. Because I saw that there too.”

  I absorbed this. “Dave didn’t tell me about your seeing Boyd,” I said.

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Why not?”

  “He was so angry with Billy when Ida died, I thought if I told him he might do something rash. David gets terribly involved. All these things matter so much to him, and afterward Sharon swore Billy was at her place the whole time. There’d have been no conviction.”

  “You could have tried.”

  “It worked out. And Billy deserved what he got.”

  I asked, “Do I deserve what I’m going to get?”

  For a moment she felt some sympathy for me. “There’s nothing else I can do. Please believe me when I say I’m sorry about that.”

  “I don’t believe you at all,” I said.

  “It’s true.”

  “You’re a cold-blooded murderer. You like killing. You’re going to enjoy killing me.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “Like you enjoyed killing Billy.”

  She paused for a moment before saying, “I didn’t enjoy killing Billy. He had to die.”

  “There was no other way with him either, I suppose.”

  “That’s right,” she said, suddenly forceful, venomous. She bolted out of her chair.

  I thought I was all over. I nearly died of shock.

  But she was only going to get something. She went to the mantelpiece over a mock fireplace. She took the lid off a ceramic jar which looked like an urn. She took out some folded sheets of paper.

  All the time she was moving, she kept the gun accurately trained on me. I believed she knew how to use it.

  She stood by the mock hearth.

  “There was no other way with Billy,” she said. “No other way.”

  I heard an energy in her voice, a vocal gleam.

  “I can tell you why,” she said.

  She shook out the papers she had taken from the urn. She flattened them against her body with one hand and then began to read.

  “One. Ida’s wishes for the land were unequivocal. Billy is equally specific that he will ignore them. Two. It is unrealistically unlikely that Billy had nothing to do with Ida’s death. Three. My own life will be significantly diminished if Ida’s forest is destroyed. Four. There comes a time when one must stand up and be counted. Are beliefs worth having? Is life worth having without them? Five. I—”

  There was a knock at the door.

  Betty Weddle’s voice faded dramatically as she heard it while saying, “. . . have little to lose.”

  Instinctively we were both silent for a moment.

  The knock repeated.

  Weddle dropped to one knee, training the gun at my head.

  “If you make a sound, it will be your last.”

  I stared at the gun. I thought. If she fires it, then the sound will be sure to bring whoever it is into the house. That person will see what’s happened and she will have to kill him or her too. That kind of chain of killings means she is sure to be caught. Therefore there is no point in her shooting me. I decided to explain this to her.

  It came out as a scream for help. And I dived forward.

  Again there was that horrible huge loud long hurtful harmful noise of the firing of a gun pointing at me.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  When I reached the floor, I scrambled forward and found a little solace by crouching beside the leather chair. The back of my head hurt, but I was otherwise whole and conscious.

  I hadn’t seen him come in, but Dave Hogue stood in the middle of the room. Betty Weddle stood facing him.

  “What in God’s name is happening, Betty?”

  “Why did you come here, David?”

  They asked these questions at the same time.

  Then they both looked at me.

  I edged toward the back of the chair, not secure enough in the probability of my heart’s continued beating to overlook any opportunity to make myself less visible to them.

  “You weren’t meant to come here,” Weddle said. “You never come here.”

  “You sounded so upset on the phone,” he said.

  “I just said I was going home. I left notes of all your messages.”

  “You sounded strange,” he said, making it clear that she hadn’t sounded half so strange as things looked.

  Hogue surveyed the room. Weddle’s eyes followed his and I began to feel more present. Not a comfortable feeling, among the limited feelings I had to choose from.

  “What are you doing, Betty?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer at first, but then his eyes fell upon the sheets of paper she had been reading from.

  “I’m killing him,” Betty Weddle said. I saw her look for me again with the big black eye in her hand. I drew back behind the chair, wishing the leather were steel.

  “Stop it! Stop it!” a voice said. I didn’t think it was mine.

  I cou
ldn’t see Weddle from my hiding place but I saw Hogue moving toward her. The goddamn gun went off again. Beside my face I saw a hole open up in the back of the leather chair. It just flowered, petals of leather pulsing out momentarily, then sagging back to stillness. A complete lifeless cycle.

  I didn’t see the bullet as it went past. I must have blinked.

  I uncoiled then.

  My sprung fear and tension and sense of injustice that I—I!—should be the object of this absurd violent attention opened into action. It wasn’t much, but I pushed the leather chair forward, toward the death dispenser, as fast and hard and straight and hard as I could. I wished to push it through her. Through her and through the wall and into the next county and country and world. If I was to be killed, I wished to kill back.

  But all my effort didn’t stop the banging noises. Bang. I couldn’t bear it.

  I stretched myself to full length behind the chair.

  It hit something. Bang. There were shatterings, crashings, smashings. Bang. Explodings, screamings. Bang. I didn’t know if I was dreaming. Bang.

  And then the heaviest weight in the whole world crushed me and I went to sleep for a while.

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  I didn’t know how long I had been unconscious when I realized that I was still breathing. I wasn’t thinking about time. I was too aware that breathing was difficult. Terribly difficult.

  I didn’t understand why until it occurred to me that the chair was on top of me, pinning me at the shoulder blades and down my back.

  But it seemed too heavy.

  Then I figured it out.

  I push chair. Chair hits Betty. Betty falls forward. Chair and Betty tip over. Albert underneath.

  Poor Albert.

  What I didn’t understand was why she didn’t get up. It’s not very nice to stay seated when your chair is crushing your houseguest.

  Maybe she didn’t know I was there.

  I tried to squirm, but all I managed to wiggle was my toes.

  She wouldn’t notice that, but I found it hard to do more because breathing was so hard.

  I moaned a little, but that tired me out.

  I tried to take a deep breath, but I couldn’t.

  Suddenly I felt I wasn’t going to get another breath. I panicked. I heaved with every heaving muscle I owned, and the chair rocked, and toppled sideways, thudding off me.