Black-Eyed Stranger

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “The time is now,” Sam said in alarm. “I confessed, didn’t I? You got witnesses.”

  Dulain frowned. “You admit you took her?”

  “I admit.” Sam said. “I told you.” He looked up. He felt like laughing. He said, “Wolf. Wolf.” It sounded like woof, woof, like an imitation of barking.

  Alan lifted his chin and a new expression formed on his sharp face. Pity? Sam watched, warily. Alan came nearer, looking down. Looking down. He put his hand on Sam’s arm, in pity. He said, “Tell me about it, Sam. I’d like to understand. What was in your heart?”

  Sam sat still and watched the hand, the clean square cut fingernails. His lips twisted. “Guess.”

  “You were married once, weren’t you, Sam? Did you ever have a child? Does Kay remind you …? Is there some frustrated …?”

  Sam pulled his sleeve out from under the hand. His black eyes were blazing. He said, “Guess again. Just keep guessing. If you never listen, you’ll never know. You’ll always have to guess.”

  Alan said slyly, “Why should you be angry? Because you couldn’t fool me?”

  Sam said, “You’re not a hard man to fool, Dulain, with your system. Whatever isn’t clear to you, why, that’s crazy.” He got up. “Hey, you, Warner? You going to turn me in?”

  Warner looked at Dulain who shook his head. “Later,” Warner said.

  “Might as well be going,” Sam mumbled. “Might as well mosey along. Don’t know what I’m waiting for.”

  “This place. This lake.” Salisbury understood nothing, nor did he necessarily believe in her presence at this place. There was no order to his thinking. He was going to ride on the mere hint, the mere chance. “How do you get to Shawpen Lake?”

  “Highway 6,” Sam said. “Look at the map.”

  Dulain said, haughtily, “We’ll get there.”

  “I’m sure. Well, so long.” Sam moved his head as if to bid them all good-by but he was blind. “And if Idon’t see you all again,” he murmured, “it’s been marvelous.”

  “You’ll see us,” Alan said. He heard the lady say, “Good-by.”

  The door shut. Salisbury cried, “Alan, where’s your car?” He was locked in the present tense. He was going only one way, after Katherine.

  Alan snapped, “Warner, get going. Catch Reilly if you can. Follow Lynch.”

  “I can try,” said Warner, “if Reilly ain’t gone already.”

  “Call back here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Where Lynch goes, I think that’s where she’ll be.” Salisbury was caught for a moment by this idea. He hesitated. He swung back to the urgency of his simple present purpose. He began to grope in the closet. “I’m going to that lake.”

  “I, too,” said Alan. “Naturally. We’ll call back, too. But if it’s a trick. It’s almost got to be a trick.”

  Martha cried, “Charles!” and she was pointing. “What’s that?” Salisbury looked down to see what it was that had fallen to the floor.

  It was a scarf.

  Martha came quickly and snatched it up. All their eyes traveled back to where the other scarf still lay on the sofa.

  “Another scarf?” Alan looked blank. “Whose scarf is this one?

  Martha had her face in this one, the one from the closet. “This one is hers.” Salisbury knew. (This one would carry her scent. It would smell of her living flesh.) “What … what does it mean?”

  Alan’s face was white with anger. “Lynch knew that other scarf was a phony. He let that slip! There’s been some monkey business, and he knows what. He knows too damn much he doesn’t tell. I don’t believe a word out of him. He couldn’t say a straightforward—”

  Martha said to her husband, “Hurry.”

  He spoke to her as if she were grown up. “You’ll take any message?”

  “Yes. I’ll be here.”

  “Call the Police Department.”

  “Yes, Charles.”

  “Tell them everything.”

  “Yes, Charles.”

  “Don’t tie up this line,” Alan said.

  “No, Alan.”

  “We’ll call you.”

  “Yes, call me.”

  Salisbury touched her arm. “You believe Lynch?”

  “I do believe she is living,” Martha said.

  In the tangled city the traffic moved—trucks, taxis, busses, some private cars.

  Sam stepped out of the stone doorway of the apartment house. It was half a block to his car. Well, he would get there or he wouldn’t. He didn’t even look, right or left. One foot fell after another and each fall surprised and even shocked him. He got into his car. It jumped under his shocked hands and feet.

  Warner raced down the back way, stepped out into the side street, hurried to Reilly in the car, caught the door as the car jumped from the curb.

  Still a third car, which was double parked to observe both exits, now jumped, too.

  Traffic swarmed.

  Sam thought, now? No. Now? No. Now? He knew there was a car after him. He went west and north and west again.

  Warner said, “Take it easy.”

  Reilly said, “Don’t kid yourself. It ain’t easy.” They were absorbed, and did not look behind.

  Behind, Baby said, “When do we close in, boss?”

  Ambielli, skillful at the wheel of the stolen car, said, “When we are alone.” He was frowning.

  Baby growled. The boss said, soothingly, “We can arrange to be alone.”

  Martha telephoned. She said crisply, “I must not tie up this telephone. Will you send someone here to talk to me?”

  Sam thought, not yet? He dared to try a trick or two. But he thought it was a silly idea. He’d never shake them.

  Baby said, “He’s trying to shake them, boss.”

  Ambielli gnawed his lip.

  “He ain’t heading for that lake, boss.”

  “If he could shake them, he might.”

  “Has he got her up there, boss?”

  “Possibly,” said Ambielli. But he kept frowning.

  Chapter 17

  THERE is only so much weeping and wailing you can do, Katherine discovered, all alone. When there is no one to listen to it, you can cry only so long before it gets silly.

  She turned the energy of her anger at Sam against the shack. She would get out. She was young and strong and this place couldn’t hold her. Not if she used all her strength and all her anger. Such a thing as imprisonment, the physical fact, had never happened to her. She couldn’t believe in it.

  The door, she found, was heavy and strong and the lock was one she didn’t understand. Some kind of double bolt. She broke a kitchen knife trying to slide the bolts back, and the flying steel, she realized, was dangerous. She thought of the pins in the hinges but they were on the outside. She soon concluded that she could not get out through that door.

  The windows were boarded over, and the boards nailed from outside. She got a sash up but there was nothing to use against the wooden barrier. She tried battering with the chair. Nothing happened. She could get no leverage to pry. She had nothing to use that was both thin and strong. She hacked with a kitchen knife but the wood was tough. She might whittle at a seam enough to make a peephole, no more.

  Glass in the high slits across the back of the shack could be easily broken out. But she could not pass through an opening eight inches high.

  She attacked the walls themselves. It was the same thing. No weapon. No tool. She knew there must have been an ax, or at least a hatchet somewhere here. If so, it was gone. The hammer was gone. He’d taken them away. He’d put the tools outside the walls where she couldn’t get them.

  He was a monster!

  There was no chimney. She couldn’t crawl through the hole where the stove pipe pierced the roof.

  The roof?

  She couldn’t get out through the roof. Her hands were full of splinters and pain. Sam Lynch was a monster!

  It was all a monstrous madness. There was no Ambielli. There was no wolf. There was only
a madman called Sam Lynch who didn’t know what he was doing, and far from keeping her safe, everything bad that had happened was his doing. She thought, what a fool! What a romantic little fool I am! If I ever get out …!

  But she couldn’t get out.

  It was terrifying. She thought, first, of fire. She’d burn! She crept to look into the iron stove. But the iron gadget for lifting the lid was gone.

  He’s a monster! she raged. I’ll freeze!

  Or she’d starve! Her teeth chattered and she had to talk herself out of a real panic.

  Katherine, listen. There’s food in the kitchen, water in the tap. She wouldn’t starve or die of thirst. She wouldn’t freeze, not in April. Blankets on the bunks. She wouldn’t burn, because she couldn’t feed the stove, and the fire in it was dying. She wouldn’t touch the kerosene cook stove in the kitchen.

  Maybe someone would come by. She could watch. She curled up near a window and peered through the cracks between the boards. She could see leaves and more leaves and a little of the incline that fell dizzily down the bank. The road, such as it might be, must run high above where she was. She couldn’t even see it.

  Maybe she could hear. The woodsy place was at first too quiet. It became an uproar of scary, unrecognizable little skittering noises, scrapings, creaks, rustles. Snakes? Even a snake couldn’t get in to this prison, she hoped.

  She couldn’t get out.

  Sam would come back. He would. He must. He wasn’t that much of a monster. But she had better do something besides huddle here for if there were wolves in the woods, there were snakes in the grass, madmen in the cities.… She got up and washed the dishes. She said to herself, severely, Okay, you’re locked up all alone in this shack in this wild place. But you better not make such a big thing of it.

  When she came to the coffee pot she drank a little of what was left. She was leery of lighting that dirty, rickety-looking, dangerously unfamiliar kerosene stove. So she drank the coffee cold.

  All day she alternately lay watching, listening, thinking, or she bustled, trying to do something. Nobody came by. Sam Lynch couldn’t care for her. She must have been right in the first place. He worked for Ambielli. If there was such a one, such a creature.

  But Sam Lynch couldn’t really care for her. A man like that? Alan said he was half crooked. His principles must be a little off, a little whacky. And how could he be attracted by such a one as Katherine Salisbury?

  Always called her sister. Strange man. She mustn’t think like a vain little fool. What could there be about her to interest him? What could there be? She looked at it, trying to look honestly. He must be working for Ambielli (and had a conscience). But she thought, no. Either he is a madman, all mixed up, fighting things just shadows in his brain, or he has blundered into a terrible mess because he cares for me.

  Sam was old. He didn’t touch her and she certainly didn’t want him to. She thought, it doesn’t go by any pattern. That’s the trouble. And then thought, fleetingly, Alan won’t know what to make of it.

  Oh, she wished Alan would come. Alan knew how to be a hero. If he knew where she was he would just come.

  But she thought, uneasily, It’s a simple world if you know how to be a hero. That makes it easy. For one thing, you’d know when to die.

  Sam kept saying he didn’t want to die.

  Well, she didn’t, either.

  She was lying on the bunk, her eyes wide open. Dark was piling up in the corners. This boarded up room was always dim. Dark would be early. If night came down and its black dark, what would she do?

  Nothing to do. Go to sleep. She sat up, looking and feeling stubborn. She knew it was worthless to be afraid. It was too confusing. She took a match and lit the lamp. The shack seemed, at once, warmer and cozier. She took light into the bathroom and washed, and tidied her hair, and brushed at her rumpled brown skirt. Her face looked strange to her, thinner and tighter. I’m aging, she thought. Aged in the woods. She laughed at that, but, all alone, you can’t laugh long.

  She thought, darned if I’m going to be so scared of that old kerosene stove. I’ll make supper. I’ll have something hot. I’ll make some coffee.

  But as she marched out to the main room, then, at last, she heard a car.

  Salisbury stood in the dingy booth and said into the phone, “Martha? Did they call?”

  Martha said, at once, “Yes, Charles. Mr. Reilly called back. They lost Sam Lynch. A reckless driver forced a truck to ram into them. He thinks the reckless driver was Ambielli. Where are you?”

  “We’re on the wrong side of the lake: Lynch didn’t warn us of the turnoff. Now we have to work around it. Are the police—?”

  “The man is here now.”

  “You’re telling him everything?”

  “Yes, Charles.”

  “I’ll call you.”

  It occurred to Salisbury as he hung up what a bare and bald exchange of unhappy facts the call had been, between him and his love. Neither of them had spared the other anything. Or mentioned hope. But they were strong and hopeful, just the same.

  Sam saw the swerving of the cars behind him and saw the traffic knot, and he skittered around a corner and was running free. He corkscrewed west. Finally he found a curb and drew up and sat still, trying to close his staring eyes. The eyelids kept fluttering, wanting to fly open. They would not rest. But he needed to rest a moment, having escaped with his life.

  What now? The girl’s old man would get up there to the shack. Sam wouldn’t go there. She’d be home, soon. But Sam would stay away. What must he do, where go, to lie low and yet observe?

  The northbound traffic on the avenue was sliding by, not fifty feet away. A blue car went, in the pack, past the street where Sam sat. It took a spurt as if it had an impulse and it switched to a left lane. It went west on the next westbound street, looped south making left turns all around, until it was on the avenue again. Northbound. Same as before.

  Quick sharp horn blasts touched off a motorist’s reflexes and opened Sam’s eyes. He could see no trouble. The light changed on the avenue. A blue car got off to a slow start in the near northbound lane. Out of the window of the blue car Baby Hohenbaum was hanging, as if he were looking at his front fender. There was no doubt it was he. And it was the blue car’s horn that still emitted yelps like coughs.

  Sam rode the shock. Either it was a fantastic coincidence, good luck or bad luck, or it was not. Or it was: Hey, Sam, lookit! Or it was tag. Or it was: hey, Sam, tag, you’re it! Sam’s black eyes were despairing.

  Ambielli said, “He make the turn?”

  “Yeah, boss. Coming out slow.”

  Ambielli showed teeth. “Ask the cop,” he nodded slowing up. “Ask him how to get to Shawpen Lake from here.”

  “I know how.”

  “Ask him.”

  The car’s noise smashed the busy silences. Kay ran to look through the crack and made ready to scream a fine great scream, to tell a stranger she was here. And get out. Get home. Be saved.

  But it was Sam’s car rattling down the incline, lurching under the shelter. “Ah, so,” said she aloud, “he deigns to come back.” She was furious.

  His key worked the lock behind her. She didn’t even turn around. “Good evening,” she said coldly.

  He came and turned her with his hands. “Sister, do this for me. Listen. Listen good. There isn’t much time.”

  “What is it now?” she scoffed. “Wolves, I suppose.”

  “All right. You’re mad. I get that. Listen, I’ve got in ahead of a procession. My God, I hoped you’d gone. I hoped you’d gone. Listen, I got up the back way. They asked for the lake. Maybe they wanted me to know it. Maybe they permitted me to get here ahead and alive, just to make double sure. Makes no difference. You got to get out. Go home.”

  “Well!” It was the first bit she understood at all. “Gladly.”

  “Don’t take any time,” he warned. “Do this for me, sister. Death I don’t care for.”

  “So you’ve said before.” She was s
cornful.

  He looked worn. His black eyes were desperate. “Put your coat on.” He began to push her arms into the sleeves. “Got money? Here’s money. Climb up the bank farther down the shore. You’ll be on the road. It’s a dead end, that way. But you go that way. Come to a field. Just cross it. There’ll be a paved road the other side of the field. Go to. your right on that road. You’ll come to a corner, about a mile. That’s the highway. You can do that?”

  “I can do anything to get away from here,” she blazed.

  “You’re mad at me.” He stated it sadly. “Listen, there is a bus, on the highway. You could take it. You could get a couple of towns along before you tell a cop who you are.”

  “I’ll tell the first cop I see.”

  “All right,” he said.

  “I could have done that days ago.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “You didn’t care about my safety.”

  “I cared some,” he said. “Listen, sister. Ah, I wish you weren’t mad. Maybe you would he for me.” They were going toward the door. “I told your people. They think I’m a liar. You could make me a liar.”

  Her heart swelled. “You told …? You saw them? How are they?” she cried, looking up at him.

  “Your mother is quite a little lady. Looked it square in the face.”

  “What in the face?”

  “Your danger.”

  “You are my danger,” she cried, furious, wanting to wound him. “Every single thing. I could have burned!”

  “You’re alive,” he said sadly. “The key was in the coffee.”

  “It’s worthless,” she cried out at him. He couldn’t follow. He couldn’t know she meant his fear.

  “Yeah, yeah, I am your danger,” he agreed. “Hurry. Get away from me.”

  “Sam …”

  “Go on. Get—Wait. Do you hear anything? I don’t hear anything.”

  “Sam, you … You think I am your danger. Is that it?”

  His eyes flickered uneasily. “Yeah, that’s my heroic position. I didn’t intend to die for you. I kept trying not to, sister. I could write a book.”

  “Oh,” she cried. “You’re always … What are you talking about? I think you’re crazy.”