by Otto Penzler
He used Jake’s phone to call the Dicklers in Clayton. The Dicklers’ two children, Dorothy and Donald, were part of Jerry’s load and they were the next stop after Joe’s Diner. The Dicklers were already alarmed because their children hadn’t appeared.
Joe didn’t offer any theories. He was scared, though. He called the trooper barracks in Lakeview and told them about the missing bus. They didn’t take it too seriously, but said they’d send a man out.
Joe headed back for Clayton. This time his heart was a lump in his throat. He drove slowly, staring at every inch of the wire guard rails. There was not a break anywhere, not a broken or bent post. The bus simply couldn’t have skidded over the embankment into the lake without smashing through the wire guard rail.
Joe Gorman felt better when he came out at his diner at the Clayton end. He felt better, but he felt dizzy. Five minutes later Trooper Teliski came whizzing through from Lakeview and stopped his car.
“What’s the gag?” he asked Joe.
Joe tried to light a cigarette and his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t make it. Teliski snapped on his lighter and held it out. Joe dragged smoke deep into his lungs.
“Look,” he said. “The bus started through the dugway at the regular time.” He told about Jerry’s stop at Nugent’s. “It never came out this end.”
A nerve twitched in Teliski’s cheek. “The lake,” he said.
Joe shook his head. “I—I thought of that, right off. I just came through ahead of you—looking. Not a break in the guard rail anywhere. Not a scratch. Not a bent post. The bus didn’t go into the lake. I’ll stake my life on that.”
“Then what else?” Teliski asked. “It couldn’t go up the mountain.”
“I know,” Joe said, and the two men stared at each other.
“It’s some kind of a joke,” Teliski said.
“What kind of a joke? It’s no joke to me—or the Dicklers. I talked to them.”
“Maybe they had permission to go to a special movie or something,” Teliski said.
“Without notifying the parents? Miss Bromfield would have told me, anyway. I talked to her. Listen, Teliski. The bus went into the dugway and it didn’t come out. It’s not in the dugway now, and it didn’t go into the lake.”
Teliski was silent for a moment, and then he spoke with a solid attempt at common sense. “It didn’t come out this end,” he said, “We’ll check back on that guard rail, but let’s say you’re right. It didn’t skid into the lake. It couldn’t go up the mountain. So where does that leave us?”
“Going nuts!” Joe said.
“It leaves us with only one answer. The station wagon never went into the dugway.”
Joe Gorman nodded. “That’s logic,” he said. “But why would Jake Nugent lie? Jerry’s an hour and three-quarters late now. If he didn’t go in the dugway, where is he? Where could he go? Why hasn’t he telephoned if everything is okay?”
A car drove up and stopped. A man got out and came running toward them. It was Karl Dickler, father of two of the missing children. “Thank God you’re here, Teliski. What’s happened?”
“Some kind of a gag,” Teliski said. “We can’t figure it out. The bus never came through the dugway.”
“But it did!” Karl Dickler said.
“It never came out this end,” Joe Gorman said. “I was watching for Pete, naturally.”
“But it did come through!” Dickler said. “I passed them myself on the way to Lakeview. They were about half a mile this way from Jake Nugent’s. I saw them! I waved at my own kids!”
The three men stared at each other.
“It never came out this end,” Joe Gorman said, in a choked voice.
Dickler swayed and reached out to the trooper to steady himself. “The lake!” he whispered.
But they were not in the lake. Joe Gorman’s survey proved accurate; no broken wire, no bent post, not even a scratch …
It was nearly dark when the real search began. Troopers, the families of the children, the selectmen, the sheriff and twenty-five or thirty volunteer deputies, a hundred or more school friends of the missing children.
The lake was definitely out. Not only was the guard rail intact, but the lake was frozen over with about an inch of ice. There wasn’t a break in the smooth surface of the ice anywhere along the two miles of shore bordering the dugway.
Men and women and children swarmed through the woods on the other side of the road, knowing all the time it was useless. The road was called the “dugway” because it had been dug out of the side of the mountain. There was a gravel bank about seven feet high running almost unbrokenly along that side of the road. There was the one old abandoned trail leading to the quarry. It was clear, after walking the first ten yards of it, that no car had come that way. It couldn’t.
A hundred phone calls were made to surrounding towns and villages. No one had seen the station wagon, the children or Jerry Mahoney. The impossible had to be faced.
The bus had gone into the dugway and it hadn’t come out. It hadn’t skidded into the lake and it hadn’t climbed the impenetrable brush of the mountain. It was just gone! Vanished into thin air! …
Everyone was deeply concerned for and sympathetic with the Dicklers, and Joe Gorman, and the Williams, the Trents, the Ishams, the Nortons, and the Jennings, parents of the missing children. Nobody thought much about Jerry Mahoney’s family, or his girl.
It wasn’t reasonable, but as the evening wore on and not one speck of evidence was found or one reasonable theory advanced, people began to talk about Jerry Mahoney. He was the driver. The bus had to have been driven somewhere. It couldn’t navigate without Jerry Mahoney at the wheel. Jerry was the only adult involved. However it had been worked—this disappearance—Jerry must have had a hand in it.
It didn’t matter that, until an hour ago, Jerry had been respected, trusted, liked. Their children were gone and Jerry had taken them somewhere. Why? Ransom. They would all get ransom letters in the morning, they said. A mass kidnapping. Jerry had the kids somewhere. There weren’t any rich kids in Clayton, so he was going to demand ransom from all seven families.
So Jerry Mahoney became a villain because there was no one else to suspect. Nobody stopped to think that Jerry’s father and Jerry’s girl might be as anxious about his absence as the others were about the missing children.
At nine-thirty Sergeant Mason and Trooper Teliski of the State Police, George Peabody, the sheriff, and a dozen men of the community including Joe Gorman and Karl Dickler stormed into the living room of Jerry Mahoney’s house where an old man with silvery white hair sat in an overstuffed armchair with Elizabeth Deering, Jerry’s fiancée, huddled on the floor beside him, her face buried on his knees, weeping.
The old man wore a rather sharply cut gray flannel suit, a bright scarlet vest with brass buttons and a green necktie that must have been designed for a Saint Patrick’s Day parade. As he stroked the girl’s blond hair, the light from the lamp reflected glittering shafts from a square-cut diamond in a heavy gold setting he wore on his little finger. He looked up at Sergeant Mason and his small army of followers, and his blue eyes stopped twinkling as he saw the stern look on the Sergeant’s face.
“All right, Pat,” Sergeant Mason said. “What’s Jerry done with those kids?” Pat Mahoney’s pale blue eyes met the Sergeant’s stare steadily. Then crinkles of mirth appeared at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
“I’d like to ask you something before I try to answer that,” Pat Mahoney said.
“Well?”
“Have you stopped beating your wife, Sergeant?” Pat Mahoney asked. His cackle of laughter was the only sound in the room …
There are those who are old enough to remember the days when Mahoney and Faye were listed about fourth on a bill of eight star acts all around the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit. Pat Mahoney was an Irish comic with dancing feet, and Nora Faye—Mrs. Mahoney to you—could match him at dancing and had the soprano voice of an angel.
Like s
o many people in show business, Pat was a blusterer, a boaster, a name dropper, but with it all a solid professional who would practice for hours a day to perfect a new routine, never missed an entrance in forty years, and up to the day young Jerry was born in a cheap hotel in Grand Rapids, Michigan, had given away half what he earned to deadbeats and hopeless failures.
The diamond ring he wore today had been in and out of a hundred hock shops. It had been the basis of his and Nora’s security for more years than he liked to remember.
If you were left alone with Pat for more than five minutes, he went back to the old days—to the people he had idolized, like Sophie Tucker, and Smith and Dale, and Williams and Wolfus, and Joe Jackson. He’d known them all, played on the same bills with them all. “But,” he would tell you, and a strange radiance would come into the pale blue eyes, “the greatest of them all was Nora Faye—Mrs. Mahoney to you.”
Once he was started on his Nora, there was no way of stopping Pat Mahoney. He told of her talents as a singer and dancer, but in the end it was a saga of endless patience, of kindness and understanding, of love for a fat-headed, vain little Irish comic, of tenderness as a mother, and finally of clear-eyed courage in the face of stark tragedy.
Mahoney and Faye had never played the Palace, the Broadway goal of all vaudevillians. Pat had worked on a dozen acts that would crack the ice and finally he’d made it.
“We’d come out in cowboy suits, all covered with jewels, and jeweled guns, and jeweled boots, and we’d do a little soft shoe routine, and then suddenly all the lights would go out and only the jewels would show—they were made special for that—and we’d go into a fast routine, pulling the guns, and twirling and juggling them, and the roof would fall in! Oh, we tried it out of town, and our agent finally got us the booking at the Palace we’d always dreamed of.”
There’d be a long silence then, and Pat would take a gaudy handkerchief from his hip pocket and blow his nose with a kind of angry violence. “I can show you the costumes still. They’re packed away in a trunk in the attic. Just the way we wore them—me and Nora—the last time we ever played. Atlantic City it was. And she came off after the act with the cheers still ringing in our ears, and down she went on the floor of the dressing room, writhing in pain.
“Then she told me. It had been getting worse for months. She didn’t want me to know. The doctor had told her straight out. She’d only a few months she could count on. She’d never said a word to me—working toward the Palace—knowing I’d dreamed of it. And only three weeks after that—she left us. Me and Jerry—she left us. We were standing by her bed when she left—and the last words she spoke were to Jerry. ‘Take care of Pat,’ she says to him. ‘He’ll be helpless without someone to take care of him.’ And then she smiled at me, and all the years were in that smile.”
And then, wherever he happened to be when he told the story, Pat Mahoney would wipe the back of his hand across his eyes and say: “If you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll be going home.…”
Nobody laughed when Pat pulled the old courtroom wheeze about “have you stopped beating your wife” on Sergeant Mason. Pat looked past the Sergeant at Trooper Teliski, and Joe Gorman, and Karl Dickler, and Mr. and Mrs. Jennings, whose two daughters were in the missing bus, and George Peabody, the fat, wheezing sheriff.
“The question I asked you, Sergeant,” he said, “makes just as much sense as the one you asked me. You asked me what Nora’s boy had done with those kids. There’s no answer to that question. Do I hear you saying, ‘I know what you must be feeling, Pat Mahoney, and you, Elizabeth Deering? And is there anything we can do for you in this hour of your terrible anxiety?’ I don’t hear you saying that, Sergeant.”
“I’m sorry, Pat,” Mason said. “Those kids are missing. Jerry had to take them somewhere.”
“No!” Liz Deering cried. “You all know Jerry better than that!”
They didn’t, it seemed, but they could be forgiven. You can’t confront people with the inexplicable without frightening them and throwing them off balance. You can’t endanger their children and expect a sane reaction. They muttered angrily, and old Pat saw the tortured faces of Joe Gorman and Karl Dickler and the swollen red eyes of Mrs. Jennings.
“Has he talked in any way queerly to you, Pat?” Mason asked. “Has he acted normal of late?”
“Nora’s boy is the most normal boy you ever met,” Pat Mahoney said, “You know that, Sergeant. Why, you’ve known him since he was a child.”
Mrs. Jennings screamed out: “He’d protect his son. Naturally he’d protect his son. But he’s stolen our children!”
“The Pied Piper rides again,” Pat Mahoney said.
“Make him talk!” Mrs. Jennings cried, and the crowd around her muttered louder.
“When did you last see Jerry, Pat?”
“Breakfast,” Pat said. “He has his lunch at Joe Gorman’s Diner.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “He should have been home for dinner long ago.”
“Did he have a need for money?” Mason asked.
“Money? He was a man respected—until now—wasn’t he? He was a man with a fine girl in love with him, wasn’t he? What need would he have for money?”
“Make him answer sensibly!” Mrs. Jennings pleaded in a despairing voice.
Joe Gorman stepped forward. “Pat, maybe Jerry got sick all of a sudden. It’s happened to men who saw action overseas. Maybe you saw signs of something and wouldn’t want to tell of it. But my Pete was on that bus, and Karl’s two, and Mrs. Jennings’s two. We’re nowhere. Pat—so if you can tell us anything! Our kids were on that bus!”
Pat Mahoney’s eyes, as he listened to Joe Gorman, filled with pain. “My kid is on that bus, too, Joe,” he said.
They all stared at him, some with hatred. And then, in the distance, they heard the wail of a siren. The troopers’ car was coming from Lakeview, hell-bent.
“Maybe it’s news!” someone shouted.
“News!”
And they all went stumbling out of the house to meet the approaching car—all but Elizabeth Deering, who stayed behind, clinging to the old man.
“I don’t understand it,” she said, her voice shaken. “They think he’s harmed their children, Pat! Why? Why would they think he’d do such a thing? Why?”
Old Pat’s eyes had a faraway look in them. “Did I ever tell you about The Great Thurston?” he asked. “Greatest magic act I ever saw.”
“Pat!” Elizabeth said, her eyes widening in horror.
“First time I ever caught his act was in Sioux City,” Pat said. “He came out in a flowing cape, and a silk hat, and he …”
Dear God, he’s losing his reason, Elizabeth Deering told herself. Let the news be good! Let them be found safe!
Outside the siren drew close.
The police car with its wailing siren carried news, but it was not the sort the people of Clayton were hoping to hear.
It was reassuring to know that within a few hours of the tragedy the entire area was alerted, that the moment daylight came a fleet of army helicopters would cover the area for hundreds of miles around, that a five-state alarm was out for the missing station wagon and its passengers, and that the Attorney General had sent the best man on his staff to direct and coordinate the search.
Top officials, viewing the case coldly and untouched by the hysteria of personal involvement, had a theory. Of course there had to be a rational explanation of the disappearance of the bus, and Clyde Haviland, tall, stoop-shouldered, scholarly looking investigator from the Attorney General’s office, was ordered to produce that explanation as soon as possible upon his arrival in Clayton. But beyond that, officials had no doubt as to the reason for the disappearance: this was a mass kidnapping; something novel in the annals of crime.
Since none of the families involved had means, Haviland and his superiors were convinced the next move in this strange charade would be a demand on the whole community to pay ransom for the children. The FBI was alerted to be ready to act the moment ther
e was any indication of involvement across state lines.
While mothers wept and the menfolk grumbled angrily that Jerry Mahoney, the driver, was at the bottom of this, officialdom worked calmly and efficiently. The Air Force turned over its complete data on Technical Sergeant Jerry Mahoney to the FBI. Men who had known Jerry in the service were waked from their sleep or pulled out of restaurants or theaters to be questioned. Had he ever said anything that would indicate he might move into a world of violence? Did his medical history contain any record of mental illness?
Sitting at a desk in town hall, Clyde Haviland reported on some of this to George Peabody, the Sheriff, the town’s three selectmen, Sergeant Mason and a couple of other troopers. Haviland, carefully polishing his shell-rimmed glasses, was a quiet, reassuring sort of man. He had a fine reputation in the state. He was not an unfamiliar figure to people in Clayton because he had solved a particularly brutal murder in the neighboring town of Johnsville, and his investigation had brought him in and out of Clayton for several weeks.
“So far,” he said, with a faint smile, “the report on Jerry Mahoney is quite extraordinary.”
“In what way?” Sergeant Mason asked, eager for the scent of blood.
“Model citizen,” Haviland said. “No one has a bad word for him. No bad temper. Never held grudges. Never chiseled. Saves his money. His savings account in the Clayton bank would surprise some of you. On the face of it, this is the last person in the world to suspect.”
“There has to be a first time for everything,” Karl Dickler said. He was a selectman as well as one of the bereaved parents.
“It’s going down toward zero tonight,” George Peabody, the sheriff, said glumly. “If those kids are out anywhere—”
“They’re one hell of a long way from here by now, if you ask me,” Sergeant Mason said.
Haviland looked at him, his eyes unblinking behind the lenses of his glasses. “Except that they never came out of the dugway.”