The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “I’m Sarah Coile,” she announced. “Remember me?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I remember. I’m Owen Williams.”

  “Are you now?” she laughed. “I thought you were Hopalong Cassidy.”

  The floor was still crowded with the dancers the reel had brought out, and Sarah let herself be pushed closer to Williams than he would have brought her on his own. He wasn’t a bad dancer, but stiff and nervous, inclined to hold her at arm’s length. She put her head on his shoulder and hummed along.

  “‘I was dancin’ with my darlin’ to the Tennessee Waltz.’ I like that song,” she murmured, “don’t you?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She looked at his dark eyes, recognizing in their depths a look he would not have wanted her to recognize.

  “I had a couple of drinks,” she said. “I’m feelin’ a little tipsy.”

  “All change,” shouted Daddy. “All change.”

  The fiddlers sawed their strings tunelessly, and someone took Sarah’s arm from behind and turned her around away from Williams. It was Huddy Foster, one of Brick’s friends, a drinker, a fighter, small, wiry, quick as a weasel. Sarah was afraid of him, but she couldn’t get away.

  The band started another waltz, and Huddy danced away with her. There was nothing shy about Huddy. He danced her close, one leg almost between hers, his hand low down on her back. When the dance finished, he followed her back to join Brick and Vinny, and the four of them went outside. They stopped in the shadows back of the dance hall, and Brick took his bottle out and passed it around. There was no ginger ale to put into it this time, and Sarah was conscious of the heat of it going down.

  When the band started up again, they went back to the dance hall together. Huddy walked beside Sarah, and she worried that he might be trying to take her over and wondered how she could get rid of him. But inside, he and Brick went off together, and after five minutes, an old boyfriend of Vinny’s came along and asked her to dance, and she went off with him. When Brick came back, he was alone. She had thought he might be angry about Vinny, but he didn’t seem to care.

  “Let’s you and me do it,” he said.

  Like Huddy, he held her close, his belly rock-hard against her.

  “Why don’t we go out for a drive some night,” he said. “We could go over the lines some night maybe and go to a movie.”

  “Vinny wouldn’t think much of that.”

  “Vinny don’t own me.”

  “I know. But she’s my friend. She’s been a real good friend to me, and I don’t want to make her mad.”

  The hard strength of him excited her, but in spite of the rye she still held to the knowledge that no matter what they did together she wouldn’t last either.

  “Well,” he was saying, “we wouldn’t have to tell her, would we?”

  After the dance, they went back to the place by the wall that had become their spot for the evening. Vinny was alone, and Sarah thought she saw a flicker of jealousy in her look when she saw her with Brick. But nobody said anything about anything. They simply watched the crowd.

  Further along the wall, Sarah saw Williams looking at her. She met his eyes, not signalling anything exactly, but not breaking the thread either. In the end, it was he who looked away, but after a few seconds his eyes drifted back to her. She put both her hands up to her head and with the palms slowly pushed her hair back from above her temples, lifting her breasts inside her dress and letting them slowly descend, watching Williams all the while as she did.

  But when the music started, it was Herbie Booth who got to her first. She told him no, and he smiled his foolish smile and just stood there. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Williams hesitate and then come on.

  “I had this dance promised,” she told Herbie.

  “Did you want to dance with him?” Williams asked when they were out on the floor.

  “I wouldn’t dance with him if he was the last man in the place.”

  “You were dancing with him before.”

  “That was just a reel. That don’t matter.”

  As they danced, she moved closer to him and again put her head on his shoulder.

  “What did you do before you went into the army?” she asked.

  “I had a job with a lumber company,” he said.

  “You mean sawin’ up logs?”

  “No. I worked in the office. I did accounts and stuff like that.”

  “You been through high school?”

  “Yes. In Fredericton.”

  She looked at him.

  “I never got through grade eight,” she said. “My father said no one needed no more school than that, not a girl anyways. Not boys neither unless they were gonna work in town jobs. So I had to quit and go to work. I work at the dairy now.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I wash milk cans mostly. There’s a big machine. But I’m gonna git a job on the ice cream counter maybe the end of the summer.”

  They danced in silence while she thought about all that. She hadn’t known that he had been through high school. Not many people who came to The Silver Dollar had been through high school. Mostly they worked on farms or in garages or drove trucks. And mostly they lived in places like her place.

  “What does your father do?” she asked.

  “He’s dead. He had a farm. My mother went on running it, but she died a couple of years ago too.”

  “So you ain’t got nobody?”

  “Uncles and aunts. Cousins. Things like that.”

  “No steady girl back in Fredericton?” she asked teasingly.

  “No,” he said.

  The dance ended, and they stood together, awkwardly, in the middle of the floor.

  “It’s gittin’ awful hot in here,” Sarah told him. “Why don’t we go outside and git some fresh air?”

  “Sure,” he answered with a touch of…what? she wondered. Surprise? Shyness?

  “I’d like some ginger ale to take out,” she said. “Would you git me some? I’ll give you the money. I ain’t tryin’ to make you treat me or nothin’. It’s just hard for a girl by herself up there.”

  “I’ll treat you,” he said. “We just got paid.”

  She went with him to the canteen and stuck close to him, so that Huddy or somebody like that wouldn’t think she was free and try to pick her up.

  When he had got the ginger ale, they went out. All the light had gone from the sky now, and it was filled with stars. Sarah took Williams’s arm. They picked their way along the darkness by the side of the hall and found themselves a spot at the back a few yards away from another couple, who were standing close together talking in low voices. Williams also had a small bottle of rye, and they spiked the ginger ale.

  They drank, awkwardly, without speaking, and when they had finished and thrown the cups away, she lifted her face towards him, and he kissed her briefly, his lips closed, his body tense.

  She put her arms around his neck, so that her breasts pressed against him. When they had started to grow towards their present heaviness, they had embarrassed her, but she understood their power now and would not for anything have traded them for Vinny’s little-girl figure.

  She could feel Williams’s heart pounding heavily even through his thick tunic.

  “Do you like me?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I like you too,” she continued to whisper.

  He kissed her again, this time putting his arms around her, and she saw his eyes close. Then suddenly he stiffened and drew away from her. Three figures had crept around the corner of the hall and were watching them.

  “Hoop and drive her there, soldier,” one of them shouted.

  “Don’t pay no attention to them,” Sarah told him, low so they couldn’t hear. She was afraid that Williams might get lured into a fight.

  Inside, the music started. The peeping Toms waited for some response from Williams, then drifted away into the darkness.

  “Don’t git yourself smothered in them bi
g tits,” one of them shouted back.

  “Let’s go back and dance,” Sarah said. “I came here with Vinny, and I better let her know where I am. If you’ll walk me home, I won’t need to go with them. It isn’t very far. Would you do that?”

  “Yes,” Williams said. “Sure.”

  They didn’t see Brick and Vinny at first, so they danced. She sang along with the music, her face down against the rough wool of Williams’s tunic. “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”

  Later she saw Vinny and Brick and waved at Vinny.

  When the set finished, the band played a few bars of “The Bear Went Over the Mountain.” This was the signal for intermission. The band climbed off the stage, and among the dancers there was a general move towards the canteen.

  “Would you like something to eat?” Williams asked.

  “No,” Sarah said. “Let’s go outside again.”

  “What about your friend?”

  “She knows I’m with you.”

  There were more couples outside this time, their cigarettes glowing along the side of the dance hall and around the parked cars.

  “Let’s go somewhere there ain’t so many people around,” Sarah whispered.

  She took Williams’s arm and led him towards the darkness at the edge of the woods. As they faded into it, someone whistled shrilly and gave a wolf-howl.

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  Tuesday, July 4. Twelve miles away across the border, the Americans were celebrating their independence. Corporal Drost, his hour of glory at the head of the Dominion Day parade mercifully behind him, sat at his desk in the RCMP office reading the Saint John paper.

  There was a double headline. nazis blasted from last major soviet city. sharp offffensive is launched on cherbourg. Inside, there were the day’s casualty lists for the province with the photographs of six of the dead in a neat block. Elsewhere, Drost read that the Cardinals were continuing to run away from the Pirates and that the Browns were still ahead in the American League. In Saint John, one of the movie houses was playing Jane Eyre with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine.

  He finished scanning the paper, and got up and looked out the window. The RCMP establishment in Wakefield was across from the rear of the courthouse on a little side street. Across the street and just behind the courthouse stood the county jail, a square, red brick building with a little crenellated tower and a yard enclosed by a high wire fence.

  As Drost stood studying it, wondering vaguely once again what purpose the tower was supposed to serve, the telephone rang.

  “I’m phonin’ about my daughter,” the woman’s voice said—a country voice, nasal and raw-edged.

  In the background, there were other voices and a sound of dishes being rattled.

  “She’s been gone since Saturday,” the voice went on, “and I just been to town and she ain’t been to work for the last two days.”

  They always began in the middle and worked both ways from there.

  “Could I have your name?” Drost asked. “Then tell me what happened.”

  “My name’s Matilda Coile,” the voice said. “My husband’s Daniel Coile. We live on the Hannigan Road. You know?”

  “Yes, I know it. So what about your daughter?”

  “I said. She ain’t been home since Saturday. She went out on Saturday night, with a friend of hers named Vinny Page, to that dance hall on the Bangor Road. And she ain’t been back. I went to the Page girl’s house because I thought she might be stayin’ there, but they ain’t seen her neither, not since Saturday. Then I went to the dairy where she works, and they ain’t seen her neither. I think somebody better start lookin’ for her.”

  “Does she have any friends, any relatives she might have gone to stay with?”

  “She don’t have a lot of friends. We got a lot of relatives, but she ain’t at none of the ones I asked. And why ain’t she at her job?”

  “Does she have a boyfriend?” Drost asked.

  “Not that I know of. But she might have and didn’t tell us.”

  “You didn’t have a fight with her on Saturday night, did you?”

  On the other end of the line there was a silence.

  “Maybe she’s run away,” Drost suggested.

  It was a great time for running away because there were so many new places to run away to—the forces, the merchant navy, the factories, and all the new stores, restaurants, boarding houses, and hotels that these gave rise to.

  “She didn’t take no clothes. She wouldn’t leave her clothes if she was goin’ away somewheres.”

  “What do you think happened?” Drost asked.

  “I don’t know. I keep goin’ over it in my mind, and I don’t know.”

  “What does your husband think?”

  “He don’t know neither.”

  “Could I speak to him?”

  “He ain’t here. I ain’t home. We ain’t got no phone. I’m at the canteen on the Bangor Road.”

  “Well, Mrs. Coile, I think I’d better come out and talk to you and your husband together.”

  “I never told him I was gonna phone,” she said. “He may not like it.”

  “Mrs. Coile, I can’t institute a search without talking to your husband.”

  Another, longer silence.

  “All right,” she said.

  “Now where do you live?”

  Drost took down the directions.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’ll be out in an hour or so.”

  Drost had only two constables—Hooper and MacDougal—in a detachment that before the war had had four. He had sent Hooper out to deal with a car accident across the river. When Hooper came back, he would turn the office over to him and go out and get the rest of the story.

  Instead of coming back after dealing with the accident, Hooper had decided on his own to make a patrol and had burned up half a tank of gas driving around the country for nothing, so it was nearly three o’clock when Drost turned off the Bangor Road onto the Hannigan Road.

  For the first couple of hundred yards, the Hannigan Road was flanked by small houses on town-size lots, then abruptly the pavement ended, and the houses gave way to woods on the left side and on the right to an abandoned church and its graveyard, and then to an alternation of patches of wood and small subsistence farms. Whether it was the ground around here that was no good or the people or both, Drost didn’t know, but the farms had an air of desolate, generations-old poverty: two-storey houses trailing randomly added ells and sheds; unpainted barns, some with their backs broken, some mere boardless skeletons; chicken coops, pigpens, fields full of rocks and rusting machinery, small potato fields, smaller vegetable gardens.

  The Coile place was just beyond the top of the long curve that brought Hannigan Road around to parallel the Bangor Road a quarter of a mile away through the woods. The house was well back from the road, and the driveway had wheel ruts so deep that Drost drove down it at walking speed to avoid taking the bottom out of the car.

  Halfway down, he was met by the inevitable dog, this one large, long-haired, muddy-red, which ran snarling and barking beside the left front wheel. When Drost stopped, it drew away a little and stood with its teeth bared, its hackles up, growling murderously. Drost studied it through the open window and decided that it was the kind that only attacked if you ran away from it. Or if someone set it on you. He hated these vicious curs that confronted him almost every time he drove into a farmyard, and he would gladly have paid five dollars for the pleasure of taking out his revolver and shooting this one.

  He got out, and the dog crouched and growled harder but made no move.

  From behind a screen door at the front of the house, a man stood watching him. He would have been there ever since the dog started to bark, but it was only now after Drost had braved the dog that he pushed open the door and came out.

  Drost recognized him as someone he had seen on the streets in Wakefield, a man somewhere in his forties, unshaven with a pasty, unhealthy-looking face and black hair going gr
ey, medium height, a hundred and eighty pounds maybe, twenty of it fat around the middle. He was wearing bib overalls, a grey flannel shirt, and gumboots.

  “Daniel Coile?” Drost asked.

  “Yes, I’m Daniel Coile,” the man said.

  He had small eyes set close in against his nose, and he studied Drost with deliberate hostility.

  “Your wife phoned me and said you had a daughter missing,”

  Drost said.

  “So she said,” Coile growled out of the side of his mouth.

  “I can’t start a search unless I have more information,” Drost told him.

  “You gonna be able to find her?”

  “I don’t know,” Drost said. “I may not even try.”

  Behind Coile beyond the screen door in the dim interior of the house, Drost made out the figure of a woman. Coile stood unmoving, watching him with his mean little eyes, and Drost considered getting back into the car and driving off. What held him back was the feeling that this may have been what Coile wanted.

  “Why don’t we go inside,” Drost said, “so that you and your wife can tell me what happened?”

  Coile shrugged, grudgingly pushed open the screen door, and led Drost down a hallway towards the back of the house.

  Matilda Coile was nervously waiting for them in the kitchen, a middle-aged, mid-sized woman bare-armed in a well-worn, sleeveless print dress. Drost noticed that on the left side of her mouth there was the suggestion of a harelip, but in spite of the lip, Drost could imagine that she might once have been quite pretty, and he wondered what had brought her to marry a pig like Coile.

  Drost put his cap on the table and sat down. Mrs. Coile hesitated, then sat down across from him, smoothing her dress over her lap. Coile stood with his back to them by the window that looked out over the creek while Mrs. Coile told Drost again the story of Sarah’s disappearance.

  “When I talked to you on the phone,” Drost said, “I got the impression that there might have been some sort of argument before she went out.”