The End of the Night

by John D. MacDonald

  But she sold off all but five acres, and she ran the small business. Had Ralph Weaver built less solidly, maintenance would have eaten up the marginal income. At seventy-two, Pearl Weaver was a tall, erect woman with a square powerful figure, and an alarmingly loud, shrill voice. A half-wit woman from over the hill came in once a week to help with the heavier cleaning. A neighbor boy helped with the big lawn. Once a week Pearl Weaver drove her ancient Dodge truck to York and did her marketing. Each year she planted a large kitchen garden, and canned what she could not use. For those who wanted it, she would provide a gargantuan country breakfast for sixty cents. The cabins rented for five dollars a couple, four dollars for a single, during the summer. In the last few years it had become a great rarity for them to be all filled—unlike the early days when sometimes all the cabins were filled and so were all the spare bedrooms in the main house. It had been three years since she had had anyone in the main house, but she kept the whole house just as spotless as the cabins.

  Summer was the best time. In the winter a whole month might go by without a single customer. The summer money had to last out the winter, and each summer she took in a little less. She was realist enough to hope that she could survive in this fashion until she died. She did not want to give up the house. Her life was in that house, all the remembered voices and gestures of love. Her only concession to her loneliness was a six-year-old television set, and she felt guilty every time she sat and watched it.

  Two cabins were occupied on Sunday night. She had hoped for more. The single said he would leave too early for breakfast. The young couple said they’d like breakfast at eight. And that was another dollar twenty.

  Though she had great need of every bit of income, she was careful about the tourists to whom she rented her cabins. Each night before going to bed she would go out and turn on the floodlight that shone directly on her sign, and take down the board that masked the legend, “Ring Night Bell for Service.” A fat, red arrow pointed at the bell button set into the sign itself.

  Her bedroom was in the front, overlooking the sign. The night bell rang in her room. Whenever it would ring, she was up and out of bed in an instant, and she would look out the window at them. They would be illuminated by the floodlight. She would watch them carefully for the look of drink, the staggering and the loud voices. And she would be wary of the too-young giggling couples. When she did not like what she saw, she would fling open the window and yell down in that terrible voice that cut the night like a sword, “Closed. Go away. Go away.” No one argued with a decision delivered with such finality.

  On Monday morning, not long before dawn, the night bell awakened her. She stood at the window in her nightgown and looked down through the copper screening and saw a good-looking automobile parked near her sign, and a man standing quietly beside it. He turned and said something to someone in the car and she heard him answer, but could not hear what was said. He seemed respectably dressed, and she could read fatigue in his posture.

  “Come to the front door of the house,” she called. “I’ll be down in one minute.”

  She put on her robe and went down. She turned on the bright overhead porch light and looked at him again before she unlatched the door. He was a big young man, quite nice-looking.

  She talked to him in the hall and he told her what he wanted and she named the price, and she took him into the parlor and had him sit at the old breakfront desk and write the names in the book. He did not want to look at the cabins first. She assured him they were clean and equipped. She told him to take the last two on the right as you stood facing the row of them, and please be careful about noise because folks were sleeping. She asked him when they’d be leaving, and he said he didn’t know, but somewhere around the end of the day.

  After she had walked him to the door and waited until the car drove out to the cabins, the lights touching the trunks of the big elms in the yard, she walked back into the parlor with the ten-dollar bill in her hand and looked at the names he had signed in the book. Mr. and Mrs. J. D. Smith. Mr. W. J. Thompson. Mr. H. Johnson. All of Pittsburgh.

  She stood with her lips compressed, sensing a wrongness that she could not identify. The young man had been very tired. And yet he had seemed to feel the need to force himself to be quite jolly. He had laughed a few times at nothing at all, an empty, social laugh. She remembered that it was exactly the way Ralph used to laugh when his conscience bothered him. The young man’s hands had been quite dirty, and that did not fit the rest of his appearance, or the cultivated sound of his voice. And his hands had trembled as he had written in the book. The writing was shaky. And they were such terribly ordinary names. But lots of people had ordinary names. That’s what made them ordinary, of course. And people with ordinary names could travel together. And it was a nice-looking car.

  She shrugged away her feeling that something was wrong, and went back to her bed. She was up an hour later, and she was hanging the board that masked the night bell when the single drove out, a salesman who had stayed with her before. He waved and she waved back. The young couple appeared for breakfast at eight-thirty. She insisted they eat until they begged for mercy. She felt great satisfaction in sending them on their way with what was probably the first decent breakfast they’d eaten in a year.

  All the time she did her housework she was conscious of the car out there, the four people sleeping. They had parked the car between the two cabins, heading out. It was a brown-and-tan car, with double headlights, and the big front grill was a shiny frozen grin.

  It always irritated her when people slept through the day, even when she was perfectly aware they had driven all night. There was something obscurely wicked about daytime sleep. A body should be up and doing under God’s sun. Even though their money was in the old brown purse hung way up in the back of the upstairs hall closet, she couldn’t stifle her resentment, and several times she caught herself mumbling to herself as she did the day’s chores, and told herself that talking to yourself was a sign of senility. She had planned to drive into York, but she didn’t want to leave the place untended with people there. Tomorrow would be soon enough. As was her habit, she worked off her irritation by finding something she had been putting off. After her meager lunch she went out and scrubbed the whole length of the front porch on her hands and knees, and then scrubbed the porch railing, posts and all.

  She heard the old water pump start up at a little after four and it pleased her to know those people were finally getting up. She remembered she hadn’t spoken to the young man about breakfast. It was a funny time of day for breakfast, but if they could eat it, she could cook it, and you couldn’t sneeze at another two dollars and forty cents. Before going to ask them, she went to the kitchen to make certain she had enough to feed four of them. Just enough eggs and more than enough of the corn bread, but the bacon would be skimpy. Two good melons, and oatmeal for those as wanted it, and use the middle-size coffeepot. That should do it just fine.

  She took off her apron and hung it on the back of the kitchen door, gave her hair a few pats and went out the back way to walk back to the cabins. When she was twenty feet from the back stoop she heard the slamming of car doors and heard the motor start. She was walking along the driveway, and she began to hurry, adjusting a social smile of invitation.

  As the car came toward her she returned its wide smile and held up her hand for them to stop.

  The car made a much greater sound and it suddenly seemed to leap upon her. The awareness of death flashed bright and hot in her mind. She had the feeling that she stood frozen by terror for a very long time. In actuality she moved almost as nimbly as an athlete. She whirled and plunged to her left, diving rather than making the mistake of trying to run, diving so that both feet left the ground, her arms reaching forward to break her fall. Even so, the wide right edge of the bumper cracked her painfully on the right ankle bone, turning her slightly so that she landed in the softness of the grass on her right arm and shoulder with a jarring thud and rolled up and over ont
o her back, legs high and kicking.

  She sat up, dazed. Over the years she had had to purchase ever stronger reading glasses, testing them at the counter of the five-and-ten in Lancaster. But her distance vision would have gratified a hawk. In the moment before her eyes filled with tears, blurring everything, she saw the car a hundred feet away, slowing for the turn onto the highway. She was too dazed to think of license numbers. She looked at their faces. A raggedy-headed girl with a mean, pouty look. A man so ugly he could get work in a cage at the carnival. A man driving, going bald, wearing glasses. A pointy-faced one he was, like an egg-sucking fox. She saw them vividly for one instant and then her eyes filled. The car was a shiny blob, turning onto the highway, heading toward Lancaster.

  Close at hand she heard a red squirred scolding her. Her eyes cleared. She saw him on a low, fat limb, staring down at her.

  “Tried to kill me!” she told him. “Sure as I live and breathe.”

  The squirrel survived the first two syllables, before the sheer volume drove him back up into his hole, high in the tree.

  Pearl Weaver stood up very slowly, testing every muscle. Her shoulder was wrenched, her right arm numbed. Her right ankle was beginning to puff, and it hurt to put weight on it, but not too much. She hobbled toward the house, and her thinking was still not clear.

  “Ready to say something about breakfast and they run you down,” she grumbled.

  She went into the parlor and sat in the big leather chair. It had always been and would always be Ralph’s chair, and she would never sit in it without feeling she used it on sufferance.

  “Why?” she demanded of the fringed lamp, the pottery cats on the mantel, the floral wallpaper. “Why?” she asked the imitation Oriental rug, the Boston rocker, the cataract eye of the silent television set. She had heard a whoop of shrill derision after she had jumped out of the way. “For fun?” She kept looking at the television set. “Or … didn’t they want to be seen?”

  Something stirred in the back of her mind. She’d followed it on television. A terrible thing! That poor girl. And they matched the words said about them, the descriptions, every one of them.

  “Lord God Almighty!” she said, and she said it very softly. “They missed me,” she said, “and they can come back for me and finish it.”

  She moved with desperate haste. She did not feel partially safe until she had all doors locked, and had Ralph’s shotgun that she had always meant to sell and somehow never had, with a dark-green-and-brass shell in the single chamber, and the hammer back.

  She had had the phone taken out six years ago. She waited for them to come back for a full fifteen minutes before deciding they were gone for good. And then she walked down the highway to the Brumbarger place nearly a half mile away, carrying the shotgun just in case. She was limping very badly by the time she got there, and her shoulder had begun to ache.

  Two minutes after Pearl Weaver entered the Brumbarger home, a sergeant in the Pennsylvania State Police sat with a comedy look of consternation on his face, holding a phone almost at arm’s length, while two men in the office chuckled. But suddenly the words began to get through to him. The dispatcher nailed the car nearest the area and sent it to the Brumbarger house on the double.

  Fifty long minutes later, every entrance booth previously alerted had a new and specific piece of information to put with their previous emergency instructions. Look for a ’58 or ’59 Mercury, brown and tan, two- or four-door sedan, fog lamps, radio aerial, Pennsylvania plates, three men and a woman.

  The old lady had been observant, and she was pleasingly positive.

  Laughlintown, Pennsylvania, is a not unpleasant small town in the Laurel Hill area of the state, not too far from the 2684-foot summit of that range of not-quite mountains. No resident of Laughlintown could approach in the intensity of his disgust and dismay at having to live there, the strong emotions of Michael Bruce Hallowell. That was not his official name. He was registered in the local high school as Carl Lartch. He was certain that this summer, between his sophomore and junior years, was fraught with more misery than one spirit could safely contain.

  In the confidential records maintained on him in the high-school files he was recorded as being highly intelligent, imaginative, a poor organizer, poorly adjusted socially, no athletic ability, inclined to be argumentative and sarcastic. Dedicated teachers considered this limp, spindly, myopic gangling, acned, large-headed, unorganized child a challenge. The journeyman teacher was delighted to pass him through the course and be rid of him. His more muscular contemporaries believed they could make of him a more socially desirable citizen by beating him on the head at every opportunity. But they could never whip him past the point where he could still wipe his bloody mouth and in iciest contempt call them peasants.

  His two sisters thought of him as an almost unendurable social handicap. His parents were baffled by him.

  Carl Lartch was not confused at all. He had read his way through better than half the books in the Laughlintown library. The world of the books was infinitely more satisfying than the world around him. He kept a private secret journal and wrote his opinions and impressions in it, comfortably aware of the danger that, should it ever be made public in his home town, the reaction would be murderous. A recent exposure to early Mencken had solidified his contempt for the booboisie. His was a total confidence that one day the people of Laughlintown would be astonished that such a man could have once lived among them, and so gratified even his continuing contempt for them would be a welcome recognition of the place of his birth.

  On this particular summer Carl had learned that books could be made even more enjoyable if devoured far from the foolish clatter of mankind, and so on every day when the weather was favorable, he would load books, his private journal, his peanut butter sandwiches and his Thermos of milk into the basket on the front of his bike and pump his way up into the hills.

  On Monday morning, the twenty-seventh day of July, Carl pedaled up the long slopes of highway, panting audibly by the time he came to his turnoff, a sandy road that was wide and clear for a hundred yards before it faded away to an impassable track. As he rested, before hiding his bike in the brush, he noted that a car had turned around with some difficulty and gone back out, leaving the only set of fresh tracks since the last rain. He also saw a jumble of footprints. Picnickers or neckers, he thought. It was correct to assume their activities were trivial, whatever they were.

  He hid his bike and, clasping his packaged possessions, went down the short, steep slope from the road to a fast, wide, noisy brook, crossed by stepping from stone to stone, and climbed the long hill beyond the brook until, winded once more, he came to his favorite place, level, grassy, shaded by old trees. From there he could see for miles but it was a view undefiled by man, consisting of only the gentle contours of the uncontaminated hills.

  He spent the long summer day in reading, writing and peaceful contemplation. When he was finally warned by the angle of the sun, he gathered up his things, took a look at his private landscape, and trudged back down to the creek. His view was obscured by the brush that grew on the hillside. Sometimes he angled to avoid especially steep places. Consequently he came out at the creek at least thirty yards downstream from where he had crossed in the morning.

  As he crossed the creek he noticed something out of the corner of his eye, not far away. He turned and saw, sprawled against the small round boulders at the water’s edge, the silent, lovely symmetry of a woman’s legs, a soiled white skirt wrenched upward to mid-thigh, a quiet curve of back in close-fitting green, a hand stubbed cruelly against a boulder, wedged there by her weight. The face was hidden, but the water, moving with chill insistence around a small pebbled curve, tugged with endless persistence at a floating strand of blond hair.

  He stared, then burst up the abrupt bank in front of him, running wildly toward the hidden bicycle. But as he ran he began to realize that his reactions were not suitable to a Villon, a Mencken, a Christopher Fry. Detachment was the epi
c quality of his whole galaxy of heroes. And so he stopped and turned and went slowly back to the woman and knelt there for a moment, studying her closely. He then reclimbed the bank and began to saunter toward home. After he had reached the highway, he remembered his bicycle. Once he had retrieved the bicycle, the empty basket reminded him of his books. By retracing his steps he found them beside the creek.

  He was able to coast a good part of the way to Laughlintown. He went directly to the police station and strolled in.

  “I should like to report something,” he said haughtily to a bored shirtsleeved man working at a scarred desk, typing a report with two fingers.

  The officer looked at him with growing distaste. “Report what, kid?”

  “Perhaps twenty minutes ago I found the body of a woman up in the hills. She’s either dead or seriously injured. She’s blond, barefoot, possibly in her twenties, wearing a white skirt and a green blouse. From tracks on a sand road near where she’s lying, I’d say she’s been there since last night.”

  After a few moments of astonishment, the officer jumped to his feet and said, “Tell me exactly where you saw this woman, kid!”

  “We could be there before I could possibly explain to you how to get there. So why don’t you get a doctor and an ambulance and more officers if you need them, and I’ll ride in the lead vehicle and show you the way.”

  “If this is some kind of a gag …”

  Carl said icily, “If I enjoyed jokes, I’d think up better ones than this.”

  It went well because it was handled by experts, and because the plan was flexible, imaginative and airtight. And there had been advance warning from so high a place that it was taken seriously.

  The instructions from the control centers were monitored and recorded, and so this particular pickup was sufficiently well documented to become a classic—written up in the mass magazines, and used as a case study in the police schools.