The Watcher

by Dolores Hitchens

  “I——” In her turn, Lottie was thoughtful. “Perhaps. She was a confiding sort of child. It wasn’t that there was a deep resentment. I always explained the why behind what I decided. And most of the time she agreed, after a little haggling. But Edie was a chatterer.” Again the thought of the neighbor, an intrusive tag end, flitted across her mind.

  “It could be,” Archer said, “that what she chattered about to her friends was passed on to this person. Must be an adult. Or she could have spoken to him directly. I’d like a list of everyone you can remember, anyone at all, you think she may have talked to.”

  “She spent hours on the bay, in her boat. And at school——”

  “Yes. I know. Practically everyone in Newport or Balboa. But make a list anyhow. You never know.” He put the paper on the desk in front of her and while she read it he waited with his gaze fixed on the wall above her head.

  She put the letter back on the desk. “That isn’t the original?”

  “The original is being given the works in L.A. They have laboratory facilities——” He pulled the sheet back, turned it to look it over.

  Lottie’s copper-colored eyes seemed darkened with fear. “Aren’t you worried? Aren’t you trying to stop this . . . this next thing he’s going to do?”

  Archer glanced up sharply and she was surprised at the sudden change. The undertaker’s calm was shot through with harsh, affronted anger. “We have to work backwards in this. From the act, the accomplished crime, to the motive, the specific reason for it. We have to get inside his head. To prevent the next thing”—he used her word with a particularly bitter emphasis—“in a town this size, we have to know why he thought these three should die.”

  She stared at him for a long minute. “In the case of Barbara Martin, what I remember of it——”

  “She had had an abortion. We can conclude that it was her pregnancy, or its termination, which seemed to him a just cause for removal. To some people, any sex outside of marriage is about as big a sin as you can have. Don’t quote me, but in my opinion such people have strong repressions and are themselves potential sex criminals. To others—sometimes I suppose to the same people—abortion is simply murder. The destruction of the unborn fetus is the killing of a living being.”

  “But this other child, this Charles Carrol——”

  “We haven’t pinpointed anything at all.” Archer had his long hands flat on the desk, was looking straight across the desk at her, and she had the feeling of being pinned by his eyes. “What about your sister?”

  “You mean . . . because I wouldn’t let her do things that seemed too grown up . . . because I forbade——”

  “No. Simple discontent wasn’t it. She knew in time you’d let her do these things. What was she doing that you didn’t know about?”

  It took a moment to register, to extract the meaning from what he had said, another moment of shock over it, and then Lottie looked at him as if he’d thrown garbage at her. “Edie? Nothing!”

  “You’ll have to do better than that.”

  She was dumfounded. “What are you trying to make me say?”

  “Not say. Remember. Your eyes are opened now, you have a clue to go on. You knew your sister. You can think back. In fact, you’ll find yourself unable not to think back. You’ll remember little things, odds and ends, that had no meaning before. Little absences, little secrets. A phone call. Something about her clothes that struck you as queer at the time, that you dismissed. A way she looked at you. You’ll see what one of these things meant.”

  “About Edie? I will remember something Edie did . . .” She got up unsteadily from the chair. There was sudden sweat on her face. “Like Barbara Martin?”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t even blink.

  “At fifteen?”

  He put an elbow on the desk and leaned his chin in it; his look seemed almost contemptuous. “Weren’t you fifteen once, Miss Tomlinson?”

  She stood stock-still. Her mouth twitched a little, that was all. She drew a deep breath, and then she touched the fingers of her left hand lightly on the desk as if to steady herself.

  “Suppose we go back now to the day your sister died, all the events leading up to that happening.” He glanced at the chair, politely, as if expecting her to sit down again.

  She leaned towards him across the desk, closer and closer. Her free right hand swung up savagely to slap his face.

  Archer put up both hands to steady his glasses, to adjust them on his nose; she watched in shocked fascination while he got her back in focus through the lenses.

  “Miss Tomlinson——”

  She turned and walked crookedly to the door, opened it, slammed it behind her.

  Archer went into the men’s room and splashed water on his bruised nose and dried it. He studied himself in the mirror over the washbasin. He made a face with a lot of teeth showing. “You brutal bastard.” He went back to the office and walked around; he walked tiredly, with a vacant compulsion, no expression on his face. He stopped by the window once to look out. He could see the main highway down the peninsula, a few cars, the wide blue sky out over the Pacific.

  “Christ, how I hate this job. And what I have to do to earn a living at it. She shouldn’t have just slapped me. She should have kicked my teeth in with one of those nice white pumps.”

  He sat down at the desk, licked his dry lips, and leaned back in the chair. He shut his eyes to think. After some silent moments he said softly, “When we find the son of a bitch I’d like a half hour alone with him. Somewhere in a soundproof room. Or out in the hills.”

  He pursed his lips, shook his head without opening his eyes.

  “Hell, fifteen minutes would be plenty.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE SIDEWALK tilted in the garish sunshine, then steadied. There was a dry hot pain deep in Lottie’s throat, tears that wouldn’t rise, and her shoulders trembled under the warm brown linen.

  How could she have gone there?

  How could she have been stupid enough, naïve enough, not to know that to invite the police to touch Edie’s memory would be to smear it? Of course, it was all they knew: dirt. They worked and lived with filth, lust, depravity, thievery, soul-sickness, and sudden death. They had certain tools in their unimaginative kits; they dragged out a tool they supposed to fit the situation. A young girl’s death was to them of a certain pattern. She was dead by violence, so she must have been doing something she shouldn’t. She must have been slipping around, morally. So go look for some undiscovered filth.

  Or make some up.

  I shouldn’t have just slapped him, Lottie told herself. I should have hit him with something. She stumbled on in the sunlight, trying to think of what she might have done to Archer if she hadn’t been so stunned by what he had said.

  She came to the bay. The north end had a lot of sales yards and little docks, places where boats were painted and repaired. She found a bench and sat down. The water looked dark green and dirty, there was flotsam in it, discards and chips from the repair yards, unidentifiable trash. The way the water looked made Lottie think of Archer’s mind. His brain must be just like that water. He wanted to dunk Edie’s memory in it.

  Her dry throat contracted. Edie . . . Edie . . .

  She tried to summon the grief, the numbing wretchedness that had wrapped her and in some way insulated and protected her; but when it came it was only a shadow of itself. It was weak, changed. Nothing settled into her like the despair she had known; it was as if some inner bulwark had been constructed within the last few hours. She found herself staring at the water again. The chips and trash shifted about, as if they were being sorted and arranged by an invisible tidal hand. There was even a sort of pattern to it all, if you studied it.

  As if—she couldn’t resist the comparison—this was Archer’s brain laid bare. Working, tidying up the dirt, putting it into the proper order. It was still dirt, but it was being classified.

  Right now, he’d be gathering something to impute to Edie.
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br />   She stood up suddenly and started to walk again.

  I’ll walk all the way home, she told herself. It will be good for me. Exercise and fresh air. I can’t just sit here thinking about Mr. Archer and his strangely respectable appearance and his cesspool of a mind. When I get home, when I’m back inside the place where Edie and I lived so long, then I can get back to normal. I will feel the grief again. I can’t imagine why I thought it should go away.

  And for a while, as she walked, the expectation of knowing the deep, insulating grief kept everything else at bay. The water sparkled on her left, there were boats out, the lazy afternoon had music and chatter in it. Once in a while, passing some house on her right, she had to answer a greeting from someone who knew her. She didn’t delay. She felt that at the end of the walk a kind of shelter waited.

  And if Mr. Archer comes to me again, she told herself, feeling suddenly competent, I’ll be savage with him. I’ll show him my utter disgust and contempt. If he hints the least thing about Edie’s morals . . .

  The thought broke off raggedly. She had a sudden sharp memory of Edie as she had seen her one day . . . one of the last days . . . stepping into the bedroom from a shower. The clean young skin, the nice breasts filling out, the legs long and smooth and rounded. The indented waist and the soft fullness of hips—Edie had been little-girl-shaped until she was almost fourteen.

  Edie had picked up a towel, turned to put a foot on a stool to dry it. And, there had been a quartet of scratches close together, straight across the small of her back. Not in a place, or in a way, she would have scratched herself. But as if, come to think of it, someone had gripped her naked there and yanked her close.

  The sidewalk really did tilt this time The sunlight exploded.

  Lottie found herself leaning crookedly on a fence. Beyond the fence a woman in a brief blue sun suit and a shaggy straw hat looked up from a bed of petunias. The bed was boxed in redwood, raised off the sand, and the flowers were growing in imported dark, rich soil. The woman was sweating, her face was reddened by her efforts with the trowel, and on her arms freckles danced. She had gloves on her hands. They were white gloves with green thumbs, enormous out-of-proportion green thumbs with a rubbery brightness. And Lottie was struck by the size of those great thumbs, the emblem of fertility and gardening good-luck, and the piddling size of the petunia bed. It struck her as utterly ridiculous. She began to giggle hysterically.

  “Well, now.” The woman turned her back, offended. Lottie pulled herself away from the fence.

  She walked, her whole body moist and leaden.

  It was beginning to happen, the way Archer had said it would. She was remembering. And the memory was tainted, it had the smell of filth about it. There would be other memories, she sensed, and they also would seem to have but one meaning, one tormenting possibility. The image of Edie, the Edie she had known, would be destroyed.

  She caught herself up short. What had Archer done to her?

  Think back. Think of that moment when you glanced at Edie as she stooped there with her back turned to you. Had the marks really seemed like those of human nails? Had they been made . . . was she positive they must have been made . . . by four fingers pressed too hard and dragged across the flesh?

  Too broadly welted to have been made by something sharp. Not slivers at the edge of the float where Edie always swam. Not loosened nailheads on someone’s dinghy. Not pins to hold in a shirt tail.

  What had she thought about them at the time? She tried to control the gathering panic.

  At the time, she recalled, she hadn’t thought much of anything. Why? Because she had wanted to be blind?

  Because I knew Edie so well.

  What had she said to Edie about them?

  “Edie babe, you’ve positively gouged yourself across the butt.”

  A sudden stiffening in the bent form. Yes, she remembered that too, now. Edie, not lifting her head, her face hidden in the damp fair hair, intent on drying her foot. Too intent

  “Something must have bitten me there, I guess. Poor old bug.” But later, much later.

  Lottie felt the warm sweat gather on her upper lip, wiped it away with the back of her hand. The dazzle off the bay seemed to invade her brain.

  But wait. Why couldn’t there be some other explanation than the one Archer’s terrible words had conjured up for her? An innocent one?

  Suppose Edie had been scratched there—by human nails. Suppose in some hassle on the beach, some completely juvenile and meaningless horseplay, her suit had slipped down that far and someone had been grabbing her? Edie didn’t have a two-piece suit, trunks and bra, which was the only sort which could have done this, but she might have borrowed one from a friend. The girls were always exchanging clothes for an hour, a day, or a week. It gave the privileges of a vastly extended wardrobe.

  Of course there must be an innocent explanation. I’ll find it.

  Edie’s dead. She can’t defend herself. She can’t offer the casual reason she might have, that day.

  Lottie thought, I’ll talk to her friends. I’ll bet I can run it down. A sudden hopeful clarity settled in her thoughts, brightened her face. Where to start? The telephone? It would be quickest.

  She began trying to compose the polite, cautious, misleading queries, and felt her tongue twist. She had so little practice in humbug.

  Did Edie ever borrow a swim suit from you? Did she wear it in a group, and was there some sort of tussle, people playing around and grabbing each other, and did she complain of being scratched?

  I don’t remember, Miss Tomlinson.

  Or worse: Scratched where?

  Or even worse: Oh, I know where she got those scratches, and it wasn’t what you think. (Giggles.)

  Dry-mouthed, eyes stinging, Lottie found herself turning into her own street. She went into her flat and sat down by the little table, took up the phone. She licked her lips, and began to dial. All of Edie’s old numbers were scribbled across the front of the phone book.

  A half hour later she dropped the phone into its cradle and sat there with her numbed thoughts in confusion. It had been nothing at all like she had expected. No slyness, no blurted confidences, no giggles, no secrets, and no information.

  Nothing, in fact.

  In the world of the young—she had forgotten this—the ones who went away, dropped from sight for any reason whatever, were forgotten in a remarkably short space. Some of Edie’s dearest friends had seemed to have trouble remembering who she was. Others confused her with new Edies, who appeared to have sprung up in ranks as thick as marching marines.

  All of the youngsters had been very polite, once they understood who she was. They seemed to make genuine efforts to recall what she wanted. They were vague about the clothes they’d shared with Edie. It appeared, too, that old swim suits vanished into limbo even more quickly than absent friends.

  There had been no curiosity. This had surprised her the most. It was as if, perhaps every second day or so, the sister or other relative of a child dead by violence called to inquire about queer scratches on the flesh, seen just before death; and the sincere, uninterested, and emphatic answer always had to be one of ignorance.

  From these polite young people she had not even raised a conjecture.

  Lottie thought, it must be me, somehow. I didn’t get through to them. Or it was the impersonality of the phone. I should have gone to see each one. I should have hammered away until someone remembered something.

  She rubbed the loosened hair back from her face. She felt the sweat that dampened her temples. The tendons in her knees shook from the long, long walk.

  I’m really making a thing out of this. Thanks to Mr. Archer. Thanks to a brand new viewpoint. A viewpoint on hell, she thought.

  Of course . . . actually . . . looking at it sanely, it didn’t amount to anything.

  She tried to regain that state of innocence, or of ignorance, in which the scratches across Edie’s rump had meant nothing. She tried to recall the assured, complacent, inc
urious attitude towards Edie, tried to drag it bodily back into her brain, and could not. The thing that Archer had said lay like a rock in its path.

  In this moment of silent struggle she was aware of a sound from the other flat, a brief stumbling noise as if someone had bumped into some piece of furniture.

  Without stopping to think through what she intended, she rose and went out into the courtyard, knocked on that other door. She had rebuffed his offered sympathy at the time Edie had died; she’d have to think of some way to apologize for that; but right now it was necessary to talk to him. He had known Edie pretty well. And he was old enough, mature enough, to be able to judge a child.

  The words rose in her throat: I have to talk to you about Edie.

  But then she became aware that, though there had been other small noises in the flat, he hadn’t come to the door. He seemed to be taking a long time answering. He seemed unwilling, as if he knew that she had come with a rush of unanswerable queries. He seemed to be holding himself back. He seemed to be keeping a secret.

  The illogical conviction fastened itself leechlike in her mind: he knows what I’ve come about. He knows, and he’s too kind . . . or he’s afraid . . . to tell me what he knows.

  She beat on the door with a clenched fist.

  Inside, Curt stood in the doorway between living room and bedroom and licked his lips with nervousness. His instinct was to get out of the place; the caller at the front door was too persistent for comfort. There was something obstinate, dogged, about the continued beating and hammering. It occurred to him that the noises he’d made, bumping furniture in the dimness, kicking the stuff on the floor, the books and boxes of papers, had been heard by the person outside.

  He didn’t want to leave. He hadn’t had much time as yet, and what he had found so far had been interesting. Books of clippings, for instance. All about Charles Carrol and Barbara Martin and Edie Tomlinson.

  This was the place, all right. This was the home of the guy who’d written the letter. There was the desk across the room, the typewriter sitting there between stacks of manuscript paper. Just yesterday, he must have typed out the page he and Arnold had fished from the envelope last night.