“I thought,” Grace began importantly, “that Jess was with her.” She gestured toward Maggie, who sat huddled on a nearby chair. “They’ve been, you know.…” Grace hesitated, uncertain how to besmirch Maggie’s reputation without implicating Jess. “Seen together outside of work,” she said finally. “Well, I didn’t want to call in the middle of something.”
Evy let forth with a slightly manic giggle, which earned her stony glances from everyone in the room.
“So,” Grace continued, “I waited and waited. Finally, she comes in and claims she hasn’t seen Jess since yesterday. I called his house right away, but no answer. Ordinarily I wouldn’t bother you, Jack, but what with no word from Mr. Emmett either, well, naturally I am very worried.”
“You did the right thing, Grace,” the officer assured her. He turned to Maggie. “What is your name, miss?”
“Margaret Fraser,” she mumbled.
Jack Schmale peered at her face for a moment, as if trying to locate a matching card in a game of Concentration. Then he shrugged and wrote it down on the pad he was holding. “And when was the last time you saw Jess Herlie?” he asked.
“Last night,” said Maggie softly. “About seven o’clock.”
“Where was that?”
“He was… it was at my house. Then he went home after that.”
The policeman looked at her intently. “So you didn’t see him or talk to him after that?”
“No,” said Maggie helplessly. “I went out. I tried to call him when I got home, but there was no answer.”
Jack took off his glasses, folded them up, and inserted them in the case in the breast pocket of his shirt. “Well, I think the first thing to do before we get all worked up is to take a ride up there. He might be taken ill or some such thing.” He tried to sound reassuring, but his words were unconvincing. Grace and Evy looked at one another. Maggie stared at the floor.
“I’ll give you a call as soon as I get back,” said Jack, starting for the door. “Meantime, try to recall if he mentioned any plans for today that you might have overlooked.”
“No,” Grace insisted. “I would have written them down on the calendar.”
“Well, sometimes we forget these things,” said Jack, zipping up his leather coat and heading toward the door. As he reached the hallway he suddenly stopped short and looked back toward the woman’s office.
“Whose are these?” he shouted.
The three women crowded into the doorway and saw him holding up the suitcases that were in the hallway near the door.
Maggie uneasily acknowledged her bags. “They’re mine.”
Schmale examined them thoughtfully. “Oh, I thought they might be Jess’s.” Then he looked up at Maggie. “Going somewhere?” he asked.
“I was,” Maggie explained carefully. “I was planning on leaving.”
“A vacation?”
“No. Moving away,” Maggie admitted, feeling ridiculous. “I just wanted to stop here and pick up a few things and tell Jess before I left.”
“Leaving?” the cop asked. “Just like that?”
Maggie drew her hands down the sides of her face to steady her expression. She could feel that Evy and Grace were staring at her. “I’ve been… I haven’t really liked it here,” she said. “I wanted to go somewhere else. Jess knew that,” she lied.
Jack Schmale pursed his lips and stared at the bags he had set down on top of one another in the hallway. “Why don’t we talk some more about it in the car?” he suggested.
Grace and Evy shot one another a glance. Maggie began to sputter. “In the car?”
“I just want you to take a ride up to Jess’s place with me. You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you?”
Maggie opened her mouth but did not speak.
“Can you spare her for a few minutes, Grace?”
“Certainly,” Grace acquiesced.
“Come along, then,” said Jack.
Numbly, Maggie picked up her coat and followed him.
Despite Jack’s warrant that they would talk on the way, Maggie and the officer passed most of the long ride without conversation. As soon as they were in the car, Jack switched on the radio to the classical station and the car was immediately filled with powerful voices singing passionately in foreign tongues.
Maggie was grateful for the wall of sound. The proximity to a policeman made her feel faint with anxiety. The constant creak of leather as he turned the wheel unnerved her. The sound of a pen in his breast pocket scraping against his badge penetrated the music like fingernails crawling across a blackboard. The keys on his belt loop jingled menacingly against the handcuffs that also dangled there. Maggie avoided the man’s mild gaze and watched the now-familiar road to Jess’s house run by. Where was he? she wondered. Maggie could see water more frequently now to her left as they neared the spot where Jess’s house stood.
“Nice spot up here where Jess lives,” said Schmale. “My wife Wilma and I lived up here at Warriner’s Point for a few years when we were first married.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yeah. Good fishing up here. And I could play all my records as loud as I pleased and nobody ever complained.” Jack chuckled at the memory. “Except Wilma, once in a while. But it’s really too far from town. I spent my whole time running back and forth.”
“It’s pretty here,” Maggie agreed. “The water view…”
“Yup.” Schmale turned up the narrow driveway, and his car slowly climbed toward the house. “Car’s here,” he said.
Maggie had already noted the presence of Jess’s late-model compact in the driveway. Schmale pulled up behind it and turned off the engine. “Let’s have a look,” he said, turning his unperturbed eyes on Maggie. He got out of the car and started down the hill toward the jetty and the shed that served as a makeshift boathouse. He glanced back to make sure that Maggie was still standing where he left her.
Gray mist from the water below rose up, dank and uninviting. Maggie watched Jack rattle the padlock and peer into the shed window. She turned her head away and looked toward the house. She recalled the first time Jess had brought her to the brightly lit, cheerful home. “I did most of the work myself,” he said, proudly gesturing toward the woodwork, shelves, and newly plastered walls. “Took me years. Except the curtains. Sharon made the curtains. First year we were here.” Jack labored up the hill and joined her on the walk. “His powerboat’s there,” he grunted. “Let’s try the house.”
His repeated knock unanswered, Jack Schmale turned the doorknob and went in. Maggie followed behind him. Inside, everything was still.
Jack poked through the first floor, turning on the lights and peering into each empty room. Then he returned to where Maggie stood in the living room.
“I’m going to have a look upstairs. He’s not down here.”
Maggie nodded and glanced around her as Schmale stomped purposefully up the stairs. “Jess?” he called out.
The living room was in its usual state of casual disarray, although the few antiques that he had acquired from his parents when they moved off island sat polished and ready for elderly guests or formal town business meetings. A row of plants on the windowsill drooped from lack of water. Maggie drifted through to the kitchen, which was orderly, the table cleared, except for the last sip in a mug of coffee that sat on the table. He wasn’t here for breakfast, she thought automatically. He drank tea for breakfast, and coffee at night. What she knew about him surprised her. She realized that every habit she had observed, every conversation they had shared, was now indelible in her memory. She could reel it all back, like a catechism.
In the den, the clutter of his books and piled-up papers caught at her with a painful immediacy. It looked as if he had just walked out for an instant. His pipe, which she had so recently returned to him, lay on its side in the ashtray, as if he had only had a moment to place it down carelessly before he vanished.
She turned away from the den and stepped back into the hall. Overhead she could hear the heavy
clomping of Jack Schmale’s boots and the faint slamming of closet doors. She tried the back door to the porch and found it unlocked. She opened the door and walked out. On a clear day you could see the water below, lapping up against the dock down the hill. Today the fog obscured it in a dense gray cloud, but she could still hear the insistent shushing of the waves.
On the porch was a wicker table, littered with a few empty beer cans and a soggy copy of the Cove News. Beside it an ancient rocker swayed, an old sweater draped haphazardly across the back. Maggie picked up the sweater and ran her hand over it. Her finger got caught by the frayed hole in one of the sleeves. She clutched the well-worn garment to her chest and looked blindly out over the land and water now eclipsed by fog. Images of Jess assailed her. The peacefulness of the house only served to exaggerate the dread that was mushrooming inside of her.
“Hey, where are you?” The voice of Jack Schmale rolled down the hallway of the little house.
Maggie started. “Out here,” she called back, her voice faint.
Jack Schmale stalked down the hallway and opened the door to the porch. She looked at him questioningly.
“He’s not here,” the policeman announced.
Maggie nodded. She knew it already.
Jack held up Jess’s wallet in his left hand. “Car keys, wallet, watch. All on his dresser. Wherever he went, he didn’t mean to stay long.”
“There’s coffee on the table from last night,” said Maggie. She carefully replaced the sweater over the back of the chair, her hands trembling.
“He never mentioned to you that he might be going anywhere?”
Maggie shook her head. “Nothing.”
“You’d better try to remember,” said Jack. “He didn’t just disappear.”
Maggie looked up sharply into the sober eyes of the policeman.
“You may as well take those bags of yours home and unpack them,” he observed. “I don’t want anybody leaving here for a while. I may have some more questions for you.”
“Are you arresting me?” she asked weakly.
“For what?” asked the old cop querulously. “Did you commit a crime?”
“No,” Maggie breathed, shaking her head.
“No evidence of foul play—yet,” said Schmale, tapping Jess’s wallet absentmindedly against the palm of his hand.
“People will say…” Maggie muttered.
“People talk,” he interrupted her. “I go by the law. But you just stick around here. I don’t want to catch you running for that ferryboat anytime soon.”
Maggie nodded and turned away from the fogged-in view. For a moment her eyes rested on the sweater, which hung like a scarecrow’s costume over the back of the chair. “Try to find him for me,” she said without conviction.
“I’ll find him,” Schmale promised grimly.
But Maggie knew, with a certainty that she could not explain, that he would not find him. At least, not for her.
18
The first thing that Jess was conscious of was a clammy chill seeping into his face through his left cheek. He moved his head slightly along the cold, bumpy dirt floor, and an incandescent pain flashed through his skull, leaving him gasping. He lay still for a moment, willing the pain to pass. Then, cautiously, he tried to move his hands.
They were twisted behind his prostrate body and were so numb that they hardly felt like part of him. He attempted to pry them apart. A tight cord, which did not budge, contained them in their awkward proximity. Although the strand felt like no more than a thread against his insensate flesh, he realized that it must be thick straps that bound him. He tried to jerk his ankles apart and found that they were bound in the same manner.
The pain in his head had returned, but it was now somewhat obscured by the emerging pains which lodged in the other parts of his awakening body. Clumsily, he attempted to flex the fingers on his hands. The resultant ache in his stiffened shoulders caused him to cry out, feebly, in protest. His muscles slackened, and he lay flat against the damp dirt floor.
He opened his eyes. His lids felt as if they were lined with particles of glass. He could make out virtually nothing of his surroundings, unable to focus in the darkness.
Jess closed his eyes again and tried to think. He did not know how long he had been lying there in the darkness. It seemed that it might have been several days. Or perhaps it had only been one. The dank vault in which he lay was silent and had no light. His moments of consciousness had been few and disconnected. Jess tried to force himself to remember anything he could. His mind felt as dark and empty as this chamber in which he lay imprisoned.
He allowed his unwilling brain to relax. As he did, an image popped into the darkness. Evy. Wielding a wrench above his head. Her eyes glittering with an insensible fury.
He remembered now. But he still had no understanding of it. Why? But before he could analyze the awful deed, he was assailed by his physical discomfort. He felt a throbbing in his head, and his bladder ached from the need to urinate. Despite the sickening stench in the room, hunger twisted his stomach. He jerked at his bound hands in a fit of impotent fury. When is she coming back? On the floor above him he could hear sounds, occasional movements. Then, silence.
Jess raised his torso slightly to try to move his head into a more comfortable position. His neck felt as if it were ready to snap from resting too long at an unnatural angle. The indignity of his situation enraged him. He did not care how much it might hurt; he wanted to sit up. He needed to lean against a wall, remove his face from the dirt. With a furious effort he began to drag himself toward the wall that he knew was behind him. He noticed a strip of light at the top of the stairs where the bottom of the door didn’t quite meet the floor. He kept his eyes on it as he dragged himself backward.
A sharp pain in his chest arrested him. A rib, he thought. Broken loose, and sharp as a saber inside him. It must have happened when he fell down the stairs. With renewed care he pushed himself back. It couldn’t be much farther. He could sense the wall looming behind him. He gave himself another shove. His body met with something behind him, stiff and bolster-shaped.
Jess wiggled his fingers around. Dimly, as if from miles away, he recognized the little remaining sensation in them. Groping behind him, his enfeebled fingers explored the bolster and then stopped. They met the unmistakable shape of their own image.
Jess let out a strangled cry of fear as his fingers deciphered the contours of a human hand. Insensible to the pain, the price in precious strength it exacted, Jess flipped himself over.
Straining his eyes, he could make out the corpse staring up at the ceiling, the huge gash on its head blackened, the feet apart, the hands seized up in death.
Agony still lingered on the slack-jawed face, but the eyes of William Emmett were blank and empty, the ghost of the publisher fled at the startling moment of death.
Despair and incredulity mingled in Jess’s distorted wail. “Oh, my God! Bill!” he cried through the cloth in his mouth.
He gaped in disbelief at the specter before him. The body was beginning to bloat in the dampness of its underground tomb. Jess suddenly felt as if he were being smothered by the revolting smell that it gave off. He rolled away from the body and lay on his back, trying to draw in breath through his gagged mouth. He stared up at the ceiling, unconsciously mimicking the posture of the dead man.
She killed him. She killed Bill. Jess tried to absorb this undeniable fact that now assaulted him. He wondered what it meant for him. An involuntary shudder racked his body. He looked again at the corpse and then jerked his eyes away. He felt as if he were falling through space, separated from everything that was solid, that made sense to him. One thought ran through his mind, over and over again. She was mad. She had killed Bill Emmett, and she was mad. With an animal strength born of an exquisite fear, Jess began to struggle against his bonds, twisting and grinding them against the dirt floor, desperately trying to loosen them, even a fraction of an inch, from his limbs.
Suddenly, a swathe
of light and an audible clatter electrified his senses. The cellar door was open. Jess could hear scraping and the unconscious mutterings of someone at the top of the stairs. He began to shake his head, as if he could will it back. His eyes were trained on the staircase. As he watched, Evy appeared in the weak bath of light, descending the steps slowly, weighted down by the giant metal washtub she was carrying.
She came down about three steps, her thin arms shaking visibly from the weight of the large tub. Water lapped up over the edges and splashed on her chest, dampening the front of the sweater she wore.
Evy did not look down at her captive, who lay rigid on the floor, following her progress with wide, unblinking eyes. She turned around and placed the tub on the step above her. Then, slowly, she backed down the stairs, lifting the brimming tub gingerly from stair to stair. When she finally reached the bottom, she lifted it up with one last heave and placed it on the dirt floor of the cellar, not far from where Jess lay. Satisfied, she turned to look at her prisoner.
“Everyone’s missed you today,” she said pleasantly.
Jess stared from the girl’s placid, vacant face to the tub, which stood not far from his head. She’s going to drown me.
Evy sighed, then sat down on the edge of the bottom step, her body taut. Clearly, she was not resting but only lighting, like a moth. “They can’t figure out where you are. Naturally, I can’t tell them.”
Evy shifted her weight and glanced over at Jess. His eyes swiveled automatically toward the corpse of William Emmett, which he could now make out more clearly in the illumination filtering down from the top of the stairs.
“Oh,” she said knowingly. “You found Mr. Emmett.” Evy shook her head. “I always kind of liked him. Boy, he had a lot of life in him. He didn’t go right off. He was moaning and groaning down here. It took him a lot longer than I thought. An old guy like that.”
Jess stared at her, his eyes registering all the horror of her matter-of-fact reminiscences of the old man’s horrible death. Evy appeared affronted at his look.
The Unforgiven Page 20