by Farris, John
Amy turned her hand over and the key rang on the glass surface of the desk. "Here. Take your key. Craig, I want . . . I want very much to talk to you. Will you sit down?"
Craig's eyes darted to the key. His smile came and went. He reached for the key. She wasn't watching; she was still looking at his face. His hand paused above the key, then closed on a baseball-size glass paperweight with a gorgeous
Amy touched his left-hand sleeve, imploringly. "Craig, it's so important that we—"
He hit her, somewhat awkwardly; over the left ear with the heavy paperweight. Amy made a meaningless sound in her throat and buckled. As she went down her hands tightened on his jacket. Her eyes opened partway and she looked up at him, dazed.
Craig was bent by the strength of her hands. "I don't want to talk to you," he said earnestly, his voice high. He swung the paperweight again, from above the head. In the golden dusty silence of the little office the paperweight made a brutal rapping sound on the flat of Amy's skull. She slid limply to the floor. There was a red seeping at the roots of her blonde hair.
Craig looked at her for perhaps half a minute. He set the paperweight aside, picked Amy up in his arms, grunted, threw her down again on the carpet behind her desk. He stood back, near the door. One of her legs from the knee down was visible protruding from behind the desk. He returned and bent the leg at the knee until it was hidden. He looked once more at her dry white face, bluish around the eyes, hollow in the temples. He had hit her very hard and he didn't know if she was breathing or not. He had no desire to find out.
He let himself out of the office and walked slowly down the hall, shambling a little, not picking up his feet.
Peter was in the same position in the wine-red high-backed chair, his small-boned hands slack in his lap. Craig squatted beside the chair, he ran his hand lightly, sympathetically over the head of the sleeper. Peter sighed, fitfully.
"I'm sorry, Michael," Craig whispered. "I'm sorry you have to go out tonight. But it's necessary."
Chapter 16
Doremus had chosen a place high on the razorback, almost directly above the school. There had been a minor rockslide in the area a year ago, clearing brush and loose soil, so nothing interfered with his line of sight. He sat with his back against an old elm tree with half its roots exposed where the slide had pared the declivity to clean rock. His booted feet were braced against one of the dry roots. He had left his 30-.06 rifle and his Dayglo-orange vest and deer hunter's cap home, but otherwise he was dressed exactly as he would have been on a hunt, for comfort and warmth. The wind sometimes howled just above his head but he had chosen his stand well—often during the long day he was afraid he had chosen too well: he was far too comfortable and battling the urge to sleep.
Hourly he arose and pulled himself up to level ground and walked around to get the kinks out of his knees and loosen stiffened muscles, then clambered down to resume his wait. He had a pair of 7x50 Japanese-made binoculars around his neck. His cache included a stock of cigars and a quart canteen of water. He also had a compact Citizens' Band radio along; he had used it twice, the first time around noon when he observed Amy Lawlor's car entering the school grounds. The second time had been at sundown, and he'd had nothing of interest to report. Both Amy's Mustang and Craig's Chevelle were still parked behind the administration building. He had seen neither of them all afternoon, and he was worried about that.
The faint steady hum of the CB radio was interrupted by Enoch Mills' voice.
"Doremus?"
He reached down and picked up the radio microphone. "Right here."
"I make it ten after nine. Anything stirring?"
"No. Peter and Craig apparently had dinner in Craig's office . . . I saw a tray being carried over. Then Peter left the administration building, alone, at seven, and walked across the quadrangle to his hall. I suppose he's in bed. The lights in Dobbs went out on schedule, and Franklin Hall should go dark in five minutes. As far as I know, Craig is still in his office."
"What about the girl? She was only going to be there an hour at the most."
Doremus hesitated; he had thought about little else during the past few hours. "I don't know where she is. I've had the glasses on her office window but I can't tell a thing. There aren't any lights."
"She must have run into trouble then. I think we ought to move in."
"If she's in trouble, that might make it worse. And if she's . . . dead, then we're too late already. I have a feeling something's about to happen, otherwise Craig would have gone home by now. Let's give him a little more time."
For the next hour Doremus kept the binoculars to his eyes almost continuously, lowering them only when the strain became intolerable and his vision blurred. He chewed nervously on an unlighted cigar, deeply regretting his decision to let Amy prowl through Craig's office on the chance that she might come across something they could use against him. Otherwise he's going to be hurt, isn't he? Maybe he'll be killed. Please let me give it a try, Doremus.
Damned fool, he thought, referring to himself. She'd been getting by on raw nerve alone, but he'd let her convince him. In a way he had handed Amy right over to that maniac. He hurled the sodden cigar over the cliff. She isn't hurt and she isn't dead, he told himself, trying to ease his conscience. The odds are Craig surprised her in his office this afternoon and he's holding her. But that means he's going to be approximately twice as tough to get to. He rubbed his smarting eyes. Soft in the head, Doremus. Soft like a melon. If you'd stayed on the force you'd be directing traffic in a cemetery right now. So think of something.
The sound of the school bell drifted through the wind; it tolled ten times. Doremus lifted his binoculars and began a thorough end-to-end check of the quiet campus. He was able to see the night watchman in his booth by the gates. Reading a newspaper. He hadn't looked out all night. If the gymnasium fell down he'd find out about it from the papers.
Tree shadows danced in the circles of light on the quadrangle. He turned the glasses on the dark bulk of the residence halls. He could not see the inner windows but the slant of the roof shone in the moonlight, gunmetal gray. He traced the roof line, focused for a few moments on the black half-acre of parking lot, the delivery area and loading dock behind the cafeteria. There was a stabbing pain in his left shoulder he hadn't been able to work out. He ignored it, returned his attention to the roof of Dobbs Hall.
The boy had appeared there as if conjured. He stood, motionless, straight, assured, in the moonlight. Doremus felt his throat squeezing tight. For several seconds Peter seemed to be listening, to be looking for something. A gust of wind almost unbalanced him. He recovered, then began running, nimbly, across the tar-and-gravel surface. Doremus tracked him, marveling. When he reached the limit of the roof Peter leaned momentarily over the parapet, looking down at the vertical mat of ivy on the otherwise blank wall.
"Watch yourself, kid," Doremus said under his breath. "Maybe you've done it before, but take care."
Confidently the boy climbed over the two-foot-high parapet, held on with both hands while he dug with his toes into the tough vine. Doremus couldn't tell if he was wearing sneakers. When he seemed sure of a foothold Peter started down. It was difficult to follow his progress, even with the good binoculars, because of the dark background. It seemed to take him the better part of five minutes to go just a few feet.
Quite suddenly, as Doremus watched edgily, Peter appeared to lose his grip, or perhaps the vine pulled away from the wall. He was free of the wall, falling. Doremus leaned forward, helplessly. Peter landed on his feet on the covered walkway to the
cafeteria, swayed there, took a hasty step to steady himself. It looked as if he would fall again, headfirst to the asphalt parking strip. But he regained balance and went down on one knee to catch his breath.
The rest of the way down was easy for him: an eight-foot jump to a grassy terrace. He picked himself up, vanished beneath the walkway. Doremus tried vainly for a couple of minutes to pick him up again. When he had his next glimpse of Peter,
the boy was running at the edge of the drive, circling behind the administration building. Doremus turned the binoculars on the Chevelle. Craig was standing beside it, waiting.
He spoke to Peter, briefly, dropping a hand on his shoulder. Then he opened a door of the car and Peter got in. Instead of getting into the car himself, Craig walked briskly back to the building. Doremus lost him. He lowered the glasses for a few moments to give his eyes a rest. Apparently there was a back entrance, most probably a basement entrance. The angle was wrong and he couldn't find a doorway with his glasses.
Automatically Doremus looked at the glowing face of his chronometer: nine minutes past ten. He raised the binoculars again.
At twenty after, Craig reappeared, carrying Amy.
The distance was too great for Doremus to tell what condition she was in, or if she was bound. Craig held her with one arm while he lifted the lid of the trunk. Unhappily there was no revealing flash of light from inside the trunk. But judging from the loose way she sprawled when Craig put her inside, she was at least unconscious, if not dead. The hatred he felt for Craig Young was as blinding as a migraine headache. He reached down, groped for the CB radio, put it in his lap. He kept his eyes on the Chevelle while he brought Enoch Mills in.
"We've got some action. Also complications. Craig's about to leave the school. Peter Mathis is in the back seat of the car, probably lying flat so he won't be seen when Craig drives through the gate. And Amy is in the trunk."
"What shape is she in?"
"I don't know. Half an hour closed up in that trunk and she's a goner no matter what. OK, he's just leaving the grounds. Better have the boys in the other car close slow. No lights. He may be panicky."
"We're ready for him," Enoch said crisply. "Come a runnin'."
Doremus clutched the radio in one hand and pulled himself up the slope. When he was standing, he unclipped the flashlight from his belt and cut his way through the buckbrush with it. Twenty yards away was an old logging road, a barely passable slash up the wooded spine of the razorback. He would never have gotten a car up there and in fact he'd had to push his scooter part of the way, but he anticipated only moderate difficulty going down. He stowed the radio away, fixed the lamp to the handlebars for additional light, kicked the motor to life and went charging away, head low to avoid the unexpected lash of a low-hanging limb.
He'd had no way of timing it, but he thought it reach the base of the ridge, where the hardtop road out of Eveningshade Hollow curved sharply around, continued on into the village two miles away. Mills had set up his intercept point there.
There were two of them, out of uniform, in an unmarked car. Engine trouble; the car was blocking the road. Mills would wave Craig down, approach apologetically, put the light and his gun on Craig at the same time. Maybe it would work. Or maybe Craig wouldn't slow down at all, and kill a couple of people trying to run away. He might have a gun of his own. But they had talked it over and decided it was the best way to grab him without unnecessary risks.
If he's driving slow, Doremus thought, plummeting toward the valley on the atrocious road, his no longer young bones taking a pounding, if he's driving slow and watching the bad curves in that road and maybe talking to Peter, then I've got a one-minute lead on him. Time to ditch the scooter and dig in by the side of the road with the Woodsman. Just in case it takes three men. But he wasn't planning to mix in. It was up to Mills now. Craig probably wouldn't recognize the undersheriff right away, not without his uniform.
The road turned down so steeply he thought he was going to go headfirst over the handlebars, and he lost his seat momentarily. Then the road widened, became level, and he went rocketing through a grove of young trees.
That girl, he thought. I don't believe I could forgive myself if—He brought the scooter to a skidding stop, parked it, ran for the blacktop road, pulling the Colt from his waistband. He saw the sheriff's car just before the big curve, taillights glowing. The deputy was under the hood with a flashlight. He had a sawed-off shotgun in his other hand. Mills leaned against the side of his car, a big, white Pontiac. The beam of his flashlight circled lazily on the road. He turned his head as Doremus approached, gasping for breath.
"Likely spot there," he said, pointing. "Good cover; he won't pick you up in his headlights."
"As soon as you pull him out of the car I'll go for the boy."
"Fine idea."
"How far behind him are your boys?"
"Reckon about a thousand yards. He won't know they're there, but if he tries to back off on us they'll block him right quick."
"Well, he's due," Doremus said. Except for the toneless wind moan, the night was still. Early frost had driven cicadas and tree frogs into the mud, and they were not close to farms or houses and the inevitable dogs. Doremus went down on his elbows below the road.
Three more minutes passed. Mills shuffled his feet on the asphalt and spat. The deputy said hoarsely, "Where's he at?"
"Maybe he had a flat tire," Mills said. "Hold it!"
Doremus looked up. A squad car came slowly into view, lights out.
"Be damned," Mills said sullenly, and wagged his flashlight. The squad car speeded up and jerked to a stop near him. Doremus got slowly to his feet. The deputy driving the squad car stuck his head out the window and said:
"Thought you'd have him. Where'd he go?"
"You tell me."
Doremus said, "You didn't pass him on the road?"
"Hell, no."
"Where could he have pulled off?" Doremus asked Mills.
"I don't know. Chuck, bring me the map."
The other two deputies remained in the squad car with the engine idling. The driver switched on his headlights as Mills unfolded the big Geological Survey map of Shades County on the trunk of his Pontiac.
"Here's the only access road between this point and the school," he muttered, aiming his flashlight at one grid of the map. "It's dirt, winds down across Settler Creek and through this bottom land, past a good-sized gravel pit. Comes out a quarter mile from the Big Diamond truck stop on 60."
"Then he's on that road."
"Could be. Only thing is, we've had the road partially barricaded almost six months now. Spring flood weakened the bridge across the creek there. It's just before falling down. He's bound to know that."
"What if he tried to get across the bridge?"
Chuck said, "What's he driving? A compact? There's a chance he might get across. He'd be a damned fool to try though. Why do you suppose he turned off the hard road?"
"Something made him nervous. Or maybe he meant to all the time. He might be looking for a place to—" Mills glanced up at Doremus with a hint of shock in his green eyes.
"To drop a body off," Doremus said, finishing it for him.
"That gravel pit would be ideal," Mills admitted. "But there's other places he could do it, and she might not be found for a while." The map bellied as the wind blew hard and Mills had to hold it down with both hands.
"It's also possible he pulled off behind the barricade and stopped there with his lights off," Doremus speculated. "Because . . . say he needed a couple of minutes to think something over. Maybe Amy is alive after all, and she was making noises in the trunk. Or he could have left something he needs at the school. If he was on the dirt road then he'd have seen the squad car go by with all lights out and become damned suspicious. That might have prompted him to double back this way." Doremus traced the Eveningshade Hollow road east, past the school and around the other end of the razorback. "If he did that, then he has a choice of roads by now. He could be anywhere."
Mills walked back to the squad car and spoke briefly to his boys. The driver turned the car around and they went off with a quick screech of tires.
"Told Bryant and McLemore to look for him this side of the bridge," Mills explained when he returned, "and I said if they was to see him then they should take him. If he ain't on the dirt road they'll make a circuit of the school grounds. Then they'll cruise all the roads between Consta
ble Ridge and Blounstown. They won't try to take him if the car's moving though—too much chance of an accident and the Mathis boy maybe getting hurt. Meantime I want to go down by the gravel pit. I've got it in my head that's where he is this minute, hauling that poor girl out of the trunk of his car. You ridin' with us, Doremus?"
"No."
Mills gave him a long look. "What are you thinking?"
"I'm wondering what Craig did to Amy. Did he make her tell that he was being watched? His actions so far indicate both carelessness and deep suspicion. What's going on in his mind? So far we've more or less assumed that he's rational, we've been trying to guess what a sane man with a body on his hands might do. But suppose he's broken down completely. He might have forgotten Amy's back there in the trunk. He might be driving around in the moonlight talking to himself with spit on his chin. He might not have any idea of where he is, what time it is, or whether he's hot or cold. Then again he could be going step by step through some intricate plot that only makes a little bit of sense to a logical mind and is guaranteed to drive us crazy trying to figure it out. And while we go off in all directions he's gradually working his way around to another victim: Helen."
"I could sure use some more men," Mills said with a sigh. "What the hell do we do? Stake out the Connelly house?"
"Not just yet. I imagine we've got an hour or two before Craig gets to Helen. In the meantime I think you ought to keep Bryant and the other deputy cruising. Who knows, they might find Craig pulled off by the side of the road somewhere reciting nursery rhymes. You might come across him sitting at the edge of the gravel pit counting bubbles where Amy sank." His forehead was deeply ridged. "I think we ought to spread out but be prepared to close quickly when Craig gives notice. I'm going to ride my scooter into the village. Helen was planning to take Peggy and me to the movies tonight—before I was called out of town, that is—and I might find them at the theater. Unfortunately it's time to bring her up to date on nephew Craig."