by Cave, Hugh
Suddenly a scream burst from her lips and she ran from the kitchen. She fled screaming into the bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
Olive and Vin looked at each other. Vin bent his knees and tried to pick up the burned photograph, but his fingers only reduced the remains to black powder. As he and Olive hurried to the bedroom, he snatched up the photos left on the table in the living room and quickly scanned them.
"She only burned one," he said. "Not the footprints. Not the kitten. Only the one of the diagram. Now why do you suppose she wanted to destroy that?"
14
It was out of the question for Jerri to go to school the next day. At Olive's urging she got up and ate a breakfast, sitting at the table with her mother and Vin. Vin had stayed all night for the first time and slept on the sofa in the living room.
The child lost her breakfast before she could reach the bathroom. When carried back to bed, she broke out in a cold sweat. Olive telephoned Doc Broderick. Vin called Keith Wilding to say he would be late to work.
After burning the photograph last night, the child had been hysterical. She lay face down on the bed, sobbing and screaming. She stopped only when exhausted. Olive and Vin had put her into bed and tried to talk to her. Vin especially.
He sat on the bed and soothed her with his voice. What was his little girl afraid of? Why had she burned a picture of a drawing that did not mean anything? "Why did you do that, baby? Tell Vin, please."
She had finally sobbed herself to sleep without telling them a thing.
Doc Broderick examined the child with care and said to Olive, "Put another blanket on her bed, then come out and shut the door." In the living room he sat scowling at her and Vin for a moment. "It's emotional. She's scared of something. If you ask me, it's probably tied in with the rest of what's been happening lately."
"It began last night when she saw a photo I had," Vin said.
"What kind of photo?"
Vin told about the uprooted exotics, the dead kitten, the diagram. "That is what did it, the diagram. She waited until our backs were turned for a moment, then dashed into the kitchen and burned it."
"Burned it?"
"Turned on the gas stove and burned it," Olive said.
"What kind of diagram are you talking about? You remember it well enough to sketch it for me?"
"There is no need for that. I have the negative." Vin took the photo-shop envelope from his pocket. "I suppose when she ran to the stove with the print, she did not know that we could make more of them from the same negative." Finding what he wanted, he handed it over.
Holding the oblong of film by a corner, Doc carried it to a window and spent a long time examining it, "Have you any idea what it is?" Vin asked.
"Never saw such a thing before. How do you know it means anything?" Doc answered his own question with a shrug. "May I borrow this? Like to show it to Chief Lighthill."
Vin hesitated. "I would rather not, Doctor. It is not mine to lend. Shall we say that if the chief wants it, he can get it from Keith? Anyway, there is another just like it. A sketch, not a photograph."
"Oh?"
"Willard Ellstrom's wife found one scratched in the school yard the day after the Hostetter boy behaved so strangely. He did it; she saw him. She copied it."
"The day after, eh?" That would explain why the Ellstroms had not mentioned the diagram when he called on them, Doc thought. "Does she still have the copy?" According to the morning news, Raymond Hostetter was missing again. Doc had been about to call the family and ask for details when Olive phoned him about Jerri. This time the boy had been missing all night.
"Well," Vin said, "it was Willard who told me about it when he handed me these pictures. So I suppose she still has it."
"You've tried to find out from Jerri what this means, of course."
"Both of us," Olive said. "She won't discuss it. Ask her why she burned the photo, she just looks at you."
Doc remembered the day Jerri had almost told him something about a door, only to pull back at the last moment. He wondered whether the strange symbol in the negative, all those squares and circles and triangles, had anything to do with that.
Still on his feet after studying the negative, he turned and looked toward the bedroom. Would a psychiatrist question the child at this point? He didn't know. He was not a psychiatrist. That reference to a door had been puzzling him, though. A question or two now, backed up by this business of burning the photo, just might produce results.
He reached the bedroom door in two strides and opened it. Tried to open it. It thumped against something inside and there was a cry of pain. Doc put his head in and looked down. Jerri Jansen was on hands and knees, peering up at him.
He bent over and took her under the arms, setting her on her feet. Her eyes were not quite right, he noticed. They didn't just look at him; they stared and were tinged with red. Maybe the door banging into her...
"You're supposed to be in bed, young lady, not snooping. Come on. Back you go." She crawled into bed by herself, and he smoothed the covers over her as Olive and Vin came in to see what was happening. "You feel all right?" he asked the child. "Or did the door give you a knock?"
She turned her face away.
"Want to ask you something," Doc said. "That photograph you burned last night . . . did it have something to do with the magic door you were telling me about?"
He had a hand on the bed when he put the question. He felt her small body stiffen and remain rigid under the covers. He waited for an answer but was given none. Ah, well . . . probably a psychiatrist would not have asked such a question.
He gave it one more try. "Don't want to talk?" Getting no answer to that either, he turned to Olive and Vin, shrugged, and went back into the living room. There he said, "It looks as though it was the photo that upset her, all right."
"And me telling her she didn't come straight home from school," Olive said. "But, you know, that isn't the whole of it, either. She was upset over something when she got in from school, Mrs. Trevett told me."
"Did you call the school to find out if anything happened there?"
"No. I guess I should have."
Doc nodded. "All right. Keep her in bed a couple of days. I'd say keep her out of school the rest of this week too, in case the trouble is something there. Can you get a few days off from work, Olive?"
"Yes."
"Better do that. And I'll be looking in. So long for now."
Doc drove to the police station and found Lorin Lighthill at his desk. He sat. “No word yet about the mayor’s boy, Chief?”
“No word,” Lighthill said, looking and sounding as though he had not been to bed last night.
“I may have a lead for you.” Doc told him about the burning of the photograph and why Keith Wilding had taken the pictures in the first place. He went on to tell Chief Lighthill about the diagram scratched in the school yard by the missing son of Mayor Hostetter. “I haven’t any idea what the design might mean,” he admitted. “But don’t you agree it’s mighty queer that two kids of that age are able to draw the same complicated diagram? I wonder who taught them, and why.”
“How do you know the same kid didn’t do both? Nobody actually saw the Jansen girl do the one at the nursery you say.”
“Well, Mrs. Ellstrom saw Raymond do the first one and when number two was drawn, he was at home. He didn’t leave the house all week.”
“You sure he didn’t?”
“That’s what Mrs. Hostetter told me.”
“Let’s go have a talk with Ellstrom,” Chief Lighthill said. “It can’t do any harm.”
They found Willard Ellstrom sweeping the sidewalk in front of his studio. “Oh-oh,” he said when the chief finished telling him what was wanted. “I gave Lois’s sketch to a friend in Miami.” He told them about Professor John Holden and Holden’s interest in the drawing.
“You suppose you could phone him, Willard?” the chief asked. “If he’s had time to look into it, he may be able to help us. Apparen
tly this drawing or diagram, whatever it is, means something.”
Saying, “Come along and talk to him yourself,” Willard led the way into his studio. He looked up the number in an address book and dialed it, calling Professor's Holden's Coconut Grove apartment. Getting no answer, he called Holden's department at the university.
A woman answered.
"Professor Holden, please," Willard said. "This is Willard Ellstrom in Nebulon. It's quite important."
"I'm sorry. Professor Holden is not here."
"'Where can I reach him?"
"I'm afraid I don't know. He is to attend a conference at the University of Oregon next week but he is driving out there. I'm afraid there's no way you can contact him."
"Oh Lord," Willard said. "Is there a chance he might call you, do you think?"
"Well, he might. But I really don't know why he should."
"Will you take my number in case he does? It's very important."
"Of course, Mister—"
"Ellstrom. Willard Ellstrom in Nebulon. He'll know what I want if you'll just tell him it's urgent." He gave her his number, thanked her, and hung up. To Chief Lighthill he said, "You heard?"
"Enough. Just what did this man say, Willard, when you showed him the diagram in Miami?"
Willard had to think. "Well, he was astonished that a seven-year-old had done it."
"What else?"
"I told him our Miss Peckham at the library had said it was just childish doodling, and he certainly disagreed with that. I remember he said these esoteric things—I believe that was the word—can lead one along some pretty dark byways, or something to that effect."
"Did he use the word cabalistic?" Doc Broderick asked, frowning.
"I don't believe so."
"I'm thinking of that room you told me about, Chief," Doc said. 'The books."
"You really do have dark byways in mind, don't you?" the chief said, struggling to get his 290 pounds erect. "Well, thanks for trying, Willard. Call me if you hear anything? I've got to get back to old Tom Ranney and a missing boy."
15
It was the beginning of a bad time for Lorin Light-hill. First, Nebulon's police could not find out who had cut the throat and gouged out the eyes of old Tom Ranney. They searched his shack. They examined the weed-grown lot for footprints. They learned nothing.
Robbery could not have been the motive; the man had owned nothing worth stealing. So far as was known, he had had no enemies. People had pitied him, not hated him. At one time or another almost every citizen of Nebulon must have seen him snoring away on a park bench. When he took off the ragged cap he always wore and laid it upside down beside him, some dropped coins into it.
Chief Lighthill clung to the belief that Raymond Hostetter was the murderer. But having no evidence and valuing his job, he kept his opinion to himself.
There remained the matter of the fingerprints on the handle of the knife. If they could be matched with Raymond's, they might prove something. But Raymond remained missing.
He had disappeared Wednesday, presumably on his way home from school. By Friday the police were desperate, the Hostetters were all but out of their minds with dread, state agencies and the county sheriff's department had been appealed to for help, and the whole town was putting forth theories.
Ruby Fortuna had kidnapped or killed the boy for accusing her of drowning her baby, some said. She had been let out of the hospital Tuesday night and must have been lying in wait for him when he left school Wednesday.
The same person who killed Tom Ranney had killed the youngster and hidden the body, said others. Probably a stranger just passing through town. Somebody not right in the head.
Leonard Quigley, the motorcycle cop, had his own theory. "You know what I think?" he snarled at Chief Lighthill. "I think we ought to investigate that Otto guy, the one who tried to feel up the little girl at the concert. I'll bet he has a thing about little kids. You just turn me loose on him and I'll get you some answers."
"Maybe later," Lighthill said, knowing Quigley was a bad man to antagonize.
The chief himself concentrated on trying to find someone who had seen Raymond walking home from school. "We know he left school by himself," he told Mr. and Mrs. Hostetter when giving them a progress report at their home Friday evening. "Miss Aube, the second-grade teacher, says she saw him leaving the school yard. No one was with him. Most of the other kids had already gone."
Mrs. Hostetter, whose eyes were red because she had been crying a lot, said, "Why was he one of the last to leave? I told him not to dawdle."
Lighthill shrugged. "So we have to assume he followed this route." He had unfolded a city map on the large marble-topped coffee table in the Hostetter's living room, and now with a felt-tipped pen he drew a red line on it. "What I've done is call at every house along that route. Every single one. But nobody saw him pass."
"He didn't come that way, then," the mayor said.
"Right. So I asked myself where else he might have gone, and of course the first place that came to mind was the Gustave Nebulon house. We'd already questioned Elizabeth Peckham and been through the house itself. You know that. But we hadn't checked the route, so we talked to every resident of those streets. Again no one saw him."
"Somebody was waiting for him right outside the school," Hostetter said. "Somebody dragged him into a car."
"It's a possibility."
"But why in God's name would anyone kidnap my son?"
"Ransom, maybe?"
"But no one has tried to contact me!"
Chief Lighthill said, "There's one other possibility." He exhaled an amount of air that only a chest as big as his could have held. "I hate to say this, but you have to admit Raymond did some peculiar things before he disappeared. That business with the marbles. The way he talked to the principal. The way he accused the Fortuna woman of drowning her baby . . ."
"Do you still maintain she did not drown the baby, Chief Lighthill?" Reatha Hostetter angily demanded. Nerves were raw now.
"Even if he saw her do it," the chief said, "doesn't it strike you folks as odd that a boy his age, always kind of shy, would step right up in a crowd and denounce a woman that way?" He shook his head as though still puzzled. "What I was saying, Raymond did these things before he disappeared. I don't insist they prove anything, but there's at least a possibility he was disturbed about something. And that means he could have just wandered off by himself. Or even run away."
The Hostetters stared at him in hostile silence.
"On the other hand," Lighthill admitted, "everyone knows he's your son, and everyone in town knows we're looking for him. Somebody would have seen him and come forward."
Another thing the chief did was talk to the children whose names he had obtained from Doc Broderick. He had nine names, not counting that of Teresa Crosser whom he had already interviewed. The number increased to twelve as he heard of others who were not Doc's patients. Worth Blair accompanied him on the calls he made. In discussing the results afterward, Lighthill said, "You think those kids were leveling with us, Worth?"
Blair shook his head.
"What's going on?"
"I got the impression they were expecting us to question them and were ready for us, Chief. As if they'd been coached."
"Or got together and decided among themselves what to tell us. Those are smart kids. Maybe not as resourceful as Teresa, but smart enough."
"I don't know much about children," Blair said, "but that lot gives me the creeps. The way they stare holes in you when you're talking to them. You notice the eyes on some of them?"
"Bloodshot? Yes."
"Worse than that. There were times I felt the way a bird is supposed to feel when a snake stares at it." In the report he wrote of the interviews with the children, however, Chief Lighthill did not mention their eyes. He said nothing of the feeling he shared with Blair that these particular youngsters were wise beyond their years. He simply wrote that none of the children admitted having seen Raymond Hostetter a
fter Raymond left school. Most, in fact, claimed they had left before him.
Stephanie Aube, the second-grade teacher, supplied the information that Raymond had not in any way behaved strangely while in school that day. "I would say he was unusually quiet even for him," she said. "But mightn't that be significant in itself? He acted almost scared. Once when he seemed to be daydreaming and I spoke to him, I noticed he trembled."
Chief Lighthill talked to Lois Ellstrom, the principal, but she could tell him nothing. He went to see Ruby Fortuna. Ruby insisted she was not responsible for Raymond's disappearance, although she bitterly hated him for falsely accusing her about her baby.
He talked to Vincent Otto, who told him of having driven past the old Nebulon house one day when a group of children, the same children, were seated in a circle at the rear of the yard. On the strength of that statement the chief sent Leonard Quigley and two other men to search the yard, but they found nothing.
"Have you figured out yet what was wrong in old Gustave's study?" the chief asked Worth Blair.
"I'm working on it, Chief. Something about those books keeps bugging me. Just give me time."
With a shake of his head Lighthill said, "I wonder how much time we have."
Friday night the sand in the hourglass ran out a little faster.
All Nebulon knew Nino and Anna Ianucci. From Italy they had come to Florida when their homeland was ruled by Benito Mussolini, whom they despised and feared. With the little money they had they bought fifty acres of marginal land and planted oranges. It was said of Mama Ianucci that she had a name for each orange tree and loved each one as she would have loved a child.
She and Nino had no children. A tragedy. "I will go to the hospital and find out if it is my fault," Nino said. "No," said Anna. "I don't want to know whose fault it is, ever." So no children. Only orange trees. And now both were in their seventies, and they walked through Nebulon hand in hand, smiling at their neighbors, showing them what it meant to be loving though old.