“Yare, I made Tuesday night’s upstate run.”
“Did you take a pretty blond girl, dressed in a gray jacket and skirt, as far as Denby?”
No. 27 stopped looking at him. His face stayed on in the same direction, but he was looking at other things. “Nawr, I didn’t.”
“Well, was she on the bus at all?”
No. 27’s eyes remained at a tangent from the man he was answering. “Nawr, she wasn’t.”
“What’re you acting so evasive about? I can tell you’re hiding something, just by looking at you.”
“I said, ‘Nawr, I didn’t.’ ”
“Listen. I’m her husband. I’ve got to know. Here, take this, only tell me, will you? I’ve got to know. It’s an awful feeling!”
The driver took a hitch in his belt. “I get good wages. A ten-dollar bill wouldn’t make me say I sawr someone when I didn’t. No, nor a twenty, nor a century either. That’s an old one. It would only make me lose my rating with the company.” He swung around on his stool, took up his coffee mug again. “I only sawr the road,” he said truculently. “I ain’t supposed to see who’s riding in back of me.”
“But you can’t help seeing who gets off each time you stop.”
This time No. 27 wouldn’t answer at all. The interview was over, as far as he was concerned. He flung down a nickel, defiantly jerked down the visor of his cap, and swaggered off.
Bliss slouched forlornly out of the terminal, worse off than before. The issue was all blurred now. The ticket-seller vaguely thought some girl or other had haphazardly bought a ticket for as much money as she had on her person that night, but without guaranteeing that she fitted his description of Smiles at all. The driver, on the other hand, definitely denied anyone like her had ridden with him, as far as Denby or anywhere else. What was he to think? Had she left, or hadn’t she left?
Whether she had or not, it was obvious that she had never arrived. He had the testimony of her own mother, and that letter from her from upstate, to vouch for that. And who was better to be believed than her own mother?
Had she stayed here in the city then? But she hadn’t done that, either. He knew Smiles so well. Even if she had gone to the length of staying overnight at a hotel that first night, Tuesday, she would have been back home with him by Wednesday morning at the very latest. Her peevishness would have evaporated long before then. Another thing, she wouldn’t have had enough money to stay for any longer than just one night at even a moderately priced hotel. She’d flung down the greater part of her household expense money on the floor that night before walking out.
“All I can do,” he thought apprehensively, “is make a round of the hotels and find out if anyone like her was at any of them Tuesday night, even if she’s not there now.”
He didn’t check every last hotel in town, but he checked all the ones she would have gone to, if she’d gone to one at all. She wouldn’t have been sappy enough to go to some rundown lodging-house near the freight yards or longshoremen’s hostelry down by the piers. That narrowed the field somewhat.
He checked on her triply: by name first, on the hotel registers for Tuesday night; then by her description, given to the desk clerks; and lastly by any and all entries in the registers, no matter what name was given. He knew her handwriting, even if she’d registered under an assumed name.
He drew a complete blank. No one who looked like her had come to any of the hotels—Tuesday night, or at any time since. No one giving her name. No one giving another name, who wrote like her. What was left? Where else could she have gone? Friends? She didn’t have any. Not close ones, not friends she knew well enough to walk in on unannounced and stay overnight with.
Where was she? She wasn’t in the city. She wasn’t in the country, up at Denby. She seemed to have vanished completely from the face of the earth.
It was past two in the morning by the time he’d finished checking the hotels. It was too late to get a bus any more that night, or he would have gone up to Denby then and there himself. He turned up his coat collar against the night mist and started disconsolately homeward. On the way he tried to buck himself up by saying: “Nothing’s happened to her. She’s just hiding out somewhere, trying to throw a scare into me. She’ll show up, she’s bound to.” It wouldn’t work, much. It was two whole days and three nights now. Marriage is learning to know another person, learning to know by heart what he or she’d do in such-and-such a situation. They’d only been married six weeks, but, after all, they’d been going together nearly a year before that; he knew her pretty well by now.
She wasn’t vindictive. She didn’t nurse grievances, even imaginary ones. There were only two possible things she would have done. She would have either gotten on that bus red-hot, been cooled off long before she got off it again, but stayed up there a couple of days as long as she was once there. Or if she hadn’t taken the bus, she would have been back by twelve at the latest right that same night, with an injured air and a remark like: “You ought to be ashamed of yourself letting your wife walk the streets like a vagrant!” or something to that effect. She hadn’t, so she must have gone up there. Then he thought of the letter from her mother, and he felt good and scared.
The phone was ringing when he got back. He could hear it even before he got the front door open. He nearly broke the door down in his hurry to get at it. For a minute he thought—
But it was only Mrs. Alden. She said, “I’ve been trying to get you ever since ten o’clock. I didn’t hear from you, and I’ve been getting more and more worried.” His heart went down under his shoelaces. “Did you locate her? Is it all right?”
“I can’t find her,” he said, so low he had to say it over again so she could catch it.
She’d been talking fast until now. Now she didn’t say anything at all for a couple of minutes; there was just an empty hum on the wire. Something came between them. They’d never seen each other face to face, but he could sense a change in her voice, a different sound to it the next time he heard it. It was as though she were drawing away from him. Not moving from where she stood, of course, but rather withdrawing her confidence. The beginnings of suspicion were lurking in it somewhere or other.
“Don’t you think it’s high time you got in touch with the police?” he heard her say. And then, so low that he could hardly get it: “If you don’t, I will.” Click, and she was gone.
He didn’t take it the way he, perhaps, should have.
As he hung up, he thought, “Yes, she’s right, I’ll have to. Nothing else left to be done now. It’s two full days now; no use kidding myself any more.”
He put on his hat and coat again, left the house once more. It was about three in the morning by this time. He hated to go to them. It seemed like writing finis to it. It seemed to make it so final, tragic, in a way. As though, once he notified them, all hope of her returning to him unharmed, of her own accord, was over. As though it stopped being just a little private, domestic matter any more and became a police matter, out of his own hands. Ridiculous, he knew, but that was the way he felt about it. But it had to be done. Just sitting worrying about her wasn’t going to bring her back.
He went in between two green door lamps and spoke to a desk sergeant. “I want to report my wife missing.” They sent a man out, a detective, to talk to him. Then he had to go down to the city morgue, to see if she was among the unidentified dead there, and that was the worst experience he’d had yet. It wasn’t the sight of the still faces one by one; it was the dread, each time, that the next one would be hers. Half under his breath, each time he shook his head and looked at someone who had once been loved, he added, “No, thank God.” She wasn’t there.
Although he hadn’t found her, all he could give when he left the place of the dead was a sigh of unutterable relief. She wasn’t among the found dead; that was all this respite marked. But he knew, although he tried to shut the grisly thought out, that there are many dead who are not found. Sometimes not right away, sometimes never.
They took him around to the hospitals then, to certain wards, and though this wasn’t quite so bad as the other place, it wasn’t much better either. He looked for her among amnesia victims, would-be suicides who had not yet recovered consciousness, persons with all the skin burned off their faces, mercifully swathed in gauze bandaging and tea leaves. They even made him look in the alcoholic wards, though he protested strenuously that she wouldn’t be there, and in the psychopathic wards.
The sigh of relief he gave when this tour was over was only less heartfelt than after leaving the morgue. She wasn’t dead. She wasn’t maimed or injured or out of her mind in any way. And still she wasn’t to be found.
Then they turned it over to Missing Persons, had her description broadcast, and told him there wasn’t anything he could do for the present but go home.
He didn’t even try to sleep when he got back the second time. Just sat there waiting—for the call that didn’t come and that he somehow knew wouldn’t come, not if he waited for a week or a month.
It was starting to get light by that time. The third day since she’d been swallowed up bodily was dawning. She wasn’t in the city, alive or dead, he was convinced. Why sit there waiting for them to locate her when he was sure she wasn’t here? He’d done all he could at this end. He hadn’t done anything yet at the other end. The thing was too serious now; it wasn’t enough just to take the word of a voice over a telephone wire that she wasn’t up there. Not even if the voice was that of her own mother, who was to be trusted if anyone was, who thought as much of her as he did. He decided he’d go up there himself. Anything was better than just sitting here waiting helplessly.
He couldn’t take the early-morning bus, the way he wanted to. Those building plans he was finishing up had to be turned in today; there was an important contractor waiting for them. He stood there poring over the blueprints, more dead than alive between worry and lack of sleep, and when they were finally finished, turned in, and O.K.’d, he went straight from the office to the terminal and took the bus that should get in there about dark.
Denby wasn’t even an incorporated village, he found when the bus finally got there, an hour late. It was just a place where a turnpike crossed another road, with houses spaced at lengthy intervals along the four arms of the intersection. Some of them a quarter of a mile apart, few of them in full view of one another due to intervening trees, bends in the roads, rises and dips of the ground. A filling-station was the nearest thing to the crossroads, in one direction. Up in the other was a store, with living-quarters over it. It was the most dispersed community he had ever seen.
He chose the store at random, stopped in there, and asked, “Which way to the Alden house?”
The storekeeper seemed to be one of those people who wear glasses for the express purpose of staring over instead of through them. Or maybe they’d slipped down on the bridge of his nose. “Take that other fork, to your right,” he instructed. “Just keep going till you think there ain’t going to be no more houses, and you’re sure I steered you wrong. Keep on going anyway. When you least expect it, one last house’ll show up, round the turn. That’s them. Can’t miss it. You’ll know it by the low brick barrier wall runs along in front of it. He put that up lately, just to keep in practice, I reckon.”
Bliss wondered what he meant by that, if anything, but didn’t bother asking. The storekeeper was evidently one of these loquacious souls who would have rambled on forever given the slightest encouragement, and Bliss was tired and anxious to reach his destination. He thanked him and left.
The walk out was no picayune city block or two; it was a good stiff hike. The road stretched before him like a white tape under the velvety night sky, dark-blue rather than black, and stars twinkled down through the openings between the roadside-tree branches. He could hear countryside night noises around him, crickets or something, and once a dog barked way off in the distance—it sounded like miles away. It was lonely, but not particularly frightening. Nature rarely is; it is man that is menacing.
Just the same, if she had come up here—and of course she hadn’t—it wouldn’t have been particularly prudent for a young girl alone like her to walk this distance at that hour of the night. She probably would have phoned out to them to come in and meet her at the crossroads, from either the store or that filling-station. And yet if both had been closed up by then—her bus wouldn’t have passed through here until one or two in the morning—she would have had to walk it alone. But she hadn’t come up so why conjure up additional dangers?
Thinking which, he came around the slow turn in the road and a low, elbow-height boundary wall sprang up beside him and ran down the road past a pleasant, white-painted two-story house, with dark gables, presumably green. They seemed to keep it in good condition. As for the wall itself, he got what the storekeeper’s remark had intended to convey when he saw it. It looked very much as though Alden had put it up simply to kill time, give himself something to do, add a fancy touch to his property. For it seemed to serve no useful purpose. It was not nearly high enough to shut off the view, so it had not been built for privacy. It only ran along the front of the parcel, did not extend around the sides or to the back, so it was not even effective as a barrier against poultry or cattle, or useful as a boundary mark. It seemed to be purely decorative. As such, it was a neat, workmanlike job; you could tell Alden had been a mason before his marriage. It was brick, smoothly, painstakingly plastered over.
There was no gate in it, just a gap, with an ornamental willow wicket arched high over it. He turned in through there. They were up yet, though perhaps already on the point of retiring. One of the upper-floor windows held a light, but with a blind discreetly drawn down over it.
He rang the bell, then stepped back from the door and looked up, expecting to be interrogated first from the window, particularly at this hour. Nothing of the kind happened; they evidently possessed the trustfulness that goes with a clear conscious. He could hear steps start down the inside stairs. A woman’s steps, at that, and a voice that carried out to where he was with surprising clarity said, “Must be somebody lost their way, I guess.”
A hospitable little lantern up over the door went on from the inside, and a moment later he was looking at a pleasant-faced, middle-aged woman with soft gray eyes. Her face was long and thin, but without the hatchet-sharp features that are so often an accompaniment of that contour of face. Her hair was a graying blond, but soft and wavy, not scraggly. Knowing who she was, he almost thought he could detect a little bit of Smiles in her face: the shape of the brows and the curve of the mouth, but that might have been just autosuggestion.
“Hm-m-m?” she said serenely.
“I’m Ed, Mrs. Alden.”
She blinked twice, as though she didn’t get it for a minute. Or maybe wasn’t expecting it.
“Smiles’ husband,” he said, a trifle irritatedly. You’re supposed to know your own in-laws. It wasn’t their fault, of course, that they didn’t. It wasn’t his, either. He and Smiles had been meaning to come up here on a visit as soon as they could, but they’d been so busy getting their own home together, and six weeks is such a short time. Her mother had been getting over a prolonged illness at the time of their wedding, hadn’t been strong enough for the trip down and back.
Both her hands came out toward his now, after that momentary blankness. “Oh, come in, Ed,” she said heartily. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, but I wish it had been under other circumstances.” She glanced past his shoulder. “She’s not with you, I see. No word yet, Ed?” she went on worriedly.
He looked down and shook his head glumly.
She held her hand to her mouth in involuntary dismay, then quickly recovered her self-control, as though not wishing to add to his distress. “Don’t know what to think,” she murmured half audibly. “It’s not like her to do a thing like that. Have you been to the police yet, Ed?”
“I reported it to them before daylight this morning. Had to go around to the different hospitals and
places.” He blew out his breath at the recollection. “Huff, it was ghastly.”
“Don’t let’s give up yet, Ed. You know the old saying, ‘No news is good news.’ ” Then: “Don’t let me keep you standing out here. Joe’s upstairs; I’ll call him down.”
As he followed her inside, his whole first impression of Smiles’ mother was that she was as nice, wholesome, and inartificial a woman as you could find anywhere. And first impressions are always half the battle.
She led him along a neat, hardwood-floored hall, varnished to the brightness of a mirror. An equally spotless white staircase rose at the back of it to the floor above.
“Let me take your hat,” she said thoughtfully, and hung it on a peg. “You look peaked, Ed; I can tell you’re taking it hard. That trip up is strenuous, too. It’s awful; you know you read about things like this in the papers nearly every day, but it’s only when it hits home you realize—”
Talking disconnectedly like that, she had reached the entrance to the living-room. She thrust her hand around to the inside of the door frame and snapped on the lights. He was standing directly in the center of the opening as she did so. There was something a little unexpected about the way they went on, but he couldn’t figure what it was; it must have been just a subconscious impression on his part. Maybe they were a little brighter than he’d expected, and after coming in out of the dark— The room looked as though it had been painted fairly recently, and he supposed that was what it was: the walls and woodwork gave it back with unexpected dazzle. It was too small a detail even to waste time on. Or is any detail ever too small?
She had left him for a moment to go as far as the foot of the stairs. “Joe, Smiles’ husband is here,” he heard her call.
A deep rumbling voice answered, “She with him?”
She tactfully didn’t answer that, no doubt to spare Bliss’s feelings; she seemed to be such a considerate woman. “Come down, dear,” was all she said.
He was a thick, heavy-set man, with a bull neck and a little circular fringe of russet-blond hair around his head, the crown of it bald. He was going to be the blunt, aggressive type, Bliss could see. With eyes too small to match it. Eyes that said, “Try and get past us.”
FOUR NOVELLAS OF FEAR: Eyes That Watch You, The Night I Died, You'll Never See Me Again, Murder Always Gathers Momentum Page 10