For a second she didn’t understand who he was talking about. Her brain was full of prickly knobbed little thoughts bouncing around like jackstraws; there was no way she could grasp a thought and examine it. She turned and started back upstairs. She seemed to be walking on a thin transparent shell; beneath it lay the eternal void, boiling, swirling, constantly in motion, pressing against her feet.
The administrator was pacing in front of her desk and cracking his knuckles. He started talking as she came in:
“Elizabeth, we do have a responsibility to guard the privacy of the patient, that’s true. But we also have a responsibility to the citizens of this state. I’m requesting that you turn over to the sheriff any information you might have which would lead to the capture of this dangerous person.”
She sat down behind her desk and looked at him. His eyes looked like peeled grapes floating in milk. “What are you talking about, Ted?”
“I am talking about the tape you made of Bollinger.”
Tape of Bollinger. In her mind’s eye she saw coils of tape wrapped around a mummified figure. “I see.” She nodded and pressed her palm together. “We respect the privacy of the patient except where it conflicts with the needs of law enforcement.”
Ted pressed his hand to his stomach and winced. “It isn’t that simple. I am besieged, Elizabeth, literally besieged with calls from people seeking reassurance. Not one has expressed any concern about the privacy of the patient. They want to know where is he, and they want to have their guns ready in case he should appear.”
“I can’t see that relevant to our situation.”
“You can’t?” He sighed. “I wish I’d stayed in the clinical field, where things are simple. Those people who called me are taxpayers. Whether we like it or not, we have to recognize that they vote for public officials, and these officials control our budget, and that is what makes our paychecks negotiable. Are you with me?”
She nodded. “You’re about to tell me there is already enough public sentiment against our coddling of criminals. We mustn’t tarnish our public image further by appearing to protect a mass murderer.”
“I am merely suggesting—”
“Throwing Bollinger’s head to the mob.”
“Not his head.”
“The contents of his head, which he revealed to me in private, assuming I was a trustworthy professional.”
“Look—I support you, up to a point. But that point has now been reached. The escape of Dan Bollinger has reopened the whole can of worms, and the sheriff believes that he may have revealed to you the names of those three who helped him get away.”
“To mer?”
“To you. The sheriff has been interrogating the attendant, and it appears that they were operating on inside information. The switchboard reports a call made from your office to the crisis ward, shortly after midnight.” He took off his glasses, polishing them on his blue necktie while he looked at her sternly. “Can you explain it?”
His eyes turned black and began to smoke; black worms crawled out of the sockets and hung down his cheeks. The worms had little smiley-faces like people stuck on letters. Egad! Smiley-faces …
She felt laughter bubbling up inside her throat, but managed to keep her voice steady. “No, Ted. I can’t explain it. One of life’s little mysteries …”
He drew a deep breath; white lines appeared around his thin nostrils. “I am trying to save your career, Liza, and will continue up to a point. After that you’ll have to accept the consequences of your actions.”
“All right. I’ll do it.”
“You’ll give the tape to the sheriff?”
“I’ll accept the consequences of not giving it to him.”
For a minute he looked at her, then he made a savage, slashing gesture with the edge of his hand. “All right, Liza. You’re on your own. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
After the door closed behind him she took the little transistor radio out of her desk and turned it on low volume. The announcer said that roadblocks had been set up on all routes leaving the county. He gave a description of Dan, and asked all persons seeing him to call the sheriff immediately, but to take no action themselves, since Bollinger was armed and dangerous.
She felt slightly sick as she turned off the radio and put it back in the drawer. She took out her shoulder bag and locked the desk, then went out.
She drove her little gray Caddy in a series of closed circles around the chapel, the old swimming pool, the new tennis courts, glancing before and behind her each time she doubled her route. She felt detached from the strolling patients, the cheerful cottages, the clipped lawns and shrubbery she had come to regard as her native turf. She didn’t care if she never saw any of it again. Is this a death wish? Or can it be that I have merely abandoned the pose of being a rational creature in control of my own actions?
WHO’S IN CHARGE HERE? The question bounced around her mind. Nobody answered.
She took the back road leading out past the old dairy barn. The afternoon was glassy, glaring. As she drove along the river bottom, she could feel the heat oozing out of the dry corn fields on each side of the road.
She crossed the railroad tracks, stopped to look both ways, then swung onto the state highway. The two-lane ribbon followed a deep slash in the tall oak forest. Deep cuts alternated with fifis, but the road itself was only a monotonous, gentle rise and fall. It made her feel disoriented, to have the landscape bobbing up and down on both sides of the car. The whine of tires was broken only by the occasional flutter of a helicopter.
Weird—to think that a manhunt was going on, and that she was responsible for it. Above the treetops on her left she saw a chopper wheeling and gyring in a search pattern; low on the western horizon flapped another. She thought of newly hatched wasps on a summer afternoon.
She swung onto the trail leading to Dan’s cabin—then hit the brakes. Three men on horseback blocked the gullied drive. They were dressed western style, with rifle butts braced on their hips. One wore a shapeless black felt hat and a raveled denim jacket; his horse was an Arabian stallion, with a coat of dull silver. He rode up and stared down at her through the open window, dark eyes crinkled at the corners, bright hard and deadly. “Where you goin’?”
He had black hair falling down over his eyes; one cheek bulged with a chaw of tobacco. A silver star above his shirt pocket caught the sun and revealed the words: SPECIAL DEPUTY.
“Nowhere. Just driving.”
“Well, this trail’s blocked.” He swung off his silver-encrusted saddle and pointed to the black-and-yellow wooden barrier standing in the trail behind the other riders. “See that?”
She raised up in her seat and looked past him. The ground was scarred by hoof prints and fresh car tracks. “It doesn’t look very heavy.”
He spat a jet of brown juice and grinned. “I’d let you in there, little lady, but you might never get out. That’s where Bollinger killed all them gals and buried ‘em. i reckon you know he escaped last night.”
“Oh really?” She looked at his rifle, then at the holstered gun which rode his hip. “Are you going to shoot him on sight?”
“We got orders to use our own judgment.” He hitched up his belt and thrust out his chest. “I sure as hell don’t aim to stand around talkin’ about his early toilet training while he guns me down.”
She felt an urge to step on the gas and twist the wheel to the right, to watch his face as the grill struck him … yes, here, right below the crotch, and then drive over him, rolling him up into a wad of broken bones and tissue with blood leaking out through the package of skin. Why? Why am I here, in the midst of this!
She slipped the car in reverse, backed out of the lane, and drove west without looking back. Now what? She remembered a prim old lady sitting in the witness room, and a fat woman saying: “… Certainly don’t let killer dope addicts prowl around MY house, Maude Adams” Well, it wouldn’t hurt to have a look …
Once off the state highway, the county road system
became a tangled skein of old logging trails covered by thin gravel. She got lost twice, and after an hour of churning up and down ridges, fording creeks spanned by concrete slabs, she spied a cluster of mailboxes. One read: Harry Adams. She drove across the bare sandstone and turned down a sunken lane bordered with conical cedars. She could see the patched roof of the barn behind a slight rise of ground. The house stood on her left, a white bungalow hidden behind a hedge of mock orange. As she lifted the loop of wire off the picket gate, she saw the woman standing in the doorway of the screened porch. She wore baggy jeans held up by a twisted leather belt, and a plaid flannel shirt buttoned at wrists and throat. Her eyes followed Elizabeth as she walked up the flagstone path.
“You’re the one who testified at the trial,” she said.
“Yes. Could we talk about Danny?”
“About Danny?” The faded blue eyes looped past her, swung around the horizon, then back to Liza. She stepped back from the door. “I dunno where he is, but you can come in and talk.”
The kitchen was bright and cheerful, with red linoleum, off-white walls, and a white dinette set with gingham-print vinyl covering the padded chairs. Elizabeth sat watching Miz Adams as she heated water, dipped out the granular instant coffee, and stirred it into thick china mugs. Elizabeth didn’t want to tell her she despised instant coffee; instead she steeled herself against the flat bland flavor which was neither coffee nor anything else, sipped and looked at the woman across the table. “Did you talk to Danny much?”
“Oh sure. He bought his eggs here, and his milk, so he’d come at least once a week. On rainy mornings or when it was cold he’d come in and sit by the fire and we’d talk about … I dunno. The weather, mostly. He didn’t have a tv so what could we talk about?”
She’s not telling me something, thought Liza. The signs were obvious to a trained eye: excessive gestures and eye movements, too-detailed answers to simple questions …
She wondered how ofteen Dan had sat in this kitchen, and what relationship he had with this woman. It couldn’t have been a great slice of his life, otherwise he would have told her about it. Or would he? He hadn’t told her about Lona …
Lize broke the long silence. “I take it you enjoyed his companionship?”
“Companionship. Now that’s a term I been hearing on my tv. Got no way of tellin’ if this has anything to do with real life or what. Seems like they have them actors do what they think people ought to be doin’, rather than what they really do. Like when you get down to real companionship … you want it to be natural. Well, so … the natural state of affairs is that when this particular cow comes in heat, she wants a bull, and if there’s none at home she’ll bust down a fence and get into the neighbor’s herd. I been a widow for three years. Thought when my old man died I couldn’t sleep …”
Miz Adam’s voice seemed to be drawing away from her. Everything was receding to a pinpoint size, but all edges were highly magnified, sharply detailed, as if seen through a reducing glass. The image was blurred, as if there were two lenses, one slightly to the left of the other. It gave a shimmering quality to the whole scene, the kitchen, the cookstove, the thick coffee mugs seemed to be painted on a screen, and the screen was peeling away to reveal the candlelight dancing on the dog-toothed roof of a cavern.
She heard a harsh breathing in her ear, closer than the sound of Maude’s voice. You hear me, Liza? DO YOU HEAR ME? ANSWER!
And to Maude Adams, or rather the spot on the cavern wall where she thought Maude would be sitting, she said: “Are there any caves around here?”
“Caves?” The voice came out of the smoky darkness. “Sure, there’s a couple on the bluff, just below the barn. There’s more in the bank along the creek. Used to be an underground river, before the roof fell in …”
“Where’s Danny’s cabin?”
“That’s down to the creek too …”
Down … down, down. Maude’s voice slowed like a rundown victrola. The room tilted, trembled, then straightened itself out. Maude sat across from her frowning. “Why’d you look at me so funny a minute ago?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your eyes went out of focus and you got as white as a sheet.”
“White as a sheet?” Liza could only repeat the phrase inanely and try to remember: Why did I look like that? A momentary feeling of being someplace else. I don’t like it much.
“Just a … dizzy spell. Could I use your bathroom?”
“It ain’t working. A tree root growed down into the septic tank, got it all clogged up. Sorry.”
“I see.” Looking down, Liza saw the old gnarled blue-veined hands gripped tightly around the cup. She pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’d better be going then.”
As she started out the kitchen door, she glanced up and saw two wooden pegs about three feet apart. Between them was the clean silhouette of a rifle, clearly outlined by dust and grime. She turned to look at Miz Adams, who sat obliquely on her chair, not facing Liza directly, but watching her from the corner of her eye. “Is there anything I can do?”
“Like what?”
“Oh … call somebody, deliver a message, anything.”
“If I wanted to call I’d use the phone, wouldn’t I?”
Liza saw a black gleaming plastic box attached to the wall of the screened porch, just outside the kitchen door. “Yes, I suppose you would. Goodbye.”
Elizabeth drove out the lane and turned right at the mailboxes. At the bottom of the hill she stopped and got out. Sycamores arched over the road, cicadas shrilled, mosquitos hung in the air as if suspended by invisible wires. She took off her shoes and walked across the concrete causeway, feeling the round pebbles under her feet, the cool water licking her toes.
Just follow the creek …
The water had cut a channel down to a layer of yellow sandstone; here and there were pools covered with darting waterbugs, then stretches of sandy gravel. Several times she had to climb over trees which had fallen across the channel.
Silence hemmed her in. The forest seemed to press on her from every side, clumps of elderberry lined the banks, thickets of willow and birch choked the sandy bed of the stream.
Scattered through the gravel were sharp chunks of flint which slashed her tender feet. She stopped to put on her shoes, then trudged on. Sweat streamed from her armpits; sweatbees, gadflies and gnats fought for control of the air around her head.
She unzipped her tunic and pulled it off, squatted down to soak it in water, then bathed her face and forehead with the cool, damp cloth. She stood up and noticed that her pants were splashed with mud and streaked with green slime. She took them off and rinsed them out, then hung them on a willow branch and sat down on a moss-flecked granite boulder. She felt stifled, hot. Spiky limbs and gnarled branches stuck out of the forest from all sides, a message saying: DO NOT ENTER. The stony ground was full of hard edges and glittering points. You had to be hard and quick. But she was soft, tender and … naked. She had not been naked in the woods since … how long was it? Some distant memory of pain and pleasure. Oh yes, that last year in high school, the field trip in biology, and she had gone off with her math teacher, that shy, serious, diffident man. They had been doing it for … oh, weeks, but he had never seen her nude. They talked that way in those days: NOOD. But someone had followed them, the girl told, and he had left the school. Ever since then the woods had awakened an erotic urge in her—the smell of leaf mould, the lush ferment of rotting crab apples, the sharp prickly fragrance of sumac … but always with a sense of dread, the feeling that somebody lurked behind the bushes, looking at her …
She lit a cigarette and debated going back to the road. She couldn’t be sure she’d ever reach the cabin by following the creek; she wasn’t positive this was the right creek. Miz Adams had been lying abount something; best thing was to go back, gain her confidence, tell her what she planned to do about Danny …
What do you plan to do? I’ll think of something.
She walked for another t
wenty minutes before she realized she’d taken the wrong fork. The stream dwindled as it rose in a series of cataracts dropping from limestone slabs. Finally the creek disappeared entirely; she stood in a marshy swale filled with shoulder-high saw-grass. Ahead of her loomed a limestone bluff; rising above it was the roof of the barn she’d seen from Miz Adam’s house. She recognized the open hayloft door with the hay Spilling out. Now she was seeing it from a different angle; the barn lay between herself and the house.
A cowpath zigzagged up the steep slope. As she climbed, she heard the dogs barking. She reached the top of the bluff and froze. Three dogs loped around the woven wire fence of the feedlot; their tongues hung out and flecks of foam flecked their lower jaws. Several cows stood inside the fence chewing their cuds, gazing at Liza with large complacent brown eyes. Three huge hogs, black and spotted, with ugly curved snouts, rooted and snuffled in one corner of the lot. As she walked closer, she saw muddy torn strips of denim fabric. Her heart stopped as she saw the white flesh of an arm protruding from under a water trough. Two of the hogs were fighting over the gray-blue coil of an intestine. Half-buried in the mud, near the fence, was something that could have been a large gourd, or a soccer ball—but it was covered with sun-streaked blonde hair …
The sun seemed to flicker like a candle blown in the wind. She thought: If I faint now, it could be the end of me.
She turned and ran toward the house.
This time she was greeted by silence. The picket gate hung open. She walked around the house and took hold of the screen door. Her heart jumped when she saw a reddish-brown smear on the sill. With shaking hands she opened the door, saw another long wet smear on the concrete floor of the screened porch.
The phone had been ripped from the wall. It lay beside the door, the plastic case cracked open to reveal the coiled wires inside.
She felt her heart thumping at the base of her throat. She knew her pulse rate must be over ninety, her blood pressure up at least twenty points. The potted plants and the vines growing under the eaves seemed full of ominous rustling and brooding silence. The fleshy leaves of a rubber tree rattled as she walked past.
Kiss The Girls and Make Them Die Page 22