Just an Ordinary Day: Stories

by Shirley Jackson

  “See you later.”

  The door slammed and Betsy, with relief and a feeling of freshness, went back to her book.

  It was not, as a matter of fact, until the next night that anyone asked Betsy where her roommate had gone. Even then it was casual, and hardly provoked Betsy to thought: “You all alone tonight?” someone asked. “She out?”

  “Haven’t seen her all day,” Betsy said.

  The day after that, Betsy began to wonder a little, mostly because the other bed in the room had still not been slept in. The monstrous thought of going to the Camp Mother occurred to her (“Did you hear about Betsy? Went tearing off to old Auntie Jane to say her roommate was missing, and here all the time the poor girl was…”) and she spoke to several other people, wondering and curious, phrasing it each time as a sort of casual question; no one, it turned out, had seen her roommate since the Monday night when she had told Betsy, “See you later,” and left.

  “You think I ought to go tell Old Jane?” Betsy asked someone on the third day.

  “Well…” consideringly. “You know, it might mean trouble for you if she’s really missing.”

  The Camp Mother, comfortable and tolerant and humorous, old enough to be the mother of any of the counselors, wise enough to give the strong impression of experience, listened carefully and asked, “And you say she’s been gone since Monday night? And here it is Thursday?”

  “I didn’t know what to do,” Betsy explained candidly; “she could have gone home, or…”

  “Or…?” said the Camp Mother.

  “She said she had something to do,” Betsy said.

  Old Jane pulled her phone over and asked, “What was her name again? Albert?”

  “Alexander. Martha Alexander.”

  “Get me the home of Martha Alexander,” Old Jane said into her phone, and from the room beyond, in the handsomely paneled building that served as the camp office and, at the other end, as kitchen, dining room, and general recreation room, Old Jane and Betsy could hear the voice of Miss Mills, Old Jane’s assistant, saying irritably, “Alexander, Alexander,” as she turned pages and opened filing drawers. “Jane?” she called out suddenly, “Martha Alexander from…?”

  “New York,” Betsy said. “I think”

  “New York,” Old Jane said into her phone.

  “Righto,” Miss Mills said from the other room.

  “Missing since Monday,” Old Jane reminded herself, consulting the notes she had made on her desk pad. “Said she had something to do. Picture?”

  “I don’t think so,” Betsy said uncertainly. “I may have a snapshot somewhere.”

  “Year?”

  “Woodsprite, I think,” Betsy said. “I’m a woodsprite, I mean, and they usually put woodsprites in with woodsprites and goblins in with goblins and senior huntsmen in with—” She stopped as the phone on Old Jane’s desk rang and Old Jane picked it up and said briskly, “Hello? Is this Mrs. Alexander? This is Miss Nicholas calling from the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen. Yes, that’s right…. Fine, Mrs. Alexander, and how are you?… Glad to hear it. Mrs. Alexander, I’m calling to check on your daughter…. Your daughter, Martha…. Yes, that’s right, Martha.” She raised her eyebrows at Betsy and continued. “We’re checking to make sure that she’s come home or that you know where she is… yes, where she is. She left the camp very suddenly last Monday night and neglected to sign out at the main desk and of course our responsibility for our girls requires that even if she has only gone home we must—” She stopped, and her eyes focused, suddenly, on the far wall. “She is not?” Old Jane asked. “Do you know where she is, then?… How about friends?… Is there anyone who might know?”

  The camp nurse, whose name was Hilda Scarlett and who was known as Will, had no record of Martha Alexander in the camp infirmary. She sat on the other side of Old Jane’s desk, twisting her hands nervously and insisting that the only girls in the infirmary at that moment were a goblin with poison oak and a woodsprite with hysterics. “I suppose you know,” she told Betsy, her voice rising, “that if you had come to one of us the minute she left…”

  “But I didn’t know” Betsy said helplessly. “I didn’t know she was gone.”

  “I am afraid,” said Old Jane ponderously, turning to regard Betsy with the air of one on whom an unnecessary and unkind burden has been thrust, “I am very much afraid that we must notify the police.”

  It was the first time the chief of police, a kindly family man whose name was Hook, had ever been required to visit a girls’ camp; his daughters had not gone in much for that sort of thing, and Mrs. Hook distrusted night air; it was also the first time that Chief Hook had ever been required to determine facts. He had been allowed to continue in office this long because his family was popular in town and the young men at the local bar liked him, and because his record for twenty years, of drunks locked up and petty thieves apprehended upon confession, had been immaculate. In a small town such as the one lying close to the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen, crime is apt to take its form from the characters of the inhabitants, and a stolen dog or broken nose is about the maximum to be achieved ordinarily in the sensational line. No one doubted Chief Hook’s complete inability to cope with the disappearance of a girl from the camp.

  “You say she was going somewhere?” he asked Betsy, having put out his cigar in deference to the camp nurse, and visibly afraid that his questions would sound foolish to Old Jane; since Chief Hook was accustomed to speaking around his cigar, his voice without it was malformed, almost quavering.

  “She said she had something to do,” Betsy told him.

  “How did she say it? As though she meant it? Or do you think she was lying?”

  “She just said it,” said Betsy, who had reached that point of stubbornness most thirteen-year-old girls have, when it seems that adult obscurity has passed beyond necessity. “I told you eight times.”

  Chief Hook blinked and cleared his throat. “She sound happy?” he asked.

  “Very happy,” said Betsy. “She was singing all evening while I was trying to write in my Nature Book, is how I remember.”

  “Singing?” said Chief Hook; it was not possible to him that a girl upon the very edge of disappearance had anything to sing about.

  “Singing?” said Old Jane.

  “Singing?” said Will Scarlett. “You never told us.”

  “Just sort of humming,” Betsy said.

  “What tune?” said Chief Hook.

  “Just humming,” Betsy said. “I told you already, just humming. I nearly went crazy with my Nature Book.”

  “Any idea where she was going?”

  “No.”

  An idea came to Chief Hook. “What was she interested in?” he asked suddenly. “You know, like sports, or boys, or anything.”

  “There are no boys at the Phillips Educational Camp for Girls,” Old Jane said stiffly.

  “She could have been interested in boys, though,” Chief Hook said. “Or—like, well, books? Reading, you know? Or baseball, maybe?”

  “We have not been able to find her Activity Chart,” the camp nurse said. “Betsy, what recreational activity group was she in?”

  “Golly.” Betsy thought deeply, and said, “Dramatics? I think she went to Dramatics.”

  “Which nature study group? Little John? Eeyore?”

  “Little John,” said Betsy uncertainly. “I think. I’m pretty sure she was in Dramatics because I think I remember her talking about Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil.”

  “That would be Dramatics,” Old Jane said. “Surely.”

  Chief Hook, who had begun to feel that this was all unnecessarily confusing, said, “What about this singing?”

  “There’s singing in Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil,” Will Scarlett said.

  “How about boys?” said Chief Hook.

  Betsy thought again, remembering as well as she could the sleeping figure in the other bed, the soiled laundry on the floor, the open sui
tcase, the tin boxes of cookies, the towels, the face cloths, the soap, the pencils… “She had her own clock,” Betsy volunteered.

  “How long have you roomed together?” Old Jane asked, and her voice was faintly sardonic, as though in deference to Chief Hook she were forced to restrain the saltier half of her remark.

  “Last year and this year,” Betsy said. “I mean, we both put in for rooms at the same time and so they put us together again. I mean, most of my friends are senior huntsmen and of course I can’t room with them because they only put senior huntsmen with—”

  “We know.” Old Jane was beginning to sound shrill. “Any mail?”

  “I don’t know about that,” Betsy said. “I was always reading my own mail.”

  “What was she wearing?” Chief Hook asked.

  “I don’t know,” Betsy said. “I didn’t turn around when she left.” She looked from Chief Hook to Will Scarlett to Old Jane with a trace of impatience. “I was doing my Nature Book.”

  A search of the room, from which Betsy abstained and which was carried on with enthusiasm by Old Jane and Will Scarlett and with some embarrassment by Chief Hook, showed that after Betsy’s possessions had been subtracted from the medley, what was left was astonishingly little. There was a typed script of Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil, and a poorly done painting of Echo Lake, which was part of the camp. There was a notebook, labeled, like Betsy’s, “Nature Book,” but it was unused, lacking the pressed wildflowers and blue jay feathers; there was a copy of Gulliver’s Travels from the camp library, which Old Jane felt might be significant. No one was able to tell certainly what she had been wearing, because the clothes in the closet were mostly Betsy’s, and jackets or overshoes left in the room by Betsy’s friends. In the drawers of the second dresser were a few scraps of underwear, a pair of heavy socks, and a red sweater which Betsy was fairly sure belonged to a woodsprite on the other side of camp.

  A careful checkup of Recreational Activity lists showed that while she was listed for dramatics and nature study and swimming, her attendance at any of them was dubious; most of the counselors kept slipshod attendance records, and none of them could remember whether any such girl could have come on any given day.

  “I’m almost sure I remember her, though,” Little John, an ardent girl of twenty-seven who wore horn-rimmed glasses and tossed her hair back from her face with a pretty gesture that somehow indicated that winters she wore it decently pinned up, told Chief Hook. “I have an awfully good memory for faces, and I think I remember her as one of Rabbit’s friends and relations. Yes, I’m sure I remember her, I have a good memory for faces.”

  “Ah,” said the librarian, who was called Miss Mills when she was secretary to Old Jane, and the Snark when she was in the library, “one girl is much like another, at this age. Their unformed minds, their unformed bodies, their little mistakes; we, too, were young once, Captain Hook.”

  “Hell,” said the muscular young woman who was known as Tarzan because she taught swimming, “did you ever look at fifty girls all in white bathing caps?”

  “Elm?” said the nature study counselor, whose name was Bluebird. “I mean, wasn’t she an elm girl? Did a nice paper on blight? Or was it the other girl, Michaels? Anyway, whichever one it might have been, it was a nice job. Out of the ordinary for us, you know; remember it particularly. Hadn’t noticed either of the girls to speak of—but if she’s really gone, she might be up on Smoky Trail looking for fern; want the girls to make a special topic of fern and mushroom.” She stopped and blinked, presumably taking in a new supply of chlorophyll. “Fern,” she said. “Pays to know plenty about fern.”

  “Few of them have any talent, anyway,” the painting counselor said. “In any of the progressive schools this sort of thing—” She gestured tiredly at the canvases propped up against tree stumps or stacked upon a rock, and moved her shoulders nervously under her brand-new blue and yellow checked shirt. “Interested psychologically, of course,” she added quickly. “If I remember this girl, she did sort of vague stuff, almost unwilling. Rejection, almost—if I can find a picture you’ll see right away what I mean.” She poked unenthusiastically among the canvases stacked on the rock, pulled her hand back and said, “Why did I ever—” wiping wet paint off on her blue jeans. “Funny,” she said, “I could have taken an oath she had a canvas around here somewhere. Sort of vague stuff, though—no sense of design, no eye.”

  “Did she ever,” Chief Hook asked Betsy, “ever ever ever mention anyplace she might want to go? Some foreign country, maybe?”

  Old Jane’s voice had an odd tone. “The parents are arriving tomorrow.”

  Chief Hook rubbed his forehead nervously. “Lost a hunter last fall on Bad Mountain,” he suggested.

  It was decided to search Bad Mountain, and then, unexpectedly, a house-to-house canvass along the road leading to Bad Mountain uncovered an honest clue. A housewife, glancing out her window to see if her husband was coming home from a poker game, had seen, she thought, the figure of a girl moving along the road, lighted occasionally by the headlights of passing cars.

  “I couldn’t swear it was a girl, though,” the housewife persisted nervously. “That is, nights when Jim is out playing, I go to bed, and this night I was only up on account we had fried clams for supper, and I like clams but they don’t—”

  “What was she wearing?” Chief Hook demanded.

  The woman thought. “Well,” she said finally, “the reason I figured she was one of those girls from the camp was she was wearing pants. But then, it could have been a man, you see, or a boy. Only somehow I sort of figured it was a girl.”

  “Did she have on a coat? Hat?”

  “A coat, I think,” the woman said, “leastways, one of those short jackets. She was going up the road toward Jones Pass.”

  Jones Pass led to Bad Mountain. It was not possible to get a picture of the girl; the picture on her camp application blank was so blurred that it resembled a hundred other girls in the camp; it was assumed, however, from the picture, that she had dark hair. A man was discovered who had given a ride to a girl hitchhiking on the road to Jones Pass; she had dark hair and was wearing blue jeans and a short tan leather jacket.

  “I don’t think she was a camp girl, though,” the man added earnestly, “not the way she talked, she wasn’t any girl from Phillips Camp, not her,” he said, and looked at Chief Hook, “Bill, you remember that youngest girl over to Ben Hart’s?”

  Chief Hook sighed. “You see anyone else driving down the road?” he asked. The man shook his head emphatically.

  One of the junior counselors at the camp, who went by the name of Piglet, had been driving home late from town that night and at one point in the road near Jones Pass had had the clear impression of someone ducking behind a tree into the shadows. She was unable to say whether or not it had been a girl, or even whether it had been a person, but Chief Hook questioned her remorselessly.

  “Can you face this girl’s parents and honestly tell them you never lifted a finger to save her?” he demanded of Piglet. “That innocent girl?”

  Will Scarlett had shut herself into the infirmary and refused to let go of the phenobarbital; it was announced that she could not be disturbed. The press agent for the camp was taking all calls and managing the general search. Newspaper reporters were encouraged, but the seventeen-year-old son of the owner of the local paper was given first chance at all new developments; it occurred to this young man to ensure that a search be made over Bad Mountain by helicopter, and the camp went to tremendous expense to import one, although its six-day tour of the mountains showed nothing, and the son of the newspaper owner subsequently informed his father that he preferred having a plane to inheriting the paper, which went to a distant cousin. It was said that the girl had turned up in a town seventy-five miles away, dead drunk and trying to get a job in a shoe store, but the proprietor of the shoe store was unable to identify her picture, and it was later proven that the girl in question was actually the daughter of the
mayor of that town. The widowed mother of the missing girl was prostrate with grief and under the care of a physician, but her uncle arrived at the camp and took personal charge of the search. The girls from the camp, led by the counselor in nature study and the senior huntsmen, had already gone over the mountain, looking for bent twigs and rock signs, but without success, although they had the assistance of chosen boy and girl scouts from the town. It was afterward told that Old Jane, indefatigable in leather puttees and a striped bandana and known to be extraordinarily susceptible to cold, had fallen down dead drunk in front of Chief Hook and had had to be carried home on a stretcher hastily improvised by the boy scouts, leading many people to believe that the girl’s body had been found.

  In the town it was generally believed that the girl had been killed and “You know,” and her body buried in a shallow grave somewhere east of Jones Pass, where the woods were deepest and ran downhill and for miles along the edge of Muddy River; knowing folk in town who had hunted the pass and Bad Mountain were quoted as saying that it would be mighty easy for anyone to miss a body in them woods; go ten feet off the path and you’re lost, and the mud that deep already; it was generally conceded in the town that the girl had been followed in the darkness by a counselor from the camp, preferably one of the quiet ones, until she was out of sight or sound of help. The townspeople remembered their grandfathers had known of people disposed of in just that way, and no one had ever heard about it, either.

  In the camp it was generally believed that one of the low bloods around the town—and try to match them for general vulgarity and insolence, and the generations of inbreeding that had led to idiocy in half the families and just plain filth in the rest—had enticed the girl off into an assignation on the mountain, and there outraged and murdered her and buried her body. The camp people believed that it was possible to dispose of a body by covering it with lime—heaven knew these country farmhands had enough lime in a barn to dispose of a dozen bodies—and that by the time the search started there wasn’t enough left of the body to find. The camp people further believed that it was no more than you might expect of a retarded village in an isolated corner of the world, and they thought you might go far before you met up with a lower and a stupider group of clods; they pointed with triumph to the unusual lack of success of the Camp Talent Show early in the summer, to which the townspeople had been invited.