Out Of The Deep I Cry (18 page)

McPhair threw them a jaunty salute as he tossed open the doors, and Harry, Stevenson, and Inman trudged up the marble stairs to the accompaniment of the unseen woman’s voice, now demanding to see the police chief. Which was usually how it worked out when anyone with a problem came through the doors and encountered Sergeant Tibbet.

The long reception hall stretched away from Harry, with doors along both sides. The hall was guarded by Sergeant Tibbet, who seemed as oaken and massive as the desk he sat behind. A slim brown-haired woman stood there, taut as fishing line snagged on a snapping turtle. When she caught sight of him, she said, “Chief McNeil?” and in her voice he could hear she was right on the edge of breaking down.

He gestured the two officers to continue on to the patrol room before taking the woman’s hand. “I’m Harry McNeil,” he said. “How can I help you?” He hoped she was here to complain about a neighbor leaving her panties out on the line or kids stuffing her mailbox with fire crackers. He was tired to the bone.

“It’s my husband. He’s missing.”

He sighed. That could mean something as simple as a broken-down automobile or as messy as a raided bank account and another woman. “To tell the truth, I was on my way home, Mrs…?”

“Ketchem. Mrs. Jonathon Ketchem. Please, you’ve got to listen to me. He’s never done this before. I don’t know who to turn to.”

He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Where do you live, Mrs. Ketchem?”

“Number 14, Ferry Street.”

Not a bad neighborhood. Hardworking, churchgoing folks who paid their bills and went to bed early. “How’d you get here this morning?”

“I walked.”

He nodded. “Well, Mrs. Ketchem, Ferry Street is on my way home.” Sergeant Tibbet raised his shaggy eyebrows at that whopper. “How ’bout I drop you off on my way, and you can fill me in on all the details.”

“How will you be able to start the search for Jon if you’re at home?”

There’s not likely to be a search, he thought, but said, “I can telephone the station and get someone working on it right away.”

Mrs. Ketchem glanced at Sergeant Tibbet, who yawned. “All right,” she said. “You can drive me home.”

In his car, she perched on the edge of the seat, twitchy, as if she were ready to bolt as soon as he slowed down. Maybe she was more used to a buggy. She had a country look to her. “You and your husband have an automobile?” he asked.

She stilled. “Yes,” she said. “Jonathon took it. He always drove it, not me.” Her skittishness reminded him of the last carriage horse he had had before buying the Studebaker. Half-Thoroughbred mare, wide-eyed and spooky as all get-out. Good wind, though, once you got her in harness. He wanted to settle her some before he got her story.

“Are you folks related to the Ketchems up to Lick Spring?”

“They’re my in-laws.”

He turned down Elm Street. “They’ve got a pretty good-sized farm,” he said.

“Yes.” She was pale, visibly controlling herself. He swung down Burgoyne Street and turned onto Ferry. “This is us,” she said. The Ketchem house was small, but neat, with a barn big enough to house a stall and a buggy attached to the rear of the house by a breezeway. He parked by the curb, got out, and opened the door for his passenger. She walked stiffly up the front steps. It looked to Harry as if she were bracing herself to reenter her home, and for a moment he wondered if her missing husband had been in the habit of knocking her around.

He wiped his boots on the mat before stepping inside. The tiny entry hall opened straight onto the parlor. A heap of painted blocks were tumbled next to the radio. “You have kids?” he said.

She paused in the middle of taking off her coat. “A little girl.”

“She in school?”

“She’s playing at a neighbor’s.” He followed her into the parlor. “She’s been asking where her father is. I just don’t know what to tell her.”

She paused in the middle of the parlor, her glance darting from davenport to easy chair to rocker, as if she had never seen the place before. He had seen other folks acting the same way when calamity had visited their houses. People came unstuck, got lost in the familiar. He made it easier for her by sitting in the rocker and gesturing for her to take the other one.

“So what is it your husband does?”

She looked at him. Her eyes were red-rimmed. “He’s… been trying out this and that…”

Drink, Harry thought. Or he’s lost his job and is bluffing out finding a new one.

“We used to farm in the Sacandaga Valley until the Conklingville Dam project bought us out the year before last. My husband put some of the money into his parents’ farm and some into his brother’s business. David has a gasoline and service station in Lake George.”

“David’s your brother-in-law?” Speaking of her relations made him realize what seemed out of kilter in the room. There were no family photographs. Not one.

“Yes.”

Harry nodded. “There wasn’t enough for your husband to buy himself a new farm?” He knew some of the folks who had owned property in the way of the dam got pretty well rooked by land speculators before the official condemnation notices went out.

“I don’t know. I suppose there was.” She cut her eyes away. “Jonathon didn’t know if he wanted to go back to being a farmer. It’s a hard life, you know. He thought maybe things would be better if we stayed in town.”

“Things?”

A faint suggestion of color came over her high cheekbones. “He did some work for the electrical company, but he was last hired and first fired when they started cutting jobs. Since then, he’s picked up work here and there, but nothing permanent. He also helps out at Father Ketchem’s farm.”

He decided to ignore the fact that she had skipped over his question. He was forming a picture of a man cut loose from his familiar roles as farmer, and landowner, and provider, relying on make-do work from his old man to keep him and his pride afloat. “Tell me about the last time you saw him,” he said.

She squared her shoulders beneath the blocky cardigan she wore and frowned, distantly, as if looking backward for the exact moment when it all started. “He had been home all day. His stomach was bothering him-it’s been bothering him a lot lately. He was feeling right irritable… I remember trying to keep our girl out of his way.” Her eyes dropped to the blocks on the rug, and the strained look on her face eased for a moment. “Anyways, after she was in bed, we got into a fight. It was one of those silly things, you know, first you say something, and then he says something, and next thing you’re going at it hammer and tongs without really seeing how you got there.” She let out a breath. “He went off in the car that night and I haven’t seen him since.”

Harry reached into his blouse pocket for his notebook. “How long ago was this?”

“Saturday night. The twenty-ninth.”

He paused in the act of reaching for a pencil. “He’s been gone two days?”

“That’s right. I could tell myself he had gone somewhere to settle himself down, but when he didn’t come home last night, either… I know something terrible’s happened to him.”

Harry relaxed back into the polished curve of the rocker. “Mrs. Ketchem, we can’t say a grown man’s missing when he’s only been away from home for a few nights. Have you checked with his family?”

“I used a neighbor’s phone last evening, when he didn’t show up for supper. Mother and Father Ketchem aren’t home, but I spoke to their herd foreman at his house. He hasn’t seen Jonathon.”

“How about his brother up in Lake George?”

“David said he wasn’t there.”

Harry wondered how truthful the brother might be. He could easily imagine the husband pulling in in the wee hours, spending the next day bellyaching about the little woman, and telling his brother to lie through his teeth when she called. Especially if he was going on a toot. “Mrs. Ketchem,” he said, “does your husband drink?”

She blanched. “No! We’re good Christians. My husband has never indulged.”

That had struck a nerve. He’d bet a dollar against a plugged nickel that if he were to go into the cellar right now, he’d find a couple mason jars of 100 proof. Behind the coal bin, or at the back of the husband’s workbench, never where she’d find it, but enough there so she’d wonder about the husband’s long trips downstairs and the smell of Sen-Sen on his breath when he came up again.

“Has he ever gone off before? After you’ve fought? You know, to cool off some?”

She shook her head, absolute in her denial. “No.”

“Any money missing?”

“He has his wallet, of course, but nothing’s been taken from the household money. I didn’t think to ask about our account at the bank.” She looked worried. “The checkbook is still on Jonathon’s desk. He usually takes care of all that.”

“It might be a good idea to stop in at the Farmers and Merchants and see if he made any withdrawals in the past few days. Yours wouldn’t be the first husband to take off in a huff, find an extra few bills in his wallet, and decide to spend them on himself before coming home.”

“But Jonathon isn’t like that,” she said, her voice rising. “That’s why I know something bad’s happened to him. He would never be gone so long without letting me know where he was.” To Harry’s discomfort, her eyes filled with tears. “I just don’t know what to do. Please. Please, find my husband.” The tears overflowed.

Harry leaned up out of the chair, yanking at his handkerchief. “Aw, now, don’t-don’t cry.” He thrust the white fabric at her and prayed she wouldn’t fall apart completely. Growing up the one son amid five sisters had left Harry with a lifelong horror of bawling females. “I’ll tell you what. I can’t put out the alert on him as a missing person. It’s at least five days too early.” Mrs. Ketchem started to cry even harder. “But!” he said. “If you can calm down and write me out a list of your husband’s friends and the places where he’s found work recently, I’ll begin asking around for him.”

Mrs. Ketchem lifted her face, red-eyed and blotchy, from his handkerchief. “Would you?”

“Yes, ma’am, I would. And I want you to try to stop worrying. In all likelihood, he’s holed up with some buddy of his, trying to think of a way to come back and apologize without bruising his pride too much.” He thought it was more likely that the missing man was either on a bender or shacked up with some sympathetic floozy, but Harry wasn’t about to suggest that to a jumpy, frightened wife. Either way, ol’ Jonathon would be back as soon as his funds ran out.

She went upstairs for some writing paper, which gave him a chance to poke around some. The place was small, just the parlor, a dining room, a tiny sitting room that looked to be used as a playroom, and the kitchen out back. The furniture was quality, but old. He guessed most of it had come down from a grandparent or two. Mrs. Ketchem was a good housewife-the china in the cupboard shone, the little girl’s toys were all stacked away, and the kitchen was scrubbed. A closet-sized room off the kitchen held a washing machine and a heap of dirty clothes, which he picked through quickly and efficiently. No signs of foul play, drunkenness, or any other type of disorder, except that of an orderly housewife neglecting her Monday wash. Which, if she feared the worst, he could understand. Nothing could bring back a person’s smell once it had been laundered away.

He was peeking out the back door, which led onto an enclosed porch, when she strode into the kitchen. She handed him a sheet of paper with a list of names and addresses written out in neat Palmer penmanship. “Here you are,” she said. Doing something, anything, had helped. She looked around the kitchen with more energy than he had seen so far. “Can I offer you a cup of coffee?” she asked.

Coffee. Oh, yes. “That’s kind of you,” he said. “Yes.”

“Can you fetch me some wood from the bin on the porch back there? It’s right beside the door.”

Like the rest of the house, the woodbin was just as it ought to be, tidy and well-stocked. There was a hatchet hanging over a chopping block, and he casually picked it up and examined it for signs that it had been used on something other than wood. But the fine wood dust caked in the joints between hatchet head and handle would never have survived a thorough cleaning.

Inside, Mrs. Ketchem had set the dripolater on and was reshelving a Chock full o’ Nuts bag. He loaded the stove’s fire box and asked her where the necessary was. She pointed him back out through the porch, and by the time he had done his business and washed up in the kitchen sink, Mrs. Ketchem was ready with a white crockery mug in each hand. She sat at the kitchen table and he joined her.

“I ought to get my daughter soon. At least now I’ll have something positive to tell her. That the police are going to try to find her father. Maybe…” She faltered, and Harry could see her forward momentum die away. She reached into her sweater pocket, withdrew his handkerchief, and wiped her eyes again. She began to hand the damp cloth back to him and then started, as if she had really seen it for the first time. She jerked her arm back and balled it in her fist. “I’ll launder this for you.”

“You don’t need to-”

“Oh, it’s the least I could do.” She stood up, looking frail inside the large sweater, which, Harry realized, was probably her husband’s. “I’m sorry for falling apart like that.” She offered him a rendition of a smile. “I know men hate to have a woman go off on them like that.”

Harry waved his hands in denial. “Not at all. You were upset.”

She smiled a bit more genuinely. “You’re very patient. Thank you.” She took the handkerchief into the laundry closet and then resettled herself in the kitchen chair. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“Let me get the inquiries in motion. Then we’ll talk again, if he hasn’t turned up.”

“When can I expect to hear from you?”

“I’ll follow up on these this morning,” he said, consigning his nap to the realm of impossibly beautiful dreams. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we have your husband back home in time for supper.”