The Cry of the Owl (16 page)

“Well, we’ll be watching the river,” Lippenholtz said gloomily, with a sigh.

The telephone rang, and Jenny excused herself and went into the living room to answer it. The two officers waited with interest in the kitchen, looking at her through the doorway.

“Oh, yes, Mitch. … No, I haven’t, that’s why I called you. … Well, have you talked to all the people you know that he knows?” Jenny saw the policemen shifting on their feet now, disappointed. “Call me if you hear anything, will you? … I don’t know, Mitch. … Goodbye.”

Jenny came back into the kitchen. “A friend of Greg’s,” she said. “He doesn’t know anything. I wanted to say,” she said, looking at both the officers, “Greg sometimes goes on benders. He could be hiding out somewhere—just drinking for a couple of days.”

“Any idea who he might be with?” asked McGregor.

“No. That’s why I called Mitch, Charles Mitchell, in Rittersville. He’s the only one I know Greg goes drinking with. I mean”—she brushed her hair back nervously at the side of her head—“it doesn’t happen very often with Greg, but it might be happening now, after a fight like that.”

“Mm-m,” said McGregor. “Routine question we have to ask, Mr. Forester. Have you ever had a police record of any kind?”

“No,” Robert said.

“Who would you say won that fight you had?”

Robert shrugged. “Neither of us. I doubt if Greg looks as beaten up as I do.”

“Well, thank you, Mr. Forester,” said Lippenholtz. “And you, Ma’am.”

They exchanged good nights, and then they were gone.

“I didn’t know you saw Greg a month ago,” Jenny said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“And he threatened you? Is that why—you started seeing less of me?”

“No, Jenny. We were seeing less of each other before Greg talked to me.” He looked away from her hurt eyes. “Can I have some hot coffee?”

“Did he try to start a fight then?”

“In front of a couple of hundred people? Not Greg.” He lit the electric burner under the coffee.

“Robert—you don’t think Greg really did fall in the river, do you?”

“No. If I thought so, I’d have said so. From what I could see of those rocks, they weren’t rapids. A fellow’d have to stumble a long
way out to get to deep water. Just rolling down the bank wouldn’t have done it. But the main thing is, I don’t think Greg was that knocked out.”

But Jenny was thinking he might have been. Where could he have gone, walked to, without being found by now? She could imagine Greg getting up a minute after Robert left him and staggering wildly in the wrong direction, wanting to fight Robert again. She knew Greg must have been in a furious temper. She looked at Robert’s serious face as he watched the coffeepot, and wondered what he was thinking now. Whatever he was thinking, she was sure it wasn’t about her. “Why did you take such trouble to tell them we weren’t engaged?” she asked.

“Because—we aren’t, and I thought making it clear would take a little of the melodrama out of the situation. Maybe it wasn’t necessary. But it can’t do any damage, can it?”

“Damage how?”

“Oh, Jenny, I don’t know. But the police usually want to know the particulars in a thing like this.”

“What do you mean by ‘a thing like this’?” she persisted, not knowing herself where the questions came from or why, only that she had to ask them.

Now Robert was frowning, annoyed or puzzled. “A man’s missing—presumably. The police don’t know me, the townspeople don’t know me. How do they know I didn’t knock him in on purpose and leave him in, to get rid of a rival?” He turned off the burner and poured coffee into her cup, then his. “I think he’ll turn up, after a binge, but meanwhile it’s not pleasant to be asked—to be suspected, maybe, of lying.” He sat down at the table with his coffee.

“Did you feel they suspected you of lying?”

“No. I don’t think so. Did you?”

“I don’t know. They’re so noncommittal. But I didn’t think it was necessary to tell them all the details.”

“What do you mean—just that we weren’t engaged?”

“Yes,” she said positively, and she felt she had a point. “They aren’t interested in that. They’re interested in whether Greg was really sitting on the bank or not and whether he could walk up to the road.”

“Yes, I know. I’ve tried to explain why I told them—why I said that about not being engaged, Jenny, and it makes sense to me. I’m sorry if it doesn’t make sense to you.”

His tone was gentle, placating, but Jenny sensed a great hardness under it, a hardness that surprised her and hurt her. They weren’t engaged, that was a fact. Maybe they never would be. An emptiness filled her, a fear of sudden pain, and in her imagination she saw Robert hitting Greg hard with his fist, knocking him across the rocks and going after him a little way to make sure he fell into the deeper water.

“What’s the matter?” Robert asked.

“Nothing. Why?”

“You looked so—”

“I don’t understand you,” she said.

Robert got up. “Jenny, what’s the trouble tonight? Tell me. You’re tired, aren’t you? This thing’s a strain.” He started toward her and stopped, let his outstretched hand drop. “What do you mean, you don’t understand me?”

“Just that. You’re still a puzzle. It’s strange.”

“Oh, Jenny! I’m about as much a puzzle as—as that pane of glass!”

“That’s for me to say, isn’t it? I feel a puzzle.”

“Jenny, are you trying to say you don’t believe what I told you about all this? I’ve told you every second of that night.”

It was not really that that troubled her. She saw Robert was getting impatient, and she didn’t care now.

“What are you trying to say?” he asked.

“I don’t know. But I’ll know—before long.” She watched his eyes narrow a little as he looked at her.

Then he lit another cigarette and began walking around the kitchen. He circled the table and said, “I’ll take off, Jenny. Let you get some sleep.”

She sensed boredom in him, and also anger and indifference, and she felt her resentment rise against all of this. “All right.”

He looked at her.

This was the nearest they’d ever come to quarreling. It was a quarrel, she realized. Most of it unspoken, only the little top part of it showing above the surface, uttered now. He was getting his coat. He put it on and came closer to her.

“I’ll say good night, Jenny. I’m sorry if I spoke angrily to you.”

She was suddenly sorry and ashamed of herself. “Oh, Robert, I didn’t mean to say anything angry to you. Honestly, I didn’t.”

He smiled, touched his still swollen lip quickly with the side of his forefinger. “O.K., let’s forget it. Call me tomorrow if you hear anything, will you? Or tonight. It’s only ten-fifteen.”

“Of course I will, Robert.”

Greg did not turn up the following day, Tuesday, or the next day. The Langley
Gazette
and even the Philadelphia
Bulletin
carried pictures of Greg, current and old photographs that his parents must have given the press. His parents had been interviewed. They were hopeful, they were praying, but they were more and more afraid that their son had been washed down the Delaware River.

From Tuesday onward, Robert’s name was also in the newspapers. The fistfight was described, and its motivation stated: the jealousy of a jilted lover. Greg was blamed for starting the fight, Robert’s attitude was left to the imagination, and the average reader, Robert supposed, would assume that he was in love with Jennifer Thierolf and had taken Greg’s place as her intended.

At the plant, Jack Nielson spoke to Robert on Tuesday morning. He had asked Robert Monday about his purple eye and his cut lip, and Robert had told him—making the story as light and funny as possible—that he had met up in the dark with an old boy friend of
Jenny’s, a fellow bigger than he was. By Tuesday morning, Jack had read the story in the papers. Robert told him about leaving Greg sitting on the steep bank of the Delaware.

“What happened is exactly what the papers say,” Robert said. “I must say, they’re not trying to slant it.”

“What do you mean ‘slant it’?” Jack asked.

“Well, it’d be so easy for them to say I knocked him into the water and won’t admit it.”

“Um-m. Yes. But whatever goes into that river turns up again. Maybe in Trenton, maybe sooner, but a body turns up. Ask Schriever. Did he tell you—”

“Yes, he told me,” Robert said. It was the story about the body of the old man that had washed up in Schriever’s back yard.

“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “He may be hiding out with some friend just to get you in trouble. Or annoy you. If he’s the kind of a guy who starts a fistfight over something like this …” Jack wagged his head.

“I haven’t any designs on Jenny,” Robert said. “It’s all so damned unnecessary.”

“Well—I’ve heard about Wyncoop. He beat up a couple of other people who stole his girls, or something like that, didn’t he?”

“Yes. News certainly travels, doesn’t it?”

“In small towns,” Jack said, smiling. “What does Jenny think about this?”

“Oh, I think she thinks Greg’s off on a binge.”

During that week, the atmosphere changed. Greg did not turn up. The sirens on the river hooted and honked, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes late at night, waking Robert up. They weren’t necessarily looking for Greg, he told himself. The sirens usually
sounded a couple of nights out of the week, but now they honked every night, and he imagined them part of the search for Greg. The papers had twice described the clothes he was wearing—a gray overcoat, a dark suit (how did anybody know what he’d been wearing, Robert wondered)—and having exhausted their sources of information about Greg, his parents and friends, they were reprinting what they had said: “We hope and we pray,” said Mrs. Wyncoop, her eyes shining with tears. “One of the best friends I ever had,” from Charles Mitchell of Rittersville, as if Greg were surely dead. Nothing happened at the plant, no more questions were asked, but Robert felt people were holding off, waiting to see what was going to happen, and he felt that nearly everybody, with the exception of Jack Nielson, secretly hoped that a body would be found in the river. Robert broke a date with Jenny on Thursday night, calling her up at six
P.M
. to say he had to put in some time on a job from the office, which was true, but Jenny was annoyed. Nickie, tipsy and cocky, had called Robert at five-thirty that day, saying, “Well, what’ve you got yourself into now, Bobbie? A little murder, maybe?” He had at last hung up on her, since, when he had tried to tell her what had happened, she had drowned him out with laughter. That night, the river horns hooted. It was not a good night for sleeping, and Robert took one of the Seconals, his first since Jenny had given them to him.

On Friday afternoon, Robert was called from his drawing table by one of the secretaries. Two gentlemen wanted to see him in the reception hall, the girl said with a smile and a lift of her eyebrows. She was Nancy, a blond girl who liked to kid with everyone.

“Gentlemen?” Robert said, getting up. He knew.

“No, they’re cops,” Nancy said. “Been paying your parking tickets lately?”

Robert managed a smile.

He walked across the drafting room, down the aisle between the long fluorescent-lighted tables. Lippenholtz and McGregor were standing in the glass-walled reception hall. They were the two of Monday night, Lippenholtz and McGregor. It was funny how the names stuck.

“Good afternoon,” Lippenholtz said.

“Good afternoon.”

Lippenholtz looked around the empty hall as if to see if anyone might be within hearing, then said, “Well, the body hasn’t been found yet—if there is one at all—but we’re still looking and we think we will find one. Now what we’d like to have from you is an absolutely factual statement of what happened,” he said in a slow, persuasive voice. “This is manslaughter at worst. Wyncoop attacked you. We’ll take your word for that, because you and Miss Thierolf had a date at seven-thirty, and we know that Wyncoop is pretty fond of picking fights with people he doesn’t like. Well and good. What we want to know is, did you knock him in the river or not?” His voice was not much above a whisper.

“I told you exactly what happened,” Robert said, also quietly. “I can’t add anything to it. He fell in for a minute and I pulled him out. After that, we didn’t fight. I left him sitting on the ground. Maybe he got up and walked right back into the river. I don’t know.”

“What’re you nervous about?” asked McGregor.

“Nothing.”

“We talked to your former wife this morning, Mr. Forester,” said Lippenholtz. “She had some things to say about your—your personality.”

Robert felt for cigarettes in his jacket pocket. “Such as what?”

“Well, she said you were erratic. Liable to violence. Would you consider that true?”

Robert shook out a match and tossed it into a sand pot by the elevator. “My wife’s apt to say anything about me. People who get divorces aren’t always on the best terms, you know.” The officers’ eyes were fixed on him, determined but not too intelligent eyes, Robert thought, which was so much the worse for him. “As for violence, Wyncoop came at me.”

“Yes, but you didn’t possibly pick up a piece of wood and give him a real conk on the head, did you?” asked Lippenholtz.

“It was a fistfight,” Robert said patiently.

Lippenholtz nodded and glanced at McGregor. “How did you meet Miss Thierolf?”

McGregor turned to a different page of his notebook.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” Robert asked.

“It might have. Would you mind telling us?” asked Lippenholtz with an encouraging smile.

Robert shrugged. “I don’t see what bearing—” He hesitated.

“Miss Thierolf doesn’t care to say how you met either. Why not, Mr. Forester? We talked to her this morning. What’s secret about it?”

Robert wondered how Jenny had reacted to the question. He wasn’t sure enough to say casually to Lippenholtz, “Through a friend. A girl named Rita.” Robert had never even seen Rita.

“Your wife told us a story about a prowler,” Lippenholtz went on. “She said Wyncoop told her Miss Thierolf had a prowler for a while. Miss Thierolf heard him outside the house. Then when she met you, or you met her, the noises stopped. You didn’t possibly meet her by prowling around the house, did you?”