The End of the Pier (17 page)

Ever since that night at the end of June, he'd puzzled over this. It nearly drove him crazy, wondering. All he could think was that it was the hand of god or his dear angel mother, who wanted to make sure the evil were punished. And the righteous went free.

Nothing else could explain it.

It must mean he was on the right track. That it wasn't too soon.

And god only knew this one deserved to die, too.

He would have liked to stay here in the woods a little longer, one hand on the knife, the other on his neck, remembering.

But he must move off now down the path and get to a place where he could watch to see if she'd be out tonight as she usually was, and which way she'd go.

If anyone deserved to die. If anyone deserved to die.

W
hat he thought she was doing was drinking. Someone in La Porte might have said that Willow Pauley's being a secret drinker was hard to believe, but Sam had no difficulty believing it. He only wished people in La Porte would pull their shades down or draw their drapes and, occasionally, lock their doors.

Sam had walked back to the police car and was watching Willow Pauley in her brightly lit, white kitchen, where she stood near the sink, moving a glass to her lips and then lowering it, and then bringing it up again, rhythmically. He saw all of this as if a dark cutout against a white background had moved.

Willow's house was not isolated like Bunny Caruso's. It was a sturdy frame-and-brick that sat in its large lot facing Main Street. But it did have a privacy that others on the street lacked, as it was spiked around with trees, mostly ash and pine. Before he died her father had run the nursery just outside of town. He loved trees so much he'd even named his two daughters and one son after them: Willow, Ashley, and Oak. Mr. Pauley had planted enough ash, pine, and oak around the house that by now the property was heavily wooded in back.

And it was the back that Sam always checked out. The old dirt road that ran all the way around the lake trickled off like rivulets from a stream and wound around and narrowed down into little more than ruts. One of them ended up here. The place could be approached from the rear, and Sam had got out and made a brief tour in and out of the heavy cover of trees.

Now he was sitting as he had outside of Bunny's, wishing that Willow would lead her life behind a down-drawn blind.

It was spot checking, that was all. It was all he could do, but he didn't do it on company time. Even if his idea about the killings was totally wrong, there was nothing to lose. He yawned and looked at the luminous dial of his watch and back at the window. One-fourteen a.m. and Willow was apparently cooking. Cooking and drinking. She raised the glass again, and the angle of light showed it to be a wineglass, a large, globelike glass.

Sam studied the spokes of the steering wheel and thought about Nancy Alonzo. She might have been thirty, thirty-five even, but she hardly looked twenty. Working as hard as she had all of her life, and only her hands had aged. He remembered how she had stood there, wringing her red, rough hands, asking Sam if he could help her get the boy back.
I never hurt him, Sheriff. I would never, ever hurt that dear boy.
Sam told her he knew she hadn't and wouldn't. He'd tried like hell to get the agency to reconsider, but with all the other “accidents” the child had suffered through, well, now it was broken limbs, and this was just too much. Poor Nancy.

Poor Nancy. Even now, two months later, Sam could hardly believe that Nancy Alonzo's reward for all of her hard work and suffering was a horrible death.

Sam raised his head from his crossed hands and watched Willow's window. Sims had no trouble, Sam thought, believing it. Sims treated the killing of Nancy Alonzo and the escape of Boy Chalmers from prison almost as if they were calling cards from heaven, something he could whip out and hand to the sheriff.

Sam squinted through the windshield at Willow's back door, the little wooden porch, and the steps going up. The door probably wasn't locked.

The trouble was, there were artificial limitations he had set. He had made big assumptions; he was aware of that. But if he began with the gut knowledge that Boy Chalmers hadn't done that murder near the Oasis tavern, and the sure knowledge that the Hebrides and state police hadn't done much looking around, then he could at least start from there. Someone else had done it, and in
order to move at all, he assumed that it was someone from these parts. Sedgewick kept talking about Hebrides and La Porte, that they were two different places. But the murder of Tony Perry had taken place in that no-man's-land of woods; and the Oasis Bar and Grille, that was as near to La Porte, almost, as it was to Hebrides.

At any rate, if he was to do anything at all by himself and on his own time, he had to leave out trying to do any more spot-checks in Hebrides. He didn't know the women there; he didn't know their habits; and it was bigger than La Porte. It was also out of his jurisdiction, though he didn't give a fuck about that.

If he was wasting his time, it was
his
time.

He sighed, turned his eyes to the rear window of the brightly lit kitchen, and saw Willow actually lighting a candle, as if she might be expecting a suitor. That old-fashioned word simply came unbidden to his mind. Willow Pauley wasn't a woman to have a suitor.

H
e had watched her for nearly a year.

He watched her now coming down the steps of the house, holding on to the wooden railing and carefully placing her feet in the way of someone old or infirm. The crown of her head was down; she was looking at her feet, and light from the street lamp capped it with silver. She reached the pavement, turned up her coat collar, and walked north to where the pavement ended suddenly. It was as if the La Porte boundaries were sharply defined.

From where he now stood, fitting the blade of the serrated knife into a leather holder he'd made especially for it, he could see both ways. He couldn't have found a better place to stand and observe whoever passed up and down Main Street. No one could see him; no one knew he was there.

Clever, that's what he'd always been. Lowering his head, he giggled. It was funny, it really was. Then soberly he zipped up his jacket and moved like any night creature from his place of safety, a fox from its den.

•  •  •

Her coat was white or cream-colored. That made it easier to keep her in sight in the darkness relieved only by the sickly yellowish glow of the vapor lamps. This was the end of town; there was no one about, and no one walked toward the town's edge this time of night, anyway. He had watched too often and too long to make a mistake of that.

In a way, he liked her, would have liked her a good deal, maybe, if she'd been a good woman. She was a person of habit, as he was.
She was dependable. You could count on her to behave in the same way, to do the same things at the same time. You could count on her.

The thought made him hesitate, made him miss a beat in his rhythmic walk, and he felt just the barest tightness in his chest.

The knife in its leather holder rubbed against his thigh. He pulled it out and ran his thumb delicately along the blade.

Even if he fell back and put more distance between them, he could see her easily because of her coat. Her coat was white (
your dress was blue
).

His foot scraped on the pavement as he stopped. He squinted his eyes shut and put his hand to his ear, rubbing the heel of the palm into it, like a swimmer whose ear was engorged with water. Where had that line come from?
“I was dressed in blue.”

He walked on, heavily. He could see the stand of pines just beyond the end of the pavement and knew she would sleepwalk along the road there. She was a dreamer, a sleepwalker (“
I was all in blue
”).

He stumbled a little; the pressure in his head was worse.

“I was all in blue . . .”

Two people. They were singing. The image that flickered on and off in his mind was of a man and a woman sitting somewhere against a painted sunset by the sea, singing. His hand was slick on the handle of the knife. His fingers were biting into his skin. Something was draining out of him, and he felt the tightening in his chest ray out to his limbs. It was not the same pressure that he had felt four years ago, or two, or one. That pain had in it the comfort of the rightness of the thing.

He had gained on her without knowing. Now she stopped. He went cold. If she looked around . . . He stepped into the shadows of the walled drive of the last house.

But she didn't. She knew she had to go down. The others knew
it; the fight they put up was for show; it was only a friendly argument.

His face felt oiled like the knife, only in sweat, and he wiped his arm across his forehead. He felt the sense of purpose leaving him and stubbornly fought to hold on to it. The voices of the singers were intrusive. He tried to shake them off, too, and kept on walking.

Why didn't she look back?

When he saw the woman in the Oasis Bar and Grille, he had not even known what moved him to seek her out, to set his feet in her direction. Her lips had been wet and shiny as red patent, glistening in the smoky light of the Oasis. That silver blouse as transparent as water, that eddied and curled around her breasts and nipples . . . None of that. It was later he had found out about the little boy,
her
little boy . . .

As if a switch had been thrown in his brain, a wire crackled, and his head snapped to the left; his body felt the current. He was crying, losing his will; it was running like sap from a tree.

To steady himself, to draw some sort of boundary around himself, he studied the houses left and right. That was Miss Ruth's front porch, chocolate-brown trim. Willow Pauley's house back off the street, showing edges of light through the trees; was she up? The row of pumps at the Red Bird gas station.

The familiar windows and the square patterns of La Porte made him breathe more easily. Why did she seem always to be coming to the edge of the pavement and yet never entering the dirt road, the woods? Hadn't it been a long time?

“I was all in blue.”

The voices of the singers were growing louder, and the scene from an old movie flashed into his mind. She was moving now towards the trees, and he remembered the little girl in the movie, the one that had turned almost overnight into a woman. But her
dress was
white
—stark virginal white, with a sash across it as black as sin. His body felt as weightless as the cone of mist thrown down by the last vapor lamp.

She was small in the distance, far ahead of him, the white coat no larger than a moth.

He stepped from the last broken rock of the pavement, walking more quickly, but steadily. Only the movement in his mind was different. In his mind he was tumbling towards her. He was stumbling over the hard earth of the rutted road, his arms outreaching to her as to some point of definition.

He could only lean for support on the knife, which had grown in his mind as big as a tree.

A white moth, fluttering . . .

T
he bladelike shrieks of laughter had come from another boat angling across Maud's line of vision. Quickly, she pulled the cord to turn the light off and closed the book.

She had left the lamp on as Sam walked away, hoping he'd stopped to look back and taken note of her refusal to do as he said, to knuckle under to his commands or to shrivel in the face of unknown, unnamed horrors like ivory grins in the night. She had plenty of named and known ones; she didn't need his jungle drums and rustling bushes.

Raised voices, shouts, and laughter issued from a party boat, a square thing on pontoons with a fringed canvas top, which held new guests, she assumed. She squinted to make out the amorphous shape of the boat, which had turned mid-lake and was shoveling across the water toward the party.

Had these people started out together, or had they come from other places, other parties? Had the boat been picking them up all along the shore, heading for Raoul and Evita's?

This cargo of dark figures seemed to fit the near-funereal movement of the boat. Only the coal ends of cigarettes, the tiny, wraithlike flames of globed candles showed the voices were not disembodied.

Maud shaded her eyes, squinting at the far dock. One-thirty in the morning and the party was getting this fresh influx of guests. It could easily go on until dawn and into the morning. The Labor Day weekend marked the end of the season, just as Memorial Day marked the beginning.

Where did they go, Raoul and Evita, when the season ended? It
was a question Maud liked to turn over in her mind, for there was such a feast of possible destinations. Brazil was one, for with names like “Raoul” and “Evita” . . .

As she tried to dislodge the two olives cramped together in the bottom of the jar she wondered, with self-disgust,
why
she kept on assuming things about them on the basis of names Sam had probably made up. There hadn't been even a hint of a name until that movie came to town called
Kiss of the Spider Woman
with an actor named Raul Julia. He was very handsome; she had seen it twice. The second time she had sat right in front of Joey, who had then come to sit beside her and share his monster tub of popcorn. He ate it by the handful, pushing the popcorn in with his hand, making comments about the “creepy faggot,” the other character, until she had had to tell him
puleeze
to be quiet. So they had sat there in the Empire Theater watching Raul smolder away on screen as if he had a whole grate of burning coals behind his eyes.

It was only after that movie that Sam had come up with that name. She didn't know where he'd got the “Evita,” unless it was from that musical. She didn't think anyone in the movie, including the Spider Woman, was named Evita, but it was all very suspicious. Maud sipped her drink.