The Man in the Net (10 page)

Timmie suddenly said in a high frightened voice, “Mummie, I want to go home.”

Steve said, “Okay, Mrs. Moreland. Maybe you’d take the kids down to the cars and wait.”

“I wanna stay,” said Buck.

“Mummie,” wailed Timmie, “I want to go home.”

“Take them, Mrs. Moreland.”

“But…” Roz Moreland gave a shrill little cry. “Steve, you don’t think … You don’t think that Linda …”

“You just sit in the car, Mrs. Moreland. Relax now. Take the kids.”

“Timmie—Buck.” Roz Moreland’s voice sounded distractedly. “Come, both of you, come.”

Her vague silhouette started down the edge of the refuse heap. There was the clatter of slipping bottles and cans. Timmie began to whimper. The thin mournful sound trailed away down the track toward the cars.

“Okay,” said Steve tersely, the man-among-men. “Got a flashlight in your car, John?”

“No.”

“Mr. Moreland’s got one. You better come with me. Okay, Mr. Moreland, you cover it way over to the edge at the right. We’ll head left from here.”

Gordon Moreland made a whinnying exclamation. “But, Steve, the kids were here searching all over. That’s how they found the suitcase. If Linda … if …”

“Maybe somewhere they didn’t look,” said Steve. “Maybe somewhere in the weeds.”

Gordon Moreland started off toward the right behind his flashlight beam. For a moment Steve Ritter stood motionless. John was very conscious of his big, quiet body close to his own. He could even hear the low steady breathing. Then Steve switched on his flashlight and turned to the left.

“Okay, John. Let’s go.”

They were searching, John knew, for Linda’s body. They had already accepted the fact, as a possibility anyway, that she was dead. Dazed and exhausted though he was, he knew too what was stirring in the Morelands’ sharp, novelists’ minds. It had been obvious in the excited shrillness of Roz’s voice and in Gordon’s stiff formality. They were thinking … He forced himself to push the thought away, to keep the words from actually forming, because it was all he could do to get through this as it was. I’ll crack up, he thought, if I let myself think about that.

He stumbled on at Steve’s side, watching the flashlight beam swinging slowly to left and to right, exposing this— that, an old iron bedstead, a clump of iris fantastically growing out of nothing, cardboard cartons, partially rotted away, and everywhere bottles and cans, bottles and cans, as if, insanely, twenty-four hours a day for generations the inhabitants of Stoneville had been doing nothing but eat and drink, eat and drink …

As they inched forward warily, peering, Steve Ritter didn’t say anything at all. John had never seen him like this, as the official, the local representative of the law. He was quite different, much more formidable, with all his waggishness gone. Once he tripped, half falling against Steve. He could feel the warmth of the other man’s hard arm under the shirt sleeve and, with a vivid repelled awareness of the sensuality of the other body, the thought came again of Linda’s confession.

It’s Steve … I don’t want him … But it’s stronger than me ….

It was Linda who was responsible for this terrible sense of unreality. Because of Linda, there was nothing that was certain any more. Steve was her lover; Steve wasn’t her lover. He would never know; and if he couldn’t know even that, what was there to cling to?

And then, gradually, just when the tautness of nerves had become excruciating, the tension began to relax. She isn’t here, he thought. He knew it with vivid certainty, almost as if, in some mad, special way, Linda—wherever she was—was communicating with him. It’s all right. We’re not going to find anything in the weeds. The ultimate moment of horror when they all turn from the thing on the ground and look at me isn’t going to come.

And they didn’t find her. After about three-quarters of an hour of their awkward, fumbling search, Steve called across the dump toward the other flashlight fanning back and forth beneath the fireflies.

“Anything, Mr. Moreland?”

“No, Steve.”

“Okay. We’ll knock off. Looks like there’s nothing anyways.”

They went back to the suitcase. Carefully Steve folded the clothes back into it, flicked the locks and lifted it up. Gordon Moreland joined them at the mouth of the dump. They all three walked in silence down the track to the road. Timmie had forgotten to be afraid. He and Buck were stalking around—sinister Martians—in the area lit by the cars’ parking lights.

Roz Moreland scrambled out of the Mercedes. She was wearing very high heels. In her hand she had her long tortoiseshell cigarette holder. An elegant, cityish, incongruous presence. Her eyes flashed for one steel second to John’s face.

“Well?” she said. “Well?”

Her husband went to her side. Her counterpart. Neat, finicky, with his cold blue eyes under reddish eyebrows and the fine, long, reddish hair meticulously in place. The conventional eccentric. The established author.

“We didn’t find anything, dear. But it’s impossible in the dark. Quite impossible.”

Roz turned to Steve, who stood, large and relaxed, a little apart from them all with the suitcase in his hand.

“What are we going to do? How do we know what’s happened to her? We’ve got to do something.”

Linda’s my wife, thought John, and already they’re treating me as if I didn’t exist.

“Look, Buck. Look,” Timmie’s voice piped. “I’m not a Martian any more. I’ve taken off my head.”

“But we can’t just do nothing,” said Roz. “Not if she’s left the house, without a car, with the suitcase on the dump, with …”

“Okay, Mrs. Moreland,” Steve jerked his head toward her car. “You’d better take Timmie home. It’s past his bedtime. Your husband and me and John, we’ll go back to my place for a while and figure this out.”

“But…” Roz swung around, her silver earrings flashing. “But—I’m a witness too. If there’s to be any discussion with the troopers …”

She wants to be in on it, thought John, an unexpected, preserving irony trickling through him. She’s not going to miss a minute of it.

Steve Ritter merely shrugged her aside. “There’ll be plenty of time for that, Mrs. Moreland. You take Timmie home. I’ll drive your husband back later. Okay, Mr. Moreland, want to come in the car with me?” He started toward his own car, calling, “Follow us, John. Back to my place. Hey—Buck. Enough of that. Car—home.”

Steve’s car started off. John followed in his. Roz was left standing stiff, outraged, by the Mercedes.

John reached the gas-station immediately behind the first car. He got out and joined the others. A mambo was pulsing on the juke-box inside the ice-cream parlor. They all went in. Betty Ritter was behind the fountain. A boy and two girls sat on stools, drinking pop. An elderly man alone—someone John knew vaguely by sight—the Town Clerk?—sat behind an empty Coca-Cola bottle at a table. They all turned to look at them.

“Hi, Mom.” Steve grinned at his wife and at the customers. “Here’s your wandering Martian. Off to bed, Buck.” He stood a moment in the middle of the room with the suitcase in his hand, swaying his hips voluptuously to the rhythm of the mambo. He was completely changed from the quiet figure on the dump. Steve Ritter—the village card again. One of the girls at the fountain laughed and called out, “Hi, Steve, you been on a trip?”

“Sure, Arlene. A monkey-business trip. Just plain monkey business like always.” Steve swung around to John and Gordon, watching them both with that veiled sardonic appraisal of his. “Well, boys, how about a popsicle on the house? No? Okay, then let’s get down to it.” That’s his way of stalling the village, thought John. He knows his Stoneville; he knows how gossip can smell something out almost before it’s happened. He felt reluctant gratitude, as if Steve were doing it for him.

They went into a tiny room just off the ice-cream parlor. Steve shut the door behind them. It was the office where he handled the gas-station’s monthly accounts. There was nothing but an old studio couch, a desk with a wooden chair, and a telephone on the wall.

“Sit down, boys. Make yourselves at home.”

Steve put Linda’s suitcase on the floor and slumped on to the couch. Gordon Moreland hovered importantly. John sat down in the wooden chair.

Steve lit a cigarette, watching John over the trail of smoke from eyes which were quite unfathomable now. Hostile? Or not hostile? Knowing more than they were admitting? Or knowing nothing at all?

“Okay, John. Let’s hear it. Skip the fight with Linda for right now. Just let us know what happened when you got back from New York.”

John made himself bring out once again the bald facts which, even to the Careys, his friends, had sounded so improbable, so false.

When he told about the slashed pictures, Gordon broke in, “Linda destroying your pictures? But that isn’t possible. Linda, of all people … !”

“You can’t never figure out what a woman’s going to do when she gets riled.” Steve’s voice cut off the sentence. “Okay, John. Go on.”

His eyes never left John’s face, but, as John continued the story, it was of Gordon Moreland that he was most immediately conscious. Prurient fascination was exuding from him almost like a smell. Don’t miss a thing. Get every detail for Roz. Put it in a book. Of course, this isn’t historical. But why not a modern book once in a while? A change of pace. John felt anger welling up through the total weariness. What the hell had this to do with Gordon Moreland?

When he’d finished, Steve Ritter stretched from the couch and stubbed his cigarette in an ashtray by John on the desk. “Okay, John. How much money did she take with her?”

“Practically none, I’d say, unless she had some I didn’t know about.”

“And where do you figure she’d have been planning to go? New York? She’s always talking about New York. Got a lot of friends down there, it seems.”

“No,” said John, “as a matter of fact, there really isn’t anyone she’s friendly with in New York.”

“But that’s absurd,” exploded Gordon Moreland. “She has dozens of friends in New York. She’s constantly talking about them. She knows everyone. The Parkinsons. The …”

“Okay, Mr. Moreland.” Once again Steve Ritter interrupted him. “You may think you know Linda and I may think I do. But John here’s her husband, ain’t he?” His eyes shifted back to John. “If it wouldn’t be New York, John, then what about Wisconsin? But her folks out there are dead, aren’t they? No reason to go back there.”

“No,” said John, thinking: So he knows that much about her. She’s at least been that intimate with him.

“And she don’t have any brothers or sisters. Only child. She’s always yakking about that.” Steve gave a little whistle. “Seems like she was walking out into the blue, don’t it?”

“Seems like it,” said John.

“Maybe to give you a scare? You think that, John? Her way, maybe, of winning the fight?”

“Maybe.”

“But the suitcase.” Gordon Moreland’s voice was shrill and whinnying. “We found it on the dump. What does anything matter but that? If the suitcase is there, then something must have happened to her.”

“Sure, sure.” Steve pursed out his lower lip. “I’m afraid it’s that way. Whatever she was planning on, it looks like something’s happened all right.”

With a lazy physical grace, he got up from the couch. “Well, John, here’s where we call the troopers, I guess. Looks like this is way out of my range. Traffic cop on weekends, checking up that the church door’s locked, helping Old Bill Dairey home when he’s been hitting the wine bottle—that’s about it so far as my authority goes. I kind of hate to do it. I mean, if there’s any chance still that it’s not really serious. But… Okay, John? Okay by you if I call Captain Green?”

“Sure. What else can we do?”

“There isn’t nothing you haven’t told us? If there is, now’s the time, now before we let it rip.”

John looked back at him, wondering: Is this perhaps my mortal enemy?

“What could I know that I haven’t told you?” he asked.

“Okay, John. Okay.”

Smiling almost affectionately, Steve put his hand on John’s shoulder and with the other reached out for the phone.

“When Captain Green shows, we’ll go up to your place and have a look-see. Better yet. I’ll have ’em meet us there. That may hold the old biddies from going to town for a while.”

His eyes were still on John’s.

“And don’t you worry now, John, boy. We’ll find her. We’re all of us friends of Linda’s, aren’t we? We’re all of us just crazy about her. This is pretty near as tough for us as it is for you.”

GORDON MORELAND wanted to go with them to join the troopers, but Steve made him call his wife and have her drive around to pick him up. Roz arrived before the troopers, and the two Morelands, both protesting their great love for Linda and their appalling anxiety, drove away.

Just after they’d gone, Steve said, “Well, John, I figure Captain Green should be along any minute now. Let’s get started.”

He picked up the suitcase and, with a casual wave to his wife behind the counter in the ice-cream parlor, led the way out to John’s car. As they drove through the dark, sprawling expanse of woods, neither of them spoke, but to John the large, silent form of the other man seemed a constant threat. He had given up wondering what had happened to Linda. Whatever it was, it was something final, irrevocable which thinking about couldn’t alter. It was his own position that obsessed him now. Although he would still only half admit it to himself, he knew what the Morelands, Steve, even the Careys were all prepared to think the moment they were given any justification.

No, it wasn’t Linda any more. It was the net which Linda had thrown around him.

When they reached the house and parked by the kitchen door, Steve didn’t get out and he didn’t give any explanation for staying in the car. But the reason was obvious to John. No one was accusing him; no one was saying anything. But no one was to go into the house, either, until Captain Green, the accredited representative of the law, first saw—whatever there was to see.

Steve lit a cigarette and, as the match light spurted up, illuminating his full, sensual mouth, offered the pack to John. The troopers’ car drove up then, gliding to a stop beside them.

“Steve?”