Nothing That Meets the Eye (44 page)

Silence. Penn started slowly back to where he had left David. A little joke, he supposed, a mildly insulting joke, but he resolved to take no offense.

He walked on toward the lodge, where he was sure he would find David thoughtfully pacing the floor as he pondered his work, perhaps dictating already into the tape recorder; but the main room was empty. There was no sound from the corner room where they worked, nor from the closed room where David slept. Penn lit a cigarette, picked up the newspaper and sat down in the single armchair. He read with deliberate concentration, finished his cigarette and lit another. The second cigarette was gone when he got up, and he felt angry and a little scared at the same time.

He went to the lodge door and called, “David!” a couple of times, loudly. He walked toward the car, got close enough to see that there was no one sitting in it. Then he returned to the lodge and methodically searched it, looking even under the bunks.

What was David going to do, come back in the middle of the night and kill him in his sleep? No, that was crazy, as crazy as one of David's story ideas. Penn suddenly thought of his dream, remembered David's brief but intense interest in it the night he had told it at the dinner table. “Who was the man with you?” David had asked. But in the dream, Penn hadn't been able to identify him. He was just a shadowy companion on a walk. “Maybe it was me,” David had said, his blue eyes shining. “Maybe you'd like me to disappear, Penn.” Neither Ginnie nor he had made a comment, Penn recalled, nor had they discussed David's remark when they were alone. It had been so long ago, over two months ago.

Penn put that out of his mind. David had probably wandered down to the lake to be alone for a while, and hadn't been courteous enough to tell him. Penn did the dishes, took a shower and crawled into his bunk. It was twelve-ten. He had thought he wouldn't be able to sleep, but he was asleep in less than two minutes.

The raucous cries of ducks on the wing awakened him at six-thirty. He put on his robe and went into the bathroom, noting that David's towel, which he had stuck hastily over the rack last night, had not been touched. Penn went to David's room and knocked. Then he opened the door a crack. The two bunks, one above the other, were still made up. Penn washed hurriedly, dressed, and went out.

He looked over the ground on both sides of the road where he had last seen David, looking for shoe prints in the moist pine needles. He walked to the lake and looked around its marshy edge; not a footprint, not a cigarette butt.

He yelled David's name, three times, and gave it up.

By seven-thirty
A.M.
Penn was in the town of Croydon. He saw a small rectangular sign between a barber's shop and a paint store that said police. He parked the car, went into the station, and told his story. As Penn had thought, the police wanted to look over the lodge. Penn led them back in David's car.

The two policemen had heard of David Ostrander, not as a writer, apparently, but as one of the few people who had a lodge in the area. Penn showed them where he had last seen David, and told them that Mr. Ostrander had been experimenting to see how well he could see him at thirty yards.

“How long have you been working for Mr. Ostrander?”

“Four months. Three months and three weeks to be exact.”

“Had he been drinking?”

“Two scotches. His usual amount. I had the same.”

Then they walked to the lake and looked around.

“Mr. Ostrander have a wife?” one of the men asked.

“Yes. She's at the house in Stonebridge, New York.”

“We'd better notify her.”

There was no telephone at the lodge. Penn wanted to stay on in case David turned up, but the police asked him to come with them back to the station, and Penn did not argue. At least he would be there when they talked with Ginnie, and he'd be able to speak with her himself. Maybe David had decided to go back to Stonebridge and was already home. The highway was only two miles from the lodge, and David could have flagged a bus or picked up a ride from someone, but Penn couldn't really imagine David Ostrander doing anything that simple or obvious.

“Listen,” Penn said to the policemen before he got into David's convertible, “I think I ought to tell you that Mr. Ostrander is kind of an odd one. He writes science fiction. I don't know what his objective is, but I think he deliberately disappeared last night. I don't think he was kidnapped or attacked by a bear or anything like that.”

The policemen looked at him thoughtfully.

“Okay, Mr. Knowlton,” one of them said. “Now you drive on ahead of us, will you?”

Back at the station in Croydon, they called the number Penn gave them. Hanna, the maid, answered. Penn, six feet from the telephone, could hear her shrill, German-accented voice; then Ginnie came on. The officer reported that David Ostrander was missing since ten o'clock last night, and asked her if she'd had any word from him. Ginnie's voice, after the first exclamation which Penn had heard, sounded alarmed. The officer watched Penn as he listened to her.

“Yes . . . What's that again? . . . No, no blood or anything. Not a clue so far. That's why we're calling you.” A long pause. The officer's pencil tapped but did not write. “I see . . . I see . . . We'll call you, Mrs. Ostrander.”

“May I speak to her?” Penn reached for the telephone.

The captain hesitated, then said, “Good-bye, Mrs. Ostrander,” and put the telephone down. “Well, Mr. Knowlton, are you prepared to swear that the story you told us is true?”

“Absolutely.”

“Because I've just heard a motive if I ever heard one. A motive for getting Mr. Ostrander out of the way. Now, just what did you do to him—or maybe say to him?” The officer leaned forward, palms on his desk.

“What did she just tell you?”

“That you're in love with her and you might have wanted her husband out of the picture.”

Penn tried to keep calm. “I was quitting my job to get away from the situation! I told Mr. Ostrander yesterday that I was going to quit, and I told his wife the day before.”

“So you admit there was a situation.”

The police, four of them now, looked at him with frank disbelief.

“Mrs. Ostrander's upset,” Penn said. “She doesn't know what she's saying. Can I talk to her, please? Now?”

“You'll see her when she gets here.” The officer sat down and picked up a pen. “Knowlton, we're booking you on suspicion. Sorry.”

They questioned him until one
P.M.
, then gave him a hamburger and a paper container of weak coffee. They kept asking him if there hadn't been a gun at the lodge—there hadn't been—and if he hadn't weighted David's body and thrown it in the lake along with the gun.

“We walked half around the lake this morning,” Penn said. “Did you notice any footprints anywhere?”

By that time, he had told them about his dream and suggested that David Ostrander was trying to enact it, an idea that brought incredulous smiles, and he had laid bare his heart in regard to Ginnie, and also his intentions with her, which were nil. Penn didn't say that Ginnie had said she was in love with him, too. He couldn't bear to tell them that, in view of what she had said about him.

They went into his past. No police record. Born in Raleigh, Virginia, graduated from the state university, a major in journalism, worked on a Baltimore paper for a year, then four years in the Coast Guard. A clean slate everywhere, and this the police seemed to believe. It was, specifically, the cleanliness of his slate with the Ostranders that they doubted. He was in love with Mrs. Ostrander and yet he was really going to quit his job and leave? Hadn't he any plans about her?

“Ask her,” Penn said tiredly.

“We'll do that,” replied the officer who was called Mac.

“She knows about the dream I had, too, and the questions her husband asked me about it,” Penn said. “Ask her in privacy, if you doubt me.”

“Get this, Knowlton,” Mac said. “We don't fool around with dreams. We want facts.”

Ginnie arrived a little after three
P.M.
Catching a glimpse of her through the bars of the cell they had put him in, Penn sighed with relief. She looked calm, perfectly in command of herself. The police took her to another room for ten minutes or so, and then they came and unlocked Penn's cell door. As he approached Ginnie, she looked at him with a hostility or fear that was like a kick in the pit of his stomach. It checked the “Hello, Ginnie” that he wanted to say.

“Will you repeat to him what he said to you day before yesterday, Mrs. Ostrander?” asked Mac.

“Yes. He said, ‘I wish David would disappear the way he did in my dream. I wish he were out of your life so I could be alone with you.'”

Penn stared at her. “Ginnie, you said that!”

“I think what we want to know from you, Knowlton, is what you did with her husband,” said Mac.

“Ginnie,” Penn said desperately, “I don't know why you're saying that. I can repeat every word of the conversation we had that afternoon, beginning with me saying I wanted to quit. That much you'll agree with, won't you?”

“Why, my husband had fired him—because of his attentions to me!” Ginnie glared at Penn and at the man around her.

Penn felt a panic, a nausea rising. Ginnie looked insane—or like a woman who was positive she was looking at her husband's murderer. There flashed to his mind her amazing coolness the moment after the one time he had kissed her, when David, by an unhappy stroke of luck, had tapped on her door and walked in. Ginnie hadn't turned a hair. She was an actress by nature, apparently, and she was acting now. “That's a lie and you know it,” Penn said.

“And it's a lie what you said to her about wanting to get rid of her husband?” Mac asked.

“Mrs. Ostrander said that, I didn't,” Penn replied, feeling suddenly weak in the knees. “That's why I was quitting. I didn't want to interfere with a marriage that—”

The listening policeman smiled.

“My husband and I were devoted.”

Then Ginnie bent her head and gave in, it appeared, to the most genuine tears in the world.

Penn turned to the desk. “All right, lock me up. I'll be glad to stay here till David Ostrander turns up—because I'll bet my life he's not dead.”