The Fiend (14 page)

Miss Albert said, “Hello.”

Mary Martha had been instructed not to speak to strangers but she didn't think this would apply to strangers in a library, so she said, “Hello,” back.

“What's your name?”

“Mary Martha Oakley.”

“That's very pretty. You're new around here, aren't you, Mary?”

The child didn't answer, she just looked down at her shoes. Her toes had begun to wiggle nervously like captive fish. She didn't want the lady to notice so she attempted to hide her feet under the chair. During the maneuver, the magazine slid off her lap onto the floor.

Miss Albert picked it up, trying not to look surprised that a child so young would choose
Fortune
as reading material. “Did you move to town recently, Mary?”

“I'm not supposed to answer when people call me Mary be­cause my name is Mary
Martha.
But I guess it's all right in a library. We didn't move to town, we've always lived here.”

“Oh. I thought—well, it doesn't matter. The story hour is beginning in a minute or two. You just go through that door over there”—Miss Albert pointed—”and turn to the right and take a seat. Any seat you like.”

“I already have a seat.”

“But you can't hear the story from this distance.”

“No, ma'am.”

“You don't want to hear the story?”

“No, ma'am, I'm waiting for my mother.”

Miss Albert concealed her disappointment behind a smile. “Well, perhaps you'd like something to read that would be a little more suitable for your age bracket.”

Mary Martha hesitated, frowning. “Do you have books about everything?”

“Pretty nearly everything, from aardvarks to Zulus. What kind of book are you interested in?”

“One about divorce.”

“Divorce?” Miss Albert said with a nervous little laugh. “Goodness, I'm not sure I— Wouldn't you like a nice picture book to look at instead?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Well, I'm afraid I don't—that is, perhaps we'd better ask Miss Lang in the reference department. She knows more about such situations than I do. Come on, I'll take you over and introduce you.”

Behind the reference desk Louise was acting very busy but Miss Albert wasn't fooled. Checking the number of sheep in Australia or the name of the capital of Ghana hadn't put the color in her cheeks and the dreamy, slightly out-of-focus look in her eyes.

“I hope I'm not interrupting anything,” Miss Albert said, knowing very well she was, but feeling that it was the kind of thing that should be interrupted, especially during working hours. “This is Mary Martha Oakley, Louise. Mary Martha, this is Miss Lang.”

Louise stared at the girl and said, “Oh,” in a cold way that puzzled Miss Albert because Louise was usually very good with children.

“Mary Martha,” Miss Albert added, “wants a book on divorce.”

“Does she, indeed,” Louise said. “Am I to gather, Miss Albert, that you've encouraged the child in her request by bring­ing her over here?”

“Not exactly. My gosh, Louise, I thought you'd get a kick out of it, a laugh.”

“You know the rules of the library as well as I do, or you should. You're excused now, Miss Albert.”

“Good,” Miss Albert said crisply. “It happens to be my lunch hour.”

Over Mary Martha's head she gave Louise a dirty look, but Louise wasn't even watching. Her eyes were still fixed on Mary Martha, as if they were seeing much more than a little girl in a pink dress with daisies.

“Oakley,” she said in a thin, dry voice. “You live at 319 Jacaranda Road?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“With your mother.”

“Yes.”

“And your little dog.”

“I don't have a little dog,” Mary Martha said uneasily. “Just a cat named Pudding.”

“But there's a dog in your neighborhood, isn't there? A little brown mongrel that chases cars?”

“I never saw any.”

“Never? Perhaps you don't particularly notice dogs.”

“Oh yes, I do. I always notice dogs because they're my favorites even more than cats and birds.”

“So if you had one, you'd certainly protect it, wouldn't you?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Louise leaned across the desk and spoke in a smiling, confi­dential whisper. “If I had a dog that chased cars, I wouldn't be anxious to admit it, either. So of course I can't really blame you for fibbing. Just between the two of us, though—”

But there was nothing between the two of them. The child, wary-eyed and flushed, began backing away, her hands jammed deep in her pockets as if they were seeking the roots of the embroidered daisies. Ten seconds later she had disappeared out the front door.

Louise watched the door, in the wild hope that the girl would decide to come back and change her story—yes, she had a little dog that chased cars; yes, one of the cars was an old green Ford coupé.

There was a dog, there had to be, because Charlie said so. It had chased his car and Charlie, afraid for the animal's safety, felt that he should warn the owner. That's why he wanted to find out who lived at 319 Jacaranda Road. What other reason could he possibly have had?

He's not a liar,
she thought.
He's so devastatingly honest sometimes it breaks my heart.

She rubbed her eyes. They were dry and gritty and in need of tears. It was as if dirt, blowing in from the busy street, had altered her vision and blurred the distinctions between fact and fantasy.

“Don't talk so fast, lamb,” Kate Oakley said. “Now let me get this straight. She asked you if you had a little brown dog that chased cars?”

Mary Martha nodded.

“And she wouldn't believe you when you denied it?”

“No, ma'am.”

“It's crazy, that's what it is. I declare, I think the whole world has gone stark staring mad except you and me.” She spoke with a certain satisfaction, as if the world was getting no more than it deserved and she was glad she'd stepped out of it in time and taken Mary Martha with her. “You'd expect a librarian, of all people, to be sensible, with all those books around.”

Immediately after Kate's departure, Ralph MacPherson made two telephone calls. The first was to the apartment where Sheridan Oakley claimed to be living. He let the phone ring a dozen times, but, as on the previous afternoon and evening, there was no answer.

The second call was to Lieutenant Gallantyne of the city police department. After an exchange of greetings, Mac came to the point:

“I'm in the market for a favor, Gallantyne.”

“That's no switch,” Gallantyne said. “What is it?”

“A client of mine claims that her husband, from whom she's separated, is harassing her and her child. She says he's driving around town in a green Ford coupé, six or seven years old, license GVK 640.”

“And?”

“I want to know if he is.”

“All I can do is check with Sacramento and find out who owns the car. That may take some time, unless you can come up with a more urgent reason than the one you've given me, say like murder, armed robbery—”

“Sorry, no armed robbery or murder. Just a divorce, with complications.”

“I think your cases are often messier than mine are,” Gallan­tyne said with a trace of envy.

“Could be. We'll have to get together on one sometime.”

“Let's do that. Now, you want us to contact Sacramento about the green Ford?”

“Yes, but meanwhile pass the license number around to the traffic boys. If they spot the car anywhere I'd like to hear about it, any time of the day or night. I have an answering service.”

“What's that license again?”

“GVK, God's Very Kind, 640.”

(11)

He bought the
new car right after work, a three-year-old dark, inconspicuous sedan. As soon as he got behind the wheel he felt safe and secure as though he'd acquired a whole new body and nobody would recognize the old Charlie any more. He felt quite independent, too. He had chosen the car by himself, with no help from Ben, and he had paid for it with his own money. The used-car salesman had taken his check without hesitation as if he couldn't help but trust a man with such an honest face as Charlie's. And Charlie, inspired by this trust, was absolutely convinced that the car had been driven only 10,000 cautious miles by one owner and a Detroit-trained ga­rage mechanic at that. A man so skillful, Charlie reasoned, would have practically no spare time and that would account for the extremely low mileage on the car.

It seemed to him that the salesman, who had paid little at­tention to him when he first started browsing around the lot, noticed the change in him, too. He started to call him sir.

“I hope you'll be very happy with your car, sir.”

“Oh, I will. I already am.”

“There's no better advertising than a satisfied customer,” the salesman said. “The only trouble with selling a man a good car like this is that we don't see him around for a long time. Good luck and safe driving to you, sir.”

“Thank you very much.”

“It was a pleasure.”

Charlie eased the car out into the street. It was getting quite late and he knew Ben would be starting to worry about him, but he didn't want to go home just yet. He wanted to drive around, to get the feel of his new car and test the strength of his new body before he exposed either to Ben or Louise. They would both be suspicious, Ben of the car and the salesman and the garage mechanic, Louise of the change in him. He realized, in a vague way, that Louise didn't really want him to change, that she was dependent on his weakness though he couldn't understand why.

When he started out, he had, at the conscious level, no destination in mind. At crossroads he made choices seemingly unconnected with what he was thinking. He turned left because the car in front of him did; he turned right to watch a flock of blackbirds feeding on a lawn; he went straight because the road crossed a creek and he liked bridges; he turned left again be­cause the setting sun hurt his eyes. The journey took on an air of adventure, as if the streets, the bridge, the blackbirds, the setting sun were all strange to him and he was a stranger to them. He wasn't lost—nobody could get lost in San Félice where the mountains were to the east and the sea to the west, with one or the other, or both, always visible—he was de­liberately misplaced, as if he were playing a game of hide-and-seek with Ben and Louise. An hour must have passed since the game started.
Ready or not, you must be caught, hiding around the goal or not.

The sun had gone down. Wisps of fog were floating in from the sea and gathering in the treetops like spiders' webs. It was time to turn on the headlights but he wasn't sure which button to press, there were so many of them on the dashboard. He pulled over to the curb and stopped the car about fifty feet from an intersection. The intersection looked familiar to him although he didn't recognize it. It wasn't until he switched on the headlights and their beam caught the street sign and held it, that he knew where he was. Jacaranda Road, 300 block.

He felt a sudden and terrible pain in his head. He heard his own voice in his ears but he couldn't tell whether it was a whisper or a scream.

“Ben! Louise! Come and find me, I'm not hiding. It's not a game anymore. Help me. Come and take me home, Louise, don't leave me in this bad place. You don't know, nobody knows, how bad—dirty—dirty bad—”

At 8:30 the phone rang and Ben, who'd been sitting beside it for a long time, answered on the first ring.

“Hello.”

“Ben, this is Louise. Charlie was supposed to pick me up half an hour ago. He may have forgotten, so I thought I'd call and jog his memory a bit.”

“He's not here.”

“Well, he's probably on his way then. I'll just go wait on the steps for him. It's a nice night.”

“It's cold.”

“No, it's not,” Louise said, laughing. “You know how it is when you're in love, Ben. All the weather is wonderful.”

“You'd better stay in the house, Louise. I don't think he's on his way over.”

“Why not? Is something the matter?”

“I'm not sure,” Ben said in his slow careful voice. “He came to the cafeteria at noon with some crazy—a far-fetched story about a strange woman trying to kill him with her car. I didn't know how much of it, if any, to believe. He may have invented the whole thing as an excuse to buy a new car. You know Charlie, he can't just go ahead and do something; he has to have a dozen reasons why, no matter how nutty some of them are. Anyway, he told me he was going to buy a new car after work.”

“He got off work three and a half hours ago. How long does it usually take him to buy a car?”