The Fiend (28 page)

She said, “If you want my mother, she's in the kitchen making breakfast.”

“I prefer to talk to you alone, Mary Martha.”

“I'd better get my mother's permission. She's kind of nervous this morning, I don't know why. But I have to be careful.”

“She hasn't told you anything?”

“Just that Mac was coming over with a soldier and we were all going to have a chat.”

“A soldier?”

“He's a lieutenant. I'm supposed to remember to call him that so I'll make a good impression.” Mary Martha looked down at her dress as if to reassure herself that it was still clean enough to make a good impression. “Do you want to come in?”

“Yes.”

“I guess it'll be all right.”

She was just closing the door when Kate Oakley's voice called out from the kitchen, “Mary Martha, tell Mac I'll be there in a minute.”

“It's not Mac,” the child said. “It's Jessie's mother.”

“Jessie's—?” Kate Oakley appeared at the far end of the hall. She began walking toward them very rapidly, her high heels ticking on the linoleum like clocks working on different time schedules, each trying to catch up with the other. Her face was heavily made up to look pink and white but the gray of trouble showed through. She placed one arm protectively around Mary Martha's shoulders. “You'd better go and put the bacon in the warming oven, dear.”

“I don't care if it gets cold,” Mary Martha said. “It tastes the same.”

“You mustn't be rude in front of company, lamb. That's un­derstood between us, isn't it?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Off you go.”

Mary Martha started down the hall.

“But I want to talk to her,” Ellen said desperately. “I've got to. She might know something.”

“She knows nothing. She's only a child.”

“
Jessie's
only
a child,
too
.”

“I'm sorry. I really am sorry, Mrs. Brant. But Mary Martha isn't supposed to talk to anyone until our lawyer arrives.”

“You haven't even told her about Jessie, have you?”

“I didn't want to upset her.”

“She's got to be told. She may be able to help. She might have seen someone, heard something. How can we know unless we ask her?”

“Mac will ask her. He can handle these—these situations better than you or I could.”

“Is that all it is to you, a situation to be handled?”

Kate shook her head helplessly. “No matter what I said to you now, it would seem wrong because you're distraught. Fur­ther conversation is pointless. I must ask you to leave.” She opened the heavy oak door. “I'm truly sorry, Mrs. Brant, but I think I'm doing the right thing. Mac will talk to Mary Martha. She feels freer with him than she would with you or me.”

“Even though he has a policeman with him?”

“Did she tell you that?”

“I figured it out.”

“Well, it won't make any difference. Mary Martha adores Mac and she's not afraid of policemen.”

But the last word curled upward into a question mark, and when Ellen looked back from the bottom of the porch steps, Kate was hanging on to the oak door as if for support.

When breakfast was over, Mary Martha sat on the window seat in the front room with the cat, Pudding, on her lap. She wasn't supposed to get her hands dirty or her dress wrinkled but she needed the comfort of the cat, his warm body and soft fur, his bright eyes that seemed to be aware of so many things and not to care about any of them very much.

In a little while she saw Mac and the lieutenant emerge from the fog and come up the front steps. She heard her mother talk­ing to them in the hall, at first in the low, careful voice she used when meeting strangers, later in a higher, less restrained and more natural voice. She sounded as if she was protesting, then arguing, and finally, losing. After a time the two men came into the front room alone, and Mac closed the door.

“Hello, Mary Martha,” Mac said. “This is Lieutenant Gallantyne.”

Still holding the cat, Mary Martha got up and executed a brief, formal curtsy.

Gallantyne bowed gravely in return. “That's a pretty cat you have there, Mary Martha. What's his name?”

“Pudding. He has other names too, though.”

“Really? Such as?”

“Geronimo, sometimes. Also King Arthur. But when he's bad and catches a bird, I call him Sheridan.” She switched the cat from her left shoulder to her right. It stopped purring and made a swift jab at her ponytail. “Do you have any medals?”

Gallantyne raised his bushy eyebrows. “Well now, I believe I won a few swimming races when I was a kid.”

“I mean real medals like for killing a hundred enemies.”

The men exchanged glances. It was as if they were both think­ing the same thing, that it seemed a long and insane time ago that men were given medals for killing.

“Lieutenant Gallantyne is not in the army,” Mac said. “He's a policeman. He's also a good friend of mine, so you needn't be afraid of him.”

“I'm not. But why does he want to see me instead of my mother?”

“He'll talk to your mother later. Right now you're more im­portant.”

She seemed pleased but at the same time suspicious. “Why am I?”

“We hope,” Gallantyne said, “that you'll be able to help us find your friend, Jessie.”

“Is she hiding?”

“We're not sure.”

“She's an awfully good hider. Being so skinny she can squeeze behind things and under things and between.”

“You and Jessie play together a lot, do you?”

“All the time except when one of us is being punished.”

“And you tell each other secrets, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Do you promise each other never to reveal these secrets to anyone else?”

Mary Martha nodded and said firmly, “And I'm not going to, either, because I crossed my heart and hoped to die.”

“Oh, I'm sure you can keep a secret very well,” Gallantyne said. “But I want you to imagine something now. Suppose you, Mary Martha, were in a dangerous situation in a place nobody knew about except you and Jessie. You're frightened and hun­gry and in pain and you want desperately to be rescued. Under those circumstances, wouldn't you release Jessie from her prom­ise to keep the name of that place a secret?”

“I guess so, only there isn't any place like that.”

“But you have other secrets.”

“Yes.”

Gallantyne was watching her gravely. “I believe that if Jessie could communicate with you right now, she'd release you from all your promises.”

“Why can't she
comm
—communicate?”

“Nobody's seen her since last night at ten o'clock. We don't know where she is or why she left or if she left by herself or with someone else.”

In a spasm of fear Mary Martha clutched the cat too tightly. He let out a yowl, unsheathed his claws and fought his way out of her grasp, onto the floor. She stood, very pale and still, one hand pressed to her scratched shoulder. “He hurt me,” she said in a shocked voice. “Sheridan hurt me.”

“I'm sure he didn't mean to.”

“He always means to. I hate him.”

“You can cry if you like,” Gallantyne said. “That might help.”

“No.”

“All right, then, we'll go on. Is that O.K.?”

“I guess so.”

“Did you and Jessie ever talk about running away together? Perhaps just in fun, like,
let's run away and join the circus.”

“That would be plain silly,” she said in a contemptuous voice. “Circuses don't even come here.”

“Times have changed since I was a boy. The only thing that made life bearable when I was mad at my family was the thought of running away and joining the circus. Did Jessie often get mad at her family?”

“Sometimes. Mostly at Mike, her older brother. He bosses her around, he's awfully mean. We think a bad witch put a curse on him when he was born.”

“Really? What kind of curse?”

“I'm not sure. But I made one up that sounds as if it might work.”

“Tell it to me.”

 

“‘Abracadabra,

Purple and green,

This little boy

Will grow up mean.'”

 

“It should be said in a more eerie-like voice, only I don't feel like it right now.”

Gallantyne pursed his lips and nodded. “Sounds pretty au­thentic to me just the way it is. Do you know any more?”

 

“‘Abracadabra,

Yellow and brown,

Uncle Howard's the nastiest

Man in town.'”

 

“That one,” she added anxiously, “isn't so good, is it?”

“Well, it's not so much a curse as a statement. Uncle How­ard's the nastiest man in town, period. By the way, who's Uncle Howard?”

“Mr. Arlington.”

“Why do you think he's so nasty, Mary Martha?”

“I don't. I only talked to him once and he was real nice. He gave me fifty cents.”

“Then why did you make up the curse about him?”

“Jessie asked me to. We were going to make up curses about all the people we hate and she wanted to start with Uncle—with Mr. Arlington.”

“Who was next on the list?”

“Nobody. We got tired of the game, and anyway my mother came to pick me up.”

“I wonder,” Gallantyne said softly, “why Jessie felt that way about Mr. Arlington. Do you have any idea?”

“No, sir. That was the first day she ever told me, when we were at the playground with Mike.”

“What day was that?”

“The day my mother and I went downtown to Mac's office.”

“Thursday,” Mac said.

Gallantyne thanked him with a nod and turned his attention back to Mary Martha. “Previous to Thursday, you thought Jessie and the Arlingtons were good friends?”

“Yes, on account of the Arlingtons were always giving her presents and making a big fuss over her.”

“Both of the Arlingtons?”

“Well—” Mary Martha studied the toes of her shoes. “Well, I guess it was mostly Aunt Virginia, him being away so much on the road. But Jessie never said anything against him until Thursday.”

“Let's assume that something happened, on Wednesday per­haps, that changed her opinion of him. Did you see Jessie on Wednesday?”

“Yes, I went over to her house and we sat on the porch steps and talked.”

“What about?”

“Lots of things.”

“Name one.”

“The book Aunt Virginia gave her. It was all about glaciers and mountains and rivers and wild things. It sounded real inter­esting. Only Jessie had to give it back because it cost too much money and her parents wouldn't let her keep it.
My
mother,” she added virtuously, “won't let me accept anything. When Sheridan sends me parcels, I'm not even allowed to peek inside. She sends them right back or throws them away, bang, into the garbage can.”

Gallantyne looked at the cat. “I gather you're referring to another Sheridan, not this one.”

“Cats can't send parcels,” Mary Martha said with a faint giggle. “That's silly. They don't have any money and they can't wrap things or write any name and address on the outside.”

Gallantyne thought, wearily, of the anonymous letter. He'd been up all night, first with the Brants and Mrs. Arlington, and later in the police lab examining the letter. He was sure now that it had been written by a man, young, literate, and in good physical health. The description fitted hundreds of men in town. The fact that Howard Arlington was one of them meant nothing in itself.

He said, “Mary Martha, you and Jessie spend quite a lot of time at the school grounds, I'm told.”

“Yes. Because of the games and swings and jungle gym.”

“Have you ever noticed anyone watching you?”

“The coach. That's his job.”

“Aside from the coach, have you seen any man hanging around the place, or perhaps the same car parked at the curb several days in a row?”

“No.” Mary Martha gave him a knowing look. “My mother told me all about men like that. They're real nasty and I'm sup­posed to run home right away when I see one of them. Jessie is, too. She's a very good runner.”