The Fiend (29 page)

Perhaps not quite good enough,
Gallantyne thought grimly. “How are you going to recognize these men when you see them?”

“Well, they offer you things like gum or candy or even a doll. Also, a ride in their car.”

“And nothing like this ever happened to you and Jessie?”

“No. We saw a mean-looking man at the playground once, but it was only Timmy's father, who was mad because Timmy missed his appointment at the dentist. Timmy wears braces.”

One corner of Gallantyne's mouth twitched impatiently.
So Timmy wears braces, and he has a mean-looking father and I am getting exactly nowhere.
“Do you know the story of Tom Sawyer, Mary Martha?”

“Our teacher told us some of it in school.”

“Perhaps you remember the cave that was the secret hide-out. Do you and Jessie have somewhere like that? Not a cave, par­ticularly, but a special private place where you can meet or leave notes for each other and things like that?”

“No.”

“Think carefully now. You see, I and a great many other people have been searching for Jessie all night.”

“She wouldn't hide all night,” Mary Martha said thoughtfully. “Not unless she took lots of sandwiches and potato chips along.”

“There's no evidence that she did.”

“Then she's not hiding. She'd be too hungry. Her father says he should get a double tax exemption for her because she eats so much. What's a tax exemption?”

“You'll find out soon enough.” Gallantyne turned to Mac, who was still standing beside the door as if on guard against a sudden intrusion by Kate Oakley. “Have you any questions you'd like to ask her?”

“One or two,” Mac said. “What time did you go to bed last night, Mary Martha?”

“About eight o'clock.”

“That's pretty early for vacation time and daylight saving.”

“My mother and I like to go to bed early and get up early. She doesn't—we don't like the nights.”

“Did you go to sleep right away?”

“I must have. I don't remember doing anything else.”

“That seems like logical reasoning,” Mac said with a wry smile. “Did you get up during the night?”

“No.”

“Not even to go to the bathroom?”

“No, but you're not supposed to talk about things like that in front of strangers,” Mary Martha said severely.

“Lieutenant Gallantyne is a friend of mine.”

“Well, he's not mine or my mother's.”

“Let's see if we can change that,” Gallantyne said. “Ask your mother to come in here, will you?”

“Yes, sir. Only—well, you better not keep her very long.”

“Why not?”

“She might cry, and crying gives her a headache.”

“We mustn't let that happen, must we?”

“No, sir.” Mary Martha executed another of her stiff little curtsies, picked up the cat and departed.

“She's a funny kid,” Gallantyne said. “Is she always like that?”

“With adults. I've never seen her in the company of other children.”

“That's odd. I understand you're the old family friend.”

“I'm the old family friend when things go wrong,” Mac said dryly. “When things are going right, I think I must be the old family enemy.”

“Exactly why did you invite yourself to come with me this morning, Mac?”

“Oh, let's just say I'm curious.”

“Let's not.”

“All right. The truth is that Kate Oakley's a very difficult and very vulnerable woman. Because she is difficult, she can't ask for or accept help the way an ordinary vulnerable person might. So I'm here to lend her moral support. I may criticize her and give her hell occasionally but she knows I'm fond of her.”

“How fond?”

“She's twenty years younger than I am. Does that answer your question?”

“Not quite.”

“Then I'll lay it on the line. There's no secret romance going on between Kate Oakley and myself. I was her father's lawyer when he was alive, and when he died I handled his estate, or rather the lack of it. I am officially Mary Martha's godfather, and unofficially I'm probably Kate's, too. That's the whole story.”

“The story hasn't ended yet,” Gallantyne said carefully. “Surely you're not naïve enough to believe we can write our own endings in this world.”

“We can do a little editing.”

“Don't kid yourself.”

Mac wanted to argue with him but he heard Kate's footsteps in the hall. He wondered what her reaction would have been to Gallantyne's insinuations: shock, displeasure, perhaps even amusement. He could never tell what she was actually thinking. When she was at her gayest, he could feel the sadness in her, and when she was in despair he sensed that it, too, was not real. Everything about her seemed to be hidden, as if at a certain period in her life she had decided to go underground where she would be safe.

He thought about the wild creatures in the canyon behind his house. The foxes, the raccoons, the possums, the chipmunks, they could all be lured out of their winter refuge by the promise of food and the warmth of a spring sun. There was no spring sun for Kate, no hunger that could be satisfied by food. He watched her as she came in, thinking,
what do you want, Kate? Tell me what you want and I'll give it to you if I can.

She hesitated in the doorway, looking as though she were try­ing to decide how to act.

Before she had a chance to decide, Gallantyne spoke to her in a quiet, confident manner, “Please sit down, Mrs. Oakley. We're hoping you'll be able to help us.”

“I hope so, too. I was—I'm very fond of Jessie. If anything's happened to her, it will be a terrible blow to Mary Martha. Do you suppose it could have been a kidnaping?”

“There's no evidence of it. The Brants are barely getting by financially, and they've received no ransom demand. We're pretty well convinced that Jessie walked out of the house volun­tarily.”

“How can you know that for sure?”

“There were no signs of a struggle in Jessie's bedroom, the Arlington's dog didn't bark as he certainly would have if he'd heard a stranger, and the back door was unlocked. It's one of the new kinds of lock built into the knob—push the knob and it locks, pull and it unlocks. We think Jessie unlocked the door, accidentally or on purpose, when she went out. I'm inclined to believe that she unlocked it deliberately with the intention of re­turning to the house. Someone, or something, interfered with that intention.”

He paused to light a cigarette, cupping his hands around the match as though he were outside on a windy day. “We'll as­sume, then, that she left the house under her own power and for a reason we don't know yet. The two likeliest places she might have gone are the Arlingtons' next door, or this house. Mrs. Arlington claims she didn't see her and you claim you didn't.”

“Of course I didn't,” she said stiffly. “I would have phoned her mother immediately.”

“What I want you to consider now is the possibility that she might somehow have gotten into the house without your seeing her, that she might have hidden some place and fallen asleep.”

“There's no such possibility.”

“You seem very sure.”

“I am. This house is Sheridan-proof. My ex-husband acquired the cunning habit of breaking in during my absences and helping himself to whatever he fancied—liquor, furniture, silver, and more liquor. I had a special lock put on every door and window. When I go out or retire for the night, I check them all. It would be as much as my life is worth to miss any of them.”

“Jessie knew about these locks, of course?”

“Yes. She asked me about them. It puzzled her that a house should have to be secured against a husband and father. . . . No, Lieutenant, Jessie could never have entered this house without my letting her in.”

That leaves the Arlingtons,
he thought,
or someone on the street between here and the Arlingtons' house.
“Would you call Jessie a shy child, Mrs. Oakley?”

“No. She has—had quite a free and easy manner with peo­ple.”

“Does that include strangers?”

“It included everyone.”

“Have you had any strangers hanging around here recently?”

She gave Mac a quick, questioning look. He responded with a nod that indicated he'd already told Gallantyne about the man in the green coupé.

“Yes,” she said, “but I never connected him with Jessie or Mary Martha.”

“Do you now?”

“I don't know. It seems odd that he'd show himself so openly if he were planning anything against Jessie or Mary Martha.”

“Perhaps he wasn't actually planning anything, he was merely waiting. And when Jessie walked out of that house by herself, she provided what he was waiting for, an opportunity.”

A spot of color, dime-sized, appeared suddenly on her throat and began expanding, up to her ear tips, down into the neckline of her dress. The full realization of Jessie's fate seemed to be spreading throughout her system like poison dye. “It could just as easily have been Mary Martha instead of Jessie. Is that what you're telling me?”

“Think about it.”

“I won't. It's unthinkable. Mary Martha wouldn't leave the house without my permission, and she'd certainly never enter the car of a strange man.”

“Some pretty powerful inducements can be offered a child her age who's lonely and has affection going to waste. A puppy, for instance, or a kitten—”

“No, no!” But even the sound of her own voice shouting de­nials could not convince her. She knew the lieutenant was right. She knew that Mary Martha had left the house without permis­sion just a few nights before. She'd run over to Jessie's using the short cut across the creek. Suppose she'd gone out the front, the way she often did. The man had been parked across the street at that very moment. “No, no,” she repeated. “I've taught Mary Martha what it took me years of torment to learn, that you can't trust men, you can't believe them. They're liars, cheats, bullies. Mary Martha already knows that. She won't have to find it out the hard way as I did, as Jessie—”

“Be quiet, Kate,” Mac said in a warning tone. “The lieutenant is too busy to listen to your theories this morning.”

She didn't even glance in his direction. “Poor Jessie, poor misguided child with all her prattle about her wonderful father. She believed it, and that fool mother of hers actually encouraged her to believe it even though she must have been aware what was going on.”

Gallantyne raised his brows. “And what was going on, Mrs. Oakley?”

“Plenty.”

“Who was involved?”

“I must caution you, Kate,” Mac said, “not to make any state­ments you're not able and willing to substantiate.”

“In other words, I'm to shut up?”

“Until you've consulted your attorney.”

“All my attorney ever does for me is tell me to shut up.”

“Rumors and gossip are not going to solve this case.”

“No, but they might help,” Gallantyne said mildly. “Now, you were going to give me some new information about Jessie's father.”

Kate looked from Gallantyne to Mac, then back to Gallan­tyne, as if she were trying to decide which one of them was the lesser evil. “It can hardly be called new. It goes back to Adam. Brant's a man and he's been availing himself of the privilege, deceiving his wife, cheating his children out of their birthright. Oh, he puts on a good front, almost as good as Sheridan when he's protesting his great love for Mary Martha.”

“You're implying that Brant is having an affair with another woman?”

“Yes.”

“Who is she?”

“Virginia Arlington.”

Both men were watching her, Mac painfully, Gallantyne with cool suspicion.

“It's true,” she added, clenching her fists. “I can't prove it, I don't have pictures of them in bed together. But I know it's a fact.”

“Facts, Mrs. Oakley, are often what we choose to believe.”

“I have nothing against Mrs. Arlington, I have no reason for wanting to believe bad things about her. She's probably just a victim like me, hoodwinked by a man, taken in by his promises. Oh, you should have heard Sheridan in the heyday of his prom­ises.... But then you very likely know all about promises, Lieu­tenant. I bet you've made lots of them.”

“A few.”

“And they weren't kept?”

“Some weren't.”

“That makes you a liar, doesn't it, Lieutenant? No better than the rest of them—”

“Please be quiet, Kate,” Mac said. “You're not doing yourself any good or Jessie any good.”