The kid was impressed. “How long does it take?”
“No time at all. She heats up to something like three thousand degrees Fahrenheit and nothing lasts long at that temperature.” Will unhooked the cover, raised it up. “You’re just about tall enough to see in there. Enough room for two or three big dogs at a time.”
“I’ll say.”
“You could pretty near fit a pony in there.”
“You sure could,” the kid said. He thought for a moment, still staring down into the oven. “What would happen if you put an animal in there while it was still alive?”
“Now there’s an interesting question,” Will allowed. “Of course I would never do that to an animal.”
“Of course not.”
“Because it would be cruel.”
“Sure, but I was just wondering.”
“But a dirty little lamb-killing brat like you,” he said, talking and moving at the same time, gripping the boy by the scruff of the neck and the seat of the pants and heaving him in one motion into the incinerator, “a brat like you is another story entirely.”
The lid was closing before the kid even thought to scream. When it slammed shut and Will hooked the catch, you could barely hear the boy’s voice. You could tell that he was yelling in terror, and there were also sounds of him kicking at the walls. Of course the big metal box didn’t budge an inch.
“If that isn’t brilliant,” I said.
“I was wondering if you knew what I was leading up to.”
“I didn’t. I followed the psychology but didn’t think it would really work. But this is just perfect.”
“I’m glad you think so.”
“Just perfect. Why, after the scare he’s getting right now, he’ll never want to look at another animal.”
“The scare?” Will’s face had a look on it I had never seen before. “You think all this is to scare him?”
He reached over and threw the switch.
Going Through the Motions
On the way home I had picked up a sack of burgers and fries at the fast-food place near the Interstate off-ramp. I popped a beer, but before I got it poured or the meal eaten I checked my phone answering machine. There was a message from Anson Pollard asking me to call him right away. His voice didn’t sound right, and there was something familiar in what was wrong with it.
I ate a hamburger and drank half a beer, then made the call. He said, “Thank God, Lou. Can you come over here?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Come over and I’ll tell you.”
I went back to the kitchen table, unwrapped a second hamburger, then wrapped it up again. I bagged the food and put it in the fridge, poured the beer down the sink.
The streetlights came on while I was driving across town to his place. No question, the days were getting longer. Not much left of spring. I switched on my headlights and thought how fast the years were starting to go, and how Anson’s voice hadn’t sounded right.
I parked at the head of his big circular driveway. My engine went on coughing for ten or twenty seconds after I cut the ignition. It’ll do that, and the kid at the garage can’t seem to figure out what to do about it. I’d had to buy my own car after the last election, and this had been as good as I could afford. Of course it didn’t settle into that coughing routine until I’d owned it a month, and now it wouldn’t quit.
Anson had the door open before I got to it. “Lou,” he said, and gripped me by the shoulders.
He was only a year older than me, which made him forty-two, but he was showing all those years and more. He was balding and carried too much weight, but that wasn’t what did it. His whole face was drawn and desperate, and I put that together with his tone of voice and knew what I’d been reminded of over the phone. He’d sounded the same way three years ago when Paula died.
“What’s the matter, Anse?”
He shook his head. “Come inside,” he said. I followed him to the room where he kept the liquor. Without asking he poured us each a full measure of straight bourbon. I didn’t much want a drink but I took it and held onto it while he drank his all the way down. He shuddered, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Beth’s been kidnapped,” he said.
“When?”
“This afternoon. She left school at the usual time. She never got home. This was in the mailbox when I got home. It hadn’t gone through the mails. They just stuck it in the box.”
I removed a sheet of paper from the envelope he handed me, unfolded it. Words cut from a newspaper, fastened in place with rubber cement. I brought the paper close to my face and sniffed at it.
He asked me what I was doing. “Sometimes you can tell by the smell when the thing was prepared. The solvent evaporates, so if you can still smell it it’s recent.”
“Does it matter when they prepared the note?”
“Probably not. Force of habit, I guess.” I’d been sheriff for three terms before Wallace Hines rode into office on the governor’s coattails. Old habits die hard.
“I just can’t understand it,” he was saying. “She knew not to get in a stranger’s car. I don’t know how many times I told her.”
“I used to talk about that at school assemblies, Anse. ‘Don’t go with strangers. Don’t accept food or candy from people you don’t know. Cross at corners. Don’t ever play in an old icebox.’ Lord, all the things you have to tell them.”
“I can’t understand it.”
“How old is Bethie?” I’d almost said was, caught myself in time. That would have crushed him. The idea that she might already be dead was one neither of us would voice. It hung in the room like a silent third party to the conversation.
“She’s nine. Ten in August. Lou, she’s all I’ve got in the world, all that’s left to me of Paula. Lou, I’ve got to get her back.”
I looked at the note again. “Says a quarter of a million dollars,” I said.
“I know.”
“Have you got it?”
“I can raise it. I’ll go talk to Jim McVeigh at the bank tomorrow. He doesn’t have to know what I need it for. I’ve borrowed large sums in cash before on a signature loan, for a real estate deal or something like that. He won’t ask too many questions.”
“Says old bills, out of sequence. Nothing larger than a twenty. He’ll fill an order like that and think it’s for real estate?”
He poured himself another drink. I still hadn’t touched mine. “Maybe he’ll figure it out,” he allowed. “He still won’t ask questions. And he won’t carry tales, either.”
“Well, you’re a good customer down there. And a major stockholder, aren’t you?”
“I have some shares, yes.”
I looked at the note, then at him. “Says no police and no FBI,” I said. “What do you think about that?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“Well, you might want to call Wally Hines. They tell me he’s the sheriff.”
“You don’t think much of Hines.”
“Not a whole lot,” I admitted, “but I’m prejudiced on the subject. He doesn’t run the department the way I did. Well, I didn’t do things the way my predecessor did, either. Old Bill Hurley. He probably didn’t think much of me, old Hurley.”
“Should I call Hines?”
“I wouldn’t. It says here they’ll kill her if you do. I don’t know that they’re watching the house, but it wouldn’t be hard for them to know if the sheriff’s office came in on the operation.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what Hines could do, to tell you the truth. You want to pay the ransom?”
“Of course I do.”
“Hines could maybe set up a stakeout, catch the kidnapper when he picks up the ransom. But they generally don’t release the victim until after they get away clean with the ransom.” If ever, I thought. “Now as far as the FBI is concerned, they know their job. They can look at the note and figure out what newspaper the words came from, where the paper was purchased, the envelope, all of t
hat. They’ll dust for fingerprints and find mine and yours, but I don’t guess the kidnapper’s were on here in the first place. What you might want to do, you might want to call the Bureau as soon as you get Bethie back. They’ve got the machinery and the know-how to nail those boys afterward.”
“But you wouldn’t call them until then?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Not that I’m going to tell you what to do or not to do, but I wouldn’t do it myself. Not if it were my little girl.”
We talked about some things. He poured another drink and I finally got around to sipping at the one he’d poured me when I first walked in. We’d been in that same room three years ago, drinking the same brand of whiskey. He’d managed to hold himself together through Paula’s funeral, and after everybody else cleared out and Bethie was asleep he and I settled in with a couple of bottles. Tonight I would take it easy on the booze, but that night three years ago I’d matched him drink for drink.
Out of the blue he said, “She could have been, you know.” I missed the connection. “Could have been your little girl,” he explained. “Bethie could have. If you’d have married Paula.”
“If your grandmother had wheels she’d be a tea cart.”
“ ‘But she’d still be your grandmother.’ Isn’t that what we used to say? You could have married Paula.”
“She had too much sense for that.” Though the cards might have played that way, if Anson Pollard hadn’t come along. Now Paula was three years dead, dead of anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, if you can believe it. And the woman I’d married, and a far cry from Paula she was, had left me and gone to California. I heard someone say that the Lord took the United States by the state of Maine and lifted, so that everything loose wound up in Southern California. Well, she was and she did, and now Anse and I were a couple of solitary birds going long in the tooth. Take away thirty pounds and a few million dollars and a nine-year-old girl with freckles and you’d be hard-pressed to tell us apart.
Take away a nine-year-old girl with freckles. Somebody’d done just that.
“You’ll see me through this,” he said. “Won’t you, Lou?”
“If it’s what you want.”
“I wish to hell you were still sheriff. The voters of this county never had any sense.”
“Maybe it’s better that I’m not. This way I’m just a private citizen, nobody for the kidnappers to get excited about.”
“I want you to work for me after this is over.”
“Well, now.”
“We can work out the details later. By God, I should have hired you the minute the election results came in. I figured we knew each other too well, we’d been through too much together. But you can do better working for me than you’re doing now, and I can use you, I know I can. We’ll talk about it later.”
“We’ll see.”
“Lou, we’ll get her back, won’t we?”
“Sure we will, Anse. Of course we will.”
Well, you have to go through the motions. There was no phone call that night. If the victim’s alive they generally make a call and let you hear their voice. On tape, maybe, but reading that day’s newspaper so you can place the recording in time. Any proof they can give you that the person’s alive makes it that much more certain you’ll pay the ransom.
Of course nothing’s hard and fast. Kidnapping’s an amateur crime and every fool who tries it has to make up his own rules. So it didn’t necessarily prove anything that there was no call.
I hung around, waiting it out with him. He hit the bourbon pretty hard but he was always a man who could take on a heavy load without showing it much. Somewhere along the way I went into the kitchen and made a pot of coffee.
A little past midnight I said, “I don’t guess there’s going to be a call tonight, Anse. I’m gonna head for home.”
He wanted me to stay over. He had reasons—in case there was a call in the middle of the night, in case something called for action. I told him he had my number and he could call me at any hour. What we both knew is his real reason was he didn’t want to be alone there, and I thought about staying with him and decided I didn’t want to. The hours were just taking too long to go by, and I didn’t figure I’d get a good night’s sleep under his roof.
I drove right on home. I kept it under the speed limit because I didn’t want one of Wally Hines’s eager beavers coming up behind me with the siren wailing. They’ll do that now. We hardly ever gave out tickets to local people when I was running the show, just a warning and a soft one at that. We saved the tickets for the leadfoot tourists. Well, another man’s apt to have his own way of doing things.
In my own house I popped a beer and ate my leftover hamburger. It was cold with the grease congealed on it but I was hungry enough to get it down. I could have had something out of Anse’s refrigerator but I hadn’t been hungry while I was there.
I sat in a chair and put on Johnny Carson but didn’t even try to pay attention. I thought how little Bethie was dead and buried somewhere that nobody would likely ever find her. Because that was the way it read, even if it wasn’t what Anse and I dared to say to each other. I sat there and thought how Paula was dead of a bee sting and my wife was on the other side of the continent and now Bethie. Thoughts swirled around in my head like water going down a bathtub drain.
I was up a long while. The television was still on when they were playing the “Star-Spangled Banner,” and I might as well have been watching programs in Japanese for all the sense they made to me.
Somewhere down the line I went to bed.
I was eating a sweet roll and drinking a cup of coffee when he called. There’d been a phone call just moments earlier from the kidnapper, he told me, his voice hoarse with the strain of it all.
“He whispered. I was half asleep, I could barely make out what he was saying. I was afraid to ask him to repeat anything. I was just afraid, Lou.”
“You get everything?”
“I think so. I have to buy a special suitcase, I have to pack it a certain way and chuck it into a culvert at a certain time.” He mentioned some of the specifics. I was only half listening. Then he said, “I asked them to let me talk to Bethie.”
“And?”
“It was as if he didn’t even hear me. He just went on telling me things, and I asked him again and he hung up.”
She was dead and in the ground, I thought.
I said, “He probably made the call from a pay phone. Most likely they’re keeping her at a farmhouse somewhere and he wouldn’t want to chance a trace on the call. He wouldn’t have her along to let her talk, he wouldn’t want to take the chance. And he’d speed up the conversation to keep it from being traced at all.”
“I thought of that, Lou. I just wished I could have heard her voice.”
He’d never hear her voice again, I thought. My mind filled with an image of a child’s broken body on a patch of ground, and a big man a few yards from her, holding a shovel, digging. I blinked my eyes, trying to chase the image, but it just went and hovered there on the edge of thought.
“You’ll hear it soon enough,” I said. “You’ll have her back soon.”
“Can you come over, Lou?”
“Hell, I’m on my way.”
I poured what was left of my coffee down the sink. I took the sweet roll with me, ate it on the way to the car. The sun was up but there was no warmth in it yet.
In the picture I’d had, with the child’s corpse and the man digging, a light rain had been falling. But there’d been no rain yesterday and it didn’t look likely today. A man’s mind’ll do tricky things, fill in details on its own. A scene like that, gloomy and all, it seems like there ought to be rain. So the mind just sketches it in.
On the way to the bank he said, “Lou, I want to hire you.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we can talk about it after Bethie’s back and all this is over, but I’m not even sure I want to stay around town, Anse. I’ve been talking with some people down in Florid
a and there might be something for me down there.”
“I can do better for you than some crackers down in Florida,” he said gruffly. “But I’m not talking about that, I’m talking about now. I want to hire you to help me get Bethie back.”
I shook my head. “You can’t pay me for that, Anson.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because I won’t take the money. Did you even think I would?”
“No. I guess I just wish you would. I’m going to have to lean on you some, Lou. It seems a lot to ask as a favor.”
“It’s not such a much,” I said. “All I’ll be doing is standing alongside you and backing you up.” Going through the motions with you, I thought.
I waited in the car while he went into the bank. I might have played the radio but he’d taken the keys with him. Force of habit, I guess. I just sat and waited.
He didn’t have the money when he came out. “Jim has to make a call or two to get that much cash together,” he explained. “It’ll be ready by two this afternoon.”
“Did he want to know what it was for?”
“I told him I had a chance to purchase an Impressionist painting from a collector who’d had financial reverses. The painting’s provenance was clear but the sale had to be a secret and the payment had to be in cash for tax purposes.”
“That’s a better story than a real estate deal.”
He managed a smile. “It seemed more imaginative. He didn’t question it. We’d better buy that suitcase.”
We parked in front of a luggage and leather goods store on Grandview Avenue. I remembered they’d had a holdup there while I was sheriff. The proprietor had been shot in the shoulder but had recovered well enough. I went in with him and Anson bought a plaid canvas suitcase. The whisperer had described the bag very precisely.
“He’s a fussy son of a bitch,” I said. “Maybe he’s got an outfit he wants it to match.”
Anse paid cash for the bag. On the drive back to his house I said, “What you were saying yesterday, Anse, that Bethie could have been mine. She’s spit and image of you. You’d hardly guess she was Paula’s child.”