Otherworldly Maine (5 page)

“Fact is, Harp, I kind of pulled a muscle in my back coming up here. Not getting no younger neither. I believe I'll just look around here a little. Trust you got no objection? To me looking around a little?”

“Coffee's dripped,” I said.

“Thing of it is, if I'd've thought you had any objection, I'd've been obliged to get me a warrant.”

“Thanks, Ben.” Harp gulped the coffee scalding. “Why, if looking around the house is the best you can do, Sher'f, I got no objection. Ben, I shouldn't be keeping you away from your affairs, but would you stay? Kind of keep him company? Not that I got much in the house, but still—you know—”

“I'll stay.” I wished I could tell him to drop that manner; it only got him deeper in the mud.

Robart handed Davidson his gun belt and holster. “Better have it, Curt, so to be in style.”

Harp and Bill were outside getting on their snowshoes; I half heard some remark of Harp's about the sheriff's aching back. They took off. The snow had almost ceased. They passed out of sight down the slope to the north, and Curt went plowing after them. Behind me Robart said, “You'd think Harp believed it himself.”

“That's how it's to be? You make us both liars before you've even done any looking?”

“I got to try to make sense of it is all.” I followed him up to the bedroom. It was cruelly cold. He touched Droopy's stiff corpse with his foot. “Hard to figure a man killing his own dog.”

“We get nowhere with that kind of idea.”

“Ben, you got to see this thing like it looks to other people. And keep out of my hair.”

“That's what scares me, Jack. Something unreasonable did happen, and Harp and I were the only ones to experience it—except Mrs. Ryder.”

“You claim you saw this—animal?”

“I didn't say that. I heard her scream. When we got upstairs this room was the way you see it.” I looked around, and again couldn't find that scrap of fur, but I spoke of it, and I give Robart credit for searching. He shook out the bedspread and blankets, examined the floor and the closet. He studied the window space, leaned out for a look at the house wall and the shed roof. His big feet avoided the broken glass, and he squatted for a long gaze at the pieces of window sash. Then he bore down on me, all policemen personified, a massive, rather intelligent, conventionally honest man with no patience for imagination, no time for any fact not already in the books. “Piece of fur, huh?” He made it sound as if I'd described a jabberwock with eyes of flame. “Okay, we're done up here.” He motioned me downstairs—all policemen who'd ever faced a crowd's dangerous stupidity with their own.

As I retreated I said, “Hope you won't be too busy to have a chemist test the blood on that sash.”

“We'll do that.” He made move-along motions with his slab hands. “Going to be a pleasure to do that little thing for you and your friend.”

Then he searched the entire house, shed, barn, and stable. I had never before watched anyone on police business; I had to admire his zeal. I got involved in the farce of holding the flashlight for him while he rooted in the cellar. In the shed I suggested that if he wanted to restack twenty-odd cords of wood he'd better wait till Harp could help him; he wasn't amused. He wasn't happy in the barn loft, either. Shifting tons of hay to find a hypothetical corpse was not a one-man job. I knew he was capable of returning with a crew and machinery to do exactly that. And by his lights it was what he ought to do. Then we were back in the kitchen, Robart giving himself a manicure with his jackknife, and I down to my last cigarette, almost the last of my endurance.

Robart was not unsubtle. I answered his questions as temperately as I could—even, for instance: “Wasn't you a mite sweet on Leda yourself?” I didn't answer any of them with flat silence; to do that right you need an accompanying act like spitting in the stove, and I'm not a chewer. From the north window he said: “Comin' back. It figures.” They had been out a little over an hour.

Harp stood by the stove with me to warm his hands. He spoke as if alone with me: “No trail, Ben.” What followed came in an undertone: “Ben, you told me about a friend of yours, scientist or something, professor—”

“Professor Malcolm?” I remembered mentioning him to Harp a long while before; I was astonished at his recalling it. Johnny Malcolm is a professor of biology who has avoided too much specialization. Not a really close friend. Harp was watching me out of a granite despair as if he had asked me to appeal to some higher court. I thought of another acquaintance in Boston, too, whom I might consult—Dr. Kahn, a psychiatrist who had once seen my wife Helen through a difficult time . . . .

“Harp,” said Robart, “I got to ask you a couple, three things. I sent word to Dick Hammond to get that god damn plow of his into this road as quick as he can. Believe he'll try. Whiles we wait on him, we might's well talk. You know I don't like to get tough.”

“Talk away,” said Harp, “only Ben here, he's got to get home without waiting on no Dick Hammond.”

“That a fact, Ben?”

“Yes. I'll keep in touch.”

“Do that,” said Robart, dismissing me. As I left he was beginning a fresh manicure, and Harp waited rigidly for the ordeal to continue. I felt morbidly that I was abandoning him.

Still—corpus delicti—nothing much more would happen until Leda Ryder was found. Then if her body were found dead by violence, with no acceptable evidence of Longtooth's existence—well, what then?

I don't think Robart would have let me go if he'd known my first act would be to call Short's brother Mike and ask him to drive me in to Lohman where I could get a bus for Boston.

Johnny Malcolm said, “I can see this is distressing you, and you wouldn't lie to me. But, Ben, as biology it won't do. Ain't no such animal. You know that.”

He wasn't being stuffy. We were having dinner at a quiet restaurant, and I had of course enjoyed the roast duckling too much. Johnny is a rock-ribbed beanpole who can eat like a walking famine with no regrets. “Suppose,” I said, “just for argument and because it's not biologically inconceivable, that there's a basis for the Yeti legend.”

“Not inconceivable. I'll give you that. So long as any poorly known corners of the world are left—the Himalayan uplands, jungles, tropic swamps, the tundra—legends will persist and some of them will have little gleams of truth. You know what I think about moon flights and all that?” He smiled; privately I was hearing Leda scream. “One of our strongest reasons for them, and for the bigger flights we'll make if we don't kill civilization first, is a hunt for new legends. We've used up our best ones, and that's dangerous.”

“Why don't we look at the countries inside us?” But Johnny wasn't listening much.

“Men can't stand it not to have closed doors and a chance to push at them. Oh, about your Yeti—he might exist. Shaggy anthropoid able to endure severe cold, so rare and clever the explorers haven't tripped over him yet. Wouldn't have to be a carnivore to have big ugly canines—look at the baboons. But if he was active in a Himalayan winter, he'd have to be able to use meat, I think. Mind you, I don't believe any of this, but you can have it as a biological not-impossible. How'd he get to Maine?”

“Strayed? Tibet—Mongolia—Arctic ice.”

“Maybe.” Johnny had begun to enjoy the hypothesis as something to play with during dinner. Soon he was helping along the brute's passage across the continents, and having fun till I grumbled something about alternatives, extraterrestrials. He wouldn't buy that, and got cross. Still hearing Leda scream, I assured him I wasn't watching for little green men.

“Ben, how much do you know about this—Harp?”

“We grew up along different lines, but he's a friend. Dinosaur, if you like, but a friend.”

“Hardshell Maine bachelor picks up dizzy young wife—”

“She's not dizzy. Wasn't. Sexy, but not dizzy.”

“All right. Bachelor stewing in his own juices for years. Sure he didn't get up on that roof himself?”

“Nuts. Unless all my senses were more paralyzed than I think, there wasn't time.”

“Unless they were more paralyzed than you think.”

“Come off it! I'm not senile yet . . . What's he supposed to have done with her? Tossed her into the snow?”

“Mph,” said Johnny, and finished his coffee. “All right. Some human freak with abnormal strength and the endurance to fossick around in a Maine blizzard stealing women. I liked the Yeti better. You say you suggested a madman to Ryder yourself. Pity if you had to come all the way here just so I could repeat your own guesswork. To make amends, want to take in a bawdy movie?”

“Love it.”

The following day Dr. Kahn made time to see me at the end of the afternoon, so polite and patient that I felt certain I was keeping him from his dinner. He seemed undecided whether to be concerned with the traumas of Harp Ryder's history or those of mine. Mine were already somewhat known to him. “I wish you had time to talk all this out to me. You've given me a nice summary of what the physical events appear to have been, but—”

“Doctor,” I said, “it
happened
. I heard the animal. The window
was
smashed—ask the sheriff. Leda Ryder did scream, and when Harp and I got up there together, the dog had been killed and Leda was gone.”

“And yet, if it was all as clear as that, I wonder why you thought of consulting me at all, Ben. I wasn't there. I'm just a headshrinker.”

“I wanted . . . Is there any way a delusion could take hold of Harp
and
me, disturb our senses in the same way? Oh, just saying it makes it ridiculous.”

Dr. Kahn smiled. “Let's say, difficult.”

“Is it possible Harp could have killed her, thrown her out through the window of the
west
bedroom—the snow must have drifted six feet or higher on that side—and then my mind distorted my time sense? So I might've stood there in the dark kitchen all the time it went on, a matter of minutes instead of seconds? Then he jumped down by the shed roof, came back into the house the normal way while I was stumbling upstairs? Oh, hell.”

Dr. Kahn had drawn a diagram of the house from my description, and peered at it with placid interest. “Benign” was a word Helen had used for him. He said, “Such a distortion of the time sense would be unusual . . . Are you feeling guilty about anything?”

“About standing there and doing nothing? I can't seriously believe it was more than a few seconds. Anyway that would make Harp a monster out of a detective story. He's not that. How could he count on me to freeze in panic? Absurd. I'd've heard the struggle, steps, the window of the west room going up. Could he have killed her and I known all about it at the time, even witnessed it, and then suffered amnesia for that one event?”

He still looked so patient I wished I hadn't come. “I won't say any trick of the mind is impossible, but I might call that one highly improbable. Academically, however, considering your emotional involvement—”

“I'm not emotionally involved!” I yelled that. He smiled, looking much more interested. 1 laughed at myself. That was better than poking him in the eye. “I'm upset, Doctor, because the whole thing goes against reason. If you start out knowing nobody's going to believe you, it's all messed up before you open your mouth.”

He nodded kindly. He's a good joe. I think he'd stopped listening for what 1 didn't say long enough to hear a little of what I did say. “You're not unstable, Ben. Don't worry about amnesia. The explanation, perhaps some human intruder, will turn out to be within the human norm. The norm of possibility does include such things as lycanthropic delusions, maniacal behavior, and so on Your police up there will carry on a good search for the poor woman. They won't overlook that snowdrift. Don't underestimate them, and don't worry about your own mind, Ben.”

“Ever seen our Maine woods?”

“No, I go away to the Cape.”

“Try it some time. Take a patch of it, say about fifty miles by fifty, that's twenty-five hundred square miles. Drop some eager policemen into it, tell 'em to hunt for something they never saw before and don't want to see, that doesn't want to be found.”

“But if your beast is human, human beings leave traces. Bodies aren't easy to hide, Ben.”

“In those woods? A body taken by a carnivorous animal? Why not?” Well, our minds didn't touch. I thanked him for his patience and got up. “The maniac responsible,” I said. “But whatever we call him, Doctor, he was
there
.”

Mike Short picked me up at the Lohman bus station, and told me something of a ferment in Darkfield. I shouldn't have been surprised. “They're all scared, Mr. Dane. They want to hurt somebody.” Mike is Jim Short's younger brother. He scrapes up a living with his taxi service and occasional odd jobs at the garage. There's a droop in his shaggy ringlets, and I believe thirty is staring him in the face. “Like old Harp he wants to tell it like it happened and nobody buys. That's sad, man. You been away what, three days? The fuzz was pissed off. You better connect with Mister Sheriff Robart like soon. He climbed all over my ass just for driving you to the bus that day, like I should've known you shouldn't.”

“I'll pacify him. They haven't found Mrs. Ryder?”

Mike spat out the car window, which was rolled down for the mild air. “Old Harp he never got such a job of snow-shoveling done in all his days. By the c'munity, for free. No, they won't find her.” In that there was plenty of I-want-to-be-asked, and something more, a hint of the mythology of Mike's generation.

“So what's your opinion, Mike?”

He maneuvered a fresh cigarette against the stub of the last and drove on through tiresome silence. The road was winding between ridged mountains of plowed, rotting snow. I had the window down on my side, too, for the genial afternoon sun, and imagined a tang of spring. At last Mike said, “You prob'ly don't go along . . . Jim got your ca' out, by the way. It's at your place . . . Well, you'll hear 'em talking it all to pieces. Some claim Harp's telling the truth. Some say he killed her himself. They don't say how he made her disappear. Ain't heard any talk against you, Mr. Dane, nothing that counts. The sheriff's peeved, but that's just on account you took off without asking.” His vague, large eyes watched the melting landscape, the ambiguous messages of spring. “Well, I think, like, a demon took her, Mr. Dane. She was one of his own, see? You got to remember, I knew that chick. Okay, you can say it ain't scientific, only there is a science to these things, I read a book about it. You can laugh if you want.”