Cornered! (4 page)

Ann Burley had awakened that morning with a premonition of disaster.

The day was like any other winter’s day on a farm outside Arrow Junction. The snow was falling, and a lot of snow fell on Arrow Junction in the winter of every year. The wind and cold and amount of snow were reaching blizzard proportions. But there had always been blizzards in Arrow Junction’s history. Snow, cold and wind. The flat barrenness of the country and the old, inadequate farmhouse. It was pretty much like any other winter’s day.

But at midmorning, when she was alone in the small house, Ann had opened herself to a self-examination more intense than any she’d ever committed before. It was an effort to recheck the events that might have led her to this premonition of disaster.

She had started in this world twenty-seven years ago, an only child of parents spread vastly in age. Her father was already middle-aged when she was born, her mother barely twenty. As she grew older her mother seemed to want to grow younger. But her father continued to want to ease into a restful twilight of old age. Her parents convivially separated when she was seventeen. Ann chose to distribute her affections equally by going away to school. Her father remained in Sacramento, her mother moved to Los Angeles.

She spent two years at college in Santa Barbara. When she went to work in San Francisco at nineteen, she was extraordinarily pretty. She worked first in an insurance office on Sansome Street, then in an advertising agency on Montgomery Street.

It was a smooth transition from girl to woman. There were impersonal visits with her father in Sacramento. The variance in their ages created a chasm, yet the relationship was always pleasant.

The time with her mother was spent absorbing the gush of her mother’s emotion, her silliness, her attempted deception of time. She had begun to realize the foolishness of her mother.

Yet Ann’s life was smooth. Her beauty saw to that. The male attendance was vast. She did not fall truly in love. The emotions she experienced were but infatuations which started quickly and ended just as quickly. She simply enjoyed life, a fast clear-running river of activity and work. That she might have viewed marriage with suspicion as the result of her own parents’ debacle did not consciously enter her mind.

So went her existence. Until that chance moment when she’d walked along her street in the dusk and saw one man kill another, and the river had gone to rapids, cascading into dangerous and deadly currents.

It was a chance incident. She had never heard of Tony Fearon. But she plainly saw him kill a man that evening: stepping forth from a large black car, firing at the man standing before one of the white houses built flush on a steep San Francisco street. She saw him kill and flee in the heavy black car.

It made no difference to her the reasons behind Tony Fearon’s reason to kill. The thing had been done and she’d seen it. She’d reported it and become a part of it. The river had run into rocks, and the river was her life.

The trial was a blur. Gambling was at the bottom of it. Tony Fearon headed one group or syndicate, and the slain man had moved in.

But that made no difference to Ann. All that did matter was that she had witnessed the murder and had the obligation of swearing in court to what she saw. Tony Fearon was convicted, judged guilty and sentenced to death. Despite endless and desperate legal maneuvering the sentence had held. But Tony Fearon had, that day of sentencing, promised loudly that he would know the destruction of this girl who had sounded his death knell…

That had been over a year ago. Now the end was approaching. The date for Tony Fearon’s final breath was coming near. Ann had been running ever since the end of that trial. But where had she run? And what good had it done? That morning, she asked herself exactly that.

It was a day like any other winter’s day on a farm outside Arrow Junction.

You could look across the farmyard and see the snow lying white and new on the ground and on the sheds and on the roof of the barn beyond. In the snowless days the farmhouse and the sheds and the barn were ugly to the eyes with their weather-gray nakedness. But now the snow was a bright and fancy decorator. Yet, snow or not, Ann had not really complained since she married Ted Burley eleven months ago. There had been plenty of reasons. But she had tenaciously ignored these reasons, telling herself steadily that she had not married Ted Burley solely to escape the threat of Tony Fearon in the anonymity of Arrow Junction…

Ted Burley had arisen that early morning from the cot bed he’d chosen to sleep in almost from the start of their marriage. The cot had been Ted Burley’s since he’d been four years old. From the second bed in the room, the large iron-framed bed that had been used by Ted Burley’s parents before they died and left him the farm, Ann watched her husband arise. Ted Burley walked heavily into the kitchen, his shoulders hulking beneath the fabric of long underwear. He put on a pair of overall pants and started a large pot of coffee.

Ann got up then too, looking at the alarm clock to realize there were still fifteen minutes before their normal time to arise. She switched off the alarm lever and put on a wool robe over her flannel pajamas. She stopped in the living room to light the stove and followed her husband into the kitchen.

“I would have gotten the coffee ready.”

“I’ve already done it.” Ted Burley walked to the back door and looked sourly through the top frame of glass at the still-dark morning.

“You got up before the alarm again.”

“Said I would last night.”

Ann knew he’d said no such thing, but she did not argue. “What would you like? Scrambled eggs? Bacon?”

“Yes,” he said, and there was almost a pouting tone to his voice.

“All right, Ted,” she said gently. She did not yet like to admit that talking to him as she would a child was something required. She had thought when she met him in Omaha that he was a very strong man. She set the kitchen table and poured beaten eggs into a frying pan. “Sit down, Ted. It’ll be ready in a minute.”

“I wish you’d quit nagging me.” He remained standing at the kitchen door, staring out grimly.

She started to retort, then did not. Her mind this morning kept switching back to her father. She’d had a dream that something horrible had happened to him and awakened in the middle of the night in a bath of terrified sweat, seeing his face smashed and bloody. It was a foolish dream, but the memory still sent her blood cold.

She placed bacon and scrambled eggs on Ted’s plate. “There you are. I don’t mean to nag.”

Silently he sat down and began eating. She poured a cup of coffee for each of them and sat down across from him.

“You going to eat or not?” he asked.

“When you’ve finished. I wanted to get yours ready right away.”

“Easy life, isn’t it? I got to eat on the run and go out and work my hands down to a nub. You haven’t anything else to do but eat breakfast whenever you feel like it.”

“Don’t be mean, Ted.”

“I’m not. I give you a good life. Maybe it isn’t good enough for you though? Maybe you liked it better in Omaha?”

“Ted, why all this—” She spread her hands. “Eleven months! It still ought to be a honeymoon, and we don’t even—”

“You shut up about that, do you hear? I told you once. I won’t any more!”

“Ted—”

“I mean it! I know what you’re talking about! Take a filthy mind to think about that all the time. Where’d you get that mind of yours? Where’d you learn to think about that all the time?”

“Can’t you understand? There’s nothing filthy about a man and wife—”

“I told you!” he said menacingly.

She looked at the vivid flush of his face. For the first time since that memorable moment of their first night together in this house or anywhere, she thought he might hit her again. She had a fleeting thought of Dr. Hugh Stewart. She had a strange impulse to get up suddenly and flee to him for protection.

But Ted Burley did not hit her. He’d done that just once so far, and that had been after their first night of married love. That night Ann had found out a lot about Ted Burley.

She did not know Ted Burley when she married him. Their courtship had been only a month long. He’d come to Omaha from the farm, a lonely man who needed her desperately, he’d told her. He’d been thirty-one and large and, even in his wind-burned and raw-boned look, handsome enough. He’d seemed to Ann as capable and strong as her idealistic concept of a noble frontiersman.

But she was on the run. She’d left San Francisco and gone to her father in Sacramento because she did not trust her mother with the knowledge of where she was. Only her father knew that she’d dyed her hair from dark brown to blond, that she’d then gone to Omaha and assumed a new name of Brown. Only her father had her Omaha address. He had not written to her since she’d got married. She had not written to him.

On the run, she had chosen what seemed solid protection in the form of Ted Burley.

She’d met him at the Stockyards Exchange where she’d gotten a job as a secretary. He’d come once on business, then returned again and again. Suddenly they were married. And Ann had gone home with him to the farmhouse outside Arrow Junction and the bed of his mother and father.

It was there, eager with a love she was certain was real, that Ann found that, despite his large size and rugged look, Ted Burley was but a prudish child.

She’d sensed his nervousness and had thought it was simply a strong man’s hidden shyness. So she’d done the advancing, and he’d been caught up by it, driven to a wild emotion. She’d willingly accepted the drive of it, no matter how brutal and selfish. When it was over he hit her.

She did not understand, and he didn’t care that she didn’t. He’d left her alone. His soul having been exposed, he seemed to hate her. He slept in his child’s bed that night; he’d slept there ever since. For weeks on end he would contain his emotion, then he would unleash it as though he were using a whip on her. Then the same withdrawal again. She began to understand more about the child within the man’s exterior. But she could not mature the spirit of him…

“Don’t like my bacon so damn well done,” he said.

“I tried to do it the way you like.”

“Maybe you don’t know how to do anything the way I like. Maybe it’s too bad you’re here and Ma isn’t. She knew everything there was to know.”

He stood up and disappeared into the parlor. He reappeared dressed and shoved his thick arms through the sleeves of a heavy mackinaw. “You going to town today?”

“I’d planned on it.”

“Well, I don’t have chains on the sedan yet. I didn’t count on that today. I got to go clear over to Webster in the truck in this damn storm.”

“If I knew how, Ted—”

He laughed harshly. “You couldn’t do anything in this world if I didn’t watch you. And I don’t have time to be teaching you how to put chains on a car! I’ll do it myself.”

She looked at him in honest wonderment. Then she said, “Did your mother know how, Ted?”

“Sure she did! She did it lots of times!”

She examined him closely, nodding.

“Got to get going,” he said, pulling a wool-lined cap over his hair, unfolding the flaps down over his ears. “See you try to keep from getting sassy with every man in town, do you hear?”

Her examination of him turned from curiosity to amazement. For a moment she was ready to laugh. He’d only started this kind of thing recently. She could still not believe he was serious. But he was, she saw, dead serious.

“Ted, you don’t honestly believe that I—”

“Damn, yes!” He left the house, slamming the door against a gust of snow-driven winter wind.

By midmorning over coffee she had become entirely introspective. And she had again allowed her feeling of fear to be felt fully. She thought of how Tony Fearon must be sitting in his cell right now, dreaming, she was certain, of how it would be when he knew she was dead, just as he’d threatened…

Shortly after that she got into the old sedan that Ted had readied earlier with chains. She drove into Arrow Junction and parked outside the Arrow Junction General Store.

She walked inside and saw Dr. Hugh Stewart. When they exchanged smiles, something warm and strange happened to her. It was a feeling of having seen someone truly familiar again, as though suddenly everyone in this community including Ted had become strangers—everyone except herself and Hugh Stewart.

She walked down the length of the counter, noticing Charlie Bacon, then Bob Saywell as he came around the end of the counter.

At that moment George Herbert had burst into the store and announced what had happened in Corly Adams’s service station that morning. Ann could not be certain. But it seemed exactly what she had been waiting for—a positive sign that death was approaching on the run.

The trouble in Graintown could have been the result of any two hoodlums, any pair of bandits. But the premonition in Ann Burley, as she fainted, had become an engulfing terror.

When Dr. Hugh Stewart drove Ann
Burley home at midday, Bob Saywell immediately prepared to make his trip through the storm to Graintown and the public library. As Bob Saywell passed the Burley farmhouse and noted the automobile of Dr. Hugh Stewart parked in the farmyard, Billy Quirter was on his way to the railroad yards.

Billy was cold. But he moved with a deadly determination. He ran from the back of a woodshed through a grove of elms and oaks. The wind whipped at him, slicing through with its cold to the inside of his bones. The snow now was like fine white sand, granular, stinging when it struck Billy’s freezing face. But Billy darted relentlessly from cover to cover.

The railroad yards were on the northeast edge of Graintown. At the east end was the train depot. Outside the depot, the tracks moved westward a short distance to the switch-offs for the cattle and hog pens on the tip-end of Graintown’s small stockyards. At that point lay two alternate tracks that carried the stock cars to the loading chutes. Two boxcars stood here in unused snowy solitude waiting for some future loading of beef or pork.

Billy Quirter made it to one of those boxcars, shoved a door open with hands grown numb with cold, and crawled inside. The cold had frozen out the smell of livestock and had, in fact, sterilized the interior with the freezing temperature. This was fortunate for Billy, because Billy hated filth desperately. Billy closed the door. From a corner he picked up a ragged blanket left by a previous transient, shook it, then wrapped himself and crouched in one corner out of the raging wind and snow to wait until he heard the sound of a train on the main tracks.

He did not know it, but he would have to wait most of the afternoon. Besides the snow-clearing engine, there were but two trains going through Graintown; the 7:30 in the morning going west, and the 4:07 in the afternoon heading east in the direction of Arrow Junction.

Despite his discomfort Billy was patient. The blanket stopped most of his shaking. He actually felt a kind of pleasure in this silent waiting, with a good view of the boxcar’s sliding door. His gun was warm in his hand beneath the blanket. He could easily kill the first thing that came through that door.

Ann Burley, that afternoon, found herself in a deeper emotional crisis than she had ever dreamed she would be in when she’d started that particular day.

She had awakened from her fainting late that morning, looking up at the face of Dr. Hugh Stewart. The fact that she had known Hugh Stewart only slightly did not diminish the feeling that his was the single face she cared to see at that moment.

He drove her home. Alone with him in the small farmhouse, despite her efforts to avoid it, there was an unsaid but strong attraction between them. She tried very hard to avoid that. But then her mind turned back to her fear. She had to find refuge somewhere. She ceased to fight the attraction.

She sat up on the sofa now. Hugh Stewart walked across the room, turned, smiled. “You look better.”

“I feel better,” she said weakly. Then she lied, “I don’t know why it happened.”

“Could have been several things. It’s possible, you know that—” He shrugged. “Pregnancy?”

“No.”

“Well, you can’t always be sure. Perhaps—”

“No.”

He nodded finally. “Maybe we ought to check you over more thoroughly. Drop into my office. I’ll—” He paused. “Maybe you have your own doctor in Graintown.”

“Yes,” she said. “I haven’t had any reason to go to him. But Ted—it’s more or less family with him.”

“Certainly,” he said, and she was sure she saw a flicker in his eyes. “But I suggest you see him. Several things, you know, could cause fainting like that. It’s always worth checking.”

“I’ll do that.”

She met his eyes for a moment, then she could look at him no longer. She knew nothing about him, and yet it was as though he were someone long familiar to her and that they had always known about this feeling.

He seemed suddenly uncomfortable. “I’ll be going. Your car’s still in the village—”

“I’ll drive in with Ted when he gets home.” She stood up. “Thank you so much, Doctor.”

“My pleasure. Give my regards to your husband, won’t you?”

She nodded and moved toward the door just as he did. He reached out and took her in his arms roughly. She met his hunger with hers, digging her fingers into his back.

She broke free and turned away abruptly, trembling…

He left quickly. She heard the sound of his car moving through the farmyard. Still trembling she felt as though she had just smashed everything she’d tried to be with Ted Burley. That was a little past noon.

At four o’clock that afternoon, Bob Saywell knocked on her door.

The unexpected sound had given her a moment of terror, until she looked out and saw his car. Then she opened the door, unusually annoyed by the sight of his fat smiling face.

“Just wanted to see how you were, Mrs. Burley.”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Well, that’s why I stopped. To find out.” He smiled. His jowls seemed to quiver faintly. There was peculiar brightness in his eyes. “May I come in? A little cold standing out here.”

“Yes,” she said, covering her annoyance. “Come in, Mr. Saywell.”

He stepped inside briskly, slapping his gloved hands together. He removed his gloves and wiped his shoes carefully on the throw rug in front of the door. “Take it Ted’s not around. Knew he was going on over to Webster. Take it he’s not back.”

“No, he’s not back.”

“Now this is a real pretty little house you’ve got here, Mrs. Burley. Twice as pretty as Ted kept it before he married up with you. Just about as pretty, I’d say, as his ma kept it before she died!”

Ann watched him walk around the room, looking at the furniture, touching things; there was an odd jauntiness to his manner; some of his perpetual obsequiousness was gone. He stopped finally, his face wreathed in good humor, eyes steadily bright. “Sit down, Mrs. Burley. I want to talk to you. Sit down over there in that chair of Ted’s ma. The light’s real good there. I can see you better.”

Ann was surprised by the commanding tone in his voice. “You want to talk to me, Mr. Saywell?”

“We can cut the monkey business. Just sit down, Mrs. Burley. Or should I say Ann?”

“I’m afraid I don’t—”

“Or should I say Ann Brown? That was your name before you married Ted, wasn’t it? Or should I just say Ann Rodick?”

She stared at him disbelievingly. Rodick, her own name! The name she’d changed to Brown when she’d gone to Omaha. He nodded, jowls jiggling. “Oh, I struck a nerve there, didn’t I? Oh, you’d better sit down now, Mrs. Burley. I do believe you might faint again.”

She did sit down now, weakly, still staring at him. “How did you find out?”

“Now you never want to think old Bob Saywell hasn’t got a good brain, you know. Didn’t build that business I’ve got by being dumb. I’ll bet you never thought it took brains to build that kind of business, did you? I’ll bet you thought Bob Saywell was just somebody cutting up the chops for you? You think maybe it doesn’t take any brains to get to be a leader of a little community like this?”

“Mr. Saywell, please! You’ve found out my real name. I want to know how and why!”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” he said, grinning wickedly. “I’ve got a good memory, Mrs. Burley. There was a trial out there on the West Coast. Made good reading. Some of the newspapers even around in this state printed it up. Seems one fellow shot another. Seems a girl saw it happen. That was you, wasn’t it? I checked that, you see? I had a clipping, but the picture of you wasn’t good. So I just drove on over to Graintown and had them dig out some old newspapers out of their files. And there it was, a real good picture. What I thought was true, wasn’t it, Ann Rodick?”

“I don’t deny it! So you know then why I changed my name and the color of my hair. You read about Tony Fearon’s threat!” She said it desperately, thinking that surely the tone Bob Saywell was using was not abusive. What reason would he have to be anything but sympathetic?

“Oh, yes. I read all about that. Yes, indeed. And I wonder—does Ted know about this?”

He’d come nearer, standing with his paunchy belly just in front of her, pink cheeks rosy in the light from the windows.

She shook her head, completely confused. “No, of course not. There’s been no need—”

“I just wonder what he’d think about this. You take Ted. He’s thin-skinned, that lad. Oh, not a lad now. But he always was real sensitive. I know people hereabouts. I know Ted, and I knew his ma and his pa. Ted is what you might call a mamma’s boy. Most people might not think that just to look at him, but that’s what he is. I wonder how it’d be if he knew you’d married him and all the time using the wrong name?”

“Mr. Saywell,” Ann said, standing up, “I don’t like the tone of your voice. You’ve found out something. But it has nothing to do with Ted. I’ve deceived him about nothing more than my name. I had a reason for that—my safety.”

Bob Saywell suddenly laughed. “You’re a tricky one, aren’t you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“I mean that way of yours. That kind of angel-like way. That’s a good way to put it, isn’t it? Angel-like. All blond and wide-eyed and kind of like a baby stare you’ve got. Only the hair isn’t really that color, and you aren’t any angel, are you, Mrs. Burley?”

She shook her head, unbelieving.

“No,” he said, “you aren’t that at all. Otherwise, why did you faint away there in my store, Mrs. Burley? I wonder if you’d tell me that?”

“You come in here? Insult me? Insinuate things? Question me? In my own home? You have no right whatever to—”

“You didn’t tell me why it was you fainted!” he said, leaning closer to her. “Now why don’t you? Why don’t you tell me it was because of all that bad business in Graintown this morning. Huh? Yes, sir! This gangster, this Mr. Tony Fearon, he threatened to get you killed before he was executed, didn’t he? Now just maybe that was it. Now maybe you thought those fellows doing that shooting in Corly Adams’s station was fellows maybe this Mr. Tony Fearon sent out to get you. Was that it, Mrs. Burley?”

She stared at him in shock. “What are you after, Mr. Saywell?”

“Did I say I was after something? Now maybe I am. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if maybe I am. But I haven’t said anything about it, have I? I’m just trying to get everything straight. Ann Rodick, the girl mixed up with those San Francisco gangsters! I just wonder what Ted would think of all that? I wonder what the whole community would think of that? Mrs. Burley turning out to be mixed up with a dirty group of California gangsters—’specially now that Corly’s gone and been killed and Sheriff Joe Bingham likeways? Now that’s a shame. People liked Corly and Joe a lot around here. I wouldn’t wonder if they might just get up and want to maybe use the tar and feathers once they found it was all your fault!”

“Mr. Saywell, I’m beginning to think you’re crazy! What kind of warped mind could you have to accuse me of being mixed up with them? I had nothing to do with anything but accidentally being in a certain place at a certain time. God knows I wish I hadn’t been! But I was and I can’t help that. What right have you to say anything is my fault?”

He was closer to her now, so close she could see the texture of his rosy skin. On close inspection it lost its cherubic look. You could see the wrinkling and the blemishing and the drying pores.

“Now I’m going to tell you something,” he said. “Something I just heard on the car radio, loud and clear, while I was driving from Graintown back here. This fellow they’re looking for, this Billy Quirter, he’s this Tony Fearon’s brother. What do you think of that!”

Hearing that was like a hard blow to the pit of Ann’s stomach. There was first the sharp pain, then a spreading dull sickness. Tony Fearon’s brother! So it was true!

“You see?” he said, smiling with his mouth but chilling her with his eyes. “I know exactly who you are.” She realized, looking into those eyes, that he was honestly condemning her—that, in reality, he thought her no different than Tony Fearon! It was a warped mind behind those eyes, she knew; warped by the narrowness of the world in which it had been spawned and aged, warped by a false sanctimony, made worse by long years of dulling his conscience until he had become a stupid hypocrite, and dangerous because of it.

If he released his knowledge, it would be like pulling the world down on her head. The newspapermen would descend. Everybody would descend. And Billy Quirter, brother of Tony Fearon, would know exactly where she was. She would again have to depend on the police to protect her. But could they protect her for a lifetime?

“I think you’d better get out of here!”

He tipped his head, gazing at her with absolute confidence. “You’re fooling me. You’re trying to bluff me. I don’t bluff, Mrs. Burley. Not Bob Saywell. No, sir. You’re scared, Mrs. Burley. I can see that. You don’t fool me at all.”

“I told you,” she said, voice tightening. “Get out!”

“Yes,” he said, “I will—when I’ve said my piece. And I think you’d better listen to that, Mrs. Burley.”

It was his sureness that frightened her.

“Go ahead then,” she said. “Say it.”

“Now that’s better,” he smiled, shifting his feet to bring himself an inch closer to her. “Now that’s a whole lot better! Yes, I’ll say it. I’ll say that you’ve brought an evil to this community of ours…”

He talked on, and the drone of his voice, now wheedling, now sharpening with viciousness, amazed her with its self-righteous conviction. And somehow his words, his face, the turning of his brain seemed to merge with the identity of Ted Burley, her husband. Somehow the personalities fused. And that was because, she realized, it was really a single mind speaking, the mind of a community with a single attitude of narrowness and backwardness.

“… so you see, Mrs. Burley, Bob Saywell, if he were a gambling man, which he’s not, would hold the cards, if he played cards, which he does not. Do you get my point? I mean this escaped gunman, this Tony Fearon’s brother, is prowling around somewhere. Now I know that. And you know that. Everybody around here knows that. But my point is that it seems nobody but you and me and him knows just why. Now we, all three, know, don’t we? But now that gangster, maybe he don’t know just exactly where you are, so he can do what we know he’s trying to do. How about that, Mrs. Burley? That’s about right, isn’t it? That’s maybe what you’re counting on, isn’t it? With your hair colored different and your name changed and living out here on this little farm of Ted’s, why, who’d think it was really Ann Rodick here, just the person this fellow’s after? Am I right?”