The end of the night (23 page)

ment, and several times she caught herself mumbling to herself as she did the day's chores, and told herself that talking to yourself was a sign of senihty. She had planned to drive into York, but she didn't want to leave the place untended with people there. Tomorrow would be soon enough. As was her habit, she worked off her irritation by finding something she had been putting off. After her meager lunch she went out and scrubbed the whole length of the front porch on her hands and knees, and then scrubbed the porch railing, posts and all.

She heard the old water pump start up at a little after four and it pleased her to know those people were finally getting up. She remembered she hadn't spoken to the young man about breakfast. It was a funny time of day for breakfast, but if they could eat it, she could cook it, and you couldn't sneeze at another two dollars and forty cents. Before going to ask them, she went to the kitchen to make certain she had enough to feed four of them. Just enough eggs and more than enough of the com bread, but the bacon would be skimpy. Two good melons, and oatmeal for those as wanted it, and use the middle-size coffeepot. That should do it just fine.

She took off her apron and hung it on the back of the kitchen door, gave her hair a few pats and went out the back way to walk back to the cabins. When she was twenty feet from the back stoop she heard the slamming of car doors and heard the motor start. She was walking along the driveway, and she began to hurry, adjusting a social smile of invitation.

As the car came toward her she returned its wide smile and held up her hand for them to stop.

The car made a much greater sound and it suddenly seemed to leap upon her. The awareness of death flashed bright and hot in her mind. She had the feeling that she stood frozen by terror for a very long time. In actuality she moved almost as nimbly as an athlete. She whirled and plunged to her left, diving rather than making the mistake of trying to run, diving so that both feet left the ground, her arms reaching forward to break her fall. Even so, the wide right edge of the bumper cracked her painfully on the right ankle bone, turning her slightly so that she landed in the softness of the grass on her right arm and shoulder with a jarring thud and rolled up and over onto her back, legs high and kicking.

She sat up, dazed. Over the years she had had to purchase ever stronger reading glasses, testing them at the counter of the five-and-ten in Lancaster. But her distance vision would

have gratified a hawk. In the moment before her eyes filled with tears, blurring everything, she saw the car a hundred feet away, slowing for the turn onto the highway. She was too dazed to think of license numbers. She looked at their faces. A raggedy-headed girl with a mean, pouty look. A man so ugly he could get work in a cage at the carnival. A man driving, going bald, wearing glasses. A pointy-faced one he was, like an egg-sucking fox. She saw them vividly for one instant and then her eyes filled. The car was a shiny blob, turning onto the highway, heading toward Lancaster.

Close at hand she heard a red squirred scolding her. Her eyes cleared. She saw him on a low, fat limb, staring down at her.

*Tried to kill me!" she told him. "Sure as I live and breathe."

The squirrel survived the first two syllables, before the sheer volume drove him back up into his hole, high in the tree.

Pearl Weaver stood up very slowly, testing every muscle. Her shoulder was wrenched, her right arm numbed. Her right ankle was beginning to puff, and it hurt to put weight on it, but not too much. She hobbled toward the house, and her thinking was still not clear.

"Ready to say something about breakfast and they run you down," she grumbled.

She went mto the parlor and sat in the big leather chair. It had always been and would always be Ralph's chair, and she would never sit in it without feeling she used it on sufferance.

"Why?" she demanded of the fringed lamp, the pottery cats on the mantel, the floral wallpaper. "Why?" she asked the imitation Oriental rug, the Boston rocker, the cataract eye of the silent television set. She had heard a whoop of shrill derision after she had jumped out of the way. "For fun?" She kept looking at the television set. "Or . . . didn't they want to be seen?"

Something stirred in the back of her mind. She'd followed it on television. A terrible thing! That poor girl. And they matched the words said about them, the descriptions, every one of them.

"Lord God Almighty!" she said, and she said it very softly. "They missed me," she said, "and they can come back for me and finish it."

She moved with desperate haste. She did not feel partially safe until she had all doors locked, and had Ralph's shotgun

that she had always meant to sell and somehow never had, with a dark-green-and-brass shell in the single chamber, and the hammer back.

She had had the phone taken out six years ago. She waited for them to come back for a full fifteen minutes before deciding they were gone for good. And then she walked down the highway to the Brumbarger place nearly a half mile away, carrying the shotgun just in case. She was limping very badly by the time she got there, and her shoulder had begun to ache.

Two minutes after Pearl Weaver entered the Brumbarger home, a sergeant in the Pennsylvania State Police sat with a comedy look of consternation on his face, holding a phone almost at arm's length, while two men in the office chuckled. But suddenly the words began to get through to him. The dispatcher nailed the car nearest the area and sent it to the Brumbarger house on the double.

Fifty long minutes later, every entrance booth previously alerted had a new and specific piece of information to put with their previous emergency instructions. Look for a '58 or '59 Mercury, brown and tan, two- or four-door sedan, fog lamps, radio aerial, Pennsylvania plates, three men and a woman.

The old lady had been observant, and she was pleasingly positive.

Laughlintown, Pennsylvania, is a not unpleasant small town in the Laurel Hill area of the state, not too far from the 26 84-foot summit of that range of not-quite mountains. No resident of Laughlintown could approach in the intensity of his disgust and dismay at having to live there, the strong emotions of Michael Bruce Hallowell. That was not his official name. He was registered in the local high school as Carl Lartch. He was certain that this summer, between his sophomore and junior years, was fraught with more misery than one spirit could safely contain.

In the confidential records maintained on him in the high-school files he was recorded as being highly intelligent, imaginative, a poor organizer, poorly adjusted socially, no athletic ability, inclined to be argumentative and sarcastic. Dedicated teachers considered this limp, spindly, myopic gangling, acned, large-headed, unorganized child a challenge. The journeyman teacher was delighted to pass him through the course and be rid of him. His more muscular contemporaries believed they could make of him a more socially desirable

citizen by beating him on the head at every opportunity. But they could never whip him past the point where he could still wipe his bloody mouth and in iciest contempt call them peasants.

His two sisters thought of him as an almost unendurable social handicap. His parents were baffled by him.

Carl Lartch was not confused at all. He had read his way through better than half the books in the Laughlintown library. The world of the books was infinitely more satisfying than the world around him. He kept a private secret journal and wrote his opinions and impressions in it, comfortably aware of the danger that, should it ever be made pubUc in his home town, the reaction would be murderous. A recent exposure to early Mencken had sohdified his contempt for the booboisie. His was a total confidence that one day the people of Laughlintown would be astonished that such a man could have once lived among them, and so gratified even his continuing contempt for them would be a welcome recognition of the place of his birth.

On this particular summer Carl had learned that books could be made even more enjoyable if devoured far from the foolish clatter of mankind, and so on every day when the weather was favorable, he would load books, his private journal, his peanut butter sandwiches and his Thermos of milk into the basket on the front of his bike and pump his way up into the hills.

On Monday morning, the twenty-seventh day of July, Carl pedaled up the long slopes of highway, panting audibly by the time he came to his turnoff, a sandy road that was wide and clear for a hundred yards before it faded away to an impassable track. As he rested, before hiding his bike in the brush, he noted that a car had turned around with some difficulty and gone back out, leaving the only set of fresh tracks since the last rain. He also saw a jumble of footprints. Picnickers or neckers, he thought. It was correct to assume their activities were trivial, whatever they were.

He hid his bike and, clasping his packaged possessions, went down the short, steep slope from the road to a fast, wide, noisy brook, crossed by stepping from stone to stone, and climbed the long hill beyond the brook until, winded once more, he came to his favorite place, level, grassy, shaded by old trees. From there he could see for miles but it was a view undefiled

by man, consisting of only the gentle contours of the uncon-taminated hills.

He spent the long summer day in reading, writing and peaceful contemplation. When he was finally warned by the angle of the sun, he gathered up his things, took a look at his private landscape, and trudged back down to the creek. His view was obscured by the brush that grew on the hillside. Sometimes he angled to avoid especially steep places. Consequently he came out at the creek at least thirty yards downstream from where he had crossed in the morning.

As he crossed the creek he noticed something out of the comer of his eye, not far away. He turned and saw, sprawled against the small round boulders at the water's edge, the silent, lovely symmetry of a woman's legs, a soiled white skirt wrenched upward to mid-thigh, a quiet curve of back in close-fitting green, a hand stubbed cruelly against a boulder, wedged there by her weight. The face was hidden, but the water, moving with chill insistence around a small pebbled curve, tugged with endless persistence at a floating strand of blond hair.

He stared, then burst up the abrupt bank in front of him, running wildly toward the hidden bicycle. But as he ran he began to realize that his reactions were not suitable to a Villon, a Mencken, a Christopher Fry. Detachment was the epic quahty of his whole galaxy of heroes. And so he stopped and turned and went slowly back to the woman and knelt there for a moment, studying her closely. He then reclimbed the bank and began to saunter toward home. After he had reached the highway, he remembered his bicycle. Once he had retrieved the bicycle, the empty basket reminded him of his books. By retracing his steps he found them beside the creek.

He was able to coast a good part of the way to Laughlin-town. He went directly to the police station and strolled in.

"I should like to report something," he said haughtily to a bored shirtsleeved man working at a scarred desk, typing a report with two fingers.

The oflBcer looked at him with growing distaste. "Report what, kid?"

"Perhaps twenty minutes ago I found the body of a woman up in the hills. She's either dead or seriously injured. She's blond, barefoot, possibly in her twenties, wearing a white skirt and a green blouse. From tracks on a sand road near where she's lying, I'd say she's been there since last night."

After a few moments of astonishment, the oflBcer jumped

to his feet and said, "Tell me exactly where you saw this woman, kid!"

"We could be there before I could possibly explain to you how to get there. So why don't you get a doctor and an ambulance and more officers if you need them, and I'll ride in the lead vehicle and show you the way."

"If this is some kind of a gag . . .'*

Carl said icily, "If I enjoyed jokes, I'd think up better ones than this."

It went weU because it was handled by experts, and because the plan was flexible, imaginative and autight. And there had been advance warning from so high a place that it was taken seriously.

The instructions from the control centers were monitored and recorded, and so this particular pickup was sufficiently well documented to become a classic—written up in the mass magazines, and used as a case study in the police schools.

When a pickup is badly handled, it becomes a bloody, dramatic, unorganized thing. Where it is done properly, it can happen so quietly that people ten feet away are unaware of it.

This pickup presented a unique problem. A high-speed, high-density, limited-access highway is no place for heroics with -sirens. A car can't be forced over onto the shoulder without the risk of a gigantic pile-up. A chase could result in heavy casualties among the innocents on vacation. And so it was decided that it had to be a stalk, a stalk so discreet that the prey would be lulled into a place where they could be taken quietly. It could be assumed that if it was fumbled, their desperation could result in explosive violence. And it was assumed the vehicle was a rolUng arsenal. There can be no room for optimism in such an operation.

At 5:22 the target car entered the Pennsylvania Turnpike at Station 22 at Morgantown. The attendant phoned the nearest control center immediately and reported the license number. It checked out as a car reported stolen in the Pittsburgh area Sunday night. As any law enforcement agency will confirm, plate numbers and descriptions of stolen cars are constantly circulated, but they are next to useless in apprehending car thieves. The volume is just too great. A very few patrol officers with excellent memories make a hobby of constantly checking for stolen vehicles as a way of combating the boredom of patrol, but generally speaking, if a stolen car is

operated in a legal manner by a person who does not excite suspicion, apprehension is exceedingly rare. Routine checks of operators' licenses, arrest due to traffic violations, and abandonment of the vehicle are the usual channels through which recover}' is made.

In this instance the check of the license against the latest theft list was an additional confirmation of the identity of the vehicle.