The Man in the Net (15 page)

She glanced at him from the wheel. She was, John knew, deliberately, out of niceness, trying to conceal Brad’s major motive for defection which was the fact that he had been championing John’s cause not out of conviction but only through principle and a desire to stand by his wife.

“If only we could get away. We must own half of that goddam paper company by now. We could sell out any time. We could leave it all and lead some sort of decent, intelligible life of our own. But Brad will never do it— not as long as his mother’s alive anyway. We can’t leave her with the whole burden, he says. Burden! He doesn’t really think his father’s a burden! He’s mad for him and he’s mad for the great ancestral business. He …”

She broke off. “I’m sorry, John. This is a hell of a time to be pouring out my woes. You were wonderful with them—really wonderful.”

“I wasn’t. I couldn’t hold them.”

“The rats. And that Steve Ritter. He’s the worst of them all. He’s the one who’s started all the hysteria, going around hinting, whipping it all up … What is it? Why is he so against you?”

I didn’t want to, but it’s stronger than me…. It’s like a disease …

“I don’t know. I figure they’re all against me because I’m something they’re not used to. Something about me makes them suspicious. And then Linda …”

Suddenly he knew he couldn’t talk about Linda, not even to Vickie Carey. They drove on in silence until they reached the house.

He suggested that she should go back and vote anyway, but she was stubborn, still fighting her own personal battle against a bullying father-in-law and a bullied husband. He mustn’t go back to his house alone, she said. She insisted on following him in her car and coming in for a drink. It was only after they’d driven to his house and were sitting in the living-room with their drinks that John began to realize just how much it meant to him, after the horrors of the day, that there should be someone who could be sitting there with him casually, almost intimately, accepting him for what he was.

She didn’t stay long. When she’d finished her drink, she got up to leave.

“I’ll have a time with poor Brad. It kills him when Father acts like this. He feels curled up, trapped, emasculated. I don’t blame him.”

She held out her hand. When he took it, her odd, irregular homely face was lit up with a shy, almost embarrassed smile.

“Can I say something, John?”

“Of course.”

“It sounds silly, insulting almost. But until tonight, with Father and the Morelands and everyone saying all those things … I wasn’t sure. I was like Brad. Part of me thought: Maybe they’re right. Maybe he has …” She broke off, withdrawing her hand. “But now it’s different. Now I believe in you.”

She stepped away from him through the front door. Then she turned back.

“I mean about Linda too. I believe she’s the way you say she is. I can imagine what a hell your life’s been. And I admire you. You’ve got more guts than I’d ever have had. So whatever happens—I mean, whatever may have happened, I’m with you. And if you need me … Well, good night, John.”

“Good night, Vickie.”

He watched her hurrying across the lawn to the car. And then, as she drove away, breaking the only link, the nightmare feeling started creeping back through him.

He was alone in the house and the huge, invisible net had swung completely around it now, encircling him.

He turned out the lights and went up to the bedroom. He had hardly been in it since Linda had gone. As he looked down at their familiar bed with its rumpled white cover, the thought of her broke through the barriers of his obsession with his own predicament and suddenly she was real again to him. She was the woman he had been married to for six years, the woman he had loved. And she was somewhere. …

The old panic image came back of her, insane, slashing the pictures in the living-room, stamping on the records, running out to the studio for the typewriter, running upstairs to pack the suitcase … And then? Throwing the suitcase on the dump? Had she done that? Burning his blue jeans in the meadow? Could she have done that too?

He had never really come to grips with it. There had never been enough of him left over from the effort of fighting his own battle. Had Linda done all that? Or did it go the other way—the way of some mysterious, improbable enemy, not only his enemy but Linda’s too? Tossing the suitcase on the dump where it would certainly be found? Burning the blue jeans in the meadow by the house where they would certainly be found? Why? Because he had killed her, of course.

For hours now he had been living with the assumption that Linda was dead, but suddenly the assumption became an utter conviction. It infected the room like the presence of her corpse.

He went to the bathroom. The towel from his afternoon’s shower still lay on the floor by the tub. He bent automatically to pick it up and put it back on the towel rack. That was when he noticed the toothbrushes, and as he looked at them, taking in what he saw, he felt a twinge of nausea. He had been in the bathroom before. How could he have missed this?

Linda’s toothbrushes were kept on the left of the mirror and his own on the right. All of Linda’s brushes were hanging in their little rack; but two of his were missing.

Then—it couldn’t have been Linda who had packed that suitcase. Someone—the Enemy—had gone to the bedroom, pulled down the suitcase, packed the dresses, hurried to the bathroom, grabbing toothbrushes, any toothbrushes … So someone—not Linda—had typed the note, slashed the pictures, stamped on the records?

He sat down on the edge of the tub. His head was aching. Didn’t he know now? Didn’t the one small fact of the toothbrushes prove once and for all that Linda had been murdered and that all the rest of it was a frame-up, a devious plot to pin suspicion on him? Gradually, through the tangle of his thoughts, he began to feel that here at least there might be a life-line. Call Captain Green. Explain about the toothbrushes. That would prove his innocence. Even Captain Green would realize that he would never have made a mistake between his own brushes and his wife’s.

But the glimpse of hope faded almost as soon as it had come. How would he be able to prove that one set of brushes had been his and the others Linda’s? He thought of the struggling, shouting mob at the town meeting, flinging at him their conviction of his guilt. That was Captain Green’s mood too. There was nothing in a quibble about toothbrushes for Captain Green.

He didn’t go back to his and Linda’s bedroom. He went to one of the other rooms, bleak, impersonal, intended for guests who had never come. He took off his clothes and lay down on the bed, struggling against new images of Linda backing away from someone, screaming, her face distorted with terror….

He tried to think of Vickie. When it didn’t work, he thought of the children, but the memory of Angel Jones kicking and yelling in his arms—“You beat up your wife” —tainted even that. A vivid picture came of the blue jeans in the state troopers’ laboratory. Men in white coats were peering through microscopes.

“If there’s something on them jeans, even the teensiest-weensiest spot…”

Steve Ritter was back. When finally he fell asleep, Steve was hunting him through the woods again, but this time he wasn’t alone. The whole population of Stoneville was crashing through the underbrush behind him, jeering and belling like hounds.

What have you done with your wife?

HE AWOKE with a start, thinking Linda had called his name. He looked at his watch. It was ten past ten. Anxiety leaped in him. How could he have slept so long? There was so much to do. Then, as memory came back, the old lethargy returned. What in fact was there to do? Telephone to Captain Green? Explain to him about the toothbrushes? He’d already decided that was useless. It was worse than useless because to Captain Green it would merely seem like another, even clumsier attempt by a guilty man to fabricate his innocence.

“John.”

Someone was calling his name, a faint, unlocalized female voice. Still only half out of his dream, he thought: Linda. He jumped up, his heart pounding.

“John … John …”

He ran to the window. A bicycle was propped against the lilac bush near the kitchen door. He pressed his face against the screen and could just catch a glimpse of a small figure, with a long dark pigtail, standing at the door. Emily Jones.

Feeling unreasonable pleasure, he shouted, “Coming.”

He hurried into the other bedroom, put on a robe and went down to the kitchen.

He opened the door and joined Emily on the step. She had a bundle of letters clutched in her hand. Her face was flushed and her eyes were very bright.

“I brought your mail.” She held the letters out to him. “Mother doesn’t know. I snuck into the post office and I pulled them out of your box—and I brought them.”

“Thanks, Emily.”

John took the letters and put them down on top of the bottled gas cylinders by the door.

“And—and I’ve come to say you mustn’t go down to the village. That’s why I’ve come.” She was panting. She must have pedaled like mad. “Bob Seely and George Hatch and all those men … they said they’d get you next time you came. They should have got you last night, they said. I just heard them. They were all talking at the store. They said they wouldn’t wait for the troopers. It wasn’t the troopers’ business anyway. It was Stoneville’s business. They said …” Suddenly she threw her arms around his waist and buried her face against him. “Oh, I hate them. I hate them. I hate them…”

Her thin body was quivering. Gently he patted her head. “It’s all right, Emily. They talk that way, but it’s just talk.”

“And Angel—she’s just as bad as the others. Just as bad as Mother and everyone. She says you did it. She says you killed Mrs. Hamilton.” She looked up at him despairingly. “But you didn’t, did you? I know you didn’t.”

“No, Emily. I didn’t. I haven’t any idea where she is.”

“Then why do they say it? Why are people like that? Why are all people so lousy?”

One arm around her, he started to open the kitchen door. “Come on in and have something to drink. You must be thirsty after the ride.”

“Oh, no.” She drew away from him with a muffled sob.

“I can’t—not now. Now, when I feel like this, I’ve got to be alone.” She ran to her bicycle, pulled it up from the lilac bush and turned to gaze at him from black, tormented eyes. “When—when this feeling’s over, maybe I’ll come back. If you want me to, I’ll clean up and I’ll cook and I’ll … But n-not now.”

Once again there was the sound of a sob. Choking it back, she jumped on the bicycle and pedaled furiously away, the dark pigtail flopping behind her.

For a moment John stood looking after her. When she disappeared around the house, he dropped down on to the kitchen step and felt in the pocket of his robe for a cigarette. There were none there. He got up to go into the kitchen and then, seeing the letters, picked them up and sat down again with them on the step.

The first thing he noticed was the
Art Review
. It had come at last, and its critic was the one he cared about the most. He tore off the wrapper and listlessly searched for his review. It was a column long and, to his amazement and delight as he read, he found it was wildly enthusiastic.

“… Perhaps in this show, the enormous step forward has not entirely been solidified. But these are by far the most exciting canvases which this critic has seen this year and it now seems incontrovertible that, with John Hamilton, this country will soon find itself in the always embarrassing position of having a really great American painter on its hands ….”

For one moment there was nothing but joy, but only for a moment. Almost immediately the irony of the situation came to him, tainting everything. What did a good review matter anymore? He dropped the magazine and looked at the letters.

It was the end of the month and they were all bills—the bill from the village store, the milk bill, a bill from Ritter’s Service Station. The last vestiges of pleasure from the review fading, he glanced at the envelope. He thought of Steve Ritter in his cramped little office making out the bill. When? Yesterday? After the search party? Before he went down to direct traffic for the town meeting?

There was a bill from a hardware store in Pittsfield. It was a store he couldn’t remember ever having been in. It must be something that Linda …

He slit the envelope and pulled out the bill. His name and address were written in at the top. Underneath was written:

August 29

3 100 lb. sacks ready-mix cement at 1.95 = 5.85

1 cement trowel = .79

Total = 6.64

For a moment he sat looking at it. August 29! That was the day after Vickie’s birthday party, the day he had gone to New York. But he hadn’t bought any cement or … He felt the suffocating nightmare quality returning. Cement! The lilac bush in front of him seemed to tremble and blur out of reality. A robin was stalking on the lawn. It seemed much larger than life and his eyes were hypnotized by it, watching while it stabbed savagely into the grass with its beak.

He jumped up, ran into the house and called the hardware store.

A woman’s voice answered in a flat, bored voice.

His hand was shaking. He could feel the receiver wobbling against his ear. He said, “This is John Hamilton in Stoneville. I’ve just got a bill for some things I didn’t order. Can I talk to someone about it?”

“One moment, sir.” Was her voice changed? Surely she, like everyone else, knew that name now—the pariah name: John Hamilton. “I’ll inquire. Hold on.”

He heard her footsteps tapping away from the phone. The sound seemed booming, quite unreal, like the sight of the robin on the lawn. Is this how it feels, he wondered, when you start to crack up, this uncontrollable shaking, this dislocation of sight and sound?

“Hello.” A man’s voice was on the phone.

He said, “This is John Hamilton.”

“Yes,” said the man. “I know. She told me.”

“I just got a bill for some things I never ordered. I thought I’d check.”

There was a long moment of silence. Then the man’s voice came again, dour, without expression. “Excuse me, Mr. Hamilton, but I think you’ll find the bill’s correct. I took the order myself.”