Where Is Janice Gantry? (11 page)

At eight o’clock I went back into Ack’s yard, rinsed off the salt under his outside shower, toweled and changed in the angle between my car and a pepper hedge, stowed my
Livona pica
in the glove compartment. Ack came out and I gave him the negative report and thanked him again for a good evening. I assured him I wasn’t going to give up after only one blank morning.

My morning mail confirmed the lull in my one-man operation. When accidents are bad enough, I do not enter the picture. There had been a dandy in the night, over on State Road 565 near Ravenna; a classic head-on on a curve, killing seven including one guy I had met casually, Troy Jamison, a builder from Ravenna who had come down and married
local money and started some kind of big development down there. From the front page photo in my morning paper, I could see that if one of my client companies had insured either of those vehicles, all I’d have to do would be approve the scrap price.

On this morning I became aware of a change in attitude toward Sis’s disappearance. It wasn’t a big enough case for nationwide or even statewide coverage, but it was a hot item on our coast, from Everglades City to Tarpon Springs. Somehow the attention seemed to blur the remembered image of Sis Gantry. She was becoming oddly fictional, an actress in a play. Normal office routine had become impossible. Even with the inevitable reduction of work, Alice Jessup could not handle the entire secretarial routine. Vince Avery had wired Tom Earle in Canada, and Vince was hanging around the office waiting for Tom to put a call through to him.

I heard that Scotty Gantry, the eldest son, had canceled his vacation plans and driven down with his family from Atlanta to be with his parents. Scotty located me at four-thirty that afternoon in the gloom of Gus Herka’s Best Beach Bar. He had stopped at the office and they had told him where he could find me.

With no hypocrisy of greeting or handshake he said, “Wanna talk to you, Brice,” and led the way over to a far table by the bowling machine.

He is nearing forty. He is wide, tough, deliberate and aggressive—a vice president and sales manager of a growing company that makes plastic and fiberglass boats.

“What do you know about this, Brice?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

“She talked to you Monday night.”

“Not Monday night, Scotty. Monday evening. In the office. Where did you get your information?”

“At dinner she said something to Mom about talking to
you, something so casual Mom can’t remember what she said. So what were the two of you talking about?”

“Nothing that could have anything to do with what’s happened.”

“I’ll decide what’s pertinent and what isn’t. What did you talk about?”

“You’re the big brother, taking care. Don’t lean on me, Scotty.”

“You want to step out the back door a minute?”

“Grow up. Neither of us has been eighteen for a long long time.”

“I want to know what you talked about.”

I couldn’t help the audible sigh. “It was a private conversation. She hasn’t made up her mind about marrying Cal McAllen. We were talking about that. She’s about decided to say yes. Every family can use a lawyer, I guess.”

“Better she should marry any son of a bitch in the state than you.”

“She married so damn good the first time?”

“Nobody could stop her.”

“Were you going to try to stop her this time?”

“Why the hell should we?”

“Nobody in the world is good enough for your kid sister, Scotty.”

“I sure as hell know you’re not. A lawyer, okay. Not a crooked ballplayer.”

“For something that never got into the papers, that got a lot of circulation, Scotty.”

“It’s hard to hide dirt.”

“If I gave a damn for your opinion one way or the other, I’d take the time to tell your story.”

“Your version. No thanks. I’d dearly love to jolt you around some, Brice.”

“You’ve got a lot of hostility there, boy.”

“Sis was just getting back on her feet when you moved in
on her with a lot of big talk. She always thinks everybody is just fine. You set her way back, Brice. You moved in on her when her guard was down.”

“Do you think I hurt her? Honestly?”

“You used her. And when you got tired of her, you broke it off. You think you did her any good?”

I can think of forty ways I could have answered that question more diplomatically. But my patience was worn thin. His manner was irritating.

“I guess I must have done her some good, pal. She used to scream with joy.”

He trotted heavily to the rear door and held it open, yelling vast incoherencies at me. I had obligated myself, and so I went blinking out into a sunny ash can area. I caught three wild and violent swings on my arms, timed the fourth one, trapped his wrist, twisted it up between his shoulder blades and ran him headlong into the side of the frame building. The vice president and sales manager dropped loosely onto his face. I rolled him onto his back. He was in the shade. He was snoring. His pulse was strong and regular. He stopped snoring, swallowed, opened his eyes and looked up at me.

“Take a little rest before you try to get up.”

“Baasard,” he mumbled.

I went back inside, picked my beer off the table and went back to the bar. “Awful goddamn quick, you know it?” Gus said. “One big thump on the building, and here you are. I don’t go out ever on account of blood turns my stomach.”

“No blood,” I said. I rubbed my left arm. He had numbed it a little.

“He still out there, Sam?”

“Maybe.”

“Some tourist could take his shoes and money, you know it?”

I finished my beer and walked back and looked. Scotty was gone. I went back and told Gus and he seemed relieved.

*   *   *

That evening I received my punishment for working off my frustration at Scotty Gantry’s expense. I had gone to bed, after setting the alarm early enough to give me time to get over to the damn beach. I was leafing through a magazine. There was an article on Hawaii, with colored photographs. I turned a page and Judy smiled out at me. It was like forgetting you have pleurisy and trying to take a deep breath. But all the pain was in the heart.

She wore a blue swim suit, spangled with stars. She sat on a hatch cover in the sunshine, smiling happily into the lense. Water droplets stood on the honeyed perfection of her shoulders. A towhead about a year and a half old was leaning against her thigh beaming up at her. Behind her I could see a section of ship’s railing, blue water, and a tropical shoreline.

“Mrs. Timothy Barriss Falter, the former Judy Caldwell, and one of the most charming young hostesses in the Islands, is shown here with her daughter, Gretchen, aboard the family schooner,
Halekulani Girl.
Tim Falter, one of the best known architects in Hawaii, often entertains friends and clients aboard the schooner, with the help of his lovely wife, by taking cruises to the outlying islands. The schooner, which sleeps ten in addition to crew quarters for captain, mate and steward, was built in California two years ago to Mr. Falter’s specifications.”

I knew she was out there. I had heard her married name, but I had managed to forget it, an exercise in amnesia I would be unable to perform twice.

“—the former Judy Caldwell—”

Not the former Mrs. Sam Brice. No mention of three years and three months of marriage to Sam. I had been expunged from the record. It put me in the category of a childhood disease. She had had measles, whooping cough and Brice’s disease.

I knew how gratified her imperious little father felt about the way things had worked out. He had faced the fact of our elopement with the same joy and understanding he would have displayed if he had found out she had been carted off to a tree house by an ape. After he had wheeled a battalion of lawyers into battle formation, she was able to forestall annulment only by convincing him she would kill herself if he pressed it through. He did not give up until after he had sent a man to see me, a dim, spindly, hesitant man bearing a check with so many zeros it gave me vertigo to look at it. But she was worth that amount per minute.

But after the inconceivable lapse of marrying me, she had steadied back onto course, regaining the lost image.

She stared at me out of the sunshine, with a Kodak smile. I threw the magazine against the wall and turned out the light, but she was still there, smiling.

“You see, Sam,” she said. “It’s all right with me now. I’m sorry about us. But I have what I must have. I guess I loved you, but you couldn’t keep up the payments. You wouldn’t have wanted what I would have become.”

As long as I was drawing my pay, shrewd little Damon Caldwell had kept up his daughter’s hefty allowance. It was more than I was getting for having my brains clouted loose every Sunday. Hers all went for clothes, cars, fun and half the rent. Mine picked up the slack. But when they threw me out, the shrewd little bastard cut her off. Maybe he even smiled while doing it, if he was sure a smile wouldn’t fracture his teeth.

She clung to me and wept wildly and said the world couldn’t lick us. She would scrub floors, wait on tables, wear rags. Maybe if we’d had kids … but we’d agreed they were for later, because they’d cut down our fun life. A month later, after being restless, bitchy and violent, she packed and went home to Wilmington, claiming she would rejoin me after
I got located. (I was still running doggedly through my list of fair weather friends.)

I got a sprawled, unpunctuated, confusing letter from her, averaging ten words to the page. I flew to Wilmington. In a frenzy of tears she told me she was no good, had no character, couldn’t love a poor man. I gathered she was either going to kill herself, go into a convent, take acting lessons, become a model, devote her life to good works, write a sensitive novel or take up nursing. But she made it clear that whatever she did, I wasn’t in the picture. She wept out her guilt and shame. She fled. The princess went back into the castle and they yanked up the drawbridge.

My next communication was from a Nevada lawyer. I knew then how completely they had whipped me, so I came home for good. It seems to be standard practice to do that. You make them stop the world and let you off, or you go home.

As the morning world was turning from gray to gold on Thursday morning, and a bank of mist was rising from the gun-metal water, I looked south along the beach and saw a distant manikin, limber and moving well, unmistakably female at even twice that range, walk down to the water and stand knee deep to make the final adjustment of a bright yellow swim cap, then wade and plunge and begin swimming straight out, in the sleek, slow, powerful cadence that can be achieved only through lessons and work and a desire for excellence.

So I began to make the motions of the shell collector, moving down the brittle windrow at the high tide line, dropping plausible items in the paper sack I was carrying, trying to move at the pace which would guarantee the stylized interception. She floated out there, and I knew that when she looked toward shore she could not fail to see me. There was a continual increase in the heat of the sun on my shoulders.

Soon I was within fifteen feet of the towel she had dropped. A bushy salmon-pink towel, a new pack of Viceroys, a narrow gold lighter, a pair of sunglasses with yellow plastic frames. I made like a sheller working a fruitful area. She started in. I did not resume forward movement until I heard the sloshing as she was wading out. I did not look at her.

I watched her bare tan feet as she crossed my bows, perhaps eight feet away. Nice feet. Tan and narrow with a high arch.

“Excuse me,” I said, standing up, reaching into my paper sack and fumbling for the
Livona pica
, and looking at all the rest of her.

There is one demon loose upon the world who spends all his infinite time and energy on the devising of all the vicious little coincidences which confound mankind. His specialty is to confront the unwary with coincidences so eerie, so obviously planned by a malevolent intelligence, that time itself comes to a full stop and his victim stands transfixed by a conviction of unreality, while in infra-space, the demon hugs his hairy belly, kicks his hooves in the air, rolling and gasping with silent laughter.

The busy demon had clad this woman in a strapless swim suit of lavender-blue, spangled with stars. It was a perfect copy of the one Judy was wearing in the color picture in the magazine. The morning sun touched the water droplets on her golden shoulders. I knew at once that this one was Judy’s height—to the half-inch—her weight to the quarter-pound. The build was the same, short-waisted, long-legged. It was a figure without that mammillary opulence which has become a fetish in the entertainment business. A fool, with a hasty glance, might get an impression of boyishness. But even a fool would have the compulsion to look once more and would see then all the tidy limber gifts, the structural intricacy.

The glutton can please himself with a hearty, simple dish;
the gourmet requires a perfect blending of tastes, something to savor and remember, never totally identifiable. Man never becomes sated with mystery.

So I stood like a fool, gawking at her. It was not Judy’s face or her hair. But the textures of her and the way she stood and even her expression were so much like Judy that I had the grotesque conviction, for a few seconds, that it was all an elaborate joke. They had used makeup. They had trapped me. Now they would all come popping out of the bushes to laugh at me.

But it was not Judy. If Judy was flawed in any way, it was because there was a faint—a very faint suggestion of sharpness about her features. This girl was flawed in an opposed way—her features snubbed, subtly heavy—a broader mouth, heavier brows, higher, sturdier cheekbones, more roundness in her face. There was more boyishness in this girl’s face, more merriness perhaps. This girl’s eyes were a clear, pale, startling green. Her hair looked to be of coarser texture than Judy’s. It was an ashy silver, a color nature could hardly have accomplished, yet close enough to her own so that it did not look at all lifeless. It was a casual cut, fairly short, yet avoiding that skinned look the Italians have foisted on an unwary world. I remembered Gus’s comment about floozy hair, and knew he could have made it only because he had not seen this girl up close.