The Girls Are Missing (4 page)

“I did. Actually, it made sense. I didn’t have this other thing, the way he did. And he kept hoping … He was so sure … ‘Just give it a little more time,’ he kept saying. And then he died, and it was all over. He never did live to see it get better.”

“But it might have,” Barbara said. “It might have gotten better.”

“Maybe.” Joyce stared into her glass at the melting ice cubes and the fresh mint from her garden. “But there was Gail growing up in poverty while he chased rainbows.”

“Where is Gail? I haven’t seen her. Isn’t she here?”

“I have no idea.” Joyce realized that she had not seen Gail, either. Not since the car came up the driveway.

Barbara said, “Excuse me for asking, but—what happened? About your husband. Was it an accident?”

“It certainly was not an accident. He was mugged.”

“Mugged?”

“He was coming home late at night.”
Very late at night, the way he always did. Much later than you have to for the theater.
“And he was robbed and stabbed in a subway station. And now you can see why I was so glad to get out of the city, and why I love—” She choked back the rest of what she was going to say, for violence had come here, too.

“Anyway,” she concluded, “this time, my life seems normal. The way it should be.”

Barbara’s mouth twisted in a humorless smile. “Good for you.”

Still bitter? Joyce sat back and watched her grind out her cigarette.

“However,” Barbara added, “I think that’s something we’d better not discuss. Although I’d love to.”

“I’m sure.”

“Oh, well. How do he and Gail get along?”

“Just fine.” If you could call it that. Most of the time they seemed to exist on parallel planes. “Why? How should they get along?”

“I just wondered.” Barbara took out her cigarette pack, shook one loose, and stared at it.

She said, “You seem like a nice, level-headed young woman.”

“I suppose I am. Are you trying to tell me something, Barbara?”

“Yes and no. After all, you’ve been married, what, a year now? Long enough to get acquainted. Maybe things are different for you.”

It was almost funny, Barbara trying to spill out her resentment about him. Naturally an ex-wife would feel that way. She might even try to poison the second wife’s attitude.

“I think,” said Joyce, “that’s a rather loaded subject for us to be talking about.”

“Yes, that’s what I thought.” Barbara sounded relieved. “I did try to stop myself.”

Not very hard, it had seemed.

“Well, I’d better be going. You make excellent iced tea, I love the mint.” She rose from her chair. Joyce rose, too, and Barbara still loomed over her. She could have been quite formidable, in her tall, worldly way, but she was softened by a streak of warmth.

“I
am
sorry, Joyce. I suppose when a marriage breaks up, there are bound to be reasons. Except I thought they were a little more—integral. I don’t know what I’m saying. Anyway, it was just a feeling I had.”

“I don’t know what you’re saying, either.” Joyce followed her to the foot of the stairs as she went up to say good-bye to Mary Ellen.

A few minutes later Barbara returned, ready to leave. “I hate to tell you this, but that lovely room is now a shambles.”

“Again?” Joyce managed a smile.

“Don’t tell me it’s a habit here, too. Oh, good heavens, and you keep such a neat house. I know Carl likes things neat.

Well, I told her to pick it all up. Just keep after her, will you?”

“I’ll try.”

“It’s adolescence. I was terrible at twelve. Have a wonderful summer, all of you.”

Joyce went outside to see her off. Mary Ellen did not appear, but when the engine started, she waved from an upstairs window.

As soon as the car had gone, a shower of pebbles fell from the bank above the driveway and Gail came scrambling down through the rock garden.

“Where on earth were you?” Joyce asked. “It would have been polite if you’d said hello to Barbara. She asked about you.”

Gail mumbled something and started into the house. At the door she turned, holding her nose. The whole house smelled of cigarettes. Joyce emptied the ashtray, and washed and dried it. Carl disliked dirty ashtrays. He said they looked obscene. And if it was worth noting that Joyce “kept such a neat house,” probably that meant Barbara did not. It must have been one hell of a marriage.

She was putting the tea glasses into the dishwasher when Anita appeared at the kitchen door.

“Hi, Mrs. Gilwood. Can I play with Gail?”

“You didn’t come through the woods, did you?” Joyce asked.

“No, I came by the road. Hi, Gail, I’m not mad at you anymore.”

Gail did not look pleased, but led the visitor up to her room, where no doubt the dolls and their paraphernalia would be out all over the place.

Better here than in the woods, Joyce thought as she went upstairs to take care of Adam. How close it might have been, the two of them there alone. What would she do if something happened to Gail? What
did
people do? There had been Larry,

and that was bad enough, but to lose a child …

She was in her bedroom, nursing the baby, when Mary Ellen knocked at the door.

“Joyce, there’s a policeman downstairs. He wants to talk to you.”

“Oh—” Joyce removed the baby from her breast. He let out a thin cry of protest.

“Shall I tell him to come back later?” Mary Ellen asked.

“No, we might as well get it over with. What does he want?”

“Just to ask some questions. Anita said somebody got murdered, is that true?”

“Yes. I should have told your mother. I didn’t want to alarm her.”

She slipped a pacifier into the baby’s mouth and carried him downstairs. Mary Ellen had installed the policeman on the living room sofa. He was a powerful-looking man, perhaps in his late thirties or early forties. His eyes were dark, his black hair flecked with gray, and his nose seemed slightly flattened, as though it might have been broken once.

He stood up as she entered the room. “Mrs. Gilwood? Police Chief D’Amico.” He held out an identification. She studied it carefully. It could have been a trick.

“You’re the one I talked to on the phone last night,” she said.

“That’s right. I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs. Gilwood. Just a few questions.” He edged back toward the sofa, but did not sit down until she did.

“This won’t take long,” he explained. “We only want to get some idea of who’s been in the area. Do you recall seeing anybody, any strangers around here, anybody who doesn’t live in the neighborhood or have business here?”

“No, I don’t.” She tried to think. “I don’t see too many people at all. It’s a kind of secluded house.”

She glanced at the picture window. A secluded house, and at the same time, a fishbowl, with all those windows.

“And a long driveway,” she added. “We can’t even see the road.”

“That’s why I thought you might have been aware of somebody passing through here. We can’t tell which way they came, but they’d have had to be on foot, going into the woods.”

Had someone walked right past this house—to his doom? Or someone, perhaps, at gunpoint. Or—

“No,” she repeated, “I haven’t seen anybody.”

“You said your daughter goes there quite often.”

“I guess so. But not now. She wouldn’t—Do you mean it was there—how long?”

“Not too long, probably. We think it was kept somewhere else, and we’d like to know where. Someplace cool, it looks like. A cave, or something. We think it was only recently dumped in those rocks. Somebody might have reconnoitered there first, or gone back to look. They’ll do that sometimes.”

“How could anybody look at it? How could they
carry
it—like that?”

“It’s hard to tell about people,” he said.

“It would have to be someone who’s a little bit crazy, wouldn’t it?”

He only smiled. “If you see anybody, or remember seeing anybody, would you let us know? Anyone who seems to be hanging around, or walking in the woods, or doing anything different than usual.”

“I will.” But there had been no one. She would have noticed somebody near her house.

“Do you mind if I talk to your daughter?” he asked, “since she was out there? The same kind of question.”

“I’d rather she didn’t—” But there was no way to protect her. Anita already knew, and undoubtedly had talked about it.

She called the girls downstairs, and hovered without seeming to listen, so Gail would be reassured but not inhibited.

“We never saw anybody,” Gail declared. “Only Mr. Lattimer, but he lives there. Sometimes he walks around in the woods.”

“Who was the dead person?” asked Anita.

“Can’t tell yet,” D’Amico replied. “We’re checking that out.”

Anita bounced on the sofa. “Was it one of those people who disappeared?” Her eyes glinted. “I hope it’s one of those people. And I found him. Her.”

Gail asked, “Is it gone now?”

“Since last night,” he said, “but I’d stay away from there till we find out more about this.”

He thanked them for their help. Gail protested that they had not been very helpful.

“You gave me information,” he said. “You told me you didn’t see anybody. That’s part of it.” He turned to Joyce. “Thanks a lot, Mrs. Gilwood. We’ll be around. That won’t surprise you, will it?”

“It will be very reassuring.” She stood at the kitchen door, with Adam fidgeting in her arms, and watched him leave.

Gail came up beside her. Joyce said, “It’s too bad about the woods. But you still have the lawn and the garden. At least we have an outdoors, not like in the city.”

“I liked the city,” Gail replied, her face becoming closed and stubborn.

Because she identified it with her father, while Cedarville meant Carl. And now death.

6
 

After lunch, while Gail and Anita cleared the table, Mary Ellen remained in her chair, gazing through the picture window. Only at a sound from Adam, upstairs, did she stir.

“Can I help you take care of the baby?”

“Of course,” said Joyce, “but I breast-feed him, so there’s not much you can do about that.”

Inadvertently her eyes dropped to Mary Ellen’s bosom, and noticed the swelling. So she was there already. No wonder Barbara had worried about her.

Mary Ellen received a lesson in diaper-changing, then retired to her room. Through its nearly closed door came the tinny strains of the small red radio. Adam was fed and had just been put back in his crib when the doorbell rang.

Joyce wondered, as she went to answer it, whether a killer would bother to ring.

Sheila Farand stood on the doorstep, her black hair straggling loose from its summer bun, her body lean and tan in khaki shorts and a red halter. Beside her was Pamela Cheskill, the exact opposite, a cool blonde in a stylish pale green pantsuit.

Sheila burst out, “My God, Joyce, remember that thing you were telling me about last night? I didn’t even think about it, but you know what—”

“Yes, I know,” said Joyce as she held open the door. “I went over and looked. And the police were here.”

“You what?” Pam exclaimed.

“I went over and looked. That’s a beautiful outfit, Pam. Would anybody care for some iced tea?”

Sheila gasped. “I couldn’t swallow right now. I keep hoping I’ll wake up from this. You went over and
looked
?”

“Not at—it.” Joyce steered them toward the sunporch. “I just went over and saw what the girls saw. Gail wanted me to. And then I called the police.”

“Oh, you were the one.” Sheila sank into a cushioned rattan chair. “They said some woman called. I have a cousin on the force, Herb Mackey, he came over and asked if we’d seen anybody hanging around. I tried to keep it from Anita, but she heard the older girls talking, and then she started bragging that she was the one who saw it first and showed it to Gail.”

“Yes, that’s what Gail said.”

“I’d just like to know what she saw.”

Joyce described what Anita had probably seen. “You couldn’t really tell. It was just a feeling you got, maybe from the smell. Wouldn’t you really like something to drink?”

Pam said, “I’d love something to drink, if you really mean drink. I could use it right now.”

Joyce mixed three gins and tonic and returned to the sun-porch. Sheila asked, “But how did you know to report it? How did it enter your mind that it was, you know, human?”

“I don’t know. I guess after I went there it just seemed too deliberate. But I felt awfully silly.”

“You shouldn’t have. If Anita’d said anything to me, I might have called them myself. But she didn’t, so I thought it was nothing, till Herb came by. I’m telling you, I nearly went into shock. Can you imagine?”

She paused to take a long swallow of her drink, then burst out, “My God, it makes me sick! I’m glad it was covered up and they couldn’t see. Do you want to know what Herb said? It was pretty far gone, but he said, even without an autopsy, they—Well, anyway, it was tied up, at least the hands. And there were stab wounds all over, and the worst part—” She drew a line from her rib cage almost to the pubic mound. “He just sliced her open, right down the middle.”

“Sheila …” Pam set down her drink and clutched at her stomach.

“All cut to pieces,” Sheila went on. “She was
gutted
. At least they assume it’s a she. I mean, things like that don’t happen to men, they’re the ones who do things like that. They compared it to Jack the Ripper.”

“Sheila, please.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Joyce. Anyway, at least he didn’t do it right there. It makes me feel a little better about the girls.”

I don’t see how, thought Joyce. “That’s what they told me, too. It was moved. In that condition. Who’d have the stomach to do that?”

“Listen, honey, the guy must be totally out of it. All that mutilation, how sick can you get?”

“It’s making me awfully sick,” said Pam. “Mind if I go out and look at your rock garden, Joyce? I saw a beautiful aquilegia, and I just love them. When my Brucie was small, he used to bite off those little round things on the crown so he could taste the nectar.”

“It’s not much of a garden, I’m afraid,” Joyce apologized. “I haven’t had time, with the baby.”