Bill Pronzini - The Vanished

‘Yes,’ I said gently. ‘I know.’

‘I don’t have none of her paintings. She never give us none of her paintings, if that’s what you want.’

‘No, that isn’t what I want.’

‘Some people come around here, wanted her paintings, but we never had none of them.’ There was a faintly bitter note in her voice, as if the fact that Diane had not given her mother and father any of her valuable art was as much of an injustice and as much of a tragedy as the girl’s death.

‘I’m not here about any paintings, Mrs. Emery,’ I said.

‘What is it, then?’

‘Do you know a man named Roy Sands?’

She did that lifting, darting thing with her eyes again, and her mouth disappeared completely in an ugly white slash, like a razor cut just before it starts to bleed. ‘That filth,’ she said shrilly. ‘He killed her, he killed my Diane girl.’

I stared at her. ‘What?’

‘He got her in the family way, and she destroyed herself on account of him, God have mercy. Him, that Army man, that filth.’

‘You’re certain he was the father of your daughter’s child?’

‘He said it, he come here and he said he was-coming around here, trying to say he was sorry.’

‘When, Mrs. Emery? When was he here?’

‘Just before Christmas, come spoiling Christmas, come just when Dan and Holly was putting up the little tree. He come and took coffee with us, saying he knew her, he knew our Diane, and then he told us he was the father of her baby and he was sorry, he was sorry they was both dead!’

‘Do you remember what day it was that he was here?’

‘Just before Christmas.’

‘Yes, but what day?’

‘Monday, day after church.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

Mrs. Emery looked at me, blinking, eyes darting. ‘Listen, who are you, mister? What’re you asking questions about him, that Sands, for?’

‘I’m trying to find him,’ I said. ‘He’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Yes, apparently soon after he was here.’

‘You a friend of his, mister?’

‘No, I’ve been-’

‘What you want here, mister?’

‘I told you, Mrs. Emery, I’m trying to find Roy Sands.’

‘I don’t know where he is, I don’t ever want to know where he is, that Army filth. We sent him packing, and he went, too, with his tail down like the dog he is-You listen here, I hope you never find him, I hope the good Lord put him down in hell for what he done to my little girl.’

‘Mrs. Emery-’

‘No, now you get out of here, I don’t want you here.’

‘Please, it’s important that I-’

‘Get out of here!’ she shouted. ‘You get out of here!’

She backed away, still clutching the sweater at her throat, a kind of wildness in her faded eyes now. I stood looking at her, indecisive; then I heard pounding steps behind me and Holly was there, the rubber mask pinched and tight and the vacuous pits radiating molten light in their depths.

‘What’d you do?’ he said. ‘What’d you do to Mrs. Emery?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything to her.’

‘Get out of here!’ the woman screamed at me. ‘Get out of here, go away, you, don’t you come back!’

‘You better do what she says, mister,’ Holly said softly, but his big hands hooked and curled at his waist and I knew that if I tried to linger, to reason with Mrs. Emery, he would jump me. Things could be very bad then, in a lot of ways. It was her property, after all.

I raised my hands, palms outward. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m going.’

‘Go on, then,’ Holly said.

I backed off a couple of steps and turned with the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. But he did not move from beside her. I walked away, slowly, and got into my car. I looked up at them, then, and they were still standing by the door to the white frame house, both of them looking down at me, this Holly with his jawlike hands still curled and Mrs. Emery still clutching her sweater at her throat.

I swung the car around and went over the platform, thinking: Poor Diane, poor genius. Maybe I can understand why death for you was preferable to coming home…

So all right.

My suspicions were confirmed, and it did not make me feel very good that they had been. I hoped that I would not have to tell Elaine Kavanaugh-trusting, loving Elaine Kavanaugh-that her fiancé had been the father of Diane Emery’s child in Kitzingen, Germany, and that it was apparently because of him she had committed suicide by hanging. If I could locate him, I knew I would say nothing to her; what point was there in releasing skeletons, in destroying individually created sainthood, if you could preserve happiness and a kind of love that had a shaky but potentially supportive foundation? Well, I had to find Sands, that was the simple fact of it. The prospect of having to tell Elaine what I knew, of having her drag it out of me as she would surely do, was painfully depressing. It was bad enough to be poking into other people’s lives, but when you had to air their dirty linen in front of them, as the old saying goes, it reaffirmed the grim comment Eberhardt had once made to me when I was still on the force: of all the grim messengers on this earth, a cop is the grimmest-a kind of Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse carrying news of death and tragedy and terror into the homes of those who pay his salary…

I got my mind off that track-some track- and back onto what I now knew of the activities of Roy Sands. He had definitely come here to Roxbury after leaving San Francisco on the nineteenth of last month; and on the twentieth he had visited the Emery farm, presumably for the purpose I had conjectured in Kitzingen: a lingering guilt at having been responsible for Diane’s death, and a slim hope that confession to her parents would give succor to his disturbed soul. But the Emerys had driven him away, offering him no forgiveness, no understanding.

And then?

Well, he had apparently left Roxbury, by one means of transportation or another, and gone directly to Eugene, Oregon, for some as yet unexplained reason. Had he done that the same day he visited the Emerys-Monday? It would not appear so, since he had checked into the Eugene hotel late on the twenty-first, Tuesday, and had sent the wires to Hendryx, Rosmond, and Gilmartin on that same evening.

After that-blank.

If Sands had spent the night of the twentieth here, he would not have had much choice of location; aside from the Redwood Lodge, where I was now staying, I had noticed a small hotel on Main Street and nothing else- although there may have been some kind of accommodations on one of the side streets. I ought to be able, then, to determine, with no problem, whether or not he had spent that particular evening in Roxbury. After that, I would just have to see what developed, what my instincts told me. I had this feeling, a prescience of sorts, that said the answer to the disappearance of Roy Sands was in this village-that the final solution to the whole affair could be had right here, with just a little digging, a little perseverance. There was no foundation for that feeling, and yet it was there and it was demanding.

I drove back to the Redwood Lodge and stopped at the office and talked again to the guy who looked like Frank Lovejoy. His name was Jardine, I discovered, and he was the owner of the motel; when I told him what my job was and asked him about Roy Sands, he was agreeably co-operative.

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I remember him clear enough-Roy Sands. He came in on foot, with just a single suitcase. It was raining a little that day, and he came shuffling down the road looking kind of wet and forlorn. Must have just got off the one o’clock bus from Eureka, I remember thinking at the time. Let’s see, I rented him cabin number three, I think it was. Only stayed the one night.’