Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

There was a brand-new padlock, undisturbed, on the door marked MEN, and none of the frosted windows had been broken or tampered with. I made a turn of the building and looked in at the side designated WOMEN; nothing there, either, except that the padlock was a little rustier. Well, Sands had not made for the rest rooms then, because even if he had found them locked, he could have broken a window to get inside or shouldered one of the doors open without too much trouble.

What had he done, then?

The most logical answer was that he had staggered off down that same road up which I had just driven, and either walked or gotten a ride back to the Redwood Lodge. And if that were the case, I was only wasting my time out here.

I went back and stood at the foot of the bridge. That intuitive sense was working again, and it kept insisting that there was something here for me, something important, and that all I had to do was keep looking in order to find out what it was. I glanced off to my left, and there was an extension of the path coming from the rest rooms; it curved over to run concurrent with the road for some little way. Behind me were two picnic tables set on either side of one of the stone barbecues, and across the bridge in front of me was the slope. The base of it, at the bank of the creek, was fairly level, and contained a path that paralleled the stream in both directions.

The back of my neck felt cold, and I put my right hand up to touch my damaged face. The fingers became immobile. My damaged face, oh Christ, my damaged face! Something dark nudged my mind, and the coldness increased, damaged face , and I was moving up and across the bridge before I even considered it. I looked to the right, deeper into the open grove; then I went off to the left, walking slowly, alternating my gaze with the side of the slope and the creek, not seeing anything, moving on instinct.

The path led me well around the slope and then, gradually, away from it, still paralleling the meandering stream. I stopped and glanced back, and I could not see the picnic grotto or the road or my car from where I was; the trees grew thickly here, and the ground was completely carpeted with wet, aromatic leaves.

I started walking again. Up ahead, beside the stream, was a huge fire-gutted redwood stump. I stopped once more, looking at it, and my eyes shifted then to a cluster of large, porous rocks at the low creek bank just beyond the stump. There were several of them, bunched closely together, and I stared at them and kept staring at them. Something wrong there, something wrong…

And I had it: the biggest of the rocks, maybe three feet in circumference, was bleached gray along the top and stained a much darker color along its bottom surface, as if that part of the rock had lain in the acid soil for a long time before being recently uprooted and partially revolved.

I went over and stood by the cluster, and there was a kind of leaden nausea in the pit of my stomach. I knew what I was going to find, had known from the moment there by the bridge. It took me a scant two minutes to shoulder the rocks out of the way, to uncover the shallow grave which had been dug beneath them-and the ugly, decomposing thing which lay within it.

Roy Sands was no longer among the missing.

The side of his head had been crushed by a blow from some heavy, blunt instrument-very probably the stained and rusted tire iron which lay alongside the body. The condition of his clothes, his flesh, the nesting presence of insects-God!-told me that he had been in there for some time, and even though there was not much left of the face for positive identification, I had no doubt at all that it was Sands.

The nausea came boiling up into my throat, and I turned away and walked stiffly to the blackened redwood stump. I leaned against that and dragged air into my lungs, and momentarily the feeling passed. A couple of blackbirds chattered in a slender thread of sunlight nearby, and then flew off together; it was very still again.

The whole sick business began to take shape in my mind. I knew beyond a doubt now the nature of the thing that had been nagging at me, the thing I had failed to consider because there had been no reason for considering it, the thing that had been subconsciously bothering me all along with its lack of rhyme or reason, its alien presence in the pattern of events as I had uncovered them.

I had been able to find no reason why Sands would have gone to Eugene, Oregon, and that was because he had never gone there. He had not sent those wires, had not been the man who checked into the transient hotel, he was dead then, he was dead and buried under those rocks behind me. The entire thing with Eugene had been a red herring, a fact I had finally guessed when I touched my face there by the bridge. Sands had been beaten by Holly, and it was incontrovertible that such a beating would have left his face as swollen and discolored and marked as mine; but neither the hotel nor the Western Union clerk had mentioned Sands as having looked battered and broken-a fact they could not have helped but notice despite a hat and a muffler and a coat with a turned-up collar, a fact one or both would have related to me.

So it was not Sands they saw, it was his murderer, the guy who had come in here after Holly left.

It had to be that way. You could figure it, and it was simple now: the guy had done the killing and buried the body, after first taking Sands’ motel key off the corpse, his wallet, and any other identification which might have been there. Then he had returned to the Redwood Lodge, slipped into Sands’ unit, and packed everything in the single suitcase. In his own car he had driven up to Eugene, and on Tuesday night, the twenty-first, he had sent those wires and he had registered at the Leavitt Hotel. Later that evening, or the next morning, he had simply walked out, leaving the suitcase there with Sands’ stuff in it.

End of the line.

In the beginning he had wanted an investigation, because that investigation would begin with the Eugene angle-the wires to California-and would eventually turn up the hotel angle, the packed suitcase, would eventually conclude with the logical assumption that the baffling disappearance had happened in Oregon. That was why no wire had been sent to Elaine Kavanaugh-to deepen the mystery. And he had figured, rightly, that a hat and a muffler and a turned-up collar would be an effective disguise-no one else but Holly knew about the beating- and that an investigator would have no reason to doubt that the man had been Sands, that a scrawled signature in a hotel register was authentic.

But my particular investigation had not stopped at the dead end in Oregon. Elaine Kavanaugh had insisted that I go to Germany, and this was something the killer had not bargained for. He had not wanted me snooping around over there, uncovering the connection between Sands and Diane Emery, and so in panic he had made those threatening telephone calls to Elaine and me in the wild hope that they would prevent excavations at Kitzingen. All they had succeeded in doing, of course, was assuring me that there was something to be learned in Germany-but panic and fear are usually irrational, especially when murder is their catalyst.

So it had to be someone Sands knew well; someone who had been aware of the debts incurred in the poker game, the amount of those debts, in order to send the wires from Eugene; someone who had hated Roy Sands for an as yet undetermined reason, and who had known he was coming to Roxbury, and who had followed him, and who had waited his chance and then moved in and killed him. It had to be the same man who had stolen the portrait from my apartment, who had made the calls. Nick Jackson was out of it now; he could not have known about those poker debts, or that Sands was coming to Roxbury- much less about the portrait of Sands and that Elaine Kavanaugh had given it to me, or about my trip to Germany in the few hours elapsed between the decision and the threatening calls. No, it had to be one of Sands’ three service buddies, the way it had seemed all along- Hendryx or Rosmond or Gilmartin.