Bill Pronzini: The Vanished

Which one?

Which one?

The portrait-why was the portrait important, why had it been stolen? To prevent me from showing it in Eugene, because in its clear, sharp detailing it was better than any photograph and might perhaps destroy the careful masquerade the killer had undertaken there? Yeah, that was certain to be part of the reason; but I had the feeling that there was more to it than that, something deeper and, if less rational, even more important to the man who had murdered Roy Sands. A pattern was beginning to take shape now, and it was an ugly pattern, one of jealousy and love and hate, one of twisted human emotions that had culminated in cold-blooded murder…

I stood with all of these answers and half-answers spinning free-fall inside my head, with the thing that had been Roy Sands lying crushed and huddled in the shallow grave a few feet behind me. I turned away, stumbling a little, and started back along the path toward the bridge and my car. The one thing I knew I had to do immediately was to contact the authorities.

My shoes scuffling through the profusion of leaves was the only sound-and then there was another, suddenly, an unmistakable metallic sound.

I stopped abruptly to listen. Nothing now, no blackbirds, no jays, just the teasing wind. My heart began to slug faster, and I went forward again, coming to the junction of slope and path and creek, moving past it, around the slope to where I could see the picnic grove and my car-my car with the hood raised and somebody, a man, I could not see his face, jerking at something inside there.

I began to run.

I ran along the path without thinking, acting on reflex, opening my mouth to shout, and strangling the cry; needles of pain lanced through my body from the exertion of aching muscles. I reached the bridge and started over it, too late remembering how noise carries in a quiet forest area; the slap of my shoes on the wooden planking was like the hollow cracking of whips. He looked up, the briefest of glances in my direction, and I still could not see his face, he had a plaid hunter’s jacket on and a hunter’s cap pulled down and he had a rifle held loosely by the stock; I felt the instinctive urge to throw myself flat and gain some kind of cover, faltering, running toward the center of the picnic grotto in a diagonal trajectory because cover was there.

The guy turned and fled.

Dark trousers and the jacket flapping loose above, the rifle extended out on his right and him running spindle-legged down the road. My lungs were on fire, but I managed to change direction, going after him, seeing him disappear around the bend in the road, vaulting the double-link chain, stumbling past my car, almost falling, mouth open and sucking air like a blowfish, thinking: Let him go, he’ll kill you, he killed Sands, you’re no goddamn hero. But I kept on running; it was as if I could not bring myself up, as if I was running on a belt with no way to stop.

A sudden roaring dissolved the stillness of the woods, an automobile engine coming to life; he had wheels parked somewhere along the road. I staggered around the bend, and a hundred yards ahead a car was pulling away, tires howling, spraying soft dirt-a green car, a green Pontiac, the same green Pontiac I had seen in front of number seven at the Redwood Lodge a little earlier that same morning.

I stopped running, gasping, watching the car hurtle down the road. He followed me up here, I thought, he followed me from San Francisco, followed me out to Hammock Grove this morning-and I turned, running again back to my car.

Lungs screaming, I leaned over the fender, looking into the engine compartment. He had pulled all of the spark-plug wires loose, and the rotor was missing. If he had taken that goddamn rotor with him…

I made a soft, meaningless sound in my throat, and rubbed thick sweat out of my eyes, and tried to get my breathing down to normal. Goddamn cigarettes, the goddamn weeds, oh, the goddamn filthy goddamn coffin nails! directing rage and impotent frustration at the handiest outlet. I pressed my cheek against the cold metal surface of the fender, and after a hellish long time my lungs cleared and I could function.

I went looking for the rotor, maybe he had thrown it away, he had to have thrown it away. Another five minutes went by, a year went by, and there it was, lying on a bed of leaves thirty feet from the car. I took it back and got it into place, and then went to work on the plug wires. It took time, time, and I could not seem to locate the proper sequence; the car was old and the firing order had not been stamped on the engine block, as with the newer models. I discovered once that I was shouting obscenities, and closed my mouth to cut that off, and the sweat ran in rivers along my body. My lungs ached and my body ached. I wanted to lie down somewhere in the cool shade of one of the redwoods, to sleep, to rest. But I kept at it, and finally I knew I had the right progression; when I kicked the engine over this time, it caught and held.

I got the hood down and backed the car around and headed back to Roxbury. I drove too fast, hunched over the wheel, trying not to think, to concentrate only on the driving. But I was thinking just enough, just enough.

Why hadn’t he killed me back there, with that rifle? Why hadn’t he shot me when he had the chance, why had he just disabled the car and not very effectively at that? One answer, one possibility, and I felt physically sick because it was too late now, I knew in my mind that it was too late now.

I came into Roxbury and off on the left was the Redwood Lodge. The green Pontiac was there, in front of number seven, slewed up to the front porch. Too late, too damned late. My foot came jamming down on the brakes, and I heard them lock with a screaming of metal and the tires screaming in a different cadence on the macadam, the machine yawing this way and that. I fought the wheel, wrenching it hard to the left-more screaming-and then I was onto the graveled half-moon and braking next to the Pontiac, jumping out with the engine still throbbing, swaying up onto the porch. The door was standing partially ajar, oh Jesus, and I put the flat of my hand against the wood and shoved it wide.

He was there.

He was turning, very slowly, in the center of the room, suspended from one of the rafter beams by a length of hemp rope looped around his neck, his head lolling to one side, neck broken, eyes staring, turning, dead.

Doug Rosmond had hanged himself, just as Diane Emery had done in Kitzingen, Germany, less than three months before.

The only thing I could think was: What am I going to say to Cheryl, what am I going to say?

I stood motionless in the doorway, staring at Rosmond, watching him turn at the end of that taut rope, hearing the rope creak slightly, nightmarishly, from his weight. I stood there for long, frozen seconds, asking myself again and again in a kind of frightening singsong, like the words of a monstrous jingle running through my mind: What am I going to say to Cheryl, what am I going to say? Then, finally, I was able to move and I stepped inside and shut the door behind me and leaned against it, still staring at Rosmond, and his face dissolved like something in quicklime and became Cheryl’s face and I was filled with an ugly, suffocating, poisonous bile.

I took another step forward, and I could not look at him any longer. I turned away and there was a mirror on the wall over the room’s writing desk. I could see myself clearly reflected in the glass. I had an insane urge to smash the mirror, the hideous, twisted, red-orange-black-pink face that stared back at me. I fought it down, turning again, and Rosmond filled the room, his body and that goddamn gallows creaking, creaking, as he turned there on the stretched rope. The bile churned in my belly and I started to back up, wanting air; for the first time, then, I saw on the varnished top of the writing desk some sheets of paper folded in half-motel stationery-and something written in heavy pencil on the back of the facing sheet.