Michael Collins - Night of the Toads

Marty was doubtful. ‘That important? A husband?’

‘Maybe he’s sick, maybe she loves him. I don’t know. I do know that this time she hasn’t come back, and she expected to.’

I went to the telephone. Sarah Wiggen was still at home, still nervous, but she didn’t sound still alone.

‘Boone Terrell?’ she said when I asked about the husband. ‘I suppose he’s in Arkansas. He lives down there.’

‘Anne divorced him?’

‘I wouldn’t know. We never knew him, and she never mentions him. You don’t think she’s gone to him? That’s crazy.’

‘You mean your whole family never knew him?’

There was a nasty kind of sigh. ‘We never even met him, and we didn’t care. She ran off, my Daddy tore up her letters. She wrote three in a year, she never liked to write, she was in seventh grade when she ran off. After a year she stopped writing.’ The was a pause. ‘Anne’s three years younger, Mr Fortune. I should have married first! She left me to help Ma along. I didn’t care about her. Four years ago I found out she was up here. I came up why not? Down home all the decent boys were married while I helped Ma. She never mentioned Boone Terrell, I didn’t ask. We didn’t get along here anyway.’

‘Ted Marshall?’ I said.

Silence. ‘Not just him. She keeps away from me.’

‘Do you know what she does weekends?’

‘Does? Sells herself in her night clubs.’

‘Yeh.’ I said.

‘Do you have some idea? You sound-’

‘I’ll know more after I’ve been back to her apartment.

I hung up before she could ask me more. All I had was an off-beat suspicion. I told Marty to wait an hour. If I wasn’t back, Joe would put her into a taxi. She understood.

There was nothing like police outside Anne Terry’s building. The stream of homecomers had thinned to solitary stragglers as the last purple light faded. The street door was open, and I heard noise in the basement. I went up, hoping the lock on her door hadn’t been fixed. It had been. I listened for a full five minutes. That can be a long time alone in a corridor. There was no sound inside. I took a breath, opened the new lock with one of my master keys.

The police had done a routine search now, but the place hadn’t changed. It was still warm, comfortable, and just beginning to have that feel of emptiness deserted apartments get after a time. Or that could have been me-looking all day for a girl who wasn’t anywhere. Only she had to be somewhere.

I started, again, with the closets-every pocket, the linings, the floors, the shelves. One concrete hint of a second home was all I needed. I didn’t get it. The chests-of-drawers were no better. Books are often good for addresses, other names. Hers weren’t: no inscriptions, no pieces of paper, no bookmark envelopes. I had hopes for the bathroom-drugstores use name-labels, and with luck she would have bought some medicine at her other place. She hadn’t.

The desk was next. It took an hour, the silence of the apartment growing heavy on me with distant voices all around from other buildings. Over an hour, but when I found it I got all at once. A sales slip from Macy’s. Among all her paid bills; a grain of sand if I hadn’t been looking for it. I didn’t fault the police, I had seen it once myself. But now I knew what I wanted. A sales slip for a bathrobe, with her name and the Tenth Street address-and an address for the robe to be sent to: Terrell, 1977-A Steiner Street, Long Island City, Queens.

I took the subway. There was no pot of gold in this. Northbound from Eighth Street it wasn’t crowded until we got to Forty-second Street, and I had a seat. By Rockefeller Centre I sat dark in a valley of humanity hanging from hand-holds. They rocked with the train, adapted to it after long years. Some read. Some stared. Some muttered to themselves. Some hung with their eyes closed, asleep standing. The late ones who worked long hours, whipped.

In Queens I found the right bus. It let me out in one of those neighbourhood business sections that fill the boroughs of New York. A thousand ‘downtowns’ like Chinese boxes, the smaller inside the larger from the centre of Manhattan out to Little Neck. The ‘New York’ the world knows is only the heart of Manhattan, the rest a series of main streets a lot like Peoria.

The main street was crowded, the stores open late where profit hung by a fingernail. Twenty yards right or left any solitary figure on the dark side streets moved like a silent shadow in a forest. Semi-detached brick houses lined the streets, driveways beside them, the yards behind. At the corners, tall apartment houses made the semi-detacheds seem isolated, individual. In each house a family lived unique in its own eyes, individual. To a giant’s microscope each family in each house was the same. That is the power and the weakness of people in mass civilization. Weakness that they believe themselves more individual than they are while the giant manipulates them. Power that they can be, in the last fire, individual beyond the giant.

Steiner Street was on a border: the border between middle-class needs and the spread of slum and industry. The same semi-detached houses, but fewer of them, surrounded by small factories, warehouses, garages. Not shabby themselves yet, the houses, but ringed by shabbiness. A street where the not-quite-poor held to the last pride of middle-class values. On its way down. Where the residents fought a rearguard action with brooms, hoses and geraniums.

The unit that had to be 1977 was the last pair on the block next to a tall warehouse. One driveway had been lost to the warehouse, and the whole semi-detached seemed squashed by the shadow of the warehouse. It would be the cheapest unit on the block. The side near the warehouse was lighted, the other side was dark. I didn’t feel optimistic. In New York, even in a semi-detached where two families live so close, neighbour too often knows nothing of each other. But there are exceptions, and I decided to ask some questions at the lighted side first.

How much of our life is automatic assumption? We see what isn’t there, because we see what our minds expect: our minds a storehouse of prejudices, automatic notions, assumptions unaffected by observation. If I had not approached the house up the narrow walk I would have taken an oath, later, that the side I wanted was the dark side. I would have believed it completely, sure I had seen it, because my mind assumed that, since I was often a mystery, the side I wanted was the dark side. I would have been wrong. The lighted side was 1977A. There was loud music inside. Very loud music, bright and bouncy.

When I rang the bell the music did not stop, but quick, light footsteps scrambled and literally ran to the door. There was a frantic fumbling at the lock, and the door swung wide open. I had to look far down at the tiny girl who stood there.

‘I’m Aggy. What’s your name?’

By her size she looked maybe three years old, but I guessed she was nearer to five. A tiny child with a round, freckled face, and big, eager brown eyes.

‘Dan,’ I said. ‘Can you tell your Daddy I’m here?’

‘Did you bring me something?’

She had seen my missing arm, and began to circle around me looking for it. She giggled, sure that the missing arm was a game-I had it hidden somewhere with something for her in it.

Another voice called, ‘Don’t stand with the door open!’

It was a firm, authoritative voice, but not adult. Aggy vanished at a run. I closed the door as a second child appeared. She was drying her hands on an adult apron. The apron touched the floor. She was about seven, thinner than Aggy.

‘Hello. Do you know how to bake biscuits?’

‘No, sorry,’ I said. ‘Is you Dad at home?’