David Wiltse - The Edge of Sleep

Reggie watched them drive off with a sense of disappointment. She had won her battle completely, she had gotten rid of that Dee woman and her hideous “husband” without any loss of property, and had even had the satisfaction of siccing the FBI onto them, but still she felt oddly cheated. Just what of, she could not have said. When she turned to speak to George, he had already slunk off.

The silence in the car was so thick that Karen felt as if it sloshed back and forth with each turn in the road like so much liquid. Becker would not even look at her and she could think of nothing to break the silence except to turn on the radio, which seemed cold and insensitive. There seemed no point in even discussing the couple from the motel. They had no child with them and there was no reason to suspect them of anything, and that was that. She did not blame them for leaving the motel so abruptly. After that kind of showdown with the owner. Karen felt she might well have done the same. Their only offense lay in being weird and in overtipping the proprietor with four days of prepaid rent. As for breaking off their relationship, it was clear that Becker had nothing to say, no defense, no argument. For all she could read into his attitude, apart from the insult of being the jilted party, he didn’t seem to care at all.

The phone was a blessing when it rang. Karen snatched it up before the ring had ceased to echo in the car.

“Crist,” she said, then listened for several moments. Becker watched her listening the way an actor listens, with subtle exaggeration, pursing her lips, squinting with concentration, nodding her head in silent agreement. It was a small show she was putting on for his benefit, he realized, making it clear that she was a woman with more pressing things to do than deal with him. At one point she looked directly at him, smiled and shrugged as if to say, what could she do; she was a helpless captive of higher purposes.

Becker was grateful for her little pantomime; it gave them both an excuse to move away from the awkwardness and tension that rode between them like a hulking stranger.

Any distraction would serve, and work was the best. They did not have to feign an interest there.

She moved the phone from her mouth and whispered “Malva” in Becker’s direction, then nodded again, as if to reassure Malva she was still listening. Becker hoped the phone call would last for the rest of the ride home. He had been painfully aware of her intense scrutiny since she dropped the bombshell. Even during the perfunctory interrogation at the motel he knew she had been observing his every move and expression. Something was expected of him, Becker knew that, some display of rage, or sorrow, some deftly articulated show of emotion accompanied by the practiced flourishes of exaggerated loss of control of a high-wire artist. She wanted to see him teetering on the edge of disaster, almost lost it there! Arms flailing to regain balance, careful now or it’s into the abyss of sorrow! She wanted a reaction. Women always wanted a reaction, but Becker could not give it to her. He responded to the pain as if he’d been kicked in the solar plexus. Paralyzed by the sudden blow, gasping for breath, it was all he could do to curl himself around the pain and try to hang on. He had no strength left over to perform the dance she expected of him. It was for her, he imagined, a very unsatisfying jilting.

“Malva,” she repeated when she hung up the phone at last. For the final moments of the call she had ceased her thespian antics and just held the receiver quietly to her ear. Becker wondered if Malva had not hung up long ago and Karen was trying to prolong the excuse to avoid him, no more eager to return to their strained silence than he was.

“Bobby Reynolds’s school says there was no school nurse on that outing and there never is. The Bickford mall does not have a nurse on duty. Hemmings has gone through the interview notes on two of the snatches besides Bickford so far. Nothing from one of them. At the other, in Peabody, a security guard mentioned having seen a nurse around the time of the boy’s disappearance, but he wasn’t sure if it was before or after. He remembered it because he said she was moving so quickly that he thought somebody must be injured somewhere. Then he said that right after the boy was discovered missing, a lot of people were moving around quickly. The interviewing agent asked the guard if there was anything particularly notable about the nurse and he said no, he thought he remembered her just because of the uniform.”

“Does the Peabody mall have nurses on duty?”

“No, but they do have an eye clinic. The nurse there wears a uniform.”

“Does the Bickford Mall have an eye clinic?”

“I’ll tell Malva to find out. What else?”

“We’ll have to go through the list of sudden departures again and check for women this time, see if any names repeat.”

“I’ll put Hemmings on it after he finishes reviewing the notes.”

Becker paused. Karen waited, then lifted the phone again. Becker stopped her with a gesture.

“If you wore a nurse’s uniform with all that starch, would you do it yourself? Wash it, starch it, iron it, whatever? The uniform on the nurse at the motel, you could cut your finger on the creases. Is that the kind of job a woman would do for herself?”

“You could, I suppose. I’m no expert on laundry, but if it was my uniform. I’d send it out, have it done professionally.”

“So would I. Which means that if I had to leave town immediately, I might have left a uniform or two in a laundry somewhere, right?”

“If our theory is right and a boy has just been killed and you’re packing up and leaving right away, you wouldn’t wait around for the laundry to get done, that’s true.”

“We can check the possible cleaners by phone, no need to have a man go to each one personally. An unclaimed nurse’s uniform shouldn’t be that common an item.”

“Hemmings,” Karen said with a chuckle as she punched in the number on the telephone. Hemmings was a minor legend in the Bureau, one of the very few agents who actually preferred desk work to being in the field. Where most agents sought the solid satisfaction of an actual collar, Hemmings found his thrills in the slow sifting of details on paper. In an era when the computer had replaced the library and file cabinet, Hemmings was a throwback to the literary age, an archivist at heart. What made him a legend rather than a curiosity, however, was his appearance. Bald and hairless since birth, Hemmings began each day by donning a toupee and applying artificial eyebrows. Tagged “Hairy” Hemmings by Bureau wags, the agent also affected facial hair of varying styles and lengths so that some days he sported a goatee, some days a pencil-thin mustache, some days a full beard. With a color sense no more consistent than his taste in tonsorial styles, he offered over the course of a year a kaleidoscopic variety of hair colors ranging from mouse to Irish red and Swedish blond. He was referred to by the agents as the man with a thousand disguises, none of them adequate. Above all, however, Hemmings was very good at his job. He worked the phones with the avidity of a teenaged girl, and when it came to paperwork it was rumored that he could find a pattern in a pane of window glass.

Becker shared Karen’s small laugh at the expense of “Hairy” Hemmings. He found that his chest seemed lighter. The sense that his cheeks and ears were ablaze with humiliation had lessened. He still didn’t want to look Karen in the eye, but he was able to feign levity.

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, waiting for Malva to answer. It wasn’t much, but at least they were working.

Dee found them a motel outside of Hinsdale in the Berkshires. From the window Ash could see the mountains rising softly on all sides with the gentle curves of a woman’s body. If he squinted he could imagine he was lying on the floor, looking up at Dee’s naked body where she lay on the bed, one mountain being the rounded mound of her breast, another the swell of hip and thigh.