Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

“Well, how the hell can you—”

He held up one hand. “I can’t make a man go out and buy groceries. And as long as he doesn’t actually starve, it might be better this way. Keeps him away from trouble. You maybe saw one of our local vigilantes watching his house.”

“Can’t you chase them away?”

“Why should I? This way I know what the hotheads are doing. I think there are some things you ought to know about Paul, Miles. I doubt that he’d tell you everything himself.”

“Everything he needed to.”

Polar Bears swung the car into a crossroads and began to go back in the general direction of Arden. We had gone nearly as far as the little town of Blundell, and we had not seen another person yet. The police radio crackled, but Hovre ignored it. He drove still at the same unhurried pace, following the line of the river through the valleys. “I wonder about that. You see, Paul’s had a few problems. Not the sort of thing a man is proud of. He’s been in a little trouble. You know how he lived in that rundown old place with his mother for years — even dropped out of school to nurse her and work so he could pay her doctor bills. Well, when the old lady died, Paul hung around town for a little bit, sort of lost, I guess, but then he packed up and went to Minneapolis for a week. About a month later, he did the same thing. He sort of settled down into a pattern. The last time he went, I got a call from a police sergeant over there. It seems that they had Paul under arrest. It seems they’d even been looking for him.” He glanced over at me, savoring the denouement. He couldn’t keep from smiling. “Seems they had a character used to hang around Boy Scout meetings — in summer, you know, when they meet in school playgrounds. Never said anything, just watched through the fence. When some of the kids walked home, he’d sort of amble on behind ‘em, not saying anything, just trolling after these kids. After a fair number of times, say half a dozen, one of the parents calls the police. And the guy ducks out of the way — police couldn’t find him. Not then. Not until he tried something in a park with lots of mommies and kiddies and cops around. He damn near exposed himself. When they came up on him, it was old Paul, with his hand on his fly. He was their boy. He’d been going over to Minnesota to release his urges, you could say, and then coming back here until he had to do it again. He confessed, of course, but he hadn’t actually done anything. But he was scared. He committed himself voluntarily to our state hospital and stayed put there months. Then he came back. He didn’t have anywhere else to go. Now I suppose he forgot to tell you about that little episode in his life.”

I just nodded. Eventually I thought of something to say. “I’ll have to take your word that what you told me is correct.” Hovre snorted with amusement. “But even so, what Paul did — what he didn’t do, rather — is a million miles from rape. The same person wouldn’t commit both kinds of crime. Not if I understand people at all.”

“Maybe so. But nobody around Arden is going to rule it out, you understand? And there are things about these killings that people generally don’t know. What we have here isn’t a straightforward rapist. Even a rapist who kills. We got something a little fancier. We got a really sick man. Could be impotent. Could even be a woman. Or a man and a woman. I go for the single man idea, but the others are possible.”

“What are you telling me?”

We were back on the fringes of Arden now, and Polar Bears was homing in toward the Nash as if he knew where it was.

“I got a theory about this boy of ours, Miles. I think he wants to come to me, he wants to talk about what he’s been doing. He’s got all that pressure, all that guilt building up inside of him. He’s bursting a gut to tell me about it. Wouldn’t you say?”

I didn’t know, and told him so.

“Just consider it. Sick as he is, he’s a mighty lonely man. He probably doesn’t even enjoy what he’s doing to these girls. But he knows he’s going to do it again.” Polar Bears looked at me; he was smiling and confidential and helpful. “There’s a big head of steam in our boy. He’s got to blow it off, but he knows it’s wrong — sick. I’m the one he has to talk to, and he knows it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s someone I see now and then, someone who’s around here and there, ready to share a few words. I might have seen him two or three times this week alone.” He pulled up to a stopsign; across the road and down the block sat the Nash. I wouldn’t have known how to find it. “Well, speaking of luck, Miles, isn’t that Nash the loaner Hank gave you?”

“Yes. What are you going to do about the men who wrecked my car?”

“I’m looking into it, Miles. Looking into it.” He rolled across the street and pulled up beside the old Nash.

“Are you going to explain what you said about the killer? About his not being a straightforward rapist?”

“Sure. Why don’t you come over to my house for a bite to eat some night this week? I’ll tell you all about it.” He reached across me and opened the door. “My cooking won’t kill you, I guess. I’ll be in touch, Miles. Keep your eyes open. Remember, you can always call me.”

His flat ingratiating voice stayed in my ears all the way home. It was almost hypnotic, like having your will taken from you. When I got out of the car at the farmhouse I was still hearing it, and I could not shake it even while I was pushing furniture around. I felt slightly engulfed by Polar Bears, and I knew the furniture would not come right, lock into the correct position, until I was free of him. I went upstairs and sat at my desk and looked into the two photographs. Eventually everything else went away, and I was left with Alison. Dimly, far away, the phone was ringing.

And the third time it happened like this:

A girl walked out of her home in the late afternoon and stood in the humid motionless air for a moment, wondering if it were not too hot to go bowling with her friends. Perspiration seemed to leap from her scalp. She remembered that she had left her sunglasses in her room, but she could not waste the energy to go back in and get them. She could feel her body sagging in the heat and the pollen count was up nearly to 200. She would be sneezing by the time she got to the Bowl-A-Rama.

Maybe it would be better to simply stay in her bedroom and read. She was small for her age, and her pretty face had a piquant, passive cast which looked utterly at home in front of a book. She wanted to be a teacher, an English teacher. The girl looked back across the brown lawn to her house, and sunlight bounced off the plateglass window. There was not a shadow in sight. She sneezed. Her white blouse already adhered to her skin.

She turned away from the glare of the sun off the picture window and went toward town. She was following the direction she had seen Chief Havre’s car travel, two or three hours earlier. Girls in Arden did not like going anywhere alone since the death of Jenny Strand: friends waited at the bowling alley. But surely in the daytime one was safe. Galen Hovre, she thought, was not intelligent enough to catch the killer of Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand: unless the big man she had seen sitting beside the sheriff was the murderer.

She idled along looking at the ground, her thin arms swinging. She admitted to herself that she disliked bowling, and did it only because everyone else did.

She never saw what grabbed her — there was only an awareness of a shape coming swiftly out of an alley, and then she was slammed against a wall and the fear was too bright in her mind for her to speak or cry out. The force with which she had been lifted and moved seemed scarcely human: what had touched her, what was bearing down on her, scarcely seemed the flesh of a fellow creature. Surrounding her was the pungent smell of earth, as if she were already in her grave.