Peter Straub - If You Could See Me Now

I came down from the porch. Lokken was nearly hopping with rage and impatience. I could see his breasts bulging in his uniform shirt. “All right. What’s your story, Teagarden?”

“What I told you.”

“Is she in the house?” asked the doctor. He looked very tired, and as though Dave Lokken had begun to wear on him.

I nodded, and the doctor began to move up this path.

“Hold on. I got a few questions first. You say you found her. Is that right?”

“That’s what I said and that’s right.”

“You got a witness?”

One of the ambulance men snickered, and Lokken’s face began to flush. “Well?”

“No. No witnesses.”

“You say you just came here this morning?”

I nodded.

“What time?”

“Just before I called you.”

“I suppose she was dead when you got here?”

“Yes.”

“Where were you coming from?” He put great weight on the question.

“The Updahl farm.”

“Anybody see you there? Wait up, doc. I wanta finish here before we go in. Well?”

“Tuta Sunderson saw me. I fired her this morning.”

Lokken seemed puzzled and angered by this detail, but he decided to ignore it. “You touch the old woman in any way?”

I nodded. The doctor looked at me for the first time.

“You did, huh? You touched her? How?”

“I held her hand.”

His color darkened, and the ambulance man snickered again.

“What made you decide to come up here this morning anyhow?”

“I wanted to see her.”

“Just wanted to see her.” his flabby incompetent face shouted that he would love to swing at me.

“I’ve had a rough morning,” said the doctor. “Dave, let’s get this over with so I can get back and write my reports.”

“Uh huh,” said Lokken, violently nodding his; head. “Teagarden, this here honeymoon of yours might come to a sudden end.”

The doctor looked at me with an almost professional curiosity, and then he and Lokken went marching up to the house.

I watched them go, and then looked at the ambulance men. They were both concentrating on the ground. One glanced at me and then snatched his cigarette from his mouth and scowled at it as if he were thinking of changing brands. After a moment I went back inside the house.

“Natural causes,” the doctor was saying. “Looks like no problems with this one. She just ran out of life.”

Lokken nodded, writing on a pad, and then looked up and noticed me. “Hey! Get out of here, Teagarden. You ain’t even supposed to be in here!”

I went out onto the porch. A minute later, Lokken bustled past me to wave in the ambulance men, who disappeared behind for a second and then reappeared carrying a stretcher. I followed them into the house, but did not go as far as the bedroom. They needed no more than seconds to place Rinn on the stretcher. The sheets and quilt had been replaced by a white blanket, pulled up over her face.

As we stood watching them carrying her down to the ambulance, Lokken was a symphony of small movements: he tapped a foot, burled a shoe on his trouser leg, patted his fat thigh with his fingertips, adjusted his holster. I understood that all this expressed his reluctance to stand so near me. When the doctor came out saying, “Let’s shake it, I got four hours’ work on the other one,” Lokken turned to me and said, “Okay, Teagarden. But we got people who will say they saw you going up into those woods. Don’t you go anywhere but back home. Got me!? Hey, Professor? You got me?”

All of which was explained by a visit I received later that day. I had been picking up the papers in my office, just gathering them up by the armful and dropping them into bushel baskets. The typewriter was useless now; the carriage had been bent so that the roller would not advance, and I threw the machine into the root cellar.

When I heard a car driving up toward the house I looked out the window: the car had already drawn up too close to the house to be visible. I waited for a knock but none came. I went downstairs and saw a police car drawn right up before the porch. Polar Bears was sitting on the near front fender, wiping his forehead with a big speckled handkerchief.

He saw me come out onto the porch, put his hand down, and shifted his body slightly so that he was facing me. “Step outside, Miles,” he said.

I stood right in front of the screen door with my hands in my pockets.

“Sorry about old Rinn,” he said. “I suppose I should apologize about Dave Lokken, too. Dr. Hampton, the county M.E., says my deputy was a little rough with you.”

“Not by your standards. He was just stupid and pompous.”

“Well, he’s no mental giant,” Polar Bears said. There was a quiet watchful quality — a restraint — to his manner which I had not seen before. We stayed where we were and regarded each other for a bit before he spoke again. I didn’t give a damn for him or anything he said. “Thought you’d like to know. The M.E. says she died forty-eight, maybe sixty hours ago. The way he puts it together, she probably knew it was happening and just got into bed and died. Heart attack. Nice and simple.”

“Does Duane know?”

“Yep. He got her transferred to the funeral parlor this afternoon. She’ll be buried day after tomorrow.” his big head was tilting, looking at me with squinting eyes. Beside him, his hat pointed toward me so that I could see light reflected from the star-shield pinned to the crown.

“Well, thanks,” I said, and moved to go back inside.

“One more thing.”

I stopped. “Yes?”

“I oughta explain to you why Dave Lokken was acting sorta extra uptight.”

“I’m not interested,” I said.

“Oh, you’re interested, Miles. See, we found that Michalski girl this morning.” He sent me one of his low heavy smiles. “Funny sort of coincidence there. She was dead, naturally. But I don’t expect that’s a surprise.”

“No. Nor to you.” I felt the dread again, and leaned against the screen door.

“Nope. I expected it. The thing is, Miles, she was right up there in those woods — not three hundred yards from Rinn’s little cabin. We started workin’ our way in from 93—” pointing with one arm — “and we just pored through them woods, see, lookin’ at every little twig, and this morning we found her buried under loose dirt in a sort of clearing up there.”

I swallowed.

“You know that clearing, Miles?”

“I might.”

“Uh huh. Real good. That’s why old Dave was sorta salty with you — you were up there with one body, and we found another one so close you could spit that far. It’s just a little natural clearing, got some campfire remains in the middle of it. Been used pretty regular, by the look of it.”

I nodded. I kept my hands in my pockets.

“Could be you used to go up there. Now that don’t make any difference but for one fact. Oh, and Miles, she was worse than the other two. Her feet were burned. Come to think of it, her hair was burned too. And, let me see. Oh yeah. She was sorta kept there. This friend of ours, he tied her to a tree or something and — I’m only guessing — -went up at night to work on her. For more than a week.”

I thought of the slight figure drawing me up toward the clearing, and of how I had taken the warm ashes as a sign of her healing presence.

“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea about who’d do a thing like that, would you?”

I was going to say yes , but instead said, “You think it was Paul Kant?”

Polar Bears nodded like a proud schoolmaster. “Real good. Real good. See, that brings up the little fact I mentioned before. What do we need to know?”

“How long she’s been dead.”

“Miles, you shoulda been a cop. See, we don’t think she died of — our friend’s little experiments. She was strangled. Big fucking bruises on her throat. Now our friend Dr. Hampton isn’t sure yet when that might have happened. But suppose it happened after Paul Kant killed himself?”