end… somehow love would find a way.
But now Polly sounded more than angry; she sounded full of pain, and something else as well. To Sheila, the something else sounded almost like hate. “You’re going on hold now, Polly-it may be awhile.”
“That’s fine. Thanks, Sheila.”
“Welcome.” She pushed the hold button and then found her cigarette. She lit it and dragged deeply, looking at the small flickering light with a frown.
16
“Alan?” Henry Payton called. “Alan, you there?” He sounded like an announcer broadcasting from inside a large empty Saltines box.
“Right here, Henry.”
“I got a call from the FBI just half an hour ago,” Henry said from inside his cracker-box. “We caught an incredibly lucky break on those prints.”
Alan’s heartbeat kicked into a higher gear. “The ones on the doorknob of Nettle’s house? The partials?”
“Right. We have a tentative match with a fellow right there in town. One prior-petty larceny in 1977. We’ve also got his service prints.”
“Don’t keep me hanging-who is it?”
“The name of the individual is Hugh Albert Priest.”
“Hugh Priest!” Alan exclaimed. He could not have been more surprised if Payton had named J. Danforth Quayle. To the best of Alan’s knowledge, the two men had known Nettle Cobb equally well. “Why would Hugh Priest kill Nettle’s dog? Or break Wilma Jerzyck’s windows, for that matter?”
“I don’t know the gentleman, so I can’t say,” Henry replied.
“Why don’t you pick him up and ask him? In fact, why don’t you do it right away, before he gets nervous and decides to visit relatives in Dry Hump, South Dakota?”
“Good idea,” Alan said. “I’ll talk to you later, Henry. Thanks.”
“Just keep me updated, scout-this is supposed to be my case, you know.”
“Yeah. I’ll talk to you.”
There was a sharp metallic sound-bink!-as the connection broke, and then Alan’s radio was transmitting the open hum of a telephone line. Alan wondered briefly what Nynex and AT amp;T would think of the games they were playing, then bent to rack the mike. As he did so, the telephone-line hum was broken by Sheila Brigham’s voice-her uncharacteristically hesitant voice.
“Sheriff, I have Polly Chalmers on hold. She’s asked to be patched through to you as soon as you’re available. Ten-four?”
Alan blinked. “Polly?” He was suddenly afraid, the way you’re afraid when the telephone rings at three in the morning. Polly had never requested such a service before, and if asked, Alan would have said she never would-it would have gone against her idea of correct behavior, and to Polly, correct behavior was very important.
“What is it, Sheila-did she say? Ten-four.”
“No, Sheriff. Ten-four.”
No. Of course she hadn’t. He had known that, too. Polly didn’t spread her business around. The fact that he’d even asked showed how surprised he was.
“Sheriff?”
“Patch her through, Sheila. Ten-four.”
“Ten-forty, Sheriff.”
Bink!
He stood there in the sunshine, his heart beating too hard and too fast. He didn’t like this.
The bink! sound came again, followed by Sheila’s voice-distant, almost lost. “Go ahead, Polly-you should be connected.”
“Alan?” The voice was so loud he recoiled. It was the voice of a giant… an angry giant. He knew that much already; one word was enough.
“I’m here, Polly-what is it?”
For a moment there was only silence. Somewhere, deep within it, was the faint mutter of other voices on other calls. He had time to wonder if he had lost the connection… time to almost hope he had.
“Alan, I know this line is open,” she said, “but you’ll know what I’m talking about. How could you? How could you?”
Something was familiar about this conversation. Something.
“Polly, I’m not understanding you-”
“Oh, I think you are,” she replied. Her voice was growing thicker, harder to understand, and Alan realized that if she wasn’t crying, she soon would be. “It’s hard to find out you don’t know a person the way you thought you did. It’s hard to find out the face you thought you loved is only a mask.”
Something familiar, right, and now he knew what it was. This was like the nightmares he’d had following the deaths of Annie and Todd, the nightmares in which he stood on the side of the road and watched them go past in the Scout. They were on their way to die. He knew it, but he was helpless to change it. He tried to wave his arms but they were too heavy. He tried to shout and couldn’t remember how to open his mouth. They drove by him as if he were invisible, and this was like that, too-as if he had become invisible to Polly in some weird way.
“Annie-” He realized with horror whose name he had said, and backtracked. “Polly. I don’t know what you’re talking about, Polly, but-”
“You do!” she screamed at him suddenly. “Don’t say you don’t when you do! Why couldn’t you wait for me to tell you, Alan? And if you couldn’t wait, why couldn’t you ask? Why did you have to go behind my back? How could you go behind my back?”
He shut his eyes tight in an effort to catch hold of his racing, confused thoughts, but it did no good. A hideous picture came instead: Mike Horton from the Norwayjournal-Register, bent over the newspaper’s Bearcat scanner, furiously taking notes in his pidgin shorthand.
“I don’t know what it is you think I’ve done, but you’ve got it wrong. Let’s get together, talk-”
“No. I don’t think I can see you now, Alan.”
“Yes. You can. And you’re going to. I’ll bThen Henry Payton’s voice cut in. Why don’t you do i’t right away, before he gets nervous and decides to visit relatives in Dry HumP, South Dakota?
“You’ll be what?” she was asking. “You’ll be what?”
“I just remembered something,” Alan said slowly.
“Oh, did you? Was it a letter you wrote at the beginning of September, Alan? A letter to San Francisco?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Polly. I can’t come now because there’s been a break in… in the other thing. But later-” She spoke to him through a series of gasping sobs that should have made her hard to understand but didn’t. “Don’t you get it, Alan? There is no later, not anymore. You-”
“Polly, please-”
“No! just leave me alone! Leave me alone, you snooping, prying son of a bitch!”
Bink!
And suddenly Alan was listening to that open telephone line hum again. He looked around the intersection of Main and School like a man who doesn’t know where he is and has no clear understanding of how he got there. His eyes had the faraway, puzzled expression often seen in the eyes of fighters in the last few seconds before their knees come unhinged and they go sprawling to the canvas for a long winter’s nap.
How had this happened? And how had it happened so quickly?
He hadn’t the slightest idea. The whole town seemed to have gone slightly nuts in the last week or so… and now Polly was infected, too.
Bink!
“Urn… Sheriff?” It was Sheila, and Alan knew from her hushed, tentative tone that she’d had her ears on during at least part of his conversation with Polly. “Alan, are you there? Come back?”
He felt a sudden urge, amazingly strong, to rip the mike out of its socket and throw it into the bushes beyond the sidewalk. Then drive away. Anywhere. just stop thinking about everything and drive down the sun.
Instead he gathered all of his forces and made himself think of Hugh Priest. That’s what he had to do, because -t now looked as if maybe Hugh had brought about the deaths of two women. Hugh was his business right now, not Polly… and he discovered a great sense of relief hiding in that.
He pushed the TRANSMIT button. “Here, Sheila. Ten-four.”
“Alan, I think I lost the connection with Polly. I… um… didn’t mean to listen, but-”
“That’s okay, Sheila; we were done.”
(There was something horrible about that, but he refused to think of it now.) “Who’s there with you right now? Ten-four?”
“John’s catching,” Sheila said, obviously relieved at the turn in the conversation. “Clut’s out on patrol. Near Castle View, according to his last ten- twenty.”
“Okay.” Polly’s face, suffused with alien anger, tried to swim to the surface of his mind. He forced it back and concentrated on Hugh Priest again. But for one terrible second he could see no faces at all; only an awful blankness.
“Alan? You there? Ten-four?”
“Yes. You bet. Call Clut and tell him to get on over to Hugh Priest’s house near the end of Castle Hill Road. He’ll know where.
I imagine Hugh’s at work, but if he does happen to be taking the day off, I’ll want Clut to pick him up and bring him in for questioning. Ten-four?”
“Ten-four, Alan.”
“Tell him to proceed with extreme caution. Tell him Hugh is wanted for questioning in the deaths of Nettle Cobb and Wilma jerzyck.
He should be able to fill in the rest of the blanks for himself.
Ten-four.”
