The Vanished

‘No, Mr. Emery he went into Eureka today.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘My name’s Holly. I work for Mr. Emery.’

‘Well, I’m glad to meet you, Holly.’

‘Mrs. Emery, she’s up at the house if you want to see her.’

‘I’ll do that, thanks.’

‘Sure,’ Holly said.

He turned, dismissing me, and got his head inside the engine compartment of the pickup again. I watched him working in there with a box-head wrench for a moment, and then I moved away and went toward the white frame house.

It was a shambling old structure with dull green shutters and a peaked roof and starched chintz curtains in the windows. There was a vegetable garden along one side, and some thin-vined climbing roses clinging like ivy to a trellis built against the right front wall. As I approached, the front door opened and a woman stepped out a few paces, staring at me.

She was very thin, very gaunt, with gray hair that seemed to grow in tufts on a sunken, colorless skull. A crooked witchlike nose protruded from the center of an angular face; above it were two small, lashless eyes with all the color long since faded out of them, and below were bloodless, almost nonexistent lips. Her calves and ankles, visible beneath the hem of an old-fashioned black skirt, were like white birch poles interwoven with the ugly blue threading of varicose veins. She wore an old gray sweater buttoned to her throat, and white ankle socks and dusty nurse-fashion oxfords, and she had about her a look of infinite weariness, infinite hardship-the way the pioneer women of the mid 1800’s must have looked after twenty or thirty years of plains life.

She said, ‘Yes? Was there something?’ She had a shrill, querulous voice, like the cry of a frightened crow.

‘Mrs. Emery?’

‘That’s right. What is it?’

‘I’d like a few words with you, if I may.’

‘About what?’

‘About your daughter-Diane.’

Her head jerked slightly, and her eyes seemed to lift in their sockets, darting, and again I was reminded of a frightened crow. She reached up with her right hand and gathered the material of her sweater tightly at her throat. ‘My daughter’s dead. She died, over in Germany, three months ago.’

‘Yes,’ I said gently. ‘I know.’

‘I don’t have none of her paintings. She never give us none of her paintings, if that’s what you want.’

‘No, that isn’t what I want.’

‘Some people come around here, wanted her paintings, but we never had none of them.’ There was a faintly bitter note in her voice, as if the fact that Diane had not given her mother and father any of her valuable art was as much of an injustice and as much of a tragedy as the girl’s death.

‘I’m not here about any paintings, Mrs. Emery,’ I said.

‘What is it, then?’

‘Do you know a man named Roy Sands?’

She did that lifting, darting thing with her eyes again, and her mouth disappeared completely in an ugly white slash, like a razor cut just before it starts to bleed. ‘That filth,’ she said shrilly. ‘He killed her, he killed my Diane girl.’

I stared at her. ‘What?’

‘He got her in the family way, and she destroyed herself on account of him, God have mercy. Him, that Army man, that filth.’

‘You’re certain he was the father of your daughter’s child?’

‘He said it, he come here and he said he was-coming around here, trying to say he was sorry.’

‘When, Mrs. Emery? When was he here?’

‘Just before Christmas, come spoiling Christmas, come just when Dan and Holly was putting up the little tree. He come and took coffee with us, saying he knew her, he knew our Diane, and then he told us he was the father of her baby and he was sorry, he was sorry they was both dead!’

‘Do you remember what day it was that he was here?’

‘Just before Christmas.’

‘Yes, but what day?’

‘Monday, day after church.’

‘You’re sure of that?’

Mrs. Emery looked at me, blinking, eyes darting. ‘Listen, who are you, mister? What’re you asking questions about him, that Sands, for?’

‘I’m trying to find him,’ I said. ‘He’s disappeared.’

‘Disappeared?’

‘Yes, apparently soon after he was here.’

‘You a friend of his, mister?’

‘No, I’ve been-’

‘What you want here, mister?’

‘I told you, Mrs. Emery, I’m trying to find Roy Sands.’

‘I don’t know where he is, I don’t ever want to know where he is, that Army filth. We sent him packing, and he went, too, with his tail down like the dog he is-You listen here, I hope you never find him, I hope the good Lord put him down in hell for what he done to my little girl.’

‘Mrs. Emery-’

‘No, now you get out of here, I don’t want you here.’

‘Please, it’s important that I-’

‘Get out of here!’ she shouted. ‘You get out of here!’

She backed away, still clutching the sweater at her throat, a kind of wildness in her faded eyes now. I stood looking at her, indecisive; then I heard pounding steps behind me and Holly was there, the rubber mask pinched and tight and the vacuous pits radiating molten light in their depths.

‘What’d you do?’ he said. ‘What’d you do to Mrs. Emery?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I didn’t do anything to her.’

‘Get out of here!’ the woman screamed at me. ‘Get out of here, go away, you, don’t you come back!’

‘You better do what she says, mister,’ Holly said softly, but his big hands hooked and curled at his waist and I knew that if I tried to linger, to reason with Mrs. Emery, he would jump me. Things could be very bad then, in a lot of ways. It was her property, after all.

I raised my hands, palms outward. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘I’m going.’

‘Go on, then,’ Holly said.

I backed off a couple of steps and turned with the hairs on the nape of my neck prickling. But he did not move from beside her. I walked away, slowly, and got into my car. I looked up at them, then, and they were still standing by the door to the white frame house, both of them looking down at me, this Holly with his jawlike hands still curled and Mrs. Emery still clutching her sweater at her throat.

I swung the car around and went over the platform, thinking: Poor Diane, poor genius. Maybe I can understand why death for you was preferable to coming home…

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

So all right.

My suspicions were confirmed, and it did not make me feel very good that they had been. I hoped that I would not have to tell Elaine Kavanaugh-trusting, loving Elaine Kavanaugh-that her fiance had been the father of Diane Emery’s child in Kitzingen, Germany, and that it was apparently because of him she had committed suicide by hanging. If I could locate him, I knew I would say nothing to her; what point was there in releasing skeletons, in