dressed in corduroy pants and a clean blue T-shirt.
‘Does Mr Ben Mears live here?’
Eva began to ask why he wasn’t in school, then didn’t. His expression was very serious, even grave. There were blue hollows under his eyes.
‘He’s sleeping.’
‘May I wait?’
Homer McCaslin ad gone directly from Green’s Mortuary to the Norton home on Brock Street. It was eleven o’clock by the time he got there. Mrs Norton was in tears, and while Bill Norton seemed calm enough, he was chain smoking and his face looked drawn.
McCaslin agreed to put the girl’s description on the wire. Yes, he would call as soon as he heard something. Yes, he would check the hospitals in the area, it was part of the routine (so was the morgue). He privately thought the girl might have gone off in a tiff. The mother admitted they had quarreled and that the girl had been talking of moving out.
Nonetheless, he cruised some of the back roads, one ear comfortably cocked to the crackle of static coming from the radio slung under the dash. At a few minutes past midnight, coming up the Brooks Road toward town, the spotlight he had trained on the soft shoulder of the road glinted off metal-a car parked in the woods.
He stopped, backed up, got out. The car was parked partway up an old disused wood-road. Chevy Vega, light brown, two years old. He pulled his heavy chained notebook out of his back pocket, paged past the interview with Ben and Jimmy, and trained his light on the license number Mrs Norton had given him. It matched. The girl’s car, all right. That made things more serious. He laid his hand on the hood. Cool. It had been parked for a while.
‘Sheriff?’
A light, carefree voice, like tinkling bells. Why had his hand dropped to the butt of his gun?
He turned and saw the Norton girl, looking incredibly beautiful, walking toward him hand in hand with a stranger-a young man with black hair unfashionably combed straight back from his forehead. McCaslin shone the flashlight at his face and had the oddest impression that the light was shining right through it without illuminating it in the slightest. And although they were walking, they left no tracks in the soft dirt. He felt fear and warning kindle in his nerves, his hand tightened on his revolver… and then loosened. He clicked off his flashlight and waited passively.
‘Sheriff,’ she said, and now her voice was low, caressing.
‘How good of you to come,’ the stranger said.
They fell on him.
Now his patrol car was parked far out on the rutted and brambled dead end of the Deep Cut Road, with hardly a twinkle of chrome showing through the heavy strands of juniper, bracken, and Loily-come-see-me. McCaslin was curled up in the trunk. The radio called him at regular intervals unheeded.
Later that same morning Susan paid a short visit to her mother but did little damage; like a leech that had fed well on a slow swimmer, she was satisfied. Still, she had been invited in and now she could come and go as she pleased. There would be a new hunger tonight… every night.
Charles Griffen had wakened his wife at a little after five on that Monday morning, his face long and chiseled into sardonic lines by his anger. Outside, the cows were bawling unmilked with full udders. He summed up the work of the night in six words: ‘Those damned boys have run off.’
But they had not. Danny Glick had found and battened upon Jack Griffen and Jack had gone to his brother Hal’s room and had finally ended his worries of school and books and unyielding fathers forever. Now both of them lay in the center of a huge pile of loose hay in the upper mow, with chaff in their hair and sweet motes of pollen dancing in the dark and tideless channels of their noses. An occasional mouse scampered across their faces.
Now the light had spilled across the land, and all evil things slept. It was to be a beautiful autumn day, crisp and clear and filled with sunshine. By and large the town (not knowing it was dead) would go off to their jobs with no inkling of the night’s work. According to the Old Farmer, sunset Monday night would come at 7:00 P.M. sharp.
The days shortened, moving toward Halloween, and beyond that, winter.
3
When Ben came downstairs at quarter to nine, Eva Miller said from the sink, ‘There’s someone waiting to see you on the porch.’
He nodded and went out the back door, still in his slippers, expecting to see either Susan or Sheriff McCaslin. But the visitor was a small, economical boy sitting on the top step of the porch and looking out over the town, which was coming slowly to its Monday morning vitality.
‘Hello?’ Ben said, and the boy turned around quickly-
They looked at each other for no great space of time, but for Ben the moment seemed to undergo a queer stretching, and a feeling of unreality swept him. The boy reminded him physically of the boy he himself had been, but it was more than that. He seemed to feel a weight settle onto his neck, as if in a curious way he sensed the more-than-chance coming together of their lives. It made him think of the day he had met Susan in the park, and how their light, get-acquainted conversation had seemed queerly heavy and fraught with intimations of the future.
Perhaps the boy felt something similar, for his eyes widened slightly and his hand found the porch railing, as if for support.
‘You’re Mr Mears,’ the boy said, not questioning.
‘Yes. You have the advantage, I’m afraid.’
