She and Henry ate lunch in silence. Henry had a copy of the new lodge ritual beside his plate. He kept it open with his knife, and studied it while he ate. After lunch Marie did her ironing and shaped the butter from yesterday’s churning—they had only one cow—into pats. About four she started on supper. Then she got dressed.
Henry was sitting in the living room when she went in. He’d washed up; he was reading the new ritual. She said, “Supper’s ready, Henry.” And then, with a great effort, “What do you think of my new dress?”
He raised his eyes. His mouth opened in a surprise which, even at the moment, Marie found not quite flattering. “Why, Marie!” he said. He smiled a little. “Marie, you’re as pretty as a picture in that dress!”
He got up from his chair and started toward her. She waited for his approach in a dazzle of happiness. He put his arm around her. He leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. Marie perceived, with an almost apocalyptic horror, that he wasn’t wearing his teeth.
When the kiss was over, she went back to the kitchen. She began to pick up pieces of chicken from the skillet and put them on the platter. She found she was crying. She tried to push the tears back with her wrists. It didn’t help. The tears still came.
For— and this was the heart of the matter, the root of the trouble, the thing that never could be altered— Henry was still Henry Bates. He might talk to her, smile at her, kiss her, be interested in her. What of it? He would still be two inches shorter than she was, years older, and bald on the top of his head. He would still forget to wear his teeth. Those darned old false teeth!
She’d got to stop. Henry would think she was crazy. She fumbled with the platter and then put it down again. Standing there among the wreck of her hopes, her cheeks shining damply and tears dripping on the neck of her dress, she heard the motor of the freezer in the pantry begin to purr.
For a moment she listened to the sound without moving. Then she raised her head.
Henry looked up at her with a puzzled frown when she went into the living room. “Something’s wrong with the freezer, Henry,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “Won’t you see if you can fix it for me? And we’ll eat.”
He got up. He followed her into the pantry. “Why, the motor’s running,” he said in a puzzled voice. He bent over the freezer’s open lid.
Marie hesitated for a moment. Her heart was thumping wildly. She was afraid he’d hear it. She hoped, oh, she hoped, this was the right thing to do. She caught her husband by the seat of the pants and dumped him into the big white chest.
She slammed the lid of the freezer shut and sat down on it.
For a while there were sounds of struggle. Henry thumped, heaved, beat on the sides of the chest. Marie, with tears running down her cheeks, remained seated on the lid. She noticed that from time to time the freezer motor made a sort of spitting noise, as if it might be over-exerting itself.
At the end of two hours she raised the freezer lid.
The Bateses’ absence was not noticed for several days. It was not until Bertha, wanting to borrow Marie’s apron pattern, called three times at the house without finding anyone at home that she grew alarmed. Then she called the sheriff and they broke into the house.
They searched it. They found nothing—no bodies, no disorder, no farewell notes.
After a decent length of time had passed, Bertha and her husband took over the farm. Bertha was Henry Bates’s nearest relative and nobody dreamed of disputing her right to it. Besides, it didn’t amount to much.
Bertha was disappointed that she never could get the freezer to work. The electrician she called in said he couldn’t understand it. The motor seemed to have burned itself out.
One day late that year the mailman brought Bertha a postcard. It was a glossy photograph of a man and woman on skis against a winter background a nd, except that the man was taller and both he and the woman much younger and better-looking than the missing couple, the pair in the picture bore a remarkable resemblance to Marie and Henry Bates. Neither of them looked a day over thirty. They wore expensive ski clothing and both of them were wreathed in smiles. The postmark on the card was Sun Valley, Idaho.
Bertha turned the card over and over, frowning and trying to make sense out of it. She felt that something had happened, but she didn’t know quite what. She hovered on the edge of wild surmise. Finally she put the card away in the upper drawer of the sideboard and stopped thinking about it. There wasn’t any use in thinking. There was no message on the card’s back.
BRENDA
Brenda Alden was a product of that aseptic, faintly sadistic, school of child rearing that is already a little old- fashioned. The vacationing parents on Moss Island liked her, and held up her politeness and good manners as examples to their offspring, but the children themselves stayed away from her, scenting in her something waspish and irritable. She was tall for her age, and lanky, with limp blonde hair. She always wore slacks.
Monday began like all her days. She had breakfast, was told to keep her elbows off the table, helped with the dishes. Then she was told to go out and play. She sauntered slowly into the woods.
The woods on Moss Island were scattered clumps of birch and denser stands of conifers. There were places where Brenda, if she tried hard, could have the illusion of a forest, and she liked that. In the western part of the island there was a wide, deep excavation which people said had been a quarry. Nobody ever said what had been quarried out of it.
It was a little before noon when Brenda smelled the rotten smell. It was an intense, bitter rottenness, almost strangling, and when it first met her nose Brenda’s face wrinkled up with distaste. But after a moment her face relaxed. She inhaled, not without eagerness. She decided to try to find the source of the smell. Sometimes she liked to smell and look at rotten things.
Sniffing, she wandered. The smell would be strong and then weak and then strong again. She was just about to give up and turn back—it was hot in the airless, piney pockets, under the sun—when she saw the man.
He was not a tramp, he was not one of the summer people. Brenda knew at once that he was not like any other man she had ever seen. His skin was not black, or brown, but of an inky grayness; his body was blobbish and irregular, as if it had been shaped out of the clots of soap and grease that stop up kitchen sinks. He held a dead bird in one crude hand. The rotten smell was welling out of him.
Brenda stared at him, her heart pounding. For a moment she was almost too frightened to move. She stood gasping and licking her lips. Then he extended an arm toward her. She turned and ran.
She heard the noise, she smelled the smell, as he came stumbling after her. Her lungs hurt. There was an ache in her side. She tripped over a root, fell to her knees, and was up again. She ran on. Only when she was almost too exhausted to go further did she look back.
He was more distant then she had hoped, though he was still coming. For a second she stood panting, her narrow sides going in and out. He was still separated from her by some fifty feet. She blinked. Then her lips curved in what was almost a smile. She turned to the right, in the direction of the quarry, and began running again, though more leisurely.
There was a thicket of poison oak; she skirted it. She stooped for a pine cone, and then another one, thrust them into the waistband of her slacks, and went on with her steady trotting. He was still following. The light seemed to hurt his eyes; his head hung forward almost on his chest. Then they were on the edge of the quarry, and Brenda must try her plan.
She was no longer afraid—or, at any rate, only a little so. Exertion had washed her sallow cheeks with an unaccustomed red. Carefully she tossed one of the pine cones over the steep quarry side so that it landed halfway toward the bottom and then rolled on down. With more force she threw the second cone; it hit well beyond the first and slid toward the bottom in a rattle of loose stones and dirt. Then, very quickly and lightly, Brenda ran to the left and crouched behind a tree.
The noise of the pine cones and stones had been not unlike that of a runner plunging over the quarry edge and down into the depths. Brenda’s pursuer halted, turning his head from side to side blindly, and seeming to sniff
