Harvey Sweet was surprised and mildly amused to discover, early in December, that his half brother seemed to be developing a crush on the girl. Although it was closer than the nearest shopping center, he and Teresa patronized the Speedy-Q only in cases of vital necessity because of the inflated prices, but he went in one evening for a dozen eggs and a better look at Ellie Peale.
His vague recollection was correct: She was nothing more than a high-school kid, who might have been passable given pompoms and a short cheerleader’s skirt instead of her tailored beige shirt and brown slacks. He remarked jauntily as she rang up the price for the eggs that they weren’t golden, just plain white, and was taken aback at the coolness of her glance above the distant little smile she gave him. She was suddenly not a yearbook stereotype but a girl who had been spoken to familiarly and didn’t much care for it.
He advised Claude at the first opportunity that he was wasting his time. “I know that type. They’re not pretty, so they make the first move and cut you dead.”
He was aware as he spoke that it was that very remoteness and clear, dark-eyed pallor—the armor of a young girl working late and usually alone, although he did not recognize this—that was challenging to Claude. Still, Sweet reflected to himself after delivering his seasoned counsel, Ellie Peale was at least single; there was no husband to erupt with a shotgun.
There was a moral involved here as well. In spite of the frequent quarrels after which Teresa stormed back to her parents, or he hit her and walked off to spend morose, beer-drinking days with friends, Sweet was faithful to his vivid shrew, and disapproved strongly of any involvement with married women.
By the time Christmas week arrived, he had forgotten the whole thing.
There was always stepped-up activity for the police at this time of year: more parties and consequently more traffic accidents; shoplifters, the inevitable break-ins where householders had piled presents around a tree clearly visible through a front window, purse-snatchings and occasional assaults in the parking lots of shopping centers open late.
That was the expected. Early on Wednesday evening, however, came a report that two prisoners had escaped from the state penitentiary and were believed headed for Albuquerque. As one of them had relatives in the North Valley, local deputies assisted the state police in the setting up of roadblocks there. When an excited call came in from a man who had just witnessed the abduction of a girl clerk from a convenience store on Quivira Road, there was some delay in getting a car to the scene. (It did not facilitate matters that the caller had a slight speech impediment which, at this time of night, might have been interpreted as something quite different.)
By this time the manager had arrived for his routine closing-up, and was able to give the police Ellie Peale’s name and address. The contents of the cash register were apparently intact—a distinct oddity, as scarcely a week went by without the holding-up of a convenience store somewhere in the city.
The witness, a dapper and entirely sober Mr. De La O, proved to be scarcely that at all. He had just pulled up in front, he said, when the door opened and a black girl came running out and leaped into the passenger side of a car with its exhaust pipe sending out steady pulses of gray.
In the not unnatural belief that he was watching a getaway, De La O had kept repeating the car’s license number aloud while he fumbled in his pockets for a pen and something to write on, with the result that when he glanced up, alerted by motion outside a van parked at the side of the store toward the back, and saw what had frightened the black girl, it was almost with the effect of an after-image.
There was only a bare light bulb at the corner of the building, and not a very powerful one at that, but another girl, this one in a light-colored shirt and dark slacks, was being forced into the van by a dark-haired man with a knife. Yes, he was sure she was struggling. By the time De La O had assimilated this astonishing fact, the van, gray or tan, he couldn’t swear which, was speeding away, headed west. The light which should have illuminated its license plate was out.
He hadn’t seen the man’s face, but would describe his hair as medium length, his height as maybe five-ten or eleven. As to clothes, he could only say that they were darkish and could have been denims.
De La O, having already recounted his tale once before the arrival of the police, had now calmed down to a point where he was trying to buy a quart of acidophilus milk from the shocked and inattentive manager. The police took his name and address and agreement to sign a statement in the morning; then, accompanied by the manager, they tramped off to the back of the store to examine the exit. De La O took his milk and departed.
The name on the mailbox at the small house where Ellie Peale lived was Chenowyth. A Christmas tree glimmered in a picture window, a ribbon-tied wreath encircled the knocker. The carport, the deputies noted, was empty.
Mrs. Chenowyth, they discovered presently when she gave them
