The vet had said calmly, “Okay, William,” after a long look, and injected the contents of a syringe under the passive black wool. William had subsided gently under Amanda’s fingers, on his way to death although she didn’t know it then.
But that look: detached, dispassionate, for a creature about whom the ultimate and necessary decision had been made. All these years later, in her bedroom doorway, a man she had never seen until tonight had turned it upon her.
Somehow or other, Amanda got the scarf knotted under her chin. She noted in a lunatic way that for all its feathery appearance it was quite scratchy. The murderer who was to companion her opened the front door, the hall light was extinguished, they went out into the bitter dark.
A few miles away, hours later than if broken promises had not been involved, the van in which Ellie Peale had been conducted to her death was being towed under police supervision from its hiding place by the river.
Chapter 15
The young Archibeque boys had no business being at the river. A first cousin of theirs had drowned in it that summer, swimming in an innocuous depth of water that masked a deep hole, and they had given solemn undertakings to stay away from the area at ail seasons. They honored their undertakings as a rule because Ray Archibeque’s reaction to disobedience did not take the form of reproachful lectures about mutual respect but was, instead, fast and physical.
Against this, on an afternoon of Christmas vacation, had to be balanced the fact that a friend of the boys had recently trapped a badger at the river, and that their father would be safely pinned to the dwindling supply of Christmas trees which, at this late date, he was selling at reduced prices. At three o’clock, Donald, nine, and Ruben, twelve, made a quiet exit riverwards.
With them they took their dog, Rusty, a freckle-faced, yellow-eyed animal who would have looked thoroughly at home in sled harness. The dog was delighted when he discovered the goal of the expedition; he often went by himself to chase squirrels or the half-wild cats abandoned as kittens, and on lucky days roll luxuriously on a putrescent carcass.
It was he who discovered the van. The afternoon was sharpening and the light beginning to dim when Donald and Ruben called him, having seen no badger tracks or indeed tracks of any kind. Instead of coming, Rusty bolted after a fugitive rustling in the underbrush, and could presently be heard doing some furious scratching. When the boys caught up with him, he was christening the front wheel of a vehicle in the immemorial fashion of his kind.
Donald confined himself to the comic strips in the evening paper. Ruben often read the front page, and looked at the televised local news, and there was frequent mention of a light-colored van in some connection with a crime.
This van was gray, and had certainly been well draped with brush and matted leaves in an isolated spot.
They had nothing for purposes of writing down the license number, and discussed and argued over it on the way home until it became a mishmash of letters and numbers. They found their father in a thunderously bad mood, preparing one of his difficult widower’s dinners and demanding, “Okay, let’s hear it, where you kids been?”
“Over at Pete’s,” said Donald, smooth and inventive although he was the younger.
So that was one thing to be recanted, right there, if they decided to say anything about their discovery.
Both boys were allowed to stay up late on nonschool nights, and at ten-thirty Ruben could bear it no longer. He had no sense of civic responsibility, but one of excitement and anticipation of his name in the papers: “Ruben Archibeque, 12, of 8821 Grove Circle, led police . . .“A trapped badger was as nothing beside this.
He forced a reluctant Donald out of bed, because in some mysterious way his brother could sometimes blunt their father’s temper, and padded into the living room and placed himself in front of the lighted television set. “Dad? Will you promise not to hit us if we tell you something?”
A can of beer came down in dangerous slow motion. “I have something to hit you for?”
“I don’t think we should tell him. He’ll hit us anyway,” said the practiced Donald.
Archibeque glared at him, drank, and squeezed the empty can into aluminum pleats. “I knew you kids had been up to something. So? I’m waiting.”
He looked capable of vaulting out of his chair, in spite of his exaggeratedly patient posture, and Ruben hastily offered the evening newspaper, folded to a story on the lower left side of the front page. “We went looking for the van at the river and I bet anything we found it,” he said, and then, to further bury the three dangerous words, “It’s this kind of light gray and it’s locked and it was all covered up with branches and stuff and it has a New Mexico license plate.”
The tale of actually searching for the van, like boy detectives, was so preposterous that it succeeded. Archibeque, who had started galvanically at the mention of the river, sank back in his chair, his dumbfounded gaze swiveling slowly from Ruben to Donald, who, briefed at the last minute, was wearing an expression of pride and virtue.
Long, chancy seconds went by before Archibeque glanced down at the paper, glanced up again, asked, “Whereabouts at the river?”
. . . Wallet with driver’s license, the required glasses, gold cigarette lighter which had been the last anniversary present from her husband: proof, as if it had been required, that Mrs. Balsam had not planned a departure. But her Rabbit was gone—with whom at the wheel, and what vehicle accompanying or following it?
Justin abandoned thought. For lack of anything better to do with it, he thrust the handbag back into hiding
