Ghouls

since I don’t go to them. But she’s always back before midnight.”

“Maybe she went to see relatives or something.”

Willard shook his head. He filled a glass with cubes from an ice-maker built into the refrigerator. “Care for something?”

“That lemonade looks good,” Kurt remarked, spying the pitcher on the counter.

“It’s been sitting out for days,” Willard said. He smiled briefly beneath his beard, and dumped the pitcher out into the sink. “I’ll make some fresh.”

Can`t be any worse than Bard’s coffee. “Don’t bother. I’ll just have what you’re having.”

Willard iced another glass, took Kurt back through the hall into a study right of the foyer, then filled both glasses with Scotch from a lead-cut decanter recessed into one of the bookshelves. “No, she hasn’t got any relatives,” he got back to saying. “I can’t begin to guess where she’s gone.”

The paneling here looked very old, and the furniture queer and older, salvaged antique junk. Must buy his furniture from Uncle Roy, Kurt thought, trusting the shadows to conceal his grin. Either that or he’s got Captain Nemo for an interior decorator. Bookshelves of conflicting design stood tall as the ceiling, and several of the carpet tiles had begun to come loose, showing gaps. Kurt jiggled his glass to watch the pretty liquid twirl over the ice. “None of my business, but is it possible that you and your wife might be having some problems, in the domestic sense?”

Willard sat down at his desk, sighing. He pursed his lips dejectedly. “In truth, our marriage has been more awkward than harmonious. We’ve never fought, really. We’ve always treated each other with the highest respect, which I’d always deemed as vital—but perhaps it was that same respect that eventually twisted our relationship into stiffness. I fear Nancy viewed the routine of our marriage as drudgery before long; she grew bored with what I took for a very content style of life. Who was the great avant-garde musician who said ‘Variety is the spice of life, but monotony is the sauce’? If that creative hypothesis is accurate, then I must be a veritable tub of sauce.”

Tub of hard sauce, you mean, Kurt amended. He tasted his Scotch and wondered if Willard might’ve inadvertently filled the decanter with gasoline. It burned down his throat like acid, cutting a line of wild, unpleasant heat.

“I’m certain my wife’s having an affair,” Willard said.

Kurt acted as though this were news. “Sorry to hear. Maybe you’re jumping to conclusions.”

“Perhaps, but not likely. I’ve always been a man of complacency, hardly a candidate for the traditional role of husband. Originally I’d thought that our mutual scientific interests might hold us together, lay the ground for a strong foundation of compatibility, but I was really just fooling myself. What could I expect? Nancy’s twenty years younger than me, and I may have failed in fulfilling certain aspects of her needs, if you receive my meaning.” Willard grinned, unabashed. “It seems she’s romantically involved with my very own security guard—good help is hard to find, as they say. He’s an acquaintance of yours, correct?”

“Yes, but Glen’s never been one to keep me up on his private life. If this is true, though, do you think it’s possible—”

“That my wife would consider running off with him?” Willard filled in. “Yes, I think so. They may have already, in fact. I’ve been ringing Glen all day.”

“He’s been in Forestville since early this morning. Police business.”

Willard’s mouth opened, shut. He looked back nebulously. “You’re sure of this?”

“Yeah, but I doubt he’ll be there long.”

“Just what kind of police business do you mean?”

“Routine questioning.”

Willard’s hand skimmed nervously over his beard. “So. If my wife’s not with him, then where is she?”

Kurt had no answer to offer. He remained standing, nipping the potent liquor, and it was then that he noticed another door on the far wall which could barely be seen for the room’s dimness. Three identical deadbolts had been set in a straight line above the doorknob. And mounted on the ceiling, just above the door itself, was another motion detector. Kurt eyed the device, mystified.

“I guess it was all a mistake,” Willard said.

“What’s that?”

“Marrying Nancy. Marrying anyone, for that matter. I would think that I’d know myself enough to realize that this would have happened eventually. I must’ve been crazy to hope that a woman as vigorous and attractive as Nancy would be content with a slothing duffer like me.”

Willard’s bid for the blues sounded pointless, ineffective. Somehow, Kurt sensed it was more an act than anything, an affectation from Willard to seem more human than he was. Kurt cleared his throat, unsure how to begin. It bothered him, but he knew he had no choice now but to betray Nancy Willard’s confidence. “The reason I came over,” Kurt started, “is, well…won’t do me much good now, I guess. What I mean is, I came to see your wife. She called me yesterday, said she wanted to tell me something. But I never got around to catching up with her.”

The words seemed to deepen the lines in Willard’s face, though his eyes remained calm and aloof. He perched his chin on his fingertips, and asked, “What time did she call you?”

“Around six, I think.”

“Then it must’ve been just before she left.”

“Right, but do you have any idea what it was she wanted to tell me?”

“I’d think it would be obvious,” Willard declared, opening his hands as though he held something invisible. “There are many wonderful things about Nancy, she has many attributes. But character was one thing she never had much of—no guts at all. She didn’t have it in her to confront me with the truth; therefore, she meant for you to do it for her.”

“Do what?”

“Be her messenger of doom, of course. She wanted you to tell me she was abandoning our marriage, since she didn’t have the nerve to do so herself.”

He’s got a point, Kurt thought. Or hadn’t there been something more to Nancy’s implications over the phone, something more severe? “Maybe,” he said then. “Assuming that she is going to leave you, and that’s still a shaky assumption at this point.”

Willard eased back in his chair, running his fingers through the ring his glass had left. “I should take a lesson from your optimism, perhaps you’re right. Perhaps I’m viewing all this through too dark a light.” He rose abruptly to his feet, but still seemed small within his cove of bookshelves. “Whatever the case, I thank you for your concern.”

“Give her till tonight,” Kurt said, following Willard to the foyer. “Once she’s gone a full twenty-four hours, then give us a call. We’ll take it from there. In the meantime, I’ll try to get hold of Glen and see what I can dig up.”

Willard halted midway through the foyer, seemingly stopped in his tracks by the portrait of his father, which Kurt remembered from his first visit.

Willard tilted his head, stared reflectively at the canvas. “Look at him, the old fuck. I’m surprised I can’t hear him laughing this very minute, all the way from hell.”

“Why would he be laughing?”

“To put it kindly, my father was the nastiest, ugliest, most narrow-minded son of a bitch to ever walk the surface of this earth,” Willard said, his face a mystery of contempt and amusement. “You see, he was always quite sure that I would not succeed in any undertaking of my life—in fact, I daresay he hoped I would fail. He was convinced that if I did not conform to his designs, then I most certainly would never amount to anything. He bull-dogged me from the very second of my birth, treated me more as a puppet than a son. He had no conception of free will; for a son, he expected a duplicate of himself, and when I made it known to him that I would not follow his footsteps, he became infuriated. It was his ultimate wish that I become a businessman, as he himself had been. But I wanted to be a doctor. I had to bus tables to get through college, and when I graduated, of course, my father refused to loan me money for medical school.”

“Then how did you do it?” Kurt asked.

Willard shrugged, lighting a short filterless cigarette. “I had no choice but to enter the military. It was a fair deal; they paid for my medical schooling in return for time in service as a doctor. I figured I’d do my four years, then