If You Could See Me Now (31 page)

All of which was explained by a visit I received later that day. I had been picking up the papers in my office, just gathering
them up by the armful and dropping them into bushel baskets. The typewriter was useless now; the carriage had been bent so that the roller would not advance, and I threw the machine into the root cellar.

When I heard a car driving up toward the house I looked out the window: the car had already drawn up too close to the house to be visible. I waited for a knock but none came. I went downstairs and saw a police car drawn right up before the porch. Polar Bears was sitting on the near front fender, wiping his forehead with a big speckled handkerchief.

He saw me come out onto the porch, put his hand down, and shifted his body slightly so that he was facing me. “Step outside, Miles,” he said.

I stood right in front of the screen door with my hands in my pockets.

“Sorry about old Rinn,” he said. “I suppose I should apologize about Dave Lokken, too. Dr. Hampton, the county M.E., says my deputy was a little rough with you.”

“Not by your standards. He was just stupid and pompous.”

“Well, he's no mental giant,” Polar Bears said. There was a quiet watchful quality—a restraint—to his manner which I had not seen before. We stayed where we were and regarded each other for a bit before he spoke again. I didn't give a damn for him or anything he said. “Thought you'd like to know. The M.E. says she died forty-eight, maybe sixty hours ago. The way he puts it together, she probably knew it was happening and just got into bed and died. Heart attack. Nice and simple.”

“Does Duane know?”

“Yep. He got her transferred to the funeral parlor this afternoon. She'll be buried day after tomorrow.” His big head was tilting, looking at me with squinting eyes. Beside him, his hat
pointed toward me so that I could see light reflected from the star shield pinned to the crown.

“Well, thanks,” I said, and moved to go back inside.

“One more thing.”

I stopped. “Yes?”

“I oughta explain to you why Dave Lokken was acting sorta extra uptight.”

“I'm not interested,” I said.

“Oh, you're interested, Miles. See, we found that Michalski girl this morning.” He sent me one of his low heavy smiles. “Funny sort of coincidence there. She was dead, naturally. But I don't expect that's a surprise.”

“No. Nor to you.” I felt the dread again, and leaned against the screen door.

“Nope. I expected it. The thing is, Miles, she was right up there in those woods—not three hundred yards from Rinn's little cabin. We started workin' our way in from 93—” pointing with one arm—“and we just
pored
through them woods, see, lookin' at every little twig, and this morning we found her buried under loose dirt in a sort of clearing up there.”

I swallowed.

“You know that clearing, Miles?”

“I might.”

“Uh-huh. Real good. That's why old Dave was sorta salty with you—you were up there with one body, and we found another one so close you could spit that far. It's just a little natural clearing, got some campfire remains in the middle of it. Been used pretty regular, by the look of it.”

I nodded. I kept my hands in my pockets.

“Could be you used to go up there. Now that don't make any difference but for one fact. Oh, and Miles, she was worse than the other two. Her feet were burned. Come to think of it,
her hair was burned too. And, let me see. Oh yeah. She was sorta kept there. This friend of ours, he tied her to a tree or something and—I'm only guessing—went up at night to work on her. For more than a week.”

I thought of the slight figure drawing me up toward the clearing, and of how I had taken the warm ashes as a sign of her healing presence.

“You wouldn't happen to have any idea about who'd do a thing like that, would you?”

I was going to say
yes
, but instead said, “You think it was Paul Kant?”

Polar Bears nodded like a proud schoolmaster. “Real good. Real good. See, that brings up the little fact I mentioned before. What do we need to know?”

“How long she's been dead.”

“Miles, you shoulda been a cop. See, we don't think she died of—our friend's little experiments. She was strangled. Big fucking bruises on her throat. Now our friend Dr. Hampton isn't sure yet when that might have happened. But suppose it happened after Paul Kant killed himself?”

I said, “It's not me, Polar Bears.”

He just sat there blinking, feigning polite attention. When I said no more, he folded his hands into his lap. “Now, we both know who it isn't, don't we, Miles? I had a talk with your prime suspect yesterday. He told me that those Coke bottles came from Du-ane's cellar, where you could get at 'em pretty easy, and he says you threw out that doorknob yourself. They were Du-ane's. Says he doesn't know how they got in his truck. And I know he hasn't been up in the woods at night, because he confessed to me what he's been doing with his nights.” He smiled again. “He and Du-ane's girl used to go down to that shack behind Andy's. Do pokey-pokey all night. Paul Kant sort of ruined their fun.”

“Nobody living is the one you want,” I said.

He squinted up his entire face, then let out a disgusted grunt and put his hat back on his head. “Miles, if you go crazy on me you're gonna ruin all the fun.” On went his sunglasses. He pushed himself off the fender. He looked like something you'd run from on a dark night. “Why don't you take a little trip with me?”

“A trip?”

“A little jaunt. I want to show you something. Get into my car.”

I just looked at him, trying to figure it out.

“Get your ass in the car, Miles.”

I did as I was told.

He spun the squad car out onto the highway without speaking to me, his face a tight mask of distaste. All of those unhappy odors began to build up. We went toward Arden at a good twenty miles over the speed limit.

“You're taking me to her parents,” I said.

He did not reply.

“You finally decided to arrest me.”

“Shut up,” he said.

But we did not stop at the police station. Polar Bears zoomed straight through Arden, and we picked up more speed as we left town. Restaurants, the bowling alley, fields. The farms and the corn took over again. Now we were in the same country he had driven me through before, the afternoon I had talked to Paul Kant: wide fields green and yellow, and the Blundell River shining through a screen of trees. Eventually Polar Bears took off his hat and sailed it onto the back seat. He ran a palm over his forehead. “Too damn hot,” he said.

“I still don't get it. If you were going to work me over you could have done it miles back.”

“I don't want to hear your voice,” he said. Then he glanced over at me. “Do you know what's in Blundell?”

I shook my head.

“Well, you're gonna find out.”

Exhausted-looking cows swung their heads to watch us pass.

“The state hospital?”

“Yeah, that's there.” He would say no more.

Hovre hit the accelerator even harder, and we sped past the sign at the Blundell town limits. It was a town much like Arden, one main street lined with stores, wooden houses with porches on a small grid of streets. Lightbulbs on a string and a row of banners hung before a used-car lot, the banners too limp to flap. A few men in straw hats and working clothes squatted on the curb.

Polar Bears took the first road out of town, and then guided the patrol car into what looked like a park. The road turned narrow. It was edged with a long green lawn. “State hospital grounds,” he said noncommittally. “But you and me ain't going there.”

I could see the big gray buildings of the hospital complex appearing through the trees to my left. They had a Martian remoteness. Sun umbrellas dotted the lawn, but no one sat beneath them.

“I'm gonna do you a real favor,” he said. “Most tourists never get to see this feature of our county.”

The road divided, and Polar Bears turned into the left fork, which soon ended in a gray parking lot before a low gray building like an ice cube. Shrubs around the sides of the cube struggled in the hard clay. I realized where I was a half second before I saw the metal plate staked into the ground in the midst of the shrubs.

“Welcome to the Furniveau County Morgue,” Polar Bears said, and got out of the car. He went across the tacky asphalt of the lot without looking back at me.

I reached the door just as it closed behind him. I pushed it open and stepped into a cold white interior. Machinery hummed behind the walls.

“This here's my assistant,” Polar Bears was saying. I realized after a moment that he meant me. He had his sunglasses off, and he rested his hands on his hips. In the antiseptic cold interior of the morgue, he smelled like a buffalo. A short dark-complected man in a spotted white coat sat at a battered desk in an alcove and incuriously looked at him. The desk was bare except for a portable radio and an ashtray. “I want him to have a look at the new one.”

The man glanced at me. It didn't make any difference to him. Nothing made any difference to him.

“Which new one?”

“Michalski.”

“Uh-huh. She's back from the autopsy. Didn't know you had any new deputies.”

“He's a volunteer,” said Polar Bears.

“Well, what the hell,” the man said, and pushed himself away from the desk. He went through green metal doors at the end of the hall. “After you,” said Polar Bears, waving me through.

It was useless to protest. I followed the attendant down a cold row of metal lockers. Hovre followed, so close that he nearly walked on my heels.

“You braced for this?” he asked me.

“I don't see the point,” I said.

“You pretty soon will.”

The dark-complected man stopped before one of the lockers, took a ring of keys from his pocket, and unlocked the door.

“Belly up,” said Polar Bears.

The little man pulled the long tray out of the locker. A dead naked girl was lying on the slab. I had thought they covered them with sheets. “God,” I said, seeing her wounds and the scars from the autopsy.

Polar Bears was waiting, very still. I looked at the girl's face. Then I began to perspire in the icy room.

Polar Bears' voice came: “She remind you of anybody?”

I tried to swallow. It was more than enough proof, if I needed any more proof. “Did the first two look more or less the same?”

“Pretty close,” said Polar Bears. “That Strand girl was as close as a sister might be.”

I remembered the violence of the hatred I had felt when she had seemed to storm inside me. She had come back all right, and she had killed three girls who had an accidental resemblance to her. I would be next.

“Interesting, isn't it?” said Hovre. “Close 'er up, Archy.”

The dark little man, who had been standing with his arms braced against the front of the locker as if asleep on his feet, pushed the tray back into the locker.

“Now let's go back to the car,” said Polar Bears.

I followed him out into the blast of heat and sunlight. He drove me back to the Updahl farm without saying a word.

After he turned up the drive he cut the patrol car onto the lawn before the porch and got out as I did. He came toward me, a big intimidating physical presence. “Suppose we just agree to stay put until I get the final word from the M.E.”

“Why don't you put me in jail?”

“Why, Miles, you're my assistant on this case,” he said, and got back into his car. “In the meantime, get some sleep. You
look like hell.” As he twirled the car into the drive, I saw the grim, entirely satisfied smile on his lips.

I woke up late in the night. Alison Greening was seated on the chair at the foot of the bed. I could just distinguish her face and the shape of her body in the moonlight. I feared—I do not know what I feared, but I feared for my life. She did nothing. I sat up in the bed: I felt terribly naked and unprotected. She seemed utterly normal; she looked like an ordinary young woman. She was looking straight at me, her expression placid and unemotional, abstracted. For a moment I thought that she looked too ordinary to have caused all the upheavals in me and in Arden. Her face was waxen. Then my fear came booming back into me, and I opened my mouth to say something. Before I could form words, she was gone.

I got out of bed, touched the chair, and went across the top of the house to my office. Papers still lay on the floor, papers spilled out of bushel baskets. She was not there.

In the morning I gulped down a half-pint of milk, thought with distaste of food, and knew that I had to get away. Rinn had been right, all that time ago. I had to leave the valley. The sight of her calmly, emotionlessly sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed, her blank face washed in moonlight, was more frightening than the frantic assault on my room. I could see that face, drained by the pale light, and it held no feeling I recognized; the complications of emotion had been erased. There was no more life in it than there was in a mask. I set down the bottle, checked my pockets for money and keys, and went outside into the sunlight. Dew lay shining on the grass.

Highway 93 to Liberty, I thought, then down to where I
could pick up the freeway to La Crosse, and then I'd cross the river and head for a small town where I would leave the Nash and telegraph the New York Chemical for money and buy a secondhand car and go to Colorado or Wyoming, where I knew nobody. I backed out into the valley road and picked up speed, heading for the highway.

When I checked the rearview mirror as I passed the church, I saw another car keeping pace with me. I accelerated, and it kept the distance between us steady. It was like the prelude to that awful night when I had lost her, the night when we had made the vow. As the other car picked up speed and came closer, I saw black and white and knew that it was a police car. If it's Polar Bears, I thought, I'll attack him with my bare hands. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, and yanked at the wheel as I went around the curve by the sandstone bluff. The Nash began to vibrate. The patrol car pulled up easily and began to nose in before me, forcing me to the side of the road. I spun into Andy's and went around the gas pumps. The patrol car anticipated me and moved ahead to block my exit. I looked around, considering backing up and swinging around into the side parking lot, but his car would have caught the old Nash in thirty seconds. I turned off the ignition.