Lost (14 page)

It was only then, standing alone at the dark window, having done what she had done with no possibility of turning back, that a burst of violent remorse welled up in her. She had done the unthinkable. And with one swift act she had made herself a fugitive and an outsider. Now Emma's words of foreboding returned to her:
You don't know what you're doing! What do you really know about her?

She was staring at the night sky, the black clouds drifting along toward some unknown destination and the stars behind the clouds, cold and brilliant, staying forever in their appointed places, never touching, never once breathing, never coming alive with a word or a laugh, like so much in life. She couldn't live in that emptiness any more. There was no love in that sky—so what she had done, wherever it led her, would have to be better than that. Even with all its traps, all its failings, this had to be better.

What else could I do, Emma? she thought. Put yourself in my place.

Keeping her eyes shut, lying absolutely still, Mamie Abbott waited that night for a sound she thought would never come—the woman's breath drawn deep and slow in sleep. She waited a little while longer until there could be no doubt that the woman was sound asleep. Then, crawling silently, Mamie touched the side of the bed and slid to the floor.

From the bathroom, a thin belt of light cut across the dark reaches of the room. Standing up in the space between the beds, Mamie waited again, watching to see if the woman would wake up. The sheet rose and fell with almost invisible regularity. Not making a sound, Mamie stooped and took up the woman's pocketbook.

On tiptoe, she carried it to the far side of her bed where the light from the bathroom was brighter, and, kneeling on the carpet, she opened it a tiny fraction at a time so that it made only the faintest sound. She felt inside the compartment and retrieved the string of hospital beads spelling her name. Then she closed the zipper, dug deep in the purse for a pencil, and found one, a yellow stub with a dull point. Behind her on the other bed, the woman moaned and shifted in her sleep. Mamie did not move a hair. When she thought it was safe, she peeked above the edge of her bed and saw the shadow of the woman, asleep and motionless under the covers. She closed the pocketbook. She returned it to the floor beside the nightstand.

She needed something to write on. Holding the hospital bracelet and the stub pencil in her fist, she slowly searched the darkened room until she came to the table with the vase of flowers on it. Stuck in among the flowers was a small white envelope with its flap standing open. Slowly she pulled it out. Inside the envelope was a printed card. And the back side was blank. There Mamie wrote:
STOP HER SHE GOT ME FRUM HASPIDL
. Then she put the card in the envelope and slipped the bracelet in, curled around so that it would fit inside the envelope, too. She licked the flap and sealed it.

The woman had left Mamie's white parka tossed over the back of a chair. Climbing into the seat, Mamie slipped the sealed envelope down inside the coat's deep front pocket and hid the pencil beneath the cushion. Now when the moment came she would be ready. She ran back to bed, shivering with the knowledge that this would all soon be over. She was far too wound up to sleep.

They left the hotel at seven-thirty, riding down in the elevator and walking out across the expansive lobby. Carrying the briefcase, Leona held Mamie's hand and walked slowly so she could keep up. A different clerk was behind the desk now, and though there was no way he could have realized she had registered falsely, Leona avoided him. She went directly to the bellman, presented her room key, and asked for her car and for her bags to be brought down. He spoke into his archaic intercom.

She felt hemmed in by the gloom of the lobby. Picking Mamie up, she went through the revolving doors to wait for her car under the hotel canopy. The morning air was cool, mild but blustery, the sky overcast with slabs of clouds. While they waited, it began to snow.

When the attendant delivered her car, she noticed that he looked at her strangely. He opened the trunk for the bellboy who was bringing her suitcases and hurried back to the driver's door as she approached it. She thought for a moment he was waiting for his tip, but then she saw what he saw: the cracked side glass, the scratches in the blue paint below the cracked window, deep scratches down to bare metal, and, mixed in the crust of slobber, fragments of dried blood.

In the raw morning light, the dreadful episode of the night before flashed through her mind. That dog wanted to kill me, she thought. Or worse … it wanted Mamie. The slamming of the trunk lid jarred her back to the here and now. She was tempted to explain with a lie what had caused the damage to her car, but instead she gave the attendant and the bellboy a dollar each.

It was snowing but now the sun was shining, and the snow melted as it touched the ground. Drops beaded on the long blue snout of the Buick. As soon as they'd left the industrial outskirts of Scranton, Leona pulled the car off the road. She took a handkerchief from her purse and dampened it with melted snow from the hood, then scrubbed desperately at the dried slobber on the paint. She had to dampen the cloth several times before she had most of the mucuslike crust removed. It ruined her handkerchief and she tossed it away.

She waited for a truck to pass before she pulled back onto the highway and drove away, still headed south along the Susquehanna River, through Pittston and Cromwell, Kingston and Plymouth.

When Scranton was well behind them, Leona turned on the car radio. She found a station that played Benny Goodman records, and numbers, as they called them, from
Show Boat
and
Oklahoma!
When she knew the words, she sang, too, but when the news came on, every thirty minutes, she turned the radio off and sang alone.

Most of the sycamores and elms along the river had shed their foliage; great swarms and drifts of leaves blew around the Buick's windows as they drove through the bright open spaces. It was becoming a glorious day, but the cracked side window split the landscape in half, distorting Leona's view. As she drove, she wondered again who it had been in the hospital room hiding behind the curtains. Watching the landscape roll by her window on the passenger side, Mamie sat on two pillows, her hands in her coat pockets, her legs swaying with the motion of the car.

When they stopped at a Shell filling station some time later, to buy gas and go to the ladies' room, Leona did not see the small hand come from the pocket; nor did she see Mamie place the florist's envelope on the chair where the station attendant had been sitting, reading his newspaper. Her back was turned.

7

Only the sound of his footsteps and the soft padding of the Chinaman's paws broke the night silence. Sherman did not hesitate or look back, striking deftly through the dark countryside. “Goddam her,” he muttered under his breath; “goddam her to hell,” the words like a chant, marking his stride. The pills held his pain to a low humming at the back of his brain.

They kept to the high ground parallel to the Scranton road. When the dog wandered down too close to the ditches, Sherman called him and made him come back. Otherwise he let the Chinaman roam. Very little traffic moved on the highway this late at night; for long periods it stood completely empty. Yet he wanted to be sure that their departure wasn't noticed by anyone. He spoke to the dog sparingly and used his pencil flashlight only when he had to—when the darkness of wild bushes blocked his path or the dog slipped into a gully that opened in the ground like a trap.

Moving quickly, they crossed pastures and fences and woods. As soon as the sun came up, Sherman opened his shirt and removed the papers and pictures he'd taken from the Mattingly house. The snapshots, blown up to frame size, had faded to a bronzy orange. The two women, the one he'd just hit and the one who'd taken Mamie, were in both the photographs. He immediately folded them, scored them with his thumbnail, and tore them in two. Then he tore the two halves showing the Mattingly woman into little chunks and threw them to the wind like confetti. In the two half-photos he kept, the woman looked younger than she did in real life. His teeth began to ache from the angry set of his jaw. From his billfold, he removed the print of Mamie's school picture that he'd torn from a newspaper, folded it with the two pictures of the woman, and returned all three, in his billfold, to his pocket.

Methodically he flipped through the sheaf of papers—most of it yesterday's mail, he guessed. All the envelopes had been opened. He separated them quickly, sorting out the circulars and bills and holding the two envelopes addressed to Leona Hillenbrandt in his teeth. The stack of useless material he tore into small pieces and let them dribble and flutter from his hands as he walked. Of the two remaining pieces, one was a letter on good-smelling paper from Cornelia Dunham, Ridgefarm Road, Brandenburg Station, Kentucky. But the other letter, from the Citizens National Bank of Scranton, held his attention and he placed the Kentucky letter inside his shirt.

Sherman tore the bank envelope apart. He paid little attention to the actual writing as he repeatedly formed the woman's name with his lips: Leona Hillenbrandt. Scranton. That had to be where she was taking Mamie. Nothing else made sense. He folded the letter with the envelope and tore them to pieces. The little wad of money he'd found wedged under the Mattingly woman's vase—the three thousand-dollar bills wrapped in a five-dollar bill—remained untouched in his jeans pocket.

It was still very early in the morning when he saw a country gas station far below and wondered if it was safe yet to hitchhike, if he was far enough away from Graylie. He was crossing an area of hills, and had wandered higher from the road than he meant to. While he looked down, two cars moved like minnows onto the asphalt drive, headed in opposite directions. He wanted to be riding in a car. He called the dog and started down the steep embankment.

He counted four cars parked on the grounds, none of them police cars—nothing that looked suspicious. As he and the dog crossed the highway through the morning fog, he saw a clump of road signs. In black letters, one said:
SCRANTON 72 MI
. The idea of seventy-two miles stretched deep in his imagination and, with it, the minutes ticking away and Mamie slipping farther out of his reach. He pulled a piece of clothesline rope from his hip pocket, tied it to the Chinaman's collar, and they jogged through a display of chalk figures strung out on the ground—reindeer and donkeys pulling carts, and birdbaths—and slipped between the parked cars.

Fog hung in scraps over the road, but the traffic was fairly brisk. As they moved into the shadow of the gas station, a car came in headed north toward Graylie. The attendant ambled from the garage, pumped the gas, and went back to work, frowning at Sherman and the Chinaman as he passed. A lull settled over the station. For several minutes nothing moved on the road.

Come on, Sherman thought, his anxiety mounting. He sat down on the concrete curbing, then stood up and scuffed back and forth.

Two cars came in and stopped on either side of the gas pumps. While the attendant handled the car pointed north, Sherman tapped the passenger window of the one going south, a maroon car. The driver leaned across the seat and rolled the window down a few inches. Sherman asked for a ride to Scranton. The man seemed to consider it, lowered his head as if to decide. “I need a lift for him, too,” Sherman said. “He's with me,” and nodded toward the Chinaman. Without answering, the man cranked the window up and turned to stare at the road.

Before the attendant had finished with the maroon car, an old blue coupe had pulled in behind it. Sherman tapped the window glass, and again he thought he might be getting somewhere until he pointed to the big grisly dog; then the driver said, “Sorry,” and went on studying the map spread on the steering wheel. The car radio was turned low, but the emphatic voice could still be heard: “
Graylie police continue to investigate last night's assault and battery of a local woman, Emma Mattingly, of 210 Columbia Avenue. Mrs. Mattingly has been listed in critical condition
.…”

Sherman heard only that much as he withdrew from the side of the car, concentrating on the man reading the map. Fright ran through him like quicksilver. She's still alive, he thought. If she could describe him, it would only be a matter of time before the cops figured out who he was and what he had done—not only what he'd done last night, but all the other nights and other things, the paperboy who'd taken his place, the fire. I should of finished her, he thought; I should of.

Even after the coupe had left, he went on glancing about, alert and cautious. He saw no immediate threat, except the attendant was coming toward them in his blackened coveralls, wiping his hands on a greasy rag. “You can't hang out here,” the man said. “You'd better just run along.” The Chinaman clambered to his feet and started to growl, his hackles rising.

“We're tryin' to catch a ride,” Sherman said, pulling the dog's collar, telling the Chinaman to shut up.

“You better catch it someplace else. I want you to clear out of here.” He went inside the garage.

Sherman slowly brushed the seat of his pants. Another car came in headed the wrong way, and the frowning attendant glared at them as he adjusted the pump handle. He had the hood up when a white pickup rolled in, going in the right direction. The driver's window was down, his elbow resting out in the chill November air. Sherman started talking to the man in earnest, telling him he had to get to Scranton because his sister was there and he had to take the dog, and could they ride in the back of the pickup, when the attendant came around the front of the truck. “If you don't head down that road right now and stop bothering my customers, I'm going to go inside and call the county sheriff.”

Sherman opened his mouth to speak.

“No buts,” the attendant said. “Either you go down that road right now or I call the cops. Take your pick.”