The Orchard (10 page)

“Mr. Gilman?”

He looked over his shoulder, and stopped.

“Would you tell Les that I tried to call him last night?”

“He wasn’t home, Amy,” he said, puzzled at the way she kept looking at him. As if he wasn’t there. As if he were only a shimmer of heat she was trying to give form.

“I know. Would you tell him I called?”

He nodded automatically and she walked away, in and out of the shade, her long legs pale, dark, pale, until a tall hedge intervened and she was gone.

Those legs, however, and the bare midriff, the ribbon of back, were little more than glimpses when he stopped again and cocked his head.

Gone now, unseen, and for the briefest of moments all he heard were her footsteps. Quiet, quick, and muffled. The way they had been in Saturday’s fog.

Good god, he thought, and waved away the notion as he climbed heavily to the porch. It was obvious to a blind man she was jealous of whoever went out with Les, but she certainly wasn’t crazy enough to follow the son’s father as well.

“Nuts,” he said as he opened the door. “You’re nuts, Gilman. She didn’t follow you then, she didn’t follow you ever, and she sure as hell didn’t kill either of those poor girls.”

The house was empty, but there were signs Les had been there—his school jacket had been tossed on the couch, and his books were on the dining room table. The upstairs rooms, though, were empty, and so, when he looked, was the backyard. There was no note.

The car was still in the garage, and he was ashamed that he had checked.

For a while, he stood in the middle of the driveway, trying to make up his mind what to do next. He could wait for Les to show himself, or he could return to the station and face Stockton with the news that the boy was gone. But waiting would kill him; and Stockton only had so much patience to go around. Frustrated, he rolled up his shirtsleeves and considered mowing the lawn, raking the yard, cleaning out the garage, washing the car. And when he was finished stalling, he found himself staring at the fence and thinking of Amy.

He told himself he was crazy, that according to his son and Denise, the girl hadn’t been quite the same since her boyfriend had died. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be too farfetched for her to latch onto Les because he had helped her; she could hold him, as a lifeline, and feel threatened, unnerved, whenever he saw someone else. Like Evelyn Zayer.

There have been less substantial motives, he thought. A lot less. And for the time being, it was better than the nothing he already had; it was far better than thinking his own boy was a killer.

Forcing down the guilty protests that began instantly to surface, he went inside and checked the telephone book for her address, then changed into jeans and an open-necked shirt. When Les still hadn’t arrived by the time he was ready, he told himself Amy was probably having supper with her family—a good time to catch her home, a bad time for questions. So he forced himself to sit down, have a sandwich he barely tasted and a glass of milk he thought sour. A note, then, for Les, apologizing for not being home and asking the boy to forage for his own supper.

Amy wasn’t home. No one was.

He stood for a moment at their door, then wandered over to Chancellor Avenue, trying to decide where best to find her, or get hold of Les. He had started for the luncheonette when he saw her heading for Mainland Road.

An impulse to call out was denied, and he followed instead, hands loose in his pockets. He was strolling, nothing more, as the last of the sun glared hard in his eyes and the heat broke drops of perspiration along the line of his hair. This was the way she’d gone when he’d seen her with Les, and he wondered if the field, the deserted Armstrong farm, was a meeting place for kids. He’d heard no word of it, believing that the local lovers’ lanes were confined to the valley on the other side of the tracks.

She paused at the corner before crossing over, down into the drainage ditch, up through the brambles.

A truck hurtled by, and he turned away from the blast of hot air that made his cheeks feel dry and cracked.

Dumb, he thought, and sprinted over, scrambling up the slope, squinting as the light shot red into his eyes, obscuring everything but the points of thorns quivering near his face. He waited, catching his breath, then slipped sideways along the hedge until he found a gap he could push through.

A pale curling mist was lifting from the field, drifting out of the trees north and south of him to wind through the weeds. He stretched his neck, rubbed his shoulders, picked up a stick and started walking. Westward, but not directly. Peering down into the dead high grass, switching aside browning stalks, watching a pair of grasshoppers whirr like cracked paper away from his shoes.

Out for a stroll.

Shading his eyes against the sun now caged behind the trees, the air difficult to breathe, his chest growing tight, locusts in the trees buzzing louder than the traffic. Stumbling over a hidden burrow that nearly turned his ankle. Kicking a branch to one side and ducking away from a swarm of spinning gnats he snorted from his nostrils, scratched out of his ears. Watching burrs cling to his legs and wobble with his motion.

Then he heard his name—a whisper, a calling—and she was standing by the near edge of the orchard, the dead and burned trees sharp and more lifeless as the day shaded faintly gold.

She smiled shyly when he reached her, still switching the weeds, once in a while taking the stick lightly to his leg. “Are you following me again, Mr. Gilman?”

He laughed. “No. I have been looking for you, though.”

She frowned briefly. “Why?”

He looked behind her, at the few blades of green that poked through the hardened ash, at the gnarled and blackened branches, at the green fields beyond, where a flock of sparrows rose and settled, rose again and circled. It was a dismal place, and he couldn’t help shaking as if he were cold, couldn’t help wondering why anyone would want to even look at this place.

“Good lord, Amy,” he said, still smiling, “do you come out here a lot?”

“Sometimes.”

“It’s like a graveyard, for Pete’s sake. Aren’t there better places to go, prettier ones?”

She reached behind her and pulled at a charred twig. “Mike was here. We had … a bunch of us had a picnic, Mr. Gilman, and he wanted me to marry him.”

He kept his silence; he tossed the stick away.

She knelt and used her twig to poke at the ground, at an anthill that seemed as dead as the orchard. Her free hand slapped at her hair to drive off a fly. “I used to think, you know, about knights and things? Shining armor and all that.” A look up. “Is that silly?”

“No,” he said honestly. “Not at all.”

“Miss Quarell doesn’t think so, either. She says that as long as there are people like me, there’s hope for the world.” Her laugh was quick, light, and scattered by the wind. “I wanted, when I was a little girl, to put my head in a unicorn’s lap, or have a prince climb a tower and save me, or have some movie star come up and take me away in his limousine.” Another laugh, cold and without mirth. “Miss Quarell says I have to be careful what I dream.”

“And what do your parents say?”

She stood, took a deep breath, and lifted her arms languidly over her head, and he couldn’t avoid looking at the flat of her tanned stomach, the lower slopes of her small breasts gleaming as if oiled.

“Get good grades, graduate, and get a good job.”

“Not bad advice, Amy,” he said uneasily, when she took a step toward him and he didn’t back away. “Practical.”

As close as the length of a finger, she looked into his eyes and he dared not look away. A hand pushed away a trailing lock of her hair, and her lips began to twist into a one-sided smile. “He’s afraid of you, you know.”

“Who?” he said, his voice harsh and strained.

Closer, and he could feel her naked stomach push gently against his belt.

“Leslie, who else? He thinks you’re going to arrest him because you think he’s a killer.” She giggled, and her tongue brushed pink across her lips. “He wants to run away, Mr. Gilman. And he wants me to go with him.”

He grabbed her waist angrily to shove her aside; she clapped her palms to his cheeks, pulled his face down, and kissed him hard, thrust her hips into his before twisting away.

“He’s not yours anymore,” she said, starting to run. “He isn’t. He’s mine.”

Too surprised to move, too confused to think, he watched as she dashed across the open ground, turning once to grin before she vanished through the hedge.

“God Almighty.” He wiped a hand over his mouth, over his eyes. “Good God Almighty.”

He wondered then how often Denise had spoken with the girl, if she had ever followed Amy out here as he had done; he wondered if she suspected what the girl had become.

Les, he thought suddenly; Christ, he had to get to Les and find out what was going on. But the step he took faltered when he tasted the girl’s mouth on his, her cool skin in his hands.

God, what the hell’s the matter with you? he told himself.

A cigarette in his hand, the match lit, gone, tossed over his shoulder.

He didn’t know.

Since this case had begun he’d been walking around as if in a daze. Normal procedures seemed to blossom into major obstacles, and under ordinary circumstances he sure as hell wouldn’t have followed a young woman all the way out here just to ask her a couple of questions. He would have waited at the house. He would have gone to the college and waited for her there. He would have done a hundred other things. But he hadn’t.

And now, abruptly, he was feeling terribly alone. As though everyone he cared for was drawing slowly away.

A glance down at his shadow, spiked and gored by the grass and the weeds. It was harder to see as the mist thickened and rose, and he shook his head quickly, looked at his cigarette and realized it had burnt down to the filter, and he was sure he hadn’t taken more than one puff. The ash still there was cold.

“Christ,” he whispered, and heard the footsteps behind him.

He turned slowly, tense in case he had to react, ready with a smile in case it was only someone just out for a walk.

No one was there.

His head tilted slightly to one side, his ears strained, his eyes narrowed in the dusk suddenly upon him.

No one was there.

Mist into patchy fog as if something was burning deep beneath the surface.

A slow and steady walk, light, quiet.

And finally, back in the shadows of the orchard’s far side, a hint of something white moving around the boles.

He stepped to his right for a clearer view, craning now, one hand slapping his leg nervously.

“Hey!”

Tall and white and long, without definite form yet anything but spectral as he took a step forward, checked himself, and stepped hastily back when a gust of wind spun ash in a dervish, when he realized that whatever was back there was pacing and watching.

“Hey, who are you? This is the police! What are you doing out here?”

He almost giggled. His voice quavered, authority shredded, and the command on the face of it was ludicrous and weak. He started toward the figure, stopped at the orchard’s edge and waited for another gust to pass, listening as it rattled through the trees and hissed like sand through the field.

And when it was over, he didn’t want to go in.

Moving farther to his right, he thought to circle the fire-spot and come at the watcher from behind. Tripping over a hillock and nearly landing on his shoulder. Slapping impatiently at the gnats that returned to bedevil him, dancing black and swift in front of his eyes no matter which way he looked. Picking up another stick and using it to knock away weeds whose heads were like dried wheat, branches that would not give, the dark that increased as the sun dropped and died. Reaching the last of the apple trees and skirting them, a headache building behind his forehead as he stared even harder to keep the white shape in sight.

Pacing, watching, quietly and soft.

Telling himself it was only a gag, that he was the butt of a prank, and before he went much farther some of Les’s friends would throw off a thin sheet and laugh at his nervousness, his gullibility, and ask him snidely if Amy Niles was his girl.

He stopped.

A slither of grey ash rounded the toe of his left foot.

His right hand slashed the stick through the air, a cat’s tail expending anger, testing fear.

Pacing, in the mist, and footsteps hard and hollow.

He blinked rapidly and swallowed, demanding to know what in god’s name had gotten into him? If it was a joke, what the hell was he doing playing along, walking right into it like some kind of fool?

He turned sharply and stalked away, hurriedly when he reached the field again, almost running when he was less than a hundred yards from the road. He hoped they were watching. He hoped they saw how he didn’t much care for their stupid jokes, their infantile notions of what was supposed to be funny. He hoped that whatever it was back there … whoever it was, he told himself angrily. Whoever, not whatever. Because it’s only kids in a sheet and you know it, you jackass, you know what they want and you won’t let them have it.

He plunged through the hedge without looking for a gap, grunting at the thorns that tore at his shirt, scratched his hands, and drew blood; across the road and into town as the streetlamps buzzed on and the pavement writhed with shadows.

Scared, he thought in amazement; Jesus, I’m scared.

He rejected the notion with a disdainful snort, saw shadows, heard footsteps, and felt the fear again.

This time he didn’t fight it—he ran, knowing he had to talk to Les, to tell him what Amy had done there in the field, to try to stop him from running away, from ruining his life. From deserting his father.

Heedless of his appearance, knowing he must look like someone fresh from a beating, he ran until he fell against the fence around his yard, panting, wrinkling his nose at the sweat that poured from his hair, rolling his shoulders against the sweat that turned his shirt flat cold. He gasped and leaned back, hands propping him up on either side, gulping the night air and feeling his heart build pressure in his chest. His legs buckled, but he didn’t fall. His head throbbed at the temples, but he didn’t close his eyes.