She smiled but said nothing. Experience and the wisdom that comes from it are the things your elders are good for, young man, she thought. I hope you remember this the next time there are problems in the village.
Call to Witness
by Nancy Schachterle
The police captain himself came to see Allison. That pleased her immensely; but it’s only right, she thought. The Ryder name still means something in this town, even if the last survivor is an old maid of eighty-three. Secretly she had been afraid that she had been in the backwater of age for so long that most people, if they thought about her at all, had decided that she must be long since dead.
Everett Barkley, he told her his name was. He was tall and well-built, filling his uniform to advantage, with little sign of the paunch that so many men his age allowed to develop.
Barkley helped himself to her father’s big leather chair, slumping comfortably to accommodate his frame to its rump-sprung curves. Allison started toward a straight-backed chair suited to the erect posture of her generation, then yielded to the pleading of well-aged bones and lowered herself carefully into her familiar upholstered armchair.
The policeman surveyed the piecrust table at his elbow, laden with silver-framed photographs. Gingerly he reached out and picked up Dodie’s picture.
“Mrs. Patrick. She must have been very young when this was taken.”
“Nineteen. She sat for that four years ago.” And she had watched, not an hour ago, Allison recalled, as they carried Dodie to the ambulance with a blanket entirely covering her.
“Did you know her well? As you probably know, I’ve been in town less than a year and I had never seen her before the... before this morning.”
Allison shuddered slightly. Automatically her hand went to her lap to caress Snowball, to seek comfort in the warm, silky fur, and the pulsations of the gentle, almost silent, purr. With a start she remembered that she had let him out in the early hours of the morning, and he hadn’t yet returned. Worry nagged at her.
What had Captain Barkley asked? Yes — about Dodie. Did I know her well?
“She came toddling up my front steps one day when she was about two, and we’ve been fast friends ever since. At that time she lived just up the hill, in the next block.”
“And since they were married they’ve lived next door to you?”
“That’s right.”
“Miss Ryder...” The policeman shifted his position, slightly ill at ease. “Would you tell me something about Dodie? Anything you like. Just your mental picture of her.”
Allison reached to take the photograph from him. “This shows her spirit well, those laughing, sparkling eyes. She was a happy girl. She used to come running up those steps — she never walked, always running — and she looked so full of life. Vital is the word that comes to my mind. Dancing, tennis, swimming, golf, singing — that was Dodie.” Allison looked down at the gray old hands that held the picture, with their knotted veins and their liver spots. Dodie had been the youth she herself had lost.
“I can see her right now, sitting on the porch railing, swinging those long, tanned legs. ‘Frank finally asked me to the dance, Miss Ryder,’ she told me! She was leaning so far out to look down the street that I was afraid she’d fall into my sweet william. ‘Here he comes now. ’Bye. See you.’ And she was gone, laughing and waving to him.”
She had been pleased about Dodie and Frank, Allison remembered. All she knew of Frank Patrick was a dark, goodlooking boy with a quick grin and a cheery wave. She didn’t know then that he was one of those helpless, hopeless creatures who feed on hurt. His charm swept up people like lilting dance music. Then, when they were dizzy from his gift of pleasure with themselves, he launched his barb and sucked at the wound. As his victims shriveled, Frank swelled with a grotesque satisfaction. Given the choice between kind and cruel, legal and illegal, moral and immoral, he’d rather go the lower path each time.
Allison handed the picture back to Captain Barkley. Carefully he placed it back among the dozen or so others that crowded the little table.
“Nieces and nephews, and their children,” Allison remarked. “I even have one great-great,” she told him, with visible pride. “But Dodie was closer to me than any of them.”
The policeman shifted his cap between his fingers in a broken, shuffling motion as if he were saying the rosary on it.
“Miss Ryder,” he said, lifting his eyes to meet hers, “it’ll be out soon, so I might as well tell you, the doctor is virtually certain it was an overdose, probably of her sleeping pills. We’ll know for sure after the autopsy. What I’m trying to do now is get a picture of her, of her husband, of her life. Now, the Patrick house and yours are very close, can’t be much more than fifteen or twenty feet apart, and their bedroom is on this side. I noticed the window was open about eight inches at the bottom. Knowing how easily sound travels on these warm, summer nights, I wondered...” He paused, waiting for Allison to volunteer the ending to his sentence. She was wearing a look of polite attention, but said nothing.
“Well,” he continued, “I just wondered whether you might have heard anything.”
Absently Allison’s hand reached again for Snowball’s head. Where could he be? She had heard him yowling his love songs on the back fence about three this morning, so she knew he was near home. Then she shook herself mentally, and tried to remember what the officer had been saying. Oh, yes. Did I hear anything?
“My bedroom is on the far side of the house from the Patricks’. I’m afraid I can be of no help to you, Captain... Barkley, isn’t it?”
Allison shrank into herself a little, half expecting a bolt of chastening lightning from above. But she hadn’t lied, she decided. Her bedroom was indeed on the far side. She needn’t tell him that most nights she didn’t sleep well, and it was cooler out on the screened porch, practically outside Dodie’s open window.
Barkley nodded, musing. “I understand Mrs. Patrick was a complete invalid for the past couple of years. Can you tell me anything about that?”
Allison sat a little more upright, legs crossed at the ankles and hands quiet in her lap. Absurdly, a seventy-year-old picture flashed into her memory of the class at Miss Van Renssalaer’s Academy for Young Ladies absorbing the principles of being prim and proper. What did any of it matter now, she wondered, after all these years? It was people, and what they did to each other, that mattered. Dodie, too, had gone to a private school, and see what happened to her.
“She went out driving by herself one night,” she told Barkley, “and... had an accident. Her spinal cord was crushed, and she was paralyzed from the waist down.”
Allison remembered that night much too clearly. The stifling heat had been emphasized by the heartless cheerfulness of crickets. About eleven o’clock, Allison had prepared a glass of lemonade for herself, and moved to the old wicker lounge on the screened porch. It seemed cooler with the light off, so she sat in the dark, sipping the tart drink and resting. At first the voices had been muted, simply alto and baritone rhythms, then they had swelled and she caught phrases rising in passionate tones. Finally, there was no effort to hush their voices, and Dodie’s anguish had cried across the night to Allison: “She’s going to have a baby, and you expect me to be calm? How could you betray me so, and with a... a creature like that?”
Frank’s voice had resounded with mocking laughter. “You can’t be that much of an innocent! Do you honestly think your simple charms could be enough for a man like me? Susie wasn’t the first, and you can be damned sure she won’t be the last. Come on now, Dodie. You’re a sweet kid, and your family’s been real helpful in getting me where I want to go, but you just can’t tie a man down.”