Reports had been of a car with out-of-state license plates idling in the road beyond the picnic grove. Several individuals had insisted they’d seen a stranger in the park at about that time: a man. One witness believed he was “Negro.” At any rate, “dark-skinned.” He had a moustache, he wore dark glasses. He wore dark clothes. He was “tall” — he was “short and heavyset” — “somewhere in his late twenties” — “somewhere in his late thirties.”
The abductor of Lisa Peery was never found. Her body had never been found. So far as anyone knew, no ransom note had been sent. There were days, in time there were weeks of search parties, local police, Boy Scouts, citizen volunteers from everywhere in the county. Panic in Strykersville, especially in the families of elementary school children. Everywhere on lampposts, walls, fences were posters of Lisa Peery’s innocently smiling face. MISSING. CHILD MISSING. HAVE YOU SEEN ME?
Eventually Lisa Peery subsided into Strykersville legend. The nightmare belonged to a bygone season in Shannon’s adolescent life which, from her adult perspective, had now a remote and bittersweet aura like the teen music, hair styles, clothes of that time. These were memories with the power to embarrass but not to illuminate.
The Leighs’ two-acre property was adjacent to a densely wooded section of Myrtle Park. The land was hilly here, with bare outcroppings of rock and wild rose. In the weeks following the abduction, Mr. Leigh, at that time a vigorous, stocky man of fifty-two, had helped participate in one or two of the searches. He’d contributed to a fund for a $25,000 reward offered for information leading to Lisa Peery’s safe return. Shannon recalled her father saying, in a quavering voice, “That cowardly bastard is one thousand miles away with that child by now. We can only pray he will let her live.”
Beneath the newspaper clippings were torn-out pages from what must have been pornographic magazines. Stark, up-close photos of very young, naked girls, some of them luridly made up with lipstick, rouge, eyeliner, and teased hair. The youngest were no older than four, the eldest about eleven. The girls’ faces appeared stunned, or were contorted and weeping, or, worse, smiling slyly at the camera as they’d been taught.
“Oh, my God.”
Shannon stepped back from the box, appalled.
Mark was watching her from the doorway. “Look at the bottom of the box. Don’t touch the things, just look.” Shannon did as Mark told, steeling herself for something very ugly. She saw a child’s plastic barrette, a single badly soiled white anklet sock, a lock of curly pale blond hair.
Mark said, “And there’s this key.”
Key? To what? Through her eyes that were stinging with moisture Shannon now stared at the key in the palm of Mark’s hand. It appeared to be an ordinary household key, slightly rusted.
“It was in the box,” Mark said. “I’ve been checking, I think it must be to the fruit cellar. There’s a padlock on the door.”
The fruit cellar: Shannon had not thought of it in years.
Really it wasn’t a cellar, just a closet in the old part of the cellar; that part that belonged to the original Leigh house, built in the late 1890s. Over the decades the house had been substantially remodeled, expanded, modernized; a new addition had been built that was as large as the original house; an attractive new basement had been added, with a concrete floor covered in linoleum. Only the earthen-floored fruit cellar remained, relic of an earlier, seemingly more innocent era before the 1960s when even well-to-do women like Shannon’s grandmother had preserved and canned fruit in glass jars, an elaborate process requiring many hours’ work; these jars had been stored in the fruit cellar, a cavelike space of the size of a good walk-in closet hollowed out of the earth and lined with stone and mortar. One spring day when Shannon was in seventh grade, Mrs. Leigh had asked her to help clean out the old fruit cellar, and so they’d emptied that dank, cobwebbed space of aged jars of fruit (pears, peaches, cherries) that no one had ever troubled to open, and eat; these must have been twenty years old, Mrs. Leigh said, and would be moldy by now, poison. There had been something fascinating — Shannon was remembering now, with a shudder — about holding in your hand a heavy jar of fruit that was very likely toxic, though possibly, in a dish, it would look like any other canned fruit. (Except: Probably it would smell. The fruit cellar stank.) Shannon and her mother hadn’t been able to clean the fruit cellar of the accumulated dirt of decades but they’d emptied the shelves, Mrs. Leigh had aimed the vacuum cleaner nozzle into the corners, and shut the door again.
There had never been any padlock on the fruit cellar door, that Shannon could remember. To what purpose, a lock on that door?
“We wouldn’t have to open it.”
“We do, though.”
They were in the basement, in the older area. Here, the ceiling was lower than in the newer area. There was a strong smell of damp. Mark was standing before the door to the fruit cellar, fumbling the key, trying to fit it into the rusted padlock. (Yes, there was a padlock on the door Shannon could swear had not existed until now.) In the thin light from overhead, that had the prismatic quaver of light reflected in water, the slot for the key looked fine as a hair. Shannon was swallowing compulsively, tasting something black and chill at the back of her mouth. She saw that her tall assured brother was perspiring, and that his hand trembled. With a stab of satisfaction she saw that his hair was thinning at the crown of his head. Mark was headmaster of a prestigious New England prep school, a man accustomed to giving orders and being obeyed, but now he stood stooped, uncertain, trying to force a key into a rusted padlock. Shannon said, her voice rising sharply, “We don’t have to open it, Mark.”
“Of course we do.”
“God. I hate you.”
Without knowing what she did Shannon snatched the key from her brother’s fingers and threw it clumsily, blindly away. The key clattered against a wall and fell to the floor glinting, clearly visible. Before Mark could curse her, Shannon ran from the room, into the newer part of the basement. Here the ceiling was higher and the space less oppressive but still the overhead lights made her eyes ache. In a panic she was remembering how, when she’d been a little girl, she’d trailed her father around the house, for her father was so rarely in the house; sometimes she would discover him in the cellar at what he called his workbench; here, he had electrical tools, as well as hammers, pliers, screwdrivers. She remembered brightly calling, “Daddy?” Descending the stairs in the pretense that Daddy wanted her company, and there was Daddy with his back to her, at the workbench, quickly sliding something into a manila envelope, and the envelope into a drawer, and the drawer firmly shut, she’d had the impression it was a magazine but she knew better than to inquire for Daddy didn’t like inquisitive little girls.
She was trying to remember her father’s face. He’d been a young man then, or nearly. His smile, the glint of his eyeglasses. She tried but couldn’t remember his eyes behind those chunky black-rimmed glasses but of course they’d been there, Daddy’s eyes. And there was Daddy smiling at her, “Why, Shannon! What brings you down here?”
Won’t You Come Out Tonight?
by Josh Pachter
In 1969, after the publication of his first short story in EQMM, Josh Pachter became the youngest active member in the history of the MWA. Since then, more than fifty of his stories have appeared in the pages of EQMM, AHMM, and dozens of other magazines and anthologies published in the U.S. and around the world. Mr. Pachter is also an award-winning translator who recently provided a story from the Dutch for our Passport to Crime series.