How old would that make it now? Eight or nine. Ten, perhaps.
If.
24
And that was how he found her. At first, he was doubtful, watching the girl who had appeared at the playground one afternoon. She was not beautiful, not even attractive-she was dark and intense, and her clothes never seemed to be clean. The other children avoided her, but children often did that; and her air of separation from them, swinging herself in lonely arcs or bouncing up and down on an otherwise empty teeter-totter, could have been a resilient child's defense against rejection.
But perhaps children were quicker at seeing real difference than adults.
He knew he would have to make up his mind quickly: his account had shrunk to a hundred and twenty-five dollars. But if he took the girl away and he was wrong, what was he: a maniac?
He started wearing the Bowie knife strapped to his side beneath his shirt when he went to the playground.
Even if he was right and the girl Ricky's "lynx," she could stick to her role-if he took her away, she could damage him irreparably by not revealing anything and waiting for the police to find them. But the nightwatcher wanted them dead: if he was right, he did not think she would let the police and the legal system punish him for her. She liked gaudier conclusions than that.
She seemed to take no notice of him, but the child began to appear in his dreams, sitting off to one side, observing him expressionlessly, and he imagined that even when she was sitting on a swing, seemingly absorbed, she peeked at him.
Don had only one real clue that she was not the ordinary child she appeared to be, and he clung to it with a fanatic's desperation. The first time he had seen her, he had gone cold.
He became a fixture in the park, a motionless man who never had his hair cut and seldom shaved, after some weeks as much to be expected at his place on the bench as the swings were in their places. Ned Rowles had done a short piece about him in The Urbanite in the early spring, so he was recognized, not molested or chased away by a deputy. He was a writer, presumably he was thinking about a book; he owned property in Milburn. If people thought he was odd, they liked having a well-known eccentric in their town; and he was known to be a friend of the Hawthornes.
Don closed out his account and took his remaining money away in cash; he could not sleep, even when he drank too much; he knew he was falling back into the patterns of his breakdown after David's death. Each morning, he taped the big knife to his side before walking to the park.
If he did not act, he knew, one day he would not be able to leave his bed: his indecision would spin back into every atom of his life. It would paralyze him. This time he would not be able to write his way out of it.
One morning he motioned to another of the children, and the little boy shyly came up to him.
"What's the name of that girl?" he asked, pointing.
The boy shuffled his feet, blinked and said, "Angie."
"Angie what?"
"Don't know."
"Why doesn't anybody ever play with her?"
The boy squinted at him, cocking his head; then, deciding that he could be trusted, leaned forward charmingly, cupping his hands beside his mouth to tell a dark secret. "Because she's awful." He scampered away, and the girl swung back and forth, back and forth, higher and higher, uncaring.
Angie. Sitting inside his sweaty clothes under a warm eleven o'clock sun, he froze.
That night, in the midst of some harried dream, Don fell out of bed and staggered to his feet, holding a head which felt as though it had fractured like a dropped plate. He went into the kitchen for a glass of water and aspirin, and saw-imagined he saw-Sears James sitting at the dining-room table playing solitaire. The hallucination looked at him disgustedly, said, "It's about time you straightened out, isn't it?" and went back to its game.
He returned to the bedroom and began throwing clothes into a suitcase, taking the Bowie knife from the top of the dresser and rolling it up in a shirt.
At seven o'clock, unable to wait any longer, he drove to the park, went to his bench and waited.
The girl appeared, walking across the damp grass, at nine. She wore a shabby pink dress he had seen many times before, and she moved swiftly, wrapped as ever in her private isolation. They were alone for the first time since Don had thought of watching the playground. He coughed, and she looked directly at him.
And he thought he understood that all of these weeks, he sitting rooted to his bench and fearing for his sanity, she obliviously, concentratedly playing by herself, had been part of her game. Even the doubt (which still would not leave him) was part of the game. She had tired him, weakened him, tortured him as she had surely tortured John Jaffrey before persuading him to jump from the bridge into a freezing river. If he was right.
"You," he said.
The girl sat on a swing and looked across the playground to him.
"You."
"What do you want?"
"Come here."
She stood up off the swing and began to march toward him. He couldn't help it-he was afraid of her. The girl paused two feet in front of him and looked into his face with unreadable black eyes.
"What's your name?"
"Angie. Nobody ever talks to me."
"Angie what?"
"Angie Messina."
"Where do you live?"
"Here. In town."
"Where?"
She pointed vaguely east-the direction of the Hollow.
"You live with your parents?"
"My parents are dead."
"Then who do you live with?"
"Just people."
"Have you ever heard of a woman named Florence de Peyser?"
She shook her head: and maybe it was true, maybe she had not.
He looked up toward the sun, sweating, unable to speak.
"What do you want?" the girl demanded to know.
"I want you to come with me."
"Where?"
"For a ride."
"Okay," she said.
Trembling, he left the bench. As simple as that. As simple as that. No one saw them go.
What's the worst thing you've ever done? Did you kidnap a friendless girl and drive without sleeping, hardly eating, stealing money when your own melted away… did you point a knife toward her bony chest?
What was the worst thing? Not the act, but the ideas about the act: the garish film unreeling through your head.
Epilogue - Moth in a Killing Jar
"Put the knife away," said his brother's voice. "You hear me, don't you, Don? Put it away. It won't do you any good anymore."
Don opened his eyes and saw the open-air restaurant about him, the gilt lettering across the street. David sat across the table, still handsome, still radiating concern, but dressed in a moldering sack which once had been a suit; the lapels were gray with fine dust, the seams sprouted white threads. Mold grew up the sleeves.
His steak and a half-full wineglass were before him; in his right hand he held a fork, in his left a bone-handled Bowie knife.
Don freed a button on his shirt and slid the knife between his shirt and his skin. "I'm sick of these tricks," he said. "You're not my brother, and I'm not in New York. We're in a motel room in Florida."
"And you haven't had nearly enough sleep," his brother said. "You really look like you're in terrible shape." David propped one elbow on the table and lifted the smoky aviator glasses off his eyes. "But maybe you're right. It doesn't unsettle you so much anymore, does it?"
Don shook his head. Even his brother's eyes were right; that seemed indecent, that she should have copied his eyes so exactly. "It proves I was right," he said.
"About the little girl in the park, you mean. Well, of course you were right about her. You were supposed to find her-haven't you worked that out yet?"