“Maybe so. But nobody around Arden is going to rule it out, you understand? And there are things about these killings that people generally don’t know. What we have here isn’t a straightforward rapist. Even a rapist who kills. We got something a little fancier. We got a really sick man. Could be impotent. Could even be a woman. Or a man and a woman. I go for the single man idea, but the others are possible.”
“What are you telling me?”
We were back on the fringes of Arden now, and Polar Bears was homing in toward the Nash as if he knew where it was.
“I got a theory about this boy of ours, Miles. I think he wants to come to me, he wants to talk about what he’s been doing. He’s got all that pressure, all that guilt building up inside of him. He’s bursting a gut to tell me about it. Wouldn’t you say?”
I didn’t know, and told him so.
“Just consider it. Sick as he is, he’s a mighty lonely man. He probably doesn’t even enjoy what he’s doing to these girls. But he knows he’s going to do it again.” Polar Bears looked at me; he was smiling and confidential and helpful. “There’s a big head of steam in our boy. He’s got to blow it off, but he knows it’s wrong — sick. I’m the one he has to talk to, and he knows it. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s someone I see now and then, someone who’s around here and there, ready to share a few words. I might have seen him two or three times this week alone.” He pulled up to a stopsign; across the road and down the block sat the Nash. I wouldn’t have known how to find it. “Well, speaking of luck, Miles, isn’t that Nash the loaner Hank gave you?”
“Yes. What are you going to do about the men who wrecked my car?”
“I’m looking into it, Miles. Looking into it.” He rolled across the street and pulled up beside the old Nash.
“Are you going to explain what you said about the killer? About his not being a straightforward rapist?”
“Sure. Why don’t you come over to my house for a bite to eat some night this week? I’ll tell you all about it.” He reached across me and opened the door. “My cooking won’t kill you, I guess. I’ll be in touch, Miles. Keep your eyes open. Remember, you can always call me.”
His flat ingratiating voice stayed in my ears all the way home. It was almost hypnotic, like having your will taken from you. When I got out of the car at the farmhouse I was still hearing it, and I could not shake it even while I was pushing furniture around. I felt slightly engulfed by Polar Bears, and I knew the furniture would not come right, lock into the correct position, until I was free of him. I went upstairs and sat at my desk and looked into the two photographs. Eventually everything else went away, and I was left with Alison. Dimly, far away, the phone was ringing.
And the third time it happened like this:
A girl walked out of her home in the late afternoon and stood in the humid motionless air for a moment, wondering if it were not too hot to go bowling with her friends. Perspiration seemed to leap from her scalp. She remembered that she had left her sunglasses in her room, but she could not waste the energy to go back in and get them. She could feel her body sagging in the heat and the pollen count was up nearly to 200. She would be sneezing by the time she got to the Bowl-A-Rama.
Maybe it would be better to simply stay in her bedroom and read. She was small for her age, and her pretty face had a piquant, passive cast which looked utterly at home in front of a book. She wanted to be a teacher, an English teacher. The girl looked back across the brown lawn to her house, and sunlight bounced off the plateglass window. There was not a shadow in sight. She sneezed. Her white blouse already adhered to her skin.
She turned away from the glare of the sun off the picture window and went toward town. She was following the direction she had seen Chief Havre’s car travel, two or three hours earlier. Girls in Arden did not like going anywhere alone since the death of Jenny Strand: friends waited at the bowling alley. But surely in the daytime one was safe. Galen Hovre, she thought, was not intelligent enough to catch the killer of Gwen Olson and Jenny Strand: unless the big man she had seen sitting beside the sheriff was the murderer.
She idled along looking at the ground, her thin arms swinging. She admitted to herself that she disliked bowling, and did it only because everyone else did.
She never saw what grabbed her — there was only an awareness of a shape coming swiftly out of an alley, and then she was slammed against a wall and the fear was too bright in her mind for her to speak or cry out. The force with which she had been lifted and moved seemed scarcely human: what had touched her, what was bearing down on her, scarcely seemed the flesh of a fellow creature. Surrounding her was the pungent smell of earth, as if she were already in her grave.
Seven
__________
My arms and legs could not move. Yet in another dimension, they were moving, not lying still on the floor of my workroom but taking me toward the woods. I witnessed both processes impartially, both the internal (walking into the woods) and the external (lying on the workroom floor), thinking that the only previous time such an experience had been given to me was when I had burst open the sea chest and looked at the photograph she had directed to be put on my desk. The air was sweet, perfumy, both in and out. The lights had all gone out and the fields were dark. At some point in the immeasurable, unreckonable amount of time since I had stood up to see why the mare was terrified, night had come. I was walking across the dark field toward the cottonwood trees; I parted thick weeds, I walked out onto a grassy root-hump and jumped easily across the creek. My body was light, a dream-body. There was no need to run. I could hear the telephone, owls, crickets. The night air was soft, so sweet it seemed liable to catch in the trees, like fog.
I passed easily beyond the next area of fields and entered the woods. Birches gleamed like girls. Who had turned the lights out? My right index finger registered the sensation of polished boards, but it was touching a ghostly maple. Leaving it behind, I walked on a mulch of leaves. The gradient began to change. A deer plunged deeper into the woods somewhere to my right, and I turned in that direction. Uphill. Through trees closer and closer, high life-breathing oaks with bark like rivers. I touched the flank of a dead maple, down across my path like the corpse of a soldier, and lifted myself with my arms so that I sat on it and then swung my legs over and let myself fall onto the springy floor again. My knees absorbed the shock. There was still the light problem, but I knew where I was going.
It was a clearing. A clearing perhaps sixteen feet across, ringed with giant oaks, the ashes of a fire at its center. She was there, waiting for me.
Magically, I knew how to get there: all I had to do was drift and I would be taken, my feet would guide me.
When the trees approached too near, I shoved them aside with my hand. Twigs caught in my jacket and hair, pulling at me as a thorny weed had captured my foot outside the Dream House. Leaves stirred in the thick perfumy air. Where my feet had been were sucking black holes. On the perpendicular sides of trees hung glistening mushrooms, white and red. I waded through ferns as high as my waist, holding my arms as if they cradled a rifle.
There was a darkening of the spirit. Going closer to where I had to go, I saw the edges of starlight on the bark-rills and began to be afraid. When I passed through a gap, it seemed to close behind me. The breathing life of the forest expressed an immensity of force. Even the air grew tight. I climbed over a lightning-blasted trunk. Living stuff coiled around my boots, golden roots proliferated over them. I stepped on a mushroom the size of a sheep’s head and felt it become jelly beneath my weight.