His first close look at Ray Beamish came when he followed him to a bowling alley where Beamish bowled in a GE daytime league. Unnoticed in the back of the spectator seats, he watched him bowl. It was not until Beamish opened a can of beer that he felt any emotion. Jenkins clenched his jaw until a knot of muscle worked under his ear. For the first time since he learned of the accident taking Elissa Deane’s life, his smoldering hatred erupted into flame. He nearly leaped to his feet to confront the tall, dark-haired Beamish.
There was a metallic taste in his mouth from the flow of adrenalin as he watched the heavy-set man nurse the beer for an hour. Jenkins slumped in his seat. If Beamish had given up his heavy drinking habits, his actions would be more stable, more predictable.
After a month in the shadow of Ray Beamish, Jerome Jenkins believed he had enough information to conclude his mission successfully. He was about to activate the final phase of his plan when something happened which caused him to change his blueprint.
On a sunny mid-morning after he checked on Ray Beamish’s arrival home from his job, and Rose Beamish’s departure for the beauty shop, Jenkins drove by the Beamish home the second time that day. He scanned the front of the house carefully. A for rent sign had been placed in an upstairs window.
He went on by to a crossroad and out into the country where, allowing himself the luxury of some emotional stimulus, he drove to the winding road near Henderson where Elissa Deane had met her death. He pulled off on the shoulder where a stone bridge arched over a creek. He got out and sat on the bank. Autumn had already fired the hills with color but his mind was closed to beauty alive. All he could see was beauty broken and dead on the creek bottom. It was here the car had struck the abutment, rolled over and ejected Elissa.
The irony of her death and the needlessness of it struck him with fresh anguish. Her injuries, while serious, were not fatal, but she had been knocked unconscious and had drowned in less that a foot of water while Ray Beamish slept in drunken stupor on the creek bank. That was where a passing motorist found him, bleeding slightly from cuts on his hands.
As he sat there he thought of the gun hidden in the trunk of his car. With the cold self possession of an executioner honing his axe, he began to evolve in his mind a more fitting death for Ray Beamish — one which would wed poetry to justice.
That evening he phoned Rose Beamish after her husband had left for work, explaining that he had seen the sign in the window, and had made an inquiry to learn that she and her husband owned the building.
“I’d be interested in renting,” Jenkins said slowly, “if it’s furnished.”
“Yes, it is, and it’s vacant right now.” Rose Beamish sounded delighted, and when he said he would be away for a few days she agreed to let him stop by that night to see the apartment.
“It’s bright and sunny. Oh, you’ll like it.” She turned on the charm.
“I’ll be right out,” Jerome Jenkins said.
Rose Beamish was in her mid-thirties, short, and obviously cared too much for sweets and starchy foods. Her hair was short and was sculpted to her head so tightly it looked like a burnished red helmet.
Jenkins studied the room arrangement of the Beamish apartment while giving the impression he was absorbed in the woman’s gushing flow of talk. His engineer’s eye recorded the location and thickness of partitions. As they went up the back stairs, Rose Beamish asked about Jenkins’ type of employment.
“I’m an advance man doing a survey for the placement of fast food franchises in the upstate area. Probably I’ll be working out of here for the better part of a year. I’ll be in and out a lot. You’ll see me lugging boxes of research material. Occasionally I’ll be away for several days. I assure you I’ll be a quiet tenant.”
“Oh, I’m glad for that. My husband works nights and sleeps days. We’re looking for someone like you. Are you — are you married?”
Jenkins stared at her. “No. No wife, no children. Nothing to keep your husband from getting the sleep he surely deserves.”
She nodded like a small mechanical doll.
“The room arrangement seems much the same as in your apartment,” he said.
“It’s identical except our bedroom is under your dinette.” She paused. “It’s rare that the two of us are in the bedroom together.” Her voice trailed off and she blushed beneath her makeup. “I mean with Ray working nights and me busy days.”
He paid her the first month’s rent. Two days later he moved in with his luggage, timing his arrival after Ray Beamish was at home and in bed, and Rose Beamish was off to Castor to give feather cuts, rinses and wave sets.
Although the new plan would take months to complete, that same morning Jerome Jenkins drove out to the country and brought back his first load of rocks.
“It may take ten or fifteen tons,” he grunted to himself as he struggled up the creek bank and put them in the trunk, “so I guess I’d better get started.”
The next day he drove to a neighboring city, where he bought a hand drill and an assortment of bits, a magnetic stud finder, a length of garden hose and faucet fittings, hose clamps, a knife and epoxy. He nested the containers and put his purchases inside them for carrying up the back stairs when Beamish was asleep.
For the next two months he carried rocks diligently, scrounging cartons wherever he could and distributing the haul around the walls of his apartment. When the creek froze and winter snows came he was reduced to picking up broken pieces of pavement and such loose stones as he could find at construction sites abandoned for the winter. Old stone walls were fruitful but too many stones were larger than he could handle.
During days of bad weather he studied the house construction, locating every nail, boring test holes in the floor quietly and with great care, taking advantage of times when the Beamishes were not home. He had noted when paying his rent that the first floor rooms had block ceilings suspended on a steel grid. No telltale dust or chips sifted below. Cracks in the old plaster were not visible.
Jenkins worked feverishly on his figures, using one of the more sophisticated calculators. Each day incoming rocks were weighed and the information recorded in his notebook. All variables such as stud spacing, floor joist and nail placement were taken into account.
He paid his rent punctually, always taking the cash downstairs in the evening after Beamish left for work. To minimize any inference that he might be avoiding Beamish, he staged a few hails and hellos from a distance as he drove away from the house.
Sometimes, tired from carrying stones in the spring after the ice was out of the creek, he stood by the kitchen window, watching Beamish work among the flowers in the garden bordering the driveway. He wondered about the irony of such a seemingly gentle man who handled flowers lovingly being a killer marked for death himself. Jenkins asked himself if the flowers knew or cared, or grew stunted and gnarled when tended by bloody hands. If that were the case, he mused, why were Beamish’s tulips, jonquils and daffodils the loveliest in Castor?
On May 27, with a newly purchased electric drill, an extension and some spade bits, he drilled a row of three-quarter inch holes through the oak flooring, the sub-floor and edges of some of the joists, waiting until the Beamishes were away from the house.
The stress and shear factors were changed so radically it took him several days to recalibrate his formula. From some wood trellis material he bought at a lumber yard he built a scale model of the house, which he used to make strength and breakage tests.
On a warm evening in mid-June, so quiet he could hear moths fluttering against the window screens, Jenkins sat on the kitchen floor, examining a collapsed section of his model home.