John D. MacDonald
Night Fright
She knew all the early-morning sounds of the city. The clink of bottles in the grayness, the rubbery snuffle of the patient horse that pulled the silent cart, the hoarse hooting of the early river tugs, and the first rustling of traffic that would deepen to a daylong roar. These were sounds she welcomed after the night silences, after the long, slow terror of the night, and when the hot summer days were well started, she could then fall asleep. It was not good sleep, though, and her weight was going down and her nerves shrilled and crawled along her body.
The summer had been planned for so long and so carefully, and now it was nightmare. The deposit on the cottage was lost, as were the days of mountain coolness and the frog sounds in the Adirondack night. She was a schoolteacher, and during other summers she had worked and she was tired, and this was to have been a summer of laziness, bought with the dollars that could have gone instead for clothes and books and plays and music.
She was a woman in her early thirties. Her bones were good, but she was too thin and she did not carry herself well. She saw herself clearly. In the beginning, she had been too young and too clever and too shy. It was a bad combination. Out of shyness and youth, she had learned to simulate a false arrogance. Cleverness gave her sharpness of tongue. And the combination had driven away those few men who had once been attracted by the curve of lip, the coltlike awkwardness. So arrogance had dried into austerity, and she knew that all the warm dreams had been false.
She had no knack of friendship. When she tried to be warm, it degenerated into nervous laughter and embarrassingly awkward gestures. But she was practical, and she saw herself clearly and saw that she could make a life out of the little satisfactions of books and music and drama and loneliness. Sometimes she was wryly amused at the tidiness of her apartment, at her cold domination of her students, at all the obsessive little routines of spinsterhood. She had contented herself with being Miss Renken of Room 612 and of Apartment 7B a mile from the school. Miss Renken, whose chill anger could awe and subdue the rebellious. And the rebellious never suspected that behind the mask of anger, there was another face, timid, shy, and sourly amused at the deception.
It started three days after school had closed. She had packed efficiently, consulted road maps, charted a course that would take her through points of historical interest, closed the apartment, and started north out of the city in her staid and aged coupe, fresh from its final checkup at the garage where she kept it. She wore a sensible traveling dress that would not wrinkle, and she held the wheel firmly.
She never got out of the city. She was seven blocks north of her apartment when she struck and killed the young woman. She saw the quick flash of the green sweater as the girl hurried out, screened until the last moment by parked cars. Miss Renken stepped hard on the brake pedal and saw for a moment the girl’s startled face turned toward her before it went down and out of sight beyond the hood, while a cheap purse was flung high and seemed to hang for too many long moments in the morning sunlight before it also fell out of sight in front of the stalled and motionless car. There were shouts and people running and horns blowing, while Miss Renken sat and still saw the afterimage of the young face, a startled and pretty face. The girl will now get up, she thought, and there will be a scene and confusion, and I should get witnesses at once, because it was certainly not my fault. I stopped the car within eight or ten feet, and no one could possibly have avoided her. But she knew her knees would not hold her up, so she sat there, still holding the wheel firmly.
The police arrived quickly, and they were efficient. They cleared a way for the ambulance, and took down names and addresses of witnesses, and spoke with firm courtesy to Miss Renken. She gave her name and address and said that she was on her way out of the city. She described how it happened, and they scribbled in notebooks, and she was asked to delay her trip until the investigation was complete and the girl’s condition was ascertained.
So Miss Renken drove back to the apartment and carried her bags upstairs. She wondered if the look of the girl’s face would ever fade completely from her mind. It seemed to remain there, like the bright spot that comes from looking at a naked bulb.
At noon she had to go out and get a light lunch, because she had emptied her small refrigerator and unplugged it the night before. She hurried back and waited. Had she known where they had taken the girl, she would have phoned the hospital.
The man came to the apartment at four o’clock. He looked big in every dimension, and he wore a wilted gray suit. He had tired, mild eyes, and he showed his credentials and introduced himself as Sergeant Moyer. He looked hot and tired, and she wished she could offer him iced tea, but, of course, there was no ice.
He thumbed at his notebook and said, “It looks like you’re all the way in the clear, Miss Renken. The cab behind you says you were doing maybe twenty. Your brakes are in good shape. You stopped within nine feet. Two witnesses saw her run out of a bar and across the sidewalk and right into traffic. The bartender said she and her boyfriend came in the first thing when he opened this morning and they were yammering at each other, and finally she slapped him and ran out, so it looks like she was too sore to look where she was going, besides having taken on three fast shots of liquor. The bartender said she was a little high when she came in. It all adds up to what should have been a simple knockdown, with her getting up and yelling your ears off, but her luck wasn’t so good.”
Miss Renken heard herself asking, “How is she?”
“It was a bad skull fracture. You see, she went down backward because she turned toward the car, and she couldn’t break the fall. She died about five minutes after they got her to the hospital. Doreen Brock, her name was, and she did waitress work and store clerking and things like that. She had been living with the fellow she was with for a couple of weeks, and he says he doesn’t think she had any folks, and I went all through her stuff and couldn’t find any addresses. Say, do you feel okay?”
Miss Renken took her hand from her eyes. “I’m all right.”
“It was one of those things. Don’t think about it too much. The inquest will be routine.” He stood up and said, “You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Killing someone. It’s hard to... I saw her face, you know, when she turned toward the car just as I... hit her. She was pretty.”
“You got anybody who can stay with you tonight?”
“I’ll be all right.”
She went with him to the door. He looked around the room for a moment. “Teach school, you said?”
“The seventh grade.”
“A tough racket, I guess.”
“It isn’t bad.”
He coughed and looked uncertain for a moment. “Look, you want anything, you call me.”
After he left, she sat for a long time, knowing there were things she should do, yet feeling trapped in this stasis of inactivity. There were all sorts and degrees of rationalizations she could make to prove it had not been her fault. And there were also the long, cold, philosophic thoughts of death and the responsibility of taking life and the validity of life itself. Yet it all came down to a pretty and frightened face and the slow arc of the cheap purse, and the brittle impact of skull on blue-gray sunlit asphalt.
She plugged in the refrigerator, filled the cube trays, remade her bed, and hurried down to buy supplies. There was no one to say, “Oh, I thought you had gone, Miss Renken! What happened?” It gave her a curious feeling of invisibility, as though she had already gone to the mountains.
She came back with the brown sack of groceries, and put them away and went to the phone and sent a wire to the owner of the cottage, saying she would be delayed a few days.