The sergeant briefed Selby on their progress to date. “We’ve checked the sexual deviates we got sheets on. And flushed out some neighborhood PTs — Peeping Toms — and characters who get it off exposing themselves — weirdos we haven’t been able to bust so far. Blanks in that area. And nothing on the perpetrator’s car. But there’s something screwy about the time, Mr. Selby. Lieutenant Eberle told me he’d mentioned this to you.”
Wilger, a thin young man with sparse hair and worried eyes, cleared his throat. “Your daughter got out of a car — or was pushed out — at Pyle’s Corner in Muhlenburg. That’s what she told Nurse Redden. She wasn’t sure what time that was. Which is understandable. But we got a fix on the time from a witness, a Mrs. Elvira Swabel. She’s an old lady and she lives there at Pyle’s Corners, right across the street from a storefront church. Your daughter got out of the car in front of that church, it’s called the Tabernacle of the Golden Flame. The preacher is a local piney, Ollie Jessup. But the church was empty that night, there were no services. But Mrs. Swabel was sitting at her window, her apartment is over a hardware store. She saw your daughter walk to the Mobil station at the other corner and buy a candy bar from an outdoor vending machine. There was enough light at the station for her to see everything pretty clear.”
“Did she get a look at the car?” Selby had asked him. “Did she notice what color it was?”
“No, the street in front of the tabernacle was too dark. But she saw your daughter start up Fairlee Road around ten o’clock, give or take a few minutes. The point is, Mr. Selby, your daughter didn’t get to Little Tenn for another three hours and that trailer camp is only a mile or so from Pyle’s Corners. So we’d like to know where she was those hours between ten and one. It could be important. Dr. Kerr doesn’t want us to question her yet, but I thought maybe you could help us.”
“I’ll talk to her, Sergeant.”
On that same day Selby found the link to the “waves” — on a back-country road about a dozen miles from Muhlenburg. The sound came to him as he crested a dirt road between the small towns of Embryville and Buck Run.
He stopped the car in open country. Meadow stretched on either side, broken by patches of sunlight and shadow. The woods burned with fall colors, but the fields were still green and hard in patches from summer.
The silence was almost complete, heavy and drowsing, but when the wind changed he heard faint echoing sounds that shook the ground gently.
Selby drove to the top of the hill and stopped again. Below him spur tracks branched out from a small switching yard. It was a marshaling area for local ranchers; beef herds were shipped here from Texas to be fattened for eastern markets. A pair of diesel locomotives were shunting cattle cars around the yard. The noise echoed from the low hills, traveling in muffled waves over the meadows.
Selby marked his map with a penciled line from Fairlee Road to Buck Run and Embryville.
At home, Mrs. Cranston told him that Miss Culpepper from the library had called, she had the material he wanted. Someone from Las Vegas also called, a Jerry Goldbirn. And their insurance man, Jay Mooney.
Shana’s bedroom door was closed, but he could hear her talking on the phone. She had been no help in his search. She had listened to the tape but insisted she couldn’t remember saying anything about tunnels or birds. She had no idea what any of it meant.
She became impatient when Selby pressed her about the outbursts in the growling and obviously assumed voice — “Hell is alone—” and “I am worse than men... more barbarous in revenge... hatred in my heart...”
She refused to discuss this with him, either retreating into apathetic silences or erupting in anger and running off to her room.
Dr. Kerr had told him to expect this kind of behavior, but Selby wasn’t prepared for her reaction when he asked her about her despairing “Mommy, my hand hurts, it’s evil, I hate it...”
She shouted, “You wouldn’t understand, you never did, you were always outside of us.”
This was true enough, but it had been a hurtful attack — he had, in fact, been an outsider, although his wife Sarah and mother-in-law Tishie pretended he wasn’t. Or simply hadn’t made a point of it.
In a way being “outside” had been a source of strength to Selby. Better outside than trapped inside the rigidity of St. Ambrose, the unyielding, arid atmosphere of his grandparents’ home in Davenport. Sure, being part of them he’d tried, and squandered energy, to understand them and at times to defend them.
He’d never been a joiner, he disliked labels. Being outside of Sarah’s faith had permitted him to accept it without pressure, and therefore to support it. Her convictions hadn’t necessarily reflected his, and because he wasn’t required to champion them out of any unexamined loyalty he’d always been comfortable with them.
Since Sarah’s death he had tried to keep their past free from wear and distortion by not living in it. He had made lists of things to try not to think of again, posting these areas with off-limits signs. His warnings included certain beaches, the colors of the hills above the place they lived in Spain, and some streets in New York and a bar on Samson Street in Philadelphia where they had gone when they were first married...
But now everything was baited with hurtful memories, even Shana’s troubled voice on the tapes... “a time to serve and to sin...”
That was from the Bible, he’d thought, but it wasn’t in the hymn of Ecclesiastes he checked that began, “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the sun. A time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to pluck up which is planted...”
“... a time to serve and to sin” wasn’t in those lines, but reading the verses reminded him of proverbs that Sarah had quoted with teasing gravity to Davey and Shana. “... her children rise up and call her blessed, for in her tongue is the law of kindness.”
In searching for the source of “Hell is alone...” and “I am... more barbarous in revenge...” he had gone through Sarah’s college notebooks, finding not what he was looking for but only a memory of her straight shoulders at a typewriter and the frowns and smiles that accompanied the clatter of her thoughts being put on paper.
He knocked on Shana’s door and heard a whispered rush of words. Then she raised her voice and asked him to come in.
She sat on the side of her bed, one bare foot resting on top of the other, and a robe pulled loosely over her pajamas. She said, “I know I’m not supposed to be talking to anybody. But what difference does it make?”
He said, “Dr. Kerr wants you to rest as much as possible.”
“Rest for what? I’m not in class, I don’t even have homework to do.”
Her room needed tidying up; an empty glass and a half-eaten sandwich were on a tray on the floor; her wastebasket was full of crumpled tissues.
The bruise on her cheek had swollen; her whole face was now disfigured and discolored. They had used to tease her about her enthusiasm for showers and shampoos, her shelves of talcum and cologne, the closets with the separate racks for sweaters and rows of jeans with horseshoes stitched in daisies on the pockets. But now her hair was tangled in coarse strands, and it looked as if she had been picking at the bandage on her hand — the gauze strips were shredded and soiled.
But her small face looked vulnerable and troubled. Her pitiful girlishness seemed to be asking him for some kind of trust, or sympathy. Still, she wouldn’t let him touch her. She stiffened if he came near her, or put out a hand to her.
Selby could feel the rebuke in her tense shoulders and tightly locked hands. Since the night he had carried her from Barby Kane’s trailer there had been this barrier between them.