“Hi, pup,” I said, and he came up to me and sat down happily and beat his ponderous tail in doggish ecstasy upon the concrete of the sidewalk.
I put out my hand to pat his head, but I never got it patted, for a car came humming swiftly down the street and swung in sharply to stop in front of us.
The door came open.
“Get in,” said Joy’s voice, “and let’s get out of here.”
We ate in another world of candlelight, One of those crazy, corny places that Joy seemed to love—not at the new nightclub that was opening out on Pinecrest Drive. That is, Joy ate. I didn’t.
Women are the damnedest people. I told her all about it. I’d already told her so much over the telephone, inadvisedly perhaps, that I had to tell her the rest of it. Actually, of course, there was no reason that I shouldn’t tell her, but I sounded sappy doing it. She went ahead and ate, in her sweet, calm way, as if I’d been telling her no more than the latest office gossip.
It was almost as if she hadn’t believed a word of what I said, although I am sure she did. Maybe she saw I was upset (who wouldn’t be upset?) and was simply doing her womanly duty of getting me calmed down.
“Go ahead and eat, Parker,” she told me. “No matter what is going on, you simply have to eat.”
I looked at my plate and gagged.
At just the thought of food, not at what Was on the plate. In the candlelight there as no way of telling what was on the plate.
“Joy,” I asked her, “why was I afraid to go out into the parking lot?”
That was the thing that bothered me. That was the thing that hurt.
“Because you’re a coward,” she said. She wasn’t helping any.
I dabbled at my food. It tasted the way you’d expect food you couldn’t see to taste.
The tiny, tinny orchestra struck up another tune—the kind of tune that went with a place like that.
I looked around the room and thought about the slithering sound that had come from behind the closet door, and it was impossible, of course. Sitting here, in this kind of atmosphere, it could be nothing more than a thing snatched naked from the middle of a dream.
But it was there, I knew. It was true, I knew. Outside the cloying, muffling influence of this man-made feather bed, there Was a stark reality that no one yet had faced. That I had touched, or glimpsed, Perhaps, but no more than the very edge of it.
“What,” Joy asked me, reading my thoughts, “do you intend to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’re a newspaperman,” she told me, “and there’s a story out there waiting for you. But, Parker, please be careful.”
“Oh certainly,” I said. “What do you think it is?” I shook my head.
“You don’t believe it,” I said. “I don’t see, this minute, how anyone can believe it.”
“I believe your own interpretation of it. But it is your interpretation, right?”
“It’s the only one I have.”
“You were drunk that first night. Blind, stinking drunk, you said. The trap—”
“But there was the cutout carpeting. I saw that when I was bright sober. And the office—”
“Let’s take it step by step,” she said. “Let’s get it figured out. You can’t let it throw you. You can’t let it bowl you over.”
“That is it!” I shouted. For I had forgotten.
“Don’t shout,” she said. “You’ll have people looking at us.”
“The bowling balls,” I told her. “I had forgotten them. There were bowling balls rolling down the road.”
“Parker!”
“Out in Timber Lane. Joe Newman called me.”
I saw her face across the table and I saw that she was scared. She’d taken all the rest of it, but the bowling balls had been the final straw. She thought that I was crazy.
“I’m sorry,” I said as gently as I could. “But, Parker! Bowling balls rolling down the road!”
“One behind the other. Rolling solemnly.”
“And Joe Newman saw them?”
“No, not Joe. Some high-school kids. They phoned in and Joe called me. I told him to forget it.”
“Out by the Belmont place?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “It all ties in, you see. I don’t know how, but somehow it all is tied together.”
I pushed the plate away and shoved back the chair.
“Where are you going, Parker?”
“First,” I told her, “I’m going to take you home. And, then, if you’ll loan me the car...”
“Certainly, but—oh, I see, the Belmont place.”
The Belmont house was dark, a huge, rectangular blackness reared among the blackness of the trees. It stood upon a high point of land thrust out into the lake, and when I stopped the car I could hear the running of the waves upon the beach. Through the trees I could see the glint of moonlight on the water and high up, in a gable, a window caught the light, but otherwise the house and its sentinel trees were wrapped in blackness. The rustling of the drying leaves, heard in the silence of the night, sounded like the furtive pattering of many little feet.
I got out of the car and closed the door gently so it wouldn’t bang. And once I got the door shut, I stayed standing there, looking at the house. I wasn’t scared exactly. The terror and the horror of the early evening had largely ebbed away. But I didn’t feel too brave.
There might be traps, I thought. Not the kind of trap that had been hidden just outside my door, but other kinds of traps. Very fiendish ones.
And then I chided myself for that kind of foolishness. For simple logic said there’d be no traps outside. For if there were, they’d catch the innocent—someone cutting through the property to get down to the lake, or children playing around that most attractive of all childish things, a vacant house—and thus would attract attention where none need be attracted. If there were any traps, they’d be inside the house. And even so, thinking of it, that seemed unlikely, too. For on their own home grounds they—whoever they might be could deal with an intruder without resorting to traps.
It probably was no more, I told myself, than errant foolishness, this whole idea of mine that the Belmont house was in some way connected with what was going on. And yet I had to go and see, I had to know, I had to run it to the end and eliminate it, or I’d always wonder if the clues had not been there.
I went tensely up the walk, my shoulders hunched against possible attack from an unknown quarter. I tried to unhunch them, but they stayed tightened up no matter how I tried.
I climbed the steps to the front door and Stood there, hesitating, debating with myself. And decided, finally, to do it the honest way, to ring the bell or knock. I hunted for the bell and found it in the darkness by the sense of touch. The button was loose and wobbled underneath my fingers and I knew it wasn’t working, but I pressed it just the same. I could hear no sound of ringing from inside the house. I pressed it once again and held it there, and there was still no sound of ringing. I knocked, and the knocking sounded loud in the quietness of the night.
I waited and nothing happened. Once I thought I heard a footfall, but it was not repeated, and I knew that it could be no more than my imagination.
Back down the steps, I moved around the house. Uncared for through many years, the foundation plantings had grown into thick, dense hedges. Fallen leaves rustled underfoot and there was a queer, almost acid autumn sharpness in the air.
The screen was loose in the fifth window that I tried. And the window was unlocked.
And it was easy, I thought—far too easy. If I were looking for a trap, here could be the trap.
I raised the window to the top and waited, and nothing happened. There was no sound except the sound of the waves upon the shore and the noisy walking of the wind through the dry leaves stillhanging in the trees. I put my hand into my topcoat pocket and the gun was there, and the flashlight I had taken from the glove compartment of Joy’s car.