Looking ahead, though. Where are you going? he said. Police. What police? Bailey police. How will you find them? Telephone, first house. People. Anywhere with people.
Imagining a telephone booth, he felt in his pocket for coins. Okay. Please connect me with the police office in Bailey. Excuse me, my name is Tony Hastings from Ohio, I have a problem. Help! Whatsat you say? Help!
What telephone booth? It needs no telephone booth, any farm house will do. Excuse me, I wonder if I could use your telephone? Land sakes mister you scared me out of my growth cant you see its the middle of the night.
My name is Tony Hastings, I’m professor of mathematics at a university you never heard of. Sic the dogs on him, no strangers snooping round my place middle of the night.
As Tony Hastings while he walked, he tried to look ahead beyond his temporary problems. If it should be necessary to rent a car for the rest of the trip. A call telling Roger McAllen to wait a day or two before opening up the cottage.
Excuse me police please I’m calling to ask are my wife and daughter there? Whatsat you say?
Three guys, name Ray Turk and Lou. Ray has a hateful sneering face triangular not much chin, teeth too big for his mouth, half bald, smash him one. Consider the charges that can be filed. Kidnapping, harassment. Car theft? Rape?
Whatsat you say, start at the beginning for Chrissake. Excuse me Tony Hastings professor Ohio going to Maine driving at night, we ran into these guys on the Interstate, they took my wife and child, no it’s not just a bump on the road.
Looking beyond this problem, jobs to do when we arrive depend on when we arrive. I might reconsider renting a catboat from Jake Malcolm. Oh foolish blind hope. Excuse me, I didn’t mean to scare you, it’s an emergency, may I?
No problems are temporary until they are over. All problems are potentially permanent.
The road was steep down and winding, he had no memory of having come up it. Sure now he had lost the incoming trail, probably at the fork. No point trying to trace it back, he had come too far, nor could he remember the turns they had made—and even if he did, where would it lead to? No village, any village would do, any police station if you can’t find Bailey. Excuse me, if you could call the other police stations with your teletype computer telephone. Because though we didn’t make a specific arrangement, a police station would be a natural clearing house, especially as that’s where we were supposed to meet.
The road leveled out and the trees stopped on both sides. Black fields. Farm country, a valley floor, he could see the shadow line of a ridge at the other end. A car appeared, its lights approaching from a long way off. Tony Hastings dropped down in the ditch and waited for it to go past. Bangor me. He had passed up a hitchhiker years ago, or tonight, Helen’s mistake, she wanted to pick him up. He never thought she would get such a lesson as this. A moment later another car. He was tired of hiding from cars. He thought all cars with headlights were enemies, but he also remembered he was still Tony Hastings. He was standing near a lane that went through an opening in a fence, prepared to run if the car slowed down, into the field full of what was probably corn as tall as he was. The car zipped by.
The big box shape near the road ahead was turning into a house, but his relief died because it had no lights, and he dared not be a stranger waking a sleeping family in the night. The road ended against another, somewhat wider. He saw lights down to the left. Maybe now, he said, at last.
He walked faster, strengthened by a vision of destination. It was a floodlight standing watch, high at the corner between barn and silo illuminating the yard between barn and house. The house itself was dark like the other.
He saw dim red and blue lights advertising beer in a window on the other side, but the window otherwise was also dark. He asked, might not a man in desperate trouble be excused for waking up a sleeping stranger if the trouble were desperate enough? But he knew people in lonely farmhouses kept shotguns for strangers at night (they might be Ray or Turk or Lou).
There were more houses now, after passing one he would see another, all dark except for their floodlit yards. He heard a dog barking behind an illuminated pig trough. He saw dark shapes like rocks in a field and realized they were cows. He noticed the improvement in his eyes. In a cluster of trees a bird started to sing, robin, and he realized the black sky was fading.
This weakening of dark meant dawn, the night was ending. It brought despair, the coming of light catching his nightmare like a photographer and making it real. It brought relief. The pacification of common sense.
Common sense, he said. Think how often you have feared tragedy because Helen was late coming home or Laura did not call on time. Remember the hurricane. Yet none of those disasters occurred, his father and mother lived out their lives, the family still consisted of Tony, his wife Laura, his daughter Helen.
Common sense, however. They banged my car and forced me off the road. They separated me from my family and drove off with them. They dumped me in a lonely place in the woods. They tried to run me down, which would have killed me.
He listened to the terrible news spoken in his head. They are dead, it said. You know they are dead. Repeated: Laura and Helen are dead. Those men have killed them. Common sense tells you that. You know it, you have known it all along, you knew it when you saw them drive off. The only question was whether they have been killed yet or that is still to come. If there was a delay, if there were still a chance to save them.
He looked at it deliberately, his memory, Laura in her traveling slacks and dark sweater standing by the car, Helen with the red kerchief around her head sitting on a rock down the road, both faces looking out the window at him as the car rushed away.
Now though the sky was still dark you could see distinctly the fields, the clumps of trees, the ridges around the valley, the houses and barns. The robins were singing in the clumps of trees. He saw a car approaching. Lights, people awake. No more hiding from cars, it seemed crazy now. Excuse me mister, the nearest village, police. There was a ritual for it, a proper gesture. He held out his thumb, and the car zipped by.
Another car in the other direction, he crossed over and held out his thumb again. No good. Then more cars. People up in the earliest dawn. The ritual gesture didn’t work. When the next car came, a van a few minutes later, he waved his hands above his head: help, help. The van tooted its horn.
His head whistled, his ears noisy, the unslept night dredged holes in his skull. The cold lit yard was like the others he had seen, but in this house there was a light upstairs and another on the ground floor in the back. He stood there, heart pounding.
He stepped up to the little front porch. The door had a window, he could see through the curtain to a corner of the lighted kitchen in the back. He turned the knob to ring the bell, jangly loud. Started up dog barking just inside. A gaunt woman in an apron appeared in the kitchen, squinting. Stayed where she was. A man in a plaid shirt appeared beside her, white hair. He approached. He pulled the curtain back and peeked out. Said something through the glass. Tony Hastings could not hear through the barking of the dog.
Tony shouted, the words he had memorized. “Excuse me sir.”