He began. “Last night, sometime after eleven. Traveling on the Interstate on our way to Maine. We were attacked by another car and forced off the road.”
He told it all, it took him several minutes. He told about the bumping of the cars and how they had to stop. How the guys changed the tire and drove off with Laura and Helen in his car, leaving him to go with Lou in theirs. He told how Lou led him along many roads before taking him finally up the grassy track into the woods where he was put out. How he walked out alone in the dark and met the other car coming in but hid from it and how when it came out again they tried to run him down. And how he had walked miles to find a house, Jack Combs’s, with a light on.
It was as if telling the story made him safe. The police had it, the danger was dispelled, he had come back from the wilderness to five thousand years of progress in a warm house linked by telephone to computer, radio, and a trained specialist. Nothing bad could happen now. In the warm farmer’s house with its breakfast smell, despite the crazy thought that wouldn’t go away saying, you haven’t found them yet.
Sergeant Miles asked questions. What exit did you leave the Interstate? Tony could not say. Describe the three guys. He did that eagerly. Describe their car. That was harder. License plate? Do you remember any landmarks while you were riding with Lou? (He remembered the small white church. He remembered the trailer above the bend in the mountain road with the light in the window.) Are you sure they were trying to run you down? Could you find your way back to the woods road from where you are now? Oh it was good to be asked questions, he didn’t know how much life he had lost until it was restored by them.
Finally the sergeant said, “Thank you Tony. We’ll look into it and call you back.”
“Wait!”
“What?”
“I can’t stay here.”
“Oh. Hold on a minute.” The phone went dead.
He glanced at his hosts, who looked away. Strangers at the edge of a village in the early morning, good enough to let him make a phone call, can’t stay here—but where can he stay, with his wife and daughter missing and his car gone and nothing but the clothes he wore and his wallet?
The phone clicked back to life. “Tony? Tell you what. We’ll send a man over, pick you up. You can wait here.”
“Okay.”
“Man will be over about a half hour.”
So they were coming for him, they would take care of him, the good police, comforting and fatherly. He wanted to rejoice, but the farmer and his wife were looking at him.
“I’ll give you a bite to eat,” Mrs. Combs said.
She fed him well at the checkered kitchen table in the harsh light of the hanging bulb, while the husband went out to do the early morning barn work that had roused him to turn on the lights Tony had spotted. Her look was cautious, she did not respond to his thanks, and he ate in silence.
“Never went in for traveling, myself,” she said. “People is different in foreign parts. Never know what kind you run into.”
He nodded, his mouth was full. Criticism disguised as sympathy, yes maam, he thought, but this happens to be your country where I ran into these people you never know what kind. Nevertheless, be grateful for the good police and the kind if cautious hosts.
By the time the police car came for him it was full daylight though the morning sun was still behind a hill. The car had an official shield on its side and a rack of lights on top. The lights were off. The policeman was a large young man with a small fuzzy brown mustache and a broad front. He looked like a childlike student who kept coming to the office last year to ask for help, Tony couldn’t remember his name.
He said, “I am Officer Talbot. Sergeant Miles told me to tell you there has been no report on your wife and child.”
The disappointment in that, he realized he was expecting to be notified any minute that Laura and Helen had called in. He thought, it’s still not eight, most stores and offices are not yet open.
The big young student in uniform idled his engine and spoke into his microphone. The radio snapped in dark male machine voices. Officer Talbot looked serious, grim. He said, “You sure you didn’t have no prearranged meeting place?”
“Yes we did, the police station in Bailey. Only they took me and dumped me in the woods instead.”
“What’s Bailey?”
“They said it was the nearest town. We were supposed to go to the Bailey police.”
“Ain’t no Bailey I ever heard of. Ain’t no Bailey police, that’s sure.”
Bad, bad—although not really new, this news.
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
They started up, the police car going in the opposite direction from where Tony had come. He felt unexpectedly afraid, as of leaving something behind. He lost track of this new journey immediately, he could not remember the turns nor the frequent villages they passed through. As if riding in this sealed protective car left the nightmare behind but at the same time destroyed the path back to it and therefore the way back to life. He remembered Miles asking if he could find his way back to where he had been from the Combs house and thought, should I have asked Talbot to help me retrace my steps? But he had not made the suggestion, lest there be something obscene about it.
The countryside was green and yellow, rolling and fresh in the morning light. The roads shone black in the sun. They sped suspended high on the sides of hills overlooking broad valleys full of fields and patches of woods, and they descended into woody groves and rode up curves and climbed long straight slopes and slowed for villages and passed clusters of farmhouses and sheds and fields of corn and other fields with cows and yards with pigs and sheep on the opposite slope and dark patches of trees on the tops of the hills. He thought, how beautiful this country if he had Laura to say it to.
The police station was a new one-story brick building surrounded by a chain link fence at the edge of a town. There were cows beyond the fence and a motel across the street. Tony Hastings followed Officer Talbot through a corridor and past a bulletin board and through an office with a counter into another office with two desks. The man at the desk in the farthest corner got up. “I’m Lieutenant Graves. Sergeant Miles went home.”
Lieutenant Graves was a small man with round cheekbones and a small chin like a cartoon squirrel and a black mustache that descended below his mouth on each side. His eyes or the shape of his face made him look a little like Ray in the night. I must not look at him, Tony said. He was afraid the lieutenant’s face would obliterate the memory of Ray’s. While Tony sat in the chair by the desk, Lieutenant Graves read the handwritten document on his desk. He was a slow reader and it took a long time. Then he asked Tony to repeat his story. He took it down on a pad of yellow lined paper, though Tony did not understand how he could compress it into so few laborious words. When the story was finished, he repeated the questions Sergeant Miles had asked. He sat a long time with his chin in his hand.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve already put out an alert for the two cars. That ought to turn up something. Don’t know what else we can do except wait.”
He looked at Tony. “Meanwhile, you ain’t got no car. You got a place to stay?”
“No.”
“There’s a motel across the street.” He wrote something on a card. “Here’s the taxi number, you want that. Money?”
“I have credit cards. My checkbook is in my suitcase. That’s in the car. All my clothes.”
“There’s a bank on Hallicot Street. Opens at nine.”