“Yes. I think you would.”
“Then make a knot.”
I made a slipknot in the legs of Jessie’s nylons and gave it back to him.
He tested it, pulling it tighter. “Now turn around.”
“You son of a bitch.”
“That’s right,” he said. “Say good-bye.”
The shotgun was still against my neck and I turned around. He pulled my arms behind me and slipped the knot over my wrists, making them burn, and then laid the shotgun on the bed and pulled me down so that I was kneeling and tied my feet and knotted the two ends, stretching me backward on my knees. He wrapped another stocking around my head, across my mouth, gagging me, and then made a loop around the leg of the bedstead. Then he pushed me over. I lay on the floor looking up at him, at his tan pants and maroon-shirted stomach. Against the far wall, Jessie had turned around, facing me. She was crying again.
“All right,” Burdette said. “We’re done here.”
He picked up the shotgun from the bed and lifted her suitcase; he took Jessie by the arm and led her out of the bedroom. That was the last I saw of her. She was wearing a warm sweater and she was crying and her brown hair was tangled.
I didn’t see any of the rest of it. I could hear only the frightened sounds coming from the boys’ bedroom down the hall. TJ and Bobby were awakened and being forced to dress and I could hear the muffled sound of Jessie’s voice trying to reassure them, but the boys were both crying, and then there was the harsh deeper sound of Burdette’s voice. When they were finished in the bedroom they walked out through the kitchen toward the back door. The door banged shut and in a moment there was the sound of a car starting up on Hawthorne Street; then there was the sound of it driving away. After that there wasn’t anything.
For the rest of that Sunday night and for most of Monday I lay in the bedroom on the floor in the old Fenner house. When he left, Burdette had not bothered to turn the light off and during the night I lay on the floor under the bright overhead light. For some reason that bothered me especially, that no one in Holt noticed it burning. But no one did. So I lay for a long time thinking about that and about other things, and then gradually it began to turn day outside, and now whether or not there was a light on in the bedroom of an apartment house at the west edge of town wouldn’t make any difference to anyone. Time passed very slowly. Occasionally I managed to sleep a little. Then I would wake again. My ear had stopped bleeding but my feet and hands felt numb and the edges of my mouth hurt from being stretched.
Meanwhile outside I could hear cars going by and I could hear the sound of kids going to school and the barking of someone’s dog. Four or five times during the day the phone rang on the wall out in the kitchen. I lay and listened to it ring. Afterward I learned that one of the calls had been Mrs. Walsh, calling from the Holt Mercury, and that another had come from the Holt Cafe, from Jessie’s boss, wanting to know why she hadn’t returned to work. I never learned who made the other calls.
Finally, late on Monday afternoon, I was released. Mrs. Nyla Waters, Jessie’s neighbor, had grown worried about seeing my car parked in front of the house all day so she had called Bud Sealy. And so, about five o’clock, Bud Sealy came over to investigate. He came inside and found me tied up in the bedroom. “What in the hell?” he said. “Jesus Christ.”
He had to help me get up. While I got dressed I told him what had happened.
All of that was three months ago. Since then time has passed as usual. It is the middle of January now, the start of another year, and people in Holt are still talking about the events of last fall. In town Joe Don Williams remains particularly upset about things, since it happened to be his shotgun that Burdette had with him that night. Burdette took it from the rack in Williams’s unlocked pickup. The pickup was parked in the alley behind Jenny New-comb’s house. So people are talking about that now too.
And in the intervening months the police have begun to send out all-points bulletins again, as they did once before when Burdette disappeared. This time they’ve charged him with kidnap as well as theft. But they haven’t been able to locate him. For as Jessie remarked about him that night in the bedroom: he’s good at that. If nothing else, Jack Burdette knows how to disappear.
So I am still in Holt County. I am still publishing the weekly newspaper my father turned over to me years ago. And Wanda Jo Evans is still in Pueblo, living on the Front Range, working for the phone company. And Nora Kramer, that fragile black-haired girl I married out of college a long time ago, is living once more with her father in Denver and they seem to be quite happy.
But Jessie? What about her?
Somewhere in this great world I want to believe that she is all right too. I want to believe that she and TJ and Bobby are still alive, even if it is in California with Jack Burdette. No one has heard anything about them since that night, but I want to believe that much and I hope for more.