I ate a hamburger and drank half a beer, then made the call. He said, “Thank God, Lou. Can you come over here?”
“What’s the matter?”
“Come over and I’ll tell you.”
I went back to the kitchen table, unwrapped a second hamburger, then wrapped it up again. I bagged the food and put it in the fridge, poured the beer down the sink.
The streetlights came on while I was driving across town to his place. No question, the days were getting longer. Not much left of spring. I switched on my headlights and thought how fast the years were starting to go, and how Anson’s voice hadn’t sounded right.
I parked at the head of his big circular driveway. My engine went on coughing for ten or twenty seconds after I cut the ignition. It’ll do that, and the kid at the garage can’t seem to figure out what to do about it. I’d had to buy my own car after the last election, and this had been as good as I could afford. Of course it didn’t settle into that coughing routine until I’d owned it a month, and now it wouldn’t quit.
Anson had the door open before I got to it. “Lou,” he said, and gripped me by the shoulders.
He was only a year older than me, which made him forty-two, but he was showing all those years and more. He was balding and carried too much weight, but that wasn’t what did it. His whole face was drawn and desperate, and I put that together with his tone of voice and knew what I’d been reminded of over the phone. He’d sounded the same way three years ago when Paula died.
“What’s the matter, Anse?”
He shook his head. “Come inside,” he said. I followed him to the room where he kept the liquor. Without asking he poured us each a full measure of straight bourbon. I didn’t much want a drink but I took it and held onto it while he drank his all the way down. He shuddered, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Beth’s been kidnapped,” he said.
“When?”
“This afternoon. She left school at the usual time. She never got home. This was in the mailbox when I got home. It hadn’t gone through the mails. They just stuck it in the box.”
I removed a sheet of paper from the envelope he handed me, unfolded it. Words cut from a newspaper, fastened in place with rubber cement. I brought the paper close to my face and sniffed at it.
He asked me what I was doing. “Sometimes you can tell by the smell when the thing was prepared. The solvent evaporates, so if you can still smell it it’s recent.”
“Does it matter when they prepared the note?”
“Probably not. Force of habit, I guess.” I’d been sheriff for three terms before Wallace Hines rode into office on the governor’s coattails. Old habits die hard.
“I just can’t understand it,” he was saying. “She knew not to get in a stranger’s car. I don’t know how many times I told her.”
“I used to talk about that at school assemblies, Anse. ‘Don’t go with strangers. Don’t accept food or candy from people you don’t know. Cross at corners. Don’t ever play in an old icebox.’ Lord, all the things you have to tell them.”
“I can’t understand it.”
“How old is Bethie?” I’d almost said was, caught myself in time. That would have crushed him. The idea that she might already be dead was one neither of us would voice. It hung in the room like a silent third party to the conversation.
“She’s nine. Ten in August. Lou, she’s all I’ve got in the world, all that’s left to me of Paula. Lou, I’ve got to get her back.”
I looked at the note again. “Says a quarter of a million dollars,” I said.
“I know.”
“Have you got it?”
“I can raise it. I’ll go talk to Jim McVeigh at the bank tomorrow. He doesn’t have to know what I need it for. I’ve borrowed large sums in cash before on a signature loan, for a real estate deal or something like that. He won’t ask too many questions.”
“Says old bills, out of sequence. Nothing larger than a twenty. He’ll fill an order like that and think it’s for real estate?”
He poured himself another drink. I still hadn’t touched mine. “Maybe he’ll figure it out,” he allowed. “He still won’t ask questions. And he won’t carry tales, either.”
“Well, you’re a good customer down there. And a major stockholder, aren’t you?”
“I have some shares, yes.”
I looked at the note, then at him. “Says no police and no FBI,” I said. “What do you think about that?”
“That’s what I was going to ask you.”
“Well, you might want to call Wally Hines. They tell me he’s the sheriff.”
“You don’t think much of Hines.”
“Not a whole lot,” I admitted, “but I’m prejudiced on the subject. He doesn’t run the department the way I did. Well, I didn’t do things the way my predecessor did, either. Old Bill Hurley. He probably didn’t think much of me, old Hurley.”
“Should I call Hines?”
“I wouldn’t. It says here they’ll kill her if you do. I don’t know that they’re watching the house, but it wouldn’t be hard for them to know if the sheriff’s office came in on the operation.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what Hines could do, to tell you the truth. You want to pay the ransom?”
“Of course I do.”
“Hines could maybe set up a stakeout, catch the kidnapper when he picks up the ransom. But they generally don’t release the victim until after they get away clean with the ransom.” If ever, I thought. “Now as far as the FBI is concerned, they know their job. They can look at the note and figure out what newspaper the words came from, where the paper was purchased, the envelope, all of that. They’ll dust for fingerprints and find mine and yours, but I don’t guess the kidnapper’s were on here in the first place. What you might want to do, you might want to call the Bureau as soon as you get Bethie back. They’ve got the machinery and the know-how to nail those boys afterward.”
“But you wouldn’t call them until then?”
“I wouldn’t,” I said. “Not that I’m going to tell you what to do or not to do, but I wouldn’t do it myself. Not if it were my little girl.”
We talked about some things. He poured another drink and I finally got around to sipping at the one he’d poured me when I first walked in. We’d been in that same room three years ago, drinking the same brand of whiskey. He’d managed to hold himself together through Paula’s funeral, and after everybody else cleared out and Bethie was asleep he and I settled in with a couple of bottles. Tonight I would take it easy on the booze, but that night three years ago I’d matched him drink for drink.
Out of the blue he said, “She could have been, you know.” I missed the connection. “Could have been your little girl,” he explained. “Bethie could have. If you’d have married Paula.”
“If your grandmother had wheels she’d be a tea cart.”
“ ‘But she’d still be your grandmother.’ Isn’t that what we used to say? You could have married Paula.”
“She had too much sense for that.” Though the cards might have played that way, if Anson Pollard hadn’t come along. Now Paula was three years dead, dead of anaphylactic shock from a bee sting, if you can believe it. And the woman I’d married, and a far cry from Paula she was, had left me and gone to California. I heard someone say that the Lord took the United States by the state of Maine and lifted, so that everything loose wound up in Southern California. Well, she was and she did, and now Anse and I were a couple of solitary birds going long in the tooth. Take away thirty pounds and a few million dollars and a nine-year-old girl with freckles and you’d be hard-pressed to tell us apart.