“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Never mind,” he said. “We seem to be back to square one.”
“Not exactly,” the head replied grimly. “She doesn’t have her father to watch out for her anymore. She’s on her own. And I want her found. Quickly.” “And if she spills her guts before we can find her?”
The head leaned back in Cap’s chair and laced her hands behind her neck. The man who was not a librarian eyed appreciatively the way her sweater pulled taut across the rounds of her breasts. Cap had never been like this.
“If she were going to spill her guts, I think she would have by now.” She leaned forward again, and tapped the desk calendar. “November fifth,” she said, “and nothing. Meantime, I think we’ve taken all the reasonable precautions. The Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune… we’re watching all the majors, but so far, nothing.”
“Suppose she decides to go to one of the minors? The Podunk Times instead of the New York Times? We can’t watch every news organ in the country.” “That is regrettably true,” the head agreed. “But there has been nothing. Which means she has said nothing.” “Would anyone really believe such a wild tale from an eight-year-old girl anyway?”
“If she lit a fire at the end of the story, I think that they might be disposed to,” the head answered. “But shall I tell you what the computer says?” She smiled and tapped the sheets. “The computer says there’s an eighty-percent probability that we can bring the committee her dead body without lifting a finger… except to ID her.”
“Suicide?”
The head nodded. The prospect seemed to please her a great deal.
“That’s nice,” the man who was not a librarian said, standing up. “For my own part, I’ll remember that the computer also said that Andrew McGee was almost certainly tipped over.”
The head’s smile faltered a bit.
“Have a nice day, Chief,” the man who was not a librarian said, and strolled out.
3
On the same November day, a man in a flannel shirt, flannel pants, and high green boots stood chopping wood under a mellow white sky. On this mild day, the prospect of another winter still seemed distant; the temperature was an agreeable fifty degrees. The man’s coat, which his wife had scolded him into wearing, hung over a fencepost. Behind him, stacked against the side of the old barn, was a spectacular drift of orange pumpkins-some of them starting to go punky now, sad to say.
The man put another log on the chopping block, slung the ax up, and brought it down. There was a satisfying thud, and two stove lengths fell to either side of the block. He was bending down to pick them up and toss them over with the others when a voice said from behind him: “You got a new block, but the mark’s still there, isn’t it? It’s still there.”
Startled, he turned around. What he saw caused him to step back involuntarily, knocking the ax to the ground, where it lay across the deep, indelible mark in the earth. At first he thought it was a ghost he was looking at, some gruesome specter of a child risen from the Dartmouth Crossing graveyard three miles up the road. She stood, pallid and dirty and thin in the driveway, her eyes hollow and glistening in their sockets, her jumper ragged and torn. A scrape mark skidded up her right arm almost to the elbow. It looked infected. There were loafers on her feet, or what had once been loafers; now it was hard to tell.
And then, suddenly, he recognized her. It was the little girl from a year ago; she had called herself Roberta, and she had a flamethrower in her head.
“Bobbi?” he said. “My sainted hat, is that Bobbi?”
“Yes, it’s still right there,” she repeated as if she had not heard him, and he suddenly realized what the glisten in her eyes was: she was weeping.
“Bobbi,” he said, “honey, what’s the matter? Where’s your dad?”
“Still there,” she said a third time, and then collapsed forward in a faint. Irv Manders was barely able to catch her. Cradling her, kneeling in the dirt of his dooryard, Irv Manders began to scream for his wife.
4
Dr. Hofferitz arrived at dusk and was in the back bedroom with the girl for about twenty minutes. Irv and Norma Manders sat in the kitchen, doing more looking at their supper than eating. Every now and then, Norma would look at her husband, not accusingly but merely questioningly, and there was the drag of fear, not in her eyes but around them-the eyes of a woman fighting a tension headache or perhaps low-back pain.
The man named Tarkington had arrived the day after the great burning; he had come to the hospital where Irv was being kept, and he had presented them with his card, which said only WHITNEY TARKINGTON GOVERNMENT ADJUSTMENTS.
“You just want to get out of here,” Norma had said. Her lips were tight and white, and her eyes had that same look of pain they had now. She had pointed at her husband’s arm, wrapped in bulky bandages; drains had been inserted, and they had been paining him considerably. Irv had told her he had gone through most of World War II with nothing much to show for it except a case of roaring hemorrhoids; it took being at home at his place in Hastings Glen to get shot up. “You just want to get out,” Norma repeated.
But Irv, who had perhaps had more time to think, only said, “Say what you have to, Tarkington.”
Tarkington had produced a check for thirty-five thousand dollars-not a government check but one drawn on the account of a large insurance company. Not one, however, that the Manderses did business with. “We don’t want your hush money,” Norma had said harshly, and reached for the call button over Irv’s bed. “I think you had better listen to me before you take any action you might regret later,” Whitney Tarkington had replied quietly and politely. Norma looked at Irv, and Irv had nodded. Her hand fell away from the call button. Reluctantly.
Tarkington had a briefcase with him. Now he put it on his knees, opened it, and removed a file with the names MANDERS and BREEDLOVE written on the tab. Norma’s eyes had widened, and her stomach began to twist and untwist. Breedlove was her maiden name. No one likes to see a government folder with his name on it; there is something terrible about the idea that tabs have been kept, perhaps secrets known.
Tarkington had talked for perhaps forty-five minutes in a low, reasonable tone. He occasionally illustrated what he had to say with Xerox copies from the Manders/Breedlove file. Norma would scan these sheets with tight lips and then pass them on to Irv in his hospital bed.
We are in a national-security situation, Tarkington had said on that horrible evening. You must realize that. We don’t enjoy doing this, but the simple fact is, you must be made to see reason. These are things you know very little about.
I know you tried to kill an unarmed man and his little girl, Irv had replied.
Tarkington had smiled coldly-a smile reserved for people who foolishly pretend to a knowledge of how the government works to protect its charges and replied, You don’t know what you saw or what it means. My job is not to convince you of that fact but only to try and convince you not to talk about it. Now, look here: this needn’t be so painful. The check is tax-free. It will pay for repairs to your house and your hospital bills with a nice little sum left over. And a good deal of unpleasantness will be avoided.
Unpleasantness, Norma thought now, listening to Dr. Hofferitz move around in the back bedroom and looking at her almost untouched supper. After Tarkington had gone, Irv had looked at her, and his mouth had been smiling, but his eyes had been sick and wounded. He told her: My daddy always said that when you was in a shit-throwing contest, it didn’t matter how much you threw but how much stuck to you.
Both of them had come from large families. Irv had three brothers and three sisters; Norma had four sisters and one brother. There were uncles, nieces, nephews, and cousins galore. There were parents and grandparents, in-laws… and, as in every family, a few outlaws.