It came back. It came back in slow motion, like a football instant replay where you see the quarterback sacked or the winning pass caught. It haunted his dreams in the days that came later. The door swinging open, the ironing board falling down to the horizontal with a ratcheting sound, reminding him somehow of a guillotine, his wife crammed into the space beneath and in her mouth a rag that had been used to polish the furniture. It came back in a kind of total recall and he knew he was going to scream again and so he slammed his forearm into his mouth and he bit it and the sound that came out was a fuzzy, blocked howl. He did that twice, and something came out of him and he was calm. It was the false calm of shock, but it could be used. The amorphous fear and the unfocused terror fell away. The throbbing in his right hand was gone. And the thought that stole into his mind now was as cold as the calmness that had settled over him, as cold as the shock, and that thought was CHARLIE.
He got up, started for the telephone, and then turned back to the stairs. He stood at the top for a moment, biting at his lips, steeling himself, and then he went back down. The dryer turned and turned. There was nothing in there but a pair of his jeans, and it was the big brass button at the waist that made that clicking, clinking sound as they turned and fell, turned and fell. Andy shut the dryer off and looked into the ironing-board closet.
“Vicky,” he said softly.
She stared at him with her dead eyes, his wife. He had walked with her, held her hand, entered her body in the dark of night. He found himself remembering the night she had drunk too much at a faculty party and he had held her head while she threw up. And that memory became the day he had been washing the station wagon and he had gone into the garage for a moment to get the can of Turtle Wax and she had picked up the hose and had run up behind him and stuffed the hose down the back of his pants. He remembered getting married and kissing her in front of everyone, relishing that kiss, her mouth, her ripe, soft mouth.
“Vicky,” he said again, and uttered a long, trembling sigh.
He pulled her out and worked the rag from her mouth. Her head lolled limp on her shoulders. He saw that the blood had come from her right hand, where some of her fingernails had been pulled. There was a small trickle of blood from one of her nostrils, but none anywhere else. Her neck had been broken by a single hard blow.
“Vicky,” he whispered.
Charlie, his mind answered back.
In the still calm that now filled his head, he understood that Charlie had become the important thing, the only important thing. Recriminations were for the future. He went back into the family room, not bothering to turn on the light this time. Across the room, by the Ping-Pong table, was a couch with a drop cloth over it. He took the drop cloth and went back into the laundry room and covered Vicky with it. Somehow, the immobile shape of her under the sofa’s drop cloth was worse. It held him nearly hypnotized. Would she never move again? Could that be?
He uncovered her face and kissed her lips. They were cold.
They pulled her nails, his mind marveled. Jesus Christ, they pulled her nails.
And he knew why. They wanted to know where Charlie was. Somehow they had lost track of her when she went to Terri Dugan’s house instead of coming home after day-camp. They had panicked, and now the watching phase was over. Vicky was dead-either on purpose or because some Shop operative had got overzealous. He knelt beside Vicky and thought it was possible that, prodded by her fear, she had done something rather more spectacular than shutting the fridge door from across the room. She might have shoved one of them away or knocked the feet out from beneath one of them. Too bad she hadn’t had enough to throw them into the wall at about fifty miles an hour, he thought.
It could have been that they knew just enough to make them nervous, he supposed. Maybe they had even been given specific orders: The woman may be extremely dangerous. If she does something-anything-to jeopardize the operation, get rid of her. Quick.
Or maybe they just didn’t like leaving witnesses. Something more than their share of the taxpayer’s dollar was at stake, after all.
But the blood. He should be thinking about the blood, which hadn’t even been dry when he discovered it, only tacky. They hadn’t been gone long when he arrived.
More insistently his mind said: Charlie!
He kissed his wife again and said, “Vicky, I’ll be back.”
But he had never seen Vicky again, either.
He had gone upstairs to the telephone and looked up the Dugans” number in Vicky’s Phone-Mate. He dialed the number the Joan Dugan answered. “Hi, Joan,” he said, and now the shock was aiding him: his voice was perfectly calm, an everyday voice. “Could I speak to Charlie for a second?” “Charlie?” Mrs. Dugan sounded doubtful. “Well, she went with those two friends of yours. Those teachers. Is… wasn’t that all right?”
Something inside of him went skyrocketing up and then came plunging down. His heart, maybe. But it would do no good to panic this nice woman whom he had only met socially four or five times. It wouldn’t help him, and it wouldn’t help Charlie.
“Damn,” he said. “I was hoping to catch her still there. When did they go?”
Mrs. Dugan’s voice faded a little. “Terri, when did Charlie go?”
A child’s voice piped something. He couldn’t tell what. There was sweat between his knuckles.
“She says about fifteen minutes ago.” She was apologetic. “I was doing the laundry and I don’t have a watch. One of them came down and spoke to me. It was all right, wasn’t it, Mr. McGee? He looked all right…”
A lunatic impulse came to him, to just laugh lightly and say Doing the laundry, were you? So was my wife. I found her crammed in under the ironing board. You got off lucky today, Joan.
He said, “That’s fine. Were they coming right here, I wonder?”
The question was relayed to Terri, who said she didn’t know. Wonderful, Andy thought. My daughter’s life is in the hands of another six-year-old girl.
He grasped at a straw.
“I have to go down to the market on the corner,” he said to Mrs. Dugan. “Will you ask Terri if they had the car or the van? In case I see them.”
This time he heard Terri. “It was the van. They went away in a gray van, like the one David Pasioco’s father has.”
“Thanks,” he said. Mrs. Dugan said not to mention it. The impulse came again, this time just to scream My wife is dead! down the line at her. My wife is dead and why were you doing your laundry while my daughter was getting into a gray van with a couple of strange men?
Instead of screaming that or anything, he hung up and went outside. The heat whacked him over the head and he staggered a little. Had it been this hot when he came? It seemed much hotter now. The mailman had come. There was a Woolco advertising circular sticking out of the mailbox that hadn’t been there before. The mailman had come while he was downstairs cradling his dead wife in his arms. His poor dead Vicky: they had pulled out her nails, and it was funny-much funnier than the way the keys had of accumulating, really-how the fact of death kept coming at you from different sides and different angles. You tried to jig and jog, you tried to protect yourself on one side, and the truth of it bored right in on another side. Death is a football player, he thought, one big mother. Death is Franco Harris or Sam Cunningham or Mean Joe Green. And it keeps throwing you down on your ass right there at the line of scrimmage.