Polar Bears’ voice came: “She remind you of anybody?”
I tried to swallow. It was more than enough proof, if I needed any more proof. “Did the first two look more or less the same?”
“Pretty close,” said Polar Bears. “That Strand girl was as close as a sister might be.”
I remembered the violence of the hatred I had felt when she had seemed to storm inside me. She had come back all right, and she had killed three girls who had an accidental resemblance to her. I would be next.
“Interesting, isn’t it?” said Hovre. “Close ‘er up, Archy.”
The dark little man, who had been standing with his arms braced against the front of the locker as if asleep on his feet, pushed the tray back into the locker.
“Now let’s go back to the car,” said Polar Bears.
I followed him out into the blast of heat and sunlight. He drove me back to the Updahl farm without saying a word.
After he turned up the drive he cut the patrol car onto the lawn before the porch and got out as I did. He came toward me, a big intimidating physical presence. “Suppose we just agree to stay put until I get the final word from the M.E.”
“Why don’t you put me in jail?”
“Why, Miles, you’re my assistant on this case,” he said, and got back into his car. “In the meantime, get some sleep. You look like hell.” As he twirled the car into the drive, I saw the grim, entirely satisfied smile on his lips.
I woke up late in the night. Alison Greening was seated on the chair at the foot of the bed. I could just distinguish her face and the shape of her body in the moonlight. I feared — I do not know what I feared, but I feared for my life. She did nothing. I sat up in the bed: I felt terribly naked and unprotected. She seemed utterly normal; she looked like an ordinary young woman. She was looking straight at me, her expression placid and unemotional, abstracted. For a moment I thought that she looked too ordinary to have caused all the upheavals in me and in Arden. Her face was waxen. Then my fear came booming back into me, and I opened my mouth to say something. Before I could form words, she was gone.
I got out of bed, touched the chair, and went across the top of the house to my office. Papers still lay on the floor, papers spilled out of bushel baskets. She was not there.
In the morning I gulped down a half-pint of milk, thought with distaste of food, and knew that I had to get away. Rinn had been right, all that time ago. I had to leave the valley. The sight of her calmly, emotionlessly sitting on the chair at the foot of the bed, her blank face washed in moonlight, was more frightening than the frantic assault on my room. I could see that face, drained by the pale light, and it held no feeling I recognized; the complications of emotion had been erased. There was no more life in it than there was in a mask. I set down the bottle, checked my pockets for money and keys, and went outside into the sunlight. Dew lay shining on the grass.
Highway 93 to Liberty, I thought, then down to where I could pick up the freeway to La Crosse, and then I’d cross the river and head for a small town where I would leave the Nash and telegraph the New York Chemical for money and buy a second-hand car and go to Colorado or Wyoming, where I knew nobody. I backed out into the valley road and picked up speed, heading for the highway.
When I checked the rearview mirror as I passed the church, I saw another car keeping pace with me. I accelerated, and it kept the distance between us steady. It was like the prelude to that awful night when I had lost her, the night when we had made the vow. As the other car picked up speed and came closer, I saw black and white and knew that it was a police car. If it’s Polar Bears, I thought, I’ll attack him with my bare hands. I pushed the accelerator to the floor, and yanked at the wheel as I went around the curve by the sandstone bluff. The Nash began to vibrate. The patrol car pulled up easily and began to nose in before me, forcing me to the side of the road. I spun into Andy’s and went around the gaspumps. The patrol car anticipated me and moved ahead to block my exit. I looked around, considering backing up and swinging around into the side parking lot, but his car would have caught the old Nash in thirty seconds. I turned off the ignition.
I got out of the car and stood up. The man behind the wheel of the patrol car opened his door and rose up into the sunshine. It was Dave Lokken. Walking toward me, he kept his right hand on his holster.
“Nice little race.” He was imitating Polar Bears, even in his slow walk. “Where do you think you were going?”
I slumped against the hot metal of the Nash. “Shopping.”
“You wasn’t thinking about leaving, I hope. Because that’s why I been sittin’ out near your place for two days, to make sure you don’t even think about it.”
“You were watching me?”
“For your own good,” he said, grinning. “The Chief says you need a lot of help. I’m gonna help you stick around where we can keep an eye on you. The medical examiner is supposed to call the Chief real soon now.”
“I’m not the one you’re looking for,” I said. “I’m telling you the truth.”
“I guess you’re gonna tell me it was Chief Havre’s boy Zack. I heard you say that a couple of nights back. You might just as well of put a gun to your head. His boy is all the family the Chief’s got. Now get back and get home.”
I remembered the pale mask looking at me from the foot of the bed; and then I looked up toward the windows of Andy’s store. Andy and his wife were standing up there looking down at us, one face showing horror, the other contempt.
“Come on and help me get my car back,” I said and turned my back on him.
After a couple of steps I stopped walking. “What would you say if I told you your Chief raped and killed a girl?” I asked. “Twenty years ago.”
“I’d say you was lookin’ to get your head blown off. Just like you been doin’ since you got here.”
“What would you say if I told you that the girl he raped—” I turned back around, looked at his angry yokel’s face and gave up. He smelled like burning rubber. “I’m going into Arden,” I said. “Tag along.”
I saw him driving along behind me all the way to Arden, at times speaking into his radio microphone, and when I haggled with the boy Hank Speltz, he stayed in the car and parked across the street from the garage. The boy at first told me that the “repairs” to the VW would cost me five hundred dollars, and I refused to pay it. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his coveralls and looked at me with sullen hatred. I asked him what he had done. “Had to rebuild most of the motor. Patch what I couldn’t rebuild. Lots of stuff. New belts.”
“I imagine you’re being funny,” I said. “I don’t think you could rebuild a cigarette.”
“Pay up or no car. You want me to get the police?”
“I’ll give you fifty dollars and that’s it. You haven’t even shown me a worksheet.”
“Five hundred. We don’t use worksheets. People around here trust us.”
It was my day for being reckless. I went across the street and opened Lokken’s door and made him follow me back to the garage. Hank Speltz looked as though he regretted his remark about getting the police.
“Well,” Speltz said after I had forced Lokken to listen to an account of our interchange, “I was chargin’ you in advance for the body work.”
Lokken looked at him disgustedly.
“I’ll give you thirty bucks,” I said.
Speltz howled, “You said fifty!”
“I changed my mind.”
“Make out a bill for thirty,” said Lokken. The boy went inside to the garage’s office.
“It’s funny,” I told Lokken, “you can’t do any wrong in this country if you’ve got a cop beside you.”