“All right.”
“Charlie, listen, you’re O.K., aren’t you? I mean, everything’s fine?”
“I am not sicked.”
“What? I didn’t hear what you—”
“I am not sicked.”
The unfamiliar word worried Ben. As the worry became larger and larger, chunks of it began dropping off and changing into something he could more easily handle — anger. By the time he reached the drug store he’d convinced himself that Charlie had used the word deliberately to annoy him.
Mr. Forster was standing outside his drug store. Though his face looked grave, there was a glint of excitement in his eyes as though he’d just found out that one of his customers had contracted a nonfatal illness which would require years of prescriptions.
“Well, well, it’s Benny Gowen. How’s the world treating you, Benny?”
“Fine. Nobody calls me Benny any more, Mr. Forster.”
“Don’t they now. Well, that puts me in a class by myself. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like a Journal.”
“Sorry, I’m all sold out.” Mr. Forster was watching Ben carefully over the top of his spectacles. “Soon as I put them out here on the stand this afternoon people began picking them up like they were ten-dollar bills. Nothing sells papers like a real nasty case of murder or whatever it was. But I guess you know all about it, being you work downtown in the hub of things.”
“I don’t have a chance to read when I’m on the job,” Ben said.
“Who was murdered?”
“The police don’t claim it was murder. But I figure it must have been. The kid’s gone, nobody’s seen hide nor hair of her since last night.”
“Kid?”
“A nine-year-old girl named Jessie Brant. Disappeared right from in front of her own house or thereabouts. Now, nobody can tell me a nine-year-old kid wearing nightclothes wouldn’t have been spotted by this time if she were still alive. It’s not reasonable. Mark my words, she’s lying dead some place and the most they can hope for is to find the body and catch the man responsible for the crime. You agree, Benny?”
“I know nothing about it.”
Mr. Forster took off his spectacles and began cleaning them with a handkerchief that was dirtier than they were. “How’s Charlie, by the way?”
He is not sicked. “He’s all right. He’s been all right for a long time now, Mr. Forster.”
“Reason I asked is, he came in here yesterday with a bad headache. He bought some aspirin, but shucks, taking aspirin isn’t getting to the root of anything. A funny thing about headaches, some doctors think they’re mostly psychological, you know, caused by emotional problems. In Charlie’s case I’m inclined to agree. Look at the record, all that trouble he’s had and—”
“That’s in the past.”
“Being in the past and being over aren’t necessarily the same thing.” Mr. Forster replaced his spectacles with the air of a man who confidently expected new knowledge from increased vision. “Now don’t get me wrong. I think Charlie’s O.K. But I’m a friend of his, I’m not the average person reading about the kid and remembering back. There’s bound to be talk.”
“I’m sure you’ll do your share of it.” Ben turned to walk away but Mr. Forster’s hand on his arm was like an anchor. “Let go of me.”
“You must have misunderstood me, Ben. I like Charlie, I’m on his side. But I can’t help feeling there’s something wrong again. It probably doesn’t involve the kid at all because it started yesterday afternoon before anything happened to her. Are you going to be reasonable and listen to me, Ben?”
“I’ll listen if you have anything constructive to say.”
“Maybe it’s constructive, I don’t know. Anyhow, a man came in here yesterday asking where Charlie lived. He gave me a pretty thin story about forgetting to look up the house number. I pretended to go along with it but I knew damned well he was trying to pump me.”
“About Charlie?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you tell him?”
“All the right things. Don’t worry about that part of it, I gave Charlie a clean bill of health, 100 percent. Only... well, it’s been on my mind ever since. The man looked like an official of some kind, why was he interested in Charlie?”
“Why didn’t you ask him?”
“Heck, it would have spoiled the game. I was supposed to be taken in, see. I was playing the part of—”
“Playing games isn’t going to help Charlie.”
Mr. Forster’s eyes glistened with excitement. “So now you’re leveling with me, eh, Ben? There is something wrong, Charlie needs help again. Is that it?”
“We all need help, Mr. Forster,” Ben said and walked away, this time without interference. He knew Mr. Forster would be watching him and he tried to move naturally and easily as though he couldn’t feel the leaden chains attached to his limbs. He had felt these chains for almost his entire life; attached to the other end of them was Charlie.
He stopped at the corner, aware of the traffic going by, the people moving up and down and across the streets, the clock in the courthouse tower chiming six. He wanted to quiet the clock so he would lose consciousness of time; he wanted to join one of the streams of strangers, anonymous people going to unnamed places. Whoever, wherever, whenever, was better than being Ben on his way home to Charlie to ask him about a dead child.
Louise’s little sports car was parked at the curb in front of the house. Ben found her in the living room, leafing through the pages of a magazine. She smiled when she looked up and saw him in the doorway, but he could tell from the uneasiness in her eyes that she’d read about the child and had been silently asking the same questions that Mr. Forster was asking out loud.
He said, trying to sound cheerful and unafraid, “Hello, Louise. When did you arrive?”
“About ten minutes ago.”
“Where’s Charlie?”
“In his room getting dressed.”
“Oh. Are you going out some place? I thought — well, it’s turning kind of cold out, it might be a nice night to build a fire and all three of us sit around and talk.”
Louise smiled again with weary patience as if she was sick of talk and especially the talk of children, young or old. “I don’t know what Charlie has in mind. When he answered the door he simply told me he was getting dressed. I’m not even sure he wanted me to wait for him. But I’m waiting, anyway. It’s becoming a habit.” She added, without any change in tone, “What time did he come home last night?”
“It must have been pretty late. I was asleep.”
“You went to sleep with Charlie still out wandering around by himself? How could you have?”
“I was tired.”
“You led me to understand that you’d go on looking for him. You said if I went home for some rest that you’d take over. And you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I started thinking about the conversation we had earlier,” Ben said with deliberation. “You gave me the business about how I should trust Charlie, let him have a chance to grow up, allow him to reach his own decisions. You can’t have it both ways, Louise. You can’t tell me one minute to treat him like a responsible adult and the next minute send me out chasing after him as if he was a three-year-old. You can’t accuse me of making mistakes in dealing with him and then an hour later beg me to make the same mistakes. Be honest, Louise. Where do you stand? What do you really think of Charlie?”
“Keep your voice down, Ben. He might hear you.”
“Is that how you treat a responsible adult, you don’t let him overhear anything?”
“I meant—”
“You meant what you said. The three-year-old shut up in the bedroom isn’t supposed to hear what Mom and Pop are talking about in the living room.”