Just as I set it down two men came in, so involved in a heated argument about the Giants that they barely glanced at me. They picked one of the recent volumes, spread it out, turned the pages with silent intensity. Then one pointed with his thumb and said, “Hah!”
“So okay. So I was wrong.”
“So you buy.”
They put the book back and left. I began to go through my volume. The paper was yellowed, the corners brittle, the type face more quaint than in the current editions.
A half hour later and two-thirds of the way through the volume, I found it. I read it carefully. It had warranted quite a splash in the paper.
I read it and read the follow-up stories in subsequent editions. The last little flicker was a page eight squib telling about the transfer of Mrs. Rolph Olan from a local hospital to a private mental institution in accordance with a court order.
I sat back and pulled the peanut-can ash tray closer and lighted a cigarette. It was not a pretty story. Mary Olan, on an October Wednesday, had been picked up at two-thirty at the private elementary school she attended by the Olan chauffeur driving Mrs. Olan’s car. The little girl had run into the house. She had seen her father’s car in the drive and was anxious to see him. Her baby brother was having his nap. The cook and maid had Wednesday afternoons off. She went in the front door. Her mother, Nadine Pryor Olan, was standing on the bottom stair of the main staircase. She held a bloody kitchen knife in her hand. Her husband was on his back on the floor in front of her, stabbed through the heart and quite dead. Nadine Olan was in a state of severe shock, unable to respond to questions.
It was established — though the paper was most coy about this — that Rolph Olan had led an active extramarital life and that this had been a cause of discord between them. Except for the sleeping child, they had been alone in the house. They were unable to establish why Mr. Rolph Olan had come home in the middle of the day. He had received a phone call at his office shortly before he left and it was believed that it was his wife who had called him home, though this could not be proved. He had a habit of answering his own phone, perhaps due to his concurrent intrigues.
At first Nadine Olan, whose health had always been delicate, had responded to treatment. She claimed that she had heard a fall shortly after she had heard her husband’s car drive in. She said she had been resting in her bedroom next to the nursery. She had thought little of it, had called to her husband, and then begun to worry when he didn’t answer. She had gone down and found him and she guessed she had instinctively pulled the knife from his chest. The next thing she knew, her daughter had come running in and had started to scream.
She had been quite calm for a few days and then, perhaps as she began to realize that everyone was quite certain she had killed him, her mind failed quickly. I guessed that it could have been due to her own uncertainty as to whether or not she had killed him. Faced with such an insoluble problem, a retreat into unreality would not be inexplicable, particularly in the case of an emotional, sensitive, unhappy woman.
During Mrs. Olan’s period of relative calmness, the paper speculated about two facts which seemed to spoil the picture of guilt. One man, who knew Rolph Olan by sight, was almost willing to swear that he had seen another man riding homeward with Mr. Olan that afternoon. And a neighbor woman reported that on that same afternoon a man had cut across her grounds and could have been coming from the Olan residence.
But when Mrs. Olan’s mind went, before she moved back into the silent darkness where she could not be reached, she made a confession of sorts. Portions of it were reprinted in the paper. It was wildly incoherent. It spoke of angels of death and the vengeance of the Lord. It spoke of sin and retribution. Her obvious insanity put a halt to further speculations about her innocence.
During the days immediately following the murder, Mr. Willis Pryor, brother of the accused woman, spent countless hours by her side, even watching over her during the night, and was tireless in proclaiming her innocence. He wrote a letter to the paper criticizing the inertia of the police. After Nadine Olan’s collapse and the medical verdict that the prognosis was unfavorable, Willis Pryor ceased his efforts in her behalf, withdrew from many community activities and resigned from the boards of several local corporations.
I sifted over what I had. It wasn’t much. It was certainly less than Dodd Raymond had. He had known enough to kill him. This was his town; he’d know little things that hadn’t been in the paper. He had perhaps used the paper to confirm his memories. And he had known Mary Olan well. She would have talked to him about such things, though not to me.
All I had was a hunch. A hunch about the evil of righteousness.
I took Toni out to dinner that Saturday evening. I guess I was poor company. I would join our group of two for a while and be fine. And then I would drift away again. Toni was aware of it, and she was half amused, half hurt. I did as well as I could, returned her to my apartment and holed up at the hotel. I phoned her after I was in bed with the light out. I could picture her sitting by my phone. She said she was wearing another pair of those delightfully diaphanous pajamas, and that she too was in darkness.
We said the things you would expect to be said under such circumstances and it was all very very fine indeed.
Two hours later, nightmare yanked me out of dreams. I felt as exposed and afraid and naked as if I had been flayed. The object of fear was gone; I couldn’t remember it. I could only remember running in slow motion with something coming after me that moved faster and faster.
The Pryor farm was, in its own way, as much a show-place as the house. Fat black cattle grazed on juicy grasses behind bone white fences. The aluminum roofs of the cattle barns blazed in the Sunday morning sun. I slowed down to watch a pack of horses running like hell. No reason. They felt good. It was that kind of a morning. Two big fieldstone posts marked off the entrance. The gravel road led straight from the entrance to the tenant house. Beyond the house, on the gentle slope of a hill, were the two cottages where the Pryors stayed when they stayed over at the farm. The cluster of barns and silos was behind the tenant house.
I ignored the severe private signs and drove on in and parked by the tenant house. A new red tractor stood in rigid angular dignity, like a strange Martian insect.
John Fidd came around from behind the tenant house and looked at me with disgust. “Yar?” he said.
“Came back down from the lake, eh?”
“No horses and no boats up there this summer. On account of Miss Mary. And that no good Yeagger. Good thing. I got too much to do here without going up there and being a stable boy. I got to watch the hands here.”
“I’d like to see the place where they found Mr. Raymond yesterday morning.”
John Fidd spat with emphasis. “Wouldn’t be anybody driving around the place at night if I was here. I can’t show you now. Too busy.”
“How do I find it?”
“You don’t,” he said.
That seemed to be that. He looked beyond me. A yellow jeep swung into the gravel road, rear wheels skidding dangerously. It was piloted by one of the Pryor girls.
“Which one is that?” I asked.
“That there is Miss Skeeter, the oldest. Best of the lot, too, if anybody should want to ask me.”
She stopped beside my car and jumped out of the jeep. She wore beat-up khaki riding pants, a yellow sports shirt. Her brown hair had paler sun streaks. She looked as round, brown, healthy and uncomplicated as a young koala bear. “Hi, John. Hello, Mr. Sewell. John, I thought I’d give Simpy a run.”
“You’re out early, Miss Skeeter.”
“I went to church early. The rest were about ready to go by the time I got back to change. Dad will probably bring the rest of them out later on.”