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Authors: John D. MacDonald
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bright again and warm, the air flavored with the nostalgia of Indian summer. I had found the road where the kids parked, where the body had been found five days after the murder. I had driven up College Street hill and past the campus and past the faculty houses beyond the campus and past the small farms, five miles along the asphalt county road. Then the road dipped and turned west, to follow the ambling line of Three Sisters Creek. Two hundred yards from the turn there was a dirt road that led toward the creek some two hundred feet away. I drove into the dirt road. By the time I had gone thirty feet I was out of sight of the county road. When I turned off the motor I was in stillness. There were bird sounds, and wind through dry leaves, and the muttering of the creek.
I got out of the car. Beer cans rusted among fallen leaves. Shards of broken glass glinted in the sun. It was not hard to imagine what it would be like at night. A trace of dash lights on chrome. Dim pulse of the bass on the radio, gargle of liquor from the nearly empty bottle, the rough deep voice of a boy trying to talk like a man, a girl’s thin, empty and expected protests, and then the quickening oven-breathing, sleazy rustlings of nylon, and then, for the bolder ones, the hastily spread blanket and hip-thump against the wounding earth while girl eyes glaze at a sky of swarming stars. A cheap thirty-second taste of eternity.
I wandered toward the creek and after a time I heard voices. I found them, three boys in the twelve-year bracket, sloshing and yelping in a black pool under high rock shadow, bright bikes discarded in sunlight.
They were brashly self-conscious about skipping school, and delighted to show me the exact place where the body had been found, along with descriptions too lurid to be possible. Their knowing language about the ways of the law was directly from any third-rate television script. One of them spotted a used flash bulb in the aspen patch and snatched it up.
“My dad says they ought to burn everybody that attacks girls even when they don’t kill ’em.”
“My dad says the chair is too easy for Landy.”
“I’ll betcha if they could have got him away from the cops they would have fixed him good.”
Soon they became bored with me and went back to the pool. I walked to the car. I had read the account in the back issues of the Warrentown paper, the reconstruction of the crime. The girl had been killed at the spot where the body was found, some seventy feet from the tire tracks. From the way twigs had been broken, she had tried to run. The killer had caught her. It made the gruesome chase more real to see the place. But I could learn nothing new there. Nothing factual. From the results of Tennant’s investigation, it was evident that Jane Ann was no stranger to this particular parking area, nor would she have been reluctant to come here. She would not have panicked and run from any normal advance. Some instinct had warned her, or perhaps the sight of the knife.
I found the Paulson address in the telephone book—88 Oak Road. I had remembered seeing that street sign somewhere near Maple Street, and found it quickly. It was the first cross street after you passed Mrs. Hemsold’s house on Maple, going away from the square. The houses were smaller than the houses on Maple. They were frame houses and they were well maintained and looked comfortable. Eighty-eight was a brown house with yellow trim, two story and unpleasantly square. There were two red maples in the front yard, and a box hedge along the sidewalk. It looked to be exactly what it was, the home of the owner of a successful market, with mortgage that had dwindled methodically through the years. It had a look of immunity to the sort of disaster it had suffered. There should still be two daughters in the house to sprawl in front of television, to quarrel over clothes, to spend inane hours at the phone.
Before I had looked at the house I had stopped in at the
I got out of the car. Beer cans rusted among fallen leaves. Shards of broken glass glinted in the sun. It was not hard to imagine what it would be like at night. A trace of dash lights on chrome. Dim pulse of the bass on the radio, gargle of liquor from the nearly empty bottle, the rough deep voice of a boy trying to talk like a man, a girl’s thin, empty and expected protests, and then the quickening oven-breathing, sleazy rustlings of nylon, and then, for the bolder ones, the hastily spread blanket and hip-thump against the wounding earth while girl eyes glaze at a sky of swarming stars. A cheap thirty-second taste of eternity.
I wandered toward the creek and after a time I heard voices. I found them, three boys in the twelve-year bracket, sloshing and yelping in a black pool under high rock shadow, bright bikes discarded in sunlight.
They were brashly self-conscious about skipping school, and delighted to show me the exact place where the body had been found, along with descriptions too lurid to be possible. Their knowing language about the ways of the law was directly from any third-rate television script. One of them spotted a used flash bulb in the aspen patch and snatched it up.
“My dad says they ought to burn everybody that attacks girls even when they don’t kill ’em.”
“My dad says the chair is too easy for Landy.”
“I’ll betcha if they could have got him away from the cops they would have fixed him good.”
Soon they became bored with me and went back to the pool. I walked to the car. I had read the account in the back issues of the Warrentown paper, the reconstruction of the crime. The girl had been killed at the spot where the body was found, some seventy feet from the tire tracks. From the way twigs had been broken, she had tried to run. The killer had caught her. It made the gruesome chase more real to see the place. But I could learn nothing new there. Nothing factual. From the results of Tennant’s investigation, it was evident that Jane Ann was no stranger to this particular parking area, nor would she have been reluctant to come here. She would not have panicked and run from any normal advance. Some instinct had warned her, or perhaps the sight of the knife.
I found the Paulson address in the telephone book—88 Oak Road. I had remembered seeing that street sign somewhere near Maple Street, and found it quickly. It was the first cross street after you passed Mrs. Hemsold’s house on Maple, going away from the square. The houses were smaller than the houses on Maple. They were frame houses and they were well maintained and looked comfortable. Eighty-eight was a brown house with yellow trim, two story and unpleasantly square. There were two red maples in the front yard, and a box hedge along the sidewalk. It looked to be exactly what it was, the home of the owner of a successful market, with mortgage that had dwindled methodically through the years. It had a look of immunity to the sort of disaster it had suffered. There should still be two daughters in the house to sprawl in front of television, to quarrel over clothes, to spend inane hours at the phone.
Before I had looked at the house I had stopped in at the
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