The Cry of the Owl (29 page)

“Dr. Knott’s condition is unchanged,” said the nurse’s voice.

“Thank you.” And what had he expected? He had left the hospital only two hours ago.

Robert poured his cold coffee down the sink. He picked up the letter he had begun to Jenny’s parents. He had removed it from the typewriter when he came in late last night, and had folded it and laid
it on his writing table. Now he wadded it up and pushed it into a paper bag of trash in the kitchen. Their address was 4751 Franklin Avenue, Scranton. He remembered it from the newspapers. Robert showered and shaved.

He got to Scranton just before one. During the drive, he had debated whether to telephone first or just ring the doorbell, and he was no nearer a decision now than he had been when he started. But he stopped at a drugstore and went into a telephone booth. He called the Rittersville police station. Detective Lippenholtz was not there, but an officer who was put on had the answer to what Robert was asking.

“Dr. McQueen was just here with his X-ray. He had only one X-ray of the lower jaw. Said he never did any work on Wyncoop’s upper jaw, so he can’t be sure. … No, he wasn’t able to identify.”

“I see. … I see.” Robert thanked him and hung up. He looked around, dazed, sightless, at the cluttered interior of the drugstore.

“Can I help you, sir?” asked a blond girl in a white smock.

Robert shook his head. “No, thanks.”

He went out to his car. He asked a traffic policeman where Franklin Avenue was, was given directions, but had to ask again at a filling station before he found it. The street was in a large residential area full of two-story houses with lawns, with trees right at the edge of the street, as there were no sidewalks. No. 4751 was a red brick house with a white door and white window sills. There was no wreath on the door. Jenny had never even described the house to him, but it stabbed him as if he had known it, as if he had been here with her. He stopped his car near the driveway at the edge of the street and got out, and walked up the straight flagstoned path. He heard a child
laughing, hesitated a split second, then went on. He knocked with the black iron knocker.

A smiling woman with a child clinging to her knees came to the door. “Yes?”

“Mrs.—This is the Thierolf house?”

The woman’s smile left her face. “Oh, no, that’s next door,” she said, pointing. “Forty-seven fifty-three.”

“Oh. Thank you. Sorry.” He turned under her staring gaze and went down the walk again. The newspapers had evidently made a misprint.

The house next door was entirely of brick, and of paler red, bigger and more sedate than the house he had first gone to. And the sight of this one did nothing to him. But he felt weaker, and had a moment of thinking he couldn’t go through with it. Then he forced himself on.

A man answered the door, a tall man with graying hair and the start of pouches in his sagging cheeks.

“Good morning. Good afternoon,” Robert added hastily. “My name—my name is Robert Forester.” Robert saw shock in the man’s eyes.

“Yes. Well—”

“I came to see you—I wanted to see you, because I—”

“Who is it, Walter?” called a woman’s voice.

Without taking his eyes from Robert, the man stepped aside a little for his wife. “This man—this is Robert Forester.”

The woman’s mouth opened in surprise. Her face was shaped like Jenny’s, a long oval, and she had the same thin lips. Her hair was gray and blond mixed, brushed back tight and straight into a bun.

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Thierolf,” Robert said. “I hope you’ll excuse me for arriving like this. I wanted to see you.”

“Well—” said the woman, looking as embarrassed and pained as Robert felt. Her eyes were sad, tired, but there was no hostility in them. “Jenny certainly—she certainly talked a lot about you.” Her eyes filled with tears.

“Go in, dear,” said the man with a nod to his wife. “I’ll talk to him.”

“Well—no.” The woman looked at Robert, in command of herself now. “I suppose—you don’t look quite like what we’d expected.”

Robert stood motionless, tense. “I wanted to say to you in person—say my regrets about—”

The woman gave a heavy sign. “Would you like to come in?” she asked with an effort.

“That isn’t necessary, thank you.” Robert looked at the still scowling face of Jenny’s father. His eyes were the color of Jenny’s. “There’s nothing I can say, I realize, that will—”

“Come in,” said the woman.

Robert went in, followed the woman into a neat living room full of floral patterns in the rug and in the upholstery. His heart jumped as he saw on the mantel what he thought was a picture of Jenny—but it was of a young man. No doubt her brother who was in college.

“Would you like to sit down?”

Robert thanked her, but remained standing. Mr. Thierolf was standing, midway between Robert and the living-room door. Jenny’s mother sat down on the small sofa.

“We can’t believe it yet. I know that’s it,” she said, touching her eyes quickly. But she was not crying now. She lifted her head and
looked at Robert. “Did she say anything to you? To give you any idea why—why she did it?”

Robert shook his head. “Not really. I saw her Monday night. Last Monday. She said she didn’t want to see me again. I asked her why. She wouldn’t tell me. I thought—naturally I thought it was because she thought I’d—that I’d been responsible for Greg’s death. Which I’m not. But I put it down to that. It never crossed my mind that she wanted to kill herself, that she was even thinking about it—I mean, in a real way.” He looked at Jenny’s father, who was listening with a frowning attention. “Although—”

“Yes?” said Mr. Thierolf.

Robert moistened his lips. “She did talk very often about death and dying. Maybe you know that.”

“Oh, we know, we know,” said Mrs. Thierolf in a hopeless tone. “Our little Rabbit—talking about death.”

“I don’t say that explains it. It doesn’t. But she talked about death as if it were something she was eager to know about. I don’t know how to put it.”

Mrs. Thierolf’s head was bent. Her husband went to her.

“I’m sorry,” Robert said to both of them. “I’ve said enough. I should go.”

Jenny’s father looked at him. He was still stooped over his wife, his hand on her shoulder. “I understand today they’re going to identify the body they found in the river?” There was a Germanic gruffness in his voice, though he had no accent.

“I’ve just heard about that,” Robert said. “The dentist doesn’t know, the Dr. McQueen of Humbert Corners. He worked only
on Greg’s lower teeth and—well, the identification’s no use. There wasn’t any.”

Mr. Thierolf nodded and said nothing.

“Mr. Thierolf, I’d like to say now—also—that I did not push Greg in the river. I’m quite sure he’s alive. I know from what Jenny told me you’re both very fond of him.”

“Oh, I wasn’t so very fond of him,” said Mr. Thierolf. “He wasn’t—” He stopped with a shrug, as if the subject was of no importance now.

“Well, we’ve lost two,” said Mrs. Thierolf, looking up at Robert, “but that still leaves us with one, our Don.” She nodded toward the photograph on the mantel, and there was a faint smile on her lips. “He’ll be graduating next month. Sit down.”

Robert sat down as if her gentle voice had been a command. He stayed perhaps ten minutes longer. Mr. Thierolf at last sat down on the sofa beside his wife. They asked Robert questions about himself, whether he was going to stay on in Langley or not. He told them of his intention to visit his mother in New Mexico. Mrs. Thierolf, with a frankness and simplicity that reminded Robert of Jenny, told him that for about ten days before Jenny’s death, Jenny had suspected that he killed Greg the night of the fight. Her friends had been talking to her. The Thierolfs said they hadn’t known what to believe. The wrongness of it embarrassed Robert, as if they were uncovering an area of stupidity in Jenny. It made him feel odd, defensive about her, ashamed for himself. They did not even indirectly ask his feelings about Jenny; they seemed to know that Jenny had cared more about him than he for her. When he got up to leave, and Mrs. Thierolf
offered to make him some tea “to drive back on,” Robert felt at first touched, then curiously annoyed by it. He declined the tea politely. He felt that they had communicated and yet not communicated. Mr. Thierolf’s attitude was decidedly more friendly by the time Robert left. His wife’s manner seemed simply that of a basically kind woman whose grief left no room for resentment, no energy for hostility. And he felt that perhaps Mrs. Thierolf had tolerated him, suspended her judgment of him, because she knew Jenny had liked him—even loved him.

For a long while after he left them, Robert drove his car slowly, his mind still filled with their conversation, with the strange dissatisfaction that he felt in the visit, which was like a puzzle to him. He was not sorry he had gone to see them. But if he had not gone, would it have made any difference to anybody? The only difference, he felt, was that not going would have been ruder and rather cowardly, but he had wanted more from the visit than the satisfaction of having done the right thing. He decided that the enigma he felt about it was due to the fact the Thierolfs did not know his character and did not know their daughter’s completely, either, and could not possibly know what had been the results of his and Jenny’s characters when they came together.

It was after five when he got home, walked into the stripped house, and saw the dismal suitcases and cartons that seemed to have been cluttering his floor for weeks. He called the hospital. Again the only report was “no change,” and when Robert asked to speak to Dr. Knott’s doctor, Dr. Purcell, he was not available. He had talked to Dr. Purcell early this morning when he had gone to the hospital. Robert felt Dr. Purcell knew the doctor would not pull through, and
was simply not saying so. Dr. Knott had not changed at all, that was true. His eyes still looked at him exactly as they had when Robert had run down the stairs and found him on the floor.

Robert made himself a Scotch and water, drank half of it, and fell asleep on the red couch. When he awakened, it was dark, and a few katydids were chanting. It was early for katydids, Robert thought, and it promised a dry summer. He turned on a light, then opened his front door and went out.
Katy-did … Katy-didn’t … did-did-did … Katy-didn’t
… He imagined hundreds of insect eyes in great rings around him, all facing him, staring. He stepped off the little porch. There was a quarter moon, midway up in the black sky on his right. His foot kicked a piece of wood, and he picked it up, unconsciously gripping it like a club. He moved toward the dark shadow of the hydrangea bush, walked around it slowly. Nothing, of course. Why had he bothered looking? Nothing ever came if he looked for it. Nothing for him. A car went by slowly, and turned in at the Kolbes’ driveway, about a hundred yards away. There was a single window lighted in the Kolbe house, and then, after a minute, another downstairs window lighted, and then a window upstairs. Kolbe was the tall fellow who had come first into Robert’s house the night of the five shots, Thursday. Kolbe was the one who had volunteered the information to the roomful of people that “the young girl who killed herself” had used to spend nights at Robert’s house. Robert might have taken the trouble to make friends with Kolbe weeks ago, he supposed. Kolbe might not have been so hostile. But he hadn’t taken the trouble, and that was that. But Robert remembered that shortly after he’d moved into the house in February, he had twice helped Kolbe shovel the snow away from his mailbox. If the
mailboxes weren’t accessible from a car, people didn’t get their mail delivered, since the postal employees were not obliged to get out of their cars when they put mail into people’s boxes. But Kolbe might as well have forgotten that little service, and probably he really had.

Then Robert heard what sounded like a shoe sliding on gravel on the road. He stepped behind the hydrangea. There was nothing to see or hear for a few seconds, then slow footsteps, unmistakably footsteps, came through the katydids’ chant. A police guard? Finally? Not very likely, Robert thought. He wasn’t sure that the police knew he was even home tonight. Robert stooped, tense, and gripped his piece of wood.

Now he saw the tall, dark figure standing at the edge of his ground, just beside the driveway. It was Greg. Greg moved toward the house, glanced to right and left, then concentrated again on the house with its side window, the one toward the road, a black square of drawn shade outlined by a thin glow of light. Greg tiptoed to one side, toward the door. It was through the window to the left of the door that Greg had twice shot before.

Robert gauged the distance between them to be eighteen or twenty feet. To reach the window Greg would have to go six feet more, and when he reached it, he would be out of Robert’s vision, around the corner of the house. Now, when he wanted their noise, the katydids seemed to mute their chant, as if they were watching with startled interest what was going on.

He saw Greg now in profile. Greg was intent, his gun lay on the shallow sill between his hands, and he was trying to raise the window with his two thumbs. The window went up a little, Robert saw it, but the shade hung below the sill, Robert knew. Greg took up his
gun. Then Robert ran the remaining six feet between them, and just as Greg turned to look at him, Robert brought the club down.

The gun went off.

Greg lay on the ground, groaning, trying to push himself up.

Robert had dropped the piece of wood. He started to hit Greg with his fist, then checked himself. Greg was not able to get up. Robert picked up the black gun near Greg’s knees. Greg cursed, looking down at the earth. Robert heard running steps on the road, from the direction of Kolbe’s house.

“Hello! Mr. Kolbe?” Robert called.

Kolbe had his hunting rifle. “What’s going on?”

Greg was staggering up, falling back against the house like a drunk. “Bastard,” he mumbled, gasping. “Bastards—”

“This is Wyncoop,” Robert said.

“What’re you doing with that gun?” Kolbe asked quickly, looking at the gun in Robert’s right hand.

“Took it off Wyncoop,” Robert said. “Can you keep him covered till I get something to tie him up with?” Robert left Kolbe there, looking a bit stunned with surprise, and went into the house.