Cape Fear Read Free Page A

squirming. What’s the matter?”
    Her eyes were very wide and focused. She looked beyond him. “How long has he been in New Essex?”
    “I don’t know. I got the impression he’d been around a few weeks.”
    “Did he have a car?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How was he dressed?”
    “Khaki pants, not very clean. A white sports shirt with short sleeves. No hat.”
    “Something happened over a week ago. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything. A week ago Wednesday, I think it was. In the morning. The kids were in school. I heard Marilyn barking her fool head off and I figured she had some horribly dangerous game treed—a chipmunk or something. So I didn’t pay any attention until she gave a shrill yelp. Then I went out in the yard. She was circling back through the field, tail tucked under, staring back toward the road. There was a gray car, sort of beat up, parked on the shoulder, and there was a man sitting on our stone wall, facing the house. He was well over a hundred yards away. I got the impression he was a heavy man, and he was bald, and he was smoking a cigar. I stared at him but he didn’t make a move. I didn’t quite know what to do. I guess Marilyn had been barking at him, but I couldn’t be sure he’d thrown a stone or anything at her. If he’d just pretended to throw a stone, our courageous dog, friend of man, would have reacted the same way. And I didn’t know if sitting on the wall is trespassing. The wall marks our line. So Marilyn and I went back into the house and she went under the living-room couch. The man made me sort of uneasy. You know, kind of alone out there. I told myself he was a salesman or something and he liked the view, so he stopped to sit and look at it awhile. When I looked the second time, he was still there. But the next time I looked he was gone. I don’t like to think it could have been … him.”
    “Neither do I. But I guess we better assume it was. Damn it, we ought to get a better dog.”
    “They don’t make better dogs. Marilyn isn’t exactly brave, but she’s sweet. Look at her.”
    Marilyn, awakened from her sleep by the whooping and splashing of the kids, had gone into the water. She was a spayed red setter with a beautiful coat and good lines. She churned around after the swimming children, yipping with her spasms of joy and excitement.
    “Now that I’ve depressed you,” he said with a heartiness he did not feel, “I can get over onto the bright side. Even though good old Dorrity, Stetch and Bowden do corporation and estate work and handle tax matters, I do have friends in the police force. In our tidy little city of one hundred and twenty-five thousand, Sam Bowden is reasonably well known, and possibly respected. Enough so that there seems to be an idea that some day I should run for something.”
    “Please don’t.”
    “I’m trying to say that I’m one of the boys. And the boys take care of their own. Yesterday I had lunch with Charlie Hooper, our bright young city attorney. I told him the story.”
    “And I’ll bet you made it sound like some kind of a joke.”
    “My hands weren’t trembling and I didn’t look haunted, but I think I made him see that I was concerned. Charlie didn’t seem to think it would be a special problem. He took down the name and description. I believe the dainty phrase he used was to have the boys ‘put the roust on him.’ That seems to mean that the officers of the law find so many ways on the books to lean heavily on an undesirable citizen that he departs for more comfortable areas.”
    “But how could we be sure he leaves, and how would we know he wouldn’t sneak back?”
    “I wish you hadn’t asked that question, honey. That’s what I’ve been thinking about.”
    “Why don’t they put him in jail?”
    “What for? My God, it would be nice if you could do that, wouldn’t it? An entirely new legal system. Jail people for what they might do. New Essex goes totalitarian. Honey, listen to me. I always use the