Voices in the Dark Read Online Free Page B

the back step. Then she cursed him roundly, which was a mistake. A while later, stepping out the front door, she saw something on the porch that heated her face. It approximated shit and, on closer inspection, was exactly that.
    Sergeant Avery responded to her incensed call and cruised the neighborhood in one of the town’s two marked police cars. The sergeant came up dry, but early that evening, five miles away, a man fitting the description was seen bathing his feet in Paget’s Pond, which was conservation property, no swimming allowed.
    At the selectmen’s meeting, second Monday of the month, Orville Farnham told the board that a person of disreputable ilk, no apparent abode or income, in other words a bum, was infecting the town. A motion was made, seconded, and Farnham brought his gavel down on a unanimous vote for the police chief to handle the matter forthwith. Chief Morgan, not present, got the message in the morning.
    In his investigation, which carried through the week, the chief learned that the fellow had been here, there, and everywhere, including the Heights, where he had been seen plucking flowers. Everett Drinkwater, the funeral director, glimpsed him reading stones in the cemetery, and birders with binoculars spotted him in purple loosestrife behind Wenson’s Ice Cream Stand on Fieldstone Road. Tish Hopkins, an elderly widow with a farm farther up Fieldstone, found him sleeping with her hens, rousted him with a pitchfork, and offered him a meal for an hour’s work, which he declined. She fed him anyway.
    Toward the end of the week the man was sighted several times on rural roads near the West Newbury line, which gave the chief a fair idea where he was taking shelter. “I’d better come with you,” said Sergeant Avery, who was off the clock. It was late afternoon, the heat high, with two fans whirring in the station. The chief said, “He’s not that big a deal.”
    The chief’s old car, unmarked except for the faded town seal on each side, ran rough. He rode it around the green, turned right onto Pleasant Street, and drove with the sun in his eyes until he reached County Road, a long and lonely stretch through pinewood, with only occasional frame houses to break the view. The sky was irreproachably blue.
    A mile from the West Newbury line he slowed at the sight of a weathered post that had once supported a mailbox and angled onto a dirt road that crept into the woods and came abruptly to a clearing. A battered pickup smeared with pine needles squatted on four flat tires. Nearby, the rusted handlebars of a bicycle protruded from weeds like the horns of a slain buck. To the left was a shack of a house with a ruined front step and torn window screens. The persons who had lived in it, Dogpatch types, a father and son, were dead, and another son, who lived in Florida, had forsaken it. The chief slipped out of the car.
    Robins sang, jays made noises. Wild raspberry canes, thick with thorns, sprang at him. He ambled toward the house, his eyes on the windows. The door hung loose. Avoiding the rain-rotted step, he edged directly into a kitchen inundated with the hot and gamey smell of animals. Skunks had long had their way with the rubbish, and raccoons with half-human hands had ransacked the cupboards. Beneath the stained sink was the murk of a rat hole. The chief stood still, breathing soundlessly, aware that someone was in the shadows of the next room. He squared himself.
    “Come out of there,” he said forcefully. “I’m a policeman.”
    He waited, listening to the mad scampering of squirrels on the roof, at least two, maybe three. A dense spiderweb near the ceiling flaunted the remains of moths. From the other room came a silence not of emptiness but of indifference.
    “Come out or I’ll shoot.”
    A voice sounded. “You don’t have a gun.”
    “I’ll get one.”
    “What kind?”
    “Never mind what kind!”
    A floorboard creaked, and a man emerged, his hair matted and his whiskers like