Ghouls by Edward Lee Page B

stopped and stared, almost rudely. In the gap between the curtains he also could see a tapered slice of the woman’s breast, abdomen, and thigh; she was nude. But in less time than it took to frown, the drapes fell back across the glass, and the figure was gone.
    Kurt drove away to his call, duped by what he’d just seen. This was the second time he’d caught a glimpse of the girl, and the second time Glen had failed to acknowledge her. He wondered what it was Glen didn’t want him to know.
    Back on 154, he slowed to a crawl, driving on the shoulder and craning his neck to read the addresses on the postboxes. Finally he found it, 2819 stenciled across the body of a very large mailbox corroded by rust. He turned and drove at least fifty yards into the woods, along a typical tree-walled dirt road, until he came to the house. What else could I expect? he thought. The house was not a house, but a long, white trailer set up on a foundation of cinderblocks—the crudest of dwellings, yet so familiar to him. Like many of the secret homes off the Route, this was surrounded by heaps of refuse and at least eight ancient automobiles, all in varying states of dilapidation. A fat-bellied cat chased famished chickens across the front yard, and faded articles of laundry flapped at him from a makeshift clothesline, like a string of lunatic signal flags. He heard dogs barking nearby as he got out, hand on his mace, but there were no dogs that he could see, just the chickens clucking and tracking circles around the yard in sheer terror. When he was halfway to what he presumed to be the front door, a voice carried out from the side, “Hey there.”
    A man had just turned the corner of the trailer and was approaching in strange, quick strides.
    “You reported a missing person?” Kurt asked.
    “That’s right. Name’s Harley Fitzwater, an’ my daughta , Donna…she been kidnapped.”
    He’d heard this before. A second look at Fitzwater showed a man who was probably not old—he just looked that way, weathered, taut, with skin like canvas. He wore a T-shirt and overalls, and looked starved in them. His eyes were squinting slits; his face reminded Kurt of the bottom of a deformed foot. Like lots of the poor in this part of Maryland, Fitzwater was one who lived off the land and water, who made cash selling skins and meat, who shivered in the winter and dripped sweat in the summer. A survivor.
    “Kidnapped, you say?”
    “That’s right. When I came back from the lake, she was gone.”
    “Does your wife—”
    “Ain’t got no wife, she been dead years. Jus me an’ Donna.”
    Parents, no matter how destitute, could never be reasoned with about such things. “Perhaps it’s hasty to suspect kidnapping at this point, Mr. Fitzwater. How old is Donna?”
    Fitzwater’s face seemed to pucker as he thought. “ Twunee -two, I think… That’s right, twunee -two.”
    “Have you talked to any of her friends, a boyfriend, maybe?”
    “Donna ain’t got no friends. Sure’s hell got no boyfriend.”
    “Well, isn’t it likely that she just went off for a walk someplace?”
    “No,” Fitzwater said. His answer was icy, unhesitant. His eyes looked more like an animal’s than a man’s. “No,” he said again.
    “How can you be sure?”
    “’Cos Donna’s got no feelin ’ from the waist down. Can’t walk, been that way since she was little.”
    Kurt tensed. He felt like he’d just been hit in the head with a box of nails.
    “Her chair’s still inside. Right ‘side the bed. Somebody took her outa her bed while I was gone.”
    “Where were you?” Kurt asked, grateful Fitzwater had cut in again.
    “I went out to the lake ‘bout an hour ‘fore sunup, stringin ’ fer white perch and cat. I got back a little while ago an’ Donna was gone.”
    Kurt took out a missing person card, the first he’d ever used, and began to fill it out with data provided by Fitzwater. Later, the information would be transferred to Maryland State Police