The Man in the Net by Patrick Quentin

Fishers’ empty house and down the hill through the woods, he turned left along the road toward Stoneville. He wouldn’t ask Steve outright. The situation was too delicate for that. But he needed gas. He could stop off at the gas-station and see how the land lay.
    The darkness had come. When he reached the little ice-cream parlor about half a mile out of the village, the neon lights were burning inside and the raucous blare of a juke-box sounded. He stopped by the gas pump. It was Mrs. Ritter who came out of the screen door, thin and dowdy with her greyish hair straggling over her forehead. Betty Ritter, soured by her husband’s neglect, old before her time, was the misanthrope of the village. If there was one person in Stoneville who wouldn’t be up on the gossip, it would be Betty Ritter. She filled his gas tank, treating him surlily but no more so than usual. When she came up to the front of the car and started wiping the windshield with a dirty rag, John said:
    “Is Steve around?”
    “Steve? He just went out on a call. Just a couple of minutes ago.” Mrs. Ritter snorted. “Steve Ritter the Stoneville police officer! That still makes me laugh. There’s only one character ought to be arrested and locked up around here and that’s Steve Ritter. Want me to charge this, Mr. Hamilton?”
    “Yes, please.” John felt his nerves tautening. “You mean he’s out on a police call?”
    “Don’t ask me. That’d be the day when Steve tells me what he’s up to. Buck was in just now babbling out some story or other about the kids. It was Steve he was telling. I was busy with a customer and didn’t pay much attention. Then the phone rang. Steve answered it and then went off in the car. He took Buck along with him, so I guess whatever it is, at least it isn’t monkey business this time.” Betty Ritter laughed and then, for a moment, paused by the car window, watching him from sardonic, faintly malicious eyes.
    “My, you look jittery, Mr. Hamilton. What’s the matter? Got a guilty conscience? Murdered your wife or something?”

8
    HE DROVE through the village. Lights gleamed in the windows of the store. A couple of cars were parked under the huge sugar maples outside the post office. A boy and girl were sitting on the porch of one of the clapboard houses. Someone was standing, smoking a cigarette, by the side of the church near the door to the basement Assembly Rooms where the town meeting was going to be held. When? Tomorrow. His anxiety accelerated by what Mrs. Ritter had told him, John had half expected a scene of unnatural bustle, indicating disaster. But everything was as quiet as usual, as pretty as a Christmas card out of season—New England in summer.
    If someone had found Linda wandering on the highway, he told himself, Steve would never have taken Buck with him. The police call couldn’t be anything to do with Linda. It was just a coincidence.
    He swung the car past the church, up the hill and down. Soon the north shore of Lake Sheldon gleamed at his right, ghostly grey in the early summer darkness. The sound of the bull-frogs’ croaking vibrated in the air. He could just make out the diving raft the township had put in the year before. The lake! he thought. It’s a cinch you’ll never find me. The words from Linda’s note seemed to be blazoned across the windshield in front of his eyes. What if she’d jumped into the lake and killed herself? No, not with a suitcase. Whatever had happened to her, however mad she had become, she wouldn’t pack a suitcase to commit suicide. Or—would she? Was that any madder than slashing the pictures, stamping on the records, typing the note when she’d never typed before and had had to go out to the studio to bring in the typewriter? How could he tell any more what she might or might not have done?
    The first anesthesia of shock was wearing off. Sitting at the wheel, his body felt as brittle as glass which