Oh, God, Hope thought. Oh, Nicky. And Dorsey. Then she felt what she held in her hand: his pants. And her fingers, suddenly as wise as a Braille reader's, located the zipper and moved on; her fingers passed over the change in the pocket, they slipped around the wide belt.
"Yup, yup, yup," said Oren Rath.
Sheep, Hope thought to herself; and one calf. "Oh, please concentrate!" she cried aloud to herself.
"Don't talk!" said Oren Rath.
But now her hand held it: the long, hard, leather sheath. That is the little hook, her fingers told her, and that is the little metal clasp. And that--oh, yes!--is the head of the thing, the bony handle of the fisherman's knife he had used to cut her son.
* * *
--
Nicky's cut was not serious. In fact, everyone was trying to figure out how he got it. Nicky was not talking yet. He enjoyed looking in the mirror at the thin, half-moon slit that was already closed.
"Must have been something very sharp," the doctor told the police. Margot, the neighbor, had thought she'd better call a doctor, too; she'd found blood on the child's bib. The police had found more blood in the bedroom; a single drop on the cream-white bedspread. They were puzzled about it; there was no other sign of violence, and Margot had seen Mrs. Standish leave. She had looked all right. The blood was from Hope's split lip--from the time Oren Rath had butted her--but there was no way any of them could know that. Margot thought there might have been sex, but she wasn't suggesting it. Dorsey Standish was too shocked to think. The police did not think there had been time for sex. The doctor knew no blow had been connected with Nicky's cut--probably not even a fall. "A razor?" he suggested. "Or a very sharp knife."
The police inspector, a solidly round and florid man, a year away from his retirement, found the cut phone cord in the bedroom. "A knife," he said. "A sharp knife with some weight to it." His name was Arden Bensenhaver, and he had once been a police superintendent in Toledo, but his methods had been judged as unorthodox.
He pointed at Nicky's cheek. "It's a flick wound," he said. He demonstrated the proper wrist action. "But you don't see many flick knives around here," Bensenhaver told them. "It's a flick-type of wound, but it's probably some kind of hunting or fishing knife."
Margot had described Oren Rath as a farm kid in a farm truck, except that the truck's color revealed the unnatural influence of the town and the university upon the farmers: turquoise. Dorsey Standish did not even associate this with the turquoise truck he had seen, or the woman in the cab whom he'd thought had resembled Hope. He still didn't understand anything.
"Did they leave a note?" he asked. Arden Bensenhaver stared at him. The doctor looked down at the floor. "You know, about a ransom?" Standish said. He was a literal man struggling for a literal hold. Someone, he thought, had said "kidnap"; wasn't there ransom in the case of kidnap?
"There's no note, Mr. Standish," Bensenhaver told him. "It doesn't look like that kind of thing."
"They were in the bedroom when I found Nicky outside the door," Margot said. "But she was all right when she left, Dorsey. I saw her."
They hadn't told Standish about Hope's panties, discarded on the bedroom floor; they'd been unable to find the matching bra. Margot had told Arden Bensenhaver that Mrs. Standish was a woman who usually wore a bra. She had left barefoot; they knew that, too. And Margot had recognized Dorsey's shirt on the farm kid. She'd got only a partial reading of the license plate; it was an in-state, commercial plate, and the first two numbers placed it within the county, but she hadn't gotten them all. The rear plate had been spattered with mud, the front plate was missing.
"We'll find them," Arden Bensenhaver said. "There's not much in the way of turquoise trucks around here. The county sheriff's boys will probably know it."
"Nicky, what happened?" Dorsey Standish asked the boy. He sat him on his lap. "What happened to Mommy?" The child pointed out the window. "So he was going to rape her?" Dorsey Standish asked them all.
Margot said, "Dorsey, let's wait until we know."
"Wait?" Standish said.
"You got to excuse me asking you," said Arden Bensenhaver, "but your wife wasn't seeing anybody, was she? You know."
Standish was mute at the question, but it seemed as if he were importantly considering it. "No, she wasn't," Margot told Bensenhaver. "Absolutely not."
"I got to ask Mr. Standish," Bensenhaver said.
"God," Margot said.
> "No, I don't think she was," Standish told the inspector.
"Of course she wasn't, Dorsey," Margot said. "Let's go take Nicky for a walk," she said to him. She was a busy, businesslike woman whom Hope liked very much. She was in and out of the house five times a day; she was always in the process of finishing something. Twice a year she had her phone disconnected, and connected again; it was like trying to stop smoking is for some people. Margot had children of her own but they were older--they were in school all day--and she often watched Nicky so that Hope could do something by herself. Dorsey Standish took Margot for granted; although he knew she was a kind and generous person, those were not qualities that especially arrested his attention. Margot, he realized now, wasn't especially attractive, either. She was not sexually attractive, he thought, and a bitter feeling rose up in Standish: he thought that no one would ever try to rape Margot--whereas Hope was a beautiful woman, anyone could see. Anyone would want her.
Dorsey Standish was all wrong about that; he didn't know the first thing about rape--that the victim hardly ever matters. At one time or another, people have tried to force sex on almost anyone imaginable. Very small children, very old people, even dead people; also animals.
Inspector Arden Bensenhaver, who knew a good deal about rape, announced that he had to get on with his job.
* * *
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