S Is for Space

The wire hangers were indeed empty. With a clatter, Fortnum shoved them aside and down along the rod, then turned and looked out of the closet at Dorothy Willis and her son, Joe.

“I was just walking by,” said Joe, “and saw the closet empty, all Dad’s clothes gone!”

“Everything was fine,” said Dorothy. “We’ve had a wonderful life. I don’t understand it, I don’t, I don’t!” She began to cry again, putting her hands to her face.

Fortnum stepped out of the closet.

“You didn’t hear him leave the house?”

“We were playing catch out front,” said Joe. “Dad said he had to go in for a minute. I went around back. Then—he was gone!”

“He must have packed quickly and walked wherever he was going, so we wouldn’t hear a cab pull up front of the house.”

They were moving out through the hall now.

“I’ll check the train depot and the airport.” Fortnum hesitated. “Dorothy, is there anything in Roger’s background—”

“It wasn’t insanity took him.” She hesitated. “I feel—somehow—he was kidnapped.”

Fortnum shook his head. “It doesn’t seem reasonable he would arrange to pack, walk out of the house, and go meet his abductors.”

Dorothy opened the door as if to let the night or the night wind move down the hall as she turned to stare back through the rooms, her voice wandering.

“No. Somehow they came into the house. Right in front of us, they stole him away.”

And then:

“… a terrible thing has happened.”

Fortnum stepped out into the night of crickets and rustling trees. The Doom Talkers, he thought, talking their Dooms. Mrs. Goodbody. Roger. And now Roger’s wife. Something terrible has happened. But what, in God’s name? And how?

He looked from Dorothy to her son. Joe, blinking the wetness from his eyes, took a long time to turn, walk along the hall, and stop, fingering the knob of the cellar door.

Fortnum felt his eyelids twitch, his iris flex, as if he were snapping a picture of something he wanted to remember.

Joe pulled the cellar door wide, stepped down out of sight, gone. The door tapped shut.

Fortnum opened his mouth to speak, but Dorothy’s hand was taking his now, he had to look at her.

“Please,” she said. “Find him for me.”

He kissed her cheek. “If it’s humanly possible …”

If it’s humanly possible. Good Lord, why had he picked those words?

He walked off into the summer night.

A gasp, an exhalation, a gasp, an exhalation, an asthmatic in-suck, a vaporing sneeze. Someone dying in the dark? No.

Just Mrs. Goodbody, unseen beyond the hedge, working late, her hand pump aimed, her bony elbow thrusting. The sick-sweet smell of bug spray enveloped Fortnum heavily as he reached his house.

“Mrs. Goodbody? Still at it?!”

From the black hedge, her voice leapt:

“Blast it, yes! Aphids, waterbugs, woodworms, and now the marasmius oreades. Lord, it grows fast!”

“What does?”