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The Whole Town’s Sleeping

The courthouse clock chimed seven times. The echoes of the chimes faded.

Warm summer twilight here in upper Illinois country in this little town deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a meadow and a lake. The sidewalks still scorched. The stores closing and the streets shadowed. And there were two moons; the clock moon with four faces in four night directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real moon rising in vanilla whiteness from the dark east.

In the drugstore fans whispered in the high ceiling. In the rococo shade of porches, a few invisible people sat. Cigars glowed pink, on occasion. Screen doors whined their springs and slammed. On the purple bricks of the summer-night streets, Douglas Spaulding ran; dogs and boys followed after.

‘Hi, Miss Lavinia!’

The boys loped away. Waving after them quietly, Lavinia Nebbs sat all alone with a tall cool lemonade in her white fingers, tapping it to her lips, sipping, waiting.

‘Here I am, Lavinia.’

She turned and there was Francine, all in snow white, at the bottom steps of the porch, in the smell of zinnias and hibiscus.

Lavinia Nebbs locked her front door and, leaving her lemonade glass half empty on the porch, said, ‘It’s a fine night for the movie.’

They walked down the street.

‘Where you going, girls?’ cried Miss Fern and Miss Roberta from their porch over the way.

Lavinia called back through the soft ocean of darkness: ‘To the Elite Theater to see CHARLIE CHAPLIN!’

‘Won’t catch us out on no night like this,’ wailed Miss Fern. ‘Not with the Lonely One strangling women. Lock ourselves up in our closet with a gun.’

‘Oh, bosh!’ Lavinia heard the old women’s door bang and lock, and she drifted on, feeling the warm breath of summer night shimmering off the oven-baked sidewalks. It was like walking on a hard crust of freshly warmed bread. The heat pulsed under your dress, along your legs, with a stealthy and not unpleasant sense of invasion.

‘Lavinia, you don’t believe all that about the Lonely One, do you?’

‘Those women like to see their tongues dance.’

‘Just the same, Hattie McDollis was killed two months ago, Roberta Ferry the month before, and now Elizabeth Ramsell’s disappeared.…’

‘Hattie McDollis was a silly girl, walked off with a traveling man, I bet.’

‘But the others, all of them, strangled, their tongues sticking out their mouths, they say.’

They stood upon the edge of the ravine that cut the town half in two. Behind them were the lit houses and music, ahead was deepness, moistness, fireflies and dark.

‘Maybe we shouldn’t go to the show tonight,’ said Francine. ‘The Lonely One might follow and kill us. I don’t like that ravine. Look at it, will you!’

Lavinia looked and the ravine was a dynamo that never stopped running, night or day; there was a great moving hum, a bumbling and murmuring of creature, insect, or plant life. It smelled like a greenhouse, of secret vapors and ancient, washed shales and quicksands. And always the black dynamo humming, with sparkles like great electricity where fireflies moved on the air.

‘It won’t be me coming back through this old ravine tonight late, so darned late; it’ll be you, Lavinia, you down the steps and over the bridge and maybe the Lonely One there.’

‘Bosh!’ said Lavinia Nebbs.

‘It’ll be you alone on the path, listening to your shoes, not me. You all alone on the way back to your house. Lavinia, don’t you get lonely living in that house?’

‘Old maids love to live alone.’ Lavinia pointed at the hot shadowy path leading down into the dark. ‘Let’s take the short cut.’

‘I’m afraid!’

‘It’s early. Lonely One won’t be out till late.’ Lavinia took the other’s arm and led her down and down the crooked path into the cricket warmth and frog sound and mosquito-delicate silence. They brushed through summer-scorched grass, burs prickling at their bare ankles.

‘Let’s run!’ gasped Francine.

‘No!’

They turned a curve in the path – and there it was.

In the singing deep night, in the shade of warm trees, as if she had laid herself out to enjoy the soft stars and the easy wind, her hands at either side of her like the oars of a delicate craft, lay Elizabeth Ramsell!

Francine screamed.

‘Don’t scream!’ Lavinia put out her hands to hold onto Francine, who was whimpering and choking. ‘Don’t! Don’t!’

The woman lay as if she had floated there, her face moonlit, her eyes wide and like flint, her tongue sticking from her mouth.

‘She’s dead!’ said Francine. ‘Oh, she’s dead, dead! She’s dead!’

Lavinia stood in the middle of a thousand warm shadows with the crickets screaming and the frogs loud.

‘We’d better get the police,’ she said at last.

Hold me, Lavinia, hold me, I’m cold, oh, I’ve never been so cold in all my life!’

Lavinia held Francine and the policemen were brushing through the crackling grass, flashlights ducked about, voices mingled, and the night grew toward eight-thirty.

‘It’s like December. I need a sweater,’ said Francine, eyes shut, against Lavinia.

The policeman said, ‘I guess you can go now, ladies. You might drop by the station tomorrow for a little more questioning.’

Lavinia and Francine walked away from the police and the sheet over the delicate thing upon the ravine grass.

Lavinia felt her heart going loudly in her and she was cold, too, with a February cold; there were bits of sudden snow all over her flesh, and the moon washed her brittle fingers whiter, and she remembered doing all the talking while Francine just sobbed against her.

A voice called from far off, ‘You want an escort, ladies?’

‘No, we’ll make it,’ said Lavinia to nobody, and they walked on. They walked through the nuzzling, whispering ravine, the ravine of whispers and clicks, the little world of investigation growing small behind them with its lights and voices.

‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ said Francine.

Lavinia examined her watch as if it was a thousand miles away on an arm and wrist grown impossibly distant. ‘It’s only eight-thirty. We’ll pick up Helen and get on to the show.’

‘The show!’ Francine jerked.

‘It’s what we need. We’ve got to forget this. It’s not good to remember. If we went home now we’d remember. We’ll go to the show as if nothing happened.’

‘Lavinia, you don’t mean it!’

‘I never meant anything more in my life. We need to laugh now and forget.’

‘But Elizabeth’s back there – your friend, my friend—’

‘We can’t help her; we can only help ourselves. Come on.’

They started up the ravine side, on the stony path, in the dark. And suddenly there, barring their way, standing very still in one spot, not seeing them, but looking on down at the moving lights and the body and listening to the official voices, was Douglas Spaulding.

He stood there, white as a mushroom, with his hands at his sides, staring down into the ravine.

‘Get home!’ cried Francine.

He did not hear.

‘You!’ shrieked Francine. ‘Get home, get out of this place, you hear? Get home, get home, get home!’

Douglas jerked his head, stared at them as if they were not there. His mouth moved. He gave a bleating sound. Then, silently, he whirled about and ran. He ran silently up the distant hills into the warm darkness.

Francine sobbed and cried again and, doing this, walked on with Lavinia Nebbs.

‘There you are! I thought you ladies’d never come!’ Helen Greer stood tapping her foot atop her porch steps. ‘You’re only an hour late, that’s all. What happened?’

‘We—’ started Francine.

Lavinia clutched her arm tight. ‘There was a commotion. Somebody found Elizabeth Ramsell in the ravine.’

‘Dead? Was she – dead?’

Lavinia nodded. Helen gasped and put her hand to her throat. ‘Who found her?’

Lavinia held Francine’s wrist firmly. ‘We don’t know.’

The three young women stood in the summer night looking at each other. ‘I’ve got a notion to go in the house and lock the doors,’ said Helen at last.

But finally she went to get a sweater, for though it was still warm, she, too, complained of the sudden winter night. While she was gone Francine whispered frantically, ‘Why didn’t you tell her?’

‘Why upset her?’ said Lavinia. ‘Tomorrow. Tomorrow’s plenty of time.’

The three women moved along the street under the black trees, past suddenly locked houses. How soon the news had spread outward from the ravine, from house to house, porch to porch, telephone to telephone. Now, passing, the three women felt eyes looking out at them from curtained windows as locks rattled into place. How strange the popsicle, the vanilla night, the night of close-packed ice cream, of mosquito-lotioned wrists, the night of running children suddenly veered from their games and put away behind glass, behind wood, the popsicles in melting puddles of lime and strawberry where they fell when the children were scooped indoors. Strange the hot rooms with the sweating people pressed tightly back into them behind the bronze knobs and knockers. Baseball bats and balls lay upon the unfootprinted lawns. A half-drawn, white-chalk game of hopscotch lay on the broiled, steamed sidewalk. It was as if someone had predicted freezing weather a moment ago.

‘We’re crazy being out on a night like this,’ said Helen.

‘Lonely One won’t kill three ladies,’ said Lavinia. ‘There’s safety in numbers. And besides, it’s too soon. The killings always come a month separated.’

A shadow fell across their terrified faces. A figure loomed behind a tree. As if someone had struck an organ a terrible blow with his fist, the three women gave off a scream, in three different shrill notes.

‘Got you!’ roared a voice. The man plunged at them. He came into the light, laughing. He leaned against a tree, pointing at the ladies weakly, laughing again.

‘Hey! I’m the Lonely One!’ said Frank Dillon.

‘Frank Dillon!’

‘Frank!’

‘Frank,’ said Lavinia, ‘if you ever do a childish thing like that again, may someone riddle you with bullets!’

‘What a thing to do!’

Francine began to cry hysterically.

Frank Dillon stopped smiling. ‘Say, I’m sorry.’

‘Go away!’ said Lavinia. ‘Haven’t you heard about Elizabeth Ramsell – found dead in the ravine? You running around scaring women! Don’t speak to us again!’

‘Aw, now—’

They moved. He moved to follow.

‘Stay right there, Mr Lonely One, and scare yourself. Go take a look at Elizabeth Ramsell’s face and see if it’s funny. Good night!’ Lavinia took the other two on along the street of trees and stars, Francine holding a kerchief to her face.

‘Francine, it was only a joke.’ Helen turned to Lavinia. ‘Why’s she crying so hard?’

‘We’ll tell you when we get downtown. We’re going to the show no matter what! Enough’s enough. Come on now, get your money ready, we’re almost there!’

The drugstore was a small pool of sluggish air which the great wooden fans stirred in tides of arnica and tonic and soda-smell out onto the brick streets.

‘I need a nickel’s worth of green peppermint chews,’ said Lavinia to the druggist. His face was set and pale, like all the faces they had seen on the half-empty streets. ‘For eating in the show,’ said Lavinia as the druggist weighed out a nickel’s worth of the green candy with a silver shovel.

‘You sure look pretty tonight, ladies. You looked cool this afternoon, Miss Lavinia, when you was in for a chocolate soda. So cool and nice that someone asked after you.’

‘Oh?’

‘Man sitting at the counter – watched you walk out. Said to me, “Say, who’s that?” Why, that’s Lavinia Nebbs, prettiest maiden lady in town, I said. “She’s beautiful,” he said. “Where does she live?”’ Here the druggist paused uncomfortably.

‘You didn’t!’ said Francine. ‘You didn’t give him her address, I hope? You didn’t!’

‘I guess I didn’t think. I said, “Oh, over on Park Street, you know, near the ravine.” A casual remark. But now, tonight, them finding the body, I heard a minute ago, I thought, My God, what’ve I done!’ He handed over the package, much too full.

‘You fool!’ cried Francine, and tears were in her eyes.

‘I’m sorry. Course, maybe it was nothing.’

Lavinia stood with the three people looking at her, staring at her. She felt nothing. Except, perhaps, the slightest prickle of excitement in her throat. She held out her money automatically.