They Never Came Home

  For a moment Frank thought he would cry with disappointment. Then he braced himself and called back to the approaching figure, now seen clearly through a break in the trees.

  “I’m here, Dad! Up here on the bluff! I still haven’t seen any trace of them!”

  It snowed on Saturday. It was a thin snow; in the city it melted almost before it touched the ground. In the mountains it clung for a few hours to the peaks, giving them a strange, soft radiance when viewed from the valley below.

  “He’ll be cold,” Mrs. Drayfus said. “He’ll freeze, up there in a snowstorm.”

  “It’s not a storm,” Mr. Drayfus told her gently. “It’s one of those freak spring snows. It will be gone before noon.”

  It was. In the afternoon the peaks stood bare again and the gray skies cleared.

  At the Cotwell house, Mrs. Cotwell put through a load of washing and baked a pie. She washed and waxed the kitchen floor and scrubbed out the cabinets in the pantry.

  “It’s easier when I keep busy,” she told the neighbors who flowed in and out of the small house in a steady stream. “I can’t just sit here. I’d be up there on the mountain too if Ed would let me. He says women would just be in the way up there.”

  She gestured toward the pie. “It’s lemon. Danny’s favorite. They’ll bring him home tonight. I just know they will. I have a feeling.”

  Mr. Drayfus got home a little after dusk. His wife and daughter met him at the door.

  “The snow wasn’t anything,” he said. “Just a few flakes. We did have a little excitement though. One of the high school kids who was helping with the search took a tumble and broke his wrist. I drove him into town to the hospital. Figured I was about the most useless member of the party and could be spared the easiest, not being able to climb or anything.”

  “Larry?” His wife made the name a question.

  “There’s still tomorrow. Things look good for tomorrow. They’re going to make a big thing out of it. They have two hundred volunteers lined up.”

  The Cotwell men arrived home an hour later. Mrs. Cotwell had the dinner table set with five places.

  She said, “Eddie, you’re limping!”

  “It’s nothing. Just a blister opened on my heel.” Her youngest son was built like the others, tall and freckled, but his face still had the soft lines of childhood. Beneath the layers of dirt, it was pale and tired.

  “I’ll get washed,” he said.

  Her eyes moved to her husband and beyond him.

  “Where’s Frank?” she asked.

  “He’s coming. He’s driving Dan’s car back. The police jumped some wires and got it started. It was parked at the foot of the lower trail. Since that honeymoon couple had their Volkswagen stolen from the same general area, they thought it would be better if we brought it home.”

  “You’re not telling me something.” She knew him too well. She could see it behind his eyes. “They found them, didn’t they? They’re …”

  “No. No, Emily, no.” He shook his head violently. “All they found was a canteen. Dan’s canteen. Eddie recognized it. It had a piece of tape up around the top of it.”

  “Where was it?” Mrs. Cotwell asked.

  He could not lie to her. “Down by the river. On the bank. Tomorrow they’re going to begin dragging.”

  Beyond him, through the open door, they could see a set of headlights turning into the driveway. Tires ground on gravel. Frank was parking it in its usual place off the edge of the drive under the elm tree.

  The sound of the familiar motor roared and then fell quiet.

  “Oh, dear God,” Mrs. Cotwell said softly. She raised her hands to her face and, for the first time in the long week, began to cry.

  TWO

  IT WAS A DRY SPRING. The warm winds of May were heavy and pink with dust from the mesas. They whipped, thick and blinding, across lawns and sent tumbleweeds whirling along the gutters and tore the first rosebuds from the bushes in the Drayfus yard.

  Joan closed the windows against them and laid damp towels along the cracks beneath the doorways, and still the dust seeped into the house, dimming the rooms and settling in thick layers upon the furniture and window sills.

  Outside, the dust filtered the light of the sun, bathing the world in an eerie rose-colored glow, completely obliterating the view of the mountains.

  “I’m glad,” Mrs. Drayfus said. “I hate them. I can’t stand to look at them, great murderous things. They’re like vultures, hanging there over us, waiting to snatch our children up and—and devour them.”

  Her voice was shrill and tight. As she had so many times in the past weeks, Joan saw her father turn toward his wife with a quick, worried glance.

  “I wish you wouldn’t say things like that, Margaret. They make you sound so … so …”

  “What? Bitter? Heartsick? Don’t I have a right to be?”

  “Of course.” He drew a long breath. “I’m heartsick too, dear. It’s not just you alone. And Joan—Larry’s her only brother. Still, we can’t let ourselves become consumed by bitterness.”

  “That’s easy enough for you to say,” Mrs. Drayfus said. “You don’t feel the way I do. If you did, you would never have let them call off the search!”

  “It had to end sometime,” he said patiently. “You can’t keep men away from their jobs, boys out of school, indefinitely. It was as thorough as it could be. I feel sure that if Larry were there to be found, they would have found him.”

  “You didn’t really love Larry!” Mrs. Drayfus said accusingly. “Not the way I did! You pretend you did now that he’s gone, but when he was here you made his life miserable! You accused him, condemned him—”

  “Margaret, that’s not so!” Lawrence Drayfus exclaimed in astonishment. “Larry was my son! I loved him dearly! I never condemned him for anything!”

  “You were going to send him away next fall! Against his wishes, even though he begged and begged you not to! Even though I begged you! All the way to Roswell to that awful military school!”

  “That school in Roswell is the best in the state. It would have been the best thing in the world for Larry. He was getting out of control, Margaret—running around with the wrong crowd, getting involved in things he shouldn’t. For his own good, he needed to spend his senior year somewhere where he would get direction and discipline.”

  “He didn’t need discipline—just understanding! Love and understanding! You never tried to get really close to Larry! He was a sensitive boy, high strung, emotional, even though he didn’t show it on the outside! You can’t take a boy like that and cram him into a mold like a million other boys!”

  Her voice was becoming shriller. Joan got up quickly and crossed to her and put her arm around her.

  “Please, Mummy.” She spoke the name softly, the old name from childhood. “You mustn’t get so upset. We all loved Larry, each of us in our own way. You can’t keep going over and over it like this. You’ll make yourself sick.”

  “He should never have gone on that camping trip,” Margaret Drayfus said in a lower voice. “It was ridiculous. I said so, right from the start. Larry isn’t the kind of boy to go climbing up and down dirty rocks. It was that Cotwell boy—he talked him into it—”

  “Mother, you’re wrong!” Joan said in automatic defense. “Really, it was Larry who suggested the camping weekend. He asked Dan to go. I heard him. He wanted to get out because …”

  The sentence trailed off.

  “Because, why?” her mother asked sharply.

  “Just because”—Joan cast a compassionate glance at her father’s set face—“because he—he thought it would be fun.”

  It was not the complete truth, but the lie, if it could be termed such, was a kind one. She could not increase the grief in her father’s eyes by quoting the words as they had actually been spoken.

  Reluctantly, her mind plunged back to that day, now almost three weeks past, when she and Dan had been doing their homework together at the kitchen table.

  Larry h
ad strolled in and stood watching them a moment. Then, without preamble, he said, “Dan, let’s go camping this weekend.”

  “Camping?” Dan had glanced up in surprise. “Hey, what’s got into you? You’ve never been interested in that sort of thing.”

  “Well, there’s always a first time.”

  There had been something in his voice that made Joan raise her eyes quickly from her book. She and Larry had never been close, it was true. In looks, in temperament, in personality, it would have been difficult to have found two more opposite people. Still, he was her brother, she loved him and had grown up with him, and she felt a sudden strange awareness that something was not exactly as it should be.

  “Come clean, Larry,” she said lightly. “What’s behind this violent yen for the great out-of-doors? It’s never affected you before.”

  “Since when does a guy have to give reasons every time he wants to commune with nature?” Larry’s green eyes were wide with innocent bewilderment. He held the pose for a long moment, and then, quickly, deserted it.

  “Okay, Miss Bloodhound, if you must know. Dad’s got me grounded this weekend. Since that party at the Brownings’, he’s cracked down, but hard. I can’t use the car. I have to be in the house at nine o’clock. I have to tell him every time I want to step out long enough to go to a movie. He may not be able to send me off to military school until next fall, but he’s damned well going to start things off right by making his own little military school right here at home.”

  “What makes you think he’s going to let you take off for a camping weekend?” Joan asked.

  “The way I figure it, it’s the only kind of outing he will let down the bars for. He’s always been after me to get out and rough around like he did at my age. And he thinks Dan’s the greatest—a real good influence on me. With Dan as my bodyguard, he’s bound to say yes.”

  Suddenly his face broke into a grin of such irresistible impishness that Joan found herself smiling back despite herself.

  “Come on, Dan, be a sport! Don’t leave me here to climb the walls all weekend!”

  “Go ahead, Dan, and give in,” Joan said in amusement. “You’ve been chafing at the bit to get up into the mountains, and you know it.”

  “Well, if you don’t mind taking a rain check on our movie date.” It had not taken much persuasion; she had known that it wouldn’t.

  “Knowing the State Theater, that picture will still be showing six months from now,” Joan said. “Besides, with exams coming up next month and two book reports due, I shouldn’t be hopping off to the movies anyway.”

  It had all been arranged so easily. Mr. Drayfus had been pleased at Larry’s unusual burst of enthusiasm for an out-of-doors weekend.

  “It will be good for him,” he had said.

  Mrs. Drayfus, it was true, had voiced hesitation, but not a great deal. It was only in afterthought that it reappeared to her as real objection.

  “You’ll probably come home exhausted,” she had said. “For goodness sake, take enough warm clothing. I hear it’s still pretty cold up in the mountains at night in April.”

  Later, when she had passed her brother in the hall, Joan had surprised herself by reaching out a hand to detain him.

  “Larry … are you sure …” She hesitated, uncertain of exactly what she was disturbed about.

  “Sure of what?” he had asked her blankly.

  “That getting away—not having to sit around here all weekend—is really the reason you want Dan to go camping with you?”

  “What other reason could there be?” He smiled at her, the quick, sweet smile that, together with the soft blond hair, tumbled childlike over his forehead, made him look about twelve years old.

  “None, I guess.” She wondered if she looked as sheepish as she felt. “Have fun.”

  The smile faded. “I don’t really expect to,” Larry had said, “but it will be better than being shut up here with Dad standing over me like a prison warden.”

  Now, gazing at her parents’ weary faces, Joan could see no reason for repeating the conversation. They were grieved enough without her dredging up bitter words to add to their pain. Besides, Larry had not really meant them; he was angry, flaring up defiantly the way teenage boys did when their first tries at independence were stepped upon. Her father would be hurt to the quick to know that these were the last words his son had spoken about him, and her mother looked as though one more ounce of pressure of any kind might be more than she could handle.

  Mrs. Drayfus was a small woman, delicately pretty and highly sensitive. It was from her that Larry had come by his looks; both mother and son were slender and small-boned with fair skin and hair.

  Joan, on the other hand, resembled her father, tall and hardy with a down-to-earth sensibility.

  “It isn’t fair!” she had cried once, despairingly, back in the early days of grade school. “It isn’t fair for Larry to be pretty when I’m the girl!”

  “You’re pretty too, Joanie,” her father had said soothingly. “You’re a different kind of pretty. Everybody can’t be the same.”

  “But Larry’s kind of looks are what people like!” Joan had insisted.

  “That’s not so.” Her father had regarded her gravely out of kind gray eyes, set beneath the heavy brows that were so much like her own. “Everybody has his own idea of what is beautiful.”

  She had carried those words with her for many years, not really believing them, but using them for comfort when times were difficult, when crowd activities began to give way to dating ones and schoolmates started to fall into pairs. It was not that she didn’t have dates of her own. She was well liked by boys and girls alike, and she seldom sat home from a party. But the dates she had were casual, friendly ones, uncolored by romance, and she was painfully aware of the fact that the boys who invited her had usually been turned down by one or two other girls first.

  And then—there was Dan. In the beginning, she knew, she had been a second-choice date for him, too. She had not really minded that; it was something to be escorted to a dance by Dan Cotwell, no matter how it happened. The startling thing was that he had called her again the next weekend. And again after that. It had gone on like that, increasing slowly, unbelievably, becoming deeper, drawing forth more of each of them, until one incredible day she had looked into his eyes and seen herself reflected there. And she had been beautiful.

  From then on, it no longer mattered that she was different from Larry. He was himself, just as she was Joan; they were what they were, and that was that. She was even able to smile when she saw the softening of her mother’s face when she looked at her son.

  That’s just the way mothers are, she told herself. Someday I’ll have a son of my own, and I’ll probably be just the same way about him.

  She was not ready yet to admit to herself that the son in her dreams had the blue eyes and cinnamon hair of Dan Cotwell.

  Now, before the real and consuming pain in her mother’s eyes, her own heart filled with an echoing agony. Larry had been her brother, and Dan—she would not let herself think of Dan. She pressed him from her mind, knowing that if she let herself picture him her control would break. This could not happen. Not yet. Not at this crucial sharp-edged time when her parents needed her so desperately.

  Strange as it seemed, quite suddenly their positions seemed to have reversed. It was she who was the oldest, the strongest. It was Joan who took the phone calls, who planned the meals, who saw to it that the household continued in its routine course.

  “Mother,” she said now, “don’t you want to lie down for a little before dinner?”

  “Dinner?” Her mother regarded her blankly.

  “I picked up a steak at the market. I thought that would be quick and easy.”

  “Oh. Oh—yes, dear. All right.” Mrs. Drayfus got up slowly. The very obedience, the childlike acceptance of direction, was in its way more frightening than the previous irrational spurt of anger.

  Afternoon gave way to evening. Still the wind
continued. The house was stuffy, with its windows closed against the sweeping dust.

  Joan broiled the steak and served it with a salad, knowing as she did so that most of it would remain untouched. After the token meal, her father turned on the television set in the den. Mrs. Drayfus sat before it, staring at the screen, watching the lifelike shadows flickering, singing, laughing in their own unreal world.

  Normally she did not watch television at all. “Silly old one-eyed monster,” she called it, preferring to read or chat or play cards with friends. Now television seemed to fill a great need in her existence. She let it fill her evenings, blanking her mind, occupying her eyes and her senses.

  Joan regarded her worriedly.

  Mr. Drayfus helped his daughter clear the table.

  “I talked to the doctor about your mother,” he said in a low voice when they stood together in the kitchen. “He says she is in a kind of shock. Her mind, her heart, everything in her is refusing to accept what has happened. It’s this business of not knowing—the waiting, the uncertainty. It will be better when …”

  He stopped.

  “When, what?” Joan asked, bracing herself.

  “When”—her father’s voice was flat with agony—“when the river goes down and they’re able to find the bodies.”

  “You can’t mean that!” Joan, in her horror, could hardly scrape out the words.

  “I do mean it,” Mr. Drayfus said. “It will be better to have the final proof, to have it over and finished, to know. There’s a place for hope, but after this long—well, there’s a point for it to end also. Your mother will be able to accept the loss if it’s final and inevitable. At least, I hope she will.”

  “Oh, Dad!” Joan’s eyes were dim with tears. “The whole thing is so … so …”

  The telephone rang.

  “Get it, will you, Joan?” Mr. Drayfus said. “If it’s for your mother, just say she’s resting.”

  “All right.” Joan went into the living room and lifted the receiver. “Hello. Drayfus residence.”

  “Is this Mrs. Drayfus?” The voice was a man’s, formal, unfamiliar.