Big Foot Stole My Wife Page 2

  Jay Jay resisted an urge to throttle the old man until the buttons popped off his ratty overalls, if only to elicit a response of any kind whatsoever. “Have you heard any of these fantastic rumors about monsters in the woods around here?”

  “Yep.”

  “You have? Well, between the two of us, we know they’re nonsense, but don’t say a word to my wife.” With a comradely wink, Jay Jay turned away, took a step, delicately faltered, and then came back to the counter. “They are nonsense, aren’t they? I don’t want to drag my wife out into the middle of the woods if there is some sort of monster skulking around. I love her too much to put her in danger just for the luxury of a few weeks of peace and quiet.”

  “Ebbers claims he saw something a while back. Ain’t no reason to trust the ravings of an old sot. Bunch of kids out camping reported something, but everybody knew they took more beer coolers than they did hot dog buns.”

  “What did they claim to see?” Jay Jay demanded in a breathless voice.

  “Big Foot. But there ain’t no such thing. Sure you don’t need any supplies?”

  “Not a thing. Before we left town, I made a list.” Jay Jay kept a faintly worried expression on his face as he walked out of the store. When he reached the car, he stopped and gnawed his lip as he gazed down the highway at a battered blue pickup, a scattering of mean houses, and the stoplight swaying in the breeze. As he glanced back at the store, he was pleased to see the storekeeper watching him through the screened door. Watching, no doubt, a husband unhappily considering the possibility that his beloved wife might be in danger from Big Foot.

  Which she was.

  He waited a week before returning to the store. He banged open the screened door and stomped to the counter. “Where’s the sheriff’s office?”

  Whilkes put down a clipboard and shrugged. “Other side of the county. Good twenty miles.”

  “You got a telephone?”

  “Yep.” He picked up the clipboard and turned back to count a row of canned green beans.

  Jay Jay allowed a hint of contrition to enter his voice. “Hey, I didn’t mean to sound curt.”

  “Didn’t notice.”

  “The problem is,” Jay Jay continued stoically, “my wife saw someone looking through our bedroom window last night. I’m not going to let some local Peeping Tom frighten my wife.”

  “That so?”

  “She was so startled that she wasn’t sure. In fact, she was whimpering about how she saw some seven-foot-tall monster, but she was darn near hysterical and I figured she was imagining things. But I intend to call the sheriff and report this pervert. They’ve probably got a file on the guy already.”

  “They don’t. No perverts around here for forty years.”

  Jay Jay put his fingertips on his temples and stared blankly at the floor. “That would explain …” he whispered, then broke off with a gulp. When the storekeeper merely scratched a number on the clipboard, he added, “… the footprints.”

  “Footprints?”

  “I know it sounds bizarre, but this morning I went out to the flower bed beneath the bedroom window and looked around. There were some marks in the mud that could have been footprints, if they hadn’t been so oversized. They were twice as large as mine, and twice as deep. Whatever made those prints was bigger than any bear I’ve ever seen.”

  “That so?” The storekeeper totaled his figures and made a notation at the bottom of the clipboard. “You starting to believe in local fairy tales?”

  “Hell, no,” Jay Jay said, laughing at the very idea. He pulled out a grocery list and laid it on the counter. “My wife’s a nervous city girl, that’s all. It was just a shadow, or a branch rubbing against the window. There’s no point in bothering the sheriff over something so trivial. Do you stock Perrier with lime?”

  He waited only three days before his next visit to the store. This time he drove into town at a perilous speed and squealed to a stop in front of the store. A cloud of dust swirled in the sultry air as he banged through the door. “Can I use the telephone?”

  “Yep.” Whilkes pulled a black telephone from under the counter and set it down in front of Jay Jay.

  “What’s the sheriff’s number?”

  The man offered the number, then watched incuriously as Jay Jay called and sputtered the story of a perverted prowler who had been frightening his wife at the Woodybrook Lodge. After a series of incredulous barks and increasingly acidic responses, Jay Jay slammed down the receiver.

  “They won’t do a damn thing,” he growled. “No investigation, no search party, no goddamn interest in catching this weirdo.”

  “Lots of timberland up that way.”

  “This joker doesn’t seem to have much trouble with the topography,” Jay Jay said. His breath was ragged and his forehead creased by the ferocity of his scowl. He hit the counter with his fist, then looked down in surprise and slowly uncurled his white fingers. “He shows up almost every night to root through the garbage cans or slobber on the windows. My wife can’t eat or sleep; she spends most of her time cowering inside, too frightened to go out in the yard or even sit on the porch.”

  “Take her home.”

  “She won’t go. You know how stubborn women can be.”

  “Can’t say I do.”

  “Well, they can be worse than mules. Corkie says she’s not going to let this pervert ruin our vacation. She keeps reminding me that we paid for a full month, and by damn we’re going to stay for a full month. If she were willing, I’d pack the car and we’d be heading back to the city within thirty minutes.”

  “Got a gun?”

  “No,” Jay Jay admitted, switching to a rueful tone, “and I couldn’t shoot a rabbit, anyway. I have a thing about blood; it makes me queasy just to think about it.” He paced across the worn wooden floor for several minutes, waiting for Whilkes to offer any further pearls of advice. “Tell me the truth,” he finally said. “Several days ago you said there weren’t any Peeping Toms in the area, but I’ve got evidence that someone or something is prowling around the lodge. Every morning the trash cans are overturned and there are muddy smudges on the porch. The flowers in the beds below the windows have been trampled into the ground. There are scratch marks on the screens. What’s doing it?”

  “Might be a bear,” Whilkes said. “Been around here before.”

  Jay Jay stared at the man, then broke into a smile. “You’re probably right, Whilkes. It’s just some hungry black bear sniffing around the lodge for food. As for the face in the window … well, my wife has a few emotional problems and does tend to allow her imagination to run wild. We’re both used to city noises; the country noises seem louder than all the horns and buses and garbage trucks.”

  “Do they?”

  “Yep.” Jay Jay went out the door and paused by his car to gaze distractedly at the highway. The blue pickup was parked near an intersection. A child wandered along the shoulder of the road, squatting occasionally to extract an aluminum can from the weeds. A dog moved across the pavement, stopping in certain safety to sniff the worn yellow line. More interestingly, dark clouds gathered in the western sky, and as he watched, lightning flickered down at a distant target.

  A dark and stormy night. It would provide a perfect background for the next stage of the plan.

  Jay Jay drove back to the cabin and murdered his wife.

  “My God! Someone help me!” he cried as he stumbled into the store and clutched the edge of the counter. Outside the rain pounded the empty highway, while lightning snaked across the sky and thunder boomed and reverberated. Jay Jay’s clothes and hair were drenched; his face was streaked with a mixture of rain and tears. The back of his shirt was stained pink by blood that oozed from an open wound on his head. He beat his fist on the counter. “Whilkes, get out here! Call the sheriff, damn it! Someone has to help me!”

  “Got trouble?” Whilkes said, appearing from behind a curtained doorway.

  “Trouble?” Jay Jay repeated with a wild laugh. “Yeah, I’ve go
t trouble. This—this monster broke into the cabin. I only got a quick glimpse of him before he slammed me against the wall, but I’ve never seen such a horrible thing. Ugly, foul-smelling, yellow-eyes, covered with matted fur. Inhuman noises. God, I thought it was a nightmare. God …” His knees buckled and he grabbed the top of the cash register to hold himself up. “Don’t just stand there and gape at me. Call the police—the sheriff—somebody!”

  “Don’t know what to say.”

  Jay Jay covered his face with his hands. His shoulders twitched as a strangled groan fought its way through his fingers. Abruptly he jerked his hands away and leaned across the counter to clutch the front of Whilkes’s overalls. “Don’t you understand what I’m saying, man? Big Foot stole my wife! You’ve got to get help.”

  “You don’t say.” The storekeeper took the telephone from under the counter and dialed a number. Once he had made it through a few preliminary remarks, he repeated Jay Jay’s story to the sheriff. In the middle of what seemed an interminable length of time, Jay Jay’s knees finally betrayed him and he sank to the wooden floor to lean against the counter. In that his face was not visible, he permitted one brief smile before resuming the bewildered, heart-broken expression of a recent widower.

  For the next forty-eight hours, deputies swarmed through the woods in search of footprints. To everyone’s regret, the steady rainfall had washed away all but a few deep indentations in the mud around the lodge. It had washed away any scent the dogs might have been able to follow, although the lodge was still tainted by a acrid odor of sulfur and wet fur. The broken window in the living room did little to protect Jay Jay and the sheriff from gusts of wind and splatters of rain as they stood in the middle of the room, conversing in low voices.

  “Don’t know what to tell you,” the sheriff said, not for the first time.

  Jay Jay hung his head, and in a dull voice said, “It’s a nightmare. I’m going to wake up any second and find my wife asleep next to me in our bed. This doesn’t really happen. I don’t believe in monsters any more than I do in fairies and leprechauns. It had to be a bear or some animal like that, not some fantastical half-human creature from a B-grade science fiction movie.” He looked up with a pleading smile. “Please, tell me I’m crazy. Tell me that I’m hallucinating and all I need is a few months in a padded room. Tell me that Corkie’s safe.”

  “I wish I could, but something sure busted in here,” the sheriff said, putting his hand on the despondent husband’s quivering shoulder. “It did a helluva lot of damage to the room, and it must have smelled worse than a pile of ripe compost. Those smears of mud were made by damn big feet. We found traces of your wife’s blood on the floor where she fought back. We’ve just got to pray she managed to escape and is trying to make her way out of the woods.”

  “It’s my fault. When the rain eased up late that afternoon, I decided to walk down to the end of the road and check the mailbox for a letter from my publisher. I told Corkie to lock the door and stay inside until I got back. I couldn’t have been gone more than thirty minutes at the most. I shouldn’t have left her alone. It’s all my fault.”

  “You can’t keep blaming yourself for what happened, Mr. Anderson. You’ve got to get hold of yourself.”

  “Then find my wife, dammit! She didn’t break the window, or ransack the room, or throw me against the wall as if I were a rag doll, or cut her finger to splatter blood on the floor. That creature has her. Find her before he does—he does something terrible to her! She’s my wife, for God’s sake.” He turned away to rub his eyes. “My wife.”

  “Every man I’ve got is still out there in the woods,” the sheriff said soothingly. “They’re searching for any trail, any mark in the mud, any indication where this … thing might have gone. All we can do is pray that your wife is all right for the moment.”

  “What about caves? When Corkie saw this monster earlier, she said it resembled some sort of bear or gorilla. Wouldn’t it be likely to hide out in a cave?”

  The sheriff sighed. “One of the search parties found a cave not too far from here. There was a pile of garbage, mostly rusty cans and scraps of vegetable matter that might have been stolen from cans behind the lodge. They said there was a definite odor that was similar to what’s here.” He paused for a moment. “I didn’t tell you this earlier, but the boys found a few bones in the back of the cave. Animals, of course. We sent them to the lab, but we’re fairly sure they’re rabbit, squirrel, maybe possum.”

  “You’ve got to find Corkie.” Groaning, Jay Jay stumbled to the sofa and collapsed, his arm flung across his face to hide any hint of calculation. The next step was vital. “I don’t think I can face the reporters,” he added in a hoarse mumble. “They’ll splash this across the top of every newspaper and trashy tabloid in the country. No one will believe it, of course—I don’t believe it myself. But an army of them will descend on us. They’ll stomp around the woods with television cameras. If this horrible creature is out there, he’ll panic and flee so far into the mountains that you’ll never find him … or my wife.”

  The sheriff came across the room and looked down with a frown. “You’re right about that, Mr. Anderson. You and I know that something strange happened in this cabin, but when the press finishes with us, we’ll be the biggest fools in the whole damn country. We had a problem like this a while back, and the reporters came in like a flock of vultures to ridicule us. Damn tourists came in by the busload to picnic in the woods and scatter beer cans all over the place. Knocked on doors, took photographs of anyone foolish enough to step outside. No one in these parts likes publicity; we live here because we prefer nice quiet lives without outsiders bothering us.”

  “Is there any way to keep this out of the newspapers?” Jay Jay asked with a glint of optimism. “In the official reports could you just say Corkie wandered away from the cabin and lost her way?”

  “Your wife’s the only one who actually got a good look at this so-called Big Foot, and she never filed an official report.” The sheriff tugged at his collar and gazed over Jay Jay’s head at a watercolor on the wall. “We did find quite a few empty liquor bottles in the trash can out back. If your wife had a drinking problem, she might have decided to take a walk and lost her way. It’d be easy to get turned around out there.”

  “Thanks,” Jay Jay said with a sincerely grateful smile. “But, please—find my wife.”

  Six days after the fact, the local weekly paper reported that Charlotte (“Corkie”) McNevins Anderson, daughter of a well-known financial figure and wife of Jonathon Jerome (“Jay Jay”) Anderson, had wandered into the woods and was still missing after an ongoing, intensive search by area lawmen. Jay Jay admitted privately to the reporter that his wife had a small drinking problem, and was pleased when his off-the-record comment was printed verbatim.

  Due to the prominence of her maiden name, the national press picked it up, albeit more than a week after the incident. Jay Jay was not surprised when the sheriff, his men, and the few residents of the town all refused to discuss the incident with outsiders. He himself stayed locked in the cabin, keeping away from the windows and ignoring questions hurled through the door. The reporters eventually accepted the fact that there would be no lurid interviews with the grieving widower and drifted away to find other “human interest” stories. “Big Foot Stole My Wife” warranted headlines; “Aged Debutant Wanders Off in Drunken Daze” warranted only a sprinkling of paragraphs on back pages.

  Fixing himself a glass of Perrier, Jay Jay sat down at the pine table and studied the piece of paper with the neatly printed list of steps in the plan. Most of them he checked off, the scratch of his pen accompanied by fleeting smiles. Corkie’s father would have to be dealt with at some point in the future, but Jay Jay felt confident he could win the old man over with copies of the official police reports and the story in the local paper. If necessary, he was prepared to mention Borwaski’s name. In any case, they could console each other over gin rummy in the locker room. He put a mark next to th
e old man’s name with a notation to suggest a reward for any information leading to poor Corkie’s whereabouts. It was time to taper off the trips to the grocery store to make hysterical calls to the sheriff’s office. One more day in the cabin, and he could announce that he could no longer bear to stay there in painful expectation that his beloved wife might come stumbling out of the woods. He made a note to stress his growing depression when he told the sheriff he intended to return home. And to beg the sheriff to call collect if a single clue were found.

  Only one major step remained on the list. With a flourish, Jay Jay checked it off, folded up the paper, and locked the list away in his briefcase. Everything else had been covered. The battered milkcan in the shed, perfect for indentations in the mud, had been rinsed off and replaced in its proper location. The sodden fur coat would serve quite nicely as an odoriferous shroud. The aroma of rotten eggs had come from a bottle, which had been washed and placed beside the sink to dry before the sheriff had first raced up the driveway. The bones in the cave were a fortuitous discovery on the search party’s part, and they had served to enhance the fantasy of a feral monster hunkered in a cave, ravaging his little forest friends and desperate to steal a she-woman for unspeakable purposes.

  If he could have arranged such a scenario, it would have been appropriate, Jay Jay told himself as he changed into heavy jeans and a work shirt in anticipation of his final step. Anyone who allowed herself to seek pleasure with someone as crude as Borwaski deserved a lifetime with a truly crude Big Foot. Dinner parties of raw rabbit legs and stagnant water. Brilliant conversation consisting of grunts and belches. Brutally violent sexual encounters.

  “If only I could have actually found the chap for you, my dear,” Jay Jay said, savoring the irony of his vision. He went to the shed to get a shovel, then went around to his car parked in front of the lodge. The body was in the trunk, wrapped in the moldering fur, and then, for hygienic purposes, in a sturdy plastic storage bag, courtesy of the furrier. The sheriff and his men had searched every inch of the cabin and its immediate surroundings, but they had given the car only a cursory glance to see if Corkie might be propped in the passenger’s seat.