Free Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

harder. License plate? Do you remember any landmarks while you were riding with Lou? (He remembered the small white church. He remembered the trailer above the bend in the mountain road with the light in the window.) Are you sure they were trying to run you down? Could you find your way back to the woods road from where you are now? Oh it was good to be asked questions, he didn’t know how much life he had lost until it was restored by them.
    Finally the sergeant said, ‘Thank you Tony. We’ll look into it and call you back.’
    ‘Wait!’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I can’t stay here.’
    ‘Oh. Hold on a minute.’ The phone went dead.
    He glanced at his hosts, who looked away. Strangers at the edge of a village in the early morning, good enough to let him make a phone call, can’t stay here – but where can he stay, with his wife and daughter missing and his car gone and nothing but the clothes he wore and his wallet?
    The phone clicked back to life. ‘Tony? Tell you what. We’ll send a man over, pick you up. You can wait here.’
    ‘Okay.’
    ‘Man will be over about a half hour.’
    So they were coming for him, they would take care of him, the good police, comforting and fatherly. He wanted to rejoice, but the farmer and his wife were looking at him.
    ‘I’ll give you a bite to eat,’ Mrs. Combs said.
    She fed him well at the checkered kitchen table in the harsh light of the hanging bulb, while the husband went out to do the early morning barn work that had roused him to turn on the lights Tony had spotted. Her look was cautious, she did not respond to his thanks, and he ate in silence.
    ‘Never went in for traveling, myself,’ she said. ‘People is different in foreign parts. Never know what kind you run into.’
    He nodded, his mouth was full. Criticism disguised as sympathy, yes maam, he thought, but this happens to be your country where I ran into these people you never know what kind. Nevertheless, be grateful for the good police and the kind if cautious hosts.
    By the time the police car came for him it was full daylight though the morning sun was still behind a hill. The car had an official shield on its side and a rack of lights on top. The lights were off. The policeman was a large young man with a small fuzzy brown mustache and a broad front. He looked like a childlike student who kept coming to the office last year to ask for help, Tony couldn’t remember his name.
    He said, ‘I am Officer Talbot. Sergeant Miles told me to tell you there has been no report on your wife and child.’
    The disappointment in that, he realized he was expecting to be notified any minute that Laura and Helen had called in. He thought, it’s still not eight, most stores and offices are not yet open.
    The big young student in uniform idled his engine and spoke into his microphone. The radio snapped in dark male machine voices. Officer Talbot looked serious, grim. He said, ‘You sure you didn’t have no prearranged meeting place?’
    ‘Yes we did, the police station in Bailey. Only they took me and dumped me in the woods instead.’
    ‘What’s Bailey?’
    ‘They said it was the nearest town. We were supposed to go to the Bailey police.’
    ‘Ain’t no Bailey I ever heard of. Ain’t no Bailey police, that’s sure.’
    Bad, bad – although not really new, this news.
    ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’
    They started up, the police car going in the opposite direction from where Tony had come. He felt unexpectedly afraid, as of leaving something behind. He lost track of this new journey immediately, he could not remember the turns nor the frequent villages they passed through. As if riding in this sealed protective car left the nightmare behind but at the same time destroyed the path back to it and therefore the way back to life. He remembered Miles asking if he could find his way back to where he had been from the Combs house and thought, should I have asked Talbot to help me retrace my steps? But he had not made the