Free Search Party by Valerie Trueblood Page B

been rubbing her hand all during this scene as if to warm her knuckles, until she became conscious of the thin skin pleating under his thumb, and put a stop to it by balling up her hand. He was a devilish man, under the sad, half-old mask he wore. Abby couldn’t believe she was going to have to watchthis part, the trouble with Bowen Gray when she was still in her teens. And then what, her husbands?
    It had never occurred to her that anything any later than her coming back home in the police car in 1937 would show up in the movie. Not that she was ashamed of any of it. Half the women in the auditorium with them—half the women in town—were divorced, so she had been ahead of her time.
    She braced herself to head into it, but the movie didn’t do that. Jake simply went back and started at the beginning. He might get to it again, but when you came right down to it what difference did it make anyway, if Abby had a wild time and the whole town saw it? Let them, let them see exactly what went on.

    N EXT the girl who had been in the tree was down out of it and she was much younger, a little girl with scuffed knees, loose socks riding down in the shoes. Towheaded. Dress much too big for her.
    A man and woman walked into the yard where two big trees made a noontime shade, and talked to the little girl. Her plain big sister was with her at the swing and they had the baby in the wagon, just like in the picture, though everything looked completely different from the way it was supposed to.
    Abby was not ready to think about this yet. She was still turning over in her mind the picture of the man playing Bowen, on the bed, straight hair fallen across his forehead. She was surprised by this evidence that Bowen must have been a boy in his twenties. And not a professor, no. Not at that age. An instructor, sauntering by her desk every day with his remarks, a kid. When Abby had always said professor to herself.
    The big dog didn’t even bark at the couple coming into the yard. Roamer. The couple’s car was parked at the curb; you saw it from the girls’ height past the red and yellow zinnias—somewhere along the line the thing had switched to color, the way they did in commercials, and zinnias now grew thickly in rows in the weeded flowerbed—a big car with a running boardand brass handles by which to pull yourself up out of the deep back seat. It was their car, but these two weren’t rich. If anything they were poorer than Abby’s family had been at that time.
    She remembered telling Jake about this car, and the Oakland that he had up there on the screen could have been the same car. A 1926 Oakland Landau, with a sunshade on the front window. This was 1931. The couple had come down from the days when they had bought this car. Jake had done a good job with that. You could sense a lot about this couple. The man squatted down to pet the big dog, which allowed him to crumple its long ears in his hands.
    Roamer. Somebody shot Roamer when he killed a chicken . But of course this dog was not Roamer. With a picture to go by, it would have been easy for Jake to get his hands on a dog like Roamer, just like he did with the car.
    He couldn’t get the people right, though. Abby was disappointed to have no personal feeling about the actors, even the little girl, beyond a vague recognition of certain things they had on, and even those things were a little off, as clothes in the movies always were, too neat or too messy, too evenly bleached, instead of faded with color still showing at the seams.
    The man was good-looking, just a bit hefty the way men were then—or the way trousers made them seem, work pants or old slacks. He was in shirtsleeves, with no job to go to. He was the kind of man who would get into a fight over the woman. He had his hand on her waist in that way, looking around at everything as if he expected a challenge.
    But the man he was playing had died just like anybody, after an accident