Free Where Is Janice Gantry? by John D. MacDonald

gave me a pretty smile and sent me right back through to Cal’s office.
    He stood up as I came in and said, “Good of you to come over, Sam. I appreciate it. I really do. Sit right there if you will. Would you try one of these cigars?”
    “I’ll stick to these, thanks, Cal.”
    He looked at me and moistened his lips and looked away again, and I knew he didn’t know exactly where to start. The word ‘colorless’ suits him. He is middle-size, middle-height. He has fine textured gray hair, combed with precision, and a neutral face, gray eyes, and neat, tidy, unremarkable clothes. His voice is dry and level and precise, his nails neatly kept. He could commit murder in front of forty witnesses and not a one of them would remember a thing about him. Because of my last talk with Sis, I could not help trying to draw a mental picture of the two of them in the marital sack. I could not make it plausible. I could not even imagine him with his hair uncombed.
    “This is very difficult for me, Sam.”
    “You want to talk about Sis, don’t you? Why should it be a strain? You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
    He squared his shoulders. “I have asked Janice to marry me.”
    “I think that’s fine. But you didn’t ask me here to give you my blessing.”
    “I’ve heard that.… you have known her very well.” The poor guy was trying to be civilized and properly casual, but I could sense how much he would have enjoyed gutting me with a rusty machete.
    I planned the words, then said, “Never fault her for that, Cal. We’re good friends who like and respect each other. When the world had beaten us both flat, we got into an emotional thing, but that ended over two years ago because we found out we don’t want the same things out of life. Nobody feels guilty or ashamed. Okay?”
    “Nobody but me, right this minute,” he said, with a smile that cost him dearly.
    “She’s steady and level and honest, Cal. Trust her, always.”
    “What I really want to ask you, Sam, is if you think this disappearance could be … my fault?” He continued quickly as he saw my look of bewilderment. “I’m an older man. She’s a young girl. I’ve been pressuring her to make up her mind. Maybe she had to run away and give herself a chance to think it over.”
    “She is
not
a giddy young girl. She’s twenty-nine, and all woman, and tough where it pays off. For God’s sake, she spent four years married to a madman. He came within a sixteenth of an inch and thirty seconds of killing her when he killed himself. Run away? Sis walks right up to any problem that comes along and stares it square in the eye.”
    “I guess I keep trying to think of … reasons that won’t scare me.”
    “She’s a complete woman, and when she says yes, she’s going to say it all the way, for keeps.”
    He picked up a long yellow pencil, studied it mildly, then abruptly snapped it in two and hurled the pieces into the wastebasket. “Then what the hell happened to her, Brice?”
    “I don’t know.”
    He swiveled his chair a quarter turn and looked out the wide window toward the blue bay. “When I lost Mary,” he said in a tired voice, “I was certain I could not survive. But I did. I knew I would never want another woman. But now I do. I know now that I might survive the loss of Janice. But I do not like to think of what I might become without her.” He turned back to me. “Do you know this Charles Haywood?”
    “Yes. Not very well.”
    “Would he hurt her?”
    “Not a chance of it. Maybe he’s capable of hurting somebody if they hurt him. But not Sis. They’re friends.”
    There was a sudden glint of shrewdness and speculation in his gray eyes. “Friends? I understand this Haywood has no family left here. If he wanted someone to help him, and he knew Sis, he might call her. She has such a great capacity for loyalty. He could have phoned her last evening. That could have been the call she got. It wasn’t like her, Mrs. Gantry tells me, for