Missing Woman Read online

  “I’m sure anyone who’s seen her wandering around like that will be able to identify her.” She was a hazel-eyed sandy blonde, mostly thin, with long flowing hair. The only thing which kept it from being a completely attractive picture was the look of mild discomfort on Priscilla Pynne’s face. It was out of sync with what was otherwise, apparently, a relaxed circumstance. I commented on this to Dr. Staedtler.

  “She didn’t like pictures being taken of her.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, she’s extremely good-looking,” Dr. Staedtler said, “and she felt her looks kept people from appreciating her other attributes.”

  “I had the same problem when I was her age,” I said. It was meant as a joke; she took it seriously. I let it pass. “I don’t know where your eleven-o’clock appointment is,” I said, “but if it’s at I.U.P.U.I. you haven’t got a lot of time.”

  “Oh.”

  “Only two more things.”

  “Yes?”

  “One is a receipt.” I wrote it out and gave it to her. “And the other is arrangements for telling you what I’ve found out. Shall I call you?”

  “That’s a little difficult. I can call you.”

  “Which may also be difficult, depending on how things go. What shall we do?”

  “I can give you a number I’ll be at between eight and eight-fifteen.”

  “O.K., fine. And if, for some reason, I can’t call then?”

  “Then I’ll call you. Do you have an answering machine? I could leave a message when you could call me again. See, I don’t know yet what my schedule is going to be.”

  “I’m afraid my machine is being repaired.” By a pawnbroker. “But I can give you a number where you can leave a message.” I wrote the number on the back of her receipt.

  “Your home?”

  “My mother.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “As you see, I’m moving offices.”

  “Oh yes. I hadn’t noticed.”

  She put the receipt in her purse and rose. “That’s it, then?”

  “Yes. I’ll get started as soon as I can,”

  “Good,” she said. And left.

  And there I was. Employed again. Rather unusually and by a client whose motives might not be exactly as advertised. But fifty dollars in the pocket go a long way sometimes.

  I walked straight back to my typewriter and produced a succinct, articulate report, with accompanying bill and accounting of expenses. I was a model of purposeful, efficient activity.

  Chapter Three

  I dropped my report at the offices of Albert Connah Enterprises: ACE, Inc. Then I drove out of Indianapolis on South Meridian Street.

  I felt buoyant, as if suddenly freed. Not only did I have a little money, but I was being sent from paint-starved ante-demolition Indianapolis to one of the nicest areas in all of Hoosierland.

  Glaciers in the dim and distant past flattened out most of what is now Indiana. But some way south of Indianapolis, the famously flat terrain suddenly sprouts hills. That’s where the glaciers stopped, and where Brown County begins.

  A forest here is set aside as a state park and although there are other areas protected one way or another, Brown County is the place preferred by flatland Hoosiers when they make their day trek in autumn to see treey hills lush with the colors of dying foliage.

  It’s nice in June too.

  Nashville is the county seat, and center of the county tourist trade. It’s known for a flourishing art colony, focused on the attractions of the scenery, that was established around the turn of the century. There are dozens of full- and part-time professional artists in the area and they add a dimension which is not standard American small-town equipment, even in tourist centers.

  The antique and curio and craft emporia are as expected and are interlaced with franchise catering outlets, restored historic buildings and associated spin-offs like a John Dillinger Museum. But quaint history provides one earthy feature which I particularly appreciate. This is the Liar’s Bench, outside the courthouse in the town square. Not only should every town have one, every courthouse should.

  The forty-three miles took me a little more than an hour. I parked within sight of the Old Log Jail and went first to the sheriff’s office. This was a carefully rusticized modern building on the west side of the square with a heavily tinted glass door.

  Just inside on the left was a counter with a notice proclaiming INFORMATION.

  That suited me, so I stood there until the young woman behind the counter finished with a telephone call and turned from her switchboard to attend to me. It was just before one o’clock.

  I asked to see the sheriff.

  “I’m afraid Sheriff Dunlap is out just now,” she said. She had a soft and pleasant voice.

  “What time will he be back?” I asked.

  “You don’t know our sheriff, then?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Well, you’ll find her just across the street partaking of her lunch at the Nashville Inn.”

  “Her?” I asked. It was involuntary, even though the switchboard operator had set me up.

  “That’s right, mister,” she said, with a grin.

  “How many times a day do you get to spring this surprise on culture-cosseted strangers?” I asked.

  “Oh, not very often. Mostly strangers don’t come in asking for the sheriff.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And Jeanna’s pretty well accepted now among all the local folk.” With a bit of pride she added, “She’s now been in office three years.”

  “Long may she reign,” I said. “You said I could find her across the street. Does that mean she wouldn’t mind my interrupting her?”

  “Not since it sounds like you’ve got something on your mind.”

  “Thank you kindly,” I said.

  As I crossed the street, I nearly convinced myself that I dimly remembered reading about the election of Indiana’s first woman sheriff. If the restaurant had been farther away, I might have succeeded.

  I asked the cashier in the restaurant and she called over a waitress, who led me through the dining room to a small window table.

  The sheriff was a tall woman, over six feet, and although not remotely beefy, neither was she frail. She wore a uniform shirt and trousers and a gun on her left side. She was somewhere in her thirties and she was finishing what seemed to be a bowl of stew.

  “Gentleman’s asked for you, Jeanna,” the waitress said.

  The sheriff wiped her lips as she turned to look at me. “Thanks, Julie,” she said, and the waitress left. “Sit down, sit down,” she said to me, and turned back to her meal.

  I sat down. “Sorry to interrupt.”

  “You want something to eat?”

  “No, thanks. I had a bite in Indianapolis before I came down,” I said.

  “O.K.,” she said. Carefully, she spooned up the final contents of the bowl. She wiped her mouth again, and then lit a cigarette. “I’m Jeanna Dunlap, sheriff of this heavenly county. Who might you be and what can we do for you?”

  “I’m a private investigator and I’ve been asked to get a few details about a local woman who I understand left her husband a couple of months ago. A Priscilla Pynne.”

  The sheriff leaned an elbow on the table. “Do you mind if I have a look at your ID?”

  “Not at all.” I gave her my license card.

  She studied it and handed it back. “That’s who you are,” she said. “What makes you think I can help you, Mr. Samson?”

  “I don’t know that you can. But it’s good form for investigators to inform the local law when they come into their jurisdiction.”

  “And you’re feeling in good form today,” she said, without cracking a smile.

  “I guess I am, Sheriff,” I said. “And it also seemed possible that you would know the woman.”

  “You think she might be known to us, eh?”

  “I think she might have been reported as a missing person, even if she w
asn’t a criminal recidivist.”

  “I must confess,” the sheriff said, “I do know Cilia Pynne. But I’d like to hear a little more of what you’re looking for her for, and on whose behalf.”

  “It’s pretty simple,” I said. “A college friend of Mrs. Pynne’s came to Indianapolis and when she called she was told that Mrs. Pynne left home two months ago. The friend hired me to find out the story, since she doesn’t have time to do it herself.”

  The sheriff thought about this for a moment. “Good friend?”

  “I don’t know. Sounds like. But she walked into my office this morning and is leaving for the East tomorrow. I’m down finding what I can for her.”

  “There some way I can check this by phone?”

  “I don’t have a daytime number for her. She’s at a job interview. I’m to phone her tonight.”

  “Some way I can check on you? Someone who knows you?”

  I gave her the name and number of a friend in the Indianapolis Police Department.

  “O.K., Mr. Samson,” she said, “I sure can tell you Priscilla Pynne left home about two months ago.”

  I waited. “That’s it?” I asked finally.

  “There isn’t much more. I don’t know the date exactly. I got the call early on a Sunday morning. You can get the date from the log over in the office. Or from the local paper. They publish the sheriff’s log week by week.”

  “Who was the call from?”

  “Her husband.”

  “Do you know where she went?”

  “Nope. Her whereabouts are unknown. Her husband filed a missing persons on her, and there is also a warrant for her arrest.”

  “A warrant? What for?”

  “On her way out she seems to have picked up about fifty dollars from her husband’s wallet.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Crime is crime,” Sheriff Dunlap said. “The lady also took his wedding ring, some silver cuff links and some loose change off the bureau.”

  “Sounds like he’s lucky they don’t put gold in teeth anymore.”

  “Could well be,” the sheriff said. “Although it could also be that her husband thought we’d look harder for her if she was accused of a crime.”

  “I take it the circumstances of her leaving are not otherwise suspicious?”

  “You take it correctly. Mrs. Pynne appears to have departed with a local man by the name of Boyd.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Springtime,” Sheriff Dunlap said. “Sap starts to rise.”

  “You say ‘appears’ to have left with him?”

  “Nobody’s heard from either of them, but they kind of left town in. the a.m. of the same morning. Bit coincidental otherwise.”

  I nodded. “Did Boyd leave family here?”

  “Nope, none. He wasn’t married, and, in fact, he lost his only relation—his mother—in the beginning of March this year.”

  “Were he and Mrs. Pynne known to be friendly?”

  “No, I’d say they kept that little secret pretty well.”

  “How did they leave?”

  “Don’t know that for sure either. We found the Pynnes’ car in the Memorial Union parking lot at I.U., over in Bloomington, you know? Billy’s car isn’t around.”

  “Billy?”

  “Billy Boyd. Just about everybody calls him Billy.”

  “He’s well known here, then?”

  “Oh yeah. Billy grew up here. Everybody local knows Billy.”

  “What does he do?”

  She snorted gently. “Billy has interests.”

  “What are you saying? Business interests?”

  “Some. From time to time. Well, look, Billy grew up here and then went away for a while, some years. When he came back, his mother set him up in pretty much whatever he wanted to do. First thing was that he took over a drugstore his father owned and converted the place into an art gallery. He was going to sweep through the art business here. But after a while he seemed to become more interested in the lady artists. In a business way he’s dabbled in one thing and another.”

  “All financed by his mother?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “And since his mother died?”

  She shrugged. “He’s talked about developing some land his mother left. But I suppose he’s carried on pretty much the same.”

  “Then Mr. Boyd has had quite a number of female friends over the years.”

  “I would have to say that notching up ladies is the one thing he has devoted himself to with unflagging consistency.”

  “Has he ever run away with any of them before?”

  “Billy ran away with a woman a long time ago. Let me think. He’s thirty-six now. That’d be when he was about fifteen, sixteen.”

  My face showed surprise.

  “He was gone several years,” she said. “That was the time I mentioned before.”

  “You know Mr. Boyd fairly well, then, do you. Sheriff?”

  “Not these days,” she said. “Not for maybe twelve years. Hell, it’s no secret. We spent some time together and I kind of thought he liked me. But in the end he was doing it just because he wondered what it would be like for Nashville’s littlest man to go with Nashville’s biggest woman.”

  “He’s a small man?”

  “A short man,” the sheriff said carefully. “About five-one, hundred and twenty.”

  “He sounds like a real romantic, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Oh, Billy’s O. K. Apart from being a real bastard, if you take him for what he is, he’s O.K.”

  “And do you know Mrs. Pynne well?”

  “Hardly at all. I met her a few times.”

  “Could you give me the name of someone who knows her better? A friend?”

  “You might try Sharon Doans. Lives down the road from the Pynnes. I understand that Sharon was just about her best friend. Though there was maybe a little trouble between them before Cilia left. You might ask her about it.”

  “All right. And Mrs. Pynne’s husband?”

  “Frank? He’s something over at I.U.”

  “Professor?”

  “No, no. Something in the administration kind of way. Buying things and something to do with buildings.”

  “And what does he think about all this?”

  “Well, he calls me up most every week to find out whether I’ve found her or not.”

  “Every week?”

  “Just about.”

  “So he’s eager to have her return?”

  “He wants her found. That’s not the same thing.”

  “Why does he call, then?”

  “He wants his fifty bucks back.”

  Chapter Four

  The sheriff and I left the restaurant together.

  “I wonder if you could give me some directions,” I said.

  “Directions are a specialty,” she said.

  I asked for the local newspaper and for the Pynnes’ house.

  “You can see the Democrat offices from here,” she said, and pointed north up Van Buren Street.

  I saw them.

  “To get to the Pynnes’ log cabin, you’ll want to go the other way.”

  “Log cabin?”

  “Oh sure. They’re all over the place. You only got to look.”

  I resolved to look.

  “Van Buren here runs into State 46. Turn toward Bloomington and head on out over Salt Creek. Just outside of town there’s a dirt road on the right. You’ll see their mailbox, but the house is way back.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Sharon Doans’ place is the next one along, and if you come to the entrance to the State Park you’ve gone too far.”

  In the general offices of the Brown County Democrat I asked to see some recent back issues. I half expected to be given specialty directions to the public library, but a grave young man at the advertising desk pointed across the room. There, just inside the photo-filled front windows, a row of newspaper display racks stood holding the previous twenty weekly e
ditions.

  I looked first for the sheriff’s log entry about Priscilla Pynne’s departure.

  The sheriff’s log was part of a feature called “The Fine Print,” which also listed area accidents, arrests, ambulance runs and hospital admissions.

  Frank Pynne’s call about his wife had come on Sunday, April 13: “7:34 a.m. Man reported his wife left home and took the family car as well as some of his money and personal possessions.”

  I leafed through that paper and the following week’s but could find no further information.

  Then I started looking through the preceding weeks to see if I could find any other references to Mrs. Pynne or Mr. Boyd.

  In the edition of April 2, I found a headline which read COUNTRY STAB FOR BOYD BIRTHDAY. The previous Saturday, Billy Boyd had had himself a big birthday celebration. The birthday was his thirty-sixth. “I generally don’t make a fuss out of this sort of thing,” Boyd was quoted as saying. “But in the Orient they have a twelve-year calendar and so they make a big thing out of every twelfth birthday. That sounded like a good idea to me.” He had rented the Nashville Theater for a country-music concert open to the public, and then held an après-show party for some two hundred people at his house. There was a head-and-shoulders picture of Boyd shaking hands with a guitar-toting gent whose name I did not recognize. Boyd had dark hair and heavy eyebrows over penetrating eyes. His features otherwise were fine, even delicate, and I would not have guessed him as old as thirty-six.

  I thumbed a few weeks farther back and, in the edition of March 5, I found the story of Boyd’s mother’s death. It was a news story and not an obituary. She had died in an accident, having slipped in her bathroom and hit her head two days before. There was no suggestion of anything suspicious, and most of the short article was the equivalent of an obit. Her husband had died in 1960; she had one child, “a local businessman”; she was a vigorous woman with an active interest in the Brown County Trust and in the Brown County Supernatural Society.

  In the same issue I found out what the Brown County Trust was. B.C.T. TAKES ON THE PYRAMID.

  The B.C.T. was an environmental group. At their annual general meeting they had voted to fight the plan to use defective limestone blocks to build a huge pyramid in Bedford as a tourist attraction and promotional device for the limestone industry.