FIVE
Four night-blooming-jasmine bushes which Duff had raised from cuttings blossomed along the edge of the veranda. Their perfume, so heady that some people cannot bear it, saturated the darkness and drifted downwind, exotic and sweet. When Duff noticed it, his attention came only in the form of a memory, a memory that Eleanor was very fond of jasmine. He tried to tell himself it was insane to imagine that, simply because she was missing, Eleanor had been kidnapped and perhaps killed by people whose very existence was shadowy.
He paced the porch, wondering what else might have happened to her, what less-horrifying thing. She had last been seen in the big yard, by Scotty and her mother, over near the banyan. He stood at the porch rail and looked at the black arcades beneath the trunks of the great tree. Had somebody been concealed there?
Suddenly, as if he had been told, Duff realized what had happened: Eleanor hadn’t previously known anything that had made her freedom on her existence a danger to “them.”
What had happened was that she had heard something from the lawn, down near the banyan.
He raced through the house, startling Mrs. Yates and the two children. “Be right back! Ten — fifteen minutes!”
He picked up the flashlight. In the barn, he shouldered a ladder.
Charles yelled, “Need me?”
“No, Charley! Stay with your mother.”
It was hard work moving through the jungle with the ladder. Time and again it hooked over trees and fouled up on boughs or vines so that he had to use his light, stop and maneuver. When, finally, he reached the sinkhole, he was panting heavily. He stood there, afraid to swing the beam of the electric torch. He shut his jaws and aimed the light down and around the edges. He didn’t see what he feared he would: a body. A girl’s body in a brown dress.