I'll Be Gone in the Dark(29)

Like that, he was gone. Where hard, small eyes had been, there was darkness. Skittering sounds could be heard, like some





creature with a muscly tail running from light. Bushes rustled. Fences thudded. The clambering grew fainter, but it didn’t matter. A distress call drowned out everything else. At the time, in 1974, Visalia businesses closed at 9:00 p.m., and trouble was mostly confined to men huddled around irrigation ditches fighting over water rights. But there was no mistaking the sound when you heard it. Movies don’t capture the effect of the real thing. It’s impossible to reproduce in a studio. Conversations stop. Heads jerk. Eardrums pound with dread, for nothing signals terror like a teenage girl’s wild, unrestrained scream in the night.

The paleness of the stranger’s face wasn’t its only unsettling feature. A week after the prowling incident, Glenda’s boyfriend, Carl,* was waiting for her outside her house. It was an early autumn evening, warm still, already dark. Glenda’s house was similar to others in the middle-class neighborhood near Mt. Whitney High School in southwest Visalia: single-story, solidly built in the 1950s; at roughly 1,500 square feet, not especially large. Carl sat on the lawn, his presence shadowed in contrast to the glow cast from the brightly lit picture window fronting the house. From his cloaked position in the yard, Carl observed a man emerge from a path that bordered the canal across the street. The man was ambling along but stopped short when his eyes locked on something. Carl followed his absorbed gaze to the window, where Glenda, dressed in a halter top and shorts, was talking with her mother in the living room. The man dropped to his hands and knees.

Carl had been at Glenda’s when she spotted the prowler outside her bedroom; he’d chased him into a neighbor’s yard before losing him in the dark. He knew he was looking at the same man. Even knowing that couldn’t prepare him for what happened next. On his hands and knees, as if magnetized by what he saw in the





window, the man began a military-style crawl toward Glenda’s house.

Carl remained still and obscured in the dark. He let the man snake his way to the front hedges. He clearly had no idea Carl was there. Achieving maximum shock effect meant choosing the precise moment to speak. Carl waited until the man had risen slightly and was peeking over the hedges into the window.

“What are you doing here?” Carl shouted.

The man recoiled in shock. He screamed something unintelligible and took off in a panicked, almost vaudevillian run. Glenda had described her prowler as chubby. He was on the heavy side, Carl confirmed, with sloping shoulders and big legs. He ran awkwardly and not particularly fast. The chase ended abruptly when the man cut to the left and ducked into a neighbor’s alcove that was screened on one side. Carl planted himself in front of the alcove, blocking the way. The man was trapped. Street lighting gave Carl a chance to observe his girlfriend’s prowler up close. He was about five ten, 180 to 190 pounds, with short, fat legs and stubby arms. His hair was blond, combed over and stringy. He had a button nose. The ears were short and fleshy, his eyes squinty. His lower lip pushed out a little bit. His face was round and expressionless.

“What were you doing looking in my girlfriend’s window?” Carl asked.

The man looked away.

“Well, Ben, it looks like the guy’s got us here!” he said loudly, excitedly, as if calling to an accomplice off to the side.

There was no one there.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Carl asked.

Getting no answer, Carl moved closer.

“Leave me alone,” the man said. “Go away.”

His speech was slow and dull now, with a hint of an Okie accent.

Carl took another step forward. The man responded by sticking





his hand in his pocket. He was wearing a brown cotton jacket with woven cuffs; it was a style that had been popular years earlier but had since gone out of fashion.

“Leave me alone,” he repeated flatly. “Go away.”

Carl noticed a bulge in the pocket where the man’s hand was. The detail took a split second to compute; when it did, Carl’s instincts ordered him to stand back. It was the strangest, most unsettling sense, glimpsing for a moment the dark circuitry at work behind the dull-eyed mask. The round-faced simpleton in unfashionable clothes with the flat voice of an Okie bumpkin was, as evidenced by the move for what was most certainly a concealed gun, someone else altogether. Carl stepped aside. He noticed when the man passed him that his face was pale and unusually smooth; Carl felt certain that he was at least twenty-five years old, but oddly for someone who had, as they might say in Visalia, “reached his majority,” it didn’t appear he could even shave.

Carl watched the man walk north up Sowell Street. He kept swiveling around every few seconds to make certain Carl wasn’t following him. Even then, with jittery body language of suspicion and fear, the man’s pale round face remained inert, smooth, and blank as an egg.

Even further back, in September of 1973, Fran Cleary* had a strange encounter in front of her West Kaweah Avenue home. As she was getting into her car, she heard a noise and looked up, spotting a man with light blond hair and a smooth round face emerging from her backyard. As he jogged into the street, he noticed Cleary and did an about-face, yelling out, “Catch you later, Sandy!” before jogging northbound onto a perpendicular road and disappearing from view. Fran told her fifteen-year-old daughter, Shari,* about the incident, and Shari revealed that she’d seen someone matching the same description peeping into her