Drowned Hopes (46 page)

When
will
he give up? she wondered, and at last he did, the ringing sound from the next block cutting off at the same instant. Shaking his head, Doug turned from the wall phone to say something bewildered — “She’s
never
home!” — to Gladys, who had just marched into the kitchen, wearing a zipper jacket and a cloth cap. But Gladys gave him an unsympathetic shrug, opened the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, and was just popping the top when someone tapped Myrtle on the shoulder.

That touch made Myrtle jump so high that both people in the kitchen turned to look out the window at the movement, and when she landed she sagged back against the rain–wet wall of the house like an overwatered clematis. In growing horror she stared upward at what appeared to be the Abominable Snowman standing before her in a yellow slicker and rainhat that made him look like a walking taco stand. This creature, spreading out massive arms with catcher’s–mitt hands at the ends of them to pen her in and keep her from running away (as though her legs had the strength to run or even, without the help of the house, to hold her upright!), growled low in his throat and then said (in English! like a person, a human being!), “You don’t look like
my
idea of a peeping Tom, lady.”

“I’m not, I, I, I, I, I —”

The monster lifted one of those hands and waved it back and forth, and Myrtle’s voice stopped. Then he said, “You, you, you, I got that part. Now try me on the next word.”

Never
had Myrtle felt so thin, so frail, so vulnerable and defenseless. She stammered out the only words that seemed to suit the case: “I’m sorry.”

“That’s nice,” the giant said. “That’s good. That counts on your side. On the other hand, ‘sorry’ isn’t, you know, an
explanation.
”

While Myrtle’s brain ran around inside her skull, looking for a bouquet of words that might placate this monster, the monster looked up at the window, raised his monster eyebrows, pointed at Myrtle a monster finger with the girth and toughness of a rat’s body, and mouthed elaborately, “You
know
this?”

Myrtle turned her head, looking up, and at this extreme angle Doug’s face, seen through the rain–drenched window, looked as scared as she felt.
He
was scared? Oh, good heavens! And when Doug nodded spastically at the monster, it seemed to Myrtle that her last hope, not even noticed till now, had just fled.

“Okay,” the monster said, and lowered his cold gaze on Myrtle once more. “It’s raining out, little lady,” he said. “Let’s us be smart. Let’s get in out of the rain.”

“I want to go home now,” Myrtle said in her tiniest voice.

For answer, the monster lifted his right hand and made a little move–along gesture. Myrtle, not knowing what else to do, obeyed, preceding the monster around to the back of the house and through the door and into the kitchen, where Doug and Gladys both looked at her with surprised disapproval.

The monster shut the door, and Doug said, “Myrtle, what are you
doing
here?”

Desperate, betrayed, feeling that
Doug
at least should be on her side, Myrtle said, “What are
you
doing here? You and the computer man and the so–called environment protection man and Gladys and my f–f–f–f — everybody else? You were here all along, lying to me, waiting for rain!”

The looks these three people gave one another at that outburst suggested to Myrtle, somewhat belatedly, that she might have revealed a bit more knowledge there than she should have. (At least she’d had sense enough not to mention her father.) Confirming this fear, the monster said, “This friend of yours knows a lot about us, Doug.”

Doug shook his head, protesting with a tremor in his voice. “Not from me, Tiny! Honest!”

Tiny?
Myrtle stared, but was distracted from this exercise in misapplied nomenclature by the sudden appearance in the kitchen of her father.

Yes. No question. She knew it at once. And almost as quickly she also knew, after one look in those icy eyes and at that gray, fleshless, hard–boned face, that this wasn’t a father into whose arms one threw oneself. In fact, as instinctively as she’d grasped their relationship, she also grasped that it might be a very bad idea to inform him of it.

It was already a bad idea merely to have attracted his attention. After a quick but penetrating glare at Myrtle, her father swiveled his eyes to the monster and said, without moving his bloodless lips, “Tiny?”

“Peeking in the window,” Tiny told him succinctly. “Doug’s girlfriend, only the idea was she didn’t know about this house or we’re here or what’s going on. Isn’t that right, Doug?”

“I
thought
so,” Doug said, sounding desperate. Spreading his arms in a gesture of appeal, he said to Myrtle’s father, “Whatever she knows, Tom, she didn’t know it from me. I swear!”

“And she knows a lot,” the monster called Tiny said. “Including we been here waiting for weather.”

Surprised, her father looked full at Myrtle (
now
she could see why Edna’s reaction had been so extreme when she’d seen this man again after so many years) and said, “Know everything, do you? Where’d you learn it all?”

“I, I saw you all come out on the lawn,” she told him in her little voice. “You were so happy when the clouds came.”

Tiny said, “She’s been keeping an eye on us, this girl.”

Myrtle’s father gave Doug a look of icy contempt, saying, “You gave it away, all right. You
are
as stupid as you look.”

While Doug was still trying to decide what if any answer to give that, her father turned back to Myrtle and said, “Who else knows about us?”

(Keep Edna out of this!) “Nobody!”

Doug said, “That’s gotta be true, Tom. She wouldn’t tell her mother, and there’s nobody else she hangs out with. She’s just a librarian here in town!”

(How empty he makes my life sound, Myrtle thought. And how little he cares about me, really.)

Her father nodded slowly, thinking things over, and then he said, “Well, the back yard’s nice and soft after all this rain. We’ll plant her when it gets dark.”

Everyone else in the room got the import of that remark before Myrtle did, and by the time she’d caught up they were all making objections, every one of which she heartily seconded.

Gladys spoke first, in tones of outrage: “You can’t do that!”

Then Doug, in tones of panic: “I can’t be involved in anything like that!”

And then Tiny, calm but persuasive: “We don’t need to do that, Tom.”

“Oh, yeah?” Her father — Tom Jimson — shook his head at all three of them. “Where does she go from here, then? Straight to the law.”

“We keep her,” Tiny said. “We’re making our move tomorrow night, anyway. After that, what do we care what she says or where she goes?”

“Then her
mother
goes to the law when she doesn’t come home,” Tom Jimson said. (It was easier to think of him by his name, and not as father at all.)

Gladys said, “She can phone her mother and say she’s gonna spend the night with Doug.”

Myrtle gasped, and Doug had the grace to look embarrassed, but Gladys turned and gave her a jaundiced look and said, “It’s better than not spending the night anywhere,” and Myrtle knew she was right.

But Tom Jimson hadn’t given up his original plan. “Where do we keep her?” he demanded. “Who’s gonna stay up with her all night? Anywhere we put her she’ll go out a window.”

“Not the attic,” said a voice from the door, and they all turned, and Wally was there (if that was his name).

How long had he been there?
Was
he the criminal mastermind Myrtle had been imagining, or merely the inoffensive little round man he seemed? Or something between the two?

Myrtle stared at him, but Wally didn’t meet her eye. Instead, he came farther into the kitchen, saying to Tom Jimson, “There’s a room up in the attic with a door we can lock. And I kind of stay up all night anyway, so I can check from time to time, make sure she isn’t trying to break out or anything.”

“She can yell out the window,” Jimson objected.

Wally shrugged that away with a little smile. He
must
be the mastermind, he was the only one who didn’t exhibit any fear of Tom Jimson. “In this rain?” he said.

Gladys said, “Wally’s right. Nobody’s out there, and if they were they couldn’t hear her.” So Wally was his real first name, at least.

Tiny said, “Look at it this way, Tom. Up to now we haven’t done anything that’s gonna get the law all excited about finding us. But if we start bumping off local citizens, everything changes.”

“I don’t
do
things like that,” Doug said with shaky insistence. “I’m a diver. That’s all I came here for.”

A brisk discussion ensued, everybody arguing against Tom Jimson’s bloodlust, and under it — behind the conversation’s back, as it were — Wally kept staring fixedly at Myrtle, as though trying to convey some private message to her. But what? Was he threatening her? Warning her? Maybe he didn’t want her to tell the others she’d met him before.

Well, that was all right. She didn’t want to tell anybody anything. Every one of these people scared her, even Gladys.

The discussion was still raging when three more people crowded into the kitchen, demanding to know what was going on, and the story of Myrtle’s capture and the controversy over her disposal was told all over again. These were two men and a woman, but neither man was the one who’d come raging and angry to pull Doug away from Myrtle’s front porch that time. So how many people were there in this …

… gang.

It’s a gang, Myrtle thought. I’ve been kidnapped by a gang. But what in heaven’s name is a gang doing in
Dudson Center?

The woman who’d just arrived, a taller and younger and friendlier–seeming person than Gladys, said at one point, “I wonder if I should phone John, see if he has any ideas for what to do.”

“
My
idea is,” Tom Jimson told her, “Al’s out of this story,”

“The attic,” Tiny said, quiet but emphatic. “Wally’s right.”

There was general agreement on this, except of course for Tom Jimson, who said, “I’ll tell you one thing, and listen with all your ears. If she gets away, it’s dynamite.
Now.
”

“Okay, okay, okay,” everybody said, and then they all gestured to Myrtle, a little impatient and irritated with her. “Come on, come on,” they all said, and the whole crowd escorted her upstairs.

The princess, stolen by gypsies/crows/Merlin/the childless peasant woman, will have a birthmark in an intimate location.

Not in Real Life. Or, even if she does, it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t any inheritance.

A princess has her father’s realm. A warlord has a cache of valuables.

Oh, the money in the reservoir. I think Tom intends to take that with him. The point is, the princess is in peril!

Naturally.

I arranged to have her placed under my protection.

Naturally.

And now I wait, and I’m patient, and I see what transpires, isn’t that right?

Naturally.

Feet. Feet entered the living room, dressed in scuffed old brown boots and raggedy–cuffed faded blue jeans. Seeing the feet, Dortmunder realized it had been the opening of the apartment door that awakened him, and then he remembered it all: 1) Guffey. 2) Tom/Tim Jimson/Jepson. 3) Handcuffs. 4) Pizza, which Guffey had gone out for.

“Got it,” Guffey announced from way up there above the feet.

“Great.” Dortmunder used his left hand to push himself to a seated position, since his right wrist was through a loop of the handcuffs, whose other loop was closed around a segment of the radiator. Dortmunder felt dizzy, woozy, and now he recalled that the reason Guffey had gone out for pizza in the first place was because they both had begun to feel they’d put somewhat too much beer into empty stomachs.

Companionably, Guffey opened the pizza box on the floor, within easy reach of Dortmunder’s left hand, and then said, “I got us some more beer, too.”

“Good.”

Guffey also sat on the floor, democratically, and they both rested their backs against the sofa while they ate pizza and drank beer and watched Raquel Welch run around inside somebody’s bloodstream. She was in a jumpsuit now, more sensibly, but she was still talking about microbiology.

After a while, Guffey said wistfully, “You know, John, this is about the nicest party I’ve been to in, oh, forty, uh, lemme think, forty–four years.”

“Well, it’s not a real party, Guffey,” Dortmunder pointed out. “It’s just the two of us.”

“For me,” Guffey told him, “two’s a crowd.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

They sat in easy silence together awhile longer, and then, during a National Guard commercial — it was really very late at night, damn near morning already — Guffey said doubtfully, “Maybe it’s Matt.”

“You think so?”

“I dunno. Try me on it.”

Filling his voice with enthusiasm and good cheer — or at least giving it the old dropout try — Dortmunder said, “Hey, Matt, whadaya say? How ya doing, Matt? Hey, look, fellas, it’s Matt Guffey!”

Guffey listened to all that, listened to the echoes, thought it over, then shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said.

“It’ll come to you,” Dortmunder assured him.

“Yeah, sure it will.”

That had been a kind of embarrassing moment, much earlier this evening, when Dortmunder, in a psychologically clever ploy to get Guffey to relax his vigil and lower his guard, had said, “Listen, if we’re gonna be stuck together a couple days, let’s at least be friendly. My name’s John.” And it had turned out that Guffey couldn’t remember his first name.

Well, you couldn’t blame the guy, really. For the last couple of decades, nobody had talked directly to Guffey at all, and during the prison years prior to that people all called one another by their last names to demonstrate how manly they really were despite whatever sexual practices incarceration might have reduced them to, so it had probably been some time in the waning days of the Second World War that anybody had last addressed Guffey by his first name.

Guffey had been embarrassed, of course, at this lapse in his memory, and Dortmunder had volunteered to help him find the missing name, so now Guffey spent a part of his time — that part not learning about microbiology — thinking about potential names, and whenever he came across one that seemed a possibility Dortmunder would try it out on him. So far, no success.

A while later, the microbiology movie came to an end and Guffey managed to get to his feet on the second try and go over to switch around the channels till he found Raquel Welch again, this time not discussing anything at all because she was a cavewoman.

The lack of discussion didn’t seem to harm the impact of the picture.

“Sam. Try Sam.”

“Hey, Sam! Sam Guffey! Come over here, Sam!”

“Nope. Makes me sound like a dog.”

After another little period of time, Dortmunder came out of a half snooze to realize he had to make room for more beer. (The pizza was all gone, but a couple beers were left.) “Guffey,” he said.

Guffey looked away from the prehistoric landscapes. “Nurm?”

“Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “I gotta go the bathroom.”

“Gee, so do I,” said Guffey.

“Yeah, but I’m, uh, I got this, this
thing
here. The whatchamacallit.”

“Oh,
that
thing,” Guffey said, and frowned.

In previous similar circumstances, Guffey had sat across the room and tossed the key to Dortmunder, who’d unlocked the cuffs and tossed the key back before Guffey permitted him to go away to the bathroom. Then it had been Dortmunder’s responsibility, under Guffey’s watchful gaze and steady rifle, to lock himself to the cuffs again on his return.

But this time, Guffey made no move to get up and cross the room to where the rifle leaned against an armchair. “Listen, Guffey,” Dortmunder said. “It’s kind of urgent.”

Guffey frowned at Dortmunder, doubling every wrinkle on his wrinkled face. He said, “You won’t try to run away, will you?”

“Run? I can barely walk.”

“Here, take the goddamn thing,” Guffey said, and yanked the handcuff key from his pocket and slapped it into Dortmunder’s palm.

“Thanks, Guffey,” Dortmunder said, the gravity of the occasion causing him to pay insufficient attention to what Guffey had just done. So he simply unlocked the cuffs, climbed the sofa and the wall to his feet, and lurched a circuitous route to the doorway and the hail and the bathroom.

While he was in there, Guffey’s voice sounded from the other side of the door: “Try Jack.”

“Hey, Jack!” Dortmunder yelled, trying to keep his aim true on a sneakily shifting bowl. “I’m fulla beer, Jack! Hey, Jack Guffey, you fulla beer?”

No answer. Dortmunder finished, flushed, washed, opened the door, and Guffey was standing there, nodding slowly, his eyes at half mast. “No,” he said, “and yes.”

Dortmunder went back to the living room and sat on the floor in front of the sofa but didn’t put the cuffs back on. He gazed at the Neanderthals — what casting! — and then at the rifle leaning against the armchair beside the television set, and thought things over. He
could
move, if he wanted to, no question about that. He just didn’t want to, that’s all.

After a while, Guffey came back into the room, bouncing off the doorposts. He gazed blearily at Dortmunder. Sounding maybe worried, maybe dangerous, certainly drunk, he said, “You didn’t put the cuffs on.”

“No, I didn’t,” Dortmunder told him. “And I didn’t grab the rifle either. What the hell, Guffey. Any enemy of Tom’s is a friend of mine. Come over here and watch the movie.”