An Owl Too Many (17 page)

“I can drive myself,” she protested. “I’m all right, honest. I’ll need my car in the morning anyway; either I’ll come to work or go home to Mother. I don’t know, I suppose I’ll show up. Maybe I’ll feel braver by then.”

“That’s the ticket,” Peter approved. “Then why don’t you drive along behind her, Swope, and make sure she gets home safely? The president and I will stay here till Mink and Bulfinch show up.”

“But what about filing my story?”

Peter looked at the president. Svenson heaved a mighty sigh. “How early?”

“Six o’clock?” Cronkite was beginning to sound hopeful.

“We’ll let you know.”

“What if I walk in the house and my mother already knows?”

That actually fetched a chuckle out of Svenson. “If your mother knows, print.”

“Thanks, President! Ready to go, Viola?” Miss Buddley snatched up a bright green vinyl raincape and slung it across her shoulders. “I’ve been ready for hours. I just hope it doesn’t start to pour the way it did yesterday.”

“By George,” said Peter, “I hadn’t noticed.” In fact, it must have been raining for a while by now. The cars in the lot glistened with moisture and small puddles were beginning to collect where the gravel was most deeply rutted. Viola and Swope both got off after some preliminary chugs and gurgles, their headlights dazzling and their windshield wipers flapping madly. The pole lights in the parking lot had turned themselves on when it got dark but didn’t seem to be making much of an impression on the night. Peter began to realize what an isolated place the station was, and also what a less-than-satisfactory supper he’d had. Why hadn’t Svenson told Mink and Bulfinch to bring along a few more sandwiches?

It occurred to him that he’d stashed a bar of chocolate in his glove compartment a while back, the giant economy size. There’d be enough for both himself and the president. Enough for him, anyway; the president had eaten the lion’s share of the cheese. Peter made up a fresh batch of dandelion-root coffee, set it to perk, and went to fetch the chocolate.

Svenson had plunked himself down in the one chair big enough to hold him and was reading
The Amicus Journal,
his granny glasses halfway down his nose. Peter poured out a couple of mugfuls, took his over to Winifred’s desk, and sat down in her chair. The ersatz coffee tasted better this time, either he was a better cook than Viola Buddley or else he was getting used to the stuff. The chocolate hadn’t melted or gone stale, it was stuffed with nuts and raisins, just what the doctor ordered for a hungry man expecting a ransom call from an unknown kidnapper.

He was beginning to feel drowsy. How much time lay between him and the conjugal couch? Helen must be home from her meeting by now, covered with glory and wearing a corsage. Chrysanthemums, most likely. She always hoped her hosts wouldn’t give her one, but they generally did. It wouldn’t hurt to give her a call, but he was reluctant to tie up the line. What if those bastards were trying to get through?

B
Y GEORGE THEY WERE
! Peter jumped a foot when the telephone rang, and grabbed the receiver on his way back down. A strange, raspy, breathy voice came through.

“We have Professor Binks in custody. She will be unharmed as long as you do exactly as we say. And what you do is nothing. Make no move, talk to nobody. Go home and sleep. Further instructions will be telephoned to this same number when we choose to give them.”

“But listen.” Peter’s voice probably sounded as peculiar as the one on the other end of the line. “We may not be able to keep the story out of the newspapers. It’s already been leaked.”

“We expected that. It doesn’t matter. Just wait.”

“Wait for what? Why should I believe you? How do we know Miss Binks is alive? Is she there? Let me talk to her.”

No answer came, but the phone hadn’t gone dead. Peter waited. At last, to his infinite relief, Winifred’s voice came over the line.

“Hello, is somebody there?”

“It’s Peter, Winifred.” Now he knew he sounded peculiar. “Are you all right?”

“Relatively speaking, yes. However, I am instructed to inform you that I shall be summarily dealt with if my captors’ instructions are not followed to the letter. As I speak, some person who is built much like my Uncle Horatio—or possibly my Aunt Annie, the sex is indeterminable—is pressing a large firearm against my rib cage.”

“My God!”

“Now, Peter, you mustn’t be unduly alarmed. I get the impression that I’m worth far more alive than dead. If I find myself being too brutally mishandled, I shall simply make them shoot me and thus defeat their—”

The connection was abruptly broken. Incredibly, Peter was smiling when he put down the receiver. “President, where can we find a tugboat?”

“Huh?”

“I think we have a clue. Do the names Horatio and Annie mean anything to you?”

“Yesus, Shandy, what a woman! Yumping Yiminy, yes. Captain Horatio Bulwinkle and Tugboat Annie Brennan. Binks must mean the Clavaclammer. Southern marshes. New marina, water-treatment center, some damn thing. Tugboats, barges, dredges. Let’s go.”

“Our orders are to sit tight and do nothing at all.”

“Huh!”

“I quite agree, but we’ve got to be cagey.”

“Call Sieglinde first.”

Svenson reached for the telephone, but Peter stopped him. “Wait a minute, let’s have a look.”

Peter was good with his hands. In a matter of moments, with the help of his trusty jackknife, he had the mouthpiece off. “Ah, here we are. See that little jigger in there?”

“Yeepers creepers, we’ve been bugged. Take the damn thing out.”

“No, I think we ought to leave it in. Go ahead and make your call, but talk in Swedish. Ask Sieglinde to get hold of Helen and tell her the game’s afoot.”

“Which foot?”

“We’ll know in a while, I hope. Tell her that if anybody phones asking for you, she’d better say you’re on your way home and ask for a number where you can call back. They’ll just hang up. Ask her to pass the word for Helen to do the same. We’re going to have to be damned circumspect, President, we don’t want Winifred to get hurt.”

“Huh!”

“M’yes, I appreciate the force of your argument. She’s got them over a barrel, let’s hope she can keep them there.”

Peter had the telephone back together now. “There you go, President. Give Sieglinde my best regards and be sure she calls Helen.”

Peter absented himself from the lobby while Thorkjeld Svenson made his call. He wasn’t being scrupulous about not listening in on the conversation, the only Swedish words he knew were
skoal
and
smorgasbord;
he just wanted to look at the weather.

His grandfather’s metaphors had tended to be on the earthy side. One was “It’s raining pitchforks and dungballs,” and that, Peter decided, was pretty damned close to what was happening right now. He wished it weren’t.

He wasn’t too concerned about his driving, the caffeine in the chocolate had given him a surge of energy. His car was in first-class shape and had been refilled with gas during its latest brief stay at Charlie Ross’s. The distance from here to Clavaton wasn’t great, the roads were good, barring a possible washout somewhere. He wasn’t sure where the dredging was taking place, but he knew how to reach the Clavaclammer Road. Presumably all they had to do was follow the river along until they spied a likely-looking tugboat.

Would the boat be docked where they could climb aboard easily? Or would they have to swim out with daggers between their teeth, pirate-style? Where would they get the daggers? What if it wasn’t actually a tugboat? No matter, it must at least look like a tugboat, or Winifred wouldn’t have given that clue. Whatever it was would likely be hell to find in pitch-dark and pouring rain, particularly when they’d have to be careful in their movements out of regard for Winifred’s sternal cavity. Not to mention their own.

President Svenson was winding up his phone call with a fervent burst of Swedish. Sieglinde must understand the words, the meaning would have been plain enough in any language. What a time for a lonesome husband to have to heed the call of duty!

Mink and Bulfinch ought to be heeding the call any time now, Peter decided it would be an act of kindness to have a potful of coffee waiting. Winifred would have to grind up more dandelion root when she got back; he’d measured out the last scoop from the canister before headlights shone briefly through the lobby windows, a car motor shut off, and two middle-aged but still wiry men dashed in from the rain.

“How’s the driving?” Peter asked.

“Could be worse.” Purvis Mink wasn’t much of a talker.

“Like, for instance, a sleet storm on top of a blizzard. Going to rain all night, we heard the weather forecast on our way here. Seems a high front’s met a low front coming through the Rye.” Alonzo Bulfinch was chatty enough when he got the chance, which he frequently didn’t, since he was boarding with Cronkite Swope’s Aunt Betsy.

Peter would have liked to ask Bulfinch whether Mrs. Lomax had filled him in on how Knapweed Calthrop was doing, but there was no sense wasting time on matters he could do nothing about. The sooner he and Svenson got cracking, the likelier they were to succeed. The weather was actually in their favor, Winifred’s guards wouldn’t be expecting a sneak attack on a night like this.

Or so Peter tried to convince himself as he threaded his way around fallen tree limbs and through puddles the size of millponds. His windshield wipers were doing their utmost, but they couldn’t sluice off the water anywhere near as fast as it was pelting against the glass. About halfway to Clavaton, they were stopped by a good-sized elm fallen straight across the road; but not for long. The president got out of the car and tossed the tree aside like a broken blossom. He wasn’t even panting when he got back in.

According to the clock on the dashboard, they’d taken an hour and thirty-two minutes to reach the river road. It felt to Peter more like twenty years. As Svenson had predicted, they soon came upon evidence that big things were happening there, though of course no work was being done tonight. Sundry silhouettes of a nautical nature could be seen drawn up to docks that Peter couldn’t recall having seen before; perhaps the docks had been built on purpose to accommodate this new flotilla of workboats. Some of the shapes showed riding lights bright enough to be a nuisance to anybody trying to sneak aboard, but probably not adequate for the sneaker to read the boats’ names by.

Peter drove on past the docks so they could get some notion of the layout. It wouldn’t matter that he’d slowed to a semi-crawl, nobody in his right mind would be driving any faster on a night like this. Once around the bend and out of sight, should anybody be looking, Peter found a place to stash the car on a concrete loading platform behind a low building that sat up from the road on the landward side. This might be some kind of storage warehouse, he surmised, he didn’t waste time trying to find out.

“Flashlight?” growled Svenson.

“In the glove compartment,” Peter told him. “The batteries and bulb are fresh, maybe we ought to use a dimmer.”

Helen had left a silk scarf in the car, it seemed a shame to ruin the pretty thing, but she’d understand. Folded and wrapped over the lens, the thin cloth diffused the beam into a hazy glow giving them light enough to see a short way ahead.

“Won’t use it till we have to,” Svenson growled low in his throat. “Come on.”

The two men picked their way across the road and around the docks, sliding on mud and splashing through puddles they couldn’t avoid. Rain beat into their eyes, ran down their faces, inside their collars. Their situation was so awful that Peter began to find it funny; he had all he could do to keep from chuckling aloud.

Once down on the docks, they realized how high the boats were riding, and why. The Clavaclammer, normally a sedate river content to flow gently among its green braes, was giving a fairly convincing portrayal of a raging torrent, already splashing right up against the edges of the docks. “By George,” Peter muttered, “I’ve never seen it like this before.”

He himself had always related more to Mole than to Ratty. A creature of the fields and hedgerows, Peter didn’t know what to make of so much water all at once. He just wished to God the dratted boats would quit bobbing around long enough to be identified.

Some of them, the open scows and floating dredges, could be eliminated out of hand. There appeared to be no place aboard where a middle-aged woman could be hidden without the risk of drowning or pneumonia. One dock was evidently reserved for pleasure boats, sleek damsels of the deep with tarpaulins over their cockpits and curtains at their cabin windows. Any of these would no doubt offer a viable hiding place, but how would they relate to Winifred’s dropped clue about the tugboat? Peter and Thorkjeld wasted a little time reading names, which told them nothing, and passed on.

Then they came upon three tubby workboats festooned along the gunwales with worn-out rubber tires. Svenson gave Peter’s shoulder a squeeze that would have laid out a lesser man for weeks. “Which?” he breathed.

Peter pulled his sopping tweed hat farther down over his eyes to keep the rain out and looked the three over. Two were cluttered with all that stuff tugboats appear to accumulate; their cabin windows showed bare, black, and shiny in the rain. The middle one was relatively uncluttered, its paint was fresher, its windows had curtains pulled tight across them. Not a chink of light was showing, but Peter had a hunch that light was there. Feeling like Carruthers sneaking up on the treasure hunters’ lair in Memmert, he doused the flashlight, sat down on a soaking-wet bollard, took off his boots, and hung them by their laces around his neck. Divining what he was up to, Svenson followed suit.

The sides of the tugboat were a good height above the dock, but getting aboard was no problem. Peter merely stood up on Thorkjeld’s shoulders and walked across. Once aboard, he found a rope ladder lying ready, flipped it over the gunwale, and Svenson climbed up much in the manner of King Kong ascending the Empire State Building.

With catlike tread, upon their putative prey they stole. There was, of course, the chance that nobody else was aboard. There was a better chance that they might come upon some authentic crew member enjoying a peaceful evening with his book, his pipe, his dog, or his doxy; that was a risk that had to be taken. Peter tried the cabin door and found it locked. He stepped aside with an over-to-you gesture. Thorkjeld put his shoulder to the lock, and shoved. They were in.