Ghost of a Chance (15 page)

“Not just yet,” Jeff said.

“You would like a cocktail first?”

“Yes, that’s it.”

Kramer rang the bell on the bar. “If there’s anything I can do for you… anything…” Bowing, he backed away from us, turned and walked briskly into the dining room.

The boy mixed us another pair of old fashioneds. He brought them to us in a booth. Jeff suggested that we sit in a booth; he had made a point of it. The boy went back to the kitchen and we were alone in the taproom.

“Kramer’s lying,” I said. “He knows that that was Sally Kennedy who came here, that she is the red-head. I could tell he was lying.”

“Yes.”

“But why? Why is he lying?”

“I think that he’s acting under orders. Orders from Sally.”

“From Sally!”

“Yes. I think he’s hiding her, that she’s made him promise not to tell anyone she’s here.”

“Including us, Jeff?”

“She mightn’t know we’re here. And if she does know, maybe she doesn’t trust us. Remember that she didn’t come to us on the train. She ducked off without seeing us.”

“There was somebody in that diner,” I said, “somebody watching her…”

“That’s true, but…” Jeff shrugged. “Haila, if you moved to the end of your seat, you could see into the dining room.”

I pushed my drink to the outside edge of the table and I followed it. The big room beyond the archway came into view. I could see the expanse of bare table tops and stacked chairs on the right side, across an aisle one occupied table set for dinner, the part of another next to it. At that one I saw the lady crocheter in profile as she raised a glass of tomato juice to her lips. In the center of the room, directly in my line of vision, Kramer stood talking to a waiter.

“I can only see a part of the room, Jeff.”

“Can you see Kramer?”

“Yes.”

“Is he facing us?”

“Yes.”

“As soon as he isn’t, Haila, tell me.”

“Oh. You’re going to look around some more?”

“I’m going to find Sally and I don’t want Kramer to know that I’ve gone. He might get over-zealous about his pledge of secrecy to her. If that is the explanation for his behavior.”

“What other explanation could there be?”

“I don’t know. Where is Kramer now?”

“Still facing this way. Jeff, what am I supposed to do while you’re gone?”

“Stay here. Look as if I were still with you. That is, look enchanted.”

“I’ll be too worried about you to look enchanted.”

“Nothing can happen to me. What could happen to me? Is it all right now?”

I scanned the dining room. The two men were still there, Kramer still talking to the waiter, the waiter nodding his head. Above the mumble and the clatter of the diners, I heard Trask’s voice ring out. His words were indistinguishable, but the tone was summoning, a command. I saw Kramer turned toward the voice, his professional smile snapping to attention. The waiter hitched the tray under his arm and moved out of sight.

“Get ready, Jeff,” I said.

The hotel manager glided around the far side of the old lady’s table and was gone. I waited a moment, making sure that all was clear.

“Now, Jeff. And good luck. Give my love to Sally.”

Jeff slid out of the booth and with three long, noiseless strides he was out of the taproom. He hurried across the lobby toward the stairway. I glanced back into the dining room.

The crocheter’s head was bent over her plate as she buttered a sliver of roll. She hadn’t seen Jeff leave. No one appeared in the archway. I looked back into the lobby. Jeff had disappeared up the stairs. No one was going up after him. His search for Sally Kennedy had started off, at least, unnoticed.

I settled back and fidgeted with my empty glass. From the dining room came the uninterrupted rattle of china, the bright clink of silver, the hum of conversation. A robust guffaw that could only have belonged to the robust Merrill rolled out once; it was joined by the more suave hilarity of Kramer. Perhaps they were amused by the giddy antics of Jeff and me. We had insisted that there was a pretty, red-haired girl on the premises. How amusing of us! The little child’s voice lifted its soprano above the laughter, raised in a question. I tried to shut out these noises and to catch some sound from above. There was nothing that I could hear.

Kramer stood suddenly in the dining room arch, his eyes upon me. I leaned across the table. I was interested and amused by a story that Jeff was not telling me. I was pretending that he hadn’t told it to me a dozen times before. I nodded and laughed a little. Jeff had never, simply never, enchanted me more.

The manager took a step forward.

“The dining room is only open for an hour, Mr. and Mrs. Troy,” he said. “Perhaps you had better come in now.”

“We’ll be right there,” I said.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and sauntered toward me. “In the wintertime, you know, we have only…”

Two more steps and he would be beyond the high back of the seat opposite me.

“Yes, I know! I do know, Mr. Kramer!” I clutched my glass, my fingers concealing its emptiness, and waved it at him with the wild desperation of an unrequited alcoholic. “I’m almost finished… just another second, Mr. Kramer!” I looked at the vacant bench opposite me and smiled a question at it. “You don’t mind waiting just another second, do you, darling?”

Kramer took one more step and halted. He nodded agreeably. “I’ll have the waiter put the tomato juice at your places,” he said. “But do hurry, Mrs. Troy, I’m sure your husband is starving. As a matter of fact, I think it would do you both a great deal of good to eat a little something.”

He smiled sweetly at me. He went back into the other room, turned to the left and moved out of sight. I took the pebble of ice out of my glass and rubbed it across my forehead; much more of this ghastly make believe and I would need two strong men to chafe my wrists.

A minute crept by, two minutes. Kramer would be back. This time he would be more insistent. This time he would come directly to our table and escort us into the dining room. I leaned far out and looked across the lobby to the foot of the stairs. They were empty; Jeff’s mission was still uncompleted.

The whooshing sound of the kitchen door swinging to and fro on its hinges sent me sliding back deep into the booth. Someone had entered the taproom, someone who would see immediately that I was alone. There was no inventing Jeff’s presence now; now I would have to explain his absence. He had gone to our room for cigarettes, for my purse, my coat. That was it. I was chilly, I wanted my coat.

I prayed that I wouldn’t perspire visibly when I said it.

The door had settled in its frame and I waited for approaching footsteps to follow. There was no sound at all, no movement. I twisted around until I could see the door. I turned until I could see all of the room behind me. I was the only person in the place.

It was a moment before I realized the truth. If no one had entered the taproom, the door must have closed behind someone, closed as he went out. But Jeff and I had been alone, completely alone. No one could possibly have…

I got on my knees and looked over the tall back of my seat into the booth behind me. A wine list lay on the table, beside it a big glass ashtray. From out of the ashtray, from a dying cigarette, a thin spiral of smoke curled up toward the ceiling.

I sank back into my seat. Someone had been sitting close behind us.

But that, I told myself, might not be important. He might not have heard us talking. Even if he had, it might have made no sense to him. There was no reason to believe that he had been eavesdropping. He had finished his cigarette and gone quietly away. Quietly… too quietly.

He had slipped out of the room so silently that it must have been on tiptoe. The only sound he had made had been when it no longer mattered, when the swinging door had disturbed the air behind him. Now I was sure.

Jeff was not searching Chappawan Lodge with a free hand. Someone had gone to follow him, to find him, to prevent his finding Sally Kennedy.

Without even a glance toward the dining room, I ran out of the bar. I didn’t care who saw me. I didn’t care about anything except catching up to Jeff before the man in the booth caught up to him.

I raced across the lobby and up the stairs to the second floor. It was here, in the rooms off this landing, that the few guests were quartered. The two wings of this floor and the entire floor above it were unoccupied. It was in that part of the hotel that Sally Kennedy would be hiding. Jeff would have realized that. By now he would have searched the wings on this floor; he would be upstairs. I climbed the second flight.

The light that drifted up from the landing below was too meager to help me much visually. It did nothing at all for my morale. Directly before me I could make out a pair of tremendous sliding doors. Behind me, across the stairwell, were the guest rooms. Somewhere to my right and to my left were the corridors of the two wings. I had taken one step toward the first of the guest rooms when I heard a whispering scrape of footsteps on the stairs. I looked down. I could see a hand, a few inches of coat sleeve, moving up the banister. It wasn’t Jeff’s hand. I turned quickly away.

There was no time to reach the nearest guest room now. Stepping back, I found the slot of a handle in one of the sliding doors. Miraculously, the door slid open with only the sigh of a sound. I darted behind it, pushed the door back until it touched its mate.

The room was completely black. I crept into it with my hands outstretched, feeling for some protection, something to put between me and the man when he opened the sliding doors. I groped on and on. The place was gigantic, unending, a cavern, and it was bare, devoid of any furnishings at all. Outside, the footsteps drew closer, stopped.

I forced myself to push ahead into the thick, smothering darkness.

I jerked my hands back and forth in front of me and then the knuckles of my right hand cracked against something round, something solid. It was a column, a small one, and my arms encircled it easily. I stepped behind it and stretched out my hands again. They touched the softness of heavy velour. The great sliding door whined as it was thrust roughly open.

A figure, only a blur of a shadow, moved through the opening and stopped. I could see a movement as he raised his arm. A blade of white light sliced the length of the room. I saw now why the place had seemed a horizontal abyss to me; this was the ballroom of Chap-pa wan Lodge.

The beam of the flashlight switched to the opposite wall and flicked along it, leaving me in utter darkness. I stepped from behind the column. I took another step and I was behind the heavy, comforting velour of the drapery, crowding back against an ice-cold glass door.

From my corner I could see obliquely through the curtain’s opening. The circle of light was dancing perfunctorily now over the far end of the room. It moved across a bandstand, it rested a moment on a bass drum. On the skin of the drum was printed in rhinestone flecked letters: THE LODGERS. The light moved down off the bandstand. It began its sweep of my wall.

I could see a dim, milky haze as the probing finger of light settled on my drapery. I flattened myself against the window and held my breath. I turned my face to the side and pressed my cheek against the freezing pane.

It must have been because I was holding my breath so tightly that I didn’t cry out. Through the window I could see the left wing of the Lodge. On the second floor two lighted windows threw soft yellow rectangles upon the snow-filled courtyard below. I caught the flash of red hair as Sally Kennedy approached one of the windows.

She pressed her hands against the glass and cupped them into a funnel as she stared out into the night. It seemed she must be looking straight up through the darkness of the court into my face.

The light fell away from my drapery. From the end of the room I heard a grunt and a muttering of disappointment. I heard footsteps moving away, the slide of the closing door, and I turned back to the courtyard.

She had moved out of the window, but the room was still lit. My eyes raced back to where the wing joined the building proper and moved slowly back again. I counted the blackened windows. There were fourteen of them before those two bright ones broke the black wall. With two windows to a room, Sally would be in the eighth one.

I pushed aside the drapery and groped my way back to the doors. My hands touched their mahogany smoothness and I stopped and listened. There was no sound at all.

Quietly, with infinite care, I eased open one half of the door and stepped out into the hall. I crept down the stairs, out of the eerie gloom of the third floor into the normal light of the second floor landing. From the lobby below came the murmur of voices. Dinner was over and the diners had adjourned to the warmth of the fireplace.

I darted across the landing, rounded the corner into the left wing. The light from the landing faded behind me and I was in darkness again. Idle first four doors I was able to see; from then on I counted by touch. A floorboard squeaked beneath me once or twice, but there was no other sound.

My hand flattened against the eighth door. A thread of light escaped across the threshold and turned the blackness at my feet into a hedgerow of gray. I didn’t knock or even whisper to Sally. Someone other than she might hear. I groped for the knob and found it. The door opened easily and so quietly that Sally Kennedy didn’t know that I had come into her room.

She was sitting on the bed, leaning forward into the light of an oil lamp that stood on the table beside it. She wore a dressing gown, a pair of slippers. Her hair was caught up in a bright ribbon, her face glistened with cold cream. At the moment, she was doing her nails, and as she etched the crimson polish into the edges, she hummed a blithe, merry tune.

She might have been a girl without a care in the world.

I shut the door behind me.

“Sally,” I said.

She leaped to her feet and wheeled to face me. Then she sank slowly down on the bed again. She carefully put the brush back into the nail polish bottle and tapped tight its cork end. She picked up a cigarette and lit it, taking care not to smudge her wet fingernails. She looked at me and she was smiling.