Ghost of a Chance (17 page)

“Haila,” she said, “what’s wrong?”

She was not Sally Kennedy. She was a member of the deadly conspiracy against Sally Kennedy. She had tricked Jeff and me from the start. This garage was a trap that I had sailed breathlessly into. In a moment Jeff would walk into it, too. There was only the girl here in the garage. There was no knowing who else was standing near, waiting, watching, ready. I had to warn Jeff; I had to keep him inside the hotel.

“Haila!” The girl’s voice was sharp. “What is it?”

“Sally,” I said, “you stay here. I’ve got… I’ve got to go back inside a moment.”

I took a step toward the door.

“Haila, darling.” Her voice was soft behind me. “Haila, turn around. There’s something I want you to see.”

I turned around. I saw at once what it was she wanted me to see.

It was a gun, a small, black revolver, and it was pointing directly at me.

“Come here,” the redhead said.
She waggled the gun. Unpleasant lights reflected from his shiny muzzle. I had never before looked down into the business end of a lethal weapon. I didn’t quite know the etiquette of the situation, didn’t quite know what was expected of me. Then it came to me in a flash. You were supposed to stall. To stall for time.

“What?” I said, stalling.

“You heard me.” She was being nasty now. “Come here.”

“Just a second,” I said. “I think there’s something in my shoe. Probably a pebble from Fire Island. The last time I was there…”

“No, don’t! You stand up. Straight.” She had turned vicious; her voice was an angry snarl. “Back up against that post.”

She pointed to the post. It was an upright two by four that stretched from the floor near the wail up into the rafters of the roof. It was not the sort of thing that I would enjoy backing up against. The gun in her hand weaved tiny circles, circles that funneled out and made the round stripes of a target on my stomach. I backed up against the post. “Clasp your hands behind it,” Red snapped.

I clasped them. A gun is even more frightening when it can’t be seen. But out of the corner of my eye I saw Red snatch a roll of electrician’s black tape from a nail on the wall above a workbench. I felt the tape tighten around my wrists, loop after loop, until it felt like a band of steel. Then she was binding my ankles. Suddenly a piece of coarse cloth slapped across my mouth and I was gagged, thoroughly, expertly. The girl was as fast and efficient as a registered nurse. She stepped in front of me to inspect her work. She liked it; she was proud of it.

“Get out of that if you can,” she said.

I tried. I couldn’t. I never would. I tried to speak and the sound was a gurgle in my throat. Red grinned at me. Then the grin slipped off her face, her eyes were alert. Abruptly she turned and hurried to the front of the garage. I twisted my head and I could see her standing in the open doorway. Jeff, my coat a bundle under his arm, was running toward her.

“Jeff!” she cried softly. Her voice throbbed with relief and gratitude. “Oh, Jeff, you’re here!”

Jeff said, “Hello. Where’s Haila?”

He couldn’t have seen me in the black depths of the garage, but she planted herself directly between us. The gun was behind her back. She said, “She went back to look for you.”

I saw Jeff glance toward the hotel. “She shouldn’t have done that,” he said. “She should have stayed here.”

I struggled against my bindings and above me I heard a soft scraping sound. I looked up, pulling again at the post. I saw the garage door move a few inches forward in its track. I shook at the post again; again the door edged forward. I looked at Red and Jeff.

He was standing a few feet beyond her, still outside the garage. She was directly under the door. If I could shake it down now, quickly… I rocked the post back and forth. I could see it inch down to fill the top of the doorway. Most of its weight was still on the horizontal track. I worked harder.

Red was talking softly. “You’d better come in here, Jeff. Someone might see you, someone might know…”

“I’ll go back and find Haila,” Jeff said. “You…”

“No,” Red said. “Stay here.”

I saw the gun move behind her back, I saw her arm stiffen. I threw all my weight back against the post. There was a tinny roar and the big door lurched forward. I heard Jeff yell a warning to Red as he lunged toward her. He tried to knock her out of the path of the downward hurtling door, but he was too late. The heavy frame hit her across the shoulders and threw her sprawling inside the garage. The gun flew from her hand and slid across the floor. Red lay quietly on the cement. A few feet from her lay Jeff, crumpled on his face. I groaned through my gags. I had got more than one bird with that stone.

I kept my eyes on Jeff, waiting, praying for him to move. He didn’t.

He looked as though he had no intention of ever moving again. He looked completely inert and absolutely comfortable. But he had to come to first, he had to. If Red beat him back to consciousness, she would have us both. I looked at the gun on the floor. It was pointing at me.

Red groaned and moved, then lay still.

Jeff didn’t even groan.

That round went to Red. Come on, Jeff, I rooted, come on, old boy, get up and get in there. If only I could reach him with my voice, if I could sing the Dartmouth fight song to him… that would bring him to his feet if he still had blood in his veins. I saw the fingers of Red’s left hand open and close.

Jeff’s left hand, and all the rest of him, was as limp as last week’s lettuce.

Come on, you big bum, are you going to let a lousy girl show you up? Where’s your pride? What will the boys on Greenwich Avenue say? Red straightened her legs and rolled over on her back. Her dress was high above her knees. Now Jeff would come to, if I knew Jeff.

He moaned softly.

That’s right, you idiot, moan! Moan and pull Red out of her coma. Red’s hands lifted to her face, her whole body struggled to rise. She lifted herself to one elbow, then fell back. She moaned again and her hand fluttered at her side.

My mind screamed at Jeff. “Get up, get up, get up.”

Jeff sat up. He looked around him, saw his hat on the floor and put it on. He straightened his tie. He saw Red. He rose shakily, walked to her and knelt at her side. He began chafing her wrists.

I shook the post with all my strength; it made no sound. I heard Jeff talking, soothingly, urgently, to Red. “Sally, come out of it. Come out of it, honey.” I strained against the binding tape at my wrists and ankles and I felt something give. I was able now to move one foot up and down. I pounded the floor with my heel. Jeff raised his head and listened.

“Rats,” he muttered. “Rats.”

He went back to work on Red again. I beat out a rhumba rhythm with my heel. I prayed that Jeff wouldn’t write that off as rats with talent. He lifted his head again. Desperately I pounded on the floor. Jeff rose, took two steps and saw me.

He tore the gag out of my mouth. He was behind me then, tearing at the tape around my wrists. The blood rushed back into my hands and I nearly screamed. My feet were free and I stamped up and down. “She isn’t Sally Kennedy,” I said.

“She isn’t… what?”

“She made a slip about the Cortlands, she doesn’t know them.” “What?”

“Never mind now. She tied me up, she’s one of them. Jeff, we’ve got to get back to New York. Sally Kennedy’s still there, still in danger…”

Jeff was looking at the redhead. He leaned over and felt her pulse. “She’ll come to pretty soon.”

“The hell with her. Jeff, pull yourself together. We’ve got to go. We’ve got to find Sally Kennedy.”

“Yes,” he said. He shook his head and took a deep breath. He picked up my coat off the floor and held it for me.

We lifted the door and ducked under it. Jeff was slamming it back when I remembered the gun. “Jeff, she had a gun! We might need…” A lock clicked inside. The door was tightly, securely closed.

“We won’t need a gun,” Jeff said. “We’ll be on our way before she comes to, before anyone can move.”

“Jeff, is she locked in?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. Let’s go. Are you all right, Haila?”

“I’ll do. How are you?”

“As well as could be expected.”

“I’m sorry about the door, but it was your own fault. That’ll teach you to stay away from redheads.”

“Did you do that? Shake down the door?”

“Of course. You know me. Jealous.”

We started back toward the hotel. “Did you find anything out from Red? Did she say anything?”

“Nothing that will help us. She bribed Kramer to get in here… gave him five hundred dollars to hide her out. She must have known that we’d stay here looking for her until it would be too late to help Sally Kennedy, until it was all over. Then…”

Jeff held open the door into the dark wing of the hotel. I stepped by him and waited while he eased shut the door behind us. I found his arm and hung onto it. I wasn’t going to be separated again from Jeff, ever again.

“What are we going to do?” I whispered.

“See Kramer right away. We’ll have him put a call through to New York, to Police Headquarters. They’ll take care of Sally. Then we’ll get the hell out of here.”

“Sally Kennedy,” I said, “Is sailing blithely somewhere around town. She doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her tomorrow morning. She can’t know, can she?”

“I guess not.”

“We should phone her first. Then the police.”

“Yes. All right, we’ll do it that way.”

We found Kramer at the reception desk in the lobby. He was fiddling half-heartedly with some papers, as if paper work was beneath a hotel man of his genius. He raised his head and shook a manicured finger at us.

“You promised me you would come to dinner,” he said. “I waited as long as possible. It’s too late now, I’m afraid.”

“We don’t want dinner,” Jeff said. He nodded toward the switchboard behind the desk. “We want to put a call through to New York. The Sultan Hotel.”

Kramer smiled gently. “You want to call New York?”

“Yes. It’s important.”

“Just like that. It’s important. You want to call New York.” The hotel manager suddenly lost his patient attitude; he became stern. “If you, Mr. Troy, it you and your charming wife behaved like normal guests instead of disappearing to heaven knows where every fifteen minutes, you would know about the telephone.”

“Tell us about the telephone.”

“It is out. There is no telephone. The line is down somewhere or other. And, personally, in weather like this I don’t blame the line for being down. If I were a line, I should be down, too.”

“Where is the nearest phone,” Jeff said, “that might still be working?”

“There isn’t one between here and the village. And how you would get to the village tonight I have no idea.”

“Mr. Kramer,” Jeff said, “we’ve caused you a lot of trouble. I don’t have time to explain, but we’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get to the village and to New York. There’s someone there who’s in trouble. We might be able to… to save her life. If you help us.”

“Save whose life?”

Jell started to say Sally Kennedy, then changed his mind. It would take too many minutes to explain to the hotel manager who was and who was not Sally Kennedy. He said, “Kramer, can you get us a car to take us to the village?”

“Who would be fool enough to drive on a night like this, Mr. Troy? The roads are positively suicidal.”

“All right,” Jeff said, “then we’ll walk.”

“Walk!” Kramer’s eyebrows raised in horror. “You would never make it, not in a million years!”

“We’ll manage somehow. Ready, Haila?”

Kramer put out a restraining hand. “Wait… wait just a minute. Our caretaker has a car. He might… he just might be persuaded to risk his neck and drive you two into town.”

“We’ll pay him whatever he asks.”

“There’s only a chance that he’ll do it. But if you insist on attempting to walk it, I’ll speak to him.”

His voice dwindled off as he hurried away. He went through the taproom and into the kitchen. In five minutes he was back, his face set in the smile of a man who can work wonders and just had.

“It’s all fixed!” he cried, “All fixed. Now don’t let him hold you up, Mr. Troy. Ten dollars, I think, will be plenty. He’ll bring the car around immediately. I told him you were ready and waiting.”

“Thanks,” Jeff said, “that’s fine.”

“Not at all. Will you be coming back with him, after you make your phone call?”

“No,” Jeff said. “We’ll settle our bill now.”

“Your bill? What bill? You’ve had no dinner, you haven’t used your room. A bill for what?” He smiled humorously at us. “Perhaps I should fine you for trespassing, but I certainly can’t charge you for room and board.”

An automobile horn sounded outside.

“There he is,” Kramer said.

He saw us to the door, shook hands, and pooh-poohed away our thanks. The two elderly ladies, tending to their needlework by the fireplace, waved good-bye to us. Merrill, his florid face even more flushed with good food and drink, roared a farewell from the dining room. Kramer opened the door and we took our leave of Chappawan Lodge.

The car, a small sedan, looked forlorn and lost in the stormy night. Its headlights, one of which was askew and errantly pointing skyward, managed to pierce no more than ten feet of the swirling snow. The caretaker was behind the wheel. Bundled to the ears in a sheepskin coat, he waved a gloved paw to us and motioned us into the back seat. Jeff put one foot on the running board.

He said, “You want ten dollars to take us to Chappawan?”

“That’s right,” the driver said.

“You think you’ll have any trouble driving…” He stopped. I saw him take a quick backward step away from the car. When he spoke again, his voice was tight. “Ten dollars,” he said. “That seems like a lot of money.”

“Make it five,” the driver said.

“No,” Jeff said. “Five’s too much. We’ll skip the whole thing.” He reached in through the door and his hand gripped my wrist. “Come on, Haila, we’ll go back.”

Startled, I slid toward the door and, in the mirror above the windshield, my eyes met the driver’s. They were blinking, fluttering eyes, set too close to a long, sharp nose. I had seen that face before. I had seen it that afternoon on the train to Chappawan.