Liberty or Death (34 page)

Clyde was shaking his head. Shaking me off. Starting to repeat the stuff they'd told him. Trying to shore up his doubts with their wall of oh so credible propaganda. I could see it happening, written all over his big, open face. I didn't have time to stay and convince him, either, because I could see something else. Something more terrible and immediate. Not about Andre, either. I could see what was going to happen next. Unless it had already happened.

He started to rise from the bed. "I think we'd better go see Hannon," he said.

There was one thing I knew Clyde cared about—those smaller and weaker than himself. Something I understood well. I put a hand on his arm. "Wait, Clyde," I said. "Listen. If I'm right... if their goal is to get Harding out so they can shut him up and taking the cop didn't work, you know what they'll do next?"

He stared at me warily, his dark brows coming together over his eyes like storm clouds, his mouth folding up in a thoughtful knot. I started to speak but he held up his hand. "Wait a minute, will you? Let me think."

I let him think, sitting in the hot room listening to my heart pound. It was like had fiddled with all my tuning dials. Suddenly the colors were more intense, my focus sharper, and I could almost sense our loud, angry words hanging in the air around us, too important to retreat until we were finished with them. Everywhere I looked they hung there, sharp, bright, intensely black words. My last challenging phrase, "You know what they'll do next," seemed to pulsate in the air like an LCD clock that needed to be reset.

I wasn't sure whether anything I'd said had penetrated, or whether my words had rolled right off and he was going to turn to me and ask me again if I was a cop. It could be that he'd simply seize me by the arm and drag me off for another tete a tete with the Reverend Stuart Hannon. If he did that, I had no more tricks in my bag. I'd bared my soul. I'd told him the truth.

I could hear the minutes ticking off on my clock. More than a few. It took an effort to hold my tongue, and I made it. I sat and held the downside possibilities at bay. I knew they would not deal kindly with me. The ticking of the clock. The pounding of my heart. The hovering words. The waiting. It was surreal. But life at the edge of exhaustion is surreal, as is life lived on the cusp of danger. I'd been there before. Probably Clyde had, too. So I waited. He pondered. Both sweating as we breathed in the thick, oxygenless air. Finally he turned to me, his face no longer knotted or suspicious, but only terribly, grimly sad. "If they can't get Jed Harding out, and they're afraid he's going to break down and talk, there's only one other way to be sure that he won't."

A chorus of angels leaped up inside me and sang Hallelujah. "Right." I nodded. "They take the boy."

 

 

 

Chapter 23

 

"The boy?" Heavily and reluctantly, though his mind had already been heading this way.

"That's right." I was sickened by the thought, yet chillingly sure.

There was something of a force of nature about Clyde. Once he'd made up his mind, there was no hesitation or pause to ponder the options. It isn't always the brightest bulbs that get things done. He was halfway to the door before I'd fully perceived that we were in agreement. He did pause then, but only to say, "Come on. We'd better get over there, see if the kid's all right and warn his grandmother. No time to waste."

The scorched scents of fear and tension hung in the air like ozone. I was dirty, unhealthy, and weak. No way did I constitute a suitable companion on Clyde's rescue mission. But I, too, needed to know what was happening. Nor did I wonder about whether this made sense. He was one of them, and yet he was doing this. Obediently, I bent to put on my shoes. As I did, I checked my watch. It was only nine. "What about the restaurant? Aren't you supposed to be down there cooking?"

He shrugged. "My cousin can do it. It'll be good practice for him. He relies on me too much. 'Course, Theresa will have a fit..." He watched me fumble with a shoelace, something I was managing with all the grace and adroitness of a four-year-old. "You want help with that?"

At four, I would have said a loud and defiant "No." At thirty-one, I just nodded. It's a slow process, but I'm learning to share and I'm learning to take. He knelt by my feet, wiggled them into the shoes, and carefully tied the laces in double knots. Here, I thought, was a man who should have children. And that thought put the lump back in my throat and the tears in my eyes.

I didn't bother to comb my hair, brush my teeth, or do any of the things a civilized woman in my situation would do. I had temporarily regained some momentum and I didn't want to lose it. I didn't know whether it was experience or an excess of caution, but I asked Clyde to wait for me outside while I dressed for battle, including trading my shorts for jeans and pulling on a bulky sweatshirt. I even made a detour through the bathroom to tuck my pills and other necessities into my purse. I expected to be coming back here to pack, but life had a way of changing my plans. Then I followed Clyde down the stairs, moving with aggravating slowness. Clyde didn't seem to notice.

I waited outside while he stuck his head into the kitchen and told his cousin he was leaving. He stayed in the doorway having some sort of discourse but I couldn't tell whether it was dealing with his cousin's timidity, Theresa's complaints, or a fond goodbye to Cathy. I leaned against the railing and thought upright thoughts. It was interesting that once we'd come to our joint conclusion, neither of us questioned the urgency of the matter. When he came out, he said, "Mind if we take your car?" and held out his hand for the keys.

I relinquished them without argument. He was clearly in better shape to drive. He opened the passenger door for me, waited until I was in, and closed it carefully behind me. I sometimes thought the world broke down into two types of men: those who held doors and those who didn't. Give me the door holders any day. Empirical evidence has shown me that this kind of courteous attention has a high correlation with decency. Still, as he was walking around the car, I released the drawer, took out my Barbie special, and slid it into my purse. Right now, Clyde and I were allegedly on the same side, but he was still one of "them." Just minutes ago, he'd been ready to strangle me or deliver me into the tender hands of Stuart Hannon. If I couldn't always be risk-averse, at least I could try to be careful.

It was a summer night, the last of the day's blue sky fading toward black. It was just at my favorite shade—the color that's called "Midnight Blue" in the Crayola box—with bright white stars beginning to peek through. Most of the cars were parked around Theresa's. A few people sat on benches, otherwise the main street was deserted. We cruised along it with the windows down, bringing in the warm scent of dust and freshly cut grass. In the distance, a mower hummed, a boat engine throbbed, loud music drifted up from the beach.

We turned at the church and rolled to a stop before Mary Harding's house. No one answered our knock at first. Fueled by what I'd seen at Mindy's trailer, I was entertaining visions of awful scenes on the other side of that shabby white wood when it finally opened and Mary Harding stood there, her faded flowered housecoat clutched together with one hand, peering anxiously up at us. She stared out, then retreated for a moment, turned on the porch light, and came back. "Pardon me," she said. "I couldn't see you before. Eyes aren't what they used to be. Is something wrong?"

"May we come in, Mrs. Harding? There's something we need to speak with you about." Suddenly I was seeing a different Clyde. A Clyde who made me wonder who he really was.

The mystery was enhanced when she said, "Of course, Mr. Davis, of course. I'm forgetting my manners. Come on in. Did Theresa send you?"

I'd never thought of Clyde having a last name before. It showed what a snob I was. How indifferent I could be, how uncurious about other people. But this was not the time for deep reflection or constructive self-criticism. We were here for a reason.

She led us into the kitchen, turning on lights as she went. Evidently, Mary Harding had been asleep and we had woken her. I felt badly, knowing how much she needed her rest. She looked wearily from us to the kettle to the sink. "Would you like some coffee? I've got instant."

Clyde looked down at his big feet. Poor guy. This was not an easy subject. "No coffee. No. Thanks, Mrs. Harding. We don't mean to take up too much of your time. We came because we were concerned about the boy."

She looked confused. "About Lyle? But why? He hasn't been up to any mischief. He hasn't been out of the house all day..." She had started to sit down but then she bobbed up again, a look of panic of her face. She reached out and grabbed my arm. "You don't mean
my
boy... Jed isn't... I mean... nothing has happened to my son, has it? It that why you're here?"

Clyde gave me a pleading look. I sat in the chair across from her and tried to keep my voice calm. "Mrs. Harding. Earlier this evening, Clyde... Mr. Davis... and I were talking about this business with the kidnapped policeman, and Paulette, and your son, Jed..."

"Jed's all right?" she interrupted. "Nothing's happened to him?"

"As far as we know."

Her head shifted, lifting her chin defiantly. "My son was not responsible for that... that kidnapping," she said. "Jed would never condone something like that. Besides, he couldn't have done it. He was in jail, as you well know."

"I know... that's why we came to see you. You see, Clyde and I are afraid that the same men who took that policeman, trying to force your son's release... might get desperate and..." This was harder than I thought. Upstairs in my room, it had seemed so clear. It was anything but clear when I tried to explain it to Mary Harding. But why should it be easy to tell a frail old woman that the ruthless men who had kidnapped a state trooper had done so because they wanted to free her son so they could kill him? Why should it be easy to talk about people who had committed a horrific murder by hacking a woman to death? Why should it be easy to tell her that her beloved grandson might be next? Even though I thought she already knew or suspected much of this.

"Mrs. Harding, we're afraid they may target Lyle..."

That was as far as I got before she put her hand over her mouth, her eyes horror-struck, her stiff little birdlike body bobbing with agitation. "No. No. No." She shook her head vehemently. "That's not possible. They'd never... What kind of a person are you to come around here at this time of night, waking me up and peddling such frightful stuff?"

"Mrs. Harding," Clyde interrupted. "We're nobody who is a threat to you. We just came because we're worried about the boy."

"Lyle's fine," she said. "He's fine. He's sleeping."

"I don't doubt that that's so, but we'd both rest a lot easier if you'd go check," he said.

Mary Harding might look fragile, but the same will that kept her going in the face of great adversity also supported a tenacious stubbornness, a stubbornness and a suspicion of strangers which I, at least, certainly was. She shook her head. "It's hard enough to get him to sleep," she said. "I'm not about to wake him just to prove to you that he's at home. Now, I appreciate your concern for me... for us... and all you've done... but everything's fine. I think you both should go."

I looked at Clyde but he didn't seem to have any suggestions. What more could we do? We'd tried. We could tell her the truth, as far as we knew it. I gave it one more try. "Look, Mrs. Harding, I don't know how much you know about what's going on around here..."

Mary Harding turned on me and suddenly she didn't look like a fragile old woman. She looked like a very cold, angry old woman. "I probably know a whole lot more than you do, young lady, seeing as you've been with us about a week and I've been around here for almost eighty years. And yes, I know why Jed's afraid to get out of jail and I know something happened to that worthless wife of his. But they've got their rule. They'd never lay a hand on the boy and you've no call to come around here, scaring me, and claiming that they would. Seems to me you've got a lot of nerve, a woman who can't even be bothered to comb her hair or wash her face, waking people up in the nighttime to scare them out of their wits with some crazy theory about my son's friends kidnapping his little boy. You don't know anything about us."

"Mrs. Harding... please... we just came to warn you..."

"I don't need to be warned about my own neighbors, missy." She rose in a clear act of dismissal.

There wasn't anything more I could do. And maybe she was right. I do have a habit of being very sure of myself but no one is always right. I got up, slowly and carefully, the way I had to remind myself to do things for a while, and turned toward the door. Behind me, Clyde tried one more time. "I wish you'd just consider..." then altered it to, "I'm sorry we bothered you, Mrs. Harding," and came after me.

She stood with her arms folded across her chest, watching us leave. Obviously her rules about seeing guests out didn't apply here, because she didn't walk us to the door. Clyde shut it behind us with a gravity and finality that signaled his discouragement better than words and walked, without speaking, down the steps. We were almost to the car when the screen door flew open and a distraught Mary Harding hurried out. "Oh, Lord help me," she cried. "Lord help me. You were right. They've taken the boy. They've taken my little boy. They've taken Lyle."