Night Walker (11 page)

He frowned at all of this, put the gun back into his pocket, and went out into the hall. The shattered flashlight was still lying to the right of the front door where the bullet had hurled it; little shards of glass from the lens were scattered glittering all over the floor. The two packed suitcases stood in the middle of the hall where Elizabeth had dropped them, after the shot, as she ran forward to help him. None of this had been touched since last night. Even the hall light was still burning.

He switched it off, picked up the broken flashlight, and went on through the dining room into the kitchen, which had apparently been modernized fairly recently. It was one of those bright laboratories of formica, rubber tile, and white enameled steel which the appliance companies liked to recommend as proper settings for their products. This one had the works, including an electric stove with the most elaborate instrument panel of Young’s experience; it had a refrigerator, deep-freeze, dishwasher, and fluorescent lighting; it had a breakfast nook in one corner; and it was spotlessly clean. Elizabeth was standing at the stove, still wearing the pink slacks and sweater of the night before. She did not look around when he came through the swinging door.

“Breakfast will be ready in a minute,” she said.

He asked, “What do I do with this?”

The question forced her to glance over her shoulder at the flashlight he held out. He saw that her face had the pale and shiny look of sleeplessness.

“Heavens, throw it anywhere,” she said irritably. “Why ask me? There’s a trash can somewhere around.”

“Thanks,” he said. “And where do I find a broom?”

“What?”

“A broom. To sweep the glass out of the front hall, or do you think it adds to the quaint charm of the place?”

She ignored his sarcasm. “There’s a broom in the broom closet.”

He checked the obvious retort, located the closet in question and equipped himself, and started out of the kitchen. At the door he stopped.

“Why the gun?”

She poked at the sputtering contents of the skillet, and pushed at her hair with the back of the hand that held the spatula, before turning to look at him again. “What, honey?”

“The gun. Last known to be reposing in my pants pocket, this morning discovered on the living room easychair.”

“Why,” she said, “I was scared he might come back.”

“So you stood watch all night? Thanks.”

“I’m not asking you to believe it, honey.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t believe it.”

“I declare, it’s pretty obvious what you think. Well, go do your sweeping, hear? These eggs won’t wait forever.”

When he returned, she was setting two places in the breakfast nook. He put the broom away where he had found it and paused by the adjacent window to look out. There was a low fog on the river, just dissipating in the sunlight, and a white sloop, sails furled, was gliding down the channel with the magical look of a sailboat proceeding through a flat calm under auxiliary power.
The masthead remained in sight at all times, but the lower rigging and the hull kept losing themselves in the mist.

Young said, “Well, she’s right on schedule.”

“Who?”

“The Decker kid.”

“Oh.”

The sloop slid past the dock and the big power cruiser moored there, and swung away out of the mist, toward open water. Young watched it for a while, with uneasy speculation. The small figure slouched in the cockpit looked harmless enough at this distance; she was wearing a short, bright green jacket and a matching hat that hid the color of her hair. She appeared to be smoking a cigarette; presently she rose and pitched the butt over the side and went below, leaving her ship to shift for itself. After a while the little vessel began to swing off course. The girl came out of the cabin carrying what seemed to be a mug of coffee, glanced casually around, and remedied the situation. Then she stood there, facing forward, drinking her coffee and steering with the tiller between her bare knees, with a kind of negligent and arrogant confidence. Confident people annoyed Young, and he looked away, to find Elizabeth beside him.

“What is it, honey?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I wish I knew how the kid fits
into this.” Then he shrugged his shoulders. “That’s a lot to ask. Hell, I don’t even know how I fit into it, do I, Elizabeth?”

“David,” she said. “Honey—”

He swung away from her. “What’s that cruiser doing down there, anyway?” he asked abruptly. “It couldn’t have wintered there; even if you don’t have enough ice here to cut it to pieces one good storm would have finished it. It’s a hell of an exposed location to keep a boat tied up to a dock, even in summer.”

She said, “Why, Larry used to — Does it matter, honey?”

“I’m asking,” he said.

She sighed. “All right. Larry used to keep it at a mooring you had to row out to, but before he left he took the boat to the yard and pulled the mooring up on shore. This spring I — I got a letter from him asking me to have the yard fix it up and bring it around; it — seemed like little enough to do.”

He did not look at her. He knew her well enough now that he did not even have to see her face to know when she was lying, although her reasons were not always clear.

“I declare,” she said, “I didn’t know I was going to have to look after it like a baby or I’d never — Bob had to show me how to pump out the water and fix the ropes and the bumpers or whatever you call
them....” Her voice died away. “Breakfast is ready, honey,” she said at last.

He nodded, not trusting himself to look at her. He held tightly to the thought of the gun, heavy in his pocket. Liar or not, she had sat up all night with a gun to protect him as he slept. He wanted to believe that.

There was an uncomfortable intimacy to the breakfast nook in the corner; it was hard to retain an attitude of aloofness toward a girl when you had to face her in a cramped space where your knees met, across a tiny table over which your hands were bound to collide in reaching for one thing or another for which neither of you had wanted to ask, not wanting to accept any favors or assistance whatever. After a while the silence became ridiculous, and Young spoke.

“This is a nice kitchen you’ve got here.”

“At least it’s mine,” she said without raising her glance from the plate.

“What do you mean?”

“All the rest is his or his family’s. This is mine.” Her voice became stronger. “I declare, I never thought I’d settle for a darn old kitchen, but — but it’s the only place in the house where I can sit and look at something that never belonged to anybody else, just me. Just me and Westinghouse and General Electric, honey.” She licked her lips. “That stove — that stove
didn’t come out of the country house of Colonel Oglethorpe Wilson’s maternal grandmother. It just came straight from Mr. Spofford, the local dealer, to me. The deep-freeze — the deep-freeze wasn’t ever a part of the estate of — of Governor Winthrop Wilson and nobody ever had to trace it to the attic of a little old farm down in the south end of the county and — have it restored by — I don’t have to remember where the darn thing came from, either, or why it’s important. It’s important because it keeps the food cold, and if it doesn’t work I send for a serviceman, and if it wears out I’ll get rid of it and buy another one. I — I don’t have to pretend I think it’s something precious and wonderful just because it once belonged to some old fogy I never saw who’d have looked down his nose at me like all the rest of the stupid, pompous, stuck-up—”

She checked herself abruptly, and drew a long, harsh breath. After a moment she made as if to rise. He pulled his knees out of the way, and she slid out of the booth and walked quickly to the stove. He saw her use a knuckle at the corner of one eye, before she picked up the coffee pot and came back to fill the cups. Then she carried the pot back to the stove and stood there for a moment. The way her shoulders squared themselves slightly beneath the thin, pink sweater, before she turned again, told him that she had made up her mind, at last, to speak.

“Honey,” she said, “honey, I didn’t know it was going to be like this. I didn’t know it was going to be you.”

Then she walked quickly toward the door, almost running before she got there; but when she reached the door she stopped and turned again.

“And I — I didn’t know he was going to be there last night; and I didn’t know he even had a gun. You mustn’t think — I can’t bear it if you think — I didn’t send you out that door to be shot at; I didn’t!”

When he reached her, she had turned her face against the door jamb, pressing against it hard as if seeking the pain, so that when she looked up at him, sensing him above her, there was a small, round, pink mark in the center of her forehead. He noticed that there was a trace of dried blood on her cheek; presumably where a flying sliver of glass had cut her the night before. This disturbed him; he took out his handkerchief and moistened it with his tongue and wiped the blood away gently, relieved to find that the cut itself was insignificant. All this time she was watching him with wide, questioning eyes. The pink mark on her forehead had died away again, so that her face was quite pale, even to the lips. Suddenly she was in his arms.

After a while he said, “Elizabeth.”

Her voice was muffled. “Yes, honey.”

“Pardon me,” he said, stroking her hair, “but isn’t it
about time to decide whose team you’re pitching for?” He felt her become quite still. “I love you but I can’t take a hell of a lot more of this; and I don’t think you can, either. You’ve got to make up your mind; you can’t have it both ways. First, you protect Larry Wilson from me and then you turn around and sit up all night to protect me from Larry Wilson and then you turn around again and start lying like hell to protect him... It won’t work, darling. I mean, you can’t have it both ways, or did I say that? I appreciate that the guy is your husband and that there are some things you can’t do to anybody you’ve once been married to. Even the law doesn’t demand that. I certainly don’t ask it. But I’m conceited enough to think that you like me—”

He stopped, because her shoulders had begun to shake. He released her, startled, and saw her take a step backward and toss back her long, dark hair, with a swing of her head, to stare at him. Her hands came together to grip each other so tightly that the knuckles showed white and bloodless. Then her head went back and she was laughing helplessly, unable to stop.

He spoke into the telephone. “This is Lawrence Wilson. Yes, Wilson. I’d like to speak to Dr. Henshaw, please... Doc, you’d better get out here on the double. Elizabeth’s throwing some kind of a wingding and I’ll be damned if I can get her to snap out of... All right, Doc.”

He put the phone down, drew a long breath, and went back up the stairs to the big light room with its basically neat, old-fashioned furniture that was overlaid, as if with tidal debris, with the litter of Elizabeth’s occupancy. She looked a little like tidal debris herself, lying where she had flung herself across the big, untidy bed. She had a pillow pressed to her face and he thought she had stuffed part of it into her mouth to silence herself. Her body had a look of trembling rigidity like that, he thought, of a hawser stretched to the breaking point; when a line began to vibrate like that you slacked off quickly if you did not want it to carry away.

But there was nothing he could do. He had considered slapping her face — a popular remedy — and
had found himself incapable of striking her. He had also debated putting her into the bathtub and turning on the cold shower, but this had seemed like a messy and humiliating procedure, especially if it did not work. Besides, the sight of him, or his touch, seemed to set her off again; and although he was tremendously worried about her he could not help resenting, a little, being considered so excruciatingly funny, even by a girl who at the moment was obviously not responsible for her own behavior.

It was a relief to hear the car in the drive. Young stepped out of the room as silently as he had entered, and waited by the stairs. Presently the doctor’s bald head appeared, and Henshaw came up, somewhat breathless from the climb, carrying his bag. He passed Young with a nodded greeting, went to the bedroom door and looked in, and turned back again.

“What happened, Mr. Young?”

“We had a kind of rough night out here, Doc,” Young said. He had had time to think things over; and now he studied the man facing him with some care. Henshaw looked as middle-aged and respectable as ever in the same or another baggy brown suit: a heavy, sagging man with a lined, honest face, the mouth of which, however, had a slightly peevish and womanly look. Young had not noticed that look before, but he noticed it now. A man with a mouth like that was not to be trusted. “Kind of rough,”
Young said softly. “I guess it just got her down. I almost threw one myself when it happened. I’ve been shot at by a lot of people, mostly Japs, but I’ve never had a ghost use me as a target before.”

Something changed in Henshaw’s eyes. “A ghost?”

“Let’s quit kidding, Doc,” Young said gently. “I don’t know what’s going on around here, but I do know that Larry Wilson’s alive. He took a potshot at me last night. Elizabeth put me to bed and stayed up with a gun in case he should come back. Maybe it just wore her down, or maybe it was a delayed reaction or something; anyway, she got hysterical right after breakfast. I don’t know just what set her off.”

“Alive?” the doctor whispered. “Wilson is alive?”

Young said, “Cut it out, Doc. It was a good gag while it lasted, but now you can cut it out.”

Henshaw let his breath go out in a little sigh. “All right, Mr. Young. I’ll cut it out. We’ll talk about it later.” He took a fresh grip on his bag.

Young said, “Doc.”

About to turn away, the older man looked back. “Yes?”

“Careful, Doc. Easy with the hypo. I suppose you have to put her to sleep, but it would be nice if she woke up again, don’t you think?” Henshaw did not speak, and Young went on: “There’s a lot of funny stuff going on around here, Doc, and you’re one of the funnier parts, I think. Any man who goes for a
woman half his age is a screwball anyway; and any doctor who’ll monkey with murder, real or phony, doesn’t really take his profession too damn seriously.”