Stolen Away (21 page)

The furniture in my corner room was sparse—bed, nightstand, small table, dresser. There were faded places on the wallpaper where framed photos, paintings, mirrors or whatever had once hung. Wind rattled the boarded-up windows, fighting to get in, somewhat successfully. Cozy it wasn’t, but the bed had clean sheets and sufficient blankets, so I thanked God and Gus the caretaker for small favors. I stripped to my underwear—wishing I’d worn long johns—and settled in. I had a lot on my mind, but it had been a long, strange day, and sleep took me quickly.

I awoke just as quickly, when—how long after, I’m not sure—my door creaked open and a small female figure stood there; light from the hall made a shapely silhouette through a sheer nightgown, a nicely top-heavy silhouette that I recognized, even sleep-dazed, as Evalyn’s.

“Nate,” she whispered. “Are you awake?”

“Sure,” I said, sitting up. Actually, I
was
awake—the kind of wide awake you can be when you’re startled into it.

She shut the door and the room went nearly black. I could barely make her shape out in the darkness; she was standing next to me, next to the bed, but I sensed her more than saw her. For one thing, she smelled good, cloaked in a perfume that suggested night-blooming jasmine. Then light flashed—a match—as she lit a red candle on my nightstand, a nightstand incidentally that bore no lamp.

In the flickery light from the candle, she stood before me with her beautiful breasts outlined under the sheer black nightgown, their rosy tips staring at me like wide eyes. Speaking of which, Evalyn’s eyes were themselves round and staring—in a pale, haunted face.

“Nate,” she said, “forgive me for this intrusion.”

I threw back the covers. “You’re forgiven.”

She climbed in bed and I threw the covers back up over her, and me. She was shivering.

“You’ve caught a chill,” I said.

“No,” she said.

“What is it then?”

“You’ll think I’m foolish.”

“No I won’t.”

“I…I was in bed, almost asleep. I heard footsteps on the stairs. I wondered who might be coming up. First I thought it might be Inga, but the sounds went right by Inga’s room and came toward mine.”

She pulled the covers around her, tighter. I slipped my arm around her; she was trembling like a frightened deer.

“As they…they reached my door, these footsteps, they stopped. I thought that any moment, whoever it was would enter my room. I thought, perhaps, it was you…after last night, perhaps a midnight rendezvous….”

“I haven’t been out of my room, Evalyn.”

She nodded, as if she knew that already. “Across from my room is a doorway to the stairs to the third floor—which is shut off. I don’t even know where the key is. I heard footsteps going up those stairs. Then I heard the footsteps above me. Above the ceiling of my room.”

“Maybe it’s Inga.”

“I don’t think so. I got up, went into the hallway. The third-floor door was locked.”

“It wasn’t me up, wandering. You don’t think Means doubled back, for some reason?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. The caretaker doesn’t live on the grounds; he has a little place in Bradley Hills. Why would he be stalking around?”

“If you’re concerned…”

“It could be one of the kidnappers, checking us out, couldn’t it?”

“It’s possible.”

She turned to me; her eyes were as frightened as they were lovely. “Can I stay with you tonight?”

“You talked me into it. What about Inga? Are you concerned about what she might think…?”

“I have no secrets from Inga. Could we block the door?”

I told her we could; I got out of bed, moved the dresser in front of the door, and got my nine millimeter out of my travel bag and put it on the nightstand.

“Slide over,” I told her. I wanted to be next to the gun.

She slid over. “I’m a damned fool.”

“This house would give Frankenstein the willies.” I climbed in bed next to her. “Look, it could’ve been your imagination. You might’ve been dreaming, or hearing night sounds…”

“It is a noisy night.”

“Sure. Why don’t you get some sleep?”

“Hold me, would you, Nate? Hold me.”

I held her.

“Don’t blow out the candle,” she said.

“I won’t.”

“Why do you put up with me?”

“I like women with big money and big breasts.”

“You’re terrible.”

“You really think so?”

“No.”

The wind shook the windows, boards and glass alike; she grabbed me. She was terrified. So I kissed her, just to settle her down. It led to more.

“You must think
I’m
terrible,” she said, later.

“Not at all.”

“You think I’m shallow. You think I’m silly.”

“Sure. But not terrible.”

She laughed; it was a husky laugh. “I’m getting old, Nate. These breasts of mine are starting to droop.”

“Not that I can see. Anyway, I’ll be glad to lift ’em for you—anytime.”

“You. You.”

I kissed her again. She seemed to have forgotten about her kidnapper or ghost or whatever-it-was making footsteps in the hall and above the ceiling. Or had she invented that to find a way into my room, without looking “terrible”?

“That’s an ominous-looking thing.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.

“I mean the gun.”

“Oh. Well, ominous is a good way for a gun to look.”

“Have…have you ever killed anyone with it?”

“Yes. I killed a kidnapper not so long ago. That’s why Lindy thinks I’m a prince.”

“You talk about it so…casually.”

“I’m not really casual about it, Evalyn. I don’t ever mean to use a gun casually. That gun of all guns….”

“What about that gun?”

I didn’t say anything.

“What is it, Nate?”

“Evalyn, I…nothing.”

“What?”

“Well. Look, I’ll be frank with you. I might’ve dismissed you as a silly, shallow woman, if it weren’t for some of what you’ve been through. If you don’t mind my saying.”

“Such as?”

I swallowed. “Losing your son.”

She touched my face.

I touched her face.

She said, “You lost somebody, too, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“Nate…are you…?”

I wiped my face with my hand; the hand came away wet. “No. Sweating. These blankets.”

“Who, Nate? Who did you lose?”

And I told her. I told her slowly, and in detail, about my father. About what I’d done to make him use my gun on himself. About how I carried that gun so I wouldn’t forget.

“But I do forget sometimes,” I admitted. “Life and death are cheap in this lousy goddamn world. Particularly in this lousy goddamn depression.”

“I’m not by nature contemplative,” she said, hugging my arm, staring into the near-darkness. “But the thing I wonder about most is why the universe is geared so to cruelty.”

I kissed her forehead.

The wind was settling down, now; it was making a whistling, almost soothing sound.

“Why don’t you tell me about your son? Tell me about your little boy.”

She did. For perhaps an hour, she told me of her “sweet and preternaturally wise” little boy. Little Vinson was the only ghost in the house, as the candle burned down and night turned to morning, and he was not a sinister presence.

A few hours later, the footsteps in the hall and the thought of ghosts seemed foolish to us as we went down for breakfast. Evalyn was wearing a casual black-and-white frock; I’d been allowed to abandon the chauffeur’s uniform for one of my two suits. Inga was fixing bacon and eggs—Gus the caretaker had dropped off some fresh supplies, it seemed—and the smells of the food and the morning were refreshing.

But Inga seemed even gloomier than usual.

We sat at an unpretentious square table in the kitchen as Inga served us our eggs and bacon and toast with a side order of bloodshot, black-circled eyes.

“My dear,” Evalyn said to the maid, “you must have had a dreadful night!”

Inga said nothing.

“Serve yourself, dear,” Evalyn told her, “and join us.”

Sullenly, Inga did. Her blonde hair hung in strings as she poked at her food. Suddenly she looked up, her eyes as wide and haunted as Evalyn’s had been when she entered my room the night before.

“Madam, if it is just the same to you, could I please change my room tonight?”

“Why, dear?”

“Somebody kept pulling the sheets off my bed every time I went to sleep.”

“Inga,” I said, “is there a lock on your door?”

“Yes—and I used it.”

“And your windows are boarded up, like mine?”

“Yes.”

Evalyn leaned forward, her blue eyes piercing. “You mean to say, Inga, that someone pulled the sheets off your bed when you were alone in the room, with the door locked and the windows boarded up?”

“Yes. Several times this happened. I hardly sleep.”

“You don’t think anybody was hiding in your room or anything?” I asked.

“I had a flashlight,” she said. “I looked under the bed, and in the closet. I was alone.”

“I’ll take that room tonight,” I told her.

For the first time Inga smiled at me. “Thank you, Mr. Heller.”

“With any luck,” Evalyn said, cheerfully, “before then, Means will show up and we’ll take delivery of ‘the book’ and be well out of this funhouse.”

But Means didn’t show.

We spent most of the day, Evalyn and I, walking the weedy, snow-patched grounds, threading through the tall bony naked trees, following paths Evalyn’s mother had traced. Often we held hands, like kids going steady; maybe, in a way, that’s what we were.

That afternoon, elderly, lanky, grossly mustached Gus—who chewed tobacco that he smelled just a little worse than—opened the door to the long-unused third floor. Gus claimed to have the only key, and the door seemed not to have been used in a while—and the caretaker had a hell of a hard time working the key in that rusty lock.

There were no ghosts on the third story other than a few more pieces of sheet-covered furniture. A layer of dust coated the floor, undisturbed by footprints.

Evalyn, standing just behind me, her fingers on my arm, said, “I must have just heard noises the wind made.”

“Must have,” I said.

I didn’t believe in haunted houses, of course, but then lately I’d been exposed to the likes of Edgar Cayce, Sister Sarah Sivella and Chief Yellow Feather, and I was starting to think we ought to start looking for Lindy’s kid in a magician’s top hat.

That evening was just as cold as the previous one, and we again huddled in the kitchen, drinking coffee, wearing blankets, waiting for either Means to show up or the phone to ring or at least some goddamn ghost to materialize. Nothing did.

Evalyn and I spent the night in the room Inga had abandoned. We sat up virtually all night, when we weren’t otherwise entertaining ourselves; Evalyn smoked a pack of cigarettes, and I ran out of Sheiks. It was a long, tiring, memorable night, but no ghosts showed, no footsteps sounded in the hall or on the stairs or on the ceiling, and nobody, flesh or vapor, pulled the covers off.

She had fallen asleep in my arms, both of us half-sitting up, pillows behind us, blankets sheathing us. Light seeped through the cracks of the boarded-up windows. The long night was over.

As I was getting out of bed, I heard something fall heavily to the floor; I jumped, and Evalyn jumped awake.

“What…?” she began.

I stood, frozen, looking at a small table against the side wall, where four or five books were in the process of tumbling to the floor, from between two secure bronze horse-head bookends.

I looked at her.

She looked at me.

Our eyes would’ve been right at home in a minstrel show.

I walked slowly over to the table. The books were on the floor, in an ungainly heap. The bookends stood alone, on the table but flush against the wall, as had been the books, before they fell. It was as if someone had shoved them on the floor; only the wall was where the books would have to have been shoved from.

I shrugged, said it was nothing, started getting my clothes on. Evalyn nodded, shrugged, padded down the hall to her own room to dress. We said nothing more about it, not over breakfast anyway; we said almost nothing at all, actually, except to comment on what a nice sunny day it was for a change.

Shortly after breakfast the phone jangled out in the hall and scared the hell out of all of us. The rings echoed through the big, mostly empty house, as Evalyn rushed to answer.

She held the receiver sideways so I could stand next to her and listen.

“Hogan speaking,” said the voice of Gaston Means. “Who is this?”

“This is Eleven,” Evalyn said.

“Eleven, we couldn’t get through with the book last night. We had a close call.”

“A close call?”

“Listen carefully: come to my home at Chevy Chase this afternoon. Be very, very careful of your movements; make certain you’re not followed. I’ll see you there at half past two.”

And we heard the click of him hanging up.

She looked at me, phone still in her hand. “I’m going, of course.”

“Not alone.” I touched her shoulder, firmly. “This could be a replay of the Maude King ‘accident.’”

“Come with me, then. He didn’t say I couldn’t bring my chauffeur.”

So early that afternoon I put on my chauffeur’s uniform and, with her navigating, found my way to Chevy Chase, in Maryland just across the state line from the District of Columbia. The neighborhood was residential and affluent, albeit not affluent in the Evalyn Walsh McLean sense. The house at 112 Leland was a big white two-story pillared number with a spacious, sloping lawn behind a wire-mesh fence—a comfy castle with the prisonlike touch of the fence and, here and there, floodlights mounted to posts. My guess was alarms and switches were hooked up, as well—Means had invested in a considerable security system.

The gate was open, however—we were expected, at least Evalyn was—and I stood behind her with my chauffeur’s cap in my hands as she rang the bell. A tall, slender youth of perhaps sixteen, neat as a pin in a diamond-patterned sweater and gray slacks, answered the door.

“We’re here to see Mr. Means,” Evalyn said, smiling.

The boy nodded; his eyes were large, brown, guileless.