The desperate hours, a novel (7 page)

miracle, had to find a way to keep them from taking anyone along with them at midnight.

He uttered a few words that he knew, vaguely, were not blasphemous although tinged with fury; they were the opposite : humble prayer of some sort, incoherent and mumbled, addressed to the darkness around him.

He went into the house through the side door, crossed the sun porch and then the living room toward Glenn Griffin waiting in the hall, out of sight of the front windows. It was not until he was standing there in the hall and after Robish had clumped in from the dining room and snatched the wrapped bottle that Dan realized that there was somethuig odd about the living room.

"Didn't get any ideas, did you. Pop?" Glenn proceeded then, while holding the gun, to search Dan, touching every pocket with that thoroughness and arrogance that Dan had come to despise.

Dan permitted this, standing rigidly, his eyes returning to the living room. He must have been behaving and reacting in a dreamlike manner, his mind told him, or he would have asked at once the question that now surged up in him, hot and choking: "Where's Cindy?"

"She's gone out, dear," Eleanor said, from her chair. "It's all right. She'll be careful."

"Out?" His voice was only an echo.

"With Charles Wright. He came anyway. Don't ask me why. And they saw him drive in, so they let Cindy go out with him before he could get inside."

"I talked to her, Hilliard," Glenn Griffin explained easily. "She's a smart gal. She won't make any mistakes. I told her what would happen if she did feel like talking. Robish now, he's jumpy, see. He thinks I'm a fool. What about you, Hilliard? You don't think I'm a fool, do you?"

"Not a fool," Dan said slowly. "No."

Glenn laughed. "Pop, you know what? You're all right.

You're a real funny guy. Now you can go in and sit down while I have a litde drink with Robish. Wouldn't want him to kill the whole bottle, would we?"

Dan felt himself moving into the living room; vaguely he saw his reflection in the windows as he sat down—a slow stiff old-man way of sitting, holding the arms of the chair against the pain that still climbed up and down his side and burned hot in his shoulder.

"Cindy won't take any chances, Dan," Eleanor said, trying to smile. "You're not worried about that, are you?"

"Of course not," Dan lied, recalling the defiant contempt in his daughter's eyes. "Cindy's too smart for that. Trust Griffin to know."

"Dan . . ." Eleanor lowered her voice to a whisper. "Dan, you didn't . . . ?"

Dan shook his head.

Eleanor relaxed slightly. "Because it's only such a short time now, dear. Till they go. Just think how we'll laugh about this at breakfast, darling."

Dan stared at her. Her face told him that she would never laugh at it. She could laugh at nearly everything, but she would never laugh at this. Besides, she still clung to the hope that when the men left, all would return to normal. Dan had accepted the fact that this was not possible; and he knew he was right.

And what if Cindy, herself free now, moved by that deep anger that, in her, seemed to be without shock, perhaps even without fear—what if she made some foolish desperate attempt to get help? What if she decided to confide in Charles Wright?

Certainly she would go over all the possibilities that Dan had struggled with, while away from the house; Dan had conquered the abortive temptation. But what would Cindy conclude? You could never be sure that someone else, even your own daughter, might not examine the same set of facts and arrive at the opposite conclusions. 55

You could not, really, be sure of anything. This, too, Dan HiUiard had learned since coming home from work at a little before 6 o'clock . . .

There was a cold glint in Cindy's eyes—very puzzling to Charles Wright, who had always thought of those eyes as soft and, if not exactly merry, at least unclouded and hinting at gaiety. Sitting beside her in the small seat of the sports car in the parking area of a drive-in restaurant—where he had brought her finally, after suggesting almost every place else in the city, including the country club—Chuck sipped at his coffee and let the evening's silence gather around again.

Over and over she had assured him, finally with some impatience, that she was fine; everything was fine, it was just this cold nagging her. But Chuck had known Cynthia Hilliard for nearly three months, and he had never seen her behave like this before. Even at the office, where she was brisk and businesslike, she managed a secret smile occasionally. And tonight, her eyes were clear and hard, with no evidence of a cold in them.

Chuck himseK had been involved in a problem of his own, that problem being Miss Cynthia Hilliard: what exactly did he feel about her? She wasn't the sort of girl Chuck normally chose for a playmate. That much was granted. Since coming home from the Marines, he steered clear of the ones who might want to turn a nice thing into a permanent and therefore, in his book, a not so nice thing. Chuck had worked out for himself a very neat little philosophy, not very original perhaps but congruent with his nature as he saw it: life is short, marriage is long, and love is something no one can depend on, ever. If this was, as his father irascibly suggested, only the fashionable cynicism of youth, so be it. He, Chuck Wright, was stuck with it.

But with this Cindy Hilliard, things had been different from the beginning. This fact bewildered him and continued to fill him with an odd high-running excitement, night and day, whether he was with her or not. What did it mean? And why was he sticking around to find out since, along the hazy edges of his thinking, he already suspected that she could not, in any conceivable way, fit into the pattern of detachment from the ordinary and conventional that he himself had decided was for him.

Tonight now, she had Ued to him on the telephone and she had been lying ever since—since she had leaped out the door of her house before he could so much as touch the doorbell and had brushed past him and climbed into the car. In the hour he had been with her, she had allowed him to park, then she had thrown herself into his arms, clinging to him for perhaps a minute in a startling and rather desperate sort of way; afterwards, she had drawn herself away, insisted on a cigarette and then fallen into a silence that shut him out completely. He had explained that he came by to bring her the novel she had remarked on at lunch, thinking she might enjoy reading it while in bed. Cindy hadn't heard this at all. Her eyes had been then, as they were now, fixed on some horizon that he could not see.

"Look, I don't mind being ignored," he lied, twisting his tall, athletic body about in the small seat, "but you might give me a hint. I can't say I know anything, being only a poor lawyer who spends his young Ufe writing briefs that any college sophomore could write, but I'm not the town moron. Or am I?"

"I'm sorry, Chuck." Just that. Flat. With a period.

Chuck shrugged, offered a cigarette which was either not seen or ignored, then lighted one for himself. "Okay, okay. Then I'll talk. Look, Cindy—here's a fellow. He was walking along a street. The sun was shining. He was whistling. He hadn't paid much attention to the sun for a long time, this 57

fellow, and when he whistled, it was usually because he was kidding himself into thinking he was a happy guy. But this time I'm telling you about, nothing in particular or stupendous had happened. Oh, he was running around with a girl, a very pretty girl, but he'd run around with girls before. Anyway, he was whistling, just because he felt like whistling. He was even kind of shocked at himself underneath—in a darned pleasant sort of way, though. Then he turned around a corner and wham! Something hit him in the face. A door. A blank door. Locked tight . . . Now the question is, honey, was this fellow kidding himseK all along?"

Slowly—very slowly then—Cindy turned to him. For a split second that hard gleam was gone. Then it happened. The small face trembled, but only a moment, a quivering along the deU-cate jawline; then the face fell apart, twisting oddly, going all wrong. She was lowering her head, her lip shaking, and before he could speak around the sudden bulge in his throat, she was against him, full against his chest.

His heart tightening, Chuck held her. Under his hands and his arms he could feel her flesh leaping and shuddering. The questions surged in him, but he said nothing. He caught the fresh scent of that lovely deep red hair, and waited.

But when she didn't speak, or cr)', his mind leaped to its own conclusions and froze around them, the suspicions of the last few weeks hardening into words: "They don't like me, do they?"

"What?"

"Your people. Mr. and Mrs. Dan Hilliard. They don't think I'm worth much, do they?"

Cindy, with her head buried against his chest, her mind battering like a trapped wild bird against the stiff helplessness that only added to her anger, decided that she had to tell him. Chuck would know a way, find a way. She had gone over it all, all evening long, and she could find no way out. But Chuck would know what to do. There had to be a crack in the wall if only a person were free enough and detached enough to see it; if only a person weren't tied up in this blind terrible anger that made you want to act, not think; kill, not talk.

"Chuck, I have to tell you. Chuck "

But then, just then with the words already forming in her throat, she remembered Glenn Griffin whispering hastily into her ear as he half-led, half-shoved her toward the door an hour ago: You tell anyone, we'll take your mother along on our little ride after while, redhead. Maybe the kid, too, in case the cops get wise to when we're blowing out of here tonight. Any shooting, you folks get it first, see.

"Yes, Cindy?" Chuck prompted.

"Take me home."

"What?"

"Please, Chuck, no more talk, no more questions. Take me home."

"Not now. What were you going to say?"

"Please, please, please."

She was sitting up straight again, in her own corner, and he caught again the hard flatness in her blue eyes—almost as though she would like to strike him, as though she hated him.

He took her home. What the hell, he was thinking, with the irritation erupting through him. She had slammed that door again, harder this time. He whipped the miniature car northward, hit the boulevard, driving fast. What the hell. Mr. Hil-liard looked upon him as reckless, restless, irresponsible. Okay. Fine. That's what he had been the last few years; that's what he was. The law office bored him. What do you want, Chuck— another war? No. No, thanks, no more of that. Among a lot of other things, he didn't want the dull routine of life such as his parents and the Hilliards lived. There had to be more to his life than that. And he was not going to be pushed into it, not by anyone, including the lovely red-haired girl who had just shut that door in his face. Why had she? Probably Papa HilUard had had his say: Chuck Wright isn't going to marry you, 59

Cindy, you or any one else. And she had believed him. This was the brush-off.

Anger curled in Chuck Wright. What else do you expect? Mr. Hilliard was right, wasn't he? You don't intend to marry her, do you? That much was for sure. Then why the balled-up, bitter-tasting resentment?

He turned into the Hilliard driveway, and he noted a small but, to him, interesting fact: Mr. Hilhard had failed, for the first time within Chuck's memory, to put his car in the garage for the night. Tsk-tsk, he thought satirically, tsk-tsk, Hilliard —what will happen to our little world if we start breaking with our trivial little ironclad habits?

The house was dark except for a hall hght upstairs.

Chuck jumped out, came around to open Cindy's door. She still sat there. She looked unable or unwilling to stir.

He felt a strange melting sensation in the pit of his stomach. His pride forgotten, youthful anger gone, he touched her arm. For a split second he was sure that she was going to crumble against him again. Her gaze still held the look of stolid hatred. And, no matter how he figured it, that didn't jibe with the other, with his own conclusions about her tonight. It seemed almost distinct from her, an impersonal force.

"Chuck," she whispered suddenly, "do you have a gun?"

He couldn't speak. There was no answer to that question that seemed to come from nowhere, staggering him, taking his breath.

"Cindy, can I help? What do you mean? Cindy!"

But she was already up and out of the seat, running toward the house, her breath sounding above the click of her heels. He followed her to the rear door, the one she always used because there was no key to the side door and her mother carried the one to the front door. She turned there, while her hand fumbled at the lock. "Forget it. Chuck. Can you forget everything?"

"No," he said and took the key from her trembling hand

and inserted it and unlocked the door. "Cindy, you can't go in now, like this. Let me come in with you. We've got to "

"No!" The whisper threatened to grow loud. "No," she hissed. "Leave me alone, Chuck. Just stay away and leave me alone, that's all!"

She slipped into the house, closed the door. Chuck whirled about, strode to the car. He discovered, without really noting the fact, that he still held the key to the back door of the Milliard house in his palm. He shoved it into his pocket, stepped into the car, maneuvered it in reverse past Cindy's coupe, past the blue sedan, onto the boulevard which was now dark and totally deserted.

This time the door was slammed and locked. Bolted tight. But Chuck couldn't say what the hell. At least he knew he couldn't make it stick. Not now. What would a girl like Cindy HiUiard want with a gun? If nothing else, he'd have the answer to that one. Hed get the answer tomorrow morning, first thing.

Dan heard the back door open and close. He had come up to bed at 11, following orders, of course. Since then, he had lain there with his hand stretched between the twin beds, holding Eleanor's closely but without pressure in his grasp. In the darkness he imagined the minutes passing. As yet, although his mind had worked its way into, through and around the problem thousands of times, he had not decided what he would do if Glenn GrifBn insisted upon taking any of them along when he left. He dared not rely on impulse when the time came—it was well after 11 and the woman should arrive any minute now— and yet he could not devise any threat strong enough to prevent GrifRn's doing exactly what he pleased then, as now.