Desperate Measures

by David R. Morrell

  “To make sure what stopped?”

  Meecham nervously tapped his fingers against his martini glass. “This is all off the record.”

  “If that’s the way you want it.”

  “It’s the way it has to be.” Meecham seemed to struggle with himself in order to say the words. “Duncan Kline was a pedophile.”

  Pittman stared.

  After further painful hesitation, Meecham continued. “A boy’s prep school was a perfect environment for him. From what my father told me, I gather that Duncan Kline was a brilliant instructor, quick, amusing, encouraging, the sort of charismatic figure who attracts the brightest of students. Apparently he was also an athlete, particularly when it came to rowing. His policy was to assess each incoming class, to select the most promising boys, a very small group, a half dozen or so, and then to nurture them throughout their four years at Grollier. I suspect that he also chose them on the basis of how emotionally distant they were from their parents, how keenly they needed a substitute father. Certainly my father was never close to his father. Duncan Kline encouraged them to take small private seminars from him. He trained them to be oarsmen and to outdistance the best official Grollier team. He gradually became more and more intimate with them, until by their junior year… As I said, one group from each incoming class. That way, as one group graduated and went on to college, another was there to take that group’s place.”

  Pittman felt sick.

  His face tight with emotion, Meecham took a long sip from his martini. “My father rejected Kline’s advances. Kline backed off. But soon he came back and persisted in making advances. This time, when my father rejected him, Kline was either so indignant or else frightened of being exposed that he made academic life intolerable for my father, giving him impossible assignments, ridiculing him at every opportunity. My father’s grades declined. So did his morale. And his health. Apparently he had some kind of collapse at home during the Easter break of his junior year. He never went back to Grollier.”

  Pittman couldn’t keep dismay from his voice. “But didn’t your father’s parents do anything about Duncan Kline?”

  “Do what?” Meecham shook his head, puzzled. “What would you have had them do?”

  “They should have reported Kline to the authorities. They should have reported the whole mess to the headmaster of the school.”

  Meecham looked at Pittman as if he’d gone insane.

  “Reported…? You obviously don’t grasp the situation. This happened in the early 1930s. The time was repressive. I assure you that topics such as child molestation were definitely not considered fit for conversation. Not in polite society. That type of sordidness existed. Everyone tacitly knew that. But surely it didn’t occur often, and when it did, it happened to other people, lesser people, unrefined, crass people who were economic and moral inferiors.”

  “Dear Lord,” Pittman said.

  Meecham looked more disturbed as he took another long sip from his martini. “That was the prevailing opinion of the time. Grollier boasts governors, senators, congressmen, even a President of the United States among its distinguished alumni. For a student to claim that sexual abuse occurred on a regular basis at that school would have been unthinkable. So many reputations would have been at stake that the authorities would never have treated the charge seriously. They would have been forced to conclude that the student was grievously mistaken, that he was making such an outrageous accusation because he needed to blame someone for his poor grades. As a matter of fact, when my father told his father what was happening at Grollier, his father slapped him, called him a liar, and told him never to repeat such filth again.”

  Pittman was astonished.

  “So my father kept it a secret and never told another person until I suggested to him that Grollier might be a good prep school for my sons.”

  “But surely the other students would have supported your father’s claim,” Pittman said.

  “Would they have? Or would their parents ever have allowed them to be subjected to questions of such a gross nature? I wonder. In any case, it’s a moot issue. The matter never got that far.”

  Her blue eyes intense, Jill leaned forward. “Are we to assume that Duncan Kline made advances to the grand counselors, also? That those advances were accepted?”

  Meecham stared at his martini glass. “They were Duncan Kline’s chosen few, and they did continue to take his seminars. By the time my father told me this—my sons went to prep school in the mid-seventies—it was too late to do anything about Kline himself. He died in the early fifties. By then he’d retired from Grollier and had a place here in Boston. My father said that one of the happiest days of his life was when he read Kline’s obituary. Believe me, my father had very few happy days.”

  Meecham finished his martini and frowned toward the pitcher as if he could use another drink. “I don’t know what you’ve set out to prove, but if there were other instructors like Kline at Grollier and if their counterparts still teach there and if your book exposes them, we’ve both done some good.”

  Suspecting something, Pittman asked, “Would you be willing to be quoted?”

  Meecham reacted sharply. “Of course not. Do you think I’d want that kind of public attention? I told you before, this conversation is strictly off the record. I’m just pointing you in the right direction. Surely someone else would be willing to substantiate what I’ve told you. Ask the grand counselors.” Meecham looked bitterly amused. “See how willing they’d be to go on record.”

  “When Jonathan Millgate was in intensive care, he told his nurse, ‘Duncan. The snow. Grollier.’ What do you suppose he meant by the reference to snow?”

  “I have no idea. Certainly my father never mentioned anything that linked Duncan Kline with snow.”

  “It’s a slang expression for—Could it be a reference to cocaine?”

  “Again, I have no idea. Was that expression even used back in the early thirties? Would someone as distinguished as Jonathan Millgate reduce himself to that type of language?”

  Pittman shrugged in discouragement, then turned, hearing a knock on the door.

  Frederick stepped in. “Mr. Meecham, two policemen are at the door.”

  4

  Pittman felt a hot rush of adrenaline.

  Meecham looked surprised. “Policemen?”

  “Detectives,” Frederick said. “They want to know if you’ve had any contact with someone named Matthew Pittman. He’s traveling with a woman and…” Frederick’s gaze settled on Pittman and Jill.

  Meecham frowned.

  “Where does that door lead?” Pittman stood unexpectedly and crossed the room toward a door in a wall that faced the rear of the house. The door was the only other way out of the room, and since Pittman had no intention of using the door through which Frederick had come, of going out to the corridor where the detectives might see him, he had to take this route. He heard Jill’s footsteps behind him.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Meecham demanded.

  By then, Pittman had pulled the door open and was lunging into a narrow hallway, Jill hurrying to follow. Pittman’s breathing quickened.

  “Stop!” Meecham said.

  On the left, Pittman passed the entrance to the mansion’s kitchen. He had a glimpse of a male cook in a white uniform, who opened his mouth in surprise. Then Pittman, flanked rapidly by Jill, was out of sight, running farther down the hallway, reaching a door, the window of which revealed a cobblestone courtyard.

  Pittman jerked the door open and felt pressure in his chest as he realized that the dusky courtyard was bordered by a high barred gate, an even higher wall, and a carriage house turned into a garage. We’ll never get out of here!

  Dismayed, he swung to look behind him. Frederick appeared at the opposite end of the hallway. The cook appeared at the entrance to the kitchen. Heavy footsteps pounded toward the hallway from the front of the house.

  To the right of the door, stairs led upward. Pittman suddenly thoug
ht of a way to escape and charged up, tugging Jill behind him. At a landing, the stairs veered up on another angle, and Pittman bounded higher, reaching a hallway on an upper level of the house.

  Closed doors lined the hallway. Meecham was making indignant demands to someone downstairs. He flinched as a door came open across from him.

  Meecham’s elderly mother appeared, deceptively frail. “So much noise. I can barely hear the television.”

  Pittman made a soothing gesture. “Mrs. Meecham, does your bedroom have a lock?”

  “Of course it has a lock. Doesn’t every bedroom have a lock? Do you think I want people barging in on me? What are you doing up here?”

  “Thanks.” Pittman hurried with Jill, who didn’t understand what Pittman was doing.

  “You can’t go in there,” Mrs. Meecham said.

  Pittman slammed and locked the door. From a television in the corner of the well-appointed lace-curtained room, complete with a four-poster bed, the opening theme music for a nature program almost obscured Mrs. Meecham’s feeble pounding on the door.

  Jill swung toward Pittman. “What are we doing in here?”

  A look of sudden understanding crossed her face as Pittman rushed toward a window. It faced the back of the house, above the peaked roof of the garage. Pittman opened it. “Come on.”

  Inexplicably Jill seemed frozen.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Jill stared toward the door. She turned her head and stared at Pittman.

  “Come on!” Pittman said.

  At once Jill became animated, taking off her pumps. “Of all the times to be wearing a skirt.”

  The hem tore as she raised her legs and climbed out the window. The pounding on the bedroom door became louder. Angry male voices were on the other side. The door shuddered as if shoulders were being heaved against it.

  Wincing from pain in his injured ribs, Pittman squirmed out the open window after Jill. The garage roof sloped down on each side, and Pittman tried to stay balanced while running along the peak. Behind him, something crashed in the bedroom. Jill reached the end of the roof and jumped down onto something, appearing to run on the shadowy air as she disappeared around the corner of another house.

  When Pittman came to the end of the garage, he saw that what Jill had jumped down onto was the foot-wide top of the high wall that enclosed the courtyard. That wall continued to the left, bordering the courtyards of other houses, bisecting the block. Hearing a shout behind him, Pittman climbed down as well and followed her, breathing so deeply and quickly that his lungs felt on fire.

  Then he, too, was out of sight from the window. He concentrated not to topple from the wall as he hurried after Jill, who clutched her shoes in one hand, her purse in the other, and scrambled in bare feet across the peak of another carriage house turned into a garage.

  A shingle gave way beneath Jill, skittering off the roof, clattering onto cobblestones. She fell on her shoulder, beginning to roll. Pittman grabbed her arm. She dropped her shoes, which hit the cobblestones next to the shingle.

  Pittman charged ahead with Jill and halted unexpectedly.

  The wall didn’t continue beyond the garage. The courtyard was framed only by buildings. Below them, a red Jaguar was parked outside the garage.

  Pittman jumped down onto the car, feeling the roof protest but hold. Jill didn’t need encouragement; she leapt down after him, the metal so smoothly waxed that her bare feet nearly slid out from under her. Pittman clutched her, kept her from falling, held her arms, lowered her toward the cobblestones, then jumped down next to her.

  The Jaguar’s owner must have been planning to leave soon. The gate to the street was open. Racing along the driveway, they reached a narrow, quiet, tree-lined, twilit street around the corner from Meecham’s address.

  Their gray Duster was parked three spaces to their left.

  “Drive.” Jill threw him the keys, then climbed into the backseat, ducking below the windows.

  As Pittman sped away from the curb, he heard her rummaging in the back. “What are you doing?”

  She was scrunched down out of sight, fumbling with something.

  “Jill, what are you—?”

  “Getting out of this damned skirt and into my jeans. This skirt is ripped up to my backside. If I’m going to be arrested, there’s no way it’s going to be with my underwear showing.”

  Pittman couldn’t help it. He was frightened, and he couldn’t catch his breath, but she sounded so embarrassed, he started laughing.

  “I’ve had it with skirts. And those useless pumps,” she said. “I don’t care who I have to make an impression on. All this running. From now on, it’s sneakers, a sweater, and jeans. And how the hell did the police know we were at Meecham’s? Who could have…?”

  Pittman stared grimly ahead. “Yes. That’s really been bothering me.” He concentrated. “Who?”

  “Wait a minute. I think I—There’s only one person who had that information. The man I phoned.”

  “At the alumni association?”

  “Yes. This evening, he must have called my father to suck up to him by bragging how he’d done me a favor.”

  “That’s got to be it. Your father knows that the police are looking for you. As soon as he heard from the alumni association, he phoned the police and sent them to the address the man gave you.”

  “We’ve got to be more careful.”

  Pittman steered onto Charles Street, trying to keep his speed down, not to be conspicuous. As other cars switched on their headlights, so did he.

  “Exactly,” Pittman said. “More careful. What were you doing back there?”

  “I told you, putting on my jeans.”

  “No. I mean back at the house. In the bedroom. You looked as if you weren’t going to leave with me.”

  Jill didn’t respond.

  “Don’t tell me that’s true,” Pittman said. “You actually thought about staying behind?”

  “For a second…” Jill hesitated. “I told myself, I can’t keep running forever. The police don’t want me. It’s Millgate’s people who want to kill me. I thought I could end it right there. I could stay behind and give myself up, explain to the police why I’ve been running, make them understand you’re innocent.”

  “Yeah, sure. I bet that would have been good for a few laughs at the precinct.” Although Pittman could understand Jill’s motives, the thought that she would have left him caused his stomach to harden. “So what made you keep going? Why didn’t you stay?”

  “The story you told me about how you’d been arrested when you were trying to get an interview with Millgate seven years ago.”

  “That’s right. Two prisoners, probably working for Millgate, beat me up while I was in a holding cell.”

  “The police weren’t quick enough to help you,” Jill said.

  “Or maybe the guards were bribed to take a long coffee break.” Pittman continued to feel bitter that she might have left him. “There’s no way the authorities could guarantee your safety. So that’s why you came with me? Your common sense took over? You listened to your survival instincts?”

  “No,” Jill said.

  “Self-preservation.”

  “No. That’s not why I came with you. It had nothing to do with worrying whether the police could protect me.”

  “Then…?”

  “I was worried about you. I couldn’t imagine what you’d be like on your own.”

  “Hey, I could have managed.”

  “You don’t realize how vulnerable you are.”

  “No kidding, every time somebody shoots at me, I get the idea.”

  “Emotionally vulnerable. Last Wednesday, you were going to do the shooting.”

  “I don’t need to be reminded. It would have saved a lot of people a lot of trouble.”

  Jill squirmed from the back into the passenger seat. “You just proved my point. I think the only reason you’ve managed to get this far is you had somebody cheering for you. I’ve never met anybody more lonely
. Why would you want to keep going if you didn’t have anything to live for, anybody to care?”

  Pittman felt as if ice had been placed on his chest. Unable to speak, he drove through the shadows of Boston Common, reaching Columbus Avenue, using the reverse of the route Jill had taken.

  “The reason I decided to stay with you,” Jill said, “is that I didn’t want to be apart from you.”

  Pittman had trouble speaking. “You sure did a lot of thinking in a couple of seconds.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this for a while,” Jill said. “I want to see how we get along when life gets normal.”

  “If,” Pittman said. “If it ever does get normal. If we can ever get through this.”

  “This is a new feeling for me,” Jill said. “It kind of snuck up on me. When you introduced me as your wife…”

  “What?”

  “I liked it.”

  Pittman was so amazed that he couldn’t react for a moment. He reached over, touching her hand.

  A car horn blared behind him as he steered from traffic and stopped at the curb. His throat feeling tighter, he studied Jill, her beguiling oval face, her long corn-silk hair, her sapphire eyes glinting from the reflection of passing headlights.

  He leaned close and gently kissed her, the softness of her lips making him tingle. When she put her arms around his neck, he felt ripples of sensation. The kiss went on and on. She parted her lips. He tasted her.

  He felt a swirling sensation and slowly leaned back, pleasantly out of breath, studying her more intensely. “I didn’t think I’d ever feel this way again.”

  “You’ve got a lot of good feelings to catch up on,” Jill said.

  Pittman kissed her again, this time with a hunger that startled him.

  Shaking, he had to stop. “My heart’s beating so fast….”

  “I know,” Jill said. “I feel light-headed.”

  Another car horn blared, passing them. Pittman turned to look out his side window. Where he’d stopped was in a no parking zone. “The last thing we need is a traffic ticket.”