Forced to bellow over the howl of the helicopter, now hovering directly above the wedding group, its rotors creating too strong a wind for comfort down below, Reverend Hookey did his best to inform the assembled guests just why they had all been gathered here.
“Over the wall!” shouted Jack to the surviving members of his cavalry. Caught up in the action, forgetting his recent doubts, free for now of the curse of ambiguity that had descended upon him, he spurred his gelding on and jumped a horse over a wall for the first time in his life, thereby learning why it’s generally considered a difficult thing to do. While the gelding trotted on up the slope without him, Jack rolled to the booted feet of Jakes, who looked down on him without kindliness.
The wind of the helicopter rotors tore off ladies’ hats, strained the moorings of the tent, knocked over pennons and flipped from one of the tables its load of linen cloth and china dinnerware, while the roar of its engine caused the wedding guests to cower and hunch as though beaten by giant cat-o’-nine-tails. Tears started in Felicia’s eyes as her veil was ripped from her head, but Mercer held her close and Reverend Hookey kept shrieking out the words of the service.
The dinghies of the Princess Pat all at once found themselves amid a swirl of boats. Fast boats roared at them and then, at the last possible instant, veered off, slewing away, creating great wakes that threatened to swamp them. Larger boats bore down, forcing them to turn away from shore. “Avast!” cried the Princess Pat crew members steering the dinghies. “Belay!” they cried, and other nautical terms, none of which did any good. The dinghies shipped water. The Galaxians’ feet got wet.
Jack’s cavalry, unhorsed, fled before Jakes and his club-brandishing mates, and fled even faster before Jakes’s fang-brandishing dogs. Jack and Sara, on the property but on foot, scampered up the slope from the gatehouse, not directly toward the casde—there were too many defenders in that direction—but at an angle that would lead them through ornamental trees up toward the clearing inland of the house and just higher, overlooking the entire wedding scene.
Benson extended an over-and-under shotgun from an attic window, boomed twice, and turned the helicopter’s windshield into an opaque shower curtain. The startled pilot, leaning out to look around this sudden expanse of pebbled glass, caught a glimpse of Benson rapidly reloading, and cried, “Oh, no! No more wars for me!” He swung the stick, and the helicopter veered up and away, with many a shriek from his photographer cargo.
One dinghy made it back to the Princess Pat. The other sank, in seven feet of water. Those from the swamped dinghy who swam back to their home yacht were not further bothered, while those who swam for shore were intercepted, hooked out of the water, thrashed severely, and dumped back into the sea next to their yacht.
Ida screamed at the helicopter pilot to return to the wedding, but he flatly refused. Navigating by keeping his head outside in his own wind, he ran up the coast till he came to a bit of flat empty beach, where he set down and ordered everybody off his ship. “Make me,” Ida said, with an icy glare. He considered that idea, shrugged, said, “You fly the fucker, then,” deplaned, and went slogging off through the sand, while a dozen cameras clicked away behind him, recording the moment.
“We have to get through!” Sara cried, totally committed to this quest. Panting in desperation, she struggled upslope past the ornamental trees, Jack hurrying in her wake, the both of them forced again and again to turn aside, every time they tried to move closer to the wedding party, by stalking retainers armed with shotguns and large sticks.
“I do!” announced John Michael Mercer, in a loud and ringing voice, no longer overpowered by the roar from above.
On the slope inland from the house, Sara slipped and almost fell, but Jack grabbed her around the waist. Holding her, he looked down at the wedding party. “Look,” he said.
The air attack had been routed. The naval invasion had been driven back into the sea. The cavalry had been unhorsed, muddied, cudgeled and bitten, and now riderless horses grazed peacefully here and there in the middle distance, adding to the bucolic beauty of the scene, while their former riders continued to leg it back across open country toward North Road.
“I do!” said Felicia Mercer, nee Nelson, smiling through her tears.
“I see them,” snarled Sara, answering Jack, staring down at the couple hand in hand before the minister. The bride was disheveled, her veil and train tom, her bridesmaids all in a heap like a pile of discarded bouquets, the wedding guests stunned and tattered, the reception tables upended, tent listing, Astroturf tom and bleeding mud. Sara glared, breast heaving, eyes still flashing with the heat of the battle. “They beat us, the bastards!” she cried.
John Michael Mercer kissed his bride. The wedding guests cheered.
Jack felt Sara’s tense body quiver within the curve of his arm. “Bastards,” she muttered. “Bastards. Bastards.”
Eleven
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright. The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light. And somewhere men are laughing and little children shout. But there is no joy in the Oak Bluffs command center on Monday morning; the Weekly Galaxy has struck out.
Boy, who had been beaten soundly twice yesterday afternoon by the large, bluff, hearty, healthy crew of a ship called Big Daddy, once for trying to swim to shore after his dinghy sank and the other for protesting this treatment in an English accent, sat at his table in the command center sullen and silent and more puffy-faced than ever, while his lieutenants and Jack’s disheartened team kept bringing in further gobbets of bad news. The helicopter had been traced to the Galaxy, and several lawsuits were being threatened. An extelephone receptionist employee of the Katama Bay Country Club had gone to the police with a story of blackmail and intimidation on the part of a
Galaxy staffer which was unfortunately supported by a tape recording surreptitiously made by the litde bitch. And, in the confusion and disorganization of yesterday’s rout, they’d lost the Mercers, who had apparently been spirited away on one of those damn ships anchored offshore. They could be anywhere in the world by now, and no one the wiser.
The Galaxy had nothing. The Galaxy could not produce one word, one picture, one inference about the John Michael Mercer wedding that a reader couldn’t find just as easily in Time or People or even the goddamn New York Times!
In the general gloom of last night, Jack had been a solitary mourner, lamenting a tragedy other than that being bewailed all around him. It wasn’t the loss of Sara’s innocence, such as it had been, that so touched him with melancholy, but the loss of his own corruption. How pure Sara’s fury had burned, as she had stared down at the bedraggled wedding party, and how weak had been his own yielding to shame and pity. What did John Michael Mercer care about Jack Ingersoll, eh? Eh? Keep that in mind, can’t you?
He can’t. He couldn’t. That the Mercer marriage was trivial and unimportant in itself didn’t bother him, since he’d accepted that idea from the beginning. But that there might still be in this life, and on this earth, things that did matter, that were important, was disturbing and deeply unsettling. Have I become spoiled for this job, he wondered? And if the answer was yes, he was in serious trouble, because he was already spoiled for everything else.
Late last night, rash with drink, he had tried to broach these thoughts to Sara, but every reminder of the Mercer nuptials just set her raging again, so much so that fortunately she never did hear what it was Jack had been trying to say. She was already up and gone when he’d rolled, sodden and remorseful, from the sack late this morning, and he hadn’t yet seen her today, but he was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed last night his separate reasons for despondency.
The light flashed on the phone on Boy’s table. He looked at it as though it were hemlock. It flashed again. Everybody in the room looked at it, as though it were Alfred Hitchcock’s glass of milk. It flashed again. Amid a general sigh, as of the sound of the unshriven departed moving through the upper branches just before s
unrise, Boy picked up the receiver and said, with simple unwonted honesty, “Boy Cartwright here.”
“Yes, Mr. DeMassi.”
Another general sigh.
“No, Mr. DeMassi, I’m afraid we—”
“We tried, Mr. DeMassi, we—”
“Yes, sir, we did try that. And a helicopter.” Sara’s voice, loud and confident, grabbed everyone’s attention: “Just a minute.”
Jack gaped at her. Everybody gaped at her. She marched in from the front door, head held high, eyes clear, tread firm. Calling to Boy, she said, “Is that Mr. DeMassi?”
Boy, too stunned to do otherwise, nodded. Other people murmured confirmation and tried to hush her, but Sara marched by them all. “Let me speak to him,,, she said, and on her way by she dropped a bulky envelope on the table in front of Jack. It was white, with blue and orange sections.
Boy stared, unable to believe it. Reporters don’t talk to Massa, not directly, not unless Massa initiates the conversation. Reporters do not interrupt conversations between Massa and editors. Reporters do not make their presence felt in any way when Massa is in conversation with an editor other than their own. Sara was violating so many conventions that when she reached out and plucked the phone receiver from Boy’s nerveless hand, he didn’t even make an attempt to stop her.
“Mr. DeMassi? Mr. DeMassi, this is Sara Joslyn, a reporter on Jack Ingersoll’s team.”
Jack pressed a hand to his hot dry forehead. “Yes, sir, that’s what I want to tell you. I have just this minute given to my editor, to Jack Ingersoll, the official wedding album of the John Michael Mercer marriage.”
Jack stared at the envelope. He tore it open. “Yes, sir, Mr. DeMassi, the photos taken by Lady Beatrice Romneysholme. We may have to negotiate with her, but we have the pictures, so it shouldn’t be impossible.”
Onto Jack’s table, out of the envelope, spilled four black plastic film containers with gray plastic caps. Inside each was a roll of 35mm film.
“Yes, sir, Jack Ingersoll has the film now. He’ll be bringing it back to Florida with him. Thank you, Mr. DeMassi.” She extended the phone toward Boy: “He wants to talk to you again.”
As Boy began to stutter and whimper into the phone, Sara crossed to Jack, smiling, nodding, accepting the silent signals of congratulation and joy from her co-workers. Jack whispered, almost afraid to hear the answer, “What did you do? How did you—”
“It was easy,” she said. She was a good three inches taller than yesterday. “Lady Bee’s an amateur photographer. Where do amateur photographers get their film developed? At the drugstore.”
Jack gazed at the torn white-orange-blue envelope on his desk.
“So I waited for her this morning,” Sara went on, “and I followed her when she was driven away from her house in one of her limos, and I watched which drugstore in Edgartown she went into, and twenty minutes later I went in and said I was there from the lab to make the film pickup.”
“Sara,” Jack said, and stopped, at a loss for words. He shook his head in wonder.
“Oh, Jack,” called Boy, looking more and more like something that should have been given decent burial a week ago, “Jack, Mr. DeMassi would have a word with you.”
Jack blundered to his feet, painfully bumping a knee and sending the film containers rolling. Sara slapped a hand over them, and Jack limped quickly across the room to take the phone from Boy’s decaying hand. “Yes, Mr. DeMassi?”
Jack smiled modestly. “Thank you, Mr. DeMassi, but you know me. I think my whole team’s special.”
Jack’s eyes shone. “Thank you, Mr. DeMassi! Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” Grabbing a pen from Boy’s jacket pocket, a piece of paper from under Boy’s elbow, Jack made quick notes. “Yes, sir. Right away. Thank you, Mr. DeMassi.”
Jack hung up. He turned his back on the moldering Boy, and smiled upon his team. “We have been given our reward,” he said.
“Yes? Yes?”
Doubt was vanquished, certainty triumphant. “We have been given,” Jack said, “a body in the box.”
THE BODY IN THE BOX
One
There. The dead man beside the road, that’s where she’d found him. Sara glanced in the rearview mirror at the spot, realizing how long it had been since she’d even thought about that incident, and then she looked forward again, through the windshield at the Weekly Galaxy building, rushing closer.
Late afternoon, Monday. While Jack and the rest of the team had gone on to Norfolk, Virginia, to set up the next command center, something to do with this mysterious body in the box, the Galaxy had chartered a plane to fly Sara and the precious rolls of Mercer wedding film to JFK, where a commercial flight for Orlando had been held for her—she merely accepted this sort of thing as her due by now—and at Orlando another chartered plane had waited to bring her down here, where she’d reclaimed her Peugeot from the airport parking lot and was now zipping out Massa’s road to the Galaxy, well ahead of closing time.
She nodded to the regular guard, parked as close to the employee entrance as possible, and went first to the Picture Department on the second floor, where the staffers fell on the rolls of film with cries of joy. Sara then went on up to Editorial to get whatever material Mary Kate might have for her to bring to Jack.
It was while she was talking with Mary Kate that she glanced across the squaricles and saw Binx Radwell walking by, looking sadder and more hopeless than ever. “Isn’t that— Isn’t that Binx?”
“The very same,” Mary Kate agreed.
“But— So he wasn’t fired, after all?”
“Sure they fired him,” Mary Kate said. “The story is, he begged Massa for a second chance. Wept real tears, and like that. So Massa hired him back, as a reporter.”
“A reporter!”
“At reporter’s starting salary.”
“Ow!”
“And assigned him to Boy Cartwright,” Mary Kate said dryly.
“Oh, poor Binx,” Sara said, watching the slopeshouldered booby settle himself at one of the long reporters’ tables on the far side of the room.
“They fired him as an example,” Mary Kate said, “and then hired him back as a long-term example.”
“And he can’t afford the real world,” Sara said.
It was amazing how large and deserted the apartment seemed. It was only last Tuesday that Phyllis had moved out, and only last Thursday that Sara herself had left on the trip to Martha’s Vineyard, and yet the big cold place felt like a mausoleum that had been deserted for years. Sara moved through it, lowering the air-conditioning, looking out at the restless Atlantic Ocean, at the beach in the building’s shadow, and the silence in the apartment just went on making her uncomfortable.
Yet, there was nothing to do but stay the night here, as planned, and take the morning flight to Washington, D.C., as planned, where a commuter flight would bring her back down to Norfolk. It was too far to drive overnight, and if she looked for a flight heading north now there wouldn’t be a place for her tonight in Norfolk. And how would she explain it to Jack? “I didn’t like my apartment.”
There was food in the freezer. The television set worked. She could make it through the night. And in any event, here was a chance to go look at her novels-in-progress. She had the feeling she was still too keyed up from the Mercer wedding to settle down to any serious work, but at least she could touch the manuscripts, glance at them, remind herself that here was what she wanted from life, the real goal.
The business in Martha’s Vineyard had been exciting, had caught her up in the rush and flow of it, but she could see how that sort of high could become dangerous. What if all you wanted in life was the pictures of the Mercer wedding, or the party for the hundred-year-old twins, or the body in the box, whatever that turned out to be? No; the rush and the high were fun, but the novels were real life.
It was while seated at the desk with Time of the
Hero spread out in front of her, but really while she was not actually paying close attention to the manuscri
pt, that she noticed the empty space among the items taped and tacked to the wall above her desk. The information about the dead man’s car was gone.
She stared at that space while a chill of fear spread through her body. She remembered taping it there. She remembered the parentheses around the uncertain final letter of the license plate (G/O/Q). She remembered putting it there, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen it there.
Am I alone in this place?
She was. Of course she was. Hesitantly at first, but then more rapidly, she moved in silence through the apartment, whipping open closets, peeking around doorways, terrified but willing herself to be brave, and of course she was alone in the apartment. The piece of paper must have been removed some time ago from above her desk.
By Phyllis.
That’s right. Who else was there? No one else had ever been in this place.
Phyllis had been at Martha’s Vineyard.
Phyllis had been seated next to her at the reporters’ table when the first sheet about the dead man’s car had disappeared.
Hurrying back to her own bedroom, Sara pulled open her closet door, pushed skirts and blouses out of the way, and saw the two boxes of Jimmy Taggart’s papers still back in there, on the floor, where she’d left them. So Phyllis hadn’t found those. But Phyllis had been gone from here only two days after Sara had brought those papers in, and Sara had—luckily—hidden Taggart’s papers, while the license number had been left right out in plain sight. For Phyllis to see, and understand.
Did Phyllis try to kill me, shooting through that window? Or was she warning me off, because she’d seen that piece of paper in this apartment, over my desk?
What’s the connection between Phyllis Perkinson of Trend magazine and the dead man beside the road?
Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Page 26