Night Call and Other Stories of Suspense

by Armstrong Charlotte

  Parkins said, “Who is Binky?”

  “Oh, that’s our son.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Why, er, playing tennis over at the Shaws, isn’t he, Ruth?”

  “Better get him,” said Parkins.

  “But Binky is only sixteen. He’s just—I don’t want to—what could he . . .”

  “Better get hold of him,” Parkins said. “And quickly.”

  Binky Pierce was a long lean lad with straight blond hair, lank and much bleached by the sun. He was in a state of complete alienation from his parents. He came in slouching hiplessly, and when he was told what had happened to old Mrs. Finney, he showed no emotion whatsoever.

  “But she said, ‘Tell Binky’,” his mother bleated. “So we thought—oh, this is so terrible. I’m sorry, dear.”

  Warren Pierce said, “It may be some kind of code, Bink. But I can’t figure out what the devil she meant. Take the first letters of those names—you get C E V O O S E V. And what’s that? Or you take the first and third and so on according to the numbers. You get C E V A D I T V.”

  Binky leaned languidly over the paper in his father’s hands.

  “You and your grandmother have some code between you?” asked Parkins. “One you both understand?”

  “No. Well, we were kicking the subject around the other day.” His parents stared at him, astonished. “We talk about a lot of stuff,” said Binky uncomfortably. “Say, could I hear the tape?”

  “Sure can,” Parkins played it back. When it stopped, Binky

  said, “Grandma’s telling us where she is. She said so. My gosh, that’s plain enough. Mom said, ‘Where are you?’ And Grandma said, ‘I’ve told you.’ ”

  “That’s what I think,” said Parkins. “But where is she?”

  “Let me have that, Dad?” The boy whisked the paper out of his father’s hand. On it were written down the names and the numbers from the telephone conversation. But before he studied them, Binky gazed thoughtfully across the room for a long moment.

  “How could it be a code?” wailed Ruth, all nerves and emotion, “She must have been just babbling. She must be so upset. My poor mother is seventy-five, you know.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Binky. “Grandma is a pretty cool cat sometimes.” Disdainfully, he used outmoded slang in order to communicate with a backward tribe.

  He sat down beside the recorder and the telephone and reached for a pencil. Binky Pierce was scared by the responsibility put on him, but he was going to cool it . . .

  Old Mrs. Finney, lying on the hard bed again, knew now that she was going to be killed, probably strangled, before the two kidnapers left for their rendezvous with the money. Milly had given the plan away several times without realizing that she had. Well, if it had to be . . .

  Binky wrote down a series of letters, punctuated with question marks. Then he struck them all out with a black stroke of rejection . . .

  Mrs. Finney thought that the kidnapers would probably wait until the last minute, because the living don’t like sitting around with a corpse in the next room. So there might be time. She sighed and waited . . .

  Binky put down A D T O N R F T.

  As he studied this series, his hand working on the pencil betrayed his deep worry. But he tossed his head doggedly. His long hair bounced, his lean face became still with concentration. His parents were like two fat pincushions, stabbed uselessly with anxiety. But he had to cool it, he had to.

  “Let me hear it again,” he said.

  Mrs. Finney heard the man come back. Then they were whispering out there. Not yet, surely? Well, if it had to be . . .

  When the tape stopped this time, Binky pounced with the pencil and made three alterations. He said to Parkins, in a cool and faintly trembling voice, “If you knew where she was, what could you do about it?”

  “Do our best to get her away from them in time,” said the detective.

  “Can you do that?”

  “No guarantee,” said Parkins, putting the hard truth on the line, because what else does a cool cat ask for? “But I’ll tell you this. Be a much better chance than she’s got right now.”

  “Okay,” said Binky. “I guess I’d better tell you where my Grandma is.”

  It was a street down by the river, and only three blocks long. It was lined almost entirely with warehouses, but there were two old frame dwellings that had survived progress. One was now a cheap boarding house. The other was divided into flats. The downstairs flat was obviously empty, but somebody was up on the second floor.

  Three men, armed, but in plain clothes, went silently up the old stairs; two made themselves invisible. The third one, who was Parkins, knocked on the door.

  When a man answered, Parkins said, “Say buddy, if you got a vehicle parked down below, some clown just backed into your headlights.”

  “What!” The voice was outraged. The door opened. Police took over. The man fought, but to no avail. The woman merely whimpered.

  Then Parkins called out, “Mrs. Finney?”

  “I’m here,” she answered cheerfully. “Come in, come in, whoever you are.”

  Later on old Mrs. Finney was eating raisin cake with gusto and drinking her third cup of coffee. She was spoiling her dinner and she would have to take pills to get to sleep this night. But who cared?

  “So you read me loud and clear, eh, Binky?” she said to her grandson, relishing everything.

  “Why, sure, Grandma,” The lean boy pretended to be casual and

  nonchalant.

  “It was so wonderful,” gushed Ruth. “Oh, Binky, I’m proud of you!”

  “Listen, it took me too long.” Binky combed his hair vigorously and fended off praise.

  “Obsolete,” mused his Grandmother, “pretty soon, that is. But for today, it served.”

  “All right. You’re smart, you two, I admit it,” said Warren Pierce. “May I ask what will be obsolete pretty soon?”

  “Pretty soon, with the all-digit dialing,” said Binky, “there won’t be any letters on the telephone. The phone. My gosh, couldn’t you hear that? She said, ‘It’s all in your hand.’ She didn’t say, ‘hands.’ ‘Hand,’ she said. So what was in Mom’s hand at the time? The phone, wasn’t it? And Grandma also said that I should get on the telephone. So, natch, I look at the phone, and there it was.”

  “What took you too long?” asked his Grandmother gently.

  “Well, I got it a little bit wrong at first. I thought you meant one letter away from C, and then one letter away from E.”

  “E!“

  “Uh, huh, so it came out B D U and nuthin’.”

  “Oh, oh,” said his Grandmother. “I didn’t think of that!”

  “Oh, well,” Binky forgave her. “Then I figured, no, you must mean the first letter in each group of three, and so on. But I was still using the E.”

  “Instead of the S, eh?”

  “But then I saw—I mean, then I heard—”

  “The S sound in Esther and the C sound in Simone and the S in Estelle,” said his Grandmother. “Those were the only names I could think of that sounded right.”

  Warren was staring at the telephone dial. “One from Celia. All right, first letter in the group ending with C. That’s an A. One from Esther. S, did you say? That’s a P. Come on, tell me the message.”

  “A P T O N B S T,” Binky spelled it out coolly, and his Grandmother’s lips moved with his.

  “I still don’t understand,” said Ruth, wringing her middle-aged hands.

  “Oh, Mom,” said her son. “Look at what it says. Don’t you see? It says Apartment on B St.”

  “Pretty cute, all right,” said Warren.

  “How clever!” raved Ruth. “Oh, how clever!”

  “Had to be short,” said Mrs. Finney reminiscently, “I knew they wouldn’t let me talk very long. Had to seem to make some sense to them. They didn’t know I’d seen the street signs.”

  “Pretty lucky,” said Warren, “that there were so many names in which the le
tters sounded right.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Finney. She reeled off some other names. “F in Effie, I in Ida or Iris. L in Ella or Elinor. O in Ophelia.”

  “And who else?” teased Binky.

  “And Zena,” said his Grandmother, “which is obsolete. But I didn’t need it.” She couldn’t help showing off. “On the other side—the first letters in each group—there’s Amy, Delia, Jean, Jane, Emma, Peony, Tina—”

  “And W?” Binky chortled.

  “Oh, I’d have thought of something.”

  “You bet,” the boy mumbled, and he wasn’t jeering.

  “But how could you think all that out?” cried Ruth, “when they might have—at any minute—Mother, you weren’t safe! I’d have been too terrified to think.”

  “No point in me being terrified,” said Mrs. Finney. “And thinking passed the time.” The old lady reflected. “I just couldn’t think of another girl’s name beginning with the sound of V. But I could always have put in boys’ names—C in Seymour, I in Isaiah, L in Elmer, V in Vito—”

  “Aw, Grandma’s too chintzy to let them get away with the money,” teased her grandson.

  “Oh, Binky, as if the money mattered! As if we wouldn’t want her safe, no matter what it cost,” Ruth wailed.

  But the cool ones—the old lady who now no more, and the young boy who not yet—the cool ones cared very much about safety-in-itself, and besides, the really cool ones knew that money-in-itself could never buy it.

  Grandmother and grandson glanced at each other in a close and merry understanding.

  In this Armstrong story, speaking in code again plays a crucial role in the resolution. Rounding out the cast are a young, successful doctor as protagonist, a popular girl from his high school past, the high school athlete she married, and the young woman he knows holds the key to resolving the conflict. Armstrong’s scene shifts as the crisis approaches demonstrate her particularly compelling ability to juggle hope, fear, and time. This story appeared in EQMM in 1969.

  NIGHT CALL

  The phone rang, loud in the dark. Young Dr. Blair summoned his faculties from sleep, as he had learned to do, picked the phone up on the fourth ring, and said his name crisply.

  “Is this David Blair? I’m Connie Miller. Do you remember me?”

  He cast back for remembrance, through internship, through college, all the way back to high school. Yes, the pretty one. The gay and popular one. Once upon a time a shy senior named David Blair had been permitted to take her to a dance. A painful and bewildering experience, for she had been a Queen in that vanished world, and he, a curiosity.

  “Oh, yes, Connie,” he said in his grown-up voice. Then, because it was 4:30 in the morning and the doctor knew this was trouble, he asked her what the trouble was.

  “It’s Mike. Oh, he’s so sick!” Now he could hear the wail and the choke of fear that so often came over the telephone in the night. “David, could you please come? Quickly? We are out at the old Benton farm, on the highway. Please?”

  “What seems to be the matter with him?” he asked in the calm voice of the doctor who needed to know.

  “He hurt his hand. It’s infected. He’s feverish. He isn’t even making sense. David, I’m scared. Please hurry.”

  “Be right there.”

  Dr. Blair put up the light and began to clothe himself, wasting no motion. Must be ten years, he reckoned it, since Connie Miller had married Michael March, the good-looking boy with the cleft in his chin, the restless pushing one with so much on the ball, the one who was going places. They had gone. Somewhere.

  He hadn’t heard anything about the Marches for a long time. Whatever they were doing now, back here, out at the old Benton farm, he couldn’t imagine.

  Well, he needn’t imagine. He had been called. His gray eyes in the mirror caught his own gray eyes in his snub-nosed homely face with a grave reminding glance.

  He left the apartment, went down, got his car out of the garage. His big powerful car. Very human David Blair, 29 years old knew that it was not altogether “for the sake of his patients” that the doctor kept a new, a mechanically perfect, a very powerful automobile. It took off, smooth as silk. Very good business for the doctor. If it pleased the young man, too so much the better.

  He slid swiftly through the little sleepy, sleeping city, where only he was moving. Out in the country the fields were dark, the sky held only the daintiest hint of dawn. He passed a truck or two—predawn people going to work. To be one of the very few who were stirring this morning gave him a certain joy.

  David sometimes told himself that he must have stumbled on a key, a secret—something. People supposed that a doctor found it difficult, found it a constant ordeal, to get up and go whenever, wherever, he was called. But this was not so.

  When he had taken an oath when he had subjected himself to a dominant idea, he had made his life not difficult, but easy. To know exactly what he ought to do made everything simple. For instance, there were no questions to ask himself now, no doubt and no choice. No wondering whether he really wished to be responsible for the well-being of Michael March. He had been called. So, as a doctor, he went. What could be easier than that?

  Couldn’t, he thought fleetingly a doctor’s wife, if he had one, accept the dominant idea, too, and find out that the burden really was easy? He had heard girls say that a doctor’s wife let herself in for a terrible life. This had made him a bit cautious with girls. It would have to be the right girl. She would have to understand how simple it was. She would have to agree. He knew such a girl.

  The big car ate up the highway. He soon came to the narrow side road that crossed some fields and led in to the old Benton place. The farmhouse was far off the highway, tucked back against a low hill. He drew up to the door. He had been quick. It was only 25 minutes since the phone had rung. He got out into silence and darkness. No light showed in the house. It might have been as deserted as usual.

  As he put his foot on the low porch the front door opened. “David? Oh, good. Oh, I’m glad!” She drew him inside. As the door closed behind him, he found he could see dimly. From somewhere, far back in this house, a little light seeped into the narrow hall.

  She had her hand on his forearm, she was leading him. There was something frightened, furtive, a whispering quality, a tiptoeing, about her. They came to a place where light spilled through a doorway.

  The ten years that had tightened and integrated David Blair had loosened and somehow scattered the forces of that neat, smart, pretty little high-school girl. Connie was now a woman subtly blowsy. Of course she was anxious, so her grooming had suffered. He made allowances. Yet her brown eyes did not quite meet his directly. They shifted. He realized with a bit of a shock that they were by no means friendly. Her hand told him how tense she was.

  She was trying to smile, but the smile was a performance. “I’m so glad to see you. How are you, David?” He was reminded of the Queen, throwing a scrap of her attention to the class sad-sack so many years ago.

  He didn’t tell her how he was. “Where is the patient?” the doctor asked gently.

  The patient was in a back bedroom, downstairs. Michael March who had been going places, had come here.

  This was no home, this farmhouse. The furnishings were old and shabby and not particularly clean. The whole atmosphere reflected the taste of another generation.

  This was a temporary perch—so temporary that the patient, lying on the bed, was not even in the bed. He wore his clothes—a soiled shirt, wrinkled trousers.

  Mike March was a man now and a sick man, disheveled, muttering with fever. The cleft was still there in his chin. His right hand was wound around with gauze.

  David looked at it and was appalled.

  “This should have had attention long ago,” he said gravely. “When did this happen?”

  “Oh, Monday,” murmured Connie. “Oh, David, please fix it. The doctor’s here,” she said to the man on the bed. “You’ll be all right now.”

 
; “How did it happen? What did this?” David demanded.

  “It was an accident,” she said vaguely. Her hand touched Mike’s forehead and David could see how the fingers trembled. “Oh, he is so sick. Can you do something quickly?” Her backbone, as he could see under the taut fabric of her rumpled dark dress, was absolutely rigid, as if it waited for a blow.

  The doctor worked over the hand, which was a mess and outraged him. He cleaned it as best he could. He bound it. Shot in an antibiotic. Straightened from the task. Said quietly, “He’ll have to go into the hospital, Connie.”

  “No,” she said rather stupidly, “we are leaving this morning.”

  The patient’s head moved. “Connie—”

  As she bent over, David rose and walked into the next room. There was no light in this sitting room, but enough crept through to show him the telephone on a small table, among the jumble of dusty-looking sofas and chairs.

  He found the light switch, flicked it on, plucked up the phone, and dialed the hospital. Staring at a picture of somebody’s ancestor, he wondered sadly how the Marches came to be in this strange place.

  He had no doubt what he must do.

  Maggie’s jaunty voice said in his ear. “Memorial Hospital.” Maggie Fowler was on the switchboard at the hospital from 9:30 in the evening to 5:30 A.M. She always said “Memorial Hospital” in that gay and lilting manner, as if to assure whoever called by night that the hospital was wide-awake and cheerfully ready for anything.

  “Maggie? Dave Blair.” He did not say, impersonally, “Dr. Blair” because he could so vividly imagine her nice square face bent into the light, the twist of the corner of her eyebrow. He had squired Maggie around, in the infrequent hours when they were both off duty. Maggie was a darling girl. Maybe she was the right girl. The trouble was, David knew, that Maggie herself wasn’t sure. She saw many things from her post in the hospital. Maggie wasn’t altogether sold on the idea of joining permanently the ranks of those to whom “night” was not private and inviolate. Maggie had once said, “Life’s too short.”