Cash McCall

by Cameron Hawley

“There must be some reason.”

  “There probably is,” she replied, still not looking at him.

  He tossed the letter on her desk and it fell within the circle of her vision but she restrained herself from reaching out to pick it up until she heard him leave. Then she read it again, not only the typed words but also what was written between the lines. It must be true … Cash controlled Lockwood Reports, too! What other reason could they possibly have for protecting him?

  Or were they only being honest, admitting that they weren’t smart enough to solve the mystery … that Cash was too clever for them? Yes, that was it … they were licked, throwing up their hands. So was Torrant … and Everett Pierce … and the Andscott crowd … everyone!

  Everyone?

  She toyed with the word, whispering it aloud as she tested varying pronunciations, baiting her mind with the annoyance of delay until she was finally willing to acknowledge the truth, smiling then as she would smile when she finally let Cash know that she was the one person in the world who knew his secrets.

  She closed her fingers, crumpling the letter, feeling the physical strength that discovery had given her. There was an unbreakable bond between them now. This was the end of fear and worry, the end of loneliness, the end of endless nights where there had been no voice but her own to answer questions that had never been asked aloud before. She would help him. They would work together. Cash would find out that she was clever, too.

  To her consternation she felt the threat of weeping, so quick-rising that an uncontrollable shudder shook loose a pair of full-made tears before she could regain her self-control.

  The telephone rang and she answered it. It was Nathan at the desk. He had a full report now on the toilet trouble in 406 and Smitty said that the only way to fix it was to put in a whole new flush valve. Would she get Mr. Pierce to sign a replacement order?

  “There’s no need of that,” she said tartly. “Go ahead.”

  7

  Gingerly toeing the accelerator, Grant Austen pulled away from the filling station, braking too quickly when a car leaped at him from the left, stalling the motor, restarting it, finally managing a plunging entrance into the traffic stream that roared down the Philadelphia Pike. At best, he was not a confident driver and now, preoccupied, he was content to follow the silvery bull’s-eye of the tank truck ahead of him, making no effort to pass even when the truck was slowed by a long uphill grade.

  There had been no prior planning of this trip to Philadelphia. As had been the case so often this past week, he had been swept along by the millrace of circumstances. At the breakfast table, Cash McCall had taken it for granted that he would be going to Philadelphia today to deposit the checks, giving him no choice except quick agreement. The impossible alternative would have been an admission that he failed to realize how important it was to prevent the loss of a single day in the investment of a sum as large as two million dollars, and now that he was going to the convention, four days would have been lost.

  Committed to leaving the moment he had finished breakfast, there had been no ground for protest when Miriam had suggested that Lory drive Mr. McCall to the airport. He had counted on those few minutes alone with Cash McCall—meaning to ask him what his plans were for the future of Suffolk Moulding—and losing them had been a momentary disappointment. But now, the situation reviewed, he decided that he had probably taken the wiser course in getting away at once. Suffolk Moulding was water over the dam. The company was sold. The checks were in his pocket.

  It was only now that he realized that he had forgotten to get Lory’s check. He had meant to ask her for it, but there had been that call from the Tribune—they were finally doing a decent story about what Suffolk Moulding had done for the community—and then Lory had gone out for the car. But it didn’t matter too much. He would make all the arrangements and she could get the check down tomorrow.

  The tank truck blinked a turning signal and pulled off toward a roadside diner, opening a stretch of free road, and Grant Austen stepped down on the gas, closed the gap that separated another queue of traffic, swept past two cars following a laboring truck and then, with open road ahead of him again, began to plan his day in Philadelphia.

  It was not until he was coming into Devon, stopped by a file of udder-swinging Holsteins crossing the road, that it occurred to him that this was Wednesday. The thing to do, he decided in a quick reversal of plan, was not to go directly to the bank. He would stop in first to see Harrison Glenn at Corporation Associates … after all, Glenn might have some ideas about investments, too … and by not going to the bank until after eleven, Will Atherson would be sure to invite him to The Wharf.

  8

  Turning into the rutted lane that connected the Suffolk Municipal Airport with the highway—the money from a federal grant, augmented by a local fund-raising campaign, had run out before the entrance road had been paved—Lory Austen noticed an unusual number of cars lined up against the fence that joined the hangar to the glass-cupolated administration building. Momentarily distracted, she failed to see a chuck-hole. The front wheel hit with a crunching thud and she glanced apologetically at Cash McCall. To her surprise, she saw that he was staring at her intently and she had the feeling that she had been watched for longer than she had realized.

  He looked away as their eyes met, not quickly as if embarrassed, but slowly as if some silent question had been answered, and she saw his hand raise to the door latch as she swung the car around the end of the hangar and braked to a stop in the cindered area beyond. Ten or a dozen cars were parked and twice that many people were crowded against the high wire fence. She saw then that the object of their attention was an airplane standing at the end of the runway, giant and glittering, dwarfing the little yellow planes that peeped out like frightened birds hiding in the black depths of the hangar. As if in explanation of the crowd’s presence, a car that was going down the highway slowed in obvious curiosity, hesitated, and then turned into the lane.

  “Looks like we have a reception committee,” Cash said, opening the door, starting to get out. “Come aboard for a look-see?”

  “You don’t mean—that plane isn’t yours?”

  “Of course. Why not?”

  “But it’s so—”

  “Come on, don’t deprive me of my fun,” he grinned. “I’m a kid with a new toy.”

  He offered his hand, giving her no chance to decline, and she slid across the seat instead of getting out on her own side, suddenly aware as she swung her feet to the ground that she had been suppressing a sense of excitement that was now threatening to break out of control.

  The old watchman was already opening the gate for them, a signal to the crowd, and there was a curious turning of heads all along the fence. Almost at the gate, two youngsters dashed into their path, sweatered and blue-jeaned, the older of the two boys twisting his right sleeve to display a felt medallion that proclaimed him an accredited JUNIOR PILOT, demanding in a just-cracking voice, “Hey, mister, ain’t that a B-26? It is a B-26, ain’t it, mister? You tell him it’s a B-26.” The smaller youngster, carrot-topped and freckle-faced, was thrust forward to face the degradation of proved stupidity.

  Cash squatted to match eye-levels with the little redhead. “You don’t think it’s a B-26, huh?”

  “I guess I oughta know a B-26,” the first boy shouted. “I’m a Junior Pilot, see, and I passed my Aircraft Identification and everything!”

  “Well, fellows, you’re both right,” Cash said soberly, man-to-man. “It used to be a B-26—”

  “I told you, I told you!” the Junior Pilot crowed.

  “—but now it’s been converted,” Cash continued with a private wink for the redhead, “so it really isn’t a B-26 any more.”

  The little fellow grinned gratefully, exposing a missing front tooth.

  “You going to take her off now?” the Junior Pilot demanded.

  “Yup,” Cash said, straightening.

  Worshipful blue eyes stared up from the redhead’s
snub-nosed face.

  The Junior Pilot kicked cinders and looked at Lory. “I bet you’re going with him, ain’t you?”

  “She sure is,” Cash said, his hand gripping her elbow as they went through the gate.

  Her heart quickened to match the faster pace as she tried to keep up with his long-striding legs. She felt the stare of the crowd but did not look back, even when she stopped hesitantly in the shadow of the wing as Cash went ahead to touch a control hidden somewhere in the plane’s fuselage. The door opened and a flight of aluminum steps came down. He beckoned and she went up the stairs, stopped at the threshold by the visual impact of the plane’s interior. Once, that first year at Prather, she had spent a weekend with Anne Robinson’s family on their sailing yacht, feeling then as she had sat in the little ship’s cabin this same warming sensation of safe containment within close-sheltering walls, the comforting assurance of life compressed to manageable size, the linked memory of that little studio that her father had built for her when she was a child.

  “Don’t keep me waiting,” Cash said, a half whisper close to her ear. “I’m a glutton for flattery.”

  “You’ll have to wait until I catch my breath,” she heard herself say, her breathlessness more than a figure of speech.

  “Like it?”

  “It’s wonderful,” she said, stepping across the threshold.

  “Want the full conducted tour—lecture and all?”

  “Lecture and all,” she laughed, giving way to a strangely giddy gaiety that somehow relieved the unexplainable tension.

  For a moment, his voice picked up the flamboyancy of a tourist guide but that quality was soon lost, his pride too genuine to be screened by mockery. Even before he had finished showing off the little stainless steel galley with its frosted refrigerator and banked thermos bottles, the mimicry was completely gone. He moved forward, passing her, bending to touch some unseen button. Magically, the wide-seated lounge unfolded into a bed, a reading light glowing on the white pillow and the shelf of books behind it.

  “A person could almost live here,” she said.

  “A person almost does.” And he opened a closet door to offer the proof of a full rack of clothing. “Impressed?”

  “Oh, I am!” she said, frightened at the explosive burst of the words, relieved when she saw only the response of appreciation in his eyes.

  “Come along and see the rest of it,” he commanded, guiding her forward with the touch of his fingers, his shoulder brushing against her as he reached out to open the door ahead of her.

  She slipped through a narrow passageway and found herself confronted by the hundred-eyed stare of the cockpit, a welter of instrument faces and controls scattered about in incredible complexity. She turned to voice her astonishment and saw that Cash had left her and was striding toward the back of the cabin. Watching, she saw the barred glint of the sun on the rising steps and then the light was cut off by the closing door. She imagined the quick explanation that he was shutting out the too-curious spectators but, back in the cockpit, his hand forced her down into one of the two seats. Before there was time for either question or protest, he slipped into the seat beside her, his hands moving over the instrument board. The intensity of his preoccupation was so great that she dared not attempt interruption. One motor burst into a roar and then the other. The plane began to move, taxiing away from the crowd-lined fence. As it turned, she caught a glimpse of the redheaded youngster, spread-eagled as he clutched the wire fence.

  “Can’t let the kids down,” Cash shouted, barely audible over the roar of the motors.

  She tried to shout back but he shook his head, touching his ear to indicate that hearing was impossible.

  The line of Lombardy poplars that bordered the end of the field rose higher and higher in the glazed frame of her vision, then suddenly slid off to the right as the horizon fanned past. The full length of the runway lay ahead of them now, the hangar far away, dwarfed by distance. The roar of the motor faded slightly and she leaned toward him, trying to hear what his moving lips were shouting. He gestured an explanation, reaching across the narrow separation between the two seats to pick up the buckle-ended half of her seat belt, tossing it across her lap. The roar of the motors rose to an ear-splitting scream and the plane shook like some mad animal staked to the earth, setting up a body-shaking tremor that seemed to originate where his fingertips had brushed her body. Threading the buckle was an endlessly fumbled task but it was finally done, cinched down with tourniquet tightness in a vain attempt to contain the backsurge of emotional reaction that threatened to stop the beating of her heart.

  The plane was moving down the runway now, gathering speed, blurring detail into streaming parallelism, banishing normality, opening her mind to a sensation never before experienced, a projectile rush into the unknown, the feeling of being hurtled into space, alone, disassociated from the bulk and substance of the plane. Then, suddenly, there was the realized miracle of free flight, seemingly self-accomplished until she glanced at the man beside her.

  His eyes were safely averted and she studied his profile for a moment, intently, as if every line were about to be etched into copper, unchangeable after the final commitment of a first drawing. Suddenly, the wing-modeled curve at the juncture of his lips softened in a signal of impending relaxation and she looked away quickly, forcing herself to study the strangely geometric mosaic of the earth, the solid underpainting of the ocher soil, the palette-scraping grays of the dead fields and leafless trees, the overglaze of blue reflected from the sky. Her eyes lifted through the chromatic scale, the sun-greened band along the horizon, the interrupting whiteness of a cloud bank, on through the infinitely subtle blending of blue into blue that ended with the deep cobalt of the zenith. When she looked down again the earth was screened with a translucent white veil and the cloud bank was no longer ahead of them.

  A spreading warmth flowed from the point of her shoulder and she turned to see that it was cupped by his hand. He was pointing to the headset that hung from a hook over her head. She took it down, put it on, guided by his gestured instructions, suddenly hearing his voice ask loudly, “Can you hear me?”

  She nodded, experiencing again the dream sensation of being able to hear his voice so close to her that he should have been touchable, only to awaken to the reality of endlessly distant separation.

  “Swing the mike around,” he said, demonstrating.

  “Like this?” she asked, fighting off the madness of unreasoning desire, the blind hope that his hand would again reach out to her.

  “Can’t hear a thing,” his voice said in her ear. “Still speechless?”

  “I’m afraid so,” she said. “But it’s—it’s wonderful.”

  He frightened her with an amused smile. “What’s wonderful?”

  “This,” she said quickly. “All of it.”

  They were suspended in space now, all sensation of movement gone. Below, an earth-shrouding veil of cloud was being slowly drawn away, a chiffon scarf in the gentlest of summer winds.

  “Know where you are?” he asked, after a long silence, pointing.

  She looked far ahead and saw that the blue of the sky had lost its horizon and was wandering aimlessly across the land. “Isn’t that—it’s water, isn’t it?”

  “Chesapeake Bay,” he explained. “At three hundred miles an hour you get places in a hurry. That’s Baltimore over there on the horizon. In a few minutes we should be able to see Washington.”

  “But I—I thought we were just—”

  “Does it matter?” the voice in her ear asked, intently serious.

  She whispered that it did not matter, thinking that her words were safely inaudible, but forgetting the microphone so close to her lips. He must have heard. There was no other explanation for the way he looked at her, only for an instant, not long enough to be a warning, and then so quickly that she did not see even the movement of his arm, she felt the crush of his body and the hard press of his lips, and the whispering of her name was a
microphoned roar in her ears, thunder-loud but still impossibly far away, and the safety belt was a maddening restraint against erasure of the distance between them. There was the sensation of falling through space, a leaf dropped into a depthless void, but when she finally opened her eyes the horizon was still a level line and the plane was an island solidly anchored in the great blue sea of the sky.

  The roar of the motors was a lost sound—she heard only the thudding pound of her heart and the sibilant microphoned rasp of her breath—and her mind seemed emptied by some strange outpouring, tremulously expectant now, waiting for the delayed surge of some surpassing sensation. But the sound of breathing faded until it fell below the threshold of audibility. She could no longer hear the pounding of her heart, and the return of conscious thought came with neither the high pitch of madness nor the clawing threat of fear, but clean and true and honest, unquestionable and inescapable. She was a woman, complete and total, wanted and wanting. For the moment that was all that mattered.

  9

  There was a new girl at the reception desk in the Corporation Associates lobby—a startlingly blond head that was bent, no less startlingly, over a copy of Parents Magazine—and when she looked up, Grant Austen was forced to identify himself, speaking his name and then adding, automatically, “—Suffolk Moulding,” unaware until after he heard himself speak the words that they were now untrue.

  The girl started to dial and he turned away, blindly surveying the lighted niches displaying the products of Corporation Associates’ major clients, his mind occupied with the newly recognized strangeness of his position. It had been the habit of a lifetime to introduce himself, “Grant Austen, Suffolk Moulding,” and the realization that his name would now have to stand nakedly alone, unassociated, came to him as something of a shock. He had, at odd moments during the past week, thought of some of the ways that his life would be changed but he had not faced before the disquieting problem of how to reply when, as had happened so many times, someone in the next seat in a plane or club car asked what line of business he was in. But it wouldn’t be for long … “Well, you see I’m in Washington now, heading up the …”