TWO O’CLOCK, EASTERN WARTIME

by John Dunning

  Anger flared in the fear. “What the hell do you know about love? He’s done everything for me, everything. If it weren’t for him I’d’ve died like Margaret, forty years ago.”

  They looked at each other for a moment as the realization washed over him. “Jesus, you’re the sister . . . you’re the missing sister.”

  She leaped at him with the news spike and jammed it into his shoulder. He hurled her away. She banged against the turntable and the needle zipped and jumped and zipped again. Stoner’s voice clicked from the monitor.

  “It’s two o’clock, eastern wartime . . . eastern wartime . . . eastern wartime . . .”

  “I hope he kills you! You and that bitch who defiled Margaret on the air!”

  Dulaney chilled. His skin was tingly and numb as the second realization hit him. He’s going after Rue.

  He bolted for the door. Behind him he could hear Hazel screaming into the microphone. “Run, Jan, run, he’s coming to get you!”

  By the time he reached his car she was sobbing on the air, with long stretches of mindless screaming.

  ( ( ( 21 ) ) )

  HALF a mile from the station he plowed his car into a sandbank. Careening up the long hill he hit some wet sand and spun out, went over the dune, and rolled. The car stopped on its side with a sickening crunch.

  He crawled out through the passenger door and ran. Behind him the wheels spun in the air and Hazel shrieked madness on the radio.

  He ran. Oh Christ, he ran.

  Little Rue. He didn’t even know where she lived. All he had to go by was what he’d heard. Two hours ago they were going to the Sandbar.

  Past the hotel. Wild thoughts of stopping and using the phone. Calling the sheriff, calling the Sandbar. But he couldn’t make himself slow down and the hotel slipped away in the night.

  Down the long straightaway into town, his feet making flat clipclop sounds on the wet empty road. Town socked in in the fog. Like running in a cloud. A faint glow ahead promising an end but never getting any brighter. Past the road where Pauline lived. Not far now.

  Forever.

  The neon sign floated in the soup. Sandbar. Only a few cars outside. Inside, no one he knew. He stood near the door, quaking with fear and rage, wheezing the wind back into his lungs.

  He asked at the bar. The party had broken up forty minutes ago. Forty minutes. He tried calling Becky from the pay phone but her line was busy.

  Out on the road, running again. Past the illuminated dig at the Harford building, south across the town to Becky’s house.

  Her car was there but the house was dark. He walked around it banging on the windows. Nobody home. How could that be? He stood in the soft sand and wondered what to do next.

  A voice on the wind. Somebody talking, out in the soup.

  Two voices, down on the beach . . . Becky, talking with one of the New York actors. He heard Blake say something and as he came closer he knew they were doing a postmortem on the Boer show, trying to dope out what went wrong. Figure how Jordan had lost his mind. He heard her say, “It’s as if he just . . . snapped.”

  He put his gun down on the hard sand. No good would come of it if she saw it. There they were, two shapes in the glow of a flashlight.

  “Becky . . .”

  They stopped talking. He sensed a chill in them.

  “I tried to call you. Your line was busy.”

  “I’m on a party line,” she said coldly.

  “Where’s Rue?”

  “What do you want with her? Haven’t you done enough to her tonight?”

  He said, “Her life’s in danger,” and that sounded crazy even to him.

  He thought if he could just get it said in one clear sentence they’d have to believe him. But there was no such sentence.

  “The Boer story was real. The kid in it . . . not a kid anymore . . . still a killer. Been here for years. Worked for Germany because he hated the British. You read the script, you know why. He killed March Flack. You know why. Killed Carnahan, Kendall, Peter. Now he’ll kill Rue.”

  She said nothing. He tried again. “I changed the script to drive him mad. I thought he’d come after me alone.”

  He tried to see her in the gloom. “Becky . . . it’s Gus.”

  “No.” She backed away. “I don’t believe it.”

  “It’s Gus. If I don’t find her, he’s going to kill her.”

  “Gus loves Rue. He’d never hurt her.”

  Dulaney looked at Blake, a shadow in the light. “Will somebody for Christ’s sake help me? He’s going to kill her.”

  “She was with us,” Blake said. “She just went home a few minutes before you got here. She’s probably still on the beach, walking.”

  “Do you know where she lives?”

  Blake nodded. “Some of the actors were supposed to go up there . . . to celebrate . . . if the play had gone well.”

  “Don’t tell him,” Becky said. “Don’t tell him anything else.”

  “I’ve got to,” Blake said. “I can’t help it. I played that part and I believe him.”

  “Jesus, you’re both crazy.”

  “Maybe so. But I played that part and it was almost like he’d crawled inside me. Even in the dress I could feel him there, watching me from the booth. Then when we were on the air . . . I’ll never forget those eyes. At the break I looked in his eyes and it was all I could do to get through it.”

  “I’m calling the police.”

  When she had gone, Blake said, “Do you know where Surfside Road is?”

  It was at the edge of town; he had passed it a hundred times and never really seen it. “She’s on the upper floor,” Blake said. “I don’t know the number. I think it’s on her mailbox.”

  Dulaney felt his way back to the gun. He heard Blake’s voice, shaky now, off in the dark. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  “No. That’s okay.”

  Blake wouldn’t be much help if he had to ask.

  ( ( ( 22 ) ) )

  HE ran back along the road; then, as the town began to appear, he slowed to a creeping walk. The fog was spotty here, with long half-clear stretches that might help him or hurt. He wasn’t sure of anything.

  He saw the apartment house a hundred yards ahead, first as a dim shape in the mist, then a new building of steel and whitewashed cinder blocks, two stories with stairs on both ends and long outer walks, like a motor court, on each floor. There were six apartments up and six down—three in a row, then a breaking hall running through the building to the opposite side, then the other three. He stood off at a distance and tried to decide what he should do. He knew he was dealing with a crack shot, one who could pop him with a rifle from almost any distance.

  There was no ground cover in the front, and an outside light shone down on the yard and the passing road and the path up from the beach. He couldn’t see the back of it without either crossing in the open or circling around and coming up from behind. For a moment he stood still; then he pushed at his indecisiveness and moved along the south side, just within the ring of darkness that reached around the outer edge of the building.

  It was better in back: there were trees and scruffy island underbrush and a footpath. He could see most of the front from there, on across the highway to the short sandy hills facing the beach. The lights were out in all the upper-floor apartments—either she had come home and gone straight to bed or she hadn’t yet come up from the beach. He moved north along the path and tried to get a better view of the road. Then several things happened at once. A car passed. In the glare of the headlights something shiny caught his eye. And almost in the same instant Rue appeared on the path from the beach.

  He moved on north and his worst fear came suddenly true. What he had seen in the woods was Stoner’s truck, pulled far off the road and hidden as much as possible between two trees. The hood was cold. He was out here somewhere and he’d been here awhile, waiting.

  Dulaney scanned the surroundings and anything was possible, nothing was clear. A new patch of fog ha
d rolled in and Rue looked like a spirit in a bad movie, willowy and fluid, out of focus. She started across the road and Dulaney felt a prickly creepiness as she walked over in full view. He couldn’t move, couldn’t call out—afraid Stoner would kill her at once if he did—all he could do was hold still and hope she’d make it on into her apartment.

  She went under the overhang and stopped, came out leafing through her mail, started up the stairs, stopped, and read something in the glare of the hanging lights. Dulaney shivered and closed his eyes. When he opened them she had not moved, and suddenly a new thought hit him. He’s not out here at all . . . he’s inside the apartment.

  Nothing else made sense if his intent was to kill her. And if it’s both of us he wants, here we are, why doesn’t he shoot? Dulaney had taken a step into the light and now he took another. His heart pounded with fear for both of them, but still no gunshot, no blinding, searing, snuffing finish. He heard her shoes click on the stairs as she started up again, and he ran along the edge of the building, in full view of the sandbank and the road and the trees to the north, but hidden from the landing and the apartment.

  Up the back way, creeping, the gun in his hand.

  She was on the landing now, coming his way. He took the stairs two at a time and his eyes broke over the top as she walked past the three apartments in the first row. She didn’t see him yet, she was still shuffling through her mail as she walked, and he made no noise as he came onto the landing and stood up straight at the end of the walk. He held the gun down at his leg so she wouldn’t see it and then her eyes came up and met his and she stopped, startled, and he touched his finger to his lips and motioned her back with his free hand. She stood there a moment, confused, unsure after the events of the evening whether he was a friend or not. She took a breath as if to speak. Again he shushed her, with a wide-eyed frantic movement of his fingers to his lips. She stepped toward him and he waved her back too late: in that jumbled half second he knew he had miscalculated again, that Stoner was not in the apartment but in the darkness of the crossing hall. She passed before it and he was upon her, looping a rope around her neck and jerking her off her feet. Dulaney must have yelled: Stoner whipped around and had her between them, her mail flying and the rope cutting into her neck as Dulaney rushed them. He could see Stoner’s gun tucked in his belt—he’d have to let her go to get at it, but no, he was strong, able to wrap the rope around his one hand and hold her up while he went for the gun with the other. Dulaney swung and the gun butt cracked against Stoner’s head. His own hands grabbed at the rope and pulled her free, and as she fell he saw Stoner’s gun coming up and he fired, twice.

  Stoner rolled over and a pool of blood spread out under his head.

  Dulaney kicked the gun away. He turned to Rue but she cried out and shrank away from him, terrified.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s all right now.”

  But she wouldn’t let him come near.

  Up and down the apartment row lights were coming on. Down in the yard he saw the sheriff ’s car just pulling in.

  “The sheriff ’s here,” he said. “It’s all right now. I’ll go down and get him.”

  But he went down the back way and disappeared into the trees.

  He ran north. In time, and with distance, he walked. He tried to think of other things and shake himself free of the man he had killed.

  The town slipped away and the road went on. It was two o’clock by the clock in his head: a perfect night for a landing. The coast was clear, not a mountie in sight, and the beach all gray with the covering fog. Hitler could land an army here this morning, if he’d had a little army to spare. If he hadn’t invaded Russia and tried to fight all his wars at once. If his spies hadn’t all died.

  Hitler was finished, done in by his own evil and arrogance and greed. It was the first time Dulaney had allowed himself to believe it. Hitler’s clock was ticking.

  He climbed the big dune for the last time and the lights of the tower appeared to his left. He could see shapes moving in the fuzzy glow of the parking lot . . . cars, people, and something flashing like an ambulance. He stood still for a long time and he knew it wasn’t safe, but the tug on his heart was powerful and deep. His life had been changed but he was leaving as he had come, uncertain and alone on a foggy night.

  His car was just as he’d left it. The motor still ran, the wheels still spun, and on the radio someone had put on an ominous piano interlude.

  Clair de Lune.

  The piano faded and a voice came over the air. “And now WHAR comes to the end of its broadcast day . . .”

  Kidd, doing his own sign-off. And what a day it had been.

  Dulaney shut down the engine. Tugged at the trunk and gave it up.

  He would leave the dresses and the shoes and all the odds and ends of their short life together. Take only his watch and the postcard, a little money, and the clothes on his back. And the water-stained photograph he had found in Sadler.

  The picture was more than a personal treasure. It would help him find her.

  Now she must be found. He had defied her curse and had broken it. She must be told.

  He would start in Seattle. But he knew she might be anywhere.

  It didn’t matter. He would find her.

  He turned west and started up the long incline to the bridge. There was a moment in the breaking fog when he almost saw the lights of the town. He stopped on the bridge and a new gathering of spirits rose up from the creek . . . Livia and Rue and Harford and Kidd and Maitland and Ali and Eli and Becky and Waldo.

  And Stoner . . . Stoner . . . that poor haunted bastard Stoner.

  He looked again and the land was gray. The town and the people had vanished, as if in a dream.

  ( ( ( · ) ) )

  CODA

  THE story of Jordan Ten Eyck ends there, on a bridge covered by fog in the third year of the war. His name was never again heard on anyone’s air, and with him into the night went the man once known as Jack Dulaney.

  Dulaney never wrote another book or answered to any crime. His name was quickly forgotten, except by a few, including, perhaps, an old lady in South Carolina, who died in 1951.

  Several attempts were made to write the story of what had happened at Harford’s radio station in the summer of 1942. Gerald Marshall Palmer had a story in the New York Times, a narrative that finally linked Ten Eyck to Dulaney, that told of his escape from a California road gang and traced him to his roots in Charleston. But Palmer was a critic at heart, far more interested in the creative fountainhead that occasionally, out of nowhere, will produce a Jordan Ten Eyck, than in aspects of the story that might have had more appeal to a police reporter.

  In March 1943 the Beachcomber ran a piece, blending the facts unearthed by Palmer with startling information that had just come to light. Police in Pennsylvania, acting on a request from New Jersey, had searched the house formerly owned by the well-remembered singer Miss Holly O’Hara, and had found the remains of a missing actor, Marty Kendall, in a crawl space. Because of the origin of the information—a tidbit revealed by a radio actress then confined to the state asylum for the insane—neither Miss O’Hara nor Jack Dulaney was considered a suspect. Said the sheriff: “We still want to talk to them both. Miss O’Hara was apparently living in a New York tenement where a man fell to his death last year, and we’d like to see Dulaney for obvious reasons. But I’m not holding my breath waiting for either of them to come in.”

  The Beachcomber would continue to recap the story every year or two, until economics forced it out of business in 1957.

  In 1962 a book was published, telling of Hitler’s plans to set up a sabotage ring in the United States during the war. The Stoner affair, as it had come to be known in the press, was given a colorful chapter. But the focus was on the two landings that had actually been accomplished, in Florida and New York, and on the constitutional questions surrounding the extraordinary secret trial of the eight saboteurs—two of them American citizens—and the immediat
e executions of six. What might have been planned in New Jersey, but was never carried out, was left to speculation.

  In 1968 the story was revived again, this time by a magazine with New Yorker ambitions: a long article, perhaps twenty thousand words, spread across an entire issue, written in a chic style, variously called metafiction, new journalism, or bullshit, depending on who was asked. The reporter had conducted rambling interviews, sometimes stretching over several days, with most of the principals still alive; then he tried to reconstruct what must have happened, from all the diverse viewpoints. A tricky business, given the vagaries of human nature, but a technique that always reads well in the hands of a skilled wordsmith.

  It was effective on several levels, especially in its depiction of radio as a central character rather than mere background. Radio drama had been gone from the national scene for years by then, and this gave it a certain appeal to readers who thought they longed for the simple innocence of those quaint and easy good old days. Old days always look simple and innocent to those who have not lived through them.

  Amazing how fast it all went away. How something so big and vital could have been reduced to a theater of babbling deejays and bloated, self-important talk show hosts. In just a few years radio as they knew it was finished. Harford died and his station was sold and sold again. By 1955 it was called WROK, the Big Rock, and a new generation of very different radio people, none of them older than thirty, sat in the upstairs slot, playing rock-and-roll records, talking over their music, saying nothing at great length, filling the air with nonstop noise.

  In the end the article tried to follow Harford’s people into their lives after radio. A few had kept in touch but eventually they drifted apart. “I can’t believe how important we were to each other,” said Rue Nicholas, now living in Connecticut. “How can people be that important to each other and then just disappear?”