Swimmer

by Graham Masterton

  ‘What did I do?’

  ‘I can’t tell you yet. But you’ve been a fantastic help.’

  ‘Hey – you’re not saying that it was Jennie Bauer who drowned Jane, are you?’

  ‘I’m not saying anything yet. But I have to know exactly what happened that morning, and this is a very good start.’

  At that moment the bar door opened and a bull-necked young man in a tight white T-shirt and jeans pushed his way in, his hair cropped to less than a millimeter. He waded across the room as if he were up to his hips in water. As soon as he reached Piper, he threw one arm around her and squeezed her in close, and looked Jim up and down with eyes like steel nailheads.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, aggressively.

  ‘You must be Ray,’ said Jim, extending his hand. ‘I’m … Jim.’

  Ray ignored his hand and turned to Piper. ‘What did I tell you about coming on to these dorks? What did I say?’

  Jim said, ‘I hope you said, “My fairest, my espoused, my latest found, Heaven’s last best gift, my ever new delight”.’

  Ray turned to him and his mouth was nothing more than a narrow slit. ‘What are you, some faggot? Leave my wife alone. She’s mine.’

  Jim couldn’t help smiling. He remembered Piper in class, dreamy and inattentive but always imagining things: castles and princes, wars and coronations.

  ‘Let me give you a word of advice, Ray,’ he said as he tucked away his photographs and stood up. ‘Piper will never be yours, not in the way you mean it, ever, for as long as she lives. And you won’t be doing yourself any favors if you think that she will.’

  ‘Hey, you!’ Ray yelled at him, as he walked toward the door. ‘Who do you think you are? Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? Hey – you come back here, man, nobody talks about my wife like that!’

  Jim walked out of the bar and back on to San Vicente, wishing he had kept his mouth shut. But as he turned back, the door swung open for a moment and he glimpsed Piper sitting at the table in the corner. The look on her face reminded him so much of the days when she had sat fiddling and daydreaming in class. She half raised her hand, a kind of weak goodbye. He was really pleased that she had remembered fragments of Milton, even if they were sentimental, and even if they were only fragments. But when things go bad, and you’re married to Ray, and you work behind the bar in the Black Velvet Alligator, who wants to be reminded of Paradise Lost?

  Fourteen

  That evening thunder began to grumble over the Santa Monica Mountains, and lightning flashed behind the clouds. Jim picked up his Eldorado from Mr Muffler, under the San Diego Freeway on National, and he was delighted by the understated burble that came out of the engine. Mr Muffler wiped his greasy hands on a rag that was even greasier, and told him that his entire exhaust assembly had been rusting away for months, and that he had been forced to replace the whole length of it, from manifold back to tailpipe, $565 plus tax.

  ‘I’ve just had to pay $250 for a seance,’ Jim protested.

  ‘There you go,’ said Mr Muffler, licking his thumb to count out the cash. ‘Personally, I never trusted those foreign cars.’

  Jim drove to Washington Freeman III’s house, pleased by the soft, luxurious whistling of a properly silenced engine, but still irritated by the cost of it. At this rate he wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for his air fare to D.C., let alone furnish his apartment, and stock up on groceries, and buy himself the three-piece charcoal-gray suit that he thought his new position in the Department of Education demanded.

  Washington was wearing a black T-shirt and baggy khaki combat pants with dozens of pockets all the way down the legs. ‘What do you keep in those?’ Jim asked him as they pulled away from the curb.

  ‘Essentials,’ said Washington, and he sounded offended.

  ‘Essentials? You mean like grenades and stuff? Extra ammunition?’

  Washington muttered something under his breath.

  ‘What did you say?’ Jim demanded. ‘Bombs?’

  ‘I said, condoms.’

  ‘I see. Well, good for you. Better safe than not safe, huh?’

  There was a long pause as they drove along Santa Monica. Then Jim said, ‘They flavored, or what?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The condoms. You can get them in strawberry, piña colada, melon flavor, anything.’

  ‘Man, you supposed to be my teacher. I’m not supposed to discuss things like that with my teacher.’

  ‘I was just curious. I was just wondering who you were expecting to jump tonight? Or should I say hump? Would that be more accurate?’

  ‘They’re just a precaution.’

  ‘A precaution against humping and jumping?’

  ‘Don’t razz me, Mr Rook.’

  ‘You’re embarrassed. You cried in class when I read you Emily Dickinson. Were you ever embarrassed about that?’

  Washington sniffed and said, ‘No. Absolutely not. That was poetry. That wasn’t personal.’

  ‘So Emily Dickinson is less embarrassing than condoms?’

  ‘Man,’ said Washington, turning around in his seat, ‘you always knew how to mess with my mind. I left college Tuesday … I ain’t never going back. But you’re still doing it to me, aintcha? Flavored condoms! You’re still messing with my mind.’

  ‘No, I’m not, Washington. You’re messing with your own mind, nobody else’s. And most of all, you mustn’t let the Swimmer take control of you. She has all the power of the ocean behind her, all the power of every rancid river and every polluted stream and every acid rainstorm. I don’t think we’ve even started to realize what we’re dealing with here. We haven’t even scratched the surface! We have to think clearly and logically and never let her twist our imagination.’

  They collected Laura and then drove to Jennie Oppenheimer’s house. On the way, Jim steered with one hand and showed them the photographs of Jane drowning.

  ‘How come the cops never looked at these?’ said Washington.

  ‘They probably did. But what can you really see, unless you know that Jane was drowned on purpose – unless she’d told you herself? A wobbly image of a striped swimsuit? A girl clinging on to a handrail? It’s not exactly prima facie evidence, is it?’

  ‘What if Jennie denies doing it?’ asked Laura.

  ‘That’s a risk we’ll have to take. But if she’s got anything like a guilty conscience about it, she’ll probably be relieved that we’ve found out.’

  They parked right outside the Oppenheimer house and climbed out of the car. In the distance it was still thundering, but so far there was no sign of rain. Jim rang the doorbell and Jennie answered almost at once. She was wearing a white blouse and a plain black skirt and she was looking flushed, as if she had been baking.

  ‘Mr Rook – Jim – what a surprise!’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind us dropping in like this. By the way, these are two former students of mine – Washington Freeman and Laura Killmeyer. They’ve been helping me to look into what happened to Mikey.’

  ‘Oh, sure. Come on in. Would you like some lemonade? It’s awfully hot, isn’t it? I wish this weather would break.’

  They followed her into the house. Outside in the yard, the pool had been covered over with a blue plastic sheet. Jennie noticed Jim looking at it and said, with a twitchy little smile, ‘It’s been drained. The house is up for sale, as a matter of fact. Doug and I have decided to go our separate ways. After Mikey died, there didn’t seem to be very much left of our marriage.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jim. ‘Death takes different people in different ways. Sometimes it brings you closer. Other times – well.’

  ‘Are you sure you won’t have some lemonade? I made it fresh – Tracey will be home soon.’

  ‘No, no thanks. I just came to talk to you about something. About Jane Tullett, as a matter of fact, and the way that she drowned.’

  Jennie looked blank. ‘What about it? She dived, she hit her head. It was an accident, and it was such a long time ago.’

  �
�The fact is, Jennie, she didn’t hit her head. Somebody else hit it for her. And after she’d hit her head, that somebody deliberately held her under the water until she drowned.’

  Jennie still looked blank. ‘I thought the coroner was satisfied that it was an accident.’

  ‘He was. But the coroner didn’t have the advantage of talking to Jane in person. So – even though he had all the evidence – he wasn’t able to draw the right inferences from it.’

  ‘What do you mean, the “right inferences”?’

  Jim spread the photographs on Jennie’s coffee table, next to the copies of Redbook and Architectural Digest. ‘This was the moment that Jane drowned … and these are pictures of the girl who drowned her.’

  Jennie’s expression stiffened. Jim pointed his finger directly to the picture of Jennie clinging on to the handrail, but she wouldn’t look at it.

  ‘Recognize yourself?’ he asked her. ‘The proof is here, Jennie. The proof has been lying in the files of the Los Angeles Times for ten years, ever since you did it. The trouble was, the only person who could interpret these photographs was Jane, and she was dead. Nobody would have known about it even now, if Jane hadn’t decided to make her presence felt.’

  Jennie said, ‘Jane drowned Mikey.’

  ‘Yes, she did. She also drowned Dennis Pease and Gabriel Dragonard and seriously injured Dottie Osias and almost drowned my friend Mervyn, Washington and Laura and me. And so far there’s no sign that she’s going to stop drowning people, and all because of you.’

  ‘She drowned Mikey,’ Jennie repeated, with tears streaming down her face.

  ‘She drowned Mikey because you drowned her. And the way things are going, she’ll probably drown you too, and God knows how many more people besides.’

  Jennie lowered her head and covered her eyes with both hands. When she spoke, it was in a low, hurried whisper, as if she were speaking in a confessional. ‘Jane had everything that I never had. She was beautiful, she was popular, she was always good at basketball and track. And she had George, and I adored George. I adored him! The very first day I walked into college and saw George I knew I had to have him for myself. I did everything I could to win him. I brought him home-made candies, I always dressed in my best. I flirted with him whenever I had the chance. But he never noticed me. I might as well have been transparent, made out of water, like Jane is now.

  ‘Every time he dated some pretty young sophomore, he and Jane would have a fight, and I always prayed that she would leave him and that finally – finally – he would turn around and see me standing right next to him and fall in love.

  ‘But it never happened, no matter what I did. And then it was the very last day of college and I knew I had to do something, or else Jane and George would go off together and I would lose him for ever. They were talking about marriage already.’

  She paused, took her hands away from her eyes and lifted her head. ‘I didn’t plan it. It just happened. I was splashing in the pool with everybody else, and I looked up, and there was Jane, just about to dive off the top board. She entered the water only a couple of feet away from me, and under the water I could see her turn and swim toward the side.

  ‘Her head came up. I turned around and nobody was looking in our direction. I grabbed her swimming cap and hit her head against the rail, as hard as I could. Then I pushed her under, and twisted my legs around her neck, and held her under. It was horrible. She seemed to take for ever to drown … struggling and hitting and even biting my knee. But in the end she stopped struggling. I counted to a hundred, and then I let her go. That’s when I pretended that I had found her. I screamed, and I couldn’t stop screaming. It was the shock, I guess … and the realization that I had actually killed her.’

  There was a long silence. Jennie took a crumpled tissue out of her sleeve and wiped her eyes. Then she said, ‘Now what? Are you going to call Lieutenant Harris?’

  ‘It depends,’ said Jim. ‘I think we have a choice here.’

  ‘A choice? What kind of a choice? I drowned Jane Tullett. I’ve just admitted it.’

  ‘Jennie, we need your help. I’m not trying to take the law into my own hands here, but my most urgent priority is to stop Jane from drowning or hurting any more of my students. As far as I can see, you’ve already suffered the worst punishment that anybody could have inflicted on you: you’ve lost your son. I could take you to Lieutenant Harris, for sure. But it’s far more important that we put Jane’s spirit to rest.’

  Jennie hesitated for a moment, then she nodded. ‘All right. I suppose it’s my fault that she’s come back, anyhow.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I always made a point of being Jane’s best friend, so that I could get close to George. I lent her my dresses, I even lent her money once. I took her home to see my parents one weekend. The day before I drowned her we were sitting on the grassy knoll outside of the physics block and she said, “You’ve been so good to me … I promise you that, wherever you are, I’ll come back in ten years’ time and pay you back for everything you’ve done for me.”

  ‘The next day, she found out what I’d been saying to George – that she’d had dozens of boyfriends, and two abortions. It was all lies, of course. But I was so much in love with George that I thought I had the moral right to win him in any way I could.’

  Jennie paused, and then she said, ‘She promised she’d come and find me, and pay me back, and she sure did, didn’t she?’

  Jim said, ‘We’re going to have to lure Jane’s spirit into a trap. The only way we can do that is to use somebody as bait. Somebody that she really wants to hurt. I can’t expect Washington or Laura to do it, so I’m asking you. I won’t pretend that it’s not going to be dangerous. It will be. But maybe you’ll think that it’s a way of redeeming yourself. If we can exorcize the Swimmer, we won’t say any more about these photographs, or what you confessed to us today, and you’ll be free to put your life back together again.’

  ‘I never would have taken you for a blackmailer, Jim.’

  ‘Sometimes we have to use whatever methods we have at our disposal. I need to catch the Swimmer, Jennie. Otherwise, God alone knows what’s going to happen to us.’

  They went round to see Susan Silverstone. She had just returned from a long natural-therapy session in somebody’s back yard, and she was looking tired. Michael was in his Medlar Tree ensemble, his face painted chalky white, his eyes painted with black circles, so that it almost looked as if he had two large holes where his eyes should be and his head was empty.

  ‘That was so-o-o exhausting,’ said Susan, draping herself on to her brown brocade daybed. ‘Every plant in that yard was hysterical. You could feel it the moment you walked out there. It was like they were screaming at me.’

  ‘What was the problem?’ asked Laura.

  ‘The owner was the problem. He’s so uptight about his career that he goes out every evening and takes all his anger out on his plants. The whole place was shivering with terror.’

  ‘Excuse me, but how do you take your anger out on a plant?’ asked Washington.

  ‘The same way you take your anger out on a person. You yell at it. Didn’t you know that plants grow better when you talk nicely to them, and play them soothing music? It works the other way around, too. I never saw such a neurotic bougainvillaea in my life.’

  Jim said, ‘We think we’ve found a way to put the Swimmer’s spirit to rest. We use fire. We trap it, and then we burn it.’

  ‘Talking of burning, I could really use a cup of herbal tea,’ said Susan. ‘Medlar Tree, would you mind putting on the kettle?’

  Medlar Tree nodded, and went through an elaborate mime of pouring out a cup of tea. Then he went through to the kitchen.

  ‘Why does he do that?’ asked Washington. ‘Act like he’s dumb and all?’

  Susan gave him a weary smile. ‘He says that if he puts a mask on his face and doesn’t speak for twenty-four hours it purifies his mind. Like drinking mineral water after you’ve be
en drinking too much alcohol. It subjugates his identity. Recharges his humility. If you can’t speak you can’t boast, that’s what he says.’

  ‘Oh yeah? How come he can still be such a pain?’

  ‘You’ll have to forgive Washington,’ said Jim. ‘He was one of Special Class II, where eloquence was considered to have a price beyond rubies, and anybody who was dumb was considered to be – well, dumb.’

  ‘Oh, believe me, Michael’s far from stupid, even when he puts on his Medlar Tree motley. He’s very loyal, too. I couldn’t survive without him – and I’m not the only one.’

  Jim said, ‘Listen – we have to summon up Jane Tullett’s spirit, and the only person I can ask to do that is you. I know what the risks are, raising up a manifestation as vengeful as hers, but you won’t be alone.’

  ‘You know that Michael won’t allow it.’

  ‘This time, I don’t care what Michael thinks. I only care what you think … and I think that you think that this situation is right on the edge of being desperate. People are going to die, Susan, and you know it.’

  ‘He won’t let me.’

  ‘Can’t you decide for yourself? The only reason he won’t let you is because he’s in love with you and he doesn’t want anything to happen to you. But if none of us ever took risks, what the hell kind of a world would this be?’

  Susan smoothed back her shiny black hair. Her eyes told him nothing. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she asked him.

  ‘First of all, we have to have a seance, to bring Jane’s spirit through to the place where we want to trap her. Once we’ve done that, we have to tempt her into taking on the shape of the Swimmer. I don’t think that’s going to be difficult, because we can make sure that there’s plenty of water around, and we can give her somebody that she’s more than anxious to drown.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘The woman who pushed her under the water at West Grove College, and killed her. It was Jennie Oppenheimer … Mikey’s mother.’

  Susan nodded, and kept on nodding. ‘Of course. Jennie Oppenheimer. That doesn’t surprise me at all. Do you know something, I had such a strange feeling about her when we first went to her house to do the spirit-trace. She had such a disconnected aura, like she was trying to hide something from me. And it seemed really unusual for anyone to come to the conclusion so quickly that their son was drowned by a vengeful spirit – even if she did see footprints beside the pool, and the bushes moving like somebody had just walked through them. I mean, a vengeful spirit: that’s the very last thing that most people would be prepared to believe.’