Captors

by Farris, John

  "Sure," Babs said, nodding. "I understand. If I were you—I mean, I just hate it, the chains and all. I'm really sorry."

  "Well, it's better than being doped out of my skull."

  "Oh, sure, lots better."

  "Why did you use the drugs in the first place, Babs?"

  "So you'd be easier to manage, that's all."

  Carol thought it over and said in a remonstrative tone, "I wouldn't have been any trouble." She lit a cigarette with shaking hands and looked again at Babs, neutral, perceptive. "Three weeks. And you don't have any idea how much longer before I can go. Another week? Two weeks?"

  "I hope not," Babs said insecurely.

  "Why so long? Can't you get the money?" Babs scratched behind an ear and looked distant, uncomprehending. Carol said quickly, "That isn't what we're waiting for, is it? Not for ransom. That's what you'd like me to believe; but you don't want money."

  Babs turned and walked to the windows: a labored stride, as if she were wading through snowdrifts, or her own suet. "Gosh, Carol, don't start again. There's no reason for you to worry. I've told you and told you."

  "You haven't told me anything," Carol replied, insinuating cruelty, her tone bleak. She looked at the chains that had made her wrists sore and then at the dark staircase and thought, as she had thought before, of running. Babs, who still considered her an invalid, had been somewhat careless again, letting her loose with only her hands bound. Carol was still weak and unsure of her wind, but she knew Babs couldn't hope to stop her. Big Jim had gone out; Carol had heard one of the cars earlier. But perhaps he'd return when she wasn't listening for him.

  Of her three captors she was afraid only of Jim Hendersholt. Not because he had tried to frighten her; he wasn't crudely menacing or sadistic. But he had engineered her captivity, first the kidnapping, now the system of locks and bright chains. Sometimes he came to look at her, wordlessly, with a dark, mulling speculation, a watchfulness that distressed her. He had quiet ways and the artist's or physician's talent for analytical observation. She felt, ultimately, that he was inside her mind. His psychological pressure was unnerving, it caused her to mistrust the recurrent impulses to escape, mistrust the limited freedom he was allowing, which could turn out to be a trap. She was afraid of attempting her escape and running afoul of Big Jim or some fail-safe he had devised, of then having to face his clinical disapproval. She was afraid of the oblivion he had promised.

  She was afraid because she didn't understand him: his cryptic humor, his odd sculpture, most of all his marriage. She wondered if he was a potential murderer. Babs had protested and protested—too much? Carol pondered the reaction she had provoked and concluded that if eventually she was to be killed, then Babs hadn't yet been informed. She just wasn't capable of concealing such knowledge.

  Carol's head and throat ached and she felt nauseated from apprehension and lack of sleep. But she was determined to keep after Babs, sweat her down, render her evasion and sunny rationalizations into a hard lump of truth.

  "Babs, after you let me go I'll have to tell the police everything I know about you and Jim and Turo."

  "Sure," Babs said, unconcerned. "We know that, Carol. It's all right."

  "Why is it all right?" Carol persisted, talking to the girl's Olympian back. "Because you don't think the police will be able to find the three of you afterward?"

  "No, they won't find us."

  "How can you be that sure? Babs, don't you ever think about what will happen if you're caught? You'll spend the rest of your life in prison." Babs folded her arms and continued to gaze, perhaps serenely, at the morning woods and the brightening hills. "Don't you know what prison is like? I was in one, on a criminology field trip. A women's prison. It was—"

  "It was full of dykes and brides," Babs said curtly. "I know. You don't have to tell me what prisons are like; my mother was a guard in a women's prison. They caught her in the laundry that one time. Four dykes. They didn't kill her but it would have been better if they had. She started drinking after that. She died about a year later. She didn't want to live after what those dirty butches did to her."

  Babs left the window and came back to Carol, a young fair tidy girl with a gross and inappropriate body, a glandular accident. What, after all, could prison mean to her? Carol thought, perhaps unfairly. Babs was smiling, but it was a smile of undirected hatred which Carol hadn't seen before.

  "Before I'd ever let an old dyke touch me I'd kill myself," Babs vowed. "If they catch up to us—which is practically impossible, we've worked it out so well—then we'll take cyanide. We've all got cyanide."

  "Cyanide?" Carol repeated, in horror, and this desperate solution made her own predicament seem clearer, her fate undeniable. "Oh, God, you couldn't—"

  "It's just part of the plan," Babs said, sounding bored. "We planned for everything. Look, I'd better help you change clothes now. I've got a terrific lot of stuff to do downstairs, Carol."

  "All right," Carol said numbly. She unbuttoned the Levi's and worked them off, pulled the nylon pants to her ankles and stepped out of them. Momentarily she was naked from the waist down. Babs, as usual, looked the other way. Carol dressed in the things that had been provided for her. Babs knelt to attach an ankle chain, growing red in the face, then struggled to her feet with Carol's help. She undid the buckles and removed the cyclist's belt. Carol rubbed her wetted stomach and ribs and breathed as deeply as she could without making herself dizzy. Babs unlocked the manacles, put the key back into her shirt pocket. Carol took off the shirt and bra she'd been wearing and finished changing. She sat down on the bed and rubbed emollient cream on her tender wrists.

  "The plan you were talking about. Is it Jim's plan?"

  Babs was using the pillowcase as a laundry bag. "Everybody had something to contribute," she said. "Everybody but me. Jim had the best ideas, though. I'd better take those sheets too, Carol."

  "Let me help you."

  "No, no, listen, enjoy your smoke, girl." Carol stood aside while Babs stripped the bed.

  "How did you get mixed up with somebody like Jim?"

  "What does that mean?" Babs said, her eyes getting frosty.

  "He's—"

  "Jun is a very sweet guy. You don't know him. Basically he's a shy person who doesn't happen to talk much. I'm not mixed up with him, I'm married to him. Married."

  "I didn't—"

  Babs looked contemptuously at her. "You think the way everybody else thinks. How did I get him? How do I hold on to him? The same way you get a man. The size of my ass doesn't mean anything."

  "Babs, you don't have to jus—"

  Babs pulled fresh linens from a drawer of the chiffonier. She banged the drawer shut. "I do anything he tells me to do. I do everything he wants. He doesn't have to say it twice, either." She stopped to get her breath, shoulders back, gasping. "I guess you think something's the matter with him. Some hang-up or something. Wanting to be married to me. Listen, I keep a good house. I'm a damned good cook. Beautiful girls can be absolute pigs; don't tell me, I've been around enough of you to know!"

  "Please don't be mad at me, Babs."

  "It doesn't take anything special to be married to a fat girl." She paused, and then, with a charmingly impudent grin, her face terribly red, she concluded, "It helps to have a long prick."

  "Babs."

  Babs lunged past her with an armload of sheets. "Just let me get finished with the bed here. I've got a million things to do downstairs. Look, if you want to think we're a bunch of criminal psychopaths, go ahead. We're not. We're like everybody else. We just take our responsibilities as human beings a little more seriously than most."

  "Babs, let me go. Now. Today. And I swear I won't tell the police anything. I'll say that I wanted to disappear and so I faked—"

  "Oh, come on, Carol," Babs said, almost rudely. She tucked the sheets in on one side and walked around the bed, hands on hips, breathing hard.

  "I'm going crazy here!" Carol screamed, and Babs looked at her, startled and worried.<
br />
  "Hey now, shhh, no yelling, you know what that'll mean," she cautioned.

  "I swear," Carol moaned, as if her nerve had failed, "I'll never say a word about—"

  "Too late," Babs muttered, frowning, and bent to her task of making the bed.

  Carol faltered in her lament, looking vague and off balance. "What is too late?"

  Babs gave the pillow a punch and put it down. "Oh, hell," she said, as if she might be angry at herself, or circumstances. "Carol, for the last time. We can't let you go, not for a few more days anyway. There's a good reason: right now you'd be one Carol Watterson too many. If you don't want the rest of your coffee I'll take the tray down now. For lunch we can have a nice dubujike or chanbuktang, except I don't have the abalone so it wouldn't be quite right. Or if you'd rather I'll fix—" She had to sneak a glance at Carol, whose expression was disturbing. Babs sighed, feeling uncomfortable.

  "You're being impersonated," she explained, as if she were explaining a great deal. She tried to get to the breakfast tray. Carol, chain rattling, blocked her. "Now, Carol," Babs pleaded, "it's part of the plan, an important part, and I absolutely can't tell you any more."

  "Babs, you're going to," Carol said, in an unearthly voice.

  "Absolutely, I can't," Babs said, backing up.

  "I think you're lying to me. I didn't know you could be that hateful!"

  "I'm not being hateful," Babs protested, seriously wounded again.

  "Tell me!"

  Babs took another step and almost backed off the bed platform. Carol caught her before she could fall. Babs, deathly afraid of falling, even from a height of eight inches, blanched and swallowed hard. She had nowhere to look but at Carol.

  Carol discovered something in Babs's ferny eyes, badly concealed. Babs loved secrets, but, quite naturally, she loved telling secrets even more.

  Carol squeezed a little harder, not trying to hurt her. Babs attempted a smile.

  As if their roles had become logically reversed at that moment, Carol was able to guide the fat girl to the bed. She sat her down gently. And sat next to Babs, close enough to feel an anticipatory tremor in the soft ballooned body.

  "I just don't want you to think I could lie to you," Babs said earnestly.

  "I know," Carol said, holding her hand comfortingly. "I know."

  Chapter Seventeen

  Wednesday, July 10

  Sam, reaching home at four in the afternoon, saw Felice and the two boys sitting peacefully out under the trees in the side yard. Riggs was lying a few feet away chewing on a bone. Sam slowed and honked the horn twice. They all looked at him. Because of the distance he couldn't see their faces clearly. He had expected a wave from Felice, but she was unmoving.

  Suddenly she bobbed up from the tubby white chair. Sam saw the big blond boy reach lazily to one side and seize her. For four or five seconds he held her by the wrist; she was steeled against him, arrested in her angle of flight. Then apparently he decided to let her go. Felice stumbled, almost losing her balance, gained momentum and plunged toward the drive. Riggs followed, happy to have a chance to romp.

  Sam was puzzled and angered by what he'd seen. He stopped the Mercedes and got out. Felice ran hard across the patterned lawn, crazy-legged like most women, while Riggs loped erratically around her and at a slant across her path.

  "Hi," Sam said pleasantly, an instant before he recognized the panic in her sharply creased face. He caught her in his arms. She lay against his breast, heaving and winded, fingers digging into his back.

  "Sam—Sam!"

  He looked at the two boys over his shoulder. They had risen and were coming.

  "What was that clown trying to do to you?" he said indignantly. "Are those Carol's—"

  Felice pushed away from him and looked into his face. She shook her head once, fiercely, to regain his attention.

  "They—Sam, they're murderers—they killed—" He gaped at her and pried himself loose, held her at arm's length, visibly alarmed by her.

  "True!" she gasped. "Believe me! They have Carol. They've come to kill the General!"

  "What in God's name," Sam said slowly, "are you talking—" Felice looked back and all but turned to stone. Riggs licked her legs and looked eagerly up at her, then cut away in a wide circle to invite her back to their romp.

  "Sam," she whispered, "I don't know what we're going to do."

  He let go of her and stepped to one side as the boys ambled up. The big blond one was smiling.

  "Howdy, Mr. Holland. I'm Rich Marsiand. This Latin lover is Turo Regalo. Did you have a nice trip for yourself?"

  "Dev," Felice said, eyes on Rich, her teeth bared in a sickened way. "Dev—in the pond. Oh, God—I saw it—"

  "Now, Felice," Rich admonished, "you promised you weren't going to get all worked up about that again."

  "What are you talking about?" Sam said furiously. "What the hell is happening here?"

  Rich scuffled at the grass and squinted at the low-lying sun and at a boy in the road pedaling along on a bicycle. He said in a low voice, his smile still comfortably fixed, "Maybe this isn't the proper place to discuss it. You look like you could use a stiff shot of something, Mr. Holland. I'll call you Sam if you don't mind, since I think we ought to get well acquainted in as short a time as possible. Call me Rich. Let's all walk along together now, folksy and happy-talking. You tell your husband why it has to be that way, Felice."

  "They have Carol," she said, as if by rote. Rich beamed and beckoned to her. She looked at him with blind abhorrence but joined him, falling in at his side, her head bent. The one called Turo walked slightly behind Sam, his face damply expressionless. Sam was sweating too, although it was a mild summer's day.

  "I want to know—" Sam began.

  "Don't get hasty, Sam. And lower your voice. This is really a fine antique house you have here, sound as a vault. They don't make them like they used to, do they? The front porch seems a little weathered, though; Turo and I were talking about giving it a coat of paint tomorrow, as long as we have time on our hands. Pay for our room and board sort of thing, you know?"

  Beside a thicket of young birches Sam stopped; Turo bumped into him and stepped back quickly.

  "Listen, you miserable idiot," Sam said to Rich, "tell me what's happened to Dev, and Carol. Where's Carol?"

  "Listen yourself, Sam," Rich said, turning, his shadow cutting sharply across the grass, across Sam's body. "If you don't care to cooperate, I'll make a little phone call, a little arrangement right now." He nudged a clump of freshly turned earth back into a bed of multicolored begonias, looked up quizzically at Sam. "I mean I'll arrange it so Carol wakes up in the middle of next month so relaxed and happy she'll have to take toilet training all over again. Do you follow me?"

  "Carol isn't here," Felice said dully. "Sam, after the kidnapping they put somebody else in her place. It wasn't Carol we got back."

  A door of the porch opened and Sam looked up, stared, looked again at Felice disbelievingly.

  "Who is that?" he said. "That's not Carol?"

  "No," Rich said, smiling at the girl. "Come here, love. Have a good nap? Her name's Lone," he explained.

  "Lone Kels," she said, joining them, slipping an arm around Rich's waist. "Now, forget you heard me say it, because as long as we're together, Sam—it's all right if I call you Sam, isn't it?—I'll be Carol to you."

  Sam studied her face—nothing could have diverted him at that moment. She was Carol, and then again she positively wasn't. Feature by feature the likeness was good, almost uncanny. But the girl wasn't posing now, she was still tousled from a hard sleep, one cheek welted by a pillow or cushion. There was no appersonation, and the specific gravity of her face, the sum of what she was emotionally, made her far different from Carol.

  Felice, her eyes curiously bland, one hand tugging and tugging at the short culotte she wore, said, "I knew she was different. I must have known."

  "You were fooled," Rich said. "No shame in that. We went through the motions of a kidnappi
ng so you'd trick yourselves into believing Lone was Carol. Give Lone credit for a damned good job of acting."

  "But I couldn't stop it, Sam," Felice said more shrilly. "I didn't realize she had the knife until it was too late. Don't you see? She cut Dev down right in front of me—"

  "Shut her up," Lone said viciously, and Sam put his arms around his wife. She didn't move or cry or seem to breathe.

  "Let's go inside," Rich said. "Turo, get her something to drink."

  "Brandy," Sam instructed. He guided Felice onto the porch. Her feet moved clumsily. She sat where he put her with her head sharply bowed, clinging tightly to one of his hands.

  "I'm all right," she advised him in a weak voice. "Don't go away, Sam."

  There was a drink cart on the porch. Turo brought a brandy in a large snifter and Felice cupped it with both hands, drank. The pungent brandy resulted in tears. She lifted her anguished face.

  "Poor Dev," she sobbed, heartbroken. "They just threw him in the pond, that's all." She hurled the snifter the length of the porch, curled herself tightly into the chair to weep. A fly buzzed over the shattered glass. Nobody said anything. Sam's face was contorted by his wife's grief.

  "How did Dev Kaufman get involved in this?" Sam asked Rich. "Was he one of you?"

  Rich lifted a bottle of Southern Comfort from the drink cart and poured himself a shot. Turo, like a compulsive housekeeper, silently picked up the fragile pieces of glass and swabbed the brandy off the tiles with a cloth moistened in the ice bucket. Lone Kels leaned against a post with her arms folded and her blonde hair celestial in a ray of sun, watching Felice with eyes narrowed and tarnished like slots in neglected armor.

  "What's yours, Sam, gin over ice?" Rich dropped a cube into a glass, milked the gin bottle, pinched two beads of lemon oil onto the surface of the gin and handed the drink to Sam. "No," he said, "Dev wasn't one of us, but in a sense we were expecting him. He was the X factor, I guess you'd say. The unforeseeable complication in an otherwise mathematically exact plan. He blew in with the rain last night ready to take up where he'd left off with Carol. Lone tried to ease him out of here before he got suspicious of her, but she had only a little background on the relationship; it was just a question of how soon he'd catch on, and what we could do about it when he did. We had a meeting and decided to level with him immediately. Lone thought she could handle it herself. Unfortunately when Lone explained that we had Carol safely tucked away and required his cooperation, Dev lost his head. He was a one-man wrecking crew. Lone doesn't like being hit; she had too much of that when she was younger. When someone hits her she's not responsible for what happens."