“Lived in Salem, Oregon, and nursed my father when he had arthritis, and helped bring up my sister’s three little boys.”
“All your life you’ve been doing that?”
“Oh, no. Before that I taught physical ed. in high school for a year, and before that I earned my board and keep at the University, the years when I wasn’t working to get a little surplus. Good grief,” I added, struck, “how drab and pathetic it sounds when it’s described that way. Really, I had plenty of fun as I went along.”
He was looking at me with interest. “You know,” he said, “I begin to get it. That background, and the invoices, and having no close friends here—yes, that explains a lot.”
“What?”
“Why you stood up to me instead of screaming, or giving in to that bluff; why you’ve taken everything in your stride since then. No, Cameron”—the name was deliberately used—“you haven’t ruined things completely; but any other woman might have done it.”
“Well, I’m glad,” I said truthfully. “When I think about that baby, and how the parents must feel, I know why people want to lynch kidnappers.”
He said slowly, “The child is our immediate problem, of course. That’s the job I have to do, and I suppose the rest can be left to the newspaper men. But—oh, Lord, how I’d like to get in on that other part, too.”
“You hate sitting here, don’t you?”
“Yes, I hate it. There are amenities, of course.” He flicked me with a glance. “I only hope I don’t pay too much attention to those, in case I should be needed. But, damn it, I have to wait till I’m called on. I can’t strike out on my own for fear of tipping over the balance. I want the kidnappers and I want to get them without endangering the baby’s life.”
“Barney—” I hesitated even to put it into words,—“after all this time, do you think she can be—still alive?”
“I hope so,” he said tonelessly. “Jay and the others know it’s to their advantage to keep her alive. Probably the woman’s been taking some kind of care—”
His voice trailed off into silence. He leaned his head against the back of the chesterfield and shut his eyes.
I sat looking at him thoughtfully, realizing the strain under which he had been laboring. Perhaps I’d helped to ease it somewhat, by letting him talk; those terrible dragging hours of inaction had to be filled somehow. Let him rest now, I thought.
For all the fantastic aspects of our nearness in this cold dreary room, there was an oddly comfortable feeling between us. We might at this moment be a long-married couple who had sat up too late discussing our household budget.
—This won’t do, Cameron, I told myself severely. A fine thing this is, sitting here playing house all by yourself, just because a man is beside you taking a little rest.—
In the quiet, I was taken unawares with a shattering yawn.
Barney sprang to attention at once. “If I’m not a heel!” he said remorsefully. “No mercy on the innocent bystander. Look, you’re tired; I’ve talked your ear off. Why don’t I go sit in the kitchen, so you can go to bed?”
“Bed!” I repeated incredulously. “Do you think I could sleep until this is over? That yawn didn’t mean I was sleepy; it just meant—the room’s chilly, and I had an early supper.”
He fixed me with an interested gaze, and hopefully murmured, “Coffee?”
“Why not? Could you do with some—and have you time?”
He looked at the watch strapped to a massive wrist. “Ten after one. I have either an hour and a half or—all night. You know, there’s a chance that the whole thing will be a washout and I won’t be called at all.”
I shook my head. “Don’t ask me how I know it, but something’s bound to happen. It’s all around us—all through this building. Don’t you feel that?”
“It may be wishful thinking; but if it’s not, let’s eat while the going is good. I’m afraid I used up some of the supplies.” He gave me a comic glance of apology.
“You cad,” I said with a grin, all at once feeling amazingly cheerful.
It was astonishing to find how useful he could be in a kitchen. The inappropriate fancy kept returning: Mama and Papa fixing a midnight snack before—no, skip that. Skip it very firmly. Agnes Cameron Ferris, you don’t know this man. What if you do like his voice and the shape of his head? What if he can cap a silly quotation, or draw accurate conclusions about you from a few bald facts, or laugh at you so that you rather enjoy it? That isn’t enough.—
You’ve got to have a good foundation: honor, and steadiness, and kindness. Don’t forget.
The coffee was on the table, and Barney had been competently employing the toaster. He was now squatting before the low cupboard, rooting in its depths for a pot of jam. That was the moment he chose to ask, “Have you ever been in love?”
The question was elaborately casual; perversely, it made me think he really wanted to know. Coming on the heels of my own musings, too, it startled out of me the truth that no other human being had ever heard.
“Once,” I said.
“What kind of a guy?” He didn’t ask if I minded his questioning.
“A really nice guy,” I said in a tone as offhand as his own. “He was a natural for a maiden’s dream; tall and black haired and blue eyed, and charm oozing from every pore. It wasn’t all on the surface, either; he’s as regular as they come. He married my sister, so I know.”
Raising his eyes to meet mine, Barney said, “H’m,” far down in his throat.
“The trouble was I couldn’t even resent it. Neither of them ever guessed how I felt, and—nobody on earth could be jealous of Merideth. She’s lovely herself, all the way through.”
“That her picture you had on your desk?”
“That’s Merideth. She’s closer to me than anyone on earth.”
“She’s beautiful, all right.”
“It’s more than that; there’s a sort of champagne quality to her that had them swooning in droves.”
“Those are her children—and his?”
I nodded.
“And you had to bring them up.” There was comprehension in his level look.
“It wasn’t so bad. I was through the worst by then. I knew from the beginning that I’d get over it someday.”
“But it took a long time, I suppose.”
I nodded again. Not until that moment had I known how complete was my recovery.
Barney said slowly, “And out of the hundreds of men who must have wanted to marry you—you never found a substitute?”
“Oh, not hundreds,” I corrected him modestly. “They didn’t quite reach three figures. Why, no—I never saw another one that suited. I knew too well what they wanted of me; a good housekeeper and mother, and a cheerful companion. Maybe I could have been those things, and felt tolerably happy; I was looking for someone who—who saw something more in me.”
(And what on earth possessed me to come out with that? I’d never have said it to Roger Tripp, for fear of demanding something he couldn’t give.)
“That’s all?” Barney prompted.
“That’s all. Short and simple annals.”
“Hey,” he said reproachfully after a brief silence, “you’re missing a cue. I asked you—”
“Oh, I’m sorry. Wait till I get my voice right.” It came out fine, throaty and languorous. “And—you?”
“Beautifully done.” He grinned, and having finished his coffee, rose to get himself a drink of water. “I’ll tell you; our slant on things is a bit different. I’ve thought I was in love, more than once; but it’s never taken me to the point of marriage.”
(Playing house without stopping to think that he might be married! That made it worse.)
“You see”—water from the faucet ran strongly into his glass, and he stood with his back to me, waiting for it to grow cold, letting it overflow—“you see, I’d always thought of women as something you took occasionally, like a highball—or champagne, if you like. It hadn’t struck me till now that they might
be a necessity, something you had to have daily. Like water,” he finished thoughtfully, and removed the glass.
The stream from the faucet hit a spoon in the sink, and shot neatly upward right into his eye. I gave way to simple laughter.
Fortunately it struck him funny too. Between splutters, mopping his streaming face with a towel, he shook with suppressed chuckles. “I make no more figures of speech,” he said, turning to face me. “Look here, what are you going to do after tonight—I mean, where do you plan to stay?”
“I expect I’d better get out of this palace of sin, a girl has to think of her reputation. The club might be the best bet; it’s a parrot house, but it’s beyond reproach.”
“That sounds safe enough. Do they—uh—do they allow followers?”
“I believe so,” I replied demurely. Both of us were still laughing. “There’s a lovely parlor for entertaining callers. It has an overhead light and some very hard sofas, and in the center is a table, and on the table is something that I think is an aspidistra.”
“No!” said Barney, awed.
“I don’t guarantee that, I’m no botanist.”
“It’s a long time since I’ve seen an aspidistra,” he remarked wistfully. “If I put on my best clothes, and came to call tomorrow night—or the next night, when you’ve had some rest—”
“You’d have to bring references,” I said as his voice trailed off, and then glanced up at him.
All the merriment had left his face, and he spoke in a low tone. “I was forgetting—what has to be done tonight.”
“But why can’t you—Barney, do you mean that the danger you talked about—”
“Oh, yes. It’s there, sure enough. Even without the unknown factor, Fingers and Jay have to be dealt with. They’re impetuous, I hear.—Don’t look like that,” he added in a curiously shaken tone.
I don’t know how I’d been looking, but my eyes dropped.
Barney waited a minute before he spoke again. “Colly O’Shea is on my side, and until now I hadn’t worried about the risk. What I do regret is having brought you into this mess.”
In as neutral a voice as I could manage, I said, “I don’t mind.”
He knew too much about me already to be deceived by that. “Understatement of the week,” he remarked derisively. “You’re having the time of your life. Well, Cameron, you listen to me. As far as you’re concerned, the excitement is all over. As soon as I leave this place, you lock the window and put a chair under the doorknob, and don’t so much as stick your nose outside, no matter what happens.”
“But—while you’re here?” I murmured with spurious meekness.
“I will protect you, cried Dick Dauntless, flexing his muscles,” Barney replied; but there was a false note in that, too, and I looked at him once more.
He was consulting his watch; he frowned, and looked down the hall. I felt guilty, as if I’d been luring him from his duty with this irrelevant chat. “Shut away up here,” he said, “I could wait all night and never know what went on. Supposing the whole thing’s called off—or supposing it’s shifted to another scene, or something’s gone wrong. Could Garwood let me know in time?”
“I thought your job was to sit here,” said I crisply.
Barney gave a short laugh. “If I said that, I was fooling myself. I’d no more miss the chance of getting my hands on those people! There’s got to be some way that I—and Colly O’Shea—” He was thinking aloud now. “Colly’s too anxious for his share.”
“What do you think he might do?”
“Gum the works somehow. If he gets hold of Jay or Fingers before they can leave, his instincts might be too much for him. He doesn’t give a damn for the baby. All he wants—”
I suggested, “Why don’t you go next door and put the fear of the Lord into him?”
Barney said, “The Lord Himself would have a hard time doing that. But—maybe I’d better talk to him again.” In his sudden restlessness, I thought, any action would be welcome. He was down the hall before he had finished speaking. I followed on his heels.
“Here,” he added sharply, turning on me, “you’re not going.”
“Why not?” I demanded. “I’m as eager as you for something to happen. I know the story now, I might as well see as much as possible while you’re here.”
He hesitated, and then gave in grudgingly. “I suppose it can’t do any harm. Just as well to have you under my eye as long as—No, no! Not through the hall. He’d never answer the bell. We’ll have to use the window.”
He had darkened the living room when we moved into the kitchen. Now all the lights were out, even in the public corridor; no line of brightness showed under my door. It was the thrifty habit of the household to plunge the halls into darkness at one o’clock each night.
I could see Barney only as a vague shadowy bulk drifting across the living room. He raised the shade, and the sky outside, faintly lit by the reflection of city lights on the low hanging clouds, showed barely two degrees brighter than the darkness of the room.
The window went up almost without a sound. “Oiled,” he breathed in answer to my cautiously whispered question. A gust of wet wind swept in on us, fluttering the curtains, and Barney breathed of it deeply as he leaned out to scan the fire escape and the alley below.
“Blacker than the Earl of Hell’s riding boots,” I heard him mutter. “I’ll get out first; don’t come yet. You last, my dear Gaston—”
He was out on the iron platform, moving quietly toward the projecting bay window of the next apartment. I could see it dimly, the section nearest me unshaded as it must have been earlier when the three had slipped out. Keeping close against the wall, Barney scratched gently on the wood of the window frame.
He waited, and scratched again. The window was open a crack at the bottom; quietly he pushed it up and slid inside.
After a wait which was probably not long enough for prudence, I followed him. With eyes growing accustomed to the dark, I could see the faintly outlined shapes of furniture, and the blacker rectangles of open doors. This apartment was much larger than mine. From barely perceptible sounds I gathered that Barney was searching the other rooms.
He came back alone.
“What’s hap—” I began, and was cut off by a venomous whisper.
“Gone, damn his hide! Gone off somewhere, maybe poking his nose into things and ruining the whole set-up. If I could get my hands on Colly I’d take him apart, so help me.”
“He didn’t just walk out on you?”
“Not unless he’s crossed me up. And—somehow, you know, I don’t believe he’d do that.”
His tone sent another small shiver across my skin.
“Look, Barney; he couldn’t possibly have gone to sleep, waiting?” I turned to the chesterfield, leaning over to feel the cushions.
“I looked there,” said the faint whisper. “D’you think he slipped down the crack? Not but what I’ve found some—What is it?”
Crouching, feeling under the sofa, for one dreadful moment I couldn’t speak; my fingers had touched leather, a heel, a lace, and I was afraid that Colly O’Shea had been found.
But beyond what I had touched was emptiness, and with a breath of relief I said, “His shoes; they’re here on the floor.”
I was startled by the headlong, silent rush across the room, and the appalled breathiness of Barney’s voice in my ear. “His shoes!” The words hissed in the darkness as he knelt immobile, his back to the windows.
They were within my direct line of vision, the three parts of the bay window. The southern one, through which we had entered, was open, the other two were closed but unshaded. Through the left-hand one I could see to the north, up the alley, along the fire platform which ran the length of the house’s rear wall.
At the far end of the building something moved, no more distinguishable than black on black, except for that slow stirring.
“Look, out there!” I breathed, “I saw something—” and was at the window, straining my eyes, bef
ore Barney’s peremptory whisper reached me.
“Cameron! Get away from there!” He came beside me, jerked at my shoulder. “Get down—”
I remember twisting half around, and the shadow outside looming suddenly large in the corner of my eye.
Then the sky fell on me.
SEVEN
Later Than You Think
POSSIBLY I WAS unconscious for a minute, not more than that. Afterward I could hear, and feel, and even get my eyes open to see that the roof and the windows were whole. It couldn’t, I conjectured dimly, have been a bomb; yet something had all but jarred my bones loose from their moorings.
What I heard was more whispering. “You fool, you incredible fool!” it said hopelessly. Was that addressed to me?
What I felt was a pair of hands, gentle and impersonal as a surgeon’s, passing over my body.
Lying still, dizzily I took stock. It was all right, wasn’t it? Those massive shoulders looming above me must be Barney’s. I was not actually hurt, evidently I’d fallen relaxed. There was just one minor annoyance: I couldn’t breathe.
And why did the whisper now seem to come from the far corner of the room? No, there must be two people here, for the one above me said simply, “Shut up.”
This whisper died away, and Barney’s fingers rested over my heart. I gave a feeble flop and tried once more to draw breath. “Coming out of it,” sounded from overhead.
I tried to corroborate him on that point, but all that emerged was a wheeze like the last strains of a parlor organ.
The voice across the room now became more audible, and revealed its owner as Mr. O’Shea. But where had he come from?
“I think,” he said contemptuously, “that her wind is knocked out.”
I wished that brick wall could have fallen on him. “Yeah,” I managed to produce from the top of one lung, and Barney’s hand went away like a rocketing pheasant.
He seemed relieved, though. “You sure? Then just lie still for a few minutes.” I was lifted, seemed to float across the room, and found myself on the chesterfield. The shadow that had carried me turned away.
Oxygen, in ever increasing quantities, helped a good deal. The ringing sensation left my head. I lay and breathed gratefully, and tried without shame to hear what the two men were saying, since they were not quite out of earshot. A quarrel conducted in whispers and pitch darkness is a very odd thing to listen to.
The 9 Dark Hours Page 8