We left Paddy and Gustin in the consulting room and crossed the empty hallway to the elevator, Drury limping slightly and supporting his weight with a cane. It was an elegant cane, of course, a long ebony stick with a silver handle. He’d probably traded his wheelchair for it at some Traynorville antique shop. He used the cane to press the elevator’s call button and then to open our last conversation as we rode the car down.
“This stick is not a prop, Scotty, I assure you. You wouldn’t believe how stiff my ankle and knee are after my short time in that cast. Which only serves me right, as you’re probably thinking.
“I hope you’re letting me off that lightly, Scotty. I hope we can part friends. I made a clean breast of things to your boss; did he tell you? I told him how you’d uncovered my sordid little plot against my own best self. It helped to say it to Maguire, the least sympathetic audience I could find, but it only helped a little. I’ll never forgive myself over what befell Hank and John.”
Outside, the sun was a gray possibility in the eastern sky, and the air was almost cool. Drury paused to light one of his expensive cigars. Then he struck out for the Roberts. He set a pace that was hard for me to match, but then, he only had two stiff joints to worry him, not to mention two ghosts to prod him along.
To help him with those, I said, “Shepard and Whitehead had a lot more to do with what happened than you. Shepard couldn’t keep his hands off Linda, and Whitehead turned blackmailer. He must have seen Linda on the terrace when the two of you were waiting for Gilbert in the dining room. She went out there from the library or some other room, and you missed her because your back was to the doors. Whitehead went looking for trouble and found it. Any responsibility left over belongs to Gilbert.”
“The unhappy little guy,” Drury said. “I must say, it isn’t very flattering to be considered a modern dress Jonah.” Being Drury, he sounded flattered about it anyway. “Tell me, was his plan really to inject me into this town like a mystery virus just to see what symptoms would break out?”
“He didn’t have a plan,” I said, repeating Gilbert’s own lament. “Just a sincere contempt for his life. I don’t think he meant to hurt anyone, least of all Linda.”
We finished our walk to the Roberts without speaking. An old man in gray overalls was using a hose to wet down the sidewalk in front of the hotel. Drury stopped to let him finish.
“Will you stay to help Linda?” I asked.
“Me? No. I doubt I’d be welcome. I’m no healer in any case. I’m an egotistical artist. I’m interested in Linda Traynor’s problems only because they’re grist for my mill. All night new conceptions have been storming my brain. What do you think of a production of Hamlet in which the same actor plays the prince and the prince’s dead father? Or how about a Macbeth in which a single person plays both Lady Macbeth and her homicidal husband? Do you think that could work?”
“Depends on how you look in drag.” I thought he was trying to get one last rise out of me, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. “I think you hung around last night because you wanted to help,” I said. “I think for once you were looking beyond yourself and your goddamn brilliant conceptions.”
Drury would only grin and shrug.
“So you’re going back to California?” I asked.
“No. There’s nothing waiting for me there but bill collectors. My Eden belongs to Ralph Lockard now, fair and square. I’m almost relieved in a way. That estate was my last tie to my fatal success. With that link broken, perhaps I’ll finally be able to move on.”
“Move on where?”
“I’ve been offered a chance to direct a film in Europe. The financing is shaky, but I’m used to that. If it should fall through, I can always look up the Banfi Family Circus.”
His laugh ended in a sigh. “I’ll miss having Hank around. What do you say, Scotty? Would you like to take his place?”
“No, thanks. I’d like my nice quiet life back.”
Drury laughed again. “I wish more people felt as you do. I’m afraid an increasing number of our fellow citizens are anxious to repeat Gilbert Traynor’s mistake. We’re far enough from the wars now, your war and Korea, for people to begin to take their peace and quiet for granted. I sense a general and growing desire to throw babies out with the bathwater, to change things for the sake of changing them or with the arrogant assumption that we can disregard the lessons of the past. Poor Gilbert’s learned what a fragile thing our illusion of order is and what a persistent influence the past can be. I sense that the country, perhaps the world, is poised on the edge of the same hard lessons.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” I said.
“I’m wrong a remarkable number of times,” Drury said. “For a genius, that is.”
He started to drop his cigar on the sidewalk, caught the eye of the old man winding up his hose, and flicked the butt into the gutter.
“But if I’m right, if we are on the brink of a national version of Gilbert’s experiment, you’ll think of me often. Every day will remind you of the time you rode shotgun on the Carson Drury roller coaster!”
47
I went up to Drury’s suite long enough to shower and change my clothes. I shaved, too, or made a pass at it. The process was complicated by Clark’s handiwork, which was healing colorfully, and by a strange reluctance I felt to look into a mirror.
I asked at the hotel desk for a cab, and the clerk directed me to the drugstore where I was almost a regular. The cabbie was at the lunch counter, ignoring his coffee. I drank it for him by way of getting his attention. He delivered me to the station just as the first rumbles of the Chicago train were sounding in the hazy distance.
I’d found my pipe while rummaging through my bags at the hotel. I filled it as I waited, packing the tobacco loosely, as my father had recommended. The pipe had dried out since my last attempt to smoke it, back on the porch of the farmhouse on the long ago Friday evening when Linda Traynor, or someone very like her, had stolen a kiss. The pipe didn’t gurgle now or burn my tongue or go out on short notice. It just hurt my teeth.
I was hoping the pipe might distract Ella from my face, but there wasn’t that much smoke in it. She was the first one off the train, stepping onto the platform as the steam from the obsolete engine was still swirling about. I liked the effect–and her traveling attire: a white suit that looked crisper than the shirt I’d just put on and a simple matching hat, under which she’d tucked her hair. Against all the white, her pale eyes looked bluer than normal. That is, they did until they narrowed at the sight of me.
“Scotty,” she said. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Paddy, too?”
“Paddy always.”
“The job over?”
“My part of it.”
She stepped up close enough for me to take her in my arms. “To think I married you for your looks,” she said.
“Serves you right,” I said and kissed her.
The kiss told Ella something, bruises and sore teeth and all. “Welcome back,” she said.
“Sorry for being away so long.” I wasn’t speaking of the time I’d spent in Indiana, and Ella knew it.
“It was only the tiniest part of our time,” she said, and we kissed again.
When we’d finished, I asked, “What are the chances of shipping the kids out parcel post?”
“Are you suddenly feeling paternal?”
“Their grandfather would like to meet them.”
The answer sounded better than my real reason for wanting the kids to see Indiana, which was that it might not be around to see much longer, not my Indiana, not if Carson Drury’s screwy prophecy was right and the country was about to throw itself off a cliff.
It didn’t seem very likely to me just then, standing on the Traynorville platform while porters unloaded newspapers and produce from the train, and the few hea
ds visible in the passenger car waited patiently for Ella and me to kiss again.
Ella was aware of our audience, too. “Is there someplace private where we could go to get reacquainted?” she asked, nestling against me. “Unless you’d rather see a movie.”
“It has been a while,” I said, holding her tighter still. “I wonder what’s playing.”
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1997 by Terence Faherty
Cover design by Kelly Parr
ISBN 978-1-4976-9065-3
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