"Oh God, McGee, am I that obvious?"
"It's only terror, honey. No worse than a bad cold."
I drove famished to my hotel, ate hugely and well, and found no messages waiting. It was nine forty-five when I got to the house that Fort built, out at Lake Pointe. Bits of light shone through cracks in the drawn draperies and closed blinds.
Anna called through the door. "Ya? Ya?"
"McGee again, Anna."
I heard the rattle of chain and the chunking of the bolt, and she opened the door part way and said, "Comen in, please sir."
I slid through and she rebolted and rechained the door. She was concealing something in the folds of her dress and when she saw that I was aware of it, she held it out, a big ugly Army issue Colt.45 automatic pistol. She held it clumsily.
"Are you frightened of something?"
"Hear noises, maybe. Herr Doktor's gun."
I took it from her. Full clip, a round in the chamber and the safety on. I put it on the table beside the door.
"How is she? How is the dear little missus?"
"I'll phone from here in a little while and find out. Anna, we have to have a heart-to-heart talk. And it might make you very unhappy."
She accepted the formality of the situation. She invited me into the kitchen into the booth. She served us coffee and little cakes and eased herself shyly into the booth across from me.
I had to start by saying that I knew Susan had been fathered by Fortner Geis. It distressed her that I should know. She acted as if it was her own guilt, her own shame. She kept telling me how "goot" the Doktor had been, and what a "bat" girl Gretchen was. Very stupid girl. You have to do your best. Some people are "veak." Gretchen had a veakness for men. Five children, four fathers.
Yes, she said, she had made it a habit to go visit Saul and Gretchen every Sunday. If a daughter tries, it is a duty, nein? They had married officially at her urging. True; Saul Gorba was a criminal, a veak man, but brilliant. A pleasure to talk to. In prison he had studied many things. Languages. German. He had learned German so quickly. She helped him with his accent, with the idioms. She had the Germanic reverence for the erudite mind. She said she would take along small gifts for the kinder, help Gretchen cook the dinner, mend the clothes of the kinder, of them all a family to make.
Then poof. Shrug. Cast eyes heavenward. What Kcuot is it? They are gone. No message, no word, no Ietter. Like animals of the forest. No consideration. It Is never to try again with such a daughter, you van believe.
Key question. Anna, did you talk about Doctor Geis? Did you talk about Gloria and Heidi and Nager to Saul and Gretchen?
Deep blush, bowed head, contrite little nod. What lit harm to talk? It is her life more with this family than that one, nein? A good man dying slowly, the civar wife trying to hold death back from him by love, his own children hating the wife, it is a sadnoss, and who else to talk to?
Did Saul encourage such talk? Did he ask questions?
Oh yes. Why asking?
And you know of the missing money?
She said with firmness that whatever the Doktor did, it was right. One should trust.
So it was time to pull the pin. "Anna, I am convinced that Saul Gorba used the information he got from you to extort all that money from Dr. Geis."
Much the same effect could have been achieved py cleaving her open from the crown of her head to the brow line.
"Lieber Gott!" she whispered. "Can not be. Can not be! The Doktor would not give to him!"
"I don't think the Doctor knew who he was giving the money to. Someone gave him some little demonstrations. Someone said, in effect, you are dying and you know it. Dying is at best a lonely thing. If you want to hang onto all the money that won't do you any good anyway, you can really die alone. I have shown you how easily it can be done. Your grandson, your second wife, Nurse Stanyard, your daughter Heidi, and the daughter you had by Gretchen will all predecease you. I think he made a logical decision. I think he sensed he was dealing with somebody merciless and perhaps a little mad. And I think he was strong enough to make his decision and then not let it bother him. He made sure Heidi got a good settlement from Trumbill. He saved out a single insurance policy for Gloria. Susan was already taken care of."
She mumbled and groaned about the cruelty of it, about how she could not believe it. Then her eyes widened and she said, "Ah! With the money he left. They ran far."
"Not very far. Now I have to ask you if you will take the responsibility for your five grandchildren."
"How do you mean, sir?"
"Gloria told me you plan to go to Florida and stay with your old friend Mrs. Kemmer. Let me see. Her son Karl fathered one of the tribe before he died, didn't he?"
"Freddy. Strong boy."
"Suppose I bring all five of them to you tomorrow and drop them in your lap. Susan's checks haven't been cashed for four months. There's a sizable emergency fund too. They are going to need stability and order. Susan is responsible and mature and devoted to the younger ones. There'd be money to set up a place here or in Florida. I couldn't promise anything, but I think there might be some financial help from Heidi to make college possible for Susan. Flow about it?"
"But there is Gretchen!"
"I don't think so. It's only a hunch, but I better tell you. I don't want to, believe me. I think she's dead. I think Saul killed her. She disappeared three weeks ago. And Saul has the hots for Susan. He gave her a very bad time. Gretchen drank. She wasn't smart. She was too friendly. She talked too much."
Anna Ottlo got up with astonishing agility and balled her apron up over her head. It was a gesture I had heard of but never seen. She trotted into a sort of pantry arrangement off the kitchen and I could hear her in there whuffling and snorting and moaning. I ate a little cake. It didn't swallow readily. I washed it down with cooling coffee. She came trudging back, knuckling her eyes like a fat child. She plumped herself down and sighed and shook her head.
"I'm going to go jounce Gorba around some. He's going to get a real good chance to work on his languages if they don't electrocute him. He can pick up Croatian, Tasmanian, and Urdu. He can have a ball. But even with what all those kids have been though, this will shake them badly."
She sighed again. She looked down at her hands, at the palms and then the backs. "All the life," she said. "Verk, verk verk. I have the arthritis: I have the high blood. Cook, clean, sew, scrub for children? Six years is the little one. How much more years of that? Nerves make the heart flutter like a bird and the eyes go black. No. I am sorry. After the Iong verk there is rest. I must have. Susan is eighteen years soon, ya? With those checks I think the judge says she can have the brothers and sister, take care. Maybe the welfare comes and looks sometimes to make sure. She is young. She can do it. I know that one. She would want it. A good lawyer could fix, nein? Maybe I am selfish old woman. Too bad. Did I ask Gretchen to have five kinder? Life is too hard. Time to sit on the porch now. Rock the chair. Warm in the sunshine. Don't blame, please sir."
"Okay. I don't blame. W C. Fields had a thing about children too."
"Who? Who?"
"Skip it." I looked at my watch. "Want to get on an extension while I find out about Gloria?"
"Oh yes!"
The operator at the hospital had me hold. I had a two-minute wait before Hayes Wyatt in his dusty, reedy voice said, "Mr. McGee?"
"Yes, Doctor."
"Bad news, I'm afraid. Pneumonia. Pulmonary edema, and we can't seem to hit it with antibiotics. Did a tracheostomy. Got her in a tent and a good team doing everything indicated, but we can't seem to make a dent in the fever. Almost a hundred and five, and if we get another three-tenths we're going to pack her in ice. So I haven't the faintest idea how much residual disturbance we've got from the dose she took, and the question may be academic. The first thing is to try to get her through the night. I better get back there, but here's someone who wants to talk to you."
"Travis? Janice Stanyard. I'm on the case with Dr. Wyatt."
; "Is she going to make it?"
"If she's tough enough. I wondered how..."
"Everything is just fine. How would you respond to my dumping five kids on you tomorrow for an indefinite stay? Buy you some rollaways. Bedding, chests of drawers, cardboard closets."
"I would love it!"
"Go back to work, woman."
"Yes sir!"
"I'm just checking possibilities. Don't count on the kids for sure."
"All right, but really I would..."
"I believe you. When should I phone back to check?"
"It will go one way or another by dawn, I would guess."
Anna let me out. She was snuffling. She said Mrs. Stanyard was nice lady.
I placed my dawn phone call long-distance, from a red brick Georgian motel just off the Interstate west of Peru, Illinois. My heart sank when I was told that Dr. Wyatt had left the hospital. I asked for Janice Stanyard. She came on, her voice blurred and dragging with exhaustion. "She was tough enough, Travis."
"Thank God!"
"She's sleeping now. I'm about to go home and do some of the same. She's going to be very weak. And we don't know about the other yet."
I went out into a bright gray Wednesday world to find that a warm wind was blowing in from somewhere. Maybe all the way up from McGee country. I had driven through inches of sticky snow, but it had all been transformed into busy water, hustling down every slope it could find. I had no idea how early the school bus picked up the kids. I had forgotten to ask Susan. I did know that the coming Friday was the last day before Christmas holidays. And I knew the kids walked out to Depue Road and caught the bus there. The place was marked on the map Susan had drawn for me.
I knew that getting into position was more, important than my morning stomach. It was flat lands, with a few gentle rolls and dips and hollows. It all looked bleak in the overcast morning light. There were some substantial farms, all trimmed and tended, and there were deserted places with tumbled buildings, fencing rusting away, leafless scrub tall in the silent fields, and it made you wonder how this one had made it and that one hadn't.
I parked by a produce stand on Route 26, shuttered and vacant. I was there a little before seven, and I had a forty-minute wait before I saw the yellow bus in my side mirror, coming around the bend. I let it get out of sight before I started up. I hung well back and then picked up speed after it made the turn onto Depue Road. Susan had said their dirt road was a mile from the corner and came in on the right, and I could tell it by the bright red paint on the post that held up the mail-box. There was no name on the mailbox.
I saw the red post all right. The bus didn't even hesitate. It rolled on by I looked up the muddy rutted road and, half-obscured by a knoll, I saw what had to be the house, set way back, two stories, steep, swaybacked roof, stingy little windows and not many of them, clapboards painted a dirty gray white. Two shutters crooked, one missing. A cheerless and isolated place.
Once well past it I dropped back and kept the bus just barely in sight. I tried to figure it out. Okay, the procedure would be to slow down, maybe look up the road to see if the kids were coming on the run. Stop and blow the horn maybe. So the driver knew they weren't going to be there. So I'd better know what he'd been told.
Seven miles further, at the big central school complex, I found out the driver was a she, a brawny, likely, and clear-eyed lass in ski pants, mackinaw, and stocking cap, with shoulders like Arnold Palmer.
"Excuse me," I said, with my best civil-service smile and patronizing manner. "District survey. A little spot check on percentage of equipment utilization. Hope you didn't get nervous to have me following you."
"Nervous? What about?"
I glanced at Susan's map and put it away. "My route sheet shows that your first stop on Depue Road is a mile from the corner. Five children. Farley."
''Got on at Shottlehausters'. Four. One's sick. Oldest. High school senior."
"Got on where?"
She raised her voice as though addressing the deaf, and enunciated more clearly. "Shottlehausters'. Shottlehausters'. The big place on 26 three mile afore Farley's. They're staying there a time."
"Oh. I see: Thank you."
"Don't mention it."
So I went back a lot faster than I had come. I guessed that when she said three mile she meant three mile. But she had been wrong. It was three miles and one half of a tenth of a mile to the giant wine-red mailbox, "Shottlehauster" lettered in white in elegant script to a broad gravel drive, a long low white ranch-style house, and, beyond, the quonset equipment shed, white barns, triple silo standing against the wide march of rich and pampered farmland. I turned in, parked and got out, hesitating over whether to go to the front of the house or the back. I could hear a loud twanging and thumping of folk-rock. A bakery truck was parked at an angle near the back entrance. Darling Bakery. "Fresh as a Stolen Kiss." "Darling Bread is Triple Enriched." Bright blue and lemon yellow decor.
At this time of day the back door would be more customary I decided, for a hardworking credit bureau fellow. To get to the back door I had to pass the kitchen windows. In the dingy morning the fluorescents were all on, bright enough so that it was like glancing through the tied-back cafe curtains into a stage set, the floor level in there maybe three feet higher than the level of the gravel driveway. I would say I was opposite that first window frozen in midstride for a second and a half. It took half a second to figure out what I was looking at, and half a second of confirming it, and half a second to get my direction reversed and get out of the way.
The Darling Bread Boy was bellied up to a long efficient counter top. Blue work shirt to match his truck. "Darling" embroidered in an arc across chunk shoulders. But the "a" and the "r" in "Darling" were covered by two gigantic vertical fuzzy pink caterpillars. Then beyond the edge of the center island in the kitchen I saw the lady feet in fuzzy white socks, clamped and locked together, pressing quite neatly the tail of the blue shirt against his butt. Saw one hairy straining leg with his trousers puddled around the ankle. Caterpillars became her sweatered forearms, her hands hooked back over the hanging-on place of the trapezius muscles, as though trying to chin herself. And over the Bread Boy shoulder was her effortful jouncing bouncing face, eyes squinched tight shut, mouth raw, like indeed with the struggle to chin herself on that horizontal bar of muscle. The twangity-thump of country git-ar with electronic assist came from the truck radio (paternalistic bakery management) and from the kitchen radio in unison, and for a oouple of micro-seconds before I sorted the scene out I had thought he was attempting a crude, vulgar, unskilled version of some contemporary dance. But it was busy old rub-a-dub-dub, humpety-rump, dumpety-bump, with the counter-topped farm wife all wedged and braced.
I fled bemused to my rental. The idling truck made little pops and puffs of exhaust smoke. Where the hell did they think they were? Westport? Bucks County? Didn't they know this was the heartland of America? Didn't she know Jack LaLanne was the only acceptable morning exercise for the busy housewife?
I started the car engine and put the automatic shift into drive and kept my foot on the brake pedal. I wondered if maybe it was the architecture which had debauched her. I could not conceive of it happening in the traditional old farm kitchens. But she could see slightly glossier versions of her own fluorescence, stainless steel, ceramic island, rubber tile, pastel enamels, warm wood paneling in the Hollywood product on both Big Screen and home tube, so there she was on the set, and she had to say the lines, but after you said the lines enough times All of a sudden you'd get interrupted by something a little more direct than a commercial message from your sponsor. But it didn't count too much because it was as unreal sort of as a giant hand coming up out of the suds, or a washer going up like an elevator, or a nut riding a horse through the back yard and turning everything radiant white.
The instant Darling Boy came trotting into view I started ahead so that he could be certain he had glimpsed my arrival. Chunky redhead with a freckly, good-natured, clenched-fist fac
e, carrying cheerfully wrapped bakery items in his big blue aluminum home-delivery basket. He gave me a glance, a happy morning nod and grin, and swung aboard his service van and rolled on out, a thousand loud guitars fading down the road, but still playing faintly inside the house.
The incident had decided me in favor of the front door. Storm door, then a big white front door with a narrow insert of vertical glass. Brass knocker shaped like the American eagle. Brass and pearl bell button which, when pushed, set off the biggest and most complicated chime set in the Sears catalogue. When it had played through to its finish, faintly heard through the doors, I felt like applauding. I waited and then thumbed them into encore, and when the presentation number was half over I saw her coming toward the door, patting her hair, hitching at her clothes, giving that sucked-in bite that goes with fresh lipstick.
One Fearful Yellow Eye Page 19