She sat and stared at me. "Half? Half of six hundred thousand?"
"Half of her end of it, and that would be subject to adjustment. The circumstances are always different. You can see how far I would have gotten with you if I told you who I was trying to help."
"She sent for you!"
"Surprise?"
"I want to be able to keep hating her, Travis."
"Then don't get to know her, if there's ever any chance left for you to get to know her."
"Do you know where the money went?"
"I might. I don't know. Susan Kemmer could be the key."
She looked toward the bedroom. "She knows?"
"I don't think so. But she knows things I have to know."
"Poor little doll. I must have frightened her." She got up and went to the bedroom. There was a line of light under the door. I hung back. Heidi knocked and the girl said to come in.
In a little while Heidi came back out and left the door open and beckoned me back into the living room. "She was just sitting in there in the chair all dressed. Quiet as a mouse. I apologized for walking in on her before. I said I thought she was sleeping. She just shrugged and said it didn't matter. I told her you want to talk to her. Do you want me to be there?"
"It might help. But it might get ugly. Don't try to step in unless I cue you. The cue word is hell, said loudly. Then you hustle to her and hug her and comfort her and chew me out. You're the guy in the white hat."
I went in with her. Heidi sat on the bed. The girl had made the bed. I leaned against a chest of drawers. "Well, Susan, I guess we'd better start leveling with each other."
"There's nothing I want to talk about, Mr. McGee."
"I know that. But you have to."
"I don't have to."
"It won't keep me from finding out. It will just save me a lot of time and effort. I know you caught that North Central bus at Bureau, at the crossroads, at a place called Sheen's, a hundred miles from here. I know that Saul and Gretchen and you five kids left Chicago on Sunday the 22nd of August in the car Saul bought at the place he worked and fixed up. You were towing a U-Haul trailer. So the little family holed up a hundred miles west of here almost four months ago. Saul's parole period was over. That's just a sample, honey. I'm not going to tell you all I know. I'm going to hold back so that I can tell if you're lying to me."
She stared at me, startled, wary, worried. "You don't want to help me. You fooled Mrs. Stanyard too. You're after him!"
"The easiest way to attract attention would be to keep you kids out of school. And he apparently wanted to lay low. So all I have to do is drive over there with you in the morning and hit the high schools in the area and find out which one you've been going to. Then get the home address from the school."
"No. Please. Please don't."
"Why the hell are you being so stubborn, girl?"
Heidi hurried to her on cue, sat on the arm of the chair, and put an arm around Susan and glowered at me and said, "Stop bullying her!" Susan had begun to cry.
"Stubborn is bad enough without being stupid too."
"She's not stupid!"
"Sure she is. She takes after her mother. She takes after Gretchen."
"She's not my real mother!" Susan declared.
I shook my head sadly. "Honey Gretchen is your real mother and Dr. Geis was your father. And your friend and protector there is your big half-sister. Say hello to Sister Heidi."
And Heidi stopped faking it. "Damn you!" she yelled at me, her face pink. "What are you trying to do to herl"
"Shake her up. She needs it."
"Leave her alone!"
I smiled. "Okay, sis. You tell her the tender love story." I closed the bedroom door on my way out. I sat in the living room and picked up an art magazine and began leafing through it. I was a great guy. I did things to people for their own good. It gave me that nice warm righteous glow.
The art magazine told me that when abstract expressionism reflected utter disenchantment with the dream it still reverted to rhetorical simplifications even in its impiety, and that it is not a unified stylistic entity because of its advocacy of alien ideas on the basis of a homiletic approach to experience. Funny I'd never realized it.
After I spent twenty minutes admiring my sterling character, Heidi came out red-eyed and wan and said, "It's tearing her to ribbons. She's had all she can take."
"Loan me your white hat and stay here," I said, and went in. The girl looked at me. It's the look the caged things have in small roadside stands.
I sat on the bed and said, "Growing up hurts, kid."
"You made everything awful."
"Your father was a fine man. Possibly a great man. Your mother was a sweet dumb sexy kid and she caught him at the wrong time or the right time, and there you sprouted. Miracle of life. Ah, sweet mystery. Et cetera."
"But why didn't he ever want to see me?"
"Let me see now. Could it be because he thought you might not be old enough to take that kind of a jar? And maybe you aren't old enough yet. He made the deal he thought best for you long ago. It didn't turn out so great. But he knew you did. He paid to have you checked out. He liked the report. I think it would be safe to say he was proud of you. But l have the feeling that his little affair with the housekeeper's daughter cost him a lot more than the annuity and paying to have reports made on you, and the ten thousand he left with Mrs. Stanyard. I have the feeling his little bout with statutory rape eventually and indirectly cost him just about everything he ever saved. Six hundred thousand dollars. And I think Saul Gorba got it."
"No! Oh, no, it wasn't anything like that. Honest. They explained it all to us kids. Saul tried to go straight, really. But there was a man at the body shop. He knew Saul had a prison record. So he started stealing. It was some way of putting the wrong amount on the bills and receipts. Saul explained it. Then the man ' put some forms in the back of Saul's locker and he found them and he knew what was happening, and he was going to be framed. Momma was so upset. Saul said that with his record he didn't have a prayer. He said he'd be sent back to prison and he said that he was pretty sure the welfare would take over and split us up and call Momma an unfit mother on account of they'd picked her up twice in Chicago on D and D and let her off with a fine, but it was on the record. He said our only chance was to just leave. He said he'd found us a nice place in the country, and we weren't to tell anybody we were leaving."
"It sounded logical to you?"
"It was the only way we could stay together as a family." She frowned. "I would be all right, but it would be terrible for Julian and Freda. I don't think Freddy cares one way or another. And Tommy is only six. He needs the rest of us."
"Where did you go?"
"Saul rented a farmhouse. It's RFD 3 Box 80, Princeton. It's off the Depue Road, all by itself at the end of a little dirt road. It's about two and a half miles from Bureau crossroads."
"Nice place?"
"Kind of shacky, but there's lots of room. Forty acres. Everything had grown up weeds and bushes. It had been empty a long time. They said we couldn't attract any attention. Our name was going to be Farley. And we had moved there from Chicago for Saul's health. We were going to farm it. We all had to practice the name. He put the Cadillac in one of the sheds and nailed up the door. He walked out and hitchhiked and came back the next day with an old pickup truck. He made a kind of workshop in another shed. When it was time to go back to school, he had our school records. He came back to the city and got them and he changed the names so you couldn't tell. They had driver's licenses and he fixed up birth certificates for us and everything. He said we were going to be the Farley family for the rest of our lives, and we shouldn't ever tell."
"Did you mind that?"
"Nobody minded much. Anything is okay with Momma, the way she is. It made-me feel bad that I couldn't write to my friends. They'd never know what happened to me. It was hard to get used to it being so quiet all the time. But after a while it didn't seem so quiet. You just heard ot
her things. Wind and birds and bugs."
"Did your mother or Saul try to find work?"
"No. Saul would go away once in a while and be gone overnight. He'd go in the old truck. We all worked fixing the old place up for winter. Then one day when we came home on the school bus there wasn't anybody there. That was... just three weeks ago today. We thought they'd gone off in the truck. Saul came back alone in the truck and he wanted to know where Momma was. We told him she was gone when we came home. I looked and found that a suitcase and a lot of her clothes were gone. Saul cursed and stormed around. He said we'd just have to all sit tight and wait for her to come back. It bothered him a lot. I'd wake up in the night and hear him walking around downstairs."
"He did beat you up?"
"He was upset and he'd been drinking. All night maybe. He came into my room before daylight and he woke me up and handed me my coat and told me to come along and not wake the other kids. He said he had something to tell me about my mother. We went out to his workshop place. He had wired it for lights and he had a space heater going. He acted strange and he kept looking at me in a funny way. He had me sit down on the cot and he sat and put his arm around me and he was kind of half crying. He said he was pretty sure that she had been gone so long now, she was never coming back.
"I told him I thought she'd be back and he told me she had threatened to go away for good because they hadn't been getting along. He kept rubbing his hand up and down my arm. He said there was just the two of us now to take care of everything. He said I was just like a regular mother to the other kids. He said I was a better mother in every way than she was. He said we had to stick together. I said I'd better go back to bed and I started to stand up, but he got my wrists and pushed me down flat on the cot. He lay down beside me and put my wrists around behind me and held them there in one hand, hurting me.
"In a funny whispery little voice he said everything was going to be wonderful. He said he loved me, and we were going to be a little family, just him and me and little Tommy, and we were going to leave soon and drive to Mexico in the Cadillac, just the three of us, and he was going to divorce Momma and marry me and we'd live in a big house with a swimming pool and have servants. He said that on the way out of town when we were fifty miles away he'd call the welfare to take care of the other three and they'd be in good hands. He kept stroking me with his free hand and I was starting to cry and begging him to stop. He kissed my neck and told me I was his little darling and he had been watching me ever since we'd left Chicago, and he had just one more little thing to take care of and then we would go on a wonderful trip. Then he opened my coat and pushed his hand up under my pajama top and started squeezing and rubbing me. It scared me so I yanked my wrists loose and I hit at him and kicked him and he fell backward off the cot. I tried to get by him and get out but he grabbed me and pulled me down and then he got up and picked me up and threw me back onto the cot. He said I was old enough and big enough for it, so I better relax and enjoy it, because I was going to have a lot of chances to get used to it. I remember scratching and biting and kicking at him and all of a sudden he was on the floor again, kneeling, all hunched over, looking up at me and holding onto himself.
"His eyes are funny. They're sort of pale brown but when he gets mad they look yellow. Golden almost. He stood up slowly and when I tried to dodge around him he hit me in the mouth with his fist and knocked me down. He picked me up and hit me a lot more times, holding me with one hand and hitting me with the other. It all got blurred. He let go of me and I fell down and he kicked me a couple of times and went away and left me there. It was getting light. Pretty soon I could get up and I went back to my room. I didn't see him. I locked the door. Mr. McGee, I knew that if I went down to the road and hitched a ride into Princeton and told the police, he'd go to jail and the welfare would get us. And I knew if I stayed there, he'd keep at me until he got what he wanted. When the kids knocked on the door to find out about breakfast I said I was sick and I told Freda and Julian to help Freddy get breakfast for everybody. I stayed in there all day. After everybody was asleep, I sneaked down and got something to eat. I knew I was safe because I could hear Saul snoring. You can always hear him all over the upstairs part after he's had a lot of beer. I took food up to my room. Monday morning when Freddy knocked at my door I said I was better but I wasn't well enough to go to school. I'd remembered about Mrs. Stanyard. He reminded me, saying I better not go to her. I had the money I'd been putting away to buy baby chicks in the spring. I heard the truck go rattling out about two o'clock, so I got dressed and left and cut across lots and came out on the Depue Road and followed it to Route 26 and walked to the crossroads where I'd heard you could get the bus to Chicago.
"The waitress at Sheen's was nice. She let me lie down in back on a couch in a room off the kitchen, and she brought me things to eat even though I couldn't pay for them. I told her I fell downstairs. She said her boyfriend had a bad temper too. I think that when... Momma comes back everything will be all right again. But he couldn't have stolen all that money you said."
"He had to steal something."
"What do you mean?"
"What did seven of you live on for four months?"
"Oh, it was hardly any rent way out away from anything in that shacky place, and we've always had that four hundred and thirty-three dollars every month."
"Not since August first, Susan. The company is holding four checks right now. The January one will be the last one made out to your mother. In February it starts to come directly to you, if they can manage to find out where you are."
She stared at me and even with the puffed lids she opened her eyes as wide as I had seen them. "But, I thought that was where she got the money to... to go on a vacation!"
"Did Saul quarrel much with her?"
"Oh yes. But it..." She stopped and put her hand to her throat. "No! He wouldn't!"
"Let's hope it's a lousy guess."
She said, "I have to get back there! I left Freddy a note. I said I was going.to go off to get Momma and bring her home and not to worry, and be good, and help each other and not fight. If he... if he..." She could not continue.
"Sit tight, honey. Draw me a map so I can find the place. I am a registered licensed sneak. I'll go check on your clan, gather them up, and haul them back here. You've got more friends on your side than you know what to do with. Me, Heidi, Mrs. Stanyard. And there's always your grandmammy Mrs. Ottlo."
"She doesn't like children very much," Susan explained. "I think they make her nervous."
Heidi spoke from the doorway, startling me. "She's right, you know. When we were little if we got in her way in the kitchen when she was busy, she'd do things that would hurt like fury, like snapping your ear with a fingernail, and giving a little pinch and twisting at the same time. She'd laugh but it was... kind of a mean laugh." She tilted her head and frowned. "I remember once Gretchen showing us her back. She took her blouse off. She must have been about thirteen, and that would make me about four and Roger was probably eight. Anna had thrashed her with a belt. I can remember the marks still, the dark places and the little streaks where it had broken the skin."
"Please hurry," Susan said to me.
ELEVEN
I TOOK Heidi into the outside corridor beyond her red door and said, "Settle her down. Get a sleeping pill into her. I'm not going to go fumbling around in the boonies in the black black night. And I don't think he's going to do any harm to those kids. I've got a hunch they might be there alone, and Saul Gorba may be rocketing south with the loot. The boy is fifteen. He should be able to cope."
"When are you going out?"
"In time to pick a nice observation post and see who gets on the school bus. I'll report by phone. Like having a sister?"
"I don't know how I feel yet. I like her."
"A staunch one. The kind that knows how to cope. Go in and be family. She needs it."
"Okay." She gave me a nervous smile. I guess it is the smile dentists see when the patient walks
in and looks at the chair and the drills and then at the dentist. "I could need it too."
"So cozy each other, Heidi. Everybody has days like this."
The smile turned wry. "That's a little hard to believe."
I had noticed a change in her. The little provocative animal grace of her moments was gone. She had taken to walking like a stick doll. But at the eame time she had stopped saying no. I knew she kept remembering the bargain she had made. But there was a certain little awareness mixed with trepidation. I had the feeling that if I made a sudden movement she would make exactly the same protective gestures Susan had made when we had looked into the room and seen her in the light from the hallway.
I rested my hand on the warm shoulder under the off-white knit and felt her tense up, and saw her throat work in a convulsive swallow.
John D MacDonald - Travis McGee 08 - One Fearful Yellow Eye Page 18