“I’ll hurry,” Lyon said and walked quickly toward the pool room, leaving Koyota struggling to replace the police seal on the door.
The pool seemed to echo as he stood on the tiled edge and looked down into the empty basin. A dim, clouded light came through the glazed ceiling. He sat and let his feet dangle over the edge.
Minutes later he heard the slither of the panel to his rear. “Are you finished, Mr. Wentworth?”
“No. Would you fill the pool, please?” Lyon pushed off the tile and fell lightly to the floor of the deep portion of the pool. “Can you remember exactly where you first saw the body?”
“About halfway toward the steps.”
“Please start the water.”
As Koyota left the room, Lyon walked the length of the pool and back. By the time he had reached the deeper part, water had begun to rush through a two-inch pipe recessed into the wall in the eight-foot-deep section. He watched the water a moment as it began to trickle around his bare feet.
“Anything else, Mr. Wentworth?”
“Yes. Adjust the water to full pressure.”
The Japanese shook his head and again disappeared. Shortly, the water flow increased. Lyon watched it a moment and then retreated halfway toward the steps. He lay on his back on the dry tiles.
“You’ll get wet, Mr. Wentworth, and we should go.”
“Uh huh,” Lyon replied and looked upward toward the indistinct day beyond the skylight.
“Mr. Wentworth …”
“Yes? Why don’t you take my car and go back to your friends? Please return in exactly five hours to pick me up.” He reached into his pocket, fished for the car keys, and tossed them to the waiting man.
“Five hours?”
“To the minute, please.”
As he heard the front door close, he crossed his arms under his head and tried to make himself comfortable on the hard surface. The sound of rushing water was not unpleasant. He closed his eyes. The Parrot at the Pool—yes. It might make a story. A sylvan glen, deep in the forest, with a clear pool of cold spring water. The animals, of all sorts, would follow the shaded paths to the pool, where the parrot reigned. He would have to think about that.
“By God, I think the silly bastard is trying to drown himself!” Captain Norbert’s voice reverberated through the tiled room as Lyon’s eyes slowly opened. He felt chilled, and as he turned to face the offending voice his nose and mouth filled with water. He gasped, choked, and sat up.
“Get out of there, Lyon,” Rocco said from the pool’s edge.
“I was worried, Mr. Wentworth,” Koyota said from behind Captain Norbert. “And so when I was ready to come back, I called Chief Herbert.”
“How long have I been in here?”
Koyota looked at his oversize wristwatch. “Four hours and fifty minutes.”
“Get the hell out of there, Wentworth, or do I have to come in and drag you out? This building is police-sealed.”
“In a few more minutes.” Lyon turned to face the deep end of the pool. It was now completely filled. Sitting in the water, he noticed that it had risen to lap around his thighs. “What happens when the pool is filled?”
“The water never cuts off. When it reaches the drains, part of it is automatically let out and recycled so that there’s a constant interchange of water.”
“Are you coming out of there?”
“I want to double-check my estimates.”
“You have broken a seal. You can get a bust for that, Wentworth.”
“O.K.”
“Damn it all, Rocco, he’s your friend. Get the crazy out of the water.”
“You had better come out, Lyon.”
“Few more minutes.”
“Bust the bastard,” Norbert said to the ever-present corporals.
From the corner of his eye Lyon saw the two police corporals jump off the side of the pool, grimace as the water seeped through their pants, and advance toward him. One pulled a blackjack from his back pocket, the other a pair of handcuffs.
“Wait a God damn minute!” Rocco yelled and jumped into the pool. His huge bulk caused a large gush of water to splatter Captain Norbert. “You lay a hand on him and you’ll deal with me!”
“Are you interfering with my orders?” the enraged Norbert bellowed.
“That’s right.” Rocco reached down, grabbed Lyon by the shirt front, and jerked him erect.
“Cut it out, Rocco. I’m not finished.”
“Yes, you are.” He threw Lyon’s weight over his shoulders, splashed to the end of the pool and let Lyon fall on the tiles. “Now, what in hell were you doing?”
“What time did Esposito die?”
“You know damn well when. The medical examiner is positive that he was killed at midnight … give or take a few minutes either way.”
“No, not killed. That’s when he died.”
“I don’t understand your semantics.”
“Esposito had dinner served exactly at six. He had probably finished at seven. He was called outside, where he was coshed.”
“Coshed?” Norbert asked.
“The victim was rendered unconscious,” Rocco translated.
“He was placed unconscious in the shallow end of the pool,” Lyon continued. “And was drowned some five hours later.”
“How in hell do you know that?”
“I just timed it.”
Rocco looked at Lyon silently for a moment and then extended his hand and helped him to his feet. “Damon Snow.”
“It’s possible.”
“He could have been knocked out and thrown into the pool at midnight,” Norbert said. “It could have happened either way.”
“I know,” Lyon said. “But you have to admit it is interesting.”
At the Thursday 10:00 A.M. tour of the toy factory, Lyon felt out of place. He wasn’t quite sure whether the unsettling feeling arose because the young tour guide reminded him of Robin, or because of the twenty-three chubby children who surrounded him as the tour formed. He had noticed the school bus when he parked the car. A sign along its body announced: “Camp Tonowanta—Slim down with a summer of fun.”
As the kids gathered around him at the entrance to the factory, he noticed that several of them, behind the counselor’s back, were surreptitiously passing candy bars back and forth.
The tour guide, who had “Wendy” emblazoned across her red sports jacket, smiled and held up a hand. The group fell silent except for the crunching of a nut bar, which caused the counselor to turn and glare.
“The first department we will visit is where the famous Wobbly dolls are made. Has everyone heard of the Wobblies?”
There were murmurs of assent as Wendy looked directly at Lyon. “For you older folks, the Wobblies are famous monsters who are characters in a children’s book series.”
“Sounds vaguely familiar,” Lyon replied, and wondered when he would ever be able to get to the next Wobbly story.
“All right, keep together now.”
The tour for Lyon was a kaleidoscope of impressions: long cutting tables where moving knives shaped dozens of patterns at once, high-speed sewing machines connecting the various parts of the Wobblies, and stuffing machines which pounded fill material into the monsters at the rate of a dozen a minute. He stood before a one-way mirror watching the testing room where small children played with new toys and games.
Fingers tapped his elbow. “We’re moving to the cafeteria for refreshments, sir.”
“We haven’t been in the east wing yet.”
“That’s the research department, where new lines are developed, but I’m afraid it’s off-limits for us.”
“Secrets?”
“Oh, yes. New lines must be kept from the competition until the toys are on the market.”
“That’s interesting. What are they developing?”
“I really don’t know.” She handed out illustrated brochures and began to shoo the group toward the cafeteria.
“A rest room?”
“Se
cond door to the left.”
As he walked toward the rest rooms, he saw the guide disappear into the cafeteria with her entourage. He hurried down the hall toward the east wing until he came to a heavy metal door with a red and white RESTRICTED AREA sign. He tried the handle, found that it turned, and stepped inside.
He found himself in a large, well-lighted workroom. “Hold it right there!” The security guard reached for the walkie-talkie snapped to his belt.
Within three minutes, Damon Snow was ushering Lyon from the east wing. “If you wanted a tour of the factory, I would have gladly given you one myself.”
“I’m interested in the east wing.”
“No can do, Lyon. You can’t imagine how cutthroat toy competition is. I wouldn’t let my own mother in there.”
“You’ve always said I was part of the Cedarcrest toy family.”
“So’s my mother.”
12
Kimberly Ward sat on the ground at the edge of the stand of pines and stared morosely down from the promontory toward the river. Distant night sounds provided an appropriate background for her unease. Nutmeg Hill loomed darkly behind her. She shook her head in an attempt to break the gloom. A hot bath, milk, and a dull book to fall asleep with might do it. Or she could take the car out on country roads and drive the limit until dawn streaked the sky and exhaustion enabled her to tumble into bed.
At first she had thought her state of mind was without cause, an occasional happening that overtook her without warning. It could have been caused by the day’s earlier incident at her office, when an employee had accused her of reverse bigotry—favoring blacks over whites. She shook her head violently and thought of her daughter away at school, immersed in African studies, dressed in Swahili robes, who now accused her mother of being an Oreo. “I’ve got to be either one or the other,” she said aloud.
She looked up at the dim figure moving toward her across the lawn and smiled. “That you, Lyon? Come talk to me. I’m in a real funk.” She stood and started toward him.
The blow startled her more than it hurt, but its force was sufficient to knock her sprawling backward against a pine trunk.
“Hey!” The running figure passed and was lost in the pines, and she yelled: “God damn it! You …” Her voice was lost in the night, and she crawled to her feet to look toward the darkened trees.
She hurried toward the main house. The back-door handle refused to budge. Locked? The Wentworths never locked the back door. She tried desperately to turn the handle back and forth, than began to knock on the windowpane. “Lyon! Bea!” They were both heavy sleepers. She ran around the house to the front door and found it also locked. It was impossible to enter the house through the combination storm-window/screens without destroying or removing the fixtures. She stood below the master-bedroom window and yelled.
Smoke curled through the living room window. Tongues of flame sputtered near the couch in the center of the room, and toward the front, fire leaped at the draperies. She knew that a large stone at the corner of the patio parapet was loose, and she threw it through the window. She put her legs over the sill and fell onto the floor. The choking smoke made her cough as she struggled for the stairs.
She fumbled with the door of the master bedroom, stumbled inside and lurched toward the bed to shake Bea’s shoulder.
“Not again, Lyon,” the sleepy woman mumbled.
“Bea! Lyon! For God’s sake, the place is on fire!”
They both awoke and sat up. Kim snapped on the overhead light and slammed the door shut as smoke billowed up the stairwell and into the room. Lyon coughed and reached for the bedstand telephone to dial 911. He looked at the receiver incredulously and dialed again. “The line’s out!”
“Someone came from the house, hit me, and ran into the woods.”
Lyon nodded as he leaped from the bed into a pair of trousers. “We’d better go out the window.” He heaved a straight-backed chair against the window and screen, carrying glass and frame away from the house. He lowered Kim and Bea by their wrists as far as he could, then released them and let them fall to the ground. He sat on the sill a moment, trying to see the ground in the darkness below, and then pushed off. As he hit the ground, he bent his knees and fell to the side in order to absorb the impact.
“Everyone all right?”
“I’ll phone from the cottage,” Kim said and took off at a full run toward her small house a hundred yards distant.
“I’m going to see if I can do anything with the fire extinguisher.”
It surprised him that the back door was locked. He elbowed a lower pane from the frame, reached through, and turned the handle. Putting a handkerchief against his face, he went into the kitchen and by memory located the extinguisher in its mountings next to the stove.
The fire seemed to have originated in the living room. He sprayed swatches of foam in front of him as he fought his way toward the flames licking their way up the draperies.
“My phone’s out, too!” Kim yelled from behind him.
“Keep it from the ceiling beams or the whole place will go,” he said as he handed her the fire extinguisher and ran from the house. Although most of the instruments and equipment from the balloon gondola had been vandalized when he landed on the beach at Lantern City, the CB radio in the pickup was still intact.
He opened the truck and switched on Channel 9, the emergency frequency. Lyon had heard that Radio Emergency Associated Citizen Teams monitored the emergency channel on a twenty-four-hour basis. “This is an emergency! Can any REACT team hear me? I repeat, this is an emergency!”
When Lyon switched to receive, a voice answered immediately, “Middleberg REACT. State your problem.”
Lyon quickly gave the location of Nutmeg Hill and asked that the Murphysville Fire Department be called.
They stood on the edge of the yard lighted by the powerful searchlights on the fire trucks. The fire had been brought under control in less than an hour; two trucks had already left, and now the rubber-coated men were searching to make sure every vestige of the fire had been extinguished.
“They didn’t have to chop the front door in,” Bea said softly. She stood forlornly by Lyon’s side. Two large tears welled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She brushed them away with the back of her hand.
Lyon thought of the hundreds of hours they had worked on the house. He could see Bea, on her knees, refinishing a difficult floor by hand, or painting and scraping the widow’s walk … and now half their home was destroyed.
Rocco Herbert flicked soot from his uniform as he stepped through the torn door. He stopped in front of Bea and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry.”
Bea blinked away another tear. “YOU COVER THE FIRES, TOO?”
“Only when the origins are suspicious.”
“The phone lines were cut, doors were locked that shouldn’t have been, and Kim was hit by someone running from the house.”
“And we found these,” Rocco said as he displayed a handful of rags. “For some reason this bunch didn’t go up.”
Lyon took the rags and sniffed them. “Gasoline. Pretty obvious, isn’t it?”
“Clear case of arson. We’ll dust for prints, but I can’t put much hope in that. What about you, Kim? Can you identify the man who ran past you?”
“I couldn’t even swear it was a man. A person wearing dark clothes. That’s all.”
Bea felt the rags. “Unbleached muslin. Odd material to use in setting a fire.”
“Unless you happen to have an awful lot of it,” Lyon said.
“I think the water did more damage than the fire,” Lyon said as they trudged through the shambles of the living room. They were throwing the irreparable pieces out on the front lawn for later trash pickup, and were trying to restore some semblance of order. The phone company had arrived early to repair the lines, and a crew of carpenters was already at work replacing window frames and sections of wall.
As Lyon and Bea carried the ruined divan out to the pile
of trash, they saw two figures coming up the drive. Bea’s fingers tightened on Lyon’s arm. “I THINK YOU’VE GOT ABOUT EIGHT YARDS OF UNBLEACHED MUSLIN COMING UP THE ROAD.”
Lyon shaded his eyes. The girl was obviously a tousled and very tired Robin. He recognized the man as Winston, one of the disciples he and Rocco had interviewed in Blossom’s office. Robin and Winston stopped to stare at the house. The early-morning wind whipped their robes backward in a trailing stream.
“What happened?” Robin asked as Bea felt the hem of her robe.
“I’d swear that it’s the same material.”
“I’ll call Rocco to have him run a match with the lab.”
“WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING HERE?”
Winston posed as he directed his answer to Robin.
“We are apostates. I would tear these unholy robes from my body, except that …”
“I think he’s bare-assed underneath,” Robin said.
“I’ll find you something to wear,” Lyon said as he took the young man’s arm.
At one time in the dimness of his past, Sarge had been a mess cook. He made very passable fried eggs and bacon, although the toast was scorched when he took a moment off to tipple. They had left the house, which was now swarming with workmen, to drop off the robes at Rocco’s office. Realizing that it was close to ten and that they were famished, Bea and Lyon had driven to Sarge’s Bar and Grill.
“They evidently do some sort of investigation on new members,” Robin said through a mouthful of egg.
“I could have told you that if you’d asked,” Winston added pompously.
She smiled at him. “Anyway, after I’d been there a few days, the great Reverend calls me into the inquisition. Winston and his cronies were there, standing behind Blossom like they were going to put me in the Iron Maiden or something. Blossom had found out that I’d been staying at your place, and he knew I was a ringer. To make a long story short, they kicked me out.”
“And Winston?”
Robin brushed her companion’s cheek. “Winston escorted me to the gate and kept right on going.”
“When was all this?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
Death Through the Looking Glass Page 12