by Lois Duncan
“I couldn’t,” Joan said. “That’s the whole thing, Frank—my parents mustn’t know about this. They’re not well, either one of them. My father has a bad heart—he had a slight attack a year ago—and he’s not supposed to be under pressure of any kind. I don’t know how he’s managed to hold up through all that’s happened these past weeks. It’s a kind of miracle. And Mother—she isn’t herself. Daddy calls it shock, but whatever it is, it’s getting worse instead of better. Sometimes I wonder if she knows us at all, she’s so wrapped up in thinking about Larry. She won’t believe he’s dead. She has him built up in her mind until he’s some sort of angel. To have somebody come out now with accusations against him—she just couldn’t handle it. I can’t tell them.”
“So what did you do?” Frank asked her. “You must have told the man something over the phone?”
“I told him not to try to talk to my parents. I said I’d take care of things.”
“You!” Frank exclaimed. “My God, Joan, how do you plan to do that? You don’t have fifty thousand dollars sitting around any place, do you?”
“No, but I do have some money,” Joan said defiantly. “I’ve had a savings account for years now. I’ve done a lot of baby-sitting, and last summer I worked as a counselor at Girl Scout camp. I was going to use the money for clothes and extras next fall for college.”
“And the rest of the money?”
“Well, I could get it somehow. At least, I could try. Now, with Dan gone …” Her voice came with a choking sound. “College doesn’t seem so … wonderful, any more. I don’t really care whether I go or not. I could get a job instead and repay the money month by month. Mother and Daddy wouldn’t have to know anything about it.”
“You must be crazy,” Frank said flatly. “You don’t even know that this Mr. Brown is telling you the truth. Larry may not owe him a penny. He may not have had anything to do with him. You read about con men like that, guys who follow up every tragedy in the paper and contact the families and make claims. This business of not wanting to hurt his reputation could just be a kind of blackmail.”
“I know,” Joan said miserably. “Still, Larry was running a little wild this past year. Dad was worried enough about it to decide to send him away to school next fall. Not that Larry would ever have done anything really bad. I’m sure he wouldn’t have. But he’s not here to defend himself, and this man says he has proof, that Larry signed a paper, an IOU for the money.”
“And you’re taking him at his word?”
“Of course not. I’m not that dumb.” Joan’s face was beginning to take on some color now, the pink flush of anger. “I told him I’d have to see the paper. I know Larry’s handwriting. Nobody could fool me about that. I’m to meet him tomorrow night. He said he’d bring it to show to me. The conversation—it all seemed to come so fast. It wasn’t until after he’d hung up and I started to think about it that I realized what I’d promised, and now—Frank, I’m scared.”
“You should be,” Frank said shortly. “That’s about the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of, a girl going out alone to meet some strange man who doesn’t even give her his right name. Where is this meeting supposed to take place?”
“At the library. On the steps. I promised—if I don’t go, he’s going to get in touch with my parents. He might call while I was out and Mother might answer the phone and—Frank …” The anger was gone now; all that was left was desperation. “Frank, what can I do? I’ve promised! I have to be there!”
“Yes, I guess you do,” Frank said quietly. “But you’re not going to go by yourself. I’ll go with you, and we’ll talk to this—Mr. Brown—together.”
FOUR
HE WAS NOT SURE how long he had slept, but he was awakened by the sound of the apartment door opening and closing. He kept his eyes determinedly closed, reluctant to tear himself away from the comfort of unconsciousness.
There was a long pause as the person in the doorway stood, silently. Then he heard the soft pad of rubber-soled shoes and caught the scent of suntan oil.
A voice spoke softly. “Dave?”
With a sigh, the boy on the bed opened his eyes, and the world came into being about him.
“Hi,” he said.
“Have you been asleep all the time I’ve been gone? How are you feeling?”
“Okay, I guess. What’s with you? I thought you were going job hunting?”
“I did, but no luck. I had my swimming stuff in the car, and I stopped off at the beach on my way back. It was really great. We’re going to have to get a surf board. Everybody out here seems to have one.”
The younger boy shoved his damp hair back from his forehead and tossed his towel over the back of a chair. He was dressed in red and blue plaid swimming shorts and a white T-shirt. His eyes were clear and green in his tanned face.
“Boy, I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat around here?”
“I think there are some apples left in that bag on the table. There was a sack of cookies somewhere around too.”
Dave pulled himself to a sitting position. He felt as groggy and dragged out as though he had been toiling outside in the hot sun instead of napping the entire afternoon indoors.
“Where did you go?” he asked. “Did you look into that ad for a department store salesman? That one looked kind of promising. With a new store opening up like that, there ought to be a lot of different openings.”
“I applied, but I don’t think anything’s going to come of it. I look too young. They acted like I still ought to be in school.”
“Well, tomorrow,” Dave said, “I’ll take a crack at it myself. We’ve got to get some money coming in. This may not be much of a room, but it costs something, and so do those apples you’re eating. And gas for the car. And that surf board you’re so keen on buying.”
“I wish you’d stop worrying. We’ve got enough cash to get along for a little while.” The blond-haired boy had found the cookies and was preparing to make a meal of them. “You’re not ready to go out and start working yet. You might keel over or something, and have a relapse.”
“A relapse?” Dave laughed shortly. “That would be pretty difficult. I don’t have anything to relapse to. My mind’s just as blank now as it was the first day we got here!”
“You’re sure?” Lance regarded him critically. “You seem better. Isn’t it starting to come back to you at all? Not anything?”
“Nothing. It’s like—well, like I just got born right here in this room. I remember yesterday and the day before that and—oh, I have a vague recollection of the drive west. Not much though. It’s the weirdest feeling. You can’t imagine.”
“Don’t let it panic you, Dave,” Lance said sympathetically. “You were sick, real sick. You ran a very high fever for a couple of weeks there. The doctor said it wasn’t unusual for this to happen, not after a bout like that. It’s a wonder you lived at all.”
“Maybe I ought to look up a doctor out here and get checked again,” Dave said. “I don’t even remember the one in New York. How long did he think it would take for me to start snapping out of this? I ought to be getting better by this time, shouldn’t I?”
“You are better,” Lance told him firmly. “A lot better. You don’t know how bad you were. You’re bound to be under par for a while, maybe even a long while. Your strength is starting to come back now, and your memory will too. The thing you don’t want to do is push yourself too hard. Instead of going out looking for work tomorrow, you ought to go over to the beach. Get some fresh air and sunshine.”
“Okay, okay. I know you’re right. I’m expecting too much too fast.”
Swinging his legs over the side of the bed, Dave got to his feet and crossed over to the French doors, which opened out onto the balcony. He stood there silently, gazing out at the world below.
Their room was a small one and the building old; the French doors themselves were sealed to prevent the room’s occupants from stepping out onto the balcony, which, the landlord had informed them, was
in need of repair. Inside the room, the chipped blue walls needed a coat of paint. The air from the one small window was set in languid motion by a large, old-fashioned fan, revolving slowly against the dingy ceiling.
The room was far indeed, from luxurious, but the view, as seen across the useless balcony, was something else entirely. The street below was lined with royal poincianas, green when they had first arrived, but now beginning to blossom out in masses of unbelievable scarlet blooms. The trees led the way in two bright trails to the end of the street where a strip of white proclaimed the sand of a public beach. Beyond that lay the water, glistening blue beneath the brighter blue of the sky. Over it all, the late afternoon sunlight fell in a golden haze.
“I guess it must be pretty different from New York,” Dave said slowly.
“Different? It’s a whole new world!” Lance had finished the cookies. Now he went over to the closet and selected a tan sports jacket and a pair of slacks. He carried them over to the second bed and laid them out carefully across the spread.
“I’m going down the hall to get a shower. Are there any clean towels?”
“There were, but I think you took the last one to the beach with you.” Dave turned to stare at him. “You going out someplace?”
“I met some guys at the beach. They’re going out on the town tonight. They asked me if I wanted to go along.”
“ ‘Out-on-the-town’ costs money,” Dave said. “With both of us out of work, I’d think you could take a rain check on that kind of evening.”
“Dave, relax, won’t you?” Lance regarded him with unconcealed exasperation. “I told you, we’ve got enough to get along. We’re not going to starve tomorrow because I go out tonight. I’ll pick up a job this next week. Maybe one of the guys I’m going out with tonight will steer me into one. Just stop worrying about everything!”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
As often happened, Dave found himself studying the younger boy’s face—blond hair, green eyes, the delicate tracery of cheekbones beneath the tanned skin. A face that could not be more different from his own.
And yet, they were brothers.
He could remember Lance’s face bending worriedly over him:
“Dave? Are you feeling better, Dave?”
“Who”—Dave had stared up at him groggily—“who are you?”
“I’m Lance! Don’t you remember me, your brother, Lance? Dave, you’ve got to remember me!”
“Yeah … yeah, I guess …”
There had been something familiar; he knew the face. It did not belong to a stranger. And yet, to have this boy his brother …
My brother! Dave shook his head, trying to clear the dizziness, to break through the cloudy curtain that hung there. My younger brother! We must have spent a lot of years together, Lance and I. We must have ridden bikes together, played ball, helped each other in and out of scrapes. Did I help him with his homework when we were kids? I must have known him when he was a baby, when that thin face was soft and rounded. I must have been a baby myself when our mother first brought him home from the hospital. Our mother …
“Lance?” He spoke suddenly. “What about our mother? Where are our parents? Back in New York?”
“We don’t have parents,” Lance said. “They were killed, both of them. It was an automobile accident, about five years ago.”
“Then, that’s where that money we’re living on came from?”
“Sure. They left it to us.”
“Who did we live with then?” Dave asked. “Back east, I mean?”
“We didn’t live with anybody. We had our own apartment.”
“Just the two of us? For five years?”
“We don’t have any other relatives,” Lance told him. “It’s just you and me, Dave—in New York or here in California. Just us. Now, if you’ll let me off from the third degree for a few minutes, I want to get the salt washed off.”
His smile took the edge from the words. Lance had a wonderful smile that lit up his face like sunshine.
My brother, Dave thought wonderingly. Perhaps he looks like one of our parents and I look like the other. A mother—a father—both dead. But there were years before that—years when we were a family! There was a past life, other places, other people—and I don’t remember it!
Dear Lord, I don’t remember any of it at all!
FIVE
THEY HAD BEEN WAITING on the steps for half an hour, and no one had come.
“Maybe it was a joke,” Frank suggested. “There are people like that, you know, nuts who think it’s funny to call people with troubles and make things worse for them. They could have got Larry’s name and address from one of the newspaper articles.”
“It wasn’t a joke,” Joan said.
She did not know why she was so certain about this. It was nothing for which she had an actual explanation. It had been something in the voice itself, in the abrupt businesslike tone that had followed the artificial offer of sympathy.
“It wasn’t a joke,” she said again. “Perhaps I got the time wrong.”
“You wouldn’t have done that.”
“I could have, I suppose. I was rattled. Maybe he said tomorrow night, or last night even.” She turned to face the boy beside her. “Anyway, he’s not here. It’s a half hour past now. If he were coming he would be here by this time.”
Frank frowned thoughtfully. In the dim half-light that flowed out to them through the glass doors of the library, his resemblance to Dan was even more striking than usual. The freckles stood out in dark spots across the bridge of his nose, and beneath them his face was white and worried.
“You wouldn’t have got twisted up on something as important as this.”
It was true, and Joan knew it. Every word of the conversation was engraved on her memory:
“The library steps—eight o’clock—Friday.”
Of course, there were branch libraries. She had assumed immediately that the one meant was the main library, because it was the main one, and because it was only a short bus ride from her home. Yet, there were other libraries scattered here and there about the city. Could the man, even now, be waiting at one of them, checking his watch, wondering angrily where she was and why she had not arrived as promised? Might he, in his anger, take out his cell phone and call her home phone, which was the only number he had for her? If so, one of her parents would answer.
“Hello,” the smooth voice would say. “This is John Brown. I want to talk to you about your son Larry.”
The mere thought of the conversation that would follow was enough to leave her feeling sick. And tonight was the worst time it could take place. That scene at the dinner table …
Joan shuddered, remembering.
“Whatever the reason, he’s evidently not coming.”
She glanced again at her watch. “We can’t keep on waiting. I told my folks I’d be home by nine-thirty.”
“You’ll make it by then. There ought to be a bus by here in a few minutes.”
Frank got up stiffly from his seat on the top step, stretching his long legs to get the kinks out of them, straightening his shoulders in the way Dan used to.
“Come on, we’d better walk down to the corner.”
They arrived at the bus stop just as the bus itself pulled to a halt, its doors rippling open before them. They climbed on and found seats easily; it was not a time of evening for people to be hunting for transportation. Those who were going someplace for the evening had already gone, and it was not yet late enough for them to be returning. Even the youngest moviegoer stayed out through the end of the first feature.
It was far from the first time Joan had taken the bus to the library after dinner. She had mentioned it casually at the table, without a thought that there might be an objection.
She was completely unprepared for her mother’s reaction:
“Why do you need to go out tonight? Now that school’s out, you can go to the library any time you want during the day. It’s not safe for a girl to be wan
dering around alone in the evening.”
“Honestly, Mother, I used to go to the library a couple of nights a week during the school year! You never worried about it before.” Joan regarded her with honest surprise. “The bus stops right down at the end of our block and again at the corner by the library.”
“You never used to go alone,” her mother said. “You had an escort.”
“Well, I do tonight too,” Joan said. “Frank Cotwell’s going to met me there and ride back with me.”
“Frank Cotwell!” Her mother stared at her in amazement. “That’s impossible! He’s up in the mountains with your brother!”
“Not Dan, Mother. Frank—Dan’s younger brother.”
“You mean, you have a date with another of the Cotwell boys?” Mrs. Drayfus’ voice had taken on a shrill note. “It’s not enough that Dan Cotwell lures your poor brother into the mountains, that he’s up there now, lost, maybe even hurt! Now you’re going to start dating another Cotwell! What kind of sister are you, Joan! Don’t you care what’s been done to your brother!”
“Dan wasn’t responsible for Larry’s going on that camping trip! I’ve told you that a hundred times! It was the other way around!” Joan fought to control her own voice. “Besides, I’m not dating Frank Cotwell. It’s nothing like that at all. He’s only a friend. He’s two years younger than I am. All we’re doing is going to the library!”
“Skip it tonight, Joanie.” Her father spoke quietly. “It’s not worth it if it upsets your mother.”
“I can’t skip it,” Joan said. “I’ve promised.”
“Then it is a date,” her mother said. “If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be so stubborn about it!” Her voice was rising higher and higher. “I will not have you associating with that dreadful family! They ought to be arrested, every one of them! When Larry gets home, that’s what we will have done—we’ll have Dan arrested for kidnapping!”
“Kidnapping!” Joan repeated the word in stunned amazement. “You can’t mean that!”
“I certainly do mean it!” Mrs. Drayfus turned to her husband. “Lawrence …”