Donald Westlake - Drowned Hopes

The monster shut the door, and Doug said, “Myrtle, what are you doing here?”

Desperate, betrayed, feeling that Doug at least should be on her side, Myrtle said, “What are you doing here? You and the computer man and the so-called environment protection man and Gladys and my f-f-f-f—everybody else? You were here all along, lying to me, waiting for rain!”

The looks these three people gave one another at that outburst suggested to Myrtle, somewhat belatedly, that she might have revealed a bit more knowledge there than she should have. (At least she’d had sense enough not to mention her father.) Confirming this fear, the monster said, “This friend of yours knows a lot about us, Doug.”

Doug shook his head, protesting with a tremor in his voice. “Not from me, Tiny! Honest!”

Tiny ? Myrtle stared, but was distracted from this exercise in misapplied nomenclature by the sudden appearance in the kitchen of her father.

Yes. No question. She knew it at once. And almost as quickly she also knew, after one look in those icy eyes and at that gray, fleshless, hard-boned face, that this wasn’t a father into whose arms one threw oneself. In fact, as instinctively as she’d grasped their relationship, she also grasped that it might be a very bad idea to inform him of it.

It was already a bad idea merely to have attracted his attention. After a quick but penetrating glare at Myrtle, her father swiveled his eyes to the monster and said, without moving his bloodless lips, “Tiny?”

“Peeking in the window,” Tiny told him succinctly. “Doug’s girlfriend, only the idea was she didn’t know about this house or we’re here or what’s going on. Isn’t that right, Doug?”

“I thought so,” Doug said, sounding desperate. Spreading his arms in a gesture of appeal, he said to Myrtle’s father, “Whatever she knows, Tom, she didn’t know it from me. I swear!”

“And she knows a lot,” the monster called Tiny said. “Including we been here waiting for weather.”

Surprised, her father looked full at Myrtle ( now she could see why Edna’s reaction had been so extreme when she’d seen this man again after so many years) and said, “Know everything, do you? Where’d you learn it all?”

“I, I saw you all come out on the lawn,” she told him in her little voice. “You were so happy when the clouds came.”

Tiny said, “She’s been keeping an eye on us, this girl.”

Myrtle’s father gave Doug a look of icy contempt, saying, “You gave it away, all right. You are as stupid as you look.”

While Doug was still trying to decide what if any answer to give that, her father turned back to Myrtle and said, “Who else knows about us?”

(Keep Edna out of this!) “Nobody!”

Doug said, “That’s gotta be true, Tom. She wouldn’t tell her mother, and there’s nobody else she hangs out with. She’s just a librarian here in town!”

(How empty he makes my life sound, Myrtle thought. And how little he cares about me, really.)

Her father nodded slowly, thinking things over, and then he said, “Well, the back yard’s nice and soft after all this rain. We’ll plant her when it gets dark.”

Everyone else in the room got the import of that remark before Myrtle did, and by the time she’d caught up they were all making objections, every one of which she heartily seconded.

Gladys spoke first, in tones of outrage: “You can’t do that!”

Then Doug, in tones of panic: “I can’t be involved in anything like that!”

And then Tiny, calm but persuasive: “We don’t need to do that, Tom.”

“Oh, yeah?” Her father—Tom Jimson—shook his head at all three of them. “Where does she go from here, then? Straight to the law.”

“We keep her,” Tiny said. “We’re making our move tomorrow night, anyway. After that, what do we care what she says or where she goes?”

“Then her mother goes to the law when she doesn’t come home,” Tom Jimson said. (It was easier to think of him by his name, and not as father at all.)

Gladys said, “She can phone her mother and say she’s gonna spend the night with Doug.”

Myrtle gasped, and Doug had the grace to look embarrassed, but Gladys turned and gave her a jaundiced look and said, “It’s better than not spending the night anywhere,” and Myrtle knew she was right.

But Tom Jimson hadn’t given up his original plan. “Where do we keep her?” he demanded. “Who’s gonna stay up with her all night? Anywhere we put her she’ll go out a window.”

“Not the attic,” said a voice from the door, and they all turned, and Wally was there (if that was his name).

How long had he been there? Was he the criminal mastermind Myrtle had been imagining, or merely the inoffensive little round man he seemed? Or something between the two?

Myrtle stared at him, but Wally didn’t meet her eye. Instead, he came farther into the kitchen, saying to Tom Jimson, “There’s a room up in the attic with a door we can lock. And I kind of stay up all night anyway, so I can check from time to time, make sure she isn’t trying to break out or anything.”

“She can yell out the window,” Jimson objected.

Wally shrugged that away with a little smile. He must be the mastermind, he was the only one who didn’t exhibit any fear of Tom Jimson. “In this rain?” he said.

Gladys said, “Wally’s right. Nobody’s out there, and if they were they couldn’t hear her.” So Wally was his real first name, at least.

Tiny said, “Look at it this way, Tom. Up to now we haven’t done anything that’s gonna get the law all excited about finding us. But if we start bumping off local citizens, everything changes.”

“I don’t do things like that,” Doug said with shaky insistence. “I’m a diver. That’s all I came here for.”

A brisk discussion ensued, everybody arguing against Tom Jimson’s bloodlust, and under it—behind the conversation’s back, as it were—Wally kept staring fixedly at Myrtle, as though trying to convey some private message to her. But what? Was he threatening her? Warning her? Maybe he didn’t want her to tell the others she’d met him before.

Well, that was all right. She didn’t want to tell anybody anything. Every one of these people scared her, even Gladys.

The discussion was still raging when three more people crowded into the kitchen, demanding to know what was going on, and the story of Myrtle’s capture and the controversy over her disposal was told all over again. These were two men and a woman, but neither man was the one who’d come raging and angry to pull Doug away from Myrtle’s front porch that time. So how many people were there in this…

… gang.

It’s a gang, Myrtle thought. I’ve been kidnapped by a gang. But what in heaven’s name is a gang doing in Dudson Center ?

The woman who’d just arrived, a taller and younger and friendlier-seeming person than Gladys, said at one point, “I wonder if I should phone John, see if he has any ideas for what to do.”

“ My idea is,” Tom Jimson told her, “Al’s out of this story,”

“The attic,” Tiny said, quiet but emphatic. “Wally’s right.”

There was general agreement on this, except of course for Tom Jimson, who said, “I’ll tell you one thing, and listen with all your ears. If she gets away, it’s dynamite. Now .”

“Okay, okay, okay,” everybody said, and then they all gestured to Myrtle, a little impatient and irritated with her. “Come on, come on,” they all said, and the whole crowd escorted her upstairs.

The warlord and the princess do not recognize each other!