Scare Tactics (40 page)

Lucy had known all of this, intuitively, and she had taken it chance on loving him. He had responded painfully—taking care to hide his pain—dutifully bringing out all the old words, the litany of love, while feeling guilty for desiring her. Maybe he had been relieved when at last she despaired of finding a reliable depth of passion and had left him, naked, distressed, but persistent out of ritual or some stubborn sense of obligation to her.

Out of the dark, alongside the highway, the tavern and roadhouse signs appeared, one on top of another, flickering across his mind. Anonymous places, with a car or two parked in front. The odor of taprooms welled out of his memory, his throat was dry. He could turn off at any one of the low, garish buildings and nudge the Cadillac against the siding. Inside, he would likely be alone; no one would try to talk to him. He knew just how he would do it: three cold beers to ease his thirst and then the first double shot of scotch, no ice. He had forty dollars in his pocket. Enough for two fifths and one of the cabins out back, deep in the pines. There were always cabins, with an iron bed and a faded pink spread, a cracked yellow dish covering the light bulb in the ceiling.

If he was lucky, he would never come out of it long enough to remember John Guthrie or Dore or Chris or Lucy.

Headlights hit his face like an icy deluge; he turned the wheel hard to the right and the other car roared by an inch away, with a howling horn, trailing off in a crazy weave of red taillights, as the driver left the pavement and then steered out of trouble.

The near miss had cleared his mind, and he sat up straighter. A headache was lodged on the left side of his skull, above the ear. Crazy bastard, he thought, and wasn’t sure if he was referring to the driver of the car he had almost run down. He found himself thinking of Lucy and that curled smile of hers, reproving smile.

What do you think of when you think of me, Lucy?

A signpost rose up out of his headlights: Lake Road, next right.

He began to feel anxious again, wishing that he had called Mike Liles before leaving, to find out if there was any news of Val St. George. It was now almost seven o’clock. Six hours earlier, St. George had committed murder. Where was he now?

The Lake Road appeared. Practice slowed, turned off the highway, and accelerated. There was a bewildering profusion of signposts along the road, and for a few moments he had no idea where to go. Then he noticed a red and yellow cutout windmill with an arrow, and took the road pointed out to him.

He was driving as fast as he dared, almost too fast for safety on the unfamiliar road. The mill appeared, an artificial creation with neon blades, apparently some sort of restaurant. There were a few cars around the place. Again he slowed, scanning the many signposts, and picked out the one that said “Baldtree” in faded hand lettering.

The lodge was almost hidden from the road by the thickness of trees around it. Practice had to back up to the single gatepost and rutted drive that wound up the knoll to a point overlooking the reservoir. He shone the spotlight of the Cadillac on the mailbox and saw the name “Childs.” But from the road the house was unlighted and looked deserted.

He had driven within a hundred feet of the lodge before he saw an old Plymouth in a lean-to garage not far away. It was Lucy’s car; she kept it at her brother’s house in town and rarely drove it anywhere.

There was a half-moon low over the hills south of the reservoir, creating enough light in the black and yellow sky for him to make his way to the front door without stumbling over the stones of a neglected rock garden. He had taken a flashlight from the dash compartment of the Cadillac, but didn’t turn it on.

He knocked several times at the heavy timber door of the lodge.

“Lucy!”

Practice waited for several seconds, then tried the door and opened it slowly. The air inside was warm and stale. He fumbled for a light switch beside the door, found one, and pushed the button several times, but there were no lights.

He thought he heard someone breathing in the room, and shut the door behind him. Then brought the flashlight up and the beam spilled into the large living room, traveling over the kind of furniture that used to grace the verandas of resort hotels thirty years ago.

“Lucy?”

He heard the slow hiss of her breath and then the beam of the flashlight found her, crouching in one corner, eyes staring intently and blinded by the light. Her lips were shaped in a snarl, and there was a sixteen-gauge shotgun in her hands, pointed directly at him. She didn’t move or speak, but the breath hissed through her teeth from time to time and her head would jerk up and down as she tightened her grip on the shotgun.

“It’s all right, Lucy,” he said gently. “It’s Jim. I came as soon as you called. What is it? What’s wrong?”

She stared at him without changing expression. Her eyes appeared to narrow a little, and there was a tiny compressed sound in her throat that sounded like “uh-oh.” Then with a rush her eyes lost their look of blindness and her face its frightening rigidity. The shotgun fell from her hands and bumped the floor. Practice swallowed hard. Lucy toppled forward on her hands and knees and stayed in that position for several moments, her hair hanging forward like a curtain.

“Oh, Jim,” she said in a dry, weightless voice. “It’s Fletch. He’s dead. And Val killed him.”

A
fter leaving the mansion that morning, Lucy had gone to her brother’s house hoping that Val St. George might try to get in touch with her there.

She had seen him about once a month since his release from the state hospital, but always he had sought her out. Either he came to the house to visit her or else he telephoned and arranged a meeting. They never met twice in the same place. Lucy never had any idea when he would call, or appear, but she was always glad to see him.

The pattern of their meetings was invariable. Val St. George talked and Lucy listened. Sometimes he went on for hours, eagerly, excitedly, like someone who had been marooned, intolerably isolated from a friendly ear. He talked until his throat was a rasp, spilling out everything he had thought or read or dreamed. Sometimes he acted out skits he had written for Lucy, or sometimes he read passages from books that had attracted him, while Lucy sat by attentively, with an occasional smile or comment.

She never asked him where he had been or what he had been doing. She saw him as an appealing, lonely boy with a need for grandeur in his life, a boy with vision and imagination, and—yes—talent, whose unhappy existence was beneath the contempt of most people. She was certain that he had a job in a neighborhood where he could be as anonymous as possible, not an easy task in a city the size of Osage Bluff.

All Lucy knew about his life was what he chose to tell her, and she felt that some of the harrowing stories he related of his ghetto childhood were fabricated, substitutions for the story he could not bring himself to tell anyone.

He came to her full of pride, vanity, schemes, and plans, as well as a rich good humor, leaving his bitterness behind. Lucy knew that Val was often tempted to unload his frustrations and resentments on her, that it was sometimes a struggle not to do so; but to come to her for pity would he to admit a final defeat, and that he wouldn’t allow himself.

The pattern of their meetings had only recently been broken. Three times in the past month Val had called her, and when she saw him, she noticed the change. He was not so quick to dominate the hours with jokes and ambitions. Instead, he asked a great many questions about her work, about the mansion, about John Guthrie and his wife and child. He seemed almost obsessed by John Guthrie; no detail of the Governor’s daily routine was unimportant to him. Lucy supplied what information she could, innocently wondering at the change in Val. When he saw that his interest in the Governor perplexed her, he quickly changed the subject for a while, but always, with the curiosity of a hound sniffing out a buried bone, would return to the same subject and probe, intently, a fixed, almost glazed look in his eyes.

The last call from Val had come yesterday afternoon. Would she meet him?

Lucy had hesitated; it meant breaking a date with Practice and leaving the mansion without telling anyone just where she was going; but the note of pleading in Val’s voice made it impossible for her to refuse.

She had waited almost an hour on the lawn of one of the high schools for him, and then returned to the mansion, feeling both annoyed and disturbed. It was the first time he had ever missed a meeting.

And little more than an hour after that, staring at the wreckage of Governor Guthrie’s bedroom, she had allowed herself to believe for an instant that somehow Val might have been responsible.

But why?

She lay sleepless most of the night. Then, after getting Chris off to school, she awakened Dore and received permission to take the day off—though Lucy was aware that the sleep-drugged Dore had scarcely heard a word she’d said.

She felt certain that Val would try to get in touch with her. But by one o’clock, as she waited in the living room of her brother’s house, an unread magazine on her lap and a ticking clock working at her nerves, she was no longer so sure, and she was no longer as confident of Val St. George as she had been.

Lucy lighted one of her infrequent cigarettes and called Fletch’s office, but his nurse told her that he hadn’t been in all morning. She received the same answer at the university hospital. It was not his day to teach nor his day to play golf, even if the weather had made golf possible. Fletch was a man of established routines, and any deviation was unheard-of.

Possibly he had taken his fishing tackle and gone down to the reservoir. Lucy went up to her brother’s bedroom and looked in the case where he kept his fishing rods and tackle, but nothing had been removed.

It was then she realized that water was running softly from a faucet in the bathroom, and she went to turn it off.

The yellow porcelain rim of the washstand showed small flecks of blood and in the bowl were streaks, as if a larger quantity of blood had been wiped up.

Lucy found it difficult to get her breath. Her eyes took in the snippings of catgut on the shelf near the washstand and a surgical needle. There were two unopened packets of gauze and an empty sodium pentothal ampule.

Stooping, she looked into the wastebasket. A small gasp broke from her lips. She reached down and pulled out the remains of a shirt she knew well, an iridescent blue, long-sleeved sport shirt with the pocket initials V.S.G.

The left sleeve of the shirt was ripped almost to the shoulder stitching and stiff with dried blood.

Lucy stood up, staring vacantly at the shirt for a moment, then a grimace appeared on her face and she dropped it, remembering Molly and Josh, the mansion shepherds.

If Val had been at the mansion and was bitten by a dog, where had he disappeared to? Why hadn’t the police been able to find him?

Because in desperation he turned to the only man whom he might trust to give him medical attention and perhaps protection from the police: Dr. Fletcher Childs. Val didn’t know Fletch, but he knew that Lucy’s brother was a doctor, and from the looks of the shirt and the preparations that Fletch had made for emergency treatment, Val had needed a doctor badly.

Then where were they? Why hadn’t Fletch called her?

In the bedroom she sat on the edge of the bed for several minutes, trying to think. Fletch would surely have driven Val to the hospital after treating his wounds. And at the hospital Val would have been swiftly arrested by state troopers.

But he hadn’t been arrested; neither Fletcher Childs nor Val St. George had gone to the hospital.

She thought to call Practice, but remembered that he had left for Fort Frontenac earlier in the day and might not be back until tomorrow.

Lucy jumped up in agitation and went to the windows, staring out at the brooding sky and the trees moving noiselessly in the wind.

There was only one place Fletch could have taken Val and that was to the lodge at the reservoir.

Her nurse’s training made her rebel at the idea. If he was badly hurt then Val belonged in the hospital, no matter what the consequences. And Fletch was wrong for not taking him there. What could he have been thinking?

Impatiently she went to her own room, changed into a pair of wool slacks and a heavy cotton athletic jersey, selected a parka from the closet, stood for a moment in the center of the room debating whether to get in touch with someone—Dore—then made a glum face at herself in the mirror and went downstairs to get her car out of the garage.

As soon as she reached the lodge she felt certain that she had made a mistake. Fletch’s own car, an Imperial, was nowhere around, and the lodge looked exactly as it had when she visited it last in November. Winter storms had uprooted a small tree in front and torn a few shingles from the roof, but there was no sign that anyone had been around, until she went inside and opened the draperies to permit a maximum of murky light to enter the three rooms of the lodge. Then she saw candles in dishes placed on tables and shelves, and smelled the recently melted wax. She went into the tiny bedroom. The covers on the bed hadn’t been folded back, but the imprint of a body was unmistakable.

Lucy searched, fearfully, for some sign of her brother or Val. She went out again to the garage and as far as the pump house at the edge of the thick woods.