Drowned Hopes

So Dortmunder didn’t move, and Guffey stepped sideways to the doorway, then backed through it and looked to the left (apartment door) and right (kitchen, with stove visible) before saying, “Okay, Mr. Dortmunder. I’m go

“Oh, sure,” Dortmunder agreed. “I’ll just stay in here until you say.”

“Good.” Guffey started to back away toward the kitchen, then stopped. Grudgingly, he said, “You want coffee?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“Okay.” Guffey started to back off again, but Dortmunder raised his hand like a kid who knows the answer. Guffey stopped. “Yeah?”

“If it isn’t too much trouble,” Dortmunder said, “uh, orange juice?”

SIXTY-SEVEN

Shoulders hunched against the steady rain, Myrtle leaned her chest against the side of the house on Oak Street and stood up on tiptoe. Watching through the kitchen window, she could see Doug standing next to the refrigerator, telephone to his ear. Across the back yards and across Myrtle Street, she could hear faintly the sound of her own phone ringing.

When will he give up? she wondered, and at last he did, the ringing sound from the next block cutting off at the same instant. Shaking his head, Doug turned from the wall phone to say something bewildered—“She’s never home!”—to Gladys, who had just marched into the kitchen, wearing a zipper jacket and a cloth cap. But Gladys gave him an unsympathetic shrug, opened the refrigerator, took out a can of beer, and was just popping the top when someone tapped Myrtle on the shoulder.

That touch made Myrtle jump so high that both people in the kitchen turned to look out the window at the movement, and when she landed she sagged back against the rain-wet wall of the house like an overwatered clematis. In growing horror she stared upward at what appeared to be the Abominable Snowman standing before her in a yellow slicker and rainhat that made him look like a walking taco stand. This creature, spreading out massive arms with catcher’s-mitt hands at the ends of them to pen her in and keep her from ru

“I’m not, I, I, I, I, I—”

The monster lifted one of those hands and waved it back and forth, and Myrtle’s voice stopped. Then he said, “You, you, you, I got that part. Now try me on the next word.”

Never had Myrtle felt so thin, so frail, so vulnerable and defenseless. She stammered out the only words that seemed to suit the case: “I’m sorry.”

“That’s nice,” the giant said. “That’s good. That counts on your side. On the other hand, ‘sorry’ isn’t, you know, an explanation.”

While Myrtle’s brain ran around inside her skull, looking for a bouquet of words that might placate this monster, the monster looked up at the window, raised his monster eyebrows, pointed at Myrtle a monster finger with the girth and toughness of a rat’s body, and mouthed elaborately, “You know this?”

Myrtle turned her head, looking up, and at this extreme angle Doug’s face, seen through the rain-drenched window, looked as scared as she felt. He was scared? Oh, good heavens! And when Doug nodded spastically at the monster, it seemed to Myrtle that her last hope, not even noticed till now, had just fled.

“Okay,” the monster said, and lowered his cold gaze on Myrtle once more. “It’s raining out, little lady,” he said. “Let’s us be smart. Let’s get in out of the rain.”

“I want to go home now,” Myrtle said in her tiniest voice.

For answer, the monster lifted his right hand and made a little move-along gesture. Myrtle, not knowing what else to do, obeyed, preceding the monster around to the back of the house and through the door and into the kitchen, where Doug and Gladys both looked at her with surprised disapproval.

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?”