Drowned Hopes

“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 go

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 go

“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 go

“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.

SIXTY-EIGHT

The warlord and the princess do not recognize each other!

The princess, stolen by gypsies/crows/Merlin/the childless peasant woman, will have a birthmark in an intimate location.

Not in Real Life. Or, even if she does, it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t any inheritance.

A princess has her father’s realm. A warlord has a cache of valuables.

Oh, the money in the reservoir. I think Tom intends to take that with him. The point is, the princess is in peril!

Naturally.

I arranged to have her placed under my protection.

Naturally.

And now I wait, and I’m patient, and I see what transpires, isn’t that right?

Naturally.

SIXTY-NINE

When Dortmunder opened one eye, everything was wrong. Opening the second eye didn’t improve the situation. He was still in the same condition, lying on the floor in the living room, facing a television set on which Raquel Welch wore a lab coat and discussed microbiology. Raquel Welch. Microbiology. Microbiology.

Feet. Feet entered the living room, dressed in scuffed old brown boots and raggedy-cuffed faded blue jeans. Seeing the feet, Dortmunder realized it had been the opening of the apartment door that awakened him, and then he remembered it all: 1) Guffey. 2) Tom/Tim Jimson/Jepson. 3) Handcuffs. 4) Pizza, which Guffey had gone out for.

“Got it,” Guffey a

“Great.” Dortmunder used his left hand to push himself to a seated position, since his right wrist was through a loop of the handcuffs, whose other loop was closed around a segment of the radiator. Dortmunder felt dizzy, woozy, and now he recalled that the reason Guffey had gone out for pizza in the first place was because they both had begun to feel they’d put somewhat too much beer into empty stomachs.

Companionably, Guffey opened the pizza box on the floor, within easy reach of Dortmunder’s left hand, and then said, “I got us some more beer, too.”

“Good.”

Guffey also sat on the floor, democratically, and they both rested their backs against the sofa while they ate pizza and drank beer and watched Raquel Welch run around inside somebody’s bloodstream. She was in a jumpsuit now, more sensibly, but she was still talking about microbiology.

After a while, Guffey said wistfully, “You know, John, this is about the nicest party I’ve been to in, oh, forty, uh, lemme think, forty-four years.”

“Well, it’s not a real party, Guffey,” Dortmunder pointed out. “It’s just the two of us.”

“For me,” Guffey told him, “two’s a crowd.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

They sat in easy silence together awhile longer, and then, during a National Guard commercial—it was really very late at night, damn near morning already—Guffey said doubtfully, “Maybe it’s Matt.”

“You think so?”

“I du

Filling his voice with enthusiasm and good cheer—or at least giving it the old dropout try—Dortmunder said, “Hey, Matt, whadaya say? How ya doing, Matt? Hey, look, fellas, it’s Matt Guffey!”

Guffey listened to all that, listened to the echoes, thought it over, then shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said.

“It’ll come to you,” Dortmunder assured him.

“Yeah, sure it will.”

That had been a kind of embarrassing moment, much earlier this evening, when Dortmunder, in a psychologically clever ploy to get Guffey to relax his vigil and lower his guard, had said, “Listen, if we’re go

Well, you couldn’t blame the guy, really. For the last couple of decades, nobody had talked directly to Guffey at all, and during the prison years prior to that people all called one another by their last names to demonstrate how manly they really were despite whatever sexual practices incarceration might have reduced them to, so it had probably been some time in the waning days of the Second World War that anybody had last addressed Guffey by his first name.

Guffey had been embarrassed, of course, at this lapse in his memory, and Dortmunder had volunteered to help him find the missing name, so now Guffey spent a part of his time—that part not learning about microbiology—thinking about potential names, and whenever he came across one that seemed a possibility Dortmunder would try it out on him. So far, no success.