Late Checkout

by Carol J. Perry

“At the count of thirty, you tell them this pretty little cowgirl and I will reappear in an amazing way. Then open the curtain, give the box one more spin, and open it. If I do this correctly, the box will be empty and the reveal will be worthy of Houdini!”

  A turtle wearing an orange headband started toward the stage. “No, Lee!” the turtle shouted.

  “Hello turtle!” Maralee called in delight. Howard closed the door to the box and the professor put his hand over Maralee’s mouth. My mouth. The box began to turn. The audience sounded far away. I heard them begin a slow count. “One . . . Two . . . Three . . .”

  The professor opened the black box door and climbed out, pulling the child with him into the offstage dressing room. “Shhh, Maralee.” He put a finger up to his lips. “We’re going to play a good trick on them. Come along and be quiet.”

  She followed the man through another door and straight into the hotel lobby. Far away, she heard the count. “Nine . . . Ten . . . Eleven . . .”

  “Put your jacket on, Maralee,” the professor ordered. “It’s getting cold outside.”

  “Okay,” Maralee held her arms—my arms—out awkwardly. The man lifted the jacket from her shoulders and put her arms into the sleeves, one at a time.

  A bell man greeted us. “Show over already, Mr. Mercury?”

  “Not yet,” Jerry Mercury said. “Intermission. We’re just sneaking outside for a smoke.”

  “I understand. Need any help with anything?”

  “No thanks. We’ve got it.”

  I need help! Please!

  “We’ve got it,” Maralee repeated.

  “Too early to bring the cake in, I guess.” The bell man pointed to a huge gingerbread house on a wheeled trolley. “See? It’s the evil witch’s house from Hansel and Gretel. Perfect for a storybook Halloween party, huh? Mrs. Doan designed it herself.”

  “Perfect.” The professor grasped the man’s arm, looking into his eyes. “Forget that you saw us. I’m not supposed to be smoking. Come on, Maralee.” But she lagged behind, fascinated by the cake. He tugged at her hand, a little roughly. Maralee doesn’t like being pulled away from the wonderful cake. She shoves her free hand into her jacket pocket. My hand. My jacket pocket.

  The stale cinnamon bun was still in that pocket. I’d meant to throw it away. But little Maralee, with childlike imagination, had a better idea. “Come on, Maralee,” the man said. “We have to run. The car is just across the street.”

  Hansel and Gretel had dropped bread crumbs in the forest so that they could find their way home. Maralee began to crumble the bun.

  Chapter 46

  Maralee concentrated on dropping crumbs. Three steps across the hotel lobby’s plush carpet and a crumb. Three more steps and another crumb. And another and another. Once outside, she dropped crumbs on the front steps. The sidewalk. The man pulled her along as they crossed Essex Street to a darkened parking lot. Maralee hesitated. She’s afraid of the dark. The man pulled her hand harder. Her other hand was busy crumbling the stale bun as she counted—one, two, three.

  Will the birds come and eat the crumbs? Maralee thought.

  No. The birds are all asleep in their nests. I thought. Keep dropping the crumbs.

  Okay. Maralee thought. But my crumbs are almost all gone.

  “Here we are. Get in.” The man opened the passenger door of the green Subaru. “Come on. Hurry.” He pushed her into the seat, reached across and buckled the seat belt. “We’re going for a nice ride.” He leaned over, those strange eyes focused on Maralee’s. “When I let you out of the car you will not remember this ride. You will not remember me being here with you. Same as before. You will not remember me this time either. You understand?”

  “Okay.” Maralee scattered the remaining crumbs onto the ground an instant before he closed the car door.

  Before? I will not remember him this time? The same as before?

  I felt the child begin to relax against the seat. She was sleepy. If child-me fell asleep would she lose contact with adult-me? I decided to try the thought-contact again, just in case I was about to lose her. What happened the other time? I thought.

  He told the lady, she thought. Not me. The lady in the bad book place. He told her but I was listening. I always listen when the lady is scared. She yawned and closed her eyes. My eyes. Good night, she thought.

  I forced her eyes—my eyes—open. Jerry Mercury was in the driver’s seat and the Subaru’s engine had growled to life. He eased the car out of the lot and onto the street. I couldn’t feel Maralee in my mind any more. Had Jerry Mercury told me to forget something that had happened in the stacks? The murder of Wee Willie Wallace? I must have seen him up there.

  I don’t remember. I don’t remember it at all.

  The professor looked left, then right. Lighted floats, costumed kids pulling costumed younger siblings in decorated wagons, a bagpiper, a Spiderman on horseback, a drum and bugle band—crowded lower Essex Street. “What the hell is going on here?” he blew the horn, signaled for a turn onto the boulevard.

  It’s the rerouted Horribles Parade, I thought, but couldn’t speak

  I decided I’d better not let him know that Maralee had figuratively left the building. Since her conversations with him so far had been pretty much limited to “Okay,” I was quite sure I could maintain the child persona if I had to. I closed my eyes, avoiding his, and tried to figure out why he’d chosen to hypnotize the child in the first place.

  Maralee! It was the name on the temporary volunteer nametag. He must have used it and the frightened child in the stacks had responded. So where were we going? And why did he want me to go with him wherever it was he was headed?

  It occurred to me then that if he thought I had witnessed what had happened that day in the stacks, I was a danger to him. If he’d somehow hypnotized the adult me along with the child, how could he be sure I wouldn’t someday remember it all?

  There was, I realized, only one way he’d be absolutely sure of that. I would have to disappear along with him. I stirred and rubbed my eyes.

  Even with my eyes closed I could tell that we were making very slow progress. The windows of the Subaru were closed but the sound of Halloween eve revelers on the streets of the Witch City told me it would take a while for Jerry Mercury to make his “getaway” if that’s what this was supposed to be. Didn’t he know he was in the middle of the annual Horribles Parade?

  He doesn’t watch the news! He said so. He doesn’t know about the squashed pumpkins, the rerouted parade.

  Back at the hotel Howard would have opened the doors of the black box by now. As far as the audience was concerned, the cowgirl and the magician had disappeared and Howard would have informed them that they should watch for the two to appear in an amazing way. They’d be expecting a Phantom of the Opera appearance of the two of us swinging over their heads from a chandelier or maybe they’d think that we’d pop out of the damned gingerbread cake. Meanwhile we’d be winding our way through the crowded streets in the most ubiquitous of cars. By the time Pete and the others figured it out Mercury could be long gone. And me along with him.

  “Lee Barrett.” The magician spoke suddenly. “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Look at me.”

  No. I don’t want to. But I turned toward him anyway and looked directly into those awful eyes.

  “You are relaxed, Lee. You feel comfortable here with me. I am a wealthy, attractive man and you are pleased that we are taking a trip together.”

  In my mind, Maralee began to sing. “Old MacDonald had a farm . . .” I lost my focus on what Jerry was saying—concentrating instead on Maralee’s song.

  “Why are we moving so slowly?” I heard my words, slightly slurred. Maralee sang “with a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there . . .”

  The professor frowned. “Traffic. We’ll be out of it in just a minute. You are happy that we’re taking a trip.” He tapped the horn, losing eye contact for a brief instant.

  “Ring around the
rosy, a pocket full of posies . . .” Maralee’s singing in my mind grew louder.

  “It wasn’t hard at all for me to do it—and to arrange all this,” he said, and reached for my hand.

  Don’t touch me. I couldn’t pull my hand away. “This old man, he played one . . .” Maralee sang.

  “I’m sure no ordinary man could have pulled it off.” His smile was nearly as chilling as those eyes. “You’re proud of me, aren’t you?”

  “Proud of you,” I repeated. Keep singing, Maralee. Don’t stop. You’re keeping me from falling into his terrible eyes.

  “Want to know how I did it?”

  “Proud of you,” I said again, still unable to form words of my own that made sense. “Jesus loves me, this I know . . .” Maralee’s voice was strong and joyous.

  “Of course you’re proud of me.” He patted his breast pocket. “You’ll be even prouder when I collect one and a half million tax-free dollars for this.”

  “For the card?” The words were mine, still slurred, as though I was drunk.

  “You saw me take it away from him, didn’t you? Doesn’t matter now. Nobody believed the card was real in the first place.” He leaned on the horn. “Get out of my way, you morons!” he shouted, then lowered his voice again. “I know it’s worth more than a million and a half, but Willie’s contact isn’t exactly a solid citizen. Big drug kingpin. Anyway, Willie’d already made the deal. The customer is paying cash. It’ll fit in a suitcase.” He shook his head. “Imagine that. A million and a half dollars in a suitcase. All I had to do was follow him into the library and take the card away from him. At first he didn’t want to give it to me.”

  He laughed then. A terrible, crazy, high-pitched giggle. “Poor Willie. He used to let me practice my hypnosis on him back when he was Marvel the Robot. Willie did all the work on finding the card for me, you know. After he messed up and killed Laraby for nothing, the little runt even went down to Palm Beach to see if Larry’s wife still had the books.” Another giggle. “Told her he was a book collector but she didn’t have them anymore. Said she was leaving them all to her daughter.” He frowned then, an angry grimace. “Stupid bastard broke into the daughter’s house,” he growled. “Got nothing.” He pounded on the horn again, and Maralee sang, “The wheels on the bus go round and round . . .”

  “Willie was such an easy subject to hypnotize.” Mercury’s voice returned to its normal pitch. “He really thought this was all his own idea. He thought that he’d find the card and sell it and be rich. I walked up to him in the library, said the magic words, and he just handed over Larry’s book and told me where to deliver the card. Then I had to kill him.” He sounded pleased with himself. “I haven’t lost my touch,” he bragged. “The only thing that could have screwed it up was a witness remembering what happened to Willie.” He smiled that chilling smile. “I was pretty sure you recognized me up there in the stacks. Then when you saw me again, when I followed you to the grocery store and you took off like a scared rabbit, I was sure of it. Problem solved. I have the card—and the witness. Couldn’t take the chance that you’d remember what happened that night. You won’t remember any of this conversation either. Too bad. Anyway, there’s a private jet waiting at the Beverly airport. We’ll be on our way out of the country while they’re all still back there anticipating a big reveal!” He patted my knee. “Want to know how I disabled the alarm system?”

  I really did want to know that. “Okay,” I said.

  “It was brilliant, wasn’t it?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “You said you were a fan of my TV show. Don’t you remember the many magnet experiments I taught you? The alarm system on the emergency door operates on a simple magnetic principle.” He sounded exactly as he had on those long-ago science shows. Friendly and kind. “Whenever the magnetic connection is broken by opening the door, the alarm is triggered. All I had to do was bypass the alarm sensor. And how, my little student, did I do that? Hmmmm?” He fixed those eyes on mine.

  “I don’t know,” I mumbled. “How?”

  “You disappoint me.” He pinched my leg. A hard pinch. “A simple strip of foil—a candy wrapper from the bowl of Halloween treats someone thoughtfully placed in the children’s media center—a strip of foil pressed in exactly the right spot, between the magnetic connectors basically does the same job that the connectors do. As long as the foil contacts the right spot the alarm will not be triggered.”

  “But then . . . ?”

  “So. You remember my lesson. Good.” He patted my knee again. “You’re wondering if the alarm would sound if I released pressure on the foil. Of course it would. But what if I reached down with my free hand and simply removed the ordinary battery which powers the sound? So brilliant!” He laughed again. “I closed the door, replaced the battery, changed into Mrs. Blatherflab, and walked right out.” His smirk was self-satisfied and evil at the same time. Like the wicked queen when she hands Snow White that apple.

  What about me? Are you going to have to kill me eventually too?

  By then Maralee was fairly shouting the SpongeBob SquarePants theme song. She’d turned her head—my head—away from Jerry Mercury. I looked out the window. Moving at what was surely less than twenty miles an hour, we passed scores of people, mostly in costume, dozens of floats, mostly lighted, crowding the street, overflowing onto the sidewalk. “The side-view mirror gave me a partial view of the vehicle directly behind us.

  Oh my god! Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? Or is this one of those maddening mirror-visions?

  It wasn’t a vision. It was real. In any other time, in any other place, what I saw in that mirror would have attracted plenty of attention. But in Salem, Massachusetts, on the night before Halloween, in the Horribles Parade, four Ninja Turtles and Lawrence of Arabia riding in a pink-and-white golf cart drew barely a passing glance.

  The golf cart picked up speed until it was almost beside the Subaru. “Hello, Turtles,” I called, tapping on the closed window. Jerry Mercury hit the horn again.

  “What the hell is going on?” he demanded. He rolled down the window. “Get out of my way, you fools!”

  The golf cart kept coming, crowding the Subaru against the curb. Mercury leaned on the horn. Somebody pounded on the trunk. “Slow down, you jerk!”

  “What’s going on here?” He looked at me.

  “Parade,” I said in my own voice.

  Mercury brought the car to a stop. “We’ll have to wait until it passes by. Shouldn’t take long.”

  The turtle in the driver’s seat pulled the golf cart ahead, blocking the Subaru’s way. The four turtles scattered.

  Lawrence of Arabia flashed a badge and a gun.

  Jerry Mercury shut off the engine, turned and glared at me. “You won’t remember,” he said and got out of the car, his hands above his head.

  Maralee sang “Row, row, row your boat . . .”

  Epilogue

  If I ever have grandkids, this’ll be for sure a story to tell them—about the time one Halloween eve in Salem, Massachusetts, when Grandma was saved from a mad magician by the four Ninja Turtles and Lawrence of Arabia.

  After Pete arrested Jerry Mercury, and a patrol car took the magician away in handcuffs, I sat alone in the passenger seat of the Subaru, confused and unsure of exactly what had just gone down. Wanda was the first person to reach me. She pulled the door open.

  “Are you okay, Lee? Jesus. What was he trying to do?” Eyes wide in her green face, with a green gloved hand she gently released my seat belt. “I yelled at you. Tried to stop you. I knew the trick was going wrong.” She hugged me. “But we followed your bread crumbs. Called Pete.”

  “You called Pete,” I said in my own voice.

  Pete, minus his Arabian desert headgear, reached across Wanda’s shell. “Let’s get you out of here, babe,” he said, taking both of my hands in his and pulling me to my feet. The turtles gathered around, shielding me from the curious stares of a costumed crowd gone suddenly silent.

  Next was a ride in a police
car, sirens screaming, through the darkened streets of Salem. Pete stayed with me while I gave my statement to the police stenographer. I hoped the things I said made sense. It turned out that what I remembered, along with what Jerry Mercury confessed to, was enough to solve our locked room mystery after all.

  First, let me admit that I do not remember seeing Jerry Mercury in the stacks that day, although, according to him, I did see him, and recognized him too. Perhaps somewhere, deep in my subconscious, six-year-old Maralee remembers. Maybe someday I will too.

  According to Mercury, it was Willie’s idea to steal the Honus Wagner card from Larry Laraby. He knew Larry kept the thing in a book about baseball. Willie had some pretty unsavory friends and one of them had offered Willie a lot of money if he could get it. So Willie pretended to have a signed Mark McGwire homerun ball, and went to the Laraby house to make the sale, then threatened Larry with a gun. When Laraby laughed at him, called him a no-talent little runt, Willie got angry and killed him with a single blow to the back of his head. Willie searched among the baseball books, looking for the card, but gave up and ducked out the back door when he heard Larry’s wife coming. Everyone was convinced that Larry had fallen from his library ladder. So the no-talent little runt got away with murder. That’s Mercury’s story anyway.

  After that, the professor got interested in having that card, and selling it for big bucks himself. He “programmed” Willie to keep trying and gave him a secret telephone number to call as soon as he found it. Willie became totally obsessed with getting that card. He even followed Mrs. Laraby to Florida, pretending to be a book collector.

  When Willie found out that Larry’s books were still in Massachusetts he came home to try again. Another fouled-up attempt, but because of a small square picture of Larry, he was pretty sure he’d figured out which book he should be looking for. He already had some practice in pretending to be a book collector. He simply knocked on Sharon’s door one day and asked if she had any sports books to sell. “Oh no,” she said. “I gave them all to the library.” Easy-peasy. He made that phone call to the professor.