The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep

by H. G. Parry

  “Hello,” she said. His eyes instantly rose to meet hers. In the yellowish light, they looked red. “I’m Lydia. Are you Eric?”

  “I am,” he said. His voice was even more grating in person. “What a lovely surprise. I’m so pleased to meet you, Miss Lydia.”

  “I’m pleased to meet you too. Do you mind if I come in?”

  His head twitched in what might have been a negative. “You aren’t. You’re repulsed by me. But it’s ever so nice of you to lie. And of course you may come in.”

  Lydia entered Rob’s office, and closed the door lightly behind her—not all the way, but enough to keep their conversation private from the murmur of legal personnel in the corridors. She had been in Rob’s office a handful of times, to wait for him to finish so they could drive home together or get lunch downtown. He had moved into it a few months ago, and it still didn’t quite look like him when he wasn’t in it. The sharp, corporate edges hadn’t been worn in yet, and even with Eric installed at a table against the wall, there was too much empty space. The harbor looked gray and wind-whipped out the window under the clouded sky.

  “You came after all then,” Eric said.

  “I wasn’t going to,” she said honestly.

  “What changed your mind?”

  She shrugged. “I knew Rob was in court this afternoon. I thought I might as well come meet him here. And while I was here, I thought I might as well as least come and meet you in person.”

  “Mr. Sutherland didn’t tell you where he was last night, did he?”

  “No,” she said. “He did not.”

  “And you don’t trust him.”

  “That’s the pointed issue, isn’t it?” It was something she had given some thought to, as she lay turned away from him in bed last night. “I trust him to mean well, absolutely. I don’t trust him to be right.”

  “So you trust his morals, but not his intellect?”

  She snorted. “That’s not very flattering to him, is it? And it’s not what I mean. You can be wrong without being either immoral or stupid, you know.”

  “I wouldn’t know, I’m afraid,” Eric said. “I know that I try not to be stupid. You want me to tell you where he was, don’t you?”

  She didn’t answer directly. Instead, she looked at him, taking in every part, the way she always did with people she wanted to make very sure of. Very few people met the challenge of regarding her with equal frankness. Her sister had told her once that she gave the impression she was measuring them up for either a makeover or a coffin. Eric, to his credit, only twitched once or twice as she took in his pale, emaciated frame, the dark circles under his eyes, the way his eyes darted to the door at the slightest sound.

  “Rob says you’re trouble,” she said. “He told me to stay away from you.”

  “You didn’t listen then. Do you think I’m trouble?”

  “Nobody else seems to. I asked Eva, you know; I spoke to her on the way in. She says you’re nice enough, and a hard worker. Mind you, I didn’t tell her what you’d said to me on the phone.” She leaned back against Rob’s desk. “I don’t think you’re trouble. I think, though, you might be in some kind of trouble.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You’re frightened of something. But whatever it is, it’s not here—you wouldn’t have been here after dark if it was. I think it’s something at home. To answer your question: I would like you to tell me where you thought Rob was. I also want you to tell me how you know, and why you would be so invested in our lives. You must realize it’s more than a little creepy.”

  “I do. I always realize. But I assure you, my investment in your lives is undesired on my part, and my reasons for mentioning it to you are purely self-serving. I want to help you in exchange for your help.”

  “My help?”

  “You were right. I am indeed in some kind of trouble—or, at least, I’m in a situation that I very much need to escape. I can’t say much more than that, but I assure you, I want nothing illegal.”

  She considered him carefully. “You must be able to say a little more than that. Are you being threatened?”

  “Yes.” His eyes glinted beneath his glasses. “That is exactly what I am.”

  “Who by? Somebody you live with?”

  He laughed shortly, and bitterly. “I don’t live. Not really. But yes, you could say that. Somebody I live with. At home.”

  “Do they hurt you?”

  “Oh yes.” He seemed not so much surprised by the question as resigned. That, more than anything, convinced her that he was sincere. “Always. If they knew I was talking to you right now, I would never be heard from again.”

  “Go to the police.”

  “I can’t.”

  “They have friends in the police?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Something.” She paused. “You know, when I was working at a bar ten years ago, we used to have a young woman coming in with her boyfriend. He was a police officer—a really nice young guy, people thought. But some of us used to notice that every so often, he’d ignore her for no reason, as if he were punishing her. Her face would be so desperate and miserable. And once, he raised his hand to wave at someone, and I saw her flinch on instinct. She used to work long hours as well.”

  “She sounds like an unfortunate woman.”

  “She was. A couple of us tried to help her, but she didn’t want to be helped. Not then. Perhaps she found her own escape route. What is it that you want?”

  “I want to live.” His vehemence startled her. “I want to live in the world, unbound, following nobody’s plots but my own.”

  “And what’s binding you now?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  That phrase again. Her instinct was to lose her patience; just in time, she reined it in. When Rob said he couldn’t tell her what was going on, he meant he wouldn’t. Eric, she suspected, at least really believed that he couldn’t. His waxy face had paled, and there were beads of sweat at his hairline. “Why not? What’s wrong?”

  He laughed through gritted teeth. “Think of it like being under a spell, Mrs.—Miss Lydia. A spell I need to work around very careful-like.”

  Lydia had no experience with spells. She had, over the years she’d worked in bars and hotels, seen people that were afraid, and who were in need of help. She was now willing to swear, whatever Rob had said, that Eric was both.

  “Suppose I were to help you,” she said. “What would you need?”

  He drew a deep breath, and exhaled again. “Money. Not a great deal of it—enough, say, for a few weeks in a hostel, plus food. Perhaps three hundred dollars. I could take it from there. Oh, and a ticket for the ferry across the Cook Strait.”

  “You want to make it to the South Island?”

  “I want to make it anywhere away from here. But the South Island will do well enough. It’ll be summer soon. I can find work fruit picking, or anything else students won’t touch.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much to ask for. You’re at the tail end of a law degree, after all—aren’t you?”

  “I don’t need anything grand. I can be very humble. But I’m not asking. I’d be ever so grateful—more grateful than I could say—if you would help me, but I would never ask for such a thing with no return. You want to know where Mr. Sutherland went on Sunday night, and what it has to do with his brother.”

  Lydia blinked. “You know Charley?”

  “We’ve not met. I’ve glimpsed him once or twice. Well?”

  “If you’re really being threatened,” she said, “then you don’t need to bargain with me. I’d help you. So would Rob.”

  “You couldn’t tell Mr. Sutherland about this,” Eric said at once.

  “Why? He’d want to help. He’s not a lawyer for nothing, you know.”

  “Perhaps he might,” Eric said. “But it would be too dangerous for me. He’s too close to it. If he tried to help me, the person I need to escape would know about it, and he’d know I’d talked. I really
am not exaggerating, Miss Lydia. My life is at stake. I’m offering to help you because I need you to help me. Perhaps I didn’t need to bargain, but if you’ll forgive me for saying so, that doesn’t accord with my experience. People don’t tend to want to help me. Besides, I might think you deserve to know what Mr. Sutherland is up to.”

  The truth was, she did—or, at least, she desperately wanted to know. She also, having met Eric, wanted to help him—whatever trouble he was in, she believed that it was real. It was the fact that these two instincts were able to be so easily satisfied in a single blow that left her uneasy. Something wasn’t quite adding up. The difficulty was, just as she hadn’t been able to think of any concrete footing on which to found her suspicions of Rob’s behavior, she couldn’t find one for Eric. In any other situation but the one he described, it would be a terribly elaborate ploy for a few hundred dollars and a ticket across Cook Strait.

  “All right,” she said at last. “I’ll help you. Would you want the money now?”

  It was partly a test, to see what he would say—she assumed a con man would want to see cash as soon as possible. She wasn’t surprised when he shook his head. “Not now. They’d find money on me as soon as I went home, and that would be the end of it. I’ll phone you when it’s time. I’ll ask to meet; please don’t be offended if I don’t say anything more, or if I pretend this meeting never happened. People might be listening. But when I call, I need you to book me a ticket on the very next ferry out of the harbor, and to bring me three hundred dollars in cash. You need to be prepared to come quickly. I’ll tell you everything you want to know then, I promise.”

  “All right.” She paused. “Tell me one thing now. Is Rob in trouble?”

  “Oh yes,” Eric answered promptly. “Yes, I would say that is exactly where he is.”

  XVI

  Charley’s birth certificate arrived in my inbox on Tuesday morning—one of the advantages of working for a reasonably prestigious law firm. Charles Sutherland, born on the seventeenth day of August twenty-six years ago to Susan and Joseph Sutherland. So that was that. He was my brother. It didn’t surprise me. I had always known that, whatever else happened. It was the rest of the world that was suddenly uncertain.

  Work went by that day in a haze of conversations and paperwork and court appearances. Now that I knew, I couldn’t believe nobody had noticed a fictional crime ring had been operating out of central Wellington. The firm was the busiest it had been in years. Yet I couldn’t concentrate, not wholeheartedly. Every time my cell phone rang, I flinched, expecting Charley or even Millie. Twice it was Lydia saying she would be home late and asking if we needed anything from the store. The rest of the time it was work. It was never my brother. The silence from the Street felt like something holding its breath. The trouble was, I didn’t know what that something was.

  And all the while, Eric was by my side, observing me at meetings, following me to court, working at his table in the corner of my office. It was like having an extra shadow, one that wanted to swallow me whole.

  “Have you heard from your brother lately, Mr. Sutherland?” he asked once.

  “Just get on with your work,” I said. I never would have spoken to a real intern like that. I wonder if he knew that—if, in fact, he was playing with me all along, knowing full well that I knew who he was. I didn’t dare to ask him, for fear he’d disappear. At least while he was by my side, watching me, I was also watching him.

  I called Charley myself, while Eric was safely dispatched getting coffee from down the street. When I couldn’t get him on his cell phone, I tried his office. He wasn’t there, but I managed to catch Beth White.

  “Charles isn’t here this afternoon,” she explained. “He’s supposed to be working from home, though I can’t get him on the phone either. I’m only in his office to get a textbook. We have a standing agreement that we can break into each other’s offices if we suspect our books are being held captive there.”

  “Sort of a probable cause arrangement,” I said. Her brisk, kind voice calmed me somewhat. “I like it. Well, I was just trying to catch him. His cell phone went to voicemail.”

  “It does that,” she agreed. “He may be in later. Shall I tell him you phoned?”

  “No,” I said quickly. “No, don’t worry. It wasn’t important.”

  “Everything’s all right, isn’t it?” Beth said. “I apologize if it’s none of my business. Charles has just seemed distracted this week.”

  I hesitated for a moment. I couldn’t tell Beth everything, of course, but it occurred to me that if anyone would be able to help, it would be another literary scholar.

  “Everything’s fine,” I said.

  She seemed to hear my hesitation better than my words. “I’m not quite sure if I should mention this,” she said, “but last week, when you came to Charles’s house, I had the distinct impression that something was wrong. And I know that since then, Charles has had something on his mind. I don’t expect you to tell me what it is. But if there’s any way I can help…”

  I don’t know how Charley always manages to amass at least one or two people in any given environment who are willing to look after him.

  “Thanks,” I said. I meant it too. “Just—If anything happens, could you give me a call? I’d really appreciate it.”

  “Of course,” she said. “What kind of thing?”

  I almost laughed. “Oh, trust me. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  I tried his cell phone again, in one of those classic examples of hope over experience. Voicemail. I told myself that could mean anything; he could be anywhere. I knew where he was.

  I looked out the window, trying to comfort myself with the lines and contours of the city: the jumble of colonial houses on the hills, the curves of the streets, the windblown harbor. The surrounding bush, ancient and mysterious and steeped in Polynesian legend. All I could see were the old Victorian bones peeking out from beneath. Wellington had been colonized in 1840. Across the world, according to Google, Charles Dickens was writing The Old Curiosity Shop.

  That same evening, Lydia came under fire from me when she arrived home from her late shift at the hotel and found me reading David Copperfield. It was the copy I had borrowed from my parents’ bookshelf that weekend—probably the first one Charley had read, when he was four or so. The cover was blue leather embossed with gold, part of a set of matching volumes. Each book opened to a glossy full-color portrait of a young Dickens, seated on a chair looking into the distance, dark auburn curls tumbling around a delicate face. If not for the air of confidence, he would have looked a little like my brother.

  I had started to read it for information, in a spirit of extreme bitterness, prepared to hate it. I couldn’t. David’s voice, from the first line, was too arresting: wry, confidential, witty, surprising. I had laughed by the end of the first page; I was lost by the second. Semiautobiographical, Charley had called it, but I doubted that Dickens’s life could have been peopled with quite so many dastardly step-relatives, loving servants, and colorful aunts. It was more than that, though. He knew things. Things about childhood, and guilt, and suffering. When Lydia opened the door out of nowhere, I was so deep in David Copperfield’s first day at school that I jumped. She found that funnier than it was.

  “That’s your brother’s book, isn’t it?” she asked.

  “Why d’you call it that?” I asked, surprising myself with my own defensiveness.

  I surprised Lydia too; she paused kicking her shoes off. “Shouldn’t I? It’s what he studies, isn’t it?”

  “Of course.” I shook my head. “I just—I wondered why you called it that, that’s all.”

  She shrugged. “I didn’t mean anything by it. Just that when I think of Dickens, I think of your brother. He wasn’t named after him, was he?”

  “Charley? I don’t think so.” I’d never really made the connection, probably because I wasn’t used to thinking of either Dickens or my brother as Charles. “Maybe. Mum always liked Dickens. I know
I was named after my grandfather on my father’s side. Nothing literary there.”

  “Unless your grandfather was Robert Louis Stevenson,” Lydia said. “Is there any dinner left?”

  “In the fridge,” I told her. “And there’s ice cream in the freezer. I picked it up on the way back.”

  “For that, I’ll forgive you for biting my head off. And for not asking how my day was immediately.”

  That made me smile reluctantly, as she knew it would.

  “I apologize for biting your head off.” I put the book away, more regretfully than I liked to admit, and leaned back to watch her in the kitchen. “And how was your day, immediately?”

  “Don’t ask.” She found the pasta in the fridge, and put it in the microwave. I heard the triple beep, and then the low, comforting hum. “Charley hasn’t called you since the weekend.”

  “I thought you wanted him to stop calling.”

  “I wanted you to tell me what he was calling about, as a matter of fact. I still do.”

  “Well. I don’t think he’ll call again anytime soon.”

  “Why not?” She leaned on her elbows against the kitchen counter, so as to scrutinize me more carefully. By all appearances, she had forgiven me for Sunday night quickly—almost too quickly—but I knew it was on her mind. There was a barrier between us that was difficult to define, and impossible to break through. We’d never had real secrets before. “Have you two had a fight?”

  “Not really.” We had, I suppose. Of course we had. But that was the least of it. “I just… I never understand how you can both worry about someone getting hurt and want to kill them yourself, you know?”

  She laughed. “That’s just brothers. Trust me, I have three younger brothers, and one elder. When we get together, our friendliest interactions legally constitute grievous bodily harm. But I would kill anyone else who laid a finger on them.”

  My stomach twisted uncomfortably at that. It was too close to something Uriah Heep had reminded me of. I don’t know why I always feel uncomfortable emotions in my stomach. It doesn’t make sense, and it’s not very fair. It’s just a thing.