Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

  “Chelsea Tuttle, if I’m not mistaken,” Melissa said. “I’m Melissa Pennyworth. Thanks.”

  “Du rien, ma soeur. I just came from a reading at the Kansas City Hunt Club which Mr. Quinlan didn’t bother to attend, and I found that little flick quite cathartic.”

  “You never can tell when a riding crop will come in handy.”

  “Just so. When I bought the thing I was afraid it might be a little too-too. The only other prop that works with hunting pinks is a cigarette holder, though, and smoking is such a dreary cliché for writers my age. Joan Didion ruined it for all of us.”

  “Look, CT,” Quinlan said, “I’m sorry about the reading, but you do one of the goddamn things about every three weeks and something came up.”

  “Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut before you get in more trouble than you already are,” Tuttle advised Quinlan sternly. She emphasized the point by poking him in the chest with the crop’s tip. “We have to talk. That is to say, I have to talk and you have to listen.”

  “Talk about what?” Quinlan asked.

  “You know bloody well what, you callow rotter. And if you don’t I just left a note in your office that should clue you in. I’ll see you at noon tomorrow, and if you have any brains at all you’ll have the champagne chilled.”

  “Time out,” Quinlan said. “I have a command performance around midnight, and I don’t know how long it’s going to go. I may not be out of bed by noon. If your problem is that important, let’s go up and talk right now.”

  Melissa’s pulse jumped at that comment, but she needn’t have worried.

  “Noon tomorrow, dear heart,” Tuttle said. “I’ll be devoting the rest of the night to an in-depth study of marine biology. T-T-F-N.”

  She executed an about-face and strolled regally down the driveway, into the darkness. Melissa stole away as well, dispensing with formalities, for as she turned toward the back door she saw Rep coming around the corner of the house. Melissa hustled over to him, fussily lifting her skirt to keep from tripping over its hem and feeling as she did so that she must look like Aunt Polly from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  “What’s up?” she asked. “Where are Peter and Linda?”

  “Well, Linda is apparently in the ladies’ room upstairs, and Peter by now is presumably waiting impatiently outside of it. He tracked me down and told me she’d been in there for an uncomfortably long time. He feels silly asking, but he’d like you to go in and make sure she’s all right.”

  Uh-oh, Melissa thought. She chanced a look over at Quinlan, who had slipped back into his car either to re-stow his pot or perhaps to take a few calming tokes.

  “Let’s go,” she said briskly.

  She led Rep through the back door and up the stairs. Seeing Peter pacing anxious circles at the far end of the second floor hallway, she figured the restrooms must be there as well. She scurried down the hall and pushed into the ladies’ room, offering Peter a hurriedly reassuring pat in transit. She found Linda on her knees, embracing the bowl of the nearest commode and vigorously engaged in reverse peristalsis.

  “Okay, bunky, it’s going to be all right,” Melissa said, dropping to her haunches beside Linda. She pulled Linda’s luxuriant chestnut hair back and laid a calming palm on her forehead. She rolled with the motion as Linda heaved again, then gentled her friend back and flushed the toilet.

  “I think that’s it,” Linda panted.

  “Just sit still in case it’s not,” Melissa said.

  “God, I shouldn’t drink,” Linda said. “I don’t drink.”

  “I can see that,” Melissa said. “Hang on a minute.”

  “Don’t leave me!” Linda pleaded with frantic urgency.

  “I’ll be right back. Just sit tight.”

  Rising, Melissa moved first to the restroom door. Linda vomiting wasn’t that big a deal—certainly not for someone who’d made it through four years of undergraduate life at the University of Michigan. Far more alarming was the prospect of Quinlan marching up the stairs at any moment. The one thing that absolutely must not happen was for Quinlan to run into Peter in the next fifteen minutes or so. As she opened the door, she hoped desperately that Rep would pick up winks and nudges with his usual facility.

  “Okay,” Melissa said with a no-details-right-now-please exhalation. “It’s going to be a few minutes yet, but there’s nothing to worry about. Something a little off in the salad dressing this afternoon would be my guess, but everything is absolutely fine now. We just need a little while to freshen up and then we’ll find you fellas downstairs.”

  “Freshen up?” Peter asked, his expression suggesting that that flippancy strained even his credulity.

  “Chick thing,” Rep said, popping Peter on the bicep. “Don’t try to figure it out. Let’s get back to the guys ’ til these two are through.”

  Rep began walking toward the stairs. Nodding as if Rep had just shared an insight of Kantian profundity, Peter followed him, uncertainly at first and then with apparently growing confidence. By the time they had gotten back into the parlor Peter was leading the way, steering Rep toward the anteroom.

  “Was Melissa just trying to humor me or does she really mean everything is all right?” Peter asked urgently as, to Rep’s surprise, he clapped his forage cap on his head and began to fit his saber back into his belt.

  “I don’t know what’s going on,” Rep said, “but if Melissa says things are fine then things are fine. Chick-time has nothing to do with clock-time, so it may take awhile. But eventually Linda will be down here as good as new.”

  “I was thinking of driving her home,” Peter said, “but a long road trip in the next hour is probably the last thing she needs.”

  “I thought we were sleeping under canvas tonight,” Rep said, blinking with surprise. “I thought that was the whole idea.”

  “Right, we were and it was. But something I need to take care of has come up all of a sudden, and I can’t wait around much longer. If you’re sure Linda’s all right, I’m going to take off. I’ll try to be back before morning if I can, but don’t count on it. In fact, I’d appreciate it if you’d hunt up Charlie Rutherford and have him play reveille.”

  “One-eighties make me dizzy,” Rep said. “What could possibly have come up in the last hour that’s so important it can’t wait ’ til morning?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain. I have to check something before I’ll even know if it’s anything at all. Just tell Linda that I know she’ll understand, and I’ll explain everything as soon as I can.”

  A quick handclasp and Peter was gone while Rep was still opening his mouth to protest further.

  Melissa by that time had sponged off Linda’s face, gotten a cup of water down her throat, and patted a semblance of pink back into her cheeks.

  “Okay,” Melissa said then. “From the top, but after two deep breaths.”

  “Right,” Linda said after obediently gulping air. “After taking a pop from that bottle of Johnny Walker Black to get my nerve up, I got Peter to the office. I’d prepared a neat little speech, but I never got past there’s something I have to talk to you about. Then I saw his uniform looking so perfect on him. And I saw his face glowing with unconditional devotion, and this look of boyish hope in his eyes. And I thought about him being out here to spend the rest of the week with his re-enactment buddies, doing this thing he loves so much. And I knew you were right. And Siebern was right. Even Quinlan was right.”

  “Not quite peer review, but I’ll take it,” Melissa said.

  “I knew I shouldn’t tell him. Not only couldn’t but shouldn’t. That if I did, I’d be doing it for me and not for him, hurting him for no good reason.”

  “I think you made the right choice.”

  “But then I had to cover so I started rattling on,” Linda said. “I said I just had to tell him what a wonderful husband he was and how thrilled I was to be married to him. And we, uh, kind of started making out a little bit.
Quite a bit, actually. When he wasn’t nibbling my ear he was whispering to me about how I’m a faultless angel and so forth.”

  “This doesn’t sound like regurgitation material so far,” Melissa said.

  “That came when we stopped to catch our breath. He held me at arms’ length, and looked at me, and then he just lit up like a six-year old seeing the tree on Christmas morning. His face was like I got it! I got it! And he said he could tell I thought I was pregnant but I wouldn’t come out and say it yet because I was worried about getting his hopes up too soon.”

  “And you started to cry?” Melissa guessed.

  “No, I was already crying. I started to feel everything come back up. I knew I wasn’t just going vomit but hurl big time, like an outtake from Animal House. I mean, the nervous tension and everything, and then the somewhat unfortunate irony on top of it—”

  “I understand,” Melissa said.

  “So I made a mad dash for the restroom. I thought a Johnny Walker encore might calm me down, but it had the opposite effect. I mean, dumb, yeah, I know. Totally. Except for New Year’s Eve and friends getting shucked by their husbands, I don’t do hard liquor at all. Anyway, I lost lunch, tea, and salad, and it seemed to go on and on. Thank God you came in.”

  “All right, trooper,” Melissa said jauntily, climbing to her feet and pulling Linda after her. “A rough patch, but no harm done. Time to show the flag. I think we’ll stick with fruit punch for the rest of the night.”

  By the time they reached the hallway Linda was walking on her own, and when they approached the head of the stairs her gait had gotten downright steady. That’s when they saw Rep coming up.

  “Where’s Peter?” Melissa asked sharply.

  “Halfway to I-29 would be my guess,” Rep said. He then quickly described Peter’s exit and relayed his message.

  “Oh God,” Linda panted, a frantic desperation straining her voice. “No, oh please God, no.”

  “Steady,” Melissa said.

  “What’s up?” Rep asked.

  “Honey,” Melissa said to him, “this is one of those yours-not-to-reason-why situations, okay? I want you to go down to the bottom of the stairs, and if anyone starts to come up before Linda and I get back down, I want to know about it before they reach the second step.”

  “Yas’m,” Rep said, clicking his heels and saluting. He headed for his post as Melissa stuck her tongue out at him.

  “All right,” Melissa said then to Linda, “into the office. We need to find out if Peter could possibly have seen anything in there that would have tipped him off to your fling.” Like Chelsea Tuttle’s note, she thought but saw no point in mentioning. Yet.

  Linda showed Melissa into the large, open office space that Quinlan shared with Linda and other freelance editors when they worked on-site. Melissa was feverishly running through a set of rationalizations to justify opening and reading Tuttle’s note, but her scruples were wasted. No envelope sheltered the missive. No folds concealed its message.

  A letter-opener savagely pinned a typewritten page to the head-high top cushion on Quinlan’s leather desk chair. Even from ten feet away Melissa could read the words hand-printed in scarlet lipstick across the typescript: “NICE TRY,” followed by a suggestion of the twelve-letter word for incestuous son. (A suggestion only, rather than the word itself, for asterisks had replaced all but the M, the F, and the Rs.) “CT” served for a signature.

  “The bowdlerization seems anomalous in context,” Melissa murmured.

  “Chelsea always has been fastidious about indecent language,” Linda explained earnestly. “She knows her demographic.”

  “Isn’t the letter opener a bit over the top?”

  “Not for Chelsea. Anything short of an Italian dagger with a jewel-encrusted hilt would strike her as the epitome of restraint.”

  Melissa leaned close enough to the letter to read its typewritten text aloud to Linda. “Dear Chelsea: I am delighted to confirm that Jackrabbit Press is prepared to make an offer for first-publication rights to your novel, An Inescapable Courtesy. Enclosed is a contract providing for an advance and royalties twenty percent better than our standard arrangement. As you will appreciate, a surrealistic, experimental novel involving intersecting narrative vectors linking the occupation of Japan after World War II with the birth of disco and the election of the first woman pope will represent a major departure for both you and Jackrabbit Press. Finding just the right marketing approach will be essential. I can only hope that you are as excited by this challenge as I am. I look forward to working together with you on this exhilarating project.”

  “Incredible,” Linda said.

  “It seems to have aggravated Chelsea,” Melissa said, “but I don’t see anything in there that could have alerted Peter.”

  “Then it must have been something else,” Linda said despairingly as she sank into a chair and contributed a few gasping whimpers.

  Melissa chanced a sidelong glance to make sure Linda was in fact moving away from Quinlan’s desk. Something dull and metallic near the top of Quinlan’s desk blotter had caught her eye. She wanted to look more closely at it without drawing Linda’s attention to it. The five-second examination that she managed left her hollow-bellied. She saw a knuckle-sized chunk of bolt with the threads worn smooth. Three strands of chestnut hair tied around the object in a delicate bow served as decoration.

  As Melissa turned back to Linda and gazed at the rich chestnut mane that Melissa had always envied she remembered Jesse Davidovich’s throwaway comment about the newel capital—threads stripped and the bolt’s sheared. She didn’t have any trouble imagining a fragment of broken bolt flying unnoticed into Quinlan’s pant-cuff as he caught his keys. And she could easily picture his prurient delight later on as he tied stray locks of Linda’s hair around the thing to turn it into a love trophy.

  Had Peter seen this while Linda was blowing lunch and figured out what it meant? She didn’t know.

  Should she tell Linda about it? Not yet.

  “Snap out of it,” Melissa said to Linda instead, with a tough-love sharpness. “You’re jumping to conclusions. We don’t know what sent Peter hurrying away. His comments to Rep certainly didn’t sound like a jealous husband furious over infidelity.”

  “You’re right,” Linda said, shaking her head with spunky determination. “You’re doing everything you can to help, and I’m acting like a sniveling wimp. You must feel like slapping me silly.”

  “Of course not,” Melissa said. Not silly. “Now, let’s get going.”

  “Where?”

  “Wherever we think Peter is.”

  Chapter 10

  You wake up earlier when you’re sleeping in a bedroll under a tent than you do on a soft bed under a roof, Rep reflected, a little after five-thirty on Wednesday morning. You hear morning sounds that you don’t hear indoors. Metal cups clanging against metal plates. Canvas rustling. Predatory songbirds warbling in melodic triumph over lesser fauna that they’ve turned into breakfast. Rain dripping on the forage cap you’d put over your face.

  Right, Rep thought. Now I remember. The Port-A-Potties.

  He pulled himself stiffly from his bedroll and found his boots stowed upside down on sticks stuck in the spongy earth. Peter’s bedroll a few feet away lay snugly tied and clearly unused. Had Peter shown up, Rep’s instructions were not to let him out of his sight pending contact with Melissa or Linda. So much for that, Rep thought—with relief rather than anxiety, for he didn’t share the wives’ edginess about Peter’s exit. He viewed it, in fact, as gender-specific overreaction. Stuff happens, for crying out loud.

  Rep hesitated about wearing his saber to the john, then decided that he felt less ridiculous with it than without it. Ducking under the tent flap into a fine mist, he gratefully accepted a cup of coffee offered by a trooper next to a bravely flickering campfire. Nothing in urban life matches the taste of coffee boiled in a covered pan over a campfire. And if anything did, Rep thought
as he choked the stuff down, it would be a Class B misdemeanor to sell it.

  He made his way toward the target range and the modern conveniences that Peter had said lay beyond it. He glanced in the general direction of Jackrabbit Press, shaking his head at the remnants of a dark gray ash-cloud that hung languidly in the air over an outbuilding chimney. Who would have had an indoor fire last night in this heat? he wondered.

  As he walked through the pale, post-dawn light, he realized with some surprise that he didn’t really have any enthusiasm for the legal project Lawrence had dangled in front of him. He didn’t want Lawrence’s shiny, spiffed up, video-game, Power Ranger Union soldiers wandering around a camp like this in their custom-designed, operetta-pretty, combed cotton uniforms. He didn’t want Lawrence to sell a few more bodice-rippers by co-opting the reverence to memory and history that the re-enactors were offering here. He didn’t blame Lawrence, who had a mass-market business to run. But Rep couldn’t generate much excitement about contributing to it. It would be like helping someone use a classic rock anthem to sell laxatives. No, wait a minute, Rep thought, I DID that. This would be worse.

  Rep’s pace quickened as he came within sight of his objective.

  “Looks like we’re headed for the same place.”

  Startled, Rep glanced over at the man who’d come out of nowhere to fall in beside him. Jedidiah Whatsisname—Trevelyan, the sutler whose sharp practice with a widow had won him an antique Barlow knife and an enemy.

  “Good morning,” Rep said.

  “Mornin’. Mind those roots. Hard to see in this light, an’ they’ll just reach out an’ grab you.”

  Rep snapped his head to look down, and in the next instant felt himself sailing inelegantly through the air. As he completed a pratfall on mud and sodden grass, he felt the sutler falling beside and on top of him.