“Excuse me, folks, I want to make a few phone calls.” Brooks followed them out.
“I could use an eggnog myself about now,” Jem said complacently.
“What did you put in it, Egbert?” Ira asked with a grin.
“Just a little tot of brandy, sir. Well, perhaps more than a little. I made extra for Mr. Jem, and I can easily make more if you and Mrs. Rivkin would care to indulge.”
“No thanks.” Miriam spoke for them both. “We may as well get home, since there's nothing more we can do tonight. Tell Sarah I'll call first thing in the morning, and you be sure to call us the minute you hear anything, no matter what time it is.”
They took themselves off. Jem found himself with a small problem between his glass and its coaster but solved it easily enough by the simple expedient of drinking the glass dry and dropping the coaster on the floor. “Shame to waste the rest of the eggnog,” he remarked. “Finish it off, Egbert, why don't you?”
“Well, Mr. Jem, seeing as how you force it on me. One generally associates eggnog with Christmas, but my mother used to give us eggnog sometimes, for medicinal purposes, you know, when she had an egg to spare and the time to mix it. Sometimes we'd get sick on purpose.”
“Getting nostalgic, are you, Egbert?”
“Well, sir, one does tend to count one's blessings at times like this. We've got the little chap back safe, and I won't give up on Mr. Max. He's got out of bad scrapes before, and Mr. Brooks's notion about ransom struck me as eminently logical and on the whole eminently encouraging. As for me—well, Mr. Jem, I don't mind admitting it was a lucky break for me when you happened to see me flipping dough in the window of that crummy pizza parlor and recognized your old army buddy fallen on hard times. Jobs were darned tough to get then with so many being turned loose. Would you care for a small dividend?”
“No, you finish it off, old buddy. I don't want to get too healthy.”
It was Sarah who found them, still in their clothes, dozing peacefully in the two easy chairs that they'd staked out as their own for the duration of the visit.
“What on earth are you two Champagne Charlies doing down here at six o'clock in the morning?”
“Good God, is that what time it is? I haven't been awake at this hour since the good old days when I stayed up all night.” Jem stretched and groaned. “Egbert, why didn't you put me to bed? Why didn't I put you to bed?”
“I haven't the foggiest, Mr. Jem. Maybe we decided to sit here and listen for the telephone. Could that have been it? I'm sorry, Mrs. Sarah, but there hasn't been any news. Yet.”
“I know. Brooks was up half the night, too, in Max's office. Why didn't you tell me he and Theonia were staying? I'd have made the bed and tidied the room.”
“That's why nobody told you. You do too damned much for too many people.” Jem cautiously turned his head, yelped, and groaned. “I knew I shouldn't have had that eggnog, it's left me with a headache. I never get headaches from gin. Where's Davy?”
“Right behind you. Come on, Davy, let's make breakfast for Uncle Egbert and Uncle Jem and you and me.”
“I don't want breakfast. I feel funny.”
“How funny, dear? Funny in your tummy?”
“I don't know. I just want to go back to bed, and I want Daddy to come. Mummy, you take me?”
“Of course, dear. Shall I carry you up?”
“Daddy carry me.”
Davy was trying not to sniffle and not succeeding very well.
Neither was Sarah. She put her hand on Davy's forehead. He didn't feel warm, but who knew what kind of germ he might have picked up in that horrible house. “I tell you what, you can dress up in Daddy's baseball cap and his Red Sox shirt, and you can be Daddy until Big Daddy comes home. Uncle Jem can be you, and Jesse will drive us to Dr. Colly's office, and he'll give us all something to make our tummies feel better.”
“You hold me?”
“If you want me to.”
“You hold me?” Davy didn't usually ask the same question twice in a row.
“Yes, I could do that. It's really, really early, though, too early for Dr. Colly to be in his office. Perhaps we ought to try eating something soft and squishy and see how it makes our tummies feel.”
“Egbert would be glad to fix you something,” said Jem.
“Not eggnog,” Sarah said, smiling at Egbert. “How about scrambling a few, or soft boiling them?”
Theonia entered, trailing clouds of mauve chiffon and ecru lace, while Sarah was breaking eggs. Gently but firmly she took the bowl away. “Sit down and drink your juice, I'll do that.”
“Not in that gorgeous negligee,” Sarah protested.
“There's plenty more where that came from,” Theonia said not so enigmatically. She'd been remodeling Caroline Kelling's costly, exquisite lingerie for years, with extravagant success, and hadn't exhausted the supply yet. “Does it bother you to see me wearing her things, Sarah?”
“Quite the contrary.” Sarah managed a feeble laugh. “I suppose it could be regarded as a form of revenge, couldn't it? She always had the most wonderful clothes, from the skin out, while I went around in my mother's old hand-me-downs or cobbled-together clothes made out of blankets. Being blind, she couldn't see how awful I looked, but she must have known. How she'd swear if she knew some other woman was wearing her precious silk de chine step-ins.”
“Especially a woman she'd never let in her house except to scrub floors.” said Theonia with perfect truth and perfect equanimity. Deftly she spooned the creamy golden eggs onto heated plates and distributed them around the table. “Why, my goodness, Davy, why are you looking so glum?”
“Don't want eggs.” Davy drooped.
“You'll hurt my feelings if you don't eat them. I'll cry.”
Her face puckered up into a grimace as horrifying as Theonia's perfect features were capable of producing. Davy looked impressed. “I can make a worse face than that.”
“As soon as you finish your eggs we'll have a contest.”
They had the contest, and Davy won. He and Egbert went upstairs so that Davy could help his old friend pick out clean clothes for the day, and the others put their heads together over a last cup of coffee.
“Thanks, Theonia,” Sarah said. “He said his tummy felt odd, but he got those eggs down all right. I think I'll take him to see Dr. Colly, though, just to be on the safe side. You should have seen that filthy place! I hope he didn't eat or drink anything. The well is probably polluted.”
“Has he told you why he went there?” Theonia tipped another spoonful of sugar in her coffee. She kept her voluptuous contours from becoming too voluptuous by periods of exercise and diet, but this was no time to worry about calories.
“I haven't dared talk to him about it yet. He was exhausted last night, and he really did look a little out of sorts this morning. It could be he's upset about something that happened over there, and if I press him, I might do more damage. I simply cannot for the life of me understand why he would take it into his head to cross the road, which he's been strictly forbidden to do, and sneak into someone else's house, which is also against the rules, and scare me half to death! I could almost be glad Max wasn't here. He'd have been frantic.”
She was lying, and she knew it, and she couldn't keep the smile plastered on her face much longer. She excused herself and fled to the deck. Gripping the rail with both hands, she stared out across the colorful drift of chrysanthemums Anne had created.
“Oh, Max,” she whispered. “I miss you so much. Where are you, darling? Where are you?”
17
Max knew where he was. Sitting on a bare rock completely surrounded by water, that was where. What he didn't know was where the damned rock was.
Somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, at a guess. There was no land visible except for a few other rocks. They were just as barren as his, so there didn't seem to be any point in swimming over to them. The coast must be west of him. He knew which way west was, he'd seen the sun rise once or twice, or maybe i
t was three times. His memory wasn't working too well. He couldn't remember a damned thing between the time he'd left Ireson's Landing and the unpleasant moment when he had found himself over his head in water and sinking fast. He had grown up not far from the ocean and had learned to swim at Revere Beach and along a fair stretch of the North Shore. That skill and his well-developed survival instinct had helped him fight his way to the surface and stay there, sometimes floating, sometimes paddling, until the sun rose and showed land close by.
Some land, Max thought. He'd been almost at the end of his strength when he'd seen it, and it had been a struggle to climb out of the water, even with the help of a handy ledge. At some point during the night he'd lost his shoes. Maybe he'd managed to take them off, though he couldn't remember doing it. Maybe a kindly mermaid had done it for him.
He was still not thinking very straight. The bump on his head might have something to do with that. Max fingered it gingerly. It was an impressive lump, as lumps went, and he wished it would. He wished he would, too. They must be looking for him by now, but how would they know where to look?
Time to think positively, Max told himself. He could have been worse off, though not much. His head was beginning to clear, and flashes of memory were coming back. Some of them had to be hallucinations, like seeing Louie Maltravers bending over him. Louie was in the clink and unlikely to leave the safety of his cell unless he was forcibly evicted. There'd been something about the Fourth of July, too. Fireworks and rockets going off.
One memory was almost certainly accurate—coming back to consciousness to find himself tied hand and foot, with a gummy gag filling his mouth and a blindfold over his eyes. He'd heard voices but couldn't make out what they were talking about. Then there'd been another stab of pain in his aching head; and blackness.
The marks of the ropes still showed on his wrists, so that part hadn't been a bad dream. He couldn't understand why they had freed him before they'd tossed him overboard. Dying of starvation or exposure was just as final as drowning, or being chewed to meatballs by some monster of the deep, but if they'd meant to kill him, why not do a thorough job of it?
Then there was the plastic bag. He'd run across it during his first feeble attempt at dog paddling, and he'd wrestled with it for a while before he'd realized it wasn't a shark or a whale. He'd hung on to it, for no good reason, and he was glad he had. That bag and its contents might save his life.
That and the seaweed. Too bad Max's old scoutmaster wasn't here to join the party. He'd taught Max all he knew about seaweed, which was more than Max had wanted to know at the time, but thank God he had. Food was all around him, even if it wasn't the sort Max Bittersohn or any member of his family would ever have eaten unless there was nothing else available. Just now there wasn't, but there was plenty of seaweed. Those leaflike forms that Max could see drifting in the water at his feet, too close to his feet, were among the most digestible and easily obtainable edibles in the ocean.
Small silvery fish slid through the weeds, but they weren't so easily attainable. Why hadn't his kindly old mentor taught him how to catch fish with his bare hands? Davy wouldn't like it, though, if Davy's father ate the fish instead of sending them home to their mothers and fathers. He'd better stick to seaweed.
Those fantastically long ribbons of kelp must go all the way down to the ocean floor; Max hoped he himself wouldn't follow them. He saw Irish moss, which was good in desserts and many other foods when treated right in the cooking; Sarah always made blanc-mange when she expected Aunt Boadicea to lunch. He saw the dark purple dulse, so full of iodine that inlanders cursed with goiters would have begged their friends and relatives to send it to them as a remedy for the unsightly and sometimes even deadly ailment, back when no other remedy was available. His old Boy Scout leader would know them all, those that were palatable just as they came, others that would have been the better for warming up if a castaway had had anything to put them in or the means of lighting a fire.
He was thinking negative thoughts again. Time to count his blessings, such as they were. Lots of tasty, juicy seaweed, and a plastic bag, and a worn red bathrobe. His bathrobe. He thought he remembered Sarah tucking it into his overnight bag. They'd joked about glamorous lady spies.
Max rubbed his stinging eyes. If they were a little damp, who would know except him? God, he missed Sarah. She must be worried about him. He was worried about her and Davy, too. An unidentified corpse on their property, the inexplicable return of the Kelling rubies, burglars, car thieves—what would happen next? Damn it, he' find a way of getting off this rock somehow, never mind how he'd gotten there.
The bathrobe had been in his overnight bag. So someone had taken it out of the bag, enclosed it in plastic, and tossed it overboard with him. His memories of the day he'd made landfall were hazy, but he'd had sense enough to spread the robe out to dry in the sun, along with his drenched clothes. He had spread the plastic bag too, so that it lined a hollow in the rock. The makeshift basin had collected enough dew to give him a drink of brackish but salt-free water that morning. The bathrobe had kept him warm the previous night. It was now spread out again, making a colorful focus for any ship, any plane, any hopeful soul in a rowboat on a trip around the world, anything between a kayak and an ocean liner, on which he could thumb a ride home to his wife and family.
It was too bad that there wasn't so much as a piece of driftwood on these rocks. He could have carved his name for posterity on it with the trusty Boy Scout knife his father had given him on his tenth birthday. They, whoever they were, hadn't bothered to take his knife. It wasn't much of a weapon, and with his hands and feet tied he couldn't have gotten at it anyhow. Another blessing, Max thought sourly. At least it might have been if he could catch a fish, which he couldn't.
Back to seaweed. Max collected a handful of kelp and chewed doggedly. All seaweeds were edible, though some of them were too tough to eat raw. At least one kind could be made into excellent pickles, if a castaway happened to have brought a pickling kettle along. He wondered how long it would take to get thoroughly sick and tired of eating seaweed. He was already sick and tired of sitting there with nothing to do. He took a stroll around his domain, six steps one way and five the other. He tried it with shorter steps to make the walk last longer; but that didn't help much.
He tried reciting poetry he'd remembered from his English classes. Unfortunately, the one that came first to mind was the short piece supposedly written by Alexander Selkirk, a marooned Scottish sailor still known as the progenitor of Robinson Crusoe:
I am monarch of all I survey,
My right there is none to dispute;
From the center all round to the sea
I am lord of the fowl and the brute.
Oh, solitude, where are they charms
That sages have seen in thy face?
Better dwell in the midst of alarms
Than reign in this horrible place.
“You can say that again, Alexander,” Max muttered.
What the hell had happened to all the shipping? Fishing boats with ship-to-shore radios that could put him in touch with his family, a yacht, the Queen Elizabeth2, one of those huge foreign factory ships that would stay in one place for weeks on end while the smaller boats brought in their fish and went back to get more, if they could find more, a Coast Guard vessel, a submarine? He'd been straining his eyes ever since the sun rose without seeing as much as a periscope.
He had no idea what time it was. A pity he hadn't been able to test the guarantees that came with the outlandishly expensive waterproof, shock-proof, everything-proof watch Sarah had given him for his last birthday. It hadn't been on his wrist when he'd finally got around to taking inventory of his remaining possessions. Nothing else was missing except objects that might have fallen out of his pockets while he was being carried or dragged around. Even his billfold was there, tucked into the zippered inner pocket of his jacket. Somebody had deliberately removed the watch, and Max doubted that the thief's motive had been t
o deprive him of the ability to tell the time. It was more likely that somebody hadn't been able to resist an expensive watch. Somebody like Louie the Locksmith. But Louie was in jail. Wasn't he?
Sitting around watching his mind wander all over the scenery, such as it was, wasn't getting him anywhere. Max stripped to the buff and let himself down into the water very carefully, not knowing what might be lurking there and not wanting to find out the hard way. He was used to his early morning dip in the sea. He swam slowly at first and was pleased to find the exercise was getting the kinks out of his arms and legs. Everything seemed to be working, including the leg he'd damaged. This past summer, he'd been constrained to spend too much time in the hospital or in outpatient therapy. It was heartening to know that he was by now completely healed, though whether he'd be able to enjoy good health for any great length of time would depend very much on matters beyond his control.
He hauled himself out of the water, feeling a lot better and, unfortunately, a lot hungrier. He dried himself on the salt-stiffened remains of his shirt and stared longingly at a bird skimming across the water. It might have been a seagull, or maybe a fulmar. He didn't really care what it was, he just wished it would have a heart attack or a stroke and drop dead in the water close enough to be retrieved.
If he could catch a couple of fishes, he might use them to lure the bird close enough to be caught. But then if he could catch a couple of fishes, he'd have something to eat that wasn't seaweed. Still no sign of a sail. Would he have to spend another night on this godforsaken rock? Would there be other nights, other days?
Of course there would. Lots of days, years and years of days. Mornings together, noontimes together, evenings together, nights together when Davy was at the lake with the Rivkins and Max and Sarah would have the house all to themselves. Maybe there'd be a nice girl like Tracy by the time Davy was off at college. But first there' be Davy the king of the sandbox, Davy in kindergarten, Davy in a rowboat with his father, Davy winning a soapbox derby, Davy entering college, Davy magna cum laude in his father's cap and gown. Davy everywhere except here, damn it. Maybe he ought to chew another mouthful of kelp, even though he doubted he could bring himself to swallow it.
The Balloon Man Page 15
