She didn’t want to go into that black rectangle. Pulling back, she whispered, “No! Jack!”
Glaring at her, a stranger, he pointed fiercely downward, at the floor of his own room, rasping, “You weren’t in here! You were in the bathroom. You’re afraid to come out.”
Then she caught his meaning at last, and allowed him to drag her into the darkness and through it to the bathroom, switching on the harsh fluorescents in there—a frightened backward look showed her the surface of her bed all puffed and tom, like a scale model of a mountain range—and then she was in the bathroom alone, the door shut, turning the lock with shaky fingers. She leaned against her robe hanging on the back of the door, its terry-cloth softness her only comfort.
Of course she couldn’t have been in Jack’s room. If Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, how much more must a staffer on the Weekly Galaxy. The follies and foibles they reported on must not be shown to exist in their own lives. If she were alive now only because she’d been in Jack’s bed rather than her own, Massa would fire them both in the morning.
She could hear Jack out there, talking to someone he’d let into her room from the hall. “She isn’t here,” his voice said, sounding honestly puzzled. “Unless she’s in the bathroom.”
Another voice approached this door, saying, “Let’s see. Miss Joslyn?” Rap rap rap against the door, vibrating against the cheek she’d pressed to her robe. “Are you in there?”
Jack’s voice, awed, said, “Look at that bed. Somebody emptied a gun into it. Look, through the window here, fired right through the glass door.”
The doorknob rattled. Rap rap rap came the knocking again. “Miss Joslyn? Are you all right?” It was true. She was afraid to come out.
Five
After the police left, Mercer and Felicia looked at one another in wordless silence until yet another goddamn discreet tap at the suite door announced the return of Ferguson, the manager, behind a sad and apologetic smile. “I couldn’t really keep the authorities out,” he said.
“No, of course not,” Mercer agreed, and gave the man a comradely pat on the arm. “I’m not blaming you, believe me I’m not. It’s my own big mouth I blame, mostly.”
Felicia, clearly troubled, said, “Johnny, nobody believes you shot at that person.”
“I have been quoted, and not inaccurately,” Mercer reminded her, “as having threatened the life and limb of Galaxy reporters before. As the cops just now pointed out.”
“Nevertheless,” Ferguson the manager said, “as Miss Nelson says, no one actually believes it was you.”
“And nevertheless right back at you,” Mercer told him, “the cops have just requested I not leave this goddamn island until they say it’s okay.”
“Oh, dear,” Ferguson said. “And I imagine, at this point, you would very much like to leave.”
“You’re damn right I would. Nothing against your place here.”
“Oh, I realize that. I know what the problem is.” Looking past Mercer, out the living room’s picture window, Ferguson said, “I see that yacht is still there.”
“They won’t give up,” Mercer said grimly, not looking toward the damn yacht. “Which is only one of the fifteen or so reasons why I wouldn’t actually take a gun to the sons of bitches. On the other hand, I can see why somebody else might, and I’ll tell you the truth, I’m not that happy they missed.”
“Johnny!”
Mercer patted the air in Felicia’s direction. “This is just between us,” he assured her. “These particular walls don't have ears.”
“Well, as to that...” Ferguson said, delicately. Mercer frowned at him. “As to what?”
“Unfortunately,” Ferguson said, “so far this morning I have had to let two employees go. The maid who would have cleaned this suite was found to have come to work with a tape recorder, and one of the night girls on the switchboard offered one of the day girls five hundred dollars to record any phone calls either of you two might make.”
“That’s crazy!” Felicia said, staring at them both.
“You see?” Mercer said, with an angry shrug. “They don’t give up.”
“And the suborning of employees,” Ferguson said, his lip curling a bit, “seems as natural to them as breathing. I feel confident of perhaps ninety-five percent of my people here, including the girl who refused to be bribed, but there’s no doubt the Galaxy will find the other five percent. And if they don’t, others will. I’m reliably informed that Green’s Hotel has now filled up with members of the press.”
“Locusts,” Mercer said.
“Oh, Johnny,” Felicia said faintly. “And we were going to have such a nice, quiet wedding.”
“If I may make a suggestion,” Ferguson said, and waited.
They both looked at him. “Go ahead,” Mercer said. “Make it.”
“I feel quite badly,” Ferguson told them, “that I cannot guarantee the privacy and security you should have at Katama Bay. I wouldn’t at all blame you for leaving.”
“But the cops say we can’t.”
“You can’t leave the island, at least not yet. But you could leave the hotel, much as I would consider that a personal defeat.”
Mercer shook his head. “Leave the hotel? This is the most secure place on the island.”
“Actually, it isn’t,” Ferguson said. “And this morning I took the liberty of phoning the person I thought might be able to help you, if she would. She has agreed. May I bring her in?”
Mercer and Felicia looked at one another, then back at Ferguson. Mercer said, “You’ve got somebody outside there? Sure, bring her in.”
“Thank you.” Ferguson turned toward the door, then looked back to say, “Let me explain first, she is not exactly au courant on current affairs. I don’t believe she even has a television set. She has no idea who you are, except a nice young couple I’ve vouched for, who merely want a simple private marriage and are being hounded by the gutter press.”
“Won’t know who I am, eh?” Mercer said, with a half-disbelieving smile. “Well, that ought to be a breath of fresh air. Bring her on in.”
Sara was still scared. Could it have been some goon hired by John Michael Mercer? Shades of Keely Jones and the shotgunning of the sound truck! But that had been the passion of the moment, and the destruction was aimed at property, not at lives. And in any event, why would John Michael Mercer pick on her in particular? It didn’t make any sense.
But if the attack didn’t have anything to do with Mercer, what did it have to do with? Someone had come around to the back of the inn at three in the morning, had come to the glass doors leading to the ground-floor terrace off Sara’s room, had aimed through the glass and the closed curtains—she’d never drawn the heavy opaque drapes in there last night—and had emptied some sort of handgun into the bed she was supposed at that moment to be asleep in.
Was it meant to be a warning, made by somebody who knew the bed was empty? But how could anyone have been sure she wasn’t asleep there? The room was dark, the curtains not easy to see through. And what warning would it have been, anyway, and from whom?
Somebody tried to kill me, Sara thought, unable to concentrate on anything else, unable to even think about the activity swirling all around her here in the Oak Bluffs command center. Jack, galvanized by the thought of Boy Cartwright coming up to take over this campaign with a new and different concept of the lead story, was madly still trying to make the initial concept fly. If there was anything to be done to save the situation, Jack would do it.
So. All day today, the Mercer suite at Katama Bay Country Club was being buried beneath a cornucopia of largesse, an amplitude of gifts; every red rose from every florist on the island, cases of champagne, original watercolors by local artists, the finest fishing equipment. The hotel, clearly at Mercer’s orders, was intercepting every gift and turning it away before Mercer even got to see it, but Jack continued anyway, manic, driven, feeling the dusky wings of Boy Cartwright on the back of his neck.
A
nd that wasn’t all. Every employee of Katama Bay Country Club was being researched, all the way back to high school and all the way out to first cousins; where there were handles, they would be grasped. The Down Under Trio, gray-faced and red-eyed but game as ever, continued to hold forth in the Nineteenth Hole at Green’s Hotel. The Princess Pat, bearing its load of telephoto-lensed photographers, continued in the offing beyond Katama Bay. Sophisticated long- range microphones purchased some time ago from a disaffected CIA ex-agent and just expressed up from Florida were being beamed at the Mercer suite from every possible direction and were recording nothing but the cricker and ghee of insects, punctuated by the occasional slamming of a telephone.
And through it all Sara sat, haunted, hunted, hunched, thinking only about the eight bullets that had fluffed her bed into the soft-sculpture equivalent of a psychotic interlude. Who had done it? Why? What would they do next?
There was no reason why she should think of the dead man beside the road, nearly four weeks ago, fifteen hundred miles away in Florida. So she didn’t.
“We really appreciate this, Lady Beatrice,” John Michael Mercer said, while Felicia clung to his arm and beamed in delight on their benefactor, and Ferguson the hotel manager stood to one side washing his hands together and smiling on one and all like a lesser saint on a good day.
“Think nothing of it,” Lady Beatrice said, with an accent Mercer and Felicia recognized as English, but which any normal class-conscious Brit would have known right away was certainly county, definitely landed, and probably from within thirty miles of Banbury. A gnarled and ageless ancient in an outdated but excellent riding habit, Lady Beatrice appeared to have been fashioned long ago out of fine old leather, well oiled and still sound. “My late husband,” she went on, “General Sir Eustace Romneysholme, Earl of Romney, believed all journalists should be horsewhipped on sight.”
“Your late husband and I would have got along, ma’am,” Mercer told her, unconsciously countering her British accent by becoming more Western than he had ever been.
“My late husband,” Lady Beatrice said, her agate eyes glinting, “used to say there were three extraneous classes of life on this planet: tsetse flies, male ballet dancers and journalists. An enemy of any of those three is a true friend of mine.”
“Lady Beatrice,” Felicia said, “this is really the nicest thing that ever happened. I was so unhappy before you came in.”
“I too have had romance in my life, young lady,” Lady Beatrice told her. “How could I stand by and see it spoiled? Of course I have to take you into my heart, and my home.”
“If we’re puttin’ you out, ma’am—”
“Nonsense,” Lady Beatrice told him. “If you were putting me out, Mr. Murphy, I wouldn’t—”
“Mercer,” Mercer said gently, with a little pained smile.
“Mercer, then,” she agreed impatiently. “And if you were putting me out, I wouldn’t permit you to. It’s as simple as that. Now clearly, however unfortunate it may be, your original thought of a church wedding here is just not on, so of course we’ll have the wedding at my home.”
“But—” Mercer said.
Felicia said, “Lady Beatrice, we have one hundred'people coming!”
“Well, no, they can’t all stay the night,” Lady Beatrice agreed. “Possibly, with doubling up, we could house perhaps half of them, but the others would have to make their own arrangements. You’ll give me your A and B lists.” A sudden and surprisingly girlish smile creased her morocco-bound face. “It will be just like house parties in the old days,” she said, a lilt in her voice.
Gently, Ferguson explained, “Lady Beatrice’s home, Romney Hall, is, uh, rather extensive.”
“I guess it must be,” Mercer said, looking more carefully at this dotty old lady.
“We shall maintain security,” the dotty old lady said, rubbing her shagreen hands together in plotter’s satisfaction, “by not informing your guests of the change in plans until the very last moment. Once they’ve arrived on the island, we’ll redirect them to the site of the happy occasion.”
“Yeah, but right there’s the snag,” Mercer said, grimacing and shaking his head and automatically looking out at the damn yacht in the damn offing, even though he’d sworn to himself he would never look at that ship or acknowledge its presence ever again. “The press is all over this island like maggots on a dead horse,” he said. “Any move I make, they’ll know it in a second.”
“Ah, but we are prepared for these maggots,” Lady Beatrice said, and smiled with approval on Mercer, saying, “How my late husband would have enjoyed you. He too had a colorful way with a phrase.”
Ferguson said, “We have a van without side windows that we use for picking up supplies at the airport. We can get you into that, with your luggage, absolutely unseen. On your way toward the airport, the van will turn off on Pohoganut Road as though the driver had to—excuse me, Lady Beatrice—relieve himself. One of Lady Beatrice’s limousines will be there to pick you up.”
“The one with the side curtains and the little Venetian blinds in back,” Lady Beatrice added.
“By the time the press finds out where you are,” Ferguson assured them, “you will be man and wife. And may you have long years of happiness, contentment and privacy.”
“Hear hear,” Lady Beatrice said.
“Gone?” Jack cried, like a mortally wounded yak. “Gone? They can’t be gone!”
It had been Don Grove’s sad task to bring this unhappy news to command center late that afternoon, a duty that did nothing to lift his normal cloud of pessimism. “They’re gone,” he repeated. “Disappeared without a trace. The manager had a lot of fun with it, let me know the
Galaxy could rent that suite for as long as we want. Eleven hundred dollars a day.”
“You took it, of course,” Jack said.
“Sure I took it,” Don agreed. “But they won’t let me in until the maid’s done. Really done. I don’t suppose she’ll leave anything.”
Ida and Sara, the latter still looking mostly like a trauma victim, came over to the scene of the disturbance, Ida saying, “What’s up?”
“The love birds have flown,” Jack explained, with bottomless bitterness.
“Impossible,” Ida said. “We’re all over them like acne. We’ve got stringers hanging from their ears.”
Sara’s attention, too, had been fairly caught, for the first time today. “Gone?” she echoed. “Gone where?”
“That is the question, all right,” Jack agreed.
“Gosh,” Sara said. “They wouldn’t try to leave the island, would they?”
“Leave?” Jack stared madly around the command center. “Leave Martha’s Vineyard? You mean, when the love birds fly, they fly?”
“There’s no more flights out today,” Ida said.
“There’s such a thing as charter,” Jack answered, and pointed a trembling finger at Don. “Go you to the airport,” he started.
Don frowned. “What about the suite?”
“Ida can do that. She’s the best searcher in the business. You go to the airport, you hire every charter pilot they got, you put everybody on standby. Nobody flies tonight.”
Don managed to nod and shake his head at the same time, as he said, “What am I hiring them for?”
“Potential emergency. We have this small sick child here.”
Sara, coming fully back to life at last, said, “All the pilots?”
“A class,” Jack decided. “The whole first grade has this mystery illness.”
“Doctors are baffled,” Ida suggested.
“Aren’t we all,” Jack agreed. “Go,” he told Don.
Don, the true centurion’s underling, went. Jack turned to Sara and Ida, saying, “Now, we have to find those two.”
“That son of a bitch,” Ida said, low and angry. “Running out on us. Who is he without us, anyway?”
“That’s right,” Sara said, as fierce in her own way as Ida. Jack stared at her in ambivalent surprise�
�did he want Sara to become Ida? What a thought!—as the girl shook her fist and declared, “What do people like John Michael Mercer have, except their celebrity?”
“That’s right,” Ida said, glaring at Sara in aggressive solidarity.
“And where do they get their celebrity?” Sara demanded.
“From us!” Ida snapped.
“That’s right!” Sara cried, in full voice. “When they want publicity, we give it to them. And when we want, they've got to give!”
Finding this new fierceness—not that new, actually—of Sara’s both encouraging and disturbing, Jack said, “Sara, my darling, I can hardly wait for you to get the opportunity to make that point to John Michael Mercer face-to-face. But before that happy event can occur—”
He broke off to glance at the door, and in came Boy Cartwright, pasty and unhealthy and diseased and smiling. Gazing around command center, “Charming little hovel,” he said.
I’ll have to get along with this toad, Jack reminded himself. “Hello, Boy,” he said. “Welcome to Martha’s Vineyard.”
“Ah, Jack,” Boy said, with his puffy squidlike smile. “How’s the old interview coming along?” I’ll have to tell him we’ve lost Mercer, Jack thought, and listened to hear how he’d phrase it, but all he heard from himself was silence.
Ida, who would not stay in the same room with Boy Cartwright if she could avoid it, turned away, saying to Jack, “I’ll go check the suite.”
“Good.”
“No more long faces,” Boy announced. From the laziness of his eyes, he must be taking Valium by the bottle these days. “We’ll all have to be much jollier, now that I’m aboard.”
“And where’s Paul Revere,” Ida was heard to mutter, on her way out, “now that we need him?”
Six
Westlake, Donald E - Sara and Jack 01 Page 23
