Rhapsody in Red

by Donn Taylor

  “Turn right,” Mara ordered.

  I did, and suddenly knew where I was. This street would take us north to the interstate, now only three blocks away. Lights of late-closing business showed up ahead.

  “Not to the interstate,” I said. “We won’t have a chance.”

  “We’re not going there,” she said. “Get ready to turn left when I tell you.”

  We sped through the next block with the two SUVs getting closer and closer.

  “Turn now,” Mara said.

  As the black shapes of a few darkened buildings whipped by, a well-lighted parking lot suddenly appeared. I braked and turned into it. At its far end loomed the long, flat building of Amazing Discount Bargains, the huge new twenty-four-hour supercenter widely touted by TV and newspapers. The parking lot lay deserted in the deepening snow, though rotating yellow beacons on two golf carts signaled the presence of security guards. Witnesses at last! The guards would be unarmed, but the thugs behind us would hardly attack us in front of them.

  “Brilliant, Mara,” I said.

  She pointed to the left-hand entrance. “Park there. We’ll call the police from inside.”

  The left front tire blew out with a sound like a cannon shot, but I wrestled the protesting car onward to a spot near the door. It wasn’t an approved parking space, but the guards weren’t close enough to stop us. We leaped out and ran for the entrance as the two SUVs pulled into the parking lot.

  Inside, Mara cornered the first clerk she saw and asked, “Where’s your phone?”

  The clerk, a frowsy woman of middle age, showed a bored stare and drawled, “Customers has to use the pay phones. They’s outside in the parking lot.”

  Mara burned her with a glance. “Call your manager.”

  The woman scratched her head. “He ain’t here right now. Him and Mabel went out for a soda.”

  I expected an explosion from Mara, but none came. Instead, she smiled and said, “I’ll catch him when I finish shopping.”

  She headed for the back of the store and I followed. As we navigated among the racks I glanced back toward the entrance. A big, tough-looking fellow rushed in and stood with hands in topcoat pockets, head turning from side to side as he surveyed the store. He was the mop-haired fellow who’d been watching me in Dolt’s. Before he found us, Mara moved us behind the fitting rooms and hurried on toward the rear.

  We swept through a lingerie department featuring garments too small for a modest midget, then through a men’s section of T-shirts with slogans that would make a sailor blush. Heck, some might even make a sitcom writer blush. We barged through hardware, camping equipment, and a vast array of fishing poles that would have kept President Cantwell busy for a week. We rounded a rack of waders and faced up against a metal door with a sign that read, “Emergency Exit: Alarm Will Sound.”

  Mara never hesitated. She slammed both hands into the door’s opening bar. The door flew open, and the alarm’s raucous beep-beep-beep echoed through the store. We stepped outside into snow that now lay ankle-deep. It slopped into my shoes, and I wished I’d had foresight enough to wear boots. Mara fared even worse in her pumps, but she didn’t complain. The snowfall suddenly erupted into a blizzard. It looked like someone had carried truckloads of Arctic snow overhead and dropped it all at once. That made the footing difficult, but at least it would cover our tracks.

  Mara seized my gloved hand and turned north along the rear of the store. “We have to disappear before they come looking.”

  When we reached the store’s corner, she continued north into the pitch-black of an unlighted field. I had misgivings because we were within a block of the interstate’s frontage road, but she seemed to know where she was going. I glanced backward and saw no pursuit. I shouldn’t have. When I did, I learned the lesson of Lot’s wife, except that I didn’t turn into a pillar of salt; I only fell facedown in the snow.

  I sprang up quickly and found Mara had waited for me. She did not offer her hand again, but forged ahead toward the lights of a three-story building on the frontage road. Breathing hard, we rounded its corner and stepped into a lighted parking lot with an electric sign that read “Dreamland Motel.”

  Mara stopped under a light and said, “Let’s get you dusted off and presentable before we go in.” Her gloved hands brushed at my overcoat. After a search, I found my handkerchief to wipe my face and clean my trifocals.

  “Go in?” I said. “But that’s a motel.”

  “Of course it’s a motel. It’s where I stayed when I first hit town.” Her eyes scorched me, but a smile played on her lips. “Motels have telephones, Cupcake. That means we can call the police. Now come along.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. This was a Mara I hadn’t seen before, and I didn’t know quite what to make of it. So I followed her into the motel like the obedient cupcake I was supposed to be.

  We found the lobby deserted except for a young male who slouched at the registration desk reading the National Enquirer and scratching his scraggly attempt at a beard.

  He looked up and asked, “Can I help you guys?” His intonation suggested he’d rather not.

  “Our car stalled,” Mara said. “We’d like two rooms for the night. Nonsmoking. On separate floors.”

  The clerk turned a blank stare on each of us in turn, then on the floor beside us, so obviously empty of luggage.

  Mara showed him her acetylene torch. “You do have rooms, don’t you?”

  He winced, grunted, and produced registration cards. We filled them out with my car and tag number but our individual credit cards. The clerk gave Mara her key card in an envelope numbered 206. Mine was 312. He mumbled something about continental breakfast from six to nine and dismissed us by returning to his National Enquirer.

  In the elevator I punched buttons for two and three. “Why the rooms?” I asked. “Why not just use the phone?”

  “Those men in the SUVs may come looking for us,” she said. “Come on,” she added as the door opened onto her floor. “We’ll make that phone call.”

  Her room contained a king-sized bed, a desk, chair, and the inevitable TV set. A bedside table held a lamp and phone. We threw our wet coats on the desk, and Mara sat on the bed by the phone. With mounting misgivings, I took the chair at the desk.

  She must have had second thoughts, too, for she asked, “Do you think the police will believe us?”

  “Not if Staggart gets involved,” I said. “We’re both fresh out of jail. That means we’re on their list of undesirables. And we don’t know if those mugs are still chasing us. For all we know, they may have left town when they didn’t catch us.”

  “Let’s think about it,” she said. “Meanwhile, I’ll tell Dr. Sheldon what’s going on.” She punched in the numbers.

  While she summarized our problems for Dr. Sheldon, I thought back over the day’s events. The attempted attack on us had taken my mind off our failed investigation. We’d evidently gotten close to someone, for we’d made the hit list of professional criminals. One of the five suspects that had threatened us had made good on the threat.

  But which one?

  I’d hardly posed the question when Mara stopped talking and began listening.

  “Thank you,” she said presently. She hung up the phone and turned to look at me, her face filled with sadness.

  “Sergeant Spencer asked Dr. Sheldon if he had seen us,” she said. “Captain Staggart has issued a new order for our arrest.”

  CHAPTER 41

  For several minutes we simply stared at each other. Despair was written on Mara’s face, and mine must have showed no better. Somewhere outside, gunmen were waiting to kill us. We’d hoped for protection from the police, but now the police had become our enemies. Even if we escaped the thugs and the police until Wednesday afternoon, the faculty hearing committee would end our professional lives. We were alone and cut off from help of any kind. Even the safety of this drab motel room was illusory. If our armed assailants found us, it would become a killing ground.

 
Sometimes the future becomes so threatening that we dismiss it and focus wholly on moment-by-moment survival.

  Thus it was with Mara. Her chin lifted that eloquent fraction and the despair on her face changed to determination.

  “Let’s go check out your room,” she said.

  Why not? We had nothing better to do. We picked up our coats and headed for the door. I opened it a crack and surveyed the hall. It was empty. Quietly, we followed it to the stairwell and climbed to the third floor. No use signaling our movements by using the elevator. Mara made no comment until I reached for the light switch in my room.

  “Wait.” She closed the door behind us and felt her way through the dark room to the window. She parted the thick curtains about a finger’s width and looked outside.

  “They’re in the parking lot,” she said. “Both SUVs and six men. It looks like they’re arguing.”

  I joined her at the window. Suddenly conscious of her feminine closeness in the dark room, I took special care to avoid touching her. As I knelt and looked through the parted curtains, she stood behind and leaned over me to look. But she seemed as careful as I not to make physical contact.

  The two SUVs were the ones that had chased us. The damaged passenger door identified one, and the other was either its mate or a dead ringer. Mara was right about the argument. One man gestured toward the motel and the one facing him pointed east along the access road. The other four stood and watched. The first man gestured again and marched toward the motel.

  Would the desk clerk betray us? For a moment we held our positions as if frozen. I heard Mara breathing above me, and my heartbeat resonated like a bass drum. Then, without words, we moved in concert as we both realized we must barricade the door.

  By now our eyes had become accustomed to the dim light. The room’s darkness was not complete, for a sliver of light crept in under the hall door and allowed us to make out the shapes of furniture. The room was a duplicate of Mara’s except that it had two queen beds instead of one king.

  Hurriedly, we disconnected the TV and moved it from the chest of drawers onto a bed. Grunting and gasping for breath, we pushed the heavy chest across the room until it rested lengthwise against the door. We lifted the desk on top of it and crowned that with the TV set. It would fall with a crash if anyone succeeded in breaking in. We saved the desk chair to club the first intruder who made it through the obstacles. As Mara had said, we weren’t thinking like professors.

  We stood there for several minutes, panting like hounds on a hot day. Mara seemed to know, as I did, that we’d done everything possible and could only wait.

  Footsteps in the hall approached our door. Passed it. Receded. The elevator door groaned, followed by the fading hum of the elevator descending. A false alarm. But it made us acutely conscious of our vulnerability.

  We waited. In the silence, the room’s artificial freshener smelled sickly sweet. The elevator hummed again, crescendoing as it ascended. Its door grated open. Footsteps again approached our door. Passed it. Again receded. Some unseen neighbor had returned from an errand downstairs.

  We resumed our places at the window, opening the curtains the barest crack. We needed the light from outside now that our barricade blocked light from under the door.

  The five men in the parking lot stamped their feet in the deepening snow and snugged their topcoat collars against the cold. After a long time, the man who’d entered the motel returned and gave something like a shrug. Another argument followed. Finally, three men got into the undamaged SUV and drove east up the access road.

  I guessed they’d argued about whether we were in the motel or had escaped in another direction. Apparently they were pursuing both possibilities.

  The three remaining men climbed awkwardly into the damaged SUV through the driver’s door. They circled farther out in the parking lot and stopped where they could observe the full face of the motel while their interior was too shadowed for anyone to see what they were doing. It looked like they’d settled in for the night.

  “We mustn’t show a light,” Mara said. “They may be trying to decide which rooms are occupied. They may make a raid later. . . .”

  I knew what she must be thinking. Regardless of propriety, this room was our prison for the night. If the faculty hearing committee got wind of it, that would put the coup de grâce to our already jeopardized careers.

  But Mara didn’t linger on the thought. “Give me your wet shoes and socks,” she said. “There has to be a hair dryer around here somewhere.”

  I gratefully complied, for my feet felt packed in ice. A few minutes later I heard the hair dryer going in the bathroom. I didn’t ask how she’d found things in the dim light, but busied myself with peeping out the window. The SUV had not moved, but the absence of condensation from the exhaust meant they’d turned off the engine. Standard cold-weather procedure: Run the engine awhile to heat the interior, shut it down to save fuel. That meant they planned a long vigil.

  Mara returned with my shoes and socks. Their heat made an instant start on thawing out my feet.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I hope you did your own.”

  I thought I saw a smile in the dim light. “I did them first. That’s the only way I could stand up long enough to do yours.”

  “Our friends have set up shop outside,” I said. “It looks like they plan to stay awhile.”

  She came and stood next to me to gaze out through the curtain. She wore no perfume, but the clean smell of soap made me acutely aware of her femininity. And of how near me she was standing. She left the curtain open a crack. Through it, light from the parking lot revealed her face as she weighed the situation.

  “They don’t know for certain we’re in here,” she said, “or if they do, they don’t know which room. If we don’t show a light, they won’t know this room is occupied.”

  “We’re okay while they’re out there,” I said, “and at least for right now they’ve decided not to come in. Maybe holding a gun on the desk clerk is too much risk if they aren’t certain we’re here.”

  “If they do come in, our barricade will give us a minute or two of warning.” Light through the curtain-crack glimmered blue in her eyes. “We might as well get some sleep now and worry about tomorrow when it gets here.”

  Before I could answer, she said “Good night,” crawled onto the nearest bed, and, without bothering to turn down the spread, buried her face in the pillow. The austerity of her Army training, I guess.

  “Good night,” I said belatedly, and crawled onto the other bed. That happened to be the one nearer the door. So if the thugs did come in, it would be my job to grab the desk chair and give my imitation of Brenda Kirsch and her two-by-four.

  In the silence of the room, fatigue dissolved my bones like salt on a snail. Silence of the room? Yes, silence. I suddenly realized my internal musicians had been on strike ever since Mara and I left Dolt’s. In the movies, the soundtrack would dramatize a chase like we’d been through with something like “The Ride of the Valkyries.” But in our case I’d not heard so much as a solitary toot.

  Just as suddenly, my orchestra returned with a reprise of Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Gradually, my emotions merged into its solemn sadness. It brought back the deep, familiar ache of my grief for Faith, now made more acute by the presence of another woman here in the room. Somewhere amid the melody and manic longing, I slipped into the sable nothingness of sleep.

  Someone was crying. Cindy? I roused, still only half-awake. Gradually, reality seeped in. A dark room. Dim light around a heavy curtain. Not home. Fully dressed on a strange bed. Not Cindy, but . . .

  The crying came from the adjacent bed, quiet gasps stifled in the pillow. Now louder, less controlled.

  Mara.

  Something badly wrong. She’d never shown much emotion, always tightly disciplined.

  The sound grew to deep, uncontrolled sobbing like a soul in torment. Desperate gasps for breath between sobs.

  I saw her then in the dim light. She lay on
her stomach, hands clutching the pillow tight against her face, body racked with the sobbing.

  Without thought, I found myself kneeling on the floor beside her bed, reluctant to speak, fearful of touching her lest I provoke a memory of even greater pain.

  But I had to do something. Carefully, gently, I put the palm of my left hand on her back between the shoulder blades. My position was awkward. To steady myself, I rested my right hand on the bed above her head.

  “It’s all right, Mara,” I whispered. “It’s all right.”

  I knew very well it wasn’t all right. Our jobs and our lives were in danger. We were alone against gunmen and police and a hostile administration. Things were far from all right, but I had to tell her something.

  Her weeping grew more violent, her body now convulsing with every sob. She did not look up, but she reached out to grasp my hand that rested on the bed. She gripped it the way a drowning person grips even the smallest twig.

  I couldn’t blame her. For two weeks she’d been remarkably controlled under stresses that grew increasingly threatening, climaxing in that deadly chase by armed gunmen. Even then she’d showed courage and composure. But even the most steadfast courage must falter sometime, so I did not wonder that hers did now.

  I have no idea how long she wept. My thighs and shoulders ached from my constrained position, yet I dared not move for fear of sending an unintended signal. For by now, with my hand resting on her silk-smooth back in the darkened motel room, I grew guiltily aware of her soft femininity. Guilty because I’d fallen asleep grieving my loss of Faith, yet now desire, long dormant, crept through my body at the mere touch of a woman I hardly knew.

  It took all of my willpower to prevent my hand from moving into a caress. To make matters worse, my internal musicians kept playing someone’s orchestral transcription of Wagner’s “Liebestod,” the “Love-Death” from Tristan und Isolde. The passionate music permeated my being until it became my passion, as if the music rather than my will were in control. The title was sometimes mistranslated “The Death of Love,” and I wondered whose love for whom.