by Joan Sargent
"Eustace, you know you don't call a high-school principal, Professor," Hank snapped at the thin little man, then turned back to Mrs. Frailey. "I'm afraid you'll have to offer better proof that Mr. Eustace took your money than that, Mrs. Frailey."
Eustace's lips curled. "Like proving that you ever had a hundred," he suggested helpfully.
Cliff had added himself to the watchers who had gathered about the small drama. Now he edged himself nearer. "Eustace, what are you doing down at this end of the hall? Weren't you assigned a room at the other end?" He sounded like a firm parent reasoning with a refractory child. "Can I help it if Mrs. Frailey fascinates me? Or maybe I don't care for the noise of the younger generation's music. I'm a big boy, Mr. Lawyer. I go where I please. American idea, remember?"
"You go down to your end of the hall, Eustace," Cliff warned him. "Mrs. Frailey, whatever possessed you to bring money here with you? If you had a hundred dollars, you should have put it in the bank."
She shook her unkempt head. "You know our sort of folks, Mr. Warrender. If we need a hundred dollars, we need it fast. Banks, you never know when they'll be open. Afternoons, evenin's, Sattidays, Sundays, they just ain't no use. Our kind of folks got to have their money where they can put their hands on it. Savin' it's been hard, but I done it. Last time the storm come, our roof blowed off an' ever' single thing we owned was wetted and blowed over. Some of it we never seen again. Money, I don't never leave."
He nodded his understanding. "I see. We'll do all we can to find it for you, Mrs. Frailey, but you mustn't go accusing people when you haven't even a shadow of proof."
Mrs. Frailey's underlip came out in a sulky stubbornness. "He's the one done it, Mr. Warrender. He done it to get hisself that dope he takes. You mark my words."
Cliff, Hank, and Donna made their way out of the excited crowd and back toward the girl's office.
She turned to Hank. "Do you think she really had a hundred dollars?"
Hank shook his head doubtfully. "I don't know. Seems unlikely."
"I think she had it," Cliff said firmly. "Nearly all the women in this section of town have a little put by, just in case. Mrs. Frailey's a little more determined than some so I'd say her money would have grown a little more. Besides, she'd never have been so angry just to impress people that she was loaded."
"Do you know Eustace? Do you think he took it?" Hank asked Cliff.
"Sure," Cliff answered. "He's in and out of court and he does take heroin when he can get it. He's had it today. Yes, I would say he's a pretty good suspect. When a man wants a fix, he'll do anything to get it. It's too bad about Eustace. He has an engineering degree from one of the Ivy League colleges. Used to make good money. But somewhere he got off on the wrong foot, and here he is." He sounded deeply regretful. "I tried to get him to go to the government hospital and straighten himself out. He laughed at me and quoted the figures to show how few ever broke the habit."
"I don't see that there's anything I can do about him and the money if he doesn't have it on him," Hank said worriedly.
"There isn't anything," Cliff agreed. "My guess is that he watched Mrs. Frailey cache it away, maybe last night, maybe this morning, came and got it as soon as she left the room and took it to someone up the corridor beyond her, and was on his way back when she returned. I shouldn't have sent him back to his quarters. He might have had the stuff on him and since that wasn't what they were looking for, the men may have missed it. He's had a shot recently, if that cocky air doesn't entirely mislead me. He's like a dog with his tail between his legs in court."
"He was yesterday afternoon when he came in, and his hands shook. I was too busy to do more than wonder about it then, but I was sure when I was bandaging his head a bit ago."
"Dope. Liquor," Cliff said, gesturing toward the room where the card players were still at it. "I've been expecting them to fall off their seats all day, but they go on and on. They're not eating anything, either. It's some sort of record, I think."
Donna didn't want to be with Cliff. It was one thing to be with a man with whom she wasn't in love, or at least hadn't realized she was in love. If he had loved her in return, that would have been wonderful. The way things were now, the sooner she could get rid of both men the happier she would be.
"I have a sick child in here," she explained with her hand on the doorknob. "He may be contagious, and even if he isn't, this is no place for idlers."
"Idlers!" Cliff laughed. "I've never run so hard in my whole life. We've had enough going on here the last twenty hours to take care of a whole city this size. And I've been right there refereeing it."
Donna didn't look at him. Her voice was cool. "One birth? We must average about ten every twenty-four hours, wouldn't you think?"
Hank was more agreeable. "You've hit on something there. This is a section of town and quite a lot of our part of it are right here in this building. I'd say the part that the most happens to."
Donna was still argumentative. "We haven't had any crime, not really, and there must be a lot of it in twenty hours. I just don't believe Mrs. Frailey had a hundred dollars, even if the man Eustace is an addict. And we haven't had a death."
Cliff laughed uneasily. "If I had some salt, I'd throw it over my shoulder, but I suppose knocking on wood will be good enough." He moved toward the door and rapped on it, then laughed again. "So much for superstition. That door's steel."
Donna nodded. "So's all the furniture in my office. You'll have to find a classroom. The desks are still wood. Have you and the school board ever thought that steel ones would keep youngsters from carving their names on the surface, Hank?"
"I don't know," Hank answered, "but I suspect we could go on refinishing wooden desks for a long time before we could buy a steel one. There's always less money than we need at schools."
"And for courts," Cliff added.
Music still beat against the walls of the corridor around the corner. The stamping of youthful feet underlined it. Cliff grinned. "Dance, Donna?"
Hank looked pained. "Not again, please. We'll have a hard enough time living that last one down."
Donna's head jerked up, chin high. "It wasn't anything to live down, Hank. You sound like an old woman. I was dancing. The kids were dancing. We all enjoyed it, and there wasn't a grain of harm in it. I won't have you sounding as if I'd broken all ten commandments in one fell swoop."
Cliff's eyes dared her. "Dance?"
She dropped her eyes. They were full of tears and she didn't want either man to know that. "I have a patient to tend," she said, opening the door to the sickroom.
But she didn't go in at once. A small boy dashed around the corner and breathlessly began a report. "There's a fire down in one seventeen. Lady put a cigarette down on a desk an'—" He stopped and gasped for breath, then took it up once more. "An' when we tried to get some water, there wasn't none."
Cliff looked teasingly at Donna. "You forgot fires. We hadn't had a fire, either."
Hank was more practical. "There are fire extinguishers along the wall. Get one from that case by my office door, Warrender. I'll pick up one down the hall."
When they had departed in haste, Donna went into her office. They would put the fire out without any trouble, she felt, but the water shortage could be more serious. There were a lot of people housed under the schoolhouse roof. Of course, they had been warned by newspaper, television, radio that they must catch water and store it. She had a five-gallon bottle in one corner behind the beaverboard screen. She hoped most of the rest had some. Cliff had said they probably had another twenty-four hours at least before anyone could hope to go home.
Mrs. Worth was nodding in a chair beside her son's bed. The boy was asleep, too. Donna crept near and touched him. His temperature had dropped a little, she decided. When he waked she would give him another aspirin. She began to try to bring order to the chaos that so many people and supplies had made of her usually immaculate office. Outside, the wind screamed. She went to the window and looked out. The palm
beyond the sidewalk bent with the fierceness of the storm, but every one of the green fans that had topped it had twisted off and blown outside of her ken. She wondered if the palm itself would be torn from its roots.
She had turned back and was putting the box of groceries out of sight behind the screen when there was a knock on her door and it opened. Mary Hendley came in without waiting for an invitation.
"Donna?" she called softly.
Mrs. Worth woke with a start and stammered, "Who—What—Oh!"
Donna appeared, brushing her rust-colored hair out of her face. "Somebody else get socked?"
Mary laughed. "No. It's something else this time, something nice. You know the Wards, of course?"
Donna nodded.
"They've asked us to tea. It seems Mrs. Ward made a cake, as she always does when there's a hurricane. She's making the tea now. You and Cliff and Hank and I are invited."
Sammy had waked and whimpered. Mrs. Worth said with surprising encouragement, "You go, Miss Ledbury. You've been having it tough and maybe a party'd rest you."
"Tell them as soon as I've checked this young man here," Donna promised. "They get the fire put out?"
"All out," Mary assured her.
Chapter XIII
All the others had gathered in the teachers' room by the time Donna got there. She had combed her hair, decided that water was too scarce to wash her face, and had tried to smooth down her rough-dried and no longer fresh uniform, but she felt rather dowdy in spite of her efforts.
Originally designed for a classroom, the teachers' room was large, with one corner cut off for a restroom for women teachers. Windows ran along the outside wall, and on an ordinary day, the place was sunny and full of light. Today, artificial light would have been welcome. As it was, the room was only less dark than the hall outside. Nevertheless, there was human warmth and brightness inside, as there always would be wherever the Wards were. Mrs. Ward, Dr. Ward's Maggie, had done her white hair in curls and fluffed it about her face. Her dimples were all out, and her eyes shone. The doctor himself looked like some gallant out of a past age. The dimness of the light hid any blight their years might have laid on them.
Both came forward to greet the last arrival of their party, Dr. Ward moving on brittle old legs and Mrs. Ward with a thrust of her wheel chair. "There you are, my dear," Mrs. Ward greeted Donna as if she were the one person out of all the world she would have been most happy to see. "Come in. Come in. We are about to light the candles. You see, it's Bradley's birthday."
The willow furniture with its faded flowered upholstery also boasted two tables, a little one that held several ash trays and a vase which, so far as Donna knew, had never held flowers, and a larger one in the middle of the room. Here sat the cake, a coconut one, fluffy white and topped by nine candles.
Dr. Ward chuckled. "Maggie was always a great one for holidays. We celebrate every possible one that other people know of and a few which are private to the Wards. She always brings a cake to a hurricane, but this time she had just finished icing this one for my birthday. She put it with the candles in a box and placed it beside her feet there in her chair, and no matter how many other things we had to bring, I couldn't persuade her to leave this one behind." He took off his nose glasses, with their black cord, and polished them on a spotless white handkerchief, not linen, but just as carefully laundered.
Donna flirtatiously dropped her long lashes and raised them again as a salute to his masculinity and her eyes twinkled. "Nine years old, I see."
"Every day of it," he admitted.
"I hope you like coconut," Mrs. Ward went on in a hospitable fluster. "It's Bradley's favorite and I always make it for his birthday and sometimes in between."
"It's my favorite, too," Donna told her, squeezing the small hand in hers.
"If it were ginger and molasses cookies, now," Cliff teased, "I would be the one who was nine years old. I must have been a very hungry-looking boy, Mrs. Ward. I never remember being in your house that you didn't feed me."
Mrs. Ward bridled at the memory. "I never knew a growing boy who wasn't hungry."
"I was hungrier than most," Cliff said. "In fact, I'm a little hungry now, and have been ever since I saw that cake. May I light the candles for you, or do you have some familiar ceremony that I'd be interfering with?"
"There's no ceremony about lighting them, but the birthday child has to blow them out and make a wish. And I am the birthday child," Dr. Ward explained dryly.
"And no matter whose birthday it is, I do the cutting so that Bradley gets the piece with the most icing," Mrs. Ward added gaily.
Mary changed the subject as the others were readying the cake. "Isn't the storm noisier in here than it was this morning?"
Hank looked out of the window at the palm that the class of '60 had placed in the patio. The wind was pulling with all its might at the fans at the top and the tree bent nearly double when gusts came, bent toward the room where they were sitting.
"You were here this morning before the eye passed over?" he asked.
"Yes, she was," Mrs. Ward answered before Mary could. "You've no idea how good everybody is to us. Somebody is always popping in here to see if we are comfortable and happy. It's the same way at home, too. Maybe we're fortunate not having the children we used to plan for. Everyone seems to feel the responsibility for us because we have no children or grandchildren." She blinked her very blue eyes and smiled as if no mist had obscured her vision for a moment.
"They'd be great-great-grandchildren by now, Maggie," Dr. Ward reminded her gently. "And without meaning to, we've become public charges."
"Charges nothing," Cliff contradicted briskly. "People come to see you to get the uplift you give their spirits. They just cover up by saying they want to do something for you. I know a lot of more helpless people who need everything, and people don't go hunting them up to do something for them. They come because they want to. Even kids. Don't you have youngsters hanging around the way you used to?"
"Not quite so many, perhaps, but yes," Mrs. Ward demurred.
"There. I knew it. I'm not one to think adolescents are any more selfish than adults, but I do think they are less adept at hiding their lack of altruism. If the youngsters still come, you can count on it you give more than you get. Dr. Ward, what's your opinion of the bond sale for the U.N.?"
The old man began to tell them what he thought, quoting from one columnist and then another. He interrupted himself long enough to blow out the candles that Cliff had just lighted, making it all in one long breath. "There. I get my wish. I shall be healthy, wealthy, and wise, any day now."
He was smiling brightly, but Donna caught sight of the eyes behind the rimless glasses. He hadn't wished for anything so foolish, she was sure. She was sure, too, that he didn't believe that blowing out the candles on top of a cake in one breath would make wishes come true. But he had made a wish, and she was pretty sure she had guessed what his deepest wish would be, whether he had wished it on the cake or not.
He went back to his discussion of current U.N. problems, and Mrs. Ward set to cutting the cake. Mary was pouring tea into paper cups.
"I'm sorry I have to serve the cake on napkins, paper ones at that," Mrs. Ward apologized. "But if you waited until you had everything just so, you'd never have a party."
"And you do love a party," her husband retorted.
"That I do," she agreed.
"Do youngsters still play pranks on their teachers?" Dr. Ward inquired of the two girls.
"First-graders are a little young for that sort of thing, so I really don't know," Mary answered.
"And they're usually too sick when they come to me," Donna explained. "I did have a group earlier this year who memorized the eye charts and chanted them off to me one after another, perfectly. But I think that was fear rather than a planned mischief. Some imaginative child had told them that we sent letters home if they didn't know all the letters, even to the smallest line, as, of course, we do. They had the notion somethi
ng dire would happen when their parents got the letter."
"This boy was a real prankster in his day," Dr. Ward went on, indicating Cliff. "Remember that book report you were so afraid would be printed in your school paper?"
Cliff laughed on a rather half hearted note. "That wasn't a prank. It was grim necessity. I was working after school, and I wasn't a great reader, anyway. The day came for a book report and I hadn't read a book, so I made one up. My English teacher was a dear old lady who, I think, wasn't as much of a reader as she should have been. She swallowed the whole thing, hook, line and sinker, and was sufficiently impressed to give it to the journalism teacher for the book-review column in the school paper. I trembled in my shoes from the time she told me until the last paper came out that year. I was sure somebody would spot my deception and tell Miss Dobry. She wasn't one to appreciate a joke and I doubt she would have thought that funny."
They laughed at that, and Donna took her turn. "I never was very good in French and was scared to death I was going to flunk my final the last year. It would have meant I wouldn't graduate. Our teacher had some very pet subjects. I got a good student to answer ten questions I thought she might ask, and memorized the answers. We had five questions and I had hit four of them. I don't believe anybody could have actually called it cheating, but I've never felt entirely comfortable in my mind about it."
Dr. Ward gave his dry chuckle. "I suppose you might call it the difference between morally and legally right."
"Surely you don't consider studying the psychology of a teacher, along with what he teaches, wrong?" Cliff argued.
"Let's say I believe the study of man is one of the most important studies," Dr. Ward agreed, without committing himself.
Mrs. Ward made a mischievous little face at the professor. "You weren't always such a stick, dear. You know, all of you, that we've been married practically forever. I wash you could have seen Bradley when he first came to my college to teach world history. He was rosy-cheeked and looked about sixteen behind his glasses."
