“But what I wish to know,” Robert put in, “is how you believe I’m involved in this.”
“You had the communiqué. You walked down that passage and you intercepted that message. You were send by Howe to—”
“I was not the only person who walked down that passage.”
“You were the only one who returned with paper in your hand!” For the first time, Phillip’s voice began to rise. “You were going to pass it to your superiors. Eventually, they would run it down to me. And then I would be hanged!”
He stopped, his breath coming in shallow gasps. “All I wanted to do was save myself,” he continued. “So when you left the inn alone I trailed you down the Pike. There was a farmer’s wagon rumbling some distance behind you, do you recall? I followed the wagon, dismounted behind some trees, and crept along the wall. I watched you remove your coat, take the paper from its pocket. I saw you sit on the wall, the communiqué in your hand. I had a knife, but I was too panicked to use it. I lunged for you and … you fell. I fell…I fell…”
I saw the cracks and wondered how to widen them.
“The communiqué is about a lot more than just being hung for a spy,” I hazarded. “After all, on this side you’re safe from the hangman. So clearly, the message has some value to you now.”
“You don’t suppose this relates to our conversation the other night at dinner, do you, Kitty?” Robert remarked conversationally. “You know … missing message, stolen goods, Dalvey boys and so forth.”
“Good point,” I said admiringly.
Phillip raised the gun in the vicinity of my forehead. “I didn’t give a damn about the Dalveys!” he snapped.
“Not on the other side, you didn’t. They became important only after you fell.” I paused, trying to sort this out. “On this side none of it should have mattered any more. So what if the British intercepted the message? So what if they ID’ed you? You were long gone.”
Phillip lowered the gun slightly. His breathing had steadied. He seemed more controlled.
“After you fell, the communiqué became immaterial.” I went on. “Until you heard the legend of the Dalveys’ treasure. Until you learned it had never been found.”
Phillip laughed. “Actually, I heard that in the hospital shortly after I arrived. The legend was very much alive and fodder for the local lunatics. Then I learned that it was true, that the Dalvey stash had never been found.”
“So now the communiqué took on new importance. If only you could find it.”
“Yes. It was there, in the madhouse, that I first entertained the idea of finding the treasure for myself. And the communiqué, even encrypted, was the only place to start.”
“And you began to look for Robert. Believing that he had it.”
“Knowing that he does.”
I let that pass. “You said the communiqué was encrypted,” I continued. “I suppose all the messages you ran were encrypted. That’s why you were so interested in the cipher wheel.”
“No. The wheel is simply a curiosity. With computers, decoding a message like that is almost trifling today. And I know the right people to do it.”
“But the point is, even though it was encrypted, you knew, in a general sense anyway, what was in the message. You knew when it was handed to you, which is why it’s important to you now. And that means you must have done a little spying of your own.”
“You are clever, Kathy Lee,” Phillip smiled.
“How did you do it?”
Phillip was perfectly willing to tell us. “Fortunately, I tend to listen at doors. Or, in this case, at windows. Strawbridge lived on Chestnut Street. We were in the library where he was sitting for his portrait. A visitor was shown in, clearly a gentleman by his dress and manner, and Strawbridge appeared startled to see him. He said, ‘Weymouth,’ and almost immediately took him into his sanctum sanctorum, as he called it — a small private study immediately off the library. The door was closed, but the windows were open, both in the study and the library.” Phillip looked at Robert. “You may recall, Colonel, that we were having a string of unseasonably warm days, a last taste of Indian summer. So I simply stood at the opened library window immediately adjacent to the study window and listened while Weymouth described the Dalveys and the fortune they amassed. What his connection to the Dalveys was I never learned. But I heard enough to know what was in that communiqué.”
“The location of the cache,” I said.
“Yes. Weymouth didn’t know specifics, just that it was hidden in one of the caves along the Schulykill River, somewhere above the city. The stash was intended for Washington, of course. And the letter, which was sealed, gave the directions. Winter was coming on, and this would pay for supplies.” He paused. “And as we discussed at dinner the other night, that could have shortened the war considerably.”
“Potentially,” Robert allowed.
“But there was a complication. Weymouth told Strawbridge the British had gotten suspicious. Which is where you come in, Colonel Upton, isn’t it? Someone at Howe’s headquarters attempted to aid the Americans, and Howe suspected it. Eventually, the operation was threatened. And you were sent by Howe to intercept that communiqué. I knew it was you. My contact had not yet arrived at the inn but a detachment of British had. And then you walked by and the letter was gone.”
“Since you knew what was in the message,” Robert said, “why not simply take it and run, find the stash and keep it for yourself?”
“For two very good reasons: at the time I knew nothing of codes and ciphers. The directions in that communiqué would have been gibberish to me, utterly useless. But I did know that if I betrayed my contacts, my life wouldn’t be worth a damn.”
“If you betrayed your contacts, you got your throat cut. And if the British intercepted the message, you got hung.” I smiled. “Gee, Phillip. You must have been sweating bullets.”
Phillip stared at me, his eyes curiously flat. “Don’t push me,” he warned.
This wasn’t looking good at all. Sooner or later Phillip would figure out we were no use to him and then he would kill us. Evidently, Robert had come to the same conclusion.
“You know, Phillip, this becomes more and more interesting by the minute. I would like to help you, really I would. Perhaps we could broker an … agreement.”
Phillip held Robert’s eyes, considering.
“You saw me reading my father’s letter,” Robert told him carefully, “which I removed from the right pocket of my coat.” He paused. “The communiqué was in the left pocket.”
“Ah.” Phillip seemed to exhale. “Yes. Perhaps we can do this together. I’d much prefer that to shooting either one of you — especially Kathy Lee, whose death would so distress her lovely mother.”
Beside me, Robert tensed.
“By the way, did you read the communiqué?” Phillip asked. “Did you … could you … decode it?”
“Don’t be a fool. If I broke the seal I would have been cashiered. Or worse.”
“Then give it to me,” Phillip went on more easily. “I’ll have it decoded, and together we’ll recover the—”
“This is tiresome, Phillip. Do you actually suppose I would simply hand it to you?”
Suddenly, Phillip thrust the muzzle of the gun hard against Robert’s temple. “My patience is wearing very thin, Upton. You have exactly five seconds to tell me where it is.”
I froze. Robert stood beside me tightly coiled, his jaw clenched. Phillip watched him, eyes unnaturally wide and his face absolutely gray. “Four,” he said. “Three…”
My mouth went dry. For a second, my mind was completely blank.
“Two…”
“The communique is exactly where Robert said it was,” I cut in quickly. “In the left pocket of his coat. But…” I hesitated, knowing I was risking everything. “Robert wasn’t wearing the coat when he fell, was he, Phillip?”
Phillip realized it as soon as I said it. In that instant he dropped the gun away from Robert’s temple and swung
his entire upper body toward me. It was what Robert had been waiting for. He launched an elbow at Phillip’s midsection, then swept me behind him with enough force that I fell to my hands and knees. I reached back for the garden stake and pulled it free, leaving a thousand splinters along my spine in the process, hissing shit shit shit. I heard the men scuffling above me and I scrambled to my feet, holding the stake like a baseball bat, and saw the men break apart. I saw Phillip shove his gun toward Robert’s diaphragm. I saw Robert feint to the left. I didn’t wait to see what would happen next. I swung the garden stake and brought it down hard on Phillip’s forearm. The gun went clattering across the floor.
Suddenly, something shifted beneath my feet. I never saw it open, but I knew we had finally sprung the elusive trap. For an awful instant I felt myself teeter on the edge. I saw Phillip swing his arms and tumble. And then Robert shouted, “Kathleen, no!”
He grabbed me and sent me spinning backward toward the window, out of harm’s way. I stumbled and caught myself on the ledge.
But when I turned around he was already gone.
Chapter 45
It was Robert, not I, who sprung the trap that swallowed him up: I was merely there beside him. And had he not flung me back, I would have followed him down that elusive chute. I hated him for saving me.
Robert fell at noon on Saturday, seconds after Phillip. There was no sign of Phillip’s car and I knew he must have walked across the field to my property, hugging the tree line to avoid being seen. Apart from the gun, which lay on the floor near the door, there was no trace that Phillip Olsen had ever been in my shed. The gun was a problem, of course, but it took me hours to realize it.
Early the next morning I packed Robert’s canvas suitcase and placed it in the garden shed where he couldn’t miss it. Above it, tacked to the wall, I hung a manila envelope filled with instructions, phone numbers and all the cash I had, as if at any time he would come tumbling back. When I realized what a liability Phillip’s gun was, I picked it up with garden gloves and peered at the tiny print along the barrel. Smith and Wesson 1911 .45, it read, all meaningless to me. I opened the dusty wooden trunk that had been sitting back there all these decades and discovered a battered pair of old brown boots, a stained and dirty banded collar shirt, a pair of breeches that buttoned just below the knee — and I knew I had found the clothes Phillip arrived in long ago. How had that been explained away by the Tiptons? What did they really know, or suspect? I tossed in the gun and slammed down the lid.
The intervening hours — between the time Robert fell and the following dawn — I spent in the shed banging on walls and beams and floors until my hands bled, trying to spring the trap to bring him back, knowing I never could. I wept until my eyes burned from the salt of tears.
Robert was right when he said he was only part of the key. There was a string of other variables that had to line up like ducks in a row in order to free the latch. During the long night I spent in the shed I tried to think of every conceivable possibility, the movements we made, the words we spoke. I couldn’t duplicate an alignment of stars, but I could reconstruct every move I made in the moments before the trap sprang.
But nothing worked. Robert was gone and I was left hammering at the gates of hell. Or heaven.
*****
Around three o’clock Saturday afternoon Lila and the children returned to River House bringing John and Helen with them. Evidently John and Helen were a last minute addition, their extended house party not breaking up but moving. By this time, I found out later, the cleaning lady had gone, leaving a note on the kitchen counter that simply read “Kathy Lee coming in tonight,” with no mention of times or travelling companions. So naturally Lila picked up the phone and dialed Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, I was hammering the shed apart with my bare fists, and when I didn’t answer the phone Lila assumed (logically) that I was on my way home. Later, she dialed the cell and was concerned that I didn’t answer. By nine that evening when Julie stopped by with July Fourth decorations she bought at the mall, Lila was becoming downright edgy. She had already tried to call her cleaning lady to get a fix on when (exactly) had I called and did I (perhaps) specify an arrival time — but no one answered at the cleaning lady’s house, and Lila finally remembered she was spending the weekend somewhere in West Virginia.
Julie recognized the signs, and stayed. Helen put the children to bed, John mixed everyone a drink and Lila paced. Finally, at one in the morning, Lila threw her glass across the living room where it smashed onto the hearth, and turned to Julie.
“Where in hell is Pennsylvania?” she demanded.
*****
The answer, of course, is “north of the Beltway.” Neither Julie nor Lila do well with interstates in general, and the Washington Beltway in particular might as well have been the outer ring of Saturn. Ever since I got my driver’s license, I’ve been the one who drives them to distant places like the big mall at Tysons Corner, lest they venture too far afield and fall off the edge of the Earth.
So Pennsylvania, which is at least two states away, posed a problem. Both of them, Julie told me later, looked at Uncle John, who ducked his head. He could be pressed into service, of course, but he’d have to be convinced.
“Terri,” Julie said to Lila suddenly, and Lila pounced for her address book. Julie told me later Lila didn’t even bother dialing the number at Terri’s house. She simply punched in the number for her cell phone. And Terri, who was cruising the nation’s highways with Steve in their gold tone Cadillac (with the license plates reading vend), answered on the second ring.
Terri and Steve, as it turned out, were just north of Baltimore heading south in the predawn hours toward Richmond, where Steve had business the following day. A little after three A.M. they met Lila and Julie — who left the children asleep at home with John and Helen — at an all-night restaurant off I-95 not far from the dreaded Beltway. Terri, who never forgot a road, knew exactly how to find Uncle Bennett’s house, so Lila and Julie piled into vend with Terri while Steve took Julie’s Honda and continued down the road alone to Richmond and business associates dressed, I am certain, in dark shiny suits and pointy shoes.
*****
They barged hysterically into Bennett’s house — my house — around seven o’clock Sunday morning and found me on the sofa. I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. I was detached from my body, my consciousness floating somewhere near the ceiling where I could see my mother run to me (the me that was on the sofa), followed briskly by Terri and Julie. Suddenly Terri reached out and took Lila by the shoulders, pulling her back, while Julie moaned oh god oh god. Clearly they thought I was dead.
But I wasn’t, much as I could have wished otherwise, and Lila saw that. She pulled away from Terri and sank down to her knees, reaching for my filthy hand.
“Oh, Kathy Lee,” she crooned. “Just look what you’ve done to your nails.”
Suddenly everyone pressed forward and began babbling all at once. Was I all right? Why was I still here? What had happen to me? Had someone hurt me? Why wouldn’t I talk?
Speak to us, Kathy Lee!
It was a man, wasn’t it, Kathy Lee?
For all I knew or cared they were talking in tongues. I closed my eyes. Behind my lids the world was blank and red. And then I saw myself in the garden shed, saw Robert reach for me.
I watched it happen all over again: Phillip falling and Robert lunging for me, flinging me to safety. I knew then he never meant to leave me. He meant to twist clear of the trap. He meant to scramble after me. But saving me cost him his balance and that last split second he needed for himself.
I saw it all. He pushed me away from the edge then tumbled backwards. Falling, yet never hitting the floor.
“Kathy Lee?” It was Lila, shaking my shoulder with annoying insistence.
“Are you listening to me, Kathy Lee?”
I wasn’t.
“Kathy Lee, are you going to lie here the rest of your life?”
Yes.
“Kathy Lee—�
� Lila bent so close I could smell her Chanel. “Kathy Lee, don’t even think of having some sort of nervous breakdown on us. If Cameron got wind of this, he’s be all over you like white on rice.”
I knew this. I knew it. I knew it without Lila pointing out all the obvious facts. I might want to ignore it or avoid it but I knew I couldn’t. I felt myself fall from my mid-air perch above the sofa. I was back in my body and gravity once again had power over me.
“You can do almost anything to Cameron, Kathy Lee, as long as you do it from a position of strength. I mean, in the end, you’ll get your divorce if you just stand up to him. But if you don’t pull yourself together, he’ll commit you to a hospital someplace. And what’s worse, he’ll take the kids.”
No shit, I thought. I opened my eyes.
“He knows it will hurt you. Plus, he’ll think he has to, Kathy Lee. He’ll think it’ll look funny if he left them with me. You know how he is about appearances. And he’ll get them, too, no matter what I do. Father’s rights and all.”
I was back in the world. I couldn’t die and I couldn’t go nuts. There was just one thing left to do.
“I think I need a bath,” I said.
Apparently, this request was interpreted as a good sign. Suddenly everyone jumped to life. Terri ran bath water, Julie laid out my clothes and Lila helped me up the stairs as if I was some sort of invalid. They even hovered in the hall while I soaked off grime in the tub, taking to me through the bathroom door. Finally, when they were sure I wasn’t going to drown myself, they went downstairs.
I listened to their retreating footsteps, climbed out of the tub, and wrapped myself up in a towel. When Julie was going through my suitcase in search of clothes for me, she also found something else, which she slipped under my blouse and left on the bench by the tub. Or perhaps it had been hidden in the folds of my clothing and she never even saw it. But when I lifted up my clothes, it tumbled to the floor. Even before I bent down to pick it up, I saw that it was an envelope from Bennett’s desk in the living room, where he kept a box of white Edgewater Bond. And on the envelope was my name, written in Robert’s clear, flowing hand.
Out of Time Page 35
