At last Robert said in a faraway voice, “Don’t feel bad, Sue. I think we’ve kind of known since yesterday afternoon that it was going to be a frost. Mama … I don’t know, she —”
“Her heart,” Victoria gulped, “also remains — untouched. Oh, I can’t understand it!” She began to cry too.
“I feel like I’m leaving you in the lur-ur-urch!” Susan wept.
“Don’t feel that way, Sue,” Victoria sobbed. “You did everything you could.”
“It’s really totus dexter, Sue,” Robert murmured. “I mean, we’re just where we were anyway before you came along. In fact, we’re better off, because if you hadn’t chased Mr. Sweeney away —”
“Oh!” Victoria gasped. She straightened up and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Oh! Before you came along —! Sue! Before you came along, I went to a wishing well, and I wished — and I got my wish! Why wouldn’t it work again?”
“But the witch is in the twentieth century,” Susan said hopelessly, “and we’re all here.”
“Oh, pooh! What difference does that make? She’s a witch, she can do what she wants. Oh! Bobbie! Let’s both sacrifice something this time and double the power of the wish!”
“Hey, that’s a capital idea, Vick!” Robert said. “There’s a strategic problem, though — we have to do it so Cousin Jane doesn’t know we’re doing it.”
“Oh, mercy, that’s right …! I know — you go back and fetch the sacrifices, Bobbie. You’re the expert forager, you’d have a better chance of getting past Cousin Jane than I would. I’ll go to the stable and watch your back bedroom window. You can drop the things out the window into the bushes. Then even if Cousin Jane catches you, I can still get the things and make a run for the well myself.”
“That’s it — divided forces! Gosh, Vick, you’d make a great general — if they allowed girls in the Army.”
“Pooh! Girls are too sensible to want to be in the Army. Now! We have to decide what we’re going to sacrifice. Remember, it has to be something you really love, or it won’t have any effect.”
Robert considered. He frowned, bit his lip, looked away from his sister, looked back, and slowly stiffened his spine. “Very well, I’ll —” He faltered an instant, then went on with a rush. “I’ll give my arrowhead collection.”
“Oh, Bobbie, that’s noble! I’m going to give my little silver mirror that Mama gave me.”
“That belonged to Great-great-great-grandmother Wayne,” Robert whispered. “Back in the Revolution.”
“I know,” Victoria sighed. “But this is more important than —”
“Wait!” Susan said. “Don’t —” She was going to say, “Don’t throw away your treasure for nothing,” but Victoria stopped her by gently laying her finger against Susan’s lips. Perhaps she could see that Susan was at the end of hope. “Ssssh!” she whispered. “Don’t say anything. Remember, it’s always darkest before dawn.”
“It’s our campaign now, Sue.” Robert added. “You did everything you could. Now it’s up to us.” He squeezed her hand. “Nil desperandum! We’ll see you again when we can. Let’s go, Vick!”
“Goodbye, Sue. Don’t worry — please. — How are you going to get back into the house, Bobbie?”
“I think that window is still open in the sun parlor.”
They crawled away along the hedge, talking in low tones, and vanished into the neglected tangle of shrubbery at the back of the Hollister property.
Susan watched them out of sight. Her heart felt like a chunk of iron. She was convinced that this was the last she would ever see of them. And she had been so numb she hadn’t even said goodbye …
The Shaws waited in their rooms for night to come.
Mr. Shaw, not wanting to hear any more about Republican villainy from Mr. Hollister, told Mrs. Hollister that he was feeling unwell, and asked for a light supper that could be sent upstairs on a tray. As a matter of fact, he was feeling unwell. The loss of the treasure, and hence his inability to help Mrs. Walker, had thrown him into a depression. When the tray came up neither he nor Susan could look at it.
Time oozed on. They endured as best they could. Mr. Shaw leafed through a stack of newspapers. Susan tried to write a goodbye letter to Victoria and Robert. After many false starts and long periods of staring into space, she produced a note that said:
Dear Vicky and Bobbie,
Goodbye. I have to go back. I’m sorry our plans failed. I don’t think I will ever be happy again.
Love, Susan
She thought she had run out of tears, but she hadn’t.
Her father came up behind her quietly and put his hands on her shoulders. “Try to look at it this way, Susie,” he pleaded. “This all happened a long time ago, really. It just seems to be happening now. But we’re really twentieth-century people, honey. All this —” he waved a hand to include the fields and woods, and the nearby town, and the Hollister and Walker houses, and their inhabitants “— all this is gone. It was all over and done with before we were even born.”
She knew, in a sense, he was right, but she could not be convinced. He didn’t sound fully convinced himself.
Mr. Hollister came home and brayed at his wife. She murmured back. The catbird that Susan had heard when she first arrived in the nineteenth century sang, and scolded mew, mew, and sang again. A golden evening declined into dusk. Mrs. Hollister brought candles up, and took away their untouched food.
To help pass the time, Susan brought her diary up to date. She wrote at the end of her last entry:
… afraid that the idea wouldn’t work. I just had a feeling that something like that doesn’t happen twice. Or maybe Vicky and Bobbie never got to the well. Anyway, nothing has happened. Nothing is going to happen. There isn’t enough time left to change anything now. We’re going back to the twentieth century and I am absolutely in despair.
11. Lady in Distress
“Hey!” Charles said. “Is that the end of it?”
After the word “despair” in Susan’s diary there was more than half a page, all blank. The facing page was blank. I searched through the rest of the pages to the back cover. They were all blank.
“Oh, no,” I groaned.
“But the Shaws didn’t come back to the twentieth century, did they?” Charles asked.
“No! I’m positive they didn’t—I would’ve heard about it, I would’ve seen them around the apartment building. And listen, there’s that old photograph — they’re all in it, Shaws and Walkers both!”
He got that look on his face again. “Edward, the fact is that you never saw Mrs. Walker and you never saw Victoria, and you never saw Robert. For that matter, how well did you actually know the Shaws?”
“Oh — slightly.”
“Slightly … Besides which, it’s a very grainy photograph. I wonder if you haven’t jumped to some mistaken conclusions. The people in that photograph may have nothing to do with people in this — this story of yours.”
“Story! Blast it, Charles, didn’t I tell you about Susan before we read the diary? And wasn’t everything in the diary absolutely consistent with that I told you? Story! It’s real, man!”
“Mmmm …”
“And another thing: I’m the only person in the world except Mrs. Clutchett who could have any notion of what this diary is about. And it falls into my hands because someone calls me up to tell me where it is. How do you explain that?”
“Well … I don’t. But there must be some simple answer. Hey, calm down! It can’t be worth getting so excited about.”
“What d’you mean, calm down? It’s maddening not to be able to know what happened!”
“Let me take you to lunch,” he suggested soothingly.
“No, thanks. I’m not hungry.”
At the front door he said, “Listen, if anything else turns up about this business, keep me posted, will you?”
“Why should I keep you posted, you skeptic?”
“Oh, I’m a skeptic, all right; as an historian I have to be.
But it’s never prevented me from enjoying a good yarn.”
A good yarn, forsooth! There are times when I could kick Charles with the greatest of pleasure. That superior, common-sensical air of his! I was being unfair, I suppose. But it irked me beyond endurance to be confronted with this mystery. Here was the diary, ending in the Shaws’ total defeat. Here was the photograph, showing the Shaws and Walkers triumphant. How had they ever managed to overcome all the obstacles in their way?
Or — I kept pushing away the dreadful thought, and it kept coming back — or had they? Was Charles perhaps right about the photograph? Was it just wishful thinking and self-delusion on my part to see Susan and Mr. Shaw and Mrs. Shaw and Robert and Victoria in those grainy, time-darkened, nineteenth-century faces …?
Oh, blast Charles, anyway!
I looked up, and saw that I was one block from home, and that a crowd was collecting on the sidewalks of Ward Street.
And good reason for it, too! Despondent as I was, I felt my heart lifting at the sight before me. There was the most gorgeous old-fashioned automobile standing by the curb. It was taller than I am, and nearly as long as a fire engine, and only the back part was enclosed; the chauffer’s seat was open to the weather. Its condition was perfect. It was blue, so dark as to look almost black, and polished like glass. Silver trim dazzled in the sun, and there were varnished wooden spokes in the wheels.
I pushed through the crowd to get a closer look, and suddenly the chauffeur had me by the arm. He was a swarthy individual in a uniform of impeccable black, including polished black leather puttees. He murmured to me in a lisping foreign accent:
“Yes, sir, very opportune, sir, I beg your pardon, but as you see, a slight mishap, sir, the lady requests your assistance, sir.”
The right front tire was flat.
“You mean —?” I began.
“Yes, sir, a trifling matter, sir, she will be most grateful, I have the tools all ready, sir.”
I hesitated. I wanted to go home and think, and I am not very mechanically inclined anyway, and there were plenty of other men in the crowd who looked more competent than I; and besides, I had always thought that such matters were the chauffeur’s job.
“If you will be so kind, sir, the lady is most anguished, sir.”
I saw a tiny fragile white-haired woman in the enclosed part of the car. She was wearing jewels and silvery furs (furs! in August!) and her withered face did have an air of vague, I could almost say absent-minded, distress.
“Oh, all right,” I said — I’m afraid with ill grace.
The chauffeur murmured, “Yes, sir, much obliged, sir, here is the jack, sir,” and I knelt down to a half-hour of frustrating labor and sweat. Everything went contrariwise. The chauffeur hovered over me, murmuring in an encouraging tone, but refusing to touch anything himself. Men in the crowd made comments and suggestions, but whenever someone stepped forward to give me a hand he would be politely turned back by the murmuring chauffeur. I really don’t know how I succeeded in figuring out the jack, and wrenching off the nuts, and extricating the spare wheel from its well in the front fender, and getting the job done. But I did, and then stood up, dripping and grease-stained and in a savage humor.
“Thank you, sir, well done, sir, the lady would like to express her gratitude, sir.”
She had pulled a little folding walnut writing desk from its compartment behind the chauffeur’s sear, and was writing with — so help me! — a goose-quill pen. ‘Is she making out a check?’ I wondered. Whatever it was, she put it in an envelope; and the chauffeur, cranking down the window between his seat and the rear compartment, took the envelope from her skinny claws, and handed it over to me.
Then he saluted, leaped into his seat, started up the motor with an incredible blast of noise that made the whole crowd jump; and that vast, stately automobile darted away through the traffic with all the agility of a sports car.
“Boy, they better get that muffler fixed,” one of the bystanders said. I agreed, with my ears ringing.
The envelope was made of beautiful thick creamy paper. My fingers had smudged it with grease already; and although I was twitching with curiosity to see what was inside, I decided that I could wait until I had washed up. I was only a block away from home.
There was a new message on the back wall of the elevator. It was written in black crayon, and it said, “Bodoni couldn’t fix a roller skate.”
Poor Mr. Bodoni! He had been getting a lot of insults like that lately. The elevator, which had been slow and noisy before the Shaws had disappeared in it, had steadily gotten slower and noisier ever since. Frequently these days it lurched from side to side in the shaft and came to a shuddering near-halt between floors. I think perhaps its travels through time had put too much strain on the mechanism. The increasingly nervous tenants showered Mr. Bodoni with complaints. He could be seen nearly every day poking around in the works with wrench, oil can, and responsible frown — but to no avail. One day someone wrote in red chalk on the back wall of the elevator, “Is this an elevator or a hearse?” The idea caught on, and similar messages began to appear as fast as Mr. Bodoni could scrub them off: “Greased Lightning,” “Please replace squirrel in motor,” “I’m too young to die!” and so forth.
Nowadays when Mr. Bodoni even suspected that you were going to complain about the elevator, he would back away with a hunted look in his eye, waving his hands and saying, “Not dangerous! Don’t you believe! A little slow, maybe, but not dangerous, don’t worry!” I guess I am the only tenant who didn’t complain; knowing, as the others couldn’t, what the elevator had been through.
But I felt like complaining now. It was taking forever to get to the fifth floor where I live, and my impatience to see what was in the envelope was growing. “Come on, old horse,” I muttered, patting its flank. It responded by giving another earthquake-lurch and a groan, and slowing down.
Eventually the arrow shuddered to a stop on 5, and the door sighed and rumbled open. I dashed to my apartment and scrubbed my hands at the kitchen sink. The grease was as stubborn as a second skin, and in the end I just wiped off what was left on the dish-towel. Now at last I could open the envelope.
It was not a check inside, but a note on the same kind of thick beautiful paper as the envelope was made of. All it said, in tiny wavery spider-web-thin letters, was:
Reservations for this year are filled, but you may send a message. I suggest a Special Notice.
I sat down.
Nothing today was making much sense …
For the next hour I puzzled over it all without reaching any conclusions, except the very tentative one that the lady who had phoned me was the same person I had seen in the automobile. All I had to go on was the fact that the automobile’s roar had sounded like the noise on the phone; and the fact, or impression, that the handwriting on the note looked the way the voice on the phone had sounded, if you see what I mean. Pretty thin evidence, I admit … But wait, there was another similarity. They both — or she, if it was the same person — had singled me out. The voice on the phone had definitely mentioned my number, and the chauffeur had seized my arm as though he had been instructed to wait for help until I came along. Well, all right — but what did it mean? Had I been called out because I was the only person who could know what Susan’s diary was about? Maybe. But surely I hadn’t been picked by the chauffeur because I was the only person who could change the wheel … As for the note, which I now read for the twentieth time — my mind knocked against it with all the effect of a moth trying to go through a windowpane.
There was a rap on my door.
It was Mr. Bodoni, his face shining with perspiration and his arms laden with newspapers. He collected these from the tenants to sell; there was an enormous stack in the basement.
“Gotny noospapers?” he said around his dead cigar.
“Nope,” I sighed. I had given up telling him that I don’t subscribe to a paper and rarely buy one.
“Yeah. Okay,” he said. He shifted th
e bundle in his arms, and said, “Hot, hah?” and turned to go. Two words leaped out at me from the densely printed grey page on top of his load.
“Wait, hold it!” I cried. He turned back. “Can I have that page?”
“Hah?”
“That page there on top. Can I have it?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring at me with puzzlement.
It was half a page, actually — the lower part. I tore it off, thanked him, and closed the door.
Did you know — I never did until that moment — that the want ads in the newspaper begin with Legal Notices and continue with Special Notices?”
Special Notices … I stood there, swallowing hard, and reading as fast as I could.
Blood plasma donors wanted …
I will not be responsible for debts incurred by anyone other than myself. Three of these, signed respectively by — well, no matter.
We have room to accept the dumping of approx. 3000 yds. of fill dirt …
NOTICE OF LIQUIDATION …
Oh, my word!
REWARD for info. leading to contact with Jane Hildegarde Clamp. Call TEM-8118.
Jane Hildegarde Clamp? Jane Clamp? Of course there could be no connection, but—
I reached for my phone and dialed. A professional, airline-stewardess kind of voice crooned, “Good afternoon, Tri-City Guaranty and Trust Company, may I help you?”
“Ah —?” I said. I hadn’t been expecting that. I don’t know what I had been expecting. “I’m calling, ah, about that Personal Notice in the paper —”
“Just one moment, sir, I’ll connect you with Mr. Thornley.”
Some bloops and bleeps and sotto voce mumbling and then another professional, deep, money kind of voice said, “Thornley here.”
“I’m calling about Jane Hildergarde Clamp.”
“Ah! You have some information?”
All in Good Time Page 8
