Time at the Top

by Edward Ormondroyd

  “Okay, okay,” Detective Haugen sighed. “Forget it.”

  “That black cat upstairs yours?” Murphy asked.

  “What cat? No cats around here. I use traps, see?” He produced one from his pocket. “Don’t say nothin’ to the tenants, willya? I get everyting under control before they notice.”

  The piece of newspaper that had been found in the hallway was not a ransom note. The penciled writing on it said:

  Dear Daddy, please don’t worry about me. I’m all right. Tell the policeman he can go away. I’m all right. I have to go back for a little while but please don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe. I’ll be home as soon as I can.

  Love, Susie

  “Careful, Mr. Shaw, don’t touch it — there may be fingerprints.”

  “That’s her writing, all right!” Mr. Shaw said. “I’d recognize it anywhere. See that loop on the a’s? Thank God she’s safe!”

  “Well, Mr. Shaw, I don’t want to alarm you, but this may be a trick of some kind. They could have forced her to write it, see? ‘Tell the policeman he can go away’ — that sounds like a fabrication to me. One thing, anyway; if they’re clumsy enough to try something like that they’re clumsy enough to get caught.”

  “At least she’s safe,” Mr. Shaw insisted. “She says she’s safe.”

  “I hope so, Mr. Shaw.”

  One faint, dusty fingerprint was found on the paper, and identified as Susan’s.

  I went to the Shaws’ apartment Friday afternoon to see if I could be of any service. Mrs. Clutchett told me of the previous night’s happenings — she had been sleeping in the apartment on the living room sofa — and introduced me to Susan’s father. He looked worn, but hopeful.

  “She says she’s safe,” he said, showing me her note. “I believe her. See how steady the writing is? If anybody had forced her to write it she’d be frightened, and the writing would show it, wouldn’t it? But it doesn’t even waver. She must be all right …”

  Meanwhile Mrs. Clutchett was making mysterious signals to me behind Mr. Shaw’s back — so mysterious, in fact, that it took me several minutes to interpret them as meaning “Come into the kitchen.” I reassured Mr. Shaw as well as I could, pointing out that the last sentence in Susan’s note struck me as particularly encouraging, and then followed Mrs. Clutchett into the kitchen.

  “Look!” she whispered dramatically, pointing under the sink.

  I looked. All I could see was a black cat crouching over a dish of hamburger and making little gargled rowr rowr noises as it ate.

  “So?” I said.

  “If — that — cat — could — talk!” she said, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes in an expression of vast significance. “Well! Believe you me, that animal’s in the thick of this. I’ve just got a hunch. I’m keeping my eye on it night and day.”

  “Oh, great!” I said. “Well, when kitty decides to reveal all, just let me know. I’ll be right down.”

  “All right! All right! You go ahead and laugh if it so pleases you. But just you let me tell you something. I used to have a cat, and you may believe this or not but it’s the pure gospel — one month to the day before poor Mr. Clutchett was taken to Heaven that cat cried for twenty-four hours without stopping. Now! Cats know. You mark my words.”

  The cat, however, kept whatever secrets it might have had, and Friday night passed without incident.

  On Saturday morning a number of people happened to converge on the Shaws’ apartment at the same time. Detective Haugen had come to report that nothing had changed, but that his bureau was following up a lead anonymously telephoned in from New Jersey. With him came a young reporter carrying a camera, and a man bearing flowers who was later identified as the vice-president of Mr. Shaw’s company. At the same time, four tenants, two men and two women, all acquaintances of Mr. Shaw, approached down the hall from the opposite direction. As everyone arrived simultaneously at the door, it opened to reveal Mr. Shaw and Mrs. Clutchett in the midst of an argument just within. He was insisting that she must go home and get some rest, not that he didn’t appreciate her concern; and she was saying that not even wild horses could budge her an inch until that poor child was found. Behind them was the night-guard policeman, stretching and yawning. For a few minutes there was a subdued hubbub at the door, with everyone murmuring “Excuse me. Pardon me.” Detective Haugen glanced impatiently at his watch. It was eight-twenty-three.

  At that instant the elevator door opened with a sigh, and Susan got out.

  She had an odd dress on: it was black, with full-length sleeves, a good deal of material bunched and draped around the hips, and skirts that reached halfway between her ankle and knee. She was also wearing black cotton stockings, and shoes of a strange cut. There were bits of straw in her hair. She was limping, and had dark circles under her eyes. Still, most of the startled observers later agreed that her expression was one of happy excitement; but Mrs. Clutchett immediately diagnosed it as a combination of shock and hysteria.

  Mr. Shaw turned pale, and murmured “Susie, Susie!” as she flung herself at him. Mrs. Clutchett shrieked. Instantly there was an enormous uproar. “Susie, Susie! Are you all right, darling? You’re not hurt?” “Oh, Daddy, I’m awfully sorry if I made you worry. I didn’t mean —” “Now, Miss, where did they leave you? What did they look like?” “Hey — smile! That’s it!” — and the glare of a flashbulb. “Those clothes!” the women murmured to each other. “Where do you suppose she got those clothes?” Doors began flying open up and down the hallway. “Now leave the poor child alone,” Mrs. Clutchett shouted, “Can’t you see she’s exhausted?” Within the apartment the cat yowled. “Hold it” — flash! — “one more, now!” “What kind of car did they have? Where did they let you off? Where did that straw come from?”

  Susan fainted.

  “Now you’ve done it!” Mrs. Clutchett shrieked. “Get out, get out, all of you! Hounding the poor child!” She seized a cushion from the sofa and began laying about her violently, while Mr. Shaw carried Susan inside. “Out! Out! I never heard of such a thing! That child says nothing and sees nobody until she’s had a rest and some broth and a doctor. Get out! Big grown ignoramuses pestering the poor baby to her death!”

  As soon as she had been laid on the bed, Susan opened her eyes and giggled. “Wasn’t that a perfect faint? I had to get rid of all those people somehow. Oh, Daddy, you look so tired! I’m awfully sorry if you worried. Did you get my note? No, I didn’t run away. No, I wasn’t kidnapped either. Well, I was going to explain the other night, but there was a policeman —”

  “The idea! The idea!” Mrs. Clutchett raged into the bedroom. “Those — those vultures! Chafe her wrists, Mr. Shaw. Where’s my smelling salts? I’m going to call a doctor.”

  “No you’re not,” Susan said. “I’m perfectly all right. I just sprained my ankle a little, that’s all. Now please go away, I want to —”

  The cat yowled under the bed.

  “It’s Toby!” She wriggled off the bed and dropped on her knees. “Come on, Toby. Puss puss! I’m awfully glad you’re not lost. I promised them I’d bring you back. Daddy! You’ll never guess how old Toby is, and he doesn’t even know it! He’s sixty, plus — what’s eighty-one from a hundred?”

  “Back on that bed, Missy! You’re overwrought, that’s what you are. Sixty my foot! Although I just knew that cat was in the thick of it somewhere. Just wait till I see that Mr. Ormondroyd, thinks he’s so smart —”

  “Puh-lease, Mrs. Clutchett! I have to talk to Daddy in private. Will you please, please, kindly —”

  “All right, all right! I’ll go and make some broth. But if you ask me, a doctor should —”

  “And please shut the door? Please? Thank you.”

  “Susan Shaw,” said her father, clutching his hair with both hands and pulling it, “will you please tell me what’s been going on around here?”

  “Of course, Daddy, I’m going to. Come on, Toby, that’s a good boy. Well, it all began — when was it? Wednesday. T
hat horrible day, remember? Oh, I bet you’re not going to believe a word of it, it’s all so — so weird! But cross my heart and hope to die, it’s all absolutely true!”

  3. A Day Awry

  Wednesday went wrong from the very beginning.

  Susan was awakened by a burst of wind that seemed to be trying to rip her bedroom window right out of its frame. Evidently it was going to be another foul March day, the third in a row now, with bitter air, a sunless sky, and an unresting grit-and-paper-bearing wind. She groaned, pulled the blankets up to her chin, and glanced at the clock.

  It was seven. She had slept through the alarm again.

  “Oh, no!” she muttered, flinging herself out of bed. There still might be time to dress and get out of her room before — but no, she was too late. The television set next door burst into noise. Even the wind couldn’t drown out that dreaded greeting. “Yap yap!” shouted Your Genial Breakfast Host, “yap yap yap!” on a soaring note of jollity; and then a crash of applause and whistles and glad cries. Susan huddled her clothes on, trying to deafen at least one ear by pressing it against her shoulder. “No, seriously,” the Genial Host shrieked through the wall into her other ear, “isn’t life the funniest thing you ever heard of in your life?” Laughter, clapping, cries. She slammed her bedroom door behind her.

  Mr. Shaw was standing by the window in the living room, looking down at the street as he knotted his tie. “Sounds like they beat you to it again,” he grinned.

  “Oh,” Susan groaned, “I can’t stand it. My fault for sleeping through the alarm again, I guess … Can I have a new one, Daddy?”

  “Alarm clock? Sure, chick. What color would you like?”

  “Oh, I don’t care. Just so it’s loud. All this one says is tinkle tinkle.”

  “One — loud — alarm — clock,” said Mr. Shaw, writing in his notebook, “color no object. Done. Meanwhile, since it’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, etcetera etcetera, maybe our friends’ antenna will get carried off. Listen to it!”

  “Wish it would carry old Yammerface off.” Imitating the Genial Host, she cried in a high-pitched voice, “Yap yap a funny thing happened to me on the way to the studio this morning yap yap the wind blew me right into the middle of last week!”

  Breakfast was a fiasco. Mr. Shaw started out by spilling coffee on his trousers. While he was changing, the toaster stuck and thoroughly carbonized the two slices of bread in it. Susan burned her thumb trying to pry them out. The second toast-making attempt was more successful, but as she was buttering a slice it slipped from her fingers and fell butterside down on her skirt. She kicked the table leg, and went to change. Every skirt but the tiresome grey and red tartan was out at the cleaners. “No, seriously,” the Genial Host yelled on the other side of the wall, “are you good folks having fun?” Roar. She fled in her slip, and changed in the living room.

  The wind was increasing. They picked at their toast without appetite.

  “Well,” Mr. Shaw sighed at last, looking at his watch, “it’s about that time.”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s the matter, chick?”

  “Oh … I have a feeling it’s going to be one of those days.”

  “I know it’s going to be one of those days. Still, life goes on.”

  Reaching the sidewalk, they were nearly knocked down by a gust of wind, and as they kissed each other goodbye a sheet of newspaper flew at their heads and wrapped its wings about them like some demented seabird. Mr. Shaw went up Ward Street to the subway, while Susan went two blocks in the opposite direction to catch her bus to school. When she reached the bus stop she discovered that she had no money — it was still in the pocket of her buttered skirt. She had to go back for it, thereby missing the bus and arriving late at school.

  There was in her grade a small, leering, unwashed boy who had appointed himself her official tormentor. With proper vigilance she could usually avoid his attentions; but during the first period the class was seated in alphabetical order, which placed him directly behind her. Today, in her preoccupation, she forgot to take the normal defensive steps. Almost instantly her braids were in the hands of the enemy. It cost her a painful wrench of the neck to jerk free. She rounded on him and hissed, “Stop that!”

  “Susan!” said Miss Melcher.

  “But he was —”

  “Do pay attention, Susan!”

  “Well, I’m trying to, but he keeps —”

  “You must try a little harder, Susan.”

  ‘All right, you little rat,’ she raged to herself, ‘just wait till I catch you!’ She endured his pestering until the bell rang, then managed to trap him at the door, where she kicked his shin. Miss Melcher looked up just in time to see it.

  “Susan Shaw,” she said in her high sorrowful voice, “Susan Shaw, why can’t you Adjust?”

  The Physical Education teacher bellowed, “Doesn’t this lovely wind just make you want to shout, girls?” Shivering and sniffling, they were herded out into the elements. A soccer ball came soaring out of the boys’ side of the playground and hit Susan on the ear.

  She struggled through a particularly difficult set of arithmetic problems, discovering only after she was finished that she had been working on the wrong assignment.

  The cafeteria ran out of Swiss steak just as she arrived; she had to take frankfurters, which she loathed.

  Her enemy pressed close to her as they entered the first afternoon class. He did not look at her. His face expressed only eagerness to reach his desk and begin his work. She allowed herself to relax. He let fly a backward kick, caught her thwack on the kneecap, and darted out of range. The Problems of Modern Living teacher was staring out the window at the time.

  But classes came to an end at last, and Susan’s spirits rose as she hurried toward the auditorium for the Thespian Club meeting. Now the whole dismal day would be set right! Yesterday tryouts had been held for “The Lady and the General: a drama of Revolutionary Boston,” and she had been at her best. Today Miss Melcher would assign the parts. There was no doubt in Susan’s mind who would get what. She was smiling as she took her seat.

  Miss Melcher saved the plum until last. “For Lavinia, the feminine lead, Elsie Mautner,” she said, avoiding Susan’s eyes; and the day’s ruin was complete.

  Susan boarded the homeward bus and collapsed on her seat in bitterness and despair. “Acting is my life!” she frequently told her classmates. At the age of nine she had been a fairy in the neighborhood Little Theatre performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and she had gone on the stage at every opportunity since. She had a flair for thinking herself into a role, and making an audience believe her in it. Furthermore, she had the quick wit that is so necessary when things go wrong. Last year, for instance, she had twice saved the Thespian Club play with her ad-libbing; once when the Chambermaid had burst into hysterical giggles instead of saying, “The King approaches!” and again when the wicked Duke had somehow gotten himself locked in the toilet and missed his entrance cue by half a minute. She loved costumes of all kinds, particularly long, full-skirted dresses that whisper when you walk in them and flare out so beautifully when you make a quick turn. That was the kind of dress this year’s lead would have, and Susan had had her heart set on playing the role. Lavinia, a Boston Belle: the part wasn’t very well written, but it had possibilities nevertheless; possibilities that Elsie Mautner wouldn’t be able to see even if you wrote out a description of them in words of one syllable.

  She, Susan, had been assigned the part of a Townswoman, with only one appearance in the first act — “Enter Townspeople, left” — where all that was required of her was to gape at the British soldiers as they marched off to Bunker Hill. When she had complained after the meeting, Miss Melcher said, “Of course, Susan, you did beautifully last year. But, you see, it’s very important to let everyone Participate, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but it’s more important to do the play right,” Susan argued. “The parts should go to the people that can handle them be
st, shouldn’t they? That’s all I —”

  “Now, Susan. We must learn to Fit In With The Group. We can’t all be prima donnas all the time, can we?”

  That was unjust. Susan had no false modesty about her talent, but she was no prima donna. It was just that if they were going to the trouble of putting on a play at all, they should do it as well as possible. It wasn’t right for Miss Melcher to regard the play as a Social Experience rather than as an artistic problem; and it wasn’t right that Lavinia, a Boston Belle, should be played like a dressmaker’s dummy, which was what Elsie would make of the part. And Susan knew, she just knew, that the minute something went wrong — and something would go wrong, it always did — Elsie Mautner would freeze up and fumble her lines; while she, Susan, would quietly die in the wings, because she couldn’t stand to see anyone, even Elsie Mautner, make a fool of herself in front of an audience …

  “Oh, go argue with City Hall!” she muttered savagely as the bus stopped at Ward Street. “Elsie Mautner!” Flinging herself down the step, she caught a button in the folding door and tore her coat sleeve.

  4. Gift of Three

  “Little girl! Little girl! Yoohoo!”

  There was nothing Susan detested more than being called “little girl.” Perhaps she was slightly smaller than average, but she was one year ahead of her age group in school; and most of the time she certainly felt more mature than anyone seemed willing to give her credit for. ‘I’ll pretend I don’t hear,’ she thought, wrinkling her nose. ‘Maybe it’s not for me, anyway.’