The Desperate Hours

by Joeseph Hays

  Dan saw the deputy sheriff—the tall, lanky one named Webb—approaching along the silent, tile-floored corridor with a trim nurse trotting soundlessly at his elbow, trying to keep up with the long strides. Jesse Webb removed his hat then, in the waiting room, and he stood there, a trifle awkward, a little shy, with his lean head shot forward.

  “Miss Standish here,” he drawled, “will give you the details. The kid’ll be out of here in two weeks. I reckon that’s enough for me. Your daughter’s in the room with him, Mr. Hilliard.

  She just apologized to me about something. It seemed to bother her a lot, that business about earning the money to Flick. Not that Flick can do much about it, where we got him. Or that she could have done anything different, then. I guess that’s all. Now will you go home?”

  Dan stood up. “If the boy’s conscious, I’d like to see him.”

  “Room 402,” the nurse said, “but-”

  Jesse Webb touched her arm and she stopped. A little crookedly Jesse was grinning down at Dan Hilliard. “I want to say something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Now it’s gone. Well, no matter. Something about—you ever want a job, sir, just look me up.” It was not what he’d intended to say. It didn’t even come close, being utterly foolish and meaningless, but it was the best Jesse Webb could manage.

  Dan Hilliard was smiling, too, and his eyes made Jesse forget the lopsided shape of the face before him. with the jaw ridged and puffed along one side. The eyes were blue now, just like the daughter’s, not black as he had imagined in the time he’d known Dan Hilliard. But there was a warmth in them, a knowingness, that it might take the girl a lifetime to acquire. Embarrassed then, Jesse turned to Mrs. Hilliard: she still wore the housedress, her hair was light, her face small and oval. Mrs. Hilliard’s eyes were soft and they seemed to look into him, and he thought of Kathleen.

  “The same to you,” Dan Hilliard said, and he offered the deputy his hand. “You’re stealing my thunder, though. That’s my work—handing out jobs. Pretty dull, compared to yours, but-” He shrugged.

  “Room 402, sir,” Jesse Webb said, releasing Dan Hilliard’s thick-muscled hand. “Then listen. You get some sleep, hear?” He said that last a little louder, a trifle more gruffly, than he’d intended. But he grew uncomfortable under Mrs. Hilliard’s eyes, wondering whether she could read his thoughts.

  He watched Dan Hilliard moving down the corridor, stepping lightly and briskly now, his body upright and confident. And the nurse began to explain to Mrs. Hilliard, in some detail, just what had taken place in the surgery.

  It’s a funny thing, Jesse Webb was thinking, how you never get said what you feel or think. He rubbed the back of his neck, blinking back the sleep that threatened to catch up with him now. You never seem to say what’s in you. He was thinking of a word, and even the word itself sounded odd in his mind. Magnificence. That was the word. You’d never think of applying it to Dan Hilliard, or people like Dan Hilliard and his wife. But it applied. Maybe you didn’t think of it normally because the chips weren’t down; but when the chips were down-

  He saw Dan Hilliard turn into a room far down the hall.

  What Dan found in that room was a young, full-bodied man stretched out flat on a bed with a very white sheet drawn up to his blunt-looking chin, his head turned away from the door. Beyond the man, framed in the early afternoon sunlight spilling through the high windows, was a slim, red-haired girl whose shoulders were set at an angry cant.

  The young man’s head turned slowly as Dan entered, and the gray eyes opened wider.

  Dan stepped to the bed.

  “You tell him, Dad,” Cindy said. “I’ve been trying to make him see. Wasn’t he foolish, Dad? I was nearly crazy in that police station, suspecting he was up to something, thinking he might be in there, too. Tell the man, Dad, so he’ll learn not to be such a reckless fool.”

  Her anger might have fooled Chuck Wright, although Dan doubted even that as he fought down a smile. He noticed the bright spots of color high on his daughter’s cheeks.

  “You were a reckless fool, Chuck,” Dan said. “It came in handy.”

  Chuck Wright looked very pale, not much like himself at all, but some of the grayness had gone from his face. “I couldn’t do anything else, I guess.” His voice was weak.

  Dan cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said brusquely. “Yes, I know the feeling.” He turned to the door. “Don’t let her rag you, son. Make her invite you to Thanksgiving dinner. I understand you’ll be out of here by then.”

  Dan Hilliard closed the door behind him and paused a moment in the hall, struck again by the radiance that he had caught in his daughter’s face. His body was tired, but his mind was not. He started down the hall. Had he said what he came all this way to say to Chuck Wright? Probably not. There were things you didn’t say, that’s all. But there were things you knew, without saying. And there were changes that took place in you without your ever being aware of them.

  He reached his wife; she was alone now. She stood up and took his arm. “You,” she said, in that same bullying way of her daughter back there, “you’re going to bed now. You’re going to sleep for three solid days. I mean it, Dan. I mean it, too.”

  They went down in the tiny elevator and then through the stone-and-marble entrance hall of the hospital.

  In the sunlight that poured down on the wide steps outside, Ralph Hilliard was surrounded by three men who looked suspiciously like newspaper reporters to Dan. One carried a camera. Ralph stopped talking when he saw his parents, and he waited for them, very still, very grave, very adult for his ten years. Then he said, out of the corner of his mouth, to the three men: “Only if you tell him I said so, I’ll sue you for libel.”

  Dan didn’t inquire what his son had told the reporters. Eleanor, too, said nothing. After the picture had been taken and they were in the taxi, she turned her face to Dan Hilliard and kissed him full on the lips and held him like that, but without any desperation, for a long time. Ralph Hilliard, embarrassed, stared out the window.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Although Joseph Hayes has been writing on a full-time basis since 1943, The Desperate Hours is his first novel. Born in Indianapolis in 1918, he spent two years in a monastery and eighteen hitchhiking through the South, and at all sorts of odd jobs, such as pushing wheel chairs at the Dallas Fair, managing a small icehouse, farm work and warehouse work. At twenty he was married to Marrijane Johnston, and together they worked their way through three more years at a Midwestern university by editing a drama magazine, typing and editing doctorate theses for correct English usage, directing amateur theatricals and radio acting. The Hayeses moved to New York in 1941 and for the next two years Mr. Hayes was employed in the editorial department of a play-publishing house—until he decided that he, too, could write plays. As soon as the first, co-authored with his wife, was published, he gave up employment promptly, and for the last ten years he has been free-lancing successfully. His work has appeared on many television screens and in the national magazines. A play, Leaf and Bough, was produced on Broadway in 1949. He now lives in Brookfield Center, Connecticut, with Marrijane and their two sons, Gregory and Jason—with frequent jaunts in as many directions as possible. He is now at work on another novel and has completed a new play for Broadway.