Killing Mr. Griffin

by Lois Duncan

  “I remember. But, my God, Mark—”

  “He’s going to beg. And he’s going to stay here until he does.”

  Jeff and Betsy had moved to join them, catching the end of his statement.

  “But what if he never does?” Jeff asked. “He’s tougher than we bargained for. We can’t just leave him here till he starves.”

  “He’ll break before then.” Beneath the heavy lids, Mark’s eyes were glistening. “Look, if we let him go now, he’s won.”

  “Mark’s right,” Betsy said. “He thinks he’s really something. He called us ‘five-year-olds.’ He thinks we’re ‘ridiculous.’”

  “But how long can we keep him here?”

  “Long enough to crack him. He will break,” Mark said determinedly. “I promise you that. He’ll break, and he’ll beg, and he’ll crawl, just the way we planned, and when he gets back in that classroom he’ll be a shell, man, just a shell. He’ll look out at that class, and he’ll know somewhere out there, scattered around behind those Shakespeare books, there are a bunch of kids who watched him crawl. He’ll know they’re picturing him here on the ground, begging. Don’t you think that’s going to do something to him?”

  “Don’t go soft, Jeff,” Betsy said. “You’re the one who was talking about having ‘guts.’”

  “I’m not going soft,” Jeff said defensively. “It’s Dave who said we should take him back.”

  “Well—I still don’t like it,” David said. “If we do leave him awhile, we’ll have to come back up here later. It can’t be all night.”

  “I’ve got a game tonight,” Jeff said. “And Betsy’s got to cheer. We can come back up after that.”

  “It’ll be like midnight!”

  “So?” Mark said. “That’ll give him plenty of time to thinkthings over—to wonder if we’re ever coming. Are you with me?”

  “Of course,” Betsy said.

  “It’s not so long,” Jeff said. “Like, till midnight isn’t that long. Maybe seven hours.”

  “Dave?”

  “I guess I don’t have a choice, do I?” David said. “I’m outvoted.”

  “Damned right you are.” Mark turned on his heel and walked back upstream to where Mr. Griffin lay, unmoving, by the waterfall. “Goodnight, Mr. G. Enjoy your own company. It’s all you’re going to have for a long time. Here’s your last chance. Going to ask us, ‘pretty please’ to let you go?”

  The man on the ground did not answer.

  “To hell with you, then—sir,” Mark said. “Come on, you guys.”

  He led the way, and the others fell into step behind him.

  Betsy turned to throw one last look at the man by the stream. He was lying very still. Only his chest was moving—up and down—up and down—as though he had been running hard.

  Betsy had a sudden childish impulse to run back and step on his face.

  CHAPTER 8

  The first time David phoned, Mr. McConnell answered.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Sue’s lying down. She doesn’t feel well tonight.”

  The second time he called, an hour later, he received the same answer, this time from a brother.

  At this point he asked his mother, “Can I use the car for a while tonight?”

  “Why?” she asked, surprised.

  There was no reason not to be truthful.

  “There’s a girl I’d like to talk to.”

  “Oh?” his mother said with interest. “The same girl you took to the picnic last weekend?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I think it’s nice that you’re interested in a girl,” Mrs. Ruggles said. “What’s she like, Davy? Why haven’t you told me about her?”

  “I did. I said I was taking her to the picnic.”

  “I know, but you made it sound like she was just one of a group. Tonight you want to see her alone. That must mean that she’s at least a little special.”

  “She’s just a girl,” David said. “She’s in one of my classes.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Not really.” That sounded funny. He rephrased it. “You might not think so. She’s very bright.”

  “I’ve wondered what sort of girl you would be attracted to. Your father liked them pretty.”

  “I guess he must have,” David said dutifully. “He married you, didn’t he?”

  “No, I mean later. He liked them very pretty and innocent and young. Of course, he looked so young himself. I’m sure they never guessed he was the father of a child. Do you remember him at all, Davy—your father?”

  “Yes,” David said, going tense inside as he always did when they touched upon this subject. “He used to play on the floor with me and pretend he was a bear.”

  “Yes, he was perfectly happy to romp with you. He was playful, like a little boy himself. It was the responsibility of supporting and raising you that he couldn’t face up to.” His mother’s expression was strange, torn, half wanting to remember, half closing the door upon everything. The closed door won. “What’s your girlfriend’s name?”

  “She’s not a girlfriend. Just a regular friend. Her name’s Sue.”

  “A nice, down-to-earth name. All right, take the car, but for heaven’s sake, drive carefully. When will you be home?”

  “Not late, Mom.”

  “Be sure you’re not. I won’t be able to sleep until you’re home, and I have to work in the morning.” And then, unpredictably, she smiled and asked, “Do you need some money?”

  “No, thanks. I have a little. Besides, we won’t be doing anything much.”

  “Have a good time,” she said. And she handed him the keys.

  When he reached Susan’s house and rang the doorbell, Mrs. McConnell answered.

  “Oh, hello, David.” She remembered his name. “Sue isn’t feeling well, but I’m sure she’ll want to see you. Sit down and I’ll go check on her and see if she’s awake.” A few moments later she came back downstairs, and her daughter was with her.

  “Hello, David,” Susan said stiffly. Her eyes shifted past his, not quite meeting them. She did, indeed, look sick. Her nose was red and her face was puffy and bruised looking.

  “I’ve got the car tonight,” he told her. “I thought you mightwant to take a ride somewhere and maybe get something to eat.”

  “Why don’t you, dear?” Mrs. McConnell said. “You hardly ate any dinner. Go get a sandwich or something, and then come back and get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Okay,” Susan said. He could see that she did not want to go but was afraid not to. The thing that had happened that afternoon could not be shoved away.

  They went out to the car, and he opened the door for her. Then he went around to the driver’s side and got in. He pulled the door closed, and they sat a moment in silence.

  Finally, David said, “Burger Shack all right?”

  “Anyplace. I’m not hungry.” Her voice was ragged. “I couldn’t swallow food right now if you paid me to. What did you do to him, Dave, after you left the school?”

  “Just what we said we were going to do. We took him up to the place by the waterfall, and Mark tried to scare him. It didn’t work very well. I mean, he didn’t scare as easily as Mark had thought he would. Mark had to keep talking to him.”

  “Was the bag still over his head?”

  “No, of course not. We took that off as soon as we got out of the city. He’s blindfolded.”

  “He is blindfolded?” Susan regarded him incredulously. “Do you mean he’s still blindfolded? You didn’t let him go?”

  “Not yet,” David said. “I thought we should, but the others outvoted me. They want to keep him tied up till he breaks. Mark wants to hear him beg to be let go.”

  “Where is he? What have you done with him?”

  David turned the key and started the engine.

  “You may not want to eat,” he said, “but we can’t just sit here in front of your house. Your parents will wonder what’s the matter. Let’s just drive around for a while.”
>
  “I asked you, where is he?”

  “Up in the mountains at the picnic place, like I told you.”

  “You left him there!” Susan exclaimed in horror.

  “Don’t sound so tragic,” David said defensively. “Nothing’s going to hurt him. Mark and Jeff are going back up there tonight after Jeff ’s game’s over. Griffin will have thought things over by then. He’ll say what Mark wants him to. Then they’ll bring him down and turn him loose like we planned.

  “Don’t worry, Sue. He’ll be in class tomorrow, you’ll see. He’ll be shook up a little, maybe, but he’ll be there.”

  “I couldn’t face him if he were,” Susan said. “I’d start to cry if I even looked at him. He thought—” Her voice broke. “He thought I was the one in danger. Did you hear him when you grabbed him? He called out, ‘Run!’ He wanted me to get away.”

  “You heard him wrong.”

  “David, I didn’t!” Susan insisted. “He cared about me—he wanted to save me! We can’t just leave him up there alone in the dark. It’s too dreadful! We’ve got to go get him!”

  “I told you, Mark and Jeff are going to do that. It won’t be long now.”

  “How can you know that? Those games run till after eleven. By the time Jeff gets showered and changed and out of there it could be midnight. Then, who knows—maybe they’ll decide not to go at all. Maybe they’ll tell each other, ‘We’ll do it in the morning.’”

  “They wouldn’t do that,” David said, but even as he spoke a shadow of a doubt shifted across his mind. Was it possible that they might do exactly what Susan was suggesting? As she said, it would be late, and Jeff would be tired and hungry. He never ate before a game and was always starving afterward. It was not inconceivable that he and Betsy and Mark might stop somewhere for a hamburger, and time would slip by. It would be Betsy’s curfew. Jeff would have to take her home, and then there would be just himself and Mark. Jeff was the one who owned the car, and if he was worn out from the game—

  “They wouldn’t do that,” David said again, but his uncertainty showed in his voice. “At least, I don’t think they would.”

  “We can’t take the chance,” Susan said. “We’ve got to go up there right now.”

  “Up to the mountains? Are you kidding? Just you and me—without Mark?”

  “We can untie him and bring him down as well as they can. It’s gone too far, Dave. It isn’t fun anymore. When you told me about it at first—at the picnic—I thought it would be—fun. But it isn’t. It’s—it’s awful.”

  She was crying now. In the faint light from the streetlamp at the corner, David could see the glitter of her tears sliding out from under the rim of her glasses and making shiny streaks down the sides of her face. The sight upset him more than he would have expected.

  “Well,” he said, “hell—I guess we could. It’s just that Mark would be so pissed off. When he plans something he likes it to go his way.”

  “Why should what Mark wants matter so much? We’re in this just as much as he is, aren’t we? Why shouldn’t what we want matter?”

  “You don’t understand,” David told her. “Mark isn’t like other people. He’s—he’s—” He struggled to find the words he wanted and was unable to do so. Mark was Mark. It was that simple. You didn’t try to explain Mark, you just accepted him.

  “But Mark’s not here now, and we are. Please, David, we’ve got to go up there! We can’t leave him a minute longer!” Her words came out in a strangled sob, and David felt his heart twist suddenly within him.

  “Okay,” he said gruffly. “Okay, you win. Just stop the sniffling, will you?”

  He threw the car into gear and stepped on the accelerator.

  They didn’t talk much during the drive to the mountains. David, whose experience in night driving was almost nonexistent, kept his eyes focused on the limited strip of road that lay exposed in the path of the headlights. He was acutely conscious of the girl on the seat beside him. She was sitting very straight and still with her hands gripped together in her lap. Her head was bent, and her hair fell forward so that when he glanced sideways he could not see her face.

  At one point he asked, “Are you still crying?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “Do you want to move over this way?”

  Wordlessly she loosened her seatbelt and slid over on the seat so that she was close beside him, her shoulder touching his. She reached up and took off her glasses and wiped the lenses on the front of her blouse.

  “I didn’t mean to make such a big deal,” she said in a small voice. “It’s just—the thought of him up there alone—”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  To his surprise, he found he really meant it. At the moment he felt calmer—better—happier than he had for a long time. The car interior was a world in itself. He and this girl, whom he had hardly known before the past week, were its only inhabitants. Outside the car windows darkness poured past them and drew together behind them, blocking out further reality.

  With his hands upon the steering wheel and the gas pedal under his foot, David knew a strange, exhilarating sense of freedom. His mother, his grandmother, school, sinks full of dishes, bowls of lime-colored gelatin, were left far behind him. What would it be like, he wondered, to keep on driving, to never come back? What if he didn’t turn north onto the road into the mountains but stayed instead on the highway, following it as far as it went, all the way to the coast? He tried to imagine what it would be like there, the air moist and salty, waves pounding upon sparkling beaches, gulls circling and screaming overhead.

  “Did you ever see the ocean?” he asked Susan.

  “Yes,” she said, surprised at the question. “Two summers ago my parents took us to California.”

  “Was it nice?”

  “We had a pretty good time. The beaches were fun. Then Kevin, my little brother, cut his foot on some barnacles and had to go to the emergency room for stitches. Things like that always happen on our vacations.”

  “I’ve never been to either coast,” David said. “I was just thinking what it would be like if we kept on driving until we reached the water.”

  “Then we could take a ship,” Susan said, “and go on farther and find an uninhabited island. People back here would think we’d disappeared off the face of the earth.”

  “You think about things like that too?”

  “Someday I’m going to live completely alone in a cabin a million miles from anywhere and think and read and write poetry and maybe even novels.” She paused and then asked tentatively, “Do you think that’s crazy, wanting to do that?”

  “That’s not crazy,” David said. “My father—” He stopped himself.

  “Yes?”

  “He did something like that, I think. Just left and went and did his thing, without worrying about what people thought. He looked like me. My gram says he did, anyway, and there’s a picture of him I found, and I remember a little. I remember his hands. They were thin and strong and they were always gentle when they touched me. Did you ever notice Griffin’s hands?”

  “No,” Susan said. “Not really. Should I have?”

  “I guess there’s no reason you would. I never noticed them myself until this afternoon when we were tying him up, and all of a sudden I got this funny feeling. There was something about his hands that reminded me of my father.”

  “How odd,” Susan said. “Shouldn’t the turnoff be right along here someplace?”

  “I think so. It’s hard to tell at night.” David squinted into the darkness. “Is that it—that road there? That is a road, isn’t it? Yes, I think that’s it.”

  “Let’s try it,” Susan said. “If we’re wrong it just means backing out and starting over.”

  David turned the car onto the dirt trail and inched it forward, the headlights throwing back strange shapes and shadows as trees and bushes and rocks emerged from the depths of the darkness and crept past them and fell away again as new forms took their places.

/>   “It’s the right road,” he said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “I remember how it took a jog to the right. You can’t see it now, but there’s a big, craggy sort of rock there on the left.”

  “I can’t see anything,” Susan told him. “Just what’s directly ahead of us.” Some time later she asked, “Haven’t we come too far?”

  “No way. We go to the end, remember?”

  “But it’s taking so long.”

  “That’s because I’m driving so slowly. All we need is to get stuck here. That would really fix things.”

  They drove on in silence, and then, suddenly, they were at the clearing.

  Susan caught her breath with a little gasp. “Someone’s here!”

  “No. That’s Griffin’s car.”

  “You left it parked right here where anybody could see it?”

  “Who’s going to see it? Nobody comes up this far, especially at night.” He pulled up next to the Chevrolet and turned off the ignition and the headlights. Immediately they were overwhelmed by silence. Complete. Unbroken. Heavy. Weighted. The absolute stillness of a forest at night.

  For a long moment they sat, unmoving. When Susan spoke at last it was in a whisper.

  “It’s so—black.”

  “There’s a flashlight in the glove compartment. My mom keeps it there in case of emergencies.” David reached across her and groped along the dashboard. He located the button and pressed it, and the front of the glove compartment swung down and he reached inside. For one awful moment he thought the light was not there, but then he found it, shoved back under some papers. He took it out and pushed the door back into place.

  “Okay,” he said. “Are you ready?”

  Without waiting for her answer, he pulled the handle and opened the car door. He got out, and his feet crunched loudly into dried leaves and dead branches.

  “Wait,” Susan said, “I’ll come out your side,” and she slid out behind him.

  For some inexplicable reason, David could not bring himself to slam the car door. The sound would have cut throughthe stillness like a gunshot. Instead, he let it ease into place, and then he pressed the switch to turn on the flashlight. The thin beam shot ahead of them, illuminating the path entrance.