Ransom

by Lois Duncan

  “I am not the father type,” he had said, and none of his friends had disagreed with him. The statement was too true to be argued.

  The telephone rang at half hour intervals all evening. It was a quarter past three when Mark Crete finally pulled into the driveway. He left his car parked there, not bothering to put it in the garage, and went into the house.

  He did not stop at Dexter’s room. He did not stop anywhere; he went straight to his bedroom and, pausing only long enough to remove his shoes, tumbled wearily onto his bed.

  After a few minutes he stirred himself enough to get up and run a glass of water. He drank it and then, leaving the bathroom light burning, he returned to his room.

  With a gigantic yawn he lowered himself to the bed for the second time and then, on impulse, reached out and unplugged the bedside telephone, shutting it off for the rest of the night.

  Chapter Five

  DEXTER WAS WORRIED ABOUT Jesse.

  It was strange that he should be, for he really did not know her at all. There had been that moment on the bus when he had looked across the aisle and noticed in her, for an instant, a resemblance to someone he had once known. Then in the car she had been crying. He had not worried about her then because it was a natural thing for a girl to cry. It was a good deal more natural, in his opinion, than to sit there like Marianne, as controlled as though being kidnapped were only another event in the course of an average week. If Jesse had kept on crying, if she had wept and shrieked and become hysterical, he would have accepted and understood it.

  But she did not.

  Instead, she became quiet. It was not a normal quiet; it was a kind of dead stillness, as though a light had been switched off inside her.

  Dexter noticed it in the morning when they were released from the storeroom and allowed at last to stand in the front room by the fire.

  The night had been the longest and most miserable of his life. The cold of the storeroom had been as complete as the inside of a refrigerator. The saving grace had been finding the sleeping bags. There were six of them, stacked in a pile against the far wall, and they had found them by touch, as they groped about in the darkness for the promised blankets.

  “If it hadn’t been for them,” he told the girls later, “we would never have lived through the night,” and Marianne nodded.

  “I’ll never forget how cold it was in the morning when I went in to bring you coffee. I unbolted the door, and the cold seemed to come rushing out to meet me. I was afraid to look.”

  She had come in about eight with the coffee and a package of buns, which evidently were to constitute breakfast.

  “I can’t let you out,” she had whispered. “Buck’s gone somewhere, and he told Rita you were to stay in here until he came back. I talked her into letting me bring you these. Are you all right?”

  “I guess so,” Glenn had muttered, and then the door had been locked again, and they had been left to huddle in the sleeping bags until, according to Bruce’s wristwatch, close to noon.

  When they were released at last and allowed to move into the living room, Dexter glanced about for Jesse. She was not in the living room, so when he had warmed himself a little, he went into the bunk room. She was standing by the window. Her back was toward him, and she did not turn when he came to stand beside her.

  “Hi,” he said awkwardly. “How did it go? Did you and Marianne make it through the night all right?”

  Without looking at him, Jesse nodded.

  “Did that guy Buck bother you or anything?”

  “No.”

  Dexter wished that she would turn so that he could see her face.

  “Did you eat any breakfast?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  He could tell she was lying. “You didn’t really, did you? Jesse, you have to eat.”

  “Oh, please …” She did turn then and face him, and he saw the strange look in her eyes, as though shock and fright had wiped away all emotion. Something has happened, he thought. Something more than I know about.

  Impulsively he reached out and touched her hand and was startled at how cold it was.

  “Jesse,” he said, “come in by the fire.”

  “No.”

  “You’re cold. You shouldn’t be in here by the window.”

  “Please,” she said, “can’t you just leave me alone?”

  It was the sort of thing he himself would have said under the same circumstances. He had, in fact, said it himself in both words and actions, many times. Now, with a feeling of helplessness, he obeyed her wishes and left her by the window and went into the other room.

  Marianne was seated on the floor by the fireplace. She had evidently spent the morning exploring the cabinets and shelves in the bunk room; for she had located a pile of paperback books, a deck of cards, and a checkerboard, although there did not seem to be any checkers.

  Glenn, who had crouched beside her to look over the pile of articles, asked, “Where did you get all this?”

  “Just dug them out. Whoever uses this cabin for hunting must have kept them here for entertainment in the evenings. Rita didn’t mind my looking. In fact, she took some of the books herself.”

  They were automatically keeping their voices low, so that they would not carry to the kitchen, where, through the open door, they could see Buck at the counter, eating and talking to Rita.

  “Do you know where he went?” Bruce asked softly, and Marianne nodded.

  “Down to that little town, the one we came through on our way up here last night. He was going to phone Juan. I guess that’s the closest place there is a landline. I’m sure there’s no cell phone reception up here.”

  Dexter’s voice was low. “What’s the matter with Jesse?”

  “The matter with her? Why, the same thing that’s the matter with all of us, I guess. She wants to go home.”

  “It’s more than that,” Dexter persisted. “She wasn’t like this last night. She was scared and upset, sure, but not to the extent that she is now. Something must have happened.”

  “I don’t know what,” Marianne told him. “We slept in the second bedroom last night, and when we got up this morning, Buck had already left. Rita hasn’t even talked to us. She has been sitting in the kitchen all morning, reading and drinking coffee.”

  “If Juan phoned our families,” Glenn said, “they must have made their plans by now. I wish we knew what the score was.”

  Marianne nodded. “Shall we ask him?”

  “I’ll do it. The worst Buck can do is refuse to answer.” Glenn got up and went across the room to the kitchen.

  Bruce’s eyes followed him admiringly. “He’s not afraid of anybody.”

  Dexter, too, watched the tall boy, noting the width of his shoulders, the ease of his stride. “What’s it like to have Superman for a brother?”

  Bruce accepted the question as a compliment. “It’s great. Everybody likes Glenn.”

  I don’t, thought Dexter. He did not speak the words aloud, but Marianne saw them in his eyes.

  “Everybody likes him,” she said pointedly, “unless they happen to be jealous of him.”

  Dexter was immediately on the defensive. “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “If you don’t know,” said Marianne, “it’s possible it doesn’t apply.”

  “You’re darned right, it doesn’t apply! If you think I’m jealous of Glenn Kirtland, that I’d change places for one minute with him or with anyone like him—” He stopped his tirade with effort.

  “What are you talking about?” Bruce asked innocently. “Nobody’s jealous of Glenn. He wouldn’t let them be. He’s so nice to everybody.”

  Before the honest bewilderment in his voice, Dexter felt a sudden shame at his outburst.

  “Sure he is, Brucie,” he said apologetically to the younger boy. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t know why I said it.”

  To his surprise Marianne reacted identically. “I baited you into it. I’m sorry, Dex. I was being horrid.” She glanced down
at her hands, clenched in her lap, and slowly forced herself to open them. “The tension is getting to all of us. We’re going to end up clawing and biting each other.”

  At that moment, Glenn came out of the kitchen and joined the group at the fire.

  “He says the wheels are turning,” he said, seating himself on the floor beside Marianne. “There is one family he hasn’t been able to contact. Buck wants to wait to pick up the money until he can get it from everybody. Then he’ll release all of us at once.”

  “The one they haven’t reached is my uncle,” Dexter said with certainty. “He’s never home. He probably hasn’t even noticed that I’m missing.”

  Marianne regarded him with wonder. “But surely, when you didn’t come home to dinner?”

  “He usually eats his dinner out. I cook for myself.” Dexter said defensively, “I’m a good cook.”

  Marianne seemed shocked. “But doesn’t your mother?”

  “My mother’s dead.” He got up then and left them by the fire and went into the bedroom to Jesse.

  She was standing, just as he had left her, by the window, gazing out into the vista of trees and sleet gray sky.

  Dexter stood beside her a moment and said, “Glenn talked to Buck. We’re going to be out of here soon.” When Jesse didn’t answer, he continued, “Juan phoned our families last night. There’s just one he hasn’t reached, and I think it’s mine. As soon as he gets hold of my uncle and makes arrangements to pick up the money …”

  His voice faded out before her lack of response. For a short while they stood in silence.

  Then Jesse asked, “Why did you come in here?”

  He was disconcerted by the question. “I don’t know exactly. I guess I just—”

  “Yes?”

  “Just wanted to talk.”

  “You could have talked to the others,” Jesse said.

  “I know. I didn’t just want to talk to be talking. I wanted to talk to you.”

  The words were true. The realization of their truth startled him. He wanted to be with this girl. He, Dexter, the loner, who hadn’t wanted to be with anybody for so long, who hadn’t cared about anybody for so long. And why? Why, suddenly, now? And why this girl, whom he hardly knew?

  Yet he did know her. He knew the straight set of the narrow shoulders, the fine, clean curve of the neck beneath the smooth dark hair. She was still turned away from him, and he ached to reach out and draw her around to face him.

  “I know you,” he wanted to say. “I know you!”

  Was it because, physically, she resembled the girl in New York? Yes, undoubtedly that was part of it, yet there was more. Now, as he stood beside her, he had the strange feeling that if he could turn her toward him and look into her eyes, he would see something there that was a reflection of his own.

  I met myself the other day,

  In quiet mouth, in eyes of gray—

  Where had he heard that poem? It must have been from his mother. Everything he knew of poetry had come from her. When he pictured his mother, it was always on the sofa in the living room of their New York apartment, with her legs curled under her like a little girl, reading poetry. During that terrible year when he had been sick, and all of the time afterward, when he was learning to walk again, when he was slowly starting to get some life back into his right side, she had read to him. The time had gone by faster, somehow, and it had been more bearable. When he thought back upon it now, of that painful, frustrating time, he remembered it with all of his senses—the taste of his own angry tears of exhaustion, the smell of hospitals, the feel of his father’s strong hands, patiently kneading and working the useless muscles of his leg and shoulder. And always in the background, the sound of his mother’s voice, reading.

  That time was like another life, like a little segment of another world, complete in itself, with just the three of them, bound together in perfect closeness by agony and love. It had been another thing altogether when he was well enough to start school again, to break from the protection of his private world and brave the cruel normality of the public school system.

  Thanks to his mother’s tutoring, he was not behind his age-group academically. In fact, if anything, he was ahead. It was the social side of life, the easy, joking give-and-take of his classmates, that was more than he could handle.

  “I’m different!” he had exclaimed wretchedly to his parents. “They don’t like me because I’m different!”

  “We’re all different,” his father had said.

  “But my difference shows! Nobody wants me on their side at games. I can’t run fast enough.”

  “You’re good at other things,” his mother had reminded him. “Your reading is way ahead of your grade level. Your teacher told me.”

  “But my handwriting isn’t. I have to do it with my left hand.”

  “So who cares?” His mother had smiled at him. “Everybody has his own problems. Most of us are so involved with our own that we don’t even notice anyone else’s. So you limp a little, so your handwriting isn’t perfect. What does it matter? Nobody cares but you!”

  The love in her voice had made the words believable. How eagerly he had grasped at them, ready to accept them as true.

  Nobody notices, he had told himself. Nobody cares.

  He had lived for three years like that, in his own little dreamworld. He had worked, during those years, and he had improved physically. He had conquered the limp, except when he was particularly tired, and had exercised regularly, even learning to ski. Although he never developed much coordination with his right hand, he did improve with practice his use of the left one, and his script, although never beautiful, was at least possible to read. The underdeveloped arm and shoulder muscles he concealed with long-sleeved shirts and sweaters, and he convinced himself that nobody was aware of them.

  Until the girl.

  She was the first girl he had ever loved, and he had loved her with the complete concentration of purpose that was his primary characteristic. He had thought she felt the same way about him. He had thought it, anyway, until that summer afternoon when he had overheard her: “He’s a nice guy and all that, and cute enough in a jacket, but I think I’d die if I ever had to be seen on the beach with him!”

  She had laughed when she said it, that low, lovely laugh which could tie his stomach in knots, and he had stood there, stunned, unable to move. And then he had turned and walked away, and he had never called her or spoken to her again.

  At home that night he had not told his parents. He had left his dinner uneaten and gone straight to bed.

  “It’s a touch of stomach flu or something,” he had told his mother when she hovered over him. “I’ll be okay tomorrow.”

  She had leaned over to touch his forehead. “You don’t have any fever.”

  “I said, I’ll be all right.”

  He had turned his face away, and his mother had said helplessly, “It’s probably just the heat. It has been such a hot summer.”

  She had been hurt, and he had known it. But he himself was too hurt to care.

  “Go away!” he had told her. “I don’t need you! I don’t need anybody!” And after she had left him, he had lain there in the hot apartment with his face pressed into his pillow and cried until there were no tears left to shed.

  Then he had slept.

  When he got up the next morning, he had changed. It was funny how quickly the change had come. It was as though while he slept, there had grown about him a wall, a transparent wall through which he could see but through which no one and nothing could reach him.

  When he passed the girl in the hall that morning, he had ignored her. He had looked past her, as though she were not worth the trouble of seeing. When she tried to speak to him, he had pretended not to hear her.

  I don’t need you, he had thought, and afterward he had wondered if he had spoken it aloud, so violently were the words churning within him. I don’t need you.

  I don’t need anybody!

  “I met myself the
other day …” He wished he could think of the rest of the poem. It was strange that he should have remembered it through the years. I met myself. What was it about Jesse that he should feel as though he had found himself in her? What was it that he recognized, that had drawn him in here, aching with an emptiness that nothing, ever, could possibly fill?

  “Jesse.”

  His emotions must have shown in his voice, for to his surprise, she did turn around. She stood there directly before him, her face raised to his, and the blank look was gone. Her eyes were pools of pure terror.

  “Dex,” she whispered, “I didn’t want to tell you. I didn’t want to tell any of you because knowing it won’t do any good. It’s all terrible enough without—without …”

  Her voice trailed off, and he asked, “What is it?”

  “I didn’t want to tell, but I have to. I have to tell it to somebody!”

  “What is it?” Dexter demanded. He found suddenly that he was gripping her shoulders with both hands. “Tell me!”

  “Last night,” said Jesse, “I couldn’t sleep. I guess none of us could very well. Marianne did doze off after a while; I could hear the change in her breathing. I lay there in my bunk, and I was scared, and I hadn’t had any dinner. All at once the whole room seemed to be spinning. I knew I had to have a drink of water. I remembered the pitcher of water out in the kitchen, and I thought I would get some.”

  “Yes?” Dexter’s hands were still on her shoulders.

  “Our door was partly open so the heat from the fire could come in. I thought that Buck and Rita had gone to bed in the other bunk room. But they hadn’t. They were in the living room, sitting in front of the fire. They were drinking beer or something. The whole room was full of the smell of it. And they were talking. I stood there in the doorway, and they didn’t know I was there, and I heard what they were saying.”

  She paused. When Dexter did not speak, she continued. “Rita was asking about the bus driver, Mr. Godfrey. She wanted to know what they had done with him. Buck told her … they killed him. That sweet old man. They killed him, Dexter! They killed him!”