The Man in the Net (18 page)

Suddenly, from outside, John heard a man’s voice shouting. He stiffened. Almost immediately another voice called back. It was so close that it seemed only inches away and the whole cave took it eerily up in an echo, sending it fluttering around above their heads like an invisible bat.

Emily’s eyes flashed to John: then she started running toward the hole in the wall.

“I’m going to get the men. I’m going to tell them John’s here. I …”

“No!” Angel flung herself on her sister, grabbing her pigtail, beating at her with her fist. “No. Louise says no. Louise says no.”

The voice came again, just outside, calling, “Nothing here, Fred. Maybe he’s doubled back to the road.” John stood, digging his nails into the palms of his hands. He could hear the man’s footsteps crunching on dry twigs. He could even hear the slow, stertorous breathing.

With a simulated whimper, Emily dropped down on to the floor. Angel straddled her imperially.

“So—so John’s got to stay?” said Emily.

“Yes, yes, yes.”

“Forever? For as long as he wants to?”

“Yes.”

“And we’ll have to help him? Whatever he wants us to do, we’ll have to do because Louise says so?”

“Yes,” said Angel.

A dead branch snapped outside. John, holding his breath, heard the rustle of the hemlock twigs as a body pushed through them. Angel turned to him with a wide, dazzling smile.

“You can scream in here,” she said. “You can scream and scream and scream, and outside you can’t hear a thing.”

She opened her mouth into an enormous “o” and started to scream in a terrible high piercing shriek which splintered back and forth from the walls. John tried to swallow but couldn’t. Angel closed her mouth and gradually the clamor faded away. Outside the man’s voice, further off, called:

“Okay, Fred. Back to the road then.”

John felt his legs giving away. He threw out a hand to support himself against the wall. In front of him, illuminated by the candle like a saint in a niche, Louise sat stiffly, her head with the heavy sunbonnet sagging slightly forward.

Angel squatted down on the floor by the paper sack.

“Now we’re going to have our picnic,” she said. “And Louise says John can have half of Emily’s share.”

SHE WAS taking things out of the sack—a box of Fig Newtons, two bottles of Coke, sandwiches wrapped in napkins, a chocolate bar. Meticulously, she arranged them on the floor in front of Louise, a large pile for herself, smaller piles for Emily and John.

“Louise says that John has to have the other Coke. Emily isn’t to drink anything.”

The men had gone. Improbably he had been saved. In the relief from tension, his mind was suddenly, preternaturally alert. This had happened. Make use of it.

While Emily hovered in the shadows beyond the candlelight, he sat down on the sandy dirt next to Angel and began to eat.
Mrs. Hamilton is bad and sneaky, saying Angel, it’s our secret
… Angel had said that. It may not have meant anything, but she’d said it. Perhaps … But that shouldn’t come first. The men thought he’d doubled back out of the woods to the road. That was the important thing at the moment. Keep them thinking that way. At least it would give him time.

Craftily he said, “It’s kind of Louise to let me stay.” Angel had started to eat the chocolate bar. “Louise likes you. I like you too. I think maybe I love you. It’s only Emily pushing into everything that makes me so mad.”

“Then Louise wants to help me?”

“Yes.”

“Would she make Emily do something for me?” Angel had finished the chocolate bar and was wiping her fingers on the wrapper.

“Louise says that Emily has to help you before she can eat her lunch.”

“But Angel…” began Emily.

John looked around to her quickly. “You come here on your bicycles, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Where are they?”

“Hidden in the hemlocks at the back.”

“Could you do something for me?”

“If I’ve got to.” Emily’s whine sounded dangerously overplayed to him, but Angel didn’t seem to notice it. Smugly she announced:

“She’s got to.”

John said, “You know the dirt road down from the Fishers’, Emily. It’s not far. Take your bicycle there, ride it down to the highway and leave it by the side of the road. Don’t let anyone see you. Then come back here. Later, when you go back to the village, tell them you were riding your bicycle down the dirt road and I ran up and asked to borrow it. They’ll find the bicycle on the highway and think I thumbed a ride from there.”

Angel was staring at him. “So you’ll pretend you’ve gone away and be here?”

John was still watching Emily. “You think you can do that?”

She broke into a delighted smile. “Of course. I’ll go this very minute.”

She ran to the opening, dropped down and wriggled away out of sight. Angel didn’t even turn her head. She sat a moment looking from the sandwiches to the Fig Newtons. She took a Fig Newton.

It should work, John was thinking. If there was anyone he could trust, it was Emily. Once she’d got the bicycle to the highway, he was safe for a while or as safe as he could be under the precarious protection of Louise. And if he could stay here! It was only then that he actually admitted to himself that this way there might be hope. He hadn’t planned it. It had just happened. But now that it had happened, wasn’t it the lesser of two evils? He knew exactly how it would have been if he’d given himself up. Even if Vickie had been able to protect him until the troopers came, he would have been arrested with everything lined up remorselessly against him. The plan of his enemy would have worked out exactly as it had been intended to work out. But now that he was here and still free, couldn’t he fight back? Someone in the community had done this to him. Someone. Steve Ritter? If, somehow …

Angel’s voice came through to him. “Emily’s a slave, isn’t she? A great fat stupid grind-her-under-your-foot slave.”

He looked at her and she giggled.

“I keep on saying you’ve done bad things to Mrs. Hamilton. I keep on saying it over and over. It makes her so mad. That’s why I say it. Just to make her mad.”

Restraining a hope which he knew was far too fragile to bear any weight, he said, “But you say Linda’s bad too.”

Angel brushed crumbs off her fingers, looked at a sandwich and then started to unwrap the napkin from it.

“Mrs. Hamilton’s bad. She’s bad and sneaky.”

“Sneaky? Why is she sneaky?”

“Hiding,” said Angel. “Hiding in the Fishers’ house when the Fishers are away. That’s sneaky, isn’t it? And it’s bad. When people are away, you don’t hide in their houses. It’s bad.”

In the candlelight her round plump face above the clutched sandwich was heavy with disapproval.

John said, “You found her hiding in the Fishers’ house?”

“She was there and there was someone with her. I was coming up the road and I saw the car drive away and then I saw her coming out of the house and she saw me and she thought I hadn’t seen her and she tried to sneak back into the house and I knew it was bad so I went up to her and I said out loud so she knew I’d seen her, ‘Hello, Mrs. Hamilton.’ I said it and she stopped trying to sneak back into the house and she came up to me and she smiled and she smiled. Oh, she’s sneaky.”

Angel stuffed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth and tilted the Coke bottle to her lips. John looked at her, his pulses tingling. Linda with someone in the Fishers’ empty house. Was this to be believed? Or was Angel just weaving another of her elaborate, spiteful fantasies?

“When was this, Angel?”

She watched him from flat black eyes. “Two weeks and two days ago. I counted. Every day that came I counted, saying: She’s going to give it to me today. But she didn’t and it’s two weeks and two days.”

“Give you what?”

“The bracelet.” Angel curved her wrist in an absurd gesture of chic. “The gold bracelet with Angel written on it, each letter on a little gold thing that wabbles. An A and an N and a G and an E and an L.”

“But why was she going to give you a bracelet?”

“Because it was like the one she had. She was standing there and she was smiling and smiling and I said, ‘It’s bad to be in someone’s house when they’re away,’ and she said, ‘I know it’s bad, Angel, but it isn’t really bad, you see, because they asked me to take care of their house for them and that’s what I was doing.’ But I knew she was just saying that and it wasn’t true because you could see from the way she looked and smiled and smiled to make me think she was so good, and it was then I saw the bracelet and I said, ‘What a pretty bracelet,’ and she let me look at it and it was gold and it had all the little things that bobble hanging on it and on each of the things was an L and an I and all that to spell Linda. And I said, ‘Oh, isn’t it pretty,’ and she stooped down and she kissed me and she said, ‘Do you like it?’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and she said, ‘We’re friends, aren’t we?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And she said, ‘Oh, yes, we are, and if you don’t tell John or anyone that you saw me taking care of the Fishers’ house, I’ll give you a bracelet just like mine with your name on it,’ and I said, ‘Thank you, Mrs. Hamilton,’ and she went away. But she didn’t give me the bracelet and every day I was waiting for it and she didn’t for two weeks and two days—except that it’s two weeks and three days because today’s a day and anyway I don’t want her stinky old bracelet anyway—and I know what she was doing in the Fishers’ house. She was stealing, don’t you think? She was in there stealing with the other person who went away in the car and the other person wasn’t you otherwise she wouldn’t have said, ‘Don’t tell John.’ So that makes it really bad and probably you knew about it and that’s why you beat up on her.”

Do I believe this? he thought. And then gradually he felt excitement stealing through him. There was only excitement. Linda, conjured up like this out of the past, had no reality to him as a person, as his wife who might or might not have been unfaithful. All that was over long ago. But the bracelet existed. Of course it did. It was the bracelet which he’d seen her wearing when she came down to greet Steve Ritter and which she’d slipped off her wrist into her pocket the moment she became conscious that he was in the room. Then, if Angel were telling the truth, the bracelet and the man must go together. Linda was wearing it for her rendezvous with him at the Fisher house because he’d given it to her.

Steve Ritter, he thought. So it had been true about Steve Ritter after all? Steve Ritter meeting her clandestinely, sometimes at the house, sometimes, if that was too dangerous, at the Fishers’, so conveniently empty and so conveniently close. The swaggering Don Juan adding Linda to his conquests and finding out too late that he had a tiger by the tail …

The shadowy enemy had taken on shape and sprung into the open. John felt the sensation of meaningless nightmare slipping away from his predicament. This way he could see it as the logical plan of a man driven to murder, desperately trying to incriminate a substitute victim. At last there was something tangible to fight against.

“You didn’t see who drove off in the car, Angel?”

“No. But he was bad too, wasn’t he? They’re both bad. And that’s why she’s run away, isn’t it? Because she was stealing in the Fishers’ house and she knew they’d catch her so she ran away and now everyone says it’s you who’s done something bad to her. But they’re dopes, stupid, drippy dopes. They don’t know what they’re talking about.” She jumped up and, lifting Louise down from the orange crate, rocked her affectedly in her arms. “That’s it, isn’t it, Louise? Louise says Mrs. Hamilton is wicked and because she never gave me the bracelet Louise says she condemns her to death.”

With the excitement mounting in him, he thought of the bracelet. Except for that moment when it had been on her wrist, he had never seen it. Where had she kept it? It wasn’t in the house with her few other pieces of jewelry. He was sure of that, not only because she’d left the little jewel case open on the vanity in their bedroom, but because, knowing Linda as intimately as he did, he knew that it would be her deepest instinct to hide anything as significant to her as a present from a lover. She would have hidden it as she had hidden her gin bottles and Bill MacAllister’s postcard. And perhaps, since there was one gift, there might be others. And other things too. Letters? If there were letters, if there were a cache …

Angel was swinging Louise to and fro in her arms, crooning a flat, droning lullaby.

Wasn’t that like Linda? If Steve had been her lover, wouldn’t she inevitably have seen to it that somehow or other he should be in her power? Of course it must have been that way, because he had killed her. He would only have killed her because she had made some unendurable demand on him, and how could she have made such a demand without the possession of some powerful weapon? Letters! Was the new hope pushing him too far into fantasy? Of course, even if there had been letters, Steve might have destroyed them when he killed her. But wasn’t it more likely that she would have been sly enough to have been sure they were hidden somewhere beyond his reach?

A secret cache? A cache which, if somehow he could get to it, might make it possible for him to break the net or, better, turn it back to entangle its own creator? He was virtually a prisoner here in the cave. He would need help, but …

A scuffling sound behind him made him spin around. Emily’s head, then her shoulders, were wriggling through the hole in the wall. She squeezed in and hurried toward him, saying exuberantly:

“I did it. Nobody saw me. I took the bike to the highway and dumped it right there where everyone can see it.”

Suddenly he thought: The children. Why not? Not just Emily and the terrifying, exigent Angel, but all the children—his allies.

In a second the decision was made. He turned to Emily who had squatted down on the floor and was hungrily eating a sandwich.

“Do you think you could get the other kids here?”

The moment he’d said it, he realized his mistake and, turning to Angel, saw the look of thunderous disapproval on her face.

But then, before his own wits had made the jump, Emily said in horror:

“Bring them to the cave? Louise would never, never, never allow that. She’d hate it. Louise would …”