Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine Presents Fifty Years of Crime and Suspense (72 page)

“Chris wouldn't know that,” says Kim, but she's already hoping maybe they've been wrong. Maybe Chris has another job, maybe Joe Gleb isn't involved at all.

“Joe knows to the penny. He knows our money isn't liquid.” Maureen has to explain this to Kim, how money can be liquid or not, how it can be tied up.

“So why is he doing it? Why is he doing this thing with Chris?” Kim asks.

“This is going to be Joe's version of the divorce,” Maureen says. “I think he wants to get his hands on everything; I think he doesn't care about the ransom at all.”

“You have to tell the police,” Kim says.

“And what would happen to you? They'd guess how I found out.”

“I could leave,” Kim says. “I could get out of town.”

“If that's what you want,” says Maureen. “But I have a better idea.”

C
HRIS GOES OUT
on the bike the next night, and soon as he clears the yard, Kim begins looking for the gun. She told Maureen “no problem,” but after she searches under the bed, the bedside table, Chris's footlocker, the shelf above their coats, the medicine cabinet, even the cupboard by the door where they put canned goods, Kim starts getting nervous. Outside, she checks the truck over like a sniffer dog but can't find a thing.

Back inside, the phone rings.

“Find it?” Maureen asks.

“Not yet. I thought you didn't want to call.”

“I'm at the gas station. Would he keep it in the bike?”

“He might. He's got those carrier things. They probably lock.”

“You'll have to check,” says Maureen.

So there's Kim with bullets rattling in her jeans pocket and the whole trailer turned upside down when Chris roars into the yard.

“Cleaning,” she says.

“Don't be crazy. We'll be outa this dump soon.”

“How soon?”

“What you don't know won't hurt you,” he says and laughs, as if he thinks he's pretty funny.

Within minutes, the phone rings again. Kim knows it's Maureen, she just knows it is, but Chris picks it up, listens a minute, then swears and says he doesn't have time for any damn opinion poll. Kim lets out her breath.

After dinner, when she carries out the garbage, Kim tries the catches on the motorbike's carriers. She tries again later on the excuse that she's left a sweater in the truck, but what she finally has to do is to get up a half hour earlier than usual the next morning. Chris is still asleep when Kim gets the bike keys out of his pocket and goes outside barefoot, half frozen, and shaking with nerves to unlock the carrier. There's the gun, black and ugly and serious looking.

Kim thinks of Joey's accident and freezes.

In her mind she hears Maureen saying, “I always kept the gun locked up, always, always locked up, but Joe wanted it handy. ‘What good's a gun you can't get to,' he'd say. Safety, that was his thing, but it wasn't very safe for a little boy, was it?” Kim remembers how Maureen's eyes went wild and dark, how she wept and said, “There were bits of bone on the wall, bits of bone.”

So Kim is reluctant to touch the gun, though Maureen went over the whole process with her two, three times. Kim stands there dithering until there's a sound—a car somewhere—and she breaks open the chamber revealing neat, shiny bullets with round brass ends. Out they come and in go the ones Maureen brought her. Close up the gun, wipe it, and put it back quick with the oily rag on top.

The carrier latch snaps loud enough to stop Kim's heart, but there's nothing, no reaction, no door opening, no face at the window, and all she's got left to do is to slide the keys back into Chris's tumbled, greasy jeans and fix herself an early breakfast.

T
WO DAYS, THREE
days, nothing happens. Kim's beginning to think that maybe there's another deal, that maybe Chris has pulled a fast one, that maybe they'll be okay after all.

Maureen wants to know if she's sure she changed all the bullets, and when Kim says yes, Maureen tells her, “Wait and see.”

But Kim's still jumpy, wired with nerves, so Maureen says, “Don't worry; we've defanged them.” Maureen seems pleased about that and confident. “There's not a damn thing they can do to us now.”

A
YELLOW WASH
from the neighbor's security light and Chris shaking her shoulder. “Get up,” he says.

“What is it? What time is it?” Kim's thinking fire, flood, or a raccoon in the trailer.

“Let's go,” he says. “This is the day.”

She gets up and dresses, her hands shaking though Chris has been defanged, though the gun is harmless, though no matter what Maureen does—calls the police or raises the cash—nobody gets hurt.

The kitchenette clock reads five thirty
A.M.
“You're way too early,” Kim says. “Joe won't be at the store before seven thirty.”

“Who said we were going to get him at the store?” Chris asks.

“You said I just needed to drop you off. You said …”

“Listen, I trust you,” Chris says with this awful, heavy certainty. “We're in this together.”

He puts his arm around her shoulder, and they go outside. She expects him to drive, but he motions her behind the wheel and gives her the keys.

“I'll tell you where to go,” he says. “Keep the lights off until we hit the road.”

The sky's beginning to gray, but Kim nearly hits the boulder at the driveway end and has to put on the low beams. It's a relief to get onto the main road and have light. Chris sits beside her, giving orders without any real direction, until they reach a country road, all winding and stone walls. After a mile or so he has her pull in at a drive with fancy carriage lamps on either side.

“Cut the lights,” he says. Kim has to wait a few seconds until she can see to ease the truck along the circular drive to a three-car garage. An attached breezeway with long windows and a glass door connects it to the house. Chris pulls on a ski mask and takes the gun out of his jacket pocket. “Keep the motor running,” he says.

None of this is quite real to Kim, though she can feel her hands, which are freezing, and the clammy coldness of the shirt against her back and a stiffness in her feet. She's really in need of sun and heat and someplace different, but the situation itself is like something on TV, like a film, a drama, a still picture in the tabloids: “Celebrity Home Invaded by Masked Intruder,” something like that.

When Kim hears the tinkle of breaking glass, she wants to push on the horn and alert the house. She also wants to put the truck in reverse and get the hell out. Instead, she hangs on to the wheel with both hands and tells herself that everything will be all right: crazy at the moment, but without permanent damage. Kim's still telling herself this when the shots start, one, then two, three, four, close together. She piles out of the truck, stumbles across the gravel drive, and races to the house, where lights are coming on and there's this indescribably bad, scary atmosphere.

“Chris,” she shouts and then, “Maureen! Joe!” Though that's careless, not prudent, dangerous, as is running down the hall toward the light, toward the master bedroom, toward Maureen, who, gun in hand, is shrugging her way into a bathrobe. Maureen has a rigid, unfamiliar expression on her face as if the darkness that used to live behind her eyes has come out into the light for good.

“What's happened?”

Maureen recognizes her then, recognizes the voice, the face. “Don't go in there,” she says, meaning the bedroom, where Kim can now see objects, bundles like, lying on the floor. Bundles she somehow knows are Chris and Joe. Kim starts to cry.

“Don't do that,” says Maureen, touching her shoulder like the old Maureen, the real Maureen, glimpsed for that second, then disappearing. “You don't have time. Go down the field track to the highway and hitch a ride to work.”

“I'll be late,” wails Kim as if this is all that matters.

“Tell them Chris went out early with the truck,” says Maureen. “You don't have to know anything else. But get out of here. You've got to get out of here now.”

K
IM WALKS OUT
the glass doors and takes a moment to see the palms and the crowded strip of sand at the edge of the water. Outside the hotel air conditioning it's really too warm for her nice receptionist's blazer, but green's her best color, and it only takes a few minutes to run to the coffee shop, crowded with delivery guys and workers and other hotel staff on breaks. Kim returns greetings, friendly waves; she's been around long enough to know people.

Coffees, one with, one without, plus a bagel, a doughnut, extra sugar. Kim's already collected her order when she checks the magazine rack and feels time stop for a moment: Princess Diana on the cover again, midnight blue silk, a jeweled necklace broad as your hand, eyes as blue as Maureen's when she stood on the edge of the grave with all the mauve and white mums and handed over the envelope.

“You'll need,” Maureen said, “to get started.”

Kim took it; there wasn't anything else to do, not if she wanted to leave, to start again, to get away from scary bundles and awkward questions and Maureen's wild eyes.

“Maybe you'll come back,” Maureen said.

And though Kim said, “Maybe,” at the time, she knows she never can, she never will, because Maureen's crazy; Joe Gleb was right about that. Just the same, standing in her green hotel blazer just across from the sand, Kim can't help feeling grateful, and nostalgic, too, about the cemetery and picnics and real life.

Otsu, Lake Biwa, eleventh-century Japan, during the O-bon festival
.

The First Day: Welcoming the Dead

He was on
his homeward journey when he found the boy. At the time, caught in the depths of hopelessness and grief, he did not understand the significance of their meeting.

Sugawara Akitada, not yet in the middle of his life, was already sick of it. A man may counter hardship, humiliation, even imminent death with resources carefully accumulated in his past and draw fresh zest for new obstacles from his achievements, but Akitada, though one of the privileged and moderately successful in the service of the emperor, had found no spiritual anchor in his soul when his young son had died during that spring's smallpox epidemic. He went through the motions of daily life as if he were no part of them, as if the man he once was had departed with the smoke from his son's funeral pyre, leaving behind an empty shell now inhabited by a stranger.

Having completed an assignment in Hikone two days earlier, Akitada rode along the southern shore of Lake Biwa in a steady drizzle. The air was saturated with moisture, his clothes clung uncomfortably, and both rider and horse were sore from the wooden saddle. This was the fifteenth day of the watery month, in the rainy season. The road had long since become a muddy track where puddles hid deep pits in which a horse could break its leg. It became clear that he could not reach his home in the capital but would have to spend the night in Otsu.

Otsu was the legendary place of parting, a symbol of grief and yearning in poetry and prose. In Otsu, wives or parents would bid farewell, perhaps forever, to their husbands or sons when they left the capital to begin their service in distant provinces of the country. Akitada himself used to feel uneasy about his return on such occasions. But those days seemed in a distant past now. He cared little what lay ahead.

At dusk he entered a dense forest, and darkness closed in about him, falling with the misting rain from the branches above and creeping from the dank shadows of the woods. When he could no longer see the road clearly, he dismounted. Leading his tired horse, he trudged onward in squelching boots and sodden straw rain cape and thought of death.

He was still in the forest when a child's whimpering roused him from his grief. But when he stopped and called out, there was no answer, and all was still again except for the dripping rain. He was almost certain the sound had been human, but the eeriness of a child's pitiful weeping in this lonely, dark place on his lonely, dark journey seemed too cruel a coincidence. This was the first night of the three-day O-bon festival, the night when the spirits of the dead return to their homes to visit before departing for another year.

If his own son's soul was seeking its way home also, Yori would not find his father there. Would he cry for him out of the darkness? Akitada shivered and shook off his sick fancies. Such superstitions were for simpler, more trusting minds. How far was Otsu?