The Houseguest (16 page)

To the credit of all of those on the Graves side, no one even feinted in the direction of pretending that the ruthless-sounding speculations as to how to dispose of the corpse had not been serious. Both Doug and Bobby silently and promptly returned to their seats. It was Audrey who spoke.

“We were only doing what we had to. You can't blame us for that.”

“You're wrong,” said Chuck. “I'm your guest. I can blame you for everything. That's the beauty of being in my position, you see. And by ‘everything' I mean either failures or successes, as unlikely as it would be that you'd have any of the latter. You people give a new meaning to the word ‘inept.' For example, why didn't it occur to someone to take my pulse?”

Lydia said, almost involuntarily, “I guess we were too eager to believe we had gotten rid of you!”

The houseguest lowered his eyes briefly. When he brought them up, anyone seeing him for the first time would surely have believed him a man of guileless virtue. “You'll say anything to me, won't you? I'm supposed to have no feelings that can be hurt. Only
you
are sensitive, isn't that it? You don't eat my food, you insult me to my face, but why not? I'm not a member of your select little crowd. I'm not good enough for your courtesy. My room isn't even in the main house, but rather out there in that godforsaken garage.” His face displayed what for all the world looked like genuine bitter indignation. “Let me ask you: who was your darky before I showed up?”

This outrageous speech seemed to have no effect whatever on her in-laws, but Lydia was provoked by it. “You're actually pretending to be
our
victim?”

Chuck shrugged. “Did
I
just hit any of
you
in the head with lethal intent? Then sit here at the dinner table, the meal going cold, and callously discuss how to get rid of the body?”

“I didn't try to kill you,” Lydia protested. “My God, I never before hit anyone with a bottle. I did it without thinking, because I was desperate. It was really not even personal.” She was beginning to despise herself for this pleading, but she could not stop. “It was just to get out of an impossible situation.”

Chuck raised his brow. “I suppose it never even occurred to you simply to ask me to leave? Wouldn't that be worth trying before you resorted to murder? You're more depraved than I thought. Human life means so little?” He shook his head, took up knife and fork, and began to eat. But hardly had he tasted the first mouthful when he spat the food back onto his plate. “It's cold now,” he said petulantly. “See what you've done? You people aren't civilized.”

Audrey seemed peculiarly stung by this comment. “Oh,” said she, “but
you
are?
You?
You shouldn't even be here. You weren't invited, and nobody knows you. We would be well within our rights to ask you to leave. I agree that murder may not be the right answer, but you have certainly tried our patience.”

The houseguest pushed away from the table. “Isn't that nice?” he asked. “Try to kill me and then excuse yourselves with sophistic reasons. I haven't laid a hostile hand on anyone in this house. You people really stink.” He abruptly stood up. “Now clean up this kitchen! You've got fifteen minutes. That's more than enough time for the four of you.” He strode out the passage to the dining room. His soft-soled shoes made little sound, and one could not be sure whether he had continued on or had stopped and was lurking within earshot.

Lydia therefore put her finger against her lips in the hush-hush signal, but Bobby perversely chose to disregard it and speak in a louder voice than normal.

“Wow,” said he. “How hopeless can we get!”

Doug scowled at his son. “None of that defeatist talk. We've had a few setbacks, that's true, but nothing more. This thing is far from being in the final innings.” He looked at Lydia. “Better leave the strong-arm stuff to me in the future.”

“It's just that I had the opportunity,” she said, her eye on the doorway through which Chuck had departed.

Doug nodded. “I'm not criticizing you. But whether or not you have the physical strength to pull off a trick like that, you are unlikely to have the psychic fortitude—unless you happen to be awfully unnatural.” He grinned quickly so as to dispose of that possibility. “You're no killer.”

“But I didn't even want to hurt him!”

“Well, now you're flirting with incredulity,” said her father-in-law. “You don't hit someone in the head with a bottle—”

“I wanted him to let us alone! I admit it wasn't well thought out.”

“Well, we've got our orders,” said Audrey, rising and beginning to clear the table. With a little toss of her well-groomed head, she added, “I'm just relieved I didn't have to eat this terrible dry rice. That's the one good thing that came of this matter.”

“Just a moment,” Lydia said. “Can you tell me one good reason why we should do as he says?”

“Now don't start that,” Bobby said urgently. “We don't want to get in worse trouble than we're already in. From now on we can't afford any more of this impulsive indulgence of our emotions.”

In annoyance Lydia addressed the doorway. “Are you taking notes, Chuck?” To Bobby she said sourly, “He's listening to all of this, you know.”

But Bobby winced and made violent gestures. Only now did it occur to her that perhaps he had, all this while, been speaking disingenuously, that it had been she who had not understood that what
he
said, at least, was for Chuck's benefit. She nodded vigorously, but the gesture seemed only to irritate him.

“I envy you, Lyd,” said he, shaking his chin. “I wish I could share your amusement, but I'm really scared. We keep getting deeper in this trouble, like quicksand, the more we struggle to get out of it. Maybe we should just give up all resistance and accept the situation. Chuck may tend toward the tyrannical, but what can he do if we simply say, ‘Okay, you win. From now on we'll do our best to carry out your commands. You're a reasonable man. You have attained your goal. What can we do to help you enjoy the fruits of your victory?'”

Unless this was hypocrisy with the purpose of deceiving the listening houseguest, it was contemptible. In either case Lydia felt she had no option but to assist Audrey in clearing the table. She scraped the contents of her own plate and Chuck's into the pedal can that was revealed by opening the under-sink cabinet door. As she carried the plates towards the dishwasher, she saw through the back-of-counter windows that parallel headlight beams had penetrated the now established darkness of the parking area. Above the clatter being made by the others, no engine sound could be heard, and the silence of this event, and the slow speed with which it was conducted, suggested the sinister rather than the arrival of aid. Were Chuck's confederates now joining him?

To Doug she said, “God! Look here.”

Doug arrived at the window just as the door of the vehicle opened and its interior was illuminated. He recognized, from the wide-brimmed hat, Lyman Finch, who though dressing like a sheriff was rather the police chief and indeed, except for a couple of part-timers, the entire force on the island, where crime had never been a major problem.

“The cops are here!” he said. “Our bacon is saved!” He chose to be jocular because now that the danger was at an end it seemed in retrospect to have been negligible. He was almost embarrassed to have played a part in the exaggeration of the possible menaces provided by Chuck Burgoyne. Thus by the time Finch, a large, ponderous figure, had lumbered to the kitchen door, Doug was on the verge of levity.

“Lyman!” he cried, flinging the door open. “What brings you to our humble abode?” He had known the man since they both were boys. Lyman in fact had as a teenager worked for an uncle whom Doug's father hired for sometime landscape work: large chunks of stone were to be relocated on the property, requiring oxlike labor performed mostly by the brawny lad, who had since those days put on an additional fifty pounds of belly and jowl.

Finch stayed on the outside step. “Phone trouble?”

Doug sighed. “In fact, yes, we do have. We—”

“Lots of people do, all over the island,” said Finch. “They's working on it. You have a emergency, you send up a flare. We'll be right on ya.”

“Flare?”

“Get a gun off one of your tubs.”

It seemed incredible to Doug that on a small island with only a few other families as prominent as his, Lyman could be unaware that he had never personally used a boat since childhood. He decided momentarily to put aside the matter of flares. “Come on in, Lyman. Have a cup of coffee.”

Lyman stubbornly lingered where he was. “Sour stomach,” said he. “But if you got gin?”

“Please come in,” said Doug. “I mentioned coffee because I thought you might be on duty.” He realized it sounded like a criticism and would have regretted making it had not Finch's reaction been anything but indignant.

“Oh, I am. But I got a hollow leg. It don't have no effect on me.” Having said which the chief lurched into the kitchen and staggered to the table. He seized the back of a free chair and hurled the seat under his bulk, which was further widened by the accessory-belt below the knitted waistband of his jacket, a quilted, high-gloss garment in dark green with no insignia in evidence (so that, as with the unmarked jeep, he could use it in off-duty, civilian hours). The wide-brimmed hat, however, displayed a dead-centered bright chromium badge of office.

“Hyah,” he said indiscriminately to Bobby and the women. It was obvious that the man was drunk. Staring at Lydia, he asked, not unkindly, “And who might you be, sister?”

Doug had no option but to play along at least for the moment.

Bobby's face was contorted. “What's going on here? Aren't you going to tell him—”

Doug cut him off. “Come on, we'll find the gin together.” He took his son by the elbow and more or less forcibly conveyed him from the room into the butler's pantry in the passage to the dining room. Chuck had last been seen there, but he was gone now.

Bobby broke away and petulantly opened the cabinet above the wet bar. “Here's the damned gin.”

“Lower your voice,” said Doug. “Look, that fat bastard is already stinking drunk. He'd be no match for Chuck. He's a stupid hayseed even when sober. I think our best hope is to get him even drunker, till he passes out, and then I'll take his gun.”

Bobby wore a quizzical scowl. “Are we back to the idea of killing Chuck?”

“No need for that now. We'll have a weapon of our own, and transportation.”

“So we'll run?”

“Unless I miss my guess, once Chuck sees that I am armed, and with a working vehicle as well, he'll pull in his horns, maybe even become downright submissive. We'll load him into Lyman's jeep, haul him out some miles down the highway, and leave him there. Oh, of course we'll take his own gun away.”

“That's it?” Bobby asked in apparent outrage, gesturing with the gin bottle. “You're not even going to have him arrested?”

“For what? To my knowledge he hasn't committed an identifiable crime.” Doug grimaced. “In fact, Lydia assaulted
him.
He could make trouble on that matter, if he wanted to.”

Bobby lowered his face. As a child he had had positively golden locks, to maintain which he would by now have had to resort to artificial means, and therefore his head looked somewhat dingy. He had none of the Graves features: the strong nose, firm chin, nut-brown extra-fine hair. “You're taking his side now?”

“Don't be foolish. I'm trying to speak of what's possible. I am after all a member of the legal profession. I am obliged to be rational. I assure you that Chuck has yet to break the law—even in the case of the sweaters your mother asserts he removed from her room. Until he takes them from the premises, he really has not committed theft.” He accepted the bottle of gin from his son. “This thing superficially seems simple: an intruder has invaded our domicile and therefore all right is on our side. Not so! It isn't a matter of justice.”

Seemingly stunned by this information, Bobby lingered behind as Doug returned to the kitchen, where Lyman's sweaty, red-faced grin was fixed on Lydia.

“—believe it,” the chief was saying. “I've lived in the country all my life, and I never before seen that kind of stuff you city folk call fun. By God I don't mind telling you I got real mad when right up there on the big screen out in what used to be a field of rye, where you could see it all up and down the county road, there was this girl taking it up the rear end from a little skinny sumbitch, but he had one on him you wouldn't believe.” He simulated the colossal member in reference by extending his right forearm and forming a fist at its end, measuring it with a left hand bladed into the crease of the elbow. “My littlest was in the car at the time, we's coming back late from the mother-in-law's, over Grampton, and she wakes up and looks out and says, ‘Oooh, what's that man doing to her heinie?'”

Doug shuddered. “Here's your gin, Lyman.”

The chief snatched the bottle away and glared at him. “Wasn't for you city people, they wouldn't try to put a porn drive-in out here, and you know it.” His leer quickly toured Lydia's body. “But I ain't got nothing against good clean sex. I like it. I like it a
whole
lot.”