The Houseguest (18 page)

Even Lydia had lost some of her earlier spunk. “Do we just cower in here till they eventually run out of ammunition?”

“I'll be happy to hear suggestions,” Doug said reprovingly.

Bobby had a hand to his ear. “They've stopped, haven't they?”

While everybody strained to listen, a voice came from outside the door. Owing to the intervening padding, it was somewhat muffled. “Let me in!” Though slightly distorted, it sounded as though produced by Chuck, but Doug certainly made no answer.

Unnecessarily, Bobby whispered, “It's a trick.”

“Doug? It's Chuck. Lyman's out of control. He's gunning for me now!” Chuck was a good actor. His terror would have seemed real enough to someone without experience of him. Doug knew that any response whatever would undoubtedly evoke an impassioned bogus argument and therefore stayed silent.

“It's the alcohol sets him off,” Chuck cried. “A chemical reaction. I forgot about that. Maybe I never quite believed it. But now he's turned homicidal. For the love of God, let me in before he finds his way back here!”

Lydia came close to Doug and spoke in an undertone.
“Could
he just be telling the truth?”

“No,”
Doug whispered with intensity.

She repeated,
“Could
he?”

It annoyed him to have to explain. “I've known Lyman for years. Drunk or sober, he's not dangerous on his own. If he is now, it's because Chuck is manipulating him. Didn't you notice how he pulled in his horns as soon as Audrey denounced him? And he was then already full of alcohol. He's a moron and a coward.”

Chuck now shouted, “No, Lyman, don't do it!” A loud shot was heard, followed by more anguished pleading from the houseguest. “Now, that came close enough! Put that pistol down before you do something you'll regret to the end of your life.”

Another shot was heard. The gunfire was no longer without reverberation, at such close range and contained within the low-ceilinged hallway. Nothing could have been louder. The mattress-and-furniture barrier looked pitiful now.

There was one last supplication from Chuck, followed by three shots in quick succession. Against his will, Doug listened for the sound of a body striking the uncarpeted floor, but of course heard nothing. Chuck was too arrogant to give the hoax the kind of detail it required.

Bobby said, in a voice of more than normal volume, pain in his pale eyes, “Maybe he was telling—”

Doug cut him off. “Can't you see it's fake? Don't go weak on me now. You've just been doing such a good job… .”

Bobby's eyes changed. “Do you mean it?” He seemed to be genuinely moved.

“Yes, I do, son. You ought to know that.” Doug suppressed an urge to say, “In case we don't come out of this.” Sentimentality could serve only the enemy.

“But what can we do now, Dad?” Bobby asked plaintively.

“Absolutely nothing. I know that's hardest to manage, but you see,
doing something'
s what's got us in so deep with Chuck.”

Bobby's nose was wrinkled. “I thought it was just the reverse: that we didn't do enough when he was moving into a position of power, that we could have stopped him in his tracks if we had got him when he was first starting out.”

Doug shook his head. “On the contrary! We paid too much attention to him, flattered him too much. He couldn't have got anywhere if he had been ignored.”

Bobby made a stubborn nose. “But what about him installing himself as a proper houseguest without an invitation from anybody? Without even
knowing
any of us! The fantastic nerve! But it worked.”

“The last chapter hasn't been written yet,” Doug said, with a narrowing of eyes. “Who can say what the end will be? Lots of things give the illusion of success at the outset, but that's all it is, an illusion. Oh, I'm not saying we're in what would seem a powerful position, barricaded here and unarmed, with not one but two adversaries frothing at the mouth to get to us, both armed to the teeth. I'm not saying this is the ground on which I'd fight by choice. But they haven't got us, have they? And aren't we in a better situation now than if we were still in the kitchen?”

Bobby nodded but suddenly he seemed to be thinking of something else. In a moment he said, “I've got an idea.”

Doug was not pleased to have his principle defied no sooner than it had been enunciated. “I thought I was just saying that we should sit tight, do nothing at all?”

Bobby hypocritically nodded agreement, but proceeded to suggest a course of action. “Now here's how it goes: we pour a puddle of water here, just in front of the door. Then we cut off the cord of the desk lamp, cut if off at the lamp end, leaving the plug end intact. We scrape off the insulation, baring the two wires. We plug one end in the wall socket, and we put the two bare wires into the puddle of water. We take away the barrier and let Chuck in. He steps into the water, and
boom
, he gets the juice.”

“If Chuck is wearing rubber-soled shoes,” said Doug, “it wouldn't work.”

Bobby stretched his lower lip halfway to his nose. “What do you think, Lyd?”

They both turned to her, Doug wryly: every time he began to approve of Bobby, he soon had reason to feel otherwise. Even in an extreme situation, the boy could rarely rise above his fundamental tendency towards fecklessness.

But Lydia was not to be seen. Nor, for that matter, was Audrey. Hearing a sound from the bathroom, Doug and Bobby went together to its open door.

Facing them, knees inside, Lydia sat on the frame of the high small window in the alcove—that from which Doug had seen her in the afternoon: she was slender enough to do that. Audrey had apparently helped her gain the height and was at the moment holding the little white stool on which she had climbed.

Audrey spoke to Doug in what he heard as a self-righteous tone. “Lydia's going to take the attack to
them.”

With a cursory wave, his daughter-in-law lifted her arms over her head, hands out the window, grasped something above, swung her legs up and out, and dropped from sight. This was done as if by a veteran gymnast, so deftly as to convert any negative feelings that Doug might have had to honest admiration.

He went to the window and looked out, but could not see her. Near the house it was always very dark back there at night, and the segment of the pool area could be distinguished only when the moon was more assertive than it was at the moment.

“She pushed the screen out,” Audrey said. “She knew how to do that.”

Lydia moved along the wall by touch. She could see nothing, but had no fear of stepping on a loose rake or kicking a lost football. She was not at home; the Graveses hired people who came regularly to tend the grounds, more Finches presumably. Her father on the other hand hired men pretentiously called gardeners (and they did plant special trees and gaudy bushes, all of which usually soon died), but were easily recognized as being the same guys who did freelance masonry, housepainting, and roofing, and on Friday nights played cards with their employer. They were the Santinis, more or less, comprising relatives and friends: another version of the Finches, except that there was not so much, if any, separation between them and their clients. Her brothers were supposed to help with outdoor work, and their habitual failure to do so was the occasion for much clamor and threats of mayhem by her father, yet she could not remember a time when such vengeance was actually wreaked. Whereas as a young female person she had now and again been denied certain privileges when she failed to discharge her kitchen duties to the letter: table-clearing, dish-scraping, loading the dishwasher in a way that would not result in broken glassware. Had she been the daughter of an earlier era, according to her mother, she would have had to assist in the washing of dishes by hand and perhaps clean bathrooms as well. But she was punished worse for using foul language, and worst of all for getting slightly tipsy on apricot brandy at the age of thirteen: the birthday party was canceled at the last minute, and it was left to her to explain to her favorite boy. But when her brother, under one influence or another, totaled the Continental, so great was her parents' relief with his escape from personal injury that he was not even grounded for a day.

Lydia did not nurse a real grudge, but the fact remained that the kitchen was the room for which she had least preference in any house. In the apartment they had shared at college, she and Bobby lived on big bags of apples and takeout from the nearest restaurant, which happened to be Korean.

This house might be amusing when one was indoors, but circumnavigating it in the darkness did not bring affection for the architect. How she longed to be back with the good old banal rectilinear, unnatural though it might be amongst foliage and granite outcroppings. More than once she had to leave a cul-de-sac or backtrack from an impasse, but eventually she blundered upon the rank of lighted casement windows that distinguished the kitchen.

An empty kitchen—which could have been expected if Lyman was truly stalking Chuck through the labyrinthine house. But the deserted table, with its horizontaled, dead-soldier gin bottle, would also make sense if Chuck was playing his possum game in that back hallway long after the police chief had driven off into the night, a much more likely state of affairs given the absence of Lyman's jeep from the parking area, where she next took her investigation.

The two vehicles belonging to the Graveses stood alone once again. Her now established night vision could see that and in fact more: the tires of both station wagon and compact sedan were flat and, as she confirmed by touch, permanently ruined. All eight had been slashed.

Now that was definitely Lyman's work, but was it mere impulsive spite or rather part of Chuck's master plan? For that matter, had the chief made his appearance for the reason he had named or had his arrival too been according to the grand design?

She returned to the house and entered the kitchen via the screen door, to the upper panel of which numerous insects adhered, seeing which she was retroactively aware that she had been bitten by multitudinous mosquitoes while traveling around the outer wall of the house; and with a significant fall of temperature at sunset, characteristic of the shore, the night was cool for her thin shirt. But some natural economy of being had kept these uncomfortable facts from her attention while she was outdoors and admitted them only now when she was safe inside.

She had expected the situation to be much worse: namely, that Lyman would still be on the premises, pistol in hand. If Chuck was once again on his own, what could be done to deal with him that had not already been tested and failed? In a sense the coming of Lyman had opened up new possibilities, which were now nullified by his departure.

While Lydia was dealing with such reflections, Chuck himself sidled furtively into the kitchen. Each was startled by the other.

“Lyman's gone?”

“You're asking me?” she said with disdain. “He's
your
partner.”

The houseguest showed her an uneasy smile. “I won't question how you happen to be at large while the rest of them are barricaded in their cowardly fashion back there, but I congratulate you on finally coming to your senses. Now let's get going before he comes back with the whole carload.” He was moving towards the screen door.

“What do you mean?”

“He went to fetch the others. Sunday nights, they all drink in the back room of the grocery store. … . Do I have to get more explicit?”

“I don't care what you get,” said Lydia, “except lost. Unfortunately, however, now that you've finally decided to leave, you can't—unless this is another trick.”

Chuck winced as though genuinely hurt. “Look, I just risked my life again for your sake. Lyman wanted to go for you. When I stopped him, he pulled his gun on me!”

Lydia stared at him for a moment, then used, uncharacteristically, a scatological term.

“All right,” Chuck cried, “call it bullshit, but let's just get out of here before he comes back with that bunch. I'm related to them, but I tell you frankly they're animals when they're full of beer. And they've got nothing to fear: Lyman's the law on this island.”

Lydia felt a chill, but she was nevertheless pleased to frustrate Chuck even though she herself would share in his disadvantage. “Didn't you hear me? Nobody can leave now. All the tires have been slashed.”

Chuck pursed his lips. “I wouldn't smile if I were you. You're facing a gang-bang, unless I can stop them somehow.”

She resisted fright with anger. “It's because of you we're in this mess. And they're
your
people!”

“Maybe I'm being contrite,” he said sadly. “Maybe it's no longer just a matter of pulling a malicious joke on those to whom it would be of no permanent consequence.”

“Oh, really? I want you to know that I think you're garbage.”

“That's too bad,” said Chuck. “Because maybe I care for you. Can't you ever put your self-righteousness aside and consider that possibility?” For an instant he had succeeded in getting her attention, but then squandered his chance by adding, “Can't you
ever
be more than the little smart-ass opportunist?”