Chapter 39 #3
The boldness of the kitchen raider suggested three things.
First, he didn’t care if one of us caught him at his meal; he had no fear of arrest—or of how an encounter would end.
Second, he had been hungry, famished, perhaps because he’d been hiding in the house since morning with nothing to eat.
Third, he came here with Captain and scaled the estate wall while Farnam’s unexpected visit had drawn everyone’s attention to the front gate; he slipped into the house while we were in negotiations on the great lawn, in the absence of birds.
He must be the boy whom Captain called Jack.
The boy who murdered his cousin Bobby for a train-flattened lucky penny.
The freak whose appearance frightened people too much for his folks to take him into town.
The psychopath who was Captain’s obedient puppet—until he didn’t want to be.
No doubt he’d hidden in the Bram to report to Captain about whether the pitchman’s demands were being met.
He must be extremely clever and gifted in some way that made it possible to elude the Pinkerton agents hour after hour.
Now he knew Captain was not going to be paid the ransom.
That was surely whom he had called from Franklin’s home office.
That was why he sounded angry and eager.
In my mind’s eye appeared the moonlit meadow from my dream—the screaming horse, the pale and long-limbed rider.
As I hurried to Gertie’s room with Harry, a sudden and sharper anxiety spurred my heart and pinched my breath.
Depending on the ruthlessness of the author, fraught moments like this in novels often led to the targeted girl—me—being abducted to encourage swift payment of the ransom that a mere threat hadn’t yet pried loose from her parents.
There was a lesser chance that the enraged intruder would murder her.
Sometimes in dire moments, life mirrors fiction as much as fiction reflects life, and then we speak solemnly of the “human tragedy.”
This was not a situation where etiquette required a polite knock and a soft-voiced query.
The door to the master suite was not locked.
This was still the Bram. As long as the exterior doors were secure, there had never been a need to lock a room door, and habits were hard to change.
The bedroom lay in deep darkness, for the moon was low in the eastern sky and the windows were untouched by its ghost light.
Harry eased the door shut behind us before switching on his Eveready.
My heart quieted a bit and breath came to me when I saw that Gertie was asleep in clean, bloodless sheets.
When I spoke her name, she woke and sat up and squinted into the light and yawned and said, “I thought we were done with that Clyde Tombaugh stuff years ago.”
“Ssshhhhh,” I warned. “Someone’s in the house.”
“Someone dangerous,” Harry clarified.
I whispered, “We’ll go to your parents and barricade their door while they phone for help.”
Gertie turned back the covers and got out of bed and slid her feet into slippers. She yawned extravagantly, her manner languid as she pulled up her pajama pants and straightened the rumpled collar of her top. “I suppose there’s no time to put on a suit of armor.”
“I’ve got a gun,” Harry said.
“That’s why I’d like armor.” Her slippers didn’t match the feet they were on, so she sat on the floor to use her hands with them.
“Are you awake?” I asked.
“I used to be. I’m sure I will be again.”
Harry looked at me. “How can she be half-asleep and still hit us with good smart-ass lines.”
“Why,” said Gertie, “can Satchmo always blow such a hot horn?” She threw aside her slippers. “To hell with it. I’ll go barefoot.”
The journey from Gertie’s room to Franklin and Loretta’s suite didn’t entail a trek as long and arduous as the one that Gary Cooper braved through in Fighting Caravans or the one John Wayne undertook in Stagecoach.
Nevertheless, we felt we needed a basic strategy on which we agreed before leaving this room, where we had a sense of safety that was comforting though entirely false.
The idea was to go from here to there without calling attention to ourselves in case the monster from the Middle West was prowling for prey.
Gertie would bring her Eveready but switch it on only if, in a crisis, our Harry shouted, More light!
I would carry his Eveready so that he could have both hands free for the pistol, but I wouldn’t turn it on until he required it.
Harry would lead with Gertie at his side.
I would follow, walking backward to be sure we couldn’t be surprised from behind.
Except for the call for more light, we would not speak even if a really good smart-ass remark occurred to one of us.
Devising a strategy was meant to give confidence, but in some cases, such as this one, the fact that a strategy was necessary could exacerbate one’s sense of danger.
As we moved out of the room and took up our positions in the hallway, though I was a freak and had known other freaks who gave me no cause for alarm, I was afraid of Midwest Jack.
He who murdered for a penny. He who would slaughter whomever Captain told him to slaughter.
Why would my subconscious, which sometimes showed me what was to come, portray him as a mantis that would take a baby from its cradle and devour it?
I was afraid for myself, but my greater fear was for this family that had been so kind to me.
Midwest Jack was here because of me. By sheltering me, the family became vulnerable to Captain’s greed, to his rage at being rejected, and to something horrific that had come into their home.
I heard the pitchman’s voice in memory: In the end, it’s only blood the boy wants, and he can’t help himself.
Harry, Gertie, and I crept warily along the west-wing hallway, where the sconces were so dimmed that shadows owned more than half the territory.
Any one of the closed doors of rooms to the left and right might pop open like a jack-in-the-box lid and spring Midwest Jack among us.
As we reached the junction with the main hall, even those gauzy lights went off, and a blackness equal to that at the bottom of an oceanic abyss washed around us.
We could have ventured forward in the pitch dark by staying on the carpet runner until we judged that we were opposite the master suite.
However, the lights had not gone off on their own, and the possibility that the freak of freaks was approaching us seemed to be just short of a certainty.
“More light,” Harry ordered. Gertie and I clicked on our Evereadys and let out our held breath when we saw that Captain’s proxy loomed neither before nor behind us.
To hell with strategy and caution. We hurried to the master bedroom door.
Harry knuckled it with three quick raps and then three more, a minimum courtesy.
We entered without waiting for a response.
Either Loretta and Franklin had been unable to turn off their minds and get the rest they needed, or they were able to shake off dreams faster than Gertie could.
They were out of bed even as our lights lanced the darkness, fumbling with switches on their bedside lamps, which availed them nothing.
Rafael, roused from sleep, romped this way and that in expectation that this sudden late-night confab was sure to be great fun.
Our elders sought flashlights in nightstand drawers while asking what was wrong, what was happening.
“Someone’s in the house,” Harry said. “I sort of heard the guy talking to someone on the phone, probably to Farnam. Now he’s shut down the lighting system. ”
“He’s been here since this morning,” I said as Gertie engaged the simple lockset.
I put down my flashlight and braced the headrail of a chair under the doorknob, wishing there were a deadbolt.
“He must have been told to monitor you and be sure you were getting the hundred thousand together. Instead, Pinkerton showed up.”
Most people would not cope well when informed that a murderous creature like Midwest Jack was loose in their house, as frightening an entity as any in the creepier films by Fritz Lang.
Most people would either panic and take ill-advised action likely to get them killed, or they would be paralyzed by the prospect of imminent death and be unable to confront the mortal threat effectively.
Franklin and Loretta were not those kind of people.
His mother—afflicted by Munchausen syndrome by proxy—had poisoned his sister to death for the sympathy it got her; Loretta lost her entire family in an earthquake; both of them survived an orphanage run by grifters.
More to the point, together they swam through the swamp of corruption that was the movie industry in their time, yet they had held fast to their principles and an admirable moral code.
After all that, a monster in the house was more of an inconvenience than a terror.