wildebeests, and you have no common sense at all.”
“Wildebeests?” I said.
“Or Siamese fighting fish.”
“I prefer to think
We walked to my apartment. “I suppose,” Susan said, “we could settle for ox. Not as strong but nearly as smart.”
Susan went to the apartment. I went to the basement and got some more firewood from the storage area and carried an armful up the back stairs. It was early afternoon. We had lunch. We watched the news. The travel ban was still with us.
“At least wait until morning,” Susan said. “Get an early start.”
“And until then?”
“We can read by the fire.”
“When that gets boring, I was thinking we could make shadow pictures on the wall. Ever see my rooster?”
Susan said, “I’ve never heard it called that.” I put my arm around her shoulder and squeezed her against me and we began to giggle. We spent the rest of the day before the fire on the couch. Mostly we read.
By seven thirty the next morning I was on the road. I had a flashlight in my hip pocket, a short prying tool stuck in my belt, my packet of floor plans in my shirt pocket, and my usual jackknife and gun. Susan kissed me goodbye without getting up, and I left without hearing any more wildebeest remarks. I walked up Marlborough to the Mass. Ave. Bridge along a quiet and narrow lane, one plow-blade wide, with the snow head-high on either side of me. Below the bridge the Charles was frozen and solid white. No sign of the river. Memorial Drive had one lane cleared in either direction, and I turned west. I had learned to walk some years ago at government expense when I had walked from Pusan to the Yalu River and then back. I moved right along. After the first mile or so I had a nice rhythm and even felt just a trickle of sweat along the line of my backbone.
It was shorter than I thought. I was on Trapelo Road in Belmont by ten forty-five. By eleven I was standing two houses away from the English place, across the street. Now if I found Rachel Wallace, I wouldn’t have to walk back. The cops would drive me. Maybe.
The house was three stories high. Across the front was a wide veranda. A long wing came off the back, and at the end of the wing there was a carriage house with a little pointed cupola on top. Mingo probably parked the family Caddies in the carriage house. There was a back door, which led through a back hall into the kitchen, according to Julie. Off the back hall there were back stairs. The veranda turned one corner and ran back along the short side of the house, the one without the wing. Big french doors opened out onto the library, where I’d talked with English before. The yard wasn’t as big as you’d expect with a house like that. Last century when they’d built the house there was plenty of land, so no one had wanted it. Now there wasn’t and they did. The neighbor’s house was maybe fifty feet away on one side, a street was ten feet away on the other, and the backyard was maybe a hundred feet deep. A chain-link fence surrounded the property, except in front, where there was a stone wall, broken by the driveway. There was no sign of the driveway now and very little of the fence in the high snow. It took me nearly two and a half hours of clambering about through snowbanks and side streets to get all of the layout of the grounds and to look at the house from all sides. When I got through, I was sweaty underneath my jacket, and the shoulder rig I was wearing chafed under my left arm. I figured it was better than walking ten miles with the gun jiggling in a hip holster.
There were people out now, shoveling and walking to the store for supplies, and a lot of laughter and neighborly hellos and a kind of siege mentality that made everyone your buddy. I studied the house. The shutters on the top-floor windows were closed, all of them, on the left side and in front. I strolled around the corner and up the side street to the right of the house. The top-floor shutters were closed there, too. I went on down the road till I could see the back shutters.
I knew where I’d look first if I ever got in there. That was the only detail to work out. Julie had told me there was a burglar alarm, and that her mother had always set it before she went to bed. Going in before Mom went to bed would seem to be the answer to that. It would help if I knew who was in there. Mingo, probably. I saw what looked like his tan Thunderbird barely showing through a snowdrift back by the carriage house. There’d be a maid or two probably, and Momma and Lawrence. Whoever was in there when the storm came would be in there now. There were no tracks, no sign of shoveling, just the smooth white sea of snow out of which the old Victorian house rose like a nineteenth-century ship.
I thought about getting in. Trying the old I’m-from-the-power-company trick. But the odds were bad. English knew me, Mingo knew me. At least one of the maids knew me. If I got caught and they got wise, things would be worse. They might kill Rachel. They might kill me, if they could. And that would leave Rachel with no one looking for her the way I was looking for her. Hawk would find her eventually, but he wouldn’t have my motivation. Hawk’s way would be prompt though. Maybe he’d find her quicker. He’d hold English out a twenty-story window till English said where Rachel was.
I thought about that. It wasn’t a bad way. The question was, How many people would I have to go through to hang English out the window? There were probably at least five people in there—Mingo, English, Momma, and two maids—but the whole Vigilance Committee could be in there sharpening their pikes for all I knew.
It was two o’clock. Nothing was happening. People like English wouldn’t have to come out till April. They’d have food in the pantry and booze in the cellar and fuel in the tank and nothing to make winter inconvenient. Did they have a hostage in the attic? Why hadn’t there been some kind of communication? Why no more ransom notes or threats about canceling the books or anything? Had they been snowed out? I didn’t know any of the answers to any of the questions, and I could only think of one way to find out.
At two fifteen I waded through the snow, sometimes waist-deep, and floundered up to the front door and rang the bell. If they knew me, they knew me. I’d deal with that if it happened. A maid answered.
I said, “Mr. English, please.”
She said, “Who may I say is calling?”
I said, “Joseph E. McCarthy.”
She said, “Just a moment, please,” and started to close the door.
