fumbled in the holder’s dish, hoping to find a book of matches.
At which point an electric light blazed about and dazzled me. I started back, but before I could escape something terrible struck my face and I was blinded. The pain made me want to scream, but I could not even breathe, and, vainly gasping for air and with my hands scrabbling like claws at my scorching eyes, I collapsed.
PART TWO
THE POLICE ARRIVED FIVE MINUTES LATER; THEIR TWO CARS rocking and wailing down the dirt track, then skidding ferociously as they braked on the clam-shell turnaround. A young excited officer, his pistol drawn, burst through the open front door and shouted at me not to move.
“Oh, go away and grow up,” I said wearily. “Do I look as if I’m about to run away?”
My sight had half returned and, through the painful tears, I could just see that the girl who had attacked me was now sitting on the stairs holding an antique whaling harpoon that used to hang on my bedroom wall. She had not used the vicious harpoon to cripple me, but a squeegee bottle which now stood beside her on the steep stairway. “He broke in,” the girl explained laconically to the three policemen who now piled excitedly into the hallway. “He says his name is O’Neill. Dr. O’Neill.” She sounded scornful. In the last few moments I had learned that this was one very tough lady.
“Do you want me to call the rescue squad?” the first policeman asked, while an older officer knelt beside me and gently pulled my hands from my face.
“What did you do to him?” the older man asked the girl.
“Ammonia.”
“Jesus. Did you dilute it?”
“No way!”
“Jesus! Get some water, Ted. Can we use your kitchen, ma’am?”
“Through there.”
“You used ammonia?” the first policeman asked in awed disbelief.
“Squirted him good.” The girl showed the officers the liquid soap bottle that she had used to lacerate me through the banister rails. “I used to know a policeman in Los Angeles,” the girl explained, “and he taught me never to piss a psychopath off, just to put the bastard down fast. Ammonia does that, and it’s legal.” The last three words were added defensively.
“Sure is.” One of the policemen had fetched a saucepan of water from the kitchen. My breath was more or less normal now, but the pain in my eyes was atrocious. The officer poured water on my face while outside the house the police radios sounded unnaturally loud in the still, cold night air.
“We’ll take him away in a moment, ma’am,” the older policeman, a sergeant, reassured the girl.
“Then bury the bastard,” the girl said vindictively.
“What did you say your name was, mister?” the sergeant asked.
“My name,” I said as grandly as I could, “is Dr. James O’Neill,” and I fumbled in an inside pocket for my false passport.
“Careful!” The sergeant moved to restrain me, then relaxed as he saw I was not pulling a gun. “I know you!” he said suddenly.
I blinked at him. My sight was still foully blurred, but I recognized the sergeant as Ted Nickerson, a guy I had last seen in twelfth grade. Damn it, I thought, but this was not what I had planned! I had planned to disappear in Cape Cod for a few weeks, hidden from sight while my ship came home, and the last thing I needed was for the word to spread that I had returned to America as bait for Michael Herlihy or il Hayaween.
“You’re Paul Shanahan!” Ted exclaimed. “Which means—” He stopped, glancing at the girl.
“Which means this is my house,” I confirmed.
“It’s not his house,” the girl insisted. “I rent this place! I’ve got a five-year lease!” She was shivering in a nightdress and an old woollen bath robe. My old woollen bath robe. She had bare feet, long black hair, and an Oriental face.
“This is the Shanahan house.” Ted Nickerson confirmed the ownership uncomfortably. He was still frowning at me. “You are Paul, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Bullshit!” the girl said with an explosively indignant force on the second syllable. “The house belongs to a guy in Boston, a guy called Patrick McPhee.”
“McPhee’s my brother-in-law,” I told her. “He’s married to my sister Maureen. Maureen holds the keys to the place while I’m away, that’s all! She uses it for summer vacations and odd weekends, nothing more.”
The girl stared at me. I guessed that by using Maureen’s name I had convinced her I was not your usual rapist breaking and entering, but might in fact be telling the truth. Ted Nickerson was still frowning, perhaps thinking about my false name. “How’s your face, Paul?”
“Hurts like hell.”
“Ammonia’s bad stuff,” he said sympathetically, “real bad.”
“How was I to know?” The girl was on the defensive now. “He doesn’t knock, he just comes into the house…”
“Like he owns it?” I finished for her.
“Oh, shit!” she said angrily. “Then why the hell are you calling yourself Dr. O’Neill?”
“None of your damned business,” I snarled, then struggled to my feet. My eyes were still streaming with tears and my throat felt as if I had gargled with undiluted sulphuric acid, but I was recovering. “Who the hell put electric light in here?”
“I did,” the girl said defiantly. “I’m a painter. I need decent light to work.”
“Did you put in the telephone as well?” Ted Nickerson asked her.
“Sure did.”
“Mind if I use it?”
“Help yourself. In the kitchen.”
The girl edged tentatively down the stairs that Captain Starbuck had built as steep as the companionways on his old whaling ships. One policeman was out in the car, and the other two were hovering nervously by the open front door. “Can we close the front door?” the girl demanded. “I’m kind of chilly.”
“Sure, ma’am.”
I went through into the living room from where I could hear Sergeant Nickerson grunting into the telephone in the kitchen. I found the new light switch and, in the glow of a lamp, saw a box of tissues on a table by the low sofa and plucked out a handful which I used to scrub my eyes. The tissues helped, though the remnants of the ammonia still stung like the devil.
The room, except for the electric light and the paintings, had not changed much. It was panelled in old pale oak and its low beamed ceiling was formed by the pine planks of the dormer storey upstairs. It was a shipwright’s house with a main floor of pegged oak that the girl had thoughtfully protected from paint drips with a dropcloth. The wide stone hearth was filled with ash on which I threw the crumpled tissues.
“Do you really own the house?” The girl had followed me into the living room.
“Yes.”
“Hell!” she said angrily, then, with her arms protectively folded across her breasts, she walked to one of the small windows that stared eastward toward the ocean. “The mailman told me he didn’t think Patrick McPhee was the owner, but I thought that was just troublemaking gossip.”
“McPhee’s always been full of shit,” I said savagely. “Marrying him was the worst day’s work Maureen ever did. So how long have you been here?”
“Three years, but I don’t live here permanently. I come here whenever I need to, but I’ve got a place of my own in New York.”
“Manhattan?”
“Sure, where else?” She turned to glare at me, as though the night’s misadventures were all my fault. “I’m sorry about your eyes.” She spoke grudgingly.
