Jimmy the Stick (16 page)

And then Connie Nix's face replaced Connie Halloran's, and I remembered how she stood so close to me in that same little room just a few hours earlier. I finished the brandy and went upstairs.

The doors to all the bedrooms were closed. Still, I could hear drunken laughter coming from Flora's room, and saw light under the door to Catherine Pennyweight's suite. I knocked. She told me to come in.

Baby Ethan was kicking around in his crib. Mrs. Pennyweight was in her chair with a cup of tea. She was watching the baby intently.

“You going to keep the kid up here or do you want me to move him to the library?” I said by way of hello.

“He'll stay with me tonight. Something's not agreeing with him. Flora and Cameron probably got him too excited this afternoon.”

“OK, but you ought to know that I'm probably going to have to go back to the city soon. There are some things I need to take care of.”

“Yes, I understand you had some unpleasantness with a policeman. It will be fine, I'm sure.” She wasn't really paying any attention to me. She didn't care about anything but the kid.

As I left Mrs. Pennyweight's room, Cameron Rivers swung open Flora's door, and stood with one shoulder leaning on the frame. She wore a thin robe. The light reflected off the mirrored walls behind her was strong enough to reveal high, sharply pointed breasts, and a less focused pubic blur in the gap between her thighs. Her crooked leer was supposed to be sexy. Flora's laughter rang out, “Oh, Cammy, stop that. You are simply too wicked for words.”

I tried not to smile as I walked toward the stairs. The woman blocked my way.

“You know, you were quite rude with Titus and Teddy. They were just having a little fun. We're trying to cheer up dear Flora now that her husband has so callously abandoned her. Don't you think a young woman like her needs friends to brighten her spirits?”

She leaned forward, fingered the edge of my lapel, and gave me a big-eyed look. Flora peeked around from behind her and giggled. I guess they thought I'd be embarrassed by standing so close to a half-naked woman as she caressed my chest. I returned the favor and gave her tit a friendly honk.

She squealed. Mrs. Pennyweight threw open her door and said sternly, “What's going on out here?”

Flora and Cameron laughed harder and jumped back into her room. Mrs. Pennyweight gave me an angry stare.

It was quiet for the rest of the night. The trouble started just before dawn.

In the library, I heard faint noises from upstairs. Some movement, doors opening, quick footsteps. The house had thick walls, so at first I didn't make anything of it, and then the sounds stopped. A minute or two later, a door slammed and I heard a woman's loud scream from upstairs. It was a young woman, either Flora or Cameron. I grabbed my stick and was out in the big room when Flora yelled, “He's gone! They've stolen little Ethan!”

She ran to the balcony railing and looked down, terrified and sobbing. “He's gone, he's gone. They've taken him!”

In that moment, I felt fear so pure and strong it cramped my stomach. Fuck, I'd failed. The goddamn bloody doll was for real. Spence had asked me to do this one thing, to protect his son, and I'd completely screwed it up, and there was nothing I'd ever be able to do to make it right. Ethan wasn't my kid but I was responsible, and right then, maybe I understood a little of the horror that the Lindberghs were going through. But for me, it only lasted for that short terrifying moment.

Before I could even move toward the stairs, Mrs. Pennyweight appeared at the far end of the room. She came up from the basement by the servants' stairs, moving fast, with something in her arms. I hoped like hell it was the kid and saw that it was.

She ignored her hysterical daughter and said sharply, “Quinn, come with me. This is an emergency,” as she hurried past me to the front door.

We got outside as Oh Boy was swinging the big Duesenberg around a Pierce-Arrow that had been left out front. Oh Boy skidded to a stop, jumped out in his shirtsleeves, and flung open the back door. We piled in and were thrown back when he stomped on the gas.

She had the kid wrapped tightly in a blanket, so at first all I could see of him was a pale blue face, so blue it was scary. His eyes were closed and he was coughing or hiccupping and his breath was shallow.

“He's in distress,” she said as she pulled the blanket away and twisted around to face me on the seat with the baby kicking on her lap. “This has happened before but never this seriously. Here, take these.”

She unwrapped the blanket and gave me two corners to hold. Three crumpled empty boxes of the kid's special food fell to the floor. She turned Ethan over on his stomach and put her hands around his ribs. She squeezed and released then pulled his arms up and repeated the motions over and over again, as if she was forcing him to breathe evenly.

The big car skidded into a hard left turn when we got to the gate and Oh Boy gave it more gas and laid on the horn. A Model A truck appeared in the headlights, dead ahead of us. Oh Boy never flinched. He kept the Duesy steady right down the middle of the blacktop. The truck veered away and slid off the road.

When I looked through the back window, it was reversing onto the road and turning to follow us. More headlights appeared behind us and another car weaved on screeching tires around the Ford. It looked like both of them were trying to keep up with us.

The .38 in my coat pocket thumped against my leg. Everything was happening so fast that I didn't understand what was going on. Hell, right then all I felt was relief. The kid may have been sick but he hadn't been snatched. It didn't even occur to me to wonder where we were going.

Oh Boy swung into another hard left at a three-way intersection and we slid across the seat. Mrs. Pennyweight lost her rhythm with the breathing exercise and yelled, “Goddammit, Oliver, slow down! If you kill us, I'll fire you!”

He paid no attention. Oh Boy was like that. He may have been too much of a worrywart, but once he got set on a task, he stuck with it. He slowed to make another left-hand turn and then sped up again. Looking through the back window, I got the impression of a big metal gate and trees on both sides. A little later, the front of a building filled the windshield and Oh Boy slowed. He followed a curved drive around it to a narrow road.

We lurched to a stop and Mrs. Pennyweight was out the car before it had settled on its springs. She and Oh Boy ran to a set of double doors, where two nurses in white were waiting to take the kid. They all hustled inside.

I turned off the engine and pocketed the keys. A nurse came running out, grabbed the crumpled food boxes from the backseat, and ran back into the building. Moments later, I heard the sound of another car, and the Pierce-Arrow that I'd seen earlier slid around the corner to a stop. Flora and Cameron in nightclothes and long coats tumbled out of the car and ran into the building. I found my stick.

Inside was a kind of admitting room with a counter at the back and corridors on either side. It had the nasty alcohol-medicine smell of a hospital. There was nobody behind the counter. I heard voices down one of the corridors and followed them to a crowded white treatment room with bright lights and a bed, where Cloninger and the nurses buzzed over little Ethan.

I couldn't see him, of course, but through the babble I heard Mrs. Pennyweight say, “When you had him yesterday, did you feed him anything?”

Flora answered, her voice rising, “What are you talking about, he's my son. We only gave him some . . . and then you steal him right out from under me and frighten me nearly to death. Even
you
can't do that, Mother!”

Figuring that there was little chance anybody would try to kidnap the boy in that crowd, I wandered back outside and got my first good look at Cloninger's acorn academy in the early light. A massive, new-looking four-story building with narrow windows rose up on one side. It reminded me of the Tombs back in the city but not nearly as big. The grounds were as carefully tended as a golf course and I could see five or six smaller older redbrick buildings nearby. I couldn't tell what they were for. There was something cold and strange about the whole setup. It gave me the same creepy feeling I got when we first drove in through the dark woods. This was a place where bad things happened.

I was sitting in the Duesenberg when Oh Boy came out. He fumbled his makings from his shirt pocket, rolled a smoke, and explained.

Little Ethan had always been a sickly kid who sometimes couldn't keep his food down and had spells where he had trouble breathing. At least, he did until Cloninger put together a special diet that eliminated meats and butter and other stuff that everybody else ate. Cloninger actually went to Europe and brought the stuff back. They'd been testing various combinations for months to figure out what worked for the kid. At first, Oh Boy said, they thought that Mrs. Conway had got the days mixed up and little Ethan had his Saturday menu on Friday, or something. Or it may have been that he ate something he wasn't supposed to have when Flora was showing him off to Cameron Rivers.

That morning, as soon as Mrs. Pennyweight realized that he was having an attack of whatever it was, she called Cloninger. He said to get the kid right over and to bring the empty boxes from his dinner. She didn't even think to say anything to Flora. She just called Oh Boy for the car and took the kid down to the kitchen to fetch the boxes. That's about the time Flora checked her mother's rooms, saw that her son wasn't there, and started screaming. The thing that Mrs. Pennyweight had been doing in the car was a variation on the “Schaefer method” that Cloninger had taught her to use whenever things got really rough for the little booger.

Oh Boy was in the middle of explaining it all when Cloninger sidled up to us. Oh Boy shied away from him. “Our paths cross again, Mr. Quinn. Trouble seems to follow you. First, poor Mr. Evans, then the two unfortunate young men last night, and now this, not that you had anything to do with it. We have located the source of the youngster's problems.”

“Yeah? And what was that?”

Cloninger didn't answer. Instead, he said, “Come, let me show you around my little establishment. There's something I want you to see.”

Oh Boy took the opportunity to duck back into the Duesenberg. I went with Cloninger around to the other side of the big building, where a terrace faced the lake. On the other side of the water, a lot closer than I expected, was the Pennyweight house.

“You see,” he said, “we're neighbors. It's a two-mile drive by car but only a hundred meters or so across the water. You need not worry. Most of our patients simply drink too much and we help them with that. Some have more serious problems, but this is not a place for ‘homicidal maniacs' or anything else you might have seen in movies.”

He pointed his cigarette at the other side of the terrace. “This way.”

I've got to admit he was right about one thing. Everything I knew about loony bins came from the pictures. I imagined drooling people in straightjackets and padded cells, and I worried that somebody would find a way to lock me up in there and it scared the hell out of me. All I wanted to do was get away.

Cloninger went down a couple of steps to a path that led to more buildings in a grove of evergreen trees. When we got closer, I saw that one of them had a steeple. He said it had been a private chapel for the previous owners or something like that, I don't remember exactly. The important thing was the graveyard, anyway. He led the way past the older headstones to the newest and biggest, a polished slab flanked by two angry angels with swords in their hands. It read:

ETHAN PENNYWEIGHT

1861–1929

Beside it was a smaller simpler stone:

MANDELINA PENNYWEIGHT

1906–1931

Cloninger said, “Ethan was my benefactor, my partner, my friend, and finally my patient. He asked to be buried here. I know that your first loyalty is to your friend Walter. But you must understand that I have known the Pennyweight family for decades. I have seen to their medical needs for three generations, ever since I came to this country. I have no one left in Germany. They are my only family now and I will not allow them to be harmed in any way. I advise you to keep that in mind. But, of course, our interests are identical, are they not? And you and I are in agreement.”

I shrugged. “I suppose so.”

He smiled that thin, spooky smile. “Excellent. Let's go back. Catherine and Flora must be ready to leave.”

As it turned out, we heard them before we saw them. Mrs. Pennyweight limped toward the car with the kid, who'd got his color back, while Flora followed beside her and screamed. Oh Boy held the car door open and watched helplessly.

“You're saying this is
my
fault?” Flora yelled. “Just because I gave him two maraschinos, maybe three.” She stepped in front of her mother and screamed at her, “He loved them, he wanted more. I've never seen him like something so much and now you're acting like it's the end of the world.”

For a time, Mrs. Pennyweight didn't react at all. For a time. Then she stared straight into her daughter's eyes and spoke slowly. “You were drunk. I know you haven't been as involved with Ethan's diet as Mrs. Conway and I, but there's no excuse for this. Don't you understand? Those cherries are preserved in alcohol. Alcohol! You might as well have given him strychnine. You could have killed him, you stupid, stupid girl.”

“That's ridiculous. Nobody cares about me. Nobody cares that I'm miserable. I'm not
just
a mother, I'm still me. . . .”

Her friend Cameron stood to one side and didn't try to hide her bright enjoyment, until she saw that I'd noticed it. Then she looked concerned.

Flora went on, “First everyone was so sorry for poor Mandelina—”