Small World (46 page)

The knife tore into the silken scarves and nylon stockings with a great hollow ripping sound like grpat wings, and then Lucy heard Roger cry out in pain. She winced against the wall and hid her eyes, so that she heard but did not see the old man shuffling to her. His huge hands fell hard on her shoulders and she looked up at him, realizing for the first time that he met her eyes bare-faced. And he was not spectacularly ugly, but angelically beautiful, undeniably Nick’s father, wearing Nick’s face as it would become.

Wonder-struck, she reached to touch him, to feel the reality of the velvety aged skin. The sound of sobbing brought her back to the misery in the bedroom. Ethelyn Blood, her trusty knife in hand, came out and shut the door behind her.

‘Keep the children away,’ she told Lucy. And then, addressing the old painter, ‘Wicked games, but at least the witch is off the island. I saw her climbing into the helicopter myself, out my bedroom window.’

Lucy, reminded of her children, ducked her head into their room, thinking if they’d slept through the helicopter, with luck they might have missed this nastiness down the hall. The shades were drawn, the room merely masses of shadows, but too quiet, she knew, even as she stepped inside. The little cots were empty, still rumpled from sleep, but no longer warm, when she put her hand on the sheets. There were no hastily discarded pajamas; the new day’s clothing, laid out the night before, remained in neatly folded piles on the bureau. Just inside the door, their sandals were still paired.

Where were they? Mechanically, she stepped back into the hall. The housekeeper, her arm in Sartoris’s, guiding him back to his room, looked back at her, the question on her face:
Are they still asleep
? And her face darkened instantly with this new worry, as she read the helplessness in Lucy’s eyes.

‘They’re not here,’ Lucy said, but her voice was so low and choked, that Ethelyn Blood let go the old man’s arm and hurried back to her.

He turned to stare at them.

‘What?’ the housekeeper asked, and didn’t wait for an answer, pushing past Lucy to look into the children’s room.

‘They must be in the kitchen, or playing,’ she said, plainly puzzled, as she stood in the doorway. ‘You didn’t hear them?’

Lucy shook her head.

The two women went into motion together, so fast Sartoris flinched against the wall, getting out of their way. Sighing, he made his own way back to his room, and began dressing.

Dividing the house between them, Lucy and the housekeeper canvassed every room, closet, and hidey-hole in ten minutes flat. Then, together, they hurried to the studio, now calling the children anxiously. And walked, a little out of breath, along the beach nearest the house, and found, to their relief, no small naked footprints into the water.

Returning to the house, they were met by Nick Weiler, who had managed in all the ruckus to pull on a pair of pants.

‘Did you find the children?’ he asked anxiously.

The women did not have to answer, but only looked at him.

He seized Ethelyn Blood by the shoulder. ‘My father says you saw Dolly leave. Was she alone?’

Mrs. Blood nodded. ‘Yes.’

Nick met Lucy’s frightened eyes reluctantly. ‘Tinker says she took his device.’

Lucy moaned. The housekeeper wrapped one long arm around the other woman’s shoulder and squeezed her comfortingly.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘Tinker,’ Nick said, ‘told Lucy yesterday he has a device that he and Dolly have used to shrink things, and people. He warned her to keep the children away from Dolly.’

Mrs. Blood’s eyes widened. ‘I never heard of such a thing,’ she gasped.

‘He warned me,’ Lucy said faintly.

‘What’s this?’ Sartoris said, behind them. ‘More devilment? Where are the little ones? Why haven’t you found them?’

Nick told him.

The old man, now wearing his old Panama, sitting on the stone wall of the terrace, listened patiently and then asked, ‘Sounds crazy. I want to talk to this Tinker. Meantime, you call the Coast Guard, or the airport, or somebody that can find out if that woman has the children with her.’

‘I’lldo it,’ Lucy said, and hurried to a phone.

‘She okay?’ Sartoris asked Nick.

‘Let her do something,’ Ethelyn Blood said, ‘do her good. She’ll be fine. I’ll get some breakfast together. Looks like we’ll need it.’

Sartoris and Nick found Roger Tinker sitting in a chair in the bedroom he had shared with Dolly. He had gotten into pants, and a shirt, but the shirt was inside out and buttoned wrong to boot. Wincing at every move, he was drawing socks on over swollen and blistered feet. He looked up at them, his eyes dull with disinterest, and returned his attention to his socks.

‘Prove it,’ the old man said calmly.

Roger looked up at him again. ‘Did ya find the kids?’ he asked shakily.

Sartoris looked at Nick.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘She’s got ’em. And if you check on it, she’ll be traveling alone.’

Nick’s frustration erupted. ‘You son of a bitch.’

‘Yeah,’ Roger agreed. ‘You got cute tits, Weiler, but you better get dressed, too. We have to catch up with that crazy bitch before she zaps New York, or something.’

Sartoris hissed in angry protest but too late; his sweetly rational son had Roger Tinker by the throat and was attempting to strangle him. It was Lucy that saved Roger, and cost Nick his nose, by opening the bedroom door to announce, ‘I called—’ Nick looked her way long enough for Roger to draw back his fist and let fly. The sound of Roger’s fist popping Nick Weiler’s nose brought Lucy’s message to a halt. Nick let go of Roger, who plopped back into his chair, panting. Speechless, Nick backed away, too, bringing his hands slowly to his nose.

Lucy caught her breath; Nick turned to her, opened his mouth, and blood gushed from his nose through his hands. She wailed; behind her, she heard Sartoris smothering a chuckle.

‘Ethelyn!’ the old man shouted.

The housekeeper appeared on the run, took in the situation with a glance, and was gone. She returned this time not with a knife but an ice pack.

Lucy had shoved Nick onto the bed, and had his head pushed back over the pillows. He winced away when she applied the ice and then gave in to the contemplation of his pain.

‘Well, enough of that foolishness,’ Sartoris said. ‘What did you find out, Lucy?’

‘I called the airport in Bar Harbor,’ Lucy said. She looked at the old man. ‘The helicopter was still in the air, but close to them. They radioed it. There was one adult passenger on board.’

‘So,’ said the old man.

‘So I told you the truth,’ Roger blurted. He was working on stuffing his feet into his shoes. ‘You better get another helicopter out here.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Ethelyn Blood said.

‘Shouldn’t we search the island?’ Lucy asked Sartoris.

Roger snorted.

Lucy, possessed of a sudden desire to strangle Dolly’s former friend herself, tightened her grasp on the ice pack and leaned into

Nick.

‘Ow,’ he said.

‘Waste of time,’ Sartoris said. ‘We’ll leave Mrs. Blood here and go after Dolly. If the children should happen to be playing hide-and-go-seek in the bushes, she’ll be here when they tire of it. But I think you must face it, Lucy, this fellow’s not lying. He may be crazy, but he’s not lying.’

Roger endeavored to look virtuous but it went to waste. Lucy couldn’t bear to look at him. Suddenly she was weeping, and it was Nick trying to hold her, his nose, and the ice pack.

They became fouled in nets of logistics.

‘There isn’t any way to land a small plane here?’ Roger asked. Sartoris shook his head. ‘First we came by boat, then after the war, by helicopter.

‘The fastest available boat’ll take an hour to the mainland on the chop there is today,’ Mrs. Blood told them, ‘and then there’s a quarter of an hour to the airport, and half an hour on the big airport at Bangor.’

‘She could still be there,’ Lucy pointed out. ‘I just don’t see how she could have made that seven-fifteen flight.’

‘She didn’t have to,’ Roger said. ‘Could have booked a private plane, or a car, either in Bar Harbor or Bangor.’

‘Or Portland, she could have flown from Bar Harbor to Portland by charter plane or helicopter. The seven-fifteen flight out of Bangor stops in Portland, doesn’t it? She could pick that up.’

‘Or a private plane, commuter plane, bus, or car, and once out of Maine, even a train,’ Sartoris objected. ‘Why try to catch heren route?’

Roger agreed. ‘Better to go right to her. We know where she’s headed, right?’

‘So all we have to do,’ Lucy finished the thought, ‘is get ourselves to New York.’

‘Mrs. Blood,’ Sartoris said, ‘see if you can put us on the twelve-fifty-three flight out of Bangor. We’ll get there, by boat if we have to, by helicopter if we can. See if there’s a helicopter at Bangor that can pick us up here.’

There was, and as it fought its way upward, Lucy watched the island shrink away and disappear into the sea with two minds. One of them, much the smaller, insisted none of this was true or sane or possible, but it shrank and disappeared like Sartoris’s island into the larger mind, the one that was a sea of grief and confusion, through which she could only struggle endlessly against her drowning.

The four of them—Sartoris, Nick Weiler, Roger Tinker, Lucy Douglas—sat in the helicopter, the molded seats of the waiting areas at the Bangor airport, the Delta jet on the ground, and in the air, speaking to each other only when necessary, carrying their secret like a piece of polished glass or a stone in their pockets, looking just like all their fellow travelers. The jet, climbing high, showed them the world beyond the island again, and brought them to earth at LaGuardia in the early afternoon.

It was all the same, so far as Lucy could see, as it had ever been. Except she didn’t know where her children were, or how they were, and she was chasing after the where and how on the word of a crazy man. And if he wasn’t crazy, she might be chasing answers she didn’t want to hear.

The old man and his son, both of them hiding their faces under broad-brimmed hats, seemed to sense the same thing; they took up instinctively protective positions, flanking her, and each held one of her hands in theirs on the cab ride into the city. Roger, taking the jump seat in their Checker, had only them to look at, unless he wanted to crane his neck to watch the traffic, but he seemed to notice them only occasionally.

He broke the silence, talking to himself. ‘I shouldn’t have made it so easy.’

‘No,’ Sartoris said, ‘you shouldn’t have. Why did you?’

Roger’s face darkened. ‘It had to be easy. So it was fast. Foolproof. There was never any time to be careful.’

‘Like an instant photo camera, anyone could use it?’ the painter probed.

Roger wrung his hands nervously. ‘Yes. Anyone could use it.’

‘Ah,’ the old man sighed.

Roger, known to the security guards, gained entrance for them into Dolly’s high-rise building and then, with the key she had not remembered to take back from him, into her apartment.

The maid, Ruta, appeared at the sound of the entering, gasped, and clapped a hand over her mouth.

‘It’s all right, Ruta,’ Roger told her, guessing that Dolly had told her Mr. Tinker wasn’t coming back, and that his sudden reappearance evoked visions of crimes passional in the maid’s head, ‘I’ve come to pick up some things of mine. It’s a friendly visit; I’ve brought along some old friends of Dolly’s. You know Mrs. Douglas, Mr. Weiler, and this is Leighton Sartoris, the

painter.’

Ruta nodded. Miss Dorothy’s daughter-in-law, one of her old boyfriends, and a famous painter who had even been in
VIP.
Perhaps nothing terrible was going to happen. It must be all the old friends were trying to cool out this breakup, not that she minded much if Miss Dorothy ditched this particular fancy man.

‘She’s in the dollhouse room?’ Roger asked.

‘Uh huh,’ the maid confirmed his guess.

‘Don’t bother with us. We’ll just go in and see her for a few minutes.’

Silently, they approached the door of the dollhouse room. The sound of Dolly’s humming reached them on sporadic bursts from beyond the door. Roger tried the knob; it moved only fractionally. He shot a quick grin at the others. For the first time, Lucy saw what Dolly might have seen in him. There was no time to think about it for Roger was fitting a key into the lock and turning it stealthily. There was a universal holding of breath.

He opened the door.

Dolly, bending into the Gingerbread Dollhouse, looked up, and smiled.

‘Hello,’ she sang gaily, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’

She hurried forward, holding out her arms as if to embrace Lucy. Lucy jumped backward, was caught by Nick, who wrapped his arms around her protectively. Dolly gave it up in midmotion, resignedly bringing her hands together in a little clap. She cocked her head at her visitors.

‘It’s sweet of you all to come. But since Lucy is finally here, I do want her to look at the Doll’s White House.’

She stepped aside, reached calmly to pinch Roger’s cheek, and giggled.