The PMS Outlaws: An Elizabeth MacPherson Novel (28 page)

“I got a description of him,” said Purdue. “While you were downstairs at the drink machine, I got Bullington to tell me everything about him that she could remember. If he hasn’t changed clothes, I can’t miss him. Even if he has, I think I can spot him.”

It had been as simple as that. They’d found him in the snack bar, just as the voice on the phone had told them they would, and Purdue had recognized him within seconds. She nudged A. P. Hill. “The dark-haired clown at the counter,” she murmured. “Keep smiling if it kills you.”

Somehow Powell Hill had got through the next ten minutes, with a plaster smile, and an imitation of a femme fatale that was good enough to fool anyone who wasn’t sober. After a few minutes’ repartee, which the young man seemed to find
bewildering, though of course his macho self-image prevented him from saying so, they led him away to an unlit wooded area that was unlikely to have passersby so late at night. This was the tricky part. Finding somewhere to go. They had discussed this point in hushed, urgent tones on the way to the snack bar. They didn’t want him at the dorm, and they couldn’t risk going back to his room, so it had to be outside. It was probably a good thing he wasn’t sober. He wasn’t thinking clearly enough to argue with them.

Working briskly and insistently as they murmured perfunctory endearments, “Trish” and “Amy” had managed to divest the young man of his clothes. As he lurched toward them to return the favor, A. P. Hill caught his wrist. She was surprisingly strong for a slender young woman. Taking martial arts classes instead of ballet had its advantages.

P. J. Purdue took the pantyhose out of her purse. “There’s more to the foreplay,” she murmured in a sultry voice. “Ever been tied up?”

The anthropology student seemed to be muttering something about South American courtship rituals as Purdue bound his wrists together behind his back with the damp pantyhose, and then tied him to a small tree. With trembling fingers made clumsy by her nervousness, A. P. Hill tied his feet together, trying not to look up as she worked.

In less than two minutes their victim was securely trussed and immobilized. Purdue stepped back and handed A. P. Hill the camera. “Shoot,” she said, “but keep me out of the frame. I’m going to tell our boyfriend here why this is happening to him.”

“We can’t!” hissed her partner in crime. “It will get … you-know-who … in trouble!”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Purdue, tapping the camera. “Not unless old Studly here wants to see his picture plastered all over campus on homemade posters—
WOULD YOU ATTEND AN UGLY-GIRL PARTY WITH THIS MAN?
”

The young man stopped struggling with his bonds. “Is that what this is about? Listen, we didn’t mean any harm.…”

“Oh, tell it to the squirrels, macho man!” Purdue snapped a few more pictures of the captive. “Let’s get out of here,” she said to A. P. Hill, who was acting as lookout.

As they turned to go, A. P. Hill said, “I’m sure this has been an interesting anthropological experience for you. File it under Revenge Rituals. And tell your Neanderthal buddies that if they don’t stop harassing campus women, they’ll all find themselves tied to trees!”

Then they ran until the young man’s shouts no longer echoed in their ears.

And that had been it, really. Although they read the local and campus newspapers front to back for weeks, there were no articles about a naked man left tied to a tree near the campus of William & Mary. No policemen came to the dorm to question anybody. Perhaps Milo Gordon had escaped on his own, and had slunk back home in the darkness without a word to anybody. It was as if the incident had never taken place.

The next time she went home, Purdue got the photos developed by a friend of hers, probably telling him some plausible lie about the subject matter: a drama class exercise, perhaps. When she came back to campus, she gave Pam Bullington one of the prints and swore her to secrecy. And that was that. Then it was over. Honor satisfied. No repercussions. They
soldiered on through the undergraduate year, concentrating on the weightier matters of exams and term papers; gradually the incident faded from Powell Hill’s mind until it had the hazy texture of a half-remembered television movie starring a girl who vaguely resembled her.

She had cause to remember it a few years later, when her law partner Bill MacPherson, remarking on his sister’s forthcoming wedding, mentioned her old boyfriend, Bill’s former roommate, Milo Gordon. When she heard the name, A. P. Hill took a deep breath and willed herself to stay calm, but she’d had to set down her coffee mug because her hand was shaking.

“Where is your old roommate now?” she’d asked Bill, as casually as she could.

“Peru, I think,” said Bill, oblivious to her discomfort. “Somewhere in South America anyhow. I get a Christmas card every couple of years. Milo is a forensic anthropologist. Studies bones. I asked him once why he didn’t study live people, and he said he didn’t much care for them.”

A. P. Hill had let out a sigh of relief as she turned the conversation into safer channels. There didn’t seem to be any likelihood of her ever meeting Milo Gordon, since he and Bill had lost touch. Even if they did meet, he might not remember her. A. P. Hill wondered if Bill had ever been told about Milo’s abduction, and what he had thought about it if he had. What would he think of her?

With P. J. Purdue at large, performing that same old stunt on a succession of strangers, A. P. Hill was very much afraid she was going to find out. Suppose when P. J. Purdue was finally taken into custody, she talked about the first crime of the PMS
Outlaws—the one in which they used pantyhose instead of handcuffs, and her accomplice had been A. P. Hill.

Powell Hill eased her foot off the accelerator. She had been doing seventy without realizing it. She was not in that much of a hurry to reach Danville. She still didn’t know what she was going to say to Bill when she got there.

“D
id you hear from your cousin Geoffrey yet?” Edith asked Bill as she brought in the mail.

“No,” said Bill. “I assume that he made it home to Georgia safely. Why? Are you worried about him?”

“No. I want to make sure he’s really gone.” Edith’s gaze took in the walls of Bill’s office, newly papered in chintz; the rowing scull set upright in a corner to serve as a bookcase; and the tartan-matted, gold-framed fox-hunting prints set at tasteful intervals along the walls. “Breaking and entering is a crime, isn’t it?” she asked Bill.

“Ye-ees,” said Bill, sorting through the letters.

“Well, breaking and decorating ought to be.”

“The decorations are probably very nice,” said Bill carefully. “I just don’t think it’s me.”

“Looks like a set for a Jane Austen film,” said Edith with a sigh. “Still, I suppose he meant well. And he certainly was good company for Mr. Jack. He’d sit and listen to him for hours on end, it seems like.”

“I know,” said Bill. “I wonder what he was up to.”

Edith shook her head. “You know him better than I do,” she said. “Well, I haven’t got time to stand around here all day talking to you. People keep coming to the back door asking for Mr. Jack. He said I was to tell them he’s in the outbuilding. I wonder what he’s up to?”

Bill smiled. “At his age? Breathing, I expect. Not much else. Anyhow, I’m going to be busy, too. A woman called a little while ago and said she wanted to talk to me about a lawsuit. Something about her car. I’ll let her in if you’re busy.”

Edith gave him a skeptical look. “Won’t that let daylight in on the majesty?”

“That I answer the door myself?” Bill smiled. “I’m hoping that if I let her in after she sees the house, she’ll be impressed by my unspoiled humility.”

“Oh, right,” said Edith. “Unspoiled humility. That’s you. Well, if you don’t need me to polish your halo, I’ll just go back to typing up the bills.”

Bill waved her away. “I can handle the clients, but if any more of Geoffrey’s workmen show up in coveralls, carrying paint cans or wallpaper rolls, you deal with them!”

D
anville had changed a lot in forty-odd years. Hillman Randolph studied the fleeting landscapes as he drove along the road that led to the Dolan place. There were just enough
familiar landmarks to reassure him that he wasn’t lost. It had been a long drive up from Georgia, and a tiring one for a man his age, but perhaps the most tiring part of the journey had been forcing himself to remember the last time he’d been in Danville: 1953. Try as he might, he couldn’t recall that night with any clarity. By the time he woke up days later in the burn center of Duke Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, he was too ill to be questioned, and too consumed with pain for rational thought. He had been fortunate that his accident was south of Danville, only an hour away from Duke University’s excellent medical facilities. Otherwise he wouldn’t have survived at all. Even with the best treatment available, it had been a near thing, and it had taken all the strength of his young body to pull him through. Sometimes he mused on the irony of the great efforts expended to save him. If the law enforcement people had known who he really was—or more precisely who he wasn’t—would they have tried so hard to save him?

Somehow, between the pain, the sedatives, and the reconstructive therapy, he had let himself become the man they mistook him for, and his own past slid away into a blur of confused images. The only thing that stood out with any clarity was the memory of Jack Dolan, who was supposed to be dead, just as he had been presumed dead. In a way he was, he thought. Maybe the real Hillman Randolph had died in Danville that night, but after all, it was his life that continued, even if a stand-in was now playing the part. First fear and then apathy had kept him from returning to Virginia, and soon his old life had become part of the mists. Until now. Whatever happened, whether they
arrested him or not, he was going back. Jack Dolan was still alive.

C
arla Larkin’s pretty face had hardened into a sullen glare. “All right,” she told her partner. “I made the phone call like you asked me to, but I still don’t see why we’re doing this. I mean, what have you got against this guy? It’s not like he’s some leering old drunk in a roadhouse. The guy I called is just minding his own business, working in his own office, so what’s the point of hitting on him?”

P. J. Purdue shrugged. “He’s male, isn’t he? Besides, he’s not important.”

“Then why do I have to do it?” asked Carla. “When I bought the handcuffs, you said one more, right? And so when we got gas at that truck stop on I-81, I picked up that big guy in the Kenworth. He was practically drooling into my coffee, and he propositioned me. So, okay, he had it coming, and I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when his buddies found him naked, handcuffed to his steering wheel, but I thought we agreed that we were going to quit. As soon as the cops talk to that trucker, they’ll know who we are and what state we’re in. Sooner or later they’ll track us down.”

“Not if we keep moving.” Purdue was sitting in the driver’s seat, eating a hamburger out of a paper wrapper. She looked tired, and in need of a bath and a change of clothes, but the look in her eyes said that they wouldn’t be taking a break yet.

“I don’t want to go back to prison,” said Carla in a small voice. “You’re a rich kid with a law degree. You can probably
talk your way into probation, but when they catch me, they’ll lock me up for good. Or at least until I’m old and ugly, which is the same thing. After that, no matter where I am, it’ll be prison.”

P. J. Purdue opened a road map. “This time tomorrow we can be in Canada,” she said. “I promise, Carla. I promise.”

G
eoffrey Chandler never thought that he would owe his life to Louis L’Amour. Ordinarily he was not an admirer of Western novels—he wasn’t even sure that he’d ever read one—but this time he had been desperate. He had an eight-hour drive ahead of him, and he was already tired when he started. Elizabeth, under the influence of her sedative, had fallen asleep within a few miles of leaving the parking lot at Cherry Hill, so there was no hope of having conversation to keep him awake.

Geoffrey stopped at a diner to get coffee—although he conceded that coffee could be a time waster on a long drive, since you do not buy coffee, you only rent it. On the counter beside the breath mints was a box of used audio books, a trucker’s lending library, he gathered: something to do with your mind when all the roads began to look the same.

After carefully inspecting the tapes on offer and rejecting glitzy love stories and self-help tapes, Geoffrey decided to ride the asphalt trail with Louis L’Amour. He reasoned that forcing himself to concentrate on a spoken narrative would keep him awake, while soothing music from the radio would have the opposite effect. With a bag full of Louies and a couple of candy bars for good measure, Geoffrey climbed back into the car and headed north up I-77.

He thought about calling Bill to warn him of their impending arrival, but after rehearsing several versions of the conversation in his mind, he could think of no explanation that did not make it sound as if he belonged in Cherry Hill as well as Elizabeth. Besides, Bill had been so relieved to see him go that Geoffrey hated to disappoint him by announcing that he was, in fact, returning.

As the car began to pick up speed, Elizabeth stirred in her sleep. “Where are we?” she murmured, stifling a yawn.

Geoffrey sighed and pushed the first tape into the dashboard cassette player. “Back in the saddle again, podnuh.”

B
ill MacPherson opened the door with a tentative smile, in case he encountered a door-to-door evangelist instead of a prospective client. The smile froze when he saw the scarred face of an elderly man glaring back at him instead of the attractive young woman that the voice on the phone had seemed to promise.

“May I help you?” said Bill when he trusted himself to speak.

“I’m looking for Jack Dolan,” the man said, peering past Bill as if he hoped to catch a glimpse of him.

“Well, he’s around someplace,” said Bill. “Probably in one of the outbuildings, pottering around. He usually turns up at mealtimes, though. Are you a friend of his?”