Drowned Hopes Part 18

Tiny said, "Where's John? He was with you!"

"Gee," Kelp said, "I figured he'd get back before me. He had the rope, he had..."

Kelp's voice faded away to silence. He turned and looked at the silent dark water. Deep as h.e.l.l out there; he knew that now. Tiny and Tom also looked out over the reservoir, listening, watching, waiting...

"Jeez," said Tiny.

The winch and its tripod fell over.

They spun around, startled by the noise, to see the winch and tripod sliding toward the water, zipping down the bank in a long shallow ground-hugging dive, determined to go for a moonlight swim.

"He's pullin the rope!" Tiny cried.

"Stop it!" Kelp yelled, and Tiny ran forward and jumped, to slam both big feet down on the snaking white rope, pinning it to the ground just in front of the suicidal winch, while Kelp flung away his goggles and flashlight and ran to the water's edge, where he gazed at the taut rope angling straight into the water.

Tiny picked up the slack part of the rope, the part between his imprisoning feet and the winch, and wrapped it around one wrist. "Should I pull it in?"

"Sure!" Kelp told him, excited and relieved. "That's gotta be John at the other end!"

So Tiny began, hand over hand, to haul in the rope. "Heavy," he commented, but kept pulling.

Tom approached the taut line of rope and looked along its length to where it disappeared in the dark water. He said, "Do you suppose he got it?"

"Jeepers," Kelp said. "Do you think so? He just kept going! We lost each other, but he just kept at it, moved right on down in there, and found the box, and now he's-" But then doubt crossed Kelp's brow and he shook his head. "I was down there," he said. "No way."

"Whatever it is," Tiny said, "it's heavy."

They stood there on the bank, water lapping just beyond their feet, Kelp and Tom tensely waiting while Tiny drew in rope, hand over hand, straining, putting his back into it. Then, all at once, Tiny fell over backward, landing with a major thump, his big legs flipping up into the air to catch a lot of suddenly loose-flying rope, and an instant later Dortmunder, who had let go the rope when he'd finally seen the surface of the water above him, came charging up onto dry land, flinging his remaining equipment left and right.

(If Bob had really wanted to see a sea serpent, he should have stuck around for this one. Unfortunately, though, the apotheosis of having sighted the first sea serpent had led him to realize that in fact he hated his bride, loathed his friends and coworkers, and despised his job, so Bob had left work and driven to the nearest town with an all-night newsstand to buy a copy of Soldier of Fortune magazine. Happiness, he now knew, would be found as a mercenary soldier on some different continent.) Having been dragged headfirst through tree stumps and roots and mud for what had seemed like miles, Dortmunder was not at the moment at his most presentable. He'd lost both his boots by this stage, plus the weight belt, plus the collapsible shovel, and several times had come d.a.m.n close to losing his grip on both the rope and his mind. The wet suit had half unzipped itself and was full of mud. So were the goggles.

This creature, looking in fact less like a sea serpent and more like one of the clay people of Mayan mythology and Flash Gordon serials, stomped up out of the reservoir and slogged straight to Tom, who actually looked kind of startled at this abrupt approach, saying, "Al? You okay?"

"I got one word to say to you, Tom," Dortmunder announced, pointing a muddy finger at Tom. "And that word is dynamite!"

Tom blinked. "Al?"

"Blow it up!" Dortmunder ranted wildly, waving in the general direction of the reservoir. "Do it any way you want! I'm through!"

Tiny, sitting up from his supine position, said, "Dortmunder? You're giving up?"

Dortmunder swiveled around to glare at him. In a clear and praiseworthy effort to keep himself more or less calm and under control, he pointed again at the reservoir with his mud-dripping finger and said, "I am not going in there again, Tiny. That's it."

Kelp approached his old friend, worry creasing his features. He said, "John? This isn't you. You don't admit defeat."

"Defeat," Dortmunder told him, and squished away to the motor home.

SECOND DOWN.

THIRTY.

May put on her mitts, opened the oven door, and took out the big white-with-tiny-blue-flowers Corning bowl containing her famous tuna ca.s.serole. It was perfect; already she knew it. The smell alone was enough to tell you. Little bubbles of the grand aroma within kept breaking through the crusty golden-brown surface-a surface composed of grated cheese and riced potatoes sprinkled liberally over elbow macaroni- and just filled the kitchen with promises of culinary pleasure to come. May hoped John could smell it from the living room.

It was only, in fact, the promise of her tuna ca.s.serole that had persuaded John to permit this meeting in the first place. "I don't want to talk about it!" he'd kept raging at the beginning. "I don't want anything more to do with it! I don't want him living in this house anymore! And I don't want to ever be underwater, or talk about being underwater, or even think about being underwater, for the rest of my life!"

This was a pretty negative att.i.tude to overcome, but May's famous tuna ca.s.serole had worked wonders before, and so she'd promised she would make it and serve it at a nice social dinner that would also happen to be a discussion of the feasibility of trying for Tom's buried/drowned cache again. That's all it would be, just a discussion, just to talk about the possibility, just to see if it really and truly was no more than a hollow hope that Tom Jimson could ever get hold of his seven-hundred-thousand-dollar stash without blowing up the Vilburgtown Reservoir dam, or if somebody, just maybe, if somebody might come up with something.

"They better not," John had said, but at long last he'd agreed to this dinner. And now all May could do was present the tuna ca.s.serole and hope for the best. From here on, it was up to everybody else.

When they had six for dinner, like tonight, they moved the coffee table out of the living room into the bedroom, and the kitchen table out of the kitchen into the living room, and the four kitchen chairs into the living room, and the other armless wooden-seated chair from the bedroom into the living room, and John would sit on a telephone book on his regular living room chair, which would still have him lower than everybody else but at least high enough to see his food and enter into the conversation. The kitchen table was really quite a good size with both its leaves open, and if you put a really thick pad under the tablecloth, you wouldn't hardly hear at all the hollow clack of Formica every time you put down your gla.s.s or your knife.

When May walked into the living room carrying the ca.s.serole like an offering in front of her, at arm's length, in her mitted hands, they were all already seated at the table, but given the smallness of the room and the way the kitchen table filled and dominated it, there was hardly much of anything else for them to do. On the other hand, May knew full well that even if the living room were the size of a baseball field, a couple of these people present would be seated at the table anyway.

"Dinner," she announced, put the ca.s.serole bowl on the middle of the table, and began to dispatch her troops: "John, see if anyone wants a beverage. Andy and Tiny, you two-"

"Anybody ready for a beer?"

"Sure."

"Yeah."

"Naturally."

"Andy and Tiny, you two get the vegetables, they're on the counter beside the sink. Tom, would you bring in the bread and b.u.t.ter, please?"

"You know," Tom said, as he got to his feet, "I'm getting used to this living on the outside, living with other people and all. Like on the television."

John flashed May a look as he left for the beer, which May refused to acknowledge.

Little Wally Knurr looked up, smiling his wet smile and saying, "Miss May, what can I do to help?"

"You're the special guest," May told him, "because it's your first time here."

"Oh, I want to do my part," Wally said, sounding worried, his broad brow knitting.

"You can help with dessert," May promised him, and Wally smiled again, happy.

Wally was a new experience for May, unlike just about anything she'd ever met before, including John's odd friends and some of the customers at the supermarket where she worked as cashier. For one thing, his appearance; enough said. For another thing, his manner toward her, which was a sort of childish courtliness; when he'd first come in this evening and called her Mrs. Dortmunder and she'd told him she wasn't Mrs. Dortmunder (without giving him her actual last name) and saying he should call her May, so that he didn't know any formal name for her at all, he'd stumbled and spluttered awhile, and then had finally decided she was "Miss May," and that was that. Then there was his size, so large horizontally and yet so small vertically; in fact, this was going to be the first meal in this apartment with two people seated on telephone books, John on the white pages and Wally on the business-to-business yellow pages to bring him up to a normal height with all the others.

Food and drink were quickly a.s.sembled, and everyone took their places. May sat nearest the door since she'd have to be going to the kitchen from time to time, and John sat facing her at the inner end of the room. Tiny sat to May's left and Wally to her right, with Andy beyond Tiny and Tom beyond Wally. Once all were settled and served, they all tasted the famous ca.s.serole, and the usual round of sincere but hurried praise ensued. Then, the amenities out of the way, silence took hold as everyone tucked in.

Nothing had been said about Tom's buried stash before dinner, and hardly anything was said on any subject at all during dinner, so it wasn't until after May and Wally had brought in the coffee and two kinds of ice cream and pound cake and raspberries and whipped cream that anyone raised the topic of the day, and then it was left to May to do it. "I guess everybody knows," she said, into the murmur of five people working their way through a number of terrific desserts, "that John doesn't think there's any way to get down into that reservoir and get Tom's money except to blow up the dam."

Wally's big wet eyes got bigger and wetter. "Blow up the dam! But that would be terrible! People would get hurt!"

"They'd get worse than hurt," May said gently. "And that's why John won't be a party to it."

"That's right," John said around a mouthful of pound cake.

"I won't do it either," Andy announced.

Tom, who'd been putting various desserts into his mouth without opening his lips, now spoke without opening his lips: "Somebody will. Lotta money down there. Tiny?"

"Include me out," Tiny said.

"But Tom's right about that," May told the table. "He's willing to do it, and some people would be willing to help him."

"Gee," Wally said, apparently contemplating previously unguessed-neither by himself nor his computer-depths of human depravity.

"So the question is," said May, "is there any other way to get in there and get that money? Any way that John could go along with."

"If that's the question," John said, "I got the short answer."

"Wait a minute, John," Andy said, and turned to May, saying, "May, I was down there, too, and I'm sorry, but I gotta go along with John. Your basic problem down there is you can't see anything. It isn't like regular water."

"They must clean the h.e.l.l out of it," John commented, "before it gets down into our sinks here."

"What it reminds me of," Andy said, "is a book I read once."

John gave him a dubious look. "Are we gonna hear about Child Heist again?"

"That isn't the only book I ever read," Andy told him. "I'm a pretty big reader, you know. It's a habit I picked up on the inside, when I had a lotta leisure time to myself."

Tom said, "I spent my time on the inside thinking about money."

"Anyway," Andy insisted, "about this book. It was a story about the Normandie, the ship that sank at the pier in New York in-"

"I got pictures of that," John said, "in that Marine Salvage book."

"Well, this is a different book," Andy told him. "It isn't a fact book, it's the other kind. A story."

"The Normandie's a fact," John maintained. "I've got pictures of it."

"Still and all," Andy said, "this is a story about the fact of the Normandie. Okay?"

"Okay," John said. "I just wanted to be sure we understood each other." And he filled his mouth with more pound cake, stuffing a little mocha b.u.t.terscotch cashew ice cream in around the edges.

"Well, the story," Andy said, with a little more edge than necessary, "is about the divers who went down inside the Normandie and tried to fix it up so they could float it again. And I was thinking when I was down in that lake, what we had there was exactly the same as what this guy described in the book."

John looked at him with flat disbelief. "Down in that lake? You were down in that lake and you were thinking about books?"

"Among other things."

"I was concentrating on the other things," John said.

May said, "John, let Andy tell us about this book."

"Thanks, May," Andy said. "The only point about the book is, it's all about the divers going down inside the Normandie and down to the bottom of the Hudson River off Forty-fourth Street, and how they had the same kind of problem we did. It's very exciting, very dramatic. Make a terrific movie, except of course you couldn't see anything."

"Maybe radio," Tiny suggested.

"Yeah, maybe so," Andy agreed. "Anyway, what they had, down at the bottom of the Hudson River, was just what we had. Everything's black and dirty, the water's full of this thick mud, and if you turn on a flashlight it's like turning on your car headlights in a thick fog; it just bounces the light back at you."

"That sounds terrible," May said.

John pushed food into one cheek in order to be able to say, "I've been telling you it was terrible, May. Do you think I give up easy?"

"No, I don't, John," May a.s.sured him. "That's why we're talking this over now."

"Getting our book reports," John said.

Tiny said, "Andy? Did this book say what they did about it, how they got around it?"

"I don't remember," Andy said. "I just remember they were down in there, inside the Normandie and around under the Normandie, in all this black dirty water."

"Not while I'm eating," John said while he was eating.

May said, "Well, it seems to me, one thing we could do is look at this book and see what solution they came up with."

"Couldn't hurt," Tiny agreed. "Andy? You still got the book?"

"I don't think so."

Wally, wriggling on the yellow pages in his eagerness to be of help, said, "I could find it! I could get us all copies of it!"

May said, "Andy? What was the t.i.tle?"

"Beats me," Andy said. "It had 'Normandie' in it."

"Do you know who wrote it?"

Andy shook his head. "I can't ever remember writers' names."

"That's okay," Wally said. "I can do it."

John said, "Not to be a wet blanket, but-"

Andy said, "Meaning, to be a wet blanket."

John gave him a look. "But," he repeated, "even if we find out there's some magic way so you can see through mud, an idea in which I personally have no belief, but even if there is such a thing, some special thing so you can see bright as day through mud, I'm still not goin down in there again. And I'll tell you why."

"That's okay," Tom said. "Dynamite's easy."