Drowned Hopes Part 29

"That's the way he looks, all right." Then Doug grinned broadly and stuck out his hand and said, "I'm Doug, by the way. Doug Berry."

Her hand in his was small and gentle, but disconcertingly bony. "Myrtle," she told him, and then seemed to hesitate or stumble or something for just a second before she said, "Myrtle Street."

"Myrtle's a nice name," he told her, holding on to her hand, getting used to it. "You don't run into too many Myrtles anymore."

"I think it's old-fashioned," she said, gently disengaging her hand from his. "But I guess I'm stuck with it. Well, I shouldn't keep you from your research." She gestured to the microfilm viewer, smiled, and went away to her counter.

Doug watched her go, pleased by her, then did get to his research. Like most small-town papers, this one didn't have a useful master index, so it was simply the tedious job of going back through the first pages, week after week; the kind of robbery he had in mind would definitely have made the front page, probably more than once.

Nothing in the first four rolls. Nothing in the first of the second batch of rolls. But then, five years before the dam was built, there it was: a major armored car robbery out on the Thruway near town. Seven hundred thousand dollars stolen! Two guards killed. Police had leads. In later weeks, gang members were found dead. The mastermind and the money had both disappeared. Police had leads. Then the story faded away. Police had no more leads. The mastermind had the money.

This was it. There wasn't the slightest doubt in Doug's mind. Seven hundred thousand dollars! That was certainly enough to make a couple of nonathletic types like Andy and John put on scuba gear and walk into a reservoir. And there was possibly a way to find out if they'd actually got their hands on that money as yet.

So let's check. Taking all the rolls of microfilm back to Myrtle-a pretty-enough name for a pretty-enough girl, he thought unkindly, but then was sorry to have had such a thought because basically he liked girls, and in any event he found Myrtle pleasant and easy to talk to-he said, "Myrtle, I've got almost everything I need now, except I've got to take a look at the papers for the last month."

"You mean, this year?" she asked, obviously bewildered by his abrupt leap in time.

"This year, right," he agreed. "I'm done with the ancient past, I'm ready to get up to date, like that VCR of yours there."

"VDT."

"Whatever."

"The most recent papers," she told him, "the last six months, aren't on microfilm yet. They're on shelves on that aisle over there. See?"

"By golly, Myrtle," he said, looking over there, "the technology just keeps jumping around in here. Now I'm gonna read actual newspapers?"

Laughing, she said, "You'll just have to rough it, I'm afraid."

"I can stand up to it," he decided.

"Good." She picked up the microfilm rolls he'd just returned, saying, "I hope this all helped."

"You and your library have been very good to me, Myrtle," Doug told her truthfully.

She frowned down at the microfilm rolls, saying, "You didn't look at these two?"

"Didn't need to," he said airily.

"This is the year you finished with?"

"That's right."

She kept frowning at the little boxes containing the microfilm. Was she suspicious for some reason? Should he have gone through the motions of looking at the rest of the rolls? But then she shook her head, smiled rather vaguely at him, and turned away, carrying the microfilm back to where it was stored.

Doug crossed to the most recent newspapers and found some old geezer hogging half of them, reading through endless local announcements, keeping other papers firmly under the one he was studying, spread out on the table. Doug made do with the papers the old coot hadn't commandeered, but found nothing in any of them about any trouble at the reservoir-his idea was that a break-in there might leave traces that would rate a report in the local paper-so at last he turned to the old fart, who hadn't finished one paper in the last half hour.

"Excuse me," Doug said, reaching for the papers under the one the old b.a.s.t.a.r.d was memorizing.

But the old son of a b.i.t.c.h hunched over his papers, folding his arms around them protectively, saying, "I'm reading these!"

"Not all of them," Doug insisted, grabbing nether papers and tugging. "You're just reading the one on top."

"Wait your turn!" the old monopolist snarled, and pressed his bony elbows down onto the papers.

Doug leaned in close and looked into his ancient opponent's beady eyes. "When old bones break," he pointed out quietly, "they take forever to heal."

The old creep blinked, licked his lips, stared around the room. "I know that cop," he announced.

"Who, Jimmy?" Doug said, and grinned, not in a friendly way. "Everybody knows Jimmy. He's one of my best friends. Maybe I'll tell him about you."

The old snothead blinked furiously for a second, then abruptly pushed the stack of papers away, crying, "Take them, if it means so much to you!"

"It does," Doug told him, and slid the papers down the table to a quieter location, while the old h.o.a.rder went stumping away to some other part of the library.

It was in the fifth of this batch of papers: SECOND BREAK-INAT RESERVOIR: Junk Car Abandoned Almost two weeks ago. They sure hadn't wasted any time after he'd replenished their air.

Doug settled down to read the story, which was bizarre enough from the newspaper's point of view, since they didn't know what had really been going on. Someone, according to the report, or more probably several someones, had cut a great hole in the fence surrounding the reservoir at the site of an old inactive railroad line, which they had apparently used in order to get an old junk car without an engine to the reservoir, where they pushed it into the water and abandoned it.

Why anybody would go to such trouble to throw away a useless car no one could figure out, but police did speculate that the perpetrators were probably the same individuals who, a month earlier, had broken padlocks in order to enter another part of the reservoir property. In that first incident, the perpetrators had apparently done nothing but gone for a midnight swim in the extremely cold water.

Abandoning an old car in the reservoir was considered a much more serious act, though officials rea.s.sured the public that the purity of the reservoir's water would not be adversely affected in any way. This being just about the end of the school year of most colleges in the region, the possibility of a schoolboy prank, possibly a fraternity hazing or some such thing, was not being discounted.

Oh, no? Doug sat back, grinning to himself. He'd found it, all right. The Vilburgtown Reservoir was the place, and the seven hundred thousand dollars was the loot.

And now to figure out how to follow the trail from here. Rising, Doug left the papers on the table-let the doddering news buff put them away, if he loved them so much-and headed for the door, to be intercepted midway by Myrtle Street, her old smiling self again, saying, "Find what you wanted?"

"I'll have a terrific report to turn in at the office," he a.s.sured her.

"You're probably looking for somewhere to have lunch now," she suggested. "Do you want a recommendation?"

She's picking me up! Doug thought, both surprised and pleased. Seeing by the large digital clock on the wall that it was shortly after one, and aware of no reason why he shouldn't be picked up by a pretty-enough girl, he flashed her his smile and said, "Only if you'll join me. When's your lunch break?"

"Right now." She matched him smile for smile. "If we can make it dutch treat, I'll be happy to come along."

"Lead on," he said.

Leading on, smiling over her shoulder, she said, "And you can tell me all about your researches."

Like fun. "I'll bore you silly with it," Doug promised.

"I'll drive and you follow."

"Anywhere."

They went out together into the bright sunlight. Trotting down the steps, squinting until he remembered to pull his sungla.s.ses down from his head to cover his eyes, Doug suddenly saw John ride by in a car. He stopped, stumbling, almost falling down the library steps, and when he'd recovered his balance he just stared.

It was John, all right, definitely John, in the pa.s.senger seat of a Buick Century Regal, fortunately looking straight ahead and not to the side out his window. Doug stooped to stare past that grim profile, and it seemed to him the driver was not Andy. And when the car went on by, it didn't have MD plates. But that had been John, all right. That gloomy pan was n.o.body in this world but John.

At the foot of the steps, shielding her eyes with her hand as she looked back up at him, Myrtle said, "Doug? Are you coming?"

"Oh, sure. Sure." Grinning again, careless and handsome in the brightness, Doug trotted down the steps.

They didn't get it. They're still hanging around. They missed again.

FORTY-SEVEN.

"Oak Street," Stan said as he made the left. "Forty-six, forty-six..."

"There it is," Dortmunder said, pointing. "Pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n place," he grumbled.

It was, too. Behind a neat green lawn stood a one-story-high white clapboard bungalow with yellow trim and shutters. Climbing roses, red and pink and cream and white, grew up across the front, enlaced with the railing of the cosy-looking broad front porch, on which the seating consisted of two rocking chairs and an actual glider, a kind of sofa without legs suspended by chains from the porch ceiling. White lace curtains made proscenium arches of every window, and the number forty-six was spelled out in iron script across the top riser of the stoop. Impatiens had just recently been planted on both sides of the cement walk; small now, they would soon spread and prosper, so that visitors would enter through a field of flowers. "How could anybody live in a place like that?" Dortmunder muttered, squinting at the brightness of it.

"Let's find out," Stan said.

A freshly graveled driveway ran beside the house, stopping at a chain-link fence at the rear. So there was no garage-rough in winter, huh? - but the back yard was enclosed. For puppies, no doubt. As Stan steered onto this driveway and came to a stop beside the porch, Dortmunder's face had begun to look like the first day of a nor'easter.

They climbed out of the Buick, took the secondary slate path across the lawn in front of the roses to the stoop, and went up onto the porch. The mailbox beside the door was an open wicker basket, without even a top on it, much less a lock. Stan pushed the white b.u.t.ton beside the front door-doors: wood and screen, the wood with a large curtained window in it-and from inside chimes sounded. Dortmunder growled, deep in his throat.

It was May who opened both doors, smiling at them, saying, "Here you are! Come in, come in. You're early."

"Did the GW Bridge and the Palisades," Stan told her as they entered the bungalow. "Avoided all that stuff with the Tappan Zee."

May was wearing an ap.r.o.n. Kissing John on the cheek, she said, "h.e.l.lo, John. I'm really glad you came."

"Had to," Dortmunder told her, and did his best to soften his face with a smile. If he was going to talk reason with this woman, if he was going to get her to move out of this crazy place and come back to the apartment where she belonged, he knew he was going to have to be pleasant, reasonable, calm, patient, understanding, and benign. He was going to have to be, in other words, everything he wasn't. "Had to talk to you," he said, and tried the smile again. It felt like it was made of wood.

Stan said, "Where's Mom?"

"Out driving her cab," May said. "She'll be back soon. Come on in the living room."

They were in a kind of entrance hall with a rug on the floor and pictures of flowers on the walls and some kind of complicated chandelier hanging from the ceiling. As they followed May through the archway on the left into the living room-sofa, chair, chair, lamp, lamp, table lamp, coffee table, end table, end table, TV console, area rug, fake marble plant stand, fern, pictures of nymphs-fauns-architecture on the walls-Stan said, "Mom's back driving her cab? She commutes to New York?"

"No, she's driving for the cab company here," May said. "Sit down, sit down."

Dortmunder looked around, but everything looked too comfortable. He sat in the middle of the sofa, but even that was cozy and soft.

Meanwhile, May was telling Stan, "She loves it, driving here. She says n.o.body fights back."

Dortmunder opened his mouth to say something nice about the roses, as a kind of icebreaker. "May," he said, "what the h.e.l.l are you doing in this place?"

May smiled at him. "Living here, John," she said.

"Why?" he demanded, even though he knew the answer.

May's smile was serene but steadfast. Dortmunder knew that smile, he'd seen her use it on delivery boys, policemen, bus drivers, drunks, sales clerks, and customs inspectors, and he knew it was unbeatable. "It's good to make a change sometimes, John," she said, utterly calm. "Move to a different place, get a different slant on life."

"And when Tom blows up the dam?"

"We can only hope he won't," she said.

"He's going to, May."

Stan, sounding a little awed, said, "You can see it from here, out the window."

The sofa on which Dortmunder sat stood in front of the window but faced the other way, at the television set, the paradigm of America. Twisting around, he looked through the draped-back curtains out the clean window and across the clean street and above the clean cottages on the other side to the broad gray wall, far away, curving among the green hills. At this distance it looked small and unimportant, just a low gray wall surrounded by hills taller than itself. But it was definitely aimed this way.

The sight gave Dortmunder a headache. Twisting back to look at May again, he said, "Tom's back in New York. He's putting together a string. He gave me what he said was a courtesy call, one last chance to join in with him when he dynamites the dam."

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him no."

May, still smiling, raised an eyebrow and said, "Did you tell him I was here?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I didn't want to hear him laugh." Leaning forward on the too-comfortable sofa, Dortmunder said, "May, Tom isn't going to care. His entire family, if he ever had a family, could move to this town, and he still wouldn't care. He's gonna blow that dam. You can't change his mind."

"I'm not trying to change Tom's mind," May said.

So that was it. Dortmunder nodded, knowing that was it. "May," he said, "I can't help. I gave that thing two tries, and that's it, I'm played out. I'm not going down in there again."

"You don't give up, John," she said.

"Sometimes I do. And I won't go down in that water again because I can't go down in that water again, and that's that."

"Then there's some other way."

"Well, I don't know what it is."

"You're not even trying to think about it, John," she said.

"That's right," he said, agreeing with her. "What I'm doing, I'm trying not to think about it. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Have Stan's friend fix up another car for us, get a lot more scuba stuff from the guy on Long Island, break through the fence all over again that they've probably got people watching now, go down in there without Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s? There'll be something else, May. It'll try to kill us some brand-new way we haven't even thought about yet. And if we even get to that G.o.dd.a.m.n town, we're gonna have to walk around on the bottom, kick up all this muck, and then try to find one little casket buried in a great big field, where, even if the landmarks are still there we won't be able to see them. Or anything else."

"If it was an easy problem, John," May said reasonably, "we wouldn't need you to solve it."

Dortmunder sat back and spread his hands. "I'll move in here with you, May, if you want. We can go together when Tom blows the dam. But that's it. I don't have anything else. Tom and me are quits."

"I know you can do it," May insisted. "If you'll just let yourself start thinking about it."