The Night Travellers by Elizabeth Spencer

Author:Elizabeth Spencer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 2012-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

14

Mary’s Tape: The Heist (continued)

“Have you thought out what to do when we get there?” Leonard Abel asked.

“No, but then, if we didn’t know how to go I might just have found it anyway.”

“Is your emotional radar as good as that?”

Over winding roads through the Green Mountain foothills, we had seen farmhouses painted red or pale yellow in large meadowlands, rolling peacefully, sunlit. It was a fair day with large free-floating white clouds, none coming near the sun. We circled among the houses in town, like the clouds ourselves, checking names on the mailboxes, but never found the right one. Leonard said he’d have to ask, make up a story, while I sat in the car on a side street with my dark glasses on and my head in the scarf, huddled down under a corduroy duffel coat I had brought from Montreal. He came back looking cheerful. It seemed the road to Fred’s house was a branch-off, a bit hard to find at first. It paralleled a state highway on the other side of a beaver marsh.

I could tell Leonard had enjoyed his contact with the people in the little store. But I was afraid he wasn’t careful enough. What story had he told? In little towns people take note of everything. If we really succeeded in making off with Kathy, somebody would come up with a complete description of us, car and all.

The truth was, Leonard loved America. He was of a mind to find Fred Davis to be a reasonable man. Such energy as Americans had! Such a great country as they’d built!

I told him his enthusiasm might be getting the better of him.

“Why, I thought I should have told them the truth in there— everything,” he expanded. “They’d probably help us.”

“One out of forty would,” I said, “and we don’t know that one.”

“You really mean that? One out of forty? You’re a cynical woman, Mary.” He was growing more euphoric than ever.

On the edge of the house property, which we saw and then backed away from, we hid the car in an unused and overgrown driveway leading to a house that had burned long ago. We crept into the shelter of pines and birches and sumac, over a brittle, glittering, micalike substance that seemed to have come up out of the soil of that area. It was hard on the knees and entered the skin like glass splinters. I scraped my leg on an exposed pine root, the blood prickling out along a band of flesh. But I hardly noticed once I heard a sound from below, from Fred’s house. It was a closing door.

On the side of the house nearest us, there was a paved terrace with some garden furniture around a glass-topped table, a pool with varicolored paving stones, and a small cast-iron fountain, water spurting from the mouth of a curved fish which was leaping upward. It was here the door had closed, and here the three of them appeared together: Mother, Fred, and Kathy.

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