“Deenie!” I gasped.
“You didn’t know, wrapped up in your books,” she spat. “Hal was just like Sandy — always working. Sharon was fed up.”
“Sharon wasn’t all he lost, Deenie.” Carly was looking daggers at her friend. “Don’t take your personal problems out on Hal.”
“Fat chance I’ll have,” Deenie shrugged, shedding the martini-induced nastiness with her usual mercurial shift of mood. “He knows Sharon told me everything,” she smirked. “He’ll steer clear of me.”
“He made it glaringly obvious that he wants to pull a Garbo when I stopped by this afternoon,” I agreed, sitting back now that the tension had eased. “By the way, Carly, Hal says he knows those two are using his boathouse.”
Carly shrugged as she lit a cigarette. “Better safe than sorry.”
I was gardening in my back yard the next morning when Hal’s beach bum pals slouched up the path from the boathouse and inspected the tool shed at the bottom of the Benson garden. Sharon had been a fiend for flowers; that shed contained every tool imaginable. Gran used to borrow from her shamelessly, which explained the dull clippers and two rusty trowels I found in our own toolroom.
The men were a mismatched set: both medium brown of hair and skin, clad in T-shirts and cutoffs, but one tall and thin, the other short and blocky. Mutt and Jeff to the life, I thought. They sniffed around inside the shed a few minutes. Hal had said they were guests, so I held my tongue; but those two had never learned company manners, I can tell you. They finally strolled east toward the Atlantic beach. I lost interest, enthralled with cutting back Gran’s clematis, which had gotten above itself and was trying to eat the back porch.
I was parched by eleven o’clock and decamped to the house for some “shade and ’ade.” When I came out later, the air was stifling and the sun glittered on the harbor where a sailboat lay becalmed. Winter storms had tumbled some small boulders into the bed of Gran’s rock garden. Despite repeated tries, neither my fingers nor the trowel could shift them. Blast! I’d have to borrow a spade from Hal.
I flicked a glance at his house. No movement at the back windows. He need never know. Wiping dirt from my palms, I strode to a break in the hedge and headed for the rich lode of that tool shed. The door was ajar; the bums evidently didn’t care who knew they’d been snooping. With another guilty glance at the blank windows of Hal’s house, I slipped inside the shed.
The interior was as dim as a mineshaft after the sunlight. Still glare-blinded, I sensed movement and ducked instinctively as something whistled past my ear. The door banged back on its hinges with the missile’s impact, spearing the gloom with a swatch of light. A bulky shadow in the corner was rearing to its feet as the light hit it. It materialized into a surprised man — but where a face could reasonably be expected, there was just a blurred outline smeared by a stocking mask. In his left paw was a long-barreled handgun.
You can’t run fast enough to beat bullets. I leaped to my left, where the tool racks stood, and grasped the nearest handle. In one smooth motion, powered by amazement and rage, I wrenched it free, twisted my whole body with the spade flailing, and let fly at the man’s head as he straightened.
It would have taken his head off if he’d been my height. As it was, the point of the flying spade hit him in the sternum with an audible thunk. Something kicked up a spout of dirt at my feet as he grunted and clutched at his chest, dropping the gun. The spade had hardly left my hand when I was grasping the next handle on the rack.
It was just as well I took no chances because the intruder was built like a bison and that first blow had only doubled him over. He was still on his feet, staggering toward me, mouth gasping horribly through the nylon. I swung the metal rake hard, prongs out, and caught him a blow on the shoulder that jarred me clear down to my sacroiliac. I was lifting it for a jab when, with a guttural curse, he dodged out the door and slammed it behind me.
In the plunging dark, I flung the rake down and dived toward the far corner. Landing on my knees, I patted desperately along the dirt floor for the gun, adrenaline pumping like a waterspout. My hand hit something covered with cloth, glanced off, froze, then crept back in slow motion. It was a leg.
I staggered to my feet and backpedaled until I came up against the door. Fumbling for the latch, I lurched out into the garden. I did have wits enough left to glance around first, but the bull had escaped that particular china shop. A small runabout carrying two people was arrowing toward the becalmed sailboat. I stared after it, delaying examination of what the bull had left behind.
Taking a deep breath — my first in minutes, it seemed — and quaking like an aspen, I propped the door open and turned to assess the damage. In the moted oblong of sunlight I could see two ankles bound by rope. One large stocking sported a hole in the heel. I knew there was an overhead light, but I was too rattled to find the switch. After a couple of fumbles along the left-hand wall, I gave it up and approached the bound feet.
The toes wriggled. I nearly jumped out of my own socks. Then I was on my knees, dragging the bound man to a sitting position — with little assistance from him, he was too busy groaning. It was Hal, masquerading as Billy the Kid. A bandana was tied across the lower half of his face, and his hands were tied behind him. I braced him back against the workbench and scrabbled for some scissors.
Scissors may cut paper, but I can testify they make little headway against whatever they’re making rope of these days. My brain finally clicked into gear, and I sprinted back to my own yard. Hal was coming around by the time I returned. When he saw me advancing on him, hedge clippers at the ready, his eyes showed a lot of white.
I snipped through the leg bindings first, then edged around to get at his back. He was awake enough by then to stretch his hands well away from his body; with his mouth still covered, I couldn’t hear his prayers. When the rope fell off, I undid the bandana for him. Beneath it was a strip of adhesive tape. Hal dealt with that himself while I slumped beside him and ordered myself to stop trembling.
That was when I noticed something really odd. Not that finding your neighbor tied up in his own tool shed isn’t odd, mind you, but this was, frankly, bizarre. Hal was chafing his wrist and noticed it at the same time. Someone had stripped a yard of insulation from the business end of a power cable and coiled the exposed copper wire four times around Hal’s upper arm. Our eyes followed the thick cord up to where it dangled from a socket in the ceiling. The same socket that operated the overhead light — which I had been trying to turn on minutes before.
“Get it off!” I muttered through clenched teeth, but Hal was already ripping the device off his arm. He gave a stiff downward yank and the cord slithered to the floor like a dying rattler. We sat in silence, staring at it, our feet poked out into the sunlight.
“Shoes,” Hal finally croaked.
I found the light switch this time, although I hesitated before flipping it. A brief search turned up his rubber-soled shoes under the workbench. The gun was there, too, but I left it. Hal donned his shoes, staggered to his feet unassisted, then flexed his shoulders — or maybe it was a shudder.
“Drink,” he said, walking very deliberately toward the door.
I couldn’t agree more.
Hal excused himself while I poured brandy into paper cups, which was all I could find in his kitchen. When he returned to his dining room, he was decidedly paler. He downed his “juice” and held the glass out for more.
I poured liberally but asked, “Should you drink?”
“It was chloroform,” he said wearily, flopping down in a captain’s chair. “No concussion.”