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 bastard was memorizing.
But the old son of a bitch 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 hoarder 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 reassured 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 assured 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 sunglasses 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 passenger 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 nobody 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…”