May looked at the storm-battered front windows. “You mean he might come back here.”
“The computer thinks so.”
Murch’s Mom said, “And you agree with it.”
“So do I,” May said. She looked very worried.
Wally said, “And then there’s Myrtle.”
Both women were taken aback by this abrupt change of subject. Murch’s Mom said, “Myrtle? That little ninny upstairs? What’s she got to do with anything?”
“Well, that’s just it,” Wally said. “Nothing.”
“That’s what I figured,” Murch’s Mom agreed.
“What I mean is,” Wally told her, “the rest of us got into this because we wanted to, we chose to be here. But Myrtle didn’t. And if her father comes back and—”
May said, “Who?”
“Tom’s her father,” Wally said. Nodding at Murch’s Mom, he said, “That lady Edna you play canasta with—”
“The girl’s mother. I know.”
“She worked in the library in Putkin’s Corners when Tom buried the casket behind it. She was the one told him they weren’t going to put in the parking lot after all. And her father was the town undertaker; it was from him that Tom got the casket.”
May said, “Why didn’t Tom say anything when Tiny caught her?”
“He doesn’t know. And I don’t think he’d care.”
Nodding thoughtfully, Murch’s Mom said, “Not a sentimental kind of guy, Tom.”
May said, “Wally? Do you and your computer have an idea what we should do?”
“Go to Myrtle’s house.”
They stared at him. May said, “For heaven’s sake, why?”
“It’s just one block over,” Wally explained. “We can see this house from there. If we turn off all these lights and go over there, then we can keep an eye on this house, and when the lights turn back on I’ll come over and look in the window and make sure everything’s okay.”
May said, “Doesn’t this mean letting Myrtle and her mother in on the whole thing?”
“Well, Myrtle’s already in on a lot of it,” Wally pointed out. “And her mother already knows Gladys, and—”
“I don’t particularly,” Murch’s Mom said through gritted teeth, “like that name.”
“Oh.” Wally blinked. “Okay, sorry. Anyway, you know Myrtle’s mother, and she knows Tom’s in town. She saw him go by in a car, and that’s what started Myrtle trying to find out things.”
May and Murch’s Mom looked at each other. Murch’s Mom said, “Well? What do you think?”
“I think I wish John was here,” May said.
“There’s never anybody home in this goddamn place,” Dortmunder said, fifteen minutes later, as he and Guffey pulled to the curb in front of the darkened 46 Oak Street. Sitting behind the wheel of the Peugeot Dormant he’d borrowed three hours ago from a cross street in the theater district back in New York, Dortmunder gazed discontentedly through the rain at the house where half the people he knew were supposed to be in residence, and where not one light was shining. Not one.
“Something wrong?” Guffey’d been getting increasingly nervy over the course of the trip, which could only be partially explained by the miserable highway conditions and Dortmunder’s less than professional driving skills. He hadn’t offered any first names for Dortmunder to try since way down by exit 2 on the Palisades Parkway. (George: No.) And now he sat hunched beside Dortmunder, chin tucked in as he blinked out at the night and the rain and the old dark house. He looked like one of the three little pigs watching for the wolf; the straw-house pig.
“Well, I suppose something’s wrong,” Dortmunder answered. “Something’s usually wrong. So what we’re gonna do, you stick close to me, and we’re gonna go in there and not turn on any lights.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And we’ll see what we see.”
Guffey frowned. “With the lights off?”
“Yes,” Dortmunder said. “We’ll see what we see with the lights off. Out.”
They got out of the car into the downpour and ran to the comparative safety of the porch. Guffey shied at the sight of the glider swinging back and forth with nobody on it. Approaching the door, Dortmunder muttered, “Last time they left the place a hundred percent unlocked. Quiet, now.”
Guffey, who hadn’t been saying anything, remained quiet.
Dortmunder gently opened the screen door, gently turned the knob of the inner door, gently pushed, and the door yawned open. Dortmunder slid silently in, followed by Guffey, and they quietly closed both doors.
“Stick close to me,” Dortmunder mouthed into Guffey’s ear, and Guffey nodded, a movement barely visible in the faint glow that was all that could reach here through the rain from the nearest streetlight.
They moved through the house, found nothing, found nobody, and found no explanation. “I should have known this,” Dortmunder said aloud, back in the living room, Guffey still so close to his right elbow it was like wearing a sleeve guard.
“You should have?” Guffey asked. “Should have known what?”
“That I’d have to give that reservoir one more whack at me,” Dortmunder said.
Soft ground. Heavy boat. Stan finally got the station wagon and boat turned around in the restricted area of the clearing at the end of the access road, but when he tried to ease down the muddy slope into the water everything immediately bogged down. The two rear wheels of the hauler virtually disappeared into the mud, and the rear wheels of the station wagon spun messily in place.
“Well, hell,” Stan said. “Everybody out.”
“Hell it is,” Tiny agreed, and everybody but Stan climbed out into the rain and the dark and the mud and the mess and a kind of nasty little needle-tipped wind.
The station wagon was lighter now, but the boat was still heavy and all the wheels were still stuck. Kelp and Tiny pushed against the front of the wagon while Tom stood off to the side and observed. The wagon’s big engine wailed and whined in competition with the wailing and whining of the storm, but nothing happened except that the pushers got extremely muddy.
Finally, Stan put the wagon in neutral, opened his window, and called Kelp and Tiny over. They slogged around to talk to him, looking like the defensive line in the final quarter of a particularly hard-fought football game, and Stan said, “We aren’t getting anywhere.”
Tiny said, “You noticed that, too, huh?”
“What we gotta do,” Stan said, “is get up on dry land and start again.”
“There isn’t any dry land,” Kelp told him.
“Drier,” Stan explained. “A little more solid, I mean. If I get up there all the way to where the road comes in, up at the top of the clearing, then I can get up some speed, run it backward fast as I can, get some momentum on shoving that goddamn boat into the water.”
“Without jackknifing,” Kelp pointed out.
“I gotta give it the try,” Stan said.
“Very tricky on this messy surface,” Kelp suggested.
Tiny said, “I hate having ideas like this, because I know who they make work for, which is me, but I think maybe we oughta drag it up to the end of the clearing like you say, and then turn this blessed car around and put the trailer hitch on the front bumper instead of the back, so you can drive frontward in low-low.”
“Now that is an idea,” Stan told him.
“I was afraid it was,” Tiny agreed. “And now I got another one. Doug can get down off that boat and help push.”
Kelp grinned at the idea. “Doug’ll love that,” he said.
“We all will,” said Tiny.
They went around to the prow of the boat and yelled at Doug for a while, and after he gave up pretending he didn’t understand what they wanted, he very reluctantly came down off his high boat and helped.
At first the station wagon didn’t want to move forward either, but then its rear wheels came struggling up out of the holes they’d dug, and the hauler’s wheels grudgingly began to lumber along through the mire, and movement took place. At the top of the clearing, Stan brought the wagon and the boat to a stop. The V tongue on the hauler was removed from the trailer hitch, and then Tiny lay down in the mud and Kelp stood by to hand him tools while Tiny, his work illuminated by the station wagon’s back-up lights, with some difficulty removed the muddy hitch from the muddy bumper. Then Stan turned the wagon around and Tiny bent over the front bumper with the trailer hitch in his hands and studied the situation. “It doesn’t want to fit,” he decided.