“Sick people,” Moxie answered.
Lopez was waiting in the front hall. He wore a clean white jacket. He said, “Mister Fletcher, Mister Sills is on the phone. He says if I don’t put you on the phone, he fires me.”
Sy Koller came out of the dining room with his cup of coffee. He said to Moxie, “We’re a part of an international conspiracy?”
“Throw ’em a script, Sy,” Moxie answered. “Let ’em see how bad it is.”
Koller said, “I’d suspect Peterman’s hand behind this foolishness—you know, for publicity—if he weren’t dead.”
Fletch said to Lopez, “Did you tell Sills what’s going on outside?”
Outside were the sounds of sirens and hysterical screaming.
“No,” said Lopez.
Fletch went down the corridor and through the billiard room to the study.
He lifted the telephone receiver from the desk.
“Good morning, Ted,” Fletch said into the phone. “Nice day. We’re just going sailing.”
“Why am I hearing sirens?”
“Sirens?”
Ted Sills said, “I’m hearing sirens over the phone. While I’ve been waiting. Was someone singing My country ’tis of thee… ?”
“I wasn’t. Not this morning.”
“I heard people screaming. I’m still hearing people screaming.”
“Must be a bad connection.”
“What’s going on there, Fletch?”
“Just settling down for breakfast. Maybe you heard Edith Howell practicing on the scales.”
Somewhere in the house another pane of glass smashed.
“What was that?” Ted Sills asked over the phone.
“What was what?”
“Sharp noise. Sounded like glass breaking.”
“Must have been at your end, Ted.”
“Sounds like a riot’s going on.”
“Must be your telephone cord, Ted. Give it a tug and see if it clears up.”
“Fletcher, I have told you and your little playmates to get out of that house.”
“Yes, you did, Ted.”
“You’re still there.”
“Having a few days of peace and quiet.”
“I heard on the morning news you’re still there. In The Blue House.”
“That reminds me, Ted. When does the rubbish get picked up? Want to make sure Lopez puts it out.”
“I want you to get out of the goddamned house!” Ted Sills shouted.
“Now, now, Ted. No wonder your phone is broken.”
“All right, Fletcher, I’m coming down there. With a shotgun. And if you’re not out of that house by the time I get there—”
“You’ll hardly be noticed. By the way, Ted, you never told me Moxie Mooney is half-owner of Five Aces Farm.”
There was silence from Ted Sill’s end of the line. From Fletch’s there were three sounds which could have been light-caliber gunshots.
“I happened to find out just this morning,” Fletch said. “I didn’t know you two knew each other.”
Ted Sills said, “Ms Mooney has a financial interest in this farm. What’s that to you?”
“Nothing. Just think it odd that here you have two such nice financial partners, Moxie and me, staying in your resort house, and you want us out.”
“Fletcher…” Ted Sills sighed. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’ve turned that house into a circus.”
“Not me, Ted.”
Moxie appeared in the doorway of the study. Her eyes were huge. “Stella Littleford’s been hurt,” she said.
“Sorry, Ted,” Fletch said into the phone. “Gotta go.”
“What did I just hear?” Sills shouted. “Who’s been hurt?”
“The three-minute eggs,” said Fletch. “Their feelings are hurt. I’m not there eating ’em.”
He hung up and followed Moxie into the front of the house.
Stella Littleford was sitting like a dropped doll on the floor of the front hall. Her hands were over her forehead. Blood was seaping through her fingers.
Sy Koller was kneeling beside her. “Definite need for stiches,” he said to Fletch. The front door was open.
A low haze of riot gas drifted over the street. Police had set up saw horse barricades in a U in the street at the front of The Blue House. Two were knocked over. There were a few discarded white robes on the road. There was also one of the uniformed plodgies sitting on the road in a position nearly identical to Stella Littleford’s, another dropped doll, also holding his head.
To the right, down Duval Street, away from the riot gas, hand-to-hand fighting and mouth-to-mouth shouting was continuing.
Directly across the street, a sinewy armed fisherman was puncturing the tires of the school buses and trucks with his fishing knife.
Gerry Littleford ran into the yard followed by two young men with a stretcher. His eyes were red and runny from the gas.
“Shit forever,” he said to Fletch. He pointed to a broken rum bottle on the front porch. “Someone pegged Stella with that. Cut her head.”
Clearly there had still been rum in the bottle when it broke. The shattered glass was in a puddle.
An ambulance was backing down the street, over one of the fallen saw horses, to the front door of The Blue House.
In the front hall, Mrs Lopez was handing wet cloths to Moxie who was handing them to Sy Koller who was applying them to Stella Littleford’s forehead. The young men who brought the stretcher stopped all that. They put a pile of dry gauze against the cut and taped it lightly.
They helped Stella onto the stretcher.
“Want me to go to the hospital with you?” Fletch asked Gerry.
“I do not.”
“Want Sy to go?”
Gerry said, “I do not.”
“Okay,” Fletch said. “I’ll see you later.”
Gerry followed the stretcher-bearers through the front door.
Fletch stood on the front porch watching them put Stella into the back of the ambulance.
When Moxie joined him, he said. “Watch your feet. Broken glass.”
The riot gas was dissipating. A swinging, kicking crowd came back down Duval Street from the right, knocking over another barricade. Fletch supposed the demonstrators were trying to get back to their buses and trucks. Their signs were broken and trampled around the trucks as were record player and the amplifiers. The trucks, the buses, and some of the cars had flat tires. But by then there were too many personal angers and personal scores to settle and the pushing and the punching continued.
From above their heads, from the upper front balcony of The Blue House boomed the world’s best trained, most voluminous voice: “Four score and seven years ago…”
“Oh, God,” said Moxie.
In fact, the people in the street did look up. That’s Frederick Mooney! And they did stop fighting.
“… our forefathers brought forth on this continent…” “Good ol’ Freddy,” said Fletch. “Let’s go sailing.”
“… a new nation…”
Fletch and Moxie walked through the house to the back. Even in the backyard they could hear Mooney’s Gettysburg Address. All other noises had ceased.
“Think of that volume of sound,” Moxie said, “coming out of a head that must hurt as much as his does!”
26
After they sailed awhile, Moxie said, “I suppose I should ask you, seeing it wasn’t so long ago you put me on an airplane ostensibly for dinner and landed me far enough away from the scene of the crime to make me a fugitive from justice, if now you have me in a sailboat, do you mean to flee the country with me?”
“Damn,” said Fletch at the tiller. “You caught me. You penetrated my purposeful plot.”