“I am ready,” he said softly.
He went downstairs to pay his rent to Mrs. Beamish, catching her just as she was walking out the door with some luggage.
“Oh, Mr. Jenkins,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you before I leave. I’m going to visit my sister in Buffalo for a week, and I want to be sure everything is all right in your apartment.”
“Fine — everything is fine, Mrs. Beamish.” Jenkins struggled to subdue the elation in his voice.
On the morning of June 15, after Ray Beamish was let off in front of his house by his car pool driver, Jerome Jenkins waited two hours until he was sure Beamish was in bed. He stood by the kitchen sink, looking back at the piles of loose stones and boxes of rock which nearly obscured the dinette area.
He turned on the faucet and timed the flow into a quart measure. In three days the trash barrels would add eleven hundred and twenty-five pounds — give or take a little for variation in barometric pressure from the 30-inch norm.
He nodded his satisfaction. The floor would go with the addition of six hundred and fifty pounds, just before noon on Friday, while Beamish slept. He attached the hose, taping the faucet open with a tiny stream flowing. He walked around the outside wall of the kitchen and descended the back stairs gingerly.
On the way to the Albany airport Jenkins passed a sprawling auto graveyard which marched through acres of head high weeds and brush, down into ravines and over wooded knolls. On a side road he found a back entrance. He drove his car among some rusted and partially dismantled veterans of the arterial wars. His car blended so well that by the time he walked out to the road he could not make it out among the hundreds of other abandoned vehicles.
After he picked the burdock burrs from his clothes, he went out on the main highway to hitchhike to Albany.
At 8:05 on June 18 Jerome Jenkins looked at his watch. He was seated in the outer office of Henry Wiley of Wiley Associates in Oregon. He took out his billfold, removing from it a brittle, yellowed newspaper clipping. He read it slowly, as if for the first time, then tore it into tiny pieces which he dropped into the wastebasket beside Helen West’s desk.
“Oh, it’s good to see you back, Mr. Jenkins,” Henry Wiley’s secretary said for the third time. “Mr. Wiley will be delighted.”
On June 18 at 11:06 a.m., Eastern time, 17,212 pounds of stones, broken concrete and rubble, and water, tore through the floor of a large two-story house on the outskirts of Castor, New York, taking with it the refrigerator, a table, some chairs, a planter and a large portion of the floor from the second floor apartment. The debris struck with such force that most of the first floor bedroom area with all it contained were plunged into the cellar in a tangled mass of jagged floor joists, shattered boards and mangled furniture. The rumble of the collapse was heard by residents a halt mile away in Castor.
After the last object to fall — a breadbox which slid from a tilted kitchen counter top — had tinkled tinnily into the gaping hole, the only sound above the pall of dust was a trickle of water flowing from a hose dangling from the ceiling above.
At 11:09 on June 18, some fifty miles away in Henderson, Ray Beamish knelt, and through a haze of tears placed flowers from his garden on the grave of Elissa Deame, just as he had done every June 18 for the past seventeen years. As always, he was so overcome with emotion he scarcely noticed the warmth of the sun and the singing of the birds in the trees.