Wellington moved his lips, but didn’t seem to speak. What he had said, subvocally, was, “Give me some siren.”
A siren wailed, sounding a few blocks away.
The driver of the Chevrolet began to honk his horn, either for the others to hurry the job or to give it up. William and Walter Wellington came driving back, and angled across the street to block the Chevrolet, whose driver kept on honking while starting to back away, trying to avoid being blocked.
Wellington was sub-vocally giving a description of the Chevrolet.
Thomas Wellington had knocked out his opponent, and was now scrambling over to help George Holt.
John Bloor arrived to help Robert and his cousin Albert, attacking the two from the Chevrolet at a different angle.
George’s opponent leaped to his feet, fought off Thomas Wellington, and ran.
There was practically no traffic in this residential neighborhood at noontime of a weekday; they had the area virtually to themselves.
The two conscious young men from the Chevrolet broke and ran, trying to get back into their car, which was still moving in reverse down the street, trying to keep the Wellington brothers from maneuvering it into a cul-de-sac.
Wellington: “Four. Let them go.”
The Chevrolet, no longer being blocked, leaped forward and made a screeching turn at the next corner. Three of the attackers departed on foot. Two were unconscious on the pavement.
Wellington: “Two. Get the Mercury out of the way.”
Thomas Wellington, Robert Pratt, both Bloors and George Holt trotted up to the flower car. The Mercury had dented its side panel, and punctured its own radiator, but that seemed to be about all the damage. Robert got behind the wheel, shifted into neutral, and steered while the others pushed the car back into the side street and left it at the curb.
The young man Robert had knocked out got dazedly to his feet. Greg Holt looked levelly at him from the window of Bradford’s car. The young man looked around, and went trotting uncertainly away.
In the lead car, Sterling was opening and closing his fists on his knees. “To do this to Elizabeth,” he kept saying. “To do this to Elizabeth.” His two brothers-in-law and their wives looked at him in helpless compassion.
Wellington: “Four. Back to your post, one block ahead.”
The Wellington brothers’ car made a U-turn and sped away.
John Bloor was running back toward car number four. His cousin and Robert and the other two were already climbing back into the third car, where Evelyn anxiously began to ask them if everybody was all right, while looking exclusively at Robert. Fifty-five seconds had passed since the accident.
The hearse began to move. The flower car followed. The seven cars with the mourners came in their wake. The final young man was sitting up in the street, rubbing his head and looking after the procession. He got to his feet, very unsteady, and walked away, going half a block before a blue Buick pulled to a stop near him and two cold-looking men got out and took him by the arms. “Hey!” he said. “What are you grabbing me for? What did I do?”
They didn’t answer him. They put him in the car and took him to a small old brick building downtown, where they led him to a room already containing the driver of the Chevrolet and two of the other four attackers. They kept him there two or three minutes, and then took him away by himself to a fairly large men’s room. There were four of them, and one of him. They stood around looking at him, and one of them soaked a white terrycloth towel in a sink full of water, then squeezed some of the water out. Holding the wet towel, he said, “Before I ask you the questions, I want to explain why you should give me the answers.” And then he began to hit the young man with the towel.
iii
The four young men in the maroon-and-black Pontiac were silent until one of them said “We’ve still got to get Lockridge.”
“Without any of them getting us.”
“Naturally.”
“I don’t care what you say,” said a third, “they were ready for us. They were out of their car before Joey even had the Chevy stopped.”
“So they know our plans,” said the first. “We can change them. We don’t have to make the try at the cemetery.”
“Fine,” said the fourth. “But what do we do instead?”
“They’ll go back to the house. We’ll wait for him there.”
“Then what?”
“The house is right on the river. We find ourselves a motorboat, we take Lockridge out the back door, into the motorboat, across the river.”
“What good does that do us?”
“The nearest bridge is ten miles away at Clark’s Ferry.”
“Okay, we can’t be followed. But we’re on the wrong side of the river. How do we get back to the farm?”
The first said, “We pick up a car on the other side, over in Millersburg. I know how to jump wires. We drive up to Sunbury, come back across the river up there, and come on back south. They’ll be looking for people going the other way, but they won’t be looking for people coming back this way.”
“I like that,” said the third.
“But first we’ve got to get a motorboat,” said the fourth. “How do we do that?”
“To start,” the first told him, “we go to the river.” Being the driver, he now faced front and started the engine, then paused to say, “Any problems?”
There were no problems. He nodded, and the Pontiac moved away from the curb.
South of town there were a number of elderly summer cottages along the river, some with boathouses, locked up now for the winter. In the third of these into which the young men forced their way, they found a motorboat whose engine would start without a key. They flipped coins democratically to decide which one would operate the motorboat, and the other three closed the boathouse doors again after he’d taken the boat out into the river. They stood on shore and waved to him, and he waved back, then turned the prow upstream and went chugging slowly northward. He was in no hurry, and the slow speed was quieter, less likely to draw attention.
The other three returned to the Pontiac, and drove north up route 11/15 to where the campus started on their left. They drove through the south gate, parked in a student parking area, and walked across the campus to the main gate, which faced the president’s house. They all had vague troubled feelings, memories, regrets, as they walked across the campus, which showed as small frowns around their mouths and eyes, but which none of them mentioned to one another.
At the president’s house, a certain amount of overlap was taking place; the undertaker’s men were still carrying equipment out, while the caterer’s men had already started carrying equipment in. The three young men casually crossed the street, walked up to the house, up the stoop to the porch, and through the open front door.
The bustle was limited to a front room on the right. The three moved past that, deeper into the house, eventually finding another area of bustle in the kitchen, where some of the caterer’s men were setting up the coffee urn and the large metal pans of food. There was a rear exit from the kitchen, but it seemed a crowded route to take if in a hurry, so they went looking for an alternate, and eventually found it. Behind the main dining room was a plant-filled solarium, its wall of windows facing the morning sun and the river. French doors led out from here to a stone patio, slate steps led down from there to the lawn.
While two of them waited in the solarium, the third went out and down to the water’s edge, to be sure the one with the motorboat had arrived. He had, and was waiting close to shore, tucked away under a willow that grew on one corner of the property.