Duke’s voice fell across his thoughts. “Hey, Eddie, come down here a second.”
“He couldn’t come up, of course,” Belle said.
Grant looked at her irritably, and then went downstairs to the living room Duke and the nurse stood at the front door, obviously ready to leave; they wore topcoats, and Duke was tossing the car keys up and down in his hand. His brother was standing at the fireplace.
“Keep an eye on him, Eddie,” Duke said. “See that he doesn’t get into the jam.”
“Where do you think you’re going?”
“Into town.” Duke smiled and took the girl’s arm. “Errand of mercy. The kid’s fever seems better, but she needs nose drops, a salve for her chest, that sort of stuff.”
Grant fought to control his swelling anger. “And you’re the hero that’s going to get it?”
“No, not me. the nurse,” Duke said easily. “The people in town know I’m Hank’s brother. If I was shopping for a sick kid the word would get around. Neighbors and friends might drop in to see if they could help. But nobody knows the girl. She can buy what she likes without causing any talk. See what I mean?”
He was right, Grant realized, but that wasn’t important — what mattered was that Duke hadn’t bothered to consult him first.
“We’re ready to go,” Duke said quietly. “Anything you want us to bring you?”
Grant hesitated, reluctant to force the issue. “Did you check the radio this morning?” he said. “The news show, I mean?”
“Sure. There’s nothing on us. Nothing at all.”
“Okay, get back here as fast as you can,” Grant said shortly. He tried to sound as if he were granting Duke permission to leave, but it didn’t come off that way; they all realized he was avoiding a challenge.
Belle came downstairs as Duke was starting the car. The noise of the motor was a series of shattering sounds against the silence. She smiled a good morning at Hank and then glanced at Grant who was still staring at the front door.
“Duke going somewhere?” she asked him.
“We need groceries. And the baby needs some things.”
“Oh.” Belle glanced at Hank, sensing that Grant’s mood was ugly. “Where’s the girl? The nurse, I mean.”
“She went with Duke,” Hank said.
“Was that smart?”
Hank shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”
“Judas Priest. Eddie, what did you let them go for?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Grant said, without looking at her. “It’s all right.”
Hank knew that Grant’s temper was dangerously short; he had lost to Duke by default and that was eating at him.
“Eddie, it wasn’t smart,” Belle said. “Duke’s after that girl. You don’t know what kind of a dumb thing he might do while he’s alone with her.”
“Don’t worry about it, I told you,” Grant said.
“How do you know Duke didn’t wake the girl up the night he took the baby?”
“What do you mean?” Grant said, turning and staring at her.
“Maybe he woke her up deliberately, that’s what I mean. He says she caught him in the nursery, but how can you be sure? It’s his story, that’s all. I wouldn’t be surprised if he woke her up just so he could bring her with us.”
“Shut up!” Grant said, making an abrupt, silencing gesture with his hand. “Stop talking up trouble.”
“I may be saving us trouble, Eddie.”
“And I told you to shut up. Duke isn’t crazy. He’s thinking of his hide just like the rest of us.”
“That’s right,” Hank said.
They both looked at him and Grant said dryly, “Thanks a lot, Junior.”
“He’s his brother after all,” Belle said. “He should know.”
“All right, he knows. And he knows his brother is no crackpot. That’s why I’m telling you.”
Hank put a cigarette in his mouth and struck a match with his good hand. “It’s not quite that simple,” he said. “Duke makes sense to himself. But sometimes other people can’t see that so they’re liable to think he’s a little cracked.”
Belle smiled at him as she sat down and crossed her legs. “That’s an interesting way to look at it,” she said, moving her foot about in a small circle. “I’m not sure I understand it, but it’s interesting anyway.”
“It’s pretty deep,” Grant said dryly. “It means Duke is smart. It means he gets what he wants.”
“That’s it exactly,” Hank said. “Regardless.”
Grant turned away from them and strolled to the windows. He stood there for a few seconds and the silence in the room stretched into a curious tension; the conversation wasn’t over yet, and everyone realized that. Duke was a subject of desperate importance to Grant and Belle; they didn’t trust him but their lives were in his hands. They wanted clues to his character, indices to his patterns of behavior. They had to know what made him tick. Hank had guessed this earlier, but now he was sure of it; he could feel their uneasiness in the silence.
Grant turned slowly and looked at him. “What do you mean ‘regardless?’ ” he said.
“Regardless?”
“You said that he got what he wanted ‘regardless.’ ” Grant gestured irritably with one hand. “What do you mean?”
“Oh. Well, I simply meant that he’d scare you with the chances he’d take. If he wanted something, that is.” Hank smiled and shook his head as if he were savoring an old, bitter-sweet memory. “One summer, for instance, Duke looked like a cinch to win the first prize for the biggest muskie caught in Lake Sandstone. The prize was twenty-five dollars, quite a bit of money in those days, and it was put up by one of the big lodges on the lake. Duke caught a beauty in July, a forty-six-pounder, and the contest ended on Labor Day. By the first of September he looked like a shoo-in. No one else had caught anything close to his big one.” Hank took a drag on his cigarette, all of his movements casual and deliberate. Then he smiled at Grant who was watching him with a hard little frown.
“You wouldn’t think twenty-five dollars would mean such a lot to a man,” he said. “I mean, a fish is a fish. But Duke wanted that prize.”
“Okay, okay, so what happened?” Grant said.
“He won the contest, all right,” Hank said, “but it was no shoo-in. A day before the contest ended the word came into the lodge that one of Duke’s Friends had caught a whopper. He was still out on the lake with it, but he’d showed it to a man coming in. And this fellow said the fish might go sixty pounds. This was around dusk, and there was only a little bit of light still showing on the horizon.”
“Never mind the nature touches,” Grant said. “Let’s have the results. You said Duke won. How come — when somebody else caught a bigger fish?”