His real hand shot out, grabbing her other wrist. “What are you doing!”
“Just putting my arm behind my back.”
“Why?”
“So we’ll be even.”
He frowned, his whole face suddenly twisting. Still tightly gripping her wrist, he turned away, his shoulders starting to move a little, rocking gently.
Ellie stared for a moment, dismayed. Then she reached out, patting his arm. “Don’t feel bad about your hand,” she said softly. “It’s all right. I like you anyway. I like you even better because of your hand.”
He turned back, facing her, his upper lip beaded with sweat, a bright red tracing the spidery network of veins in his eyes. “I like you, too,” he said in a thick, coated voice. She felt his fingers loosen on her wrist and then with a quick, sharp movement, he jerked his hand away.
“Get out of here,” he muttered, so low that she thought she had misunderstood him. She waited a moment, uncertainty climbing into her eyes.
“I said get out of here!” It was a yell, high-pitched and frenzied, almost like the voice of a woman. He thumped the ground, with his hand, his face distorting, parting his lips flat against his teeth. “Get out of here, get out of here...”
Ellie scrambled to her feet.
“Get out! Get out! Get out!”
The cries of rage and anguish followed her across the fields, echoing through her skull, louder than the roar of her own pulses. Stumbling, falling, pushing to her feet, she ran, sobs of terror and heartbreak pulling at her throat. She hurtled the low brick wall and raced into her own yard.
“Mamma, Mamma!”
Her mother was instantly awake. Ellie clattered up the steps and fell into her arms. “He screamed at me, Mamma, and told me to go... He told me to go...”
“Who told you to go! Ellie, what are you talking about?”
“The man, Mamma, the man with the hand...”
Ellie’s words dissolved then and her face crumpled and her mother dragged her, sobbing and shaking, into the house.
Ellie didn’t see the human dragnet that converged on the doll factory. She didn’t see the police officers or the patrol cars or the man as he was driven up the gnarled wedge of road past her house. She didn’t even remember that there was lightning and rain and thunder all through the night. She only knew that the next morning, the heat wave was broken and the yard glistened in the sun, and right after breakfast she set out with her bathing suit and towel and lunch in a brown paper bag to spend the day at the swimming pool in the park.
Passing the old factory road, she glanced down at the burned-out archway. Her mother had explained about strangers and how you never knew which ones were sick in their minds so you should stay away from them all. Ellie was quite sure though, that if his mind had been well, he wouldn’t have chased her away. She looked down, kicking morosely at a stone. If his mind had been well, they could have played chess every day.
From behind, she heard Stacy Patterson’s voice calling to her. “El-lie... Wait up...”
Ellie turned, waving vigorously.
Stacy caught up and they walked side by side, swinging their lunches. “Boy, is it ever good to see you,” Ellie said.
“Me, too,” Stacy breathed fervently. “What’d you do all week?”
“Nothing. All I did was play stupid old chess.”
“Me, too. Only I played Monopoly. With my stupid old brother.”
“Did you win?”
“No.”
“Me either. I didn’t even stalemate.”
Aftermath of Death
by Talmage Powell
Condescension may offtimes prove to be the trigger for a deadly boomerang.
“The disease has a jawbreaking technical name,” Dr. Mallory Ames said. “But in layman’s language, Nicky Colgren died of breakdown and malfunction of the liver. Liver failure, you might say.”
Ames sighed heavily as he gave the news to Ronald Clary and Hadley Lawrence. Lawrence, an attorney, had summoned his two friends to his office. It was early evening and the large office building had an air of desertion and desolation.
Managing editor of the city’s leading newspaper, Clary stirred quietly as he lighted a cigar. A powerfully built, balding man, Clary’s eyes were normally diamond-hard windows on a personality not easily shocked or dismayed. “I suppose,” he mused, “I owe it to good old Nicky to write the obituary myself.”
“It’s difficult to think of him being gone,” Lawrence said.
“There was little I could do,” Dr. Ames said. “We can repair the heart, replace the kidney. But when the lowly liver quits, we might as well close up shop.”
“You were with him until the end?” Lawrence asked.
“Of course,” Ames nodded. “From the first symptom until the moment when I had to put my signature on the death certificate, I was in constant attendance. It was the least I could do for Nicky.”
Lawrence moved slowly behind his desk and sat down. He was a dark, thin man, with the look of temperament in the fine lines of his face. The desk was massive, hand-rubbed walnut in keeping with the rest of the large imposing office.
“Old Nicky,” he murmured, “no more bumbling for him, dubbing them off the tee or slicing his irons in the rough.”
“He hadn’t a bad life,” Clary said. “Over fifty years of it. Ineffectual and slightly ridiculous at times, true. But with all that inherited wealth, he had a good, solid shield.”
“He wasn’t the same Nicky at the end,” Ames said. “With the pudgy grin and little-boyishness gone, he was just a tired old man with a thin, graying mustache and pouches under his eyes.”
“Liquor and women,” Clary said, “and the parties he was always bustling around preparing for.”
“His most serious interests,” Lawrence agreed. “You know, when you get right down to it, he had nothing in common with us three. I wonder why he dung to us as friends?”
“We were his points of contact with a world that had more substance than his own,” Clary said. “And I suppose it bolstered our own egos to have him around.”
Ames nodded acceptance of the point Clary had made; then the doctor turned to the attorney. “Hadley, why’d you call us down here?”
“I have a letter from Nicky,” Lawrence opened a drawer in his desk. “It was written night before last and delivered to me by special messenger. Attached to it were instructions for the three of us to read it jointly in the event of Nicky’s death.”
Clary and Ames glanced at each other and drew involuntarily closer to the desk. Lawrence sat holding the white, sealed envelope for a moment. Then he picked up a thin, golden letter opener. The ripping of the envelope was inordinately loud and jarring in the silence that had come to the office.
Lawrence went pale as he skimmed over the letter.
“Come on, Hadley!” Clary snapped his fingers. “It was meant for all three of us.”
“I’m not sure you want to hear it.”
“I’m certain we do,” Ames said. A robust, rather florid, stuffy looking man, the doctor glared briefly at his friend.
“Sure,” Clary said. “Read it aloud, Hadley.”
With another moment’s hesitation, the attorney took a breath and began reading in a voice that faltered every now and then:
“Dear Pals,
“I suspect, from Mal’s demeanor, that this mysterious liver ailment is going to knock me off. I should at least like to die from a man-sized cause. Instead — wouldn’t you know it — the bumbling nitwit will expire from a fouled-up liver, of all things.
“Don’t protest, friends. I didn’t use the word nitwit lightly. I have known, since I was a kid smothered by governesses and nurses, that the word described me well. I know further that you have always secretly thought of me in precisely such terms.