“Thank you, Mrs. Ammons. You’ve been very helpful.”
Bill slowly cradled the phone and began to probe the hypnotic patterns of the Motherwell across his desk.
Accepting the premise that Elliot Suggins Hoover was alive and that he and Sideburns were one and the same person, why then had he chosen to return the correspondence from Who’s Who unopened and with no forwarding address?
Bill made two more long-distance calls.
One to the main office of the National Chapter of the Shriners, in Cleveland; the other to the Iron & Steel Institute, in Pittsburgh. Both corroborated the information he had got from Mrs. Ammons. The Shriners still had him listed in their inactive roster, although they presumed him dead since they had not heard from him in seven years. The Iron & Steel Institute had revoked his membership in 1968 after a one-year lapse in his dues payments.
Well, Bill thought, at least one thing was becoming clear.
Sometime around 1967, something happened to cause Elliot Suggins Hoover to wish to disappear from the face of the earth.
The noise was appalling. A bedlam of car horns and obscenities battered through Janice’s wavering consciousness, pulling, tugging, wrenching her back to wakefulness. Against her will. She would have preferred the silent, restful nothingness to the tough, blasting cadences pressing in on her from all directions.
She was sitting on the curb in a puddle of wet slush, where the policeman had placed her after the accident, leaning against a litter bin with the legend “Use Me Please” hovering slightly above and to the right of her line of vision. A bevy of faces drifted in and out of focus around her, sympathetic, solicitous, rapt with interest and excitement. Beyond them, the indistinct figures of two men hurling foulnesses at each other strained to penetrate the barrier of blue-coated policemen separating them.
A voice suddenly descended to her ear, gently advising, “The ambulance’ll be here soon, ma’am.” Why these words filled her with dread, she couldn’t define. She would have to think about it, in a methodical, orderly way, organizing each piece of information as Bill would, step by step.
She began with: The ambulance must not come. Which led to: Why must it not come? Because.…
And here she faltered.
Backtrack!
She had been … where?
With whom?
Bypass it!
She had been in an accident. Of that she was sure.
She had been sitting in a cab, going … somewhere.… A wire screen separating the driver from the passenger had impeded her vision somewhat. Even so, she could see what was going to happen fully a minute before it did. The corridor between the traffic on the left and the Number 5 bus on the right was much too narrow to slip through. Certainly, the cabdriver must have realized it. If he attempted it, the cab would be sandwiched between them and crushed. It was inevitable. Janice reenacted the scene in her mind, reprising the same shock of terror she had previously felt as the cab lunged madly forward at full speed, plowing ahead in total disregard of the consequences. She recalled the metal scraping against metal sounds as the cab skidded bouncingly off traffic from left to right, the crunching collision against immovable forces, and the sudden, jarring halt that sent her hurtling forward into the wire screen … into blackness.
There was a fraction of a second, just before she fell into the soft cushion of darkness, when Janice experienced a fear, no, it was more a terror, so overwhelming that she thought her heart would stop beating.
Sitting on the curb, sorting about the hazy corridors of her memory, Janice had the distinct feeling that the terror she had felt in the minuscule moment of time related to something quite apart from the accident. Some other issue, not the accident, was involved. Some issue or duty that the accident was preventing her from completing. Duty. Yes, it was a duty.
“Keep it movin’,” a policeman was saying. “Give her some air.”
A gauzy parade of faces milled sluggishly past her in double images, a grotesque montage of mixed genders; painted eyes; scarlet lips, pursed, smiling; the head of a man, bristling with red facial hair; a child, a girl, gawking wide-eyed down at her—The girl! Janice’s eyes widened in alarm. The girl!
“Oh, my God!” Janice stammered aloud and struggled to her feet, clinging to the litter bin for support. Ivy! She’d be out of school! She’d be waiting! Alone! With the man! What was his name? Oh, God!
“Take it easy, ma’am,” the policeman was saying to her. “The ambulance’ll be here soon.…”
Janice clutched her shaking hand to still it as she strove to focus her vision on the small, numberless Lucite wristwatch, trying to decide whether the hands were pointing at the two fifteen nubs or the three fifteen.
“Please, what time is it?” Janice sobbed, grasping the policeman’s jacket and spinning him around.
“Easy, ma’am,” the officer urged. “Its just a little past three o’clock.”
“Oh, my God! I’ve got to go!”
“Now, now, you just take it easy—”
“But I must go, Officer!” Janice was shouting into the young Irish face. “It’s an emergency!”
“Oh? What kind of emergency?”
“It’s my daughter. Ivy. She’s been let out of school. She’s alone, waiting for me!”
“She’ll be all right, ma’am,” the policeman soothed. “They’ll keep her in the office till you get there.”
“No!” Janice shook her head at him in a crazy, wild way. “I must go now! Please!”
Her tears and hysteria were beginning to score points with the policeman. After a moment’s thoughtful consideration, he asked, “Don’t you think you should have a doctor look you over, ma’am?”
“No.” Janice wept. “I’m all right, really. Absolutely all right. Please, help me find a cab! Please!”
“Well—If you think you’ll be all right—”
“I’ll be fine. Thank you.”
Janice swayed only slightly as the policeman led her through the circle of faces, clearing their path with shouts and threats. He halted a cab with his whistle and opened the rear door. A man was seated in the back.
“Please leave this cab, sir,” the policeman ordered, using the proper Delahanty-approved words. “I am a police officer, and under Section One Hundred and Fifty of the Penal Code of New York, it is necessary for me to use this vehicle.”
The flabbergasted occupant of the cab quickly emerged, and Janice climbed in.
“Remember the name Donovan, Twenty-eighth Precinct, in case you need me,” the policeman shouted as the cab pulled away. Janice heard him, but her mind did not record the information.
A strange and invigorating feeling of buoyancy was working itself through the various levels of Janice’s body as the cab skittered and swerved through the maze of slippery streets, selecting the least encumbered route to their destination. She found her dizziness a distinct comfort as it mitigated orientation and reduced awareness of the terrors that lay in wait at the end of their journey.
The time was three thirty when Janice, maintaining a frail hold on consciousness, counted out four dollar bills, which included the ejected passenger’s fare as well, and shakily turned them over to the cabdriver. He had plotted his course so that Janice would be discharged directly in front of the school building, which, she noted with a sinking heart as they approached it, was totally deserted.
A few flakes of new snow were falling on the cleanly swept sidewalk as Janice left the cab. She started toward the school entrance, but the moment she did, she saw the sidewalk slide away from her and felt as if consciousness might depart at any moment. A nearby fire hydrant became her support, and she stood, stooping over it, clinging hard for several minutes, commanding her vision to cease whirling and her heart to stop pounding.