“I didn’t think I’d made a mistake. I thought sure you’d be one of us. Are you so stupid, Dan, that you don’t understand? You can’t leave now.”
I stared at him and then my legs got weak and I sat down. It was true, knowing what I knew, I had either to join his organization, or—
“Oh, yes,” Edwin answered my unspoken question. “If you don’t take the job, there’s only one way out, and I shall not hesitate to use it. I am building a tremendous business, and I can’t have you knock it down like a child playing with blocks.”
“Suppose I kept my mouth shut?”
“Unless you take part, I cannot trust you, Dan. Surely you can see that.” He shook his head sadly. “I wish you’d be like the rest of the family, son. We all pull together here. Well, you sleep on it, Dan.”
He unlocked the door.
“Please don’t try to get away.”
I left the library then and went upstairs to my room. And found the third note:
Do not do anything foolish. Stay where you are.
I wadded the note up angrily and thrust it into my pocket. Who, in that inimical household, might have written it? Certainly not Edwin. Linda? Perhaps. Felicia? I didn’t think so. Fred? I doubted whether Fred thought much about anybody but himself. Philip? Never.
Who, then?
In exasperation I lay down on the top of my bed in my shirt and trousers and, after a little while, dozed off.
I awoke with a start, a clear picture in my mind: the open end papers of the book on Grandma Moses, with the name Maud Owen, heavily block printed, like the notes I had received.
At the same time, a tactile memory returned, of the old lady’s hand in mine, when I spoke to Felicia in the garden. At first it had lain like a quiescent bird, then it stirred as I spoke to Felicia, until finally, when I had asked for help, grandmother’s hand had become so tense, I had released it!
Grandmother Owen was not senile. She was pretending! I was sure now it was she who had written those notes. But who had slipped them under my door? Felicia?
I sat up in bed. I had to get out of my stepfather’s house, and I had to get Felicia and my grandmother out, too!
Outside my door I could hear someone walking heavily up and down. There was a patch of light on my ceiling, shining up from the terrace below my window, and when I peeked out, I could see a man below, a stranger in khaki trousers and windbreaker, sitting in a chair reading a newspaper.
But my window was in shadow, and I saw a broad ledge that led, on my left, to the south-west corner of the house.
Presently, having put on my best dark blue suit for camouflage, I climbed out on the ledge and started shuffling, back pressed against the wall, towards the corner of the building. The guard looked up once, and I thought he’d seen me, but then he went on reading the newspaper. I slipped around the corner, where, finding an ivy trellis, I climbed down to the ground and stood listening.
The pounding of the surf was amplified by a low cloudiness, and from a distance I could hear the whine of the beach line bus, starting up from a passenger stop.
Felicia’s room, which adjoined Grandmother Owen’s, lay directly under my own, and the window stood partly open.
I climbed across the sill and then hesitated as the blackness pressed against my eyes like a mask. I heard the tick of an alarm dockland a sigh amid the rustle of bedclothes. My outstretched hand touched something, the shade of a lamp. I felt for its switch and turned the lamp on. Felicia was sitting up in bed with the blanket at her chin, staring at me.
“Oh, Dan!” She got out of bed, and slipped into a kimona. “I wasn’t sleeping, I was worrying about you. Mr. Gentry ordered me to keep Mrs. Owen and myself to our rooms tonight. What’s happened?”
“No time to talk. Get your clothes oh. We’re getting out of here. This the door to grandmother’s room?”
“Dan, there’s something—”
“I know. She’s only pretending to be out of touch. But why?”
She ignored my question. “If you’re in danger, Dan, she said she would save you.”
I snorted. “Save me? I’m twenty-two years old and able-bodied. How could a little wisp of a woman like that save me?”
Before Felicia could answer, there was a sharp rapping from the hall door.
“Quick,” I said, lunging for the door to grandmother’s room. But I had barely time to get it open before there came a crash and the splintering wood, and Edwin was standing in the hall doorway, his face as murderous as the black muzzle of the gun he pointed at me.
“You’ve made your intentions very clear, Dan,” he said.
Fred entered with Linda then, and they both looked at me with loathing, as if I had betrayed the family in some unspeakable fashion. Philip came too, loitering in the doorway.
“A general meeting of the board of directors?” I asked.
“You might call it that,” Edwin said. “We just took a vote about what to do with you, Philip.”
His nephew made a halfhearted attempt to come to attention.
“Philip, I’m giving you a chance to reinstate yourself.” He put the gun in Phil’s hand. “Take Dan down to the furnace room. We’ll stay here until it’s over.”
“What about her?” Phil was a big shot now.
“That’s up to Miss Fox. We’ll talk about it while you’re gone.”
Phil jabbed the gun in my back, and at that moment, Grandmother Owen appeared at her doorway, and came teetering into the room.
“I’ll just sit down, if you don’t mind,” she said, as she lowered her fragile figure into a slipper chair. “I’m not much used to walking about, you know.”
Edwin, with nothing to say for once, simply stared at her.
“Now put away that silly gun, Philip. You must let Dan alone. He’s a good boy and deserves saving. Don’t look so surprised, Edwin. When you started talking about having me institutionalized about three years ago, I knew it was because your secrets were getting too scandalous for me to hear, and you began to fear me. But I did not wish to be put away; I found it more interesting here, so long as you didn’t try to harm anyone in my family. So I became senile, you see.”
“And all this time—” Edwin managed to say.
“Yes, I have been aware of your activities. In a way, though, they’ve been a blessing to me, because even at my age, I wanted to express myself — not in painting, like Grandma Moses, but in writing. Like Dan.”
She gave me an affectionate look that reminded me of Aunt Kate. “And here, all around me, was a perfect subject. I would be the historian of Edwin’s criminal family. So I wrote it all out in my book. I call it My Life Among the Sinners. It runs three hundred and fifty pages!”
“Where is that book!” Edwin took a step towards the old lady’s bedroom.
“Oh, not in there. My last nurse was in on my secret, just as Felicia is. The other nurse mailed it for me, to Harper and Row. It must be over a month ago now.”
“Harper and Row!”
“Oh, yes. It’s all hand written, in ink, and held together with a ribbon. And I wrote a nice little letter with it, swearing on my honor it was all true!”
So those had not been medicinal stains on my grandmother’s fingertips. They were ink stains!
Fred said: “They won’t even read the manuscript, dad.”
Edwin looked relieved, but only for a moment.
“But I also made a condensed article and sent it to Harper’s Magazine,” Grandmother Owen said serenely. “That was about a month ago, too. And just the other day, the day that Dan arrived, I sent a copy of the article to the San Francisco Police department. You mailed it, didn’t you, Felicia?”