Perhaps he had handled the shop’s affairs a bit poorly. It had only been through over-optimism about the shop’s potential. Overbuying. Overstock. And then an extra-long slack season called Recession. Upper Amsterdam was dotted with linoleum shops; he should have realized it took a long, long time to build up prestige in a neighborhood. But he hadn’t, and now he was in trouble.
Would they help him … their Felice’s husband … when he needed it so desperately? They would not!
He let the last memory flick out of sight, and sighed wearily, sinking back against the wall. He had even tried to get Felice to cash in Penny’s bonds, but she had looked at him as though he were crazy. Penny. She was wealthier than him! Thoughts of the little girl annoyed him; he put her instantly from his mind.
He shoved back through the swinging door and joined the family in the living room.
“Oh, Daddy!” Penny smiled as he came into sight, running to him. “Let’s show Uncle Bob and Aunt Madge how I can swing from the door ledge. Lift me, Daddy!”
Roger felt an unreasoning fury rise up in him.
“Not now, Penny.”
“Pleeease, Daddy?”
“I said not now, Penny. Later.”
She sulked then, the way she always did, and he felt like slapping her, the way he had yesterday when she had washed his pipe, saying it was smelly. But he could see the annoyed expressions of the relatives. No need to get them any more rankled than they were. He lifted her, let her fingertips hook onto the ledge over the door to the dining room. Penny hung there an instant, then let go with a sharp squeal.
She fell to the carpet, and instantly the relatives were on their feet. Their darling niece , Roger thought sourly.
“She’s all right,” he said quickly.
Penny got up, shamefacedly, and brushed off her skirt. “I couldn’t hold on as good as I usually do.” She grinned.
The relatives grinned back.
Roger felt the depression of finality welling up in him.
The evening went badly.
Roger lay awake in his bed, thinking. Across from him Felice lay heavily on her back, the sharp, short wheeze that annoyed him so helping to keep him alert now; he wanted to be alert now.
There seemed no way out. The jobbers would take back the merchandise, and the shop owner would break the lease somehow. Shortly thereafter he would be back in servitude. To work under someone again, as he had six years before, seemed the most abhorrent of fates after being his own boss.
Then, as he lay there, from some unknown well of desperate resource … because he was desperate … something that Uncle Bob (no, not again, never again Uncle Bob; just Bob, that was all) had said when Penny got up from the floor, registered. Registered differently than the first time he had heard it.
We just wouldn’t know what to do if anything happened to our little Penny.
The first time, he had thought wryly that it would be delightful if something happened to the affection-hungry little brat. But now …
Now there was more to it, and a plan formed. Slowly, but with increasing clarity, till he sat up and thought about it coldly. Finally, he got out of bed and went to find his pipe. To think some more. Would it work? Could it work? Why not?
He examined it from every angle, playing devil’s advocate with the idea, posing every possible catastrophic fuck-up imaginable. But be was able to continue a way around each one; till it became obvious the plan was foolproof.
Revenge and a solution and everything all knitted together so beautifully he felt like clapping his hands in joy. But he stilled the happiness within him and looked at it again, exhaustively, from every fantastically improbable viewpoint of failure. There would be difficulties, but not nearly as many as he had first supposed. By doing it as simply and directly as possible, it would work.
He drew deeply on the pipe, sitting on the sofa, his feet up on the coffee table, staring at the redness of his heels in the bedroom slippers.
It would work. Dammit, it would work!
The next day he closed the shop at lunchtime and drove the pickup truck down onto 23rd Street, stopping at a likely pawn shop.
He bought the old office model Underwood typewriter for fifteen dollars, carrying it quickly to the truck, and leaving before the owner could remember who he was, or what direction he had taken.
Back in the shop he typed the note on a piece of plain paper napkin, taken from a Nedick’s orange juice stand in midtown Manhattan. He wore gloves.
The note was short and direct.
Then he waited three weeks, stalling off the bill collectors, telling them he was getting a loan from the bank.
Then the night arrived.
He waited silently, feigning sleep, till three-thirty when the night was at its most silent. Then, he dressed quickly and quietly, making certain Felice in the other bed did not waken. Then he took the rope and the gag and the many strips of adhesive tape he had secreted beneath his winter sweaters in the bureau, and crept silently into Penny’s room.
He had the ten strips of adhesive over her eyes, and the gag in her mouth, taped down, before her struggles grew violent. It was unnecessary to become brutal about it; just a light tap behind the ear, and she went limp.
He tied her securely, hands behind her back, and carried her down the service stairs to the street, making certain he had not been seen. It was perfect; not a soul in sight, and as moonless a night as one could wish, so the insomniacs in their nocturnal wanderings could not be sure of anything they saw.
The car was directly in front of the building. He had made certain of that. The drive out to Jersey was smooth and fast with traffic in the Holland Tunnel almost nonexistent. Penny lay silently under a blanket in the trunk.
He had scouted the area carefully, and found the abandoned farmhouse outside Red Bank, New Jersey with little difficulty. The weather-beaten, almost-collapsed tool shed was set back from the house, in a little hollow: cut off from sight from the road.
He put the flashlight on the shelf and shone it on the post he had driven into the ground the week before. He tested it again to make certain it was solid. It wouldn’t budge an inch, no matter how hard he struggled, and he tied Penny to it tightly, making certain the adhesive was still over her eyes. She came to, just as he was burning the gloves. She struggled and coughed, and tried to scream, but it did no good. She was secured. For two days, if all went well.
For an instant he had qualms about her starving, left alone for two days. He thought back and tried to remember if he had heard of two-day starvation. Nothing came to mind, and he dismissed the thoughts, making certain the gloves burned to ash …
He gathered the remains on a piece of newspaper and folded it together to be disposed of along the road back to New York.
He looked at his step-daughter for a moment longer, then edged the door open with his foot. As he did so, he looked down, and smiled at his cleverness in wearing a new pair of tennis shoes. Shoes that could be bought in any one of a hundred stores in Manhattan, but shoes he had bought two years before — and had never gotten to wear. They would go, too, as soon as he was in the car and driving back.
He didn’t bother to say goodbye to Penny.
No sense letting her know it was her “Dear, Darling Daddy” who had kidnapped her.
He edged the door closed securely, and went back to the car. The night was still moonless. Ideal for a late drive home.
It had all been easier than he’d thought.
He had made a point of sleeping late the next morning, waiting till Felice’s sharp, repetitive screams had brought him leaping from the bed. He had rushed into the small bedroom, seen Felice screaming over and over again, crying, moaning, beating at the pillow.