The Hour of the Oxrun Dead (Necon Classic Horror) Page 6

  A muffled voice panicked her into dousing the light.

  Nothing.

  Be cool, Natalie, she ordered. You’re scaring yourself to death.

  And in the darkness, the afterimage of the room persisted until she felt an irrational sensation of imminent suffocation.

  Out, then, and her hand closed around the glass doorknob. It turned, though not smoothly, and she pulled the heavy wood to her as cautiously as she could. The first glimpse of the dim hall light temporarily blinded her, but in listening, she heard nothing; no footsteps, no argument. Then: The faint thumping of drums from below, and the strident punctuation of laughter above the hum of conversation. A ritual in a hive, she thought and increased the opening sufficient to allow her head to poke through. The hall was deserted, and without waiting to see if there were signs of impending company, she slid out, closed the door behind her and ran to the main corridor. Lucky you, she told herself as she passed the powder room, then slowed to what she hoped would be a natural, casually bored walk.

  Another moment of caution when she reached the banister and quickly surveyed the entrance hall. Except for the servant still in his place by the door, it too was empty, and it was all she could do to keep from laughing as she descended, one hand sliding along the waxed wood, the other holding her purse loosely at her side.

  “A queen, and a pity these aren’t marble, either.”

  Her heart raced, but her face was passive as she glanced over the railing and saw Marc sitting on a bench. He had a glass in his hand and was toasting her with a broad smile. When she joined him, he offered her a drink and she accepted it gladly.

  “Having a wonderful evening?”

  “Lovely,” she said, but stopped short of telling him what had just happened, what she had overheard.

  “What?” he asked, sensing her indecision. When she shook her head, he set the glass on the floor and stood over her. “What do you say we truck out of here, as Dederson would say? I’ve got my words of wisdom from the man, and you look as though you could stand a little depressurizing.”

  “If you’re inviting me out to a bar, you’re on,” she said, rising.

  “Do you think Gernard will miss you?”

  She considered several appropriately obscene remarks, poked his stomach instead.

  “Our coats,” he said. “Wait a sec. I’ll be back in a flash.”

  He hurried off and cornered the Pakistani. The servant nodded at his whispering and vanished into a room opposite the buffet entrance.

  With her palms beginning to feel uncomfortably moist, Natalie stood by the newel post and was unable to stop herself from gasping when a hand gripped her shoulder.

  “Mrs. Windsor,” said a man on the stairs. He was in dinner jacket and black tie, with a violet sash diagonally across his chest. His hair was long, white and brushed straight back from a smooth brow. His nose had been broken at least twice, but the cragged angle only served to underscore rather than detract from the out-of-doors ruggedness his profile maintained. In startling contrast, his hand was pale, almost femininely soft. “I don’t believe we’ve met formally.”

  “A pleasure, Mr. Toal,” she said as her composure returned. “But if you don’t mind my asking, how did you know my name?”

  “I make it a point to know every beautiful woman’s name in Oxrun Station,” he said. “Besides, I am the President of the Council, you know.”

  To which I am supposed to reply: I owe you my job, don’t I? she thought; but I’ll be hanged if I will.

  Her silence seemed to disconcert him and he half turned to leave. Then, changing his mind, he leaned forward and whispered as Marc approached, “I am grateful you came tonight, Mrs. Windsor. But you are out of your league, aren’t you?”

  “League? I didn’t know we were playing baseball, Mr. Toal.”

  He glared at her quip, and released her shoulder. He nodded curtly at Marc and brushed past him into the reception room.

  “Well,” Marc said. “You two make friends?”

  Natalie chewed thoughtfully at her lower lip.

  “No, but I think I’ve just been threatened.”

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  The Chancellor Inn had once been the residence of a prosperous Oxrun farmer who had died during an abolitionist riot in Hartford prior to the Civil War. And whatever he might actually have been like during his lifetime, the huge, dark-hued oil hanging over the fireplace in the main lounge portrayed him as a rugged, no-nonsense individual who would just as soon thrash his opponents as compromise with them. The present owner, Artemus Hall, attributed the generally subdued atmosphere of his Inn’s second floor salon to the portrait’s glaring black eyes rather than the indirect lighting. In contrast to the rest of the building, there were no tables, the clientele being restricted to small booths thickly leathered with highly polished armrests wide enough for drink and limb. Between the booths were pewter ash trays and broad-topped pedestals on which were centered candles under red chimneys. And although the conversations were suitably lowered and carefully interwoven with unobtrusive taped music, there was no intrusion at all from the larger, noisier restaurant below.

  When Natalie and Marc arrived, still shivering from the bitter night air, the only booth available was in the back corner and partially hidden by the fireplace’s protruding fieldstone side.

  “Cosy,” Natalie said as a waitress took their overcoats. Marc exaggerated stumbling through the dim light, and she sighed. He was not the most romantic man in the world. But she kept silent when he ordered for both of them, lighted a cigarette and leaned back against the gleaming leather.

  “I’m always waiting for Aaron Burr to walk in,” he said, “looking for a clear shot at Hamilton. Or some plantation owner a-busting in demanding we turn over his runaway slave or be hanged in the trying.”

  “Lovely thought,” she said, accepting her sour from the offered tray. She sipped it gratefully. A double, no ice, and the foam stuck to and sweetened her upper lip. “But what’s the matter with Washington?”

  “In a room like this? This,” he said with a deep voice and conspiratorial frown, “is the room for intrigue, my dear, not patriotism or flags flying over Trenton on Christmas Day. Aaron Burr, Simon Legree, or perhaps even Benny Arnold skulking in from black deeds at West Point. We in the know always call him Benny, you see.”

  She smiled, sipped again, and finally allowed herself to relax. The cowl bunched uncomfortably against her back, but she ignored it; a penance for the presumption of the costume, she thought.

  “Now,” he said after they’d had their first drink in easy silence and had ordered another round, “what’s all this about a threat from our leading money-changer?”

  The time had been long in coming. It was one thing for her to maintain a solitary existence in a town not noted for leaving its more notorious citizenry alone-it was, in fact, relatively easy and she’d few complaints. The mourning for Ben had ended; less than a year with him was not the most solid foundation for a lifetime of black and blue shadows under one’s eyes. She had just wanted to be alone, and her weapon was the acceptable aloofness her widowhood perpetuated. However, it was quite another thing to keep her own counsel in matters that were beginning to instill in her a nebulous dread. Had she mentioned this to Sam, Miriam, or Elaine, she knew she would have been tolerated, jollied, tsked at and patted figuratively on the head with admonitions to take a vacation, that the books in the stacks were becoming too real; what she needed was a human — male — companion to show her the way back into the real world.

  And immediately she’d become acquainted with Marc, she had hoped he would brush all that nonsense aside and make himself available for a little old-fashioned shoulder crying.

  Yet she hesitated under his patient stare.

  Suppose, she thought, his shoulder wasn’t broad enough?

  Then he shifted and lighted a second cigarette from the candle. When the waitress glared at him, he threw her a kiss, blew her a smoke ring and
sat back to wait.

  She told him, repeating the overheard conversation almost verbatim, hissing the remarks Toal had made while she’d been standing by the staircase. He said nothing, toying with his glass instead, using the swizzle stick to spear at the cherry and orange slice. Finally, as she finished, he gave her a small boy look of apology and used a finger to slide out the fruit and pop them into his mouth. His lips puckered and he sucked in air sharply.

  “My teeth are going to rot,” he said, signaling for a refill. “One should never make a sour with Southern Comfort instead of whiskey — it does decadent things to one’s brain.”

  It was an effort not to shout at him.

  “He really said that?”

  She nodded, watched him light still another cigarette. The match’s flame added lines to his face, and the candle in the red chimney reflected its own light in his glasses. As he tilted his head, the flame centered itself in the lenses, and she shuddered and pushed the chimney aside.

  “Well, I’ll tell you, girl, I think our Mr. Toal is a very strange person. Peculiar strange, I mean. And if I had the slightest idea what he meant, or what his wife and barracuda daughter meant, I’d be the first to tell you.”

  “You don’t like Cynthia?”

  “Who, me? Just because a couple of months ago, out of the clear blue whatever, she tried to rape me in the office, then followed me around like a bitch in heat for three weeks — why should I not like her?” He frowned then. ‘‘I’ll never understand that. I’d only met her once before, at something Dederson was throwing at the paper. He introduced us, in fact.” He grinned. “Not that I want to make a connection, but things haven’t been the same at the old press since.”

  A quick and inexplicable moment of anger was followed instantly by a decision. “Marc, let me tell you something else.”

  He nodded, once, Cynthia already forgotten.

  “You remember those papers I was working on when you picked me up tonight?”

  “I resent the phrase ‘picked you up.’ It implies salacious consent on your part.”

  “To know me is to pick me,” she said. “Now will you please listen for a minute?”

  He tried a lecherous grin and, laughing at her expression, crossed his knees and began tracing patterns in the moisture left by his glass on the arm rest.

  “Every so often, the Council — which is my ultimate collective employer — asks Mrs. Hall about the books we order. But only every so often. We’ve never been told not to buy anything, nor have we ever been overruled on orders already a fait accompli. What they ask is which books have been taken out the most, which ones seem to be a waste of town money.”

  “Reasonable,” he muttered, not really interrupting.

  “Absolutely,” she said, “and thanks to the college’s computer, all I have to do is request the information and I get a complete run through of the frequency of usage for every volume in the library. Once I pass that on to the Council, I never hear about it again. At least, I never heard from them before.”

  “But then?”

  “But then, last June — no, last May, it was — they wanted to establish a system of prior approval for all the books we purchased, with the proviso that they could add or delete books of their own if they wanted.”

  A woman on the far side of the fireplace suddenly burst into laughter, too loud to be completely sober. The booth’s back was too high for Natalie to see her, but a moment after the disturbance began she saw the emaciated shadow of Artemus Hall threading his way solemnly across the floor. A sharp whispered exchange resulted in a couple striding quickly out, their dignity faltering by the pursuit of the innkeeper’s shadow. It all happened so quickly, there weren’t half a dozen ripples to mark the incident’s passing.

  Natalie shook her head. Sympathy for the embarrassment. Disgust for the forgetfulness that allowed people to get drunk. She looked at Marc, watched him tap his swizzle stick lightly against the rim of the ash tray. He cleared his throat.

  “I, uh, can see where this would get you upset, Nat, what with your sovereignty not stepped on before. But they’re still within their rights, you know. He who holds the purse strings and all that crap.”

  “That’s not what bothers me,” she said. “You see, ever since this system started, books have been missing from the stacks. Not the usual and expected losses you get from kids and a few sticky-fingered cheapskates. Odd books, books you’d never think somebody would want to steal.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well,” and she dropped her hands into her lap and rubbed one thumb against the other, “first of all, those that usually go are the current best sellers, or the reference books that cost a small fortune if you buy them in the store. Now, almost every Bible in the place has been taken. A couple of Books of Mormon, a Koran, a pair of specially bound Pentateuchs. All of them gone.”

  “Religious fanatic,” he suggested. “Somebody who hates God?”

  She shrugged. “I thought so, at first. But then there are the nonfictional inspirational types, all of them, too.”

  “Atheist, then, who can’t even stand the secular religions.”

  Natalie grinned, and forced herself to relax as soon as she realized how stiff she’d been holding herself. Marc was following directly along the trail she herself had taken when she’d winnowed from the inventory the list of stolen books. “Then how do you explain Nietzsche, Kant, Spinoza, and a dozen more like them? Or Darwin, Sagan, even the most modern types of mysteries and science fiction?”

  He rubbed a hand over his face, emptied his glass and waved off the waitress when she made a pass for it. He smoked another cigarette halfway to the filter before lifting his palms in surrender. “All right, I can’t make the connection. What do you have?”

  “Nothing, really,” she said truthfully. “Not yet, anyway. But when I asked Mrs. Hall about the thefts, she nearly hit the ceiling. It was strange, Marc, really strange.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Windsor, I thought your duties had been made quite plain to you?

  Really, Mrs. Hall, I only wanted to tell you about a situation you should be aware of. These stolen books —

  Mrs. Windsor, you are trying my patience. I was led to believe that you were reasonably experienced in library administration. A college graduate, isn’t that right? Didn’t they teach you about inventory losses? Don’t you know there are children who love —

  To steal Spinoza? Come on, Mrs. Hall, really!

  Natalie, Natalie, you’re making too much of a perfectly ordinary situation. We have to expect — yes, even in a place like Oxrun Station — we have to expect a certain amount of thievery to go on in any given year. It’s even included in the budget, Natalie, as I’m sure you are well a ware of.

  But there are so many!

  Natalie, I haven’t time to argue with you, not time enough to teach you what you should already know. Please forget it.

  Mrs. Hall, there’s no need to get —

  Mrs. Windsor, for the last time, I’m asking you to forget this matter. And if it comes down to it, this is not your province as defined by your contract. I will take care of it, as always.

  Wouldn’t you like some help, though? There’s so much to do.

  Mrs. Windsor ... Natalie ... I am trying to be pleasant and you’re not helping me a bit by pursuing something that is, frankly, none of your business. You still have a great deal to learn about the tasks you’re already supposed to be performing. I do not want you taking on something else. Your own duties, Mrs. Windsor, or ...

  Or what, Mrs. Hall?

  You’re a librarian, Mrs. Windsor ... read between the lines.

  * * *

  Natalie’s face flushed with anger. “Naturally, that didn’t stop me. And that’s when I found out the other thing.”

  “Lord, woman, are you Ellery Queen in drag?”

  “You’ll never know,” she said, knowing there was a blush at her neck in reaction to his staring admiration. “Look, let’s go back to the li
brary. I want you to see what I was doing, see if you come to the same conclusion I did.”

  “Which is?”

  She waved the query aside brusquely. “No fair. I don’t want to prejudice the witness.”

  “Whatever you say, madam detective. The chariot awaits without.”

  “The way you drive, without gas, most likely.”

  “You,” he said, “are a kill-joy.”

  The narrow parking lot behind the library was dimly lighted, a measure that received the strong and futile disapproval of the staff in the wake of an energy-saving program initiated the previous spring. It was reasonable, the Council argued, to suppose that since the library was closed for long stretches at a time, there was no need to light the parking lot for anybody. Criminals, they added in anticipation of protests, would get in no matter what. Darkness would force them to be more careful and therefore less likely to smash glass and damage doors.

  It was the kind of reasoning that often made Natalie wish she had taken up steel work or coal mining.

  They decided to use the side entrance rather than call undue attention to themselves by going in the front way. Should a passing patrol see the light at the desk or in her office window, they would not as a rule investigate because there were few on the force, thanks to Sam, who didn’t know her erratic working hours. She whispered this to Marc while she fumbled with her passkey; then she took a deep breath and pulled him inside.

  They were in a narrow corridor that ended abruptly behind them. The floor sloped gently upward toward the front, and they had gone only a few paces before Natalie froze, one hand clutching an aluminum banister, the other Marc’s arm. He started to speak but she placed a hand quickly against his mouth and listened.

  Silence.

  Night chill.

  An occasional creak as the afternoon warmth escaped into darkness.

  She felt his lips brush her ear.

  “What?”