Doug too seized this opportunity to charge the houseguest, leaping from his chair just as Bobby was coming around him, and they were first entangled in each other and next were carried by momentum into Audrey, whose grip on the chef’s knife was tenuous. Reclaiming his equilibrium, Chuck deftly stepped in and did not so much take the knife from her as relieve her of its weight.
If Chuck had lost any emotional balance, he had regained it so quickly as not to suggest even a momentary loss. He placed the knife on the lip of the sink and, with a positive lilt in his voice, saying, “Let’s eat this dinner,” sat down at his place.
Lydia was disgusted with the Graveses for so botching their best and perhaps only advantage, but she was also fair enough to admit that she herself had not even tried though she had been as close to the action as Doug and much closer than Bobby.
But Chuck was unarmed now, seated and eating with keen appetite, and yet neither male Graves made a move towards him. Perhaps the three of them were playing fixed roles in a ritual of virility that she was not supposed to understand, let alone interfere in: an example of the master-slave arrangement that some said was fundamental to the homosexual experience. In any event, it was insultingly obvious that no one expected anything of her: she had been morally excluded. She suddenly became aware of the longing gaze that Audrey was directing towards her wineglass, and would have offered it to her mother-in-law had Chuck not been sitting between them—but in so thinking she was being as pusillanimous as her men.
She made a violent effort to regain self-respect. “All right, Chuck,” she said, “we are the same kind, you and I, birds of a feather. We’ve had to fight all our lives just to hang on, whereas these people have had it all handed to them. Why should we show them any mercy?”
But while she was aware that the Graveses had been thrown into a state of shock by this speech, Chuck was not impressed by it. He continued eating in silence for a while; then he raised a fork and stabbed the air between them.
“Where’s your judgment?” he asked. “Did you really think I’d be taken in by a simulated change of heart—coming as it does just after the utter collapse of the only opportunity they have had, or will ever have? You’ve just given up on them, have decided to throw in with me for purely negative reasons. But don’t you think I’m smart enough to know you’d just be waiting for me to show the slightest weakness?” He lowered the fork. “By now you’ll have to do better than that. It’s gone on too long. You could have joined up at the outset. Now you’ll have to prove yourself to gain admittance.”
So she had thoroughly compromised herself with all parties while having the highest motives. It was necessary to act decisively now or be lost forever.
She seized the wine bottle by its neck and swung it at Chuck’s head as hard as she could. His flinch did not begin until the bottle was too close to avoid. The impact was soundless and more awful thereby: a man could be killed with no more noise than that? As he was in the (for some reason) extremely slow process of slumping in the chair, his body having (nonsensically) gone rigid before his head had (improbably) fallen to the left shoulder, in the direction from which he had been struck—she had never before sapped a human being—while watching all of this she yet was careful to return the wine bottle, contents intact, to an upright situation on the table.
For a long moment no Graves made any response whatever. Had an observer, or a camera, been looking only at them during this episode, no emotion would have been seen to register on any countenance. Or so it seemed to Lydia, who of course had been mostly watching Chuck.
Finally Doug asked, “Was it necessary to go that far?”
“With the phone off,” said Audrey, “we can’t call an ambulance. And the cars aren’t in running condition.”
“And who’s responsible for that?” Lydia screamed. But underneath it all she was already frightened by her own sympathetic feelings for the fellow man that had been downed, even though when up he had been an enemy.
Bobby was the only one to rise. He came to stand over Chuck.
“A goner,” said he, showing his teeth in an emotion that was hard to identify with certainty but might have been a grin of terror.
“What,” asked Doug, remaining in his chair, “became of our idea to take him prisoner?”
Audrey was performing a series of shrugs. “We’ve got Band-Aids and cotton, I suppose, but what first aid can mend a broken skull?”
Lydia was being seriously threatened with panic now. She held it at bay by attacking her in-laws.
“Cowards! You talk violently but do nothing, and then when someone else finally acts, you condemn her. You’re worthless. Go to hell!”
But she was immediately taken aback by Doug’s reversal. “She’s got a point,” he said. He left his chair and walked in the direction of Chuck. He stopped when he reached Audrey and put a hand on her shoulder. “We’re all involved, willy-nilly, under the circumstances. In for a penny, in for a pound. We’ll have to dispose of the body.”
Bobby seemed relieved to have a task to discuss. “He’s just a little runt,” he said. “He won’t be hard to carry, and we’ll only have to do it as far as the edge of the bluff, where he can be rolled off. Then we’ll go down and push him into the water. The undertow will take over from there.”
Lydia was supersensitive to this reference. “Oh, no!”
Audrey’s face was in her hands. She began to make a distant moaning sound but took it no further as she offered a suggestion of her own, one that might be called poetic. “There’s a little grove of paper birch just off the lane …”
Bobby produced a chok-chok noise with tongue and teeth. “We’d better get going while there’s still some light outside.” He slid his hands into Chuck’s armpits and heaved. The inert body did not move. Bobby grunted, adjusted the angle of his hands and shoulder, and braced his legs in another way. “He’s heavier than I thought.” He tried again and more strenuously, his face coloring and neck tendons in evidence, but had no success. He straightened himself.
“I can’t believe this. I can’t budge him. Dad?”
It was unclear whether this was an appeal for help or a rhetorical question. Doug showed no hesitation in taking it for the latter, and came no closer. “It may turn out to be necessary to get a board of some kind, or a big thick branch, to serve as a lever.” His brows came together over his nose, as if he were thinking of even more sophisticated measures by which to move the body.
Lydia went to the sink and vomited for the second time that day. But she had eaten nothing since the first session and therefore was not relieved of any burden while her throat was once again made sore. What an outrage that it was possible for a person of her character to become a murderess merely by trying to protect her existing interests—that is, with no hope of illicit gain or any other criminal motive.
Bobby said, “We might just leave him in the chair and slide it out the—no, we’d have to lift it when we got outside, wouldn’t we?” He sighed heavily. “What a pain in the neck! If anybody told me I’d be doing this on Sunday evening …”
“If a ghoulish joke was needed,” said Doug, “I might say that big knife’s handy for making a large package into many small ones.” He did not accompany this with a laugh, but Bobby chuckled hollowly while backing away from the body as if avoiding temptation.
Lydia returned. “Look,” she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do. I’ll take full responsibility if trouble comes from this. None of you were implicated. I’ll make that clear.” She stared at each of them in turn. “I saw the chance and took it. I guess I’ll regret that the rest of my life.”
Bobby said, “Okay, Lyd, but we’ve got a problem here that goes beyond ego.”
Doug looked at his son with apparent respect. “Bob’s right. Any connection with this will stain us if it gets known outside this house. We must dispose of the body so that it can never be found. Now, that might sound like a simple, straightforward job, considering that we’re surrounded on three sides by dense woods and are facing an ocean, but I haven’t as yet heard of a method of burial that is one hundred percent secure against discovery. We’ll have to settle therefore on the least likely to fail quickly. Now, the undertow is attractive insofar as it will take all labor out of our hands once we get the body into the water—no grave need be dug.” He smiled. “But that same current that taketh away is quite capable of bringing back what it took. It will require hard physical labor. A grave must not only be deep but every grain of extra earth should be taken away from the site and pine needles and other normal forest-floor debris placed carefully over the area, but not so obviously as to call special attention to it. This will need some artistry. Audrey can advise us on the landscaping.” He smiled encouragingly in her direction, but his wife was seemingly preoccupied, eyes fixed on the plateful of rice before her.
Bobby was shaking his head. “It seems that no sooner does someone hide a body in a woods than kids suddenly start playing ball nearby and soon enough one of them hits the ball into the trees, where it inevitably rolls up to the very toe of the corpse.”
“You haven’t listened to a word I said,” his father observed, more in melancholy disappointment than in anger. “In the first place, there’s no meadow or clearing where ball could be played until you’re on the other side of the island. Then did I not say a deep grave? There’d be no exposed toe for a ball to roll up to.”
“Animals,” said Bobby, “wild or domestic, have keen noses which can smell a decomposing body through tons of earth.”
“So big rocks are rolled into the grave,” said Doug, in a tone that suggested his patience was thinning at last.
Audrey raised her placid face. “Fire,” said she.
“Oh,” said Doug, “that’s the worst, absolutely the worst idea of all.”
“It’s the best.” She was serenely stubborn. “Don’t you see? It takes care of everything at once.”
“Now, just let me explain why it’s not good. The furnace here only burns oil: there’s no provision in it for burning anything other than fuel oil, no place to put anything else. And I trust not even you would suggest one of the fireplaces. What does that leave, a forest fire?” He had not looked at Lydia for a while, but he did so now, showing his derisive smirk.
“You’re not getting the point,” Lydia told him. “Audrey means burn down the entire house, leaving Chuck’s body inside. Don’t you, Audrey?” Her mother-in-law did not appear grateful for the elucidation of her plan: perhaps she had wanted to withhold it temporarily, provoking more exasperation. As it was she ignored Lydia and stared silently at her husband.
“Are you serious?” Doug asked, dividing his glances between Lydia and Audrey, so that the former anyway could not decide who was being addressed.
Audrey finally spoke. “Mrs. Finch, the cleaning gang, Tedesco, and Perlmutter knew that Chuck was staying here—to name only those we can be sure about. There may be others. The most certain way to call unwelcome attention to us would be to have him disappear completely.”
“But to burn down our house!” Doug cried. “That would make big news here and certainly get back to the city among our friends and relatives. And if a body were found in the ashes, it would certainly be picked up by the city media: Sunday’s a traditionally thin news day in world events. My family is not unknown in this part of the world. Nor is your own, for that matter.”
Bobby said, “We’d have to identify Chuck, and who might not hear about it when it hit the news? We’d be targets for his friends and family, if any.”
“I was just getting to that,” his father noted jealously. “Can you imagine the lawsuits? Or worse, the possible pathologic individuals who might seek revenge for its own sake?”
“It’s clear, then, that there is no answer to your problem. Fortunately for you, the problem does not exist.”
These words were spoken by Chuck, for he was not dead. As he briskly straightened up in the chair, it seemed unlikely that he had even been hurt.
Lydia’s relief was’almost immediately replaced by chagrin. The bottle had made so little noise in striking him because it had hardly struck him. The episode had been the kind of movie-illusion used by stuntmen in on-screen fights. From the viewer’s angle the punches find their targets, whereas really they only just miss. She was therefore not a murderess or even a true assailant. On the other hand, she was back with ineffectuality, and Chuck was in a stronger situation than ever to demand compliance from his captives.
To the credit of all of those on the Graves side, no one even feinted in the direction of pretending that the ruthless-sounding speculations as to how to dispose of the corpse had not been serious. Both Doug and Bobby silently and promptly returned to their seats. It was Audrey who spoke.
“We were only doing what we had to. You can’t blame us for that.”
“You’re wrong,” said Chuck. “I’m your guest. I can blame you for everything. That’s the beauty of being in my position, you see. And by ‘everything’ I mean either failures or successes, as unlikely as it would be that you’d have any of the latter. You people give a new meaning to the word ‘inept.’ For example, why didn’t it occur to someone to take my pulse?”
Lydia said, almost involuntarily, “I guess we were too eager to believe we had gotten rid of you!”
The houseguest lowered his eyes briefly. When he brought them up, anyone seeing him for the first time would surely have believed him a man of guileless virtue. “You’ll say anything to me, won’t you? I’m supposed to have no feelings that can be hurt. Only you are sensitive, isn’t that it? You don’t eat my food, you insult me to my face, but why not? I’m not a member of your select little crowd. I’m not good enough for your courtesy. My room isn’t even in the main house, but rather out there in that godforsaken garage.” His face displayed what for all the world looked like genuine bitter indignation. “Let me ask you: who was your darky before I showed up?”
This outrageous speech seemed to have no effect whatever on her in-laws, but Lydia was provoked by it. “You’re actually pretending to be our victim?”
Chuck shrugged. “Did I just hit any of you in the head with lethal intent? Then sit here at the dinner table, the meal going cold, and callously discuss how to get rid of the body?”
“I didn’t try to kill you,” Lydia protested. “My God, I never before hit anyone with a bottle. I did it without thinking, because I was desperate. It was really not even personal.” She was beginning to despise herself for this pleading, but she could not stop. “It was just to get out of an impossible situation.”
Chuck raised his brow. “I suppose it never even occurred to you simply to ask me to leave? Wouldn’t that be worth trying before you resorted to murder? You’re more depraved than I thought. Human life means so little?” He shook his head, took up knife and fork, and began to eat. But hardly had he tasted the first mouthful when he spat the food back onto his plate. “It’s cold now,” he said petulantly. “See what you’ve done? You people aren’t civilized.”
Audrey seemed peculiarly stung by this comment. “Oh,” said she, “but you are? You? You shouldn’t even be here. You weren’t invited, and nobody knows you. We would be well within our rights to ask you to leave. I agree that murder may not be the right answer, but you have certainly tried our patience.”
The houseguest pushed away from the table. “Isn’t that nice?” he asked. “Try to kill me and then excuse yourselves with sophistic reasons. I haven’t laid a hostile hand on anyone in this house. You people really stink.” He abruptly stood up. “Now clean up this kitchen! You’ve got fifteen minutes. That’s more than enough time for the four of you.” He strode out the passage to the dining room. His soft-soled shoes made little sound, and one could not be sure whether he had continued on or had stopped and was lurking within earshot.
Lydia therefore put her finger against her lips in the hush-hush signal, but Bobby perversely chose to disregard it and speak in a louder voice than normal.
“Wow,” said he. “How hopeless can we get!”
Doug scowled at his son. “None of that defeatist talk. We’ve had a few setbacks, that’s true, but nothing more. This thing is far from being in the final innings.” He looked at Lydia. “Better leave the strong-arm stuff to me in the future.”
“It’s just that I had the opportunity,” she said, her eye on the doorway through which Chuck had departed.
Doug nodded. “I’m not criticizing you. But whether or not you have the physical strength to pull off a trick like that, you are unlikely to have the psychic fortitude—unless you happen to be awfully unnatural.” He grinned quickly so as to dispose of that possibility. “You’re no killer.”
“But I didn’t even want to hurt him!”
“Well, now you’re flirting with incredulity,” said her father-in-law. “You don’t hit someone in the head with a bottle—”
“I wanted him to let us alone! I admit it wasn’t well thought out.”
“Well, we’ve got our orders,” said Audrey, rising and beginning to clear the table. With a little toss of her well-groomed head, she added, “I’m just relieved I didn’t have to eat this terrible dry rice. That’s the one good thing that came of this matter.”
“Just a moment,” Lydia said. “Can you tell me one good reason why we should do as he says?”
“Now don’t start that,” Bobby said urgently. “We don’t want to get in worse trouble than we’re already in. From now on we can’t afford any more of this impulsive indulgence of our emotions.”
In annoyance Lydia addressed the doorway. “Are you taking notes, Chuck?” To Bobby she said sourly, “He’s listening to all of this, you know.”
But Bobby winced and made violent gestures. Only now did it occur to her that perhaps he had, all this while, been speaking disingenuously, that it had been she who had not understood that what he said, at least, was for Chuck’s benefit. She nodded vigorously, but the gesture seemed only to irritate him.
“I envy you, Lyd,” said he, shaking his chin. “I wish I could share your amusement, but I’m really scared. We keep getting deeper in this trouble, like quicksand, the more we struggle to get out of it. Maybe we should just give up all resistance and accept the situation. Chuck may tend toward the tyrannical, but what can he do if we simply say, ‘Okay, you win. From now on we’ll do our best to carry out your commands. You’re a reasonable man. You have attained your goal. What can we do to help you enjoy the fruits of your victory?’”
Unless this was hypocrisy with the purpose of deceiving the listening houseguest, it was contemptible. In either case Lydia felt she had no option but to assist Audrey in clearing the table. She scraped the contents of her own plate and Chuck’s into the pedal can that was revealed by opening the under-sink cabinet door. As she carried the plates towards the dishwasher, she saw through the back-of-counter windows that parallel headlight beams had penetrated the now established darkness of the parking area. Above the clatter being made by the others, no engine sound could be heard, and the silence of this event, and the slow speed with which it was conducted, suggested the sinister rather than the arrival of aid. Were Chuck’s confederates now joining him?
To Doug she said, “God! Look here.”
Doug arrived at the window just as the door of the vehicle opened and its interior was illuminated. He recognized, from the wide-brimmed hat, Lyman Finch, who though dressing like a sheriff was rather the police chief and indeed, except for a couple of part-timers, the entire force on the island, where crime had never been a major problem.
“The cops are here!” he said. “Our bacon is saved!” He chose to be jocular because now that the danger was at an end it seemed in retrospect to have been negligible. He was almost embarrassed to have played a part in the exaggeration of the possible menaces provided by Chuck Burgoyne. Thus by the time Finch, a large, ponderous figure, had lumbered to the kitchen door, Doug was on the verge of levity.
“Lyman!” he cried, flinging the door open. “What brings you to our humble abode?” He had known the man since they both were boys. Lyman in fact had as a teenager worked for an uncle whom Doug’s father hired for sometime landscape work: large chunks of stone were to be relocated on the property, requiring oxlike labor performed mostly by the brawny lad, who had since those days put on an additional fifty pounds of belly and jowl.
Finch stayed on the outside step. “Phone trouble?”
Doug sighed. “In fact, yes, we do have. We—”
“Lots of people do, all over the island,” said Finch. “They’s working on it. You have a emergency, you send up a flare. We’ll be right on ya.”
“Flare?”
“Get a gun off one of your tubs.”
It seemed incredible to Doug that on a small island with only a few other families as prominent as his, Lyman could be unaware that he had never personally used a boat since childhood. He decided momentarily to put aside the matter of flares. “Come on in, Lyman. Have a cup of coffee.”
Lyman stubbornly lingered where he was. “Sour stomach,” said he. “But if you got gin?”
“Please come in,” said Doug. “I mentioned coffee because I thought you might be on duty.” He realized it sounded like a criticism and would have regretted making it had not Finch’s reaction been anything but indignant.
“Oh, I am. But I got a hollow leg. It don’t have no effect on me.” Having said which the chief lurched into the kitchen and staggered to the table. He seized the back of a free chair and hurled the seat under his bulk, which was further widened by the accessory-belt below the knitted waistband of his jacket, a quilted, high-gloss garment in dark green with no insignia in evidence (so that, as with the unmarked jeep, he could use it in off-duty, civilian hours). The wide-brimmed hat, however, displayed a dead-centered bright chromium badge of office.
“Hyah,” he said indiscriminately to Bobby and the women. It was obvious that the man was drunk. Staring at Lydia, he asked, not unkindly, “And who might you be, sister?”
Doug had no option but to play along at least for the moment.
Bobby’s face was contorted. “What’s going on here? Aren’t you going to tell him—”
Doug cut him off. “Come on, we’ll find the gin together.” He took his son by the elbow and more or less forcibly conveyed him from the room into the butler’s pantry in the passage to the dining room. Chuck had last been seen there, but he was gone now.
Bobby broke away and petulantly opened the cabinet above the wet bar. “Here’s the damned gin.”
“Lower your voice,” said Doug. “Look, that fat bastard is already stinking drunk. He’d be no match for Chuck. He’s a stupid hayseed even when sober. I think our best hope is to get him even drunker, till he passes out, and then I’ll take his gun.”
Bobby wore a quizzical scowl. “Are we back to the idea of killing Chuck?”
“No need for that now. We’ll have a weapon of our own, and transportation.”
“So we’ll run?”
“Unless I miss my guess, once Chuck sees that I am armed, and with a working vehicle as well, he’ll pull in his horns, maybe even become downright submissive. We’ll load him into Lyman’s jeep, haul him out some miles down the highway, and leave him there. Oh, of course we’ll take his own gun away.”
“That’s it?” Bobby asked in apparent outrage, gesturing with the gin bottle. “You’re not even going to have him arrested?”
“For what? To my knowledge he hasn’t committed an identifiable crime.” Doug grimaced. “In fact, Lydia assaulted him. He could make trouble on that matter, if he wanted to.”
Bobby lowered his face. As a child he had had positively golden locks, to maintain which he would by now have had to resort to artificial means, and therefore his head looked somewhat dingy. He had none of the Graves features: the strong nose, firm chin, nut-brown extra-fine hair. “You’re taking his side now?”
“Don’t be foolish. I’m trying to speak of what’s possible. I am after all a member of the legal profession. I am obliged to be rational. I assure you that Chuck has yet to break the law—even in the case of the sweaters your mother asserts he removed from her room. Until he takes them from the premises, he really has not committed theft.” He accepted the bottle of gin from his son. “This thing superficially seems simple: an intruder has invaded our domicile and therefore all right is on our side. Not so! It isn’t a matter of justice.”
Seemingly stunned by this information, Bobby lingered behind as Doug returned to the kitchen, where Lyman’s sweaty, red-faced grin was fixed on Lydia.
“—believe it,” the chief was saying. “I’ve lived in the country all my life, and I never before seen that kind of stuff you city folk call fun. By God I don’t mind telling you I got real mad when right up there on the big screen out in what used to be a field of rye, where you could see it all up and down the county road, there was this girl taking it up the rear end from a little skinny sumbitch, but he had one on him you wouldn’t believe.” He simulated the colossal member in reference by extending his right forearm and forming a fist at its end, measuring it with a left hand bladed into the crease of the elbow. “My littlest was in the car at the time, we’s coming back late from the mother-in-law’s, over Grampton, and she wakes up and looks out and says, ‘Oooh, what’s that man doing to her heinie?’”
Doug shuddered. “Here’s your gin, Lyman.”
The chief snatched the bottle away and glared at him. “Wasn’t for you city people, they wouldn’t try to put a porn drive-in out here, and you know it.” His leer quickly toured Lydia’s body. “But I ain’t got nothing against good clean sex. I like it. I like it a whole lot.”
This was hardly the time to remind Lyman that a cousin of his, another Finch, owned the drive-in movie, which was patronized almost totally by locals and never summer people.
“Chief,” Lydia said, “what’s the punishment for rape in this part of the world?”
“That’s a theoretical question, Lyman,” Doug said quickly. “I’m sure the crime itself is rare on the island.”
The chief lifted the bottle and sucked at its mouth: but then he had not been furnished with a glass. When he brought the vessel down he inspected the label. “Is this imported? Or did you take a leak in it before handing it to me?” The question, if a joke, was nevertheless put without evidence of humor or even good feeling.
“Rape?” he said then. “I’ll tell you who commits it around here: the womenfolk.” He winked at Lydia.
“Well, does that answer your question, Lydia?” Doug had moved into a position back of the chief, so that he could indicate, with violent grimaces, that she should abandon the inquiry.
But she ignored him and continued to address Lyman. “I assure you I am being serious, and I’ll thank you to answer me with respect.”
Couldn’t she see that her tone was the worst to use with a brute like Lyman Finch?
Doug shouted, “Hey, I forgot the ice!” and made as much commotion as he could in going to the refrigerator.
But behind him Lyman said, “You didn’t bring me a glass, neither. You figured the likes of me wouldn’t drink from a glass, right? We’re all shit to you, ain’t we?”
Doug turned and said, “No, that isn’t the case at all, Lyman. We’ve been friends for what? Thirty-forty years?” He tried to inject some false warmth into this phrasing, and spoke to Bobby, “Lyman and I knew each other as boys.”
“I always wanted to whip his ass,” the chief told Lydia. “But they wouldn’t let me, not even when he tried to fuck my little sister. She was doin’ maid work for them, cleanin’ their toilets, and she was only fourteen years of age.”
The facts were that at that time Roberta Finch was at least three years older and it was she who had propositioned Doug, successfully, and displayed a good deal more sexual technique than he, seventeen himself and already experienced with “bad” city girls and professional whores, had yet to encounter. When questioned on this, Roberta alluded to home study, as the only sister in a family of boys. It was even likely that her father had had at her, given the appearance of her mother.
“Come on, Lyman,” Doug protested, though of course he could not dare to give his real defense. “We were all just kids in those days.”
The chief continued to direct his words to Lydia. “What really got Bertie was he offered her fifty cents! Mr. Lottabucks here. A half dollar for her cherry.” He swigged more gin from the bottle and banged it down. Suddenly he threw back his head and emitted a bellow of laughter. “Shit, she might of taken it, if it had been seventy-five!”
Audrey had been silent till this moment. Now she rose in her place. “You disgusting, squalid man. Get out of this house.”
As if more conflict were needed! Doug began to gesture ineffectually, but could find nothing to say. It was the women who had brought about this latest debacle, damn them.
But a remarkable thing happened in the next moment. The chief removed the campaign hat he had been wearing since he entered the kitchen. He surveyed the tabletop and then slid his chair back so as to accommodate the high-crowned hat on his lap. A dank lock of hair clung to his very pale bald spot.
He glanced sheepishly at Audrey. “I beg your pardon, ma’am. I got a bug yesterday and am on medication.” He nodded at the bottle. “This here is all I had to drink I swear. I been running off at the mouth, I know. I’m really sorry.”
Doug was relieved but also embarrassed. “Bobby, get some glasses. Why don’t we all have a nice drink at this point?” In making this suggestion he was thinking mostly of Audrey: no doubt much of her indignation towards Lyman Finch was due to his having exclusive possession of the bottle.
But Audrey said, “No! This man must leave immediately. We’ve been imposed on too much today.” She was displaying an authority that her husband had never before seen in her.
Saying, “Yes, ma’am,” Lyman got to his feet, holding his shield-bearing hat flat against his crotch. “I didn’t mean no harm.”
But his hostess would not relinquish her advantage. “Sure you did,” she said. “You’re full of resentment, and you’ll take it out on anybody who will put up with it. Go out and give someone a speeding ticket, and let us alone. We’re what we are.”
“Just a minute,” said Lydia, rising to her feet. She was speaking to Audrey. “Don’t let him go!” To Lyman she said, “We’ve got a problem, officer. We’re trapped here. It might not look like it, but we’re actually prisoners. We need your help. We’re being terrorized. … .”
She was exaggerating outlandishly, and Doug would have jumped in to dampen or deflect the worst of this crazy stuff, which if it became public knowledge through Lyman, who was surely the typical Finch gossip, the Graveses would be derided all over the island and perhaps all the way back to the city. Did you hear this? How some drifter, a little nobody, just walked in and took charge?
Doug would surely have acted had Chuck Burgoyne not strolled in at this moment, saying, “Hi, Lyman.”
The chief turned and, when he saw who it was, stopped cringing. “Charley! I didn’t know you was still here.”
“Where else would I be?” asked Chuck, with the warmest of smiles for all. “This place suits me. I’m staying permanently. I hope you’re not leaving right now, Lyman. Let’s have a drink!”
Lyman put his hat on his head and returned to the table.
Doug asked, incredulously, “You know each other?”
“We’re cousins,” said Chuck. He made a shooing motion. “And we want some privacy. You all get out of here and go to bed, chop-chop.”
Lyman stared at Doug for an instant and then guffawed. “By God, you got ’em trained, Charley.” He winked. “That include the little chippie?”
Chuck returned the wink. “What do you think, Lyman?”
Obviously, new plans had to be made now. Even Lydia seemed to agree. At least she did not launch an attack on the cousins, but decorously left the kitchen with the rest of the family.