When I was clear, I trod water and looked in at them. Whitmore had come all the way to the edge of the embankment, wanting to get every foot of distance she could. Hell, every damned inch.
Devore was parked behind her in his wheelchair. They were both still grinning, and now their faces were as red as the faces of imps in hell. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Another twenty minutes and it would be getting dark. Could I keep my head above water for another twenty minutes? I thought so, if I didn’t panic again, but not much longer. I thought of drowning in the dark, looking up and seeing Venus just before I went under for the last time, and the panic-rat slashed me with its teeth again. The panic-rat was worse than Rogette and her rocks, much worse.
Maybe not worse than Devore.
I looked both ways along the lakefront, checking The Street wherever it wove out of the trees for a dozen feet or a dozen yards. I didn’t care about being embarrassed anymore, but I saw no one.
Dear God, where was everybody? Gone to the Mountain View in Fryeburg for pizza, or the Village Cafe for milkshakes?
‘What do you want?’ I called in to Devore. ‘Do you want me to tell you I’ll butt out of your business? Okay, I’ll butt out!’
He laughed.
Well, I hadn’t expected it to work. Even if I’d been sincere about it, he wouldn’t have believed me.
‘We just want to see how long you can swim,’ Whitmore said, and threw another rock — -a long, lazy toss that fell about five feet short of where I was.
They mean to kill me, I thought. They really do.
Yes. And what was more, they might well get away with it. A crazy idea, both plausible and implausible at the same time, rose in my mind. I could see Rogette Whitmore tacking a notice to the cOMMUNITY DOIN’S board outside the Lakeview General Store.
TO THE MARTIANS OF TR-90, GREETINGS!
Mr, MAXWELL DEVORE, everyone’s favorite Martian, will
give each resident of the TR ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS if no
one will use The Street on FRIDAY EVENING, THE 17th OF
JULY, between the hours of SEVEN and NINE P.M. Keep our
‘SUMMER FRIENDS’ away, too! And remember: GOOD
MARTIANS are like GOOD MONKEYS: they SEE no evil,
HEAR no evil, and SPEAK no evil!
I couldn’t really believe it, not even in my current situation . . . and yet I almost could. At the very least I had to grant him the luck of the devil.
Tired. My sneakers heavier than ever. I tried to push one of them off and succeeded only in taking in another mouthful of lakewater. They stood watching me, Devore occasionally picking the mask up from his lap and having a revivifying suck.
I couldn’t wait until dark. The sun exits in a hurry here in western Maine — as it does, I guess, in mountain country everywhere — but the twilights are long and lingering. By the time it got dark enough in the west to move without being seen, the moon would have risen in the east.
I found myself imagining my obituary in the New York Times, the headline reading POPULAR
ROMANTIC SUSPENSE NOVELIST DROWNS IN MAINE. Debra Weinstock would provide them with the author photo from the forthcoming Helen’s Promise. Harold Oblowski would say all the right things, and he’d also remember to put a modest (but not tiny) death notice in Publishers Weekly. He would go half-and-half with Putnam on it, and —
I sank, swallowed more water, and spat it out. I began pummelling the lake again and forced myself to stop. From the shore, I could hear Rogette Whitmore’s tinkling laughter. You bitch, I thought, you scrawny bi —
Mike, Jo said.
Her voice was in my head, but it wasn’t the one I make when I’m imagining her side of a mental dialogue or when I just miss her and need to whistle her up for awhile. As if to underline this, something splashed to my right, splashed hard. When I looked in that direction I saw no fish, not even a ripple. What I saw instead was our swimming float, anchored about a hundred yards away in the sunset-colored water.
‘I can’t swim that far, baby,’ I croaked.
‘Did you say something, Noonan?’ Devore called from the shore. He cupped a mocking hand to one of his huge waxlump ears. ‘Couldn’t quite make it out! You sound all out of breath!’ More tinkling laughter from Whitmore. He was Johnny Carson; she was Ed Mcmahon.
You can make it. I’ll help you.
The float, I realized, might be my only chance — there wasn’t another one on this part of the shore, and it was at least ten yards beyond Whitmore’s longest rockshot so far. I began to dogpaddle in that direction, my arms now as leaden as my feet. Each time I felt my head on the verge of going under I paused, treading water, telling myself to take it easy, I was in pretty good shape and doing okay, telling myself that if I didn’t panic I’d be all right. The old bitch and the even older bastard resumed pacing me, but they saw where I was headed and the laughter stopped. So did the taunts.
For a long time the swimming float seemed to draw no closer. I told myself that was just because the light was fading, the color of the water draining from red to purple to a near-black that was the color of Devore’s gums, but I was able to muster less and less conviction for this idea as my breath shortened and my arms grew heavier.
When I was still thirty yards away a cramp struck my left leg. I rolled sideways like a swamped sailboat, trying to reach the bunched muscle. More water poured down my throat. I tried to cough it out, then retched and went under with my stomach still trying to heave and my fingers still looking for the knotted place above the knee.
I’m really drowning, I thought, strangely calm now that it was happening. This is how it happens, this is it.
Then I felt a hand seize me by the nape of the neck. The pain of having my hair yanked brought me back to reality in a flash — it was better than an epinephrine injection. I felt another hand clamp around my left leg; there was a brief but terrific sense of heat. The cramp let go and I broke the surface swimming — really swimming this time, not just dog-paddling, and in what seemed like seconds I was clinging to the ladder on the side of the float, breathing in great, snatching gasps, waiting to see if I was going to be all right or if my heart was going to detonate in my chest like a hand grenade. At last my lungs started to overcome my oxygen debt, and everything began to calm down. I gave it another minute, then climbed out of the water and into what was now the ashes of twilight. I stood facing west for a little while, bent over with my hands on my knees, dripping on the boards. Then I turned around, meaning this time to flip them not just a single bird but that fabled double eagle. There was no one to flip it to. The Street was empty. Devore and Rogette Whitmore were gone.
Maybe they were gone. I’d do well to remember there was a lot of Street I couldn’t see. I sat cross-legged on the float until the moon rose, waiting and watching for any movement. Half an hour, I think. Maybe forty-five minutes. I checked my watch, but got no help there; it had shipped some water and stopped at 7:30 P.M. To the other satisfactions Devore owed me I could now add the price of one Timex Indiglo — that’s $29.95, asshole, cough it up.
At last I climbed back down the ladder, slipped into the water, and stroked for shore as quietly as I could. I was rested, my head had stopped aching (although the knot above the nape of my neck
still throbbed steadily), and I no longer felt off-balance and incredulous. In some ways, that had been the worst of it — trying to cope not just with the apparition of the drowned boy, the flying rocks, and the lake, but with the pervasive sense that none of this could be happening, that rich old software moguls did not try to drown novelists who strayed into their line of sight.
Had tonight’s adventure been a case of simple straying into Devore’s view, though? A coincidental meeting, no more than that? Wasn’t it likely he’d been having me watched ever since the Fourth of July . . . maybe from the other side of the lake, by people with high-powered optical equipment? Paranoid bullshit, I would have said . . . at least I would have said it before the two of them almost sank me in Dark Score Lake like a kid’s paper boat in a mudpuddle.