Tom looked as if he had been insulted. “What do you think I’m going to feed you? Poisoned fungoides?”
“That’s just it,” said Cynthia quickly. “How do you tell them out?”
“Eat ’em,” said Tom. “If you live, they’re mushrooms. If you drop dead, well!” He gave a great guffaw, which amused Fortnum but only made his mother wince. She sat back in her chair. “I-I don’t like them,” she said. “Boy, oh, boy.”
Tom seized the flat angrily. “When are we going to have the next wet-blanket sale in this house?”
He shuffled morosely away. “Tom-” said Fortnum. “Never mind,” said Tom. “Everyone figures they’ll be ruined by the boy entrepreneur. To heck with it!”
Fortnum got inside just as Tom heaved the mushrooms, flat and all, down the cellar stairs. He slammed the cellar door and ran out the back door.
Fortnum turned back to his wife, who, stricken, glanced away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know why, I just had to say that to Tom. I–“
The phone rang. Fortnum brought the phone outside on it extension cord.
“Hugh?” It was Dorothy Willis’s voice. She sounded suddenly very old and very frightened. “Hugh, Roger isn’t there, is he?”
“Dorothy? No.”
“He’s gone!” said Dorothy. “All his clothes were taken from the closet.” She began to cry.
“Dorothy, hold on, I’ll be there in a minute.”
“You must help, oh, you must. Something’s happened to him, I know it,” she wailed. “Unless you do something, we’ll never see him alive again.”
Very slowly he put the receiver back on its book, her voice weeping inside it. The night crickets quite suddenly were very loud. He felt the hairs, one by one, go up on the back of his neck. Hair can’t do that, he thought. Silly, silly. It can’t do that, not in real life, it can’t! But, one by slow prickling one, his hair did.
The wire hangers were indeed empty. With a clatter, Fortnum shoved them aside and down along the rod, then turned and looked out of the closet at Dorothy Willis and her son Joe.
“I was just walking by,” said Joe, “and saw the closet empty, all Dad’s clothes gone!”
“Everything was fine,” said Dorothy. “We’ve had a wonderful life. I don’t understand, I don’t, I don’t!” She began to cry again, putting her hands to her face.
Fortnum stepped out of the closet. “You didn’t hear him leave the house?”
“We were playing catch out front,” said Joe. “Dad said he had to go in for a minute. I went around back. Then he was gone!”
“He must have packed quickly and walked wherever he was going, so we wouldn’t hear a cab pull up in front of the house.”
They were moving out through the hall now. “I’ll check the train depot and the airport.” Fortnum hesitated. “Dorothy, is there anything in Roger’s background–“
“It wasn’t insanity took him.” She hesitated. “I feel, somehow, he was kidnapped.”
Fortnum shook his head. “It doesn’t seem reasonable he would arrange to pack, walk out of the house and go meet his abductors.”
Dorothy opened the door as if to let the night or the night wind move down the hall as she turned to stare back through the rooms, her voice wandering. “No. Somehow they came into the house. Right in front of us, they stole him away.”
And then: “A terrible thing has happened.”
Fortnum stepped out into the night of crickets and rustling trees. The doom talkers, he thought, talking their dooms. Mrs. Goodbody, Roger, and now Roger’s wife. Something terrible has happened. But what, in God’s name? And how?
He looked from Dorothy to her son. Joe, blinking the wetness from his eyes, took a long time to turn, walk along the hall and stop, fingering the knob of the cellar door.
Fortnum felt his eyelids twitch, his iris flex, as if he were snapping a picture of something he wanted to remember.
Joe pulled the cellar door wide, stepped down out of sight, gone.
The door tapped shut.
Fortnum opened his mouth to speak, but Dorothy’s hand was taking his now, he had to look at her. “Please,” she said. “Find him for me.”
He kissed her cheek. “If it’s humanly possible.” If it’s humanly possible. Good Lord, why had he picked those words?
He walked off into the summer night.
A gasp, an exhalation, a gasp, an exhalation, an asthmatic insuck, a vaporing sneeze. Somebody dying in the dark? No.
Just Mrs. Goodbody, unseen beyond the hedge, working late, her hand pump aimed, her bony elbow thrusting. The sick-sweet smell of bug spray enveloped Fortnum as he reached his house. “Mrs. Goodbody? Still at it?”
From the black hedge her voice leaped. “Damn it, yes! Aphids, water bugs, woodworms, and now the Marasmius oreades. Lord, it grows fast!”
“What does?”
“The Marasmius oreades, of course! It’s me against them and I intend to win! There! There! There!”
He left the hedge, the gasping pump, the wheezing voice, and found his wife waiting for him on the porch almost as if she were going to take up where Dorothy had left off at her door a few minutes ago.
Fortnum was about to speak when a shadow moved in aide. There was a creaking noise. A knob rattled.
Tom vanished into the basement.
Fortnum felt as if someone had set off an explosion in his face. He reeled. Everything had the numbed familiarity of those waking dreams where all motions are remembered before they occur, all dialogue known before it falls from the lips.
He found himself staring at the shut basement door. Cynthia took him inside, amused.
“What? Tom? Oh, I relented. The darn mushrooms meant so much to him. Besides, when he threw them into the cellar they did nicely, just lying in the dirt—-“
“Did they?” Fortnum heard himself say.
Cynthia took his arm “What about Roger?”
“He’s gone, yes.”
“Men, men, men,” she said.
“No, you’re wrong,” he said. “I saw Roger every day the last ten years. When you know a man that well, you can tell how things are at home, whether things are in the oven or the Mixmaster.
Death hadn’t breathed down his neck yet; he wasn’t running scared after his immortal youth, picking peaches in someone else’s orchards. No, no, I swear, I’d bet my last dollar on it Roger—“
The doorbell rang behind him. The delivery boy had come up quietly onto the porch and was standing there with a telegram in his hand.
“Fortnum?”
Cynthia snapped on the hall light as he ripped the envelope open and smoothed it out for reading.
TRAVELING NEW ORLEANS. THIS TELEGRAM POSSIBLE OFFGUARD MOMENT.
YOU MUST REFUSE, REPEAT REFUSE, ALL SPECIAL DELIVERY PACKAGES. ROGER
Cynthia glanced up from the paper. “I don’t understand. What does he mean?”
But Fortnum was already at the telephone, dialing swiftly, once. “Operator? The police, and hurry!”
At ten-fifteen that night the phone rang for the sixth time during the evening. Fortnum got it and immediately gasped. “Roger! Where are you?”
“Where am I, hell,” said Roger lightly, almost amused. “You know very well where I am, you’re responsible for this. I should be angry!”
Cynthia, at his nod, had hurried to take the extension phone in the kitchen. When he heard the soft click, he went on. “Roger, I swear I don’t know. I got that telegram from you–“
“What telegram?” said Roger jovially. “I sent no telegram. Now, of a sudden, the police come pouring onto the southbound train, pull me off in some jerk-water, and I’m calling you to get them off my neck. Hugh, if this is some joke-“
“But, Roger, you just vanished!”
“On a business trip, if you can call that vanishing. I told Dorothy about this, and Joe.”
“This is all very confusing, Roger. You’re in no danger? Nobody’s blackmailing you, forcing you into this speech?”
“I’m fine, healthy, free and unafraid.”
“But, Roger, your premonitions?”
“Poppycock! Now, look, I’m being very good about this, aren’t I?”
“Sure, Roger–“
“Then play the good father and give me permission to go. Call Dorothy and tell her I’ll be back in five days. How could she have forgotten?”
“She did, Roger. See you in five days, then?”
“Five days, I swear.”
The voice was indeed winning and warm, the old Roger again. Fortnum shook his head. “Roger,” he said, “this is the craziest day I’ve ever spent. You’re not running off from Dorothy? Good Lord, you can tell me.”
“I love her with all my heart. Now here’s Lieutenant Parker of the Ridgetown police. Goodbye, Hugh.”
“Good—“
But the lieutenant was on the line, talking, talking angrily. What had Fortnum meant putting them to this trouble? What was going on? Who did he think he was? Did or didn’t he want this so-called friend held or released?
“Released,” Fortnum managed to say somewhere along the way, and hung up the phone and imagined he heard a voice call all aboard and the massive thunder of the train leaving the station two hundred miles south in the somehow increasingly dark night.
Cynthia walked very slowly into the parlor. “I feel so foolish,” she said.
“How do you think I feel?”
“Who could have sent that telegram, and why?” He poured himself some Scotch and stood in the middle of the room looking at it.
“I’m glad Roger is all right,” his wife said at last.
“He isn’t,” said Fortnum.
“But you just said—-“
“I said nothing. After all we couldn’t very well drag him off that train and truss him up and send him home, could we, if he insisted he was okay? No. He sent that telegram, but changed his mind after sending it.
Why, why, why?” Fortnum paced the room, sipping the drink. “Why warn us against special-delivery packages? The only package we’ve got this year which fits that description is the one Tom got this morning…”
