Drowned Hopes (41 page)

Well, that should be easy. Their first goal had been the railroad track, and then they’d intended to follow that down to the railroad station in Putkin’s Corners, because the library — this library right here — was directly across the street from that station. So if he went over there, sooner or later Doug would show up.

Fine. Kelp turned away from the library and sailed across a street he couldn’t see to the front wall of the railroad station, which he could see, once he was right on top of it. Or it was on top of him. A big old stone building, from back when people hadn’t yet known that the railroads were a transitional technology. Again, the window and door frames and other useful parts were gone, but the stone pile was still there, easily identifiable as railroad architecture.

Unwilling to swim — sail, fly — through the building, Kelp made his way around it instead, and there was the concrete platform, much the worse for wear; and beyond it the tracks. Kelp floated over there and descended almost to the ground to study the tracks and then to look all around. No Doug, not yet. But gee, it would have been fun to pole in here in that car! Kelp could just
see
it.

Oh, well, it wasn’t going to happen, that’s all. Still, Kelp thought, we’re here. One way or another, we’re here. At least I am. Here, and raring to go.

Come on, Doug.

SPLASH!

Dortmunder about jumped out of the boat, staring around in frenzy, and when he first saw Doug’s head in the water below his right elbow he had no idea what it could be. A bomb? A coconut?

The coconut removed its mouthpiece and goggles and spoke: “Where’s Andy?”

“Oh, my God, it’s Doug!”

“Of course it’s Doug,” Doug said. “Andy isn’t here?”

“No,” Dortmunder told him, “he went in right after you.”

“Shit,” Doug commented.

Dortmunder said, “You don’t think something’s wrong, do you?”

“He didn’t hold on to the guideline, that’s all,” Doug answered, wriggling for demonstration the white nylon cord that was tied to the boat and that then angled straight down into the water, its other end tied to the weight at the bottom.

Dortmunder nodded, saying, “Oh. He was supposed to hold on to that, was he?”

“That’s how we keep together,” Doug pointed out. “That’s how I found you, coming back up.”

Dortmunder said, “Probably he was thinking mostly about his mouthpiece.”

“His mouthpiece?”

“And his goggles,” Dortmunder added. “He forgot to put them on before he went over.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Doug said. “Listen, if he comes up or anything, give two tugs on this line here, okay?”

“Right,” Dortmunder said. “But you don’t think anything happened, do you?”

But Doug was gone, shooting back down into the depths. Dortmunder looked over the side, seeing nothing. Not even his own reflection. Poor Andy, he thought.

That could be
me,
he thought.

But he couldn’t see himself, nor was there anyone else to observe him seated there. Minute after minute there was nobody else, and after a while Kelp began to fidget, began to feel a little cold and uncomfortable on this stone bench, began, in fact, to feel quite
alone
here in Putkin’s Corners.

Where was Doug? Wouldn’t he have to follow the tracks to the station? Wasn’t that the most logical, the only thing, he could do? And then —

Light. Vague, dim, barely discernible inside the muck, made harder to see by the diffusion of his own light. Hard even to be sure it truly existed, wasn’t merely some refracted ray of his own headlamp’s gleam, but wasn’t that, over there, not along the track but over on the far side, on the east bound platform, where he hadn’t expected to see anything at all,
some
sort of light?

I should reach up, Kelp thought, and switch off my lamp to make it easier to see that light over there; if there’s really a light over there to be seen. The problem was, he’d had plenty of time by now to get himself good and spooked, which he hadn’t realized until that other light — if it existed — had come swimming more or less into view from a completely unexpected direction. What if it was a — Well, there aren’t any ghosts, really, but — Underwater, somehow, the regular rules didn’t seem to apply. Maybe anything that wanted to exist could exist, down here, at the bottom, away from people. Maybe that light was … anything at all.

Kelp managed to lift his right hand and touch the switch on his headlamp, but he never did summon the strength to turn it off. He just sat there, hand to head, while the light across the way floated and swayed, moved into nonexistence, flowed back again, disappeared once more, and then suddenly came straight at him! Oh, boy. Oh, boy.

It was Doug. Kelp felt vast relief and didn’t even mind when Doug hauled him to his feet and shook a stern finger at him, which he then pointed at the white nylon cord wrapped around his other wrist. This cord drifted away upward into the dark, and the second Kelp saw it he remembered what he was supposed to have done first thing out of the boat.

Of course! Dummy! Elaborately, he demonstrated to Doug his understanding, embarrassment, apology, by throwing both hands up in the air, then smacking himself on the ear, shaking his head, punching himself on the jaw, pounding his right fist into his left palm …

Doug grabbed both his wrists. When Kelp looked inquiringly at him, Doug released the wrists and made down–patting gestures: take it easy.

Oh. Sure. Kelp nodded, flashing his headlamp up and down Doug’s person.

Next, Doug selected one of several more nylon cords hooked to his weight belt and tied the other end to Kelp’s belt. Now they could be up to eight feet apart but wouldn’t lose each other.

Great. Kelp expressed his pleasure in this move by firmly shaking Doug’s hand with both of his. Doug nodded, a bit impatiently, pulled his hand free, and made walking movements with his fingers.

Right. Kelp nodded emphatically again, and would have turned and walked from here to the library but that Doug suddenly lifted up into the air — into the
water
— and started swimming away. Hastily, before the rope linking them could get taut, Kelp launched himself off the platform and followed.

Dortmunder sat in the rubber boat, bored, sleepy, a little chilly, also apprehensive about Andy Kelp. Was he okay down there? Would Doug find him? If there was some sort of trouble, wouldn’t Doug have come back to say so by now?

Plip,
on the back of his hand. Thinking it was some kind of splash from the water all around him, he brushed it off.

Plip.
Forehead this time.
Plip–plip–plip.

No. Dortmunder lifted his head toward the completely beclouded sky.
Plipliplipliplplplppppppp …

“Of course,” Dortmunder said, and hunched his shoulders against the rain.

This time it was Kelp who held the cord in position, while Doug swam this way and that, exactly like a fish in a too–small aquarium, and eventually came back with a rock of his own, which was placed atop the knot.

The next part would be tricky. They wanted to mark a distance out across the field at right angles to the library wall. They’d rehearsed this in daylight, on dry land, in the back yard at 46 Oak Street, but doing it under present conditions was still kind of strange. For instance, they hadn’t spent all their time flying
over
the back yard.

First, Kelp stood straddling the knot, his back — or the scuba tank, actually — against the library wall, his face turned outward so the beam from his headlamp marked the right angle. Then Doug, paying out the cord as he went, swam eight feet away along that light beam and paused there with the new line of cord resting on the bottom. Kelp now lifted into the water, kick–swam forward about four feet, and put his second flashlight on the ground beside the cord, switched on, the beam running out along the rest of the cord. Then he came forward to where Doug waited, straddled the cord again, and Doug backed away slowly, paying out more cord, keeping his alignment with the two lights until he’d gone another eight feet. Then they repeated the procedure all over again.

According to Wally’s calculations, the center of the buried casket would be thirty–seven feet out from the library wall, which meant they had to go through their slow underwater gavotte five times before they reached the second knot in the measuring cord, the one that said,
Dig here.

At last. Floating over the spot, heads close, haloed in sepia illumination, Kelp and Doug grinned around their mouthpieces at each other. Victory was in their grasp.

But the damn thing can sure wallow, all right. In fact, with Dortmunder’s weight in it, the boat’s attitude seemed to be that if it filled with water it would be perfectly happy to loll around just a few inches below the surface, soaking Dortmunder to the bone and ruining the little 10hp motor.

Number one, he wasn’t dressed for this crap. He’d known he was going to be outdoors, on the reservoir, in a boat, in the dark, in June, with the temperature fairly cool, so he’d worn solid thick–soled shoes and wool socks and black chinos and a zipper–front weatherproof jacket. But none of that was enough. Not in this rain. Not
underwater.

And that was number two. NO UNDERWATER. That was the deal this time, that’s why Dortmunder wasn’t suited up like Kelp and Doug. He would go along with everybody else, he would even go
on
the water if it would help, but
in
the water, no.

Also, number three, the gas tank. A small red metal five–gallon tank attached to the motor by a black flexible hose, up till now it had been content to nestle in under the doughnut curve of the side of the boat, back near the rear, where the doughnut was replaced by a solid square piece of fabric–covered wood to which the motor was clamped.

But gasoline is lighter than water, and as the interior of the boat turned itself inexorably into a wading pool the gas tank wanted to come out and play. Dortmunder had no bailing can, nothing to bail with except his cupped hands, and it was both annoying and painful to have those cupped hands constantly banging into a passing gas tank. He kept pushing it back into its corner, muttering at it as though it were a playful puppy being playful at the wrong time, but the damn thing just kept bobbing back out again.

The boat was shipping water,
that’s
why it was sinking so fast. It was happening around the motor. The top of the flat piece the motor was clamped to was a little lower than the top of the doughnut anyway, and with the weight of the motor pulling that end down it was lower yet, so now, with the boat wallowing half submerged, water lapped in around the motor every time Dortmunder moved, and still did when Dortmunder didn’t move because the
boat
moved. The
reservoir
moved. The
air
moved. And the water chuckled in.

He had to shift the weight somehow, get that goddamn flat rear of the boat higher than the rest. But how? There wasn’t much time left; the water inside the boat kept rising, and of course the higher it rose the lower the boat sank and the more rapidly more water came in at the back.

He had shifted his own weight forward; it wasn’t enough. The gas tank moved all over the place, but didn’t seem to matter much. The only really heavy thing left, the thing that was causing all the trouble, was the motor. Move that, temporarily, move it to the front of the boat, and then the back would be higher and he could bail steadily for a while and maybe get ahead of this thing, at least until Doug and Kelp came back.

The important thing, he told himself, is not to drop the goddamn motor over the side. That would be tough to explain to the divers. He’d watched Doug install the thing, however, and it seemed to him he could uninstall it without disaster, so he set to work, at once, before the boat sank any lower.

First, release the gizmo on the side that permitted him to tilt the motor forward, bringing the propeller out of the water but, more importantly under these circumstances, also bringing some of the weight of the motor into the boat.

Then remove the fuel hose from the motor, in the front, just under the housing, where it attached by sliding on over a kind of thick bright–metal needle.

Then, one–handed, holding the motor with the other hand, very slowly and carefully loosen the two wing nuts holding the clamps on both sides.

Then,
gripping the wet metal of the motor housing as tightly as possible,
lift
the motor out of the groove,
shift
it forward into the boat,
lose
balance on the wobbly unreliable bottom of the god–damn–it–to–hell boat,
lunge
away from the back and toward the front with the damn motor grasped tightly in both of one’s arms to keep it inside the boat, and
sprawl
lengthwise on top of the motor as it lands heavily on the front part of the doughnut, fuel needle first. Fuel needle first.

What’s that hissing noise?