Lost Lake House (8 page)

“Reward!” Dorothy had heard steps clumping
about the library, and now knew they belonged to the chief of
police, who surged into view by the front of the desk, a tall heavy
man with gray hair thinning to baldness. “Perkins, you’ve said you
believe Maurice Vernon is behind it all, and that’s what makes the
reward business impossible. Vernon can afford to pay well and he
knows it. What reason would one of his bootleggers have to throw up
a steady paying job for—”

“To get out of an illegal operation that
might be shut down at any moment, in exchange for five hundred
dollars of certain money—”

“
Five hundred!
” The exclamation broke
from the two seated men simultaneously and nearly shook the
room.

“That,” said Dorothy’s father, “is what I
intended to propose this afternoon. I partly agree with you; I
don’t believe the hundred-dollar reward is tempting enough.”

“But five hundred—under present economic
conditions—rate of taxes—salaries—” The two other aldermen were in
paroxysms of reaction to the notion of spending.

Alderman Perkins’ voice rose to a steely
ring that filled the library. “And just what else can we do?
You
admit that Vernon has beaten you, that your police force
can’t catch his bootleggers in the act of running the stuff.
We
are powerless: passing hatfuls of new regulations would
be as worthless as the paper they were printed on so long as the
old ones are broken with impunity.” There was the sound of a heavy
chair scraping and Dorothy knew he was on his feet. “Gentlemen, we
didn’t enact Prohibition law, and we have been placed at a
disadvantage from the beginning in trying to enforce it. But the
fact remains: these racketeers are taking advantage of a
black-market demand for liquor among the worst elements of society.
And we have no choice but to fight it or lose control of our
city.”

Dorothy found she had been holding her
breath. Involuntarily she leaned forward a little and her shoulder
touched the door—it creaked inward an inch.

Her father looked over at the door and saw
her, and spoke without a pause or a change in his council-voice.
“Yes, what is it?”

“N-nothing,” said Dorothy, coming just a
little bit inside the doorway. “I—I just wanted to ask you about
something—when you aren’t busy.” Her eyes slipped self-consciously
to the faces of the other three men, who had naturally turned to
look at her.

“One moment,” said her father. The men
turned their attention back to him, and he addressed them again.
“Gentlemen, I know we’re agreed on what I have already said. The
only question is one of practical policy. If you do not agree with
my proposal I don’t see what more I can offer.”

There was a pause. The other two aldermen
exchanged several questions and answers in one glance, and then one
of them leaned forward in his chair to speak.

“We’ll give it a week,” he said. “That
should give the Chief his opportunity…after that, if nothing’s
changed, I think it would be advisable to call a full meeting of
the Board.”

Alderman Perkins nodded curtly. The
committee got up to go, and Dorothy moved aside to let them go
through the library door. The first two men smiled briefly and
mechanically as they passed her; the chief of police brought up the
rear muttering exasperatedly to himself and did not even look at
her.

She stood there, feeling very small in the
stillness of the library, as she listened to them getting their
hats in the hall and leaving by the front door. Her father had sat
down at his desk again and was turning over some papers, familiar
chisel-carved lines of concentration in his forehead. He had
apparently forgotten about her already. Dorothy looked woefully
over at the sunlight pouring between the heavy drapes on the
library windows, trying to draw something from its shine to bolster
her fallen spirits. Her blood had turned at the ring in her
father’s voice when he pronounced judgment on “the worst elements
of society”—if only the committee knew they had been conducting a
meeting in the presence of such an element, that a girl who had
been in a speakeasy and tasted the contraband liquor stood back
trying to make herself inconspicuous against the library door.

Obviously her father was not going to notice
her again unless she said or did something. She went slowly toward
the desk and rounded the corner of it so she stood at his right
hand. After a moment he glanced up. “What? Oh…yes. One moment,
Dorothy.”

He studied the last document in his hand,
his dark brows drawn low in concentration. Dorothy looked at him
curiously. Something about him had impressed her in that scene with
the committee. Perhaps it was the rather grand way he had stood
firm on what he thought was right, even though it was likely to
bring him more trouble. Dorothy, watching him, wondered suddenly if
he
ever wanted to taste something of life outside the walls
of his library, if he ever grew tired of committees and city
regulations…

He laid the papers aside and looked up,
turning toward her a little. “What is it?”

For a second—half a second—Dorothy stared
into his face, so familiar and yet somehow always strange. It
occurred to her for the first time that her father was a handsome
man, and that there were more lines around his eyes and in his
forehead than she remembered. Ever since Prohibition began he had
headed the committee charged with fighting bootlegging in the city;
it had lost him sleep and cost the taxpayers money and caused
unpleasant arguments at committee meetings. Now was she to confess
she had spent the allowance he gave her on admission to the
nightclub housing the most notorious speakeasy of all? Dorothy had
underestimated all the reasons he had to be angry with her, and how
potent that anger might be.

She opened her mouth—somehow kept back a
gasp of indecision, and struggled for something else to put in
place of the confession.

“It—it wasn’t anything, really,” she said.
“I wanted to ask if I—if I could borrow a book from the shelf. The
one—Tennyson’s poems.”

“Yes, certainly,” said her father. Dorothy
thought she saw a lifting of the lines in his forehead, almost as
if he were pleased. He turned in his chair to look at the shelves
that lined the wall behind his desk. “I believe it’s near the end,
there, on the first shelf.”

Dorothy went over to the bookshelf and slid
out the elderly gilt-edged volume with fingers that did not seem to
belong to her. Her escape at the edge of the cliff left her almost
light-headed. She could not do it, she could not…she could never
confess. She sensed her father’s eyes following her, with more
approval than he had shown in a while. He had always used to enjoy
reading himself. Perhaps he thought she had improved.

Stepping softly over the library carpet—for
she did not want to attract his notice any more now—she made her
way out of the room, and her heart bobbled again as her father’s
voice followed her through the door. “Can you shut the door behind
you, Dorothy? I have some telephoning to do.”

With a sense of gratefulness she shut the
polished door, then crossed to the staircase and sat down on the
bottom stair, the poetry-book on her knees and her spirits wilted
again. She would put it off for a week. The committeemen had said
the same thing. Perhaps after another week had gone by she could
ask him about the shoes, and get away with it. The weeks spun out
sickeningly before her…she would go back to the Lake House, again
and again…she had no more courage to free herself of that than she
had to face her father.

From the moment she stepped off the ferry on
Wednesday night, Dorothy moved in a mood of recklessness. She had
felt it building as she dressed in her room, as she walked quickly
along the sidewalk to the corner rendezvous with her coat pulled
snugly against the evening’s chill. If she was here, she might as
well make the most of it. She might as well be what everyone
expected her to be. The glitter of gold lamp-brackets and swirled
marble floors went to her head like champagne—she made it go to her
head, in the way she imagined champagne would. Wasn’t it funny that
she had tasted gin but never champagne? Cruelly funny.

She was talkative and laughed a good deal
with her dance partners; she contradicted Kitty Lawrence flatly
several times in a way that made Kitty look at her with lips
pinched straight in displeasure. And when Sloop Jackson joined the
group, she looked at him sidelong in a way which seemed to say that
in spite of the episode in the hall last week, she wanted him to
know she wasn’t a child and she was going to prove it on her own
terms. She was playing with fire and she knew it—but almost her
whole life was playing with fire now, so what difference did a few
more sparks make?

After dancing, and refreshments, and a good
deal of insincere laughter, Dorothy began to feel that she must
really be enjoying herself. Why shouldn’t she? Her behavior matched
what she had thought odd and artificial about the others before,
and maybe that was the secret: you could get along with anybody if
you matched them. But under it all was a fierce, teeth-clenched
feeling which she strongly suspected would have translated into a
desire to cry if she had been alone in her bedroom at home.

“Want to go downstairs?” said Sloop Jackson,
and when Kitty and Ida and their escorts all said “Yes, let’s,”
Dorothy tossed her head and said nothing, but followed along with
them.

They went down the spiral staircase and
paused on the tiled landing, because a crowd of people were going
through the open chimney-door ahead of them. They moved closer and
Jackson produced his card. Dorothy studied for a second the sharp
watchful face of the man who checked the credentials for the secret
door. How would the management feel, she wondered, if they knew
they were admitting the daughter of the alderman who headed the
Prohibition committee into the speakeasy under their very noses?
She briefly considered the idea that it might be dangerous. But who
cared—danger was only an additional spark to toy with now.

She was on the threshold, with the steps
leading down into the speakeasy before her, when a sudden murmur
broke out on the landing, and then louder noise from upstairs.
Dorothy turned her head, and Sloop Jackson also turned quickly and
listened. There were bangs like doors being flung open, a chaos of
voices raised and piercing shrill whistles.

“Police raid,” said Jackson. He turned and
took Dorothy by the arm. “In here. Quick, before it closes!”

“In there? No!—but—”

“They’ll never find the door! All we’ve got
to do is sit tight till they’re gone. Come on, Dorothy!”

But Dorothy, all her old terrors resurrected
by the sounds above, pulled back in sudden panic. She would
not
be trapped in that horrible speakeasy! Whether the
police broke down the door and found them or whether they were shut
into that closed, sunken red dimness of the underground room while
the raid passed overhead, she could not stand it. She tore away
from Jackson and stumbled up the steps—the chimney-door was
closing, and she struggled through at the last moment; it rubbed
rough over her shoulder and nearly tore her frock. Blindly she
plunged into a corridor leading to the right…a few yards on she
found a set of curving granite stairs and saw they were empty, and
rushed up them.

She was on the ground-floor level again; the
hall she found herself in was empty, but the loud confusion of
voices seemed just around a corner to her left. Dorothy turned the
other way and fled through the empty halls, the sounds of the raid
still behind her; shying away from open doors to other rooms,
seeking only some escape to the outside. Ahead of her in the
V-shaped juncture of two dim corridors, a French window stood open
to the darkness. Dorothy made for it; she went through without
stopping and her heart leaped into her mouth as her foot found
nothing outside and she shot down into the jungle of a rhododendron
bed.

She landed on her hands and knees in damp
wood mulch, shaken by the two-foot drop. It was dark here, with
only a faint glimmer from the shiny flat leaves of the
rhododendrons reflecting what light came from within the French
window. Dorothy scrambled to her feet, bits of the wood sticking to
her palms and her knees, and pushed through the bushes. The smooth
leaves slapped her; the dew-soaked wilted blossoms were cold
against her skin like soggy wads of tissue paper, and she nearly
turned an ankle when the heel of her shoe caught in the loose bed.
She ran across a bit of dark lawn, vaguely aware of huge oak trees
looming up overhead, and then her feet crunched on small gravel—it
was a path and it ran down the hill away from the House and she
swung left and followed it.