The Last Coin (23 page)

Robert Louis Stevenson
Virginibus Puerisque

I
T WAS LATE
—after midnight. Pennyman hadn’t come in all day. Andrew was sure of it. He would give the old man another hour, maybe catch an hour of sleep himself, if he could. It was high time he had a look inside Pennyman’s room, and this was as good a night as any. He punched buttons on his little battery-operated kitchen timer, setting it for sixty minutes. In order to muffle it, he shoved it under the pillow on the couch. Then he lay down and fell asleep almost at once.

He woke up from a dream involving pigs, wondering where he was, wondering at the ringing buzz in his ear, and he groped for the alarm clock. Then he remembered. He sat up groggily, rubbing his eyes. He could barely keep them wedged open. His back was nearly murdering him, and he was stiff in the joints. He suddenly wanted very much to go back to sleep, to lie on the couch forever. But he couldn’t. He had a mission. When he stood up, though, he almost tumbled forward onto his face. An hour’s worth of sleep had just made him more beat; his mind was a sandy pudding. Then he thought about the pending adventure, and the thought woke him up. He stretched, tucked in his shirt, and stepped out into the livingroom.

The tennis ball he’d set against the front door still sat there. Pennyman hadn’t come in. He was gone for the night—something fairly common lately. Mrs. Gummidge had mentioned having spoken to him before dinner. She had said that Pennyman had spent most of the day in his room and then had gone out to a relative’s house in Glendale, where he would doubtless spend the night. But neither Andrew nor Rose had seen Pennyman that morning, and Andrew suspected that he’d gone off early and hadn’t returned, that Mrs. Gummidge had lied. Pennyman was using Mrs. Gummidge for an alibi, it seemed. From Andrew’s point of view, a man who needed an alibi was usually guilty as a gibbon ape.

Andrew didn’t much trust Mrs. Gummidge, not since he’d overheard them at the window. He was certain that they were up to something together, that they’d joined forces since coming to live at the inn. In one way it relieved him just a little. Mrs. Gummidge, after all … One would have thought that Pennyman could find more capable allies. Perhaps his liaison with Mrs. Gummidge was evidence that Pennyman was mostly show, mostly facade. He was the sort, certainly, who
seemed
to be. That was something Andrew could sniff out pretty accurately. Andrew had a good nose for falseness.

He looked around for something else—something that would make a clatter. The fireplace tools would do. He left them hanging precariously in their wrought iron holder and tilted the whole business against the door. If Pennyman came in now, the whole house would know it. Andrew would have some explaining to do, but it would be better than Pennyman sneaking in and catching Andrew rummaging in his room.

He creaked up the stairs, listening to the snores echoing down the stairwell from Aunt Naomi’s room in the attic, listening for sounds of restlessness from the bedroom where Rose, by now, had been asleep for three hours. He couldn’t help grinning. There was excitement in skulking around a dark house after midnight, doing battle with the forces of evil—or the forces of something.

One of Aunt Naomi’s cats strolled down from above and stood blinking at him on the stairs. Then it jumped past him and ran down the stairs to the ground-floor landing, where it sat on its haunches and stared out toward the front door. Another cat appeared above, coming along down to rub against Andrew’s leg. It sat down outside Pennyman’s door and meowed softly. The cat below meowed as if in response. Andrew had the uncanny feeling that the cats were up to something—that they were signaling each other. He was certain somehow that they were on his side, though—that once again they were watching over him.

He suddenly felt surefooted and keen. The thrill of it all had scoured the sleep from his head. He could picture the interior of Pennyman’s bedroom—the chair, the bureau, the bookcases, the single bed tucked into an alcove in the wall and with a curtain hung across in front of it. He’d found and bought the furniture himself. Rose had sewed the bedchamber curtain, and Andrew had installed it on a wooden rod across the front of the bed alcove. There wasn’t a square inch of the room that he wasn’t familiar with. He really didn’t need the penlight in his pocket; he could feel his way from stem to stern in the dark.

Suddenly and without a tickle of warning, he sneezed. He squelched it with his hand, sort of moomphing it into his palm. He pinched his nose to stop an inevitable second sneeze as he froze there on the darkened stairs, listening again, his heart slamming. No one stirred. The snores continued unabated from overhead, and in the still, enclosed air of the stairwell hung just a hint of the smell of cats. It was comforting, somehow, and hadn’t the power anymore to disgust him or set him into a rage.

He still didn’t like the idea of a house full of them, though. His resolve to deal with them had weakened a bit, but he still had a score to settle there. He had to be the master of his own house. One thing at a time, though; that was how it had to be. Pennyman first, the cats afterward. He wouldn’t make the mistake of overreaching himself. He tiptoed past the cat, bending over to pet it and feeling guilty again for plotting against it. He paused outside Pennyman’s door, listening for one last time. Then he steeled himself, shoved the door open slowly, and stepped into the dark interior of the room.

There was the smell of books and rosewater and bay rum. An octagonal, hinged mirror sitting atop the bureau caught a glint of moonlight through the window. Arranged atop the bureau were carefully laid out toiletries: tortoiseshell combs and brushes, a mustache scissors, bottles of hair tonic and skin lotion, an emery board and another mirror—for admiring the back of his head, apparently. It was an unimpressive lot of credentials, but it was all Pennyman had to recommend himself. Mess his hair up and he was a sorry-looking scarecrow.

Andrew abruptly considered tumbling the lot of it out the window. He could watch Pennyman’s pride crack to bits on the stones of the pathway below. Walk with the proud, he thought, and you shall be scornful. That was true enough. If there was one thing that Pennyman surely was, it was scornful. Andrew was—what?—scornful of it. He grinned again. That’s what tripped him up every time—his pride in being humble. It beat all. There was no way to lick it.

He found himself contemplating a hairbrush, idly thinking about philosophy. He shook his head, clearing it again. There was no time for that. At any moment the fireplace tools might clatter down on the hardwood floor and Andrew’s mission would come to a bad end. What if Rose, waking up and stepping into the hallway, caught him sneaking out of Pennyman’s room? What if she got downstairs before him and found the fireplace tools strewn across the floor? Who would appear to be the fool, the lunatic? He or Pennyman? He knew the answer to that. He also knew that Rose wasn’t the sort to lie in bed and shake when there were strange noises in the house. She was every bit as likely to pull on her bathrobe and have a look. He wondered suddenly what he was doing there at all, meddling in Pennyman’s room.

The business of the fish tonic—that was central. Come to think of it, that was the other odor, mingling with the hair tonic and the bay rum and the general old-house smell. And there was something more, too—the faint smell of something sweet and chemical. What was it?—perfume, perhaps. A woman’s perfume.

His eyes were adjusted to the dark, but the faint moonlight wasn’t quite enough illumination to do the trick. He pulled out the penlight and switched it on, shining it first at this, then at that. There was a plethora of drawers in the room—five in the bureau, two in the desk, six in the built-in cupboard below the bed. He wished he could look through them all, but it would be folly. What if Rose awakened and went downstairs out of kindness to him, to wake him up on the couch and urge him to come up to bed? He’d have to hurry.

There it was, as if it had been left for him. On the little mahogany table next to the head of the bed alcove sat a half-filled bottle, open and with a glass vial lying beside it. It was odd that Pennyman would leave it open, and even odder that he’d leave it out like that, unless he were so conceited and sure of himself that he couldn’t imagine anyone slipping in like this. Andrew pulled his silver flask out of his coat pocket, twisted open the cap, tilted the fish elixir bottle over it, and drained off a quarter inch or so—no more than a half ounce, just enough to have a bit of laboratory work done on it.

He set the bottle down, recapped his flask, and put it away. He was torn between hauling open drawers and getting the hell out. What might he find there? Anything at all; that was the answer. It was odds-on that there was something incriminating in Pennyman’s goods—some telling affidavit, some revealing letter, a photograph, a recipe for brewing up poisons out of blowfish. It was tempting, but far too dangerous. He’d be back—when it was safer and he had more time. He’d bring Pickett along and do the job right; one of them to rifle Pennyman’s goods and the other to keep watch.

He shined the penlight once more around the room, but the tiny beam wasn’t enough to reveal anything telling. One bit of real information; that’s all he asked for. The elixir was well and good, but what could it reveal? That it had been extracted from a carp? He already knew that much, or at least suspected it.

He turned to the curtain across the bed, reached up and grabbed it below its wooden rings, and slid it open in a rush.

Mrs. Gummidge lay there, asleep.

Andrew shouted, hoarse and silent as if in a dream. He jammed his fist partly into his mouth and reeled back into the desk, paralyzed with heart-hammering fear and flinging his penlight away onto the floor. It blinked out when it hit, and he scrabbled after it, down onto his hands and knees. It had rolled under the chair. He flailed for it, looking back over his shoulder, certain now that Mrs. Gummidge was dead. He couldn’t bear to have his back turned to her.

He twisted around and stood up, abandoning the flashlight and stepping toward the door in long, silent strides, squinting at Mrs. Gummidge and breathing through clenched teeth. He paused there for a moment. If she was dead he’d have to take action … Steeling himself, he squinted at her, lying there in the shadow of the alcove, stiff and awful like an old-woman doll. She was breathing, though. And she stirred just a little.

It struck him suddenly that it wasn’t Mrs. Gummidge at all, but was Pennyman in a Mrs. Gummidge mask, and the thought propelled his hand toward the doorknob like a shot out of a sling. But that was madness, and he told himself so as he whipped the door back, stepped out into the hallway, and threw himself past the waiting cat and nearly head-first down the stairs. Straight into the kitchen he went and out into the bar. He poured a shaky drink out of the scotch bottle, and then for reasons he couldn’t define he slipped out through the street door into the night air, striding around and into the backyard and then into the garage, where he set the scotch onto the bench and then held onto the bench himself, breathing like an engine.

He stood just so for minutes, not daring to turn on the light. All the old night fears of his childhood had rushed back in upon him. Mrs. Gummidge’s curl-encircled face had been horrible. She’d nearly gorgonized him. He shuddered and drained his glass, listening in anticipation for the sounds of pursuit. He could picture Mrs. Gummidge coming out through the back door like a wraith, like Lady Macbeth, drifting toward him through the night air with bloody hands and a loathsome automaton grin on her face. He shuddered again, cursing himself for not having hidden a bottle of scotch somewhere in the garage. Minutes passed and his breathing leveled out. It was cold. The concrete floor felt frozen through his socks. There was no sound of pursuit—no lights blinking on or back doors whispering shut. What he wanted more than anything, suddenly, was to go to bed. Rose’s company, even if she was asleep, was worth a fortune to him.

The next day, Andrew was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the library when Pennyman came home. Andrew was happy to see him. It was late in the afternoon, and the mail had dropped through the slot just a half hour earlier. The note was there.

Luckily, it had been beaten up in transit, no doubt having been routed through the downtown station, and seemingly used as a coffee cup coaster for a day or two and then trodden on before delivery. It had become a happy mess of wrinkles and dirty Scotch tape, of unidentifiable stains and childish, semi-literate lettering.

Andrew had avoided Mrs. Gummidge most of the day, but she’d gone about her business as if she’d no idea that Andrew had come across her sleeping in Pennyman’s bed. In fact, she seemed weirdly high-spirited, winking at him once in an appallingly suggestive way. Andrew could hardly accuse her of being in the room, but in the cold light of day he’d begun to generate theories to explain things. It seemed fairly likely that, if nothing else, Pennyman and Mrs. Gummidge were tolerably familiar with each other, that they’d been carrying on in secret. There was nothing he could do about his suspicions except dwell on them, and he had been engaged in doing just that when in had come Pennyman, through the door, almost on the heels of the mailman.

Pennyman was carrying his coat, folded over his arm. He looked particularly proud of himself; he had almost a youthful, damn-all appearance to him, as if he’d just finished off a half-bottle of wine and the world was a rosy place. The sight of him in such a state would normally have made Andrew seethe, but given the circumstances, the arrival of the anonymous letter and all … Andrew looked up and winked and said that Pennyman looked surprisingly well today, in such a tone as implied that on most days Pennyman looked uncommonly miserable and tired. Then Andrew began to whistle the tootling little melody from “Steamboat Willie,” and pretended to read his book while actually watching Pennyman sort through the mail and willing him to open the note then and there and not carry it away to his room.