Thorn by Fred Saberhagen (reading like a writer TXT) 📕

Subaru wagon and the old Buick, and told him how they had searched through both without finding anything of interest. Both vehicles were now covered with old tarps, in a ravine where no one was likely to look. Ike said they had done a good job in getting rid of tracks.

      Gliddon listened, and nodded, and presently gave more orders. He wanted his four captives disposed in four separate rooms for their interrogations. There were plenty of rooms, otherwise unused, in the old place, and Gliddon preferred to have four separate stories to sift through for the truth instead of one. He didn’t anticipate any great trouble in getting at the truth, or at least the part of it that these four unlucky kids could tell him. But he could see that even when they’d told him all they could, plenty of problems were going to remain.

      In his days of hiding out here Gliddon had wondered sometimes whether the many little rooms in the sprawling old building might have been monks’ cells in the old days. Many of the rooms still had doors, though few had ever had windows. When Gliddon looked into the little earth-floored chamber where Helen had been put to wait for him, he saw that what had been a tiny window must have been blocked up earlier by Ike or Ralph, with chunks of wood and wads of plastic, as part of the general effort they had made to keep out some of the cold and to keep their lights from being visible. Anyway, Gliddon thought it a damn good thing that one way or another they weren’t going to have to camp out here much longer. The deal for the undercover sale of the painting ought to be concluded any day now, according to what Gliddon had heard from Del Seabright on the phone.

      Keeping his small battery-powered lantern aimed at the girl, Gliddon set it down on the floor. The old door of the room sagged half-closed behind him, and he let it stay that way. It was cold in here, even colder than out in the big room, and Gliddon in his heavy jacket was no more than comfortable. But the girl sitting on the floor was barefoot and without a coat; still she wasn’t even shivering. Or very much frightened, either; the expression on her face as she looked back at Gliddon was half dazed, half arrogant.

      She’s on something, all right, Gliddon thought, staring back at her through the eyeholes in his mask. She’s got to be. He could only hope that she was not too far out of it to do a little useful talking. Del’s niece. Well, that was just too bad. Del might make a fuss, but Gliddon couldn’t see any way to avoid wasting this girl, and the three who had come with her as well, now things had gone this far. Helping Del sell the painting his way had been an okay idea, but it wasn’t necessarily the only way for Gliddon to go. He himself was no art expert; but experts could be hired when they were needed, as Gliddon himself had been hired, often enough, for his own specialty. Now he had the painting, and he had an airplane, and he knew one or two people down in Mexico who would be glad enough to welcome him there with his treasure any time he wanted to drop in. He understood he wouldn’t be getting anything like full value for the painting that way, but still he ought to be able to turn a nice profit. And tonight things were looking more and more like that was the route that he was going to have to take.

      He stood there looking down at Helen for a while, and her expression didn’t change. That was a bad sign. “Well, girly. You and your friends have sure got yourselves into a bunch of trouble here. I mean a real bunch. Can you understand that? Am I getting through to you at all?”

      Evidently he wasn’t, for Helen still sounded almost cheerful. “My Uncle Del is going to be angry with you for this. He’s going to be out looking for me. He loves me a lot, you know, just like I was his own daughter.”

      “Yeah, I bet he does. And in several other ways as well. I think I see how that goes, kid. But there’s one thing I definitely don’t get. You see, I really thought that you were dead. Just like everybody else, I thought so. Now it turns out you’re not dead, and you’ve been hiding out with Uncle Del, and Mommy and Stepdaddy too, I suppose; so okay. But I should have been told that you were still alive. I mean, I was in on that snatch operation from the start, all the way, and I thought for sure that you were the one who was gunned down in that upstairs hall. We sure as hell shotgunned someone.”

      Gliddon paused, with a faint sigh. The sappy look on the kid’s face didn’t hold out much hope that he was going to learn much from her tonight.

      Could he believe anything she said, anyway? But it was important that he try—something was going on here that he wasn’t in on. Something even deeper than the faked kidnapping and killing, and the faked loss of the painting. Something very important, no doubt about that. And he hadn’t been told by the Seabrights.

      But wait. At last, as the kid considered what he had just told her, her eyes were beginning to look shocked. “That was my girlfriend Annie who was killed,” she whispered. “Did you do that?”

      “You know, Helen, I think you’ve changed a little since that night. Stand up for a minute, let me take a look.”

      Obediently the girl stood up on her bare feet. She managed the move quickly and without difficulty despite having her hands fastened behind her back.

      “I think you’re a little taller now, Helen, than when I saw