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

riding with. She was just giving me a ride. I didn’t want to bust in on anything up here.”

      “When you say the girl, you mean Helen Seabright?”

      “Yeah. That’s her. That’s who she told me she was.”

      “Well then say Helen Seabright. I want to be filled in on all the details, so tell me everything you can. What happens to you from here on is going to depend a lot on what you tell me.” Gliddon worked a cigarette and a match out of his shirt pocket and lit up. “Here, want a drag?”

      “Sure. Thanks.”

      Gliddon held the smoke, let the kid inhale deeply. “Now, you say that Helen Seabright was just giving you a ride. You mean she just picked you up along the highway?”

      The kid hesitated. Gliddon could see him wavering, and then apparently deciding to tell the truth. Yippee. “No, we started out from her place in Santa Fe. Her parents’ place, I guess. Great big house. Gosh.”

      “And her Uncle Del was there with you, and you were all having a sort of party before you decided to take a ride.”

      “Party? No. I just came to the house looking for another girl.”

      “You like girls?” The boy was silent, and Gliddon went on: “Never mind. Who was this one you say that you were looking for?”

      “Annie Chapman, her name was. Still is, I guess.”

      Annie Chapman. One name Gliddon was never likely to forget. Not after that one party night in Phoenix, and what had happened afterward. Del’s big secret, whatever it was, that Gliddon wasn’t in on—it would have something to do with her. “All right. Then what?”

      “Then … I kind of conked out on a sofa for a while. When I woke up this girl, Helen, was sitting there and she started talking to me. Also there was a woman in the house, and a man, an old guy, real huge. I don’t know if he was her Uncle Del that you mentioned, or her father, or who.”

      “You never saw him before, huh?” He peeled off his mask. “How about me?”

      The kid was immediately struck blank and hopeless. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t always remember things too good.”

      “That’s fine. Outta sight. Some things you’re not supposed to remember. But when I ask you to remember something, you make a special effort, huh?”

      “Sure. Anything you say.”

      “Now do you know who that big old man was?”

      “No. I don’t. Really.”

      “Okay. And the girl you started out looking for was Annie Chapman.”

      “Yeah, but they all swore she wasn’t there and they didn’t know her. You know her? She looks quite a bit like Helen.”

      Yeah, there had been a good resemblance. Gliddon pondered. Sisters, somehow? Nothing seemed to quite make sense. And this kid didn’t seem to recall that orgy night at Phoenix at all. Gliddon himself had picked up both Pat and Annie on that night, one at a bus station, one on the road—recruiting for parties had been part of his job for Delaunay. Another part had been joining in—Del liked to have a physically able and trusted employee on hand in case things got rowdy, as they often did. That night the group had included Helen, Pat, Annie Chapman—and what’s-his-name, that muscular young drifter who had followed Annie when she danced off into the museum room, and had been killed by her there. Gliddon could see it yet: the strong, naked young male swinging the silver artifact, some kind of model ship, right for Annie’s head; and Annie dodging and reaching up somehow out of her crouch, grabbing her assailant by wrist and ankle, and—and just tipping him somehow, so that his long-haired head smashed on a marble base, and blood sprayed on the white carpet. Gliddon had seen a few fights in his time, but never before a stunt like that.

      And from that moment, Del had made Annie his special project; he had wanted something special from her, obviously. And Gliddon, looking back, couldn’t be sure that the special something had really had anything to do with sex. Gliddon had seen very little of her from that night on…

      And then, on the night of the engineered kidnapping, it must have been Annie Chapman, running in panic through the upstairs hall of the same mansion, who wouldn’t stop when she was yelled at and so had caught a charge of buckshot in the head. Del must have known who the dead girl was; but he had said nothing to Gliddon; and the family had identified the dead girl as Helen, and had cremated her.

      Why?

      Something to do with inheritance, with wills, with who gets what. Gliddon didn’t understand all the legal angles of what happened when someone as wealthy as Del died or supposedly died. Del wanted to be thought dead, to disappear, while in fact retaining control over most of his own great riches. Gliddon could understand that; he was trying to do something like it himself. But he was more and more convinced that something else important was being planned by Del, and Gliddon hadn’t been dealt in. Except, maybe, in some way, he was going to be set up to take a fall.

      Damn the whole Seabright crew, anyway. They were trying something that Gliddon wasn’t going to like when he found out about it. The way things were looking, more and more, they pretty well had to be.

      The boy still sat on the floor, looking up at Gliddon, growing more and more frightened; he looked sick. “Listen,” he pleaded now, “I gotta go to the toilet. Please.”

      “Okay,” said Gliddon. He turned away and stuck his head out of the door of the cell. Suddenly he found himself feeling and thinking like a jailor, and it was amusing. “Ike? You got a client here. Take him for a walk and bring him back. I want to talk to him some more, later.”

* * *

      Judy could hear, down at the other end of the strange little hallway, the voices murmuring, sometimes rising a little in