The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [61]
Then she shifted to, “Want my dolly.”
“Your dolly? It’s right—oh.” Books, shoes, the carved menagerie, even the tatty coat she’d become so attached to, but the doll that Goodman had bought for her was left behind in the tangle of bed-clothes.
“I’m so sorry, honey, but—wait, stop—please, just hush!”
“Want Dolly!”
I couldn’t throttle her, couldn’t even threaten her as I might an adult, so what—ah: bribery. “Estelle,” I said in quiet tones, “if I get Dolly for you, do you promise to be quiet? Absolutely quiet?”
Her thumb crept up to her mouth, and she nodded.
I sighed. I doubted Sherlock Holmes had ever faced such a maddening comedy of errors in one of his adventures. “I promise, Estelle, I will get you your dolly.”
“I’ll get it,” Goodman told me.
“Wait,” I said as an idea blossomed. “What if—would you mind awfully taking Estelle and Javitz away now, then coming back for me? It would be enormously helpful to know who these people are.”
“Give me an hour and I’ll hand you their heads.”
It was temporary outrage speaking, not serious proposition—a man who had driven ambulances during the War and who lived in the woods without so much as a shotgun was not about to commit mass homicide.
“Please, Goodman—Robert: Take these two to safety. I will be perfectly safe here until you return.”
Javitz, hearing the decision being made, tried to give me back the revolver. “No,” I said. “You may need it to protect her.”
Putting him in charge of protection may have restored a modicum of his masculine dignity. He put the gun back into his belt, and struggled to his feet.
In thirty seconds, I was alone.
Chapter 33
I tripped once on an unseen obstacle in the clearing, and once inside, gave my hip an agonizing gouge on the unexpected corner of a table. Long minutes later my fingers located the texture of firm stuffing amidst the soft bed-clothes; I stuck the doll in my waistband and turned to go.
A brief flash of light shot across the clearing from the east, the direction we’d come from the first night. I leapt into the bedroom, pulled up the window, and dropped to the ground outside.
The smell of fermentation led me to the apple tree, halfway between the house and the out-building and wide enough to conceal me from a casual inspection. From there I could see something of the meadow, where brief flickers of light drove away all thought of friends or poetry fanatics. The approaching men were experienced, using their lights sparingly as they spread out in near-complete silence around the dark buildings. The circle grew tight, and tighter, until a voice called, “The door’s standing open.”
I could not see that side of the house, but I imagined that two of the men entered in a swift rush, because the sounds of banging were followed by a minute of silence. A torch went on inside. Thirty seconds later, a head stuck out of the bedroom window and a beam played through the orchard, not quite reaching my tree. The head pulled back. A voice reported, “They’re gone.”
Three torches immediately went on, one of them barely ten feet from me, and bounced over the ground as the men went to the front. The lamp went on inside. Wary of others lingering in the dark, I crept forward until I was directly underneath the open window. I could hear their words: five men.
“—paper, it’s open at the obituaries,” said a deep London voice.
“The lamp was still warm,” said another.
“Any sign of the girl?”
Did he mean Estelle, or me? Could Brothers have summoned the means to direct five violent men here, to retrieve the child he was determined to keep?
“There’s two chairs pulled out from the table.”
“Could mean nothing.”
“Is this the kind of food a man on his own would have?” a new voice wondered.
I was startled when the next voice came inches from me: “Someone’s been sleeping on the floor in here.”
“This is the place, all right. Where do you suppose they’ve got to?”
“Ten feet away, they’d disappear,” said the first voice.
“Want to sit and wait?”
“No point, I shouldn’t think. Let’s have a look at that out-house. Then we can leave