Are You Haunted (part fifty-two)

Are You Haunted

(part fifty-two)

“But why should they… Do you mean Mr. Guy? Why should they want to kill you?”

“Well, if they stated their intentions among themselves, they would never say so. They might say they wanted to help me. But you see how we find ourselves, Mr. Kenzie. I was seen taking papers from the lab. Mr. Guy, also, when he knew more, may have thought of this. I was given a new assignment. After four months I left it, everything behind. I did not go to work that day. I had come to a need…to know the names, the number of the dead. I knew only a handful. Drybrook, his wife, who was Emmaline, Dr. Lealy, Dr. Lealy’s secretary, Joseph Alcock. A young woman named Martha Hymes, who had been a lab assistant, who had come out with us, and who was struck by a piece of debris at the fence. I returned here, I walked through the town, and I when I saw a face I felt I recognized, I approached that person. I asked my questions. I learned from Mr. Guy the Chief of Security’s name, Samuel Calander.

“They did not lock me up. Then, for one thing, they would bear the expense of it. You see that a man who is a stranger, and foreign, who attracts attention, hardly needs watching at all. Mr. Guy and Mr. Summers can learn what they like of my movements, from everyone who sees me about. But during the war, and the year or two after, when the world was unsettled, they believed I would contact someone, or someone would contact me. Because I might have some secret…they could not satisfy themselves I did not.

“Now they have made their plans, and they find it convenient, finally, to be rid of me.”

“The thing is, in answer to your question…”

Summers reached for his cup. Isobel watched him discover it empty, saw animation―as much as she’d ever seen on Summers’s face―illustrate the pity of it.

But she was not budging.

“I told you, Mr. Summers, I would heat the last of the pot, but I won’t make more. Mr. Baker trusts me to close for him, and he’s only just hired me. And if you knew what he said to me this afternoon…”

“No, I can square things with Baker. I know Baker. But never mind coffee. What I want to say is, Davis Drybrook was a personality type…”

He paused to light a cigarette.

“That I call a key player. Not the guy with the hero complex, the guy who runs into the burning building. The key player wants to be the guy who rang the alarm. When he was a college boy at Princeton, young Davis met the commies and saw he could work his way up within their group. It was the fact they were a group, that he could be a participant, that mattered to him. He didn’t sit around reading ideologies and getting his passions stirred. And I’ll let you know for free…”

51

Haunted
Are You Haunted (part fifty-three)

(2019, Stephanie Foster)