A Question Of Time Fred Saberhagen (reading the story of the .TXT) 📖

      “They’re gone now. It’s all over,” said Brainard in a husky voice. Maria thought that he looked curiously relieved.

      Maria’s radio was buzzing on the little table beside her chair, and she groped to answer it.

      Outside, Joe, sitting helplessly on the ground, was using his own radio to call repeatedly for help.

      John Southerland, getting the call, at last did leave his post, moving decisively. With flashlight in hand he went running around the house and downhill to the place from which Joe was calling for help.

      John relaxed somewhat when the beam of his flashlight showed him his brother-in-law sitting on a rock, swearing too loudly for a man with mortal injury.

      “Help me up, goddam it!”

      “Where you hurt?”

      “My ankle.”

      John grabbed the older man under the arms and hoisted. “Where’s Bill?” he asked, looking around.

      “Went chasing off downhill like a damn fool.” Joe balanced on one foot, leaning half his weight on John’s shoulder. “After those … I tried to stop him—no, don’t you go running after him.”

      “He went chasing after…?” John didn’t complete the question; he could already read the answer in Joe’s frightened eyes.

      For the next couple of minutes they both tried, with no success, to get Bill on the radio.

      “Help me back to the house,” Joe growled at last. “What’s going on in there?”

      “I haven’t looked. Maria sounded like she had things under control—still there, Maria?”

      “Still here,” her voice responded after a moment. “If you guys are coming in I’ll open the trapdoor.”

      Getting the injured man up the ladder was difficult, but with Maria tugging from above and John pushing from below the task proved not impossible. Joe’s adrenaline was up, and his arms were strong enough to hoist his weight repeatedly.

      Brainard and Sarah came to meet the investigators in the lowest level of the house.

      Of those present, no one but Joe had been hurt.

      “Did I hear shots?” he demanded.

      No one answered that directly.

      “I thought I heard one,” said Maria. “And Mr. Brainard here was carrying a pistol. Also there’s a small hole in one of the windows.”

      “All right, we’ll deal with that later.” For a moment Joe stared at Brainard, who looked back numbly. “Maria, try again to get Bill on the radio. John, get me up the stairway to the main floor, can you?”

      While John was helping the boss upstairs, Maria tried her radio repeatedly. “This is the house,” she kept saying. “Bill, is that you? Come in.”

      Only noise responded.

      Joe, hobbling now through the middle level of the house, leaning on furniture, muttered something to the effect that the radios were expensive junk.

      “They always worked great before,” John commented.

      And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Bill’s voice was coming clearly through the little unit in Maria’s hand. Some of the words were unclear, half-drowned in noise, but the burden of Bill’s message seemed to be that he had managed to get himself lost, or at least bewildered; he was going to have to sit tight until daylight.

      Joe, at the head of a stairway, looking down at Maria at the foot, let out a sigh of relief. He nodded at her.

      “Sit tight, then,” she told Bill. “Anything you need?”

      Bill did not answer. Joe shook his head and muttered.

* * *

       Maria was left with the puzzling feeling that she had fainted during the excitement; but no, she couldn’t have done that. She had been sleeping when it started, that was it. Noise had awakened her, and lights at the windows, and then … Brainard, standing over her with gun in hand.

      She had the nagging feeling that there had been something else. But just exactly what …

      Neither the client nor her nephew, thought Maria, puzzling, were as outraged as she would have expected clients to be under the circumstances. At first old Sarah had been, naturally enough, somewhat stunned by the intrusion, but now she appeared much calmer. Neither she nor Brainard wanted to call in the Park Rangers, who served as the first line of police here on this federal land. She, Maria, would certainly have been outraged if she had hired a private security force at great expense, and her new employees had failed her dismally within a few hours of going on the job.

      Joe established himself for the time being in a chair on the highest level of the house. Maria suggested tentatively that she and John try searching downhill for Bill in darkness; or they could at least try shining flashlights in that direction, so their missing colleague might have a beacon that could guide him home.

      Joe fiercely forbade any attempt to search, and proclaimed it his opinion that shining lights anywhere would be a waste of time.

      “But there’s no use his just sitting there on a rock all night if he doesn’t have to. If we could just show a bright light—”

      “Sit down and shut up.” Joe Keogh’s gaze for once was icy. “I know what I’m doing. I’m not sending any more people down that hill tonight. Our client is up here.”

      “Okay.” And Maria wondered silently why the boss was so vehement. Well, some people got that way after they had screwed things up.

      All of them gradually became aware that Brainard seemed much more at ease now than he had been before the mysterious visitation. Now he was going out of his way to be friendly with the hired investigators, offering to get them coffee or hot chocolate from the kitchen.

      Sarah Tyrrell on the other hand, after a few minutes of apparently peaceful contemplation, had resumed worrying. She had retreated to her bedroom, where she sat in a rocker, tense, staring into space, saying little. The old lady seemed still to welcome the presence of Maria, who tried to comfort her.

* * *

      John and Joe also remained in the Tyrrell House for another couple of hours. The two men took turns, one dozing in a chair while the other remained awake, listening for any further radio communication from Bill. A light was kept