The Last Coin Read Free Page B

deviations, but that was pretty obvious hogwash. Andrew wondered whether anyone knew for sure, whether there were some few chosen people out there who understood, who nodded at such occurrences and winked at each other.
    The city of Seal Beach was full of oddballs these days, too: men from secret societies, palm readers, psychics of indeterminate powers. There had been a convention of mystics in South Long Beach just last week. Even Beams Pickett had taken up with one, a woman who didn’t at all have the appearance of a spiritualist, but who had announced that Andrew’s house was full of “emanations.” He hated that kind of talk.
    He shook his head. He’d been daydreaming, so to speak. His mind had wandered, and that wasn’t good. That was his problem all along. Rose, his wife, had told him so on more than one occasion. He grinned in at the cat on the dresser, trying to mesmerize it. “Keep still,” he whispered, slowly dangling the noose in over its head. He held his breath, stopped dead for a slice of a moment, then jerked on the line and yanked back on the pole at the same instant. The line went taut and pulled the cat off the dresser. The pole whumped down across the sill, overbalanced, and whammed onto the bed just as the weirdly heavy cat hit the floorboards with a crash that made it sound as if the thing had smashed into fragments. The cat inside the window howled into his ear and leaped out onto the roof. The half-dozen cats left inside ran mad, leaping and yowling and hissing. He jerked at his pole, but the noose was caught on something—the edge of the bed, probably.
    A light blinked on, and there was Aunt Naomi, her hair papered into tight little curls, her face twisted into something resembling a fish. She clutched the bedclothes to her chest and screamed, then snatched up the lamp beside her bed and pitched it toward the window. The room winked into darkness, and the flying lamp banged against the wall a foot from his head.
    The pole wrenched loose just then with a suddenness that propelled him backward. He dropped it and grappled for the rain gutter as the ladder slid sideways toward the camphor tree in a rush that tore his hands loose. He smashed in among the branches, hollering, hooking his left leg around the drainpipe and ripping it away, crashing up against a limb and holding on, his legs dangling fourteen feet above the ground. Hauling himself onto the limb, trembling, he listened to doors slamming and people shouting below. Aunt Naomi shrieked. Cats scoured across the rooftops, alerting the neighborhood. Dogs howled.
    His pole and ladder lay on the ground. His flour sack had entangled itself in the foliage. He could climb back up onto the roof if he had to, scramble over to the other side, shinny down a drainpipe into the backyard. They’d know by now that he wasn’t in bed, of course, but he’d claim to have gone out after the marauder. He’d claim to have chased him off, to have hit him, perhaps, with a rock. The prowler wouldn’t come fooling around
there
any more, not after that. Aunt Naomi couldn’t have known who it was that had menaced her. The moment of light wouldn’t have given her eyes enough time to adjust. She wouldn’t cut him out of her will. She would thank him for the part he’d played. She’d …
    A light shone up into the tree. People gathered on the lawn below: his wife, Mrs. Gummidge, Pennyman. All of them were there. And the neighbor, too—old what’s his name, Ken-or-Ed, as his wife called him. My God he was fat without a shirt on—out half-naked, minding everybody’s business but his own. He was almost a cephalopod in the silver moonlight. His bald head shone with sweat.
    There was a silence below. Then, hesitantly, Rose’s voice: “Is that you, Andrew? Why are you in the tree, dear?”
    “There’s been some sort of funny business. I’m surprised you didn’t hear it. I couldn’t sleep, because of the heat, so I came downstairs and out onto the porch