A Town Is Drowning Read online

  She knew as soon as she heard the knock on the door that it was Mrs. Goudeket. The chapter went into the bulging file under the bed; the half-page beginning on the story about Dick McCue went into the typewriter, using the paper bale so Old Bat-Ears wouldn’t hear the ratchet clicking. “Come in, please,” she called, with just the proper annoyance at being interrupted.

  She glanced coldly at her employer.

  Mrs. Goudeket sat down without waiting to be asked; those stairs were getting steeper every day. “Sharon, honey,” she wheezed, “I want you to dome a favor. Frankly, I’m a little worried.”

  Sharon listened with minimal courtesy. Unbelievable, she thought to herself, now the old harpy expected her to go driving out in this crazy rain to find out if it was really raining. So suppose she got into Hebertown, what could she find out? The lines were down? They knew that. And what else could there conceivably be?

  Since it was a point of principle, she knew what she had to say. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Goudeket,” she said gently. “It just isn’t my job.” Besides, the season was practically over; so let Old Bat-Ears fire her.

  “Aw, Sharon,” wheedled Mrs. Goudeket. “Who else have I got? Believe me, it’s not for me, it’s for all of us. Suppose—”

  “No.”

  “No!” shrilled Mrs. Goudeket. “I feed you the whole summer, for what? One little thing I want you to do, and what do I get? Listen here, young lady, I’m telling you for the last time—” It went on for ten minutes, during which Mrs. Goudeket quite forgot to worry about the storm.

  She was still breathing hard when she appeared at the door of the Game Room and signaled imperiously to Dick McCue.

  “You got to drive me into Hebertown,” she ordered.

  “But Mrs. Goudeket!” He nodded back at the room, where a couple of sullen guests were doggedly putting golf balls into a tumbler. “I got a contest going. Dave said I had to help out; he said—”

  “This is more important,” Mrs. Goudeket said firmly. “You think I like going myself? God knows what the guests will think, so don’t tell them. Let them look.”

  “All right, Mrs. Goudeket. I’ll tell you what, I’ll go get the car and meet you at the kitchen entrance. Just the two of us going?”

  Mrs. Goudeket smiled frostily. “Three,” she said. “Miss Froman is leaving us.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The burgess of Hebertown wasn’t having any luck with his call to the weather bureau. Because he was the burgess, he had got his own line to the central office back in service; but the central office was having a hell of a time getting through to any point outside.

  If he had got through, he wouldn’t have had much luck either, because there were plenty of lines down, but practically all the ones that were left were trying to get onto the same three instruments in the bureau’s outer office.

  The chief of bureau was talking into one of them, kept open with a direct line to the nearest Civil Defense filter center: “Charley? Here’s the latest. No chance of the rain stopping for at least several hours, that’s the big thing. Some places it’s hitting an inch an hour. There’s all that wet air that Diane pulled in from the Atlantic, and now the winds have pushed it up; when it gets cold the water has to come out. How much?” He blinked at the phone; he had been in that office for seventeen hours and, he suddenly remembered, he’d never got around to having lunch sent up. “Call it ten inches, average through the area affected. What?” He sat up straight. “Now listen, Charley! I’ve busted forecasts and I’ve admitted it; but you can’t hang this one on me—”

  The station duty forecaster, on the phone next to him, was saying: “Sure, we’re sticking by our forecast. Go ahead and print it. Flood damage? No, I can’t give you anything; not our line. Please, won’t you read the forecast? We said heavy rain. We said prospect of danger from flooding because the soil is saturated—no room for the rain to soak in, it has to run off somewhere. The only thing we didn’t say was ‘positively.’ *’ He hung up, but didn’t take his hand off the phone; it would ring again in seconds. It didn’t much matter what they printed, of course; the newspaper that had been on the wire was in a town that had grown rich from the two rivers that joined in its heart, and the forecaster had his own feelings about what those two rivers might do.

  He took his other hand off the clipboard and found he had crumpled their copy for the last forecast into a ball. He tossed it in the basket, hardly hearing his chief shouting into the phone next to him; it didn’t matter, he knew it by heart now anyhow, but as the phone rang again, he made a dive and recovered the forecast. He smoothed it out carefully. It might, he suddenly realized, be very important indeed, over the next weeks and months when the investigating commissions and legislative committees began sniffing through the debris.

  Mrs. Chesbro came smiling into the burgess’s office. “Excuse me,” she said. “I knocked, but you were busy on the phone—”

  “Not very,” said the burgess, slamming the instrument down. Now he couldn’t even get the central office again. “What can I do for you?” He didn’t know the woman. She was expensively dressed; the burgess, whose wife read Vogue, realized that her flat-heeled leather shoes, her matching waterproof tweed coat and cap, her neat leather gloves all were imported and expensive. For the rest, she was a small blonde in her twenties with a careful, conciliatory look on her face.

  “I’m Mrs. Arthur Chesbro,” she said. “Arthur and I drove over from Summit to see you. Arthur let me off and then he decided he’d better move the car to a little higher ground, the top of that little shopping street you have, Sullivan Street, isn’t it? After General Sullivan, I suppose? And he’ll be right along and then you two can get on with your little talk.”

  The burgess looked at her vaguely, her chatter only half comprehended. If she had been a man he would have said something like: “I’m sorry but I’m tied up now; write me a letter and we’ll make an appointment.” Since she was a woman his old-fashioned notions ruled that out. “I didn’t expect Mr. Chesbro,” he began. “I’ve got so much on my mind right now with the rain—” He noted with wry amusement that he had started to say “flood” and changed the word. Civic pride or superstition?—“that I don’t think this is the best time for a meeting. Could you go and head him off, Mrs. Chesbro? It can’t be urgent.”

  “Arthur thinks it is,” she said. “A man phoned him from New York that this Mickey Groff is on his way and Arthur swore around the house for fifteen minutes and then told me to get out the car and, well, here I am.” She could ask for a favor and keep her dignity. “I’m sure it won’t take more than a minute. Arthur says it’s all cut and dried.”

  Chief Brayer came in without knocking. His black slicker streamed and his mustache was limp. “Henry,” he said to the burgess, “I make it twelve feet and rising at the Sullivan Street bridge. In thirty-five it was only eight feet and in thirty-nine it was only nine and a half. What’s going on down in the Hollow, God only knows. Anyway, I’d better get down there with all the boys. All right?”

  “Sure, Red. Get on down. Send somebody to my place in a car with a trailer hitch; have ‘em tow my boat down to the Hollow. It’s all set up on the trailer in the garage, ready to go.” He grinned wryly. “I was thinking I might take Bess up to Cayuga for a day on the water.”

  Mrs. Chesbro looked on blankly.

  “Great,” the chief said. “It’s got a good spotlight, too. We’ll need that. If you don’t mind a suggestion, Henry, I’d turn out the fire department and have them standing by. You may need some able-bodied men in a hurry. Twelve feet and rising—” He hurried from the office.

  “Excuse me,” the burgess said to Mrs. Chesbro, and tried the interphone on his desk. It worked; so far the main to the north end of the borough had not been flooded and shorted out.

  “Fire chief.” said the interphone.

  “This is Henry, Chief. Red Brayer thinks, and I agree, that you should sound the general alarm for the volunteers, that they should be standing by in the e
ngine house with their cars parked in the square. The Hollow’s filling up fast—at least it must be; the water’s twelve feet and rising at the bridge.”

  “Right, Henry. That all?”

  “For the present, yes,” the burgess sighed. He clicked the box off. Immediately he heard the klaxon on top of the building hoot three longs, then pause and hoot again and then again. It was the Emergency Muster signal, and it would galvanize fifty men scattered throughout the borough into dropping whatever they were doing, tearing to their cars and speeding to the borough hall, or more exactly to its ground floor left wing where the fire department-two LaFrance pumpers, one ancient and one beautifully new, two full-time employees, the chief and the driver—were housed. He hoped they wouldn’t be too disappointed when they found they’d be on a boring standby.

  And now, he thought, he really ought to get out and drive around on a tour of inspection. There wasn’t any point to sticking in the office with the phone out and the firemen and police already committed to action. He had hoped for some usefulness out of the local radio station, but it was silent, had been for an hour. The news of the Hollow explained that; the transmitter tower, a modest spire, was planted in a marshy field down that way. It had something to do with a good ground, he had been told once, so they had a good ground and they were now bugged out the one time they’d be able to do a public service beyond broadcasting damnfool hillbilly music.

  He was reaching for his raincoat, to the dismay of Mrs. Chesbro, when a big man came in. The burgess recognized him as her husband, the redoubtable Arthur Chesbro of Summit. He had, quite consciously, had as little to do with Arthur Chesbro as possible, but there was an irreducible minimum of contact with the man that couldn’t be avoided. He was all over the place in Summit, a closely neighboring borough, and he had feelers out through the entire area. You heard of his interest in this and that—bankrolling a resort, buying a professional building a county away and turning it over fast, snapping up timber rights to a farmer’s woodlot and turning them over to a firm from over the state line; snatching an FCG television construction permit from under the nose of heavy competition and then not building the station after all for mysterious and profitable reasons. He was a leading citizen, the burgess supposed, but he had nevertheless carefully avoided him whenever possible. He was not really sure why, but once after a couple of bourbons with Chief Brayer he had told the chief that he thought Arthur Chesbro suffered from a case of moral and ethical halitosis.

  Physically, Chesbro was a picture of success, rather soaked and winded success at the moment, having hiked in the rain from Sullivan Street and climbed the steep stairs to the burgess’s second-floor office.

  He grasped the burgess’s automatically extended hand with a firm and manly grip. “It’s good to see you again, Henry,” he intoned. “How’s Bess?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “And that boy of yours in medical school?”

  “Fine—uh, Arthur.” He thought resignedly that you have to go along with these characters. And maybe, for God’s sake, Chesbro actually did remember Bess and did remember hearing about Ted and actually did wish them well. Maybe.

  “I see you’ve met my wife, Henry. Well, it looks like quite a nasty downpour, doesn’t it?”

  Now he’s talking about the weather, for God’s sake, to put me at my ease and get the conversation going on a topic of universal interest. Always start by talking about the weather; nobody’s so shy or so stupid that he can’t think of something to say about the weather. Well, sir, this time the maxim was going to backfire in Arthur Chesbro’s red face. “Glad you mentioned that, Arthur,” the burgess said briskly. “I’m leaving now. I’m afraid we’re in for something worse than we got in thirty-five and thirty-nine, and I’m going to cruise around and have a look-see. I don’t know why you came to see me on a dirty night like this, but if you can’t put it in a nutshell it’ll have to wait.”

  Arthur Chesbro was disconcerted. “Didn’t you see the story in the paper yesterday, Henry?”

  “I’ve been mighty busy,” the burgess apologized, getting into his raincoat.

  “Well, it said, roughly—well, never mind the story. What I want to do is take the old Swanscomb Mill off the borough’s hands and put a tidy rental into the communal pocket—and hire a few of your local people.”

  “Sounds fine,” the burgess said. He started for the door. “But there’s a fellow with a plant in Brooklyn who’s interested too. I understood he’s coming out to see us about it, but I suppose this weather’ll hold him up. I think we’d better table this matter until I hear from him and have a chance to compare the offers. Now, if you’ll excuse me—

  “I never thought,” said Chesbro flatly, “that I’d see a neighbor selling out to foreign interests when he has a bid from a local man.”

  The burgess took his hand off the doorknob and looked at Chesbro steadily up and down. “I don’t like your language worth a damn,” he said. “I’d give you a lecture on manners if I didn’t have more important things to do. You can find your way out, can’t you?”

  Chesbro’s eyes dropped, but the burgess thought he could read a look of calculation on his face. “Sorry,” he said. “By the way, my car is just up the hill. Can I help out?”

  “Well.” said the burgess, and thought. Might as well save climbing all the way up West Street—and you couldn’t brush off a man who was trying to do you a favor, just because you thought he stank. “Obliged,” he said. “If you’ll drop me at my house I’ll pick up my own car.’

  ‘

  He waited with Mrs. Chesbro while her husband dashed through the rain. She didn’t talk, which the burgess approved, and once when he met her eye she gave him a tired smile. The burgess judged that she was onto her husband, and seldom had anything to smile about.

  For that matter, what did anyone have to smile about? The burgess looked over his borough and hardly heard Artie Chesbro chattering beside him. The street lamps at the bottom of West Street were out. One of the big elms that framed the post office was trailing a pair of enormous branches, broken-winged, across the street; they had to detour far to the left to pass it. Well, there wouldn’t be much traffic tonight—and you couldn’t tell, maybe he’d be lucky and the whole tree would have to come down; and then they could get on with widening West Street and the hell with the Garden Club.

  They went up over the West Street hill and down the other side, “—don’t know if you’ve considered the importance of warehousing facilities in attracting industry,“ Chesbro was saying in his ear. “War plants? Sure. They’re a dime a dozen, Henry, and they come and fold up and then where are you? But you take a town that’s got a reputation for good, low-cost—”

  The burgess felt entirely too surrounded by Chesbros, with Artie babbling on one side and the wife, silent on the other. Then they turned into Sycamore. The burgess leaned forward. Funny, he could hardly see the highway junction at the bottom of the hill. They rolled down at forty or so, and then everything happened at once. Something jumped up out of the pavement ahead of them. “Watch out!” yelled the burgess. “Jesus!” cried Artie Chesbro, slamming on the brakes and skidding. It looked like a figure, some crazy kind of figure hard to make out in the rain, that suddenly started to get up in the middle of the road; it humped itself and flopped back, and then leaped high in the air, higher than the roof of the car.

  Mrs. Chesbro laughed out loud, nervously.

  “Busted water pipe!” cried Artie Chesbro. “Look, Henry, it’s a whole fountain!”

  It was a fountain, all right, but it wasn’t anything broken. The burgess swallowed hard. Not in ‘35, not even in ‘39, had the storm sewers backed up hard enough and fast enough to send their manhole lids flying into the

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Dick McCue started off like a jet pilot. “What’s the hurry?” Mrs. Goudeket demanded. “Better go slow and we’ll get there.” She was feeling uneasier than ever; because though she had heard the rain pounding on the house, and seen
the rain sluicing down the windows, she hadn’t felt the rain until that two-yard dash from the door to the station wagon that had wet her to the skin.

  “Sure, Mrs. Goudeket,” he said cheerfully, and slowed down—briefly. Fast, slow—he could drive that blacktop road down to the highway in his sleep. This was what he liked; something happening. He never would have taken the agency’s offer of this job if he’d known it would involve running putting contests for rained-in guests who blamed it all on him. Girls, dances, a chance to sharpen up his game for the all-important Inter-Collegiate Medalist next year—the agency had made it sound pretty great. Of course, he had a lot to offer, too—his maidenhead, for instance, as far as the world of golf was concerned; now he was definitely and permanently a pro, and some of the doors in golfing were forever closed to him. Maybe he should have held out for more money. But what was the difference; Dick McCue knew well enough that his game wasn’t going to support him all his life; he had a good, powerful drive and a touch with the putter, but everything between the tee and the cup was hard work. It made him a splendid golf pro for Mrs. Goudeket’s guests, most of whose future golfing would be either on a driving range or on one of those miniature courses that were coming back, but that was as far as his talents went. Dick McCue didn’t kid himself—or anyway, not about his golf.

  Mrs. Goudeket cried out and clutched his arm. “Look! Four hundred dollars worth of topsoil!” But it wasn’t four hundred dollars worth of topsoil any more; it was a lake. She looked at it incredulously. She remembered distinctly what it had looked like when she and Mr. Goudeket had taken possession of Goudeket’s Green Acres, formerly known as Holiday Hacienda: It had been a muddy cow pasture, rutted and gullied. It had taken three days with a bulldozer before they could start putting the topsoil on—