Read Online The Underground Man by Ross MacDonald - Free Book Online

book, and read aloud from it: “IKT 447.”
    I wrote down the number. Then I returned to the front room and reported to Kelsey. Mrs. Broadhurst was slumped in the platform rocker. Her color was high and her eyes were partly closed.
    “Has she been drinking?” I asked Kelsey.
    “Not that I know of.”
    Mrs. Broadhurst sighed, and made an effort to get up. She fell back onto the platform rocker, which creaked under her weight.
    Mrs. Snow backed through the doorway from the kitchen. She was balancing a tray which held the brown teapot, containers of milk and sugar, and a bone-china cup and saucer which looked as if they had been worn thin. She set the tray on a table beside the platform rocker, and filled the teacup from the pot. I could see the dark tea rising through the cup.
    She spoke to Mrs. Broadhurst with forced cheerfulness: “A spot of tea is good for whatever ails you. It will clear your brain and pep you up. I know just how you like it, with milk and sugar—isn’t that right?”
    Mrs. Broadhurst said in a thick voice: “You’re very kind.”
    She reached for the teacup. Her arm swung wide and loose, sweeping the teacup and the milk and sugar off the tray. Mrs. Snow got down on her knees and gathered the pieces of the broken cup as if it was a religious object. She darted into the kitchen for a towel and blotted up some of the tea from the threadbare carpet.
    Kelsey had lifted Mrs. Broadhurst by the shoulders and kept her from falling out of the chair.
    “Who’s her doctor?” I asked Mrs. Snow.
    “Dr. Jerome. Do you want me to look up the number for you?”
    “You could call him yourself.”
    “What shall I say is the matter?”
    “I don’t know. It could be a heart attack. Maybe you better call an ambulance, too.”
    Mrs. Snow stood motionless for a second, as if all her responses had been used up. Then she went back into the kitchen. I heard her dialing.
    I was getting restless. The missing boy was the main thing, and he was long gone by now. I gave Kelsey the license number of the gardener’s old car and suggested that he put out an all-points on it. He called the sheriff’s office.
    I went outside. Jean was pacing back and forth on the broken sidewalk. Her short skirt and her long white legs gave her a harlequin aspect, like a sad clown caught on a poor street under a smoky sky.
    “What on earth is going on in there?”
    I told her what the gardener had told me and added that her mother-in-law was ill.
    “She’s never been ill in her life.”
    “She is now. We’re getting an ambulance for her.” As I spoke, I could hear it coming in the distance like the memory of a scream.
    “What am I going to do?” Jean said, as if the ambulance was coming for her.
    “Go with Mrs. Broadhurst to the hospital.”
    “Where are you going?”
    “I don’t know yet.”
    “I’d rather go with you.”
    I didn’t know exactly what she meant, and neither, I thought, did she. I gave her my business card and an all-purpose answer: “We’ll keep in touch. Let my answering service know where you’re staying.”
    She looked at the card as if it was in a foreign language. “You’re quitting on me, aren’t you?”
    “No. I’m not.”
    “Do you want money, is that it?”
    “It can wait.”
    “What do you want from me, then?”
    “Nothing.”
    She looked at me as if she knew better. People always wanted something.
    The ambulance turned the corner. Its animal scream sank to a growl before it stopped in the road.
    “This the Snow residence?” the driver called.
    I said it was. He and his partner took a stretcher into the house and came out with Mrs. Broadhurst on it. As they lifted her into the back of the ambulance, she tried to sit up.
    “Who pushed me?”
    “Nobody, dearie,” the driver said. “We’ll give you a sniff of oxygen and that’ll perk you up.”
    Jean said without looking at me: “I’ll follow along in her car. I can’t let her go to the hospital by herself.”
    I decided it was