Free 7191 by Unknown Page B

Janice and Ivy bundled together in a warm embrace, playing Actors and Actresses.
    Bill spread a tablecloth across the coverlet, and they ate their picnic dinner on the bed. By seven thirty, when the call came, love and togetherness were firmly reestablished.
    Ivy snatched up the phone from the bedside table on the first ring.
    ‘Yes?’ A short pause, then: ‘It’s for you, Dad.’
    Bill signalled Janice to take the receiver, then hurried out of the room to take the call on the downstairs extension. Janice kept the phone at her ear, but covered the mouthpiece with her hand. In a moment Bill’s voice came on the other end.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Mr Templeton?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘My name is Elliot Hoover.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘I think we should talk.’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘May I come to your home?’
    ‘No. How about my office tomorrow morning?’
    ‘I think we should talk right away. I’d also like Mrs Templeton to be present. How about meeting me downstairs in the restaurant bar?’
    ‘Impossible. We can’t leave our child alone.’
    ‘Carole Federico might be willing to sit with Ivy for an hour or so.’
    Janice could well understand the long pause that followed this remarkable statement. She could sense Bill’s shock at the scope and depth of Hoover’s knowledge of the most intimate corners of their lives.
    ‘I’ll see,’ she heard Bill stammer at last.
    ‘Say, eight thirty?’
    ‘I’ll see.’
    The phone clicked twice before Janice placed hers back on its cradle.
    Ivy broke into a giggle. She had picked up a Snoopy book and was browsing through it while they talked on the phone. Inwardly, Janice reacted harshly to the laughter, felt it was all wrong, inappropriate, totally out of place - like someone laughing at a funeral.

Part two
Elliot Hoover

6
    Except for two functioning tables and a line-up of tuxedoed waiters, silently manning their posts at strategic peripheral intervals, patiently awaiting the nine thirty closing time, the Des Artistes Restaurant seemed poised on the precipice of sleep.
    Bill and Janice quietly made their way through the hushed, sombre atmosphere, en route to the bar-room, which lay just beyond the restaurant in a small, partially enclosed niche.
    Kurt, the bartender, gave Bill and Janice a smile of recognition as they stood on the threshold of the darkly panelled room, searching among several faces for a sign of Hoover. There were only five customers present.
    ‘Mr and Mrs Templeton, I’m Elliot Hoover.’
    Janice jumped, startled; Bill swung about, too fast, betraying his surprise. Hovering before them was a face they would have sworn they’d never seen before.
    The hairless pale skin, clear and unwrinkled, belonged to a man of twenty. The smile, sweet and ingenuous, disclosed two rows of small white teeth sandwiched between colourless thin lips. On closer inspection, the light-brown hair was somewhat sparse and receding, yet could this be the forty-six-year-old man they had read about in Who’s Who?
    Hoover noted their surprise, and his smile deepened, as he suggested, ‘There’s a quiet table over there in the corner.’
    Bill and Janice followed him like a pair of sheep being escorted by a Judas goat to the killing room. They sat together, against the wall, at the wave of Hoover’s hand, while he took the chair opposite them across the table.
    ‘I want to thank you both for agreeing to see me tonight,’ Elliot Hoover began, in a low, soothing voice that seemed to dicker over the selection of each word. ‘I truly appreciate it’
    Marie, the pretty barmaid, appeared at their table, smiling inquiringly.
    ‘Would you care for something, Mrs Templeton?’ Hoover politely asked Janice.
    ‘No, thank you,’ she replied.
    ‘I’ll have a scotch and water,’ Bill said.
    ‘Do you have Chinese gunpowder tea?’ inquired Hoover.
    ‘I think they may have some in the kitchen,’ Marie ventured.
    ‘That’ll be fine for me, thank you,’ he said, dismissing Marie and turning his