Arcade Read online

  ARCADE

  ROBERT MAXXE

  Copyright © 1984 by Robert Maxxe

  Best Bet Digital LLC.

  For my Mother and Father—

  Earth Dweller and Time Traveler

  with thanks for giving me the moon

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  1

  "What you need," Nick Foster said as he sat in the breakfast nook, passively watching his mother race through her morning's Grand Prix circuit around the kitchen, "is a robot."

  For the moment, Carrie Foster was too busy to answer. She finished pouring waffle batter into the iron, then scuttled to the oven door for a peek at the tray of twelve five-inch bacon quiches. Seeing they were done, she grabbed up pot holders and slid the tray out of the oven to cool. Then she went back to squeezing the last orange for her children's juice.

  She knew just what had inspired the robot remark. Last night she had passed through the living room while Nick and Emily were ogling a television news "magazine" program with a feature about a man who had put together his own homemade robot. Using sheet iron and metal tubing, wire, flashlight bulbs, wheels from a shopping cart, and various electronic components, the amateur inventor had assembled a cumbersome device that was capable of rolling through the house to do the vacuuming, move groceries from the carport to the kitchen, wake up different family members at certain pre-set hours, play simplistic games of catch with his children, and even back itself into a plug when the time came to recharge its batteries. Maybe the Robot Age had arrived to ease the standard housewife's burden, Carrie thought. But the time was still far off when a robot could do what she did. She finished squeezing the juice and set two glasses on the pine table.

  "What I need," she replied at last to her son, "is for you to start making breakfast for you and your sister. Then it'd be a little easier to get the rest of my work done."

  Nick pouted a little and took a sip from his glass.

  "I could mash the oranges, Mommy," Emily offered. "I already know how to cook." It was true indeed that, at a mere age seven, Emily had become adept at opening and warming cans of Spaghetti-Os.

  "We'll see," Carrie said, already retreating from her suggestion. Reasonable as it was, she couldn't help feeling a bit churlish. Yes, Nick was twelve; she had a right to demand more from him. No doubt making breakfast for the children, seeing that they always had freshly squeezed juice, waffles, or hot cereal in winter was pampering them by present-day standards. But she hadn't yet gotten over the idea that they needed some extra pampering as compensation for living without a father.

  "Suppose instead," Nick piped up, "I just make you a robot."

  Carrie laughed appreciatively as she opened the waffle iron and lifted out the finished grids of dough. The funny thing was that a kid nowadays probably could build some electronic marvel as easily as learning how to make a bowl of Instant Quaker Oats.

  "It's a deal," she said, putting waffles and syrup on the table. "Only make it a little more presentable than that portable junkyard they showed on television."

  "Oh sure. I could cover it with a rubber skin . . . you know, like those Halloween masks. I could probably even make it look like Dad."

  Carrie turned away quickly. For all their amazing vulnerability, how stunningly insensitive children could be. She knew Nick had meant it as a gift, still it hurt, the very thought: a robot to replace Mike!

  But the pain settled as she finished preparing all the food to be transported to the store. From the refrigerator she took the large bowls of salmon mousse and seviche and a mocha d'acquoise torte, all made the night before. After wrapping them in Saran, she laid them carefully into a carton and went out the back door to put the box in the station wagon.

  When she returned, the tray of quiches had cooled enough to pick up bare-handed, and the children were finishing their waffles. "Let's go, kids," Carrie said. "Grab your coats."

  She preceded them out and set the tray in the back of the wagon. Then, for the first time since she'd gotten out of bed at sunrise, she paused and looked at the day, soothed by all the signs of change. The glaring metallic sky of August had given way to the cool porcelain blue of autumn. Here and there fallen leaves fluttered and scratched over the macadam of Shoreview Drive. The breeze blowing in off the Atlantic was no longer tinged with the musty odor of seaweed drying on the beach; now she smelled the briny astringency of salt mist from a storm that had raged somewhere off the coast last night.

  Soon, she thought. The season was virtually over, and soon all the summer people would be gone from Millport. She'd be able to sleep late instead of rising early to cook for the store. Days wouldn't be taken up completely with phoning suppliers for extra stock, working behind the counter, walking through to greet customers. Business would be deliciously slow, and she'd be able to leave Patrick in charge while she went home early, lit a fire, and read one of the bestsellers that all the summer people had been able to enjoy during their days of lolling on the beach. Soon.

  But not quite yet. The city schools had been open for a few weeks, and families with vacation homes in Millport were no longer in full-time residence. The weather had been warm enough until now, however, to justify the weekend trek out from the city. According to the weather forecast, the weekend starting tomorrow would also be on the warm side. Not beach weather, though. This was the weekend, Carrie was sure, that the summer people would use to close up their houses before going away to leave all the real Millporters in peace.

  Suddenly Carrie had to smile at the intolerant drift of her thoughts. Who was she to be reflecting on the summer people as a trial to be borne? Not so long ago she had been one of them. She had used the town as it pleased her—she and Mike and the children—semiannually loving it and leaving it, moving back to the city and never giving a thought to the problems of Millport's schools, or the passage of a new bond issue to buy the town much-needed snow-removal equipment. Mike's success as an international investment consultant had made possible a life that glided between a penthouse in the city and a beach house in Millport, on Long Island's summer riviera. Until, three years ago, that easy existence had been wiped out overnight. While on a business trip to Munich, riding in one of those marvelous German cars being driven along an autobahn by one of his clients (at 170 kilometers per hour, according to reports from the Polizei), Mike had been killed in an automobile accident. Only then Carrie had discovered that Mike's business was in trouble, had been since the onset of the recession; both houses were mortgaged to the hilt, the savings were gone, her jewelry had all been used as collateral for loans. She had surrendered the jewels and sold the penthouse coop to pay other debts. Faced with a choice of where to settle and bring up the children, Millport seemed the better, safer place—especially since she would be bringing them up alone. In Millport, too, Carrie had figured out a way t
o make a living on her own.

  Which was the other reason she had no business being intolerant of the summer people. Let's not forget, m'girl, Carrie reproached herself as she thought about the peaceful winter ahead, that without all those well-heeled seasonal invaders, your very comfortable income would be cut by a very uncomfortable two thirds.

  Nick and Emily exploded through the screen door and dove into the back seat of the car.

  "Hey, move it, Mom!" Nick shouted when it took Carrie a second to shake off her reverie and get behind the wheel. "You'll make us late!"

  Children. Little tyrants. She loved hers beyond all measure. They were, after all, her saviors.

  "I'm really gonna do it, Mom," Nick said as the car drew up by the field that fronted Millport Elementary and Middle School. "I'm gonna ask my shop teacher about making a robot."

  A robot made of wood? Nothing to do, of course, but encourage the project. "Just one favor," Carrie said to Nick as Emily leaned over the seat for a farewell hug. "I'd rather you make him look like Clark Gable."

  "Who's he?" Nick said, and slammed the door, in need of neither a hug nor an answer.

  She watched them walk away, Nick with his slightly exaggerated saunter, Emily's ponytail swinging. When they disappeared into the stream of other children, she pulled away.

  Continuing along Hawthorne Way, Carrie came after two blocks to the intersection with Millport's central thoroughfare, Elm Street. She was about to swing right, toward the west end of the street where her store was located, when she remembered the pills waiting to be picked up at Osgood's Pharmacy.

  She hesitated, motor idling. The filled prescription had been waiting there for three weeks.

  In the wake of Mike's death there had been months of sleepless nights. She had endured them at first, waiting hour after hour in the dark for the deeper shadow to pass by and carry her off, if for no more than a few precious minutes. Finally she had been forced to surrender to a doctor's advice to use pills. Lately, though, she had needed them less and less. A supply that once lasted only six weeks made do for six months. When the last prescription ran out, she hadn't immediately renewed it. She wanted to believe she had adjusted at last to living without him, and the first sleepless nights during the summer she'd been able to tell herself it was only the heat. But then there had been a whole patch of them, and she had called the pharmacy. Still, she resisted actually picking up the pills. . . .

  But tonight, she reminded herself, she would have to be up very late working in the kitchen. With the summer people storing away linens, turning off the water so their pipes wouldn't freeze, they would be camping out in their own houses. There would be a rush over the weekend to buy convenient snacks. She could sell three or four dozen extra quiches, twenty or thirty pounds of the salads, at least. From experience, Carrie knew that when she was under some extra pressure like this, the sleeping would be hardest, the darkness filled with visions of Mike in the wreckage, crying out to her.

  She took the left turn at last, heading east in the direction of Osgood's.

  Only much later she would realize it was the first turn toward a whole new season of bad nights.

  2

  Elm Street, Millport's tree-shaded main thoroughfare, was one of the town's principal charms. Hardly more than a third of a mile from end to end, the street began at the broad village green, where the state road took a sharp right, and ran to a small traffic island capped by the stone obelisk engraved with names of those thirty-eight "sons of Millport" who had given their lives in two World Wars and Korea. (Four more had been killed in Viet Nam, but the stone had yet to be carved in their honor.) Between these two terminal points the street was divided into five blocks, each with six to ten stores or restaurants on either side. The buildings in this commercial stretch had been constructed many years before the city council set zoning requirements, but there had always been respect for scale and tradition in Millport. Most of the structures were only one story, a few had a second level into which the larger businesses—like the B. Altman's branch—had expanded, or where local dentists and lawyers had their offices. In a civic-improvement drive fifteen years ago, incentives had been offered for all landlords to unify the Elm Street facades in a white brick or clapboard colonial style, and most had complied to give the street a dominantly clean, classical look.

  More than anything else, however, Elm Street owed its pleasant character to the rows of tall trees that shaded the sidewalks, and from which it took its hackneyed name. Planted by the town's forefathers to celebrate its incorporation two centuries earlier, the trees had so far been spared the Dutch Elm blight that had ravaged the species in so many other places. Residents of the town liked to cite the flourishing health of these elms as proof that Millport stood on magic ground, a blessed spot with a special place in God's heart.

  Osgood's Pharmacy was nearly at the east end of Elm, near the war memorial. A metered space was open directly in front of the drugstore (another benefit of the summer people's migration—parking places again!), and Carrie pulled in. There were even ten free minutes left on the meter.

  She got out of her Escort station wagon and started around to the entrance of the pharmacy. Then, casting a casual glance across the street, she saw something that stopped her dead in her tracks.

  Pooh's cottage was being emptied out, demolished.

  Standing by the car, Carrie watched the door of a small house on the other side of Elm as several men in dusty workclothes made repeated trips in and out. Emerging with armloads of splintered lumber, they tossed it all into the back of a dump truck and returned inside for more.

  A lump rose in Carrie's throat.

  Winifred Bedford—whose first name had been reduced to Winnie, and from there to the more affectionate "Pooh"—was a spinster, the last descendant of a family that had arrived on this part of Long Island with the first English settlers. Farmers originally, their landholdings had been dissipated in bad marriages, and by the late nineteenth century all that remained in their possession was the colonial cottage finally inherited by Pooh. She lived in two rooms at the back, and in the portion of the small house that fronted on Elm Street, she ran a shop that dealt haphazardly in all sorts of bric-a-brac, rusty toys, secondhand clothes, broken appliances and other cast-offs.

  As a summer resident, Carrie had often enjoyed rummaging in Pooh's shop, and she had made a friend of the old woman. So when Carrie had moved alone to Millport, the genteel spinster had provided the first friendly anchor in a community that did not embrace outsiders during the off-season. There were many chill afternoons when Carrie accepted Pooh's invitation to tea. Especially during a period when she was weighted down by financial problems, Carrie had always drawn comfort, even strength, from sitting in the old woman's quaint world of white elephants and soaking up her calm indifference to money and ambition.

  After Pooh's death last spring, Carrie had suggested to the Town Council that, as a memorial to the old woman, it purchase the cottage and relocate the Millport Historical Society there from the cramped room it occupied in the church basement. Owen Haber, head of the Council, had been in favor. But then an heir to Pooh's estate had turned up, a male cousin from a branch of the family that had drifted away to Oklahoma. With commercial space on Elm Street at a premium, the cousin had seen the cottage might be a money-spinner. Following a wholesale liquidation of everything in the shop, the heir had disappeared back to Oklahoma, leaving the property in the hands of a local realtor.

  Through the summer the cottage had remained empty, a FOR RENT sign taped in a window. Carrie was surprised the space hadn't been grabbed up to take advantage of Millport's peak season. Then one afternoon in August she had bumped into Edna Swann, the agent handling the rental, who revealed that the cousin was insisting on seven thousand dollars a month, almost triple the local average for comparable space!

  But apparently the new owner's greed and stubbornness had paid off. Seven thousand a month, Carrie thought as she stared across the street, who wo
uld pay that kind of money?

  And wasn't it odd that the renovation was beginning now? Whenever space on Elm Street was remodeled, the work always began at the end of winter. That allowed construction unhindered by weather, with two or three months to get ready, in time to open with a surge of summer business. Opening just when business would be in the doldrums was poor financial strategy. Nobody could survive for long simply on local trade.

  Curious, Carrie crossed the street to the cottage. As she went around the rear of the dump truck, one of the workmen was heading over with a load of broken boards painted yellow. Sadly, Carrie recognized them as shelving from Pooh's kitchen. The whole place was being torn apart.

  "Good morning," she said, making an effort to sound cheerful.

  "Hi." The workman heaved his burden into the truck, then paused to give Carrie a leering smile. He was young, with long hair, and wearing a denim shirt cut off at the shoulders to reveal his muscular arms.

  "I was just wondering," she said, "what's going in here?"

  "Going in?" The young man shot a puzzled glance toward the dump truck.

  "I mean the cottage. What kind of tenant is taking over?"

  The workman shrugged. "Sorry, babe, I don't know. I'm just here for the wrecking part."

  Carrie didn't like being called "babe" by a stranger; it felt even more impertinent coming from a man ten years her junior. But she kept her temper in check for the sake of getting information.

  "Is there anyone around who can tell me?"

  The young man was still eyeing her provocatively. Why, Carrie wondered, did such a simple encounter have to be sexually charged? All right, she knew she was attractive, but did that give license for men to mentally undress her? Or was it her own fault? After being without a man for three years, was she unwillingly, unconsciously, putting out a signal of desperation, giving off some barely detectable seductive scent?

  She was about to turn on her heel and walk away, when the young man replied. "There was a guy here a while ago looking at some blueprints. Maybe he knows something."