by Peter Straub
I sat in the cold room, paralyzed straight down to the core. Alison. I thought: the twenty-first begins at midnight on the twentieth. One day away from the day just beginning to appear in stripes of dark purple over the woods blackening the hills.
—
As the morning drew closer I moved out onto the porch. The bands of purple increased in width; the wide fields, striped yellow and green, grew in visibility and detail. Fog lay upon them in trails of misty gray, wisps of cotton snagged in the corn.
Footsteps awoke me. My hands and feet were cold. The sky had become a flat uniform pale blue, and the mist was gone from everywhere but the very edges of the woods. It was going to be one of those days when the moon is visible all morning, hanging in blue sky like a white dead stone. Tuta Sunderson was coming heavily up the drive, trudging as though her shoes were encased in concrete. Her bag jigged at her side. When she saw me, her mouth clapped shut and her face hardened. I waited for her to open the screen door and come onto the porch.
“You don’t have to come here anymore,” I said. “The job is over.”
“What do you mean?” I could see suspicion darken her goggling eyes.
“Your employment is terminated. I don’t need you anymore. The job is finis. Kaput. Ended. Over. Finished. Done.”
“You been sitting here all night?” She crossed her arms over her chest, an operation requiring an impressive amount of effort. “Drinking gin?”
“Please go home, Mrs. Sunderson.”
“You afraid of my seeing something? Well, I’ve already seen it.”
“You haven’t seen anything.”
“You look kinda sick. What did you do, swallow a bottle of aspirin or something?”
“I don’t know how suicide ever got along without you.”
“By rights I should get the whole week’s wages.”
“Indeed you should. In fact you should get two weeks’ wages. Forgive me. Please take fourteen dollars.” I reached in my pocket, drew out bills, counted out two fives and four ones and handed them to her.
“One week’s, I told you. That’s five dollars. You’re paying for today, Friday and Saturday besides the three days I worked.” She took one of the fives and dropped the rest of the money beside me on the porch swing.
“Splendid. Please go and leave me alone. I realize that I’ve been awful to you. I couldn’t help it. I’m sorry.”
“I know what you’re doing,” she said. “You’re as filthy as any beast of the field.”
“That was eloquent.” I closed my eyes. After a while the noise of her breathing changed, and I could hear her turning around. I was getting better. Now I could smell anger. Thank you, Alison. The screen door banged shut, I kept my eyes closed as I heard her walking down the drive.
Who slept together?
One crushed an anthill.
One broke a chair.
One was afraid.
One swam in blood.
One had cold hands.
One had the last word.
When I opened my eyes she was gone. A dusty brown Ford, the mailman’s car, came up the road and passed the impaled metal receptacle without braking. No more fan mail, no more letters from my cousin. Yes. It made sense. Her body—her skeleton, after twenty years—was in a graveyard in Los Angeles, beneath a headstone I had never seen. So she had to put herself together out of the available materials. Or be just a wind, the cold breath of spirit. Leaves, gravel, thorns. Thorns for tearing.
I stood up and went down from the porch. I said in my mind: thorns for tearing. I felt as though I were walking in my sleep. The door on the driver’s side of the Nash had slipped out of alignment, and it dipped when I opened it, creaking loudly in a voice like rust.
For a moment I could not remember where I was going, and simply put-putted up the road, going slowly and serenely as Duane on the big tractor. Then I remembered. The last, the only help. I depressed the accelerator, made the car rattle, picked up speed as I went past the Sunderson house. Mrs. Sunderson was at one of the windows, watching me go by. Then the shell of the school, the church, the tight curve at the sandstone bluff. I passed Andy’s, and saw him pumping gas. His face was like clotted milk. Behind him was a large black area of dead land. His clotted-milk face swung around, tracking me as I passed.
When I came to the narrow path going up between the fields to the trees I swung hard on the wheel again and began to bounce along, going in the direction of the sun. A few ears of corn in the row nearest the road had been struck down, broken off at the stalk, and they lay flattened and sprawling at the field’s edge. Here and there, whole rows had been trampled down; stick-leg cornstalks tilted crazily. Soon I reached the first of the trees, and then the fields vanished behind me and I was threading between big oaks. The narrow early sunlight filtered by the boughs and leaves came down in ribbons. I parked on the slope beside the tall red henhouse. When I got out of the car I could hear the gabbling of the birds. A few terrified hens ran away into the woods, lurching from side to side.
I looked in the henhouse first. I pulled open the doors and stepped inside, hit once again by the stench. It seemed even stronger than on the day when I had clumsily helped her cull the eggs. Two or three birds flapped their wings, high up on their nests. Beaked heads swiveled, button eyes stared fixedly. Slowly, I backed out, the fixed eyes glaring at me from the sides of their old men’s heads. I closed the door as gently as she had taught me.
Two chickens were roosting on the hood of the Nash. I went up the path toward her house. Here the sunlight was blocked from entering directly, and there was only a golden hovering rustle overhead, where the leaves formed another sky. The little house seemed dark and empty.
One had cold hands.
One had the last word.
On a counter in the kitchen stood a plate stacked with something wrapped in a red-and-white gingham cloth. I touched the cloth. It was dry. I folded it back, and saw mold sprinkled green on the surface of the top piece of lefsa.
She was in the bedroom, lying in the middle of the double bed. A yellowed sheet, a patchwork quilt, covered her. My nostrils caught an odor like a deep bass chord. I knew she was dead before I touched her and felt the stiffness of her fingers. The white hair was spread thickly on the embroidered pillowcase. Two, three days dead, I thought. She might have died while Paul Kant’s body was being dragged from the flames of the Dream House, or while I was fitting my body within a ghost’s. I put down her stiff hand and went back into the dark kitchen to telephone the Arden police.
—
“Uh, goddam,” said Dave Lokken after I had spoken two sentences of explanation. “You’re there now? With her?”
“Yes.”
“You say you found her?”
“Yes.”
“Any, uh, marks on her? Any signs of, uh, assault? Any indication of cause of death?”
“She was about ninety-four years old,” I said. “I suppose that’ll do for cause of death.”
“Well goddam. Goddam. You say you just found her now? What the hell were you doing up there anyways?”
For the last protection. “She was my grandmother’s sister,” I said.
“Uh, family reasons,” he said, and I knew he was writing it down. “So you’re up there in those woods now? That’s where her farm is, right?”
“That’s where I am.”
“Well, goddam.” I couldn’t figure out why he was so agitated by my information. “Look. Teagarden, you don’t budge. Just stay there until I can get out there with an ambulance. Don’t touch anything.”
“I want to talk to Polar Bears,” I said.
“Well, you can’t. You get that? The Chief ain’t here now. But don’t worry, Teagarden, you’ll be talkin’ to the Chief soon enough.” He hung up without saying good-bye.
Lokken had been like a being from another, more furious world, and I went back into Rinn’s bedroom and sat beside her on the bed. I realized that I was still moving with the numbness which had settled on me durin
g my almost sleepless night in the living room I had prepared for Alison Greening, and I nearly stretched out on the bed beside Rinn’s body. Her face seemed smoother in death, less Chinese and wrinkled. I was conscious of the bones pushing through the skin of her face. I touched her cheek and then tried to pull the sheet and quilt up over her head. They were pinned beneath her arms; and I remembered Lokken’s telling me not to touch anything.
It was over an hour before I heard vehicles coming up the drive from the valley road, and went onto her porch to see a police car drawing up alongside the Nash, followed by an ambulance.
Chubby Dave Lokken bounced out of the police car and waved angrily at the two men in the ambulance. They got out and crossed their arms and leaned against the side of the ambulance. One of them was smoking, and the leafage of smoke from his cigarette wound up to the dense covering of trees. “You, Teagarden,” Lokken shouted, and I turned my head to look at him. For the first time I saw the rumpled-looking man wearing a suit who stood beside the deputy. He had a Marine crewcut and wore thick glasses. “Teagarden, get the hell out here!” Lokken shouted. The man beside him sighed and rubbed his face, and I saw the black bag in his hands.
I came down from the porch. Lokken was nearly hopping with rage and impatience. I could see his breasts bulging in his uniform shirt. “All right. What’s your story, Teagarden?”
“What I told you.”
“Is she in the house?” asked the doctor. He looked very tired, and as though Dave Lokken had begun to wear on him.
I nodded, and the doctor began to move up the path.
“Hold on. I got a few questions first. You say you found her. Is that right?”
“That’s what I said and that’s right.”
“You got a witness?”
One of the ambulance men snickered, and Lokken’s face began to flush. “Well?”
“No. No witnesses.”
“You say you just came here this morning?”
I nodded.
“What time?”
“Just before I called you.”
“I suppose she was dead when you got here?”
“Yes.”
“Where were you coming from?” He put great weight on the question.
“The Updahl farm.”
“Anybody see you there? Wait up, doc. I wanta finish here before we go in. Well?”
“Tuta Sunderson saw me. I fired her this morning.”
Lokken seemed puzzled and angered by this detail, but he decided to ignore it. “You touch the old woman in any way?”
I nodded. The doctor looked at me for the first time.
“You did, huh? You touched her? How?”
“I held her hand.”
His color darkened, and the ambulance man snickered again.
“What made you decide to come up here this morning anyhow?”
“I wanted to see her.”
“Just wanted to see her.” His flabby incompetent face shouted that he would love to swing at me.
“I’ve had a rough morning,” said the doctor. “Dave, let’s get this over with so I can get back and write my reports.”
“Uh-huh,” said Lokken, violently nodding his head. “Teagarden, this here honeymoon of yours might come to a sudden end.”
The doctor looked at me with an almost professional curiosity, and then he and Lokken went marching up to the house.
I watched them go, and then looked at the ambulance men. They were both concentrating on the ground. One glanced at me and then snatched his cigarette from his mouth and scowled at it as if he were thinking of changing brands. After a moment I went back inside the house.
“Natural causes,” the doctor was saying. “Looks like no problems with this one. She just ran out of life.”
Lokken nodded, writing on a pad, and then looked up and noticed me. “Hey! Get out of here, Teagarden. You ain’t even supposed to be in here!”
I went out onto the porch. A minute later, Lokken bustled past me to wave in the ambulance men, who disappeared behind for a second and then reappeared carrying a stretcher. I followed them into the house, but did not go as far as the bedroom. They needed no more than seconds to place Rinn on the stretcher. The sheets and quilt had been replaced by a white blanket, pulled up over her face.
As we stood watching them carrying her down to the ambulance, Lokken was a symphony of small movements: he tapped a foot, buffed a shoe on his trouser leg, patted his fat thigh with his fingertips, adjusted his holster. I understood that all this expressed his reluctance to stand so near me. When the doctor came out saying, “Let’s shake it, I got four hours’ work on the other one,” Lokken turned to me and said, “Okay, Teagarden. But we got people who will say they saw you going up into those woods. Don’t you go anywhere but back home. Got me? Hey, Professor? You got me?”
—
All of which was explained by a visit I received later that day. I had been picking up the papers in my office, just gathering them up by the armful and dropping them into bushel baskets. The typewriter was useless now; the carriage had been bent so that the roller would not advance, and I threw the machine into the root cellar.
When I heard a car driving up toward the house I looked out the window: the car had already drawn up too close to the house to be visible. I waited for a knock but none came. I went downstairs and saw a police car drawn right up before the porch. Polar Bears was sitting on the near front fender, wiping his forehead with a big speckled handkerchief.
He saw me come out onto the porch, put his hand down, and shifted his body slightly so that he was facing me. “Step outside, Miles,” he said.
I stood right in front of the screen door with my hands in my pockets.
“Sorry about old Rinn,” he said. “I suppose I should apologize about Dave Lokken, too. Dr. Hampton, the county M.E., says my deputy was a little rough with you.”
“Not by your standards. He was just stupid and pompous.”
“Well, he’s no mental giant,” Polar Bears said. There was a quiet watchful quality—a restraint—to his manner which I had not seen before. We stayed where we were and regarded each other for a bit before he spoke again. I didn’t give a damn for him or anything he said. “Thought you’d like to know. The M.E. says she died forty-eight, maybe sixty hours ago. The way he puts it together, she probably knew it was happening and just got into bed and died. Heart attack. Nice and simple.”
“Does Duane know?”
“Yep. He got her transferred to the funeral parlor this afternoon. She’ll be buried day after tomorrow.” His big head was tilting, looking at me with squinting eyes. Beside him, his hat pointed toward me so that I could see light reflected from the star shield pinned to the crown.
“Well, thanks,” I said, and moved to go back inside.
“One more thing.”
I stopped. “Yes?”
“I oughta explain to you why Dave Lokken was acting sorta extra uptight.”
“I’m not interested,” I said.
“Oh, you’re interested, Miles. See, we found that Michalski girl this morning.” He sent me one of his low heavy smiles. “Funny sort of coincidence there. She was dead, naturally. But I don’t expect that’s a surprise.”
“No. Nor to you.” I felt the dread again, and leaned against the screen door.
“Nope. I expected it. The thing is, Miles, she was right up there in those woods—not three hundred yards from Rinn’s little cabin. We started workin’ our way in from 93—” pointing with one arm—“and we just pored through them woods, see, lookin’ at every little twig, and this morning we found her buried under loose dirt in a sort of clearing up there.”
I swallowed.
“You know that clearing, Miles?”
“I might.”
“Uh-huh. Real good. That’s why old Dave was sorta salty with you—you were up there with one body, and we found another one so close you could spit that far. It’s just a little natural clearing, got some campfire remains in the middle of it. Be
en used pretty regular, by the look of it.”
I nodded. I kept my hands in my pockets.
“Could be you used to go up there. Now that don’t make any difference but for one fact. Oh, and Miles, she was worse than the other two. Her feet were burned. Come to think of it, her hair was burned too. And, let me see. Oh yeah. She was sorta kept there. This friend of ours, he tied her to a tree or something and—I’m only guessing—went up at night to work on her. For more than a week.”
I thought of the slight figure drawing me up toward the clearing, and of how I had taken the warm ashes as a sign of her healing presence.
“You wouldn’t happen to have any idea about who’d do a thing like that, would you?”
I was going to say yes, but instead said, “You think it was Paul Kant?”
Polar Bears nodded like a proud schoolmaster. “Real good. Real good. See, that brings up the little fact I mentioned before. What do we need to know?”
“How long she’s been dead.”
“Miles, you shoulda been a cop. See, we don’t think she died of—our friend’s little experiments. She was strangled. Big fucking bruises on her throat. Now our friend Dr. Hampton isn’t sure yet when that might have happened. But suppose it happened after Paul Kant killed himself?”
I said, “It’s not me, Polar Bears.”
He just sat there blinking, feigning polite attention. When I said no more, he folded his hands into his lap. “Now, we both know who it isn’t, don’t we, Miles? I had a talk with your prime suspect yesterday. He told me that those Coke bottles came from Du-ane’s cellar, where you could get at ’em pretty easy, and he says you threw out that doorknob yourself. They were Du-ane’s. Says he doesn’t know how they got in his truck. And I know he hasn’t been up in the woods at night, because he confessed to me what he’s been doing with his nights.” He smiled again. “He and Du-ane’s girl used to go down to that shack behind Andy’s. Do pokey-pokey all night. Paul Kant sort of ruined their fun.”
