by Peter Straub
She stood up and carried her cup to the coffeemaker. Dishes and glasses filled the sink, and stains of various kinds and colors lay on the counter. Then she heard the words “Richard Dart” come from the radio.
“. . . this vicinity. Police in Springfield discovered a mutilated male corpse and signs of struggle in a room at the Hillside Motel on Tilton Street. Springfield police have indicated the possibility that the fugitive serial killer has been injured, and are conducting a thorough search of the Tilton Street area. Residents are warned that Dart is armed and extremely dangerous. He is thirty-eight years old, six feet, two inches tall, weighs two hundred pounds, has fair hair and brown eyes, and was last seen wearing a gray suit and a white shirt. The fate and whereabouts of his hostage, Mrs. Nora Chancel, are likewise unknown.”
Smiling an utterly mirthless smile, Dan Harwich came back into the kitchen and stopped moving at the sound of Nora’s name.
“Mrs. Chancel is described as being forty-nine years of age, five-six in height, slender, weighing approximately one hundred and ten pounds, with short, dark brown hair and brown eyes, last seen wearing blue jeans and a long-sleeved dark blue shirt. Anyone seeing Mrs. Chancel or any person who appears to be Mrs. Chancel should immediately contact the police or the local office of the FBI.
“Police have not yet been able to identify Dart’s latest victim.
“In other local news, State Senator Mitchell Kramer resolutely denies recent charges of mishandling of . . .”
Harwich switched off the radio. “Give me the keys.” Nora handed them over.
“Your life is a lot more adventurous than mine.” He smiled almost apologetically.
“I’m making you uncomfortable, so I’ll go,” she said. “You don’t have to keep me around out of charity because we used to be friends.”
“We were a lot more than that. Maybe I ought to be uncomfortable now and then.” He grinned at her, and his eyes flickered, and for a second the old Dan Harwich shone through the surface of this warier, more cynical version. “Back in a flash.”
“In the meantime, try to think about what I ought to do, will you? Can you?”
“I’m thinking about it already,” Harwich said.
58
WHEN HARWICH CAME back, Nora said, “I get the feeling your wife isn’t expected anytime soon.”
“Don’t worry about her.” Harwich arched his back. “Lark’s not in the picture anymore.”
“I’m sorry. When did that happen?”
“The disaster took place on the day we got married. I think I got involved with her to get away from Helen. You remember Helen, I suppose?”
“How could I forget Helen?”
“Probably the only time you were thrown out of somebody’s house.” Harwich laughed. “In the end, she didn’t want to live here and I did, so I bought her out. Bought is the word, believe me. Two million in alimony, plus ten thousand a month in support payments. Thank God, last year she suckered some other poor bastard into marrying her. At least I covered my ass when I married Lark. She signed a prenuptial—two hundred fifty thousand, all her clothes and jewelry and her car, that’s it. On the whole, I should have been smarter than to marry someone named Lark Pettigrew. I let her redo the whole place, and now I’m living in this dollhouse.” He gave Nora a rueful, affectionate look. “The woman I should have married was you, but I was too stupid to know it. There you were, right in front of me.”
“I would have married you,” Nora said.
“That last time? You turned up here like Vietnam all over again, I mean, you were wild. And I was already seeing Lark, anyhow. What I’m saying is, I should have married you instead of that miserable witch Helen.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know. Do you know? It’s probably better we didn’t. I don’t seem to be very good at marriage.” He made a wide gesture with one arm and laughed. “Lark took off about three weeks ago, and the week after that I fired the cleaning woman. I don’t mind the mess. Damn woman used to rearrange all my books and papers. Excuse me, but I never understood why I should have to learn my cleaning woman’s filing system.”
She smiled.
“Christ, what’s the matter with me?” He clamped his eyes shut. “All this stuff happening to you, and I’m talking about bullshit instead of helping you.”
“You’re already helping me,” Nora said. “You don’t know how often I think about you.”
He leaned over the top of his chair and closed one hand around one of hers, squeezed, and released it. “I think you should stay here at least a day or two, maybe more. I have that operation this afternoon, but I’ll come back around four or five, get some food, we can see if they picked up Dart, talk things out. Let me pamper you.”
“That sounds wonderful,” Nora said. “You’d really let me stay?”
Harwich leaned forward and took her hand again. “If you even try to get away, I’ll lock you in the attic.”
Her pulse seemed to stop.
“I can’t believe I said that.” He gripped her hand, which wanted to shrink to a stone. “Nora, you’re like a godsend, you remind me of real life, can you understand that?”
“I remind you of real life.”
“Yeah, whatever that is. You do.” Harwich let go of her hand and wiped his eyes, which had suddenly filled with tears. “Sorry. I’m supposed to be helping you, and instead I come unglued.” He tried to smile.
“It’s okay,” Nora said. “My life is a lot messier than yours.”
He rubbed his finger beneath his nose and withdrew into himself for a moment, gazing unseeing at the plates stacked at the edge of the table. “Let’s make up your bed.” He stood up, and she did too, returning his smile. “Do you want to bring in your bags, or anything?”
“Right now, all I want to do is rest.”
“Sounds good to me,” Harwich said.
59
AFTER STOPPING AT the linen closet for paisley sheets and matching pillowcases so new they were still in the package, they went into a front bedroom with flowered blue wallpaper and knotty pine furniture disposed around the edges of a pink-and-blue hooked rug. A rocker made of lacquered twigs sat in front of the window. Harwich ripped the sheets from their wrappers before flipping the dark blue duvet off the bed.
“The bed’s comfortable, but stay out of that chair.” Harwich nodded at the rocker. “One of Lark’s inspirations—a two-thousand-dollar chair that tears holes in your sweaters.”
He snapped a fitted sheet across the bed. Nora slid the top corner over the mattress as Harwich did the same on his side. They moved down the bed to fit the sheet over the bottom corners. Together they straightened and smoothed the top sheet and tucked it under the foot of the bed.
“Hospital corners,” Harwich said. “Be still, my heart.” They began stuffing pillows into the cases.
“Dan, what am I going to do?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and stepped toward her, the playfully ironic manner instantly discarded. “First of all, we have to see if the police pick up Dart, or, even better, find his body. Then we want to find out if the FBI is still after you.” He put his right hand on her shoulder.
“You don’t think I should try to see this doctor?”
“Aren’t I good enough for you?” He tried to look wounded.
“The one Dick Dart wanted to kill.”
“The only thing you should do, if you still care about Davey, is tell him the Chancel House lawyers are selling them down the river. That might straighten out your problems with the old man.”
Dan Harwich seemed to have admitted fresh air and sunlight into a dank chamber where Nora had been spinning in darkness.
“If I were you,” Harwich said, “I’d take his father for everything I could get. That tough old number from up the road in Northampton, Calvin Coolidge, wasn’t wrong: the business of America is business.”
Nora closed her eyes against a wave of nausea and heard the shufflings of a gathering of demons
. “Don’t do this to me,” she said. “Please.”
Harwich put an arm around her waist and guided her to the side of the bed. “Sorry. You need rest, and I’m talking your ear off.”
“I’ll be okay.” She clasped her hand on his wrist, feeling completely divided: one part of her wanted Harwich to stay with her, and another, equal part wanted him to leave the room. “I should apologize, not you.”
“Stretch out.”
She obeyed. He went to the foot of the bed, untied her shoes, and pulled them off. “Thanks.”
“You remember this doctor’s name?”
She shook her head. “Something Irish.”
“That narrows the field. How about O’Hara? Michael O’Hara?”
She shook her head again.
“The man you want is gay, isn’t he?” He began kneading the sole of her right foot with his thumbs. “I can’t think of more than three gay doctors in the whole town, and they’re all younger than I am.” What he was doing to her foot set off reverberations and echoes throughout her body. “Did you hear his first name?”
She nodded.
“What letter did it start with?”
Without any hesitation at all, Nora said, “M.”
“Michael. Morris. Montague. Max. Miles. Manny. Mark. What else? Monroe.”
“Mark.”
“Mark?” He dug his thumbs into her left foot, and a tingle wound all the way up her backbone. “Mark. With an Irish last name, and gay to boot. Let’s see. Conlon, Conboy, Congdon, Condon, Mulroy, Murphy, Morphy, Brophy, O’Malley, Joyce, Tierney, Kiernan, Boyce, Mulligan, this isn’t easy. Burke. Brannigan. Sullivan. Boyle.”
“Hold on. That was close. Sounds like Boyle.” She held her breath and closed her eyes, and a name floated toward her out of the darkness. “Foyle. His name was Mark Foyle.”
“Mark Foil?”
“That’s the name.”
He laughed. “Yes, but you were thinking F-o-y-l-e, which is why you thought it was an Irish name. Mark Foil is about as Irish as the queen of England, and his name is Foil as in tinfoil. Or as I heard him say once, Foil as in fencing.” He spoke the last phrase in a mincing, affected voice.
“You know him.”
“Foiled again,” Harwich said, using the same swishy voice.
“Is he like that?”
“He couldn’t afford to be. The man was a GP for upwards of forty years, and this isn’t the most liberated place on the face of the earth.”
“Where does he live?”
“The good part of town,” Harwich said. “Unlike we lesser mortals, Dr. Foil can behold a great many trees when he glances out of his leaded windows.” He patted her foot. “Look, if you want to see the guy, I’ll take you over there. But the guy’s one of those patrician queers.”
The word queers chilled Nora. It sounded ugly and wrong, especially coming from Dan Harwich, but she pushed aside her distaste. “You think he wouldn’t have time for me?”
“Foil never had time for me, if that’s any indication. God, you should see his boyfriend.”
The telephone down the corridor began ringing. “You could probably use a nap,” Harwich said.
“I could try.”
Released, he gave her foot a last pat, went smiling toward the door, and closed it behind him. Nora heard his footsteps racing toward the telephone, which must have been in his bedroom. A moment later, in a voice loud enough to be overheard through the door, he said, “Okay, I know, I know I did.”
She thought she might as well take a bath. On the marble shelf beside the antique sink in the bathroom lay three new toothbrushes still in their transparent pastel coffins and a pump dispensing baking soda and peroxide toothpaste. Nora struggled with one of the toothbrush containers until she managed to splinter one side. Above the tub, modern fittings protruded from the pink-tiled wall. Checking for the necessary supplies, Nora saw a tall, half-filled bottle of shampoo and a matching bottle of conditioner, both for dry or damaged hair, surrounded by a great number of hotel giveaway containers. A used shower cap lay over the showerhead like a felt mute over the bell of a trombone.
Lark had moved out of Harwich’s bed before she had moved out of his house. On a shelf above the towels Nora saw a deodorant stick, a half-empty bottle of mouthwash, a Murine bottle, a nearly empty aspirin bottle, an emery board worn white in a line down the middle, a couple of kinds of moisturizer and skin cream, and a tall spray bottle of Je Reviens, almost full. She began pulling the T-shirt out of her jeans.
Someone behind her said, “Hold it,” and she uttered a squeak and jumped half an inch off the ground.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to . . .”
She turned around, her hand at the pulse beating in her throat, to find an apologetic-looking Dan Harwich inside the bath-room door.
“I thought you heard me.”
“I was getting ready to take a bath.”
“Actually,” Harwich said, “maybe we ought to get in touch with Mark Foil. In case Dart did get away, as unlikely as that is, we have to make sure Mark is protected.”
“Well, fine,” Nora said, unsure what to make of this sudden reversal.
“We might be able to go over there this morning.” His whole tempo had sped up, like Nora’s pulse. Smiling in an almost insistent way, he went sideways through the bathroom door, silently asking her to come with him.
“You changed your mind in a hurry.”
“You know my whole problem? I can’t get out of my stupid patterns. I think Mark Foil looks down on me, and I resent that. An egotistical voice in my head says I’m a hotshot and he’s only a retired GP, who does he think he is, screw him. I shouldn’t let that kind of crap keep me from doing what’s right.”
Nora followed him into a huge bedroom with a four-poster bed and a big-screen television set. Clothes lay scattered across the floor. “What was Dart going to say to these people? How was he going to get into their houses?”
“I was supposed to be writing something about that summer at Shorelands—the summer of 1938. Everybody knows about Hugo Driver, but the other guests have never been given their due. Something like that.”
“Sounds good,” Harwich said. “If I have a talent for anything besides surgery, it’s for bullshit. Who do you want to be?” He kicked aside a pile of old socks and sweat clothes on his way to a bookcase.
“Gosh, I don’t know,” Nora said.
“What’s a lady-writer kind of name? Emily Eliot. You’re my old friend Emily Eliot, we went to Brown together, and now you’re writing a piece about whatsit, Shorelands. Let’s see, you got a Ph.D. from Harvard, you taught for a while, but quit to be a freelance writer.” He was paging through a fat directory. “We have to make you a respectable citizen or Mark Foil won’t give you the time of day. You published one book five years ago. It was about . . . hmm . . . Robert Frost? Was he ever at Shorelands?”
“Probably.”
“Published by, who? Chancel House, I guess.”
“And I was edited by Merle Marvell.”
“Who? Oh, I get it, he’s the big gun there.”
“The biggest,” said Nora, smiling.
“The whole point about lying is to be as specific as possible.” He flipped a page and ran his finger down a list of names. “Here we go. Since this is Mark Foil we’re talking about, he might be spending the summer on a Greek island, but let’s give it a try. What was his boyfriend’s name, Somebody Monk, like Thelonious?”
“Creeley,” she said.
Harwich dialed the number and held up crossed fingers while it rang.
“Hello, I wonder if I could speak to Mark, please. . . . This is Dan Harwich. . . . Yes, of course, hello, Andrew, how are you? . . . Oh, are you? Wonderful. . . . Provincetown, how nice for you. . . . Well, if you think you could. . . . Thanks.”
He put his hand over the receiver. “His boyfriend says they’re going to Provincetown for the rest of the summer. Doesn’t sound too good.” He attended to the telephone again. “Mark, hello, t
his is Dan Harwich. . . . An old friend of mine from Brown, a writer, showed up here in the course of doing research for a book, and it turns out that she wants to get in touch with you. . . . That’s right. Her name is Emily Eliot, and she’s completely house-trained, Harvard Ph.D. . . . A poet named Creeley Monk? . . . Yes, that’s right. She’s interested in the people who were at a place called Shorelands with him, and it seems she came across your name somewhere. . . .”
He looked at her. “He wants to know where you saw his name.”
Dart had not explained how he had heard of Mark Foil. “Doing research on Creeley Monk.”
He repeated the phrase into the telephone. “No, she did a book before this. Robert Frost. . . . Yes, she’s right here.”
He held out the receiver. “Emily? Dr. Foil wants to talk to you.” When she took it from him, he pretended he was working a shovel.
A clipped, incisive voice nothing like Harwich’s effeminate parody said, “What is going on, Miss Eliot? Dan Harwich doesn’t have any serious friends.”
“I was a youthful mistake,” Nora said.
“You can’t be writing a book about Creeley Monk. Nobody remembers Creeley anymore.”
“As Dan said, I’m working on a book about what happened at Shorelands during the summer of 1938. I think Hugo Driver’s success unfairly eclipsed the other writers who were there.”
“Do you have a publisher?”
“Chancel House.”
A long silence. “Why don’t you come over and let me take a look at you? We’re going out of town this morning, but we still have some time.”
60
A SLENDER, SMILING young man in a lightweight gray suit and black silk shirt opened the door of the stone house amid the oak trees and greeted them. Harwich introduced his friend Emily Eliot to the young man, Andrew Martindale, who looked straight into Nora’s eyes, widened his smile, and instantly changed from a diplomatic male model into a real person filled with curiosity, humor, and goodwill. “It’s wonderful that you’re here,” he said to Nora. “Mark is tremendously interested in your project. I wonder if you know what you’re in for!”
