Strange Doin's in the Pine Hills

by Ardath Mayhar

Sitting there, sheltered from the pitiless moonlight, I thought of Ed and Vance. My big brothers, always sources of pride and frustration to me. Kind, off-handedly patient with my unfeminine presence, they bridged, to some extent, the hostile gap between my helpless smallness and Mama’s powerful will. They meant me well, even while leaving me out of plans, ignoring my questions and comments—and me. I never quarreled with either of them, and now I was grateful for that. That unforgiving house could not charge me with disliking my brothers!

  I shook myself from that dazed recollection. Fanciful notions, for one considering herself a skeptic! Now I owned that tall house, lock, stock, and barrel. I could burn it down, if I chose, for the insurance had lapsed while the lawyers tried to locate me to hand over this unexpected and unwanted heritage. They had had no cash to pay insurance or upkeep. There had been barely enough to bury Vance decently.

  I smiled, thinking of the way in which my brother had enjoyed the wealth Dad had killed himself acquiring for Mama. He spent it to the last dime, and I was glad of it. I paid the lawyers’ fees myself, and didn’t begrudge a dime of it. I made more than enough, in the first half of my life, to entertain any fancy I chose during the last half, even if it meant a cash loss.

  Making that success refuted, in my mind, Mama’s assessment of me, which had been a mix of fury at my plainness, and frustration at my wrongheaded love of adventure and business. Before she died, I let her know, by way of Ed and Vance, that I had more than made good. Rags to riches described my career, though the rags had been Mama’s idea, when I resisted her steamrollering of my life.

  Not that Ed and Vance submitted to her. They had that easy grace that agrees tacitly with anything you say without betraying the fact that they intend to do whatever they damned well please when the time comes. I had been too honest—or perhaps pig-headed was the best word for it. Centuries ago, if I had been a boy, at the age of nineteen I would have sewn a cross on my cloak and found a Crusade to follow. I wanted conflict, challenge, a cause to give my life meaning. Mama gave me conflict enough, that was true, for we had been at daggers’ points for a year when at last I left, dramatically and on foot, bearing my few possessions on my back in the best fairytale tradition.

  I laughed, sitting there in the Lincoln and thinking of the night I walked down this road, the trees on either hand making dapples of moonlight across the gravel. I cranked the engine and eased forward toward the house. Then I was full of fury, determined to prove myself. Now I could only wish that someone was left who might care if I proved anything. My victory was empty.

  The house was empty too. A daily cleaning woman had done for Vance, in contrast to the teams of servants who came and went under Mama’s hard-handed rule. The daily maid had cooked for him, which was fortunate. If no one had invented pork and beans, Vance would have starved, if left on his own.

  I drove around the circular drive and into the portico at the back. No limousine had ever pulled into its shelter to discharge important guests for a function over which Mama presided. If Dad had lived, it might have happened, but Mama was too impatient. She heckled him to his grave, I always believed, and by dying he only gave her more cause to complain.

  I killed the engine and stepped out of the car. Sweeping away below, in all its splendor, was the view that Dad had found and built his house to enjoy. In the moon’s chilly light, the forest stretched away, broken only by distant twinkles marking Gallatin, far to the north, and Venusia, almost below and fifteen miles away. Occasional sparks showed isolated farms. Mama always hated that view, which was the reason for her isolation from a world just waiting to worship at her feet.

  My case was light. The bigger ones and the books I left in the car, as I unlocked the heavy door, whose stained glass inset was only a black glimmer in the darkness. The big brass key turned crankily, and the door swung open, letting me step, after so many years, into the impressive back corridor of my home. I shivered suddenly and touched the light switch.

  Blast! I had sent money for the necessary connections, but the lawyers had not reconnected the electricity. I wondered suddenly if the oil tanks had been filled before Vance died. We were too remote for natural gas or any water supply except our own. If there was oil in the huge container in the cellar and water in the tanks on the roof, I might be able to survive until something could be done. The water pump to resupply the roof tanks would have to wait. I hoped the tanks had been filled recently.

  I set my case in the hall and went to check the nearest bathroom. The tap turned stiffly, allowing a stream of water to run into the basin. It tasted a bit flat and galvanized (from the tank, of course), but the pressure was good.

  The old lamps still should be in the kitchen, I suspected. Nothing ever changed in Mama’s house, whether she was there or not. And sure enough, they sat on their high shelf, together with a two-gallon can of lamp oil. I set one on the kitchen table, and when it was lit, the mellow glow softened the clinical look of the room. I had always hated the kitchen, and so had all the cooks in the long roll of those who came to work for Mama. They usually lasted from a week to a month, as I recalled.

  “It may be modern and sanitary,” one had snorted at Mama upon leaving. “But it’s like working in a confounded morgue. You can almost smell disinfectant!”

  You still could, though it was obvious the place had not been scrubbed up thoroughly for a long time. I wondered suddenly about food.... I had been so distracted at the thought of coming here that I had never thought to pick up supplies.

  I blessed Vance as I checked the pantry. Though the refrigerator and freezer were bare and clean, in the pantry shelves were row upon row of canned goods. An entire shelf of pork and beans took me back in time to our campouts—the rare ones that admitted a small sister to the complement. I could smell the smoke of the fire, taste the slightly ashy beans, the tin spoon—I brought myself back to the present with an effort. The second shelf held canned beef, vegetables of many kinds, soup, potato chips in cans. There was enough to do me well for as long as I wanted to stay, if I didn’t become too weary of canned food. I had never been even as much of a cook as Vance.

  The house was cold, chilled with the damp of an unoccupied house in late fall. I tried the furnace, pumped the pilot—then remembered that the fans required electricity. Knowing my Mama, I knew the old oil heaters were probably in the cellar, beside the new furnace. I felt certain that there would be enough oil left in the tanks, even unfilled ones, to fill one for days. Those big tanks had never been completely empty in all the years I lived here.

  It took a lot of bumping and swearing, but at last I got the bulky heater into the library. There I cursed the lack of care that left Dad’s valuable books to the mercies of damp and insects. I brought a couple of the lamps, as well, and when all were alight, the room began to warm, and the light chased away unwelcome memories.

  I cleaned up in the nearby bath—in cold water, of course—put on my flannel pajamas and my woolly robe, and returned to sit in the deep chair that Mama had consecrated to Dad’s memory. I had never sat in it once in my entire life. Her smaller armchair was set at an angle beyond the marble topped table holding the lamp. I could almost see her there, her gray hair tied into an uncompromising knot, her black eyes snapping as she charged me with some unforgivable sin that no proper daughter would ever dream of committing.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I stared around the room. The fireplace was sealed, as it had been since Mama put in the furnace (“inefficient!” Mama had said). The mantel was still filled with delicate jade sculptures, which had been Ed’s treasures. I ached suddenly, seeing his big brown face, his huge hands tenderly cradling one of the pieces.

  On the library table were Vance’s sailing ships, twenty-five of them, each the product of months or even years of work. Some he carved from ivory he found in antique shops, some he made of woods, and some of filigreed metal. All were lovely and fragile—as gossamer as Vance had been tough and square-hewn.

  I had seemed to b
e the gentle, sensitive one, but inside I was tough and determined. Of the three, I was the only one to tackle and conquer the giant Money. I sighed.

  Something moved at the edge of the pooled lamplight. Pale and furry, it looked like...a cat? But the house had been empty for months. How could one have survived without help and alone?

  Mama’s Angora had borne me no malice. Indeed, it had cuddled in my lap, when we could find a private moment free of Mama, before she called “Ginni! Ginni! Where has that cat got to?” and that sent the animal scampering. She, too, knew the penalty of crossing Mama.

  “Kitty-kitty!” I called. I felt foolish. How could there possibly be a cat here?

  There was no sound, no hint of motion. I settled back in Dad’s chair and looked in the direction I’d been avoiding all evening. Mama’s portrait, hanging over the long table, had been painted by the foremost painter of her day, at the height of her early beauty. She had believed with all her might that her talented husband was going to pull her, along with him, to the height of social and political power.

  Even I could see that she was lovely then, though to my knowing eye the beginning of the domineering curl had already touched her smiling mouth. There was the hint of hardness in the dark eyes. Yet she seemed, there in oils, all grace, tenderness, and beauty. I used to come into this room, as a child, to look at the picture and to wonder what fairy had stolen away that lovely woman and substituted the mother I knew. The contrast between the person the artist had seen and what that woman had become still puzzled me.

  She had great determination. Her talents varied from a competence in business to a genius at manipulating people. Why had she not gone out, after Dad died, and used his wealth and her wits to make her own place in the world? I had been too young to wonder, at the time, but I did so now.

  Then I shuddered. Something touched my ankle, and I stared down into an inquiring Angora face. Smiling, I scraped the remnants of my corned beef onto a saucer and slid it beneath the chair, wondering how the beast had survived. The mouse population must be down to nothing—and how had it gotten water? Then I recalled the toilet in the bathroom.

  Its lid was open.

  I didn’t watch, for Ginni had hated being observed when eating. Instead, I rose and took my dirty plate and cup back to the kitchen. Nothing could have made me leave it until morning, for Mama might return from her grave to call me a slob.

  The hall was lit dimly by the lamps in the library as I returned, picking my way between small Persian rugs. I froze in place as a voice called from above, “Ginni! Ginni! Where has that cat got to?”

  The shrill tone scraped along my nerves. My ears rang with it. Suddenly I recalled what Ed had written me, shortly after Mama’s death. “We knew for some time that she was failing. You remember Ginni, the cat? She still had an Angora, this one called Ginni too. Three days before she died, Mama called in Dr. Allison and asked him point-blank if she was dying. He didn’t try to deny it.

  “After he was gone, she called Ginni and Vance and me into her room. We thought she was going to say goodbye—give us some sort of last instructions—maybe ask us to find you. At least something that normal people do when they die. Not Mama. She strangled the cat and handed it to me.

  “‘Go bury it in the garden’,” she said. And I did, but I have to admit that for the first time I realized that you were right about Mama. I suppose my memories went back to when Vance and I were little, and she was still a human person. Now I know why you left, Berna. I understand a lot of things. I’m going to move away, for I can’t seem to bear it here any more.”

  He did leave, and he died four years after that, though he was only thirty-six at the time. Vance had shared Mama’s money with him freely, but he didn’t enjoy it, and he just drifted away in Mama’s wake.

  Now I was in the hall where I had stood so many times, hearing her call her cat. That small sad shape in the library—was it or was it not a living animal? I hurried into the room and looked under the chair. The saucer of food had not been touched, though a long pale hair clung to the upholstery of the flounce edging the slipcover.

  The voice came nearer, as if Mama were coming downstairs. “Ginni!”

  My hand touched something under the chair, soft and tenuous. Almost not there, yet tangible. I closed my fingers about the furry shape, and something not quite invisible came into the light with my hand. There was the ghost of a purr.

  I stood, feeling my knees shake beneath me. I felt myself turn pale, and I had to admit that I was cold with terror. I had feared her alive. How could I face her dead? The thing in my hand squirmed about, as if trying to hide against me.

  I spent years in trying to escape from the house and Mama. I had achieved the impossible again and again, believing that it would free me from her. But it had not. Tucking the cat beneath my arm, I stepped forward and kicked over the stove, spilling blazing oil over the Persian carpet. I thought of the books—a pity, but necessary.

  In the hall, I caught up my case and my purse. My jacket came out of the closet, with the keys of the car in a pocket. I went quietly and not too quickly down the hall toward the rear entry. There came a screech behind me. “You! Berna! I always knew you were no good! Where’s my cat? Ginni! Don’t take her away!”

  I was at the door, leaving it open behind me to the rising breeze. The car started with the ease of expensive engineering, and I pulled around the circle and down the drive. Where the woods had been, I stopped and stepped out to watch the house burn. It was like a beacon. They would see it in Gallatin. Trucks might well come up from Venusia, but they would be too late. Mama and her house were going up in flames.

  Would I be free at last? I was taking with me something, not a living, visible creature, but something that had feared Mama as much as I had. I saved Ginni, at last, from her murderer. Something in that act also saved me. Maybe now I could go on and live a life, find someone to share the rest of it. Make two or three more fortunes?

  The wind freshened in my face. The cold October moon shone overhead. Against my chest there was the tremulous hint of a purr.

  HIDEOUT

  We don’t lack for criminal types in the piney woods. There has been more than one bank robber or murderer lost forever in our woods, fields, and old abandoned houses. And even now bodies turn up in the oddest places. Too often the killers are never found....

  The stout walls, built of heart-pine, had been under attack by weather and insects for a decade. The roof had begun to sag, and the porch steps were a sift of sawdust left by the invading termites. Hawthorn and privet bushes had run wild, and berry vines had thrust questing fingers into every possible crevice.

  Only dust moved inside, except for an occasional roach and the omnipresent spiders in the corners. Even vandals and couples looking for a place to make out did not go there.

  What had happened ten years before had left its mark on the minds of locals, and it was not the sort of matter that country people can forget.

  The furniture was still in place, veiled with cobweb and dust, for not even a thief had entered the place. An occasional breeze, gusting through broken panes, fluttered the webs, shaking down more dust that danced in the sun rays slanting through cracks in the walls.

  It didn’t seem likely that anyone would ever come there again.

  * * * * * * *

  Harper felt the impact of the slug even before he realized he had heard the shot. It knocked him sideways into a tangle of sawvine, which was lucky for him and fatal for Seldane. He rolled to come up on his belly, the revolver bulky in his grip. As Seldane looked over the bush behind which he had taken cover, Harper shot him through the head.

  The sharp echoes died away into the woods, and he knew that nobody was nearer than five miles who might hear them. For the first time since they had pulled the bank job two hours ago, he was safe. And now the money was his, all of it. It was only right—he hadn’t been the one to try to backshoot his partner.

  Blood was sticky in his shirt—he was hit
just below his left armpit, but the bullet had angled away from his chest. It seemed to have torn a hole in the muscle as it exited the wound, but he knew what to do about that. Korea had taught him a lot, and ’Nam had finished his education. He tore up his shirt and packed it into the worst of the holes, reducing the bleeding, as far as he could tell, to a minimum. Once he thought he wouldn’t bleed to death, he crawled out of the vines and went to examine Seldane. The briefcase lay beside him in the pine straw—forty thousand dollars was inside it, still undivided, and now not to be. All his.

  Small banks might not keep millions of dollars on hand, but they didn’t have much security. On balance, they made far better marks than bigger, richer banks did.

  He hadn’t begun to hurt yet, though his head felt a bit light and the wood was tilting a bit from time to time. He hefted the briefcase in his good hand, after stuffing the gun into his belt. He followed the dim path that was supposed to lead to the spot where Seldane had stashed the second car. The first was ditched in a ravine, several miles behind off a logging road.

  Harper felt a tiny regret that he no longer had Seldane to guide him through the forest. This was his partner’s neck of the woods—he knew the trails through the thickets as only a native country boy could, and already Harper was feeling confused. He came to a fork in the path. Each track, leading into the shadows of the trees, looked equally abandoned and unpromising. He couldn’t recall Seldane’s mentioning a fork, and he certainly hadn’t expected to need such information. Now he had to choose.

  “Eeny-meeny-minie-mo,” he chanted aloud. His voice sounded odd, and he thought he must be feeling the wound and the blood loss more than he suspected. He turned right, through a stand of hickories. The path slanted down toward a creek that ran through gray-barked birches and ranks of cattails. He sloshed through the water, feeling mud ooze into his loafers, and smelling the thick greenish stink of stagnant muck. Seldane had said nothing about a creek!