A Penny for the Hangman

by Tom Savage

  “How many times a day do you open a door, Karen? Let’s say you’re in a room in your apartment or at the office of your magazine, and you decide to go from one part of it to another. You enter a room, you walk down a street, you dine in a restaurant, you attend a play or film, you shop for clothes or groceries. You never pause to consider the number of times you move freely about your environment. Now, imagine for a moment that all the doors in your world are locked. Not only are you not allowed to go through them, you’re not even allowed to touch them. I don’t know if it’s possible for a pretty young woman like you to picture such a thing, but try.”

  “I can’t,” Karen admitted. She stared at him, collecting her thoughts. She hadn’t expected such a speech. Neither had Don Price; he’d stopped clicking his camera. The two of them were a perfect audience, arrested by his unexpected eloquence.

  “Well, that’s prison,” Anderman whispered with a fleeting smile and a shrug. “It’s every bit as dark and frightening as you’ve heard, and it goes on and on for years. Everything is boiled down to one simple act: survival. You try not to go mad, and that alone becomes a project.” He laughed suddenly, and his face was transformed into something younger, the harsh lines around his eyes briefly vanishing. “When I got out, the first thing I had to relearn was how to open doors. The act of reaching out and turning a knob may seem simple to you, but it is possible to lose the knack. My second challenge was eating. I constantly had to remind myself to sit upright at the table, not hunched forward with my arms around a metal tray, an animal guarding its feed. On my release, I spent a while in a motel not far from the prison. I remember the first time I took a bath there, what a glorious thing it was—in prison there were only showers. I lay in the tub for hours, until I was one huge wrinkle. Oh, the luxury of a private bathroom!”

  Karen smiled, charmed, and she heard Don Price’s chuckle beside her. She glanced over at him and gestured to the camera in his hands. He nodded and went back to work, getting a shot of Anderman with the ragged afternoon sky behind him.

  “I learned to drive,” their host continued, leaning back against the sundeck rail and smiling at the memory. “I was in a class with a bunch of teenagers, of course, and I got my license and bought a used car. I drove all over town and out along the highways. I couldn’t go far at first—I had to remain in the county for a while—but I must have racked up a few thousand miles in aimless wandering, making up for lost time. The movement itself was so exhilarating, so empowering. That’s freedom; just going where you want, doing as you please, with no one watching you.”

  A breeze from the ocean chilled the deck, reminding Karen that a storm was building. She glanced down at her notepad, wondering how to work her other questions into the conversation. This man has a peculiar talent, she thought. He’s able to take over any situation, so subtly that you almost don’t realize how manipulative he is. She’d have to watch herself with him.

  “The town where you were, the motel, the kids in the driving school—how were they with you? They must have been curious, to say the least. You and Rodney Harper were quite famous. How did you adjust to being—well, notorious?”

  Another shrug from her subject. “When I got out, I was Mr. Huxley. I evaded the army of reporters waiting at the prison gates, and I eventually slipped into obscurity. By the time I arrived in driving school, nobody knew who I was.”

  “What about the lawsuit?” Karen asked.

  He blinked. “Lawsuit?” Then he nodded and said, “Oh yes, the lawsuit. Random House. But that was New York, so I was Wulf Anderman there, and yes, there were lots of journalists around for it. But I slipped away again when it was over. I’ve been Huxley ever since.”

  “How do you feel now, about the book?”

  Another shrug. “Sergeant Faison and his book are of no interest to me anymore.”

  “Lieutenant Faison,” Karen corrected.

  “Yes, well, he was merely a sergeant when we knew him.”

  Karen noted his attitude as he made this remark, his tone of polite disdain. So, he’s still the privileged, upper-class white boy, she concluded, in spite of all he’s been through.

  “You’ve been back in the world since 1981,” she said. “You’ve been free for nearly thirty years, but only here on Hangman Cay for the last two. Where were you before this?”

  “Ah,” he said, stepping forward from the railing, once more in charge. “You do have more questions. Quite a few, I should imagine. You must stay for dinner. I insist.”

  “But the boat—” Karen began.

  Anderman waved an arm in airy dismissal. “The boat is at our disposal. You can go back later. You’re having dinner with me; it’s settled. But first, a tour of the island.”

  He hobbled across the sundeck and in through the sliding doors. Karen looked at Don Price, who grinned at her. She smiled back, knowing they were both thinking the same thing: Anderman had managed to prolong their visit, and at the same time he’d avoided answering her question. Oh yes, he was manipulative. As they followed him inside, Karen wondered if Rodney Harper, wherever he was, possessed this same talent.

  —

  “Those Awful Boys” (continued)

  Rachel Gould was the boys’ English teacher in the two years leading up to the crime. She died in 1988, but her son, Leonard, recalls her stories:

  “My parents went to St. Thomas in 1953, and Mom taught there for six years. She was a great teacher; all the kids loved her. But Rodney Harper changed everything. He was the only student she was ever afraid of, and his father was such a big shot on the island. That swastika Rodney always wore, and his obvious admiration for Hitler—it really got to her. Mom lost all four grandparents and three cousins in the camps, and that snotty rich kid made fun of her.

  “One day, just before it happened, he came into her class with his usual ‘Heil, Hitler!’ and she finally snapped. She ripped the chain off his neck and threw it into the trash, told him to get out of her classroom. He screamed, told her his father would have her fired, but Mr. Harper actually sided with her. He made Rodney apologize to her in front of everyone. The next day, after school, she found a dead iguana on the driver’s seat of her car. It had been cut wide open, eviscerated.

  “My dad was threatening to really hurt Rodney—he didn’t care if he was just a kid—but he never got the chance. Two days later was Friday, March 13. Mom left the school after that semester; she and Dad went back to the States, and she never taught again. She missed teaching a lot, but she was afraid she’d run into another Rodney Harper. She always used to say it just wasn’t worth it.”

  —

  “I don’t like it,” Molly said to her husband. “I don’t like it one bit.”

  “Just wash up those dishes,” Carl Graves muttered, “then see to the bedrooms.” He didn’t voice the second part of his gruff statement; there was no need for it. Or else. The words hung in the air as though they’d actually been spoken. Without another glance at her, he stalked out of the kitchen.

  Molly sighed and plunged her rubber-gloved hands into the scalding water in the sink. Gold-rimmed plates, sterling silver forks, crystal wine goblets—she washed and rinsed them carefully, aware of the consequences should anything be broken. No chance of an electric dishwasher in this godforsaken place. She wouldn’t complain about that—not aloud, at any rate. At least she had a washing machine and dryer for the clothes, thank God for small favors, but she sometimes felt her entire life had been spent scrubbing, scraping, and rinsing dishes. Other people’s dishes. When this was over, when she and Carl were back home in the States, she’d ask him for a dishwasher. Who knows? She might even get it.

  Well, she could dream, anyway, of a little house somewhere in their hometown. Athens Place was pretty. Just a few rooms and a kitchen with lots of sunlight and maybe a front yard. A yard would be nice. Flowers—she’d always wanted to try her hand at gardening. Roses and geraniums and smooth green grass, surrounded by a little white fence…

  They would h
ave the money for it. Whatever else you could say about Mr. Huxley, he paid them well. Molly had been saving all their wages, ever since they’d arrived here. Her husband had arrived home in their trailer late one night with a story about running into an old “roommate” from “the place.” He never named it, or even said the word “prison”; it was always “the place.” Carl had met up with this old pal, Thomas Huxley, in the local dive where he and all the other unemployed ex-cons got together every night for darts and pool, and this Huxley guy had made him a tempting offer, one that included her.

  It seemed Huxley was a rich eccentric who’d purchased an island in the West Indies, and he wanted Carl and Molly to join him there, to work for him, keeping house while he wrote his books. Two years in the beautiful tropics, room and board and wages. When she’d heard the amount of the salary, she’d readily agreed—not that she’d had any say in the matter. They gave up the rented trailer, packed what little they had, and traveled two thousand miles to…this. This strange old man in this big house on this speck of land in the back end of nowhere.

  At first she’d regarded it as a blessing, despite the heat and the insects and the isolation. Carl was always getting into trouble back home, always falling in with losers who talked him into their drunken schemes to get rich quick while doing as little actual work as possible. This had led to the bungled robbery and the dead man, the night watchman at the jewelry store, and Carl’s double-crossing pals had left him holding the bag for it. Several years of prison had not improved his luck; he was back with the wrong crowd as soon as he was out, and Molly wanted to protect him. At the time, his prison friend’s offer of steady employment in the far-off Virgin Islands had seemed like just the ticket. They’d been married more than thirty years now, they’d had a son together, and her dream of a nice place to retire to was for both of them. For all his faults, she loved Carl, and what choice did she have, anyway? She’d rather be with him than be alone.

  The old man—Molly always thought of Mr. Huxley as old, despite the fact that he only had about ten years on Carl—was demanding, and his peculiar hold over her husband had never been explained to her. She knew he wasn’t really “Mr. Huxley,” knew who he really was and what he’d done, this famous killer. But he had a commanding way about him, enough to make Carl run down here at a mere snap of his fingers. And Mr. Huxley was always calculating—you could see it in his eyes. She didn’t care for him, and that was a fact.

  But the money was good, and the two years were nearly over. Soon, she thought. Athens Place, maybe; roses and geraniums…

  Meanwhile, there were beds to make and dinner to be seen to. These journalists were here for the evening, and the girl was here for the night, even if she didn’t seem to know it yet. Three days, in fact—he planned to have the girl here for three days. Karen Tyler reminded Molly of herself at that age.

  No, Molly didn’t like it. She didn’t like it one bit.

  —

  “Those Awful Boys” (continued)

  Letitia Stewart, 87, was a prominent hostess in St. Thomas’s “Statesider society” at that time, and she remembers the two families:

  “Oh, they were the most dreadful people! And they kept to themselves, mainly because most of us would have nothing to do with them. They drank, you know, and there was something so tawdry about the whole setup. Tobias Harper and Hjordis Anderman were carrying on quite openly, and poor Lucinda Harper was a wreck, a born victim. She drank more than the others, and she took a lot of medications. As for Felix Anderman—well, unfortunately he was the best doctor on the island. He was my physician, and everyone else’s, but we all knew about him. With those four as parents, I can just imagine the atmosphere in which those two boys grew up. It was a disgrace!”

  Did no one on the island attempt to intervene on behalf of the children?

  “Well, no, dear,” Stewart says. “There were none of these Social Services or Child Services or whatever they’re called—not in those days. And we didn’t all go about as they do now, interfering in other people’s business. That sort of thing simply wasn’t done.”

  —

  “Life is an adventure,” Karen’s mother used to tell her, “so be sure you experience it when it happens.” It was one of Grace Tyler’s favorites, one of several rules in her “Mom” arsenal, along with the ones about always having umbrellas and clean underwear and quarters for the pay phone.

  It seemed odd, now, that Grace would have spoken of life as an adventure to be lived and relished, considering her own history. So pretty, so quiet, so maternal; dedicated to her Catholic beliefs and her job at the law firm and Karen, though not in that order, never in that order. Karen had been the beginning, end, and full substance of Grace Tyler’s modest existence. She’d hardly been the sort of woman to take Life in her teeth and tear out huge chunks of it, and yet this is what she had wished for her daughter. Live, live, live! So, here Karen was, being adventurous.

  Wulf Anderman knew every inch of this island, every hill and rock and tree. The old man seemed more agile out here than in the house, relying less on his cane. They’d begun their tour at the edge of the cliff beside the big house. Anderman had led the way from the paving into the bushes at the far end of the patio, beyond the stone outbuilding near the kitchen. The brush had been cleared away on the cliff, leaving a flat lawn of wild sea grass with the dramatic drop on three sides to the jagged rocks and roiling foam a hundred feet below. This bare patch of ground resembled nothing so much as a tiny park with a panoramic prospect of ocean and sky, dominated at its tip by the oddest, most sinister-looking tree Karen had ever seen.

  The massive, gnarled oak had once been tall, but the charred black bark and the strange shape of the trunk bore silent evidence of some long-ago disaster. Lightning, Karen guessed. Now the tree was bowed, hunched over, as though bending under an oppressive weight. There was a crotch at eye level, bisecting the upper part, and from those two tangential sections the dry, foreshortened limbs reached up into the gray sky, straining—or so it seemed to Karen—in a kind of silent appeal or supplication. One withered arm, thicker than the others, extended straight out over the void, ending in a blunt knob that had presumably once borne leaves, as the entire tree had in its prime. Their host pointed to this branch.

  “That’s where they lynched the pirates, or so the story goes,” Anderman said, smiling indulgently at the notion. “The freebooters, the glorious outlaws—men who were so much more glamorous than the ordinary creatures who executed them. This was the hanging tree. The condemned men were required to pay their executioner a gold coin for his services, and then he strung them up. The authorities left the pirates’ bodies there for the vultures—or, in this part of the world, the gulls and pelicans.”

  Karen stared at the skeletal limb and blasted black trunk, stark against the sky, while Don Price snapped photos. She was curious. “The tree is dead now; it’s been dead for many years, I should imagine. Wouldn’t it be best to simply cut it down?”

  “Oh, my dear, that would be a shame,” Anderman said. “As long as the tree is here, the legend lives on. We’ll always remember the colorful pirates, while the dreary men who destroyed them are long forgotten. Those pious, law-abiding citizens only managed to ensure the immortality of the outlaws they executed. There’s something perfect about that, don’t you think? And speaking of perfection, it’s time for the caves.”

  With that, he turned back the way they’d come. Karen gave the dead tree a last, long look, and then she and Don Price went after him. He led them across the patio and away from the house, through more underbrush to the forest above the beach. They followed the ridge the entire length of the island, which was longer than Karen had imagined, and she wondered how far it was to the opposite end. Their sudden descent and the approaching roar of breakers told her they’d reached it, even before they emerged from the trees.

  “Holy cow!” Don Price whispered at her shoulder, and they paused to take in the dramatic sight before them. Their host had stop
ped as well, turning around to face them and waving an arm to indicate the view, grinning at their stunned expressions. He stood on a wide, uneven shelf of rock that gradually sloped downward toward the sea some thirty yards away. A strong breeze from the ocean rushed at them, stinging their faces and whipping their hair out behind them. The rocky escarpment was amazing enough, but what really held their awed attention were the huge black boulders that lined the coast itself, rising straight up from the surf to jagged heights against the sky, some more rounded than others, leaning precariously together as though bracing themselves against the constant onslaught of the waves. Karen’s initial impression of them was of a ring of sentinels, soldiers standing at attention whose commander had long ago instructed them to repel all boarders, and that was precisely what they were doing.

  Here, nature was relentless. The roar of crashing breakers was as constant as the massive, graceful spumes of white foam that flew straight up from the rocks before receding, only to smash in again a moment later. She’d seen this unquiet coast from the boat when they’d arrived, but that wasn’t the same as being here, so close that the spray actually misted her and the rhythmic explosions of water against rock tore all other sound out of the world. This was a violent place.

  “The Hangman caves!” Wulf Anderman announced, raising his voice to a shout in order to compete with the natural symphony behind him. He came back to join them at the edge of the forest. “Of course, most of them aren’t technically caves, just recesses between the leaning rocks, and you can’t see them from here; they’re under us, below the rock face, at the water’s edge. Down there.” He pointed toward the crashing surf beneath the overhang. “We used to climb down and explore them on calm days; we’d pretend they were our seaside castle. Roddy called this place Tintagel, after the fortress in the King Arthur stories.” He smiled at the memory, then turned and moved across the rock shelf, back the way they’d come. “I think we’ll take the path down to the beach for our return.” He disappeared among the trees, clearly expecting them to follow.