A Penny for the Hangman

by Tom Savage

  And I should be asleep, too, Karen reminded herself. I have a big day ahead of me tomorrow. A revealing, in-depth interview, if all goes well. And it would go well; she’d see to that. Anderman was going to tell her the story she’d come all this way to record. It would be a subjective, first-person version of a well-known incident, but she was hoping it would also be more than that, a tale of long-ago passion and violence. And love—she was sure there had been love.

  She wanted to get the story right, if only for Sally Cohen. She’d phoned her editor from the hotel last night to discuss a few embellishments for the articles she’d already sent in, and Sally had told her how pleased she was with Karen’s work. The magazine was getting positive feedback from various quarters about the first article, and it had only been on the stands and online for one day. Karen knew that her journalistic future was riding on this series. And here, alone in this lovely bedroom, she acknowledged her other, private reason for wanting it to be a success: She wanted Jim to be proud of her.

  Jim. She smiled at the thought of his face, that lopsided grin, the way he had of rolling his eyes and smirking whenever she mentioned celebrities. Well, she’d show him!

  She dropped the terry robe at the foot of the bed, turned off the lamp, and crawled back in between the sheets. It was comfortable, this sturdy mahogany four-poster. She still hadn’t shaken the heaviness, the odd exhaustion she’d felt ever since dinner, and she welcomed the sheer luxury.

  The opera was over; she couldn’t hear the music now. The room next door, behind the headboard, was silent. But just before she drifted off for the second time that night, she heard, through the low hum of the air-conditioning and the muffled roll of the faraway surf, the first gentle patter of rain against the windows.

  —

  Rodney Harper’s Diary

  JANUARY 17, 1959

  The center of the chessboard is the most powerful vantage point, the strongest position. Wulf is constantly rushing all his men off to the opposite side of the board, the territory of the enemy queen, but I keep a few men in the middle where I can see what’s going on. This is probably the best strategy I’ve learned from studying the Grandmasters of the game.

  Stay in the center.

  Watch.

  And wait.

  —

  Gabby woke at midnight, sitting up in the tiny bunk with a start, the sound of his own hoarse cry echoing in his ears. The dream had come again, startling him awake, leaving him panicked and drenched in sweat. Whenever the dream came at home, his wife always went into the bathroom and came back with a wet cloth and bathed his face. Then she would hold him in her arms, softly singing an old song of the Islands, until he drifted off again. But Alma wasn’t here with him tonight. She was asleep in their house, three miles away.

  He dragged his clammy, feverish body off the bunk, careful not to bump his head on the low cabin ceiling in the dark. He stumbled up onto the deck and stood in the light rainfall that had begun, gazing out at the ocean. The shower soothed his hot chest and arms, and the relative quiet of the sleeping marina lulled the panic from him. Relative quiet: There were lights from the bars and restaurants in the dockside village behind him, and the sound of distant music and laughter anchored him, reminding him that humanity was there, not far away. He wasn’t alone, a frightened child in the night. For that was the recurring dream he’d had all his life, and it hadn’t varied once in all these years. Alone in the dark, powerless and terrified, with unimaginable monsters scratching at the door.

  He glanced back at the lights, wondering if he should throw on some clothes and go up there, surround himself with locals and tourists, order rum and watch the dancing. Or just get in his car and drive the short way home, slip quietly into his own bed beside his sleeping wife.

  No. He’d made a decision and would stick to it. He returned to the cabin, checking the radio for traffic. No messages. He grabbed a can of Heineken from the fridge and went back up to the deck. The rain had ceased. He sat in one of the fishing chairs, swiveling around to face the open sea again. He sipped his beer, feeling the moist breeze and peering off in the direction where the tiny island lay. Hangman Cay.

  They were over there, Don Price and the girl, Karen something. With Carl Graves and his unhappy wife, who was always complaining about the weekly shopping. And with his best client, Mr. Huxley, the elegant old man who paid him a handsome retainer to always be on call. Gabby had hustled to get the commission, from the moment two years ago when he’d first heard about the man who’d bought the deserted house on the remote island and taken up residence there. He’d reasoned that this man would need regular supplies and occasional transportation, so he’d borrowed his friend Curtis’s boat and sailed over there to present himself. Carl Graves had come down to greet him, and he’d taken him up to the house on the hill—the only time in these two years Gabby had ever been inside it. When he saw the old man, he was sure. When he saw the big painting in the living room, he knew.

  He offered Mr. Huxley his services, and Huxley was delighted. Then he went back to St. Thomas, emptied his savings account, borrowed cash from the bank, and bought the Turnabout. He’d always dreamed of having his own service, not working for others, and this was the opportunity he’d been waiting for. The old man became his first and best customer. Every week since then, rain or shine, he ferried Mr. and Mrs. Graves back and forth. Groceries, usually, or he deposited them on the dock and they went off somewhere in the Land Rover that Mr. Huxley kept in the marina parking lot on St. Thomas. Carl Graves had made several trips up to the States, but he was always back in a matter of days, and Gabby would ferry him to Hangman Cay again. The old man never came away from the island, never so much as stepped aboard the Turnabout. But he sometimes waved from the house above, and Gabby waved back.

  Gabby had peeked into the boathouse once, and he wondered why they never used the ancient, gas-fueled wooden speedboat that was stored in there, covered with a dusty tarp. Maybe Carl and Molly Graves couldn’t handle a boat, he reasoned, but he knew Mr. Huxley could. Gabby knew who Mr. Huxley really was. Gabby knew a lot of things.

  He finished the beer and went back down to the cabin for another. Then he sat in the fishing chair, gazing out at the darkness until the first rays of light stole onto the docks and boats around him. He’d give it another day, he decided, another twenty-four hours. If he hadn’t received a radio message from Carl Graves by then, he’d go over to Hangman Cay and find out what was going on. He knew what Friday was, the significance of it, and he wondered what the old man was up to. So, twenty-four hours. No more.

  He watched and waited.

  New York City

  I’m grateful to have this project. It’s a strict regimen, something I feel I must work on every day, and it’s actually bringing me some insight into all this. It makes me feel close to Karen, imagining her thoughts and actions in that March of 2009. It is cathartic, I suppose.

  What I first fell in love with was her innocence. Karen had an old-fashioned, otherworldly quality, the result of being raised by a loving, overprotective single mother. She grew up in a hothouse of sorts, and she adopted the ways of princesses in ivory towers. She always had a few close, carefully chosen friends. She was never a party type or a sorority pledge, and hard rock and hard drugs held no allure. Her emails were always as long and detailed as her articles. The men she loved—and I include myself here—were all dreamy romantics of one sort or another.

  She saw the world through the cleansing filter of make-believe. When the little girl on 81st Street imagined herself as a newswoman, she probably had visions of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, and Sally Field in Absence of Malice—brave, resolute beauties marching forth to right the wrongs of the world. Her real-life heroes were no less romantic: Nellie Bly, Margaret Bourke-White, Ernie Pyle. She had a special place in her heart for Sir Henry Stanley, whose African quest made him one of the most famous correspondents in history. But there’s a downside to such
rose-colored fantasies. Karen’s keen journalistic eye didn’t always recognize evil, even when she came face-to-face with it. She wasn’t a match for Hangman Cay.

  The last time I spoke with her had been that Tuesday night, after her dinner at Mafolie with Lieutenant Faison, when she asked me what she should wear to the interview the next day. She said she’d call the following night, Wednesday, when she’d returned from the interview. I didn’t hear from her that night, or the next morning. I tried the hotel on Thursday afternoon, and they told me she hadn’t come back there yet. I called them again that evening. No Karen. No message. That’s when I started to worry. But still I waited, for which I haven’t been able to forgive myself. I decided to give her until Friday morning. By the time I finally got my ass in gear, it was too late.

  I’d been to St. Thomas twice in my younger days, once with my parents and later with a couple of pals from college. I stayed at the Reef both times, which is why I recommended it to Karen. My friends and I sailed to St. John and Virgin Gorda on a catamaran, and I remember seeing Tortola and Norman Island and Peter Island and several tiny islets in the distance—for all I know, one of these was Hangman Cay. But a few months ago, when I finally committed myself to writing this, I decided that I had to see it up close.

  I flew down there and stayed at the Reef for three days. I went to Tamarind and met Mrs. MacArthur, I spoke with Faison and his son, and on my last day, Gabby ferried me over to Hangman Cay on the Turnabout. I looked around the quiet forest and stared up at the ghostly walls of the house on the cliff. I stood on the sunny beach, picturing a violent midnight and the figure of a frightened young woman with a machete in her hand, bursting from the boathouse and running frantically through the rain to the opposite end, toward the safety of the caves. “You must be more careful, Karen.”

  So, I’ve seen the actual setting recently, and I can describe it. Still, this story is secondhand.

  I began this chronicle with Karen’s articles and Rodney Harper’s diary from fifty years ago, but now there are several more balls to juggle. The trial transcripts are public records, and Lieutenant Faison the Elder has kindly allowed me to quote from his book. The box that arrived here from the Virgin Islands one week after the events in 2009 has now been retrieved from the back of my closet, where it’s been gathering dust all this time. I took out the old schoolbook diary and the crudely carved chess service, and set them up on the desk before me. The Nikon camera that had once hung from the neck of Sidney Singleton was the next thing to be placed there, and the photos he took have been duly scrutinized on my computer screen.

  Now I am taking out the last items from the box and placing them beside the camera, diary, recorder, and chess set. It’s time for these objects to enter the story. They are old compact discs containing Word files, journal entries from a personal computer. The Remington typewriter that Karen and Sidney Singleton saw on the desk in the upstairs office was merely for show, apparently, one more red herring in a veritable ocean of them.

  He wrote it all down: the whole scheme, his little human chess game, start to finish. He’d been planning it for fifty years, and he’d managed to get everything in place for the big day, the Golden Anniversary. When I think of what happened to Karen, to Sidney Singleton, to all the others in the past and the present, I have an urge to destroy these discs, to bend and twist and break them with my hands until they’re nothing but gleaming shards, but I’ll resist the urge. There is something of value in them, a cautionary tale. I will be quoting from this electronic journal, blending it into my account of those last two days on the island.

  Isolated Pawn

  THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2009

  Chapter Eight

  “The Night Is Forever”

  by Karen Tyler

  Rodney Harper and Wulfgar Anderman were national and world news from the night of their arrest. The headlines continued throughout their trial and imprisonment, until November 15, 1959, when two young ex-convicts entered a Kansas farmhouse and murdered the family that lived there. Dick Hickock and Perry Smith became the new celebrities du jour, but Harper and Anderman weren’t forgotten—far from it. Over the years, their legend has grown to cult status.

  —

  When Karen woke in the four-poster bed on Thursday morning, the rain of last night had stopped and pale sunlight streamed in through a gap in the curtains at one of the windows. She got out of bed and went to the window, parted the curtains, and raised the sash. The dark clouds of yesterday still crowded the sky and the breeze that greeted her was heavy with moisture, so the promised storm was definitely in the offing. Anytime now, from the look of things. This wasn’t the shiny tropical morning she’d awakened to on her first two days here, but it would do. The view alone was worth the journey.

  She rested her elbows on the sill and leaned her head out, inhaling deeply, filling her nostrils with turquoise. She laughed aloud, delighted with her thought. If scents came in colors, this particular aroma would be blue-green. The light, salty tang of the ocean was mingled with the heavy, sweet smell of lush vegetation after a rainfall, creating a perfume that could never be captured in a bottle. You had to be here, on these islands, to experience it.

  This window faced the cove, and the front patio was below her on the left. There was a clump of bushes directly under the window: verdant leaves and scarlet hibiscus flowers. The trees that ringed the patio partially blocked her view of the cove, but she could just make out the white sand through the foliage. The beach looked so inviting, even in the cloudy morning, that she toyed with the idea of getting her bikini from her bag, lowering herself from the window, and making the short drop into the bushes, then running down the stairs to plunge into the cool water. Would her host consider that rude?

  Her host. She shut the window and came back into the room, glancing at her watch: nearly nine. She’d slept well after her little late-night adventure. If she were home, she would have been up for two hours already. Oh well, it was probably best to treat this excursion as a vacation. But no morning swim, she decided with a reluctant sigh. A shower, then breakfast. Then she and Anderman could get down to business.

  She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth. The toothbrush was her own, but this morning she realized that the toothpaste and mouthwash in the bathroom were her exact brands. She’d been so tired last night that she hadn’t noticed the coincidence. In the shower, she found fresh bottles of her preferred body wash, shampoo, and conditioner on a shelf above the faucets. She removed the nightgown that was exactly her size. Odd, she thought. Wulf’s lady friend, or whoever the woman is who usually uses this bedroom, seems to have a lot in common with me. Granted, I’m a standard size and these things are all popular brands, but still…

  As she washed her hair, Karen wondered if she could ask Wulf Anderman who owned these toiletries. Could that be considered part of the interview? She’d ask him anyway. She was a reporter, after all, and these details were the precise reason magazines were so popular. Besides, she wondered what sort of woman would be willing to overlook his shocking history. She was aware of the phenomenon of people who were emotionally and sexually drawn to criminals, especially famous ones. Even death row inmates garnered a surprising number of pen pals and marriage proposals. Perhaps she could make it a sidebar to the Anderman profile. She’d mention the idea to Sally Cohen.

  When she emerged from the bathroom, she found another surprise. There, neatly folded on the armchair by the window, were her jeans, blouse, and socks. She’d dropped them there in a heap last night, but at some point while she slept they’d been taken away and laundered. Mrs. Graves was no oil painting, but she certainly was efficient. Karen suppressed a guilty chuckle at her unkind thought as she put everything on. She grabbed her watch, recorder, and notebook and left the bedroom.

  “Good morning, my dear.” Anderman was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, leaning on his cane, dressed in a khaki safari jacket and matching slacks. His white shirt was open at the collar. His bald head gleam
ed, and his blue eyes were twinkling. All he needed were a pith helmet and a rifle, and he’d look like one of those aristocrats in Out of Africa. If she hadn’t seen it herself, she’d never have guessed that this dapper gentleman had stayed awake all night, listening to opera and weeping. In the light of day, he looked well rested and remarkably cheerful.

  Karen grinned as she came down the stairs to join him. “Good morning, Mr. Anderman.”

  “Please call me Wulf,” he said. “You look lovely today.”

  “Thank you, Mr.—umm, Wulf. I love your house. I love this island! I haven’t slept so well in years. You may have trouble getting rid of me.”

  He laughed. “We’ll send for your things, shall we?”

  “I wish! But duty calls back in New York, so we’d best get on with our work. But first, may I try calling New York again? My cell just doesn’t work here.”

  “Of course,” he said, waving her toward the hall table.

  As Karen went over to the phone, she heard the low rumble of thunder from the sea. She wasn’t surprised, considering the weather, that there was no dial tone.

  “Perhaps later,” Wulf said. “I’m afraid there’s going to be more rain today. I was hoping we could dine on the sundeck, but indoors seems the wiser choice. Come, my dear.”

  He extended his free arm, and she took it. They made their slow, steady way into the dining room, where Mrs. Graves was setting plates. Karen admired the array before her as she took her seat: fruit, toast, juice, and coffee. Mrs. Graves mumbled something about making omelets and went off to the kitchen.

  “I was wondering,” Karen said as she reached for her cup, “whose nightgown and toiletries I’m using.”