“She knew he’d be at prayer. It was no more of a chance than any of the rest of it. When her husband told her of this place, he no doubt went into great detail.”
Sheriff Partell’s expression was somber. “Delia,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid I’ll have to…”
“I know,” she said. “It was the chance I took.”
“You’re confessing?”
But there was still a spark of fire in her eyes. “Not on your life! I’ll fight it out with a jury.”
Vicky Nelson turned to me with a low snort. “Didn’t I tell you she was a real bitch? Let’s get out of here. …”
Simon and I dropped Vicky back at her car, and that was the last I saw of her—though the memory of those legs stayed with me for many days. We spent the night with Father Hadden, and I know that he and Simon talked far into it, of the strange happenings and the strange things that did not happen. And when we left the next morning the priest was busy telephoning—talking to the eighteen men who were all that remained of the case’s loose ends.
A month or so later I received a letter at my New York office. It was sent to Simon Ark, in my care, and it was from Father Hadden. It had been a busy month for him, but it was a happy letter. He had succeeded in organizing the Penitentes into a group to help him with parish activities, and he had great hopes that their overwhelming piety was being channeled into more normal activities. Juan Cruz, unfortunately, had suffered a mild nervous breakdown—but Father Hadden even held out hope for him. And surprisingly enough he added a P. S. to the effect that Vicky Nelson and Yates Ambrose were planning to be married.
“He doesn’t say a word about the spirits,” I pointed out to Simon.
“It is a happy letter, my friend. Full of the joy of young love and older faith. There will be no more spirits for Father Hadden.”
And one day—it must have been a year later—the priest himself visited us, happy in the midst of a job well done. “I’m here only for a few days,” he said. “I couldn’t pass through without seeing my old friends.”
“How are Vicky and Yates?” I asked.
“Happy,” he said, and that after all was a complete answer.
And Simon smiled down on the man of God. “No more spirits?”
But the priest hesitated before answering. “Only one, Mr. Ark. Only one.”
“One?”
He nodded. “Delia Summer died in the gas chamber last month.” And that was all he would say. …
THE JUDGES OF HADES
THE NIGHTMARE BEGAN WITH eleven words in a telegram: YOUR SISTER AND FATHER KILLED IN AUTO ACCIDENT. COME AT ONCE.
That was all.
I stared at it for a full five minutes, reading it over and over, hoping that the words would somehow magically change before my eyes.
Then finally I looked away from the telegram on my desk and gazed out the window at the snowy February canyons of Manhattan. At that moment Maple Shades, Indiana, seemed a lifetime away, and even my sister and my father were merely vague figures in my memory.
But now they were dead. I would have to return to Maple Shades, Indiana, now, and stand beside the graves as their bodies were lowered into the ground, and perhaps shed a tear for what might have been.
I picked up the telephone and dialed the Westchester number where my wife would be, just starting to prepare the evening meal. “Hello, dear,” I said into the mouthpiece. “I just received a telegram from Uncle Philip. My sister and father were both killed in an auto accident. …”
“Oh, no. …” Shelly gasped on the other end of the line. “How awful!”
“Look…I guess we’re going to have to fly out there for the funeral and things. Can you be ready to go tonight?”
“Of course.”
“Good. I’ll call the airline now and see about reservations. I think there’s a plane around seven. …”
And so it began.
I stuffed the telegram into my pocket.
Luckily the major Spring book promotions were already under way at Neptune Books, so I had no thoughts of business to trouble me that night as our plane winged its way over Pennsylvania’s ragged mountains. And with Shelly in the seat next to me, I felt that I could face anything the people of Maple Shades had to offer.
It was an odd town, Maple Shades, lying as it did on the banks of the not-so-beautiful Ohio at a point where three states almost touched. For though it was actually located in the state of Indiana, its business and social life was influenced more by the fact that it was somewhat a suburb of Cincinnati, across the Ohio line. And its thinking more than once had reflected that of the South, as represented by Kentucky, the third state which bounded that odd bend in the Ohio River.
It was a combination of cultures which had made me flee from Maple Shades as soon as I was able, leaving behind the smug suburban aristocracy into which I had been born. I’d left nearly twenty years ago, to become a newspaper reporter out west; to go off to the wars; to meet and marry Shelly Constance; and finally to rise to the vice-presidency of a leading New York publishing house before the age of forty.
In all those years I’d never been back to Maple Shades, except for occasional Christmas visits—and once right after I’d married Shelly, when I knew my dying mother would want to see the girl I’d chosen.
But now it was time to return. My sister, whom I loved, and my father, who maybe wasn’t so bad after all, were dead—dead together in an automobile somewhere along the banks of the Ohio, or perhaps against one of the tall, stately maples that gave the town its name. They were gone, and when I thought about the people they’d left behind—Uncle Philip and his wife, my sister’s husband, and the rest—I wondered why it had to be those two who died.
“We’re coming into the Cincinnati airport,” Shelly said quietly, a voice at my side cutting sharply through the fog of my thoughts.
“So soon?”
“So soon,” she repeated. “Is it going to be that hard for you to go back, to face them after all these years?”
“I don’t know. I just have a feeling. …”
The plane bumped to a rocky landing and slowed suddenly as the twin propellers reversed their pitch. We were there. We were in Cincinnati, and home was only a few miles away, across the state line.
We drove through the city to Bridgetown, and then out route 264 till we picked up the modern divided highway at Cleves. It was a familiar route, and the cab driver hurried along through the gently falling snow with the air of one retracing a familiar but boring journey.
Then we were across the state line, into Indiana. And soon I saw the familiar billboard standing to the right of the road: WELCOME TO MAPLE SHADES, THE HOTTEST LITTLE TOWN IN AMERICA. POPULATION: 32,590. KIWANIS CLUB MEETS EVERY WEDNESDAY NOON.
I laughed a little to myself when I saw it, remembering a favorite high school trick of my youth. Someone was forever slipping out at night to paint over the part of the sign reading MAPLE S, and drivers in the morning were often quite startled to be confronted with a sign reading: WELCOME TO HADES, THE HOTTEST LITTLE TOWN IN AMERICA.
In spite of this, the town fathers had never changed their slogan, and I imagined the high school boys were still at it, when the spirit moved them.
But the cab had slowed now, and I was startled to find that we’d already arrived at my uncle’s rambling white house near the edge of town. Maple Shades was the county seat, and both my father and uncle served as judges, a position which called for rambling white houses in a town like this.
We paid the driver and started up the steps with our bags. I didn’t know whether Uncle Philip intended to put us up at his house during our stay; but he had plenty of room and I decided to give him the opportunity, anyway.
He opened the door at our ring, and at once he was the Uncle Philip of old, calm, dignified, sardonic. “Well,” he began in his best courtroom voice, “I’m glad to see you two could make it.” He always included Shelly in his attacks on me, as if by marrying me she had taken on the burden of my im
agined guilt.
“We came as soon as I received your telegram, Philip,” I replied. “You remember Shelly, of course.”
“Of course. … Well, come on in out of the cold. The others are all here, too.”
BY “THE OTHERS” I soon saw that he meant his wife, Rita; my sister’s husband, Frank Broderick; and the local District Attorney, Hallison James. Hallison had been the family’s closest friend for years, and at the moment he was the only one of the four I was happy to see.
Rita’s eyes were red-rimmed, though I couldn’t imagine why she would ever shed tears for my father and sister. Frank was in bad shape, I saw at once, and I felt suddenly a little more kindly toward him. My sister, Stella, had been a wonderful girl, and the loss of her would be great after five years of married life.
“How did it happen?” I asked.
“We don’t know exactly,” James stated quietly. “It was down on the River Road. …”
“Who was driving?”
“They were in two separate cars,” Uncle Philip mumbled, in a voice that was hardly his. “Richard was driving his car north, and Stella was traveling south on the same road. The…the cars crashed head-on, a tremendous impact. Both of them were killed almost instantly.”
“But,” I began, “but how could such a thing have happened? There are no curves in the River Road, and it’s well-lighted. Was it icy?”
“Dry as a bone,” Uncle Philip muttered. “The snow didn’t start until later.”
My mind was in a fog, struggling to break free from the haze of half-formed horrors that lurked there. “Then how?”
Hallison James spoke with a sorrowful voice. “We don’t think it was an accident,” he said, speaking very much like the District Attorney. “We think it was a case of murder and suicide. …”
After that, everyone talked. And talked.
I listened, and after a time Shelly came over to my side and slipped her warm hand into mine. And I clung to it because it was the only real thing in a world suddenly full of shattered images and toppling towers. I was surprised myself at how much the news affected me. I was surprised at how much feeling I still had left for a father I didn’t love, and a sister I hadn’t seen in two years.
“Oh, such coincidences happen, of course,” Hallison was saying. “There was a case like it in Ohio a year or two ago. And another out West, where a woman killed her own child while she was out driving several blocks from her house. But the situation is different here. Stella couldn’t have helped recognizing her father’s black-and-white Buick, just as he must have seen her station wagon coming down the road toward him. They saw each other, because it was after eight o’clock, with plenty of daylight to see by.”
He paused to light a fresh cigar, and I took a firmer grip on Shelly’s warm hand. Frank Broderick still sat in silence, his head bowed low. And Rita and Philip stood together in somber silence across the room.
“No,” Hallison James continued, “it couldn’t have been an accident. They saw each other, and one of them pointed the automobile at the other; and they hit…”
I thought about Stella, with her fiery temper inherited from our father. Yes, either one of them might have done it, in a moment of blind rage.
“What side of the road were the cars oh?” I asked.
“They were in the middle. Apparently the intended victim tried to swerve out of the way, but didn’t quite make it.”
“Did anyone see the accident?”
“Not really. A farmer out in his field had his head turned the other way. He turned as soon as he heard the crash, then ran to his house to call the highway patrol. He reached the wreck itself within three minutes, but by that time they were both dead.”
Uncle Philip added the exacting details of the accident with a voice that was almost relish. “Stella was thrown through the windshield. She received a broken neck that killed her instantly. Her father must have died seconds later, of multiple internal injuries and a fractured skull.”
“All right, Philip,” Frank Broderick shouted, rising to his feet, “you don’t have to gloat about it. I know you hated them both, but she was my wife, you know.”
Uncle Philip produced a silk handkerchief to wipe his sweated brow. “You’re upset, my boy,” he said after a moment. “No one regrets this tragedy more than I do.”
“I’ll bet,” was Frank’s comment.
I sighed quietly to myself and wished I was back in New York. The good life in Maple Shades was the same as always—the only new element seemed to be the introduction of Frank Broderick, a young man who seemed to belong with the rest of them.
I hadn’t known Frank before my sister married him; even now I knew only that he had been a nebulous sportsman, sailing the inland waterway between the cocktail parties of Washington and the steaming sands of Florida. Stella had met him six years earlier, on a trip to the West Indies with our father. They’d still loved each other then, but many things had happened in six years.
She’d fallen in love with Frank, and they’d married a year later. And it was because of Frank that the final breakup had come, a few years back. It was then, over a complicated legal matter, that my father, the judge, had ruled against his own son-in-law in a decidedly unfair decision. From that day on, Stella and her father had never spoken to each other.
But could the memory of this unfairness have made Stella smash her car into his? I didn’t know, but it was something I had to find out.
“Of course,” James was saying, “you’ll want to keep this quiet. I can see that nothing gets in the papers about it.”
Uncle Philip’s wife, Rita, agreed. “Certainly, Hallison. But won’t people talk anyway? There’s another election this Fall and I don’t want to go through another thing like the Judges of Hades campaign.”
“What was that?” I asked. There was so much about their ordinary conversation that I didn’t understand. I was beginning to realize how much I’d really lost contact with these people who were my relatives.
“Somebody in the opposition party started calling Philip and Richard the Judges of Hades. Apparently it was a name given to a group of Greek vase paintings that someone came across.” Rita explained. “It was a clever name, especially since the boys are always painting over the sign. Of course, what they were driving at was that Philip and Richard were too strict in their verdicts.” She said it as a school teacher might; and then I remembered that she’d once been a school teacher, before she married my uncle.
Uncle Philip smiled slightly. “My brother and I were what used to be referred to as Hanging Judges. It’s a matter of degree, of course. Both Richard and I have always felt that the punishment should more than fit the crime, as a warning to future criminals.”
“Well,” Hallison interrupted, “we won’t get anywhere this way. We’re agreed to keep any hint of murder out of the papers, but there’s a further problem to be resolved.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Your uncle here feels that we should hire a private detective to make discreet inquiries about the accident.”
“What?” I almost shouted. “I thought you just said you wanted to hush the whole thing up!”
For a second everybody was talking at once; but finally they quieted down, and Uncle Philip’s voice emerged from the babble. “As I said before, I’m up for reelection this November. I don’t want somebody springing this story the week before the election unless I have the answers ready for them.”
Though I certainly didn’t go along with his motives, I was beginning to think that I, too, would like to know more about the accident on the River Road that morning. “All right,” I agreed finally. “Are you planning to get someone from Cincinnati?”
“And have the word all over town in a day?” Uncle Philip moaned. “Impossible! What we need is a total stranger. We were thinking you might know someone in New York, who could…”
The fact that I was a book publisher somehow had connected itself with private detectives in these people’s min
ds. I could see it was no use explaining that the only private eye I’d ever seen had been one from Kansas City, whom I’d met at a writers’ conference.
And then I thought of Simon Ark. …
“Yes,” I replied slowly. “I know a man; perhaps I could call him.”
“Certainly.” Uncle Philip motioned toward the phone. “The sooner the better.”
-2-
I took the phone into the next room and partly closed the door. It wouldn’t do for them to hear my conversation with Simon Ark. I asked for long distance, and within a minute I was connected with the night operator at the College of the Hudson.
“Professor Dark, please.”
“Who?”
“This is a long distance call from Indiana. I wish to speak to Professor Dark; he’s doing basic research in Satanism with your Ancient History department.”
“Oh! Certainly. Just a moment, please.”
The moment stretched to five, and I was beginning to think I should have called person-to-person when finally I heard the familiar voice on the other end of the line.
“Professor Dark here.”
I hadn’t quite figured out why Simon Ark was hiding his identity during his stay at the College of the Hudson; but since he was producing a definitive work on Satanism in ancient times for Neptune Books to publish, I wasn’t really concerned what name he used. For certainly no one knew more about Satan than Simon Ark, a man who’d devoted his life and work to seeking out the devil’s deeds.
“This is your publisher talking,” I told him.
“Who…?” And then he recognized my voice. “Oh, how are you this evening?”
“Pretty good, Simon. Look, I’m calling from Indiana. My father and my sister were killed this morning in an auto accident. …”
“I’m awfully sorry to hear that.”
“Thank you. The reason I’m calling is that there’s an element of mystery in the thing. I don’t want to discuss it over the phone, but I’d like you to fly out here if you could.”
The Judges of Hades Page 11
