The View from the Cherry Tree

by Willo Davis Roberts

  An idea struck him so sharply that he held his breath for a few seconds. Was there any chance the killer had left clues inside the house? In all the movies, the murderer returns to the scene of the crime to destroy the evidence.

  The blood seemed to move thickly in his ears; the idea both frightened and excited him. Maybe if he found some evidence, and then hid and watched it . . . maybe one of them would come, to see about it.

  The screen door slammed behind him. He didn’t wait to see who it was; it didn’t matter, because any of them would give him away. Rob breathed deeply and took the same path as the cat, out along the thick branch that stretched to the open window.

  At the moment he was over the end of it that had held Mrs. Calloway’s dangling body he felt a reluctance to go any further, but the sound of voices behind him was a spur. He swallowed and moved the rest of the way along the limb, reaching out with a foot for the windowsill, easing himself through the opening.

  For some time he didn’t go any further, didn’t even look around. Safe behind the lace curtains, he could look out across the grassy expanse between the two houses. The tree itself cut off some of the view, but it didn’t keep the voices from reaching him.

  “Robbie! Robbie, where are you?” That was his mother. She sounded upset.

  “Does he have friends nearby where he could go, Mrs. Mallory?” That was the cop, Riley. “It might be smart to check with his friends, if you could tell us who they are. Make up a list, maybe.”

  “Yes, of course, if you think that’ll help. Although I can’t imagine . . . this isn’t like Rob, at all.”

  Darcy’s clear tone carried from the porch. “What shall we do, Mom? The rehearsal’s set for twenty minutes from now. Shall I call and say we can’t make it? I don’t know if we can even notify everybody in that length of time . . . some of them have probably already started for the church.”

  Mrs. Mallory’s hesitation was brief. “No. Go on and go. It doesn’t matter whether I’m there or not. All I have to do is walk down the aisle on the arm of the usher, isn’t it? We’ll have to brief your father later, anyway, when he gets here. The rest of you might as well go ahead as planned.”

  Steve, back now, sounded uncertain for the first time since Rob had known him. “Do you think . . . should we postpone the wedding, Mrs. Mallory?”

  “With two hundred and fifty people coming?” She sounded as if she were strangling, Rob thought. “No, of course not. This is going to be straightened out, Rob’s just . . . just wandered off somewhere, he’ll turn up. Go on.”

  The voices blended, blurred, the words impossible to catch as people moved toward the cars in front or back into the house. Rob hadn’t seen her approach, so he jumped when Teddi spoke from only a few feet away.

  “Robbie? Robbie, it’s me, Teddi. Do you hear me? Answer me, Robbie! I won’t let anyone hurt you, don’t you know that?”

  By shifting position slightly, he could see her. She was looking up into the cherry tree, her head thrown back, concern written on her familiar features.

  How could she promise anything, when the police were right there, ready to take him into custody? Even so, the urge to say something was overwhelming. Teddi he trusted. If he told her not to tell where he was, she wouldn’t.

  He actually parted his lips, ready to speak her name, when he saw that Max was with her. Old Max, also looking anxious. Old Max, with his long-sleeved blue shirt that might conceal the marks of Sonny’s claws.

  Rob squinted, trying to see Max’s hands and at the same time to remember again the hands that had pushed the old woman. He wasn’t successful either way; Max had his hands in his pockets and all he could remember about the murderer’s hands was that they were large.

  “He isn’t in the tree, Teddi. He usually sits right there, in that crotch. It’s the only comfortable place to sit. Besides, he wouldn’t be hiding in the cherry tree; he knows we all know he goes up there.”

  Rob bit his lower lip. If it were only Teddi, he would take a chance. With Max there, he didn’t dare. Not if there was a possibility that Max was the one who was after him.

  Teddi turned away; there was a tremor in her voice. “If I could just talk to him . . . he must be horribly upset.”

  “He’ll turn up,” Max assured her. “Come on, you’ve got to practice being a bridesmaid. We’d better get going with the rest of them.”

  “You’re coming along?”

  “Sure. You need a ride over and back, don’t you? I’ll leave you off and come back in an hour, right? Afterward maybe we can . . .”

  “Afterward we’re coming back here.” Teddi’s tone had firmed. “Until I’m sure Robbie’s all right.”

  “Of course he’s all right, but we’ll come back. Whatever you want. Let’s go.”

  Rob, watching through the heavy lace, felt a little bit the way the captain must feel, left on his sinking ship as the last of his crew is transferred to another vessel. He had to kneel at the window in order to get any sort of view; he leaned against the sill, welcoming the steadying influence of something immovable, until he realized that he was causing the curtains to pull tight. That would give him away, if anyone looked at them.

  Car doors slammed, voices mingled unintelligibly. When the wedding party was gone, there were still plenty of people around. Including the police, whom he could see still talking to his mother, although he couldn’t make out their words. Not until they left, when Fritz called out, “Well, you give us a call when he turns up, Mrs. Mallory. We’ll be in touch later, anyway, just in case.”

  Just in case what? Rob wondered. He got a glimpse of his mother’s face as she turned toward the house; she looked very tired and almost as if she were about to cry.

  “Why don’t you let me fix you a drink, Marge? You sure look like you need one,” ­Sylvester suggested, touching her arm.

  “What I need,” Mrs. Mallory said, her voice wavering, “is for Wally to come home. Or even call. I’d settle for a call right now.”

  “Well, sure, that will make you feel better, when he comes. But there’s nothing he can do that the rest of us can’t . . . we’ll get the kids out looking around the neighborhood, and the police are going to check with all his buddies. In the meantime, anything that’ll help hold you together ought to be to the good, hadn’t it? Let’s all have a martini, just to put things in perspective.”

  They went inside and for a time Rob crouched where he was, until there was no one outside except the girl cousins and Neddy, who had somehow appropriated an orange-colored stuffed lion that belonged to Teddi. He felt a surge of resentment on Teddi’s behalf; he knew she hadn’t said the little brat could play with the lion. She kept it on the foot of her bed, and she wouldn’t want it to get dirty.

  Behind him Rob heard small sounds that brought him about with neck-cracking speed, his eyes wide.

  He’d never been inside this house before, had had only a glimpse of it through the window. It was heavily, ornately furnished with very old things, sort of like his grandmother had, only his grandmother’s house smelled of cookies and baking bread and lemon furniture polish. This place smelled of old sweat and musty carpeting and strange unpleasant things he couldn’t identify.

  The sounds were Sonny, probing the goldfish bowl with one sturdy paw. There was a flash of color, and the orangy fish slithered down the cat’s throat. Sonny eyed Rob with ears back, twitching, expectant.

  There was only one fish left in the bowl.

  Rob exhaled slowly. “Go ahead, who cares? Nobody else wants them, anyway.”

  Sonny continued to watch him, yellow eyes glittering.

  “You just startled me. That’s why I jumped. You don’t think I’m afraid of being in here, do you? Just because it’s her house? She’s dead and carried away, and there’s nothing here to hurt anybody. It’s just an empty house.”

  He hoped the cat didn’t notice that his
words were slightly unsteady. Because it was true, of course, that there was nothing to be afraid of in the empty house. Nobody knew he was here.

  He got up, then, and looked around. There were plants all over the place, green things with all kinds of leaves, growing in pots. Most of them didn’t have any flowers. He wondered why she liked just all those leaves, with nothing on them. They were kind of creepy.

  That reminded him of the pot that had been dropped on him from the second floor. Maybe if he went up there he’d find a clue of some kind.

  He had no idea where the stairs were. He’d have to poke around and find them. Although it was still broad daylight outside, it was rather murky in here because of the heavy curtains, and a lot of the shades were down. Mrs. Calloway must have been part mole.

  For a split second he remembered her as he had seen her this morning, the leather strap twisted around her neck, her mouth open, her blue eyes bulging. He put the memory aside quickly. She was dead, and he didn’t believe in ghosts.

  Still, he was glad to have Sonny’s company as he moved through the lower rooms.

  Mrs. Calloway hadn’t been a very good housekeeper. There was dust on everything, and the smell of mildew, and always that overpowering odor that seemed a combination of medicine and unwashed bodies and rotting garbage.

  Rob moved slowly, opening doors slowly, especially in the darker rooms. On the threshold of one room he stopped, his throat closing on a yell he couldn’t make, for there was a figure in the middle of the floor.

  Once more he exhaled slowly, allowing his heartbeat to slow. Only one of those dressmaker dummy things. The room was a clutter of ancient treadle sewing machine, bags and boxes of materials and buttons, and newspapers. Cripes, there must be ten years’ worth of newspapers stacked up in the corners.

  He moved into the tower room. From it he had a view up and down the street, both ways, and of all the houses on the other side of the road. He could well believe she hadn’t missed much from here, even if she hadn’t used the binoculars.

  He came at last to the stairs. They weren’t carpeted, like the ones at home, and they creaked beneath his weight. There was so much dust on the handrail that he couldn’t think anyone had used it in years.

  Yet someone had gone up there recently, someone had dropped the flowerpot in an attempt to hit him. Someone had shot at him.

  There was a different aura about the second floor. At first he didn’t know what it was, then he realized that the smell was no longer overpowering. It was musty and dusty, but the more unpleasant odors were all downstairs.

  The room in which he was interested would be on the east side, toward the front, but not all the way. It ought to be that door, over there.

  Rob stopped, unable to control the hammering in his chest. What if there were someone in there, the man who had shot at him . . .

  It was silly, of course. The man hadn’t stayed here. He’d gone downstairs and across the lawn and joined the wedding guests next door, waiting for another chance at the boy who’d been unlucky enough to be watching when Mrs. ­Calloway was pushed out the ­window.

  Sonny strolled past him, unalarmed, stirring up the dust of years. Rob moved, more slowly now, and gave the door a tentative push.

  It was a big room, empty of furniture, the floor showing where the rug had been taken up from its center, and spots in the faded floral wallpaper showed where pictures had once been.

  The only things still there were the curtains of heavy lace. Rob made his way toward the window, wondering if Sonny shared his tension, for the cat had turned and was looking at him in an oddly alert way.

  Rob didn’t have to move the curtains aside to see that a man in this window would have a clear shot at anyone sitting on the Mallory steps.

  There were scuff marks in the dust where the man had knelt; and further evidence—the first real proof he could present to the police and his parents that he wasn’t making things up—there were three spent .22 shells. In this room where nobody had lived for more than a quarter of a century!

  His first impulse was to scoop them up to show his father, but he remembered in time that the police liked to collect their own evidence. They might not believe him, that he’d found the shells here. On the other hand, there was the possibility that the shooter might remember the shells and come back for them, and who would then take Rob’s word for their existence?

  He ended by picking up one of them and slipping it into his pocket, leaving the other two untouched. If there had previously been any doubts in his own mind, they were now gone. This was no wild imagining, no jumping to conclusions. It was true. Someone had tried to kill him. And that someone would try again, if he could, until he succeeded.

  “Dad will come home pretty soon,” Rob said aloud, quietly. “When he does, I’ll be all right.”

  He had no interest in further exploration of the house. It was too big, too gloomy, too dark in the corners. If the guilty man came back to destroy the evidence, it was to this room he would come. There was no need to watch any of the rest of the house.

  He’d always thought of Mrs. Calloway as a witch, an evil storybook sort of person. Here in her house, he began to see her as a human being. There was a bag of knitting beside a chair in her sitting room. Some mending on a low table. A Bible open beside it, a faded ­purple ribbon marking the place.

  Mrs. Calloway reading the Bible? It seemed unlikely, yet when he stared down at the pages he could see that she’d underlined various passages, the same way his grandmother did in her Bible.

  Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man hath nowhere to lay his head, he read.

  Bleakly, Rob turned away. I know how he must have felt.

  He wandered through into the kitchen, and then wished he hadn’t. He’d never been in an untidier room. There were dirty dishes in the sink . . . not just today’s dishes, but stacks of them. The stench of garbage was overpowering. A wide trail of ants led along a counter to where some sugar had been spilled; they were carrying it, grain by grain, down the wall and into a crack in the floor.

  There were the remains of breakfast on the table, egg drying on a plate, coffee staining the painted wooden surface. And there were newspapers. Hundreds of them, everywhere. On the chairs, on top of the refrigerator, in heaps on the floor. She must have saved every paper she got in the past twenty years.

  The floor hadn’t been swept in days. He avoided what looked like a finger bone (for the witch from Hansel and Gretel?) and began to retreat toward the less filthy part of the house.

  It was twilight, now, at least inside the house. They ought to be coming back from the rehearsal pretty soon, and his father would surely be coming before long. All he had to do was stick it out until then, and he’d be all right.

  He had reached the threshold of the dining room when he heard the footsteps on the back porch. The boards creaked under a man’s weight.

  Rob froze, unable to complete his step into the other room, unable to think fast enough to hide. Paralysis held him there, breathing painfully suspended, as the door began to open.

  Thirteen

  It was Derek, still wearing his brown slacks and yellow shirt. He hesitated as his eyes adjusted to the dimness.

  He seemed somewhat disconcerted at seeing Rob. “Well, there you are. I ought to have guessed you’d hide over here.” His hand groped for the wall switch, turning on a forty-watt bulb.

  Rob couldn’t have said anything if he’d tried.

  Derek didn’t seem to notice. “Boy, it sure stinks in here, doesn’t it? Somebody’ll have to come in and clean up the place.”

  Sonny came through the doorway, brushing Rob’s ankles. He saw Derek and meowed plaintively.

  “You hungry? Missed your supper, didn’t you? How about you, Rob? You had anything to eat?”

  Rob swallowed, but that was all. If he decided to run, wh
ere could he run to? The window in the dining room was open but he couldn’t get through it in a hurry, probably not before Derek could catch up with him.

  Was it Derek he had to fear? Was it?

  “What are you hiding from?” Derek asked.

  Was there malice in Derek’s gaze, or was it only that the light from the small naked bulb cast his face into unaccustomed planes and shadows that made it seem so?

  “For gosh sakes, Rob, you’ve got everybody thinking you’re some kind of nut. Knocking babies around, calling the police with wild ­stories . . .” Derek’s expression altered when he smiled. “What did you tell them that brought them roaring out here to talk to you?”

  It was painful to swallow, but he kept having to do it or he couldn’t seem to breathe. Rob forced his vocal cords to respond to his command.

  “What did they say?”

  “I didn’t hear all of it. Just that you’d made some kind of phone call, and they were checking it out. Your mother’s real upset with you. So’s Darcy. Poor Darcy, she doesn’t want her wedding spoiled.”

  “I haven’t spoiled her wedding.”

  “Not yet,” Derek agreed. “You told me something kind of far out, earlier . . . about Aunt Bea being pushed out the window. Was that what you told the police?”

  Rob didn’t answer.

  “Was it true, then? I mean, you’re not just having a field day taking off on stuff you got from TV; you really saw something this morning? What did you see?”

  “Just what I told you. Somebody pushed her. I saw his hands. That’s all. Just his hands.”

  “And you told that to the police?”

  How dangerous was it to admit what he had said, if Derek was the one who was stalking him? Dangerous, indeed, to admit to a killer that you hadn’t been able to pass along to anyone else the evidence that would incriminate him.

  “I don’t remember what all I told them. They didn’t seem to think I was serious, anyway.”