The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

Yawning, he brought himself into a sitting position on the bed. The room smelled stale. He eyed his suitcase dully — did he have the piece of paper somewhere in there with his clothes, or in his camera bag, or stuffed into the pocket of his jeans …?

  He gave up thinking, and eyed the night stand next to the bed. Under the phone was a slot with a local phonebook in it …

  Still yawning, he fumbled through the yellow pages to the listings for Real Estate Brokers and found nothing under Williams. He forced his mind to work for a moment …

  Nash & Williams, that was it.

  He dialed the number, and naturally got Brenda Nash instead of Linda Williams.

  “Got a pen, hon?” Nash said in an annoying chirp. “I’ll give you her cell—”

  Corrie groped on the night table, found the hotel ball point and the note pad beneath it.

  “Go ahead.”

  Nash chirped a number at him, and Corrie wrote it down.

  He hung up the phone before the niceties were finished, and dialed the new number.

  Four rings, and then a business-like: “Lucy Williams.”

  He told her who he was, sat dully through her short lecture about punctuality, and arranged to meet her at her office at four o’clock.

  When she started in on another lecture, he said as politely as he could muster, “I’ll be there,” and hung up the phone.

  He could imagine her stuffing the cell phone back into her huge bag filled with papers, shaking her head …

  He lay back down on the bed, devoid of any form of energy, and closed his eyes—

  When he awoke again on his back, after more blackness and no dreams, it was nearly four o’clock.

  “Shit.”

  He felt even clammier than before, but forced himself from the bed and into the same clothes he had worn the day before. He tried to remember if there was a clean shirt in his bag, but gave up, forcing the old one on and buttoning it. His sports jackets smelled like scotch and cigarettes, but he pushed his arms through the sleeves.

  Down the stairs of the hotel, past the desk, into the street …

  Afternoon sunshine hurt his eyes; it was colder than he thought …

  He reached the real estate office at 4:04, and she was just leaving, her car keys in her right hand.

  She glared at him, was thinking, Corrie could tell, of telling him he was too late—

  “I’m awfully sorry,” he forced himself to say, “I just got back from Los Angeles late last night …” He forced a winning smile onto his face.

  “Two minutes,” she said, glancing at her watch and turning back into the office.

  “That’s all I’ll need.”

  He showed his driver’s license, signed a paper, and was given the key to his mother’s home.

  “All these years, empty,” Linda Williams was saying. “There were a hundred times I could have sold—”

  “Thanks for your help,” he said, getting up.

  She was suddenly solicitous, almost sweet: “Now, Corrie, if you ever decide to sell—”

  He waggled the house keys as he walked out the door, not turning around.

  “I’ll certainly remember you, Lucy,” he said.

  His feet carried him towards home.

  In the 1940s his father returned from World War II and, with the help of a G.I. mortgage and his life savings, as well as those of his wife, built the nicest house along the Sagett River, one of the numerous small feeders in the Adirondack area which eventually spit into the mighty Hudson. The Sagett had only crested once, in 1970, when Corrie was a baby — he remember the water lapping at the front porch, as close as it got to the house, and sailing a boat in what had been the front yard. The rest of the time the river was only background noise, and a source of occasional swimming, when it was high enough in the summer, which it often was not, and frustrating fishing expeditions.

  There were only two other houses on Sagett River Road, both of them much grander than the Phaeder house, which had two floors and a basement but a gravel drive in place of a garage, which by then his father could not afford. He had bought every close acre of property he could along with the house plot, intending to grow pumpkins, which in the 1950s was a fairly new thing in Orangefield. Ten years later, when Orangefield became the best known town on the East Coast for pumpkins, it would have made him a rich man. But he had no aptitude for farming, and soon went bust. The plots which would have made him rich were sold off to pay mounting debts. Corrie had never heard of him being a success at anything, except bearing a son, which he did late in life. And then he had died. Corrie only remembered him as a furrowed, frowning face staring down at him in his crib.

  But his second wife, who bore Corrie at the age of thirty, managed, some way or other, to get along. Corrie never wanted for anything, and he knew from an early age that his mother, a strong woman, would do just about anything for him.

  And also, that she never wanted him to leave Orangefield.

  Down Main Street a good mile, across Main and then a left onto Potter Street and then toward the river. Most of the housing in Orangefield in the fifties had been developmental, on the other side of town. Here at the western edge, near the river, with the jungle of oak maple trees, it almost felt almost Southern.

  Corrie could hear it, now — the faint, playful tinkle of the river that had been the background noise to his life for eighteen years.

  And then a right turn onto Sagett Road. It and the river were named after Col. James Sagett, a hero of the Civil War and one of Orangefield’s early settlers; his own house, the grandest along the river, was the first Corrie passed, and it looked the same: a plantation house (it was said that Sagett brought the plans back from Chattanooga), and the only house in the entire town that refused to take part in Orangefield’s Halloween festivities, even to the point of barring the door to trick-or-treaters. There were many egg marks around the front door, and Corrie had once beaten up Jimmy Sagett III, after the smaller boy had called his mother a name.

  And then the Barron house, and then …

  Home.

  He thought he would feel something — anything — when he finally stood before it again. He felt his hand on the house key in his pocket, but that was all. It looked the same: the gravel drive, now ingrown with weeds, leading to the shed in the back, which was missing one door; the front porch, jutting out, painted in peeling white paint (how many times he had repainted that porch with his mother!), the big picture window on the left, the red front door, the neat row of windows on the second floor, the faded white shingles, the single peaked gable over his bedroom on the left, the chimney which ran down to the living room behind it …

  It was just a house — the house he’d grown up in.

  Home.

  His hand tightened around the key in his pocket.

  Already he could feel the urge to walk forward, mount the creaking front steps to the white porch, put the key (how his fingers knew that key in his pocket, every worn curve, the one raised rough bit of metal near its key ring which rasped against his fingertip) into the lock and hear the tumblers fall into place, the snick of the house letting go, opening to him …

  His mother had never lived an uneasy day in it, his father, who had built it partly with his own hands, left no record of trouble with the house itself. No guests had ever complained of anything but perhaps discomfort, in the days before air conditioning, when the second floor, and especially the tiny third floor storage garret over Corrie’s room, became unbearably hot (his father had not provided for cross ventilation in his house plan).

  The key was warm in Corrie’s hand.

  He took a step forward, and then another, and found himself in front of the front porch.

  The line of the Sagett River flood of 1978 was still visible, a faint trace in the overgrowth that marked a spot just along front of the house; when the river receded it had left a slightly higher grade of silt and soil behind in its retreat.

  He had sailed a boat, and been happy, and was five year
s old then. He remembered the sailboat, a real wooden one, painted blue with a real cream colored linen sail, from a toy store in New York City, slipping away from his fingers and the wind taking it immediately away, out over where the road had been (dirt then, paved now) and toward the real river. He had rushed after it, finding himself in water up to his knees and then his mother called him back. He had watched with tears in his eyes as the boat slid away, down into the rushing Sagett and downstream toward, he imagined, the deep roar of the Hudson River.

  “I’ll get you a new one,” his mother had soothed, and she had, but the river had receded by then.

  That night he cried in his bed, and thought it was the worst day of his life.

  Two years later, in his secret heart, he named the house Gallow House.

  Corrie found himself in front of the red door, putting the key into the lock.

  He opened the door, and felt something almost whisper Yesssss, as the air of the closed-up place was let out.

  He stepped in, feeling his hand go cold on the key, still in his fingers.

  Home.

  Only for him.

  Even at the age of seven, he knew he would die here.

  Chapter Four

  Detective Grant looked through the papers on his desk with indifference. If he loved the job, he hated the paperwork, and there seemed to be more of it all the time. He was old enough to remember the days of carbon copies, and everything in triplicate. He had been one of the few in the department to welcome the coming of the computer, figuring it would free them from all that.

  He’d been wrong — and he usually wasn’t wrong.

  All computers had done was make more paper. Now everything was in quintuplet, and spit out of a printer which often jammed, or ran out of its ink cartridge, and just plain busted.

  And unlike those old triplicate carbons, where everything was attached until you tore off the copies yourself, the five copies the printer spit out tended to get scattered, which meant you had to go back, wait in line, and make more copies.

  Grant stared at the four copies of a report (B&E, Fowler St., Jeremy Gates, age 17, found with a crowbar outside the residence of one Mr. Jellick; Gates had managed to get the crowbar, and his arm, stuck under the sill of Mr. Jellick’s very powerful automatic garage door. One thing that never changed about perp kids: they were stupid) and looked at the line of two uniforms in front of the single department printer. There were three uniforms milling around the copier, which seemed to be broken, giving off a hiccupping sound.

  He scowled: how many times had he ended up going to Wilson’s Pharmacy, down the block, and inserting his own quarter into Wilson’s pay copy machine, just to avoid that line?

  He went into his pocket to see if he had any change, and to pull out his cigarette pack.

  “Weren’t you quitting?” Pell Simpson, the only other detective on the Orangefield police force, asked with a laugh. It was more of a snort.

  “I quit every week,” Grant answered. “At least my name’s not Pelletier, right?”

  It was an old routine, and Simpson snorted again. He sat on the edge of Grant’s desk, grinning; Grant knew he was counting the four pages Grant held, which told him everything he needed to know about Grant’s day. Simpson was tall and lean and stooped, with large feet and a chiseled face and thinning sandy hair. He looked more like a pumpkin farmer than a cop, and was known as “Farmer” when fun wasn’t being made of his first name. He kept to himself too much, which had always vaguely bothered Grant, but he was good at his job and pleasant enough.

  “Say, Farmer,” Grant began, before being cut off by the loud voice of Chip Prohman, the desk sergeant. Prohman was loud and fat and pretty much stupid, at least in Grant’s eyes. Grant imagined he would never get any farther than he was now (he’d been a disaster as a beat cop), and would probably end up on the night desk down the road, which would pretty much bury him.

  “Hey Grant!” Prohman shouted. No one turned toward him but Bill.

  Prohman laughed, a hooting sound. “Here’s one for ya! Didn’t you mess with a guy named Willims last year, ’round Halloween?”

  Grant went instantly through his memory file: Willims …

  By a split-second, Prohman beat Grant’s mind: “Bee keeper, wasn’t he? Well, he’s dead! Dispatcher got a call a little while ago. Patrol car just called it in — he hung himself! Pretty funny, eh?”

  Prohman was grinning ear-to-ear. With barely contained disgust, Grant turned away, and then turned back.

  “Where?” Grant asked.

  “Where what?” Prohman, ever thick, blinked back.

  “Where did Willims hang himself?”

  Prohman rifled through a stack of papers on his desk; his mind had already moved on. Finally he traced his fingers down a particular page, mouthing the words to himself as he read.

  “Here it is! Hung himself from a tree in his own backyard! Right next to a hornets nest! Hey, that’s pretty funny — bee guy hanging himself, just like a hanging nest! Ha!”

  Farmer, frowning, said, “Wasn’t that the guy involved with that writer and his wife dying last year?”

  “Kerlan,” Grant answered, nodding. “Weird shit. Willims was the guy the D.A. told to keep his yap shut.” He looked up at Farmer. “Me, too.”

  Farmer nodded, got up, stretched his long body. “Well, I’ve got a line to stand on,” he said, and moved off, scooping a handful of his own papers from his desk and moving toward the copy machine.

  “Hey, Grant!” Prohman’s annoying voice cut through the quiet again. He had another sheet of paper in his hand, and was smiling hugely.

  Rather than listen to the desk sergeant’s idiotic musings long distance, Grant got up and approached the front desk.

  He waited patiently while Prohman mouthed words.

  “Ha!” the desk sergeant said finally. His smile widened. “Here’s a real killer for ya! Charley Morton’s dead, too!”

  Something resembling ice chilled Grant for a moment, and froze him when Prohman went on, hooting: “And get this! Dropped dead in his driveway! And the hospital says it was from …” Prohman leaned closer to the paper, trying to pronounce a word: “ … anaphylactic …shock. From a hornet!”

  Prohman dropped the paper and gave a huge laugh. “Same day! The bee keeper dies, and the D.A. is killed by a hornet! Whoo!”

  Grant was already out the door.

  Orangefield was full of weird shit. Grant knew that intimately by now. Especially around Halloween. Even when Grant was a kid, growing up in neighboring Lewiston, everyone had told stories about Orangefield. For a while, even after he joined the Orangefield police force, after being recruited by Riley Gates, he thought it was all talk, jealousy for a town that had made it financially. For Orangefield was nothing if not a gold mine. Best pumpkins in the country, and it was no joke. They grew everywhere, up hillsides and down, in every free plot of ground and every patch and farm. And they grew perfect and fat and with dollar signs pinned to their stems. People drove two hundred and fifty miles just to buy pumpkins in Orangefield, and to partake in the hooey (in Grant’s eyes) of the Pumpkin Days Festival, a week long carnival that brought out the greed and civic pride (often the same thing) in everyone in town. There were endless celebrations, parades, exhibits, tent shows, concerts, speeches, and, for the police, endless trouble.

  But it all seemed to work, year after year, and the town, because of it, was fat and happy, with good schools, a good budget, clean streets, happy citizens …

  But the weird shit—

  Grant had believed none of it, at first. Every year around Halloween, as the cash registers began to sing, the farmer’s smiles grew wider and the mayor’s speeches more full-of-it, something strange, often off in a corner, would happen. Some break-in that couldn’t be solved, indeed looked more like a locked-room mystery story than anything else. Or a report of a ghost by a staunchly reliable citizen. Or the burning to black of a huge pumpkin field, someone’s entire yearly income, with no source of f
ire — gasoline, kerosene, blowtorch — found by the arson guys. (That was a truly strange one.) Little things. Medium things.

  And then, last year: Peter Kerlan, the children’s book writer, and his wife.

  That had been the strangest, so far.

  Grant and Fred Willims, the now-dead bee keeper, had arrived in Kerlan’s back yard on Halloween night in time to see the author yank open the door to his wooden tool shed — out stumbled what looked to Grant (and Willims) to be a human skeleton completely covered in hornets. The skeleton stumbled into Kerlan and then the hornets were on him, leaving the skeleton to collapse into bones.

  Kerlan was stung to death.

  The skeleton had been his wife.

  She had been trapped in the shed with a huge hornets nest.

  Weird shit.

  And here it came again …

  Grant walked quickly to his car.

  He had no trouble finding the bee keeper’s house; he had visited Willims once this past spring (long after the D.A., Morton, had sealed the case and warned them both never to say anything about it). By then, Willims had started to drink, and told Grant about being bothered.

  “It’s the hornets,” he said; “you think you know how they’ll react — hell, there’s only one way they can react! They react to light — if you shine a flashlight on ’em in the dark, they’ll go for it.

  “But lately, they’ve been acting strange — stinging when there’s no reason, going for me when there’s no light at all, leaving the nest at night — that’s something they never do! At dusk, they’re all in the nest. But not now …

  “Hell, I found an active nest last winter! You’ve got to understand, a hornet’s nest just doesn’t make it through the winter. All the workers die, only a couple of females, who become queens, protect themselves somewhere and re-emerge in the spring to start new nests. But on Christmas Eve I found a nest inside a closet in the house, when I went in to pull out some presents I stored there.

  “That just doesn’t happen!”

  Willims’ house was small and tidy — at least it had been. When Grant pulled into the long dirt driveway he was struck by the condition the house was in — in the short months since he had last seen the bee keeper the house was a shambles — tidy lawn dug up, eaves sagging, two holes in the red shingle roof, a broken window. The front door was open, and had what looked like an axe embedded in it.