How Like an Angel

by Margaret Millar

  “I can see it,” Lassiter said, “if that man happened to be the Master, the guy who issued the orders. They were used to obeying him, weren’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “About everything?”

  “About everything.”

  “But you don’t think he gave the order to disperse?”

  “Oh, I think he gave it all right,” Quinn said slowly. “Only it might not have been his own idea.”

  “You mean he was bribed?”

  “He wouldn’t look at it like that.”

  “I would. When money changes hands and no goods or services or act of charity is involved, it’s a bribe.”

  “All right, call it that. But put yourself in his place: the colony was going downhill, people were deserting and no new converts were showing up. Even before the death of Hay­wood and of Sister Blessing, he must have seen the beginning of the end. Two murders brought it perilously close.”

  “You’re breaking my heart, Quinn.”

  “I’m trying to reconstruct what might have happened.”

  “Well, go on. The end is perilously close. And?”

  “The murderer may have offered him a deal: disperse the colony for the time being, and later reconvene under better circumstances.”

  “Meaning with working capital?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s a mighty nice theory, Quinn,” Lassiter said with an ironic smile. “However, there are a few teeny-weeny holes in it.”

  “I know that, but—”

  “Now, according to the confession letter which Martha O’Gorman finally decided to tell me about, O’Gorman was killed by a transient in a fit of anger. O’Gorman had about two dollars on him and there was an old typewriter in the back seat of the car. Total value of the take, say ten bucks. Maybe I’m a pessimist, but if I were about to refinance a religious colony, I’d figure on a little more than ten bucks as working capital. . . . No, don’t interrupt. I’m aware of your idea that Alberta Haywood paid the man to murder O’Gorman. Here you’re in real trouble: first, nothing of this was mentioned in the letter. Second, Alberta Haywood had no reason for want­ing O’Gorman dead. Third, she has denied, very convincingly, that she knew any transient and that she gave him any money, or any of George Haywood’s clothes. Now, where are you?”

  Quinn shrugged. “Where you said. In real trouble.”

  “Well, I’m right behind you.”

  Lassiter went over to the window. The bars across it had been fashioned to look like fancy iron grillwork, but they were still bars and he didn’t like them. In moments of weariness and discouragement, he wondered whether the bars were there to keep his own self from escaping.

  He said, without turning, “Twenty-four people give up everything they possess for the sake of a twenty-fifth—their residence, their community life, their sheep and cattle—even, to a certain extent, their beliefs—because they can’t live in the outside world without accepting many things about it that they find sinful. So what made them do it? Only two reasons seem powerful enough for me to accept. Either a great deal of money was involved or the Master himself is the man we’re after. Take your choice.”

  “I choose the money.”

  “And where did it come from?”

  “Alberta Haywood’s embezzlements.”

  “For Pete’s sake.” Lassiter whirled around impatiently. “You were the one who convinced me she was telling the truth about not paying anyone to murder O’Gorman, not knowing the transient, not giving him George Haywood’s clothes—”

  “I still think it was the truth.”

  “You’re contradicting yourself.”

  “No,” Quinn said. “I don’t believe she gave a lot of money and George’s clothes to a transient. I believe she gave them to somebody else.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  He had become part of the forest.

  Even the birds were used to him by now. The mourning doves waddling around outside their sloppy nests or paired in swift whistling flights, the towhees foraging noisily with both feet in the dry leaves, the goshawks waiting in ambush to pounce on a passing quail, the chickadees clinging upside down on the pine branches, the phainopeplas, scraps of black silk basted to the gray netting of Spanish moss, the tanagers, quick flashes of yellow and black among the green leaves, none of them either challenged or acknowledged the presence of the bearded man. They ignored his attempts to lure them by imitating their calls and offering them food. They were not fooled by his coos and purrs and warbles, and there was still food enough in the forest: madrone berries and field mice, insects hiding beneath the eucalyptus bark, moths in the oaks at dusk, slugs in the underbrush, cocoons under the eaves of the Tower.

  The birds were, in fact, better fed than he. What cooking he did was hurried and at night, so the smoke of his fire wouldn’t be seen by rangers manning the lookout station. Even at best, the supplies at the Tower were meager and now they were also stale. He ate rice with weevils in it, he fought the cockroaches for the remains of the wheat and barley, he trapped bush bunnies and skinned them with a straight razor. What saved him was the vegetable garden. In spite of the weeds and the depredations of deer and rabbits and gophers, there were tomatoes and onions to be picked, and carrots and beets and potatoes to be dug up and cooked, or half cooked, depending on how long he felt it was safe to keep the fire going.

  The fawns, the only wild creatures willing to make friends with him, were, of necessity, his enemies. When they came to the vegetable garden, at dawn and at dusk, he threw stones to chase them away, feeling sick at heart when they fled.

  Sometimes he apologized to them and tried to explain: “I’m sorry. I like you, but you’re stealing my food and I need it. You see, someone is coming for me but I’m not sure how much longer I have to wait. When she comes, I’ll go away with her and the vegetables will all be yours. I have been through a great deal. You wouldn’t want me to starve now, just at the point where our plan is working out....”

  He still called it “our plan,” though it had been hers from the beginning. It had started with such innocence, a meeting on a street corner, an exchange of tentative smiles and good mornings: “I’m afraid it’s going to be another hot day.” “Yes ma’am, I’m afraid it is.”

  After that he ran into her unexpectedly at all sorts of places, a supermarket, the library, a parking lot, a coffee house, a movie, a laundromat. By the time he was beginning to sus­pect that these meetings were not entirely accidental, it no longer mattered because he was sure he was in love with her. Her quietness made him feel like talking, her gentleness made him bold, her timidity brave, her lack of criticism self-confident.

  Their private meetings were, necessarily, brief and in places avoided by other people, like the dry, dusty river bed. Here, without even touching each other, they voiced their love and despair until the two seemed inseparable, one word, love-despair. Their mutual suffering became a neurotic substitute for happiness until a point of no return was reached.

  “I can’t go on like this,” he told her. “All I can think of is chucking everything overboard and running away.”

  “Running away is for children, dearest.”

  “Then I’m childish. I want to take off and never see anyone again, not even you.”

  She knew the time had come when his misery was so great that he would accept any plan at all. “We must make long-term arrangements. We love each other, we have money, we can start a whole new life together in a different place.”

  “How, for God’s sake?”

  “First we must get rid of O’Gorman.”

  He thought she was joking. He laughed and said, “Oh, come now. Poor O’Gorman surely doesn’t deserve that.”

  “I’m serious. It’s the only way we can be sure we’ll always remain together, with no one trying to separate us or inte
rfere with us.”

  During the next month she worked out every detail down to the very clothes he would wear. She bought, and stocked with supplies, an old shack in the San Gabriel Mountains where he was to hide out while waiting for her. His nearest neighbors were members of an obscure religious cult. It was with the children that he first became acquainted, the oldest a girl about ten. She was fascinated by the sound of his type­writer, peering at him from behind trees and bushes as he sat on the back porch typing because there was nothing else to do.

  She was a timid little creature with odd flashes of boldness. “What’s that thing?”

  “A typewriter.”

  “It sounds like a drum. If it was mine I’d hit it harder and make more noise.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Karma.”

  “Don’t you have another name, too?”

  “No. Just Karma.”

  “Would you like to try the typewriter, Karma?”

  “Does it belong to the devil?”

  “No.”

  “All right.”

  He used Karma as an excuse for his first visit to the colony. As his loneliness grew more unbearable, there were other visits. Excuses became unnecessary. The Brothers and Sisters asked him no questions: they accepted it as perfectly natural that he, like themselves, should have turned his back on the world and sought refuge in the mountains. In turn, he ap­preciated their community life. There was always someone around, always some chore to be done which kept him from brooding, and their rigid rules gave him a sense of security.

  He had been in the mountains for over a month when the bad news came in a letter:

  Dearest, I have only a minute now to write, I’ve made a mistake and they’re onto me. I’ll be gone for a while. Please wait. This is not the end for us, it is just a postponement, dear one. We must not try and contact each other. Have faith in me as I have in you. I can endure anything knowing you’ll be waiting for me. I love you, I love you. . . .

  Before he burned it, he read the brief note a dozen times, whimpering like an abandoned child. Then he took the blade out of his safety razor and cut both his wrists.

  When he returned to consciousness he was lying on a cot in a strange room. Both his wrists were heavily bandaged and Sister Blessing was bending over him: “You are awake now, Brother?”

  He tried to speak and couldn’t, so he nodded.

  “The Lord spared you, Brother, because you are not yet prepared for the hereafter. You must become a True Be­liever.” Her hand on his forehead was cool, and her voice firm and gentle. “You must renounce the world and its evils. Your pulse is steady and you have no fever. Could you swallow a bit of soup? As I was saying, you can’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven without some preliminary spadework. You’d better start now, don’t you think?”

  He had neither the strength nor the desire to think. He renounced the world out of apathy and joined the colony because it was there and he had no other place and no other people. When the Brothers and Sisters moved north to their new quarters in the Tower, he dug up the money he had buried in an old suitcase and went along. By that time the colony had become his home, his family, and, to some extent, his religion. He reburied the suitcase and the long wait con­tinued.

  On a trip into San Felice with Brother Crown he had learned Alberta’s fate from a newspaper he found lying in a gutter. He sent her a religious pamphlet with certain words lightly underlined to let her know where he was living. He made it look like the kind of thing a crank might send to some­one in trouble. Whether it passed the prison censor, and whether she understood it if it had, he could only hope. Hope and fear alternated in him; they were twin heads on a single body, equally nourished.

  The years passed. He never spoke her name aloud to any­one. He made no further contact with her nor she with him. Then, on a summer morning, he was in the kitchen with Sister Blessing, and, still dazed with weariness, he heard her speak the ominous words: “You were talking in your sleep last night, Brother. Who’s Patrick O’Gorman?”

  He tried to avoid a reply by shrugging and shaking his head, but she was insistent.

  “None of that now, do you hear me? I want an answer.”

  “He was an old friend. I went to school with him.”

  Even though it was the truth she didn’t believe him. “Really? You didn’t sound as if he were an old friend. You were grind­ing your teeth and scowling.”

  She dropped the subject at that point, only to pick it up a few days later: “You were mumbling in your sleep again last night, Brother, all about O’Gorman and Chicote and some money. I hope your conscience isn’t bothering you?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “If it is, Brother, you’d better tell someone. A bad con­science is worse than a bad liver. I’ve seen plenty of both. Whatever you did in the outside world is of no importance here except to you, how it affects your spiritual health and peace of mind. When the devil gnaws your innards, cast him out, don’t give him sanctuary.”

  Throughout the days that followed he would turn to see her watching him, her eyes sharp and curious as a crow’s.

  The stranger Quinn came and went, returned and left again. Sister Blessing, released from her isolation, was pale and haggard.

  “You didn’t tell me O’Gorman was dead, Brother.”

  He shook his head.

  “Were you responsible, Brother?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was an accident?”

  “No.”

  “You meant it? Planned it?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at him with eyes no longer curious, only worried and sad. “Quinn said that O’Gorman left a wife and the poor woman is suffering from terrible uncertainty. Wrongs like this must be righted, Brother, for the salvation of your soul. You cannot bring a murdered man to life, but you can do something to help his widow. You must write a letter, Brother, confessing the truth. I’ll see to it that you’re not caught. The letter will be posted in Chicago and no one will ever suspect that you wrote it.”

  He took precautions anyway. He used his left hand to dis­guise his handwriting. He mixed fact and fantasy, and, in the mixing, revealed more of himself than he thought he was revealing. Composing the letter afforded him a peculiar satis­faction. It was as if he was finally laying O’Gorman to rest, inscribing on his tombstone a nasty little epitaph which he doubted a grieving widow would ever show to anyone.

  At his insistence. Sister Blessing read the letter, making little clucking noises of disapproval. “You needn’t have been so—well, frank.”

  “Why not?”

  “It seems vindictive to me, against her as well as him. That isn’t good, Brother. I fear for the salvation of your soul. You’ve not cast out the devil if you still harbor hatred for your victim. . . .”

  Every morning when he woke up in the hayloft his first thought was that this might be the day; the day of liberation, of reward, of security and a new life. But the days came and went and they were all the same, and when each one was over he put another mark on the wall of the barn. The days were as alike as the marks. There weren’t even any alarms. The last of the sheriff’s men had departed a month ago, and even if they came back they would find no signs of him in the Tower or the community kitchen. He avoided both these places and stuck to the barn; hour by hour he concealed all traces of his presence. Before he left the hayloft in the morn­ing he fluffed up the hay with a pitchfork to remove the imprint of his body. He buried his spoor and garbage, and at night, after putting out his small fire, he covered the ashes with pine needles and oak leaves. What had started out as a game of outwitting his enemies had become a ritual of self-effacement.

  Only rarely did he think of leaving the Tower and going to a city to hide. The idea of being alone in a city terrified him. Besides, more than half th
e money was gone now, he had to save the rest of it for the future. He often worried about ex­plaining the missing money to her when she came. He planned his approach: “Listen, dearest, I had to do what I did. If I’d run away from the Tower by myself, the authorities would have known immediately that I and I alone was the guilty one. As it is, by bribing the Master to disperse the colony, I confused the issue. They probably still haven’t narrowed the search down. . . . Oh, the Master was bribable, all right, be­cause he was desperate. He saw the beginning of the end for the colony and he knew the only way to save it was for the members to go out in the world to seek new converts, and then eventually return here. And the only way this could be accomplished was with the money, your money. That’s why I’ve stayed here at the Tower, to save the rest of it.”

  He remembered the night she had first told him about the money and his feelings of utter incredulity and shock and pity.

  “You’ve been stealing?”

  “Yes.”

  “In the name of God, what for?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t spend it, not much, anyway. I just—well, I want it. I just want it.”

  “Listen to me. You’ve got to put it back, make restitution.”

  “I won’t do that.”

  “But you’ll go to prison.”

  “They haven’t caught me yet.”

  “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “Yes, I do. I stole some money, a lot of money.”

  “You must put it back, Alberta. I couldn’t go on living without you.”

  “You won’t have to. I’ve got a plan.”

  Her plan seemed crazy to him at first, but eventually he came to accept it because he had no better one to offer her; in fact, he had no plan at all, he was not used to doing his own thinking.

  He insisted on one promise from her, that after O’Gorman was out of the picture, she would take no more chances at the bank. She would stop falsifying the books and wait for the time when it would be safe for her to leave Chicote without anyone connecting her with O’Gorman’s disappearance. She had broken the promise and made the mistake that sent her to prison. It wasn’t like Alberta to make mistakes. Had she been thinking too much of him and of their future together? Or had she acted out of an unconscious desire to be caught and pun­ished not only for her embezzlements but for her relationship with him? Though she had never voiced her feelings of sexual guilt, he was aware that they were strong in her, and aware, too, that she had known no other man.