The Rim of Morning

by William Sloane

  Mrs. Marcy’s name, of course. I heard Anne give a gasp as she heard it. We both knew then who was on the other side of that door and the knowledge was appalling. It could only be her husband. And that meant—

  The lamp in the kitchen was still burning and everything was completely ordinary. I blew out my candle and put it on the table as I went across the room. The bolt stuck in the door and I had to tug to get it open. All the while his knuckles were rapping against the panels. “Just a second,” I said urgently, and then the bar slid back and I turned the door handle.

  He was standing on the top step, a tall, slightly stooped farmer with a dark face and sullen mouth. In the air that blew past him into the room there was the ammoniacal pungency of the cow stable. He stared at me with momentary surprise and then pushed past me into the room. “Where’s Elora?” he said harshly.

  Anne was looking at him with recognition and a white face. “Why, Mr. Marcy,” she told him in a thin voice, “did she come back here for something? She went home hours ago.”

  “Ain’t been home yet,” he replied, and stared round the room with anger and bewilderment. “Not since mornin’.” He pointed to the lamp. “Her light’s still goin’, too.”

  “Her light?” I asked in confusion.

  “Yeah. You can see that from our house. When it goes out I know she’s started back. But it’s past ten now. I come over to see what was keepin’ her.”

  “Listen,” I told him. “Your wife went home early. She had a minor accident. Nothing serious. But Mrs. Walters decided she oughtn’t to work any more and sent her home in the afternoon. She even walked part way with her. She must be home.”

  “She ain’t.”

  We stood there for a minute staring at him. I know that alarm was going through my mind siren-loud and sudden. Something was terribly wrong. “Sit down a minute,” I said. “We’ll tell you the whole thing.”

  He took a chair grudgingly. There was a truculence about him that made you dislike the man on sight, and yet he was Mrs. Marcy’s husband and entitled to know what had happened. I gave it to him in as few words as I could.

  He listened without interruption, though the rigidity of his big body in the chair suggested that he neither believed what I said nor cared much about it, one way or the other. He was not going to be easy to deal with. When I mentioned Dr. Rambouillet’s name he snorted, but that was the only sound he made until I finished. “So,” I concluded, “if she hasn’t reached your house, we’d better go look along the road.” Under the heavy impact of his silence I began to feel resentful and, when he made no move to get up, I added sharply, “If she’s had a concussion, she may be lying unconscious. We’ve got to find her at once.”

  “She ain’t on the road,” he said heavily. “I come that way.

  “Perhaps she wandered off it or you missed her.”

  He jerked a splayed thumb toward the lamp. “How come the light?”

  We explained that Mrs. Walters had left it there in case Mr. Blair needed anything in the night. It sounded unlikely enough in my own ears as I told it, but he gave no indication of whether he accepted it or not. After a minute he grunted and got to his feet. “If anything’s happened to her,” he said, “you folks’ll hev to answer fer it.” In two strides he had picked up the lantern and was out the door.

  Anne produced a flashlight from the hall and slipped it into my hand. We followed him without exchanging a word. Her face was still white and she was biting her lip. Outside, the night was raw and dark and a breeze had sprung up heavy with the smell of the sea. Anne and I let Seth Marcy go ahead of us and followed without exchanging a word. There was nothing I cared to say that I wanted him to overhear. So we went down the road in a triangle, Seth in front with his lantern, and the two of us, a few feet apart, with the flash-light trailing him. After some yards I went over to the side of the road and I confess that I was extremely frightened. If Mrs. Walters’ story was a true one, I knew what we should find there, but if it wasn’t . . . well, that didn’t bear thinking about. The story she had told had to be true.

  The prints were there, all right, and my heart gave a powerful thump of relief when I saw them. It was all right, then, and Mrs. Walters had not been lying. Though their edges had been softened by the tail end of the rain, which had fallen after they were made, the footsteps were distinct enough, punched heavily into the mud.

  “Look!” I called, and Seth Marcy stopped and came back to me with his lantern.

  “There are yours,” I pointed out, “fresh and sharp. These others are blurred a bit but you can see them all right.”

  He stared down at them, his face heavy and uncompromising, but there was no misreading that track in the mud. Two sets of women’s footmarks, with water shining in them blackly where the heels had sunk deep, headed in the direction we had been going. And a single set coming back toward the house. “You see,” I said, “here’s the two of them going toward your house, Mr. Marcy. And this other single set is Mrs. Walters coming back.”

  He nodded heavily. “Ayuh.” I was rather ashamed of myself over the triumph that I was feeling. After all, these prints told us nothing about where Mrs. Marcy was now and it was selfish to be as relieved as I was. But we in the Talcott house were at least substantiated in our story. There had been no criminal negligence on our part.

  Seth Marcy stood staring at the footprints for a full minute, and then grunted and turned on down the road, holding his lantern low and walking carefully to one side of the impressions. Every few steps he paused and re-examined the tracks. Thus we proceeded down the road, anxiously and wordlessly, for perhaps a quarter of a mile. Seth stopped then, so long that Anne and I had time to catch up with him. When we arrived, we saw what it was that had halted him.

  There were a cluster of prints in the mud beside us, a number made by each woman. I could easily distinguish between Mrs. Walters’ thinner, higher heels, and the wide, run-over ones of Mrs. Marcy, although without that difference it might not have been too easy. The shoes were within a half size of each other. From one cluster, a line ran back toward the house we had left. “This must be where they separated,” I said.

  “There’s Mrs. Walters, going back to the house.”

  The farmer grunted. “Looks like it. Here’s Elora, goin’ on.” He picked up the lantern and began to walk forward more slowly. The two of us stayed right behind him, now.

  “The mud must have been awful,” Anne remarked. “Look how deep she sunk in.”

  It was true that the prints were deep, but I remembered the greasy gruel of mud on the road that afternoon and was not surprised. We kept on. Mrs. Marcy’s steps had evidently been steady enough at first; they were spaced evenly and in a straight line. But after a couple of hundred yards they began to waver and straggle uncertainly from side to side of the path. The picture was all too easy to reconstruct: these footprints had been made by a woman who was staggering. For a few yards they would run straight again, and then angle off in confused sorties, sometimes toward the center of the road and again toward the field grass along its edge. In the glow of the lantern Seth Marcy’s face was set and the block of his jaw muscles stood out under the skin of his cheeks. He followed each of those pitiful divergencies in his wife’s track patiently and without a word, but little by little his stride began to lengthen.

  Abruptly he came to a second halt and when we reached him the reason was plain. In the mud was a rounded hollow, deeper at the end toward our line of direction, and beyond it the smudged outline of a hand which had slid through the mud. Either Mrs. Marcy had slipped or she had half fallen from weakness, catching herself on one knee and one outflung hand. None of us was an expert trail reader, but the meaning of those marks in the mud was primer plain. I thought of the two women, their backs toward each other, going their separate ways, and Mrs. Marcy faint and dizzy with weakness. Why hadn’t she called out? Maybe Mrs. Walters had gone too far to hear her. It was a picture that I didn’t want to reconstruct in my mind.

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p; We pressed on more rapidly. There were other places where she had slipped and fallen—at one of them we could make out the mark of the curved umbrella handle and I told Seth Marcy what it was. He did not seem to hear me.

  It was just after that when the anxiety in my mind turned to a sick anticipation of tragedy. The lights of the Marcy house were already in sight, ahead, and well to our right. The road in to it cannot have been more than a few rods beyond where we stopped, which was at the entrance to a rough sort of track which cut sharply off across the fields. It was nothing more than a haying road for farm wagons and machinery, but it was, even in the glow of one lantern, a perceptible turnoff, and it led to the right, just as the true entrance to the Marcy place did farther on. And the prints of Mrs. Marcy’s shoes turned down that miserable byway.

  When he saw that they did indeed leave the road, Seth Marcy gave a groan like a man in unbearable pain and began to run heavily down the false track into which, by some horrible error, his wife had turned. Anne and I pounded along after him and, as we ran, some change in the sky, or perhaps the sudden absence of tree masses against the night dark told us what must be in his mind. For this rough trace of a road ran straight toward the river.

  We found the umbrella, its ribs broken and its handle coated with mud, caught against a scrub alder at the point where the field road turned again, to the left, and ran along between the edge of the field and the river. But it was a turn that Mrs. Marcy had never made. We stood for a long time beside the last print of her shoes, staring down at the crumbled lip of sod and below it, perhaps ten feet, the strong black swirl of the Kennebec where it cut in against the shore.

  Seth Marcy stood there beside us like a man in a dream, looking down at the edge of the running water with dry, hot eyes. After a minute his lips moved. “God damn her,” he said, “may her soul burn in hell for this.”

  Neither Anne nor I thought for an instant that he meant his wife.

  15.

  FROM THAT moment on, the night became a confusion and a madness of futile activities. I remember scrambling down that bank for one last, hopeless, stupid inspection of its slope, with Anne saying over and over, “Dick! Look out! Come back! . . .” and Seth Marcy running heavily up and down the edge of the bluff like a dog that has lost the scent of his quarry. There was no beach at the foot of that bluff, nothing but the deep swirl of the water against the same ledge of rock that lower down provided Julian’s house with so firm a bulwark against the winter ice and spring floods. There wasn’t even a tree against which she could have caught. For a minute I debated shedding my clothes and swimming down along the bank with the currents of the ebbing tide and the river boiling along together. But the enterprise, though it did look possible, was clearly both dangerous and foolish. Nothing would be gained by it.

  When I scrambled up the bank, Seth Marcy was already plunging across the field toward his house. “He’s going to telephone,” Anne said, “and then go into town for boats.”

  “They won’t find her,” I said. “But I suppose I ought to go with him.”

  “No,” she replied. “He said for us to keep out of it, that we’d done enough harm already. Oh, Dick!” Her voice broke and when I found her in the dark and put my arm round her shoulders, I felt that she was shaking. “It’s so horrible!” she said in a small, broken voice. “She was sweet, Dick, and she never had any fun and now she’s gone.”

  “Easy all,” I told her. “Don’t let go. Come on, now, we’ve got to get back to the house.”

  All the way home her hand was cold and tight inside mine and once I thought how glad I was to be there with her. But, most of the time my imagination was racing ahead, trying to foresee what this pitiful business was going to lead to in the next few days, and what I could do to protect Anne and Julian. And the more I considered it, the more it seemed to me that we were in for a very unpleasant time indeed.

  Mrs. Walters was in the kitchen when we got back, tired, muddy, cold, and at least on my part, half stupefied with loss of sleep. I told her the story dully, not even bothering to watch her while I spoke. She said little, exclaimed with horror when I came to the part about the river bank, and finally declared in a low voice, “It’s my fault, Professor Sayles. I accept the entire responsibility for what seems to have happened. I never, never would have let her start home unless I’d felt certain she was all right.”

  “I believe you,” I said, “but I only hope to God the rest of them do. Particularly Seth Marcy.”

  She made no reply to that but poured out two cups of coffee, and Anne and I sat down to drink it. I discovered that my teeth were chattering and, when I picked up the cup, my hand trembled so that I hoped Anne wouldn’t notice it. She kept looking at me most of the time and the sorrow and regret in her eyes made a lump come into my throat. “Elora was a darling,” she said once. I nodded. There wasn’t anything I could think of that would help.

  When we finished the coffee, Anne and I went into the living room. Mrs. Walters said that she would make more of the stuff and that we could do what we wanted. “They’ll be coming here later, of course,” she added. “There’s not much use in going back to bed.” The living room was cold and, when we lighted the lamp, the shadows came back into the corners again. Through the south windows we could see that the black sweep of the river was sprinkled with distant lights, low against the water. I knew they were lanterns and flashlights in the bows of boats. They moved back and forth across the water, crawling from shore to shore with a grim persistence.

  Anne saw them too. “They’re looking now. I suppose there isn’t a chance . . .”

  “I shouldn’t think so.”

  “She’d never be able to swim, of course . . . I hope it was quick for her.”

  “You mustn’t think about it.”

  She lifted a white face to me. “I still can’t quite believe it, Dick. How could she have taken that wrong turn? This is almost like her own back yard, this land around here.”

  I had been thinking about that and, even though it didn’t wholly satisfy me, I said, “She must have had a bad concussion. They don’t always show up right away.”

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

  “Now listen,” I told her, “we’ve got to stop thinking about what’s already happened and get ready for what’s coming.”

  “Coming?”

  “Yes. There’ll be people here after a while and they’re going to ask us a lot of questions. Even an accidental death . . .” That word was heavy in the air between us.

  She nodded and the firelight was red gold in her hair. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Furthermore, they’ll all blame us for what’s happened. Seth Marcy isn’t going to be easy to deal with, though I guess most of what he feels will be directed against Mrs. Walters.”

  She looked at me and her lips were thin and pale across her face. “It was her fault, Dick . . . if only we’d stopped at Marcy’s on the way to town.”

  The same regret had been tormenting me. Being wise after the event is one of the things I do best and it occurred to me that if we— or even one of us—had gone over to the Marcy house after supper to ask about Elora it would have looked better. As it was, it seemed clear we had acted in a way that would look stupid and callous to any outsider. But there was nothing for it but to face the music, try to behave as decently and calmly as we could, and make any recompense we could find to Seth Marcy.

  “Sure it was her fault, partly,” I agreed. “But I’m to blame somewhat, too. We should have done it differently.” I decided to talk it over with her. “I’ve been wondering if we ought to get a lawyer,” I began, “but the objection to that is people will think we are protecting ourselves because we feel guilty.”

  She shivered. “The people here . . .” Her voice was low. “They’re going to hate us anyway.”

  I began to pace back and forth across the room and, even in the absorption of what I was thinking, I noticed how my shadow swelled and shrank against the far w
all of the room. “The only thing is to tell the truth and take the consequences.” The prospect was a bitter one. “We’ll have to hope they believe us.”

  Anne looked puzzled and it seemed to me that her face was paler than before. “What else can they think?” Her voice was low and there was a tremble in it.

  “Nothing, of course,” I said, damning myself for a fool. “We may have been stupid, but that’s the worst anybody could say.”

  “What’s the worst anybody can say?” Mrs. Walters had come into the room with the noiseless step that was one of the things about her I was beginning to hate.

  “Anne and I were just talking about how all this was going to sound in Barsham Harbor,” I said. “We both think they’ll hate us.”

  She sat down on the sofa and looked at the pair of us in turn. “And what if they do?”

  Anne stared back at her. “I should think you’d be a little worried about it,” she said and her voice was bitter now, instead of afraid. “If you’d been listening to Seth Marcy and what he was saying, you wouldn’t be so calm about it. He hates us. All of us. And you most especially.” Her tone was clear and hard; it rang in the room.

  Mrs. Walters folded her hands. “Don’t shout at me,” she said. “I want Julian to get all the rest he can.” She studied the tips of her fingers and then flexed them slowly in a movement so feline and relaxed that it made me want to look away. “Seth Marcy is a lout. I know his kind. You leave Seth Marcy to me; if he tries to make any trouble I’ll take care of it—and him.”

  Those words of hers may read like sheer bombast, but they did not sound so in that shadowy room. I was shocked by the cold determination in her voice, the flat indifference to a tragedy which had happened only hours before. “You know,” I said as quietly as I could, “there’s not a chance that Mrs. Marcy is still alive?”

  She nodded without speaking.

  “Well, we’re all responsible for that simple, elemental, and horrible fact, Mrs. Walters. You more than the rest of us.”