The Ashes of an Oak

by Bradbury, Chris

  There was nothing to be seen, so he wandered back up and climbed back through the window. Could someone have come in? Absolutely, though that was not the real question. The question was why they came in. Nothing was stolen. Mrs Dybek had nothing to steal; maybe the TV, the radio, her purse, but there were better targets a hundred feet down. This place was slim pickings. So what they were left with was some sort of pervert who liked to watch old ladies sleep? Anything was possible. He’d arrested a guy once for running a brothel. It wasn’t so much that he was running a brothel as the fact that the whores were sheep and goats and pigs. All they could charge him with was animal cruelty.

  The things people did were never a surprise.

  All this was assuming that Mrs Dybek hadn’t carried forward a nightmare or that she wasn’t creating a story for the attention.

  On the other hand, the fact that she took a flight over a rail four floors up did seem awfully coincidental.

  ‘Hey, Frank.’

  A thin-faced man, five inches taller than Frank, with ten years to spare on him, came out of the bedroom. ‘Milt?’ The Chief Medical Examiner held out his hand. Frank shook it warmly. ‘Who let you out of the cage?’

  ‘Emmet contacted me. Asked me to take it. Said this one mattered.’

  ‘Yeah. It does. I appreciate that.’

  ‘Doesn’t do any harm to get into the field once in a while either.’

  ‘I guess not,’ said Frank. ‘Did you find anything?’

  Milt shook his head. ‘Not at first glance, but we’ve scraped the place. Give us a couple of days, see what we can come up with. You knew her?’

  ‘Kind of. She came to the precinct house a few times a week.’

  ‘Lonely?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Suicidal?’

  Frank shook his head emphatically. ‘Not in a million years.’

  ‘Family?’

  Frank hesitated and quickly thought through all the conversations they’d had. ‘Her husband died fifteen years ago. Heart attack. They’d had a child, but it had died young. Polio or something. I’m not sure.’

  Milt picked up his bag and rearranged things so that he could close it. ‘The ashes of an oak in the chimney,’ he muttered.

  Frank turned from gazing absent-mindedly out of the window. ‘Say what?’

  ‘Nothing. Just a poem I remember from school.’ Milt snapped his bag shut. ‘Okay. I’m done here. Feel free to look around.’ Frank nodded his thanks. ‘It’s not often we get to like these people, is it? All we ever see is the worst of it. I’m sorry for the old girl, Frank.’

  Frank wandered into the kitchen ‘Okay, Milt,’ he called back. ‘Thanks. You have a good day.’

  ‘You too.’

  As Milt put a foot out the door Frank called out. ‘Can you smell anything?’

  Milt sniffed. ‘Not any more. You talking about anything in particular?’

  Frank put his head around the door and leaned against the jamb. ‘When I walked in, I could smell cabbage and lavender. I’m willing to bet she has several bottles of lavender spray in her bedroom.’

  ‘Yes, she has.’

  ‘So what’s that other smell? I can get something underneath it but can’t quite place it, you know?’

  Milt sniffed again, more deeply. ‘It’s all sort of mingled together now, Frank. Can’t say I noticed as I came in. I didn’t even notice the lavender.’

  Frank frowned. ‘Okay.’ He went back into the kitchen. ‘I’ll see you.’

  The kitchen, like the living room, was what Frank expected. Some cupboards, a sink, a fridge, small table. It was tidy though. The living room hadn’t had a speck of dust in it, even the back of the TV. The kitchen was the same. She was a very ordered lady.

  Frank went through the cupboards. There was very little. It looked like she shopped daily for food. Something to do, he supposed. Something to fill the time. If you have no food, you’re forced to go out and get some air.

  Crockery-wise, she had two of everything, some of them chipped. One for her and one in case a she had a visitor.

  Steve came in. ‘Anything, Frank?’

  ‘No. You?’

  ‘Not really,’ sighed Steve. ‘People come and go as they please. There’s no call system, no security. I’ve had three different descriptions of postal workers who did the same delivery. According to the witnesses, he was black going on white and a heavy set midget of five feet eleven. One of them even said that he was a she.’

  Frank looked in the final cupboard. It was empty.

  ‘We’re lucky, you and me,’ he said. ‘I have Mary, you have Val. You ever wonder how far away we are from becoming a Dybek?’ He leaned against the wall and scanned the kitchen. ‘It’s no wonder she came to see us all the time.’

  ‘You start thinking like that, Frank, you’re on the way out.’

  ‘Maybe I am.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘I’m thinking of retiring. That’s what I was talking to Emmet about.’

  Steve went to the cupboards and started going through them. He reached the crockery cupboard and took out a cup. He ran a finger around the inside and sniffed at it. ‘I wouldn’t blame you if you did, Frank. I’d miss you like a limb, but I wouldn’t blame you.’

  ‘What’s with the cup?’ asked Frank.

  Steve handed it to him. ‘Take a look at it.’ He took out the crockery and laid it on the side in the same way that it had been laid out in the cupboard, on top of the saucers that had been at the back.

  ‘Okay,’ said Frank. ‘I’ve looked at it. I can confirm its cupness. It is a cup.’

  Steve took a step back and pointed at the crockery. ‘Okay, look at all these, from back to front.’ He took the cup from Frank and put it in the same place that it would have been in the cupboard. ‘How many times have we been into an apartment or a house where someone lives on their own?’

  Frank shrugged. ‘Hundreds. Thousands probably.’

  ‘And what we see is they nearly always use the same plate, the same cup, the same saucer, the same knife and fork. They use them, wash them, and leave them out for next time. I do the same when Val goes to her mother’s. It’s easier.’ He picked a plate from the back of the pile. It had a layer of dust and dirt. ‘This is dirty. She didn’t use it. She didn’t have guests that used it. Same with the cup. They just sit there and catch the dirt. Someone comes round, you sluice it out under the tap and it’s usable. The ones at the front are hers, because they are clean. She used…’ He began to pick pieces up. ‘…this cup, this saucer, and…’

  ‘And?’

  Steve pointed at the sink. ‘And that knife, that spoon.’ He paused and smiled. ‘And the plate. The plate is hers. Why is there another one next to the empty glass?’

  Frank’s jaw fell. He walked to the sink. ‘Christ!’ he said. ‘So who used the other plate?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘You couldn’t have just said that in the first place?’

  ‘Hey, you didn’t even notice it. Call yourself a fucking detective?’

  Frank waved a dismissive hand. ‘That means nothing. She probably dragged that poor deformed mailman in here, she was so lonely. Come on, Steve...’

  Steve held up a hand. ‘Hold on, Frank. Granted, it ain’t science but, she had a guest, welcome or unwelcome, and she didn’t have time to wash up and put the spare plate back in its place. And she would’ve done. You know it. You’ve seen how tidy she kept this place.’

  Frank thought about how clean the back of the TV had been, how clean the windows were. The carpet may have been worn, but it too was spotless. Mrs Dybek was a lady of habit. He drummed his fingers against the sink. ‘See if Milt’s still in the building would you? Get him to take the plate and glass away. He might find something on them.’

  Steve walked away at a pace to catch Milt.

  ‘Shit!’ said Frank.

  He’d just made a fool of himself. A while ago he’d have seen that but, there he was, ready to walk out and close the door,
until Steve turned up. Maybe it was time to go.

  He walked back into the living room.

  The man in the sharp, dark grey suit stared through the window at him.

  Frank jumped back and lost his balance and fell back over the arm of the chair. ‘Holy shit!’

  He picked himself up, but by the time he was back on his feet, the man had gone. He leapt to the window and looked out. There was no one. He pulled out his gun, bent through the gap, stepped onto the platform and took off down the steps two at a time. ‘Hold it!’ he shouted. ‘Police officer!’ – like that ever stopped anybody from running, he thought.

  He reached the lowest level and stopped. There was no one. Not a sound. No footsteps, no heavy breathing, no one in the alley.

  He put the gun away and leaned against the railing. His breath stuttered from him as if he’d just run a marathon. He bent double and spat.

  ‘What the hell?’ he said. ‘What the hell?’

  Chapter 4

  Frank turned the key, stepped into his house and shut out the world. He leaned against the door, listened to the silence and endured it, forced his ears and his mind to accept that this was in fact a part of the norm.

  He dropped his keys into an ashtray on a hallway table, caught himself in a mirror, growled and went into the living room.

  ‘Hey,’ he said.

  Mary pulled her eyes away from her book and smiled. ‘Hey to you too.’

  ‘What are you reading?’ Mary held the book up for Frank to see. ‘Babbit? Does that say Babbit?’ He read the rest of the cover. ‘Sinclair Lewis. Which one is his first name?’

  He went over to a cabinet and poured himself a whisky. He downed half of it instantly and topped it up.

  ‘How was your day?’ asked Mary.

  ‘Tell me about yours first.’

  ‘That doesn’t bode well.’

  ‘I need sunshine, not rain.’ Frank sat down in a chair, kicked off his shoes and sighed.

  Mary turned the corner of the page down and closed the book. ‘I taught some kids English. Some of them liked it, many didn’t. One of them peed in the bin. I don’t know why he did that and neither does he. He just thought it would be funny at the time.’

  ‘I can sort of see that,’ said Frank. Mary narrowed her eyes. ‘It’s a boy thing, lady. You wouldn’t understand. You girls have such a narrow vision.’

  ‘I hope you feel the same when you arrest him for peeing in public when he’s twenty.’

  ‘Anything on the promotion?’

  Mary shook her head. ‘No. Not yet.’ She got up, took his empty glass away and refilled it. ‘Your turn to spill the beans, mister.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Hey. What are the rules of this house? You come in from work, get it out of your system and that way we don’t let it suck the goodness from us like some psychic tapeworm.’

  She went back to her chair and sat down with her feet curled beneath her. She was five years his junior and those five years showed. She hadn’t managed to get that patina of pale weariness and inertia that he saw in himself; the mask of the city that defined him as much as his soul. Her smile still lit her up and when she put her long blond hair into a pony tail, as she had now, she could have been ten years younger. She had a good figure compared to most women her age and still managed to see the positive in most things.

  ‘I’m thinking of retiring,’ said Frank.

  The reply came without hesitation. ‘Good.’

  Frank turned to her. His blue eyes examined her every twitch for lies. ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. You’ve given that place your all for thirty years. It’s time you got something back.’

  ‘Yeah. You’re right.’

  Mary waited. She knew Frank better than she knew herself. There was more to come. She could tell by the way his head was inclined, the way he watched the reflection of the lights break up in his crystal glass and turn the whisky that smoky gold, the way the corner of his mouth twitched as if he was trying to form the words. In a moment, he would open his mouth to speak, then change his mind and close his lips like a trap catching the words before they escaped. Then he would say what he wanted, because once those words had taken that crazy ride from his brain to his mouth, she knew he couldn’t stand the feel of them dancing on his tongue, just itching to get out.

  ‘You remember Mrs Dybek?’

  ‘No. Remind me.’

  ‘She used to come into the precinct three or four times a week with all these tales…’

  Mary remembered Mrs Dybek, the short, round Polish lady who lived alone in an apartment since her husband died fifteen years ago, who came in with stories of aliens and ghosts and complaints that the garbage men sang too loudly on pick up day. She let Frank tell her again because he needed to. It was all a part of the process.

  ‘…and she died today.’

  Frank took a drink and lit a cigarette.

  ‘What happened?’ asked Mary.

  ‘She took a dive from the fourth floor. Came to an abrupt halt on the first.’

  ‘Suicide?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It doesn’t figure that way.’

  ‘Someone murdered her?’

  Frank pursed his lips. ‘I think so, yes.’

  ‘Poor old dear.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. There’s this lady, does no harm to anyone but come out with the odd bit of cuckoo and now she’s dead. It’s not right.’

  ‘What makes her different from all the others, Frank?’

  Frank shot her an angry glance. What the hell kind of question was that? ‘You mean, what made her different from the dead junkies and whores and dealers and thieves and the rapists and the robbers and all the other shit we scrape off the sidewalk?’

  Mary’s expression didn’t change. ‘Yeah. Them and the thousands of other Mrs Dybeks that you’ve known. They’re all innocent at some time, Frank. Every one of them. The guy who held up the pharmacy the other week, for example. He wasn’t born with a gun in his hand, same way Mrs Dybek wasn’t born to fall from her landing.’ She went over and sat on his lap and looked into his eyes. ‘So what makes her different, Frank?’

  Frank rubbed a hand across tired eyes. She always did this, she always drowned him in whisky then broke him down. She was the queen of marital interrogation.

  ‘The difference is me,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s like I woke up a different person this morning. I’m smelling things I never smelled before and noticing things I never saw. Faces, wounds, people.’ He finished his drink and put the glass down. ‘You know, Steve picked up on something today that even two weeks ago I would’ve seen. I notice all these other things and I miss that.’

  Mary put her head on his shoulder and wrapped an arm around him. ‘Well, maybe there’s a part of you that’s saying you want to retire. Maybe this is your subconscious talking, you know? Freud says that we’re like icebergs and that all this hidden stuff, our deep, true feelings, hides under the water and we only acknowledge a tiny part of ourselves. It’s like we drown the bits that hurt us. But they have to come out somehow, Frank. They have to.’

  Frank rubbed a hand over her hair and kissed her forehead. ‘Geez, teacher, how comes you're so clever and I’m so dumb?’ he mocked gently.

  ‘Why, that’s why I’s a teacher and you’s just a dummy cop. Cause I’s so smart.’

  They laughed. The crisis, for the moment, was over.

  ‘You think it’s a good idea, then? This retirement thing?’ asked Frank.

  ‘If you can handle it, sure.’

  ‘I thought maybe we could move upstate. Some quiet town with a lake for fishing and woods for walking…’

  ‘And a school where you go out into the yard and ring a brass bell to call the children in to class and where you can tell them a story that they think might just be true because they haven’t seen it all already.’

  ‘What do you say?’

  ‘I say let’s do it. You want some food?’

  Frank put h
is head back and closed his eyes. ‘No, he said. ‘Let’s just stay like this forever.’

  She kissed his cheek. ‘I’d love to Frank, but you’re a bony old bastard and I’m hungry.’

  ‘Okay.’ As Mary got up, Frank held her wrist. ‘Say, you’re a teacher. You know anything about a poem which goes something like…’ He closed his eyes again as he recalled the words. ‘”The ashes of an oak in the chimney…”, stuff like that?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s by a fella called John Donne. English guy. Why?’

  ‘Oh, Milt was reciting it this afternoon while were looking round the Dybek place.’

  Mary sat down on the arm of the chair. ‘”It comes equally to us all, and makes us all equal when it comes. The ashes of an oak in the chimney are no epitaph of that oak, to tell me how high or large that was”,’ she recited.

  Frank was impressed. ‘Wow. Teacher! You know some things. What does it mean?’

  ‘It means that when death comes, we are all the same. It means that the residue of us, that which we leave behind, doesn’t tell the whole tale.’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘Will that do you?’

  ‘I guess so. Kind of sad, don’t you think?’

  Mary smiled thinly. ‘Spaghetti or potatoes?’

  Frank looked at the clock. The thick luminous hands smiled at him. Ten to two.

  He’d slept; the whisky had seen to that.

  Then at one on the dot, his eyes had snapped open.

  Next to him, Mary snored lightly.

  Frank slipped out of bed, grabbed his smokes and went to the window. Mary turned over. Her breaths became deep and long, weighted by the pleasure of unconsciousness.

  Outside, people were walking and talking loudly, happily. Cars went smoothly by. The heat from their engines melded with the warm night air and sent a ripple before them as if they were melting the world. Their tyres crackled upon the gritty road like popping corn. It seemed as if they had no passengers. They were just empty automatons grazing his lifeline, to disappear among the street lamps and porch lights into the oppressive distance of a glimmering summer night. At the end of their journey, they would reveal their secrets and eject the hearts that beat within them, to either carry out their evil deeds or reach a dull conclusion to their aimless day. Each car held a secret. Each journey held a story. Each story had an end. He hoped with all his heart that he wouldn’t be there at journey’s end. It never ended well when he became involved.