The Baxter Letters

by Dolores Hitchens

  I hate that bed, she thought. I won’t ever sleep in it again. She went into the bathroom, shut the door, and began to bathe her face.

  Tom rapped softly. “Jeff.”

  “Go away. Please just go away.”

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “It doesn’t matter." She was looking at her own face in the mirror, this middle-of-the-night face marked with tears, and with other things. With a haggard tiredness that made her seem old, for one. The split seams, the frayed underwear and the runover heels had crept into her eyes.

  She looked down at herself. I never used to go around like this, she thought. We never were rich, but we were always clean and mended.

  “I was so damned worried about you,” Tom was pleading through the door. “I couldn’t imagine what had taken you out like that, no word to explain, nothing at all. I was scared, and then when I saw you I … I just blew up.”

  It could be true.

  Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

  She looked at that tired, heavy-lidded face in the mirror and thought: this is the way you look when you fight with yourself all the time. She opened the door, not meeting Tom’s eyes, went to the bedroom and got the old robe and wrapped herself in it.

  “Come to bed, Baby. Don’t act like this.”

  “I’m not coming to bed.” She looked at him briefly. He looked hot and excited, and exasperated. “If you were so worried about me, why did you go out? Why weren’t you waiting for me at home?”

  His mouth twitched, and he frowned. “You’re not acting like the girl I know.”

  “I’m more like something squawking from a tree?” And then from his blankness she knew that he didn’t even remember having said it, and she added, “I’ll finish what’s left of the night on the couch.”

  “I can’t believe it.” He turned away.

  Tears came into her eyes again; she wanted to run after Tom, to beg his forgiveness. This was their first real quarrel. It mustn’t go on, it mustn’t become any more serious. If she rushed into his arms now, whispering her love, asking his pardon, it would end in an instant.

  She dried the tears on a towel in the bathroom. It was a frayed towel and needed laundering. She dropped it into the carton that served as a hamper. Tom is my husband. I want all of the best things for him: success, happiness, peace of mind. I won’t be one of these wives who take love away to punish their man. She went out into the narrow hall. There was a light at the end, in the bedroom, Tom’s shadow moving there on the wall.

  She turned her back to it and went into the living room. The light still burned in the kitchen. She went to the couch, sat down, then lifted her feet and curled herself on the velvet cushions. She didn’t expect to sleep; there was too much to think about—Tom’s anger and disappointment in her, the story Mrs. Appleton had told, what Mr. Dunavan must be thinking at her erratic behavior. But in the midst of anxiety she felt the tug of drowsiness, and when she woke the gray light of dawn had filled the kitchen, drowning the yellow glow of the electric bulb.

  She lifted her head. There was no sound from the other end of the apartment. Silently she stole back there, peeped in. Tom was spread face-down across the middle of the bed, the bedclothes knotted across his hips. His sleeping face seemed vaguely unhappy. She waited, willing him to wake and see her there. If I crept into bed with him now, she told herself, we’d make love and everything that happened yesterday would be forgotten.

  Or would it?

  Didn’t a day leave its stamp upon your life like a footprint in earth?

  She put her hand on the bed, almost touching Tom’s, but then she drew back, and in turning, she noticed Bax’s box on the dresser with the heaped stuff in it, and remembered that today she was supposed to take it all to Mr. Dunavan. Soundlessly, she carried the box with her as she went out to the kitchen.

  While she made coffee and drank a cup standing beside the sink, she kept waiting for some sound of Tom’s waking. But Tom didn’t wake, and soon it was time to get dressed, to get ready for the office. She stole back to the bedroom for her underthings, hose, a dress. The dress had a button missing. The slip had shrunk. She sat on the velvet couch and tried to understand why these disasters happened.

  I’m so tired at night, she thought. If I had any sense, I’d plan my outfit for the next day when I got home, only there’s dinner to get. And always shopping, and then washing up. And the bills to sort out and worry over. And behind it all, the need for sleep like a fire creeping closer minute by minute.

  She thought all at once of that woman whose portrait lay among the other stuff in Bax’s things. She brought the box from the kitchen, found the portrait. The imperious eyes stared into hers. The voice, she thought, would have been soft, perhaps even gracious. But inflexible in its will to command. I wonder why she fascinates me so.

  Perhaps it’s because I know that she never wore frayed and faded clothes. Not once. Not even for an instant. Nothing of hers ever had buttons missing, had shrunk, had cheap lace tatting. She had been a De la Cruz, she had belonged to a family that was powerful and wealthy, and then she had had to marry the General, but that still hadn’t meant being poor. The General might have been hard to get along with but he wouldn’t have let his wife go shabby.

  Had the woman been the one who had decided that she had had enough of the General? Mrs. Appleton had said that the family had decided. They had done the maneuvering to set their daughter free. Bax had been their tool. Here he was, then, with the General’s fleeing wife. In New Orleans. And on what footing? A friend? A servitor? A lover?

  Looking into the proud face, Jennifer thought, this woman would not have taken a lover.

  I have to get dressed and go to work.

  The eyes in the photograph seemed to hold hers with a terrible intensity, as if to convey a message perhaps. Something very bad had happened at the end. But what?

  She put the picture down slowly. She had to figure out a way to get these things out of the house. She was shuffling it all together to return it to the shoebox when she heard a sound and looked up to find Tom in the doorway.

  “Before you go,” he said, “you have to write that letter to Bax.

  A stubborn defiance rose in her, so swiftly that it seemed it must already have been there. She tried to crush it down, while an inner voice whispered, “It mustn’t end like this.”

  Nothing is ending….

  “Tom, Uncle Bax is probably not even in Nueva Brisa. Nor hasn’t been for years.”

  “I just have a hunch the letter will find him.”

  Her curiosity forced her to ask: “What did Sean find out?”

  He shrugged, and his expression told her that he intended letting go of very little. “Just that years ago there was a General Lucero down there. A strong man. He made himself immensely rich, so rich that some of the wealthy families grew afraid of him and had him slung in the clink. Where he’s wasted, and waited, for many a year. And now it seems he may be out again. Setting up shop again in the strong-man business.”

  “If Bax had anything to do with his trouble, Bax won’t go back there. It would be too dangerous.”

  “Well, let’s say that Bax might know where the fortune went.”

  “The fortune?”

  “The news services are sniffing around down there, very quietly, and very quietly some pretty big people are leaving the country. And Bax might have bounced back into favor again. He sounds like a pretty slick character to me.”

  It could be true, she thought. The General’s need for Bax’s services might outweigh any grudge he held. Could it be that the General did not even know the role Bax had played all those years ago?

  If by some miracle Bax were in Nueva Brisa, back in favor with the General, why would he be warning his old co-conspirators of the danger to come? No, it didn’t make sense. He still considered himself a partner to the plot, looking after the safety of the others.

  “There’s an enormous amount of money somewhere,” Tom was saying, “and no
t in a Swiss bank, or the General would have had it out in a jiffy. To buy guns with. Or to buy people. What I’m determined to have, Jeff—I want us to have a chunk of the gelt. I don’t want ten thousand. That’s chicken feed. I want fifty thousand. Your Uncle Bax has to understand that before we run any more silly errands, we cut ourselves in.”

  She stared at him in what she knew was her best country-gawk.

  “Fifty thousand,” Tom repeated, his greenish eyes glowing.

  Again she thought of something that she had to ask, and said, “Tom, why wouldn’t the General’s wife have taken the money? She ran away to the United States. Mrs. Appleton’s job was to bring the little boy, on a forged passport. Didn’t Sean find out—”

  “The little boy died of a fever. Right away. Something he must have picked up on the trip. The woman was in hiding until she knew that she was safe from the General, afraid to contact a doctor until it was too late. Even afraid to get in touch with her family, who were back there in Nueva Brisa, where it must have been pretty ticklish until the General was out of the palace and into the clink. When the General was finally deposed of course, all of this came into the open. But if, at the time she was in hiding she had had any money, any big amount of money, she could have bought protection, bought medical help, surrounded herself with guns.”

  “This happened in New Orleans?”

  “The boy died in New Orleans, yes.”

  There was no photograph in any of Bax’s stuff of the little boy. The General was here, the wife … A sudden compelling idea caused her to reach for Mrs. Appleton’s letter. She slit the envelope across the top with her nail and pulled out the contents.

  Tom yelled, “For God’s sake, what are you doing? You’ve ruined it—”

  There was a thick piece of writing paper, folded around a stiffer rectangle. She unwound the paper. The rectangle was brown, the old-fashioned brown mounting of an old-fashioned photograph. She turned the picture over. Two people sat staring at the camera—a very young and pretty Mrs. Appleton, dressed in the style of twentyfive years before. Beside her sat a young boy; he was a nice-looking child but here there was something obviously wrong. There was a sick, strange expression in his eyes.

  Tom was looking over her shoulder. “Who’s the woman?”

  “Mrs. Appleton.”

  “The boy is the General’s kid, no doubt about that.” Tom sat down and stared thoughtfully at nothing. “So that’s way the envelopes were all taped up. Photos inside. God, what fools we were to let go of the other two without seeing what was inside. What damned fools—”

  “I’m sorry I looked.” Jennifer couldn’t stop the tears. The little boy in the picture was so lost, so forlorn, and you sensed the illness that burned inside him. “I don’t see how she can sleep at night.”

  “Mrs. Appleton? Well, I can understand how she’d feel damned nervous about the General.”

  “Tom, he died. No man is going to forget or forgive that. I can’t believe Bax would take a chance of getting anywhere near the General, nor even the city. At any moment … if he doesn’t already know … the General could find out what Bax had done. Look at him here!” She thrust the photograph of Bax and the General toward Tom. “He may be old now, worn and sick from the years in prison. But someone took his son away. To die. Is this the face of a man who would ever forget that?”

  Tom glanced at the photograph and shrugged, then handed it back to her. “Look, Jeff, it’s all ancient history now. We don’t know how the General felt about the kid, nor about the woman. Maybe he was so gung-ho and busy with his army he scarcely noticed them. Maybe the wife made the kid into a sissy the General couldn’t stand. Maybe the General didn’t like kids. Any kids. Maybe—”

  “There’s something written on the sheet of paper.”

  “Read it.”

  My dear Kitten—

  You remember the Tiger?

  Well, after all these years the Tiger is leaving his cage.

  He’ll probably be pretty hungry. I’m returning your photograph with this message.

  Baxter

  “The photographs,” Tom said, drawing his lips tight against his teeth in angry perplexity. “He’s kept them all these years. They represented a hell of a threat to these people, the ones he involved in his plot. He kept the photos, and now he has them returned—just like that. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It makes sense to Bax, somehow,” Jennifer insisted. “It fits in with what he’s doing.”

  The buzzer rang. For an instant she and Tom were caught there, looking at each other in surprise, and then Tom sprang up and hurried to the box that hung on the wall by the entry. He spoke there, briefly, came back with excitement flickering in his eyes.

  “A Special Delivery letter, coming up!”

  “Be careful!”

  “You’re still dreaming about the dog Sean imagined? Wait … you’ll see a nice proper postman.”

  But when the knock came, and Tom opened the door, there was no proper postman. There was a letter dropped on the sill and a thin shabby scared-eyed man backing away into shadow. He touched the brim of his broken hat to Tom.

  Tom looked up as he reached for the letter. “Hey! Who’re you?”

  The shabby figure was beating a retreat to catch the elevator before it left, and in that instant Jennifer saw the fearful glance the man threw over his shoulder. “I’m just a relief man, Mr. Burch,” came a hoarse whiney whisper, and then the cage rattled and he was gone.

  “Queer old duck,” Tom said, examining the letter. He looked at the address with satisfaction and squinted at the postmark. “El Paso. I’ll just bet.” He tore open the end of the envelope. A single bill fluttered from its case of newsprint; Tom’s eyes followed it to the floor. He whooped. Even Jennifer could see the figure on the bill.

  “Old Bax is a mind-reader,” Tom exulted, shutting the door at his back and opening the sheet of note-paper.

  Five Hundred Dollars….

  She was going to be late to work.

  “We deliver the letter to Coulter,” Tom was saying with his eyes on the written sheet. “Only we don’t, Baby. We don’t do a thing. This is the down payment. The other forty-nine thousand five hundred’s coming up—”

  The photograph of Mrs. Appleton beside the little boy who had died lay face up beside Jennifer’s knee. She reached to turn the picture over. In that moment she suddenly couldn’t look at it again.

  Chapter 13

  She carried the package into Mr. Dunavan’s office. He was standing behind the desk, frowning at some papers he had spread out there, as if trying to decide about something. He glanced up at her. The warmth that came into his eyes shook her, made her afraid. Her emotions were battered, rubbed raw. She couldn’t stand the least bit of sympathy or compassion. She would dissolve. She put the package gingerly on the end of the desk and began to untie it. The box spilled some of its contents as she freed it from the heavy wrapping paper.

  It was all here—all except Mr. Coulter’s letter. She had, in the end, made a bargain with Tom. She would write out the letter to Uncle Bax if he would let her take all but the Coulter letter to be put into the vault. Tom had even grudgingly admitted the step might be a wise one. He had helped to wrap and tie Uncle Bax’s stuff carefully, and at her insistence he’d gone down with her and seen her safely into a cab.

  Mr. Dunavan seemed pleased to get away from the puzzle spread out on his desk. He began to sift through the contents of the box. He looked briefly at the pictures of Bax with the General, of Bax with the woman. Jennifer picked up Mrs. Appleton’s letter and offered it to him. “I’ve opened this. Mrs. Appleton insisted that she didn’t want it, that I wasn’t to give it to her. Actually, she begged me to burn it, but I didn’t do that.”

  He opened the letter and removed the photograph first. Jennifer began to tell him the story of last evening, of her sudden desire to see Mrs. Appleton, of the trip to Far Rockaway and the visit’s mysterious end. She hesitated, stumbled, here and there. Tom was
left out, so that the story had gaps in it. Most of all she wanted to tell Mr. Dunavan about Tom’s dangerous plan to get fifty thousand dollars out of Uncle Bax, but the words wouldn’t come.

  Mr. Dunavan was looking at the photograph of Mrs. Appleton and the little boy.

  “She seems protective here,” he said. “I think she liked the child very much. It must have been a horrible shock when she learned of his death. What became of his mother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She hadn’t thought to ask, and Tom hadn’t volunteered any information about the General’s wife.

  “I suppose,” Jennifer said slowly, “that she would have gone back to her own country, in time. Wouldn’t she have?”

  “Let me try to get hold of Ron right now,” Mr. Dunavan decided. He put down the photograph and went to the phone, dialed, asked for an outside line. He reached for his book of phone numbers, dialed again. “Hello. Is Ron Dixon in?” He waited, smiling across at Jennifer. His smile seemed to cover a searching attitude; he was measuring something in Jennifer. Her ability to lie, perhaps. Did he sense those discrepancies, the parts of her story where gaps existed, where the shards of half-truths lay exposed?

  “Hi, Ron? Scott here. Oh, you already knew that.” He spent a couple of minutes in banter, in catching up with personal affairs, and then asked, “I was wondering what was happening in Nueva Brisa. Anything new on the wires?” He listened, the smile went away. “In the old days, General Lucero had a wife. Do you know what happened to her?” Again, he listened. “Sure, call back when you find out. I’m kind of curious. No, nothing to do with any business affairs whatever. Just me.” He hung up.

  “He doesn’t know what happened to the General’s wife?”

  “No, but he’s going to find out. And he can do that much quicker than we can. As for news out of the country, officially there isn’t any. Several months ago somebody from the State Department went down there, and saw what was happening to our money—the loan had gone into somebody’s bank account—and raised hell. Then a lot of ruffled feelings had to be soothed, with more money probably, and a commission of landowners and serfs was set up to do something about dividing some of the big estates. Not a chance, of course, according to Ron. The place never changes.”