A Show of Hands

by David Crossman

  “I seem to remember someone saying you went to school.”

  She laughed. “My great college career! The best-laid plans, you know.” The laugh dissolved into a smile, soft at the edges.

  Crisp smiled back. “Well, you’re young yet. Maybe you can pick up where you left off someday.”

  It seemed as though she had been puttering aimlessly, just like Matty always seemed to putter aimlessly, yet somehow everything got done. She’d even folded the dirty linen over her arm. She looked out the window. “I don’t think so, Mr. Crisp.” There was nothing left of the unsteady smile. Her expression was one of stoic resolve. “Some things just weren’t meant to be.”

  Crisp understood that. He nodded. He was nodding a lot lately. People do when they reach a certain age. Sarah turned from the window, looked at him, and smiled. Her eyes were pale and deep with thought. “Oh, well,” she said. “This is the next best thing, I guess. I’ll be back in before I leave to see if there’s anything you need.”

  Crisp looked forward to it. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d spent a pleasant few minutes with someone from the Dark Ages between twelve and twenty-five.

  Before he knew it he’d eaten a spoonful of Jell-O. “Oh, Miss . . . Sarah . . .” The question he’d been trying to formulate came to him, but it was having difficulty getting out of his full mouth.

  “Everything okay?” asked Sarah.

  “I’m fine, thank you,” Crisp replied. “Do you recall, by any chance, when the McKennistons left the island last summer?”

  Only her eyes reacted to mention of the name. A spark, if that, passed too quickly to identify the emotion behind it. If not smothered, contained. “I really don’t remember, exactly,” she said. Her voice quivered almost imperceptibly with the aftershocks of the brief flush of feeling.

  “Generally, then,” he coaxed gently.

  Some linens had slipped from her hands. She retrieved them from the floor. “Usually . . . Labor Day weekend.” She was having to struggle to maintain her composure. Neddy McKenniston? The baby? It stood to reason. The smile that followed was quick and insincere. “I have other patients, you know,” she said. “We don’t want them jealous now, do we?”

  “Just one more thing,” said Crisp. “Last year, did anyone stay behind, after Labor Day?”

  “I really don’t know,” Sarah replied quickly. The slightest trace of tension tinted her voice. “Daphne—she’s the senator’s daughter—came up with the kids one weekend. Everything was shut up, though. They stayed over on East Haven.”

  “And the young fellow—Ned. Is that his name?” said Crisp. He watched her reaction.

  She guarded it closely. “Neddy,” she corrected. “I don’t remember. He was always . . . He came and went, you know? I don’t think he stayed after Labor Day.”

  She was uncomfortable. Crisp put her at ease with a smile. “Ah, youth,” he said dreamily. He looked out the window at a small patch of blue-gray sky embroidered by the branches of an evergreen. “Do you think spring will ever come?”

  Sarah looked out the window, too. But she didn’t see what he saw. “Spring,” she said. There was no inflection to the word. It was as if she was phonetically repeating a word in a foreign language.

  They stared in silence for a moment, until someone dropped something in the corridor. “I’ve got to go,” said Sarah, and she did.

  The telephone woke him in the late afternoon. The lowering sun had draped the windowsill and the few Spartan furnishings in its immediate vicinity with fool’s gold. The phone had been ringing in the dream from which he’d been awakened. He looked at the device. A human making that much noise would be animated, flailing arms and legs, jumping up and down. The phone just screamed. It couldn’t care less if anyone heard it or not. It had no share in the news it brought. He won the staring match. It finally stopped ringing.

  Microscopic scribbles of dust floated across the shaft of sunlight. He followed them with his eyes and let his mind wander.

  Whose voice is that I hear from time to time

  Calling in the canyons of my mind?

  What childhood cantata, bold and free

  Searches for its echo now . . . in me?

  He’d have to write that one down.

  The phone rang again, but this time it proved irresistible.

  “Hello?”

  “Crisp? Hanson.”

  “Hello, Mr. Hanson.”

  “Two things,” said Hanson. “Actually, three things. First, the lab gave me the rundown on that makeup. It all checks out like you said. I’ve got it right here. Let me see”—he made the sounds of someone trying to find their glasses, then putting them on—“ah, there. Evrington’s Theatrical Makeup—that ring a bell?” It did. “Well, that’s what it was. Lead base, just like you said. I think it makes what they call the ‘foundation.’ I guess you’d know that better than I.” He would. “Anyway, this is the old formula, before it was outlawed.”

  “In 1932.”

  “In 1932, that’s right. After that they changed everything. It matches what we found on the girl.”

  Crisp was nodding again. He caught himself this time, and stopped—not without some effort. “What was the second thing?”

  “I’m re-exhuming the Calderwood boy Saturday.”

  “Good.”

  “Is it?” said Hanson. “I can think of better ways to spend my evenings, you know.”

  “And the third thing?”

  “Third,” said Hanson with a sigh. “Worst of all.” He paused. “They found the Sanborn fellow . . . at the bottom of the cliff in front of McKenniston’s. He was wedged in the rocks.”

  “Dead,” said Crisp, almost reflexively.

  “Seems he was in some kind of golf cart or something. Went straight over the edge and . . . well. It was in this little cove. Out of the way.”

  “Did they do an autopsy?”

  “Autopsy?” said Hanson incredulously. “Why? He drove off the cliff and died.”

  “Did he?”

  Hanson stopped breathing for a second. “Didn’t he?”

  “There should be an autopsy.”

  “Do you really think it’s necessary?”

  Crisp let the silence answer in the affirmative.

  “What reason can I give?”

  “You don’t need to give a reason.”

  “Well, then, what reason can you give me?”

  “I’m sure I don’t have to give you one, if you think about it,” said Crisp. “Mostly Sanborn didn’t lock me in the freezer.”

  “He could have done it accidentally,” said Hanson, jumping in without looking. “Then he goes out, jumps in the golf cart, rushes off for help, loses his way in the fog or has mechanical difficulty, and”—he made a whooshing sound—“off he goes!”

  “And who turned on the freezer after the door was shut?”

  “Well, of course—”

  “And he couldn’t have ‘jumped into’ the cart. It was down in the barn, if it’s the one I’m thinking of. And even if he did decide to go dig out the golf cart and run for help rather than simply opening the door or using the telephone or getting in his truck, what would he have been doing near the cliff? The road is in the opposite direction. And—”

  “All right! All right. I get the message,” said Hanson. “So, somebody knocks him out while you’re in the freezer—”

  “Slams the door shut—”

  “Turns on the generator, gets the golf cart?”

  “Gets the golf cart,” Crisp agreed.

  “Drags the body out of the house, puts it in the cart, drives to the cliff—”

  “Stops, puts Mostly behind the wheel, and . . .”

  Hanson added his whooshing sound.

  It suddenly struck Crisp that Mostly was dead. His heart sank. There was enough room in the emptiness of himself to admit the fact, as it had the loss of so many over the years, but the addition of a new member to the fraternity of terrors stirred the old ghosts. They lamented loudly and whisp
ered the horrible secrets only he knew.

  “Why kill Mostly Sanborn?” said Hanson. “Who’d do something like that?”

  Crisp knew. There was always the expedient. Sangé Timor, attaché to the Turkish embassy in Sebastopol, had died similarly, the only difference being he was in a car, and the cliff in that instance overlooked the Caspian. He and Hanson shared a pungent snifter of quietude.

  “You still haven’t told me what I’m looking for,” said Hanson.

  “Pardon?” Crisp was a little startled by the voice in his ear. He’d been watching the nurse inject something pink into a little tube attached to his IV and had forgotten he was on the phone.

  “The Calderwood boy. What am I looking for?”

  The nurse concluded the particulars of her routine with hardly a troubling of the air and left the room. The residue of her presence, a musk-based perfume, settled softly on the linens.

  “Hands,” said Crisp. He was having a hard time concentrating. “Look closely at his hands. Especially the wrists.”

  “Is it that important?” said Hanson.

  “I think so,” Crisp replied. He was wondering what was in the pink solution. Potent, whatever it was. Maybe they’d give him some to take home.

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Crisp echoed. He felt as though he was talking from the bottom of a large, deep oil drum. He knew he was thinking the words, but he couldn’t tell whether he was voicing them.

  “Why is it important?” Hanson said. He sounded as though he was in an oil drum, too.

  “You’ll see . . . when you see,” said Crisp, not meaning to be enigmatic. His senses were swimming, and the synapses in his brain seemed to be bridging oceans of green Jell-O.”

  “Are you all right?” said Hanson a little sharply.

  Crisp’s hand had stopped tingling. He looked at the neatly wrapped bandage and realized he didn’t even know which finger was missing. “Besides,” he said, but he couldn’t get a handle on whatever thought had engendered the word. His head felt weighted with rocks and tossed into the depths of his pillow. The linen crinkled loudly in his ears. His eyes seemed knit together, and the pink liquid was pulling what was left of his consciousness into the leaden abyss of sleep. “Medication,” he whispered.

  “Go to sleep,” said Hanson. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “I don’t think this is a good idea.” Sarah Quinn objected to the fact that Crisp had decided to remove himself from the hospital Saturday, having spent only nine days of a two-week stay. Despite the medication, he’d had a bad night. What little sleep he managed to get was interrupted at regular intervals by nurses who, he determined, subscribed to the concept of sleep deprivation as fundamental to recovery.

  This morning he felt much worse. The phantom pain where his finger and toes used to be was nearly unbearable. How does one scratch an itch when the extremity that itches isn’t there? Unfortunately, the only treatment was more medication, administered by what seemed like buckets full, and that was worse. Clouding his mind. Fogging his reason. That he couldn’t abide. If he was going to die, it would be with a clear head, and that was available to him only outside the hospital—back on the island. At Matty’s.

  Of course she’d tried to talk him out of it when she stopped by the room before breakfast. Halfheartedly, though. Deep down inside she couldn’t see how anyone managed to get better in a hospital. She’d much rather have him home, where she could take proper care of him.

  “What about the pain?” she asked.

  He smiled weakly. “It clears the head.”

  His head was sublimely clear as, with nine fingers, he pulled on his clothes. The third finger of his left hand was missing. One of his favorites. He’d stolen a glance when the nurse changed his bandage before breakfast. Very neat. Squared off at the end with loose skin pulled over it and sewn together like a little bag.

  “You’ll want medication,” Sarah said. She helped him button his shirt. “Can you walk?”

  He did feel lopsided. He’d been standing only a few minutes and already his remaining toes ached with the strain of compensating for their fallen comrades. His lack of balance was further augmented by the wadded bandage around his foot, which made him feel as though he was perpetually walking uphill. The analogy was not lost on him. He wondered if the disability would affect his bicycle riding. “I’ll get along,” he said.

  Clear as his brain might be, he still couldn’t recall what he’d wanted to ask Sarah. Something important.

  The last button poked its head out. “Well,” Sarah said resignedly, “I guess you’re old enough to know what’s best.” If he wasn’t, no one was. “But I can’t take care of you like I wanted to.” She’d already pulled the sheets and pillowcases off the bed and put them in a wire cart in the hallway. She completed a second circuit of the room as he looked on. It was as if no one had even been there. It could have been a display in the Smithsonian. “And on the left, ladies and gentlemen, a typical hospital room of the mid to late twentieth century. Note the television on the wall. We know this diabolical device was often used in prisons of the time, presumably to torture intractable inmates. Its presence in a place of healing, however, is mystifying. Of course, there are a number of theories . . .”

  “I could stop by your house now and then to see how you’re doing,” Sarah suggested as she fit him to a walker. “I could make it by after supper once or twice, or on weekends. When are you having the stitches out?”

  They’d told him, but he didn’t remember. “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, probably ten days or so. I can make it over a few times in the meantime. Make sure you’re comfortable. Bring your medicine.”

  Matty would be hard enough to deal with on that score. She’d make him stick out his tongue to be sure he swallowed it. She was a suspicious woman.

  Crisp didn’t want anyone reminding him to take medicine.

  Nevertheless, he’d been trying to think of a way, short of remaining in the hospital, to get a few minutes alone with Sarah. He smiled warmly. “I’d like that, Sarah,” he said. “If you wouldn’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” she replied. She seemed almost relieved.

  “I know you’ve . . . there are a lot of demands on your time.”

  Sarah brushed a lock of hair from her forehead. “Oh, no trouble at all. Really,” she said. “I’ll be over in a few days. Matty Gilchrist’s, right?”

  “Here, here, now! You march right on out! You can’t go up there!” Matty’s voice was rising by octaves as she delivered this broken address to person or persons unknown. Two sets of footsteps on the stairs. One man in sneakers or deck shoes, one woman in pumps. Whoever they are, thought Crisp, I can’t let them see me like this. Matty’d be embarrassed.

  He sat up, straightened the bedclothes, and scooped an armload of debris from the nightstand and stuffed it under his pillow. Further housekeeping was preempted by a loud rap on the door.

  “Professor Crisp?” said the sneakers. The pumps were still ascending the stairs. “Daniel Levinson, Rockland Telegraph. Can we come in?”

  Crisp hadn’t even time to deliberate on how a Daniel Levinson could be plural, nor to respond, before the door flew open. In came a short, animated man with a wide face, unruly black hair, and too much waist for his pants.

  “Can I help—”

  “Where do you want me to set up, Dan?” These words announced the arrival of a tall woman with long braided hair, a narrow torso, and a large bottom—a configuration, thought Crisp, that put her at low risk of a heart attack. She dressed the way women did in the sixties. A time-warp baby. She looked at him. “That’s nice,” she said. Crisp smiled. “Good light there. Can we lose the specs? I’ll set up here out of the way. Excuse me, sir,” she continued. “Could you take off your glasses? We’re going to get an awful glare if you—”

  “Why do you want to take my picture?” said Crisp, deducing from the camera pointed at him that this was her intention. He left his glasses on.


  “To put in the paper,” the once-young woman replied. “Get a light reading on him, will you, Danny?” She handed the busy young man a little black gizmo with a white knob on it.

  “How’s your finger?” said the young man, selecting one of a family of pens from among its brethren in his shirt pocket. He produced a tape recorder and flipped open a notebook. Crisp wondered which of the two he mistrusted most.

  “Pardon?”

  “The finger,” repeated the reporter. “It was the finger, right?” He was looking at the photographer.

  “And two toes,” said the woman, completing the inventory of missing items. “I think he’s a little hard of hearing. Speak up.”

  “Yeah. Finger and toes,” Danny said much too loud for print. “How are they?”

  “Missing,” said Crisp. He’d never cared for the press, and these two, it seemed clear, were determined to reinforce his opinion. “How are yours?”

  The female contingent of the journalistic assault popped the flash on her camera. “Good. Great. Let’s do it.”

  “All right,” said Danny. He pulled a chair to the bedside and sat down. It was an old wicker chair that Matty had inherited from her great-grandfather, a sea captain. She’d made pillows for it, and they were fastened by little ribbons or something. It hadn’t been sat on for years. In fact, Matty had specifically asked Crisp not to sit on it. “It’s just for decoration, you see,” she’d said. Now there was an overweight reporter in it, and it was creaking. “Tell us all about it.”

  He set the tape recorder on the mattress.

  “I don’t know if you should be sitting on that chair,” Crisp cautioned. “It belonged to Matty’s great-grandfather—”

  “It’ll be okay, Professor,” said the reporter, a good deal louder than necessary. “I’ll worry about the chair, you worry about trying to remember all the facts.”

  Crisp’s eyes clouded. His hand began to shake and his head bobbed a little.

  “I think we’re losing him,” the woman whispered. “You’d better talk fast.”