Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The irony of the situation, as I understand it, after some eight or nine months of painstaking scrutiny into old documents, letters, police reports, and the like, is that Xavier Kilgarvan had no legitimate case to “crack,” as the reader will see: but was fully accurate in his exposure of the murderer, and to be faulted only minimally, in his investigative procedure. For, within an admirably brief period of time, the appalling mystery is handily resolved: the murderer, unlike Valentine Westergaard, does not escape God’s wrath: and peace and tranquillity are restored to a distressed community. In addition, a happy ending is provided,—one both plausible and deserved.*

  HEREWITH, after upward of seven decades, the sole definitive account of the most-publicized mystery of Winterthurn, of a season long past.

  “. . . You Alone Are Our Salvation”

  Every extant account of the infamous murders in the Grace Episcopal rectory begins on the afternoon of September 11, with the discovery of the bodies, or with the sighting, not many minutes beforehand, of the “red-haired specter” bearing his bloodied ax: but fresh evidence, to which, it seems, I alone have access, would place the actual beginning of the mystery some twenty-four hours earlier, in a very different setting altogether.

  For it was in upper Pinckney Street, near the intersection with Chambers, in the midst of the hurlyburly of a late weekday afternoon,—when hackney cabs, carriages, motor cars, and, not least, clattering trolleys were in full force—that a veiled woman in a cab signaled to a Negro shoeshine boy, that he should come to the curb, and run a simple errand for her. Succinct and direct was the charge, with no wasted words on the woman’s side, and immediate compliance on the boy’s: for he was accustomed to such requests from the white gentry, and did not think it a curious matter, that a lady whose features were hidden behind a pearl-gray gauze veil, and whose voice was lowered to a hoarse, rapid murmur, should entrust him with an “urgent” message, to be sent at once by way of Western Union,—albeit the telegraph office was but a stone’s throw away, and the lady might easily have alighted from her cab, to send it herself.

  However, this was evidently not her wish: for the boy was given a thrice-folded sheet of stationery, and several dollars in paper money; and, while the lady remained seated in the cab, to watch after him, he ran without hesitation to the Western Union office, and did as he had been instructed. (Doubtless it was the case that, to the Negro lad, all white ladies were, in a sense, featureless; or hidden from such lowly eyes as his by near-opaque veils. Consequently, he had not the vaguest impression, whether the mysterious lady was young, or middle-aged, or old; whether her manner had been controlled, or agitated; what sort of clothes she had worn,—albeit he had a dim recollection of a dark wide-brimmed hat, adorned with smooth black curving feathers, shielding much of her face, and all of her hair.)

  The message had been fastidiously printed in black ink, in tall, perfectly formed (or disguised) block letters, on a sheet of plain white stationery that bore no letterhead, and yielded no fragrant scent, however subtle; as it was unsigned, and, moreover, addressed to Mr. Xavier Kilgarvan, of 38 Washington Square, New York City, the telegraph operator was naturally roused to curiosity,—and disappointed that the stammering shoeshine boy could offer no explanation, other than that “a gracious lady had bade him bring the message” to Western Union, and have it sent with no delay.

  In its entirety, as it was sent out from Winterthurn City at 5:15 P.M., on September 10, the telegram read:

  XAVIER KILGARVAN RETURN TO WINTERTHURN IMMEDIATELY

  YOU ALONE ARE OUR SALVATION

  A Parenthetical Aside

  As to the fate of the telegram, bearing its “urgent” message: though it was delivered with admirable alacrity to the correct address,—which is to say, to the handsome brick-and-stucco townhouse at 38 Washington Square, which Xavier Kilgarvan had purchased some years previous—it happened, unfortunately, that the detective was not at home to receive it: whereupon, there being, evidently, no servant on the premises, it was merely slipped beneath the door: and its terse imperative was to go unread for approximately twenty hours,—within, that is, ninety minutes of the first of the murders in the rectory, some two hundred and thirty miles away.

  Had Xavier Kilgarvan not been absent from home; had he received the telegram by the evening of September 10, as the sender had wished,—it is scarcely a farfetched speculation to suppose that the lives of several persons would have been spared, and The Bloodstained Bridal Gown would be unknown to us; and Xavier Kilgarvan’s prospering career would not have been so abruptly terminated.

  “The Golden Vanity”

  Judging from several reports, and from the testimony of her cook and housemaid Bessie Hyde, it must have been at approximately 3:45 P.M. on the warm, airless, and mist-shrouded afternoon of September 11, when, seated at her escritoire in the ground-floor sitting room of Jewett Cottage, poor Mrs. Bunting,—that is, Mrs. Letitia Bunting, Reverend Bunting’s seventy-two-year-old mother—glanced up perplexed from a letter she was writing to her sister in Nautauga Falls, to see, or to imagine she saw, by way of a wall mirror, Reverend Bunting himself noiselessly entering the room behind her. How queer that Harmon would walk into the cottage unannounced,—how queer, his expression of startled, anguished, and, as it were, petulant entreaty! Mrs. Bunting stared: and let drop her pen, taking no notice that it spilled ink on her letter: and stared yet the more: for, without turning, she seemed to comprehend that the image of her belovèd son was not altogether right: a clouded, wavering, shimmering, somehow insubstantial reflection, as if seen through water, or obscured by the mists that had settled in Winterthurn since the preceding night. “Why, Harmon, what is it,—why do you look so aggrieved?” the widowed mother said in a low, frightened voice: her eyes catching at his, despite the distortion of the polished lenses he wore, and a certain tremulousness of his facial muscles: and her sense, she knew not why, that the dark-garbed gentleman in the mirror both was, yet was not, her dear son. He had halted just inside the doorway and stood tall, stout, swaying, reproachful,—one hand extended, and the palm held upward, in a gesture both supplicant and commanding. “Mother, come! Mother!” he whispered, though his thin lips seemed scarcely to move, and the silvery-gray muttonchop whiskers framing his stern face looked, of a sudden, stiff and lifeless as steel wool; and the chill utterance seemed as much to have sounded within the lady’s head as without.

  “Why, Harmon,—dear—what is it?” Mrs. Bunting exclaimed.

  Pressing a plump beringed hand against her bosom, Mrs. Bunting turned to see, all amazedly, that no one stood behind her: neither her son nor anyone else had entered the somewhat dim little room, with its patterned rosy wallpaper, and its white damask draperies, and its pleasing richness,—indeed, was it not a veritable cornucopia of possessions, assembled over a long and energetic life?—of chairs, and sofas, and small tables, and lamps with painted globes, and china figurines, and framed daguerreotypes, and the like: naught but what might have been,—and even in this, Mrs. Bunting could not trust her blinking eyes—a wisp or tendril of fog that had insinuated its way into the cottage, though all the windows and doors were surely secured.

  “Harmon, dear son—what is it? What—?”

  Mrs. Bunting’s affrighted voice sounded most peculiar, in the empty parlor: and when she looked back to the mirror,—this, a good-sized oval framed in carved cherrywood, that had belonged to the Bunting family for generations—she saw that the image had abruptly vanished, and naught but the familiar furnishings were reflected. (Yet, now, had they not acquired an uncanny etiolated aura, to appear, to her dazed eye, not altogether right?—)

  “I have seen a ghost,” Mrs. Bunting murmured aloud; then, but a scant second later, she chided herself, for the thought was preposterous: her darling Harmon was alive, and, indeed, in the prime of life, despite his growing stoutness, and an inclination to exhaust himself with work, and complaints now and then of digestive upsets. Moreover, Mrs. Bunting, for all that she was well into her
seventy-third year, and had never, through much of her energetic life, been overly robust or hardy,—being, in truth, a mere four feet nine inches tall—prided herself on being an upstanding Christian lady, of Protestant demeanor: loved throughout her son’s parish for her unfailing high spirits, and resolute optimism, and oft-expressed faith in the “simple good news of the Gospels”: never inclined to succumb to idle fancies of morbidity, or pagan superstition; and little disposed to coddle those persons (excepting not even her troubled daughter-in-law Perdita) whose tempers led them in that direction. Indeed, Reverend Bunting’s parishioners marveled at Letitia Bunting’s selfless zeal, in heading the Ladies’ Altar Society, and helping to organize the Sunday School, and the Young People’s Bible Hour, and participating in numerous Winterthurn City charitable organizations, while (as it was whispered) her daughter-in-law shrugged off her responsibilities, with the plea of ill-health, or too little time. Mrs. Bunting’s religion, if not precisely a “muscular” species of Christianity, of the kind popularly espoused by prominent clergymen of the day,—and by former President Teddy Roosevelt himself—was at the very least a right-thinking and uplifting sort, merry, sunny, and forthright. Thus it was, the minister’s mother found welcoming smiles everywhere: for it was oft claimed that her pert, pink, smooth-skinned face, and her china-blue “twinkling” eyes, and, above all, her hearty hello, could virtually transform a sickroom, and bring sunshine where shadow commonly dwelt. For what does it profit us as Christians, Mrs. Bunting frankly believed, to ponder overmuch on the old issues of Hell, and damnation, and God’s wrath, and man’s fallen nature, seeing that, as the Gospels spelled out so clearly, Jesus Christ has died for our sins—?

  So it was, this good woman bethought herself, that she could not possibly have seen a ghost, still less the ghost of her son: and would not cause any foolish upset in either of the households,—albeit her heartbeat was yet erratic, and a sickened sense of apprehension arose in her. Here in the cottage, Bessie was busily absorbed in the kitchen preparing for a high tea, to which some eight or ten prominent ladies of the parish were invited, and which both Harmon and Perdita would attend,—the latter, that is, if her capricious health allowed. So Mrs. Bunting did not want to disturb her. Nor would she succumb to the temptation to hurry over to the rectory (some three hundred yards away, along Jewett’s Lane), just to pop her head in, as she sometimes did at this time of day: for it was certainly the case that Harmon was taken up with pastoral matters, and, of late, when Mrs. Bunting dropped by uninvited, it struck her that her daughter-in-law’s hospitality was distinctly strained. (“Ah, my dear,—I hope I am not intruding!” Mrs. Bunting would call out cheerily, as ready to betake herself out of the parlor, as not: for the diminutive lady prided herself on resolutely not being one of those meddlesome mothers-in-law of whom it is common parlance to joke,—albeit her distinguished son, after more than a decade of marriage, made no secret of his dependence upon her, in matters both personal and professional. “Not at all, Mother Bunting,—not at all: pray be seated,” Perdita would say, fumbling with a loosened plait of hair, or attempting, with childlike awkwardness and impatience, to adjust one of her stockings. How odd it was, Mrs. Bunting could not help but think, no matter the time of day she visited, Perdita seemed invariably to be taken by surprise: her toilette not adequately completed, her housedress not altogether fresh, and her manner,—ah, her manner!—distracted, or morose, or “nervy.” Why, upon one occasion not long before, it was evident that Perdita, though very prettily attired in a pale green brushed-velvet dress, and her chestnut-brown hair for once done up sensibly, had neglected to put on either stockings or shoes: and was barefoot downstairs, in the rectory parlor, at ten o’clock of a midsummer morning, when any parishioner, dropping by, might have seen her. Naturally Mrs. Bunting refrained from making any censorious comment, save, afterward, in privacy to her son; nor had she ever spoken directly to Perdita of the unwholesome habit the younger woman had fallen into, over the years, of brewing countless pots of strong black China tea, which, with no sweetening added, nor even a dollop of cream, she drank from morning until night—! And yet Harmon professed to wonder at her nervousness and “high-strung” behavior, and to insist that she see Dr. Hatch on a regular basis.)

  Such thoughts fairly streamed through Mrs. Bunting’s mind as, seated at her escritoire, she made an effort to concentrate on her letter to her sister, and to resist glancing up, every minute or so, to the mirror on the wall: which, though reflecting now an incontestably empty space, yet exuded an air of the uncanny and the disagreeable. “It is absurd,—it is impossible,—and gives great offense to our Maker,” Mrs. Bunting chided herself, “to incline to such superstitious notions.” Her late husband, Mr. Robert Darr Bunting, Rector of the Church of St. John the Evangelist, of Nautauga Falls, had strongly disapproved of such pagan nonsense; as did her dear son Harmon,—albeit, residing in Winterthurn as he did, he was oft-times confronted (as he frowningly confessed) with matters not easily explained away by scientific or logical proof, or Christian common sense. For instance, in the very vicinity of Grace Church, in a wooded area bounded by Berwick Avenue to the south and Jewett’s Pond (or Lake, as it was frequently called, since it measured nearly two miles in circumference) to the north, there had been, over the decades, and, alas, even within the past few months, certain inexplicable occurrences: the consequence, some thought, of “damned spirits” laid to an inappropriate rest, in the sanctified soil of Grace Church Cemetery; or, it may have been, as the elderly sexton Henry Harder believed, the result of a drowning,—whether accidental, or homicidal, or self-inflicted, none knew—that had taken place in Jewett’s Pond in the late 1790s. Oft-times, on a clear and windless night, in the depths of the winter, cries for help seemed to emanate from the pond,—shrieks, and screams, and impassioned pleas—in a voice hardly human, and not to be identified as either male or female; at other times, footsteps sounded heavily in the lane, as if someone were running, though no one was to be seen. Poor Mrs. Bunting was loath to confess that, living in Jewett Cottage as she did (Reverend Bunting having bought the tidy little stone-and-stucco house for her at the turn of the century), she was prone to hear these unearthly sounds, or to imagine she did; and made an effort to believe her son’s firm-stated theory, that the cries from the pond were made by shifting or cracking ice, in the frigid depths of winter; and the footsteps were naught but some simply explained phenomena, of wind, loose shingles, creaking tree limbs, and the like.

  Yet it seemed that, from time to time, and not exclusively by night, spectral figures were seen in the area, arising from the pond and the tall marsh grasses on its banks, and drifting, vaporlike, through the woods; ascending to one or another of the houses overlooking the hollow,—the Pitt-Davies’, the Niehardts’, the rectory, Jewett Cottage itself. Phantom faces were reported to appear at bedroom windows, to gaze into lighted rooms; unexplained footsteps were heard on stairs; soft whispers, murmurs, and cajolings emerged from the very air. And, ah!—some young girls and women claimed even to be touched, or caressed, by invisible hands: an experience that aroused incalculable terror, and was scarcely to be explained away by level-headed persons like Reverend Bunting. Indeed, Perdita herself had several times complained of a “chill and malefic presence” in the rectory, especially when Harmon was away in the evening, on church business: she heard footsteps overhead, and a soft tuneless whistling that “mocked even as it threatened”: one August night, in no way wracked by wind or rain, or given an oppressive refulgence by the full moon (whose “glowering face” oft-times distressed her), Perdita woke terrified from a nightmare to see, pressed against the windowpane, a human countenance,—far too vivid and substantial, she claimed, to be mere wisps of vapor from the pond. (With that characteristic admixture of resignation and alarm that so nettled her mother-in-law,—albeit Letitia Bunting held her tongue on such matters—Perdita allowed her comforters to know that the spectral face, while horrific, was yet “familiar” to her mind’s eye: and did not
altogether surprise her—! “I am wicked,—I have sinned,—even if I have not sinned, why, I am wicked,” the young Mrs. Bunting said listlessly, “so he shall come for me: and naught but a thin pane of glass separates us.”)

  Such remarks could not fail to annoy Harmon, who was inclined to believe, like many another resident of the affluent northerly section of the city, that persons who had no business in the neighborhood were responsible for these intrusions: unemployed men pretending to be seeking work: thieves, and parentless children, and riffraff of every sort, spilling out, as it were, of the crowded slums south of the river, where, in the 1890s and the first decade of the new century, thousands upon thousands of men and women had settled,—immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe; impoverished Negroes from the South; country people forced from their farms by the erratic value of the dollar, to work in the factories and mills of South Winterthurn. “And to agitate therein for higher wages, and fewer hours of work,—and to cast their traitorous votes for Eugene Debs!” Harmon Bunting drily observed. (Indeed, Harmon had suffered, in the past several years, from what he saw as a “tragic diminution” in the reliability of the American workingman and -woman: gentleman as he was, he found himself ill-suited to contend with the vagaries of drunken gravediggers, indifferent handymen, dishonest servant-girls, and even, for an infuriating spell in 1908–9, a young assistant pastor with a Harvard degree who slyly questioned his superior’s theology, and spoke casually of him behind his back. Thus it seemed more imperative to Reverend Bunting every day to “hold the line” and to “stick fast”: which virtues he frequently preached from the sanctity of the Grace Episcopal pulpit.)