Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Seeing that her listener frowned, and sipped at his coffee with, it may have been, a hint of impatience,—for such tales were farfetched indeed, in the calming light of day—Mrs. Harwich shifted her tone, to say that it invariably happened, following one of these queer episodes, that the mistress either took to her bed or was up and about very early, with an excess of energy, and stern commandments for all.

  As for the foundling infant left at the rectory door, one Christmas Eve but a few years back,—Mrs. Bunting was all in a fever to keep it and raise it as her own; and went so far as to “baptize” it with a name so queer, it seemed at first her own invention,—a foreign name by the sound of it, Mrs. Harwich said, which she had never trusted herself to pronounce. “‘If,’—‘Iffi,’—‘Iffagene,’ a very queer name,” Mrs. Harwich said, blushing, “of a sort never heard in Winterthurn.” “Perhaps you mean ‘Iphigenia’?” Xavier asked, staring at the woman. “Well,—yes—whatever,” Mrs. Harwich said, “but it did not matter, as the Reverend forbade her to keep the sickly thing; and Dr. Hatch’s housekeeper confided in me afterward, it was marked with the dread disease of its sinful parents, and would never have lived to maturity.”

  Pricked by this quaint usage, Xavier Kilgarvan inquired of the woman why she had said the babe would never have lived; and was informed, in a near-whisper, that Reverend Bunting and Dr. Hatch had concurred in their judgment that to provide costly medical treatment for the piteous thing, and, as it were, “nurse” it along, would be contrary to God’s will. Thus, despite Perdita Bunting’s tearful protestations, and threats the unhappy woman made against her own life, the foundling was allowed most mercifully to expire: for ’twas clear that God’s initial damnation on its head could scarcely be contravened, without risking His especial wrath; and naught but the most desperate of women would wish to adopt a baby under such scandalous circumstances.

  “Indeed,—indeed, you may be correct,” Xavier said, signaling, by the sudden flatness of his voice, that the subject had begun to bore him, “for is not any act of adoption hereabouts, one of desperation?”

  SHORTLY AFTERWARD, Xavier applied himself to a re-examination of the rectory, with the thought in mind that he would scrutinize those things which, some days before, he had considered relatively insignificant. For it is often the case that the interstices of an investigation yield fruit, when other spheres prove barren.

  So it was, he happened across a packet of clippings, yellowed magazine articles, etc., pertaining to himself, at the bottom of a steamer trunk carelessly filled with cast-off ladies’ clothing,—doubtless Perdita’s: and blinked, and stared, and swallowed hard, while leafing through these documents, a number of which he had never set eyes upon before!—for such was the young detective’s impatience with the public face of his career, he could not be troubled to keep accounts. A pulse beat strongly in his throat; he felt a chill rising from the dank earthen floor, to his very heart; and a voice of stifled rage instructed him, The wretched woman has loved you all along, and you she, and yet she has been another man’s wife, and now must be his widow. After a minute, however, Xavier sufficiently recovered himself to cram the puerile clippings back into their envelope, and hide it beneath the untidy layers of clothing: the which momentarily diverted his attention, and assuaged the painful beating in his throat, in that he noted their odd charm,—the bicycling costume in particular, being of a rich blue-brown velveteen, bloomers and embroidered bolero alike. These too, however, he let fall back into the musty interior of the old trunk; and conscientiously shut the lid upon them. “So she has thought of me, from time to time, doubtless solely when her eye hit upon such public notices,” Xavier sullenly bethought himself. “Well,—so be it: I cannot say that I have thought overmuch of her.”

  Xavier then perused the first-floor rooms of the residence, excepting the kitchen and the servants’ quarters, finding little of note in the dim-lit music room, or in the parlor, or in the dining room with its mullioned bay window and glass-fronted sideboard: high-ceilinged, joyless, yet unfailingly proper rooms, which boasted very little of the personal, or the unique. (A Chinese vase in which four or five peacock feathers stood; a somewhat hazy watercolor of a river scene, perhaps by a local artist,—perhaps by Perdita herself; numerous cut-glass figurines, of dancers, elves, affable “wild” creatures: these, and no more.) “Such is the wintry ambiance of the Buntings’ marriage,” Xavier thought, with a stab of gratification, “—the bed in which she, of her own free will, chose to lie.”

  In opening the door to Reverend Bunting’s study, however, he gave a start, as, for a scant blurred instant he saw, or seemed to see, the shadowed figure of Ellery Poindexter before him: Mr. Poindexter harassed, and breathing hoarsely, as he stooped to grasp someone or something in his arms, to drag it to the divan nearby. And, ah!—the broken and bleeding figure of a woman lay already on the divan, her finery despoiled, her hair loosed from its elegant coiffure, one plump arm stretching lifeless to the carpet—!

  An eye’s blink, and the hazy scene vanished, as if it had never been: patches of watery sunshine, cast by the mullioned squares of the room’s single window, dispersed the hellish apparitions: albeit the detective could smell, with sickened certitude, that very same commingling of the odors of blood, and animal terror, and perfume, and tobacco, and the oily hair pomade that Ellery Poindexter wore, with near as much clarity as he had smelled it on the evening of September 11.

  This morning, however, the book-lined study with its somewhat faded wallpaper, and its dark wainscoting, and its large and graceless roll-top desk, possessed no horrors, and, indeed, appeared to be so scrubbed and polished, and resolutely tidied up, one might have mistaken it for a very ordinary room altogether: a place of laborious and dreary sermonizing, where troubled parishioners came for spiritual solace. Only the absence of several items,—amongst them the leather divan and the blood-soaked carpet—suggested that something untoward had occurred.

  Fired with a nervous sort of energy, Xavier Kilgarvan proceeded to search the room, tapping assiduously for false panels in the ceiling-high bookcase; investigating the floorboards, and the fireplace, and the antique molding; and, with that indefatigable instinct for thoroughness which was rarely acknowledged in him (possessing, it seems, none of the “glamour” of other detectively traits), he betook himself to examine, volume by volume, all the books in the room—!

  How much time this dull, exacting, and fatiguing task required, I cannot say, save to note that, some hours later, Mrs. Harwich timidly rapped on the door, to inquire if Mr. Kilgarvan should like luncheon: the which invitation was politely declined. Agèd volumes in Latin and German: folios of one thousand pages each: dissertations on every aspect of Christian theology, through the centuries: anti-Papist doctrines: complete volumes of The Christian Journal, The New England Preacher, The Journal of the Harvard Divinity School, and more: collections of sermons by various gentlemen of the cloth, of whom Xavier had never heard: and, in a proud calfskin binding, with gilt-edged pages, The Collected Sermons of Harmon Atticus Bunting,—through which Xavier leafed with some distaste, yet, all fortuitously, as this proved the very volume he sought. For there had been slipped into the cumbersome volume a number of strips of foolscap, containing notes for sermons, drafts of sermons, et al., and, near the very back, drafts of those selfsame “anonymous” letters Xavier had been studying but a few hours earlier—!

  So it was, Xavier blinked and stared, and could scarcely believe the evidence of his eyes: for though he had bemusedly entertained the notion that Reverend Harmon Bunting might have written the letters,—might have, like virtually any male citizen in Winterthurn—he must not have considered it seriously, to judge from the surprise he felt.

  “The brute, the swine,—he, of all persons!—the sanctimonious hypocrite!” Thus Xavier’s disgust broke from him, as, by the pale-glowering light of the window, he hurriedly perused the half-dozen drafts, taking note of how, even while sketching out his lewd remarks, Bunting had, all shrewdly, es
sayed to disguise his hand. “Yet it is his hand, as even the least professional eye might see,” Xavier inwardly declared.

  After some ten or fifteen minutes of scrupulous examination, Xavier folded all the sheets of foolscap up,—including those pertaining to mere sermons—and slipped them, with care, into a secret inner pocket of his coat.

  YET HE FOUND HIMSELF unable to leave the rectory: for its dank and oppressive air was such, he pitied all who must remain in it: and it is no irresponsible flight of hyperbole to say that his heart fairly ached for the young widow who lay in her invalid’s bed, but a floor above. How grievously abused Xavier’s cousin had been, by the masculine sex!—whether her assailant Poindexter, or her husband Bunting, or, indeed, her wicked and unnatural father, many years before. (A veritable shudder of loathing ran through Xavier when, of a sudden, he thought of Erasmus Kilgarvan,—a figure out of the past, which is to say, out of Winterthurn, which he had not contemplated for more than twenty years. “He, the greatest of brutes,—the swine, the father of all,” Xavier murmured. “If only he is truly dead—!”)

  Taking the stairs to the second floor in such determined haste, he bounded up two or three steps at a time, Xavier Kilgarvan went directly to the chamber in which Perdita lay, and saw, through the crack of the door, the girl Nell seated in a rocking chair; and, close by, in a bed of modest proportions, albeit charmingly canopied in white damask sprinkled with rosebuds, Perdita herself,—asleep, or unconscious, in so profound a stupor, her breath came gasping and arrhythmic, and her lips appeared parched, and even cracked with fever blisters; her skin had acquired the flawless dead-white tone of alabaster, as if she were, not a living woman, but a beauteous effigy of Death,—placed amidst a bower of spotless white linen, in a pose of mocking serenity!

  She is dying,—she is near death—they have destroyed her, Xavier thought, stricken to the heart.

  At this moment Nell glanced up from her knitting in alarm, and sprang to the door, to close it against him: her broad ruddy face expressing such fearful surprise, she might have been gazing at her mistress’s assailant in the doorway, and not at Xavier Kilgarvan, whom she certainly knew. However, Xavier handily prevented the door being shut; and drew the trembling girl out into the corridor, to inform her that he had come to speak with Mrs. Bunting,—and that she was wanted straightaway downstairs, by the housekeeper. “Please, sir, Mr. Kilgarvan, sir,” the girl said in a quavering voice, “you know I am forbidden to allow any visitors into this room; you know Mrs. Bunting is in a delirium,—she is very ill—Dr. Hatch has cautioned me, and Miss Thérèse—O please, sir—” Thus the blushing maidservant protested, very nearly weeping with distress, and embarrassment, and, it may have been, some degree of girlish excitement at Xavier’s presence.

  But Xavier sent her away, with dispatch; and entered the dim-lit bed-chamber, which, as a consequence of the drawn blinds, and a pale green-gold covering of tea-paper on the walls, possessed an eerie undersea quality. How quiet this perfumed chamber, save for its mistress’s labored breathing! How gingerly, and with what reverence, Xavier approached the bed, to gaze upon the sleeping woman!—to see how Time had, subtly, yet incontestably, etched her forehead with fine, white, perplexed lines; and dulled the luster of her superb hair, now streaked with silver, in more artless profusion than Xavier’s own. Yet Perdita’s beauty seemed the more haunting, for being so poignantly touched with mortality.

  Scarcely daring to breathe, Xavier gazed hungrily upon her: and saw, with a stab of incalculable emotion, that she had removed her wedding band from her left hand, and now wore, on her smallest finger, an antique ruby ring of exquisite design: a child’s ring, it seemed: and one which struck Xavier’s eye as familiar,—ah, how wondrously familiar!

  He bent over her, to stroke the disordered tresses on her pillow; and to murmur her magical name; and, with but a moment’s hesitation, to kiss her cool cheek,—with the immediate consequence that her eyelids began to flutter, and blink; and, by degrees, consciousness, and recognition, flooded into her vision.

  “My Perdita—!” Xavier whispered.

  Xavier Kilgarvan’s Investigation: The Embrace

  While our daily lives commonly proceed with so little variation, one day is scarcely to be distinguished from the next, and an entire week,—nay, a month—may glide by with seamless ease, it is a predominant characteristic of a criminal investigation that each day is fraught with discovery, and oft-times with danger: and the passage of a mere twelve hours may so completely eclipse the day that preceded it, it constitutes a unit entire in itself. Now Fortune smiles; now frowns; now clues appear to “fall into place”; now the detective’s theory is so cruelly injured, a giant’s hand might well have swooped idly down, to brush all the chess pieces from the table—!

  Thus, the painful contrast betwixt the events of September 15, which roused in Xavier Kilgarvan such rare emotion, he felt himself, for the first time in years, on the very brink of contentment,—and those of September 16, one of the most disagreeable days of his professional life.

  XAVIER WAS SEATED with Murre Pitt-Davies in the latter’s handsome drawing room, sipping sherry, and talking of divers subjects,—listening, rather, as Murre inclined toward loquacity, and did not need to be drawn out by the detective,—when, shortly past five o’clock, word came that the fugitive Dovekie had been, at last, taken into custody by police; and brought to the Winterthurn County Jail, after a considerable struggle; and would be presently available for questioning by Xavier Kilgarvan.

  So it was, Xavier sprang from his seat, in some excitement: for he was convinced that Dovekie’s testimony would clear him and, if all went well, provide evidence by which a case against Ellery Poindexter might be assembled.

  (Since Xavier’s nettlesome interview with Poindexter, he had questioned numerous persons about him, and, most specifically, about his relations with his late wife, Amanda: but the results were inconclusive indeed. On every side it was hinted that the Poindexters were mismatched, and, perhaps, Ellery Poindexter had not practiced the strictest fidelity in his marriage,—indeed, he was rumored to have a mistress in Rivière-du-Loup, and even to have sired bastard children, unknown to his family. It was hinted that Amanda Poindexter’s anxiety over religious matters, and, indeed, her dependence upon Reverend Bunting and his counsel, might have sprung from marital discord. Yet, to Xavier Kilgarvan’s frustration, no one wished to speak frankly. His promise that remarks would be held in strictest confidence proved of little help: one lady would frown, and stare pensively into her tea cup, and suggest to Xavier that he ask such questions of another lady: that lady would begin to speak, think better of it, fall frowningly silent, and then, with a sigh, aver that she was not the one to question: and so on, and so forth, until Xavier agonized that he had fallen into the midst of a veritable clan of sphinxes! Nor were the gentlemen of Winterthurn any less reticent: for, it seemed, they feared Ellery Poindexter for his wicked tongue, and his penchant for taking revenge in underhanded ways, against persons imagined to have offended him. Early on in the investigation, Xavier learned that the master of St. Bride’s was known as an indefatigable enemy and naught but an intermittent friend: he gambled carelessly at his clubs, and at the horse track; “forgot” to pay his debts; and flew into a rage if it were suggested, however diplomatically, that he had done so. Seemingly for the sport of it, he set friends against one another; blackballed the very “up and coming” gentlemen of Winterthurn society, whom he appeared to be championing to their faces; and had been known to participate in business deals of a clouded nature, especially involving the Great Northern Pacific Railroad Development Company, in which he was the principal shareholder. Only Wilbur Elspeth spoke openly against him, telling Xavier, with a grim visage, that “the Devil himself might know where Poindexter had been, on the afternoon of the murders,”—but Xavier wondered how to credit this, since Elspeth and Poindexter had been feuding for years, on the Bishop’s Standing Committee. No lady would say what she seemed to be thinking, albeit
Murre’s aunt, Miss Elvira Pitt-Davies, strongly hinted that Xavier should be discreet in his inquiries, as Poindexter was one to bear a grudge for years: he had once boastfully described himself, in her presence, as wishing neither to forget nor to forgive,—what sport did life hold otherwise? Revenge is a dish best served cold,—thus he had quoted a Spanish proverb, to the perplexity of his well-bred listeners. Of the servants in Poindexter’s employ, no one would speak with Xavier save McPhearson Jones, whom Poindexter had discharged from his post for drunkenness, but two days after the murders: and Jones’s allegations against his former employer,—that he chastised his wife in such uncouth language, the poor lady habitually burst into tears—struck Xavier as not altogether reliable. Whom could he believe? Whom could he approach? His cousin Thérèse, with whom he spoke but briefly, seemed to wish to shun him, saying that she knew very little of Ellery Poindexter,—knew little, and wanted to know less; and that the entire affair, involving the murders, and the tragedy that had befallen Perdita, left her so sickened, she cared not to speak of it at all. “No more would I,” Xavier faintly protested, “save that it is my duty.”)

  SINCE THE CALAMITOUS afternoon when, it seemed, Jabez Dovekie disappeared into thin air in the hilly scrubland beyond Jewett’s Pond, a number of search parties had been organized throughout the valley, seeking the red-haired fugitive in such places as Mt. Moriah, and Mt. Provenance, and Nautauga Falls, to no avail: for, alas, one false lead followed another: with Dovekie, or his fearsome look-alike, being sighted virtually everywhere, oft-times in several towns at the same approximate hour,—and with his bloody ax in hand.