Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Which is to say,—

  Then, of a sudden, the detective was sickened to the very marrow of his bones, to hear a shout behind him, and to know himself detected, in this graceless posture: the which infelicitous turnabout had rarely befallen him in his years of professional service—!

  Turning, then, he was astounded to see his very adversary rushing toward him, shouting, and choking, and flailing his arms about!—Poindexter’s sickly face so contorted with fury, one could scarcely have recognized him. For a scant moment Xavier stood affrighted and paralyzed as any boy, exposed in a guilty predicament: albeit his wily trained muscles alerted themselves to withstand physical assault; and his gaze leapt about to determine whether a weapon of any sort lay close at hand,—or whether he must defend his life against the madman bare-fisted.

  Alas, there was nothing: not a tree limb,—not a club,—not a hammer or an ax: nothing whatsoever, for his panicked fingers to grasp.

  “You!—it is you! And here! Of all places! Here! I will not bear it. It is an insult God cannot ask me to bear!” With which infuriated words Poindexter threw himself upon poor Xavier, his fingers essaying to close brutally about Xavier’s throat.

  Albeit the detective had been taken totally by surprise,—his flank undefended, as it were—he was agile enough to slip from the fiend’s grasp, protecting himself with fists, and elbows, and feet: striking a blow all wildly here, and another there,—with the immediate result that Poindexter’s nose spurted red, and he grew more maddened still, and began to scream, and seemed, of a sudden, suffused with a maniacal strength to kill, to kill, to kill: emitting now sounds partaking rather more of the bestial, than the human,—and gasping for breath,—and choking, while poor Xavier nearly collapsed beneath the sheer weight of his bulk; and again his fingers groped for Xavier’s throat,—and squeezed, and squeezed—until, of a sudden, both men tumbling to the snow, and rolling and wrestling about, the pressure of Poindexter’s fingers was relaxed: and Xavier knew himself spared, and his opponent lifeless. Apoplexy, perhaps; or heart failure; or a seizure of some kind,—thus, dazed and blinking, and himself wounded about the face, Xavier reasoned, while summoning forth the strength to crawl from beneath his opponent’s bulk, and rise to his feet.

  So this scene, ill-orchestrated as it has been, ends nonetheless in triumph, with Xavier Kilgarvan crouched trembling over his adversary’s corpse, musing aloud: “Dead?—he is dead?—he?—at last?—Poindexter,—dead? And it is all over—?”

  Epilogue

  I

  Certainly, in the narrative it should please me to write, and, doubtless, the reader to read, the mystery entitled The Bloodstained Bridal Gown would end at this dramatic juncture: the detective at last triumphant, after his long and torturous ordeal,—the villain dead by his own hand, in a manner of speaking,—and naught remaining but the judicious tying-up of a few loose threads, that the case be formally closed. Here, too, we have the additional benison, that some nine months later, not one but two devoted couples,—Xavier and Perdita, and Murre Pitt-Davies and Thérèse—are to be yoked in Holy Matrimony: the morbid infelicities of the past swept aside, and, with God’s grace, a cloudless future in store for all principals.

  This unlook’d-to double wedding does indeed take place, on a hazily warm morning in September: but, unfortunately, some exceedingly painful months lay between, during which time poor Xavier Kilgarvan suffered greatly,—the more so, in that the circumstances of his “nervous collapse” were never understood; and so many irresponsible rumors made their way through Winterthurn, it is all but impossible to sort out truth from fancy.

  All that is known with certainty is that, scarcely a fortnight following the death of Ellery Poindexter, Xavier Kilgarvan was felled by some sort of debilitating illness, or condition, rising partly from physical exhaustion and partly from an overtaxed imagination: the which could not fail to have been exacerbated by alcoholic spirits. (For more than one scandalmonger had spread the news that Xavier Kilgarvan had taken to drink; and was no stranger to opium, besides—! Whereupon cruel commentary was aired, yet again, on the tainted blood inherited from a distant ancestor, harking back at least to Colonial times, and to the fateful intermingling of pure English stock with Red Indians, native to the Winterthurn Valley.)

  So far as Xavier’s struggle with Ellery Poindexter was concerned, however, and the outcome of his investigation,—the reader may be somewhat surprised (as, indeed, I must confess I was) to learn that, as soon as Poindexter was buried, public sentiment swung strongly against him. Xavier Kilgarvan’s highly detailed case against the suspect was doubtless convincing, but, it seemed, of a sudden, no one required convincing!—the consensus now being, on every level of society, that Poindexter, and not the luckless Jabez Dovekie, had committed the ax murders after all.

  And why had he done it?—why had a gentleman of his wealth and rank stooped to so bestial an act?

  Suddenly, through Winterthurn City, it was said to have been “generally known” that Amanda Poindexter and Harmon Bunting had been involved in an illicit liaison, which roused the cuckolded Ellery to the simple expedient of revenge; just as it was “known,”—nay, “it had been known all along”—that Poindexter, though making a pretense of Christian virtue, and invariably chairing the Bishop’s Standing Committee with an iron hand, had been a shameless profligate and immoralist, since coming of age. The Peregrines, and the Goshawks, and the Von Goelers, and the De Forrests; the Elspeths, and the Westergaards, and the Penistones; why, even the Pitt-Davies,—even the Shaws (who had long been reticent about their son-in-law)—now spoke openly of the man’s criminal excesses: his unpaid gambling debts, scattered about the state; his rudeness; his indifference as to grooming; his negligence as a husband, and father, and heir to the St. Bride’s estate; and, not least, his predilection for such outposts of debauchery as Rivière-du-Loup. (“Why, sir, if Poindexter has whelped one nigger bastard, you may be sure he has whelped a dozen!” Thus the venerable Henry Peregrine himself said, one evening at cards: whereupon it quickly became common knowledge through town that Poindexter had fathered a dozen illegitimate children, or more,—and all with “nigger wenches” of the most depraved sort.)

  To this consensus was added the whispered testimony of Amanda’s elder sister, that she knew for a fact that Ellery Poindexter had penned the unspeakable letters received by several ladies,—as she had received one of these shocking missives herself, but had destroyed it at once, and told no one of it, out of a terror of her brother-in-law. Also, it was whispered, by certain lady friends of Amanda’s, that though she was “altogether innocent” of any romantic attachment to Reverend Bunting, had she not been, Ellery Poindexter’s numberless infidelities would have driven her to it—!

  Most damaging of all was the vehement testimony of Dr. Holyrod Wilts, who had been summoned to examine the fallen man, in Rivière-du-Loup, and had pronounced him dead of “those convulsive seizures of the central nervous system and paroxysms of the heart” common to syphilitic infection. Dr. Wilts, an old acquaintance of the deceased, boasted that he himself had had a hand in bringing the murderer to justice: for ’twas he who had provided Xavier Kilgarvan with invaluable information, leading him to Poindexter’s secret household,—his refuge of sin—in Rivière-du-Loup. (For, it seems, Dr. Wilts had for weeks strongly suspected,—or, it might have been, had actually known—that Ellery Poindexter had butchered his wife and the Buntings, in order to be free to remarry: his present mistress being but a common whore, of sullied racial strain, employed at the Hotel Paradise. “Her identity is kept secret, and she herself is in terror of stepping forward,” the white-haired physician said, “for fear of becoming implicated as an accessory to the crime: and as I am a gentleman, I have sworn not to expose her.”)

  YET, THOUGH FULSOMELY PRAISED on all sides as a detective of rare genius, and once again besieged by invitations to the most exclusive houses in Winterthurn, Xavier Kilgarvan took no evident joy in his triumph: and presented to the world so pa
le, flaccid, and remorseful a countenance, one might surmise he had not solved a devilishly knotty murder case, but, instead, lost his closest friend,—or his very brother!

  One evening, partaking of an intimate dinner at the Pitt-Davies home,—there being only Thérèse, and Elvira Pitt-Davies, and, of course, Murre, as his companions—Xavier of a sudden laid down his fork and gripped his head in his hands, and murmured, through numbed lips, that he could not eat: nay, he could not go on.

  A moment of stricken silence ensued; then Murre rose from his seat, to approach his friend, and inquire what was wrong; and poor Xavier, yet gripping his head in his hands, as if it pulsed with pain too violent to be borne, whispered that he did not know: he did not know what was wrong: he had no idea whatsoever, what was wrong, save that it was wrong,—and he could not continue.

  Thereafter, all swiftly, he sank, it seems, into most surprising idleness, rarely left his suite of rooms, and rarely welcomed Murre in; ate very little; began drinking ever earlier in the day,—so unnaturally early, it might be said that he was never without a drink close at hand, save when lying senseless on his bed, or (thus the servants whispered) on the carpeted floor. “Xavier, what is wrong?—please answer—what is wrong?” Murre worriedly inquired of him, several times a day; whereupon the detective, unshaven, and disheveled, and perplexed, it seemed, as Murre himself was perplexed, answered, he did not know what was wrong.

  It was Xavier’s stated intention to leave Winterthurn City and return to Manhattan, in order to take up, at once, his detective work,—there being, by this time, any number of fresh mysteries at hand, and clients begging in desperation for his services. Yet, it seemed, he lacked the requisite energy to make arrangements; and easily bent to Murre’s suggestion that, as he was feeling still the debilitating effect of the “Poindexter case,” he might better stay where he was.

  Ah, how peculiar a mystery it was!—that Xavier did not know what was wrong, save that it was wrong—and he could not go on.

  His faithful friend Murre asked of him, whether he wished to see a physician: but Xavier’s muttered reply was negative. Then, would he like to speak with any acquaintance?—or, if the lesions had healed betwixt them, his father?—or his brother Bradford?

  “I have no father, in any accurate manner of speaking,” Xavier sullenly said, “nor, what is even more felicitous, any ‘brother Bradford.’”

  When Murre brought news of Perdita, conveyed to him by Thérèse, it was observed that Xavier visibly brightened: for the widow’s physician in Contracoeur now voiced a “cautious hope” regarding her full recovery, where, formerly, he had not wished to comment. “Then she is well?—I mean, she is not ill?—I mean, not gravely ill?” Xavier asked, his brow anxiously knit. “But why does she not write?—or does she write, and her letters are lost? Yet, still, I shall write to her, this evening, perhaps, or tomorrow; I shall write to her; for there are many things to be said . . .” Whereupon his voice trailed off into a listless silence; and, after a minute, he lapsed into his distracted state, scarcely knowing where he was.

  In so spiritless a mood, Xavier shunned all festivities of the holiday season; and many were the days, I am sorry to say, in late December, when he did not trouble himself to dress completely, or to perform the most cursory rites of his toilet,—and this, at a time when he was fiercely pursued by Winterthurn hostesses; and served up, as it were, in altogether rhapsodic terms, in the newspapers of the Northeast. Letters and telegrams arrived daily at the Pitt-Davies home, and petitioners came in person, begging the detective’s services, and proffering highly satisfactory fees: but, alas, Xavier would have none of them: and instructed the Pitt-Davies servants never to bother him with such trifles.

  “Cannot you tell these persons that I am departed,—or dead?” Xavier irritably jested.

  Thus it was, while all of Winterthurn celebrated Christmas, Xavier Kilgarvan kept to his retreat on the second floor of the Pitt-Davies house, and felt so little suffused with energy, he did not even stand at the window, to stare over at Grace Church, as he had been wont to do. Much of the time he lay part-dressed on his bed, sipping gin, and thinking, and thinking,—though what it was, of which he thought, he seemed not to know. If he tried to read, the print swirled and danced before his eyes; if he tried to sleep, his brain worked all the more frenetically, as it had been accustomed to working in the past several months: albeit now, it seemed, he had nothing about which to think.

  “I am indeed a mirror suspended above an abyss,” he thought, “possessed of no content, and reflecting nothing save motion. And now, alas, that motion appears to have stilled—!”

  Though, with Ellery Poindexter’s death, the mystery of the Grace Church murders would seem to have been resolved, Xavier could not forgo thinking of it; and soon lapsed into perusing his coded notes on the subject and staring, oft-times for long-benumbed periods at a stretch, at the several labyrinthine charts, graphs, and maps he had so meticulously devised,—in another phase of his life, it seemed. A sickly sort of fascination led him, yet again, to the “anonymous” letters he knew to have been penned by Harmon Bunting: the which he read, and reread; and shook his head over; and yet again, he knew not why, reread,—hearing a sinister voice in these rhythms:

  . . .’Tis the Devil’s very own delicacy you are, tho’ chastely professing otherwise! . . . like many another wife of this quaint region in whose mouth (as the naughty expression would have it) butter would not melt. Nay, it is no secret to me, that Woman is but a gilded & primped sepulcher,—a chasm of sickly heat,—a bunghole, as St. Augustine would have it, into which Man falls to his damnation. Such frailties can be attributed to the Moon’s tide, tho’ I (who know the wicked heart of Woman well) should attribute them to a volition diseased & spiteful & mischievous & wanton . . .

  “Whose voice?—whose voice do I hear?” the stricken man cried aloud.

  IT WAS THIS very letter (originally received, according to records, by the late Mrs. Poindexter herself) that was found gripped betwixt Xavier Kilgarvan’s tight-closed fingers when a manservant discovered him the following morning: lying part-sensible, and raving, on the carpet beside his bed.

  HEREAFTER, XAVIER DESCENDED into a state of despondent torpor, beside which his previous mood appeared healthsome indeed. Now, he could be prevailed upon to eat virtually nothing; or, if he swallowed a few mouthfuls, he immediately sickened, and vomited it up again. Oft-times, when Murre Pitt-Davies gingerly approached him, he burst into childish tears, saying that it had been he, and not Ellery Poindexter after all, who had committed the murders—!

  “Why, Xavier, how is that possible?” Murre inquired, laying a cool hand against his friend’s feverish brow.

  “I—I know not—I cannot remember precisely—Albeit I do remember that I had cunningly arranged to appear to arrive in Winterthurn on the evening of—was it September eleventh?—yes, September eleventh—when in truth I had arrived the night before—in order to consummate a secret design—The dimensions of which,” he said, faltering, “I cannot speak.”

  “And why cannot you speak of them, Xavier?” Murre gently inquired.

  To which reasonable question, the distraught man could supply no answer,—no answer at all.

  IT WAS ON a snow-swept New Year’s Eve that the troubled detective consigned to the flames every shred of information he had so laboriously gathered regarding the infamous Poindexter case: his coded notes,—copies of numerous official documents from the coroner’s office, the chief of police, etc.; dozens of “tips” from informants both identified and anonymous; the labyrinthine charts, graphs, and maps; and, not least, the collection of offensive letters received by the Winterthurn ladies. Alas, that such priceless papers were destroyed by Xavier’s own hand, in a roaring conflagration in his suite—!

  “Loathsome, loathsome,—loathsome,” Xavier muttered, poking the evidence more forcibly into the flames. “Thus the ‘Old Year’ ends!”

  And in the morning, when the New Year dawned frigid and silen
t, the detective was discovered in Grace Church Cemetery,—wandering shoeless and but part-clad, murmuring aloud, and laughing, and swiping at invisible adversaries amidst the snow-shrouded gravestones.

  Ah, so dazed and contorted was the gentleman’s face,—so bloodshot his eyes—and so silvery-white had his wavy hair become, in a matter of hours, he was scarcely to be recognized: and had to be carried bodily back to the Pitt-Davies home, that he might be positively identified by his shocked friend as,—Xavier Kilgarvan.

  II

  Thus, an interlude of some twenty weeks ensued, reaching well into spring: during which time the detective drank deep, as it were, of the waters of Pathos,—those of Tragedy being finally inappropriate, as, by pained and halting degrees, he did recover.

  But, ah!—how pained and halting indeed, and how doubtful, was his convalescence!—and how frequently Murre Pitt-Davies and his dear friend Thérèse despaired that the patient would ever regain any measure of his former strength, and his former mental faculties, and, withal, his former soul,—though he had been placed under the rigorous care of a physician, and watched day and night, that he might adhere to a healthsome regimen of rest, and quiet, and prolonged sleep; and, it scarcely needs be said, naught but the most nourishing of foods and drink. (For all alcoholic beverages were now forbidden him: and though, in the first weeks, the piteous gentleman begged for strong drink,—essayed to seduce the servants into aiding him, and bullied, and threatened where he could—he soon came to see that his salvation lay in renouncing drink forever: and made the heroic resolve, in as firm a voice as he could summon forth, that he would never allow a drop of alcohol to touch his lips again, so long as he lived.)