Twisting the Rope

by MacAvoy, R. A. ;

  And how strange a murder weapon. Murder is always a mistake.

  As though conjured, Elen Evans came in the door, slumped from weariness and with her fringe of hair in untidy strings, but still perfectly in command of herself. “Where is everybody?” she asked. Under her dark hair and dark tan, her face shone pale. The painted walls put a green tint to it.

  Elizabeth lifted her head from the glass-topped bureau table, where she still sat by the phone. She had the red imprints of her knuckles on her cheek. She focused with difficulty on Elen, decided she was inconsequential, and put her head down again.

  Martha was not looking at Elen’s face, but at her hand and what she held in it. “You brought back my van?”

  Elen blinked and glanced at the key ring herself. “Oh. Yes. I’m sorry. I… borrowed it.”

  “You didn’t tell me.”

  Though Martha’s words had been free of rancor, Elen flinched. “I’m so sorry about that, Martha. Especially after I heard they arrested Mayland for this damn George thing. But I didn’t expect to be gone more than—”

  “Oh my, that’s right.” Martha raked her hair with both hands and she walked over to where Elen stood in the doorway. “That’s what I said to your friend on the phone. And that’s what I thought at the time. But it wasn’t for that. He was arrested for shaking up Don Stoughie.”

  Elen’s mouth sagged open, her shoulders sank down, and she swayed on her feet, but such was her self-possession that all these seemed only conscious theatricality. “My dear! For shaking the who…?”

  “Assault,” said Martha. “It’s claimed that he used some… fairly mild strong-arm tactics in order to get Stoughie to release our money.”

  Elen threw her purse on the bed, following it with herself. “Really? How frivolous! And what marvelous timing.”

  She stared blankly at the blank ceiling, and after sixty seconds, she added in quite another tone, “So there’s no evidence to say George’s death was anything other than suicide, is there?”

  Martha sat down beside her. Her hair stood out in a wing on one side and she wore an owlish, tired expression. “None that I know of. But I don’t think it was suicide. Do you?”

  Elen merely stared.

  “Besides, we have another problem right now. Marty’s gone off again.”

  Elen sat up so fast the bed rocked. “Oh, no. The beach!”

  Elizabeth spoke, and her voice was phlegmy with suppressed tears. “We tried that. Both Mayland and the police. She’s not there.

  “According to him she went north, this time. He found footprints. Some people saw her. I wish he’d call in again.”

  Elen squeezed her head between her hands. “Slow down. Too much to digest, here, and I just woke up. That sweet idiot Sandy thought I needed my sleep too much and I woke up and came blasting down here thinking they had our manager on a murder rap….”

  Martha took a breath to collect herself. From where she was sitting she could see the distant backyard, but not the little boy. Nor the tricycle. Just as well.

  “He’s out on bail for the assault charge. He and Pádraig went out along the streets, looking for Marty or for someone who might have seen her walking along.”

  “Pádraig may very well find her,” Elen interrupted. “He has an affinity for children. Like calls to like, I guess.”

  Martha considered this and a slight smile touched her lips. “Mayland has an affinity for Marty herself. Like calling to unlike.”

  “She went looking for Judy, again,” Elizabeth said, and her voice was ragged. “God, I wish I knew where that one came from! I ask her and she just cries.”

  The blond woman’s face was patches of white and red and her bones stood out both in face and shoulders. Elen Evans stared at her silently, as though she were afraid of her, and indeed, with her size, passion, and Valkyrie face, Elizabeth did look dangerous. Martha glanced again at the van keys.

  “I’m going to follow them,” she stated. “Give me those keys and all the dimes you have.” She turned to her daughter almost fiercely. “I think you should come with me, Liz. You’re falling apart here.”

  Elizabeth made a floundering gesture to rise, but then fell down onto the stool again. “The phone. I have to stay….”

  “I can do that.” Elen slipped off the bed and her eyes, like Elizabeth’s, were wet. “It’s the least I can do for you, after running off with your only transportation all this time.” She dispossessed Elizabeth of the seat. “I won’t move from here till you come back.

  “With Marty.”

  Teddy came in without knocking, for the door was not completely closed. He found Elen in the comfortable armchair, for she had dragged the phone to the breakfast table. Her eyes were swollen.

  “Wet through,” he mumbled. “And for nothing. At least not on the material level.” Then he remembered Elen had not been there before.

  “They tell you? About Marty?”

  She nodded and yawned. “Yep. And that Mayland isn’t really arrested for murder.”

  “If it was murder,” he said.

  Elen made a casting-away gesture: remnant of her usual smooth manner. “La! But Martha believes it was murder. And who is the prime suspect, I ask you? He shows up dead the very day he blows the gaff on our very embarrassing shared past….”

  There was silence, broken only by traffic, bird song, and faint footsteps in the hall. Teddy broke it. “Hey, Elen, did you see a friend of mine here this morning? Little guy with a headband?”

  Elen squinted at him, irritated by the non sequitur. “No, I didn’t.”

  The reply was daunting, but it did not satisfy Ted Poznan. He wiggled in his damp shirt and gazed at his own face in the mirror behind the bureau. The footsteps became louder and then someone knocked.

  As Ted had left it cracked, the door opened by the force of the knock to reveal Sergeant Anderson standing there. “Hello again,” he said. “Where’s Mrs. Macnamara?”

  “Out looking for Marty,” answered Elen, rising. “You do know about that, don’t you?”

  Stepping into the room, Anderson nodded to Teddy. He revealed a patrolman, who stood outside.

  “I heard it on the radio, but I was out investigating—oddly enough—another missing child.”

  Elen sighed, rubbed her eyes, and looked around for a chair. “That seems to be the trendy thing now. Pictures on all my shopping bags of missing children. And the coupon packages… Horrible. Do sit down, Inspector.”

  “Sergeant,” he corrected her amiably. “And I’m afraid I’d like a little private conversation…”

  Elen’s face froze and went white. Teddy rose and looked uncertain whether perhaps leaving Elen would be an act of cowardice.

  “Go, Ted,” she whispered.

  “But the conversation I had in mind was with Mr. Poznan,” said Detective-Sergeant Anderson apologetically.

  Teddy’s brown eyes went very wide.

  The Bear Went Over the Mountain

  The two men stood at the dripping edge of the forest. “Shit, what a strange place,” said Pádraig reverently and he took a step back onto the sidewalk.

  Long stepped into the briars that edged the road and they clawed at his cream-colored trousers. He called over his shoulder: “And it has a strange reputation. It’s a state park. I would rather find that Marty hadn’t gone in here, but that deer path is the sort of thing that would attract a child.”

  “I would like to see a deer. A wild deer.” Pádraig took another step back and lunged forward, making a single leap over the bramble barrier. He landed hands and knees on wet redwood mulch and sent a spatter of mud onto his companion. He apologized, grinning.

  The light was dim, not merely because of the wind-blown and dissolving clouds in the sky, but because of the trees. The perfectly straight and even trunks of the redwoods seemed to be holding up a blue-green and furry ceiling far above. Sound faded. There was no undergrowth. A few yards in, it was perfectly dust-dry.

  There was a streak of paler dust scor
ing the mulch from behind them and into the distance ahead. “This has been disturbed recently,” said Long. “Perhaps only by deer…” He straightened again and looked up. “Or dogs.” The silence of the place fell like drapes around them, and Long continued in a whisper: “Older than human. Older than the hairy creatures: these redwood trees. Even as a sapling a redwood feels old. They do not compromise, and they do not care for us or for our problems, a Phádraig.”

  “Then you’re like these trees yourself, Mayland,” said Pádraig, walking very close beside him and looking all around. “It’s just this morning when we were at the bar I began to wonder if you were human, with your talk about the age on you and the power. Maybe you have the soul of a redwood.”

  Long stopped and snorted. “By seven sages, I remember that conversation! And if that was any indication, I have the soul of a drunk. And I—well, I won’t brag my age under a redwood tree. Most inauspicious.

  “But it isn’t the redwoods that give the park its odd reputation. The strangeness I mean is of human kind.” His breath made a thick, phlegmy sound and he winced as he cleared his throat.

  “This place is too big and too dark and hilly to be patrolled. And it is too near a pleasant town like Santa Cruz. It attracts those who can neither live in cities nor in complete wilderness. I read about it too often in the San Francisco papers: criminals and crazy people. The poor park has more than its share of crazy people.” Long’s steps raised little beige clouds. It sounded as though he were walking on foam. “Of course a man may be only pleasantly crazy—some of the finest men are called crazy—but people have died here.”

  Pádraig now stepped so close beside Long they bumped shoulders with each step. “Óch, you have more than your share of craziness all over this country, I think.” His foot slipped into a hole concealed by shed redwood sprigs and he went down with an outsized squeal.

  Long caught him under the arms and pulled him up. “Why you would call me a part of this country, I don’t know. It’s you who have the citizenship by birth, isn’t it? Through your mother?”

  Pádraig’s glance was doggishly sly. “Aw, but that didn’t fool you, did it?”

  “Indeed it did, a Phádraig! Are your papers forged, then?”

  Pádraig gave a completely childish skip over the redwood mulch. “They’re real papers for a real Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin, but I’m not him. He’s my cousin of the same name, who does plastering and has no use for his passport, so I’ve been him since I came out for my first race.

  “Did I really fool you? And Martha? She must have known better, for she knows my ma. I made the mistake of telling George, worse my luck.”

  Long stopped still in a cloud of forest dust. “St. Ives knew? I’m surprised he kept his mouth shut, since he was not your friend at all….”

  “You can believe he wasn’t! It was his idea that I should go home in the first week, and he said if I was still with the band after that, he’d turn me in to the immigration men. But it seems he forgot again, or was afraid what Martha would do, because I heard no more about it.”

  Pádraig stood beside Long, grinning unrepentantly and with his hair in his eyes. It seemed he attracted more dirt in his passage than did the other, and a large part of it was on his face. His shirt front had come out of his trousers. His raffish, unfinished appearance led Long to thinking.

  “One question, a Phádraig. Are you the same age as well as the same name as your cousin?”

  The grin grew broader. “That would be asking too much out of chance. I’m three years older. Couldn’t you have guessed that?”

  “I could not,” answered Long very firmly. “And I think this trick of yours is going to do you no good, lad. The police aren’t stupid, and if they find out you are traveling under false papers—and it would have been so easy to get you a temporary visa for the tour—they’ll feel obliged to poke further. You’ve put yourself into a corner where you have a reason to have killed that man there. Worse for yourself, you made the very rope that took his life.”

  Long, the complete linguist, often slipped from English to Irish in speaking with Pádraig, and such was the influence of the boy’s history that the more he chided him the more he tended to use Irish.

  But before Long was finished talking, Pádraig had finished listening, for there was a shimmer of metal at the floor of a valley below them, most unaccountable in the forest. The young man plunged with renewed enthusiasm down the slippery hill. Mr. Long followed more sedately, for the dust had set him to coughing once again.

  “Don’t worry, Mayland,” Pádraig called out as he slid. “I need that passport for the autumn, when I’m going to be teaching the sailing classes by Boston. And why should it be questioned a bit? No one knows now but you, and you won’t tell.”

  Don’t depend on that, my boy, said Long, but only to himself. He stepped delicately in Pádraig’s wake, wondering why the young fellow who had been so cowed by St. Ives (and by his father, if Martha was to be believed) could be so hard for Long himself to influence.

  Perhaps his personal authority was waning. Why not, when his body’s constitution let him down so easily? At one time the affair with Don Stoughie would not have dragged out to its cat-fight end.

  But watching Pádraig Ó Súilleabháin bounce, high stepping down the dry slope in front of him, full of determination and unthinking confidence, Long decided that it was not his own senility, but only that the boy reminded him too strongly of Marty for him to use discipline.

  “Look what we have here!” Pádraig kicked the fallen needles aside, covering himself in aromatic compost. “It’s iron. A train rail, out here in the middle of the wilderness.”

  Long stooped down and picked among the litter less wholeheartedly. At this distance, the smell of the cast redwood twigs was heady. “Right enough. It’s an old, narrow-gauge railroad line. In remarkably good preservation too. The top shows almost no rust.”

  “Well, what would you have, in this desert?” said Pádraig, and he added, “I think that she came down here. Look how it’s scuffed all along the side. She went along the track, probably walking on it, down between those two hills.” Pádraig started off at a trot. Walking on the rail.

  “It isn’t a desert in the winter,” said Long, again following. “And I’m not at all sure this track wasn’t made by deer or dogs.”

  Pádraig shrugged, not bothering to turn. “But I’m confident we’re close behind her, Mayland, and sometimes I know things I can’t explain. Isn’t it so with you?”

  Long chuckled, and for easier conversation, he stepped onto the other shiny rail. His balance was at least as good as Pádraig’s, and he bounced less. “Not at all, my friend. I know only what I am told, or what my eyes and ears tell me. I loathe the confusion of the occult. It does not lead to the truth.”

  “Now you sound like the priest.” Pádraig’s progress faltered, for he had led Long around a bend into a very intimidating scene. To the left of the old rail rose what might have been a brush jam in a creek. But the branches were the trunks of massive trees that rose in splintered majesty forty feet up. A circle of earth and root the size of a small asteroid clutched at the air. Only half-aware of his action, Pádraig slipped from the rail and retreated five steps to the steep undercut of the right-hand slope. “Jesus! What hand did that? It darkens the sky!”

  Long came beside him and pointed. “If you look a few yards away you can see the bed of a stream, though it’s dry.”

  “That little thing?”

  “I told you there is some rain here in the winter. It’s odd that slide didn’t block our path entirely. It looks like it’s been cleared. But why would anyone go to the effort of moving all that?”

  Pádraig continued flattened against the crumbly wall, shaking his head from side to side in awe of the fallen monsters.

  “Well, let’s go on now, if you’ve still got your feeling. I wouldn’t want the child to be caught by the dark in here.”

  As if in response to Long’s unhappy t
hought, the air filled with a lonely keening. In the hush of the trees, it was very loud. It got louder. There was a menacing rumble.

  “I hear it this time, all right,” Pádraig stated. “Very like the pipes. Not the elbow pipes, but the Scottish pipes, I think. And it’s no recording, for—”

  Long had been staring into the dusky distance, frozen with what seemed a supernatural horror. Now he locked his spiderish hand around Pádraig’s upper arm. “Jump, Pádraig! Jump!” As good as his word, Long flung himself of into the tangle of fallen branches, carrying his astonished companion with him. It was a heavy, bruising fall.

  Five seconds later, the train shot through, its undersized steam locomotive puffing gouts of smoke. The three little cars behind it were filled with wondering faces as the tourists took in the scope and size of the root ball on the fallen redwood. Long and Ó Súilleabháin were too far down amid the detritus of the stream bed to be seen, or to note how dear was the tiny antique train that had nearly run them over.

  Pádraig lay flat on his back with a burled tree limb sticking out from behind his shoulder like a second head. His shirt gaped over a midsection that gleamed against the black earth and his belt had caught a branch and pulled his trousers half down over an equally white rear end. First he covered himself again, and then felt himself over for injuries.

  He groaned and scrambled up painfully, saying: “I am the donkey with the longest ears in all Kerry. And California, I think. The sound of the Scottish pipes. Listen to me!”

  Long was already seated cross-legged on a flat splinter of redwood in front of the mammoth root ball. He was dusting off his jacket sleeves, and such is the magic of silk fabric that his apparel had suffered minimal damage. “I was quite fooled too, Pádraig. Though the rails were in suspiciously good repair.”