The Man in the Woods

by Rosemary Wells

  “It makes no sense at all,” said Aunt Stella. “The only thing on the tape is part of a Christmas song.”

  Helen slid the cassette onto the spools of her tape recorder. There was a short period during which only the steady hum of the tape going around could be heard. Then very clearly the whistling began. This time there was nothing light or musical about it. Each note was perfectly clipped as if he wanted her to sing along, which it was impossible not to do, since the words came into her head as surely as the order of the alphabet. The whistling was low and certain and slow, as if to make sure she would understand:

  He sees you when you’re sleeping,

  He knows when you’re awake,

  He knows if you’ve been bad or good,

  So be good for goodness sake.

  Oh! you better watch out….

  After only five lines, the whistling stopped and there was only a dead hum on the tape.

  Long after her father had come home, gone to the police station with the tape, locket, and envelope, and come back home again, Helen sat in his lap, the side of her face resting on his softly breathing chest, her arms clasped around his back, under his arms. The back of his shirt was damp. It was a hot night. There was nothing left to say. He had answered all her questions, with slight variations, but generally the same way each time. It was a school prank. Things like this happened every day of the week, according to Chief Ryser. He had hundreds of threatening notes and phone calls to deal with every year. Almost every one came from some half-crazy coward with a grudge of some kind. Even Ryser’s son had gotten a few threatening notes in the mail. It turned out someone in his class thought the boy had ratted on him for cheating on a math test.

  “Dad, the eyes! Mother’s eyes were bloody red!”

  “And I told you before, there was just a bit of red backing paper behind the photograph. That’s all.”

  “But, Dad, before there was no red backing paper. I swear! The photograph popped out of the locket last summer—the summer before anyway. There was no backing paper of any kind. Beside that, if it was just a piece of paper behind the photograph, why didn’t the pin or needle—or whatever he used to poke her eyes out—why didn’t that pierce both pieces of paper at the same time? Why? Why did he leave just the eye sockets looking bloody red and not make holes in the backing paper? Why?”

  “How can anyone figure out a thing like that?” her father said. “Now everything’s going to be all right.”

  He went on to tell her what a hectic, nuisance-filled evening poor Chief Ryser was having. While they’d been talking in the police station parking lot, all kinds of minor disasters had been reported within her father’s earshot over Ryser’s CB radio. Helen knew how it had gone—with the two men, probably rocking back and forth on their heels, hands in pockets, assuring each other that this was just kid’s stuff. Ryser probably talked about football. Most men did. And her dear father probably mentioned a few local toxic waste dumps in passing. That or what he always called “the lost tribe of Israel,” his beloved, stumbling Boston Red Sox.

  Helen removed her arms from around him.

  “Feeling better?” he asked.

  She looked up at him. With his smile, his sea-blue eyes, and his lovely head of hair, he receded from her like a comet heading for a remote star, although his arms, strong and warm, held her close.

  “Yes, I feel okay, Dad,” said Helen. This was a lie.

  After supper Aunt Stella left for her weekly bridge game with many warnings about locking windows and doors. Taking a whistle out of her purse, she told Helen to blow it as hard as she could into the receiver should an obscene phone caller ring up, in order at least to get him in the eardrum.

  As the house was stuffy, Helen’s father opened all the windows and doors the minute Aunt Stella’s car pulled out of the driveway. The Red Sox and Yankees were playing in a critical series. When the television went on, Helen was able to call Pinky without being overheard. Pinky promised to be at her house in ten minutes. He told her to have the envelope ready for him.

  “What are you going to do with it?” Helen asked.

  “Take it to my Uncle Max, the printer. All he said he needed was an original.”

  “Pinky,” said Helen, “you know what this means?”

  “What?”

  “It means we’re … we’re getting into this deeper. If we trace his printing press through your Uncle Max, it means we’re following him.”

  “He’s following you, isn’t he?” asked Pinky abruptly and hung up.

  Helen tried to take some pleasure in the thought that Pinky cared and wanted to protect her, but she could not. She went down to the kitchen and got two bottles of Coke from the icebox and, quietly opening the front door, over the chatter of the television in the den, she placed them in the milk-bottle box. She was not going to lie. She was not going to sneak out of the house, and she was not, for one minute, going to miss Uncle Max.

  “Dad, please,” she asked again and again, “just for a soda.”

  “No!” said her father as many times, not taking his gaze off the baseball players. “Silver dollars on my eyes before I let you leave this house.”

  Helen waited. Twenty-five minutes passed before Pinky came. She let him in without a word, her finger pressed to her lips.

  “Hello, sir,” said Pinky in his best West Point cadet voice.

  Helen’s father gave him a dark look with a kernel of humor in back of it. “Trying to butter me up like a piece of toast?” he asked, suppressing the twinkle in his eyes.

  For fifteen minutes Pinky and Helen’s father shouted and groaned over the game in progress. After the Red Sox had scored three runs, Pinky asked if it would be all right to take Helen out for a soda.

  “You know about the locket and everything?” asked her father, reaching deep into a cracker box.

  “Yes, sir, but please don’t worry.”

  Her father brushed some cracker crumbs off his lap onto the rug. “You are Sam Levy’s son, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “Yes, well, he was my father until he died.” Helen could feel Pinky’s mind zooming around. “I mean, he’s still my father. Yes.”

  Helen’s father smiled. “Sam was a good man,” he said. “Wish I’d had time to know him better. You can go. But I’m warning you. Be back before Stella at ten-forty-five, or she’ll put all three of our heads in the food processor.”

  Pinky straddled his motorbike, balancing on the seat while he examined the envelope and the locket and played the tape three times over on the recorder.

  Helen sat on the ground beside the motorcycle. When Pinky took off the earphones, she asked, “Does it scare you?”

  “It scares me,” said Pinky. “God, that song … I always hated that song when I was a little tiny kid. I used to lie in bed even in July and think about being watched all the way from the North Pole. It never bothered me that God was looking straight down from heaven and seeing everything. What bothered me was thinking Santa Claus had eyesight that followed the curve of the earth and…. You look pale.”

  Helen tried to rub some color into her cheeks. She opened both Cokes and tried to get the words to the song out of her head. They would not go. “I don’t understand,” she said at last. “I didn’t write that article.”

  “Whoever it is thinks you know too much, all the same,” said Pinky. “Your name was in the paper with your address. Maybe he saw you in the woods. You’ve been talking about writing this article to just about everybody. Someone you talked to could have told someone else. The word got out anyway. Maybe you ought to go home. Let me go to Uncle Max. Nobody’s after me.”

  “Yet,” said Helen.

  “Yet,” Pinky agreed.

  Helen took the locket back from Pinky. Her father had promised he would find another nice picture of her mother for it. Well, she didn’t want another nice picture. He had poked out her mother’s eyes, and maybe he had it in mind to poke out hers. He would wait for her, in her imagination, now, in the shadow of e
very tree and wall. He would sit unseen at movie theaters, stand hidden on streets, watching her. He would follow her home and stare at her, faceless, through the windows of her house while she ate and slept.

  “Like hell I’ll go home, Pinky,” she said.

  The bumpy, mosquito-ridden trip to Dartmouth dragged like a bad year. Uncle Max made it worthwhile.

  “Max Levy,” he said, extending an ink-stained hand to Helen and pumping hers happily. He explained that he was Pinky’s only relative who was not blond and good-looking. Uncle Max’s hair was almost gone, his glasses smudged, and his smile as beatific as a child’s.

  His basement workshop ran the whole length and breadth of his house and was filled with small presses, parts of presses, complete and incomplete fonts made of metal and wood, parts of typewriters, and stacks of books. He showed Helen his collection of hundred-year-old wooden type fonts, rescued, he said, from a warehouse about to be torn down in Taunton. He spoke of them as if they’d been children rescued from a fire.

  Uncle Max made them each a glass of ice tea with fresh mint leaves and poured himself a crystal goblet of Riesling from a half bottle he kept in a small under-the-counter refrigerator. Then he switched on a brilliant light over his work table, pulled on a pair of surgeon’s gloves, and examined the envelope and the copy of the tip-off note. He looked at them this way and that and then placed them under a giant desk magnifier that was bolted to the edge of the table. Several times he ran his fingers over the type on the envelope, and once he measured the lines with a ruler marked not in inches but in some other measurement Helen did not know. He murmured little bits of things to himself and hummed, the whole time, parts of the national anthem. “Too bad this is all you’ve got,” he said. “Still….

  He put the envelope and the note down and began consulting his books. He went from one to the next, frowning and looking in indexes and going back over the same pages again and again. “Funny,” he said more to himself than to Pinky and Helen. “Impossible really. But then…. If this came from the Smithsonian in Washington, I wouldn’t have any trouble at all. I just find it hard to believe.”

  “What, Uncle Max?” asked Pinky, breaking his impatient silence. “What is it?”

  “It’s a Thurber,” said Uncle Max. “No question. Look here.” He positioned the magnifier so that Pinky and Helen could both see through it. He pointed with a pair of tweezers. “Do you see that every character, that means letter,” he added for Helen’s benefit, “every character has a tiny little ridge or line underneath it? See that?”

  “I see it,” said Pinky. “It isn’t inked, but it’s there. It shows up like a shadow on the Xerox copy.”

  “Okay,” said Uncle Max. He folded his glasses and put them in his shirt pocket. “When you set type, what’s the first thing you do before you ink and print?”

  “You lock it in, of course,” said Pinky.

  “Right,” said Uncle Max, and for Helen’s understanding he explained again, making a little drawing as he did. “See?” he said. “When you set a line of type, each piece, each letter, is attached to a heavy block, metal or wood. You make a line with your words, and then you slip a bar over the top and under the bottom of the line. It’s called locking it in. That keeps everything straight, and the pieces of type don’t slide around. Now, these little ridges on your envelope and note here are uneven. If this envelope, say, had been done on a printing press, it would have been locked in and the little ridges would be even, but they aren’t even.” Uncle Max looked at Pinky. “You said on the telephone the police think it was done on a cheap toy set?”

  Pinky nodded.

  “Even a cheap rubber toy set has to be locked in or you can’t print,” said Uncle Max.

  “What does that mean?” asked Helen.

  “It means both the note and the envelope were written on an extremely old typewriter, or writing machine, as it was called in those days. Before the Civil War. Now, most people think the typewriter was invented around 1880, which is true actually. At least it came into commercial use then. But way back in about 1847 there was a man called Burt and another called Thurber. They fooled around with this writing machine idea. Your note and envelope were typed on a Thurber machine made over in Worcester in 1847. Both samples match the one in my book exactly. Take a look. What confirms it is the raised lettering. You see, Mr. Thurber meant his machine as a sort of braille writer too, so that blind people could read the type with their fingertips. He never got anywhere with it. It was a dismal failure. He spent the rest of his life manufacturing sextants and compasses for ships.”

  Helen and Pinky looked at the sample in Uncle Max’s book. “It matches exactly,” said Helen. “Every letter is the same.”

  “It’s very strange,” said Uncle Max. “There are only two Thurbers known to exist in the world. One’s in the Smithsonian in Washington, and the other’s in a typewriter museum in England. A Thurber is a very rare beetle indeed. There must have been another one. No wonder your cops, with all the best intentions, couldn’t find it.”

  The envelope and the tip-off note rested bleakly on the table beneath the dazzling work light. A photograph of the Smithsonian Institution’s Thurber was reproduced next to the sample. It looked more like an unsuccessful musical instrument than an unsuccessful typewriter. Helen read through the sample in the book. It was an incomplete letter to President Polk, dated March 8, 1848, announcing the invention of the machine itself.

  Somewhere in the back of Helen’s mind the horrible little Christmas song began to play again. “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” The locket was in her shirt-front pocket, the picture, eyeless. How would he do it to her if she wasn’t good. Would he hold her down? She would fight and scream like a tiger. Somehow he’d probably knock her out first. Then it would be easy to get at her eyes.

  Miles in the distance thunder volleyed and boomed from the south, as if awakening some long-dead secret by force.

  Uncle Max sat in a tattered Barcalounger and poured himself the last inch of Riesling in the bottle. Cleaning the smudges off his glasses, he asked gently, “I wonder who could have a Thurber?”

  Chapter 7

  HELEN WATCHED MR. BRZOSTOSKI’S eyes. He had switched the tape to the beginning again and was listening intently. She worried that although he had no foreign accent whatever, he might have been born in Europe and the words to the song would not come easily to him as they had to her and to Pinky.

  When he’d heard it through once more, he took the orange sponge earphones off his head and asked, “Who did the police tell your father it was?”

  “Some old singer called Bing Crosby who used to whistle on the radio,” said Helen. “Ryser thought it was ‘White Christmas,’ which it isn’t.”

  “Did your father point that out? Did he show Ryser the envelope?”

  “He said it was done on a toy set.”

  “Voiceprints? Fingerprints?”

  “Can’t voiceprint whistling. Aunt Stella, me, my father had all handled the cassette. Mr. Bro, I told you they thought it was a joke.”

  “And you think I will look at this differently?”

  “Well … do you?” Helen asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

  “At least,” said Helen, “will you help me, Mr. Bro? You’re a history teacher. Will you tell me how to go about looking for a hundred-and-forty-year-old writing machine?”

  “Not if it’s in the hands of some maniac, I won’t.”

  “Then you do believe me?” Helen asked, unable to keep either the sharpness or the honey out of her voice.

  Mr. Bro did not answer until he had finished an entire banana. He folded the skin neatly on his blotter. “Yes,” he said, just as neatly. “But I can’t help you.”

  Helen stood. “Then I’ll do it myself,” she said. “I’ll find a way.”

  “Sit down. No, you won’t,” said Mr. Bro. “Helen, I’m a teacher. A responsible adult. I can’t let you
go off the deep end looking for an old typewriter with some nut who uses it. Some nut who pokes out eyes.”

  “You think that’s what he means to do to me?”

  “Of course that’s what he means to do. He’s telling you, you better be good and you better watch out. He has quite deliberately punched out the eyes in the photograph, then placed red paper, cut out exactly in the shape of the locket, behind the picture to give the impression of … forgive me, gouged out eyes. If this had been simple backing paper, both papers would have holes in them. Beside that … Mr. Bro removed the photo of Helen’s mother carefully and set it on the desk. He took out the red paper behind it, touched his finger to his tongue, and rubbed it across the tiny scarlet scrap. “Ink,” he declared, looking at his reddened thumb. “Ink. Somebody’s gone to the trouble of coloring that bit of paper with red ink. If it were backing paper or anything else manufactured or printed, it wouldn’t come off with a lick of my finger, would it? So. That’s a warning. It’s clear as day.”

  “If it’s so clear to you and me and to Pinky, how come they won’t listen? Why, Mr. Bro?”

  Mr. Bro smiled a little bitterly. He folded up the copy of the tip-off note and placed it with the locket and the cassette in the envelope. “If he—whoever it is—cut out letters, say from the newspaper, and pasted them on a sheet of stationery and directly said, ‘Keep out of this or I’ll poke your eyes out,’ believe me the cops would have sat up and taken notice. He’s clever, this fellow. He did it in just such a way as to scare the living daylights out of you and make the cops laugh.”

  “What—” Helen began.

  “Just let me think,” said Mr. Bro. He swiveled in his chair and gazed out the window, murmuring tiny sounds. Then he swiveled back and faced her. “What would happen,” he asked, “if you went back to the police and showed them Uncle Max’s book and proved to them that both the tip-off note about Stubby’s rock throwing and the threat to you, the envelope anyway, were typed on an identical machine and that it wasn’t a toy at all? It’s a rare antique.”