The Man in the Woods

by Rosemary Wells

  “Sir,” said Pinky, “we found it.” He put the crumpled scrap of paper with the Thurber type sample on Ryser’s blotter. “We found the machine that was used to write the tip-off note about Stubby Atlas. Also the envelope that Helen’s locket and the tape were in. It’s in a basement up in the woods, off Route Six.”

  “And I have a sketch of the guy who was using it,” said Helen. She caught Pinky’s eye for a minute. They would not give the old Indian away. “We … I saw him for just a second.”

  Ryser looked at the type sample and the drawing blankly. “Well, you sure can draw,” he said. He was trying to be kind, Helen knew. But his attention had died. “Frank!” he yelled. “File this and get these kids home before the girl’s aunt has heart failure.”

  “Is that all?” Helen asked. “Aren’t you going to go up and take fingerprints from the writing machine?”

  “Honey,” said Ryser, standing, leaning on his arms on the desk and shrugging his massive shoulders, “I told you before and I’ll tell you again—” but he was interrupted.

  “Where’d you get this, kids?” asked the sergeant at his side. “Where did you find this piece of paper?” He had turned Helen’s drawing over and placed it, back up, on Ryser’s desk.

  Ryser scowled, put on his glasses, and read it. The color drained right out of his face and then right back in, until the tiny veins in his cheeks went magenta. “Where?” he asked.

  “In the closet at the back of the old cellar,” said Helen.

  “Was it wrapped around a container?” snapped Ryser. “Was the container full and heavy? Were there other containers?”

  “I don’t know,” answered Helen. “It was so dark. I couldn’t see. There … yes, there were lots of them. Little tins like pipe tobacco comes in. They were full, all right. They’d never been unpacked. I pried open the carton myself.”

  Ryser turned to the sergeant. “Get on the horn,” he said. “Call the lab. See if you can talk to the head, what’s his name? Feinberg. Find out how long this stuff lasts. How long is it potent?”

  Pinky had meanwhile taken the wrapper off Ryser’s desk. He handed it to Helen without a word. She turned the paper so that she could read the fancy lettering. On it was printed:

  PURE MORPHINE—100% PURE

  “Okay,” said Ryser. He pointed his finger at Helen and kept it pointed. “How many cans of this stuff was in the cellar?”

  Helen closed her eyes. She wanted to get it just right. She pictured herself in slow motion, struggling with the label of the Scotch oats cannister. Reaching over the lye soaps. Prying off the top of the carton. Reaching in. “At least twenty in the carton I opened,” she said. “The carton was filled with sawdust. All the other cans were wrapped up tight in heavy oily paper. This was the only one that didn’t have the oily paper on it. There were several stacks of cartons. All identical. I took this can from the top box on the left-hand stack. The cellar is very neat and orderly. Everything of one kind is kept together. I’d guess there were twenty cans to a carton and twelve cartons. Maybe ten cartons.”

  “Were the cans that you picked up heavy? All of them? Were they full?”

  “Yes,” said Helen.

  The sergeant returned. “I talked to Feinberg,” he said. “He talked to somebody up at Harvard. If the stuff is sealed tight and kept in a cool, dark place, it might last forever. Apparently somebody out in Ohio found an old bottle two years ago. Something called laudanum. Had it tested. The opium and alcohol were even more potent than they’d expected. It had aged like good wine.”

  “Then this morphine could still be converted to heroin,” Ryser said, seeming dazed.

  The sergeant shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “Converting it is easy for anybody with a hot plate and some liquid ether. The thing is, it’s the morphine itself that’s the gold. Converted or not, it’s worth a mint and a half. If there’s two hundred cans of morphine there—my God—I can’t—I can’t even begin to figure what that’d be worth on the street.”

  The fog had lifted and the rain had started again. Helen and Pinky each sat on the back seat of an enormous Harley-Davidson motorcycle, behind an enormous policeman. They tore through the peaceful woods with terrifying, ear-splitting noise and speed.

  Helen wished she could talk about her tangled, rushing thoughts to Pinky. Around her policeman’s huge blue back she could just see Pinky. He was up ahead on the first motorcycle, giving directions back to Lucy’s basement. She pictured Pinky, laughing in his ironic way. “With our luck,” he would say, “the typewriter will be clean of prints and the stuff in the cans will be gone by the time we get back there.”

  It was.

  Chapter 13

  HELEN’S FATHER TALKED TO her in a voice he usually saved for water polluters. “Liar!” he said for the tenth time.

  Helen sat on her bed, her father in a chair. She had been banished to her bedroom for an unspecified length of time the moment Chief Ryser had left the house with a silent, raging Pinky in tow.

  “Dad,” said Helen, trying to keep her voice steady, “the cans were full. I felt them. They were heavy.”

  “They were empty. The police went through every morphine cannister in those cartons, and every single one of them was empty.”

  “Dad, please. Please listen. I picked up all the cans in the carton I opened. They were sealed in an oily paper, all except for one, and they were all full. When the cops came back, every single can was empty, and the oily paper wrappings were gone. Somebody was there after Pinky and I left. By the time we got out of the police station, he would have had at least an hour and a half.”

  “The cartons were covered with dust,” said her father. “The cops said they hadn’t been touched in a hundred years.”

  “There was dust in every corner of that cellar, Dad. All he had to do was take handfuls of it and spread it on the boxes and cans.”

  “Can’t you admit to a mistake?” asked her father. “Causing endless trouble and wasting the police’s time. Embarrassing Aunt Stella and me. Can’t you even do that?”

  Helen wondered if he was softening slightly. He was saying mistake instead of lie. “It wasn’t a mistake,” she answered heatedly.

  “Then it’s a lie,” said her father with even more heat. “It’s a lie just like the lie you trumped up with your boyfriend. Said you were going up to school to the Whaler, didn’t you? But you headed out to the woods. Had it all cooked up with him ahead of time, didn’t you?”

  “No, no, no, Dad. Pinky did invent that story, but we were halfway to the woods before I knew.”

  “You could have turned around!”

  “No, I couldn’t. You don’t understand, Dad.”

  “You bet I don’t. I understand my daughter’s a liar. That’s what I understand.”

  “You!” said Helen, her temper edging out despair. “You sitting down in the living room with Chief Ryser half an hour ago! Not listening to Pinky or me. Just agreeing with him because he’s a man. A man in a uniform. You’d go along with anything any other man says. Being one of the boys. That’s all you care about!”

  “That hurt,” said her father.

  “Well, you’ve hurt me!”

  After he left, Helen sat alone on her bed. She did not cry with the rage and fear that were boiling up inside her but coolly took the morphine label and pinned it drawing side out on the wall over her desk. She stared at the face. The face stared at her. It was a good drawing. Something told her she knew who it was. She struggled to make sense of it, but he remained hidden behind just the wrong eyes, mouth, and hair, like the dark side of a half-moon.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “How do you plan to get me? Are you going to get Pinky too?” Innocent, careless Pinky, she thought. All the time that the Indian had been describing the face she was drawing, someone had lain hidden in the fog listening. He’d gone into the cellar after they’d left, cleaned the prints off the Thurber, taken away every grain in every can of morphine, and disappeared. But now he knew she hadn’t b
een good, hadn’t watched out. She put her hands over her eyes.

  Aunt Stella knocked tentatively on the door. She’d brought up a portion of tuna fish casserole on one of her best Spode plates. “You have to eat,” she said when Helen showed no inclination to do so.

  “Later, please, Aunt Stella,” said Helen. “I’m doing my homework.”

  When Aunt Stella left the room, for some reason tip-toeing as if not to disturb a sick patient, Helen shoved the plate of tuna fish away, against the little Hummel figurine that still stood, chipped staff in hand, on her desk top.

  Her father came in to say good night. He looked at the untouched food. “Sweet Pea,” he began, but everything that had welled up inside Helen surged out of her. She dropped her head on her cradled arms and cried as desperately as a mother who’d lost a child.

  “I brought you some warm milk with nutmeg on it,” he said. “Please, babe. I know it’s hard to be a teenager. Your body goes through a lot of changes. Things’ll seem better in the morning. Please drink the milk. It’ll do you good.”

  “Go away,” said Helen. “Please just go away with your milk and your teenage body changes!”

  Helen did not lift her head until the house had long been still. Deep, regular snores came from her father’s bedroom. Aunt Stella’s bedroom was always deathly quiet, for Aunt Stella slept as deeply as a sunken ship.

  There was nothing to say to Pinky, even if she summoned up the courage to call him. He would be at the motel desk tonight. Saturday was the Seafarer’s busiest night. There was nothing she could tell him that he wouldn’t have worked out in his own head already. All their hard work. All their disappointments and dead ends overcome, and what was left? She had hurt her father terribly, and he had hurt her. What was said could not be unsaid. Beyond was a desert of nothingness because she was afraid that he, whoever he was, would climb up the rose trellis and strangle her in her sleep—or her eyes … her eyes …

  She stared at the face in her drawing again. Without the right shape and nose and mouth it meant nothing. Its expression was as passive as the Hummel figurine’s. Dear God, where are you tonight? she asked miserably. But the only answer was the pouring, unrelenting rain.

  That’s it, she decided. It was like having a rare illness that no one understood. She would have to spend years watching, listening, never concentrating for a minute on anything more than whether there were enough people around to keep her safe. And she would worry about Pinky, whom she’d dragged into this. Free Pinky, cocksure and unafraid. She tore the drawing down from the wall and shoved it into her wastebasket. For good measure she picked up the Hummel figurine and all the bottled-up fury came out again and she pitched it like a fast ball across the room. It bounced against the wall and began to play.

  “Oh, shut up!” Helen growled, and she reached for it to stop the key. Once more her breathing came short, and she felt for the floor, as if the house and room itself were about to dissolve. After the music box had run through its tune, she wound it up again and replayed it to make sure. It wasn’t necessary. “The Happy Wanderer” was printed on the underside of the figurine.

  Helen snatched the drawing from the wastebasket and flattened it out on her desk. She watched as the slightly distorted features grew together and became a face she knew well. There was pure joy in her voice when she said, “I’m going to get you first.”

  Helen pulled on her winter parka. Holding the front of it open, she drew the telephone in against herself, muffling the sound of the dial. When a sleepy Pinky answered “Seafarer,” she said only one thing. “Come now!”

  Twenty minutes went by with Helen waiting, unmoving, gazing through the bay window of the darkened living room at the watery street. At last across the road there were two blinks from the weak flashlight. She let herself out the kitchen way, closing the door painfully slowly. She ran around the front of the house, splashed across the puddles, and jumped on the back of Pinky’s motorbike.

  “What? Where?” he asked desperately. “I had a terrible time getting out. I made my sister take the desk. I had to promise her ten things to make her do it.”

  On the way Helen blessed the rain for keeping the streets clear of traffic. They had never gone downtown before on the motorbike. If the police picked them up … She didn’t want to think what would happen if the police picked them up. Between snatches of explanation into Pinky’s ear she kept a sharp watch out for patrol cars. It would be our luck, she told herself, to get stopped now. Pinky made a sudden right turn, and she nearly fell off the bike. “What was that?” she asked, peering back into the downpour.

  “Squad car,” he said, “cooping.”

  He drove into a deserted parking lot in the middle of town. They walked, not letting go of each other’s hands.

  The fire escape on the corner building zigzagged up five stories. One corner of the fifth floor was lighted. The rain beat down like a drum tattoo on the garbage cans in the alley and hid the noise as Pinky jumped like a basketball player and pulled down the squeaky iron ladder. Up the open gridwork steps they crept. For three or four minutes they watched him behind the iron bars and through a skewed blind of Perry and Crowe’s supply-room window.

  Helen whispered, “Stubby Atlas knew what he was doing after all. He knew what was in those trucks.”

  Barry worked steadily by the light of a single chrome lamp. The work table was covered with different Hummel figurines. The music boxes had been removed, and into the cavities where the music boxes went he sifted small amounts of white powder with a tiny silver scoop. Then he plastered gold Perry and Crowe gift stickers over the openings, placed the Hummel figurines in Perry and Crowe gift boxes, and addressed the label on each box after consulting a small red book.

  After addressing each box he dropped it into a hopper marked UPS Truck and started in on the next. From time to time he wound up one of the little music box workings and whistled along with it.

  Pinky did not stay. He went off down the stairs of the fire escape. He was gone for what seemed to Helen like an hour, and then suddenly he was back at her side, panting.

  “Did you call the police?” Helen asked.

  Pinky shook his head. “I called Brzostoski,” he said. “He called the cops. Told them there was a robbery in progress, fifth floor Perry and Crowe. Not to run the sirens.”

  Barry’s body stiffened and then sagged when he saw the policeman. The officer hesitated. “Robbery in progress?” he asked, hand on his revolver. Pinky wrenched open the window and was in the room, pointing to a plastic bag of white powder at Barry’s side. “Look at it!” Pinky yelled. “Come over here and look at what’s in this bag and what he’s putting into those little music boxes!”

  “You don’t have a warrant to come in here,” Barry snarled. “You need a search warrant!” He got up and placed a chair between himself and Pinky, for some reason.

  Dear God, Helen prayed silently, please don’t make them need a search warrant! The policeman strolled thoughtfully over to a green garbage bag that lay under the table full of Hummel figurines. Three other policemen walked quietly in through the door and watched him. The first officer ran his fingers through the powdery white substance and touched one to his tongue.

  “You need a search warrant!” Barry screamed.

  “Shipping Johnson’s baby powder out in these things?” asked the officer.

  Soon there were ten other policemen in the room. One was Frank, Ryser’s chief deputy. He looked at Pinky first, then Helen, and then at Barry’s array of materials. He picked up the little red book. “Atlas’s,” he said. “Atlas’s father’s book with the addresses of all his drug dealer pals.” He shook his head. “How?” he asked them. “How did you find this. How?”

  When Helen had no answer but a smile he turned to Barry. “And who the devil are you?” he asked.

  “I don’t have to tell you that,” Barry snarled. “My constitutional rights—”

  “Shut up, Barry,” said Pinky. “His name is Barry de Wolf,”
Pinky went on. “Senior at New Bedford Regional. Big Shot. Birdwatcher. That’s probably how he found the cellar in the first place. Poking around the woods after blue jays.”

  “Yeah?” said the policeman edging toward Barry. He picked up the little red book. “And how did you find this? Birdwatching too?” He waved the book in front of Barry before slipping it into his pocket. “A lot of interesting names and addresses in this book, de Wolf. Aren’t there? We’re going to put you and a lot of Chet Malinka’s good buddies out of business. How did you get it?”

  Barry spat out, “My constitutional rights are being—”

  “Okay!” said the policeman, grinning and holding up a deferential hand.

  “He worked for Perry and Crowe this summer. Still does,” said Pinky casually. “He lifted it off Stubby, probably.”

  “The moron lost it,” Barry snarled. “I never stole anything in my life.”

  The policeman had dropped his hand to his side. He looked again at one of the Hummel figurines. “So Stubby knew what he was doing after all,” he said slowly. “He did want to rob the china and glass shipments. Sure he did. He could feed his habit and go into business on the side with what was in these little statues. You,” he said, pointing vaguely in Barry’s direction, “you found the dope in the cellar. All you needed was an outlet, some way to sell it without getting your hands dirty on the street. Must have been like a gift dropped from heaven when Stubby Atlas showed up for work with his dad’s addresses in his back pocket. Tell me, why does a boy with your brains and imagination go out and ruin his life like this? You’re not a minor, de Wolf. You’ll get at least twenty years, you know.”

  Barry was led out by two policemen. Several more hovered over Pinky and Helen asking twenty different questions at once. Pinky began with Uncle Max. Helen followed with Lucy.