by Byars, Betsy
In the center of the clearing she could see the ruins of an old fountain. Stones had fallen from the sides. The statue that had once graced the center of the fountain had fallen on its side.
There! She saw what she had been looking for.
It was a brown, stone-colored bundle blown against the fallen statue. It was so much the color of the statue that it was as if it had been deliberately camouflaged.
She approached carefully, looking over her shoulder at the house. No one seemed to be watching, so she bent and picked up the bundle.
It was a large piece of fabric, a garment of some kind, slightly damp now from the recent rain shower. She gathered it up and moved back into the shelter of the trees.
She unfolded the garment and held it up. It was a coat. It was one of those practical all-purpose coats that Herculeah’s mother was always after her to buy.
She drew in her breath and peered closer. There were dark stains on the fabric. Brown stains. And Herculeah knew instantly what the stains were.
Blood.
18
DRAGON-LADY RED AND TICKLE-ME PINK PINK
Herculeah felt an instant and deep concern for the owner of this coat. And, at the same time, she felt a deep determination to find out what had happened to the owner.
The belt of the coat hung loosely to the ground. She ran her fingers over it thoughtfully as if seeking a clue.
She realized that if the raincoat had been wrapped and tied with the belt before being thrown from the tower, it would look exactly as Meat had described it. First it would appear to be round, even a stone, and then as it unfolded and was blown by the wind it might seem to have wings.
But whose coat was it?
She held it against her, checking the size. It was a small coat, too small to fit her. And way too small for Nurse Wegman.
She eyed it. And it couldn’t belong to the sister. She hadn’t been out of the house for fifty years. The style of clothing she wore was so old that even Hidden Treasures wouldn’t carry it.
She patted the pockets.
Yes! Now at last she would learn something about the owner of the coat. What people kept in their pockets was often revealing.
She was reaching into the left pocket when she saw movement at the house. Instinctively she drew back deeper into the trees.
The front door opened and Nurse Wegman came out. She was wearing a down jacket and a cap. The peak of the cap hid her eyes.
She paused on the steps and looked to the right and left. Her eyes seemed to linger on the grove of trees where Herculeah was hiding. Herculeah clutched the coat tightly against her as if for protection. To her great relief, the eyes moved on.
Nurse Wegman came down the steps. She turned away from the direction of the tower. Anyway, she couldn’t have been headed there. The tower had no outside door. She circled the house and walked to the large stone garage at the rear. Herculeah had not noticed the garage before. Nurse Wegman entered the garage by a side door and closed it behind her.
Herculeah sighed with relief. Now she could get back to the pockets. She reached into the left pocket and took out the contents. There wasn’t as much there as she had hoped—a crumpled tissue, a small comb, and a lipstick.
Well, there was one other pocket to search. She was disappointed in what she found there, too—a scarf and a single white glove.
The scarf was white silk. The lipstick was Coty. Herculeah took off the cap and twisted the base. The lipstick was pale pink.
She glanced at the bottom of the tube. In the little red circle, in white letters, was the shade: Petal Rose.
Herculeah didn’t know much about lipsticks—she didn’t bother with the stuff herself—but she did know that a lipstick called Petal Rose would never have appealed to Nurse Wegman. She’d want something like Dragon-Lady Red.
And the old sister, she’d want something like Tickle-Me Pink. Herculeah grinned. Maybe, she thought, I’ll go into the cosmetics business and think of names for them.
She broke off quickly.
She noticed the garage door was being opened. She noticed one other thing: Her hair was beginning to frizzle.
19
DEAD PHONE, DEAD MAN?
The garage door was not one of those modern, remote-controlled garage doors. This door required manpower, but Nurse Wegman was up to the job. She shoved the door with such force that it not only opened but rattled overhead in its tracks as if it didn’t want to stop. Herculeah could hear the noise from where she stood in the trees.
A car shot out of the garage. Nurse Wegman was at the wheel.
She backed the car onto the grass and turned onto the drive with such speed that gravel flew. She did not glance in Herculeah’s direction. Nurse Wegman seemed to be in a hurry.
Herculeah moved out of the trees to make sure Nurse Wegman drove through the gates. She watched the car disappear around the bend and out of sight.
Herculeah’s mind then turned to Mr. Hunt. Had Nurse Wegman left him alone? Was the housekeeper there? The housekeeper usually parked her car—an old Buick—by the kitchen door.
Holding the coat against her, Herculeah went around the house. As she had feared, there was no car parked by the door.
I’ve got to call Mom, Herculeah thought. This situation has gotten out of hand. Mr. Hunt has been abandoned.
She tried the kitchen door. It was locked. She knocked and peered through the glass. She saw no one, and no one came to the door.
She went quickly around the house. She paused at the window of the library. The curtains had been opened, and she looked in. She saw a scene of destruction. All the books lay on the floor. Pictures had been torn from the walls.
With a sinking feeling, Herculeah continued to the front of the house. She went up the steps, draped the raincoat over a porch chair, and turned the doorbell. The ding-dong of doom—as Meat called it—sounded, but no one came to answer. She turned the doorknob, but the door was locked.
“Hello, is anybody home?”
She had turned to go when suddenly she heard a faint click. It was as if someone had done something to the lock of the door. Herculeah reached out and took the doorknob a second time. Now it turned in her hand.
She pushed, and the huge door opened. The hall inside was empty. No one was in sight. Perhaps, Herculeah thought, the door had been unlocked all along.
She was not satisfied with this explanation, but she couldn’t waste time wondering about it. She went directly to the phone at the back of the hall. She would call her mom, and then she would leave Hunt House. She would take herself out of what was becoming an increasingly frightening situation.
She put one hand up to her hair. My hair is too frightened to even frizzle, she thought, trying to make herself smile.
She stopped at the telephone table where yesterday she had called her mom. The phone was not there. It had been overturned and lay beneath the table on the floor. Herculeah picked up the phone and listened. The line was dead.
She glanced around in confusion. Maybe, she thought, that was why Nurse Wegman had left in such a hurry. Maybe something had happened upstairs and Mr. Hunt needed attention. Nurse Wegman had had to go and phone for the doctor. Or an ambulance!
Herculeah glanced overhead at the ceiling as if she could find the answer there. Then, making a quick decision, she ran to the stairs. Taking them in twos, then threes, she was soon at the top.
“Mr. Hunt!”
She ran to his bedroom. The door was open.
“Mr. Hunt!”
Herculeah rushed into the room. Today the air was stale with the odor of sickness. As she crossed to the high bed, she saw that the sheets had not been changed. Mr. Hunt wore the same stained gown from yesterday.
She glanced around. The curtains had been drawn over the windows. It seemed more like a funeral parlor than a sick room.
Mr. Hunt lay without moving. His eyes were dull and listless and stared up at the ceiling. Herculeah saw no sign of life.
“Mr. Hunt, it’
s me, Herculeah Jones.”
His thin arms lay palm-up on either side of his body. Gently she reached out and touched the inside of his wrist. She had a moment of relief as she felt his faint pulse. He was not dead.
She bent closer, and now she could hear him breathing. It was shallow, however, and his face was pale.
“Mr. Hunt, can you hear me?”
She froze. For in that moment, when her guard was down, she heard a noise in the hallway behind her.
A footstep.
Someone was there.
The softness, the stealth of the footstep told Herculeah that whoever was outside did not want her to know they were there.
Herculeah waited. Her heart pounded with fear. She was frozen in place at Mr. Hunt’s bedside. She listened with increasing dread for the next, closer footstep.
20
THE KEY
Minutes passed, clicked off audibly by the old clock in the hall downstairs.
Herculeah did not move. She listened, her face turned toward the doorway, her heart in her throat.
She heard no more footsteps.
Moving carefully, quietly, Herculeah crossed to the door. She peered out. The hall was empty. She stepped outside the door and looked both ways. There was no one in sight. As she turned to go back into the room, she glanced down at her feet.
There lay a key.
It was an old iron key, heavy. It was the kind of key that would open a basement door, a garage door, or—she drew in her breath—the door to a tower.
She tried to remember if the key had been there when she had come up the stairs. She didn’t think so, but it could have been. She had been in such a hurry, she could have stepped right over it and not noticed.
She picked up the key and held it in her hand, feeling the weight of it. Her fingers curled around the metal as she reentered Mr. Hunt’s bedroom.
Mr. Hunt’s eyes still stared blindly at the ceiling.
“I need your help, Mr. Hunt,” she said.
She opened her fingers and held the key in front of his unseeing eyes.
“Mr. Hunt,” she said. Her voice was low with urgency. “I need your help, Mr. Hunt. I need to know if this is the key to the tower.”
No answer.
“Just blink once if it is. I have to know.”
No answer.
“Mr. Hunt, please try to help me. I found this key outside the door to your room. It was on the floor. I think someone put it there deliberately. I think someone wanted me to find it.”
No answer.
“Because if this is the key to the tower, I think it means that someone wants me to go there. There’s something there that I’m supposed to see, something important.”
She was talking to herself now. “And there’s no door to the tower outside, so this key opens a door that’s somewhere inside the house.” She turned back to Mr. Hunt.
“Is there something in the tower, Mr. Hunt? Something I ought to see?”
She glanced at the drawn curtains as if to see beyond them to the tower. Then she looked over her shoulder at the door.
“Because this is beginning to make sense to me. When I tried the front door, it was locked. Then there was a faint click and the door opened. It was as if someone wanted to me to come in. Then when I was beside your bed, I heard a footstep. No one appeared, but this key was left where I would find it. Someone is telling me to go to the tower.”
She continued to hold the key in front of Mr. Hunt’s unblinking, unseeing eyes.
“Is this the key to the tower, Mr. Hunt? And if so, should I go there?”
His eyes closed, then opened.
“Oh, that was stupid. I asked two questions. You’ll have to do it again because I don’t know if that was just a reflex or if you were telling me, yes, this is the key to the tower and, yes, I should go there.”
Mr. Hunt had no more answers to give, and Herculeah wasn’t sure that one blink had been an answer.
“Mr. Hunt, I know it’s your sister who is trying to lead us to the tower. Yesterday she threw a woman’s coat from the tower. Today, this key. She is determined that someone will go there. And there is no one left to go but me.”
Herculeah made her decision.
“I’ll be back,” she told Mr. Hunt. She started for the doorway, crossed the hall, and ran down the stairs.
She paused for a moment at the foot of the stairs and glanced at the front door. All her instincts told her that she should leave now. She should go out the door while she still could. She should get help.
But the key. The key!
Mr. Hunt’s sister had given her this key as surely as if she had put it directly into her hands. The sister had wanted her to come into the house and now wanted her to unlock the door to the tower.
And if she left, her thoughts continued, whatever was in the tower might disappear. If she left, she would never know the secret it held. That was something Herculeah could not bear.
She didn’t know where the door to the tower was, but she knew the direction. She ran through the hall, through an old parlor, into another hallway. The first nurse had said a person could get lost in the house. She said there were odd-shaped rooms and halls that led nowhere.
This was one of those halls that led nowhere. Herculeah turned. There was a small storage room on the left, then another hallway. It was like a maze. The door had to be here somewhere.
With the key clasped tightly in her hand, she continued her frantic search for the tower’s entrance.
21
AT THE WINDOW
Meat was standing at his living-room window. He had been standing here ever since Herculeah had left for Hunt House. His dad had not called, and Meat was not free to leave until he did.
He had already been uneasy about her going, but there had been something in her early morning phone call that had made him even more uneasy. “I wish you were going with me,” she had said. The voice had not sounded like Herculeah at all.
“I wish I could, too,” he had said. It wasn’t true; what he really wanted was for neither of them to go again—ever. He’d blurted out, “Don’t go!”
And she had answered, as he had known she would, “I have to.”
There at the window, Meat would occasionally rub his hands nervously up and down his sweatshirt. As he did this, he thought of all the dangers, all the things that could harm her.
There was Mr. Hunt. Meat wasn’t at all sure the man was really paralyzed. The thought of Herculeah sitting there, unaware, reading that terrible book when suddenly ... gotcha!
Meat swallowed.
The sound was loud enough to reach his mother in the kitchen. “Are you all right, Albert?” she called.
“I’m fine.”
Then there was the old woman. He had looked into her face and seen madness and evil, and the thought of Herculeah being trapped by her in one of those dark rooms ...
He swallowed again. Immediately he called out, “I’m still fine,” to his mother.
He realized then that he was trying to swallow his fear. He knew from past experience that fear was an object that could not be swallowed.
Then there was Nurse Wegman. Meat had only seen her for a moment or two at the front door and when he was recovering from a faint, but there had been a look in her eyes that he hadn’t liked. It reminded him of a newspaper picture he’d seen of a nurse who went around killing old people, putting them out of their misery.
What was it they had called her? Oh, yes—“The Angel of Death.”
Meat didn’t even try to swallow that thought. He just pressed his fingers against his throat to hold the terror from rising any higher.
And then there was the tower.
The tower was a place where tragedy happened. It had happened twice before, and it would happen again. He himself had almost been the victim, but a tower like that would not be satisfied with only two victims.
Meat’s mom came and stood in the doorway to the living room. She smelled nicely of barbecued pork chop
s, but Meat, whose throat was blocked, could not have eaten anything.
“If you’re so worried about Herculeah ...” she began.
Meat didn’t let her finish. “I didn’t say I was worried about her.”
“You didn’t have to. If you’re so worried about Herculeah, why don’t you call her?”
“She’s at Hunt House.”
“Well. Hunt House has a phone, doesn’t it? She called me on it yesterday to ask for a ride.”
“Mom, that’s not a bad idea.” He sighed. “Only it’s probably an unlisted number.”
“It’s not. I looked it up.” She handed him a Post-it note with a number on it.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, genuinely puzzled by this unexpected kindness.
“Sometimes I think I’m a little hard on the girl. I actually felt sorry for her yesterday when we were talking about Steffie. She isn’t entirely to blame for the way she is. She’s got a private detective for a mother and a police detective for a father. I’m not saying a word against the father—we owe a debt of gratitude to him. He saved your uncle Neiman.”
“And he found my father,” Meat added.
She gave him a sharp look. “A phone call to Hunt House is one thing. I don’t want you to go back there. Is that clear?” It was.
He went directly to the telephone. He didn’t know exactly what he would say when the phone was answered. It didn’t matter. It was just an I-know-Herculeah‘s-there-and-she’d-better-be-all-right call.
With trembling fingers he punched in the numbers. The line was not busy. It was ringing. He was expecting to hear the voice of the housekeeper, or Nurse Wegman, maybe even Herculeah herself. It was none of these.
“Pizza, pizza,” a young male voice said. “Our special today is—”
“Sorry, wrong number,” Meat said. He hung up the phone even though he was a little curious about the special. He dialed more carefully this time. The line was busy. He dialed several more times. Busy. He dialed the operator. He did not like to speak to operators, but this was an emergency.
