Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “It handles beautifully.”

  “And what about my wife?” He grinned. This time, the light in his eyes was still humorous, but not at all comfortable. “Would you say she handles beautifully? Accelerates smoothly? Did you find her well engineered?”

  “Forget it, Stewart,” I said. “Your marriage has nothing to do with me.”

  “You would admit, wouldn’t you, that my wife is an extremely good-looking woman? Even a beautiful woman? What you might call an attractive bit of horseflesh?”

  “She’s attractive, yes,” I said. “But if you’re having someone follow her around with a camera, I feel sorry for you.”

  “Bear with me,” he said. “I bet you wondered why a woman like that would marry me. After all, I’m rich, but not superrich, I’m twelve years older than she is, and I live in a nowhere Midwestern town. Am I right?”

  “I wondered about some of that,” I said.

  “Sure you did. If you hadn’t, she would have done it for you. Now, between us, she isn’t so great in bed, is she? When it comes to performance, this car is a lot more satisfying. My wife is too selfish to be a good lay.”

  “Stop it. You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  “You ought to know who you’re dealing with. Laurie is nothing like what you think she is. For her, you’re only a convenient way to make more trouble for me. She’s a soulless bitch.”

  “If she’s that terrible, divorce her.”

  “Jesus, I don’t care about her personality.” He laughed at me. “This isn’t the fucking Boy Scouts. I just want her to do what I say.”

  “You should be wearing a loincloth and carrying a club.”

  “Good Lord,” he said. “A feminist. Did my dear wife tell you anything about the trust?”

  “What trust?”

  “Let’s find out what she said about herself. Did she tell you about her background, her family, anything like that?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “Wonderful story, isn’t it? I’m crazy about it.”

  An empty, brown hillside sloped down to the right side of the road. Far away on our left, little ranch houses stood on quarter-acre lots. Every other one looked unoccupied. Stewart pulled to the side of the road and switched off the engine. He drew up one knee and twisted on his seat to face me.

  “I take it you heard about Yves D’Lency, the poet and art dealer who ran away from his noble family and palled around with artists and so forth before he came to America. The poor guy’s plane went down outside Santa Barbara, right?”

  “What’s your point?” I said.

  “Laurie’s father’s real name was Evan Delancy, a product of Trenton, New Jersey. He was a part-time bricklayer with a big appetite for booze. When he couldn’t get work in Trenton anymore, he packed up the family and drove to Los Angeles, where he branched out into the stickup business. One day a tough old bird who owned a liquor store blew him away. Bye-bye, Dad. Mom traded her ass for favors from her boyfriends until she married a cameraman at Warner Brothers. This is the guy my wife refers to as a movie producer.”

  “You want me to believe this,” I said.

  “Believe it, don’t believe it, but this information cost me more money than I just gave Earl Sawyer. Mom married the cameraman. Guess what? He’s another drunk. After the studio fired him, he took out his frustrations by beating up his wife and stepdaughter. Laurie dropped out of high school and did so many drugs she wound up in a mental hospital. When she was straight enough to figure out how to act, she got acquainted with a nice old doctor named Deering. Deering thought she was a poor, misguided orphan who deserved a break. He and his wife took her in. They bought her good clothes and sent her to private school, which is where she learned about table manners and grammar. After she graduated from the private school, she ran away to San Francisco. Pretty soon, she was living with Teddy Wainwright. Remember him?”

  I knew that Teddy Wainwright had played the leading man’s best friend in a lot of romantic comedies made in the fifties. Later on, he had starred in two television series.

  What I had not known was that in the early seventies, no longer able to find roles in Hollywood but grown rich from real estate investments, Wainwright had decked himself in beads and Nehru jackets and moved to San Francisco to enjoy a second youth. Laurie Delancy had moved in with him when he was seventy-one, she twenty-one. Through multiple infidelities and other tempests on her part, including the refusal to marry him, they stayed together until his death four years later. Wainwright had rewritten his will to give her two paintings from his extensive art collection, a Frida Kahlo and a Tamara de Lempicka, plus $250,000 and the use of his apartment until she married, when the apartment reverted to his only child, a daughter. The daughter inherited the majority of his estate, including the rest of his collection, at the time appraised at $5 million.

  “Turns out, back in the twenties old Teddy bought two Picassos, a Cézanne, and a Miró, and sometime in the fifties, he squirreled them away in a vault. His collection wound up being worth seventy, eighty million. You can bet Laurie’s still kicking herself for not marrying the old guy. She landed a job at KRON, where she wanted to end up doing the local news, but oops, no experience. No journalism background, no degree, nothing. She was a production assistant—a gofer. A year later, when I met her, she was a PR girl. Laurie acted like she fell in love with me, and I do mean acted. It could have worked out, except she was a phony.”

  “How soon after you were married did you hire the private detective?”

  “I hired a detective as soon as I got interested in her. I didn’t tell her until we were on our honeymoon. A bungalow at a great resort in the Caribbean. Champagne on the balcony. Moonlight on the water. ‘Listen to this,’ I said. ‘You won’t believe it.’ She cried real tears. An amazing woman.”

  “And she gave you a son and heir.”

  Hatch smiled. “Cobbie’s going to be a fine young man after I knock that music crap out of him and get him involved in sports.”

  “And your son is the reason you can’t divorce Laurie.”

  His smile shrank. “It seems she mentioned my family’s financial arrangements after all. What kind of spin did she put on it?”

  I described what I could remember.

  “Not bad, as far as it goes,” Hatch said. “At thirty-five, Cobbie will come into a great deal of money. I want to make sure he knows how to handle it.” His eyes charged with amusement. “Do you know why my father wrote in the condition about criminal charges?”

  “Laurie said something about his brother.”

  “It had nothing to do with that.” The amusement came back into his eyes. He was trying to charm me, I realized, and he was doing a good job. “When were you born?”

  “In 1958.”

  “You were too young for the sixties. I turned eighteen in 1968.” He laughed. “My senior year at Edgerton Academy, my hair came down to my shoulders. I used to lock my door and crank up the stereo until I couldn’t hear the old man bitching at me. The Stones, the Doors, Iron Butterfly. Cream. Paul Butter-field. I played rhythm guitar with this band, Delta Mud. You can imagine how terrible we were.”

  “White-boy blues,” I said.

  “White preppy blues. White Midwestern preppy blues.” He biffed my upper arm, jock-style. “God, we were crazy. Toke up on the way to school. Get wasted from Thursday night to Monday morning. We had one honest-to-God musician in our band, the guy played the shit out of the blues. Amazing player, amazing. We’d show up in front of these Albertus frat boys who didn’t care about anything except a steady beat, and … it was like hearing God play guitar. You probably heard of him. Goat Gridwell?”

  Gridwell’s power-guitar blues jams had sold millions of records through the seventies and into the next decade. Whenever someone had made me listen to a Goat Gridwell record, what struck me was how much better he was than most guitarists who played that kind of music. I remembered noticing his yellow-gold hair and green eyes on the cover of Rolling Stone a
nd thinking that I had never before seen a face that looked cherubic and dissipated at the same time.

  “Our senior year, he got kicked out of the academy and took off for San Francisco. I asked Laurie if she’d ever heard him play, and she had no idea. To her, all music sounds the same. Anyhow, Goat got too rich and too famous. The old story. Fried his brain, the poor bastard. He’s back in Edgerton now. There’s nothing left. I slip him a couple of bucks now and then, but the guy stares right through me.”

  If I were Goat Gridwell, I’d ignore you, too, I thought.

  “So one night after dinner, I forgot to lock my door. I’m sitting on the floor with ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ blasting through my speakers and smoking dope. Wham! In comes my father. Cobden goes nuts. He let me stay in school, but I had to cut my hair, and he let me know that if I ever got into trouble with the law, I wouldn’t get a penny from the trust.”

  “Are you worried about the case in Kentucky?”

  “It’s nothing but dust and hot air. Be gone in a week. But this might interest you. Yesterday afternoon my wife called the attorney for the trust, Parker Gillespie. He’s the son of Charles Gillespie, who set it up. Seventy-three years old, loyal as a pit bull. Laurie never showed the slightest interest in him before, and all of a sudden, she’s looking for an education. You tell me, what did she ask Gillespie?”

  “No idea,” I said.

  “She’s concerned about the clause my father added to the agreement. If I’m convicted of these crimes I of course did not commit, am I really disinherited? Unfortunately, Gillespie said, that would be the case, Mrs. Hatch. Then she asked, What’s my son’s position? Well, in the absence of any other male heir the child would inherit the whole of the trust. Who would look after the trust? she asks. That is the role of the administrator, Gillespie said. Laurie asked him, If the worst happens, will you continue to administer the trust, Mr. Gillespie? Gillespie told her he would be pleased to give her all the assistance she desired. Beginning to see the picture? She wants the money.”

  “She wants to protect it for Cobbie.”

  Hatch’s sneer was worthy of Uncle Clark. “Cobbie wouldn’t inherit until thirty-five. In the meantime, the administrator has discretion over the money. Laurie would appoint herself administrator and grab whatever she wanted. That’s what she is about.”

  “Thanks for the explanation,” I said. “Take me back to town.”

  “I want you to see something, remember? You’ll be astonished. History is going to rise up and speak.” He smiled in spurious camaraderie. “I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t show it to you.” He switched on the engine and dropped the car into gear.

  67

  Sixty years ago, the overgrown field had been a meadow, the stark remains at the edge of the wood a tall stone house with dormers and a portico. I was trying to control the disquiet brought on by the feeling that if I walked into the woods about thirty feet to the right of the ruined house, I would find a lightning-blasted oak.

  “Has anyone ever told you about the old Dunstan place?”

  “After his brother was killed, Sylvan imported the stones from England and had it rebuilt.”

  Hatch raised his eyebrows. “England? It was Providence, Rhode Island. That’s why this street is named New Providence Road. I know more about your family than you do.”

  “That wouldn’t be hard to do,” I said, thinking that there were things about the Dunstans Stewart Hatch would never know or guess.

  “Do you know who originally built the place?”

  “Who was Frank Lloyd Wright?” I said. “Sorry, Alex, I hit the buzzer by accident.” My ears were ringing, and my stomach was queasy.

  “A man named Omar Dunstan. He turned up in Providence in the 1750s with a bunch of West Indian servants and a lot of money. Dunstan called himself an importer and shipowner, but none of his ships ever docked in Providence. He made frequent trips to South Carolina, Virginia, and New Orleans. What do you think he was importing?”

  “What are the blues?”

  “Human beings. His men bought or captured slaves in West Africa and the Caribbean and sold them in the Southern colonies. Dunstan wasn’t married, but he produced three or four children who almost never left the house. The neighbors heard strange noises and saw peculiar lights in the windows. There were rumors about witchcraft and black magic. Finally, a party of citizens raided the house with the intention of driving the family out of town. They were too late. The place was empty.”

  I had to sit down, and I parked myself on the hood of the Mercedes.

  “The place stood empty for decades. Its reputation was so bad that the city couldn’t find anyone willing to tear it down. People called it ‘the Shunned House.’ In the end, they built a fence around it and let it crumble for the next hundred years.”

  The Shunned House? It rang a bell too distant to be identified. Stewart Hatch’s voice wavered like a bad radio signal before the emanations coming from the ruin.

  “During the Civil War, two brothers named Dunstan escaped from the stockade, where they were being held for corpse robbing. In 1874, Omar and Sylvan Dunstan turned up in Edgerton and moved into the Brazen Head. Before long, they had enough money to set up in business, Omar as a pawnbroker and Sylvan as a moneylender. These were Reconstruction days, remember. Ten years later, they had taken over the bank and were living out in the boonies on Cherry Street. When floods bankrupted people, they foreclosed and Sylvan bought their properties for next to nothing. I always thought it was kind of strange that Omar was the one who got killed, because people here really hated Sylvan. Like to hear my father’s theory?”

  “Life wouldn’t be complete without it.”

  “No one but Sylvan ever saw the so-called gunman who shot his brother and rode off down the street. My father thought Sylvan made him up because he killed Omar. By then, Omar was turning into a respectable citizen. He owned half the properties on Commercial Avenue. My father said Sylvan didn’t give a damn about respectability. And he was tired of sharing Omar’s wife.”

  “I heard about their arrangement,” I said.

  “Sylvan shipped these stones from Rhode Island and brought out a crew of Portuguese workmen he put up out here in shacks. He said he wanted the house restored to its original condition, and the local guys didn’t know enough about the detail work. People in town thought he didn’t want them to know what his house was like.”

  “There were rumors,” I said.

  “Chains attached to beds in the attic. Concealed hideaways. Weird stuff. You know what small towns are like. Sylvan could have let people in, showed them around, but instead he holed up and fended people off. When he came into town, he carried a gun. His kids grew up like animals. Some of them ran off, no one knows where. A couple got killed swimming in the river and fighting in taverns. Howard, your grandfather, stayed on the plantation, even though he hated his old man. Supposedly, Sylvan shot himself cleaning a gun, but some said your grandfather did it for him. Sounds like poetic justice to me.” Hatch’s voice came from a long way away.

  “People who talk about poetic justice don’t know anything about poetry.”

  “Cute. I’ll have to remember that. Anyhow, Howard buried his father behind the house. Then he had Omar’s coffin moved from Little Ridge and buried next to it. Then he went the same way as Sylvan and screwed every woman he could get his hands on. If his wife didn’t run off, he killed her, too. Ran the bank into the ground, threw away his money. You know what people used to say about him when I was a kid?”

  “That he could be in two places at once,” I said. “Go through doors without opening them. Read your mind and predict the future. Float off the ground and hang in the air.”

  Hatch gave me a surprised disgruntled look—I was not supposed to know about Howard Dunstan. “It’s a good thing his daughters moved back to Cherry Street, because one night the house burned up around him.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “This part’s extremely interesting,�
� Hatch said. I could scarcely hear him over the tumult from where I least wanted to go. “My father told me that on the night of the fire his father, Carpenter Hatch, locked himself in the library with Sylvester Milton, Grennie’s father, and a little guy named Pee Wee La Chapelle, who used to do odd jobs for them. He saw them go out, and late that night he heard them come back. Do you suppose they burned the place down?”

  “Stewart,” I said, “I don’t care who burned it down.”

  “These bones turned up. Not human, but not from any known animal, either. We’re talking 1935, remember, practically the Dark Ages. Who knows what they were? Howard’s daughters got the insurance money, and that was that.”

  I barely felt him putting his hand on my shoulder.

  “No matter what my wife says, Stewart Hatch is not a bad guy.” He patted my cheek. “Out of the kindness of my heart, I am presenting you with certain facts.”

  “Mighty white of you,” I said.

  “You turned down my offer. Fine. It’s time to go back where you belong.”

  “I can’t believe you were in a band with Goat Gridwell,” I said.

  He laughed. His teeth were marvels of dentistry, his eyes shone with a companionable gleam, the blazer clung to the back of his neck like a tape.

  “Stewart, you can be completely charming, but you belong in jail. It would be a tragedy if you got custody of your son.”

  He jerked his hands out of his pockets. “If you want a lift back to town, try the pay phone down the road.”

  I turned my back on him, stepped across the dusty verge and moved like a sleepwalker into the dense growth covering the field. An engine whirred into life, and gravel flew like buckshot from beneath squealing tires.

  68

  Darkness and nightmare boomed from the ruined house and the trees behind it. My dream-shadow had told me, All your life, you have felt the loss of something extraordinarily important. If you found it, could you live with the consequences? I had answered Yes, and in spite of my fear and nausea, in spite of my desire not to know, now my response was the same.