Hound

by Vincent McCaffrey

  "Maybe. But I just wanted to see if you'd notice .... And I wanted you to know I wanted you to notice."

  Henry proceeded from there to the library. Finally, in that room, some things seemed out of place. He was not sure what exactly had changed, but it seemed more than incidental, and he said this to the detective.

  O'Connor answered his observation.

  "This is where she was found.... I'm afraid a lot of things were moved in the first rush."

  Henry sat in the leather chair by the door and looked around for a moment. He felt suddenly drained.

  He said, “Who found her?” He had never asked.

  The detective looked at him from where he stood across the expanse of the table. “The cleaning service."

  "Where ...?"

  "There. Just by where you're sitting. On the floor. A Mexican woman. All the cleaning services are using them now. She thought Mrs. Johnson had fallen. She even lifted her up before she realized. Then she ran down the stairwell screaming in Spanish all the way to the street."

  Morgan had been strangled in that space beside him, only two days before. And two nights ago they had made love.

  "Jesus.” The word escaped from his lips.

  The detective stopped his nervous circling, and his voice lowered.

  "Can you keep going?"

  Henry straightened his back and blinked against tears.

  "Yeah..."

  He stood and walked around the conference table before the question struck him out loud.

  "But why was she in here?"

  He was still not quite in control of his voice.

  O'Connor asked, “Why?"

  Henry took a breath for the oxygen to speak. “Just a thought. This is Heber's room. All these are the books of his clients. They kept them here because they used to have small meetings at the apartment with the authors and the lawyers and all that. All the other books in the apartment are their personal books, the ones they read for themselves."

  The detective nodded, but he did not answer. He was thin-lipped and flat-cheeked and expressionless except for his eyes, which Henry had begun to watch for some clue of what the man wanted.

  Leaving the library, Henry walked again around the living room. The sun was gone now to a red haze above the purple of Cambridge and the liquid black of the Charles River. A faint brush of color danced in the wake of a few small boats.

  It was Albert's contention that Morgan had been killed by a thief. And according to the best television cop shows, and the received wisdom of the ages, thieves only kill when they've made a mistake. They are there for the money, or jewels, or whatever, and then run. Morgan was probably in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had been away for months and come home unexpectedly. She was there alone after Henry left.

  Albert wondered if the police had checked out the building superintendent. In his own experience as a trashman, the building superintendents were occasionally up to no good. They were often trying to sell goods they had acquired from unsuspecting tenants.

  Henry answered Albert's theory skeptically. “Fred. Fred doesn't look very dangerous, He's about sixty-five. He hardly moves."

  Albert closed his eyes as if Henry were hopeless and said, “He probably knows everything there is to know."

  Henry mentioned Albert's theory of building superintendents to Detective O'Connor as they let themselves out of the building. The super had always been there when Henry had unloaded books in the past. Where was he now?

  The detective responded without enthusiasm to the suggestion. It seemed the superintendent's job was only part-time now, in these days of tighter budgets.

  "Let me do the wondering. You won't be doing yourself a favor by dwelling on any of it,” he was told.

  Henry walked home alone. Marlborough Street was relatively quiet now, despite rush hour. There was an audible whisper to the yellowing leaves even above the hiss of traffic, at least until he reached the phalanxes of cars coming off Beacon Street.

  The lamps which illuminated the Public Garden above the shadowed walkers on their way home appeared old enough to have been burning in another age. High heels barked at the walkways. Was it really simpler then? Would an adventuress like Helen Mawson have taken any note of a poor, hopeless used-book dealer?

  What had happened to Henry had greatly disturbed Albert. That he knew. His friend had been wordless for most of the first account Henry had given him. Then Albert's frequent contention in darker moments, that human beings were all just savages in designer clothes, was brought out. He noted again that the purpose of civilization was just to distract the savages with trinkets while the innocent made their escape.

  "We live our lives with the tacit understanding that our time is borrowed, allotted, and proscribed,” Albert had said. “Something terrible like this is everyday in other places. You wouldn't want to live in Sarajevo or Mambasa. Or Detroit, for that matter. Jesus! My uncle used to live in Detroit."

  If that were true now, it might have been true in 1915, Henry thought. And, of course, there was a war in Europe at the time. Murdering was sanctioned and made official.

  Henry had objected, recalling his own favorite argument. “I've told you—Hobbes was wrong. We don't need kings. A life that's ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’ is only for those who don't read Shakespeare, or care to. We don't need the State. We need Yeats. We need more books and more time to read them."

  But then, Morgan had read her Shakespeare, and still she had been caught by a brute.

  Albert had sighed loudly with some kind of deeper resignation.

  "That's all too complicated. When I go home, there is always one person who's happy to see me. My little Jimmy. He never yells at me. He never complains. He never asks for anything—well, not much, anyway. He doesn't need a new pair of shoes every three months. He never tells me what I should have done. Dogs are more civilized than human beings. What you need, Henry, is a dog."

  Walking home alone through the busy shadows of Beacon Street, Henry wished he had a dog.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Chapter Eight

  Mrs. Prowder's door was open when he came in, and Mary's head popped forward much as her mother's often had—the red of Mary's hair almost garish.

  "Hello ... hello. Mr. Sullivan. I was wondering what the police were here for?"

  She stood then by the door, and he stopped at the foot of the stairway.

  He said, “Just ‘Henry’ is fine,” trying to gather his thoughts for an answer. “They wanted to speak to me....” He told her as briefly as he could what had happened. Feeling the weight of the lack of sleep, he leaned in the doorway and was instantly aware that old Mrs. Prowder would have objected and advised him to stand up straight.

  Mary did not seem surprised by his story. Perhaps she had already heard and only wanted reassurance on the matter.

  She said, “I'm sorry. We've both lost someone, then .... I was about to leave, and I was hoping you'd be home. I wanted to give you something.” She turned and grabbed a small book from the fireplace mantle facing the door. “You know she mostly read the papers and chatted with her friends. But she did like to read a book now and then, even if she didn't read those ‘digest’ things. Mostly, she got what she wanted from the library. But this was in the china cabinet. I thought you'd like it. It has someone else's name inside. I figured some tenant left it behind."

  Henry knew the book at once. It was a small green leather and India paper edition of the poems of Tennyson published by Nelson in England and popular in the United States as a Christmas gift at the time of World War One. Not worth a great deal, but with reasonably large type—good to handle and read.

  He said, “It's very nice. Have you read Tennyson?"

  Mary forced a polite smile. “No. I never read poetry. It's all so very precious and fancy or mean and nasty. Not my thing."

  Her distaste for poetry was audible in the tone of her words alone.

  He shook his head. “You'd like this,
I think. Your mother liked it. She read it through more than once."

  This widened her eyes. Henry thought she might be too weary from her own efforts to show more. She held the small book in the palm of her hand with her fingers bent back like it was an exhibit of some kind. “Really? I didn't know she ever read poetry."

  Henry put his hands in his pockets, trying to avoid the desire to lean again as he offered more of an explanation.

  "She told me once she hated her name. She wouldn't tell me what it was for a long time. Always said she was known as just Mrs. Prowder and happy with that. But then I noticed a letter once from her bank and saw her name on it."

  Mary interrupted.

  "Enid. She hated it. Enid and Elwin Prowder. She thought it sounded silly."

  Henry smiled and took the book in his own hand.

  "So I gave her this. The Idylls of the King. There is a wonderful part of it called ‘Enid.’ She even learned a portion of it and recited it back to me a few times. ‘Turn, Fortune, turn thy wheel with smile or frown; with that wild wheel we go not up or down; Our hoard is little, but our hearts are great .... ‘"

  Mary's eyes showed her confusion. “Not really. My mother? Out loud? She was always so practical."

  Henry said, “Not always,” without being sure of exactly why poetry was not practical.

  "Oh. I didn't know ... .” Her fingers closed on the book in his hand. “I'll keep it, then."

  She clasped the small book against her breast and smiled back at him, now obviously pleased. Henry was afraid he might be seeing tears form in her eyes soon, and he quickly said good night.

  Eliot opened his door on the landing; the music behind him thickened the mix of yellow light and the smell of cooked food. He was thin to the point of being bony, a wispy beard covering sunken cheeks. Mrs. Prowder had often worried over Eliot's sallow complexion. He was a vegetarian, it seemed, an unnatural religion in Mrs. Prowder's cosmos. His greatest offense, however, was his overweight and overactive girlfriend, Jessica, who often spent the night and seldom slept.

  Jessica smiled at Henry from the couch. The light of the apartment gave Eliot's complexion the look of cheese.

  Without greeting, Eliot said, “What were the cops about?"

  Henry fleetingly considered being cute and saying they were looking for drugs. “Just me. Someone died. They're just checking people out."

  Eliot's chin went up, and he studied Henry with half-closed eyes over the beard-stubbled expanse of his cheeks. “Something wrong?"

  Henry said, “She was murdered."

  This brought the chin back down with a gape. “Mrs. Prowder?"

  Eliot's cheeks now rose in a swell below his eyes, and his mouth widened in a grimace.

  Henry took a breath against smiling at the facial contortions. “No. Someone else. Don't worry about it."

  Behind Eliot, Jessica's smile had vanished in a wide expression of surprise.

  She said, “Where?"

  Henry needed another breath for that. His own body weight seemed to be doubling as he stood in place.

  "A few blocks away. Don't worry about it. I've got to get some sleep. I'm pretty beat. Good night."

  Henry made the last flight of stairs one step at a time. There was less to clean up this time from the police visit, and he gathered Helen Mawson's letters to one side and lay down on his bed, intending to close his eyes for only a moment before straightening up. Instead he fell into a pool of sleep, the sinking weight of his own body more than he could hold up. He resurfaced only fitfully to occasional street noise or the odd figment of a fading dream.

  "Helen."

  In the dark of early morning he awoke thinking of a young woman he did not know. Her hair was long, tied to one side with a turn of blue knitting yarn so that it fell over one shoulder. What was the color of her hair? Brown? Not plain brown. Something more. Her eyes were blue, almost purple, and too big for her face, which made her look very young. Cornflower blue came to mind, though Henry was certain he had never seen a blue cornflower in his life. She was small-boned but large-breasted, and this could not be hidden by the dress she wore, which was ankle-length and began at her throat with a white frill of lace. The dress was a deep blue brilliantine, embroidered with the same white lace. She had been looking directly at him, and he was sure he had spoken her name when he awoke.

  The room was not completely dark, and the gaslight from the streetlamps below cast a film through the flaws in the glass of the window onto his ceiling. The blank plaster directly above, with its small cracks, was now the background to the image of the girl he had seen in his dream.

  He knew the dress had been mentioned and complimented in one of the letters. The size of her eyes, and their color, too, had been mentioned in another. He was not certain how his mind had formed the whole of the image, but it fascinated him and brought him wide awake as the image faded beneath the onslaught of his thoughts.

  He remembered again the Jack Finney book, and the idea of time travel. Surely, his small room in this house was part of another time. The letters had transported him so easily, so clearly.

  When he turned on the light by his bed, the piles of her books stacked in front of the already-full bookcase along the wall presented themselves as an eccentric cityscape in miniature. The matching maroon cloth volumes of Richard Harding Davis and the green of F. Hopkinson Smith towered at one end over shorter stacks of Anthony Hope and Rudyard Kipling. Another tall stack of Winston Churchill rested beside the shorter one of Edward Noyes Westcott. Thick Mary Johnson novels butted against thin ones by Alice Hegan Rice.

  His father had brought the books over as some kind of gesture, and Henry was thankful for that much. Henry would have to thank the old man again for it, even if he'd done it just to get them out of his own way.

  Henry wanted to catalogue as much as he could before packing them up, and he had not yet found a space that would be best for that.

  Still in his underwear, he sat at his desk and pressed the button on his computer before he had actually made the decision to start working.

  Closest to him were the five stacks of leather-bound Roycrofter books, and he pulled off the top volume of these and set it by the keyboard. It was part of a pamphlet series of “Little Journeys” which had been gathered later into a single volume. This one began with Wordsworth. The leather of the cover was brushed to a soft texture and not stiffened with cardboard but left limp, as was the style of many of the other volumes. The paper was the color of dark cream.

  All of it was intended to evoke an ancient time, an idealized moment of harmonious human endeavor which had never actually existed outside the minds of those first children of the industrial age who were already despairing of steel and smoke. Henry had read a little of melancholy Ruskin and mad Morris—or was it the other way around?—the Arts and Crafts movement, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his lovelorn and religiously unhappy sister, Christina. The artifice of it all had always struck Henry as false. A made-up past imposed on a rejected present, and like Christina and her unrequited lovers, barren.

  Well, he thought, to be fair, there was the chair. Albert had taken it from the little house in Dedham and was keeping it for Henry in his basement. William Morris had in fact made a good and comfortable reading chair.

  Turning the title page of the Wordsworth to read the copyright, he noticed a penciled comment in a neat script. “Not the way it looks at all. Probably did not go inside as I did. Sounds like one of the Stoddard descriptions.” The handwriting was Helen Mawson's.

  Henry turned a clump of rough-cut pages and read a paragraph of chatty background biography on Wordsworth. He had never been fond of Elbert Hubbard—his pedantic style or his overplayful use of difficult words—and it did not take long to make Henry quit and close the book now.

  Setting it back, he noticed the edge of something protruding from another of the volumes lower in the stack. He opened this to a batch of thin pamphlets and folded sheets. They w
ere all printed in the same style as the books and bore the Roycrofter heading here or there. On stiffer stock was a printed listing of room rates at the Roycroft Inn at East Aurora, New York. One listing was circled with the date October 12 penciled beside it. The cost was three dollars per night. Breakfast was fifty cents. Dinner was a dollar fifty and included a choice of beef or lamb. The rate card included the date 1912 at the bottom.

  Elbert Hubbard had run an amazing operation for many years. In the best American business tradition, he had adopted the aesthetic socialism of the Rossettis’ Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and the Arts and Crafts medievalism of William Morris, from England, to the American business credo and the middle-class prosperity of upstate New York—and made it pay. Pamphlets and books were hand-produced by the thousands on letter presses in the shops he had built in the small hamlet of East Aurora, near Buffalo. His short-story pamphlet, A Message to Garcia, had sold in the millions after the Spanish-American War.

  In a colony-like settlement, Hubbard had encouraged volunteers to come and learn handicraft trades ranging from printing and papermaking to the hand illumination of books, and including the carpentry necessary for building the shops where all the work was done. This for a middle-class market which was only just finding the time to spare for luxuries and home decoration. Hubbard's reinvented aesthetic was a match for his marketing genius.

  So it appeared that Helen might have gone to East Aurora. This seemed like a loose end of information to Henry, and he had no idea what use it might be.

  Fully awake now, he pulled a container of orange juice from the small refrigerator in the kitchenette and sat back at his desk to begin cataloguing. He set the more difficult Roycrofter books aside and picked from a stack of books by fabulist John Kendrick Bangs to begin. He had finished those, and four by Mary Austin, as the glass of his window had turned gray. Nearly thirty titles were entered by the time his stomach pulled him away to the Paramount Cafe to find some food and coffee.