The Dreadful Revenge of Ernest Gallen

by James Lincoln Collier

  I didn’t say anything, so the voice went on. “Gene, when you and your little friends broach this matter with Samuels on Sunday, you might ask him how they knew that the jail key was hidden in the first-aid kit.”

  This was interesting, and I forgot I wasn’t listening. “Who knew?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’ll leave it at that. Just ask Samuels how they knew that the jail key was hidden in the first-aid kit.”

  “Who hid it there?”

  “Remember, Gene, I’m growing impatient. I’m not going to wait much longer. It’s time we got cracking on this. Catch him alone. Use a baseball bat. Nobody will suspect anything if you’re seen carrying a baseball bat around. There won’t be much blood. Rifle his pockets afterwards, take his money, your mom’s rings. The police will think it was a robbery. You came in from baseball and found him sprawled on the floor. Nobody will ever suspect you.”

  I shuddered. “No!” I shouted. “Never. Now go away.”

  “Soon, Gene,” the voice said. “Soon.”

  Sonny and I went over to Sam’s house after church—after church for Sam, anyway. Mom had a rush typing job to do that had to be ready Monday morning, so we hadn’t gone, and Sonny had hardly been inside a church in his life.

  He’d hardly been inside a house like the Samuels’, either. The Samuels weren’t rich by any means, but they were comfortable. Mr. Samuels said he probably could have made more money if he’d stayed on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. He’d won a couple of prizes for his stories, and would have been an editor there by now, but he liked running his own show. Money wasn’t the key thing, he always said; it was doing the kind of work you wanted to do.

  We came in through the front door and Sonny stood there looking around. He wasn’t in awe, nothing like that, just curious about how people like the Samuels lived. Sofa, a couple of bookcases with glass doors, framed prizes Mr. Samuels had won hanging on the walls, window curtains pulled back, little plaster statuettes of shepherds and shepherdesses dancing on top of the bookcases, a piano, a big carpet with a shiny floor showing around the edges, on the piano a silver dish of mints we weren’t supposed to hook but always did.

  The windows in Sonny’s cabin had never seen a curtain, the only books were his dad’s cowboy magazines, and I doubt if he knew the difference between a mint and an aspirin, for he’d probably never eaten either one.

  Sam came downstairs from her room when she heard us come in. “Did he say he’d talk to us?” I asked.

  “He knows we’re onto something. I don’t know how he figured it out. Maybe I said something wrong.”

  “We’re gonna tell him anyway,” Sonny said. “It don’t matter if he figured it out.”

  “He’s out in the sunroom,” Sam said. We hooked a couple of mints from the silver dish on the piano and went on out there. Sun coming in, red and yellow Mexican rug on the floor, more bookcases, some ferns in a big pot, a painting of some cathedral, another painting of cowboys in a water hole fighting off some Indians. Mr. Samuels was lying on a sofa, his leg in a cast, writing on a yellow lined pad. He was a big guy, not fat, but a little flabby. “Hello, kids,” he said. He’d known me pretty much all my life and he knew at least who Sonny was, knew his dad. A newspaperman like him gets to know a lot of people around town. He put the yellow lined pad on the floor. “Sonny, I’m sorry about your dad. I can’t say I knew him well, but I knew him a little. I never took against him. I don’t see where he ever harmed anyone but himself.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sonny said.

  “What’s on your minds, kids?”

  Sonny and I looked at Sam. “Dad.” She took a quick look at Sonny and me. She was pretty nervous about this, even though it was her own dad. “Dad, we’re finding out about something that happened in Magnolia a while back that nobody ever talks about.”

  “Oh?” he said. He cocked his head to one side and looked us over. “And what is that?”

  “Somebody was lynched,” she said.

  He kind of gave a jerk and stared at us. Then he relaxed again. “Where’d you get that idea, kids?”

  We looked at one another. We could see that we ought to have worked out a story first. I figured it was safest to come as close to the truth as we could. “Mr. Samuels, when we were going through the Chronicles we saw something about there being oil under the old Toffey house. It made some mention of my dad. Tom Richards. I got curious about it. There wasn’t anything wrong with that, was there?”

  “No, Gene, nothing wrong with it. It’s perfectly natural that you’d want to know about your father. Of course I knew him. I can’t say I knew him very well, but enough to chat with when I ran into him. But if you’re going to ask me about him, it isn’t up to me to tell you. That’s your mom’s business. She and your grampa.”

  “They won’t tell me anything. I didn’t think you’d tell me anything, either. That isn’t why we came.”

  He looked from one of us to the next. “Why’d you come, then?”

  “We want to know about the lynching, Dad,” Sam said. “Half the people in town were involved. Sonny thinks his dad was in on it somehow, Gene’s dad, his grampa.” She took a deep breath. “You knew about it and kept it out of the paper.”

  He gave a little smile. “Now hold it, kids. You’re letting your imaginations run away with you. Who said there was a lynching?”

  “We know it,” Sonny said. “There was a lynching, all right.”

  “How are you so sure, Sonny?”

  “Dad, we went out to the Toffey house. Nobody ever goes out there. Sonny’s dad told him it was a good place to stay away from. We got curious and we went there.”

  “Oh? And what did you find?”

  Once again we looked at one another to see whose turn it was to speak. “We found a noose,” Sam said. “And underneath, a heap of bones and half-rotted clothes.”

  Mr. Samuels didn’t say anything for a bit, but sat there with the white cast sticking out in front of him, thinking. “Did you find anything else? That’s it? The bones and the clothes?”

  “We found this, Dad,” Sam said. She held out the clipping from the newspaper.

  Mr. Samuels took it and scanned it quickly. Then he handed it back to Sam. “Where did you find it?”

  “In the dead guy’s pocket,” Sonny said.

  Mr. Samuels nodded his head. “Well, I can understand your curiosity, kids. You’re all bright, imaginative kids and something like this would excite your interest. Bound to. But I think you’re adding up two and two to make twenty-two. That old Toffey house has been a nuisance for years. It’s always attracted people we’d just as soon not see around Magnolia. People down on their luck, traveling between St. Louis and Kansas City. Bums, not to put too fine a point on it. You can feel sorry for them, but unfortunately they’ll steal anything that isn’t nailed down. They pass the word among themselves that the old Toffey house is a place where they can sleep when they’re passing through. It wouldn’t be surprising that one of those fellows had died out there. Got drunk, fell asleep in cold weather, and froze to death. It happens all the time. Killed in a fight. Or simply had a heart attack. Any number of things could have happened.”

  “That doesn’t explain the noose,” I said.

  He shrugged again. “They could have no relationship, the one to the other. Somebody could have put the noose up as a macabre joke after they stumbled across the body. Or it was put up at some time to warn people off.”

  “It seems like too much of a coincidence, Dad,” Sam said.

  “Yes, it probably does,” he said. “Could have been a lynching, a case where two or three bums were sleeping out there. Caught one of them stealing; they were drinking and decided to lynch the thief. That happens, too.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry to spoil your fun, kids. A lynching would be a lot more interesting than a quarrel among bums, but I’ve been in the newspaper business long enough to see a thousand interesting stories melt away under a cold look.”

  “What about the oil swindle?”
Sonny asked. “My dad had oil certificates out of it. My mom’s still got them. She says she ought to throw them away, but they were something Dad saved for years and she can’t bring herself to just toss them out.”

  “Look, kids, that’s an ancient story. I don’t remember exactly what it was about anymore myself. It’s long forgotten around Magnolia.”

  “Dad,” Sam said. “How come you never ran anything in the Chronicle about it?”

  “What makes you think I didn’t?”

  “Mr. Samuels,” I said, “we went through all the Chronicles for that time and we didn’t see anything. A story like that must have been pretty big for a little town like Magnolia. It should have been on the front page.”

  He looked from one of us to the other. “There never was any school project, was there, kids? You made that story up as an excuse to examine the back issues, didn’t you?”

  We didn’t say anything.

  “I thought so,” he said. “What’s this all about? Who put you up to it?”

  Once again we looked at one another, wondering what to tell him. Why hadn’t we worked out a story before? “We got it from my dad,” Sonny said. “He was being haunted by some voice. That’s why he stepped off the lumber platform. The voice told him to do it.”

  “Sonny, I don’t mean to be disrespectful of the dead, but how could he have told you this when he was already dead himself?”

  “He told us before. Me and Mom. She can tell you. He was being haunted by a voice that was always telling him to jump in front of cars and such.”

  “He was hearing voices in his head?”

  “A voice. He wasn’t making it up. It was really happening to him. It was the specter of the man who got lynched.”

  Mr. Samuels nodded his head. “I see. That makes things a little clearer. Sonny, I know that your dad had his problems. That’s no secret around town. No offense meant—a lot of people have problems, some of them a great deal worse than his. I didn’t know that it had gotten so bad that he was hearing voices in his head. It makes what he did a little more understandable. I feel sorry for him. He must have been suffering a good deal. But we can’t allow ourselves to take as fact the ramblings of a person with mental problems.”

  “Dad wasn’t having mental problems,” Sonny said. “He was being haunted.”

  Mr. Samuels looked annoyed. “Sonny, I respect your loyalty to your father. That’s creditable in you. But—”

  “Dad, it’s real,” Sam said. “Gene—”

  “Look, kids, I’ve got work to do.” He was getting sore. “The paper still has to come out, broken leg or no broken leg. You’re letting your imaginations run away with you. There are no such things as ghosts, specters, whatever you want to call them.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then I said, “How did the lynch mob know that the jail key was in the first-aid kit?”

  The room was suddenly dead quiet. Mr. Samuels swung his leg off the sofa and sat up. He looked at us for a moment. Then he said softly, “How’d you know about that, Gene?”

  “The specter told me, the same as it told Sonny’s dad to walk off into midair.” I paused. “The same as it told you to drive into that tree.”

  “That was a mental lapse,” he said.

  “No, it wasn’t,” Sonny said. “The specter was trying to kill you the same as it killed my dad.”

  Mr. Samuels turned his head to look out the window at the sun shining on the maple tree in the side yard. Finally he turned back to us and shook his head. “I suppose we were wrong to think that we could bury this thing forever. You kids are right. There was a lynching in Magnolia. This fellow Gallen, it was. He’d been swindling people with this oil deal. Some of us had been suspicious from the start, but a lot of people around here smelled easy money and got suckered. People were throwing their lifetime savings at Gallen. Finally some of us realized it had to be stopped. We called in the FBI and the thing quickly collapsed. We jailed Gallen, but at three o’clock in the morning some fellows came out to the jail. We didn’t have but two cells then. We never had any need for any more, never had any real criminals around here. Locked up drunks who got to fighting from time to time. Mostly the cells stood empty.

  “I don’t know where Gene got it from, but he’s right. The key was hidden in the first-aid kit. They had different hiding places for it, but it was there that night. Only three or four people knew about it. The fire chief, in case the jail caught on fire, the two constables—that was all the police force we had at the time. The mayor, I guess. One of them revealed the hiding place to the mob. I don’t know who, and don’t want to know. The mob came to the jail, ran the constable on duty out of there, found the key. They took this poor fellow Gallen out to the old Toffey place and hung him. It was a terrible thing for them to do. But there were some good people involved in it who got caught up in the emotions of the moment. Family men, good citizens who took care of their own. Those of us who knew about it decided it was best for the town to forget about it. Let the waters close over it. We put out the word that the prisoner had been transferred to another jurisdiction for trial.”

  We were silent. Then Sam said, “Dad, why didn’t somebody go out there and bury those bones?”

  “At first we didn’t know they were there. We knew that Gallen had been taken out of jail, but we didn’t know where they’d taken him. Then, a few years later a rumor began to go around. Somebody had a little too much to drink and said something in a bar. We talked about it—John Adamson, myself, the fellow who was mayor at the time. We saw that we were stuck. Disposing of those bones without reporting them to the police was about as illegal as you can get. If we’d got caught it would have meant real trouble. Not just to us: there’d have been an investigation, and like as not the whole story would have come out. The men who’d lynched Gallen would have faced long jail sentences, maybe even the electric chair. An awful lot of people would have been hurt. Not just the men, but their wives, children, parents, friends. Half the town, near enough. We decided to leave well enough alone. Let time pass.”

  “Mr. Samuels,” I said, “weren’t you afraid somebody might stumble on the bones by chance?”

  “Oh, sure. That was the risk we had to take. But since the Depression there are a lot of abandoned farmhouses around here. Farmers couldn’t pay their mortgages, lost their farms, went out to California to work picking fruit and such. One more abandoned farmhouse wouldn’t attract special attention. We decided to take the risk. And it worked, until now.”

  We were all quiet for a little bit. Then Sonny said, “My dad was one of them who started it.”

  Mr. Samuels shook his head. “I’m not going to say anything more about it. What’s done is done. I’m going to ask you kids to forget about the whole thing. I’ve leveled with you. I’ve told you what you wanted to know. You owe me something. I want you to drop it.”

  “Mr. Samuels,” I said. “How come they didn’t lynch my dad? How did he get away?”

  Mr. Samuels thought for a minute. “You’re concerned that your dad might have been involved in something criminal, aren’t you, Gene?”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  He considered for another minute. “Well, it isn’t my business to tell you about your father. That’s up to your mom and your grampa. But I guess there’s no harm in telling you that Tom—your dad—was mighty proud of you, the way any young father would be proud to have a fine, healthy baby boy.” He glanced at Sam. “Nothing wrong with having a baby girl, either, but Tom was proud he’d got a boy. I remember, Sunday mornings he’d carry you out to the Magnolia Diner for breakfast so your mom could sleep late. I’d go out for the Sunday papers about that time, and I’d see him through the diner window. He’d have you kneeling up in the booth next to him so he could feed you bites of sausage and pancakes. I don’t imagine that sausages and pancakes were the best breakfast for a little tot, but it didn’t seem to do you any harm.” He paused again. “I—that’s about as much as I ought to say. You can ask your mom
about him.”

  He leaned back on the sofa. “Look, I have an editorial to write. I have to get to work. Now, I want you to forget about this ghost business—specter, whatever you call it. Yes, I understand that people sometimes think they’re hearing things. It happens to everybody—a little voice at the back of your head saying something odd. I know it seems real at the time. But it’s imaginary. Sometimes the mind plays tricks on itself. I want you to forget about that stuff.”

  The only trouble was that the specter wasn’t going to let us forget about it.

  Chapter 10

  “You see, Gene, I was right,” the hollow voice said. “They lynched me, and Samuels and your grampa covered it up. Covered up a murder, Gene. Let the men who killed me go free. Do you think that’s right, Gene?”

  I was up in my room, studying for an English test. What with everything that had been happening, I was pretty far behind in stuff I was supposed to be reading. “Okay, you were right. I admit it. Why can’t you just forget about it? You deserved it, swindling all those people out of their savings.”

  “Nobody deserves to be murdered, Gene. With a good lawyer I’d have got off, anyway. Found not guilty. Found innocent of all charges.”

  I was determined not to let him see I was scared. “How could you be innocent? There was no oil under that land and you knew it.”

  “They’d have had to prove I knew there was no oil on the place. That’s a hard thing to prove, Gene. In this America you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

  “I don’t care what they could prove or couldn’t prove. You were guilty. You deserved it.”

  “Think of it, Gene. Think what it means to be waked up suddenly at three in the morning by a bunch of men with paper bags over their heads. Big eyeholes cut into the paper bags. Oh, those eyeholes staring at you, black spots staring. They grab you, half awake, stuff a handkerchief in your mouth so you can’t shout. You’re choking, and they tie your hands behind you, tie your feet together, handle you rough. I tried to fight, but I didn’t have a chance, not against a dozen men punching and pulling at me. They carried me out of there, tossed me in the back of a truck, and off we went with three men crouched over me holding rifles. Out to the Toffey place. My place. I never bothered to furnish it. Old farms weren’t my cup of tea. Elegant hotels with marble lobbies and palm trees were more my style.