“The only night I would have given her a gift like that,” I answered, “would have been on our wedding night.”
He blinked once, and the fear in his eyes faded out. Then he asked, “Why’d you have it then?”
“There’s a friend of Brunrichter’s by the name of Vernon. A banker. There was just something about him, I don’t know, some quality … He was talking about those missing girls once and, the things he said about them, it made me suspect him is all. Made me think he might be responsible. So I broke into his house one day, looking for evidence. I saw that underdress on his bed and … I took it. Without even thinking what I might do with it. Turns out I couldn’t do a thing.”
“Are you saying maybe he’s the one kidnapped those girls?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore. I can barely keep a thought straight in my head.”
Buck responded to my statement with his own look of helplessness, eyebrows raised above a plaintive gaze, mouth crooked as if to ask, What can I do about this mess?
“All right,” I told him, and strained to focus my thoughts, to locate one small point of clarity in the miasma. And the only point of clarity I could see was Susan. Susan was all that mattered. “Your home. Did you do the search?”
“I did,” he said.
“What did you find?”
He shook his head.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing of any good.”
“But something? Surely you found something?”
“It’s in my hat,” he said.
“Turn sideways just a bit, with your back to the guard.”
He did so.
“Now take your hat off—be natural, Buck, not too fast. Hold it down in front of you. Good, good. Now give me what you found.”
“Should I just hand it up to you?” he asked.
“Can the guard see what you’re doing?”
“Not unless he can see through me he can’t.”
“Go ahead then. But slowly. Don’t let your shoulders move.”
He brought the fingertips of his right hand to the bottom of the panel opening. Between finger and thumb he held a small black feather. Something snagged in my chest when I saw it. Something jagged pierced my heart.
“I gave that to her,” I told him. “It was inside the book I gave her that night.”
“It’s nothing then?”
“No. It’s nothing.”
He read the anguish in my eyes. “Maybe you’d like to keep it,” he said.
I closed my hand around it, withdrew it from his fingers and clasped it tight.
“The only other thing was this,” he said. He held it on the tip of his index finger, a broken piece of shell no bigger than a fingernail, its edges smoothed and upward curving, suggesting a concave structure, the outer surface a subtle pink, the interior as white as pearl.
“I thought it must’ve come off one of my boots,” he said, “from down on the docks. Except that it isn’t a mussel or clamshell, is it? It don’t look like either of them to me.”
I placed it on my own fingertip, concave side down, and held it to the light. It looked familiar somehow, but I could make no connection, could not remember where I might have seen such a shell.
“It’s from out of the river, ain’t it?” Buck asked.
“I don’t know. It seems awfully clean, doesn’t it? There’s not a trace of mud on it anywhere I can see.”
I studied it awhile longer, but in the end it told me nothing. A broken piece of shell. Probably given to Susan by one of her students.
My hopes, meager as they were, sank further. Again I turned to Buck, meaning to hand him the shell piece along with the bad news that nothing could be gleaned from it. But he was staring hard at my hand, brow knitted.
“What are you thinking?” I asked.
“What book?” he said.
“I don’t understand.”
“You said you gave her a book that night. The one with the feather in it. Except that there’s not a new book anywhere in the house. I know every book there.”
“Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, by Poe. He inscribed it for her. I gave it to her just before we said good night.”
“It’s not in the house,” he said.
“You’re sure about this?”
“The feather was on the floor underneath her bed. That shell was in the kitchen, stuck between two boards. There wasn’t no book.”
He watched me for a moment, waiting for an explanation. I could not piece together a coherent thought.
“Somebody killed her for a book?” he asked, too loud. “For a goddamn book?”
“Shhh, no, no. No, it wouldn’t have been like that.”
“Then why?”
I held the raven’s feather in my left hand, the broken shell still stuck to a finger of my right hand. I closed both hands into loose fists then, closed my eyes so as to better let the images come to me. And that is all they were, mere images, fleeting pictures in my mind, not sufficient for conclusion or even theory. But they raised a question or two.
“Now what’s got you thinking?” Buck asked.
I looked at him again. “Are you ready to do more?”
“I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Two things. First, are you familiar with the hills behind Dr. Brunrichter’s estate?”
“Only from a distance. I know where they are.”
“I want you to go there, Buck. Find some roundabout way. Make certain no one spots you. But go there and take this shell—put out your finger. There, take that shell and go to the hills about a quarter mile behind the mansion. You’ll see a mausoleum there, and that’s where you need to go. Don’t let yourself be seen.”
“He’s not behind this, is he? Is that what you’re saying?”
The fire flared in his eyes then, and because I knew the kind of rage that might come upon him, knew what he might do with it, I told him, “No. No, I’m certain he’s not.”
“Then what am I to do with this?” he asked, meaning the shell.
“All around the mausoleum there is a border of seashells.”
“Sonofabitch!” he cried.
“Buck, hush! You have to be quiet now. We have to take this one step at a time.”
“You do think it was him, don’t you?”
“It wasn’t him! Now listen to me. Do you want to do this for Susan or not?”
He glared at me then, furious that I should doubt his devotion to her. I did not. I only doubted that he could channel his emotions appropriately to our needs.
Then, finally, holding himself in check, he asked, “What is it I’m to do?”
“Just see if it fits is all. See if that piece of shell might have come from the mausoleum or not. You’ll be able to tell.”
“And if it did?”
“Then we’ll know something we didn’t know yesterday. But first, before you do that. First I need you to do something else.”
He waited.
“We need another person to help.”
“Who?” he asked.
“I don’t know who. But it has to be somebody you can trust. Somebody we can both trust. And it has to be somebody who can … .” I struggled with how to say it. “Somebody who can move in higher circles than you and I. Somebody of a higher station in life.”
His brow was wrinkling again.
“There are people who need to be questioned,” I said. “Successful, prosperous people. The kind who would never speak to you or me. And even if they did, who would never tell us the truth.”
“Who would I even ask? That kind of person would never deal with me in the first place.”
“I don’t know, Buck. But you have to think of somebody. And when you do, send him here. Have him come to see me at the soonest possible moment.”
“What would he tell the guards about why he’s coming here?”
“Buck, I don’t know! The two of you will just have to figure it out!”
“I wouldn’t know who to ask,” he said.
I was exhausted. Depleted of argument. I took a step back, let my gaze wander away to the blankness of wall. Blankness and surrender.
“All right,” he said then.
I felt a smile come. “You also need to eat something,” I told him. “Change your shirt. Take care of yourself.”
“Look who’s giving advice,” he said.
And all through the long afternoon afterward I clutched that small black feather atop my chest. Raven’s feather. From a bird both reviled and worshipped. Devourer of carrion. Soothsayer. Truth teller. Midnight messenger of the untimely dead.
THERE is a place in one’s self that can be reached only when you lose everything that has mattered to you. It is as if you had been sitting in a spacious and sunlit room, with a feast of bright tomorrows laid out before you on the table, and you are standing there with a cigar in one hand and a snifter of cognac in the other, ready to take your seat and fill your plate, when suddenly the floor collapses beneath you and you go tumbling down through darkness to land in a small dank hole, alone in the deepest of places, while shattered crystal and ash rain down upon your head.
In that place, after the shock of initial impact wears off, after the reality sinks in and you accept that the situation cannot be easily undone or time turned back, you no longer care what becomes of you. It is not courage because courage requires that you act in the face of your fears. But you are not in the least afraid. You lie stripped of all hope and all of your previous ambitions.
For my part only one thing remained to be accomplished in my life. I needed to murder the individual who had murdered Susan. If I perished in the effort, all the better. I also accepted the fact that if I succeeded in the effort, success would not matter much either, but only until the satisfaction gleaned from it was devoured by the loss that did not end.
Yes, the pleasure of success would be temporary but it was the only pleasure I could anticipate ever again. All other pleasures had been rendered null and void. What did writing or riches or anything else avail in the absence of love? What did guilt or innocence matter? I was not driven to clear my name. My name and my future were no longer relevant. The only name that had meant anything to me was one I had fabricated, and it was gone now too, blown away like a dandelion’s wisp.
And if somehow I succeeded in my final ambition, what then? Then … movement. Nothing more. Whether by foot or boat or rail I would set myself in motion, always away from but never toward anything in particular, until I was acted upon in such a way that required a reaction. I would make no precipitating maneuvers of my own. I would turn myself into a cipher, a zero, a slowly rolling nothing.
Maudlin? Yes. But such was the only comfort I could muster there at the lowest latitude of my soul. The world is dark, indelibly dark, when you are only seventeen and believe with all your heart that you will never be happy again.
27
IT COULD not have been more than two hours after Buck’s visit to me than the panel door slid open with a bang. I was lying faceup on my bunk, staring into God’s cyclopean eye, which at the moment was clouded over, milky with indifference. A few minutes before this I had been inspired by the raven’s feather clutched in my hand and had come up with a scheme of action and was waiting for God to blink as a sign of his approval. That is, I promised myself that if a bird flew past my window, any kind of bird at all, I would do what I had devised.
The plan was simple enough: At evening mealtime, when one of my jailers came to push a bowl of bean or cabbage soup through the opening, I would respond by hurling out the contents of my chamber pot. With any luck at all this would so enrage the guard that he would rush headlong into my cell. If my luck continued to hold, and it probably would not, I might subdue him before he could bash my brains to a pulp. After that, how I would make it through the next door and the two outer guards, I had no idea. In truth I had no real hope of escape, no hopes at all. My mood after Buck’s departure had quickly plummeted, so that I now considered a death by beating preferable to one more night of this damnable impotence.
And so I lay there watching for my omen. Instead, the panel door slid open with a bang. And in the opening, adorned with its usual sneer, the pockmarked face of my midday guard.
“Wake up!” he told me.
“Bring me something to eat.”
“Hungry now, are you? I knew you couldn’t hold out.”
“Bring me some food!”
“You’ll eat when it’s time to eat. Till then you can scrape up what’s on the floor.”
“Fuck you,” I told him.
“Sit up!” he barked. “Got somebody here wants to pray for you.”
“Pray for this,” I answered, and made an obscene gesture.
He laughed. What could I do or say that he hadn’t experienced before? A moment later he stepped to the side and said to the person there, “I ain’t responsible for the way he’s going to talk to you. Just remember that.”
The face of Miss Jones then appeared in the opening, a hard and angular face, her thin neck black-collared, gray hair black-bonneted. Just the sight of her astringent countenance was a shock to me, and not a pleasant one.
“Have you a favorite passage from the Bible?” she asked. Her voice coming into the small enclosed room seemed a jagged kind of shriek, a caw thrown down from a brittle branch.
I felt inclined to shock her in return. “The Song of Solomon,” I answered.
She showed no surprise, not the slightest discomfort. And answered, “I think not.”
She brought a heavy Bible up to the opening and rested it on the panel’s ledge. “Revelations,” she said. Now she turned to the right and spoke to the guard, whom I could no longer see. “You should stay as well,” she told him. “It will do you good to hear this.”
He laughed again, this time just one explosive “Hah!” Then his footsteps echoed down the hall. Miss Jones continued to watch after him. A few moments later the guard’s chair, at the end of the hall, scraped shrilly over the floor as he dropped himself into it. She called, “You should come back down here and listen to this!”
In my mind I could picture his wave of dismissal.
“I insist that you come down here!” she said. “You must provide an example for this young man!”
“You do what you came to do,” he called to her, his voice an impatient boom, “and leave me out of it!” The chair legs scraped again, this time the longer squeak of a chair being jerked and twisted so as to face away from her.
Miss Jones sniffed once as if insulted. Then she turned to face me once again. With her head framed as it was in the aperture, her features appeared more exaggerated than ever, heronlike, a long beaked face on a serpentine neck.
She lay open the Bible. “The Revelation of St. John the Divine,” she said. “We shall begin with chapter two.”
“I’m not interested in this,” I told her.
She began anyway. “‘I know thy works, and thy labor, and thy patience, and how thou canst not bear them which are evil.’”
“Come take her out of here!” I screamed.
The guard down the hall laughed mightily.
Miss Jones continued to read. “‘And thou hast tried them which say they are apostles, and are not, and hast found them liars.’”
I told myself, I should not have to suffer this as well. I lay there awhile longer, jaw clenched, and began a low rumbling moan in an effort to drown her out. She read even louder.
“‘Nevertheless I have somewhat against thee, because thou has left thy first love.’”
“Damn you,” I muttered, then swung my feet onto the floor, and stood and crossed to her, meaning, if necessary, to shove that Bible out into the hallway, Miss Jones preceding it. I was but one long stride from doing so when, with a flick of her bony finger, she dislodged a slip of folded paper from between the Bible’s pages and sent it trembling to the floor.
She continued to read, did not slow by a beat or lift her eyes to me. The paper lay there on the stones
, no accident.
I sank to my haunches, picked up the paper, unfolded it. Only two words were written on the paper, words penned in an elegant script, a very womanly hand, both words underlined. At the top of the paper she had written Names? And midway down the center of the page, Questions?
My brain fogged momentarily, but just as quickly the fog evaporated. She was the person Buck Kemmer had sent! Miss Jones! I felt suddenly giddy with the absurdity of it.
Strange how a manner and countenance so annoying can become in an instant so endearing. What an actress she was! I wanted to kiss that parched hard cheek of hers.
I rose and moved closer. I signaled, by scrawling my finger through the air, that I required a writing instrument of some kind.
She slid a bit more of the Bible inside my cell. With her left hand she fingered a thick stack of pages and lifted them slightly, revealing the stub of pencil secreted beneath them. I slipped a finger between the pages and slid the pencil out.
She read on. “‘I know thy works and where thou dwellest … . Repent; or else I will come unto thee quickly … . And I will give him the morning star … .’”
And as she read I wrote what names I could remember. Vernon, of course, was first on the list. Then Kane. Gatesford. The girl, Lydia Cavin. Soon afterward I gave up on trying to remember individual names and scrawled Any and all of the Quintillian Society. Under her second notation I wrote: How long did Poe’s reception continue? Was Brunrichter ever absent from it? At what time and for how long? Did any of the other guests leave soon after my departure?
I prayed for a clearer mind but I could think of nothing more to write. So I refolded the paper along its crease and slipped it into the Bible, along with the pencil stub.
She read a few moments longer, then finally stopped. She closed her eyes as if to bless me with a silent benediction. I whispered, “Be careful how you ask those questions. Don’t make anybody suspicious about—”
Her eyes flew open. “Do not presume to tell me how to conduct my business, young man.”
The guard’s chair legs squeaked. I could sense the man looking her way. And so I put my hands on the Bible and slammed it shut and shoved it up against her scrawny bosom. I gave her a wink and shouted, “Get her out of here now! I don’t have to put up with this!”
Disquiet Heart Page 24
