I Want to Go Home

by Frances Lockridge

  The flashlight was little good. The beam lighted only fog, retreated from fog, made fog luminous and so doubly opaque. A flashlight could show you the ground at your feet and the wall of mist around you. It could not show you a little boy wandering lost, confused, fear swallowing his voice and the fog his choked answer to the shouts—to Scott’s shout from some distance off, sounding as if he were farther from the house and to her right; to Mrs. Bromwell’s calling from nearer the house; to the repeated calls of William and the kennel man and the gardeners and the maids.

  There were many people seeking Lorry, and yet each of them was, minutes after leaving the house, desertedly alone. The voices of the others were unreal, like the echoes of voices. Karen, one of Scott’s out-door coats heavy on her shoulders, clumsily wrapping her, went the way Scott had told her—east across the lawn, down the path to the first field, through the gap in the stone fence beyond. She looked back now and then, and at first could see the lights of the house and know where she was. “Lorry!” she called. “Lorry!” But the lights of the house dimmed as she crossed the first field, and then the ground sloped down and cut the house off from her. She might easily get lost herself, she thought. Where was the path? Should the growth of the summer, dry now, harsh now, be so thick here and so high here? “Lorry! Lorry!” A child would grow panic-stricken here, in this; grow hysterical with fear. Even Lorry; even quiet, observing Lorry.

  She stumbled, caught herself by seizing a little tree, but then found the ground sloping more abruptly under her feet and had to catch again at a slim trunk and then again. Where was she now? This wasn’t right. Somehow she had got turned around, stumbled out of the second field having started east and turned unconsciously to the south. Probably, without knowing it, she had gone through another gap in a stone wall and was on the edge of the Raewood swamp. Not Bromwell land at all, not—

  The flashlight was of some use now. It showed her the hummocks of swamp grass ahead. A child could die here! “Lorry! Lorry! Lorry!” The effort of calling rasped at her throat. She stumbled and did not fully catch herself, and one foot went deep into water between the hummocks. A little farther on there would be a brook. She was in the Raewood swamp, unquestionably. But could Lorry have got so far—so far on short legs, so far on such slender legs? She stood on one of the hummocks, teetering insecurely, and let the flashlight’s beam do what it could. Did it catch water there? The brook? And—something huddled by the water?

  Karen Mason could hardly remember afterward how she reached the brook, how she fell between hummocks, went up to her knees in mud and water, how once she seemed to be crawling, not walking. But she reached the brook and what was beside it, was half in it.

  It was not Lorry. It was Marta Bromwell. She was face down in the brook. The parka hood of her coat covered her black hair. And the water covered her pretty face.

  Karen called her name and tugged at her and got her face out of the water. But as she did this, gave all her strength to doing it, did it with a frantic strength she had not known she had, she realized that there was not much point to it. Marta was dead.

  She had not come there across the fields. She had come there, to die there, down a path which led from near the kennels out to the comparative firmness of an old farm road. When she knew Marta was dead, Karen ran along the path and then along the road, calling, “Scott! Scott!” He would, she thought—not knowing why she thought it—be first to hear her.

  The farm road joined a town road after a hundred yards or so. Karen knew where she was. She ran along the road, which would take her to another and then, after only a few more yards, to the drive which led up to the monstrous shingled house. She ran, and a pain knifed at her side, and she kept on running, her lungs straining for air. She ran as if she were pursued, her feet sinking into the softness of the path and then of the road. But at last she was on the packed gravel of the drive and running toward the house.

  She met Mrs. Bromwell first. Mrs. Bromwell was walking up the drive, calling the child’s name. She looked back when she heard the sound of Karen’s running. She stopped.

  “Lorry?” she said, quickly, fear in her voice.

  Gaspingly, Karen told her.

  “But how dreadful,” Lucretia Bromwell said. She seemed to sway a little, but perhaps the unsteadiness was Karen’s own. In the gray dark, nothing was clear.

  It was then that Everett Hume made his second appearance of the evening. Because of the fog, his appearance was startlingly abrupt; at one moment he was invisible (although his steps must have been audible, only unrecorded); at the next Karen could almost have reached out and touched him. He had a flashlight and, when he came to them, threw its beam briefly on the two women and then on his own face.

  “Something’s wrong,” he said and Mrs. Bromwell said, “Oh!” and then, “Who are you?” Hume waited an instant, looking at Karen.

  “The man who came to telephone,” Karen said, and tried to remember more. “Mr. Hume,” she said.

  “Can I do something?” Hume asked, and he spoke to the elder woman. For the instant she merely looked at him. “I heard someone running,” he said. “I was still at the end of the drive. Waiting. Before that people were shouting. As if they were trying to find somebody.”

  There was a clarity in his words, in his tone, which was unlike the night. It was as if there had been fog, too, in Karen’s mind, and the voice penetrated it.

  “A little boy,” Karen said, when Mrs. Bromwell still said nothing. “Mrs. Bromwell’s grandson. Lorry. But now—”

  “My daughter-in-law has had an accident,” Mrs. Bromwell said. “Miss Mason was running for help. She’s afraid—”

  “She’s dead,” Karen said. “It—it couldn’t be any other way. She was in the brook.”

  “I’ll go back with you,” Hume said. He spoke quickly, as if he had taken charge quickly. “Mrs. Bromwell can get the others. Call a doctor.” He paused a moment and looked at Karen. “You’re up to it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Oh—yes!” She looked at Mrs. Bromwell.

  “All right,” Mrs. Bromwell said. “Go with him.”

  “The path off the old road,” Karen said. “You know where I mean.”

  “Of course,” Mrs. Bromwell said. “Go with him.”

  Hume did not run; did not quite run. But Karen had almost to run again to keep up with him. After a little he took her arm to help her. “Sometimes you can do something,” he said, as he half pulled her. “Drowning’s funny.” But Karen missed the path in the fog, and they were lost momentarily, and had to go back to find it.

  Marta was lying as Karen had left her; she might, now she was out of the water, her face visible, have lain down to rest. Quickly, Hume dropped to both knees beside her; gently touched her face. He lifted one of her arms and watched it fall again. He shook his head.

  “She’s dead, poor kid,” he said and, without standing, twisted to face Karen. “You pulled her out?”

  “Yes,” Karen said.

  “Where was she?” he asked. “Before?” He felt Marta’s heavy coat, her skirt. “The clothing’s not wet. Not soaked.”

  It was only her head, Karen told him. It was as if—almost it was as if she had lain face downward to drink from the brook and then had let her face into the brook, her head into the water.

  “She must have stumbled,” Karen said. “Fallen forward. Hit her head on something.”

  Hume stood up, then. “Show me,” he said.

  “Almost where she is,” Karen told him. “I could only pull her back a little.”

  Hume threw the beam of his flashlight on the brook; it groped with the fog. He looked at the ground around, and then, more carefully, at Marta’s body.

  “There’s nothing to stumble over,” he said. “And I don’t see any mark on her head. She was sure-footed enough.” He paused, but only momentarily. “At least, she looks young. Healthy. People catch themselves.”

  “I don’t know,” Karen said. “What do you mean?”

  “Som
eone could have pushed her down,” Hume said. “Or tripped her. Got on her back and held her face under. Holding onto that hood thing. Not even touching her. Just her clothes.”

  He was looking at the ground again, slowly, carefully.

  “She’d have struggled, of course,” he said. “Not much, probably. Not long. Sort of—thrashed around. Tried to—” He broke off, and went back to Marta’s body, and now he looked at her hands.

  “Tried to push herself up,” he said. “And—see?”

  He held up one of the dead hands, the beam of the flashlight on it. The palm was dirty, as if it had been ground against earth or stone. On the fleshy part of the thumb there was an abrasion, the skin not quite broken.

  “As she did,” Hume said, and put the arm down again, gently this time. “With light we’d see more, probably. She wouldn’t die without trying. Not—” He stopped abruptly, and began again. “Almost anybody could have done it,” he said. “One’s almost helpless lying that way.” He turned the flashlight on Karen. “Even a little person,” he said. “Somebody no bigger than you.”

  Then they heard voices.

  “The others are coming,” Karen said….

  Marta Bromwell had been a little person, too. She had weighed hardly more than Karen. Scott Bromwell could carry his wife’s body in his arms along the path and the farm road, along the county road and up the long drive to the monstrous house. Karen had expected Hume to make some protest when Scott took the body up but he did not. And, by the time they reached the house, he was not with them, although nobody had noticed when he disappeared.

  Marta’s body lay for half an hour on her bed—her wide bed in a room which had about it the kind of glitter she had always liked—before the doctor arrived, examined briefly, shook his head in a physician’s deprecation of the inevitable and said that the police would have to be notified. A formality, of course. “Always in accidental death,” he said. He would notify the police.

  It was Karen herself, after she had changed quickly, who received the doctor, stood in Marta’s room while he made his brief examination and, finally, showed him the nearest telephone extension.

  Before the doctor came, Scott had stood for long minutes looking at his wife’s body on the bed, not speaking, showing little in his face. Mrs. Bromwell had stood near the door and waited, but finally she had spoken.

  “Scott—Lorry,” she had said. “We’ve got to find Lorry.”

  Scott Bromwell had stood for a moment longer and then, almost physically, shaken himself away from death, and from memories which had not died.

  In the East Room, Karen had waited, standing in front of the fire, shaking—partly with cold. She had not seen Scott by his wife’s body; had not tried to imagine it. She had waited, shaking a little, feeling a kind of numbness. Outside, in the fog, she could still hear men and women calling the child’s name. Most of them seemed now to be at some distance from the house.

  It had been Scott who asked her to wait for the doctor; Mrs. Bromwell who had said that Karen must change before anything and that she would wait until Karen came down again. When Karen did come down, Mrs. Bromwell went back into the fog to call “Lorry! Lorry!” with the others. In her voice, now, there was a kind of desperation.

  The doctor had gone to the East Room to wait after his telephone call, and Karen was with him—in front of the fire again, sipping a drink he had ordered her to take, when Mrs. Bromwell came back. Her face was gray and, for the first time since Karen had known her, she was a little uncertain in her movements. She stood in the door of the room and shook her head.

  “I can’t go on with it,” she said. “I’m too old.” She looked at Karen as if she had never seen her before. “Too old,” she repeated. “We can’t find the child.”

  She swayed and the doctor was across the room, helping her to a sofa. He poured brandy for her and, when she merely held the glass and looked at it, and did not appear to see it, sat down beside her and lifted the hand which held the glass to the old woman’s bloodless lips. After a moment, but still not seeming to know what she did, she sipped from the glass.

  It was then that Everett Hume made his third appearance of the evening, coming once more out of the fog. Apparently he had found the front door unlocked, because when they looked up at a sound he stood in the door of the East Room. And Lorry was in his arms, his head against the man’s shoulder.

  Lucretia Bromwell dropped the glass and her breath came in shudderingly and she started to get up—all this before Hume spoke. But his smile had told them before he spoke.

  “The kid’s all right,” he said. “Asleep. He was sleeping in the back seat of my car.” He shook his head. “All the time you were looking for him, probably,” the blond man said. “He didn’t waken when I picked him up.”

  III

  The first contact of the police with the Bromwell murder was indirect. It was made in White Plains at a few minutes before six on the afternoon of that last Monday in the East’s second mildest (and altogether foggiest) January of history. There was nothing to excite the police at the beginning of the White Plains incident. A Cadillac convertible, very glossy, very long, was going west on Main Street, came to a traffic light and went too far. The driver, it appeared, had been napping. The car stopped in the middle of the intersection and started to back up. Patrolman Fleury of the White Plains police looked at it in disgust, blew his whistle and sauntered over. He had been on the sidewalk to the right of the car and had to circle it to approach the driver’s seat. Just as he rounded the rear of the car, the door on the driver’s side opened and a small man in a windbreaker and corduroy trousers jumped out and started to run. Fleury said, “Hey You!” at him in the tone of authority and the man stopped.

  He did not have a driver’s license nor did he have the car’s registration form. This made it more interesting to Patrolman Fleury, who began to have the pleased conviction that he had happened onto something. He looked at his list of license numbers of stolen cars and the conviction abated somewhat, since the number he wanted was not on it. Nevertheless, he took the little man and the big car to a station house. A check proved that the car still had not been reported stolen, and a further check that it was registered in the name of Scott Bromwell, of the Town of Poundridge (although the mail address was a rural route from New Canaan). Confronted with this information, the little man admitted he was not Scott Bromwell. Pressed, he said he was Bill Higgins. He also told the police, with a kind of querulous indignation, in tones of ineffectual violence, that they had nothing on him.

  “He told me to take the Caddy into town,” Bill Higgins said, and rubbed his nose, which was inclined to drip, with the back of his hand. The hand was red and roughened, as if it had been much out of doors and seldom gloved. “He said, ‘Bill, you drive her in, see? You leave her at this place, see?’” The police were unimpressed; direct quotation, they felt, did not add verisimilitude. On the contrary. “He told me,” Bill Higgins said. “You ask him. You just ask him.”

  That, the police told Bill Higgins, they would certainly do.

  “That’s right,” Bill said, with increased feeling. “You just ask him.” But he looked quickly around as he spoke, as if looking for an aperture into which to escape. The desk sergeant looked at Patrolman Fleury and smiled openly.

  “Better have a look in the car,” the sergeant told Fleury. “See Mr. Higgins here didn’t leave anything. Like a gun, maybe.”

  “Now listen here,” Bill said. “He told me to take the Caddy.”

  The sergeant said, “Sure he did,” and Fleury went out into the damp grayness to look over the car. In the course of looking he found a glove compartment unlocked and looked into it. It was almost filled by a heavy, leather-covered box, which looked to Fleury like a jewel case. The remainder of his search was hasty and turned up nothing. He carried the box in and, since it was unlocked, the sergeant opened it. He looked into it and, in tones of awe, appeared to seek divine guidance. Fleury looked into the box and echoed his
superior’s words. Then both of them looked at Higgins, and the sergeant shook his head thoughtfully. Higgins still looked like a small-timer to the sergeant; he looked like a man who might alternate odd jobs—spading up suburban gardens, for example—with a little ineffectual burglary. But here he was making off not only with a Cadillac, but with what the sergeant, thinking of future headlines, characterized in his mind as “a fortune in gems.” (The jewels were subsequently valued at more than a hundred thousand dollars, which gave the sergeant no reason to modify his characterization.)

  “Well, Higgins,” the sergeant said, after prolonged inspection of the little man, “quite a haul, wasn’t it? And here you had to go and get color blind at just the wrong time.” He made a commiserating sound with his tongue and teeth.

  “I swear to God—” Bill Higgins began, and was told, abruptly, to save it.

  “Listen, lieutenant,” Higgins said earnestly, and wiping his nose even more ardently on the back of his hand, “listen, I never seen that box before. Never even seen it.”

  The sergeant merely shook his head, pityingly.

  “Suppose I borrowed the car,” Higgins said. “That don’t mean nothing. What’uz that mean?”

  “Grand larceny,” the sergeant told him.

  “Listen,” Higgins said. “It was just standin’ there, see? I wasn’t stealin’ nothin’. Mr. Bromwell knows I wouldn’t steal nothin’.”

  “He wouldn’t steal nothing,” the sergeant told Patrolman Fleury. “Just a Cadillac. Just maybe a million dollars’ worth of jewelry.”

  “He’s a Sunday school boy,” Fleury said. “That’s what he is, sure enough. Maybe we should give him a gold star.”

  Both policemen found this amusing. Bill Higgins did not.

  “I just found it standing there,” he said. “Backed up in this place like somebody was hiding it. So I thought, ‘Bill,’ I thought, ‘that’s Mr. Bromwell’s car and he wouldn’t want it jes’ standin’ there,’ so I says, ‘Bill, what you ought to do is—’”