by John Manning
“Get me out of this room!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. He picked up a vase and hurled it. It smashed against the door into hundreds of shards of glass.
Maybe that would bring someone running.
But it didn’t. The house retained its eerie calm.
Which only infuriated Ryan more.
As a kid, he used to throw temper tantrums. Mom always gave in and let him have the candy bar or the extra bottle of Coke after he started screaming and kicking. Sometimes he still threw tantrums. At the office, if his assistants didn’t do everything they were supposed to do, or had failed to call a client or move stocks or trade shares, Ryan was known to rip them new assholes right in front of everybody. Often he threw things, like he’d just hurled that vase. Once he threw an assistant’s iPhone out the window when it rang while he was speaking. It smashed the glass and dropped twenty-three floors to land on top of a parked cab on Wall Street. Good thing it hadn’t hit someone in the head.
But as much as Ryan wanted to pitch a hissy fit, wanted to throw a few more things and break them against the door, he sensed this time a tantrum would do him no good. If he was going to break anything, it would have to be the glass in one of the windows. Then he’d have to crawl out, risking getting cut on the broken glass and rosebushes. This was just too terrible for words.
It was, however, about to get more terrible.
Ryan heard a sound. He turned. He heard it again. He spun around.
It sounded as if someone was in the room with him, though he could plainly see he was alone.
But then he heard it again. Footsteps. Not from above. Not from outside the room. But within the very room.
His father’s study was large but very open. The desk was set near the windows, surrounded by wooden cabinets. The other half of the room contained two comfortable chairs positioned in front of a fireplace. There were no closets, no alcoves. If someone were in the room with him, Ryan would have been able to see them. There was nowhere for someone to hide.
The sound this time came from behind him. Spinning around once more, Ryan saw no one there.
But it had sounded as if someone had just walked up behind him!
“What the fuck?” he whispered to himself.
Now there was another sound. Metal. It sounded like metal being tapped against the tiles of the floor. Someone walking around the room, banging something made of metal. Not heavy metal. The sound almost had a musical tone to it. There was reverberation in the air. If Ryan strained his ears, he could still hear it.
“What the fuck is going on?” he whispered again, and for the first time, he felt a little flicker of fear.
He would break the window. It was the only way. He picked up a heavy marble paperweight from his father’s desk and aimed it at the glass. But even as he did so, he heard the sound again. A footstep. The tapping of metal against tile.
He glanced around quickly.
And this time he saw it.
A man. A man in dirty overalls and a straggly beard. And in his hand he held an enormous pitchfork, its sharp tines scraping against the floor.
“Who the fuck are you?” Ryan screamed.
The man stood there, gazing at him with eyes so dark that they seemed dead. There was no emotion in the man’s face. Only dumb, brute power.
“How did you get in here?” Ryan demanded.
It was amazing how many thoughts could rush in to fill his mind in so short a time. A new landscaper. That’s who it must be. Someone Dad hired. A big old dumbass. Blundered into the house.
Or maybe not so dumb. Maybe he was trying to rob the place…
But why would he be carrying a pitchfork? There were no haystacks on the property…
“Who are you?” Ryan asked again.
The man seemed jolted into movement by his words. He took a step toward Ryan.
Ryan drew his arm back and let the paperweight in his hands go flying across the room. He watched as the heavy object struck the brute in the forehead. It bounced off easily, leaving no mark, drawing no blood. The man didn’t even blink, didn’t even seem to notice. He just kept walking toward Ryan.
“Stay back!” Ryan shrilled.
Now the man lifted the pitchfork.
He means to kill me, Ryan thought. He is going to stick that thing right through me!
He leapt behind his father’s desk just as the pitchfork came crashing down, piercing the wall behind him instead. There was a second’s delay as the man extracted the prongs out of the plaster, just enough time for Ryan to yank open his father’s bottom desk drawer and remove the pistol he knew he kept inside. He stood, holding it toward the man, his hands shaking terribly.
“Come any closer and you are a dead man,” Ryan said.
The words didn’t faze the maniac. He just aimed his pitchfork at Ryan and resumed his approach. Ryan fired.
He saw the bullets hit the man. He saw them tear the fabric of his stained old overalls. He fired three shots. Each one tore through the man’s chest. But once again there was no blood. Once again there was no stopping the man.
“Please, don’t!” Ryan screamed, crumbling to floor as the man stood over him with the pitchfork. “Please don’t kill me! I beg you! I can make you rich! Richer than you ever dreamed of.”
The man with the black, dead eyes looked down at him.
“Rich,” Ryan cried, tears streaming down his face. “I can make you rich.”
“Kill him,” came a small voice from somewhere. “Kill him.”
The man seemed to hear it. He raised the pitchfork higher, intending to bring it down onto Ryan’s chest.
Ryan screamed and closed his eyes, bracing for the impact.
“What’s the matter?”
Chelsea’s voice. Ryan just continued screaming.
“What the fuck is the matter?”
He opened his eyes. Instead of the man with the pitchfork, his sister stood over him. She looked pissed.
“What is going on?”
“The man!” Ryan shouted, getting back to his feet. “Where is he? We’ve got to get out of here! He’ll kill us!”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Did you do too much coke?”
Ryan glared at Chelsea. “The man! He has a pitchfork! We’ve got to get out of here!” He grabbed her hand and began pulling her toward the door of the study. It was wide open now.
Chelsea shook off his grip. “Did you drop acid or something? Or are you doing crystal meth again?”
“We’ve got to get out of here!” Ryan shouted. “The man!”
“There’s no man!” Chelsea shouted back at him. “I’m upstairs, trying to sleep off this hangover, and I hear you screaming. And were those gunshots?” She looked down at the floor, stooping to pick up her father’s gun. “Who were you shooting at?”
“The man! The man with the pitchfork! He locked me in here and was going to kill me! You had to have seen him! I was right there!” He pointed to the spot behind the desk where he’d been cornered. “He was standing over me with the pitchfork when you came in!”
Chelsea made a face. “You are so fucked up on something, big brother. Don’t tell me you didn’t snort something up your nose.”
“I didn’t! I’m totally sober! Totally straight!”
Chelsea laughed. “I came down here, and the door was open, and I saw you cowering behind Daddy’s desk. You were alone, Ryan! Alone! No man with any pitchfork!”
“There was a man! I shot at him! The bullets didn’t even slow him down!”
Chelsea rolled her eyes, not unlike the way Ryan had done earlier. “Okay, whatever. Just go upstairs and lie down, okay? Just chill. And no more of whatever you were smoking or snorting.”
Ryan couldn’t form the words. What had just happened to him?
His sister pushed past him. “I’m going back to sleep. Please! No more screaming or shooting guns!”
He grabbed her arm. “He must still be in the house,” he told her. “He must have snuck out when you opened th
e door. We’ve got to get out of here!”
Once again she shook him off her. “The door wasn’t closed, Ryan. It was open. I could see you from the hallway. Listen to me! There was no man!”
Her eyes held his. Ryan began to shudder. He wrapped his arms around himself.
Chelsea walked out of the room and headed back up the stairs.
Ryan couldn’t stop trembling. He looked around the room, ran out into the hallway, peered out the windows into the yard. There was no man. No sign any man had ever been there. The front door was locked. He checked every room in the house.
There was no man.
He returned to the study and looked around. Was Chelsea right? Had he done some coke? Maybe he had. He often resorted to blow when he was crazed with work and stress. Maybe he’d been feeling stressed out about leaving for Maine tomorrow and had decided to get a little high. Maybe he’d done a line and now he couldn’t remember doing it. Maybe it was bad stuff. Crack. Maybe it was crack. And maybe it had done things to his mind…
It was only then that he remembered the wall.
He hurried over to look at it.
He gasped.
They were there.
Five holes.
Five holes where the prongs of the pitchfork had pierced the plaster.
Chapter Eleven
“There is simply no way he wouldn’t have seen him,” Carolyn mused to herself, reenacting for the third time the order of events as Harry Noons had described them.
She stood on the terrace that led into the kitchen of the great house. Off to her right was the former entrance into the servants’ quarters. Once it had consisted of a series of stone steps that led into the basement. Now it was sealed over with concrete. But it was still plainly evident that anyone leaving that way would have had to pass right by this terrace. The place where Harry Noons had been standing when he rushed out of the house after hearing the screams from downstairs.
“And he saw no one come out,” Carolyn said to herself. “No one. He ran down there himself and saw no one. No one passed him on the stairs.”
Clem may have hid in the basement. That was the only logical explanation. He could have been hiding in the basement when Harry Noons came running back down the stairs. But by then, everyone in the household had come running themselves, and they searched everywhere for Clem. Surely they would have searched the basement. Surely, if Clem had been hiding, someone would have spotted him-if not immediately, then when he tried to make his escape.
No, the only answer was that Clem must have made a run for it up the steps into the main house and escaped through the front door. It would had to have occurred in the few seconds between the time Noons ran out of the kitchen and back down the steps into the servants’ quarters. But that was awfully unlikely, too: Carolyn had been up and down the staircase into the main house many times now, and Clem would have had to run out through the front foyer while the house was filled with people. How odd that no one would have seen him. But it was the only logical answer to how he had gotten out of the basement.
That is, the only logical answer if Clem had actually been the one to kill Beatrice.
The morning was cool, with a hint of autumn. The dew was still on the grass when Carolyn had tiptoed out of the house to once again reenact in her mind the day Beatrice was killed. Mr. Young and Douglas were still asleep; the servants had yet to arrive to begin cooking their usual sumptuous breakfast. The sun was still rising over the trees, the sky a wash of rosy pink with flecks of yellow. Carolyn walked back and forth through the wet grass imagining Harry Noons coming out of the sealed-up entrance and crossing the terrace, going inside the house to tell Mrs. Young he was finished for the day, then coming back out here when he heard the screams.
“Good morning.”
Douglas’s voice startled her. She turned quickly, then smiled. The morning sun cast a soft pink glow on his face. His hair glowed. He looked incredibly handsome in that light.
“Oh, good morning,” she said.
“Still perplexed about how the brute escaped?” he asked.
She nodded. “It doesn’t make sense.”
“He must have run past while Noons was standing in the doorway to the house, talking to my great-great-great-grandmother,” Douglas said.
Carolyn shook her head. “Look for yourself. He would have had to run right past here. Right here! This is where Noons would have been standing. He would have seen him!”
“Then when and how did Clem make his escape?”
“He could have left the basement immediately after Noons did, in those few moments when Noons was inside the kitchen, talking with Mrs. Young. That was the only moment when Noons might have missed seeing someone leaving the basement.”
“But the screams came only after Noons was inside the kitchen. If Clem left immediately after Noons did, as you say, he couldn’t have been down there killing Beatrice.”
“Precisely.” Carolyn raised her eyebrows. “In some ways, the timing actually offers a bit of an alibi for Clem.”
“Why are you so certain Clem didn’t kill Beatrice?” Douglas asked. “Clearly he’s involved in all of this. People have seen his ghost. He’s the man with the pitchfork.”
Carolyn shrugged. “I’m not certain he didn’t kill her. He may well have. He certainly seems the most likely suspect. Beatrice was murdered with one of the tools of Clem’s trade. He was there moments before she died, and they were arguing. She had just turned him down, so he definitely had a motive.” She smiled. “I’m just considering all options. It’s what investigators do.”
Douglas sighed. “And do they also visit sad old ladies confined to mental institutions?”
Carolyn sighed as well. The task ahead of them this day was not going to be pleasant. “When necessary, we do.” She glanced over at the rising sun, now seeming to set the trees afire. “You don’t have to go with me to see Jeanette. I can go alone.”
“No, I want to go.” Douglas looked sad. “I remember my father taking me to see her once when I was quite little. He always felt real bad about what happened to her. I remember that he told me that when they were kids, he used to think Jeanette was the most beautiful girl in the world. She was a little bit older than he was, and Dad would just sit there and watch her at family gatherings, transfixed by her. She was like his first crush. And smart, too. He always said Jeanette was so smart. That it was all so tragic because Jeanette had been going to Yale and was going to have this great life. When we went to see her, I remember how sad Dad was afterward. He kept repeating how beautiful Jeanette had been, and how smart.”
Carolyn nodded. She’d been reading about Jeanette Young. She had been a master’s student at Yale at the time she went into that room. Kip had found several of her student papers, and they were preserved in the files he’d drawn up on every member of the family who had been chosen in the lottery. Jeanette was involved in the women’s liberation movement, and had written extremely literate papers on the prevalence of sexism in academia and religious life and the marketplace. This was no timid little woman who could be scared into submission. Indeed, Carolyn found it fascinating that the one person who had made it out of that room alive was a woman. Was it Jeanette’s gender or the sheer strength of her willpower that had allowed her to survive? Or possibly was it a combination of both?
Of course, she could hear Howard Young saying to her that it would be hard to say that Jeanette survived, given what she had become.
They heard movement in the kitchen then. The servants had arrived. The smell of cinnamon bread baking was wafting across the yard. Carolyn and Douglas smiled at each other and headed inside.
Howard Young was apparently sleeping late, so they ate breakfast by themselves. Carolyn thought it peculiar that he wasn’t up to give her any last-minute advice about her visit to Jeanette. But perhaps the prospect of her visit to his unfortunate niece distressed him so much that he preferred not to talk any more about it until it was all over. Douglas had confirmed that the
subject of Jeanette had always made his uncle quite sad. The whole family had always been upset about poor Jeanette.
But she was alive. And that was more than could be said about many members of the family.
Carolyn had been warned that she wouldn’t get much out of Jeanette. Kip had been to see her. All he had gotten was a blank stare. He had learned nothing. Even when Georgeanne had touched her hand, she had been unable to pick up anything concrete. “Peaceful,” Georgeanne said. “All I can tell you is that she feels peaceful.”
At least they could be grateful for that. Jeanette may have been lost to the world, but at least she didn’t spend her days in any kind of tortured misery.
After breakfast, they headed outside. Carolyn expected that one of Mr. Young’s cars would be brought around for them to use. The home where Jeanette was living was only about an hour away up the coast. But instead of a car, waiting outside in the front driveway was Douglas’s motorcycle.
“We’re taking that?” she asked, wide-eyed.
Douglas grinned at her, flashing those dimples. “Sure. It’s a gorgeous day.”
Carolyn gulped. “I’ve never been on a motorcycle before,” she admitted.
Douglas’s smile only broadened. “Then maybe it’s time you were.” He handed her a helmet. “Strap it on, baby.”
Carolyn gave a little nervous laugh, then exchanged her bag, containing her notebooks and tape recorder, for the helmet. Douglas secured her bag into one of the side compartments of the bike as she awkwardly slipped the helmet onto her head. He smiled.
“Here, let me help you,” he said.
Tenderly he adjusted the strap under her chin, tightening it so it was snug but not uncomfortable. It was the closest they had yet been to each other. Their eyes locked.
“Feel okay?” he asked her.
Carolyn nodded.
