Miss Lizzie

by Walter Satterthwait

  “And you’re sure Father’s all right?”

  “Really, he’s fine. He said I should come and tell you not to worry.”

  We talked for a while longer, perhaps another half an hour, and William told us about his past few days, the bugs, the smells, the dullard of a jailer. Already, at seventeen, he had acquired the exasperating masculine habit of speaking about a past misery as though it were merely an amusing inconvenience.

  At three o’clock, there was another knocking at the door.

  William stopped talking and looked at Miss Lizzie, who looked at me. “Would you like to get that, Amanda?”

  It was Father. He smiled down at me and said, “I’ve got the car. Why don’t the three of us go out for a drive?”

  We went to Mortimer’s. Father drank a scotch and water, William had a beer, I had coffee. William was exuberant, laughing and grinning at nothing at all; Father was only a little less so.

  I, on the other hand, felt curiously flat and deflated. I was glad enough that William had been released, and pleased that the police had not held Father; but it seemed to me that both of them, in the pleasure of their freedom, had forgotten that neither the police nor Mr. Boyle had any idea who had actually killed Audrey. And until that person was found, suspicion would be directed at my father and my brother and perhaps even at me.

  And, too, I suspect that working somewhere deep inside me, at a level below consciousness, was the knowledge that Father had not only lied to me but that he had, as he admitted, left me to find Audrey’s shattered body. Consciously, by a deliberate effort, I avoided the thought: He was my father, and I loved him. But the knowledge was there, and I believe it goes some way toward explaining my listlessness.

  I was not unaware either that Father had let William spend another night in jail while he himself stayed in Boston, probably with Susan St. Clair. Perhaps he believed it might be their last night together; I still resented it.

  Decades can pass sometimes, and even entire lives, before we forgive our parents their humanity.

  But, sitting there, I smiled and nodded and pretended to share their happiness. (I was learning how to be a grownup, a skill that today, I am glad to say, I have long since lost.)

  Mr. Mortimer came to our table and made a fuss over William, clapping him on the back and asking him about the food in the “pokey.” After buying us another round of drinks, he lumbered off, grinning, to the bar.

  We left around five o’clock and went to the Fairview. Father called Miss Lizzie from there, to tell her I would be having an early dinner with him and William. When we finished, William went upstairs to take a bath and Father drove me back to Miss Lizzie’s. By this time, about six-thirty, a light rain was falling, a sad slow drizzle, and a fog was beginning to roll in off the ocean. Pale tendrils of mist slowly whirled across the road, curled against the streetlamps. They scattered as we passed, whipped away by the passage of Father’s Studebaker.

  Father told me, when he dropped me off, that he would come by in the morning, at nine, to pick me up for church; a reminder, unknown to him, that God and I had so far failed to resolve our dilemma.

  Miss Lizzie and I were in the parlor, working on the Nikola system, when the telephone rang at eight o’clock. Miss Lizzie answered it.

  “Yes.… Hello, how are you? … Yes? … Good, good. I’m pleased to hear it.” She began to relate the story of William’s release, and I realized that she must be talking to Boyle.

  “Yes,” she said. “It does.… Yes. So there’s no question about it? He was in Boston on Tuesday morning? … I see.… Did they? And what might that be? Indeed.… Indeed.… It was never solved, then? … Yes. I agree.… And they’re certain it’s the same person? … No doubt at all. Yes, I understand.… I spoke with him this afternoon.… Yes, he will.… Yes. Thanks very much. You’ve done a wonderful job.… Good-bye.”

  She hung up the phone and returned to her chair, across the coffee table from my perch on the sofa. “Mr. Boyle,” she said. “He was quite a fund of information.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Well, first, he talked to the Norton man, and he’s obtained a signed statement from him that verifies William’s story. He admits that he picked your brother up just a little after ten o’clock.”

  “But the police have already let William go.”

  “Every little bit helps, I should think. Second, he spoke with the people Mr. Chatsworth had mentioned. Apparently Mr. Chatsworth was telling the truth. He was in Boston on Tuesday. Mr. Boyle says there’s no question about it.”

  “So he couldn’t have been the one who killed Audrey.”

  “Evidently not. But Mr. Boyle has received some information from the Pinkerton office in New York City.”

  “Yes?”

  For some reason, Miss Lizzie frowned. “Yes. It seems that five years ago, in Manhattan, Mrs. Helene Archer was arrested for the murder of her husband.”

  I just sat there, stupefied, while Miss Lizzie, still frowning, looked thoughtfully down at the cards arranged on the coffee table.

  Finally I said, “She killed her husband? Mrs. Archer did?”

  Miss Lizzie looked up. “She was arrested, but the case never came to trial. According to Mr. Boyle’s Pinkerton associates, the police were convinced she was guilty, but they never found the evidence they needed.”

  “But the police can be wrong.”

  She nodded. She examined the cards again. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, they can.”

  “How did he die?”

  “He was stabbed. Mrs. Archer is the one who reported it. She told the police she came back from shopping and found him lying there. In the bedroom. She always maintained that a burglar had killed him.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?”

  “Possible, certainly, from what Mr. Boyle says. As to whether it’s true or not, I’ve honestly no idea. The police found out that she and her husband hadn’t been getting along. Apparently she was seeing another man.”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Boyle didn’t say. He’ll be back here in the morning. He said he’d bring all the information with him.”

  “Do you think we should tell the police?”

  “Mr. Boyle intends to. He’s telephoning Chief Da Silva at the moment.” She frowned. “I suppose he has a moral obligation to do so.”

  “You don’t think he should, you mean?”

  She frowned again. “I honestly don’t know, Amanda.”

  “But if she killed her husband, then it’s possible she killed Audrey.”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.” She shook her head abruptly, as though clearing it of thought. “Let’s not worry about it now. The police can deal with her.” She looked down at the cards. “Now. Where were we?”

  Miss Lizzie stayed downstairs, reading, when I went up to my room at nine-thirty. I was not especially tired, but I wanted to think. I undressed, put on my nightgown, and climbed into bed.

  Mrs. Archer? Madame Helene? Could she really have killed Audrey?

  She was strange, yes, wearing that silly pseudo-Grecian gown, talking to spirits; but could she kill? (Had she run out of spirits and decided to create one of her own?)

  Her having killed Audrey might explain why she had come to Miss Lizzie’s house on Thursday. As Boyle had pointed out, she might have wanted to learn what we knew, and what we suspected, about the murder.

  But she could have come, just as easily, because she honestly believed she might help us.

  Could she kill?

  I did not know. It was one of the many things I did not know. For the past four days I had been discovering that the boundaries of my knowledge were much less far apart than I had assumed, and that the territory which lay beyond them was enormous.

  Until last Tuesday, I had believed that life was like a river, silver and clear, carrying me off idyllically toward the (presumably rosy) future. Now I had discovered that below the surface, other, darker currents flowed. And that below these, down at the murky b
ottom, down among the stones and the weeds and the muck, creatures lived whom I did not understand, but whose grotesque faces, as they rose to the surface, I feared I might recognize.

  Downstairs, the telephone rang.

  Who, I wondered, would be calling now?

  After a few minutes, I heard the floorboard creak outside my room, and then a gentle tapping on the door.

  “Amanda?” Miss Lizzie, calling very softly.

  “I’m awake, Miss Lizzie.”

  She opened the door and stood a silhouette, featureless, in the dim light of the hallway. “I’m going out for a few moments, dear. I wanted to let you know.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve some business to attend to. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “What time is it now?”

  “A bit after ten. You stay in bed, and I’ll be back before you know it.”

  “Okay, Miss Lizzie.”

  “And Amanda?”

  “Yes?”

  “Keep the doors locked. All right, dear?”

  “Yes,” I said. “All right.”

  Ten minutes later I stood at the window with a new set of questions to wonder about. Who had telephoned? Why had Miss Lizzie left? Where had she gone? And why the admonition about keeping the doors locked?

  Below me, the fog had grown thicker. The sea was gone, lost in the murk. I could make out, barely, the gray shape of the hedges that separated Miss Lizzie’s property from ours; but everything else was a blur of white.

  It was moving, the fog, as though it were alive. Pale streamers would detach themselves from the main body and writhe and coil on their own, twisting about, slowly twirling, and then mysteriously blend back once again with the cloud. Sometimes a patch would open up and I could see through it to the ground, black now against the smoky white.

  And then, as I watched, something else moved down there. Off to my left, beside the hedges.

  I blinked. I had imagined it; I must have. Staring for so long at the fog, my eyes had amused themselves by inventing a presence that was not there.

  But no. It moved again, away from the hedges, skulking, a dark form shrouded by the mist, but obviously human. Because it was dressed in black and appeared to be cowled, I imagined for a moment that it was a monk; and, idiotically, I actually wondered what strange Gothic mission he might be on.

  And when the figure trod into a small patch of clear air and raised an arm, I expected to see a lantern at the end of it, or a candle, to light the way.

  Instead, I saw a hatchet.

  Since then, over the years, I have seen that hatchet many times, at night in dreams, during the day on misty streets when wisps of fog parted to reveal a form before me, black arm raised, a form that, after a frozen moment, metamorphosed into something harmless and prosaic and consequently mocking: a streetlamp, or a signpost. For years (and so habituated to it did I become that soon it was automatic) I have avoided standing beside, even looking at, windows when a fog rolled outside.

  And for years, too, I have occasionally wondered what might have happened if I had not been standing by that particular window when that form stalked across the yard below. I would be dead, I expect.

  At the time, standing there, I did not think that the figure beneath me might be Mrs. Archer, or that it might be someone else. I assigned to it no human identity at all. I knew only, as my heart rolled over in my breast and my blood turned to frost, that the Thing down there was the monster that had butchered Audrey and that now It was coming for me.

  If I had run from the house, if I had tried to hide inside it (and I do not know, to this day, why I did not), I imagine I would be just as dead as if I had not seen the Thing approaching. Instead, I watched It disappear against the wall, and then, my heart drumming, I, glanced frantically around the room for a weapon, for something, anything, I could use to protect myself.

  There was nothing.

  Think! I told myself. Think!

  There had to be something. Somewhere in the house there had to be something I could use against that beast outside.

  Hatchet. Yes. Miss Lizzie’s hatchet.

  And I had to get to it before the Thing got in, before the Thing reached me.

  I ran to the door, jerked it open, ran down the hall and down the steps. At the bottom, I swung myself around the corner and raced down the hallway. I tore open the closet door, yanked at the light string, and scrambled to the toolbox. My thumbs fumbled at the latches, and then I clicked them open and I tossed back the lid of the box and I reached inside, grabbed at the shelf, ripped it out and hurled it aside, boxes scattering across the closet floor.

  And down there, inside the box, the hatchet was gone.

  THIRTY-ONE

  FOR A MOMENT I just knelt there, staring dumbly down at the toolbox.

  It was impossible. The hatchet had been there only yesterday. I had seen it, I had held it.

  Forget about the hatchet. Do something.

  The telephone.

  Call for help.

  I sprang up and ran from the closet, ran down the hallway into the parlor to the phone. I snatched up the receiver.

  Coming from the earpiece there was nothing, no sound at all. The phone was dead.

  It might only be children, I told myself. Children playing pranks.

  But it was almost eleven o’clock at night. The children were asleep. This was no prank.

  That Thing, that beast, the monster who had hacked Audrey and left her smashed and torn, It was out there somewhere, hiding in the fog. From out there It was watching me, watching every move I made.

  Fool, I told myself, and ran over to the light, switched it off.

  Standing in the dark, I could hear myself breathing, harsh and quick. My heart was pounding so quickly, so powerfully, that I thought it might tear itself from my chest.

  I would wait. I would wait until the Thing tried to get in. Whichever door It tried, front or back, I would run to the other.

  I waited, listening.

  Nothing.

  All at once I remembered the kitchen. The carving knives.

  Moving on tiptoe, trying to be absolutely silent, as much to hear the Thing as to prevent Its hearing me, I crept across the parlor toward the hallway.

  Suddenly there was a loud thump. I froze.

  The noise came again. Thump.

  It had come from the parlor wall, the one facing the street, and it sounded like someone slamming a hand against the wood outside.

  Thump.

  What was happening?

  I had not moved. Now, holding my breath, I edged closer to the parlor door.

  Thump.

  The sound was getting closer to the window. All I could see out there was the oily whirl of fog.

  I moved closer to the door, my stare locked on the window. I took another silent step and, just then, with a suddenness that chilled me, a figure appeared beyond the glass.

  I did not recognize it at first. Its chest was black with gore and blood was pouring down its face, streaming past the white startled eyes.

  Then I recognized the closely cropped hair, the trim mustache, both bright white against the blood.

  It was Mr. Foley, the Pinkerton man.

  Suddenly, as though in surrender, he slumped against the window. His mouth agape, his eyes still open, staring intently but seeing nothing, he began to sink toward the ground. In an instant he was gone, and there was only the broad black greasy smear along the glass and the swirling white fog beyond.

  I did not stop to consider what Mr. Foley might have been doing outside Miss Lizzie’s house. I only ran. Out of the parlor, down the hallway, into the kitchen, over to the cutlery drawer. I heaved it open with such force that it jumped from the cabinet and sent knives flying across the room, scattering along the floor. I saw the long French carving knife smack against the base of the stove. Throwing the drawer aside, I scurried over, grabbed it.

  Just as I did, the kitchen door began to rattle, the door to the back porch. It ra
ttled violently, loudly, insanely: someone out there fighting with the doorknob. I could not see through the lace curtains, but It could see in. The Thing was on the porch, less than six feet away.

  What I should have done, of course, was run for the front door. I believe I would have escaped. Once outside, I could run downtown; if It followed, I could hide in the fog.

  But the image of Mr. Foley lying out there, soaked in blood, those blind white eyes swimming up at me through the fog, made it impossible. Without really thinking, knife in hand, I darted up the stairs. Behind me I heard the crash and tinkle of breaking glass.

  I raced down the hall. My bedroom door had no lock; I dashed into Miss Lizzie’s room, slammed the door, turned the lock, switched on the light.

  The lock looked too flimsy to hold for long. Quickly, frantically, I glanced around the room. I had to move something against the door, form a barricade.

  The makeup dresser.

  I ran to it, tossed the knife onto it, wrapped my fingers around its far corner, and pulled. It was solid teak; it would not budge.

  I heard steps on the stairway.

  With a gasp, using all my strength, I tugged again at the dresser. It moved. Only an inch or two, but it moved.

  Out in the hall, floorboards creaked.

  My nightgown was soaked with sweat; my hair, cold and damp, stuck to my forehead. I tugged again, crying out with the effort. The sharp edge bit into my fingers, and the dresser moved. But again only an inch.

  The doorknob turned. Someone pounded once, very hard, at the door, and the wood shook.

  The window. Get out.

  The screen was in place. My fingers, slick and trembling, slipped on the latches. They had been painted over, they would never open. I clawed my nails at the mesh, saw it was useless, ran back to the dresser and seized the knife.