Tales for a Stormy Night: Fifteen Crime Stories

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  The woman was hysterical. “They took our little boy. They killed his father and they took our little boy.” She kept crying out for someone to help her; anyone. The Chief of Police and Tom, who was in the room with them, tried to calm her down. She couldn’t say who “they” were.

  When Doc appeared and commanded that someone get a neighbor woman in to help him, Tom started to leave. Andy caught his arm.

  “I don’t know what she’s talking about,” Tom said. “She says the boy’s been kidnapped. More like a neighbor’s got him, but I’m going to organize a search. If we don’t find him it’ll be the State Police, and after that the F.B.I.”

  “The kid’s not here?”

  “Maybe you can find him. I’ve been from basement to roof.”

  Room by room Andy searched the house. The child’s bed had not been slept in much that night. You couldn’t really tell, the things a youngster took in bed with him. The window was open just a little and it was hard to raise it higher. The back door to the house was open and Andy would have said the kid had gone that way because on the back steps was a woolen monkey, its ears still frosty damp with spittle.

  Andy got a flashlight from the car and joined the other deputies, Tom, Murph, and Frankie among them. They went from house to house to ask if anyone had seen the child. No one had and the mother’s cry of kidnapping had gone the rounds.

  They searched till dawn. By then the State Police were in the town; the Chief cordoned off the house and set a guard. The house was quite empty. Doc Harrington had given the woman an injection and driven her himself the eight miles to the hospital.

  The men, chilled to the bone, were having coffee at the station house when old Mrs. Malcolm, on her way to early Mass, stopped by to say she’d heard a noise that sounded like a kitten’s mew at the bottom of her well. The well had long been dry and she’d had it boarded up after the Russo dog had fallen in and died there. But the kids kept coming back. They pried loose the boards and played at flushing “Charlie” from his underground hideout.

  Tom and Andy were already in the Malcolm yard when the fire truck arrived. With their own hands they tore away the boards that weren’t already loose at the well’s mouth. The shaft was dark, but there were steps at least halfway down the shoring. It was decided, however, to put a ladder down.

  Tom, again making himself the boss, said he was going down. The others linked themselves together, a human chain, to keep the ladder from striking bottom. The depth was about thirty feet. Andy was the signalman. He reported every step Tom took, and he cried out the moment Tom’s flashlight discovered the child on the rocks heaped at the bottom of the dry well.

  “He’s sleeping,” Tom shouted up. “He’s sleeping like a little baby.”

  “He can’t be, falling that far down. Be careful how you lift him,” Andy said.

  Tom steadied the ladder among the rocks, draped the limp child over his shoulder, and started up. The firemen went back to the truck for their emergency equipment. Andy kept up a singsong cautioning: a kid was just a little thing, it got hurt real easy. Tom was too large a man for such a job, and he ought to have more patience.

  “Will you shut your damned mouth up there?” Tom shouted. “I’m coming up the best I can.”

  He’d got past halfway when the boy recovered consciousness. At first he squirmed and cried. The men crowded in to watch. Andy begged them not to block the light.

  “Just keep coming easy,” Andy crooned, and to the child, “There’s nothing you should be a-scared of, little fella. You’re going to come out fine.”

  Then—it was at the moment Tom’s face moved into the light—the child began to scream and beat at him with fists and feet, and a rhythm of words came out of him, over and over again, until no one who wasn’t deaf could mistake what he was saying: “My dad, my dad, you shot my dad!”

  Tom tried to get a better hold of him, or so he claimed when he got up, but the child fought out of his grasp. Tom caught him by the leg; then the ladder jolted—a rock displaced below. The child slipped away and plummeted silently out of sight. That was what was so strange, the way he fell, not making any cry at all.

  Tom lumbered down again. He brought the child up and laid him on the ground. Everyone could see that he was dead, the skull crushed in on top.

  Andy searched the wrists anyway and then the chest where the pajamas had been ripped, but he found no heartbeat, and the mouth was full of blood. He looked up at Tom who stood, dirty and sullen, watching him.

  “I didn’t want to let go of him. I swear it, Andy.”

  Andy’s eyes never left his face. “You killed him. You killed this baby boy.”

  “I didn’t, Andy.”

  “I saw it with my own eyes.” Andy drew his gun.

  “For God’s sake, man. Murph, Frankie, you saw what happened!”

  They too had drawn their guns. The Chief of Police and the State Troopers were coming up the hill, a minute or two away. The two firemen coming with the resuscitator were unarmed.

  Tom backed off a step, but when he saw Andy release the safety catch he turned and ran. That’s when they brought him down, making sure he was immediately dead.

  1971

  Old Friends

  THE TWO WOMEN HAD been friends since childhood, their mothers friends before them. Both were in their late twenties; neither had married. Amy intended not to, although she was beginning to lose some of the vehemence with which she declared that purpose. Virginia was still saying she was waiting for the right man to come along. She admitted herself to be an old-fashioned girl. One of the sadnesses in her life was that the men she liked most were already married. It made her furious when Amy would say, “Happily?”

  “I suppose you think I should have an affair,” Virginia said.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, it would be good for you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well, let me put it this way,” Amy would say, and the same conversation had occurred in some form or other a number of times, “it would be better than a bad marriage just for the sake of being married.”

  “According to you,” Virginia would say, “there are no good marriages.”

  “Not many, and I don’t know of a single one that came with a guarantee.”

  One might have thought that it was Amy who had grown up in the broken home. Her parents had only recently celebrated their thirty-fifth wedding anniversary. Whereas Virginia’s mother had divorced her third husband, each of whom had left her better off financially than had his predecessor. She and Virginia were often taken for sisters. But so were Virginia and Amy. Or, to make Virginia’s own distinction, she was always being taken for Amy’s sister.

  At one time they had worked for the same New York publishing house, Virginia as an assistant art director, Amy as an assistant to the senior editor. Amy’s father, a retired executive of the firm, had arranged interviews for both girls after they finished college. The jobs, he insisted, they had got for themselves. Virginia stayed with hers. More than anything in the world, except possibly a husband who loved and respected her, she wanted her independence of her mother. Amy, to cap the interminable subject, once suggested that was why Virginia wanted a husband, to protect her from her mother.

  “I am perfectly capable of protecting myself.”

  And that of course, Amy realized in time, was her friend’s trouble. Nobody could do anything for her. She resented anyone’s attempting it. Which made her yearning for a husband suspect: what Virginia really wanted, Amy decided, was a baby. This insight, as well as others just as profound if true, had slipped beyond Amy’s conscious reckoning of her friend’s character long before the weekend Amy reneged on the invitation to the country.

  Sometimes months went by when they did not see each other. Amy, on inheriting an ancient cottage from an aunt, gave up her regular job for freelance writing, copy editing, and restoring the cottage. While not far from the city and not actually isolated, the cottage retained a rare privacy. It had settled d
eeper and deeper into the ground with the decades, and the mountain laurel that surrounded it was as snug as a shawl.

  Knowing Virginia to be a Sunday painter, Amy thought of her whenever there was a change in nature. Such a change had come that week with the sudden November stripping of the leaves. The light took on a special quality and the long grass in the meadow quivered glossily golden in the sun and turned silver under the moon. She called Virginia on Thursday.

  “Well, now, I would like to,” Virginia said, mulling over the invitation aloud. “I half promised Allan—I don’t know if I’ve told you about him, the architect?—I didn’t actually commit myself. Thank you, Amy. I’d love to come.”

  Amy was on the point of saying she could bring Allan, the architect, and then it occurred to her that he might be an invention of Virginia’s, part of that same old face-saving syndrome which, when they saw too much of one another, made their friendship dreary. She almost wished she had not called. However, they discussed the bus schedule and settled on a time for Virginia’s arrival.

  “If I miss that one, I’ll take the next,” Virginia said. There was always a little hitch to allow room for independence.

  That very afternoon Amy received a call from Mike Trilling, one of the few men with whom she had ever been deeply in love. A newspaper correspondent, Mike had been sent overseas just when they had become very happy together. If he had asked it, she would have followed him, but he had not asked it, and she had been a long time getting over the separation. Except that she was not over it. She knew that the moment she heard his voice.

  Her end of the conversation was filled with pauses.

  Finally Mike said, “Are you still hung up on me?”

  “What humility! Yes, damn you.”

  “You don’t have to swear at me. I’ve got the same problem—once in love with Amy, here I am again. I’d come out for the weekend if you’d ask me.”

  “All right, you’re invited.”

  “I’ll rent a car and be there early tomorrow evening. We can have dinner at The Tavern. Is the food as good as it used to be?”

  “I’ll fix us something. It’s not that good. You can bring the wine.” She refrained from saying that he could take the bus, an hour’s trip. There was no better way to put a man off than to try to save his money for him.

  She postponed the decision on what to say to Virginia, and while she cleaned house she let her memory of the times she and Mike had been together run full flood. She washed her hair and dried it before the blaze in the fireplace. Mike loved to bury his face in her hair, to discover in it the faint fragrance of wood smoke; he loved to run his fingers through it on the pillow and give it a not altogether gentle tug, pulling her face to his.

  She could not tell Ginny that Mike was the reason she was asking her to postpone until the following weekend. It would be unkind. Anyone else might understand, but Ginny would understand even more than was intended: she would reexamine the whole of her life in terms of that rejection. Amy did not call her until morning.

  “Ginny, I’ve had the most tremendous idea for a story. I was up half the night thinking about it, afraid to lose it, or that it wouldn’t be any good in the morning. But it’s a good one and I want to dash it off fresh. Will you come next week instead? I know you understand…” She made herself stop. She was saying too much.

  “Of course,” Virginia said, and her voice had that dead air of self-abnegation. “I envy you.”

  “Bless you for understanding,” Amy said. “The same time next weekend. I’ll be watching for you.”

  Once off the phone she gave herself up to the pleasure of anticipation. Almost a year had passed since she and Mike were last together. She had had a couple of brief encounters since, but no one had taken his place. She had worked. She had done a lot more work with Mike away than when he was around. They had not corresponded. He had called her on New Year’s Eve. Collect, because he was at a friend’s house and the British would not accept his credit-card charge. She had not asked him about the friend. She did not propose to ask any questions now.

  At first it seemed like old times, their sitting before the fire with martinis, Mike on the floor at her feet, his head resting on his arm where it lay across her knees. His hair had begun to thin on the very top of his head. She put her finger to the spot, a cold finger, for she had just put down her glass.

  Mike got up and sat in the chair opposite hers, brushing back his hair, something almost tender in the way he stroked the spot.

  “I’m wicked, aren’t I?” she said, carrying off as best she could what she knew to have been a mistake.

  “Tell me about that,” he said, purposely obtuse.

  “Naughty, I mean.”

  “Oh, nuts. With the British, every other word is ‘naughty.’ Aren’t I the naughty one?” He mimicked someone’s accent. “It’s such a faggoty word.”

  “I guess it is,” Amy said.

  He fidgeted a moment, as though trying to get comfortable in the chair, then got up and gave one of the logs a kick. “It’s not easy—getting reacquainted when so much has happened in between.”

  “Oh?” In spite of herself.

  He looked around at her. “I’ve been working bloody hard. Five months in Cyprus.”

  “I know.”

  “Does nobody in America read history?”

  “I suspect the trouble is that nobody listens to those who read history.”

  “Did you follow my dispatches?”

  “Every word, my darling.”

  Things went a little better. He looked at his glass. “I can’t drink martinis like I used to. What kind of vermouth did you use?”

  The phone rang and Amy, on her way to answer it, said, “Try putting in more gin.”

  It was Virginia, of all people. “I won’t disturb you except for a minute.”

  “It’s all right. I’m taking a break.” She was afraid Mike might put on a record.

  “I want to ask a favor of you, Amy. I got myself into a predicament. When Allan called a while ago, I decided I didn’t want to talk to him, so I said I was on my way to spend the weekend with you. I don’t think he’ll call, but in case he does, would you tell him I’ve gone on a long walk or something like that?”

  Amy drew a deep breath and tried to think of something to say that would not expose the extent of her exasperation. The most natural thing in the world would have been: Ginny, the reason I asked you not to come—

  “I don’t think he will call.”

  “Okay, Ginny. I’ll tell him.”

  “Get his number and say I’ll call him back.”

  “I’ll tell him that,” Amy said. It was all a fantasy, and in some way or other Virginia thought she was getting even. If there was an Allan and if these little exchanges did occur, she would then have to call Virginia back and tell her that Allan had telephoned her.

  “Was that Virginia?” Mike said.

  “Yes.”

  “Hasn’t she hooked herself a man yet?”

  “You damn smug—” Amy exploded, possibly because she was annoyed with both Virginia and him. But Virginia, being the more vulnerable and absent, got such loyal defense in the argument that ensued, she would have been stunned. Indeed, it might have changed her whole picture of herself.

  Mike and Amy did reach a rapprochement. After all, it was his remembering Amy’s complaints about her friend in the old days that had provoked his comment: she should blame herself, not him. After the second martini they were laughing and talking about old intimacies, and how they had used to put the third martini on ice for afterward. Such good memories and the kisses which, if they weren’t the same, were better than most, sufficed to get them into the bedroom. There, alas, nothing went the same as it had used to.

  “Damn it,” Mike kept saying, “this never happens to me.”

  “It’s all right,” Amy said over and over again, although well aware he had used the present tense.

  Later, watching him stoop to see himself in her dressin
g-table mirror while he knotted his tie, she said, “Bed isn’t everything.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But it’s a lot,” she said and threw off the blankets.

  By the time she finished in the bathroom, he had gone back to the living room where he stood before the fire and stared into it. A fresh log was catching on, the flames like little tongues darting up the sides. He had not brought the martini pitcher from the kitchen.

  “You can’t go home again,” she said.

  “I guess not.” He could at least have said that it was fun trying. But what he said was, “Amy, let’s not spoil a beautiful memory.”

  “Oh, boy. I don’t believe you said it. Not Mike Trilling.”

  “All right. ‘You can’t go home again’ wasn’t exactly original either. We aren’t going to make it, Amy, so why don’t I just take off before we start bickering again? No recriminations, no goodbyes, no tears.”

  Her throat tight as a corked bottle, she went up the stairs and got his coat and overnight bag.

  On the porch they did not even shake hands—a turn and a quickly averted glance lest their eyes get caught, and a little wave before he opened the car door. When he was gone, she remembered the wine. It was as well she had forgotten it. A “thank you” for anything would have humiliated them both.

  Returning to the house she felt as sober as the moon and as lonely. There was a whispery sound to the fire, and her aunt’s Seth Thomas floor clock ticked with the slow heavy rhythm of a tired heart. Most things break: the phrase from somewhere she could not remember kept running through her mind. The old clock rasped and struck once. Hard though it was to believe, the hour was only half-past eight.

  She called Virginia.

  Her friend took her time picking up the phone. “I wasn’t going to answer. I thought it might be Allan. Did he call me there?”

  “Not so far, dear. Ginny, you could make the nine-thirty bus and come on out. The story isn’t ready yet. I always start too soon. I’m botching it terribly.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t think I will, Amy. I want to stay home by myself now where I can think things out comfortably. I’m a mess, but since I know it, I ought to be able to do something about it.”