Dreamthorp

by Williamson, Chet

  "You think she might have gone away for a day or two?"

  Alice shook her head firmly. "Absolutely not. I mean to say we're not the closest of friends, even though we are next door neighbors, but if she went away I think she'd let me know. And there's been a light burning upstairs. I noticed it last night after it got dark, and it's still on. And Martha wouldn't go off and leave a light burning like that, I know her. I'm just afraid something's happened to her."

  "Do you want to call the police?"

  "No, no. I mean, I would feel terribly silly if she had gone away, and she weren't there—you know, one of these hysterical old women who makes mountains out of molehills."

  "Well, what do you want me to do?" Tom asked politely. "We really can't break in, you know."

  "Oh, we don't have to break in. I've got a key. Martha gave me one in case there was ever an emergency—you know, if she was away at Bible study or something and water was pouring out of her house, or fire, or something like that." Alice's eyes narrowed. "I know, you're wondering why I don't just go in and check then. Well, to tell the truth, I'm a little scared.''

  Tom nodded. "Sure. I'll go with you."

  Martha Sipling's cottage was two down from Laura Stark's, with Alice's on the far side. The Sipling place was one of the larger cottages, but Martha was the last of the Siplings. Her husband had died years before, and their only son had been killed in Korea.

  "I remember," Alice said as they walked, "back in the fifties it must've been. Simon Beech, his name was, and he had a cottage up on Thoreau. Kept to himself, didn't make friends too easy, and one winter folks realized they hadn't seen him anywhere in about a week. He didn't get much mail, so nobody noticed right away. Didn't have a phone either. Well, they finally broke down his door, and the smell that came out of there was just atrocious. He did have a small dog, and the dog had . . . well, I guess you know. Just had a heart attack, and the furnace stayed on, kept the place real warm. It was awful. Took them months to get it to the place where they could even show it on the market. It's the cottage the Allens live in now."

  "What happened to the dog?" Tom asked.

  "I don't know," Alice said with some surprise, as if amazed that she had never learned that thread of the story.

  But then her attention leaped to something more immediate. "There," she said. "You can see the light from here."

  Tom looked up through the leaves of the trees. Sure enough, there was a pale light shining in the shadows of the second story.

  "You can see it better from my side," said Alice. "It's in the hall. Come on. The key is to the back door."

  They walked through the thickness of pine needles up the short grade to the back of the cottage, and Alice handed the key to Tom. When he fit it in the lock, he thought it was the wrong key, but then realized that the back door was hardly ever used, and rust had built up. He wiggled it for a few seconds, then felt it turn.

  The odor hit them as he opened the door. It was not putrescence, but rather a stale, musty smell mingled with something more pungent, salty and metallic, nothing he could immediately recognize. He turned to Alice.

  "That musty smell—that's her hats," Alice said quietly. "But that other . . ."

  They stepped onto the clean linoleum of the kitchen and listened to a clock ticking from a room in the front. Tom looked around quickly. Everything seemed in order. There was a single plate on the checkered tablecloth that covered the kitchen table, with a knife, spoon, and fork flanking it. Samplers covered the bright yellow walls, and the chrome of the appliances gleamed spotlessly.

  Tom led the way into the dining room, past the massive oak pedestal table and chairs, the large china closet filled with white and blue pieces. The little light that came in through the heavily-curtained windows had been diminished by the trees that arched over the cottage, and he wanted to turn on a light, but he felt that to do so would be an admission of cowardice to Alice Penworth.

  As they passed through the room, Tom slowly became aware of another regular sound beside the clock's steady ticking. "Listen," he said to Alice. "You hear that? Like something . . . ticking?"

  She stopped walking and listened. "It's dripping," she said. "Like a slow leak. God, I wonder if one of her pipes did break." She clucked and shook her head. "The room through there. The stairs are on the far side of it."

  Tom stepped through the door and froze. It seemed as though a crowd of people were sitting in the shadows of the next room, staring at him. They had no features on their faces.

  Alice heard Tom gasp and quickly said, "Hats, just hats. She collected them. Turn on that light."

  He pulled the metal chain of a Tiffany lamp on a table next to him, and the room was illuminated by a dark rose light. The far wall was covered by a huge, glass bookcase full of hats, and tables of varying heights stretched from wall to wall. On each was a number of manikin heads, each topped in turn with a hat. Most were from the Victorian era, replete with feathers and ribbons, and Tom was unpleasantly reminded of stuffed birds in a museum. They looked at home in the room with its sepia-colored wallpaper patterned in deep green twisting vines that became lost in the darkness of the high ceiling. The atmosphere was redolent of age, and Tom noticed that the smell was far stronger here—not only the musty smell of the hats, but also that silvery smell he could not identify.

  His attention was suddenly caught by a hat less than two yards away from him on a deal table. It was made of velvet, he thought, a dark wine color. Yet it seemed to glisten in the dim light far more than its companions. Tom took a step toward it when he heard the dripping sound again, and saw something tiny and dark land on the red velvet with an audible sound.

  At first he tried to tell himself that it was only water, that, as Alice Penworth had surmised, something had gone wrong with the upstairs plumbing. But when the next drop followed a few seconds later, he reached out a hand and touched the velvet hat. It was sodden, and when he drew his hand away, his fingers were red with blood.

  "My God," whispered Alice Penworth, looking upward.

  Tom followed her gaze and saw directly above the sopping hat, a large, irregular, dark patch on the ceiling from which the blood was slowly dripping. He tried to talk but nothing came out, and he cleared his throat roughly. The sound made Alice jump. "Is there . . . a phone here?"

  "In the kitchen."

  "Okay. You call the police."

  "What about an ambulance?" Alice asked, her voice shaking.

  "All right, yes," Tom said, thinking that it was far too late for that now. "An ambulance." He watched the spot on the ceiling, and heard Alice turn and move across the dining room, into the kitchen.

  In a way, Tom wanted to stay downstairs until the police came, but if there was the slightest chance that the old woman was still alive, then he must go up and try to help. He told himself that it was possible that whatever had happened upstairs was the result of an accident, but he did not believe it. What had happened was the result of violence, and he had the distinct and uncomfortable feeling that what had caused that violence was still here in the cottage. He was a rational man, and this was an irrational suspicion but one he could not shake.

  Still, he had to see.

  He walked through the room full of hats, glancing around him as he went as if to make sure that the egg-faced heads did not turn as he passed. The stairs creaked shrilly as he climbed them, and he realized that before he reached the top he would be able to look over the edge of the hall floor and see what it was that had lost so much blood. It made him pause, and in the silence he heard Alice's voice from the kitchen, muted but intense.

  The knowledge that someone else was in the house and that help would soon be on the way gave him courage, and he finished his climb up the noisy stairs. The light was on, and at the far end of the wide hall he saw a blanket bin built against the wall. Nearly all of the older cottages had them. They were similar to wood bins, with heavy lids that lifted up and leaned against the wall, and were sometimes hooked so they wou
ld not fall.

  This one had fallen. Martha Sipling's head and upper torso were hidden from sight, but her hips and legs were not. Streaks of dried blood ran down them, blood that had turned her fluffy slippers from white to a muddy red.

  Tom looked at the blanket bin in amazement. The lid had apparently fallen down on Martha Sipling as she was leaning into it, but the lid was now nearly closed. It was impossible. There had to be some space that her stomach and back occupied, some bulk there to keep the lid partway open. But there was not.

  He stepped closer, and saw that the lid was open, but only half an inch. Martha Sipling's buttocks and legs beneath the thin nightgown were pale where the blood did not darken them. Tom put his fingers under the lid, and slowly lifted it up.

  No longer held by the lid, Martha Sipling's separated lower half slipped out of the nightgown, slid down the outside of the bin, and landed wetly on the floor next to Tom's feet. A milky strand of gray intestine trailed behind like an afterthought.

  Tom retched and looked away, looked at the bottom of the bloody nightgown hanging out of the closed bin, and retched again when he thought of what was still inside it. He turned around and began to walk toward the stairs, but found that his legs had become rubbery, and he had to stop and force himself to breathe slowly. He swallowed down bile several times, and only the irrational thought of the two white legs and hips rising of their own volition and sliding after him, leaving footprints in their own blood, brought him to the stairs. He ran down them and did not look back once.

  Alice Penworth was still on the telephone. "Oh, just a minute," she told someone, "here he comes now," and she looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and dread.

  "She's dead," Tom said softly. "There's . . . she's dead."

  "He says she's dead," Alice said into the phone. "All right. All right, we will . . . yes. Good-bye." She hung up. 'What was it, Tom?" Alice asked him. "What happened?"

  Tom shook his head and caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror that hung in the corner of the kitchen. It had painted angels surrounding it, and he thought his face looked as white as their wings. "She was . . . killed," he said weakly.

  "You mean that she was—"

  "Murdered," Tom said. "I think she was. I don't think there was any other way that . . ." He paused, felt his lunch push its way upward, saw a toilet bowl through a door that he had thought was a pantry, and ran inside. He knelt by the toilet and let it happen, thinking irrelevantly how neat Martha Sipling had been, how tidy this bathroom was, how clean the bowl.

  When he was finished, he blew his nose several times into toilet paper, and went back into the kitchen. Alice was sitting at the kitchen table, looking down at the clean, empty plate Martha Sipling had set for a meal she would never eat. Tom sat down too.

  A Chalmers police car pulled up in front of the Sipling cottage fifteen minutes later, and Bret Walters and Stu Bottomly climbed out. Bret was the police chief in Chalmers, town three miles away from Dreamthorp and two thousand people larger, and Stu was his deputy. They were hatless, and both wore gray, short-sleeved uniform shirts and matching trousers. Stu's fit better because he was easier to fit—tall, slender, and young. Bret Walters, on the other hand, had a squat, short body that age had done nothing to improve. They knocked on the front door just as the ambulance pulled up, lights flashing but sirens off, behind their car.

  Tom unlocked and opened the door. Bret smiled grimly at him. "How you doing, Tom?"

  "I've been better," Tom said as he stepped aside and allowed the men to enter. "Mrs. Sipling is upstairs."

  "Pretty bad?" Bret asked, and Tom nodded. "Okay, well look, we're here now, and the medical examiner'll get here shortly. Why don't you go home—you too, Miss Penworthand I'll let you know what happens. Probably want to question both of you, too. Just routine stuff."

  "Fine," Tom said. "You know where we live."

  He knew both Bret and Stu from the annual Dreamthorp art show. Tom was on the planning committee every year, and the policemen, along with a few hired men, provided crowd control for the event. They were nice, friendly men, but Tom didn't think either one of them was ready for this. They had been upset enough when the playhouse collapsed, and none of the victims had been in the shape that Martha Sipling was in upstairs.

  When Tom got home, Josh was at work and his parents had gone down to the lake, so he sat on the porch, had a stiff drink of Jack Daniel's, no ice, and thought about Martha Sipling. He had told Alice that he thought it was murder, and although he had no concrete reason for thinking so, he was sure he was right. If that lid, heavy as it was, had simply fallen on the woman as she was leaning into the bin, it certainly would have harmed her, it might conceivably have killed her if it had hit her thin, frail body in a vulnerable place, but there was no way on God's green earth that it would have cut her in two. It was simply not possible.

  No, Tom reasoned, the only thing that could have caused what he had seen was if someone had slammed the lid down hard on Martha Sipling, and done it over and over again, with extraordinary force, until her spine, her internal organs, her muscles and flesh around her stomach and back had been compressed to a pulp. That was the only way that lid could have nearly closed, the only way that old woman could have been ripped in half.

  He shuddered and felt his gorge rise again. He had not felt nauseated during the playhouse tragedy because he had things to do, people to help. But in this case he was doomed to inaction. The only thing he could do for Martha Sipling was remember.

  He took another swallow of his drink and looked down the narrow street to where a dark blue car with official plates was driving up. The medical examiner, he thought. What a treat he had in store. Two men in suits—one with a camera—got out of the car and went into the cottage. Tom sat for a few minutes longer, then became aware that he smelled strongly of sweat. He went inside, took a shower, and changed his clothes. At three o'clock Ed and Frances returned from the beach, and he told them only that there had been an accident, and that Mrs. Sipling had been killed. Frances went into semi-hysterics, but Ed seemed calm enough about it, picking up his book and ensconcing himself upon a chair in the living room. Frances, clucking, went into the kitchen. Things were back to normal, Tom thought.

  He went down to his shop, but was unable to concentrate on any work and went back out onto the street. The ambulance and the medical examiner's cars were gone, but now a state police car was parked behind Bret's. Tom walked down the street and found Bret and Stu sitting on Martha Sipling's front steps. Bret was wiping his forehead and neck with a large blue handkerchief and Stu was flapping the tails of his uniform shirt as if to dry his sweat. Stu was pale, Bret was red faced, but both looked weary and unnerved. Bret waved his handkerchief when he saw Tom.

  "M.E.—that's the medical examiner, like the coroner?—he says it's definitely of suspicious origin," Bret explained after Tom sat down two steps beneath him.

  "Does that mean murder?"

  Bret nodded. "Appears so." He twisted his handkerchief and drops of sweat darkened the wooden steps. "Jesus, look at that, just the thought of it makes me sweat like a pig."

  "When's the last time there was a murder in Dreamthorp, Bret?" Stu asked in a high, piping voice that always surprised Tom when he heard it.

  "Not since I've been chief. Not even since I was a deputy. Hell, I think it must've been back in the forties when that guy killed his wife and then shot himself because he found out she was fooling around. Up on Whittier Avenue—the cottage is still there."

  "We've had some in Chalmers, though," Stu said. Tom thought it sounded as if he were bragging.

  "Oh yeah," Bret nodded. "One every four or five years, maybe. But, hell, that happens when you get a few thousand people together. Odds are one or two of them's gonna turn out to be a bad apple. But it sure doesn't happen much in Dreamthorp."

  "Must be the mountain air," Stu said, forcing a smile.

  "Any idea what happened?" Tom asked.

  "Well, the state cops are i
n there now," Bret said. "They've got a lot more stuff than we do when it comes to murder investigations, if that's what this is."

  "You saw her," Tom said. "You think there's any other possibility?"

  "No. Not really. But there was no other sign of violence, no screens forced or anything. And the back door was locked?"

  "Back and front," Tom said, remembering turning the dead bolt to let Bret and Stu in the front.

  "Somebody must've killed her," said Stu. "That was the most horrible thing I've ever seen. Must've been a maniac."

  "Don't say things like that," Bret cautioned his deputy. "You don't want those kind of rumors spreading. Jesus only knows what the papers are gonna do with this."

  As if on cue, a Ford Escort with WJMP-TV logos coating it came rolling down the street and stopped right in the middle in front of the Sipling cottage.

  "Hey!" Bret called to the driver. "You can't leave that there. Pull on over."

  The driver shook his head in disgust but did as Bret directed, which was lucky for Laura Stark, whose Cressida now came up Emerson Avenue. She drove past the Sipling place, saw the police cars and the WJMP car, and waved uneasily to Tom, who smiled thinly and waved back, then pulled her car into the spot in front of her own cottage.

  Tom listened for a moment while Diane Sherman, an evening newscaster for WJMP, questioned Bret. Then, as Tom stood up and started home, the woman called after him. "Excuse me," she said. "Sir, were you involved at all?"

  "No," Tom said, neither turning his head nor slowing his pace.

  Laura was standing next to her car when he reached her place. "Hi," she said, giving him a tentative smile. "What's happening?"

  He smiled back. It wasn't hard. She was a pretty woman, Tom thought, tall and broad-shouldered, but she carried her size well and didn't try to hide it like so many others might have. She looked proud. He would have liked to smile more broadly at her, but the situation scarcely warranted it. "Martha Sipling—there's been an accident. She's dead."