The Fates

by Thomas Tessier

  ‘Right,’ Sturdevent said curtly and hung up. Damn. Tonight’s game was important, too. Sturdevent’s team, The Giants, were neck-and-neck with tonight’s opponents, Todd Tigers for first place in the league.

  ‘All set, Al?’ Greg Hibbard, the team captain, asked as Sturdevent returned to the lane.

  ‘No, I just got a call, Greg, and I’ll have to leave right away.’ He threw his ordinary shoes in his bowling bag and zipped it up unhappily.

  ‘Oh, damn, that’s too bad.’ Hibbard said.

  ‘Got anybody here who can sub for me?’

  ‘I thought I saw Maggie Waters’ boy here somewhere. We’ll find somebody. Too bad you’re going to miss it, though.’ Hibbard hefted a bowling ball idly in his hands.

  ‘Yeah. You better win.’

  ‘Right, Al, see you next week, if not before.’

  Sturdevent left with a brief wave to his fellow Giants and was soon speeding along the Turnpike into town, wondering why this incident had to happen on his bowling night. He couldn’t believe that it was as bad as Corwin had suggested on the phone. Still, Hanley wanted him to come in and see it, and Ned Hanley would never do that unless it were something way out of the ordinary.

  Hanley was a take-charge guy with plenty of ambition. If he had any kind of personality, Sturdevent thought, if he knew how to talk with politicians, the town leaders, well, then Hanley might even have my job. But that would never happen. And nobody ever gets murdered in Millville.

  Sturdevent spotted the crowd of people standing around outside of Dom’s as soon as he turned the corner into Hoadley Street. Patrolman Lawson was trying to shoo the onlookers away and keep traffic moving at the same time. Not an easy task, from the looks of it, Sturdevent thought, as he parked in front of the First City Bank’s driveway. He strolled up the sidewalk casually, like any other citizen out for an evening walk.

  ‘Okay, Vinnie?’

  ‘Oh, hi Chief. Yeah, I guess.’ His tone of voice suggested that things were not okay.

  ‘Corwin and Hanley upstairs?’ Sturdevent gestured with his thumb.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’ll send Dave down to give you a hand in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Lawson looked with curiosity at Sturdevent’s bowling shoes. ‘Watch out for the glass, Chief, it’s all over the place.’

  ‘Uh-hunh.’ Sturdevent looked around and saw that the patrolman was right. He pushed a few splintered chunks of glass with his toe and looked up at the broken windows on the first floor, before stepping carefully into the pizza restaurant. He found Ned Hanley in the back room with Mrs Ruggieri, Tony and a few other people he didn’t recognise. ‘Hello, Ned.’

  ‘Chief. Thanks for coming. I knew you’d want to see this for yourself.’ To the other people Hanley said, ‘Okay, you can go now. We’ll get in touch if we need you again.’

  The customers went out quickly. Mrs Ruggieri and Tony sat in silence. Hanley led Sturdevent out back and up the wooden stairs.

  ‘What is it, Ned?’

  ‘We’ve got their stories, Chief, but they aren’t much of a help. You’ll see what I mean when you see the room.’

  ‘Who’s the dead party?’

  ‘Guy name of James Donner. Lived alone here, worked at the post office for years. Mrs Ruggieri says he was always very quiet and polite to her, never any trouble whatsoever.’

  They had stopped, at Hanley’s move, on the landing.

  ‘Where is it?’ Sturdevent asked. ‘In there, right?’

  Dave Corwin appeared behind the screen door but said nothing. Sturdevent noticed him as a pale presence at the edge of his vision.

  ‘It’s pretty nasty in there, Chief. I just want to let you know ahead of time,’ Hanley said, and turned to the door.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, let’s go,’ Sturdevent replied brusquely. ‘Hi, Dave.’

  ‘Evening, Chief.’

  ‘You don’t look too good.’ Sturdevent smiled, but his attempt to sound humorous had no effect on Corwin.

  Ned Hanley’s burly frame stood in the hallway of the apartment, one arm extended in a gesture towards the room concerned. You still look like a traffic cop, Sturdevent thought as he approached.

  ‘In here, huh?’

  ‘In here,’ Hanley nodded.

  Everything in the room had been destroyed. Sturdevent had been prepared for a mass, but the damage was even more extensive than he had anticipated. He noticed the wallpaper before he even looked for the body. Long strips of it had been peeled away from the wall and hung limply in tatters.

  ‘Look at that wallpaper,’ he said, matter-of-factly.

  ‘I noticed,’ Hanley replied.

  ‘You fellows look through any of this stuff yet?’

  ‘No, sir, the only thing we did was get a new light bulb. I had Dave call you as soon as I got here.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Sturdevent had ventured only a few feet into the room. This is going to take time, he thought.

  Dave Corwin edged into the doorway, clearly surprised at the composure the Chief was maintaining. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this, Chief?’

  ‘Nope,’ Sturdevent answered calmly. ‘Dave, would you go downstairs and give Vinnie a hand? Clear those people away if you can and collect as much of that broken glass as possible, and don’t smudge it.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Did either of you call Doc Schmidt?’

  ‘He’s out to dinner,’ Hanley replied. ‘But they’re trying to locate him and get him here straight away.’

  ‘Good.’

  Sturdevent surveyed the scene with mounting anxiety. What had taken place in this room was terrible, monstrous, more so than he cared to admit to himself. He hunched down to look closely at the corpse lying on the floor near the door. It was a bloody, torn heap of flesh and protruding bones. The minute he saw Donner’s body Sturdevent thought of Bondarevsky’s cow, and the more he examined the remains here the more he was sure the two incidents were related. One side of Donner’s face was visible, and the flesh was ripped from the corner of the lips back across the cheek to the eye socket. Most of his hair had been yanked loose and his head was marked by red spots that resembled miniature divots on a golf course.

  Donner’s arms seemed unnaturally long and Sturdevent suspected that beneath the blood and the tattered clothing they would find stretched and tom muscles, as had been the case with Bondarevsky’s cow. But there’s no smell here, he noted mentally.

  Several objects were embedded in Donner’s back. Sturdevent leaned forward a few more inches to try to identify them. He frowned.

  ‘Okay,’ Sturdevent said, rising to his feet again, ‘what’s the story as you’ve got it so far?’

  ‘This guy is regular as clockwork, according to Mrs Ruggieri, who owns the joint downstairs and also happens to be the landlady. Donner never did a thing out of line. Got up, worked, came home, didn’t drink, few friends, quiet as a mouse. A cipher, a nobody. We’ve got nothing on him at the office but we’ve put out for state and federal information.’

  ‘Okay. What happened tonight?’

  ‘About seven-fifteen everybody downstairs started hearing this terrific racket. The old lady tries to get in, but the door is locked and anyway the noise scares her. While they’re calling us the noise stops. They say nobody left this apartment — Tony, the guy who cooks, watched the back porch and that’s the only entrance. But they could have missed somebody. I got the impression they were hopping around like a bunch of scared rabbits.’

  ‘Did they see anybody come in with Donner earlier?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I see. What about — ?’

  ‘Chief?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Before Doc Schmidt or anybody else gets here, I want to show you something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take a look at this.’ Hanley knelt down and pointed with a pencil at some torn sheets of printed paper sprinkled about the floor. ‘These here.’

  ‘What are they?’ Sturdevent a
sked, peering about as if not quite sure what in particular he was supposed to be looking at.

  ‘Look at this one.’ Hanley tapped lightly on a larger fragment. ‘It’s all in Russian.’

  ‘Russian? Is that what this is?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I’m ninety-nine per cent certain.’

  ‘Well, what about it?’

  ‘I just wondered about our friend here,’ Hanley said, pointing to the corpse. ‘Guy works in the post office. Has a house full of stuff written in Russian. Sounds a little peculiar to me.’

  ‘You think he might be some kind of spy?’ Sturdevent made no effort to hide his smile.

  ‘All I’m saying is it looks unusual, Chief.’ Hanley’s face had reddened slightly. ‘Unless you know Russian I’d think about asking the FBI to at least look in on it.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘I just think that we should be on top of the situation from the start.’

  ‘Good, good. Christ, this place has been tom to pieces.’ Sturdevent stood helplessly, wondering where to begin. The room was awash with blood and debris.

  ‘One person didn’t do all this, I can tell you that.’ Hanley lit a cigarette and tossed the extinguished match out into the hallway. ‘It had to be several people.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just look at it —’

  ‘No, I mean why on earth would anybody do this? Go to all this trouble? I can’t see anything that’s been left untouched. People kill people all the time, but they seldom go to all this bother for trimmings.’

  ‘Do you think the people downstairs could be tied in on this?’

  ‘Who?’ Sturdevent looked puzzled.

  ‘The old lady who owns the place and her cook, Tony.’

  ‘Weren’t they working in the restaurant at the time?’

  ‘Yeah, but…’ Hanley wanted prompting.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘They’re both Italians.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hanley said in a tone of voice that made it clear he had very definite ideas.

  Sturdevent spoke the word: ‘Mafia?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Hanley affirmed without hesitation. ‘We have to look into every possibility.’

  ‘Sure, Ned,’ Sturdevent smirked. ‘You follow up that angle.’ Hanley would get lost in a broom closet if I wasn’t around to keep an eye on him.

  ‘It could be a band of crazies, doing it for kicks,’ Hanley said quite seriously, making Sturdevent think again of Bondarevsky’s bitter explanation. ‘Like the Manson gang.’ Sturdevent didn’t respond to this line of theory. ‘Hell, I don’t know. What does it look like to you?’

  ‘It looks like he opened a bottle of beer and a tornado came out. Look at those things stuck in Donner’s back.’

  ‘Yeah, I know,’ Hanley replied thickly.

  ‘And the bits of wood and metal shot into the walls, and here, in the broken table top.’ Sturdevent looked grimly at his colleague. That isn’t natural. A person can’t do that, it takes too much force and pressure on a tiny point.’

  ‘Do you think it could have been some kind of explosion or —’

  ‘No, not an explosion. Nothing looks burned. No smell. Some kind of freak whirlwind, maybe.’

  ‘Indoors?’ Hanley sounded unconvinced. He still wanted to establish human agency.

  ‘I know it sounds unlikely, but it’s the only thing I can think of that makes any kind of sense.’

  ‘Look at the window frames,’ Hanley countered. ‘They’re both three-quarters shut and they blew out in that position. No whirlwind or dust devil could have come in through those narrow openings and then done all this.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Back door? Who knows, damn it all. I’m going down to call for some outside help.’

  ‘Who?’ Hanley asked, one eyebrow raised in mild surprise. ‘I don’t know yet. Waterbury or Hartford, or the State Police. All this stuff has to be examined by a good lab crew and we just don’t have the facilities to do it.’

  ‘That’s the truth. You going to talk to the Feds?’

  ‘They’ll be notified, of course. Donner was a federal employee. But I don’t think we have to ask them to investigate. Yet.’

  ‘Chief? What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Stay here and search the rest of the apartment, Ned. I’ll send Dave back up to watch this room. Don’t let Doc Schmidt disturb things any more than he has to in examining the body.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ll get some lab boys over here as soon as possible.’

  On his way to the station Sturdevent’s mind was a jumble of confused thoughts. He would have to tell them about Bondarevsky’s cow. Tomorrow or the next day. He wanted to see a complete lab report on the room, first, and a post-mortem from Doc Schmidt. Then they could sit down and try to make sense of it all. But as he rode along the darkening streets of Millville, he worried.

  There was a sick, inescapable feeling in his gut that something was happening to his town. Something terrible. Something he might not be able to handle.

  *

  ‘I’m going inside and see if there’s a ball game on TV, honey.’ Stu Calder said, rising from the lawn chair.

  ‘Okay, lover.’

  ‘Want anything?’

  ‘No, I’ll be in soon.’ Marge Calder swirled the last inch of whiskey sour in a stem glass.

  ‘The grass is damp, watch out for the night-crawlers between your toes,’ Stu said

  ‘They don’t bother me.’ She heard the screen door click shut behind her husband. It was a glorious night. The sky was brilliant with stars and the air was still warm but not at all uncomfortable. There was even a hint of a breeze up from the valley.

  Marge Calder was twenty-five, three years younger than her husband who was already a very successful systems analyst. They had built this house on Riverside Hill the year before. It had cost a lot, but it was worth it — the view was one of the best in the area. They were here to stay, Marge knew that. Stu didn’t mind the drive to New Haven every day. They wanted to live in a small town, in a special house, their very own house.

  Sometimes Marge regretted it a little. Millville was pretty dull compared with New Haven, where she and Stu had met and married, and even New Haven was pretty dull compared with other cities she had been to. But you could always drive to New York for a little excitement, dinner and a show. The peace and quiet here was worth it. When her parents had split up, years ago, she decided that she would have and hold a family, her family, in her home. She always thought that neither of her parents ever really wanted her, they were so caught up in their own lives.

  That would never happen in her family, the one she was going to have. But she didn’t believe in rushing children. There was plenty of time for that. Now was the time when she and Stu could enjoy each other and their freedom. The house now; in a few years the children.

  She inhaled deeply, enjoying the clear air. She still wore the skimpy bikini and white terry-cloth robe she had on when they returned from a swim at the lake earlier in the evening. The night is delicious, she thought, walking barefoot through the cool, moist grass towards the back end of their lawn. They had over an acre of land, though some of it sloped away sharply at the rear of the lot. Marge liked the tall grass and weeds that grew there. The rough edge was nice, more interesting that a perfectly manicured plot, which was what all the other yards in the area were. She liked the country feel, even if it was largely illusion.

  She sat down in the tall grass now. Her long, tanned legs were slick with moisture and she rubbed them slowly, with pleasure. Marge enjoyed her body, sex was healthy, fun, just about the best thing she could think of. Stu liked to watch her caress herself and she enjoyed doing it. She lay back in the tall grass and gazed at the sky dreamily. Some night she and Stu would have to come out here and make love. He could be persuaded. Some night soon. At midnight, that would be nice. Marge swung her arms around in half-circles, splashing more water from the surrounding plan
ts onto her face and body. She felt wonderful, cool and silvery, a night nymph.

  When she sat up a few minutes later and looked out across the valley, she saw the bright blue light almost immediately.

  Gosh, she thought, that’s what Sylvia and I saw the other day. The light was in about the same place, on the opposite side of the valley. It seemed much brighter now, at night. Again, Marge found it impossible to tell whether it was on the ground or in the air — at this distance and against the receding backdrop of a hilly landscape the perspective was too difficult to make out. But it looks like it’s in the air, hovering, she thought.

  ‘Stu —’ she started to call out, but stopped, knowing he wouldn’t hear her. Even if he did he probably wouldn’t come right away, not if he was watching a ball game. She rose to go get her husband and, in turning to the house, she spotted another blue light, far to the north of the town.

  ‘Wow.’ She breathed the word. Although the second light was farther away it seemed almost as bright as the other one. It also seemed certainly to be in the air, just above the line of the land as she tried to picture it. They were beautiful, but they couldn’t be man-made, she thought, and the notion of flying saucers crossed her mind again, just as it had the other day. Marge was a firm believer in flying saucers. Just looking at the stars on any night, a night like tonight, was enough to convince her that there was life elsewhere. And all those sightings, they couldn’t all be disproved. The only problem was, flying saucers were supposed to fly, and those things just sat there. Hovering? Studying us? Endless possibilities raced through her mind. She scanned the view in all directions, hoping for more bright lights, but the southern exposure was obscured less than a mile away by the bend of the hill, and to the west, over the roof of her house, the Calders’ own large horse-chestnut trees reached up to the stars.

  Marge felt a shiver run through her, and she remained staring at the twin blue flares for a few more moments before trotting across the back lawn and into the house. It took five minutes and a commercial before she got Stu outside. The lights were still there.

  ‘See,’ she said, pointing to the first light she had seen.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, ‘yeah, I see it.’ He didn’t sound overly impressed.