KILLER, COME BACK TO ME
Ray Bradbury

Copyright

COLLINS CRIME CLUB

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street,

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Ray Bradbury Literary Works, LLC 2020

The Additional Copyright Information at end of this eBook constitutes an extension to this copyright page.

Introduction © Jonathan R Eller 2020

Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Many of the stories in this book were previously published in the UK in the following:

Dandelion Wine, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1957, Corgi 1965 and Grafton 1977; Dark Forces, first published in Great Britain by Macdonald 1980 and Futura 1984; I Sing the Body Electric!, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1970, Corgi 1971 and Grafton 1991; The Illustrated Man, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1952 and Grafton 1977; Long After Midnight, first published in Great Britain by Hart-Davis, MacGibbon 1977 and Granada 1984; The Machineries of Joy, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1966 and Grafton 1977; The October Country (containing some stories published in Dark Carnival), first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1953 and New English Library 1963; S is for Space, first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd 1968; The Toynbee Convector, first published in Great Britain by Grafton 1989; Twice 22 (comprised of stories from The Golden Apples of the Sun and A Medicine for Melancholy) first published in Great Britain by Rupert Hart-Davis 1953

This book is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008414047

Ebook Edition © August 2020 ISBN: 9780008414054

Version: 2020-07-23

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

The Talking Box: Ray Bradbury’s Crime Fiction by Jonathan R Eller

A Touch of Petulance

The Screaming Woman

The Trunk Lady

‘I’m Not So Dumb!’

Killer, Come Back to Me!

Dead Men Rise Up Never

Where Everything Ends

Corpse Carnival

And So Died Riabouchinska

Yesterday I Lived!

The Town Where No One Got Off

The Whole Town’s Sleeping

At Midnight, In the Month of June

The Smiling People

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl

The Small Assassin

Marionettes, Inc.

Punishment Without Crime

Some Live Like Lazarus

The Utterly Perfect Murder

Afterword: Hammett? Chandler? Not to Worry!

Additional Copyright Information

About the Author

Also by Ray Bradbury

About the Publisher

The Talking Box:
Ray Bradbury’s Crime Fiction by Jonathan R. Eller

‘I … took all these pages and put them in my talking box. That was the box I kept by my typewriter where my ideas lay and spoke to me early mornings … so my stories got written.’ In the early 1980s, Ray Bradbury used his imaginary talking box to compose Death Is a Lonely Business, an experiment in autobiography that emerged from decades of suspense crime stories told through unexpected plot twists and vividly dark metaphors. If you want to know how Ray Bradbury developed the power to write this late-life novel and its sequels, you must read through the tales gathered here in Killer, Come Back to Me.

As we look back from the vantage point of Bradbury’s 2020 centennial year, the significance of these sinister tales is unmistakable. They are as important to the first twenty years of his career – his most prolific decades as a story writer – as the fantasy and science fiction that he brought into the literary mainstream. In fact, his special off-trail brand of crime fiction found wide popularity in the detective pulps while he was still developing the mastery of science fiction that he would achieve in the postwar genre magazines.

Bradbury’s crime pathologies also spilled over into the pages of Weird Tales, where by 1944 he would appear in all six bimonthly issues. ‘The Smiling People,’ from the May 1946 issue of Weird Tales, is just such an example, but by then Bradbury had already fully established himself in the stable of detective pulps flourishing within the Popular Publications syndicate. There was just enough ‘grue’ in some of his crime tales to place five stories in Dime Mystery, one of Popular’s ‘shudder pulps’ modeled on the Grand Guignol tradition of visualized terror. These include the haunting ‘Dead Men Rise Up Never,’ ‘Corpse Carnival,’ and the shocking consequences of birth trauma found in ‘The Small Assassin,’ all featured in this volume.

Popular’s subeditors Mike Tilden and Ryerson Johnson quickly warmed to Bradbury’s unusual style and the emotional fire of his prose and accepted a total of eight stories in the less gruesome Popular pulps Detective Tales and New Detective. The range of these stories is represented in the collection by ‘Killer, Come Back to Me!,’ ‘The Trunk Lady,’ and ‘“I’m Not So Dumb!”’ Popular’s editor-in-chief Alden Norton was frustrated by Bradbury’s insistence on letting his characters tell their own stories, but he nonetheless took ‘Yesterday I Lived!’ for Flynn’s Detective Fiction just before wartime paper rationing killed off that well-respected genre magazine. Although Bradbury never submitted to the logical conventions of crime fiction, his early mastery of the form is evident in two of his earliest 1944 sales – ‘The Trunk Lady’ and ‘Yesterday I Lived!,’ stories highly regarded by Bradbury’s mentors Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner.

By the early 1950s, Bradbury’s newer crime and suspense ideas radiated out into the science fiction stories he described as his ‘marionette’ tales. Two of these, ‘Marionettes, Inc.’ and ‘Punishment Without Crime,’ are paired in the second half of this collection. By this time Bradbury was well-established in the major market magazines, where he would take his murderers out of noir settings and into the small-town Midwestern life he remembered from childhood. ‘The Whole Town’s Sleeping,’ perhaps Bradbury’s most famous suspense tale, prompted Ellery Queen’s Frederic Dannay to solicit the sequel, ‘At Midnight, in the Month of June’; both tales are paired here, surrounded by other experiments in crime fiction originating in the 1950s and early 1960s, but often not published until years later.

It didn’t really matter when these stories were published; in his mind, they already formed a great part of the foundation that had made him one of the best-known storytellers of our time – a masterful explorer of the dark fantastic; a universally recognized guardian of freedom of the imagination; an abiding presence in Hollywood; and a visionary of the Space Age. But Bradbury was, above all, an explorer of the things that make us human, and his probing creativity reached deepest into the darker regions of the human mind. Perhaps more than any other aspect of his work, Bradbury’s crime suspense fiction reveals what Damon Knight called Bradbury’s prime area of interest: ‘the fundamental prerational fears and longings and desires: the rage at being born; the will to be loved; the longing to communicate; the hatred of parents and siblings, the fear of things that are not the self.’

Selecting the stories for this collection proved to be a challenge eagerly embraced. An earlier collection, aptly titled A Memory of Murder, gathered a number of the stories from Bradbury’s Popular Publications magazine sales of the mid-1940s. Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai, Bradbury’s long-time literary agent Michael Congdon, and I eventually reached across a far broader span of time to bring together the best early stories with the later tales that document Bradbury’s best crime suspense efforts written in the 1950s and early 1960s. In the process, we harvested three of Bradbury’s noir-era tales that had evaded the earlier collection entirely: ‘The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl’; our title story, ‘Killer, Come Back to Me!’; and ‘Where Everything Ends,’ the long-unpublished source text for Bradbury’s milestone 1985 detective novel, Death Is a Lonely Business.

The imaginary talking box of that novel, representing mysterious and unpredictable upwellings from the writer’s deep subconscious, is as close as we’ll ever get to the enigmatic source of Ray Bradbury’s ideas. He viewed life as a long rope that ‘goes back to the time we were born and extends on out ahead to the time of our death.’ The moments in between became stories that probe the past or perhaps catch a glimpse of the future. Killer, Come Back to Me opens with ‘A Touch of Petulance,’ the story of a possible dark future; the second tale, ‘The Screaming Woman,’ pivots on a crucial memory from the past. Present, past or future, this new collection of Ray Bradbury’s crime stories beckons. You are invited to follow his lead.

Jonathan R. Eller is a Chancellor’s Professor of English and director of the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University’s School of Liberal Arts. His books on Bradbury’s life and career include the trilogy Becoming Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Unbound, and Bradbury Beyond Apollo.

A Touch of Petulance

On an otherwise ordinary evening in May, a week before his twenty-ninth birthday, Jonathan Hughes met his fate, commuting from another time, another year, another life.

His fate was unrecognizable at first, of course, and boarded the train at the same hour, in Pennsylvania Station, and sat with Hughes for the dinnertime journey across Long Island. It was the newspaper held by this fate disguised as an older man that caused Jonathan Hughes to stare and finally say:

‘Sir, pardon me, your New York Times seems different from mine. The typeface on your front page seems more modern. Is that a later edition?’

‘No!’ The older man stopped, swallowed hard, and at last managed to say, ‘Yes. A very late edition.’

Hughes glanced around. ‘Excuse me, but – all the other editions look the same. Is yours a trial copy for a future change?’

‘Future?’ The older man’s mouth barely moved. His entire body seemed to wither in his clothes, as if he had lost weight with a single exhalation. ‘Indeed,’ he whispered. ‘Future change. God, what a joke.’

Jonathan Hughes blinked at the newspaper’s dateline: May 2, 1999.

‘Now, see here –’ he protested, and then his eyes moved down to find a small story, minus picture, in the upper-lefthand corner of the front page:

WOMAN MURDERED

POLICE SEEK HUSBAND

Body of Mrs. Alice Hughes found shot to death—

The train thundered over a bridge. Outside the window, a billion trees rose up, flourished their green branches in convulsions of wind, then fell as if chopped to earth.

The train rolled into a station as if nothing at all in the world had happened.

In the silence, the young man’s eyes returned to the text:

Jonathan Hughes, certified public accountant, of 112 Plandome Avenue, Plandome—

‘My God!’ he cried. ‘Get away!’

But he himself rose and ran a few steps back before the older man could move. The train jolted and threw him into an empty seat where he stared wildly out at a river of green light that rushed past the windows.

Christ, he thought, who would do such a thing? Who’d try to hurt us – us? What kind of joke? To mock a new marriage with a fine wife? Damn! And again, trembling, Damn, oh, damn!

The train rounded a curve and all but threw him to his feet. Like a man drunk with travelling, gravity, and simple rage, he swung about and lurched back to confront the old man, bent now into his newspaper, gone to earth, hiding in print. Hughes brushed the paper out of the way, and clutched the old man’s shoulder. The old man, startled, glanced up, tears running from his eyes. They were both held in a long moment of thunderous travelling. Hughes felt his soul rise to leave his body.

‘Who are you?’

Someone must have shouted that.

The train rocked as if it might derail.

The old man stood up as if shot in the heart, blindly crammed something in Jonathan Hughes’s hand, and blundered away down the aisle and into the next car.

The younger man opened his fist and turned a card over and read a few words that moved him heavily down to sit and read the words again:

JONATHAN HUGHES, CPA

679-4990. PLANDOME.

‘No!’ someone shouted.

Me, thought the young man. Why, that old man is … me.

There was a conspiracy, no, several conspiracies. Someone had contrived a joke about murder and played it on him. The train roared on with five hundred commuters who all rode, swaying like a team of drunken intellectuals behind their masking books and papers, while the old man, as if pursued by demons, fled off away from car to car. By the time Jonathan Hughes had rampaged his blood and completely thrown his sanity off balance, the old man had plunged, as if falling, to the farthest end of the commuter’s special.

The two men met again in the last car, which was almost empty. Jonathan Hughes came and stood over the old man, who refused to look up. He was crying so hard now that conversation would have been impossible.

Who, thought the young man, who is he crying for? Stop, please, stop.

The old man, as if commanded, sat up, wiped his eyes, blew his nose, and began to speak in a frail voice that drew Jonathan Hughes near and finally caused him to sit and listen to the whispers:

‘We were born –’

‘We?’ cried the young man.

‘We,’ whispered the old man, looking out at the gathering dusk that travelled like smokes and burnings past the window, ‘we, yes, we, the two of us, we were born in Quincy in nineteen fifty, August twenty-second –’

Yes, thought Hughes.

‘– and lived at Forty-nine Washington Street and went to Central School and walked to that school all through first grade with Isabel Perry –’

Isabel, thought the young man.

‘We …’ murmured the old man. ‘Our’ whispered the old man. ‘Us.’ And went on and on with it:

‘Our woodshop teacher, Mr. Bisbee. History teacher, Miss Monks. We broke our right ankle, age ten, ice-skating. Almost drowned, age eleven; Father saved us. Fell in love, age twelve, Impi Johnson –’

Seventh grade, lovely lady, long since dead, Jesus God, thought the young man, growing old.

And that’s what happened. In the next minute, two minutes, three, the old man talked and talked and gradually became younger with talking, so his cheeks glowed and his eyes brightened, while the young man, weighted with old knowledge given, sank lower in his seat and grew pale so that both almost met in mid-talking, mid-listening, and became twins in passing. There was a moment when Jonathan Hughes knew for an absolute insane certainty, that if he dared glance up he would see identical twins in the mirrored window of a night-rushing world.

He did not look up.

The old man finished, his frame erect now, his head somehow driven high by the talking out, the long-lost revelations.

‘That’s the past,’ he said.

I should hit him, thought Hughes. Accuse him. Shout at him. Why aren’t I hitting, accusing, shouting?

Because …

The old man sensed the question and said, ‘You know I’m who I say I am. I know everything there is to know about us. Now – the future?’

‘Mine?’

‘Ours,’ said the old man.

Jonathan Hughes nodded, staring at the newspaper clutched in the old man’s right hand. The old man folded it and put it away.

‘Your business will slowly become less than good. For what reasons, who can say? A child will be born and die. A mistress will be taken and lost. A wife will become less than good. And at last, oh believe it, yes, do, very slowly, you will come to – how shall I say it – hate her living presence. There, I see I’ve upset you. I’ll shut up.’

They rode in silence for a long while, and the old man grew old again, and the young man along with him. When he had aged just the proper amount, the young man nodded the talk to continue, not looking at the other who now said:

‘Impossible, yes, you’ve been married only a year, a great year, the best. Hard to think that a single drop of ink could colour a whole pitcher of clear fresh water. But colour it could and colour it did. And at last the entire world changed, not just our wife, not just the beautiful woman, the fine dream.’

‘You –’ Jonathan Hughes started and stopped. ‘You – killed her?’

‘We did. Both of us. But if I have my way, if I can convince you, neither of us will, she will live, and you will grow old to become a happier, finer me. I pray for that. I weep for that. There’s still time. Across the years, I intend to shake you up, change your blood, shape your mind. God, if people knew what murder is. So silly, so stupid, so – ugly. But there is hope, for I have somehow got here, touched you, begun the change that will save our souls. Now, listen. You do admit, do you not, that we are one and the same, that the twins of time ride this train this hour this night?’

The train whistled ahead of them, clearing the track of an encumbrance of years.

The young man nodded the most infinitely microscopic of nods. The old man needed no more.

‘I ran away. I ran to you. That’s all I can say. She’s been dead only a day, and I ran. Where to go? Nowhere to hide, save Time. No one to plead with, no judge, no jury, no proper witnesses save – you. Only you can wash the blood away, do you see? You drew me, then. Your youngness, your innocence, your good hours, your fine life still untouched, was the machine that seized me down the track. All of my sanity lies in you. If you turn away, great God, I’m lost, no, we are lost. We’ll share a grave and never rise and be buried forever in misery. Shall I tell you what you must do?’

The young man rose.

‘Plandome,’ a voice cried. ‘Plandome.’

And they were out on the platform with the old man running after, the young man blundering into walls, into people, feeling as if his limbs might fly apart.

‘Wait!’ cried the old man. ‘Oh, please.’

The young man kept moving.

‘Don’t you see, we’re in this together, we must think of it together, solve it together, so you won’t become me and I won’t have to come impossibly in search of you, oh, it’s all mad, insane, I know, I know, but listen!’

The young man stopped at the edge of the platform where cars were pulling in, with joyful cries or muted greetings, brief honkings, gunnings of motors, lights vanishing away. The old man grasped the young man’s elbow.

‘Good God, your wife, mine, will be here in a moment, there’s so much to tell, you can’t know what I know, there’s twenty years of unfound information lost between which we must trade and understand! Are you listening? God, you don’t believe!’

Jonathan Hughes was watching the street. A long way off a final car was approaching. He said: ‘What happened in the attic at my grandmother’s house in the summer of nineteen fifty-eight? No one knows that but me. Well?’

The old man’s shoulders slumped. He breathed more easily, and as if reciting from a promptboard said. ‘We hid ourselves there for two days, alone. No one ever knew where we hid. Everyone thought we had run away to drown in the lake or fall in the river. But all the time, crying, not feeling wanted, we hid up above and … listened to the wind and wanted to die.’

The young man turned at last to stare fixedly at his older self, tears in his eyes. ‘You love me, then?’

‘I had better,’ said the old man. ‘I’m all you have.’

The car was pulling up at the station. A young woman smiled and waved behind the glass.

‘Quick,’ said the old man, quietly. ‘Let me come home, watch, show you, teach you, find where things went wrong, correct them now, maybe hand you a fine life forever, let me –’

The car horn sounded, the car stopped, the young woman leaned out.

‘Hello, lovely man!’ she cried.

Jonathan Hughes exploded a laugh and burst into a manic run. ‘Lovely lady, hi –’

‘Wait.’

He stopped and turned to look at the old man with the newspaper, trembling there on the station platform. The old man raised one hand, questioningly.

‘Haven’t you forgotten something?’

Silence. At last: ‘You,’ said Jonathan Hughes. ‘You.’

The car rounded a turn in the night. The woman, the old man, the young, swayed with the motion.

‘What did you say your name was?’ the young woman said, above the rush and run of country and road.

‘He didn’t say,’ said Jonathan Hughes quickly.

‘Weldon,’ said the old man, blinking.

‘Why,’ said Alice Hughes. ‘That’s my maiden name.’

The old man gasped inaudibly, but recovered. ‘Well, is it? How curious!’

‘I wonder if we’re related? You –’

‘He was my teacher at Central High,’ said Jonathan Hughes, quickly.

‘And still am,’ said the old man. ‘And still am.’ And they were home.

He could not stop staring. All through dinner, the old man simply sat with his hands empty half the time and stared at the lovely woman across the table from him. Jonathan Hughes fidgeted, talked much too loudly to cover the silences, and ate sparsely. The old man continued to stare as if a miracle was happening every ten seconds. He watched Alice’s mouth as if it were giving forth fountains of diamonds. He watched her eyes as if all the hidden wisdoms of the world were there, and now found for the first time. By the look of his face, the old man, stunned, had forgotten why he was there.

‘Have I a crumb on my chin?’ cried Alice Hughes, suddenly. ‘Why is everyone watching me?’

Whereupon the old man burst into tears that shocked everyone. He could not seem to stop, until at last Alice came around the table to touch his shoulder.

‘Forgive me,’ he said. ‘It’s just that you’re so lovely. Please sit down. Forgive.’

They finished off the dessert and with a great display of tossing down his fork and wiping his mouth with his napkin, Jonathan Hughes cried, ‘That was fabulous. Dear wife, I love you!’ He kissed her on the cheek, thought better of it, and rekissed her, on the mouth. ‘You see?’ He glanced at the old man. ‘I very much love my wife.’

The old man nodded quietly and said, ‘Yes, yes, I remember.’

‘You remember?’ said Alice, staring.

‘A toast!’ said Jonathan Hughes, quickly. ‘To a fine wife, a grand future!’

His wife laughed. She raised her glass.

‘Mr. Weldon,’ she said, after a moment. ‘You’re not drinking? …’

It was strange seeing the old man at the door to the living room.

‘Watch this,’ he said, and closed his eyes. He began to move certainly and surely about the room, eyes shut. ‘Over here is the pipestand, over here the books. On the fourth shelf down a copy of Eiseley’s The Star Thrower. One shelf up H. G. Wells’s Time Machine, most appropriate, and over here the special chair, and me in it.’

He sat. He opened his eyes.

Watching from the door, Jonathan Hughes said, ‘You’re not going to cry again, are you?’

‘No. No more crying.’

There were sounds of washing up from the kitchen. The lovely woman out there hummed under her breath. Both men turned to look out of the room toward that humming.

‘Someday,’ said Jonathan Hughes, ‘I will hate her? Someday, I will kill her?’

‘It doesn’t seem possible, does it? I’ve watched her for an hour and found nothing, no hint, no clue, not the merest period, semicolon or exclamation point of blemish, bump, or hair out of place with her. I’ve watched you, too, to see if you were at fault, we were at fault, in all this.’

‘And?’ The young man poured sherry for both of them, and handed over a glass.

‘You drink too much is about the sum. Watch it.’

Hughes put his drink down without sipping it. ‘What else?’

‘I suppose I should give you a list, make you keep it, look at it every day. Advice from the old crazy to the young fool.’

‘Whatever you say, I’ll remember.’

‘Will you? For how long? A month, a year, then, like everything else, it’ll go. You’ll be busy living. You’ll be slowly turning into … me. She will slowly be turning into someone worth putting out of the world. Tell her you love her.’

‘Every day.’

‘Promise! It’s that important! Maybe that’s where I failed myself, failed us. Every day, without fail!’ The old man leaned forward, his face taking fire with his words. ‘Every day. Every day!’

Alice stood in the doorway, faintly alarmed.

‘Anything wrong?’

‘No, no.’ Jonathan Hughes smiled. ‘We were trying to decide which of us likes you best.’

She laughed, shrugged, and went away.

‘I think,’ said Jonathan Hughes, and stopped and closed his eyes, forcing himself to say it, ‘it’s time for you to go.’

‘Yes, time.’ But the old man did not move. His voice was very tired, exhausted, sad. ‘I’ve been sitting here feeling defeated. I can’t find anything wrong. I can’t find the flaw. I can’t advise you, my God, it’s so stupid, I shouldn’t have come to upset you, worry you, disturb your life, when I have nothing to offer but vague suggestions, inane cryings of doom. I sat here a moment ago and thought: I’ll kill her now, get rid of her now, take the blame now, as an old man, so the young man there, you, can go on into the future and be free of her. Isn’t that silly? I wonder if it would work? It’s that old time-travel paradox, isn’t it? Would I foul up the time flow, the world, the universe, what? Don’t worry, no, no, don’t look that way. No murder now. It’s all been done up ahead, twenty years in your future. The old man having done nothing whatever, having been no help, will now open the door and run away to his madness.’

He arose and shut his eyes again.

‘Let me see if I can find my way out of my own house, in the dark.’

He moved, the young man moved with him to find the closet by the front door and open it and take out the old man’s overcoat and slowly shrug him into it.

‘You have helped,’ said Jonathan Hughes. ‘You have told me to tell her I love her.’

‘Yes, I did do that, didn’t I?’

They turned to the door.

‘Is there hope for us?’ the old man asked, suddenly, fiercely.

‘Yes. I’ll make sure of it,’ said Jonathan Hughes.

‘Good, oh, good. I almost believe!’

The old man put one hand out and blindly opened the front door.

‘I won’t say goodbye to her. I couldn’t stand looking at that lovely face. Tell her the old fool’s gone. Where? Up the road to wait for you. You’ll arrive someday.’

‘To become you? Not a chance,’ said the young man.

‘Keep saying that. And – my God – here –’ The old man fumbled in his pocket and drew forth a small object wrapped in crumpled newspaper. ‘You’d better keep this. I can’t be trusted, even now. I might do something wild. Here. Here.’

He thrust the object into the young man’s hands. ‘Goodbye. Doesn’t that mean: God be with you? Yes. Goodbye.’

The old man hurried down the walk into the night. A wind shook the trees. A long way off, a train moved in darkness, arriving or departing, no one could tell.

Jonathan Hughes stood in the doorway for a long while, trying to see if there really was someone out there vanishing in the dark.

‘Darling,’ his wife called.

He began to unwrap the small object.

She was in the parlour door behind him now, but her voice sounded as remote as the fading footsteps along the dark street.

‘Don’t stand there letting the draft in,’ she said.

He stiffened as he finished unwrapping the object. It lay in his hand, a small revolver.

Far away the train sounded a final cry, which failed in the wind.

‘Shut the door,’ said his wife.

His face was cold. He closed his eyes.

Her voice. Wasn’t there just the tiniest touch of petulance there?

He turned slowly, off balance. His shoulder brushed the door. It drifted. Then:

The wind, all by itself, slammed the door with a bang.

The Screaming Woman

My name is Margaret Leary and I’m ten years old and in the fifth grade at Central School. I haven’t any brothers or sisters, but I’ve got a nice father and mother except they don’t pay much attention to me. And anyway, we never thought we’d have anything to do with a murdered woman. Or almost, anyway.

When you’re just living on a street like we live on, you don’t think awful things are going to happen, like shooting or stabbing or burying people under the ground, practically in your back yard. And when it does happen you don’t believe it. You just go on buttering your toast or baking a cake.

I got to tell you how it happened. It was a noon in the middle of July. It was hot and Mama said to me, ‘Margaret, you go to the store and buy some ice cream. It’s Saturday, Dad’s home for lunch, so we’ll have a treat.’

I ran out across the empty lot behind our house. It was a big lot, where kids had played baseball, and broken glass and stuff. And on my way back from the store with the ice cream I was just walking along, minding my own business, when all of a sudden it happened.

I heard the Screaming Woman.

I stopped and listened.

It was coming up out of the ground.

A woman was buried under the rocks and dirt and glass, and she was screaming, all wild and horrible, for someone to dig her out.

I just stood there, afraid. She kept screaming, muffled.

Then I started to run. I fell down, got up, and ran some more. I got in the screen door of my house and there was Mama, calm as you please, not knowing what I knew, that there was a real live woman buried out in back of our house, just a hundred yards away, screaming bloody murder.

‘Mama,’ I said.

‘Don’t stand there with the ice cream,’ said Mama.

‘But, Mama,’ I said.

‘Put it in the icebox,’ she said.

‘Listen, Mama, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.’

‘And wash your hands,’ said Mama.

‘She was screaming and screaming …’

‘Let’s see, now, salt and pepper,’ said Mama, far away.

‘Listen to me,’ I said, loud. ‘We got to dig her out. She’s buried under tons and tons of dirt and if we don’t dig her out, she’ll choke up and die.’

‘I’m certain she can wait until after lunch,’ said Mama.

‘Mama, don’t you believe me?’

‘Of course, dear. Now wash your hands and take this plate of meat in to your father.’

‘I don’t even know who she is or how she got there,’ I said. ‘But we got to help her before it’s too late.’

‘Good gosh,’ said Mama. ‘Look at this ice cream. What did you do, just stand in the sun and let it melt?’

‘Well, the empty lot …’

‘Go on, now, scoot.’

I went into the dining room.

‘Hi, Dad, there’s a Screaming Woman in the empty lot.’

‘I never knew a woman who didn’t,’ said Dad.

‘I’m serious,’ I said.

‘You look very grave,’ said Father.

‘We’ve got to get picks and shovels and excavate, like for an Egyptian mummy,’ I said.

‘I don’t feel like an archaeologist, Margaret,’ said Father. ‘Now, some nice cool October day, I’ll take you up on that.’

‘But we can’t wait that long,’ I almost screamed. My heart was bursting in me. I was excited and scared and afraid and here was Dad, putting meat on his plate, cutting and chewing and paying me no attention.

‘Dad?’ I said.

‘Mmmm?’ he said, chewing.

‘Dad, you just gotta come out after lunch and help me,’ I said. ‘Dad, Dad, I’ll give you all the money in my piggy bank!’

‘Well,’ said Dad. ‘So it’s a business proposition, is it? It must be important for you to offer your perfectly good money. How much money will you pay, by the hour?’

‘I got five whole dollars it took me a year to save, and it’s all yours.’

Dad touched my arm. ‘I’m touched. I’m really touched. You want me to play with you and you’re willing to pay for my time. Honest, Margaret, you make your old Dad feel like a piker. I don’t give you enough time. Tell you what, after lunch, I’ll come out and listen to your Screaming Woman, free of charge.’

‘Will you, oh, will you, really?’

‘Yes, ma’am, that’s what I’ll do,’ said Dad. ‘But you must promise me one thing?’

‘What?’

‘If I come out, you must eat all of your lunch first.’

‘I promise,’ I said.

‘Okay.’

Mother came in and sat down and we started to eat.

‘Not so fast,’ said Mama.

I slowed down. Then I started eating fast again.

‘You heard your mother,’ said Dad.

‘The Screaming Woman,’ I said. ‘We got to hurry.’

‘I,’ said Father, ‘intend sitting here quietly and judiciously giving my attention first to my steak, then to my potatoes, and my salad, of course, and then to my ice cream, and after that to a long drink of iced coffee, if you don’t mind. I may be a good hour at it. And another thing, young lady, if you mention her name, this Screaming Whatsis, once more at this table during lunch, I won’t go out with you to hear her recital.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Is that understood?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I said.

Lunch was a million years long. Everybody moved in slow motion, like those films you see at the movies. Mama got up slow and got down slow and forks and knives and spoons moved slow. Even the flies in the room were slow. And Dad’s cheek muscles moved slow. It was so slow. I wanted to scream, ‘Hurry! Oh, please, rush, get up, run around, come on out, run!’

But no, I had to sit, and all the while we sat there slowly, slowly eating our lunch, out there in the empty lot (I could hear her screaming in my mind. Scream!) was the Screaming Woman, all alone, while the world ate its lunch and the sun was hot and the lot was empty as the sky.

‘There we are,’ said Dad, finished at last.

‘Now will you come out to see the Screaming Woman?’ I said.

‘First a little more iced coffee,’ said Dad.

‘Speaking of Screaming Women,’ said Mother, ‘Charlie Nesbitt and his wife Helen had another fight last night.’

‘That’s nothing new,’ said Father. ‘They’re always fighting.’

‘If you ask me, Charlie’s no good,’ said Mother. ‘Or her, either.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Dad. ‘I think she’s pretty nice.’

‘You’re prejudiced. After all, you almost married her.’

‘You going to bring that up again?’ he said. ‘After all, I was only engaged to her six weeks.’

‘You showed some sense when you broke it off.’

‘Oh, you know Helen. Always stagestruck. Wanted to travel in a trunk. I just couldn’t see it. That broke it up. She was sweet, though. Sweet and kind.’

‘What did it get her? A terrible brute of a husband like Charlie.’

‘Dad,’ I said.

‘I’ll give you that. Charlie has got a terrible temper,’ said Dad. ‘Remember when Helen had the lead in our high school graduation play? Pretty as a picture. She wrote some songs for it herself. That was the summer she wrote that song for me.’

‘Ha,’ said Mother.

‘Don’t laugh. It was a good song.’

‘You never told me about that song.’

‘It was between Helen and me. Let’s see, how did it go?’

‘Dad,’ I said.

‘You’d better take your daughter out in the back lot,’ said Mother, ‘before she collapses. You can sing me that wonderful song later.’

‘Okay, come on, you,’ said Dad, and I ran him out of the house.

The empty lot was still empty and hot and the glass sparkled green and white and brown all around where the bottles lay. ‘Now, where’s this Screaming Woman?’ laughed Dad.

‘We forgot the shovels,’ I cried.

‘We’ll get them later, after we hear the soloist,’ said Dad. I took him over to the spot. ‘Listen,’ I said.

We listened.

‘I don’t hear anything,’ said Dad, at last. ‘Shh,’ I said. ‘Wait.’

We listened some more. ‘Hey, there, Screaming Woman!’ I cried.

We heard the sun in the sky. We heard the wind in the trees, real quiet. We heard a bus, far away, running along. We heard a car pass.

That was all.

‘Margaret,’ said Father. ‘I suggest you go lie down and put a damp cloth on your forehead.’

‘But she was here,’ I shouted. ‘I heard her, screaming and screaming and screaming. See, here’s where the ground’s been dug up.’ I called frantically at the earth. ‘Hey there, you down there!’

‘Margaret,’ said Father. ‘This is the place where Mr. Kelly dug yesterday, a big hole, to bury his trash and garbage in.’

‘But during the night,’ I said, ‘someone else used Mr. Kelly’s burying place to bury a woman. And covered it all over again.’

‘Well, I’m going back in and take a cool shower,’ said Dad.

‘You won’t help me dig?’

‘Better not stay out here too long,’ said Dad. ‘It’s hot.’

Dad walked off. I heard the back door slam.

I stamped on the ground. ‘Darn,’ I said.

The screaming started again.

She screamed and screamed. Maybe she had been tired and was resting and now she began it all over, just for me.

I stood in the empty lot in the hot sun and I felt like crying. I ran back to the house and banged the door.

‘Dad, she’s screaming again!’

‘Sure, sure,’ said Dad. ‘Come on.’ And he led me to my upstairs bedroom. ‘Here,’ he said. He made me lie down and put a cold rag on my head. ‘Just take it easy.’

I began to cry. ‘Oh, Dad, we can’t let her die. She’s all buried, like that person in that story by Edgar Allan Poe, and think how awful it is to be screaming and no one paying any attention.’

‘I forbid you to leave the house,’ said Dad, worried. ‘You just lie there the rest of the afternoon.’ He went out and locked the door. I heard him and Mother talking in the front room. After a while I stopped crying. I got up and tiptoed to the window. My room was upstairs. It seemed high.

I took a sheet off the bed and tied it to the bedpost and let it out the window. Then I climbed out the window and shinnied down until I touched the ground. Then I ran to the garage, quiet, and I got a couple of shovels and I ran to the empty lot. It was hotter than ever. And I started to dig, and all the while I dug, the Screaming Woman screamed …

It was hard work. Shoving in the shovel and lifting the rocks and glass. And I knew I’d be doing it all afternoon and maybe I wouldn’t finish in time. What could I do? Run tell other people? But they’d be like Mom and Dad, pay no attention. I just kept digging, all by myself.

About ten minutes later, Dippy Smith came along the path through the empty lot. He’s my age and goes to my school.

‘Hi, Margaret,’ he said.

‘Hi, Dippy,’ I gasped.

‘What you doing?’ he asked.

‘Digging.’

‘For what?’

‘I got a Screaming Lady in the ground and I’m digging for her,’ I said.

‘I don’t hear no screaming,’ said Dippy.

‘You sit down and wait awhile and you’ll hear her scream yet. Or better still, help me dig.’

‘I don’t dig unless I hear a scream,’ he said.

We waited.

‘Listen!’ I cried. ‘Did you hear it?’

‘Hey,’ said Dippy, with slow appreciation, his eyes gleaming. ‘That’s okay. Do it again.’

‘Do what again?’

‘The scream.’

‘We got to wait,’ I said, puzzled.

‘Do it again,’ he insisted, shaking my arm. ‘Go on.’ He dug in his pocket for a brown aggie. ‘Here.’ He shoved it at me. ‘I’ll give you this marble if you do it again.’

A scream came out of the ground.

‘Hot dog!’ said Dippy. ‘Teach me to do it!’ He danced around as if I was a miracle.

‘I don’t …’ I started to say.

‘Did you get the Throw-Your-Voice book for a dime from that Magic Company in Dallas, Texas?’ cried Dippy. ‘You got one of those tin ventriloquist contraptions in your mouth?’

‘Y-yes,’ I lied, for I wanted him to help. ‘If you’ll help dig, I’ll tell you about it later.’

‘Swell,’ he said. ‘Give me a shovel.’

We both dug together, and from time to time the woman screamed.

‘Boy,’ said Dippy. ‘You’d think she was right under foot. You’re wonderful, Maggie.’ Then he said, ‘What’s her name?’

‘Who?’

‘The Screaming Woman. You must have a name for her.’

‘Oh, sure.’ I thought a moment. ‘Her name’s Wilma Schweiger and she’s a rich old woman, ninety-six years old, and she was buried by a man named Spike, who counterfeited ten-dollar bills.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Dippy.

‘And there’s hidden treasure buried with her, and I, I’m a grave robber come to dig her out and get it,’ I gasped, digging excitedly.

Dippy made his eyes Oriental and mysterious. ‘Can I be a grave robber, too?’ He had a better idea. ‘Let’s pretend it’s the Princess Ommanatra, an Egyptian queen, covered with diamonds!’

We kept digging and I thought, Oh, we will rescue her, we will. If only we keep on!

‘Hey, I just got an idea,’ said Dippy. And he ran off and got a piece of cardboard. He scribbled on it with crayon.

‘Keep digging!’ I said. ‘We can’t stop!’

‘I’m making a sign. See? SLUMBERLAND CEMETERY! We can bury some birds and beetles here, in matchboxes and stuff. I’ll go find some butterflies.’

‘No, Dippy!’

‘It’s more fun that way. I’ll get me a dead cat, too, maybe …’

‘Dippy, use your shovel! Please!’

‘Aw,’ said Dippy. ‘I’m tired. I think I’ll go home and take a nap.’

‘You can’t do that.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Dippy, there’s something I want to tell you.’

‘What?’

He gave the shovel a kick.

I whispered in his ear. ‘There’s really a woman buried here.’

‘Why sure there is,’ he said. ‘You said it, Maggie.’

‘You don’t believe me, either.’

‘Tell me how you throw your voice and I’ll keep on digging.’

‘But I can’t tell you, because I’m not doing it,’ I said. ‘Look, Dippy. I’ll stand way over here and you listen there.’

The Screaming Woman screamed again.

‘Hey!’ said Dippy. ‘There really is a woman here!’

‘That’s what I tried to say.’

‘Let’s dig!’ said Dippy.

We dug for twenty minutes.

‘I wonder who she is?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I wonder if it’s Mrs. Nelson or Mrs. Turner or Mrs. Bradley. I wonder if she’s pretty. Wonder what colour her hair is? Wonder if she’s thirty or ninety or sixty?’

‘Dig!’ I said.

The mound grew high.

‘Wonder if she’ll reward us for digging her up.’

‘Sure.’

‘A quarter, do you think?’

‘More than that. I bet it’s a dollar.’

Dippy remembered as he dug, ‘I read a book once of magic. There was a Hindu with no clothes on who crept down in a grave and slept there sixty days, not eating anything, no malts, no chewing gum or candy, no air, for sixty days.’ His face fell. ‘Say, wouldn’t it be awful if it was only a radio buried here and us working so hard?’

‘A radio’s nice, it’d be all ours.’

Just then a shadow fell across us.

‘Hey, you kids, what you think you’re doing?’

We turned. It was Mr. Kelly, the man who owned the empty lot. ‘Oh, hello, Mr. Kelly,’ we said.

‘Tell you what I want you to do,’ said Mr. Kelly. ‘I want you to take those shovels and take that soil and shovel it right back in that hole you been digging. That’s what I want you to do.’

My heart started beating fast again. I wanted to scream myself.

‘But Mr. Kelly, there’s a Screaming Woman and …’

‘I’m not interested. I don’t hear a thing.’

‘Listen!’ I cried.

The scream.

Mr. Kelly listened and shook his head. ‘Don’t hear nothing. Go on now, fill it up and get home with you before I give you my foot!’

We filled the hole all back in again. And all the while we filled it in, Mr. Kelly stood there, arms folded, and the woman screamed, but Mr. Kelly pretended not to hear it.

When we were finished, Mr. Kelly stomped off, saying, ‘Go on home now. And if I catch you here again …’

I turned to Dippy. ‘He’s the one,’ I whispered.

‘Huh?’ said Dippy.

‘He murdered Mrs. Kelly. He buried her here, after he strangled her, in a box, but she came to. Why, he stood right here and she screamed and he wouldn’t pay any attention.’

‘Hey,’ said Dippy. ‘That’s right. He stood right here and lied to us.’

‘There’s only one thing to do,’ I said. ‘Call the police and have them come arrest Mr. Kelly.’

We ran for the corner store telephone.

The police knocked on Mr. Kelly’s door five minutes later. Dippy and I were hiding in the bushes, listening.

‘Mr. Kelly?’ said the police officer.

‘Yes, sir, what can I do for you?’

‘Is Mrs. Kelly at home?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘May we see her, sir?’

‘Of course. Hey, Anna!’

Mrs. Kelly came to the door and looked out. ‘Yes, sir?’

‘I beg your pardon,’ apologized the officer. ‘We had a report that you were buried out in an empty lot, Mrs. Kelly. It sounded like a child made the call, but we had to be certain. Sorry to have troubled you.’

‘It’s those blasted kids,’ cried Mr. Kelly, angrily. ‘If I ever catch them, I’ll rip them limb from limb!’

‘Cheezit!’ said Dippy, and we both ran.

‘What’ll we do now?’ I said.

‘I got to go home,’ said Dippy. ‘Boy, we’re really in trouble. We’ll get a licking for this.’

‘But what about the Screaming Woman?’

‘To heck with her,’ said Dippy. ‘We don’t dare go near that empty lot again. Old man Kelly’ll be waiting around with his razor strap and lambast heck out’n us. And I just happened to remember, Maggie. Ain’t old man Kelly sort of deaf, hard-of-hearing?’

‘Oh, my gosh,’ I said. ‘No wonder he didn’t hear the screams.’

‘So long,’ said Dippy. ‘We sure got in trouble over your darn old ventriloquist voice. I’ll be seeing you.’

I was left all alone in the world, no one to help me, no one to believe me at all. I just wanted to crawl down in that box with the Screaming Woman and die. The police were after me now, for lying to them, only I didn’t know it was a lie, and my father was probably looking for me, too, or would be once he found my bed empty. There was only one last thing to do, and I did it.

I went from house to house, all down the street, near the empty lot. And I rang every bell and when the door opened I said: ‘I beg your pardon, Mrs. Griswold, but is anyone missing from your house?’ or ‘Hello, Mrs. Pikes, you’re looking fine today. Glad to see you home!’ And once I saw that the lady of the house was home I just chatted awhile to be polite, and went on down the street.

The hours were rolling along. It was getting late. I kept thinking, oh, there’s only so much air in that box with that woman under the earth, and if I don’t hurry, she’ll suffocate, and I got to rush! So I rang bells and knocked on doors, and it got later, and I was just about to give up and go home, when I knocked on the last door, which was the door of Mr. Charlie Nesbitt, who lives next to us. I kept knocking and knocking.

Instead of Mrs. Nesbitt, or Helen as my father calls her, coming to the door, why it was Mr. Nesbitt, Charlie, himself.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘It’s you, Margaret.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Good afternoon.’

‘What can I do for you, kid?’ he said.

‘Well, I thought I’d like to see your wife, Mrs. Nesbitt,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ he said.

‘May I?’

‘Well, she’s gone out to the store,’ he said.

‘I’ll wait,’ I said, and slipped in past him.

‘Hey,’ he said.

I sat down in a chair. ‘My, it’s a hot day,’ I said, trying to be calm, thinking about the empty lot and air going out of the box, and the screams getting weaker and weaker.

‘Say, listen, kid,’ said Charlie, coming over to me, ‘I don’t think you better wait.’

‘Oh, sure,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘Well, my wife won’t be back,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Not today, that is. She’s gone to the store, like I said, but, but, she’s going on from there to visit her mother. Yeah. She’s going to visit her mother, in Schenectady. She’ll be back, two or three days, maybe a week.’

‘That’s a shame,’ I said.

‘Why?’

‘I wanted to tell her something.’

‘What?’

‘I just wanted to tell her there’s a woman buried over in the empty lot, screaming under tons and tons of dirt.’

Mr. Nesbitt dropped his cigarette.

‘You dropped your cigarette, Mr. Nesbitt,’ I pointed out, with my shoe.

‘Oh, did I? Sure. So I did,’ he mumbled. ‘Well, I’ll tell Helen when she comes home, your story. She’ll be glad to hear it.’

‘Thanks. It’s a real woman.’

‘How do you know it is?’

‘I heard her.’

‘How, how you know it isn’t, well, a mandrake root?’

‘What’s that?’

‘You know. A mandrake. It’s a kind of a plant, kid. They scream. I know, I read it once. How you know it ain’t a mandrake?’

‘I never thought of that.’

‘You better start thinking,’ he said, lighting another cigarette. He tried to be casual. ‘Say, kid, you, eh, you say anything about this to anyone?’

‘Sure, I told lots of people.’

Mr. Nesbitt burned his hand on his match.

‘Anybody doing anything about it?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They won’t believe me.’

He smiled. ‘Of course. Naturally. You’re nothing but a kid. Why should they listen to you?’

‘I’m going back now and dig her out with a spade,’ I said.

‘Wait.’

‘I got to go,’ I said.

‘Stick around,’ he insisted.

‘Thanks, but no,’ I said, frantically.

He took my arm. ‘Know how to play cards, kid? Blackjack?’

‘Yes, sir.’

He took out a deck of cards from a desk. ‘We’ll have a game.’

‘I got to go dig.’

‘Plenty of time for that,’ he said, quiet. ‘Anyway, maybe my wife’ll be home. Sure. That’s it. You wait for her. Wait awhile.’

‘You think she will be?’

‘Sure, kid. Say, about that voice; is it very strong?’

‘It gets weaker all the time.’

Mr. Nesbitt sighed and smiled. ‘You and your kid games. Here now, let’s play that game of blackjack, it’s more fun than Screaming Women.’

‘I got to go. It’s late.’

‘Stick around, you got nothing to do.’

I knew what he was trying to do. He was trying to keep me in his house until the screaming died down and was gone. He was trying to keep me from helping her. ‘My wife’ll be home in ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Sure. Ten minutes. You wait. You sit right there.’

We played cards. The clock ticked. The sun went down the sky. It was getting late. The screaming got fainter and fainter in my mind. ‘I got to go,’ I said.

‘Another game,’ said Mr. Nesbitt. ‘Wait another hour, kid. My wife’ll come yet. Wait.’

In another hour he looked at his watch. ‘Well, kid, I guess you can go now.’ And I knew what his plan was. He’d sneak down in the middle of the night and dig up his wife, still alive, and take her somewhere else and bury her, good. ‘So long, kid. So long.’ He let me go, because he thought that by now the air must all be gone from the box.

The door shut in my face.

I went back near the empty lot and hid in some bushes. What could I do? Tell my folks? But they hadn’t believed me. Call the police on Mr. Charlie Nesbitt? But he said his wife was away visiting. Nobody would believe me!

I watched Mr. Kelly’s house. He wasn’t in sight. I ran over to the place where the screaming had been and just stood there.

The screaming had stopped. It was so quiet I thought I would never hear a scream again. It was all over. I was too late, I thought.

I bent down and put my ear against the ground.

And then I heard it, way down, way deep, and so faint I could hardly hear it.

The woman wasn’t screaming any more. She was singing. Something about, ‘I loved you fair, I loved you well.’

It was sort of a sad song. Very faint. And sort of broken. All of those hours down under the ground in that box must have sort of made her crazy. All she needed was some air and food and she’d be all right. But she just kept singing, not wanting to scream any more, not caring, just singing.

I listened to the song.

And then I turned and walked straight across the lot and up the steps to my house and I opened the front door.

‘Father,’ I said.

‘So there you are!’ he cried.

‘Father,’ I said.

‘You’re going to get a licking,’ he said.

‘She’s not screaming any more.’

‘Don’t talk about her!’

‘She’s singing now,’ I cried.

‘You’re not telling the truth!’

‘Dad,’ I said. ‘She’s out there and she’ll be dead soon if you don’t listen to me. She’s out there, singing, and this is what she’s singing.’ I hummed the tune. I sang a few of the words. ‘I loved you fair, I loved you well …’

Dad’s face grew pale. He came and took my arm.

‘What did you say?’ he said.

I sang it again: ‘I loved you fair, I loved you well.’

‘Where did you hear that song?’ he shouted.

‘Out in the empty lot, just now.’

‘But that’s Helen’s song, the one she wrote, years ago, for me!’ cried Father. ‘You can’t know it. Nobody knew it, except Helen and me. I never sang it to anyone, not you or anyone.’

‘Sure,’ I said.

‘Oh, my God!’ cried Father, and ran out the door to get a shovel. The last I saw of him he was in the empty lot, digging, and lots of other people with him, digging.

I felt so happy I wanted to cry.

I dialled a number on the phone and when Dippy answered I said, ‘Hi, Dippy. Everything’s fine. Everything’s worked out keen. The Screaming Woman isn’t screaming any more.’

‘Swell,’ said Dippy.

‘I’ll meet you in the empty lot with a shovel in two minutes,’ I said.

‘Last one there’s a monkey! So long!’ cried Dippy.

‘So long, Dippy!’ I said, and ran.

The Trunk Lady

Johnny Menlo kicked his shoes and sat down hard on the bottom of the attic stairs. His teacher, his special private tutor, was not coming after all. So he wouldn’t have someone in the house all to himself.

Downstairs the party was running full blast. The sounds of it came up mockingly – the laughter, the cocktail shakers clinking, the music. Johnny thought he had got away from its sounds, sitting way up here, so lonely. His teacher was supposed to have come today. She hadn’t.

Mom and Dad, so busy drinking with people, gave Johnny the kind of look you give your shadow.

Johnny retreated farther up the stairs into the complete musty asylum of the abandoned attic. Even up here the dust and warm afternoon quiet was rustled by the party noises from below.

Johnny glanced around. There were four trunks sitting under veils of webs in the dim corners. A sunbeam fell through a small dirty window, lighted things for Johnny’s curious blue eyes.

The trunk in the north corner, for instance. It was always locked, the key hidden somewhere. The hasps were down now, but the brass tongue in the middle was flipped up, unlocked.

Johnny walked to the trunk and pried the hasps open. He pulled the lid up. Suddenly the attic was very cold.

She was inside.

Curled up, her body was, young, pretty. Her slender face was like chalk etched against the blackboard of her hair. Johnny gasped, but not too loudly. He held onto the trunk rim. Only her perfume was still alive. She looked as lonely and abandoned as he felt. He sympathized. Attics are places for things neglected and forgotten.

Death had apparently come through suffocation. Someone had slammed the heavy airtight lid down upon her curled loveliness. Her hand was like a white fragment of it against her filmy pink cocktail dress.

A moment later he found the balled wad of paper on the floor. It was only part of a note, with her writing on it.

– you’ve got to make it up to me, the way I’ve been treated. It shouldn’t be difficult. I could be Johnny’s teacher. That would explain my presence in the house to everyone. ELLIE.

He looked at her quiet beauty. It seemed as if she might have fallen asleep during the cocktail party and had been carried here and the lid slammed down upon her while in slumber!

The attic dimness moved in about Johnny, shaking him, then drawing out, leaving him numbed and saying, ‘Are you my teacher? Are you the one I was going to have for myself alone? But they – they killed you? Why should anyone kill my teacher?’ Another thought rushed the first away. He, Johnny Menlo, of the society Menlos, had found a body, hadn’t he? Sure. His eyes widened. Mom and Dad’d have to notice him now, more often.

Why, even Grandma would quit playing chess all day with Uncle Flinny, choke on her brandy, stare at him through thick glasses, and cry, ‘My God, child, your snooping finally came to a profit, did it?’

Sure! Sure! Johnny blinked rapidly, his heart pounding.

Cousin William might even faint at the news!

He, Johnny Menlo, had found the body. Pictures in the papers of himself instead of Mother beaming out of the society columns!

Hiding the note in his pocket, Johnny took one last long look at the pretty lashes and the pink lips and the dark black hair of the Trunk Lady. He closed the lid on her sleeping.

He’d scream. Yes, at the top of the grand stairs. Scream till the sky fell down, and the party with it! Scream!

His screaming wasn’t bad at all.

Down the stairs, across the hall, making a path with his screaming through the startled ranks of people, Johnny reached Mother’s glittering cocktail gown and held onto it very tightly.

‘Johnny, Johnny, why are you downstairs? What’s the matter? I told you –’ Mother’s girl-face looked down over the glitter. He grabbed another fistful of spangles. He yelled it:

‘Mom, there’s a body in the attic!’

Like faces in a football stadium, the faces watching them. Mother stiffened, then relaxed. ‘Let go my dress, darling, you’ll get it dirty. Look at your hands, cobwebs and all. Now run up to your room like a good boy.’ She patted his head.

‘But Mom!’ he wailed. ‘There’s a body –’

‘Good Lord,’ someone murmured. ‘Just like his father.’

Johnny spun angrily. ‘You shut up! There is so a body!’

Mother didn’t see him. She looked at her guests, and all Johnny could see was her lovely swanlike throat, the firm chin with the pulse beating under it, her fingers fixing the chestnut shine of hair swept up from her ears.

‘Please forgive Johnny,’ she was saying. ‘Children are so imaginative, aren’t they?’

Her chin came down. There was no light in her blue eyes. ‘You’d better go upstairs, Johnny.’

‘Oh, but, Mom –’

His world was crashing. The spangles slipped from between his fingers. He suddenly hated everyone at the party looking at him.

‘You heard what your mother said, General.’

That was Dad’s resonant voice and it meant the fight was lost. Johnny jerked around, shot one last glare at the people, and ran upstairs, tears coming into his eyes.

He twisted the brass knob of Grandma’s door. She sat playing chess with Uncle Flinny before the great glaring window. Sunlight glinted off her glasses. She hardly looked up.

‘Pardon me, Granny, but –’

She shifted her cane against her thin knee. ‘Well?’

‘There’s a body in the attic and nobody’ll believe me –’

‘Go away, Johnny!’

‘But,’ he cried, ‘there’s a body!’

‘We know it, we know it! Now run get Cousin William a bottle of cognac! Scat! Go!’

Johnny went and got the cognac from the wine pantry, rapped on Cousin William’s door, and thought he heard indrawn breath behind the panelling. Then Cousin William whispered quickly.

‘Who’s there?’ ‘Cognac.’

‘Oh, fine, fine!’ Cousin William’s weak-chinned, rabbity face poked out, his soft hands darting after the offered liquor. ‘Thank God. Now go away and let me get drunk!’

The door slammed, but before it did Johnny got a brief glimpse of the cluttered, disorderly interior of Cousin William’s Designing Room – the mannequins standing stiff around with brilliant silks draped, cut, fixed to them, watercolour sketches of capes, hats, suits, thumbtacked to the plaster walls. Bright heaps of woollens, threaded spools, and all. The door cut it off, locked it in, and Cousin William was nervously attending his cognac behind the shining knob.

Johnny eyed the hall phone, his anger simmering. He thought of Mom and Dad dancing, Uncle Flinny and Grandma playing their eternal chess, Cousin William drinking – and himself a stranger in this great old echoing house. He snatched up the phone.

‘Uh – I want – that is – give me the police station.’

Another deep voice cut in on the operator’s.

‘Hang up the phone, Johnny. Hang up and go to bed.’ Dad’s very resonant and cultured voice.

Johnny hung up slowly. So this was his reward for finding a body? He sat and cried with frustration. He felt like the lady in the trunk, the lid slammed in his face by five people! Slammed!

He was twisting in bed when Uncle Flinny softly opened the door and poked his curly, soft-haired, big head into the room. His eyes were round, black, gentle, peaceful-looking. He came in with slow, soft movements, sat on the edge of the chair beside the bed like a very quiet little bird. He folded his birdlike fingers.

‘Since you’re retiring early,’ he said, ‘I thought I’d better come tell your bedtime story early too. Yes?’

Johnny felt himself too old for stories. Being raised in such an adult house with few contacts with children, and having an advanced education with such mature talk and mature people around, he felt himself far above bedtime stories. But he resigned himself, sighed, and said, ‘Okay, Uncle Flinny. Go ahead. Shoot.’

Uncle Flinny held onto his neatly pressed black trousers at the knees as if they’d explode and slowly pieced out his tale.

‘Well, once there was a young woman who was very beautiful –’

Oh-oh! Johnny’d heard this story a thousand times before. He fidgeted. A body in the attic and he had to listen to this.

‘And,’ continued Uncle Flinny, ‘this beautiful young girl fell in love with and married a young knight. They lived happily for years. Until one day a Dark One kidnapped the beautiful woman and ran away with her.’ Uncle Flinny looked sad and old.

‘And then the husband came home,’ prompted Johnny.

Uncle Flinny didn’t hear him at all. He just kept talking in a funny soft monotone. ‘The husband chased the Dark One into a Dark Land. But no matter how hard he pleaded, or tried to catch up with the Dark One, he never could. His wife was gone forever. Forever.’

Uncle Flinny’s breathing was uneven, harsh. His eyes glowed dark, round. His lips trembled. He wasn’t himself. He was someone else off a million miles in that Dark Land. He seized his knees tighter and bent over them.

‘But the husband searched and searched, vowing that someday he would find and kill the Dark One, and, wonder of wonders, he did! He struck the Dark One down, but oh God above, after striking the Dark One he found that somehow the Dark One looked like his beautiful wife! And he found to his horror that he himself was growing – darker and darker …’

The end. Johnny hoped there’d be no more. Uncle Flinny sat sighing in the atmosphere he’d built from the story. He’d forgotten Johnny was a part of the room. His hands were shaking and he was out of breath. He just sat there.

Johnny shivered for no reason he knew. ‘Thanks. Thanks very much, Uncle Flinny,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the swell story.’

Uncle Flinny turned blind eyes. ‘Unh?’ He relaxed, recognizing Johnny. ‘Oh, yes. Anytime. Anytime at all.’

‘You sure get steamed up, Uncle Flinny.’

Uncle Flinny quietly opened the door. ‘Good night, Johnny.’

‘Oh, Uncle!’

‘Yes?’

Johnny stopped himself. ‘Never mind.’

Uncle Flinny shuffled out. The door closed gently.

Johnny bounced furiously on the springs. ‘The things I’ve had to do the last few days, to keep this family happy! Listen to Uncle Flinny – wait on Grandma – get out of the way of Mother – obey Father. And keep Cousin William drunk. Guh!’

He was tired of them all. For a change why not some attention for himself? He could hear the party continuing downstairs. Slipping from bed, he listened against the door.

In the next hour he heard all varieties of feet upon the stairs, like heartbeats in the house. The crisp, snapping moves of Grandma and her pert cane feeling the layers of altitude. The shuffle of Uncle Flinny. The even long and easy stride of Dad. The glide of Mother. The nervous, uneasy tripping of Cousin William.

And there were voices talking, some arguing, some urging, others hysterical, mixed – Dad calm, Mother criticizing, Grandma stern, Cousin William whimpering, Uncle Flinny quiet. Once or twice the attic door creaked.

No one even came near Johnny’s room. The party still existed downstairs, unaware of all this badinage. Night was coming swiftly on with an autumn chill.

Finally it was quiet again. Johnny hurried up the dark, dusty stairs into the attic, heart beating quickly. He’d show them!

The trunk was not heavy, strangely enough. One could easily tip it toward the stairs, and the stairs led down to the landing. One more push from the landing and down, down, down into the living room. Yes. They’d have to believe him now!

Johnny tipped the trunk.

People were talking. Music was playing on the radio-phonograph. Mom and Dad mingled with the bright swarm, flames about which social moths beat their sophisticated wings.

It was in the very midst of these things that Johnny’s small voice made some sort of declaration from atop the hall staircase. He yelled loudly.

‘Mom! Dad!’

Everybody turned and looked, as at a reception. The woman came down the stairs.

Somebody had to scream. It sounded almost like Cousin William. But everybody watched, falling back, as the woman came down the stairs in her filmy cocktail dress. Well, she didn’t exactly come down. She rolled.

Over and over, arms limp, legs limp, head bobbing, hair flailing in a dark whip, around and down, softly nudging the steps, jointless, boneless, and lifeless. When she reached the bottom Johnny was right after her.

‘I told you, Mother! Dad, I found her again! I found her!’

He’d always and forever remember Mother’s face in that moment and the way she said his name. ‘Johnny …!’ And the way she struck him across the face.

Someone said, ‘Call the police!’

Someone else had the phone, ticking it. Dad’s face was like a wet grey calm, suddenly old and tired. Johnny fell back from Mother’s blow, holding to the banister. He thought She’s never hit me before. Never before. Always kind and good, thoughtless at times, maybe, but she never went and hit me before today.

Then it happened. Everybody began laughing. Somebody pointed at the body, their faces got red, and they laughed. Dad laughed, too, with everything but his eyes.

‘I’ll be damned,’ someone said. ‘So that’s the body the child found upstairs?’

‘A mannequin!’ someone declared.

‘Of course. A store-window dummy. Easy to see how a child might think it a body.’ Again, laughter. Lots of it.

‘A mannequin.’ The laughter grew and grew upon itself.

Johnny, trembling, crept and bent and touched the outflung hand, pulled away, touched it again, felt tremblingly the hard cold plastic.

‘That’s not the body,’ he said, looking up, bewildered. He shook his head, moving back. ‘That’s not the body at all,’ he said. ‘The other body was different. Warmish and soft. It was a real woman!’

‘Johnny!’

Dad had stopped smiling. Mother clenched a fist with white knuckles.

Johnny said, ‘Just the same, it’s not the one!’ He began to cry. Tears came as on the windshield of a car in a storm, erasing the world in wet portions. ‘Just the same, she was dead and she wasn’t made of plaster!’

The house was full of sounds late that night. People talking in locked rooms. Arguments. Once he thought he heard Cousin William sobbing. Feet climbed stairs, lights clicked on and off. Finally everyone was in bed, and Johnny sat up, throwing back the covers. That clicking was Cousin William double-locking his door. Why? … Because someone or something was walking around in the house?

Johnny started. His doorknob was turning. The door pushed open a few inches. Someone was standing there in the darkness, looking in. A heart is an erratic thing. Like mercury. It scurries all over a person’s insides. Johnny’s heart was like mercury.

The door remained open. The shadow remained standing in the doorway, staring, looking in. Johnny said nothing. Then, very matter-of-factly, the shadow withdrew, and the door closed.

Rapping the lock home hard, Johnny threw his breath out and lay trembling on the door. Pressure from outside a moment later, from that withdrawn shadow, could not force the bolt. Johnny listened. The shadow went away.

Very weakly Johnny returned to bed, trembling. ‘Mom! Mom,’ he said to himself, ‘are you mad at me for making a scene before all of society? Would you kill me, Mom? Was there something about the Trunk Lady and Dad, something you didn’t like, and did you kill her because of it? Now, when I come around, in the way, what will you do to me? Oh, Mom, it can’t be you!’’

‘Dad,’ he said, the same way, ‘you made me hang up the phone. Are you afraid it will get out too? Afraid of your business, your money, your reputation at the club, huh, Dad? Was that you standing in the door, silent and dark and thinking? You’ve been my favourite in the family. But now, today, you’re so quiet and you don’t even look at me.’

Cousin William. He could have changed the bodies, tried to fool Johnny. He could have put one of the mannequins in the trunk instead. Was she Cousin William’s girlfriend? Was she causing trouble somehow? Or was Cousin William just afraid for his reputation? Him and his mannequins and his famous, expensive dresses for expensive women. Was it him, twisting the doorknob a moment ago?

Maybe it was Uncle Flinny, with his bedtime stories and his quiet ways. He loved Mother so much – his sister. He’d do anything for her or Dad or Grandma or Cousin William. Would he kill for her or Dad or the others to keep this house whole, intact and untouched?

Grandma. Played her cold game of chess day by day and drank her brandy neat. Her whole life was keeping the house moving together. Her whole life was society and position and taste. What if someone came into the house and tried to do all the ordering instead of her? What would she do to her?

All of them! All of them!

Johnny sank shivering back on the springs. A woman walked into a big mothballed old mansion like this and suddenly everyone was afraid. Just one woman.

On the table beside his bed Johnny groped and found the note he’d discovered in the attic dust. He felt of it, and read it again in his mind:

– you’ve got to make it up to me, the way I’ve been treated. It shouldn’t be difficult. I could be Johnny’s teacher. That would explain my presence in the house to everyone. ELLIE.

Johnny turned over.

‘Ellie, my teacher, where are you now?’ he asked the darkness. ‘Lonely and resting in Cousin William’s studio with all the other stiffened mannequins? Playing chess with Grandma, only not moving? In the cold, dark basement like the wine casks put away for all the years? Somewhere in this big house tonight. But maybe not tomorrow. Unless I find you before then …’

There was a huge back yard with many acres to it, fruit trees, a flower garden, the swimming pool, the bathhouse, servants’ quarters immediately behind the big house. Sunlight caught between a row of sycamore trees and a high green fence that shielded all this from the street. There was an oak tree to dangle from in the afternoon, and a policeman who walked his beat just under that tree on the sidewalk beyond the fence. Johnny climbed up and waited.

The policeman walked below. Johnny rattled leaves.

‘Hi, son.’ The policeman looked up. ‘Better watch out. You’ll fall.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Johnny. ‘We got a dead lady in our house and everybody keeps it secret.’

The policeman made a smile. ‘You have, have you?’

Johnny shifted himself. ‘I found her in a trunk. Somebody killed her. I tried to call the police last night, but Dad wouldn’t let me. I tipped the trunk over, and she fell downstairs but she turned out to be a wax doll. It wasn’t the lady after all.’

‘So.’ The policeman chuckled, enjoying it.

‘But the other lady was real,’ insisted Johnny.

‘What other lady?’

‘The first one I found. Cousin William’s a dress designer. He changed bodies. You should have seen everyone at breakfast this morning. Trying to be happy. Like in the movies. But they can’t fool me. They’re not happy. Mother looks tired, and she’s real touchy. I wonder how long they can go around like this without yelling?’

The policeman scowled. ‘Honest to God, you sound just like my kid. Him and his Buck Rogers disintegrators and his comic books. Honest to God, it’s a crime what they give the younger generation to read. Ruin their minds with it. Killing. Corpses. Ah!’

‘But it’s true!’

‘See you later,’ said the policeman, and walked on.

Johnny clung there, and the tree trembled in the wind. Then he dropped down across the fence and gave chase. ‘You got to come look. They’ll take her away if you don’t – then nobody’ll ever find her.’

The policeman was patient. ‘Look, little boy, I can’t go nowhere without no warrant. How do I know you’re not lying?’ He was joking now.

‘You’ve just got to believe me – that’s all.’

The policeman stuck out his hand. ‘Here.’

Johnny took it. The policeman walked.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Johnny. ‘To see your mother.’

‘No!’ Johnny squirmed frantically. ‘That won’t help! She’ll hate me for it! She’ll lie about it!’

The policeman firmly escorted him around front and thumbed the bell. First a maid, and then Mother was at the door, her face pale as milk, her lips a red smear against the white. Her pompadour was a little toppled over. There were blue pouches under her suddenly dull eyes.

‘Johnny!’

‘Better keep him inside, ma’am.’ The policeman touched his cap. ‘He’ll get hurt running in the street.’

‘Thank you, officer.’

The officer looked at her, then at Johnny. Johnny started to speak, but he could only sob. Two tears ran down his cheeks as the door closed, shutting the officer outside.

Mother didn’t say anything to Johnny. Not a word. She just stood there, lost and white, twisting her fingers. That was all.

Hours later in the day, Johnny wrote it all down upon a nickel tablet of paper. Everything he knew about the Trunk Lady, everything he knew about Cousin William, Mom, Dad, Uncle Flinny, Grandma. Wetting his pencil, Johnny put it out in lines like this:

‘The Lady in the Trunk loved Dad. Dad killed her when she came to the house.’ Johnny pouted over that one. ‘Either that or Mom killed her.’ Long years of viewing motion picture murders went through Johnny’s mind. ‘Then, of course, Grandma or Uncle Flinny could have killed her because their authority and security was threatened.’ Yeah. Johnny scribbled quick. Let’s see, now. ‘And Cousin William? Maybe it was his woman friend, after all.’ Johnny sort of hoped it was. He wasn’t very partial to Cousin W. ‘Maybe, maybe there was something in Grandma’s past? Or Uncle Flinny’s?’ Now, how about –

‘Johnny!’

Grandma’s voice. Johnny put away the pad.

Grandma came in the door and guided Johnny out through the hall and into her room, using her cane as a nervous prod. She seated him before the chessboard and nodded at the pale pieces. ‘Those are yours. Mine are black.’ She thought it over, eyes closed.

‘Mine are always black.’

‘We can’t play,’ Johnny announced. ‘Two of your black pieces are missing.’ He pointed.

She looked. ‘Uncle Flinny again. He’s always taking some of my players. Always and forever. We’ll play anyway. I’ll use what I have. Move.’ She jabbed a skinny finger.

‘Where’s Uncle Flinny?’

‘Watering the garden. Move,’ she ordered.

Her eyes watched his fingers in their path. She leaned forward slowly over the shining pieces. ‘We’re all good people, Johnny. We led a good life these twenty years in this house. You’ve been in it only part of that twenty. We never asked for no trouble. Don’t make us any, Johnny.’

He sat there. A fly buzzed against the large window. Far away, below, water ran from a faucet. ‘I don’t want no – trouble,’ he said.

The chessboard blurred and ran away like coloured water. ‘Dad looked so white and funny at breakfast today. Why should he feel that way over a wax doll, Grandma? And Mom, she looks like she’s all twisted up like a spring inside a clock, ready to bust loose. That’s no way to act over a doll, is it?’

Grandma deliberated over her bishop, withdrawn into herself like an old hermit crab in a shell of lace. ‘There was no body. Just your imagination. Forget it. Forget it.’ She glared at the child as if he were responsible. ‘Walk light from now on, sonny. Keep quiet and keep out of the way and forget it. Someone’s got to tell you these things. Don’t know why it’s always me. But just forget it!’

They played chess until twilight. Then the house got dark again too quickly, everybody hurried through supper, and it seemed that everybody went to bed early too.

Johnny listened to the hours chiming out one by one. Someone rapped on the door. Johnny said,

‘Who is it?’

‘Uncle Flinny.’’

‘What do you want, Uncle Flinny!’

‘Time for your bedtime story, Johnny.’’

‘Oh, well – not tonight, please, Uncle Flinny.’

‘Yes. Please. This is a very special story. A very extra special bedtime story.’

Johnny waited. Then: ‘I’m tired, Uncle Flinny. Some other time, huh? Not tonight, please.’

Uncle Flinny went away and after a while the clock chimed again. It was after ten. More time. After eleven. More time. Almost twelve.

Johnny opened the door.

The house was completely asleep. You could tell by the quiet, untouched gleam on the long hall stairs, clear moonlight pouring through great areas of glass, and no shadow moving.

Johnny closed the door behind him. From off somewhere in a quiet land, Grandma breathed heavily in her great four-postered bed. There was a tinkling noise, very faintly, as if bottles were being cautiously rattled behind Cousin William’s door.

Johnny paused at the staircase. All he had to do would be return to bed and forget about it, believe that it was all a mistake, and there would be no trouble. It would be forgotten and things would take up where they’d been a few days ago.

Mother would laugh at her parties. Dad would drive back and forth to the office with his thick briefcase. Grandma would sneak her brandy on the side. Cousin William would insert needles into mannequin flesh, and Uncle Flinny would go on forever telling his feverish bedtime stories that meant nothing.

Yet it was not so easy as that. Things could not go back now. Only ahead. You can’t forget. Dad, his only friend, was a stranger now, since the – incident. Mother was worse than ever. Her eyes looked like they cried at night. Down under the glitter she had to live too. And Grandma, she’d drink two bottles instead of one bottle of brandy a week. And Cousin William, every time he stuck a pin into a mannequin he’d think of the Trunk Lady, blanch, cringe, and start whimpering over his cognac.

And she – the lovely dark-haired stranger in the musty trunk – had looked so lonely up there where he’d found her. So apart. There was a bond between them. She was a stranger to the house – and was killed for it. Johnny was a stranger in the house now too. He wanted to find her again, because of that. They were almost brother and sister. She needed finding. She needed to be remembered, not to be forgotten.

Johnny went down each step with careful footing. He clung to the banister, sliding his fingers. She would not be in the attic now, nor would she be in any of the upstairs rooms. How could they sleep with her so near them? … Downstairs perhaps. Somewhere in the accumulated night of the house. Not in the servants’ quarters.

He had just reached the stair bottom when he heard one of the upstairs doors open very slowly and close. After that there was not a sound, but quite calmly, quietly, someone came and stood at the top of the stairs, looking down.

Johnny froze. He leaned against the wall like a shadow. Sweat came out on his face and trickled in the small palms of his hands. He could not see who it was. They just stood there, watching, looking down, silent and waiting.

Things had to go on. You can’t lie in bed and forget. Johnny couldn’t just forget the stranger, the Trunk Lady, in her lonely attitude of death. The murderer, too, could not forget easily – nor that there was a small boy in the house who was too curious, too incautious.

Johnny breathed very slowly. He waited a moment. Then, when he saw that the person at the top of the stairs was not coming down, he moved quickly down the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door into the moonlit veldt of the garden.

The swimming pool lay flat and shining square, with a fringe of trees beyond it, stars over it, the bathhouse near it, the low garden rows to left and right. Farther down was the greenhouse and the garden toolshed. Johnny ran.

The shadows of the toolshed offered temporary haven. Looking back, he detected no movement in the house, no light. The body would most probably be in one of these outlying houses.

His bed would feel nice now. The lock on the door would be nice. Johnny trembled like the water in the pool. Suddenly he saw someone standing in the upstairs hall window. There was just a hint of a standing figure there. Looking down, as it had looked from the top of the stairs … Then – it was gone.

Now, down the gravel drive on the side of the house, footsteps sounded. Someone was coming from the front of the house, around under the sycamores. Someone moving in sycamore shadows, stealthily and unseen.

Then, very suddenly, breaking into half-light, she was there. She! Not Mother, nor Grandmother. But emerging half into moonlight, half in flecked shadow – was the Trunk Lady.

She looked at Johnny, far across the garden, and said nothing.

Johnny swallowed tightly and blinked. He held onto himself, his thighs, his knees, with clenched fingers. He crouched and squinted and stared in raw disbelief. A night wind set the sycamore leaves to shivering. From a way off an auto horn hooted like a lonely owl.

She was not dead after all. The whole house had tried to fool him. This was some fantastic jest he could not understand. They were all against him. His teacher was alive! There was no murder, no death! She was here, for him alone! In his hour of loneliness, she was here!

He darted out into the moonlight. Panting, not yelling, not laughing, he ran toward her across the grass, to the tiles of the swimming pool, across the tiles, around the pool and toward the sycamores.

She stood waiting for him, arms outstretched to take him into their soft embrace, sycamore shadows stirring over her cocktail dress, setting it into dreamy motion.

He said, ‘Ellie, is that you?’

He reached the rim of stirring shadow and screamed. The universe seemed to explode. The cocktail dress whirled madly, toppling in a drunken insanity. The Trunk Lady bent and there came a hoarse panting sound. She was fainting.

No! She was falling! A shadow hit him across the face, jarring his senses, once, twice, three times. He fell to his knees and before he could rise fingers were over his face, fingers that numbed him, gripping tight his sobbing mouth.

Mother!

The thought slammed him! Mother, dressed in the Trunk Lady’s cocktail dress. Decoying him out into her arms, fooling him.

Mother, don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! he tried to cry. I’m sorry I tried to bring the police! Mother, you love Father – is that why you killed Ellie? Mother, let me go! Mother, you looked so much like her standing in the sycamore shadows!

But the hands would not let him go. There was a rushing, a body against him. A series of shocks. The fingers were so strong, so much thicker than they should be. Much thicker! Johnny screamed inwardly, drawing air in an awful slobbering whistle.

The house leaned over him as if to collapse and crush him in its fall. The great old sleeping house with everyone sleeping in it, unaware that this silent struggle was happening by the flat shine of the pool.

Suddenly he realized that it was not Mother, not the Trunk Lady. The fingers were too strong. Who is stronger than Mother, sterner, more quick and hard?

Grandmother, perhaps?

The body was too hard against him. He half broke free and saw the flat of moonlight, the filmy cocktail dress lying alone, sprawled – and a mannequin hand thrown out into light. The mannequin was on the ground, dead, plastic, cold. Someone else was behind Johnny, holding, fighting.

Cousin William!

But there was no smell of cognac. The actions were the actions of a sober man. The breath was clean and clear and quick, almost sobbing.

Father!

Dad he tried to yell. Don’t, don’t, please don’t!

Then a voice was talking. Something black and small clattered on the tiles beside the swirling water, and Johnny suddenly knew. The hands were tight, the voice tighter, whispering. ‘You hurt your mother!’’

I didn’t mean to, Johnny screamed inwardly.

‘If it hadn’t been for you,’ said the voice, whispering, ‘your mother would never have known about the Dark One dying!’

I didn’t mean to find the Trunk Lady, cried Johnny silently, fighting.

‘It’ll kill her, the shock of it. If she dies, I won’t want to live. She’s all I’ve had ever since twenty years ago when it all happened!’

The voice husked on: ‘Ellie came to the party. They tried to fool me, make out she was somebody else. But I guessed. She came upstairs in her cocktail gown and I gave her a glass of brandy with sleeping powder in it, and I put her to gentle sleep in the old old trunk. Nobody would have known if you hadn’t looked. Ellie would have just disappeared forever. Only Grandma and me would know! But you’re Dark, too, you’re Dark, just like Ellie!’’ the voice whispered. ‘Sometimes, when I look at you, I see her face! So, now –’’

The Dark One. Johnny’s mind spun, ached, and thrust to get free. Uncle Flinny!

Uncle Flinny, he thought. Why do you call Ellie the Dark One? Why? Your bedtime stories, Uncle Flinny. For so many years you’ve told the same story, the same strange story about the Dark One and the beautiful woman, and now the Dark One came to be my teacher, and why did you kill her! What did she do to you? Why do you call her the Dark One? What does the bedtime story mean? I don’t know.

‘Don’t kill me, Uncle Flinny. The water’s cold and shining tonight. I don’t want to be under the cold shine of it.’’

Johnny grabbed onto the body behind him and fell forward. The two of them plunged screaming into the pool. There was a great plunging nausea. The fingers released him. There was a fighting in wet darkness, water stabbing his nostrils, bubbles breaking from his lips.

When Johnny broke surface there was a great sound of air rising from below, a dim surging of an old man jerking against the lazy tide. The man never came to the surface again. Just the bubbles came …

Johnny was crying, screaming to himself as he dragged himself from the pool and saw her lying there so lonely and tired – the mannequin in the cocktail dress. His foot knocked something dark and small rolling on the tiles. He picked it up. One of the dark chess pieces Uncle Flinny was always stealing from the chess set in Grandma’s room.

Johnny held it tight, not seeing it really, and looked at the pool with the slowing ripples on it where Uncle Flinny slept below. It was crazy, so crazy he couldn’t stand it.

He looked at the house through blurred eyes, and he was shaking like a sick dog. Lights were clicking on all over it. Windows in squares of yellow and orange. Father was running downstairs, shouting, and the back door was opening, just as Johnny collapsed, sobbing, upon the cold hard tiles …

Mother sat on one side of the bed, Dad on the other side. Johnny got his crying all out of him and lay back and looked at Dad, then Mom. ‘Mom?’

She said nothing, but smiled weakly and held onto his hands so tightly.

‘Mom, oh, Mom,’ Johnny said. ‘I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep. Why? Why, Dad?’ He looked at Dad again. ‘Dad, what happened? I don’t know.’

Dad found it hard to say. He said it anyway. ‘Uncle Flinny was married twenty years ago. His wife died when their baby was born. Uncle Flinny loved his wife very much. She was very beautiful and good. Uncle Flinny hated the baby. He’d have nothing to do with it. He thought the baby was a murderer. You can understand how he felt, can’t you? You can understand how I’d feel if Mother died?’

Johnny nodded weakly, not too sure at all that he understood. ‘Uncle Flinny put the baby in a girl’s home somewhere. He wouldn’t tell us where. She grew up, bitter, hating Uncle Flinny because he treated her unfairly. After all, she didn’t ask to be born. You see, son?’ he said.

‘Yeah, Dad.’

‘Well, just a month ago, Ellie, the baby, grown up now, found out where we lived somehow. She wrote a letter. We offered her a job as your teacher, which was only right and deserving. We thought to keep it secret from your uncle. When Ellie came, and went upstairs during the party, Uncle Flinny guessed who she was.’

Dad couldn’t speak for a moment. He closed his eyes. ‘Then – you found her in the attic. We tried to keep it quiet. We tried to make you forget. It was no use. We could never forget, ourselves. It was bound to come out. There was so much at stake, though, all our lives, we tried to work it out quietly. Things like money and reputations and business and what people would say made us do it, son … And – really – they’re not worth a damn!’

Johnny turned his head. ‘I kept poking my nose in –’

‘You were our conscience, I guess. A rather active symbol. You kept the house stirred up. Uncle Flinny thought you were hurting your mother. Your mother – his sister – was all he had after his wife’s death.’

‘So he tried to make it look like I was drowned in the pool –’

Mother suddenly bent and held on to Johnny closely. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny. Sometimes we’re blind. I didn’t think he’d do that.’

‘What about the police?’

‘The truth. Flinny killed her and committed suicide.’ Mother’s voice seemed distant and removed and tired. Johnny heard himself talking. ‘Uncle Flinny used to tell me bedtime stories, Mom. I still don’t understand. All about the Dark One and the beautiful wife, and –’

‘Someday, when you’re older, you’ll understand. Poor Ellie. She was always the Dark One.’

Things were fading away, away. It was all over, done. ‘No more bedtime stories, Mom, please. No more, huh?’

Out of the tired darkness, Mom said, ‘No more, Johnny.’

Johnny rolled wearily over into dreams. His left hand opened and the small black object in it fell clattering to the bedroom floor. He was asleep even before the Black Knight ceased rolling.

‘I’m Not So Dumb!’

Oh, I’m not so dumb. No, sir. When those men at Spaulding’s Corner said there was a dead man hereabouts, you think I ran quick to the Sheriff’s office to give in the news?

You got another think coming. I turned around and walked off from them men, looking over my shoulder every second or so to see if they was smiling after me, their eyes shining with a prank, and I went to stare at the body first. It was Mr. Simmons’s body in that empty-echoed farmhouse of his where the green weeds grew thick for years and there was a larkspur, bluebird sprouts, and morning-fires fringing the path. I tromped up to the door, knocked, and when nobody said they was home, I squeaked the door open and looked in.

Only then did I get going for the Sheriff.

On the way some kids threw rocks at me and laughed.

I met the Sheriff coming. When I told him he said yes, yes, he knew all about it, get outa the way! and I shied off, letting him and Mr. Crockwell smelling of farm dirt and Mr. Willis smelling of hardware hinges and Jamie MacHugh smelling of soap and scent and Mr. Duffy smelling of bar beer past.

When I got back to the lonely grey house they were inside bending around like a labour crew working a ditch. Can I come in, I wondered, and they grumbled no, no, go away, you would only be underfoot, Peter.

That’s the way it is. People always shake me to one side, chortling at me. Those folks who told me about the body, you know what they expected? Expected me to call the Sheriff without stopping to see if they was lying or not. Not me, not anymore. I realized what went on last spring when they sent me jogging for a skyhook and shore line for the twenty-seventh time in as many years; and when I sweated all the way down the shore curve to Wembley’s Pier to fetch a pentagonal monkey wrench which I never found in all my tries from the age of seventeen on up to now.

So I fooled them this time by checking first and then running for help.

The Sheriff slouched out of the house half an hour later, shaking his dusty head. ‘Poor Mr. Simmons, his head is all rucked in like the skin of a rusted potbelly stove.’

‘Oh?’ I asked.

The Sheriff flickered a mean yellow glance at me, switching his moustache around on his thin upper lip, balancing it. ‘You damn right it is.’

‘A murder mystery, hunh?’ I asked.

‘I won’t say it’s a mystery,’ said the Sheriff. ‘You know who done it?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly, and shut up,’ snapped the Sheriff, thumb-rolling a cigarette; and sucked it into half ash with his first flame. ‘I’m thinking.’

‘Can I help?’ I asked.

‘You,’ snorted the Sheriff, looking up at me on top of my mountain of bones and body, ‘help? Ha!’

Everybody laughed, holding rib bones like bundles of breathing sticks and blowing out cheeks and glittering their sharp shiny eyes. Me help, that was sure something to tickle.

Mr. Crockwell, he was the farmer man, he laughed, and Mr. Willis, he was the hardware-store man and tough as a rail spike, he laughed like tapping a sledge on a beam iron, and Mr. Duffy’s Irish bartender laugh made his tongue jig around pink in his mouth; and Jamie MacHugh, who would run away if you yelled boo, he laughed too.

‘I been reading Sherlock Holmes,’ I said.

The Sheriff raked me over. ‘Since when you reading?’

‘I can read, never mind,’ I said.

‘Think you can solve mysteries, eh?’ cried the Sheriff. ‘Get the hell away afore I boot the big rump off you!’

‘Leave him be, Sheriff,’ laughed Jamie MacHugh, waving one hand. He clicked his tongue at me. ‘You’re a first-rate sleuth, ain’t you, Peter?’

I blinked at him six times.

‘Sleuth, detective, Sherlock Holmes, I mean,’ said Jamie MacHugh.

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘Why, why-high,’ laughed Jamie MacHugh, ‘I’d bet my money on big Peter here any day, ann-eee day! Strong, strapping lad, Sheriff. He could solve this case with one shuffle of his big left shoe, couldn’t he, men?’

Mr. Crockwell winked at Mr. Willis and Mr. Willis tonked a laugh out like cleaning your pipe on a flat stone, and everybody shot little sly glances at the Sheriff, nudging one another’s ribs and chuckling.

‘Sure, I’d bet good money any autumn on Peter there. Here’s fifty cents says Peter can solve the case afore the Sheriff!’ said Jamie.

‘Now, look here!’ bellowed the Sheriff, standing stiff.

‘Here’s seventy cents says the same,’ drawled Mr. Willis.

And here came round money silver shining, and green money like little wings flapping on their hairy hands.

The Sheriff kicked a boot angrily. ‘Odd dammit. No feebleminded giant can solve any murder case with me around!’

Jamie MacHugh tilted back and forth on his heels. ‘Scared?’

‘Hell’s gate, no! But you’re all riding my goat!’

‘We mean it. Here’s our money, Sheriff; you meeting it?’

The Sheriff crackled he sure as hell would, and did. Everybody boomed out laughter like on bass drums and with brass trumpets. Somebody slapped me on the back but I didn’t feel it. Someone yelled for me to go in there and show him, Peter, show him, but it was all underwater, far away. Blood pounded around on big red boots in my ears, kicking my brain back and forth like a wrinkled football.

The Sheriff looked at me. I looked at him with my heavy hands hanging. He laughed right out.

‘God, I’ll solve this case before Peter has time to open his mouth for spit!’

The Sheriff wouldn’t let me be in the room with the corpse unless I stood on one leg and put both hands out in the air. I had to do it. The others said it was fair. I did it. I must have stood there during most the time we talked, on one leg, hands out to balance, and them snickering when I toppled.

‘Well,’ I said, over the corpse, ‘he’s dead.’

‘Brilliant!’ Jamie MacHugh had a bone of laughter caught in his throat, choking him.

‘And he’s been head-bashed,’ I said, ‘with a heavy thing.’

‘Colossal! Wonderful!’ spluttered Jamie.

‘And no woman done it,’ I said. ‘Because a woman couldn’t have done it so heavy and hard.’

Jamie laughed less. ‘True enough.’ He glanced at the others, eyebrows up a tremor. ‘That’s true; we didn’t think of that.’

‘That counts out all females,’ I said.

Mr. Crockwell teased the Sheriff. ‘You didn’t say that, Sheriff.’

The Sheriff’s cigarette hissed sparks in a Fourth of July pinwheel. ‘I was going to say it! Damn, anyone can see a woman didn’t do it! Peter, you go stand in the corner and do your talking!’

I stood in the corner on one foot.

‘And –’ I said.

‘Shut up,’ said the Sheriff. ‘You’ve had your say, let me have mine.’ He hitched up his trousers on his rump. Silence. The Sheriff scowled. ‘Well, like he says, the man’s dead, head stove in, and a woman didn’t do it and –’

‘Ha-ha,’ said Mr. Crockwell.

The Sheriff shot him a blazing look. Mr. Crockwell covered his mouth with his hand.

‘And the body’s been dead twenty-four hours,’ I said, sniffing. ‘Any dimwit knows that!’ yelled the Sheriff.

‘You didn’t say that before,’ said James MacHugh.

‘Do I have to say, can’t I think a few?’

I looked around the empty room. Mr. Simmons was a strange man, living alone with no furniture in the house and only carpets here and there, and one cot upstairs. Didn’t want to spend money on stuff. Saved it.

I said, ‘There wasn’t much fuss or fight; nothing’s upset. Must’ve been killed by someone he trusted.’

The Sheriff started to swear but Jamie MacHugh said for him to let me talk, this was damn interesting. The others said so too. I smiled. I closed my eyes, grinning soft, and opened them again and everyone looked at me for the first time in my life as if I was good enough to stand beside them. I stepped from the corner, slowly.

I crouched beside Mr. Simmons, looking. He was blood ripe. The Sheriff quick followed, imitating me, on his knees. I peered close. The Sheriff peered close. I fussed with the rug. Sheriff fussed with the rug. I smoothed Mr. Simmons’s right sleeve. Guess who smoothed Mr. Simmons’s left sleeve? I made a humming sound like a comb and tissue in my throat. The Sheriff ground his teeth together. Everybody stood high and sweating sour in the summer-heated quiet.

‘What was that about him being murdered by a friend?’ Mr. Crockwell wanted to know.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Someone he trusted, no commotion.’

‘That’s right,’ said Mr. Willis, who didn’t speak much.

Everybody said it was right, all right.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘what people didn’t like the cold man here?’

The Sheriff’s voice was high and stringy with irritation. ‘Simmons wasn’t liked by many. Always fightin’ with folks, tetchy-like.’

I looked at the men, wondering which one I could detect to be the murderer. My eyes kept snapping in rubber-band moves to Jamie MacHugh. Jamie always was flighty. You lost your matchbox and stared at Jamie, he’d whine, guilty, ‘I didn’t take it.’ If you dropped a nickel and it went away Jamie’d say, ‘I didn’t do it!’

Funny. Something scared him as a kid, all the time he felt guilty, whether or not he was. So I couldn’t help but see him now, and go up and down him with my eyes, him so nervous and losing his head over things. Just opposite of Hardware Willis, who would stand rock stiff while lightning bounced around him.

‘I heard Jamie say Mr. Simmons should be killed,’ I said.

Jamie opened his eyes. ‘I never said that. And if I did, you know how you say things you never mean.’

‘I heard you say it, anyways.’

‘Now, now, now,’ said Jamie three times. ‘You, you, you are not Sheriff for this city, city. You just shut your trap.’

The Sheriff fox-grinned. ‘What’s the matter with you, Jamie? Second ago you was egging Peter on, all het up for his side.’

‘I don’t want anybody accusing me, that’s all, you big slob,’ said Jamie to me. ‘Go stand on one foot in the corner!’

I didn’t blink my eyes. ‘I heard you say Mr. Simmons should be dead.’

‘You look sort of nervous, Jamie?’ remarked the Sheriff.

‘I remember,’ said Mr. Willis. ‘You did say that, Jamie. Say, Peter, you got a good memory.’ He nodded at me smartly. ‘I bet fingerprints of Jamie are around here,’ I said.

‘Sure,’ cried Jamie, pale. ‘Sure, they’re here. I was here early yesterday afternoon to try and get back my thirty dollars from that damn scoundrel lying limp on the floor, you elephant!’

‘You see,’ I said. ‘He was here. His fingerprints all around like ants at a picnic.’ And I added, ‘I bet if we looked in his pocket we’d find Mr. Simmons’s wallet full of money, I bet we would.’

‘Nobody looks through my pockets!’

‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Jamie.

‘Sheriff,’ I said.

The Sheriff looked at me, looked at Jamie. ‘Jamie,’ he said.

‘Sheriff,’ said Jamie.

‘Who was it picked me to solve this case?’ I said. ‘Jamie did, Sheriff.’

The Sheriff’s cigarette hung cold on his lip, twitching. ‘That’s right.’

‘Why’d he want me solving it, Sheriff?’ I asked, and answered, ‘Because he thought I’d only kick up mud in the creek, rile you so you wouldn’t get nothing done.’

‘Well odd damn, imagine that,’ murmured the others, moving back.

The Sheriff squinted tight.

‘Peter, I got to admit, you got something. Jamie was sure hot to bring you up to mess around. He started them goddamn bets. Irritated me with you until I can’t see beans from breakfast!’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Well now, I didn’t kill nobody, I didn’t sic Peter on you for that purpose, Sheriff, oh, no, I didn’t,’ said Jamie MacHugh, sweat gobbering out his head like water from them fancy park sprinkling systems in the concrete skulls of them pretty naked women statues.

The Sheriff said, ‘Let Peter search you.’

Jamie said no, as I grabbed his wrists with one big hand and held them while I put my other hand in his rear pants pocket and pulled out the dead man’s wallet.

‘No,’ whispered Jamie like a ghost.

I let him go. He swung around next thing, gibbering, and slammed out the door, crying, before anybody could stop him.

‘Go get him, Peter!’ everybody yelled.

‘You really want me to?’ I asked. ‘You’re not kidding like with the skyhook and shore line?’

‘No, no,’ they cried. ‘Get him!’

I thundered out the door and ran after Jamie in the hot sun over a green hill, through a little woods. What if Jamie gets away, I thought. No, he can’t do that. I’ll run fast.

Just near the edge of town I caught up with Jamie.

He never should have tried to fight me.

Crunch.

So now people sit around the Sheriff’s office on summer evenings dangling their shoes in a little laced pattern and speaking with smoke blowing from their easy mouths about how the Sheriff let me solve the case. And the Sheriff says he don’t care, he’s just as pleased that I caught the criminal as if he’d done it himself; but the Sheriff winces when he says this.

Kids on the street don’t kick my shins no more or throw rocks at me. They come ask to hold my hands as we walk downtown. They ask me to tell how I did it. Even ladies in pretty blue or green dresses look over back fences and ask. And I shine up the battered silver star the Sheriff had left over from twenty years ago, catch it on my chest where it sparkles, and I tell everybody again how I solved the Simmons case and caught the murderer Jamie MacHugh, who broke his neck trying to get out of my hands.

Nobody ever tells me to run get a skyhook or shore line or a left-handed screwdriver no more. They think my silences are thinking ones. Men nod at me from cars and say hello Peter and they don’t laugh so much, they sort of admire me, and just this morning asked if I intended solving any more cases.

I’m very happy. Happier than in all my days. I’m certainly glad now that Mr. Simmons died and I had a chance to catch Jamie MacHugh that way. No telling how much longer these people might have pestered me.

And if you’ll promise, cross your heart, hope to die, spit over your left shoulder, not to tell nobody, I’ll let you in on a little secret.

I killed Mr. Simmons myself.

You understand why, don’t you?

As I said at the beginning – I’m not so dumb.

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