Jack and Susan in 1953

by Michael McDowell

  Rodolfo took her out onto the lawn in front of the house so that she could see the six pillars that gave the place its name.

  The house was quite beautiful; long, low, and rambling, with windows of different and odd sizes. The pillars served to hold up a wide porch roof that sheltered the front windows from the sun. They were thick and massive, disproportionate to the rest of the house, but in a place so pleasant, cheerful, and comfortable, matters of architectural purity seemed of little importance. Susan, for a few seconds, as she looked up at the house with the bright sun at her back, entertained a little fantasy of living here with Jack.

  She could imagine long, lazy days in the course of which they hadn’t a care in the world; no worries about being arrested, being trapped in small spaces, or being done in by nine-year-old boys called Armando.

  “Why did you come here?” Susan asked Rodolfo.

  “Here? The Pillars?”

  Susan nodded. He had wound her arm tightly within his.

  “To burn it down,” he said.

  Half an hour after he had been forced into the small dusty store in San Cristóbal, Jack came out again.

  The handcuffs had been sawed from his arm, and given as a souvenir to the boy who had pumped his gas. With his good arm laid across the edge of the table—the better to be sawed upon—and his bad arm pressed across his breast in the broken cast and sling, he was fed beans and rice by a patient old woman who also put a bottle of beer to his lips every now and then. A daughter of the house had taken English in school, and Jack talked with her, hoping to explain his situation.

  The daughter of the house didn’t know that much English, but she made a real effort, for she did understand that Jack was married to James Bright’s niece, and evidently Susan’s uncle had been well liked in the area. There was something about his treatment of some infamous and hated band of sharecroppers, as nearly as Jack could make out. The old woman crossed herself, fork in hand, every time James Bright was mentioned.

  Best of all, when Jack came out of the little store, he had a map of the area, with the location of The Pillars clearly marked.

  He followed the map carefully, back out onto the lonely roads that wound past wide, dismal fields of tobacco. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of the Caribbean to his left as he drove west. It was now about four in the afternoon, and the sun was shining directly into his eyes, making it difficult to see. He’d been driving along with a low fence at his left for some time before he came to any break in it. He passed the break before he’d realized that this must be the entrance to The Pillars.

  He backed up and looked for a sign. He didn’t find one, but he did find a post that looked as if it had borne a sign, and that the sign had recently been ripped off.

  He turned down the narrow dirt road and drove cautiously along it. On both sides, fields of sugarcane rose up to a height of eight feet and more. Jack could see nothing on either side of him but the forest of cane. If he had had a good arm to stretch out the window he could have touched the stalks. Above was the bleached sky, ahead of and behind him, the narrow road. Between the ruts of the road grew weeds so high and coarse Jack could feel them as they dragged along the chassis of the Ford.

  Once or twice other tracks crossed out into the cane fields, and Jack thought it a good idea to stop while he was still out of sight of the house. He turned the car down one of these lanes—so narrow that the green stalks of cane brushed against the side of the car, and the foliage brushed against the side of Jack’s face through the open window. Once Jack had hidden the car from the main road, he turned off the ignition, got out, and retraced his path.

  The double-rutted road between the fields of cane wound on, and Jack was sorry now that he’d drunk that beer back in San Cristóbal. The sun was still hot, shining in his face; his left arm ached and itched under his cast; he was sweating and filthy. And he didn’t know what he was going to face at the end of the road.

  He had neither a weapon nor the use of both arms, and he had to admit to himself that Woolf, panting along behind him, was not the dog to attack on command.

  Jack, despite his fears for Susan’s safety, began to hope that this tiny rutted road would go on forever.

  It didn’t, of course. Soon Jack noticed the tops of trees over the cane field to his right. And by the time he had figured out this meant the cultivated fields were coming to an end, they stopped.

  He found himself standing at the edge of a lawn. The road widened a bit here and led to a kind of whitewashed stone archway, and through this arch Jack could see a paved courtyard with beds of flowers.

  He moved across the grass, trying to stay out of sight of the house, and peered through the archway into the center of the courtyard. There he saw the dark green Cadillac in which he had seen Rodolfo and Libby drive away from the racetrack. The trunk was open.

  Jack saw no one, heard nothing. He stood still for a few minutes, leaning down to hold on to Woolf’s collar to prevent the dog from running off.

  Woolf lay on the ground, exhausted from the heat. Birds called in the trees that surrounded the house, and Jack could hear the soothing crash of waves on the beach.

  Except for the evidence of the automobile, Jack would have surmised that the place was deserted.

  Woolf suddenly jumped to his feet, and took off—with such alacrity that Jack lost his grip. The dog was headed for a leaking faucet he’d just seen on the far side of the patio. Jack instinctively started after him, but before he had taken more than half a step, the sound of a gunshot rang out from the direction of the house, and a chip of stone flew up just in front of Woolf as the bullet struck the pavement. The shard struck Woolf in the flank, and the dog skidded and yelped and plunged into a flower bed.

  Jack jumped back to the protection of the archway.

  The house was not deserted.

  Now, having been lucky enough to escape this immediate detection, all he had to do was to find a way inside, disarm the person with the gun, and rescue Susan.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  “BURN…IT…DOWN?” Susan repeated slowly. She tried to imagine the house in front of her in flames, and couldn’t. It seemed such a waste, such a terrible waste. She tried to think if perhaps Rodolfo meant something else or if his very good English had suddenly given way, and he intended something quite different and innocent.

  “Yes,” he replied, understanding perfectly, “burn it down to the ground.”

  He led her gently back to the house, as if they were an affianced couple, strolling about the estate of some happy and well-situated relative.

  “Would you like to see upstairs?” he asked.

  “Before it’s too late?”

  There were times she wished she could bridle her tongue. She made a mental resolution to do better in the future.

  Rodolfo didn’t reply. They stepped inside, and after the heat of the sun, the marble-floored entranceway was cool and dim. He led her up a curving staircase that was carved of some dark wood; it appeared to have been polished recently. A stair carpet patterned in deep red and blue sank thick and soft beneath her feet.

  Upstairs a long corridor ran along the front nearly the length of the house, with a row of evenly spaced windows overlooking the sloping greensward and the Caribbean. Gauzy white curtains blew in and tangled themselves across their path as Rodolfo led her toward a door at the end of the hall.

  Along the way they passed other doors, to guest bedrooms and bathrooms, Susan surmised. One door was open, and yes, she’d been right. It was a bedroom, and on the bed lay Libby.

  “Libby!” Susan called. Libby didn’t stir.

  Rodolfo guided Susan past. “Libby is sleeping,” he said. He opened the door at the end of the corridor and Susan stepped into a massive bedroom. Her uncle’s, she assumed, though its furnishings and ornamentation were rather more ornate than she would have predicted for a bachelor. The room was crowded with antique French furniture, a host of bibelots, engravings in gilded frames, many lamps and mirrors, and a v
ast mahogany bed with a graceful canopy of mosquito netting.

  “Lie down,” Rodolfo said, “you must be very tired.”

  The bed looked white and pristine, and Susan felt soiled. But there were other reasons for not lying down.

  “Why?” she asked.

  “I said, because you must be very tired.”

  “No,” she said. “Why are you going to burn down this house?”

  Rodolfo seated himself in a chair at a small desk that was arranged against a section of wall between two windows. He was turned so that he could face both the desk and Susan as well. He didn’t answer, but pulled out a drawer of the desk and extracted its contents: two handfuls of folded papers and envelopes.

  He began examining the papers, making no reply to Susan’s question.

  “Why did you have my uncle killed?” she asked. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “Ah!” he said, unfolding a document that had a legal stamp on it, “you recognized Armando.”

  “Yes,” said Susan. “That was the boy who killed James.”

  “Armando is my brother,” said Rodolfo. “Actually, my half-brother. We have the same father.”

  Susan had a sudden moment of panic. Should she run? Where would she run to? Rodolfo’s casual insouciance suggested that he had no fear of her escaping. And if that was so…

  “Tell me!” she pleaded.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Everything. I don’t understand any of this.”

  As he went through the papers, Rodolfo merely dropped them on the floor, the way a man might do who knew they were soon to be destroyed.

  “No,” said Rodolfo, peering into another drawer, “there is no reason for you to be told anything, for in a little while…” He didn’t finish his sentence for he’d become absorbed in the contents of a letter, which made him smile.

  Actually, he didn’t need to finish, because Susan understood him well enough as it was. In a little while you will be dead…

  Some attempt at escape began to seem like a better option than simply letting this maniac kill her without her putting up a struggle.

  Rodolfo seemed to sense this change in her attitude. He glanced up from the amusing letter. He was no longer smiling. “Lie down on the bed as I told you,” he said in an icy tone she’d never heard him use before. “Or I will shoot you now.”

  Susan saw that he now held a small revolver, hardly larger than his hand; it had apparently lain out of sight in the recesses of her uncle’s desk.

  Susan sat down on the edge of the bed. Now there seemed to be nothing to do but put off the desperate moment; only the slender hope that Jack would arrive in time with more help than just that dog.

  “What are you looking for?” she asked as calmly as she could.

  “The deeds to your uncle’s properties.”

  “What makes you think he’d keep them here?”

  Rodolfo shrugged. “I don’t think he did. I think they’re probably in a safe deposit box in his Havana bank. But just in case he did keep them here, I don’t want to burn them up.”

  “Rodolfo…”

  “Yes, Susan?”

  “Why did you come to New York?”

  “To get you to marry me,” he replied simply.

  In a third drawer he found a sheaf of financial statements. He examined the one on top, glanced at the one on bottom, tore off a letterhead, and then pushed everything else off on to the floor. Old canceled checks fluttered over the carpet.

  Susan remembered seeing more than one movie in which a hopeless victim persuaded her potential murderer to explain his motives, to detail a long and successful series of deviousnesses, to exult in his perfidious cleverness, and—because of the time lost in this egotistical display—to forfeit the whole game. The heroine was invariably rescued, and the villain, if not killed on the spot, ended up in jail. Of course those were movies from her childhood, the thirties. Maybe in 1953 things didn’t work quite that way.

  If Susan could only persuade Rodolfo to tell her the whole story—and it looked to be a complicated one—then maybe this would provide extra time for the cavalry, in the form of her one-armed husband and their feeble-minded pet, to arrive.

  “You knew I was going to inherit this house.”

  “Of course,” he admitted.

  “But if you wanted it so badly, then why are you going to burn it down? And what about Libby?” She wasn’t so much concerned with his answers as she was anxious that he talk. If he was talking, and responding to her questions, then he could not also be setting about to murder her in that maddeningly unconcerned manner of his. But her plan didn’t seem to be working.

  “As I said before,” said Rodolfo, calmly shutting the last of the drawers, “there’s no need for you to know. Because in just a few minutes it’s not going to make any difference to you at all.”

  He rose from the desk with the gun.

  Susan tensed as he came nearer the bed.

  “Lie down,” he said once more.

  Susan could see no help for it but to do as he’d ordered.

  Still aiming the revolver at her, Rodolfo reached up with his left hand and tore down the filmy mosquito netting.

  “Rip this apart,” he commanded her, “and twist it.”

  Without getting up from the soft feather mattresses beneath her, Susan did so, making a small rope about half an inch thick out of the netting, but taking her time doing so. She tried to control the shaking she felt inside; she wouldn’t give this Cuban cobra the satisfaction.

  “Now wrap it around your ankles,” said Rodolfo. When she was done he tugged at it to make sure the knot was tight.

  “Now make another one.”

  A second makeshift rope was twisted out of the netting. “Turn over.”

  She thought she saw her chance. She knew that he’d have to put down the gun to tie her hands together, so when she rolled over, she counted one, two and then kicked out with all her might, hoping to catch him in that vulnerable place between his legs.

  Her feet struck against air, and she succeeded in doing nothing but turning herself crossways on the bed and tangling the spread beneath her.

  Then she heard a shot—and even though she feared that in the next moment she would die, she did not scream out. She felt nothing.

  By the time she realized that the shot had come from elsewhere in the house, she felt a hard blow to her temple. Then there was blackness and there was nothing else.

  It was the smell of kerosene that roused her.

  She thought for a moment that she was back in summer camp at Lake Winnipesaukee. But that would make her no more than thirteen years old, and she knew that wasn’t right. Which meant that she was in someplace other than New Hampshire. She opened her eyes and saw an expanse of white silk.

  The odor of kerosene was stronger. The noisome smell did not help her headache. She could not move, and she realized that her legs and hands were tied.

  Then she remembered where she was, and under what circumstances. She jerked her body about so that her head hung over the bed. She could see splotches of liquid on the carpet, and whole puddles of the flammable stuff on the bare floor inside the hallway door.

  The light in the room wasn’t much different, so she knew that she hadn’t been unconscious long.

  “Libby!” she screamed.

  Rodolfo leaned in through the doorway, evidently to avoid stepping in the puddles. “It would have been better if you had remained unconscious,” he said. He smiled a smile of slight embarrassment. “I don’t really like doing this, you know.”

  “You’re going to burn me alive!”

  “You and Libby,” he amended. “She is unconscious, I’m happy to say.”

  “Why don’t you shoot me!”

  “Because it must look like an accident,” he explained. “The mosquito-netting ropes will burn completely, and no one will know that you were tied.”

  He reached into his pocket, and took out a small packet of matches he’d picked
up from the Varadero Room at the Hotel Nacional. Susan even remembered seeing him place them in his pocket.

  “I’m very sorry,” he said with what appeared to Susan, even in her predicament, to be absolute sincerity.

  He tore out one of the paper matches, struck it, held it beneath the book until the whole thing seared up in a whoosh of flame. Then he tossed the small torch into the center of the room.

  His aim was good, and the amount of kerosene he’d used was substantial. The Oriental carpet on the floor of James Bright’s bedroom suddenly exploded in a large circle of flame.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  IT WAS JACK’S fervent hope that whoever had shot at the dog had not seen the dog’s master. Jack could have run back across the side lawn to the shelter of the trees, but he decided against that. Someone inside the house would have been watching for another running target, canine or otherwise. So keeping himself low and using the ornamental plantings for cover, he crept up until he got to the house itself.

  He now flattened himself against the side of the house, no pleasant sensation considering the sharpness of the stucco covering. He inched toward the front, ducked beneath a window, came up again, and ducked beneath another window. At the front corner of the house he paused for a moment using a large, blooming oleander as cover.

  He crept around the front of the house, feeling absurdly exposed. It was well that poor Woolf was keeping away.

  The first window he reached was open. He stood beside it and listened. He heard nothing inside. He took a chance and peered in. At this end of the house was some sort of long narrow storage room, dim and cool. Through the open window, even with the oleander at his side, he was certain he detected the odor of kerosene.

  It was difficult, Jack realized, for a man with his arm in a cast to negotiate climbing through a window four feet off the ground, but he decided to try. For some reason he thought it was better to be shot at close range than to be picked off as he ran across an open lawn. He got as close to the window as he could, and then raised his left leg, and got it through the aperture. He gripped the lower half of the window sash with his good arm, and pulled himself up and into the storeroom, banging his head, getting splinters into his hand, and tearing a hole in the front of his trousers.