Quiet Dell: A Novel

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  Eric regarded her. “I agree.”

  “As to the story, we shall file a teaser, to make the afternoon edition, under both bylines: an Iowa farmer has identified Harry Powers as his son. Full story follows. If I telegraph Grimm, and we are back in two hours, we can phone him to corroborate the Wisconsin identification made through his office, and state the ID as fact. Our stories will then accompany the photograph in the evening edition, which the AP will pick up by tomorrow. As to the Wisconsin angle, I agree; we say in the teaser that farmer Jacob Aukes of Kanawha, Iowa, alleges, et cetera.”

  Eric looked at her with a quizzical smile. He was angry, or admiring, and had a high color. “You have a bit of dust, here, on your cheek, cousin.” He held her chin in one hand and touched a moistened forefinger to the corner of her mouth. “There,” he said.

  “Are you practicing seduction techniques on me, Eric? You test my patience.”

  “Do I? You have straw in your hair, as well.” He combed her hair with his fingers, loosening the pins, touching the bits of straw as tousled strands of her hair fell from its chignon. “We are both covered with hay dust,” he said quietly. “If you were a man of my preferences, with whom I had experienced this journey, I would be tasting you now. As it is, I keep seeing you pour that jug of water over your head at the Gore, so suddenly that you wrenched my heart open.”

  “Eric, don’t play with me.”

  “Emily, I think you know I am not playing. I find myself very sympathetic to Charles O’Boyle, in consideration of one matter.”

  Emily felt her hair come down around her. “And which matter is that, Eric?”

  His eyes were a lovely blue-green, and serious now, if not as grave and angry as before. “On the matter of marrying a woman, when the woman is superior in every way to any sexual partner with whom one is currently engaged, or whom one employs for pleasure or safety.”

  Beyond the dash of the truck, a small cloud of grasshoppers whirred along the road, alighting and arising in hopscotch motion. She made herself attend his words; her feelings for him were layered beyond clarity. “My dear Eric,” she said, and drew back to look at him. “Perhaps you are speaking to the wrong party. Perhaps you should discuss this with Charles O’Boyle.”

  “Don’t be daft.” Eric pulled away from her and turned to face the road. He watched the grasshoppers rise and fall and flow into the field opposite, swallowed by the corn.

  “I know you think of him. Have you contacted him at all?” These were questions, and statements to acknowledge. “He did not attend the Eichers’ service at St. Luke’s. He did not send word. No one, to my knowledge, has heard from him.”

  “No. He does not answer his Chicago exchange, and careful inquiries of his firm reveal that he has not come back.”

  “I wonder what has happened to him.”

  “I don’t know, Emily. Perhaps someone has killed him in Mexico; that happens. Perhaps he is in love with some Mexican youth. Perhaps he cannot face coming back. His letter to the police has appeared everywhere, now that Powers is arrested and the bodies found.”

  “His firm has no address for him in Mexico?”

  “Certainly not. That would be very stupid of him. He has probably been in touch with them to say that he is avoiding reporters due to his involvement in the Eicher matter, and of course they would be very sympathetic, as it gives them a direct link to the story of the hour.”

  She felt, suddenly, the heavy day. The truck on the flat road would appear a small dot from the sky into which they would soon ascend; the leaves of the corn all around them would be invisible; the grasshoppers would live for some days, then litter the ground.

  “Eric, shall we file at Fairbank?”

  He was starting the truck. “Yes. Your grandparents’ farm is there.” He looked at her, driving. “We will file the teaser, you will send the telegram. In Chicago, I will make the call to Grimm.”

  “Yes, you make the call. There is the turn to Fairbank. The farm is two miles this side of the town.” Eric was her intimate, she thought, her partner in these depths, like William, but differently. She felt her breath come fast as they neared the turn, and only pointed the way.

  From fifty yards, the house came into view. The tall line of cottonwoods was fully in leaf, and their canopies almost touched, rising even above the peaked roof of the house. The modest gingerbread trim was still painted yellow, and the house, dark green. Someone had fenced the yard, and built an outbuilding far back, painted to match the house. The front porch and steps, and the side porch that let onto a circular gazebo, were in good repair, and empty of any furniture.

  “This is the farmhouse? It’s a small mansion.” Eric stopped the truck, shouldered his camera, and came around to assist Emily. He lifted her onto the road and set her on her feet. “You aren’t faint, are you?”

  “Perhaps a bit. It is only . . . so strange to see this house.”

  “How large was the farm? Where were your father’s people born?”

  “They were English and came from East Anglia, nearly two hundred years ago, to a land grant of some three thousand acres. They gave the land, in the 1850s, for Fairbank Township, the Presbyterian church, and the Dutch Reformed, as well, to build the community, and of course the railroad took the land they wanted, for the route and the station.” They were walking up the front steps, where they knocked at the door and received no answer.

  “No one is home,” Eric said.

  “I feel as though my grandparents should be here, that I have arrived at the wrong time, and missed them.”

  “Where was your room?”

  “At the far end of the house, just over the gazebo,” Emily said. “I loved to wait there at night, for fireflies in the fields.”

  “Stand just there, so I see the whole house behind you.” Eric was photographing the house, the view from the gazebo, all of it. “Your father left here. Did he ever return?”

  They sat on the bare board floor, facing one another. “He went away to college in the East, and did return, twice a year, but my mother didn’t like the farm. He brought me, when I was very young. Even at two or three, I stayed for weeks. My grandmother . . . adored me, and was good with children.”

  “Your mother wasn’t. Good with children.”

  “No. She’d grown up in boarding schools and thought I would do the same. She wanted something for herself, some vocation, but was never sure what it was, and women didn’t explore such options, at the time.”

  “How did your father die, Emily?”

  “He died of pneumonia in Chicago, unexpectedly, in 1903. They couldn’t save him, though he was only thirty-three. He never knew about so much—the Great War, Lindbergh’s flight, nothing of my life. But when I was here, I felt him close to me, and of course my grandparents spoke of him. They let me know, every day, that I was miraculous, his gift to them.”

  Eric looked up into the circular roof above them, which was hung with intricate spiderwebs. “Yes, they helped give you that—perceptive confidence. You are seldom daunted.”

  “My grandmother always told me, ‘He is with you, very pleased, very proud.’ It’s not so different from what Annabel Eicher’s grandmother said to her.”

  “It’s quite different, Emily, really,” Eric said gently. “According to O’Boyle, Annabel was told to listen for messages from the beyond. But I know you feel a sympathy for her, that is not simply childlike—”

  “I suppose I feel a sympathy for who she might have been, and I don’t patronize an idea of her, simply because she was a child. Children are themselves, after all.”

  “Are they?” Eric leaned back against the railing. “Was Harm Drenth ‘himself’?”

  “I don’t know, Eric. How did you read the father?”

  “Tireless Dutch farmer. Germanic, typical of his undemonstrative culture; sons should work, be good. Powers seems to have been uncontrollable early on. I do believe those stories Aukes told us.” He stood to help Emily up. “We must find Fairbank, and file.” />
  “I thought I might know when I saw Wilko Drenth, whether he’d done something to his son, or felt responsible—but I wasn’t sure.”

  “I know a bit of Dutch.” Eric kept a hand at her waist as they crossed the yard. “Drenth repeated ‘shame’ as though to himself, but we already knew the boy shamed the family, from Aukes.”

  “His own shame, perhaps. Interesting how the revelation always comes in the last moments of an interview, just as one nearly turns away.” They were in the truck. Emily looked back at the house, thankful for Eric’s voice. “What Drenth muttered was like a bitter prayer, or a curse. And what was that phrase he repeated?”

  Eric pulled onto the road, throwing up an arc of dust. “I’m not sure, but meer means ‘lake,’ and I think the rest means ‘I knew,’ or ‘I knew then,’ as in, ‘even then, I knew’ . . . something, with certainty, but didn’t act on his knowledge.”

  “Saving the boy, in a lake, when he knew,” Emily said. “That is what he meant. His responsibility in these murders is that he saved the child who would commit them. He saved the child, yet he already knew something was wrong. Something a beating, a mother’s love, chores, getting older, couldn’t fix.” She looked about them, for they had reached the town.

  “This is Fairbank, then,” Eric said.

  “Yes. Farther on is the town hall, the school. The train depot is beyond the curve. The telegraph office is here.”

  Inside, they composed and filed. Emily sent Grimm a telegram:

  Sheriff W. B. Grimm Stop Clarksburg West Virginia Stop Powers Served Time Stop Name Of Harm Herman Drenth Stop Waupun State Prison Stop Wisconsin Stop Dutch Immigrant Stop Emily Thornhill.

  They would make the airfield in fifteen minutes. Eric drove straight on. The landing strip shimmered to the right. The fields were flung out around them; miles of grain and corn lay open to the cloudless sky. It was pitiless and beautiful. She did not believe in evil, but in mistakes and conditions, in cause and effect across arcs so long that history might seem reasonless, but never was.

  She saw the father, in another country, hesitate an instant, and plunge toward the boy in the lake. Not far from shore, but far enough.

  And the boy, flailing, saw him, felt the hesitation, the recognition: Harm would do bad things. He was unknowable, even as a child, to himself, to others. Born different, cunning. Manipulative, unloving, remorseless. Curious. Covert. Taking things apart to see inside them. A clock. A dead bird. A living bird. Blood on his fingers. Washing his hands before they saw. Secret things, a secret life. Stealing small toys for his sister, but hiding her dolls. Cutting up the dolls, tearing off the heads. Pounding, smashing. Bury the pieces. Here, and there, where no one will look.

  XI.

  Emily Thornhill’s Clippings, September 1931

  “Where Is This Virginia?”

  Wilko Drenth, pious immigrant farmer of near Fairbank, Iowa, recognizes the picture of Harry F. Powers in a newspaper as his son, Harm Drenth. Looking on is Drenth’s son-in-law, Evert Schroder . . .

  —Ames Daily Tribune, September 5, 1931

  A curious trait shown by Drenth was remembered by H. H. Delthouse, who said that Drenth had once borrowed a watch from his brother and had taken it apart and put it back together again before returning it.

  —Mason City Globe-Gazette, September 11, 1931

  Middle-aged Women Were Favorites: Officers point to the fact that Powers picked middle-aged women as his “prospects” because they were susceptible to his amours. Most of the women with whom he corresponded and who later became his murder victims had passed or were nearing the “fat and forty” age women dread.

  —The Clarksburg Telegram, September 12, 1931

  Starving: “There are more people starving for love and companionship than there are starving for bread,” red-inked the American Friendship Society of Detroit, which offered “ABSOLUTELY FREE” lists of wealthy widows to anybody who had the price of a two-cent stamp. In four years the “society” had collected more than $10,000 in “dues.”

  —“We Make Thousands Happy,” Time magazine, September 14, 1931

  Discovery of another alias for Powers: Joe Gildaw. Found on a photo of him inscribed in his hand, “Taken Aug. 14, 1924.” . . . At the time he was writing to a girl, Anna, at Vanderbilt PA. . . . An acknowledgment of the photo was also found, addressed to Joe Gildaw, Miller SD. Found in the trunk also was a photo of an Illinois woman who had left her home two years ago to marry a man in Iowa and who has not been heard of since.

  —The Clarksburg Telegram, September 15, 1931

  XII.

  September 1931

  Chicago and Park Ridge, Illinois

  Clarksburg, West Virginia

  Charles O’Boyle: Ceremony

  September 4, 1931

  He’d stood on a balcony in Mexico, looking down into the square, and made himself acknowledge that he would never see them again. There would be no long table decorated with thistles and pasteboard turkeys at Thanksgiving, no candles at Christmas, or the miniature Yuletide village the girls so adored. He would not bring the children here, to this coastal town of beaches and sun-drenched plazas, after his marriage to Anna.

  She’d told him nothing; she knew he would never have allowed her to enter into such folly. He could not blame himself for anything but too much absence. She’d pretended to consider, had agreed to discuss their plans in mid-July, when he was back in Chicago. In that alternate world, they announced their engagement in September, married at Thanksgiving, embarked on a family wedding trip to Mexico during the children’s Christmas holiday. Annabel stood beside him on the balcony, flying a small kite shaped like a bird; Anna kept Grethe close beside her in the crowded square below, shopping for the lace mantillas young girls wore to church. Hart stood near, at the next stall, where boys sold painted maracas made of gourds.

  He knew, of course, where men found men, which small tequila bars to frequent, where to have dinner in outdoor cafés after dark, drinking sweet, bitter coffee by the fountains. He avoided what he knew and went, day by day, to the many small churches near the hotel. He lit candles for the children, for Anna, reciting their names like a rosary. The sound of the coins in the offering boxes, the little flames leaping up on the small white candles, were his only ceremony.

  He arrived home, unknowingly, the day of the memorial service, and read the notice in the Tribune. He would not, could not attend, and was unprepared for the complete desolation he felt on entering his apartment. He could not sleep. He decided to ask Dunnegan for a transfer and leave Chicago. New York, perhaps, somewhere they had never been, where no one would speak of them. His service had taken numerous messages from reporters who wanted to exploit his connection to the case. He’d returned one call, to Eric Lindstrom, late last night.

  “Lindstrom? It’s Charles O’Boyle.”

  “You’re back then. May I see you?”

  “I’m just back. On the day of the service, actually. I could not . . . attend.”

  “Of course not. I’m just back myself, tonight, from Iowa. We found Powers’ father; we know who Powers is. I have a great deal to tell you.” He paused. “The Eicher estate is to be sold tomorrow. The contents of the house. Allow me to drive you there, to retrieve your things.”

  “All of it sold, tomorrow?”

  “I know William Malone would like to speak with you, about anything you want withheld from sale, that you might want to purchase. The Eicher possessions belong to the bank now. Do you want his exchange?”

  Charles took down the number. “It seems late to phone him. I would like one of her paintings, and, her desk. It should not go to a stranger.”

  “You need only leave a message, on his service. And may I come by for you tomorrow? You’ll need transport, for those things you’ve stored.”

  “You’re certain you don’t mind?”

  “Quite certain. I’ll be at your building at seven, parked by the curb.” He paused, as though to say more. “Good night, then.”

>   Charles found himself listening, after the click of disconnection, to the air on the line.

  Emily Thornhill: Estate Sale

  September 4, 1931

  Emily wanted to arrive early at the Eicher house, though she’d barely slept. She rode the 7:00 A.M. streetcar from the Loop, the very line Heinrich Eicher had undoubtedly taken daily from Park Ridge to Chicago. It was a mere half hour. Duty sat quietly in her valise, which she held on her lap; she kept her hand upon him, and watched the glint of the rails race past. Trees overhanging the streetcar line had begun to turn yellow and orange, halfway up their branches. She welcomed autumn, and winter’s advance; this summer must pass. There must be storms to blow away the images she could not outdistance, and the memory of Iowa’s unrelenting sunlight.

  Eric agreed not to include for publication the revelation of Drenth’s near drowning as a boy, or Wilko Drenth’s words, sworn or prayed in Dutch. They were not public statements, for he’d no idea Eric understood. The boy was dangerous. His name did not mean “harm” in the father’s tongue, but the father knew: the child liked to hurt things, watch them hurt, he felt no loyalty or guilt. He did not love his father, or anyone.

  Many believed drowning an easy death, a fast, rushed cessation: enclosure, drifting down.

  Animals left their damaged young on the ground, in the open, intuiting difference, danger to the herd not visible to the eye. She remembered Annabel’s sign: Graveyard for Animals. Perhaps it was still there. The bird buried below was bones and dust.

  She unfolded her copy of the Tribune, delivered to her door each day by six. Eric had filed the follow-up on Powers’ Wisconsin imprisonment:

  Early Crime of Drenth Result of Spurned Love

  Stole Woman’s Bridal Outfit in Anger

  AP, Waupun, Wisconsin, September 7