Birge lifted his hat and scratched his head. He pawed the earth with his foot, pointing the toe down like a ballet dancer. “Where was he last night?”
“Right here!” I snapped.
“All night?”
“That’s right.”
“You know that for sure?”
I didn’t know, and for a moment I ransacked my brain for some clever reply. “He had supper with us. At nine o’clock he got a book and went to his room. At ten I saw the light go out under his door. It was about ten, wasn’t it, Alice?”
She nodded to Birge. “He always goes to bed at ten.”
“We went to bed around eleven,” I added. “He was still there.”
“How do you know?” Birge asked.
The question pulled me up short. Of course I didn’t know. “Well, where else would he be?”
Birge smiled as if my blustering had told him all he needed to know.
“Would you be surprised if I told you he was seen over in town about midnight?”
“Last night?” Alice asked, looking very skeptical.
“That’s right.”
“And when did this Petrie business take place?” I asked.
“ ’Bout two A.M.”
I caught a glimpse of Alice’s eyes—full of hurt and disbelief.
“Oh—I don’t believe it,” she said.
I must admit very frankly that I half did. But I wasn’t going to say that. For some reason we’d simply assumed that having a room upstairs and a place to eat regularly had put an end to Richard’s nocturnal ramblings. For the life of me now I can’t imagine what reason there was to justify such a wild assumption.
“Well, he’s not a prisoner here,” I said. “He’s always been free to go and come as he pleases.”
Birge looked at me. “Oh?” he said, his voice full of portentousness.
“Is that bad?” I said, already a little terrified that I’d made some huge blunder and inadvertently turned the key in the cell that would encage Richard Atlee forever.
“Nope,” said Birge. “Ain’t bad at all.” His eyes swung out again cross the patch of wood and settled fixedly on the stone wall. “He sure done a pretty job on that wall for you, Albert, ain’t he?”
It always irritated me the way Birge would slip into first names after he’d been calling you by your surname for the past half-hour. “Look here,” I said finally, at the end of my patience, “are you charging him formally?”
“Not charging anyone.”
“Then I’m not going to answer any more questions. And if you want my opinion of Petrie, he’s a son of a bitch. He knows as well as I do that that oily worm of a clerk he’s got working for him stole fifty dollars from the boy!”
Birge gazed at me silently, his greenish-yellow eyes narrowing again until they were thin gashes in his head. “How would you like to come over to Petrie’s with me and have a look around?”
“For what purpose?” I shouted.
“Don’t get yourself all het up,” said Birge.
“I will not go down there!” I added emphatically. By this time small pinwheels were spinning before my eyes.
“Why should he have to go?” Alice said.
“No one sayin’ he has to. But I think it’s somethin’ he oughta see. Somethin’ the two of you oughta see. I tell you, it’d be an education.”
It wasn’t the words, but the way he said it. The effect of it was to change the whole gist of our thinking.
“Very well,” said Alice, after we’d exchanged a brief glance, “we’ll go right away.”
It was a grim spectacle we saw there that morning, the glass walls and roof of the greenhouse punched out; jagged shards of glass still hinged to the window frames, like broken teeth in a shattered mouth; the splintered glass counters; the big fifty-pound bags of seed and humus, gouged and slashed, their innards seeping slowly outwards onto the floor; the floor strewn with glass and peat; dozens of pots of plants and flowers, overturned, uprooted, or hurled against the walls with such violence as to fracture and perforate the plaster in many spots. And the machinery—the harvesters and tractors, the spreaders and power mowers, all horribly hacked and smashed. And above that, hanging like a haze, the nauseating choking stink of dung fertilizers.
But it wasn’t the mere spectacle of destruction that shook me so deeply—as total and final as that was. What stunned me was the force of violence in the act. As I stood there I tried to compute in my head the amount of sheer hate a single person, acting alone, had to generate in order to wreak that much devastation. When I thought about it, it made me feel a little giddy and weak in the knees as we stood there in the doorway with the waves of fertilizer dust pushing outwards against us.
“Surely you don’t think one person could have done all this?” I said.
Birge walked slowly to a corner of the nursery, the sound of grinding glass beneath his heels. His back was to us when he reached a point and stooped over. When he stood up again and started back toward us he was carrying a long-handled lumberman’s ax. He carried it head down and dangling at his knee. “It was done with this.”
“Just that?” I asked.
“That’s all we found.” He watched me closely as he spoke. “Didn’t even bother tryin’ to conceal it, either. Just chucked it off there in the corner when he was finished.”
“Are there any fingerprints?” I asked.
“Sure,” Birge said, with a smile that was a little patronizing. “Hundreds of ’em. Thousands. This thing’s been settin’ around this place for years. Probably find the fingerprints of the whole damn town on it, includin’ yours and mine as well.”
“But there must be fresh prints,” I said.
Birge sighed. “I doubt it.”
“Why?”
“Person who did this,” Birge said, his eyes scanning the ceiling and the floors, “was a pro. Had to be in order to get as much done as he did. A pro don’t have no prints around. He’s very clean. Wears gloves.” He held the ax up for me to inspect. “We’ll check it for prints,” he said. “But we ain’t gonna find none.”
Alice stared at the ax, a sickly expression on her face. “You mean to tell me that nobody heard all this going on last night?”
“This is a pretty far piece from town, Miz Graves. No houses or people ’round. Nobody to bother a man if he’s bent on trouble.”
Just then a small bell jingled and Petrie appeared from somewhere in back of the store. Standing behind him was a drab, wispy-looking creature with small, frightened eyes. I took this to be his wife. Petrie himself appeared to be among the living dead. His clothing was rumpled, his eyes dazed and ringed with red. His tousled hair appeared to have gone full gray overnight.
When he saw us, he stiffened. Then he made a move toward me and stumbled, but the tiny creature at his side caught his sleeve and held him fast. Just then Birge grabbed him.
Suddenly Petrie, with both feet set unsteadily on the floor, swaying a bit like a harbor buoy, raised a long, hairy arm and thrust an accusatory finger in my direction. “You know who did this!” The voice came out a hoarse, raspy whisper. “You Goddamn well know who did this—”
“Harlowe,” sobbed the little birdlike thing still clutching his sleeve. He snatched his arm from her as if he were about to fling her off. She fled backwards more from fright than the violence of the motion.
“You Goddamn well know who!” Petrie thundered. “And you’re gonna pay. Hear me? You’re gonna Goddamn well pay.”
When Birge half-guided, half-pushed us out the front door, Petrie was still thundering, his face the color of ashes, and wagging a finger at me like a specter. Standing outside by the car I was terribly rattled. I could still hear the man ranting inside the nursery.
When we got into the car, I rolled -the window down and Birge stood there stooping and chatting with us quietly, sweating under his trooper’s hat.
“He’s wiped out,” Birge said. “Under-insured.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said
curtly. “That’s awfully short-sighted. Having a business and not having proper coverage.”
He made a sound halfway between a word and a grunt. “Well, like I say, I wanted you to see it.”
“Well, now I’ve seen it,” I replied, my eyes fixed straight ahead. “And it proves nothing.”
“That’s right,” said Birge. “Seeing as how the boy was home with you all night.”
“He may very well have been,” I said, bristling at the sarcasm. “It’s my word against the word of this person who saw him in town.”
“That’s right,” said Birge. “That’s right.” He said it as if he were pacifying an hysterical child. “Tell me—you know anything about this boy you got up there with you?” he said.
I glared at him stonily. “I know everything I have to know about him.”
We drove back in silence, the sky blue and splashed with long white feathery clouds, the earth green and the air heavy with new foliage. And in my mind, sharply and indelibly etched’ a picture—sun slanting through jagged shards of glass, and the bags of seed, slumped over and oozing their contents out onto the floor. I tried over and over again to relate the picture to Richard Atlee. There was a part of me that wanted to see him wielding the ax, see the blade flashing in wide whooshing arcs, impacting with a sickening thud on the stuffed bags and shattering the glass. I could see a body in shadows, nearly faceless, caught up in that fury like a windmill run amuck. But I couldn’t attach that sweet, shy, almost saintlike face to the body. None of it was plausible.
Halfway to the house, Alice, her eyes fixed straight ahead and riveted to the road suddenly said: “He was out last night.”
The car swerved a bit. “Oh?” I said. That was all I could manage to say, and then I drove on quietly, conscious of a long sigh coming from me.
“I heard him come in about four o’clock,” she went on.
“You did?”
“Through the cellar door.”
“I see.”
“What does it mean? After all, it doesn’t actually mean—”
“For God’s sake, Alice—”
“I know,” she moaned softly. I thought she was going to cry.
“The cellar door?” I said it over and over again as if the act of repetition could obliterate the fact. “He hasn’t come in that way for months. He uses the front door now, doesn’t he? At least that’s what I thought.”
“I know,” she said very softly. “I know you thought that.”
I looked at her cringing now in her seat. “Doesn’t he?” I asked again with a terrible sense of foreboding.
This time she didn’t answer, but merely kept her eyes riveted to the road.
“Has he been going out nights again?” I asked. “Regularly, I mean?”
I feared the answer, knowing it full well before it came.
“Pretty much.” She whispered the words almost under her breath.
I drove a bit further through the spring morning, watching a lofty mushroom of a cloud, fixed and unmoving in the distance as if it were etched on the sky. “For God’s sake, Alice. Why didn’t you say anything?”
I felt her turn and stare at me while I watched the faded white line running down the center of the road.
“Say what?” she gasped. “Say he was out last night? Are you mad?”
“Well, I didn’t mean—”
“Put him right in the hands of Birge. He’d just love that. Say something, indeed. Would you have?”
She had a way of putting things right on the line Alice does. It’s a kind of bluntness that’s made me blanch in the past. Her question had gone right to the heart of the matter, and my response to it was immediate.
“No,” I said, a little shocked at my own reply, “I wouldn’t have.”
We made a right turn off the main highway and started up the Bog Road.
After a while I said, “He wouldn’t have much of a chance with these people here.”
“None,” she said flatly, her voice a peculiar mixture of defiance and fright.
“Well don’t worry. We’re not going to let them railroad the boy.”
“They’d love to,” she said. “Oh, wouldn’t they just love to!”
“Yes,” I said. “But I won’t let them.”
Those were bold words coming from the likes of me. Even as I said them, hearing my voice a little tinny and tremulous, coming at me over great distances, I could barely get my poor trembling hands to steer the car safely over the gutted, crumbling road to home.
“What are you going to do?” she asked after a while.
“For God’s sake, Alice—”
“Well, tell me. I want to know.”
“Did you see that mess there?”
“Tell me, Albert.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. How should I know?” I said and drove on.
Just before we reached the house she put her hand gently on my wrist. “Listen, Albert—That thing I said to you the other night—”
“What thing?” My mind was a total blank.
“About you wanting to get rid of him.”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Oh, forget it.”
When we got home, there was still no sign of Richard. We ate our lunch and speculated over the possibility that he might have left—got frightened by the realization of what he’d done and run off. Halfway through lunch we tiptoed like thieves across the parlor to the closed door we’d vowed we’d never open again, and opened it.
Spotless and immaculate it was, like the billet of a first year cadet—everything sparkling and in order, everything in place, nothing gone. We finished our lunch with a great cloud of worry hovering above us.
In the early afternoon we decided to take a walk through the woods—far back to the geese pond where we hadn’t been since the late autumn. It was beautiful—full of new birds and the signs of wild life, chattering squirrels and chipmunks, fresh deer droppings all about the pine spills. But even as we strolled there amidst that peaceable kingdom, there was between Alice and me a clammy apprehension. The scene at Petrie’s that day had scared the life out of us and now we had a kind of unspoken dread of seeing him that night or, for that matter, ever again.
I mark that moment as a turning point in our feelings about Richard Atlee. There was nothing dramatic about it, mind you. It wasn’t that we were now so decidedly against him, so much as we weren’t any longer so decidedly for him. But at that time, we were scarcely conscious of any of that ourselves.
It was late afternoon when we started back. Somewhere along the way Alice said, “Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe we’ve jumped to conclusions.”
“Maybe,” I said, lunging at the possibility. But even as I said it, I didn’t believe it. Not for a moment. Still, I was very eager to entertain the thought. And so was Alice.
“After all,” I went on heatedly, “no one saw him. And the mere fact that he was out late last night—”
“Of course,” said Alice, brightening noticeably. “And what Birge said—”
“You mean about his being seen in town?”
“Yes.”
“I wouldn’t pay too much attention to that. After all, Richard is a nocturnal creature by habit.”
“That’s right, dear. That’s right.”
“And if he’d been out nights breaking into places in the area, we’d certainly have heard about it long before this.”
“Of course we would’ve,” Alice breathlessly agreed. “Birge would’ve been up after him a long time ago—”
We walked back feeling our spirits lighten a bit and our wavering courage return. But when the chimneytops of the house came into view soaring above the trees, we were suddenly back in the trough of despond, with all the old doubts and anxieties roaring back at us with a vengeance.
It was nearly dusk when we tramped up on the back porch. To our great surprise we could see lights burning in the kitchen and the living room.
“He’s home,” Alice whispered almost g
rimly.
“Yes,” I said, a fist closing over my heart.
We turned the knob and entered.
It would be hard to adequately describe the curious scene that followed. I’m sure I don’t recall it all. Only a long, stuttering series of fragments—the lights all on, the Haydn trumpet concerto blaring on the phonograph, the table in the dining room set with the best china and silver, the damask napkins curled and set out in the old brass napkin rings, a lively fire crackling on the hearth, all of it reminiscent of our Christmas feast. There was a large centerpiece of freshly picked lilacs in the middle of the table and out of the kitchen wafted savory scents. It wasn’t what we’d expected at all.
Picture next Richard Atlee appearing like an apparition from the kitchen, dressed in his work clothes with one of Alice’s aprons tied on over that, the lumpish, mud-streaked overalls showing beneath the frilly borders of the apron, and his hair flowing wildly over his shoulders. For a moment I wanted to laugh. It was all so ludicrous. But instead I stood there speechless, my jaw slung open and drooping idiotically.
Alice moved behind me. “Richard?” she murmured. “Are you all right?”
He smiled and looked a trifle surprised. “Sure.”
“What’s going on here?” I said, trying to be heard above the trumpet concerto.
“I made supper.” He spoke with a sweet, almost angelic emphasis.
“Oh,” was all I could say. Then I stood there looking at Alice.
“How sweet, Richard,” she said. “The table is beautiful.” She had that sickly frozen smile on her face. I could see her struggling for words. She glanced at the phonograph. “May I lower that?”
“Sure,” he said, rather in the way a father grants a child a second piece of candy.
Alice crossed the room and lowered the volume of the phonograph. “Now,” she said, “we can all hear ourselves think.”
“I made supper,” Richard volunteered again, giving it the same sweet emphasis he had before.
“How thoughtful,” said Alice.
“What a wonderful surprise!” I said, and we stood there shifting from foot to foot, gawking at everything until Richard bade us enter and we stumbled forward into the dimly lit parlor and took our seats before the fire while he served us each a sherry and then disappeared into the kitchen. Imagine—serving sherry and smiling like an angel after a night of nearly apocalyptic violence.
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