The Amulet

by Michael McDowell

  But, thought Gussie suddenly, if both of them were dead maybe it was little Mary that had done it. Gone in there while they was sleepin’ and dreamin’ and stuck a ice pick in her daddy’s ear, and then done somethin’ else—I don’t know what—to Miz Thelma. Ohhh, that child! Kill her mama and daddy, and then go right back to bed, and sleep the sleep of the righteous!

  Gussie knew that little Mary was not a particularly sweet little girl—but she wasn’t a mean one either and Gussie knew anyway, from experience, that it was the sweet ones that were always playing around in somebody else’s belly with a butcher knife. Probably then it wasn’t little Mary—maybe it was robbers, or an escaped con from the pen come back to settle a score with Officer James Shirley.

  The black woman had turned away from the window and leaned against the side of the house. It didn’t matter now what had happened or who had done it, but it was very important that she get little Mary out of the house without her seeing the bodies of her parents. The door to the master bedroom was open, and Gussie could see that if she waked the child and told her to come let her in at the back door, Mary would pass that way and see the corpses.

  Gussie went back to Mary’s bedroom window and tried it; it was unlocked. Gently she pushed it up, and then called to Mary. The child sat up sleepily in the bed.

  “Gussie,” she said softly, “why you climbing in my window?”

  “Come here, child.”

  “What?” said Mary, not understanding what Gussie could want with her at the window. “Let me go open the back door, Gussie. You cain’t climb in the window. Daddy’ll shoot you for a burglar.”

  Gussie sighed briefly. If little Mary thought that her father was still alive, then it hadn’t been she who had committed the double murder.

  “Come here, child,” said Gussie again.

  Mary shrugged, and went over to the window, a little unsteadily.

  Gussie thrust her hands beneath the small child’s arms, and lifted her out of the window.

  “Oh, Gussie!” cried Mary, “Mama is gone kill me if I get my feet on this wet grass. You know how Mama hates the dew!”

  “Child,” said Gussie, “your mama’s not gone never yell at you again!”

  Taking the child by the hand, Gussie ran next door, to the Presbyterian manse, and beat on the back door.

  Little Mary stared round her and wondered what on earth her mother was going to have to say about these strange, unprecedented proceedings. She had already be­gun to make up excuses for herself, for she was positive that she would be blamed, and not Gussie.

  Chapter 22

  Sheriff Garrett and Deputy Barnes were now the only senior members of the Pine Cone police force, now that James Shirley was dead. They stood in the bedroom of their slain colleague, shortly after the bodies had been re­moved to the funeral home. They had come immediately after being called, and were sickened by what they had found. It had been obvious to the officers that no one but James and Thelma were involved in the crime, and so they had allowed the corpses to be removed after only a cursory examination.

  These were rural southern policemen, used to brutal, sudden murders of passion. Few crimes in Pine Cone went unsolved. A murder was frequently threatened before­hand, and was rarely denied afterward, and there was no great need for sophisticated techniques of clue-gathering. It was obvious what had transpired in this bedroom, or rather it was obvious “who had done the transpiring,” but the motives, the causes, would remain forever unknown.

  Deputy Barnes shook his head solemnly. “Don’t make sense, just don’t make no sense.”

  “Thelma Shirley was a hard woman, sometimes,” the sheriff judged, “but I never thought she’d really go and kill James.”

  “You’re sure though that she killed him, and then killed herself.”

  “It’s not a accident, Barnes, to get a ice pick stuck up your brain. So I’d say yes, Thelma Shirley killed her hus­band.”

  “He couldn’t have done it himself?” asked the deputy.

  “Couldn’t have got it in that deep ’fore he’d be dead. Would have stopped because of the pain. Couldn’t have gone on if he had wanted to, so she must have done it. Bad way to go,” the sheriff concluded, and sighed heavily.

  “So,” said Deputy Barnes, trying to get through this all step by meager step. “Thelma killed James, and then killed herself.”

  “Nooooo,” said the sheriff slowly, and glanced with some distaste at the blood on the floor. So much had been spilled that the center of the stains was still damp. He noticed as well that it had just begun to rain outside. The moisture in the air drew the smell of blood up from the floor. Human blood smelt a lot different from animal blood. It wasn’t a buck that had died in the bedroom, the sheriff thought. “I didn’t say Thelma killed herself. You don’t cut your throat with a piece of broken glass that’s been on the floor. I think she must have slipped and fell on it.”

  “Accident then?”

  The sheriff nodded.

  “So she killed him on purpose, and then died herself by mistake.” The sheriff nodded again, exasperated by Dep­uty Barnes’ unconquerable slowness.

  “Well,” said the deputy, “how was she gone explain that? If she hadn’t of died accidental, I mean? Gussie would have come in here today and she would have found the body, and ever’body in town would have knowed who done it. It’s not something she could get away with.”

  “No,” said the sheriff, agreeing almost reluctantly, “it’s not.” He didn’t want to admit what didn’t make sense at all: why Thelma Shirley would have killed her husband in so obvious a way.

  “Maybe she was planning on getting rid of the body. Burying it. Throwing it in the river. Burning it in the dump.”

  “Thelma Shirley had a bad back,” the sheriff argued, “she couldn’t have managed that body by herself, and she would have known that she couldn’t.”

  “Maybe she was gone say robbers did it,” suggested Barnes. The sheriff shook his head again.

  “Then people would have said, ‘Where was you when the robbers come, Thelma? And why didn’t they wake up little Mary? And what robbers carry around ice picks for weapons?’”

  The men were silent a moment, and then the deputy spoke again. “Sheriff,” he said.

  “What, Barnes?”

  “I don’t think it makes sense.”

  “No,” Garrett reluctantly agreed, “it don’t make no sense.”

  At this juncture, Gussie appeared in the doorway of the room. She nodded to the two policemen, and said, “Well, guess I ought to clean up a little in here. Miz Dorothy’s on her way down here. She’s the only family they had around here, Mr. James’s sister, and I don’t think she’s gone want to see all that blood.”

  The sheriff looked at Gussie. “Was they getting along, Gussie?”

  She shrugged. “Not no worse than ever before.”

  The two policemen shook their heads, and left the room. Gussie opened the windows of the room, reaching across the bed so that she wouldn’t track through the blood. The sound of the soft rain across the lawn was comforting.

  On the side of the bed where the bodies had lain, Gussie dragged a throw rug out of her way, and then pulled the bedspread off. Part of the fringe had been stained with blood, and the whole thing would have to be sent to the cleaners. She carried the spread into the kitchen and returned with a large bundle of thick rags and cloths with which to wipe up the blood. She knelt at the edge of the stain, and had just begun to sop up what was nearest her when her eye was caught by something just under­neath the edge of the bed. She leaned forward, resting a few fingers on the spilled blood, and retrieved a necklace, a piece of jewelry she had never seen before. It was caked with blood. She took it to the bathroom, put it under run­ning water, and wiped it clean. She examined it carefully as she dried it, and then brought it back into the bedroom. She stared at it a moment, and then dropped it onto the dresser shelf. It wasn’t any more strange finding the neck­lace than it had been to discover
the corpses of her two employers that morning.

  As she continued to mop up the blood, she wondered who was going to pay her for the morning’s work.

  Chapter 23

  Gussie had only just finished setting the bedroom to rights, wiping up the blood, mopping and cleaning the floor, dragging a rug from the guest bedroom in to cover the spot, changing the bedspread and sheets, before Dor­othy and Malcolm Sims arrived from Montgomery. Dor­othy was James’ sister, a woman Gussie didn’t care any more for than she had for Thelma Shirley. Gussie had worked for the family for years, but she and Dorothy had never gotten along very well, and Dorothy had always translated this dislike into a mistrust of Gussie’s honesty. She told anyone in Pine Cone who would listen that Gussie was robbing her brother blind; the town, to its credit, be­lieved not a word of it and for the most part cared no more for Dorothy Sims than Gussie did. It had been a re­lief when she had married Malcolm Sims and moved to Montgomery. The only thing that people had regretted about that marriage was the contemplation of what would be Malcolm’s lot. Everyone was surprised to arrive at the wedding ceremony and find a pleasant, gentle man. There were two questions that were asked about him: how had he been roped into it all? and had anyone had the decency to warn him against what he was getting himself into?

  At any rate, Dorothy and Malcolm Sims had disap­peared from Pine Cone, making only sporadic return vis­its. More often, they entertained James and Thelma and little Mary in Montgomery, since of course the capital pos­sessed many more attractions than the small town. But now they were back for a couple of days, and on a very melancholy occasion. What the Shirleys had possessed was left to Mary, and Dorothy and Malcolm had been desig­nated her guardians. James Shirley had been a policeman, and therefore had realized the suddenness and arbitrari­ness of death; he had thought it wise to provide for the child.

  In the afternoon, when the Simses arrived in Pine Cone, it was still raining. They stopped by the funeral home to make sure that everything had been taken care of there. Malcolm looked at the large pile of broken wooden crates in the back of the establishment, wondering at the number of coffins that had recently arrived. Dorothy briefly con­ferred with the funeral director, and determined peremp­torily on closed coffins, though she was assured that the wounds in the two corpses could be effectively disguised. “Well,” said the undertaker, “we just make sure that James is lying with his right side to the congregation and that way won’t nobody be tempted to look in his ear, and then we just have to find Thelma a high-necked dress.”

  “Closed coffins for murders,” snapped Dorothy Sims, “don’t want to have gawkers sticking their fingers in the holes to see how deep they were. And you know as well as I do that that’s just what people around here are liable to do.”

  “Well,” said the undertaker softly, seeing that Dorothy was taking this matter-of-fact view, “are you going to have the services together, seeing it was a murder? And do you want them in the same plot—or maybe at oppo­site ends of the cemetery?”

  “ ’Course not!” Dorothy cried. “That woman may have killed James, but they were husband and wife right to the very end, and there’s no sense separating them in death. Murder’s a bad thing, but there’s no use being vindictive. I didn’t like the woman when she was alive, and that’s enough as far as I’m concerned.”

  Dorothy Sims was motivated perhaps more by con­siderations of the greater cost of two funerals and two burial places for her brother and sister-in-law, than by any real forgiveness in her heart for what Thelma Shirley had done.

  After leaving the funeral parlor, Dorothy and Malcolm went to her brother’s home. Dorothy stepped next door to speak to the Presbyterian minister and asked him to keep little Mary for a while longer, while she and Malcolm went over the house. It was necessary to make sure that every­thing was out of the way; the child ought not to be upset.

  Little Mary came out of the den, where she had been watching the Saturday afternoon horror film on television, and spoke briefly to her aunt.

  “You all right, Mary?” said Dorothy Sims.

  “I sneezed three times, ’cause Gussie dragged me across that wet grass, and she pulled me right out through the window.”

  Dorothy thought it best not to mention the deaths to her niece, and therefore said only, “You wrap up good then, because it would be a fool thing to catch pneumonia in the middle of summer, you hear me?”

  The child nodded, and Dorothy took her leave, perfunc­torily thanking the minister for his assistance. He faltered a few words of condolence, but Dorothy shot a quick look at the child, and shook her head for him to say nothing more. It was actually she who didn’t want to be bothered with condolences.

  When she went into her brother’s house she found Malcolm hovering in the doorway of the bedroom, anxious to see the place where the murder had occurred, but re­luctant to step inside. “I thought I’d wait for you, before I went in.”

  “That Gussie’s not here, is she?” demanded Dorothy.

  “No,” said the husband, “I sent her on home. There wasn’t anything more she could do, I s’pose. I paid her for the day.”

  “I don’t know why you bothered to do that, Malcolm! Once she found the bodies, I just know she took enough for two months’ pay! I’m glad we didn’t get here any later than we did, ’cause we might not have found the house here.”

  Then, without hesitation, Dorothy stepped into the room. She pulled open the closet doors, and looked briefly into them. She pulled out each drawer in the dresser and the chest of drawers, and then set herself at Thelma’s dressing table, and began to go through the cases and contents in earnest.

  Malcolm was still at the door. “Dorothy,” he said, “can’t you wait till after the funeral? It was your own brother and he died in this room, right under that rug you’re sitting on. I can see the stains, ’cause blood don’t come up that easy.”

  “He was in the bed, Malcolm. That’s Thelma’s blood. And I’m not going to wait for the funeral. I want to make sure that Gussie didn’t take anything.”

  “How would you know if she did?” her husband asked.

  Dorothy did not answer, but was examining each piece of jewelry in the left-hand drawer. After a moment, with­out looking up, she asked: “Malcolm, you think James’s pants’ll fit you?”

  This time it was Malcolm who did not answer. He was displeased that his wife reacted so casually to what had happened only the night before.

  “You look in that closet,” she said, choosing not to recognize his reticence and displeasure. “Take out a pair, and try them on. If they fit all right, we’ll take ’em all back with us.”

  Malcolm grimaced and stepped gingerly into the room. He moved swiftly to the closet, pulled out a pair as quickly as he could, and then retreated into the hallway.

  Dorothy glanced up, and saw her husband, standing just outside the door of the room, removing his pants.

  “Why you doing that out in the hall?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, “I just don’t think it would be respectful to the dead, if I was to take off my pants in there.”

  Dorothy laughed briefly, and then said, “I know she didn’t take any of the silver, ’cause she knows I’d miss it. I know every piece that Mama left to James. But I just bet she went through every piece of jewelry that Thelma had.”

  From the hallway, Malcolm said, “What about that piece right there on top? She didn’t take that.” Dorothy looked down at the dresser shelf. There lay the amulet.

  “Well, that’s ’cause it’s not gaudy enough! Colored folks like to sparkle, Malcolm!”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say, Dorothy! And you know it’s not true. I’m glad nobody heard you say that.”

  “Well,” said Dorothy, “I’m not gone give her the chance to get it now either,” and with that, she picked the amulet up, and dropped it into her dress pocket.

  Dorothy Sims turned and looked at her husband in the doorway of the room. He was standing u
ncomfortably in a pair of James Shirley’s pants. “They’re real tight,” he said.

  Chapter 24

  From the Shirley house, Sheriff Garrett had telephoned Malcolm Sims in Montgomery, and told him what had happened. Garrett explained to his deputy, “She was James’s sister, and it ought to be broke to her as easy as possible.” But the truth was that the sheriff just didn’t want to talk to Dorothy at all. She was a difficult woman at the best of times and goodness only knew what she would say to him if he tried to tell her that her brother James had just been ice-picked to death by his wife. Let Sims do it, the sheriff thought, he ought to be used to it by now anyway. It was a bad business all around.

  The news lurched through Pine Cone. As soon as the Presbyterian minister’s wife had prepared little Mary a tall glass of coffee that was mostly sugar and milk, she ran into her laundry room, closed the door carefully, and plied the pink Princess-phone extension to all her friends. She had climbed on top of the washing machine and was watching out a little ventilation window all the while that Garrett and Barnes were inspecting the scene of the crime. In a short time the details that the minister’s wife had got from Gussie, as well as her firsthand report, had taken care of Pine Cone north of Commercial Boulevard.

  In the meantime the sheriff and his deputy were having a melancholy breakfast in the diner near the train tracks, and here the two friendly waitresses quizzed the two men on their dour looks. They received the information on the murder-suicide with little endearing screams and great rolling of mascaraed eyes. They distributed the news freely among all the customers who came in afterward, and this provided for the part of Pine Cone below Commercial Boulevard.