A Penny for the Hangman

by Tom Savage

  Then she saw movement in the shadows far below her, and a light. A flashlight. Mr. Graves was leading Don Price down the long flight of stone steps to the beach. She could just make out the two dark shapes. She looked out toward the horizon, peering through the gloom for signs of Gabby’s boat, but she could only see the black ocean.

  She turned back to the room and removed her clothes. Her toothbrush was in her purse beside the useless cell phone. She was reaching for it when she focused on something she hadn’t noticed before. On the foot of the bed, neatly laid out, were a white cotton nightgown and a white terry robe. She picked up the gown and inspected it: It was exactly her size. Mrs. Graves had placed these articles here in anticipation that Karen would stay the night, even before Karen herself knew this. She smiled at her host’s apparently limitless efficiency.

  She also wondered, briefly, whose gown and robe they were, but she was too exhausted to think clearly. This had been an eventful day, and tomorrow would be busy as well, and the room was all but spinning around her. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth, and when she came back she pulled on the cotton shift, switched off the lights, and fell across the bed. She barely had time to maneuver herself under the sheets and lay her head back against the pillows before she was asleep.

  —

  From the Testimony of Territorial District Coroner Clive Girard in People V. Harper and Anderman, St. Thomas Municipal Court, Wednesday, April 15, 1959 (continued)

  DR. GIRARD: In my opinion, the five victims at Tamarind were disabled with the drug so that what came next would be easier to accomplish. It was all meticulously planned beforehand.

  —

  Sidney Singleton was following the light. He peered through the darkness at the long staircase that curved down before him, making out the edges of the steps in the sporadic glow from the flashlight Mr. Graves was holding. The mysterious weariness he was experiencing made the descent seem treacherous. The big man in the Hawaiian shirt was a few steps below him, moving carefully down in the dark. The sound of waves on the beach grew louder as they neared the base of the stairs.

  There was no moonlight to speak of; it was concealed behind a blanket of clouds. The silver formations were backlit by the moon, glowing faintly above the ocean. Only the occasional glint on the waves as they approached the inlet below him proved that the moon was there at all. He was reminded once again of the isolation, just how far this tiny isle was from the rest of the world. Even the moon had trouble reaching it.

  A sudden buzzing beside his ear made him raise his hand and wave it. Mosquitoes, the bane of these islands, the blot on all tropical splendor. As he descended, he also heard rustling as a hundred unseen creatures reacted to the glare of the flashlight. Sid imagined iguanas, mongooses, lizards, and who knew what else slithering away from the light, hiding in the shadows.

  All he wanted to do right now was sleep.

  As they came to the bottom of the stairs and stepped down onto the cool sand, he peered groggily out at the water. He could just see the breakers lapping at the shore, but nothing beyond them. He could hear no faint sound of a motor, only the chirring of tree frogs and the buzz of mosquitoes. In contrast to the house, it was cold here on the beach, downright chilly. He clasped his arms to his chest and shivered.

  “Where’s Gabby?” he asked Mr. Graves.

  The man in front of him stopped and turned around in the sand, lowering the flashlight beam to his feet. Sid couldn’t see the man’s bearded face.

  “He’ll be along directly,” Mr. Graves said. “We agreed on ten o’clock, and it’s nearly that now. Just a few minutes.”

  Sid nodded. He swatted at yet another dive-bombing bloodsucker, yawned, and reached into the pocket of his T-shirt for his cigarettes. Maybe the nicotine would make him feel more alert. The T-shirt suddenly seemed inadequate, and he wished he had a sweater. He braced himself for the return trip, reasoning that it would be even colder in Gabby’s boat, on the open water.

  Oh well, he’d gotten his story—or part of it, anyway. And his camera was full of pictures, exclusive photos of the notorious Wulfgar Anderman. He’d return to Frenchman’s Reef, and he’d book himself on the earliest flight to New York tomorrow. With any luck, he’d be back in his apartment by this time tomorrow night.

  He’d have to explain all this to Gwen eventually, and she might not take it well, but those were the breaks. So what if he lost Gwen Levene? He wasn’t exactly in love with her, although she did have good connections. But Sid was closing in on thirty-five, and it was high time he got his journalistic career into high gear. Screw Wulfgar Anderman and his empty threats! The man was a felon, a convicted killer, and Sid figured that any court in the world would side with him if it came to a lawsuit. The photos, along with what he’d recorded today and a generous dollop of history, would make an excellent book. He was eager to get to work on it—just as soon as he’d slept for about twelve hours….

  So, where the hell was the boat?

  He took a cigarette from the pack and placed it into his mouth, then produced his lighter. As he lit the cigarette with it, he glanced at the embossed S on the side—S for Superman, as he had joked to Karen Tyler when she’d noticed it. It had been a gift from Gwen, and he imagined it wouldn’t be long before Karen Tyler found that out for herself. Oh well, he’d cross that bridge when he came to it.

  A sharp breeze blew in from the water, extinguishing his lighter. The man beside him had been gazing out at the horizon, but now he turned his head and looked up at the lights of the house above them. Sid held up the pack.

  “Cigarette?” he offered.

  “You shouldn’t smoke,” the big man said, turning to Sid and taking a step forward. “It’s bad for your health.”

  Sid flinched. The man was too close to him; he could feel the heat from his body. The flashlight suddenly came up to shine directly in Sid’s eyes, dazzling him. He raised his hands before his face and took an involuntary step backward, and his cigarette and lighter dropped to the sand at his feet.

  “Hey!” he cried, blinking in the glare, and through the spots that danced before him he saw the movement of the big man’s other arm, the one that was not holding the flashlight. It was clutching something else, something that glinted briefly before the flashlight was switched off. The sudden, complete darkness was even more blinding than the glare had been. But Sid had seen the enormous knife in Mr. Graves’s hand, and his fundamental instincts took over. A burst of adrenaline replaced his fatigue, galvanizing him, and he turned around to the stairs behind him, drawing in breath to shout, to run up to the house, to find the others. To live.

  But the darkness had disoriented him. Instead of the stairs, he collided heavily with the no trespassing sign beside the bottom step. He lost his balance, reaching up to clutch at the sign, but everything seemed to have lost its solidity. The world was dissolving around him, even as his body became heavier. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even breathe.

  At that moment he felt a hot, searing sensation in his back, and he gasped as it traveled forward through him, piercing his heart. He opened his mouth to scream in pain, in outrage, in sheer confusion, but already his throat and lungs were filling with liquid. He slid down the smooth wooden sign to his knees and tumbled forward. His forehead hit the bottom stone step with an audible crack, and then he was lying facedown in the cool, moist sand.

  He heard movement somewhere above him, someone arriving down the stairs. Then he heard two voices.

  “There you are. I was afraid you’d miss all the fun.”

  “Not a chance, Carl. I was just putting Miss Tyler to bed. Here, give me that knife. It’s my turn!”

  He had to stand up, but nothing in his body seemed to work. He couldn’t breathe, and something was pouring out of his mouth. Oh God, he thought, and then, Karen…

  That was as far as he got before his mind ceased to function. The final sensation he felt was the cold, smooth metal in the sand under his right arm: the Zippo lighter with S
for Superman. S for Sidney. S for Singleton. With a long, bubbling sigh, he settled down into the void.

  Mercifully, he didn’t feel what happened next.

  —

  From the testimony of Territorial District Coroner Clive Girard in People v. Harper and Anderman, St. Thomas Municipal Court, Wednesday, April 15, 1959 (continued)

  DR. GIRARD: Dr. Anderman died of a single stab wound to the heart. In this respect, his body was the least violated. The three women were struck on their heads with the machete, the two wives from the front and Bernice Watkins from behind. All three women’s skulls were crushed. The most extensive damage was to the body of the fifth victim. I must say, I was an army medic in Europe throughout the war, and again in Korea. I’ve worked on many men injured or killed in battle. But I have never, ever seen anything like what was done to Tobias Harper.

  —

  Karen was dreaming of her guardian angel, the phantom presence she called The Watcher. In the dream, she was walking down a quiet New York street, somewhere near her home, and she could hear footsteps behind her. She’d had this dream before, and, as she always did in the dream, she began to walk faster. She was never sure why, but she had the distinct feeling that the echoing footsteps on the sidewalk back there were ominous, a source of negative energy. Danger—it was the word that always occurred to her. Someone was following her, someone with bad intentions. And always the street, the sidewalk, the buildings looming above her, were deserted, not a soul anywhere. She moved along the sidewalk, passing by the front steps of town houses and the canopied entrances of apartment complexes, their empty windows gaping. No doormen, no pedestrians, no cars or buses. She was alone in this silent otherworld, alone with her stalker.

  She knew if she walked even faster and didn’t turn to look behind her, she would soon hear the other footsteps, the good ones. Her Watcher was always somewhere nearby, and he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to her. He would materialize beside her in this desolate street, and his appearance would banish the person, the thing, that followed her. She never had a clear picture of her tormentor. As a child, she’d imagined the axe-wielding monsters from horror films, but over the years, it had evolved into an undefined darkness, a shadow that produced hollow footsteps. But she always recognized The Watcher, the good presence: It was the man in the raincoat, the one she’d seen on three occasions and sensed on others, the man who’d helped her up from the wet gutter that long-ago April afternoon. A tall, older gentleman with a hat of some kind and a face that was essentially blank. A big man with a soft voice, who had called her by her name. “You must be more careful, Karen.” Whenever he arrived in her dream, the pursuing footsteps stopped. The Watcher would smile and hold out his hand to her….

  She wasn’t sure what woke her. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been asleep. For that matter, when she sat up in the strange bed in the pitch-black bedroom, she wasn’t at all certain where she was, and she felt a thrill of panic. For one wrenching moment, she thought she’d awakened inside her nightmare.

  Then she heard the ocean, and it all came back to her. This was the guest bedroom in Wulfgar Anderman’s house on Hangman Cay. The sound of the breakers far below the house was faint, almost but not quite drowned out by the low hum of the central air-conditioning. Even with the windows closed and the curtains drawn, the distant, rhythmic crashing of water against rocks provided the room with soothing background noise. And there was something else, another sound coming through the wall behind the headboard. She strained to listen.

  She fumbled for the bedside lamp and switched it on. The soft glow filled the room, calming her. She squinted at her watch: It was just going on midnight, which meant she’d only been asleep for two hours. She threw off the sheets and rose from the bed, and the air-conditioning struck her bare skin. Her face and arms were moist, clammy, as though she’d been running in her sleep. Remembering the dark street of her dream, she thought, Perhaps I was running. She smiled at the notion and reached for the robe that lay at the foot of the bed.

  Now she listened again. Yes, the sound was coming from the next room, Wulf Anderman’s office. Music. She tied the robe around her waist and went over to the bedroom door. Opening it slowly, carefully, she peered out at the unlit gallery. Empty. She stepped outside, leaving the door open behind her.

  The lamp on the telephone table in the hall below the gallery provided the only illumination. She moved to the smooth wood railing and looked down. The hall was still, and from this angle she could see the archway that led to the living room. Nothing there. The entire downstairs area she could see from here was dark and silent. She turned her attention to the carved oak office door a few feet to her left.

  The gallery floor was polished wood with a chessboard-patterned, brown-and-gold carpet running down its entire length. Keeping her bare feet on the carpet, she tiptoed closer to the office, where a strip of light shone along the bottom of the door. Karen arrived before it and leaned forward, her head cocked to one side, nearly touching the wood. Now she could hear the music clearly, even identify it: the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. It was being played softly, but she could make out the woman’s voice.

  She thought of her boyfriend in New York. Jim O’Brien had been brought up in a house that took the arts seriously, and he’d expanded Karen’s awareness considerably. Until she’d met him three years ago, she’d never paid much attention to opera, but he was a definite fan. This particular opera was a favorite of his; he played this very recording of it at home sometimes, while he was writing. Soon, Karen knew, the woman would fall silent and the orchestra would continue to a final symphonic crescendo of tragedy.

  Another noise emanated from the room, not part of the recording, and it took her by surprise. Over the music, or through it, she heard a man’s muffled sobbing. She listened to this other sound and wondered at it. True, the music was sad—Jim considered it the most heartbreaking melody ever written—but she wasn’t sold on the idea that the man on the other side of the door was merely overwhelmed by the power of the song. “Liebestod” translated as “love in death,” and perhaps it was being used now as a soundtrack to accompany, to augment, Wulf Anderman’s private sorrow.

  She saw her elegant host in her mind’s eye, slumped in the chair at the desk, with that old Remington typewriter before him. He would be in a red smoking jacket of satin or velvet, perhaps, a crystal goblet of red wine in his hand, and the tears flowed down his face as he remembered…what? What did he mourn? His dead parents? The other victims? Henry Vance, Harper’s long-dead foreman, the poor native man he and his accomplice had clearly intended to frame for the murders? Did he weep for all the years he’d lost, shut away in prison? Or was there someone else, someone since then, perhaps the owner of the gown and robe she was now wearing? Had there been anyone—male or female—in his life since then? Karen didn’t think so. This little drama behind the door, the tears and the Wagner, was a nightly ritual, she was certain of it. Wulf Anderman was crying out in his isolation, his loneliness, feeling sorry for himself, deprived as he was of the one person he’d ever loved.

  Rodney Harper.

  It occurred to her there, outside the door, that she envied him his grief. Her own first love, when she was all of fourteen, Wally Sharp, the cute red-haired comedian in ninth grade—where was he now? She hadn’t spared a thought for him in years, any more than she had for the other, later ones at NYU: Cal, the intense poet, or Giorgio, the Italian theater major. Nice, all of them, but gone, off somewhere in that cloudy area called the past, and now she had no regrets and few clear memories. She felt no compulsion to mourn them. They hadn’t broken her heart; they hadn’t been important enough, in the long run. She wondered if Jim O’Brien was. Maybe. Probably. Still, her host’s dramatic history seemed, at that moment, so much stronger, so much more substantial, than her own. This man had lived and loved and—

  Killed. Karen brought herself abruptly back to the present, focusing on the oak door and the sounds beyo
nd it, the opera and the crying. She was standing here, coveting the life, the experience, the passions, of a murderer! What on earth was wrong with her?

  Somewhere behind her, below the gallery, a door creaked open and clicked shut. She crouched down and moved away from the office door, stealing a glance through the balusters as she went. Carl Graves had just come in the front door of the house. He stood in the hall, wiping his face and hands with a handkerchief. Karen was back in her room, in the act of shutting the door, when she heard the office door open, and the insistent strings of the finale became louder. She peered through the crack in the doorway as Anderman, in silk pajamas and a red robe not unlike the one she’d imagined, came out to the gallery rail and looked down, his back to her.

  “Everything all right, Carl?” he called down.

  From below she heard, “Yup, everything’s fine.”

  “Okay,” Anderman said. “Good night.”

  Mr. Anderman turned around and went back inside the office, and the door closed behind him, cutting off the music. Karen could barely hear the heavy footsteps as Mr. Graves went away down the hall toward the kitchen and his own quarters. She carefully shut the bedroom door and leaned back against it, breathing deeply.

  She was surprised to discover that she was giggling uncontrollably. What if they’d found me there, she thought, spying on my host in the middle of the night? Would I be banished, “thrown off the island” like the losers on that idiotic TV survival show? Would the boatman, Gabby, have to turn around and come back for me? Then she thought, Yup? What sort of servant speaks that way to his employer?

  The fit of giddiness passed, and she moved back over to the bed. She remembered what Anderman had said this afternoon, about Mr. Graves being an old friend of his. More a friend than a servant, apparently. And they couldn’t expel her—not tonight, at any rate. Gabby would be back in St. Thomas by now, and the phone wasn’t working; they had no way of contacting him at the moment. He had ferried Don Price back across the sea to St. Thomas. Don Price should be home by now, probably asleep, and tomorrow he’d go back to work at the Daily News.