by Gafford, Sam
Mrs. Martin replied, in the easily offended tone of the elderly, that she certainly did know where Mrs. Bradley was living and gave me exact directions to the house. I would not be likely to learn much from her, Mrs. Martin warned, as she was well into her eighties and not entirely comprehensible. On a whim, I casually asked if Mr. Arthur Daily had been in lately. Mrs. Martin said, somewhat confusedly, that Daily had been in only the day before. Extremely pleased, I consulted one of the local maps and was able to get a general idea of where Daily’s house had stood in 1946. It was certainly off in the woods, and I had a suspicion that it was as remote now as it had been forty years ago.
Before I left the library, I asked Mrs. Martin if she was a native of Northport and was not surprised to learn that she was a recent arrival. Apparently, even people who had lived in the town for more than thirty years were still considered ‘newcomers.’ She was imported, she explained, to clean up the mess left by Mrs. Bradley and get the library into working order. I thought that it must have been so, as she had been the first person I had seen in Northport who cared about anything.
Her directions were, of course, exact and I soon found myself outside a small, tan house with the name ‘Bradley’ on the mailbox. Going to the door, I knocked timidly and wondered what I could possibly say to this woman that would make any sort of sense.
A large shape moved behind the door and slowly opened it. A rather brutish-looking man stuck his head around the corner and asked what I wanted. When I replied that I had come to see Mrs. Bradley, he seemed unimpressed and acted as if she received visitors every day. He opened the door for me and started down the hall. Mrs. Bradley was in the sitting room, and he left me to make my own introductions.
As I walked into the room, the first thing I noticed was an overwhelming smell of mustiness. The room was decorated in a grandmotherly style and the shades were wide open to let in the afternoon sun. Mrs. Bradley was sitting in a chair in the corner, looking out at the window at nothing in particular. She looked to have been a large woman in her youth, but old age had shrunken her body so much that she appeared to be a midget wearing a giant’s clothes. I wondered how clear her mind might be. I introduced myself, and she seemed to be extremely uninterested in both me and whatever I had come to talk about.
Luckily, I had brought along a portable pocket tape recorder and started it before the conversation began. Although her speech rambled at times, she seemed remarkably clear-headed for her eighty-plus years. Amazingly, she remembered Winslow exactly.
“Oh, yes,” she began in a weak voice, “you’re interested in that writer feller, eh? Haven’t thought about him for years and years now. I wonder how long it’s been?”
“He visited your library during a trip here in 1946,” I prompted. “Do you remember anything about him?”
“Remember? Hell! I remember everything about that man. What a strange one he was! Comes into my library with that mousy little Arthur Daily and starts poking around. ‘Why don’t I have more papers?’ he says. ‘Where’re all your magazines? Don’t you have any information on this?’ Stupid little whiner was all he was. Complaining about the way I ran my library and after I had the kindness to sit and help him personally with his research. Some gratitude. Then! You should have heard him when I mentioned the box of town records in the back. Nearly threw a fit!”
“Why was that?”
“Oh, he was screaming about how they should be in the historical society or a museum somewhere. As if anyone’d be interested in them. That’s all I needed. Some nosy little busybody coming about complaining about the way I do things. Most racket I ever heard out of anyone. And then you should have heard him the next day!”
“The next day? What happened then?”
“Well, he come running in bright and early that morning. I knew he hadn’t slept all night, ’cause he had on the same clothes he’d worn the day before. Thought I wouldn’t notice. Anyway, he’s all hot and bothered about something he found in the papers. All that fuss after I was nice enough to let him borrow them. I figured Daily would make sure that nothing happened to them, if they was worth anything anyway. So he’s waving these sheets of paper in front of my face screaming as how they’re pages out of the diary of someone and did I know where the rest of the pages were. I told him politely that I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about and let him look around in all the restricted areas to see if he could find his precious book. Some thanks I get. After a couple of hours he starts whooping and hollering as he’d found the foolish thing. Didn’t look like much to me, just some old diary of someone who died a long time ago. He went and sat down and started reading it.”
“Mrs. Bradley, do you remember whose diary it was?”
“Nope, not a clue. He didn’t show it to me and I didn’t ask. About an hour or so later, I notice he’s just sitting there. Not moving, not turning the pages, nothing. It was as if he was listening to something. So I went over to him and touched him on the shoulder, and he jumped a mile! I swear! Almost gave me a heart attack! Damn fool. He’s just standing there looking at me. Then he rushes by me out the door and that’s the last I ever seen of him.”
“What happened to the book?”
“He took it with him. Never saw it again. That’s how I remember him so well. Only had one book thief while I was librarian and it was him.”
“What about the other papers he borrowed?”
“He stole them too! Along with the book. I really let Daily have it over that. I loaned this Winslow feller the papers because Daily vouched for him. Said he was a famous, well-respected writer who was doing historical research on the town. Just a plain little thief, if you ask me!”
“And that’s all you remember?”
“You’re lucky I remember that much. You see, it was the look on his face that did it. It was so strange that I’ve never forgotten it. I seen it once or twice before in my life. Once, back when I was a young girl, we all went to see a Lon Chaney film at the movie theater in Lake George. Some of the looks on my friend’s faces were like his. You know . . . frightened, scared almost to death . . . but mesmerized, as if they couldn’t look away. That’s what he looked like.”
I thanked Mrs. Bradley for the information and she seemed almost instantly to forget that I was there. It was as if a switch had been thrown in her mind. I saw myself out into the street and could hear the son puttering about somewhere in the house as I left. She appeared to have shut down the instant she finished what she had to say. Just as if someone were giving dictation to me through her.
By the time I got to town, it was approaching nightfall. I decided to have a quick dinner in the restaurant and retire to my room. With luck, I would track down Arthur Daily the next day and hopefully solve the remaining riddles. Why did Winslow leave Daily’s house so suddenly, and why was he so anxious to leave but take so long doing so? Strange things indeed.
The meal was enjoyable if somewhat bland. The fare consisted of meat and potatoes but of such a plain variety that I was forced to cover mine in salt and ketchup in order to give it some taste. Miss Bradshaw, the hotel owner, stopped by and asked how my research was going. I related the strange story that Mrs. Bradley had told me along with my reservations over finding out that Winslow had stolen important historical documents. I still felt, however, that there had to be a rational explanation somewhere.
I was comforted by the fact that she had managed to find the hotel records for 1946 and was happy to lend them to me for the night. Ecstatic, I followed her back into the hotel lobby and took the large register up to my room. It was a thick, clumsy book and actually held the records for 1940–1960. Even in the earlier years, there did not appear to be a lot of business in the hotel.
Opening the door to my room, I noticed a faint odor but brushed it aside as mustiness in my eagerness to examine the register. I placed it on the small desk and leafed through the pages. I knew the exact date I was looking for: February 8, 1946. I recognized Winslow’s handwriting immed
iately, but it was not his name. The same spidery script that I had seen in letters and memos had, almost painfully exactly, signed the name ‘Richard Clay.’ That was the name that Winslow sometimes signed on his lesser work. The records indicated that he had signed in early on that day, about ten o’clock. Flipping through the pages, I found that he checked out on February 10, also early in the day. Evidently, Winslow traveled all day in order to return home the same day. It still did not answer the question about why he had left Daily’s and why he stayed those extra days in the hotel.
On a whim, I flipped through the later pages in the book. There were very few entries, but on the page for February 8, 1948, I found the name ‘Richard Clay’ written again! Exactly two years to the day. Winslow had returned to the hotel and to Northport. Stunned, I flipped ahead to 1950, and found another entry. It was the same for 1952, 1954, and 1956. A year after his death, the name appeared again. Amazed, I continued to scan the pages. He appeared again in 1958 and 1960, at which point the register ended.
I went back and checked the signatures more closely. They were definitely in Winslow’s handwriting. Mentally, I reviewed the facts surrounding his death in 1955. He had been driving on some on the mountainous roads in upstate New York when the vehicle spun out of control and plummeted off a cliff. The car was positively identified as being Winslow’s, but the body was so badly injured and ravaged by the forest animals that visual recognition was impossible. Checking some of my research material, I found that the decree of death was given by the coroner in Gloversville, New York, who identified the body by dental records. Something did not make sense.
Why would someone impersonate Winslow to the extent of using his literary pseudonym? And yet, if (by some extreme stretch of the imagination) Winslow was still alive, who was that in the car? With a sense of events spiraling out of control, I made some notes and went to bed. My impending visit to Daily was slowly becoming more important.
That night, I had what became, in retrospect, a significant dream. I remember that I had been floating above a stretch of trees that, as in Winslow’s dream, cried out to me. Suddenly my aspect changed and I found myself underground. Not in a coffin or a cave, but encased in the earth through which I was able to move effortlessly. I swam through the dirt, following some need to move forward, and came to a spot that I could only call ‘blighted earth,’ into which I dove. The dream became more confused after that, and I was left only with the memory of being engulfed by something that both filled and devoured me, leaving an empty shell behind.
I was not entirely oblivious of the significance of having such a dream in the same room that Winslow himself had occupied not once, but apparently many times. Quickly washing and dressing, I carried the register book down to the lobby. Miss Bradshaw was not in sight and, loath to leave the book just lying there, I brought it along with me. I was still troubled with the information I had learned, but hoped that Daily might be able to shed some light on it. After all, if Winslow had been making continuous visits to Northport, surely Daily would have known about it.
I followed the route I had planned out the day before, but was less comfortable on these roads. The trees along this trip seemed uncomfortably close and tight to the road, as if they were slowly seeking to encircle me. The condition of the road left much to be desired, and it wasn’t until I had gotten halfway there that I remembered I hadn’t eaten breakfast. Doubtless, these events conspired to put me on edge as I inched closer to Daily.
Rounding one of the curves, I nearly missed the small mailbox by the side of the road with ‘Daily’ printed in small, precise letters. The driveway was dirt and my car tires groaned as I pulled off the highway back into the horse age. I could not see any buildings through the trees but moved slowly down the road. Coming through a particularly thick group of trees, I finally saw what I had previously only known in fiction.
The farmhouse stood alone and away from the road. It was clearly the oldest thing I had seen yet in Sutter’s Corners and I wondered at the fact that it still stood at all. The walls were made of some dark wood that looked horribly absorbent and warped. There were only a few cracked and broken windows in the thing, and it was one of the most disgusting hovels I had ever seen. I was not frightened so much as entranced by it. That such a center of ugliness could exist amidst such natural beauty! I had no wish to do so, but my obligation to Lauren demanded that I enter the building. Only there, all my fears told me, would I find the answer to her disappearance and my pain. Not for the first time, I wondered if I really wished to know the truth. Trembling, I opened the door and stepped inside.
The door opened slowly and I stood face to face with Arthur Daily. The sunken-faced youth had become a sunken-faced old man whose scar had not lost its power to fascinate. Once again, I explained who I was and my desire to learn more about Winslow. Daily seemed to take it all in stride and invited me into his house, where he insisted that I sit and drink some iced tea with him. In between sips of the horrid liquid, he unfolded a tale that was amazing in its lack of interest.
“Don’t really know what I can tell you about Winslow,” Daily began. “He only stayed with me for a few days and then went home. Never heard from him again.”
“Why was that?”
“No particular reason, I guess. We just had different interests and nothing really in common. Not a heck of a lot for us to talk about. Him being the city fellow and everything and me just being a country boy.”
“But you spent some time in New York City, didn’t you? Isn’t that where you got that scar?”
“How’d you know about that?”
I explained about the existence of the letters and their importance to my work.
Daily, miracle of miracles, actually smiled.
“He always thought that there’d be a ‘Winslow Collection’ someday. ‘Something to leave everyone who’d come after me,’ he said. Guess he was right about that.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“Oh, during one of our talks. He liked to talk about his work and how he felt it’d be important one day. Didn’t have much else in his life, you know.”
“What else did he talk about?”
“Just the usual type of stuff, I guess. Things that I’d been wondering for a while, like where he got his ideas from and how he wrote his stories. I just liked his stuff and wanted to know how he came about it. Haven’t you ever wondered about that? That quality of imagination that inspires literature and creativity? Haven’t you ever wondered where that stuff comes from? And why people are the only ones who do it? You don’t see monkeys or animals drawing pictures or writing stories. What about you? Where do you get your ideas for articles and stuff like that from?”
“I . . . I don’t know. I never really thought about it before. I just respond to something that interests me. I notice something in a writer’s work that speaks to me and I try to explain it to other people.”
“Uh-huh. I was kind of the same with Winslow. I’ve always wondered where stuff like that comes from. Dreams, thoughts, that kind of stuff. Like there’s a place that only certain people can reach where these things live. A kind of world that keeps making itself up every time someone reaches it. That sort of thing.”
I had a feeling that the pragmatist Winslow wouldn’t have appreciated this viewpoint any more than I did.
“I spoke to Mrs. Bradley in town and she mentioned to me that Winslow had found some sort of diary in the library. Do you know anything about that?”
“Only what she told me a long time ago. Winslow had been up late reading those old papers, and he had me take him down to town early the next morning. She told me he found some sort of diary, but he never showed it to me. When we got back that day, he just took his stuff and left. Went back home.”
“And you never saw him again?”
“Nope. Heard about his accident but never saw him again.”
“What about the hotel?”
“What about it?”
“You didn�
�t know that he stayed at the hotel in town on the anniversary of his visit here every two years?”
Daily hesitated. I couldn’t read what he was feeling. He looked to be both confused and triumphant. For an old man with wrinkled skin, his face was amazingly flexible.
“No,” he said at last, “I didn’t know that.”
I didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to know that he was hiding something, and yet his voice sounded sincere.
“Why would someone sign Winslow’s name in the register if he never came here?”
“Well, people do all kinds of strange things. Sometimes they just can’t help themselves. Could be another fan like yourself.”
Registering under a pseudonym on a date that no one knew was important before I found the papers? Doubtful.
The remainder of the interview was pointless. Daily didn’t know why Winslow left, why he stayed in the hotel the extra days, why someone would sign his name in the register, or where the diary was. I was astonished at the amount of information that Daily didn’t know. In fact, he seemed more interested in learning what had happened with Winslow’s work since his death. Hoping to draw him out more, I explained (in great detail) how the original Sargasso Press editions were collectors’ items now and that many current writers cited Winslow as an influence. Daily listened intently, with an uncharacteristic interest when I explained about the publication of The Collected Works of Robert Winslow as well as the volumes of letters and criticism that had appeared in the previous two decades. I was talking about how the bulk of criticism focused on “The Dreamer in Fire” when his face went blank.
“I didn’t like that one,” Daily said. “Didn’t like it at all.”
“But it was his greatest work!”
“No, ‘The Face Behind Mine’ was his best work. Nothing after that felt like his voice.”