by Peter Straub
“Are you staying in a hotel?” I asked.
“We’re with my sister. She and her husband moved to Elm Hill years before us—that’s why we came here. When we bought our house, it was the only one on the street. There were fields all around us.”
Other questions drew out the information that they had moved to Millhaven from Yugoslavia, where in the first days of their marriage they had rented out rooms in their house to tourists while David had gone to university. They had moved to America just before the war. David had trained as an accountant and eventually got a job with the Glax Corporation.
“The Glax Corporation?” I remembered Theresa’s saying “the Dragonette boy.” On our left, sunlight turned half the pond’s surface to a still, rich gold. Mallards floated in pairs on the gilded water. “You must have known Walter Dragonette.”
“He came to my department a year before I retired,” David said. I didn’t want to ask the question anyone with even a tenuous connection to a famous or infamous person hears over and over. Neither did John. There was silence in the car for a few seconds.
Theresa broke it. “David was shaken when the news came out.”
“Were you fond of him?” I asked.
“I used to think I was fond of Walter, once.” He coughed. “He had the manner of a courteous young man. But after three or four months, I began to think that Walter was nonexistent. His body was there, he was polite, he got his work done even though he sometimes came in late, but he was not present.”
We drove past the low, red town hall. Visible around a bend in the road, the bare hill that gave the suburb its name raised itself into the sunlight. Mica glittered and dazzled in the gray paths that crossed its deep green.
“Don’t you think they suffer, people like that?” asked Theresa.
Her question startled me with its echo of some barely conscious thought of my own. As soon as she spoke, I knew I agreed with her—I believed in the principle behind her words.
“No,” her husband said flatly. “He was not alive. If you’re not alive, you do not feel anything.”
I moved my head to see Theresa in the rearview mirror. She had turned toward her husband, and her surprisingly sharp, clear profile stood out like a profile on a coin. She moved her eyes to meet mine in the mirror. I felt a shock of empathy.
“What do you think, Mr. Underhill?”
I wrenched my eyes away to check for traffic before turning into the parking lot of the little shopping center. “We saw part of his interrogation,” I said. “He said that he had been sexually abused by a neighbor when he was a small boy. So yes, I do think he suffered once.”
“That is not an excuse,” David said.
“No,” Theresa sighed. “It is not an excuse.”
I pulled into a space, and David said something to her in the language they had spoken in their garage. Whatever he said ended with the word Tresich. I am spelling it the only way I can, phonetically. She had anglicized her name for the sake of people like me and the Belknaps.
We got out of the car.
John said, “If that communication was too private to disclose, please tell me, but I can’t help but be curious about what you just said.”
“It was—” David stopped, and raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.
“My husband mentioned to me how awful it is, that we have known two murderers.” That same forceful compassion came out of her again, straight at me. “When we lived upstairs from Mr. Bandolier, he killed his wife.”
7
WE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT TO DO,” Theresa said. Cups of coffee steamed on the pale wood of the window table between us. She and I sat beside the window onto the parking lot, David and John opposite each other. Two children rolled down the long green hill across the street, spinning through the grass with flying arms and legs. “We were so frightened of that man. David is right. He was like a Nazi, a Nazi of the private life. And we were so new in America that we thought he could put us in jail if we went to the police. We lived in his house, we didn’t know what rights he had over us.”
“Violent,” David said. “Always shouting, always yelling.”
“Now we would know what to do,” she said. “In those days, we didn’t think anyone would believe us.”
“You have no doubt that he killed his wife?”
David shook his head emphatically, and Theresa said, “I wish we did.” She picked up her coffee and sipped it. “His wife was named Anna. She was a beautiful woman, blond, always very quiet and shy. He didn’t want her talking to anyone. He didn’t want people to know that he beat her.” Her eyes met mine again. “Especially on weekend nights, when he was drunk.”
“Drunker,” said David. “On the weekends, he drank more, even more than usual. Then began the yelling, yelling, yelling. And it got louder and louder, until the screaming began.”
“I would see Anna outside in back when we hung up our wash, and she had so many bruises. Sometimes it hurt her to raise her arms.”
“He beat her to death?” I asked.
She nodded. “One night, I think in October, we heard the shouts, the curses. She was crying so pitifully. He started smashing furniture. They were in their bedroom, just below ours. That big loud voice, cursing at her. It went on and on, and then it just stopped. There was silence.” She glanced at her husband, who nodded. “Their fights usually ended with Anna crying, and Mr. Bandolier, Bob, calming down and … crooning at her. This time the noise just stopped.” She was looking down at the table. “I felt sick to my stomach.”
“But you didn’t go downstairs?” John asked.
“No,” David said. “Bob would not permit that.”
“What did he do, call an ambulance?” I asked.
Theresa shook her head vigorously. “I think Anna was in a coma. The next morning, he must have put her in bed and cleaned up the room.”
This description was so close to what had happened to April Ransom that I looked to see how John was taking it. He was leaning forward with his chin propped on his hand, listening calmly.
“We never saw Anna anymore. He began doing all the washing. Eventually, he washed her sheets every night, because we could see them on the line in the mornings. And a smell began to come from their apartment. That smell got worse and worse, and finally I stopped him one day and asked about Anna. He said she was ill, but he was taking care of her.”
David stirred. “Theresa told me he was home all day, and I was worried because of the thought of my wife in the same house with that, that mad creature.”
“But I was fine, he never bothered me.”
“Bandolier stayed home all day?” I asked.
“I think he must have been fired.”
“He was,” I said. “Later, his boss took him back because he was good at his job.”
“I can imagine,” Theresa said. “He probably made the trains run on time.” She shook her head and sipped her coffee again. “One day, David and I couldn’t take it anymore, thinking about what was going on downstairs. David knocked on their door, and when it opened, we could see straight through into their bedroom—and then we really knew.”
“Yes,” David said.
“Her face was covered in blood. There was a smell of—of rot. That’s what it was. He didn’t know enough to turn her in bed, and she had bedsores. Her sheets were filthy. It was obvious that she was dying. He came out bellowing and ordered us upstairs.”
“And a little while after that, we saw a doctor come to their door,” said David. “A terrible doctor. I knew she was dead.”
“I thought he must have finally understood that she was dying and decided to get real medical help. But David was right. A little while after the doctor left, two men came and took her out. She was covered in a sheet. There was never an obituary, there was no funeral, nothing.”
Theresa put her chin in her hand, like John, and turned her head to look out of the big bright window. She sighed, distancing herself from what she was remembering, and leaned back
and pushed her hair off her forehead with one hand. “We didn’t know what could happen next. It was a terrible time. Mr. Bandolier had some kind of job, because he went out of the house dressed in his suits. We thought the police would come for him. Even a doctor as terrible as that man who came to his apartment must have known how Mrs. Bandolier had died. But nothing happened, and nothing happened. And then something did happen, Mr. Underhill. But it was nothing like what we expected.”
She looked straight into my eyes again. “Your sister was killed outside the St. Alwyn Hotel.”
Though she had been leading me toward this connection all the way through her story, I still could not be certain that I understood her. I had become interested in Bob Bandolier, but chiefly as a source for other information and only secondarily as himself, and therefore my next question sounded doubtful. “You mean, you thought that he was the person who murdered my sister?”
“Not at first,” she said. “We did not think that at all. But then about a week later, maybe less—” She looked at her husband, and he shrugged.
“Five days,” I said. My voice did not seem to be working properly. They both looked at me, and I cleared my throat. “Five days later.”
“Five days later, after midnight, the sound of the front door of the building opening and closing woke us both up. Maybe half an hour later, the same sound woke us up again. And when we read the papers the next day—when we read about that woman who was killed in the same place as the little girl, your sister, we wondered.”
“You wondered,” I said. “And five nights later?”
“We heard the same thing—the front door opening and closing. After David went to work, I went out to buy a newspaper. And there it was. Another person, a musician, had been killed right in the hotel. I ran home and locked myself in our apartment and called David at work.”
“Yes,” David said. “And what I said to Theresa was, you cannot arrest a man for murder because he leaves his house at night.” He seemed more depressed by what he had said forty years ago than by what had happened to his house within the past twenty-four hours.
“And five days later?”
“It was the same,” David said. “Exactly the same. Another person is killed.”
“And you still didn’t go to the police?”
“We might have, even though we were so frightened,” Theresa said. “But the next time someone was attacked, Mr. Bandolier was home.”
“And what about the time after that?”
“We heard him go out, exactly as before,” said David. “Theresa said to me, what if another person tried to kill the young doctor? I said, what if the same person tried to kill the doctor, Theresa? But on the weekends, we began looking for another place to live. Neither of us could sleep in that house anymore.”
“Someone else tried to kill Dr. Laing,” I said. My feelings were trying to catch up with my mind. I thought that there must be hundreds of questions I should ask these two people. “What did you think after the detective was found dead?”
“What did I think? I did not think. I felt relief,” David said.
“Yes, tremendous relief. Because all at once, everyone knew that he was the one. But later—”
She glanced at her husband, who nodded unhappily.
“You had doubts?”
“Yes,” she said. “I still thought that some other person might have tried to kill the doctor. And the only person that poor policeman really had any reason to hate so much was that terrible man, the butcher on Muffin Street. And what we thought, what David and I thought—”
“Yes?” I said.
“Was that Mr. Bandolier had murdered people because the hotel had fired him. He could have done a thing like that, he was capable of that. People didn’t mean anything to him. And then, of course, there were the roses.”
“What roses?” John and I said this more or less in unison.
She looked at me in surprise. “Didn’t you say you went to the house?”
I nodded.
“Didn’t you see the roses at the front of the house?”
“No.” I felt my heart begin to pound.
“Mr. Bandolier loved roses. Whenever he had time, he was out in front, caring for his roses. You would have thought they were his children.”
8
TIME SHOULD HAVE STOPPED. The sky should have turned black. There should have been a bolt of lightning and crashes of thunder. None of these things happened. I did not pass out, I didn’t leap to my feet, I didn’t knock the table over. The information I had been searching for, consciously or unconsciously, all of my life had just been given to me by a white-haired woman in a sweatshirt and blue jeans who had known it for forty years, and the only thing that happened was that she and I both picked up our cups and drank more steaming coffee.
I knew the name of the man who had taken my sister’s life—he was a horrible human being named Bob Bandolier, Bad Bob, a Nazi of the private life—I might never be able to prove that Bob Bandolier had killed my sister or that he had been the man who called himself Blue Rose, but being able to prove it was weightless beside the satisfaction of knowing his name. I knew his name. I felt like a struck gong.
I looked out of the window. The children who had been rolling down the hill were scampering up over the dense green, holding their arms out toward their parents. Theresa Sunchana reached out to rest her cool hand on my hand.
“I guess the neighbors pulled out the roses after he left,” I said. “The house has been empty for years.” This statement seemed absurdly empty and anticlimactic, but so would anything else I could have said. The children rushed into the arms of their parents and then spun away, ready for another long giddy flip-flop down Elm Hill. Theresa’s hand squeezed mine and drew away.
If he was still alive, I had to find him. I had to see him put in jail, or my sister’s hungry spirit would never be free, or I free of it.
“Should we go to the police now?” David asked.
“We must,” said Theresa. “If he’s still alive, it isn’t too late.”
I turned away from the window, able to look at Theresa Sunchana now without disintegrating. “Thank you,” I said.
She slid her hand across the table again. I put mine on top of it, and she neatly revolved her hand to give me another squeeze before she took her hand back. “He was such a completely terrible human being. He even sent away that adorable little boy. He banished him.”
“The boy was better off,” David said.
“What little boy was that?” I thought they must have been talking about some boy from the neighborhood, some Pigtown boy like me.
“Fee,” she said. “Don’t you know about Fee?”
I blinked at her.
“Mr. Bandolier banished him, he cast out his own son,” she said.
“His son?” I asked, stupidly.
“Fielding,” said David. “We called him Fee—a sweet child.”
“I loved that little boy,” Theresa told me. “I felt so sorry for him. I wish David and I could have taken him.”
Theresa looked down into her cup when the inevitable objection came from David. When he had finished listing the reasons why adopting the child had been an impossibility, she raised her head again. “Sometimes I would see him sitting on the step in front of the house. He looked so cold and abandoned. His father made him go to the movies alone—a five-year-old boy! Sending him to the movies by himself!”
All I wanted to do was to get out of the coffee shop. A number of distressing symptoms had decided to attack simultaneously. I felt hot and slightly dizzy. My breath was caught in my throat.
I looked across the table, but instead of the reassuring figure of Theresa Sunchana, saw the boy from the Green Woman Taproom, the imagined boy who was fighting to come into this world. Behind every figure stood another, insisting on being seen.
9
ALLERTON, I REMEMBERED. Or ALLINGHAM, on the side of a stalled truck. Where I dip my buckets, where I fill my pen. David Sunchana
’s polite, unswervably gentle voice brought me back to the table. “The insurance men. And we have so many things to take from the house.”
“Oh, we have a thousand things to do. We’ll do them.” She was still sitting across from me, and the sun still fell on the scene across the street, where a boy carried a big kite shaped like a dragon uphill.
Theresa Sunchana had not taken her eyes from me. “I’m glad you found us,” she said. “You needed to know.”
I looked around for the waitress, and John said, “I already paid.” He looked a little smug about it.
We stood up from the table and, with the awkwardness and hesitancies of a party of four, moved toward the door.
When I pulled back out of the lot, I found Theresa’s eyes in the rearview mirror again. “You said Bandolier sent Fee away. Do you know where he sent him?”
“Yes,” she said. “I asked him. He said that Fee went to live with Anna’s sister Judy in some little town in Iowa, or somewhere like that.”
“Can you remember the name of the town?”
“Is that of any importance, at this point?” David asked.
We drove around the pretty little pond. A boy barely old enough to walk clapped his hands at a foot-high sailboat. We followed the meandering curves of Bayberry Lane. “I don’t think it was Iowa,” she said. “Give me a minute, I’ll remember it.”
“This woman remembers everything,” said David. “She is a phenomenon of memory.”
From this end of Bayberry Lane, their house looked like a photograph from London after the blitz. A long length of glinting rubble led into a room without an exterior wall. Both of the Sunchanas fell silent as soon as it came into view, and they did not speak until I pulled up behind the station wagon. David opened the door on his side, and Theresa leaned forward and patted my shoulder. “I knew I’d remember. It was Ohio—Azure, Ohio. And the name of Anna’s sister was Judy Leatherwood.”
“Theresa, you amaze me.”
“Who could forget a name like Leatherwood?” She got out of the car and waved at us as David put his fingers in his wiry hair and walked toward what was left of his house.