by Stuart Woods
He sat up and hugged her to him and did as she asked, without effort, pouring himself into her in floods until, at last, he had only the strength to lay his head on her shoulder and hold on. She ran her fingers through his hair and rested with him, both of them twitching involuntarily. Then she pushed him gently back into the recliner and stood up. She passed a hand over his eyes and said, “No, just rest, don’t get up.” He did as she asked. A moment later he opened his eyes, and she was standing over him, her jeans on, tying a knot in her shirttail.
“Don’t go,” he said, attempting to rise.
She pushed him back in the deck chair and kissed him. “I must. Mama will wake up soon. I need to be there.” She kissed him again, then started for the stairs.
“Leonie,” he called, and she stopped and turned. “Why me?”
She paused, and for a moment he thought she would tell him. Then her expression changed, and she shrugged. “Why not?” She ran down the steps and away.
Howell gathered up their towels and started toward the bedroom, feeling just a bit pleased with himself. It was a nice thing, having a sex life again; it did wonders for the ego. It was the best of all worlds, he thought. The relationship with Scotty was such that he felt no guilt about sleeping with Leonie; they had both made their declarations on that subject. On the other hand, Leonie didn’t know about Scotty. He didn’t feel inclined to tell her, either. After all, Scotty was only available in the evenings, and Leonie had said she could only see him in the afternoons. He felt a little guilty about feeling so good about that, but pushed the thought aside. He didn’t need guilt right now. Then his eye fell on Elizabeth’s letter.
He picked it up and weighed it in his hand. At least two pages of her heavy, cream writing paper. He dreaded reading it; she would probably beg him to come back, making him feel even more guilty. He tore it open and sat down to her bold, precise handwriting.
Dear Johnny,
If I were a braver person I would have come up to see you, or at least called you, but I’m not, so I’m taking the coward’s way out.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since you left. I felt when you went that you probably would not come back, but then I thought you might come back out of a sense of obligation and not because you wanted to. I don’t want that, and, after a lot of agonizing, I think it would be better if you didn’t come back in any case.
I may as well tell you, too, before you hear it from somebody else, that I’ve met a man that I’m strongly attracted to. You don’t know him; his name is Winston Behn. He’s not one of the people we ran around with, he’s a fashion designer, and a good one. (Definitely not gay.) We seem to have a lot in common, and I’ve grown very fond of him very quickly. I don’t know if it will work, but I have to try.
I know you feel badly that it was you who drew away, but I don’t think you should. I honestly think you did the best you could. We never fought or tried to hurt each other, and I have a lot of good memories. A part of me will always love you, and I’ll always think of you as my friend. I hope you’ll think of me that way.
I’m in no hurry for a divorce, but I think when you’ve finished your work up there we should sit down and discuss it. Denham will handle it for me, and, since I can’t see us squabbling over things, you might ask him to do for you, as well.
Again, I’m sorry to have to tell you all this in a letter instead of face to face, but I don’t think I could have done it any other way. I hope you’re taking care of yourself and that your work is going well. We’ll talk when you come back.
Affectionately, Liz
On the second page there was a postscript.
P.S. Although Winston and I aren’t living together, exactly, he is spending a lot of time here, so I’ve packed all your things from the dressing room and the library and moved them out to your study over the garage. I’ve had the gardener put the Porsche under cover and attach a trickle charger to the battery. Please feel free to leave these things here until you’ve found your own place, or as long as you like. Unless you particularly want it, I would like to have the station wagon back for the cook to use when you come back from the mountains.
L.
Stunned, Howell read the letter again. Winston. What kind of name was that? Bulldogs were named Winston. Definitely not gay – oh, swell, that meant they were screwing the socks off each other twice every night of the week and four times on Sunday. And his things were in the fucking garage, now; that was considerate of her. We wouldn’t want Winston to have to look at Johnny’s toothbrush in the bathroom, would we? Howell wadded the letter and threw it at the fireplace as hard as he could.
He stood there, breathing hard, livid. He kicked a chair across the room and walked out onto the deck. Then he began to get some control of himself. It was his fault, all of it, he knew. She couldn’t have been better, not at any time. Maximum wife. He hadn’t deserved her. And, after all, he was screwing the socks off two women; what did he have to be jealous about? All he had wanted was out of the marriage, wasn’t it? He sat down on a deck chair and looked, sightlessly, at the lake. He felt something solid, something permanent breaking inside him. He put his face in his hands and wept like a child.
15
Scotty attacked the large steak with both hands. “I know he’s dirty, now, I just don’t know how.”
“What’s changed?” Howell tried to get interested; he needed to think about something else besides Elizabeth and Winston.
“He’s bought this great huge filing cabinet with a steel bar and transferred a lot of his files to it. Sally or I have a key to everything else, but not to this. I mean, I do, but I’m not supposed to.” She told him, with some relish, how she had palmed the third key.
Howell laughed aloud at her audacity; with that sort of brass, she might well make a good investigative reporter. “Pretty swift, Scotty, so what’s the problem? Pillage his fucking filing cabinet, and get the goods on him.”
“I’ve already pillaged it, and there’s nothing in it but regular stuff- ordinary office records. I went through all four drawers, file by file.”
Howell chewed his steak thoughtfully. “Is there anything else in the office – another filing cabinet, a safe – that only Bo has access to?”
Scotty dumped sour cream onto a baked potato. “Nope. Just that one filing cabinet.”
“Then that’s where it is.”
“What is?”
“The goods, if there are any.”
“It ain’t. Trust me.”
“It is. Let me tell you a story. A few years back, I got a tip from a secretary at the Capitol that her boss, the guy who handled the physical plant, all the repairs and maintenance, was on the take from contractors. She and I went into his office late of an evening, you might say, and we went through every filing cabinet in the place. Nothing. So, over breakfast, after a night of fruitless endeavor, I asked her to tell me all about the guy, what he was like. He was a maniac for records, a regular pedant about office procedures. That told me that he had to have some records somewhere; he couldn’t have lived with himself unless he had records. We went back to the office the next night, and this time we really took the place apart. Nothing. Three nights later, we found it. It was a tiny notebook, and it was hidden in a cut-out book, just sitting there on a bookshelf in plain view.”
“Bo’s that way about keeping records.”
“Damn right. He told me so himself only yesterday. Stopped by for a cup of coffee that turned into a drink.”
“I noticed he was drinking at the office.”
“So, I’m telling you that if Bo is as hipped on record keeping as he himself says he is, and if he’s dirty, he’s got a record of it. And I’ll give you odds it’s in that filing cabinet.”
“But I’ve already been through the goddamned thing, I told you.”
“Yeah, but you’re forgetting something. A guy, a public servant, an accountant who’s an embezzler, anybody with a game on the side who keeps a record, doesn’t do it in one of those
big old ledgers out of Dickens. He does it small, compact. A notebook, like my guy at the capital, maybe a few sheets of paper. He doesn’t bury it in the backyard – he’s got to make entries in it from time to time; he doesn’t stick it in the safe – that’s the first place a prosecutor would look if things went sour – and anyway, you and Sally know the combination.”
“So?”
“So he gets himself this lockup filing cabinet, very conspicuous, and he puts a lot of old crap in it and…?”
“Oh, come on, Johnny, I’ve already told you…”
“And he hides his records in plain sight; he picks himself out a nice, dull file – say, unpaid parking tickets or something, and he sticks his notebook in there. Did you think you’d find a file labeled DIRTY MONEY?”
Scotty had stopped chewing. “Jesus, why didn’t I think of that?”
“Grand jury wants to go after him, they’re going to do what you did. Who wants to waste his time going through old parking tickets? Now, the FBI, they’d lock themselves in and read everything, if it took ‘em a year. But all Bo needs is two minutes’ notice, and he whips out the incriminating stuff, and then he buries it in the backyard, or burns it. Except a true-blue keeper of records would never burn it. Never happen.”
“So I’ve gotta go back in there and go through every file. And Christ knows when I’ll be able to do it. There’s always somebody else in the office.”
“Middle of the night?”
“A radio operator, minimum. Always.”
“Then you’re going to have to get clever, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I’m going to have to get clever.” Scotty chewed her steak and narrowed her eyes.
“But not cute. You get cute and slip up, and Bo will hang you out to dry, kiddo, I mean it. I’ve tried to tell you before how territorial these country sheriffs are. The Mafia couldn’t make you go away any faster or better. Bo’s in control up here, and don’t you ever forget it.”
There was a rap on the door that made them both jump. “Jesus, he’s come to get you,” Howell laughed. He got up and went to answer it. A small, gray-haired black man in a white jacket stood on the porch. He looked like a butler.
“Good evening, sir, my name is Alfred,” the man said. “Mr. Eric Sutherland asked me to bring you this.” He was a butler; he held out a white envelope.
Howell took it. “Thank you, Alfred.”
“Mr. Sutherland asked me to wait for a reply, sir.”
Howell opened the envelope. A heavy, engraved card came out. Eric Sutherland was requesting the pleasure of his company for cocktails on Saturday afternoon. “Thank Mr. Sutherland for me, Alfred, and tell him I’d be pleased to come.” He had a thought. “And I’d like to bring a young lady, if that would be all right.”
Alfred bowed slightly. “I’m sure that will be just fine, Mr. Howell. I’ll convey your acceptance to Mr. Sutherland.” And he was gone.
Howell closed the door and tossed the card to Scotty. “Alfred is conveying my acceptance to Mr. Sutherland. Want to come?”
“Well,” she said, “it would be nice to see what the crumbs of the upper crust are like around here. All I’ve seen so far are the drunks and speeders.”
“You own a dress?”
“You betcha. How much of a shock shall I give old Mr. Sutherland?”
“None at all, please. I’ve still got a few weeks to go around here. This must be Sutherland’s annual bash. I heard something about it.”
“It is. Bo got his invitation this afternoon.”
“By hand?”
“Yep. Apparently, old man Sutherland doesn’t trust the post office.”
“Sort of courtly, that, hand-delivered invitations.”
“From what I hear, once a year is the most Eric Sutherland can manage courtly. He probably didn’t want to spend the money on the stamps.”
“Well, we’d better take advantage, hadn’t we?
Very late that night, he wasn’t sure quite how late, Howell came gently, fully awake. Scotty slept beside him, quietly, almost like a child. He had a curious sensation of unease; something seemed out of kilter. Then the silence came to him. There were no crickets.
He stopped himself from getting up immediately. He asked himself questions: was he really awake? Yes. Was he sober? Yes. He looked about the room, which seemed perfectly normal; he felt the sheet over him, rubbed it through his fingers; all senses working, performing normally. Finally, sure that he was in complete charge of himself, he got up and walked through the silence to the living room windows. Once again, the lake was not there, but another place; the house, tranquil in the moonlight, lay below him, and he heard the tune drifting toward him.
“Scotty!” he called out, afraid to take his eyes from the scene. “Scotty, come here quickly!”
“What?” her sleepy voice answered from the bedroom.
“Get out of bed and come here right now, goddamnit!” He heard the bed move and her bare feet on the living room floor. She came on the deck beside him.
“What? What is it?” She sounded fully awake and alarmed.
He reached out behind him for her hand, then stood her in front of him. “Look,” he said, taking her head in his hands and pointing her at what he could still see. “Tell me exactly what you see before you.”
He felt her go rigid.
“What’s happening?” she asked, her voice trembling. “What’s going on, Johnny?”
“What do you see?” he asked urgently. “Tell me exactly what you see.”
“A road, a house. It’s misty.”
“How many windows in the house?”
“Uh, two… three… four that I can see.”
“How many chimneys?”
“Two.”
“Do you hear anything?”
“Your hands are over my ears.”
He moved them. “Now?”
“A piano.”
“What’s it playing?”
“I… I don’t know. It sounds familiar, but…” She turned and buried her face in his chest. “I’m scared, Johnny.”
“It’s all right, nothing’s going to happen to us.” He lowered his head and kissed her hair, and, as he did, he heard the crickets. He looked up, and the lake looked back at him.
He showed her the lake, then put his arm about her and walked her into the living room. He sat her down on the piano bench and inserted a roll into the piano.
“What are you doing?”
“Listen.” He switched on the instrument; it began to play.
“That’s the song, the song I heard out there on the deck,” she said after a moment. Her voice was small and frightened. “Johnny, do you know what is happening here? Please tell me if you do.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t. But I know now that I’m not crazy.”
“Why?” she demanded. “What makes you so damned confident about that? You may be crazy, and I may be, too.”
“No, we’re not crazy, either of us.”
“Why not?”
“Because two people, even two crazy people, can’t have the same hallucination. What we saw was real.”
16
The morning after Scotty, too, had seen the vision, which is how Howell had come to think of it, Howell woke with an oddly pleasant feeling. It was mysterious, but faintly familiar, and it took him a couple of hours to bring it into focus. For a year, now, and perhaps for the better part of two, he now realized, he had been, more than anything else, bored. For all of his life, boredom had been foreign to him, and his work as a newspaperman had been boredom’s antithesis. Now, on this bright, cool August morning, in this most beautiful of places, in the throes of what could only be a classic, male-menopausal, midlife crisis, he was experiencing anew the intellectual and emotional condition which had always driven him: curiosity. He was once again, at long last, interested in something.
The fact of Scotty’s seeing the vision convinced him that he was not mad, not hallucinating. He was by no means convinced that what he had been
experiencing had a supernatural basis. The experience was, in some sense, real; it had a rational, if unfamiliar basis, and he was a rational man. He would proceed rationally.
Scotty did not entirely share his view of the situation. “Listen, John, this place is screwy – haunted, or something.”
“Or something. Does it scare you?”
“Well, yeah, a little.” She cocked her head to one side and looked thoughtful. “I mean, I’m not terrified, no more than after the seance, but that didn’t seem quite as real.”
Howell had been about to tell her about the girl; but now he felt that the introduction into the situation of what Scotty might interpret as a ghost might disturb her too much, and he didn’t want her to panic on him, now. “Well, I think it all means something, and I want to find out what.”
“How do you figure on doing that?” she asked.
“I’m not sure exactly, but before I can proceed, there’s something I need.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ll tell you when I’ve got it.”
Howell knew where to get it, too, he thought as he drove into Sutherland. He read the directory at the courthouse and bounded up the stairs two at a time. A young woman asked if she could help him.
“What a lovely dress,” he said, enthusiastically. She blushed. “Lovely. Uh, I’m interested in the local geography, and I wonder if I might see a survey map of the area?”
“Why, sure.” She was putty in his hands, now. “The whole county?”
“Oh, no, not the whole thing, just the town of Sutherland and the surrounding area.”
She reached under the counter and pulled out a sheet of typewriter paper with a map printed on it. “Here’s the official Chamber of Commerce map of the town, and that shows a little bit beyond the city limits.”