Further Lane

by James Brady

  She tossed her head in irritation. “If you’re all that bright, why bother killing people with bits of privet hedge? Aren’t there subtler ways? Aren’t I a pretty fair shot?”

  “You and Hannah were forever bickering over the privet. Using a privet stake through her black heart may have seemed to you bleak poetic justice.”

  She was as truly calm as I was only pretending to be. I even got a smile.

  “My, we are clever, Beecher. You’d think you were your father. The Admiral would be so proud the way you put two and three together and get six. You don’t add, you multiply. There’s privet hedge anywhere you look out here. I’ve no monopoly on the stuff. Privet is to East Hampton what the pine is to Maine. The redwood to California. Yet you come up with these astonishing conclusions.”

  Here was where I started tap-dancing:

  “I’ve been up to your place, broke into one of the greenhouses, stole your gardening gloves. They bore the same combination of soot and privet hedge the crime lab found in the wounds that killed them both, Hannah and Leo Brass.”

  Her face started to fall apart then. But only for an instant. The old WASP grace under pressure came through. Until, as we both heard a car, she wheeled. It sounded like Alix’s Jag. I turned toward the parking lot trying to see if it were. A mistake. When I turned back Pam had her tote bag in one hand and a small but impressive-looking handgun in the other. With what seemed a professional silencer over the muzzle. That Pam, she thought of everything, didn’t she?

  “Just shut up and stand where you are, Beecher.”

  “Sure, Pam. No problem.” It wouldn’t be very smart of her to start shooting people in broad daylight on the grounds of the Maidstone Club but you never knew. She’d killed two people already and had nothing to lose. A weekday morning out of season with nobody around. And with a silencer, to boot. She sounded cool and controlled but why take a chance? People got jittery and started shooting. It happened. I’d been shot in the ass once and didn’t want any more of it. Then Alix strode onto the court, seeing both of us but not yet seeing the gun. To Alix it was simply a couple of members having a clubby little chat.

  “Hi, there, Pamela. Playing a match? Jolly good to see you. Sorry I’ m late, Beecher. The door Mr. Warrender told us was supposed to be open was locked and I had to—Is that a gun, Ms. Phythian?”

  “How observant. Yes, and I’d like you over on this side of the net as well, please. I’ll be leaving shortly in my car and I’d prefer you didn’t attempt to impede me.”

  “Not at all,” I said, trying to make it sound as if that were the furthest thing from my mind. As it pretty much was.

  Not Alix’s, however.

  “So it was you that bumped everyone off, I take it? Crumbs, that’s a stunner. Not even John le Carré could possibly have…”

  What the hell was Alix up to? Instead of coming around the net to our side as Pam ordered, she drifted across the baseline. She had something in mind. Just what, I hadn’t a clue. But I started talking again, trying to get Pam refocused on me rather man on Alix.

  “Clever of you to have known precisely where Leo would be once the storm came ashore. Took someone versed in local topography to know about The Gut and how crucial it is to the ecology of Georgica Pond.”

  Alix was still moving, a fixed smile on her face. What the hell was she…? Then she said, her voice very steady, “Beecher, how did you get the goods on her, so to speak?”

  “The gloves. Her gardening gloves.”

  “My word, just think of it.…”

  Pam’s voice, hard and angry, cut across our silly dialogue like the crack of a whip. “Enough! There isn’t a functioning brain between the two of you. How you stumbled across my path is just sheer rotten luck. I…”

  Did I see a warning light blinking on? Or was I …

  “Don’t you dare…” Pam started.

  From somewhere behind me there was a loud bang of sorts and there whizzed past my ear a blur of yellow moving very very fast. Pock! Then the same succession of sounds. Pock-pock! Facing me, Pam started to dodge, raising the gun menacingly, and then, as a yellow tennis ball smashed into her chest, she staggered and fell.

  Game, set, and match, Alix Dunraven.

  * * *

  I used the old length of climbing rope from Hannah’s “junk” collection to bind her hands. Then I released tension on the net of the teaching court and had Pam Phythian snugly rolled up like a rug long before the cops arrived and even before she was fully recovered from the thud of that ninety-mile-an-hour serve.

  “Fortunate thing she didn’t have the machine set to toss up a lob,” Alix commented thoughtfully.

  Pam, considering her situation, was remarkably composed. Most of her venom was reserved for the late Hannah Cutting.

  “I told you she wasn’t our sort, not our sort at all. The very idea of her attempting to climb Everest. On the way up from Katmandu she was forever on the cell phone to the gossip columns, posing for photos with the grinning Sherpas, and shaving her legs. To think that a woman so common might one day stand atop a summit where Hillary and Tenzing once…”

  “And where you yourself also stood, Ms. Phythian,” Alix threw in.

  “Quite so,” Pam Phythian said, pleased at the notion.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Ang Thwat spun out into space and fell into eternity …

  With Pam at our mercy, I decided to explain why I suspected something had happened three years ago on Everest between Hannah and her that would eventually lead Pam Phythian to violence.

  “You were a suspect, I suppose most of us were, no matter how marginally. But when I checked back issues of the East Hampton Star I realized it was only a month or so after you returned from that tragic business atop Everest that Hannah was put up for membership in the Ladies’ Village Improvement Society and you pulled rank and forced a vote you knew would end by rejecting her. But why? A relatively unimportant matter but you risked embarrassment to kill her chances. Obviously, a few weeks after you both came home, the differences between you had become deadly, far beyond trimming the privet hedge and backing rival charities. It was Everest, wasn’t it?”

  She just stared at me. Furious and stubborn, sure she could dominate, quite certain I was only making wild guesses.

  Very quietly, I said, “The rope, Pam. That length of climbing rope Hannah brought back from Everest. That was it, wasn’t it?”

  She started to talk then, compulsively. The police had been called and were on the way and I suppose I should have tried to stop her, to have warned Pam against self-incrimination, but I wasn’t a policeman or the D.A.; I was certainly no lawyer. And despite being wrapped in tennis netting, she was in no mood to be shut up and seemed in a curious way to be at the center of our attention.

  “The traditional approach to Everest is an overland trek of seventy miles or so from Katmandu to the Thyangboche monastery,” she began. “It can take two or even three weeks; the porters carry such heavy loads and the country is so rough. May seem like a waste of time, but it works out well, permitting the climbers to acclimate gradually to higher and higher altitudes, helps them put a fine edge on fitness. A mountain like Everest demands more than Tuesdays and Thursdays on the Stairmaster. But our expedition was anything but traditional, half of us high-powered women, ‘a dirty half-dozen,’ so we laughingly termed ourselves, all of us savvy dames accustomed to having our egos massaged, having our way. So the decision was made to save three weeks and airlift by chopper directly from Katmandu to the monastery base camp and start out from there. I objected, so did a few others. Hannah and the majority would have none of it. She was incredibly eager to push on. She’d cut a deal with one of the TV networks and wanted to get on with the videotaping and the climb and get her adventures on the air. It was sure to sell more books, more magazines, more everything, more … Hannah. So we began our trek without the usual preconditioning and with predictable results, pulled muscles, hammies, sprains. On the approach march most of us wore sensible
khaki shorts; Hannah sported a miniskirt and kept asking someone or other to shoot photos and videotape of her on the march. She shaved her legs every morning before we broke camp and drove everyone nuts, forever on the cell phone, talking to people in New York and dictating to secretaries back there. A porter broke his leg fording a mountain stream and you could see Hannah looking impatiently at her Cartier tank watch, wondering just how long this latest crisis was going to delay things. A man writhing in agony and she’s looking at her watch.

  “On the mountain itself, her pushiness actually helped. The higher you climb, the more sluggish people get. They have to be chivied out of their sleeping bags in the morning, forced to saddle up heavy loads and get cracking. Despite her lack of high mountain experience, Hannah was so good at that part of it; you might resent the woman and admire her at the same time. She would have made a marvelous drill instructor at boot camp. And she was fit; that was another thing you couldn’t fault her for…”

  But what happened? I asked. You don’t kill someone because she made you get up in the morning and shaved her legs; you threw a shoe at her but you didn’t drive a stake of privet through her heart.

  It was above camp four that it all happened, Pam said, the camp from which the final assault party would make its sprint for the summit, there and back in one day. Reach the summit or admit failure and fall back. They were running short of options, of oxygen bottles and food and everything else, and worst of all, running short of good weather.

  “The monsoon was moving in,” Pam went on. “Base camp radio relayed us the weather reports from Delhi each morning, each evening. We’d had a splendid run of almost a fortnight, fine, clear weather and no new snow. But the window of opportunity was closing fast. Delhi reported the monsoon was boiling up out of the Bay of Bengal and headed our way fast. Even the greenest of us knew what that meant; you can’t climb above eight thousand meters when the wind blows at a hundred miles an hour and six feet of new snow can fall in a single day. When the monsoon reaches the Himalayas you shut down climbing until October. The guides chose those of us they considered fit enough to make the attempt. There were two distinct teams. I guess because they thought we were pals, Hannah and I were put together with Ang Thwat the Sherpa on one of them, and from here on would rope up as one. Which displeased both of us since we’d been snapping at each other and didn’t really want to be on the same rope. By now, I believe we cordially detested each other.”

  You couldn’t stop her now. What was it that drove them to confession and self-incrimination, she and Royal both, spilling their guts to strangers out of some mystic need to purge themselves of sin? Cotton Mather might have understood it. Or his brother, Increase Mather, or the men who burned the women at Salem. Puritanism and WASP guilt and an irresistible urge to tell all?

  “Our rope never did reach the summit,” Pam resumed. “Didn’t miss by more than a few hundred feet, but by then Wales, our leader, ordered retreat. Snow was falling, daylight fading, wind rising, we were desperately short of oxygen, and the damned Sherpas seemed to have shirked their job of setting up fixed ropes at the steeper places. A grand adventure was turning into nightmare, arguably into disaster. Yet Hannah kept griping. Why couldn’t we have pressed on? If she could make it this far with her limited experience, what plagued the rest of us? Hot shots! she sneered. ‘Ms. Magazine Goes on an Outing!’

  “Her contempt was something you could feel! We set off back down to camp four and the safety of tents and sleeping bags and primus stoves and radio. Some of us never got there. The storm caught us. One of the Sherpas collapsed. My feet were freezing. I guess we were all pretty badly spent. Even Hannah. But she kept on and on about it, we’d been so near the top …

  “We were all roped in two-person or three-person teams. We were halfway down the Southeast Ridge when Conrad and the Sherpa just disappeared. Wales said it was ten thousand feet down that side of the ridge. I didn’t even feel a sense of loss. We were all going to die, I was sure. Why mourn the dead when we’d shortly be with them? Wales was shouting at us now. He was panicking, too. All that Seattle cool oozing out of him. I think he was afraid we were giving up, that we’d refuse to go on, would just sit down there in the snow and die. We would have, too, I guess we realized that, but there comes a stage of fatigue and oxygen starvation where you couldn’t care less. Die? Why not? Nothing could be worse than this. I know I felt that way. Wales was starting to go back to help one of the Sherpas. I remember screaming at him not to leave us, to get us the hell out of here. I lost it a bit, I guess, and found myself shouting at him:

  “‘It’s only a Sherpa!’

  “It was then that Hannah Cutting slapped me. Called me a bitch. A coward. A weakling …

  “And I was none of those things. I was so much better than she was. My breeding so much better … It was just that I was exhausted, worn down, out of my head for lack of oxygen. I only wanted to hollow out a little place in the snow and lie down and die.”

  She paused.

  “We were at that stretch of the Southeast Ridge when it narrows to a knife edge with those terrible voids falling away on either side. Hannah and I were roped together, three on the rope. Ang was leading with me second and Hannah trailing. Tired as I was, and frightened, I was the more experienced climber, I had the better technique. Hannah had that astonishing primal energy but even she seemed to accept that I should be ahead of her. The knife edge was by now more like a razor’s edge, so narrow along here it was a matter of putting one foot ahead of the other and keeping your balance, like a high wire act. All this in darkness and with a full gale blowing and heavy snow. Then my crampon slipped, my left foot went out from under me, and suddenly I was falling. It was ten thousand feet down and I knew I was going to die. Only I didn’t fall, I didn’t die. Ang reached back to steady me and then, so fast I don’t know what happened, he slipped and went over the edge. I was pulled down, too, and started to slide after him, pulled by the rope. Hannah threw herself down on the other side of the knife edge as a counterweight and with the rope pulled in opposite directions; I was being nearly cut in half. I could see Ang hanging there over the void, hear him wheezing and helpless. To the other side, Hannah lay flat on her stomach holding all three of us from sliding off into space. But she was losing the fight. Ang and I together weighed too much for her to haul us back. Slowly but surely we were all sliding toward infinity. Hannah was cursing. I could hear her panting, between the swear words. And then, miraculously for us, tragically for him, the rope connecting Ang to me and behind me to Hannah parted!

  “Ang Thwat spun out into space, not making a sound, and fell into eternity. The rope had parted, leaving Hannah and me secure, balanced on either side of the knife edge. After a minute to get our breath, we were able to scramble back to our feet. And now it was Hannah who would lead, who’d proved the stronger.

  “I started to say thanks, for having been so quick and so strong, for having saved my life. She cut me off with a snarl. ‘I didn’t do it for you, Pam. I did it for myself! If you fell, you’d take me with you.’

  “Somehow, we got down to the South Col and bivouacked for the night. Wales never got back. Two others died in the night. Frozen and exhausted. When the chopper came Hannah laughed at me. ‘Better go first, Pam, you poor dear,’ that sort of thing, her voice full of contempt. My feet were solid blocks of ice and I was still feeling awful but I wasn’t going to take that. I swung at her with my rucksack and knocked her right off her feet. But she was quickly up and hitting out at me. I remember the guides pulling us apart and then I was in the Nepalese chopper and flying and for the first time since the evening before, I realized I was going to live, that I wasn’t going to die on Mount Everest.”

  Pam stopped.

  “It was later that day I also realized I’d put myself forever at Hannah Cutting’s mercy, that all she had to do was to tell what happened, and I’d be drummed out of society. In a small town like East Hampton if people are laughing at you behind your back, you
might as well sell the house, pack up, and get out. It’s never forgotten, you’re never forgiven for not living up to whatever defines your class. I was the blueblood and I’d folded; Hannah the peasant from Polish Town hadn’t. That was four years ago. She’s been holding it over my head ever since. And now she was coming out with this book of hers that Liz Smith was saying would name names and tell all. And I had to do something about it now before she left for Nepal and the reconnaissance because she might not be back to East Hampton until next summer. By that time she might well have succeeded in climbing Everest and her book would be out. A heroine and a best-selling author all wrapped in the one sexy Hannah package.

  “She was stronger than I was and I hated her for it; she’d saved my life and I’d never been able to forgive her for that.”

  For all her gush, she was still tiptoeing carefully around one thing. There was still one thing about which she wasn’t leveling and telling all. It wasn’t just that Hannah might humiliate her in society; it was that Hannah knew something even worse that happened up there on the knife edge of the Everest ridge lines. So I asked:

  “The rope holding you to Ang, Pam. What happened to it? Why did it mean so much to Hannah to have a lousy length of old mountaineering rope?”