“If he’s killed two men, like his father before him, he’ll put up a fight.”
Harrison didn’t answer. He got in the motorcar and settled himself next to Rutledge.
They found the house without any trouble, and went together to the door. It was opened by a middle-aged woman, one side of her face dark with bruising. “Yes?” she said, wariness in her eyes as she held the door half-closed so that they couldn’t see beyond her into the passage.
“Mrs. Miller?” Rutledge said pleasantly. “I’ve come to speak to you about your late husband. Mr. Harrison, here, tells me that he died only recently.”
“Yes, two weeks and three days ago,” she answered, her eyes clouding with grief. “It was a hard blow.”
“How did he die?”
“Of a cancer,” she said. “In his lungs. What is it you wanted with him? I’ve paid all his debts I knew of. There’s not much money left.”
“Could we come in? It will only take a moment.”
“I’m—I’m in the middle of preparing dinner,” she said, her voice rising. “Could you come again another day?”
“I’m afraid not. I have to return to London shortly.” He put a hand on the door, and she cried out.
“Stay here,” he said to Harrison, and set out at a run around the side of the house toward the rear. He was just in time to see a young man of perhaps twenty dashing out the kitchen door, heading for the orchard and the copse of trees beyond. Rutledge went after him, and they were halfway through the copse before he brought the fleeing suspect down. Getting to his feet, he hauled Teddy Miller up again, and said, “I’m arresting you for the murder of one Captain Jarvis and a hotel clerk named Phelps.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Teddy Miller said, still breathing hard. “You don’t know anything about me.”
“I know you slapped your mother for getting rid of your father’s old box. Where is it now?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Teddy sneered, trying to shake off Rutledge’s grip on his shoulder. “Maybe I burned it.”
“Not likely,” Rutledge said. “Or you wouldn’t have killed two men to retrieve it.” He marched Miller around the house to where his mother stood in the doorway, her face streaked with tears.
“I didn’t tell them anything, Teddy,” she called to her son, her voice edged with fear. “Truly I didn’t.”
“He won’t be around to harm you, Mrs. Miller,” Rutledge said, pushing Miller toward the motorcar. “He’s in police custody now.”
Harrison joined him, holding the door as Rutledge, his mind on Hamish, pushed Teddy Miller into the rear seat.
“Will she be all right?” Harrison asked, looking over his shoulder at the stricken woman. “I’m not sure how much she understood about this business. But she did say to me, ‘It’s brought nothing but evil, that box.’ ”
“She could be arrested. Time will tell. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think her husband ever told her where the box came from. And she was too frightened to betray her son.”
They drove directly to the constable’s office, and it was a good hour before Constable Hull quite grasped what had been happening while he was quietly making his morning rounds. He went to see the bodies, and then insisted on interviewing Mrs. Miller.
She recognized the two knives used in the killings—they had come from her own kitchen—and began to cry.
They set about searching the house, but there was no sign of the box. When Hull had left to question Teddy Miller again, Rutledge went out to scour the orchard and small wood. It had begun to rain in earnest, and he was forced to return for an umbrella. He found Mrs. Miller in the kitchen, and when she looked up at his face, he knew he had been searching in the right place.
Half an hour later, he’d found the box, this time buried a little deeper. For that Mrs. Miller could indeed have been charged. He couldn’t decide whether she had tried to shield her son or whether she was determined to be rid of the box that had cost her family so dearly.
“I tried to open it once,” she said as he brought it in and used a cloth to wipe away the water and the earth that clung to it. “But the hasp doesn’t work.”
“No. It’s a puzzle box,” he said, and fumbled for the hidden key. Suddenly the front moved, and then swung out. Mrs. Miller came to stare over his shoulder at the contents. Inside was a faded, brittle square of silk, and on it lay a lock of hair curled into a half-moon.
Hamish said something, but he was drowned out by Mrs. Miller.
“That’s all?” she was exclaiming, shock in her voice. “He killed for someone’s hair?”
He wasn’t sure whether she was speaking of her husband or her son. “It’s a talisman,” he explained. “A lucky charm to those who served in the regiment this belonged to.”
“I hated the box,” she retorted. “I saw my husband’s face whenever he looked at it. And I shivered.”
“Why do you believe it’s malevolent?” Rutledge asked, restoring the hair and the silk to the box and closing it.
“Harry told me once that it held his father’s heart. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. If I’d had my wits about me, I’d have told Teddy that it was buried with his father. But I was too frightened, when he thought it was gone forever. He wanted to pass it down to his son. Well, he won’t never have one now, will he? And the box will go back where it came from. All nice and tidy, that, only I’m left with no husband and no son on account of it. Will they give me a reward for its return, do you think? It’s only fair, considering.”
HEDGE
BY JONATHAN STONE
I’m writing these words in complete darkness.
I can’t see this pen or paper in front of me.
I’m forming these words carefully in straight lines across the paper—assuming this handwriting will be clear enough to read—whoever ends up reading it—if anyone ends up reading it.
I’m writing this purely by feel. Like everything I do in here. The darkness is so black, so absolute, my eyes are useless. Still in working order presumably, but with no current function. I’ve never seen what surrounds me here, and if I am brought out of here the way I was brought in, I never will.
I can only feel for, and imagine, what it looks like around me. I’m reduced, literally, to my imagination. Sometimes I catch myself wondering if there’s anything really there, at my ink-black periphery. But of course, I know there is. I know too well the solidity, the thickness, that is there.
I gave up kicking. I kicked furiously for a little while, then began to worry about conserving my energy.
I gave up screaming. The screaming made me feel better—a release—but only for a moment. It’s such a tight, close space, my eardrums rang from my own screaming. Soon enough I knew it was pointless. It was only wearing me out.
I can only speculate about where I am. My initial kicking yielded only a sense of the solidity of my container. And the solidity of what surrounds me, beyond my container. The solid, discouraging thunk and thud of thickness, of substance. Of don’t-kid-yourself-you-ain’t-goin’-nowhere.
It’s about three feet high, give or take, too low to stand up in, so I periodically clench my legs, pump them, shift them, have done that since I got here. I keep count, track the repetitions in my head, to make sure I’m doing it long enough to qualify as exercise, to keep my blood flowing.
Not surprisingly, you quickly lose all sense of time. You have no way to gauge it. They took my watch, of course, its dim dial a beacon of order and organization. Who would have thought I’d miss its seconds, minutes, and hours so acutely?
It’s dank. Which is why I assume I’m belowground. How far belowground? Three feet, fifteen feet, a hundred? In an old mine shaft? An abandoned well? An industrial fill site? An old cave? I have no idea. Or is the dankness just my own mustiness at this point, my own anxious sweat, a coating of worry?
It’s silent. The noise of life totally gone. I hear only my own sounds—the beat of my breathing, my shifting—which I am
acutely conscious of one minute, then forget about the next, and am again conscious of the minute after that. Part of the antipodal rhythm in here: hyper-self-awareness, and then, a moment later, no sense of a self at all.
The air pipe is about eight inches wide. It lets them drop me food without my ever setting eyes on any of them. Without their risking my seeing them, identifying them.
Potatoes. Fresh fruit. A can of beans. A carton of juice. There’s a little porcelain bowl in the corner. My hands stumbled onto it when I first felt around me, and its function was immediately obvious. The stench I have to bear. Overwhelming at first—you gag as it marinates at such close range, but then, as the days wore on, it was hardly noticeable. Smell, like sight, is a sense that can be suspended by circumstance, apparently. And when (on the second day? the third day?) they lowered a clean bowl balanced in a simple rope sling, I understood well enough. I took the clean bowl off the sling and carefully—very carefully—put the filled one in it.
It feels like a coffin. But it’s not a coffin, I remind myself. It’s somewhat taller, a little wider. If it felt too much like a coffin, if it felt too much like you were buried alive, you might go crazy. It needs to feel just enough like it is not a coffin. They know this, I’m sure. They know how to keep you—they need to keep you—just this side of sanity. Crazy, you have no value to anyone—and that’s not the condition they want you in.
No noise, no sound, except the slight scratching of this pen skating across the paper, the click of my punctuation landing on the page, correctly, I hope, in the otherwise utter, exaggerated silence around me.
This thick stack of paper, these dozen pens, mysteriously here for me, greeting my searching hands on my arrival.
Trying to keep straight lines, keep enough space between them, not bunch them too close. I’m carefully rotating the pens, switching to a new one every few pages, to maximize the chances that my words are actually making it onto the page.
I’m writing this as fast as I can, because I don’t know how much time I have.
Maybe only another minute. Maybe another week. Maybe a month. Maybe eternity. (I’m trying not to think about that last too closely, trying to push the thought away, but it’s hard to push anything beyond these thick dank walls.) And although there is the chance they want me to write only to see what I know—and then they’ll bury it along with me—there’s also the chance they want me to write it for some actual, future use, where my story, my version of events, is genuinely valued.
Because the paper and pens are presumably here for a reason. Merely to keep me sane? Or to drive me crazy? Or for some purpose opaquely between those two?
IF YOU WERE awake, alert to the world around you, if you were honest with yourself, you saw it coming. We all did.
The only surprise, really, was that it hadn’t happened before.
You could certainly hear it, couldn’t you, in the commentary of your coworkers, delivered in a jaded tone of inevitability. You could read about it in the sober news articles, see it quantified in the accompanying charts, couldn’t miss it in the strident, alarm-bell editorials.
You could hear the phrases—the verbal shorthand—passed slickly, knowingly back and forth like hors d’oeuvres at a cocktail party. Bandied around by the cable commentators, by your frail and alarmist eighty-five-year-old neighbor, by the couple behind you in the theater just before the film starts.
Growing income disparity. Richer and poorer. Two Americas—separating fast.
Disappearing middle class. We’re becoming South America.
(You were at those dinner parties, weren’t you, where you discussed or at least acknowledged the two Americas, in the form of outrageous CEO pay and equally absurd minimum wage, and the dangerously growing chasm between rich and poor, the protesters camped in city parks across the country—and yet blithely and eagerly and with no sense of irony in the next moment you exchanged recommendations on landscape crews or designer clothing sales or highlights of your last golf round. No inherent accusation. I saw you at those parties. You saw me.)
If you were alert, you saw it coming—a by-product of the slow-motion collapse of our financial system—its immense granite and marble pieces in their thunderous fall to earth sending out a vast rising cloud of unemployment and a billowing dust of anomie, desperation, and foreclosure, on homes, futures, lives—combined with a government that, it turned out, couldn’t protect its citizenry in the aftermath of a bad Gulf storm, or win little wars of its own devising against third-rate countries with crackpot dictators—a government paralyzed by partisanship and infighting like a parlor full of quarrelsome aunts—so how could it ever be effective against the guerrilla nature and craft of what was coming….
So it became in a way inevitable, and finally, it was here: our latest import. Like fresh flowers from Peru and Uruguay. Like our silent diligent busboys and landscapers and masons from Mexico and Guatemala and Honduras. Like our coffee from Colombia and Brazil. Simply the latest South American product.
Kidnapping.
Not like snatching the Lindbergh baby, though, with catchphrases and newspaper headlines and newsstand sales. Not disenfranchised white-trash moms or laid-off dads using a stolen kid as a pawn. Not taking a kid from a mall parking lot. Not kidnapping for emotional leverage in a disastrous marriage or as a political statement, but much more pure and direct than that.
Kidnapping for money. Simple commerce. The business of kidnapping. A business we’d never had. A vast new enterprise galloping onto the American economic landscape, with a cottage industry of security firms, private police, alarm systems, tracking devices, springing up around it.
Yes, at some level, inevitable. An utterly logical extension of social forces and events—illegal immigration, income disparity, economic meltdown, and our battered but still mythic virtues of private enterprise and free-market capitalism.
A broad social problem that fractured like a fragile jigsaw puzzle into individual problems, each piece its own island of woe. A social problem, arriving where you never really believe broad social problems will arrive—at your own doorstep.
SPEAKING OF DOORSTEPS: follow me now across this particular one… that of a fancy building where the hum of Fifth Avenue goes suddenly silent behind me as I enter the building’s vaults and coolness. Where I announce myself and my destination, which solicits a raised eyebrow of appraisal and then a quick nod of approval from the uniformed doorman. Where the whispering whoosh of soft oiled mechanics is all I hear ascending in the dark cherrywood elevator—with a plush bench with embroidered cushion along one side for a weary matron or pampered child. My entry into the apartment is closely supervised by the uniformed maid, leading me along a corridor of original neoclassical, Impressionist, and New York Brutalist canvases, and antique maps dating to the Renaissance, letting out in a mahogany den anchored by an immense Louis XIV desk—huge leather chairs facing it, and a fireplace behind it where perfect blond logs smoke and crackle.
It could be the apartment of a corporate law firm’s senior partner, or the New York residence of a multinational’s CEO, or the Manhattan retreat of a Midwestern industrialist or a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. It is in fact the home of my brother.
He could be any of those. It doesn’t much matter, for the purposes of this record. In fact, his social group crosses the borders of all those occupations. They whack the little white ball around together expertly, second nature, while they throw deals each other’s way.
We occupy different universes, which intersect, only glancingly, on Thanksgiving and Christmas. His adorable young daughters have never flown commercially. His goateed chef, Armando, travels everywhere with them. I’ve observed a steady process of increasing insulation—big tracts of land, private schooling, home delivery of groceries and goods—anything to cut off interaction with the world at large.
But the more our lives have diverged, the more our bonds of love must be proved to each other, and provide proof to ourselves—See, it’s not about
worldly circumstance, it’s about something deeper—to reaffirm the pride in our connection.
He just bought an island off Nova Scotia. He’s also got one in the Caribbean. His friends are buying them, too—it’s the thing to do. The island of their existence was at first merely metaphorical. Now they’re isolating themselves physically as well. Islands used to be an impractical fantasy—inaccessible, wildly impossible to build on and maintain. But personal jet travel—and the absurdly outsized returns in a previously humming world economy—have revived the allure of island life.
“Coming along,” he says of his Nova Scotia property. “Guesthouse and dock are done. Main house has a ways to go. I’ll have you up soon.” I’ll get my few days, shoehorned in between his high-powered, like-walleted guests—his friends.
We rarely talk business. He’s an investor, a capitalist. I’m an investigative journalist. (I’m a freelancer, and the small circle of online publications I work for now each want their own coverage of, their own angle on, the kidnapping story—a story too pervasive, too personal to not be covering—and like all my assignments, it will help pay my modest but rising rent.) He is establishment, the power structure, there to maintain it and enhance it; I’m there to question it, challenge it, rattle it, shake it up. We are like brothers lining up on opposite sides of the scrimmage line, brothers divided by a civil war—but have rarely said anything to acknowledge it. In truth, we both enjoy it, I think—bracketing the world, encompassing the world, from its opposite sides.
But now our lives are at risk of intersecting beyond the holidays. Because if certain criminal parties learn that an investigative journalist on their trail is the only brother of a wealthy financier, grabbing me both silences me and promises a payday—maybe too tempting a combination to resist. So I owe my brother this visit, to say what I’m working on (I wouldn’t let him deter me, and he wouldn’t bother to try), and to warn him how it makes us both a target.
Mystery Writers of America Presents the Mystery Box Page 28