The View from the Cherry Tree

by Willo Davis Roberts

  “Go on! Get away, you nasty thing!”

  She leaned toward him, her head and shoulders out the window, swatting at the cat. Sonny was a hardened customer, however; unafraid, he was poised to spring.

  Rob slid one foot downward, seeking the limb he knew was there, ready to reach out and grab the cat, when it happened.

  It was so fast he could hardly take in what he had seen, although later he was able to put it all together as if in slow motion. It took much longer to tell about it than it did to happen.

  Mrs. Calloway was leaning through the window, with Sonny ready to spring. (Perhaps he remembered the taste of that goldfish, and that there were more of them in there, through that open window.) Suddenly the old lady was lifted off her feet, through the opening, surprise causing her to emit a small squeak. That’s all, only a squeak, like a cornered mouse.

  For just a second Rob saw the hands that had pushed her . . . big hands, a man’s hands, surely . . . and Sonny, alarmed by the figure coming toward him, bounded from the branch into the house. Rob heard a muffled grunt and saw the cat disappear, blood oozing up in ridges on the man’s forearms where Sonny’s claws had raked him. And then the arms were gone, the lace curtain hung limply across the opening, and he couldn’t see into the house any longer.

  All of that he saw, in seconds . . . less than seconds . . . while Mrs. Calloway was falling, flailing with her arms and legs. Then she gave a gurgling, choked cry and was silent.

  Rob stared down into her face, which was looking straight up at him and slowly turning blue. The leather strap of the binoculars had twisted about her neck, and as she fell had caught around the big branch, the one that had been cut off when it approached the side of her house; it was thick, thick enough to hold her meager weight as she swung there, her toes dangling only a foot or two off the ground.

  Her glasses had gone askew, tipped by a branch or perhaps one of her own clawing hands, for she tried to loosen the strap at her neck. Her eyes, up close, were a pale blue; they bulged as if they were being squeezed out of her, and her mouth gaped, working soundlessly, then not at all.

  Rob was frozen above her in the tree, looking down, unbelieving as the intelligence in the eyes, the fear, the agony, faded. He opened his mouth, trying to yell because he could hear people behind him at his own house, but he couldn’t make any noise. Not even a squeak.

  The bulging eyes continued to stare up at him, sightless now. He knew they couldn’t see him. The small body swung gently, turning a little, on the leather strap.

  His chest hurt, as if his own breathing had been cut off. Rob shot one frantic glance after Sonny, but there was no way of getting him back, short of climbing over that awful swinging body, which he could not do. If they found the cat in the house maybe they’d say it was his fault, and they’d put him to sleep or ­something . . . He ought to go after the cat, and he couldn’t. He couldn’t speak, he couldn’t move.

  And then his foot slipped, and he fell forward, almost onto . . . it. Already he thought of her that way . . . as it. Not a person, but a thing. He actually brushed against the swinging body as he fell. He didn’t feel the twigs that scraped his face and his arms, didn’t know when he struck the ground. He doubled his legs under him, and they took him toward the back door; his hands didn’t seem to work right as he scrabbled with the door, and he stumbled going across the threshold.

  The house was full of people, their faces blurring before his eyes.

  “Leave the pieces, huh, boy?” Mr. Mallory bent over to right a chair Rob didn’t even know he’d overturned. “Where have you been? Your mother wanted you to . . .”

  It didn’t register, whatever his mother wanted him to do. It took two tries before the words came, gasping, puffing, almost not words at all.

  “She’s dead! Mrs. Calloway is dead! She’s hanging in the cherry tree!”

  None of their faces changed. Mr. Mallory sighed, shaking his head slightly. “Rob, I’m sorry if this weekend is boring you, but the rest of us are busy and we haven’t got time for any more of your foolishness, do you understand?”

  There seemed to be a roaring noise in his ears, as if something were gushing through his head, under pressure.

  “No, it’s not . . . I’m . . . Dad, she really is dead! She’s hanging in the cherry tree! And Sonny went through her window, he’s in her house . . . he didn’t have anything to do with it, honest he didn’t . . . but she’s just . . . hanging there . . . and her eyes are squeezed out!”

  They really looked at him, then.

  Mrs. Mallory rose slowly from the chair where she had been sitting, hemming Darcy’s dress. “Robert Walter Mallory, if you’re making this up . . .”

  He shook his head, pleading for them to believe him, feeling as if he’d been running for blocks. “I’m not, Mom! She’s dead, she’s really dead!”

  The color left his mother’s face. “Maybe you’d better go see, Wally.”

  Their faces reflected, now, his own horror. They were beginning to believe, at least that he thought what he was saying was the truth.

  “How could you possibly know . . .” Darcy asked slowly.

  “I know. I was . . . looking at her, when she died.”

  His words echoed hollowly. Mr. Mallory moved toward the door, not running but moving fast, and the rest of them followed. Rob didn’t know if he wanted to go out there again or not. He had a horrid notion that he was going to dream about Mrs. Calloway, swinging and swaying from the branch of the cherry tree, with her eyes bugging out. He felt a little sick to his stomach.

  They poured out into the sunlit yard like a swarm of ants over spilled syrup, and then slowed. His father had reached her, put his arms up, lifting the frail old body. Funny, how little she looked. Rob had never thought of her as being so tiny.

  Walt Mallory looked toward the house. “Come here, somebody . . . Steve, give me a hand, get that strap off of there . . . Teddi, call the ambulance.”

  Teddi was halfway back to the house when he followed that up with a final command. “Better call the police, too, I guess.”

  With Steve freeing the strap from the stump of the limb, the old woman was lifted down and stretched out on the grass. Rob stayed where he was, beside his own house. He could see all he wanted to see from there. He wondered if Sonny would come if they called him at the open window, but he didn’t want to walk over so close to . . . it . . . to find out.

  Mr. Mallory and Steve were kneeling beside the old woman. His mother, who had gone halfway to them, called out, “Is she . . . is she really? . . .”

  Mr. Mallory stood up. “Yes, looks like she strangled on that confounded binocular strap. Of all the stupid things . . . there isn’t anything anybody can do for her now, I’m afraid.”

  Mrs. Mallory retreated to Rob’s side, putting one hand on his shoulder. She was ­trembling.

  “Dear heaven . . . of all the times for such a thing to happen . . . what did happen, Rob? She just fell out the window?”

  He opened his mouth, but Teddi’s words covered his own as she came running back outside. “They’re coming, both of them, the ambulance and the police! Is she really dead?”

  Steve came toward them across the grass. “She’s dead, all right. Man, talk about a freaky accident . . . another foot and she’d have been able to stand up.”

  “Hey, what’s going on? Holding a convention?”

  They all looked toward the street, where Max was coming toward them, smiling. “I had such a hassle with Old Lady Calloway yesterday, I thought I’d better park around the corner this time. What’s going on?”

  He read their expressions, then, and a moment later spotted the limp small figure on the grass. “Hey, what happened?”

  “It’s Mrs. Calloway,” Teddi said, torn between horror and excitement. “I called an ambulance, but Daddy and Steve say she’s dead.”

  Max swallowed.
“How come? I mean, what happened?”

  “She fell out the window and hanged herself in the cherry tree with the binocular straps,” Steve explained. “Rob saw her fall. I wouldn’t go look at her if I were you; she isn’t pretty.”

  “I have no desire to look at her,” Max assured him. “What a thing to happen.”

  Behind them, in the house, the telephone began to chime. For a moment nobody moved.

  “Teddi, get the phone.” His mother might have been rooted there beside him, her fingers digging into his shoulder. “I don’t think I can take much more today. There are the sirens. Now I suppose everybody within blocks will be out here.”

  Mr. Mallory was still standing beside the body. “Yes. Why don’t you all go in the house? I’ll talk to them when they come.”

  “Darcy!” Teddi poked her head out a window. “It’s the bakery calling back. There’s been some kind of mix-up on your cake; they had the date down wrong, for next Saturday.”

  Darcy, who was already pale, began to shake. “They couldn’t have it wrong. They couldn’t! I saw them mark it in the book, the seventeenth, I saw it!”

  “Well, I don’t know, that’s what they said! Somebody better talk to them!”

  Mrs. Mallory inhaled deeply, releasing Rob. “Well, if they made a mistake they’d better start working double-time, because they’re going to have a cake to feed three hundred people at the reception hall by noon tomorrow, or else!”

  “Will you talk to them, Darcy?”

  “Mom . . . please, Mom . . .” Darcy looked as if she were going to cry.

  “Don’t worry, they’ll have a cake if they all have to stay up all night making it.” Mrs. Mallory strode up the steps, in a way that made Rob glad it wasn’t him she was mad at.

  Rob stood where he was as the rest of the family reentered the house, listening to the approaching sirens. They were almost here, and he hadn’t gotten Sonny out of the house next door, and maybe they’d seal it up or something, and the cat wouldn’t be able to get out . . .

  And then he saw him. Sonny, creeping along the side of Mrs. Calloway’s house. Rob felt a slight relaxation of his muscles. At least the cat had come out; he wouldn’t be trapped in there.

  He watched his father meet the police at the curb. There were two of them, both men his father knew. They talked for a minute, there on the sidewalk, and then they all walked up to stand over Mrs. Calloway. One of them was shaking his head.

  It was about then that Rob began to go over the events in his mind. How Old Lady Calloway had been leaning out the window and those hands had come out and pushed her, and old Sonny had scratched the man on the arms.

  He understood how anybody might have wanted to push her out the window. And it wasn’t as if anybody could expect to murder her that way. As Steve had remarked, she might not have been hurt at all if she’d fallen to the ground. If it hadn’t been for that crazy binocular strap catching on a sawed-off limb, she could have escaped without even a broken bone.

  So he didn’t feel that he could walk over to the officers and tell them the woman had been murdered. But he ought to tell them there had been somebody with her in the house, somebody who’d pushed her. There’d been something on TV about a man who killed somebody, but he hadn’t meant to, and they hadn’t charged him with first degree murder . . . Rob tried to remember exactly what had happened on the show, but it got too mixed up with other shows in his mind.

  Well, the thing to do was tell his father. He’d know what to do about it, if anything needed to be done.

  Six

  Reluctantly, he made his way toward the small group beside the neighboring house. One of the officers, Riley, looked up and saw him.

  “This the boy who saw it happen?”

  “Yes, this is Rob. He was sitting in the tree . . . he often sits up there. He called us right away, but it was too late. By the time we got her down she was dead.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised if it broke her neck,” the other officer commented, gesturing to the ambulance attendants who were hauling out their stretcher. “Kind of ironic, ain’t it? I mean, she was the pest of the neighborhood with those binoculars, minding everybody else’s business, and they’re what killed her.”

  “You get complaints about her?” Mr. ­Mallory asked.

  “Oh, not officially, not very often. But you hear things, a town the size of this one. She was always calling us about something. Somebody’s dog, or kid, or something. Called us yesterday, said some young fella drove over her garden hose and wrecked it.” He shook his head.

  Max had overheard that. He strode toward them. “That was me. I didn’t know she called the police. Her crummy hose was leaky already, and she left it in the street where I couldn’t help running over it.”

  “Yeah. We figured that out, from what she said.” Rob remembered the cop’s name, now, the tall, skinny redhead with the big Adam’s apple. Fritz. He didn’t know if that was his last name or his first, but they called him Fritz. “Bit of a kook, wasn’t she? Feuding with everybody all the time. I guess, living next door, you got the brunt of it?”

  “Well, she wasn’t an easy woman to live next to,” Mr. Mallory admitted. They were all standing so they didn’t have to look at Mrs. Calloway. Rob sneaked a look at her, felt his stomach lurch, and looked quickly away. Somehow he’d thought she’d stop looking so pop-eyed after they took her down. “She attacked Rob last night with a broom when he went over there to get our cat . . . and she enticed the cat by leaving meat scraps on the back porch.”

  Riley, the shorter, dark-haired one, nodded. “She was about ready to be committed, I guess. Maybe it’s just as well this way, better for her than being locked up.

  Rob cleared his throat. “Dad . . .”

  “Later, son. I guess they’re ready to take her away. I suppose there’ll have to be an inquest?”

  “Oh, yes, but there won’t be any problem about it,” Riley assured them. “It’s perfectly clear what happened . . . and the boy saw it.”

  “He won’t have to testify, will he? He’s only eleven.”

  “I don’t know for sure about that . . . it isn’t up to us to decide . . . but I wouldn’t worry about it, Walt. They won’t make it any harder on him than they have to. What do you think, Fritz, we better get the crime lab out here? Take some pictures?”

  “Well, it looks like an accident, pure and simple, but it wouldn’t hurt to protect ourselves with a few pictures. Yeah, let’s call in and let somebody else decide. You guys bring a sheet or something you can put over her? Whole blasted neighborhood’s out gawking.”

  Rob hadn’t noticed, but he did, now. People were coming out of their houses, leaning over the back fence, some of them even walking out across the lawns.

  “Dad, when she fell . . .”

  His father patted him on the shoulder. “Come on inside, son. The whole town’s here, they don’t need us. You want to use our telephone, Fritz?”

  “No, I’ll use the radio in the car. Go ahead inside. Be easiest if you came downtown, Walt . . . let somebody type up your statement.”

  “I don’t have to do it today, I hope. My daughter’s getting married tomorrow, and we’ve got a million things to do. Monday all right?”

  “Well, if it isn’t, we’ll let you know. Somebody’ll call you.”

  Rob was beginning to shake a little, he didn’t know why. He had to trot to keep up with his father. “Dad, Mrs. Calloway didn’t just fall out of the window . . .”

  “Rob, let’s not blow it up any bigger than it was, okay? I’d rather not get you involved in it at all. You had nothing to do with it, did you?”

  “No, except I was . . . was spitting cherry pits at her window, and . . . and I guess that’s why she leaned out the window.”

  Mr. Mallory gave him a tired grin. “Well, you ought to have known better than that, after everything else that’s hap
pened. But it didn’t have anything to do with her hanging herself, you know. So try not to think about it.”

  “But there was somebody in there, Dad, I heard . . .” His words were wasted, uttered at the same moment his mother called from the window.

  “Wally! Can you come to the phone? It’s Jim French, and I told him you were awfully busy, but he said it’s important. He sounds upset.”

  Mr. Mallory strode up the front steps and into the house, not hearing Rob’s final words. Frustrated, Rob followed him, but his father was already on the telephone and his mother was saying, “Tell him to wait until Monday if it’s business, honey. We’ve got too much to do to worry about anything else now.”

  Mr. Mallory made shushing gestures at her, speaking into the phone. “Yes, Jim, this is Walt.”

  It seemed to Rob that his father’s face grew grim as he listened, although his mother didn’t seem to notice anything. The doorbell rang, and she turned away to answer it.

  Ellen Anderson stood there, a too-thin girl with long brown hair caught back in a ponytail with a rubber band.

  “Hello, Mrs. Mallory. Darcy said I’d be doing her a big favor if I could take Nancy’s place in the wedding . . .”

  “Yes, you will, if you can get into her dress.”

  “I think I can, but she’s taller than I am, so it would have to be shortened.”

  “Maybe you could do that this afternoon.”

  “I don’t know how to shorten anything, Mrs. Mallory. I flunked freshman sewing, and my mother just gave up on me.”

  “Maybe your mother . . .”

  “My mother’s gone to Kansas City for a week. My grandmother’s sick.”

  Mrs. Mallory sighed. “Well, all right. Go up and try it on . . . it’s in Darcy’s room. I’ll be up in a minute to pin it up.”

  Rob stood between his parents, feeling an urgent need to say something to one of them. They ought to know Mrs. Calloway was pushed out that window; surely it was important to let someone know that?