by Peter Straub
“I just heard about Les, Patsy. Jesus, what a damn shame.”
Years of living with Les McCloud had trained her to hear the falsity in men’s voices, so she said only, “Yes.”
“A terrible thing. I was with him nearly all day that Saturday, you know. On the course.”
And in the bar, Patsy thought. “I didn’t know that.”
“Oh, yeah. We played eighteen holes. He had a good time, Patsy. I thought you ought to know that.”
“Thank you, Archie.”
“So how are you making out? How are you holding up?” She suddenly remembered what he looked like. A short paunchy red-faced man in garish clothes. Bright clever blue eyes.
“I’m just trying to get through the morning, Archie. When it’s twelve, I’ll try to get through the afternoon. I couldn’t tell you how I was holding up.”
“Well, I’d be happy to come over anytime and help out. I’m a lawyer, I’ve seen a lot of things, Patsy. Any help you need—getting the estate in order, just talking things through. I make a great shoulder to cry on, Patsy.”
Patsy said nothing at all.
“And if you want to get out of the house, I’d be real happy to take you out for a bite anytime, Patsy. What about tonight? I bet there’s a lot of stuff you want to talk about, things you have to say, things you’re afraid you’ll never be able to say. I can help you, and I’m betting that you need a little old-fashioned help. Should I just come by for you around seven?”
“What did you have in mind, Archie?” she asked. “Candlelight and wine? Does that strike you as appropriate for the young widow?”
“I think the young widow should have anything she wants.”
“Oh, good. Then I’ll tell you what I want, Archie. I want you to go into the bathroom.”
“Huh?”
“Into the bathroom. Then I want you to switch on the light. You have to be able to see yourself very well. Then I want you to take off your pants. Then I want you to take off your underpants. I want you to stand over the sink and think about me. I’m five-five, Archie. I weigh a hundred and sixteen pounds. I’m actually pretty skinny, Archie. I want you to put your hand on yourself.”
“Hey, what the hell is this, Patsy?”
“Well, it’s what you’re going to do anyway, isn’t it, Archie? So I might as well want you to do it. Because you’re not going to do anything else.”
“Jesus, you’re sick.” Archie hung up hastily.
Patsy smiled—a little wearily, a little bitterly, but she smiled.
3
When Mikki O’Hara opened the door of her long white clapboard house on Hampstead’s hilly north side, Sarah Spry said, “Oh, Mikki,” and held out her arms and embraced her. Mikki O’Hara was eight inches taller than Sarah, and had to stoop down. Sarah kissed her temple, leaving a little streak of lipstick, and briskly patted her back. “Oh, Mikki,” she repeated. “I’m so sorry.” She clung to the taller woman for several seconds before releasing her.
When they parted, Sarah saw her original impression of the dead children’s mother confirmed. Mikki’s face had sunken in—she looked twenty years older. Her eyes burned from far back in her head, her cheeks were shadowed. “Honest,” Sarah said, “if you don’t feel like talking to me, I’ll go right back to my car and go on my merry way. Stan Brockett can take a running jump for all I care. I’d understand perfectly.”
“Don’t be dumb,” Mikki O’Hara said. “I’m glad for the company. For some reason, I seem to be all alone.”
“Alone?” Sarah was shocked. “Where’s Des?”
“Des went to Australia with a client. They’re doing something way out in the outback, someplace called Coober Pedy, and I couldn’t even get through to him until last night. He’s coming back, but he won’t be here until tomorrow.”
A faint though biting odor of whiskey accompanied this speech. Sarah thought that was understandable. Mikki O’Hara had identified her children’s swollen bodies, spoken to the police, and then spent a day and a night alone. Probably tranquilizers had seen her through the night, but Sarah didn’t think that she had had more than an hour’s sleep.
“Come on in, will you?” Mikki asked. “Don’t just stand around on my doorstep, you’ll make me nervous.”
“Do you want company for tonight?” Sarah asked. “You shouldn’t be alone.”
“Oh, my sister’s coming in from Toledo, but thanks, Sarah. You want a drink?”
They were going into the living room, which had been decorated with long high-backed Italian furniture of pale brown leather, glass-topped tables, and track lights pointing down toward Mikki’s bright watery abstractions. The drinks trolley had been rolled up to the edge of the long couch.
Sarah’s mouth was already forming no, but she looked at the eight or nine bottles on the trolley, at the ice melting in the silver bucket, and pity made her say, “Yes, just a small one of whatever you’re having.”
Mikki wobbled toward the couch in her long brocaded caftan, saying, “Great, great, great.” She sat down heavily, reached down to get a clean glass from the trolley’s bottom shelf, and then looked across at Sarah, who had seated herself in the massive chair which faced the couch. Mikki’s face looked blowtorched—the decorative caftan and the pale furniture in the bright room, even her own harmless and pretty paintings, conspired against that painful face. There was no room here for grief, no provisions had been made for it. “So Brockett thinks I’m of public interest, does he?”
Sarah took her notebook and pen out of her bag. “I’ll just sit here and have a drink, if you’d like. I mean it.”
“Oh, Sarah, you always mean everything you say. Have some Scotch.” Mikki poured half an inch of whiskey into Sarah’s glass, dug a few swimming cubes out of the ice bucket with her fingers, and then held the glass out toward Sarah. “Come and get it.”
Sarah stood up and took the glass from Mikki’s fingers.
“Really,” Mikki said. “I don’t mind talking about it. Really I don’t.” She picked up her own glass from the trolley and sipped what looked like straight Scotch. “It’s all I think about, why shouldn’t I talk about it? The only thing is, you have to promise not to be embarrassed if I cry. Just take a little snort and wait until it blows over.”
“Fine, Mikki,” Sarah said.
“You know what the funny thing is?” Mikki O’Hara asked. “Those kids never went out at night, especially not by themselves. Never. They just never did it. And they never went to the beach without permission. I don’t think Tommy especially liked the beach anyhow. He liked sailing, remember? Tommy was crazy about sailing. We were going to get him a little Sunfish for his tenth birthday—he would have loved that.” Mikki O’Hara’s face worked, and her mouth trembled. She slugged back a huge mouthful of the whiskey. “But I’ll tell you what I really don’t get. You know what I don’t get, Sarah? How those kids got all the way to Gravesend Beach. That’s four miles away. Four miles. You know—they didn’t walk all that way by themselves. Someone picked them up. Someone took them there. Some total creep picked up my kids and . . .” Mikki ducked her head and sobbed while Sarah sat stiff with self-contempt.
“Ah, shit,” Mikki said finally. “I can’t even say it without crying, but I think that’s what happened. They wouldn’t walk all that way by themselves. Little Martin was still using a baby bottle. I used to think he’d end up carrying the trusty old Evenflo off to college with him.”
“But they left the house by themselves,” Sarah said. “At least, I didn’t hear that anyone was considering the possibility of kidnapping.”
“It was Tommy,” Mikki said. “It had to have been Tommy. He must have egged Martin into it. He must have gotten him out of his bed and put his clothes on him and told him some crazy story . . . and then gone out with him.” Mikki flashed her sunken eyes, and for a second looked to Sarah like some crazy old woman you’d see on the streets in New York, an old woman with no teeth and a bulging sack filled with torn-up papers and all her clothes. �
��Honestly, if Tommy walked in the door right this minute, I’d hit the little bastard so hard I’d probably kill him.”
The terrible eyes clamped shut again, and the shoulders shook under the brocaded caftan. Mikki was making a kittenish mewing sound. Sarah was trying not to feel like a grave robber: she could not imagine why Stan Brockett had sent her here.
Sarah stood up, walked around the coffee table, and sat down beside Mikki. She put her thin arm across Mikki’s broad back. Then she pulled the other woman toward her.
Mikki’s sobs eventually ticked down to a ragged trembling. “Oh, my poor babies,” she got out, and a fresh line of tears jetted out from the corners of her eyes and spilled down her cheeks to her jawline. “Martin was so impatient with himself. He wanted to be a great big boy just like his brother. And Tommy called him stupid and all the normal abusive things boys say to their brothers, but secretly he was bursting with pride that Martin idolized him so much.” Mikki slowly straightened up, and drained what was left in her glass. “I want them to get the guy who took my children to the beach and killed them. I want them to stake the son of a bitch to an anthill. I want them to peel his skin off while he’s still living.” Her eyes were those of the crazy toothless bag lady again. “I want to see him suffer as much as anybody can suffer and still live. And then I want to kill him myself.”
Then Mikki surprised Sarah by hitting her hand on the reporter’s knee and leaning close to her as if she were going to confide a secret. “You know, I did something. I had this dream.” She leaned back again and smiled at Sarah from the burned-out eyes. “Remember when I told you that if Tommy came in I’d knock his block off?”
Sarah nodded.
“Well, I dreamed that Tommy did come in. Into my bedroom. He was so cold his teeth were chattering. I held out my hand, and he took it. He was all wet. I could smell the water on him, you know how you can do that? He was freezing. Freezing. So I pulled him toward me, and I lifted up the sheet, and I just pulled him into bed with me. Then I tried to warm him up by hugging him and hugging him.”
Sarah put her arms around her friend again. Now, how, she wondered, would Stan Brockett want me to put that into my story?
4
On Monday morning Richard had a phone call from a man who said, “Hey, this is Baumeister Trucking and I’m on the Post Road, how do I get to this Beach Trail anyhow?”
“Who was that?” Laura asked, coming into the kitchen carrying a container of Ajax and a wet rag.
“Our stuff will be here soon. That was the truck driver.”
“We get our furniture back at last?”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“I have a surprise for you,” Laura said. “I’ve been saving it for today.”
“I have a surprise for you too. When I was at the supermarket this morning, I heard the two women in front of me discussing the death of that man who killed the two women here in town.”
“Did you really? Oh, thank God.” Laura’s hands had flown to her mouth, where they knitted together in an unconscious reference to prayer. “Thank God. Oh, I’m so glad. I mean, I’m not happy that he’s dead, but I’m happy that he’s not still walking around. It’s such a relief, with you going off to Providence tomorrow.”
“I thought you’d like to know,” Richard said. “But I didn’t know you were worried about me going away. Sweetie, I’ll only be gone a couple of days.”
“I know, but I was nervous anyhow. I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t want to make you feel defensive about going.”
“I’m already defensive about going,” Richard said. “This house is going to be such a mess.”
“Just you wait. We’ll have everything unpacked by tonight and the furniture all set out and the dishes all put away. The mess won’t be so bad. Lump and I will survive if you’re gone for a couple of days. At least we’ll have our own bed back again.”
“Farewell to Surf City,” Richard said, and embraced her.
“You really heard those women say that, didn’t you?” Laura asked.
“Sure I did. You think I made it up?”
“How did that man die?” She had her arms around him, and her head lay against his chest.
“I guess it happened just down on Mount Avenue. The man broke into a house, and the owner was there with a gun. The man got shot.”
“I’m glad that’s over,” Laura said.
Richard saw a brown truck pull into the driveway. “Here’s the rest of our life,” he said to Laura.
A bulletlike man with a cigar stuck in his jaws eased down out of the cab and began to move slowly toward the back door. The rear doors of the truck swung open, and two muscular black teenagers jumped out.
“Do they have the right address?” Laura asked.
“It’s their famous continuity of service,” Richard said. “They try to bring most of the same furniture they took away from you in the first place.”
* * *
Sarah Spry pulled into the driveway as the two teenagers were teetering down the planks between the ground and the back of the truck. Between them was a massive Victorian sofa. The driver sat enthroned in his cab, too grand to help the boys. Boxes that were full, half-full, and empty—the same gray and yellow boxes they had first seen in London—covered the kitchen and living-room floors. Two of the chairs that matched the sofa sat in puddles of crinkly brown paper on either side of the fireplace.
Richard held the door open for her, and she came in and put her hands on her hips and tilted her head back and looked around appreciatively. “You’re a whiz,” she said. “That awful smell is completely gone. And you’ve started to fix up the old place already.”
“Well, we wanted to get as much done as we could before the furniture arrived,” Richard explained. Sarah Spry’s manner was just what he had remembered, but her face looked odd . . . her eyes were puffy and rimmed with red, as if she had some kind of eye infection.
“I know I look funny,” the reporter said. “I’ve been crying. I had to do something pretty miserable before I could come here. Have you heard about the two children who drowned themselves at the beach just down the road? Happened Saturday night. I had to see their mother, and she’s an old friend of mine. Hello, you must be Laura,” she said to Laura, who was standing rather gloomily just inside the door to the kitchen. “Isn’t your hair a beautiful color? Mine’s as red as an old fireplug, but yours, my dear, you look like a fairytale princess. So anyhow, we cried us a river, as Julie London used to say.”
The two teenage boys were now coming awkwardly through the door, their biceps bulging like weightlifters’. Richard knew that the sofa must have weighed three hundred pounds. “Facing the fireplace,” Laura said, and they staggered toward the living room.
“What a terrible thing,” Richard said, and Laura nodded and said, “Is she all right?”
“She’s getting drunk,” Sarah said. “Her husband is in some backwater in Australia, and that’s the kind of thing you get in Patchin County. Husbands hop all over the world like bugs.”
“Would you like some coffee?” Laura asked. “I just discovered a kettle and our old cups. We brought some instant from our other house.”
“You not only look like an angel, you have the temperament of one. What a splendid idea, coffee. Instant is dandy with me, by the by. It’s practically all I ever drink. Who has time these days for all that other stuff?”
Laura disappeared back into the kitchen.
“Two children drowned themselves?” Richard asked, remembering how she had phrased it. “You mean they killed themselves? Two brothers?”
“I didn’t mean to make it sound worse than it was. They must have gone in swimming very late that night—around three in the morning. It looks like they just swam out until they couldn’t swim any farther. Or maybe one got into trouble and the other died trying to save him. That’s probably what happened.”
“They were teenagers?”
“Nine and four.”
“Oh, m
y God,” Richard said.
Sarah Spry nodded grimly. “It’s one of those terrible things. Hampstead has had its share of them, over the years. Why, do you know that one of my first jobs as a reporter was to go out to the country club and see the body of the man who owned this house? John Sayre? Well, it was. And he was a suicide, let me tell you.”
“Yes, I know,” Richard said.
“You talk to your neighbor across the street, he’ll fill you in. Old Graham Williams. He was there that night. He was one of the last people to see John Sayre alive.”
“Graham is a friend of mine,” he said.
“Then you’ve got better taste than most of the people in this town.” They had gone into the big living room and Sarah put herself down on the huge sofa. She opened her bag and took her notebook and pen from it.
“Talk about yourself,” she said, opening her notebook. “What was it like, being on Daddy’s Here? What do you think about it now? Do you ever plan to go back to acting?”
So he talked about Daddy’s Here. He described his respect for Carter Oldfield, his love for Ruth Branden. He did not mention Billy Bentley’s name—he wanted not to think about Billy Bentley.
“Well, that sounds good, anyhow,” Sarah Spry told him. Laura had come in with three cups of coffee, and she sat on the sofa with the reporter.
Richard could tell that she was furious with Mrs. Spry for staying, furious for implying that he had just lied to her. He knew she was furious because she sat very still and did not blink for long periods. Laura wanted everybody out of the house.
“As for what I’m doing now,” he said, “I guess I’m trying to bring the past to life.” And that was an unfortunate choice of words, he thought, considering what he and Williams and Patsy had been talking about; but he went on to describe their house in London and the business that had grown from it.
“I’m sorry,” Sarah Spry said. “I’m losing track somehow. Could you repeat what you just said?”
Laura swung her foot up and down, up and down, burning with impatience only Richard could see.