Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  “But why was he famous?” Sarah asked.

  “Everybody knew about the Shadow once,” Hattie said. “Used to be the most famous man on Mill Walk. I think he was the greatest detective in the world—like someone you could read about in a book. He made a lot of people uncomfortable, he did—they had too many secrets, and they were afraid he’d know all about them. He still makes ’em uncomfortable. I think a lot of folks on this island would be happier if he passed real soon.”

  Sarah turned a reflective glance on Tom, and he said, “Hattie, did Dr. Milton come here to warn you off talking to me?”

  “Let me ask you something. Are you making ready to sue Shady Mount? And do you want Nancy Vetiver to help you do it?”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Because you had to have that second operation—they made a mess of the first one, you know. Tom ain’t that stupid, I said. If you could be sued on this island, it would have happened a long time ago. But if you want to, Tom, you go ahead—you might not be able to win, but you could smear him a little.”

  “Dr. Milton?” asked Sarah.

  “Hattie once told me I ought to take my fork and stab him in his fat fish-colored hand.”

  “Should have too. Anyhow, you want Nancy’s address, I got it. I see Nancy once a week or so—she drops in to talk to me. Boney can try to get me thrown out of my house here, it might be harder than he thinks.”

  “He said he’d get you evicted? Don’t you own this place?”

  “Tossed out on my old black ass, was the way he said it. Every month but June, July, and August, I pay rent to a man who comes collecting for the Redwing Holding Company. Jerry Hasek is his name, and he’s just the man you’d send if you wanted to scare the rent out of seventy-seven-year-old ladies. He wouldn’t be good for much else. In September, he takes four months’ money all at once. Summers, he goes up north with all the Redwings, and a couple other no-goods Ralph Redwing keeps on the payroll.”

  “I know him,” Sarah said. “Well, I know who he is. Acne scars, always looks worried about something?”

  “That’s him, that’s my rent collector.”

  “You know him?” Tom asked.

  “Sure—he drives Ralph, when Ralph uses a car. And he’s a kind of bodyguard.”

  “So,” Hattie said. “You gonna take on Boney? It don’t look that way to me.”

  “No,” Tom said. “I just saw him at the hospital this morning—I asked him about Nancy, and he told me she was suspended, but he wouldn’t say why. I don’t think he wants you to tell me why, either.”

  Hattie scowled down into her mug of tea, and all the lines in her face deepened alarmingly. An almost ferocious sadness had claimed her, and Tom saw that it had always been there, underlying everything she had said. “This tea’s gone cold,” she said. Hattie pushed herself up and went to the sink, where she rinsed out the mug. “I guess that man died. That policeman who got shot. Reminds me of the old days, with Barbara Deane.”

  “Mendenhall,” Tom said. “Yes, he died this morning. I saw them taking his body out of the hospital.”

  Hattie leaned back against her sink. “You think Nancy Vetiver was a bad nurse?”

  “I think she was the only one as good as you,” Tom said.

  “That girl was a nurse, same as me,” Hattie said. “She could have been a doctor but nobody would let her, so she did the next best thing. Didn’t have the money to be a doctor, anyhow, so she went to the nursing school at St. Mary Nieves, same as me, and when they saw how good she was, they hired her for Shady Mount.” She looked at each of them with the fierce sadness Tom had seen earlier. “You can’t tell someone like that not to do her job—you can’t say, do bad now, we don’t want you to be good today.” Hattie lowered her head and wrapped her arms around her chest. “This island, this is some place. This can be some damn place, Mill Walk.” She turned from them, and seemed to look at her wall of framed photographs.

  “Nancy came here a couple times, the last few weeks. Seemed like it was getting worse. See, if she got suspended, that meant she couldn’t keep her place anymore, because the hospital owned her apartment. They told her. Told her.”

  Hattie turned around again. “You know what? Boney’s scared of something. Tells you Nancy got suspended, and doesn’t have sense enough to make up a good lie about why.” She crossed her arms over her chest again, and looked amazingly like the stuffed hawk in the birdcage. “Makes me mad—damn mad. Because I halfway believed the man.”

  She looked up at Tom. “Everything about this thing makes me mad. Two kinds of law—two kinds of medicine. Boney coming out here, all sweet and nice, then telling me that if I talk to you he might have to—to ‘respond to my disloyalty,’ that’s how he said it—hard as that would be for him, he says, when he already got Nancy out of the hospital. See, he went too far then too!” She seemed to blaze as she came across the floor to Tom: it was as if the hawk had come to life and swooped toward him. She put her thin old hand on his shoulder, and he felt her talons clamp down. “He doesn’t know who you are, Tom. He thinks he knows, he thinks he knows all about you. Thinks you’ll be just like all the rest—except one. You know who I mean, don’t you?”

  “The Shadow.” He looked at Sarah, who sipped her tea and looked calmly back across the top of the cup. “You said something about a woman named Barbara Deane? She was a nurse?”

  “For a time. Barbara Deane was your midwife.” She dug her fingers into his skin. “You want to see Nancy Vetiver? If you do, I’ll take you to her.”

  “I want to come too,” Sarah said.

  “You don’t know where she is.” Hattie turned sharply to face her.

  “I bet I do. Dr. Milton or whoever it was wanted to scare her into doing what they wanted, right? So who owns the hospital? And what else do they own?”

  Hattie nodded. “Dressed like that? Looking like you look? You can’t.”

  “Can’t what?” Tom asked.

  “Go with you to the Elysian Courts.”

  Tom looked up at Hattie, and Hattie raised her eyebrows, amused and impressed.

  “Give me something else to wear, then. I don’t care what it is, I just need something to cover me up.”

  “I got something here might work,” Hattie said. She moved across the room, knelt by the bed, and pulled a trunk from beneath it. She opened the trunk, swept aside layers of bright fabrics, and drew out a long black shapeless thing. “Nobody’s touched this since the first Mrs. Arthur Thielman.”

  “What’s that?” Tom asked. “A parachute?”

  “It’s a cape,” Sarah said, springing up to try it on. “It’s perfect.”

  The red lining flashed against the black silk as Sarah twirled the cape over her shoulders, and then the whole thing gathered and swung and fell back into its natural folds, covering Sarah from her neck to her feet. She instantly looked ten years older and more sophisticated, another kind of person altogether.

  For a second, Tom thought he was seeing Jeanine Thielman.

  Then Sarah said, “Wow! I love it!” and she was Sarah Spence again, and in the next second, swept to the window and bent down to see if her dog was still where she had left him. Evidently he was, for she straightened up and made another twirl that exposed her tennis shoes. “Jamie’s grandmother used to wear this? What do you think she was like?”

  Hattie gave Tom a sly look, and said, “Tuck your hair in, turn up the collar, keep the front closed, and we’ll be ready to visit Nancy, I reckon. Nobody’ll mess with you now, as long as I’m with you.”

  Hattie ushered both of them back outside into the hot sun, the sweet, sickening odor drifting from the dump, the wheeling gulls, and the rows of identical houses.

  Bingo barked once, then recognized Sarah.

  “How do you get three people and one dog into that car?” Hattie asked.

  “Do you mind sitting on Tom’s lap?” Sarah asked.

  “Not if he doesn’t,” Hattie said. “We can put the car across the street from Maxw
ell’s Heaven. Friend of mine will keep it safe—the dog too.”

  Hattie climbed in after Tom, and seemed to weigh no more than Bingo. As if she were a child, he could see over the top of her head.

  “Tuaregs and lascars, here we come,” Sarah said, and turned around on the narrow road.

  “God help us,” said Hattie.

  Soon they were driving in the darkness between the listing tenements. Hattie told Sarah to turn down into a nearly invisible cobblestone path beneath a shadowy archway, and around various corners past curtained windows and peeling walls until they came to a small cobbled court with a blue scrap of sky at its top, as if they were deep in a well. Barred windows and heavy doors stood on every side, and the air smelled of must. One of the heavy doors creaked open, and a large bearded man with a leather cap and apron peered out at them. He frowned at the car before recognizing Hattie, but immediately agreed to keep watch on the car and look after the dog for half an hour. Hattie introduced him as Percy, and Percy took the willing dog under his arm and led them into the building and up stairs and through vast empty rooms and small rooms crowded with bags and barrels. Bingo stared at everything with intent interest. “Who is Percy?” Tom whispered, and Hattie said, “Bone merchant. Human hair.” The man took them through a dusty parlor and back out into the slanting street. They were across the street from Maxwell’s Heaven.

  “Just follow me now, and don’t talk to anyone or stop to stare at anything,” Hattie said.

  Tom crossed the narrow street a step behind her. Sarah gripped his arm through the cape. The series of linked tenements built by Maxwell Redwing seemed to grow taller with every step.

  “Are you sure you want to come with us?” he whispered.

  “Are you kidding?” she whispered back. “I’m not going to let you go in there alone!”

  Hattie walked unhesitatingly into an arched passageway and disappeared. Tom and Sarah followed. The light died. Hattie was visible only as a small dark outline before them. The air instantly became colder, and the odors of must and dry rot—along with a thousand others—seeped from the walls. They hurried forward, and seconds later followed Hattie out of the passageway.

  “This is the First Court,” Hattie said, looking around them. “There are three, altogether. Nancy’s in the second. I’ve only been as far as her place, and I suppose I’d get lost if I tried to go any farther.”

  In the jumble of first impressions, Tom had taken in only that the space around him looked vaguely like a prison, vaguely like a European slum, and more than either of these like an illustration from a sinister comic book—tilting little streets connected by wooden passages like freight cars suspended in the air.

  Three or four ragged men had begun shambling toward them from a doorway next to a lighted window across the court. Hattie turned to face them. The men shuffled and whispered to each other. One of them gave Hattie a wave that flapped the entire sleeve of his coat. They shambled back toward their doorway, and sat down, puddled in their coats, before Bobcat’s Place.

  “Don’t mind those old boys,” Hattie said. “They know me.… Tom! Read this writing.”

  He moved beside her and looked down. At his feet was a square brass plaque on which the raised lettering had been rubbed away to near illegibility, like the letters on an old headstone:

  ELYSIAN COURTS

  DESIGNED BY THE PHILANTHROPIST MAXWELL REDWING

  BUILT BY GLENDENNING UPSHAW

  AND MILL WALK CONSTRUCTION CO.

  FOR THE GREATER GOOD

  OF THE PEOPLE OF THIS ISLAND

  1922

  “LET EACH MAN HAVE A HOME

  TO CALL HIS OWN”

  “See that?” Hattie said. “That’s what they said—‘Let each man have a home to call his own.’ Philanthropists, that’s what they called themselves.”

  1922: two years before the death of his wife, three years before the murder of Jeanine Thielman and the construction of the hospital in Miami. Elysian Courts had been Mill Walk Construction’s first big project, built with Maxwell Redwing’s money.

  Maxwell’s Heaven looked like a small city. Crooked little streets twisted off the court, which was lined with a jumble of bars, liquor stores, and lodging houses, connected overhead by the wooden passages that reminded Tom of freight cars. Through the lanes and mazelike passages, he saw an endlessly proliferating warren of cramped streets, leaning buildings, walls with narrow doors and wooden stiles. Neon signs glowed red and blue, FREDO’S. 2 GIRLS, BOBCAT’S PLACE. Laundry hung on drooping lines strung between windows.

  “Look out below!” a woman yelled from above them. She was leaning out of a narrow window in a building across the court. She overturned a black metal bowl, and liquid streamed down, seeming to dissolve into the air before it struck the ground. A barefoot man in torn clothes led an exhausted donkey and a ragged child through one of the passages into the maze.

  Hattie took them toward the passage from which the man with the donkey had come. White letters in the brick gave its name as Edgewater Trail. It led beneath one of the suspended wooden freight cars.

  Hattie said, “Old Maxwell and your grandfather thought that street names from your part of town would be a good influence on the people in here—over there’s Yorkminster Place, and where we’re going there’s Ely Place and Stonehenge Circle.” Her black eyes flashed at him as she led them into the passage.

  “Doesn’t the mail ever get mixed up?” Tom asked.

  “There’s no mail here,” Hattie said from in front of him. “No police, either, and no firemen, no doctors, no schools, except for what they teach themselves, no stores but liquor stores, no nothin’ but what you see.”

  They had emerged into a wide cobbled lane lined with high blackened wooden walls inset here and there with slanted windows. The same white inset letters, some of which had fallen off or been removed, gave its name as Vic or a Terrace. A crowd of dirty children ran past the front of the lane, splashing in a stream that ran down the middle of the street. Now the odor was almost visible in the air, and Sarah held an edge of the cape over her nose and mouth.

  Hattie jumped over the stream and led them up a flight of wooden steps. Another crooked flight, marked Waterloo Lane, led upward toward darkness. Hattie scurried down a murky corridor, and began to move quickly toward the next set of stairs.

  “What do they do here?” Tom asked. “How do they live?”

  “They sell things to Percy—their own hair, or their own rags. Some get out, like Nancy. These days, most young ones manage to get out, soon as they can. Some of ’em like it here.”

  They had come to a wide space where wooden walkways spanned the fronts of the buildings on all sides. Rows of doors stood on the far sides of the walks. A man leaned against the railing of the second walkway, gazing down at them and smoking a pipe.

  “You see,” Hattie said, “this here is a world, and we’re in the center of it now. Nobody sees this world, but here it is.” She looked up at the man leaning on the railing. “Is Nancy home, Bill?”

  The man pointed with his pipe at a door farther along the walkway.

  Hattie led them up the wooden steps to the second walkway. “How is she, Bill?” she asked when they had come near to him.

  The man turned his head and looked at each of them from beneath the brim of his soft cap. His face was very dirty, full of hard lines, and in the grey light of the Courts, his cap, face, and pipe all seemed the same muddy color. He took a long time to speak. “Busy.”

  “And you, Bill?”

  He was staring at Sarah’s hair, and again took a long time to respond. “Good. Helped a man move a piano, two days ago.”

  “We’ll go along and see her, then,” Hattie said, and Bill turned back to the railing.

  The three of them walked down the creaking boards until they had nearly reached the end of the walkway. Tom looked over the railing, and Sarah asked Hattie, “Is Bill a friend of yours?”

  “He’s Nancy’s brother,” Hattie said.
r />   Tom would have turned around to make sure he had heard her correctly, but just then a man in a grey suit and a grey turtleneck appeared, moving soundlessly and easily down the steps of the wooden structure over the drainage ditch. Bill took his pipe from his mouth and stepped back from the railing. The man in grey stepped into the Second Court and began walking in a straight line that would bring him directly beneath Tom. Bill gestured for Tom to move back, and Tom hesitated before pushing back from the railing. The man was bald, and his face was a smooth anonymous mask. Tom did not realize that he was Captain Fulton Bishop until he had begun to move back into the protection of the walkway. Hattie knocked on the last door, and knocked again. Captain Bishop glanced up without breaking stride as Tom moved back, and the boy saw his eyes through the gaps in the railing, as alive and alert as two match flames.

  Then the door opened, and Captain Bishop passed out of the Second Court and went deeper into Maxwell’s Heaven. His footsteps clicked against the stone. Tom heard Nancy Vetiver saying, “Who’d you bring me, Hattie?”

  She smiled from Hattie to Sarah, and then included him in the same smile. She did not recognize him, but he would have known her instantly if he had seen her on any street in Mill Walk. Her hair, a darker blond than Sarah’s, had been cut to a rough shag, and the lines bracketing her mouth seemed deeper, but she was otherwise the same woman who had helped him endure the worst months of his life. He realized that he had loved her absolutely then, and that part of him still did love her.

  “An old patient of ours came calling,” Hattie said.

  Nancy looked from Sarah to Tom and back to Sarah, trying to work out which was the old patient. “Well, you’d better come on in and find something to sit on, and I’ll be able to spend some time with you in a minute.” She smiled, looking a little baffled but not at all irritated, and stepped back to let them in.