Mystery brt-2

by Peter Straub

  “Wouldn’t she like to come with me?”

  “Gloria can’t go back,” his grandfather said. “We tried it once, the year after my wife died—didn’t work. Didn’t work at all. She couldn’t handle it. Eventually I gave up and came back early, got on with my Miami business. Worked out for the best in the long run.”

  “Worked out for the best?” Tom asked, appalled.

  “I got that hospital built in record time.” Perhaps hearing that he and Tom had been talking about different things, he added, “I made a couple of appointments for Gloria with a doctor in Miami, the kind of fellow they called an alienist in those days. Turned out to be nothing but a quack. Most of those fellows are, you know. He wanted me to come in for appointments, and I told him that I was a lot saner than he was. Pulled the plug on that nonsense. Gloria was a child who had lost her mother the summer before, that was the whole of the trouble.”

  Tom remembered his mother gripping her martini glass at her father’s table on the terrace.

  “Can you think of anything else that could have upset her that summer?” Tom asked.

  “Not at all. Apart from Glor’s trouble, it was a perfect summer. One of the young Redwing boys, Jonathan, was getting married to a pretty girl from Atlanta. A Redwing wedding is always a real event, and it should have been a delightful summer, what with all the parties at the club.”

  “But it wasn’t,” Tom said.

  “You’ll have better luck. Just get to the airport on time.”

  Tom promised to do so, and his grandfather hung up without waiting to be thanked or saying good-bye.

  Tom found himself in the hall at the foot of the staircase without any memory of leaving the study. Soft intermittent wails and wordless, high-pitched imprecations came from the floor above. He looked into the wide living room and saw that everything in it was dead. All the furniture, the chairs and tables and the long couch, was dead furniture. “So she gave him the runaround,” he said. “So she tried to lie her way out of it.” His father’s voice rumbled. “It should have been a delightful summer,” Tom said. Upstairs, something crashed and broke. His feet walked him back into the study. He sat on the arm of his father’s recliner and looked at the smooth charcoal screen of the television for a time before realizing that it was switched off. His legs took him across the room, and his hand pushed the power button. In a row of men in sports jackets behind a long curved desk, Joe Ruddler grimaced violently toward the camera. Wide printing at the bottom of the screen announced ALL-ISLAND LIVE ACTION NEWS NEXT! A commercial for auto wax battered the air. Tom turned down the volume and moved to a wobbly rush-bottomed chair and waited.

  “I hope you told ’em I’d call right back,” his father said.

  Tom turned his head and saw his father standing just outside the doors. “The call was for me. It was Grand-Dad.”

  A layer of cells died just below the surface of his father’s face.

  “We had a long talk. Probably the longest talk I’ve ever had with him. On a one-to-one basis, I mean.”

  Something happened to the dark pouches beneath his father’s eyes.

  “Ralph Redwing came up. I’m going up north on your buddy’s plane the day after tomorrow. Grand-Dad sounded pleased with himself.”

  His father’s eyes looked bruised—that was it. Not the pouches, the eyes themselves.

  “I didn’t say anything about the wonderful visit and the five-dollar cigar. I didn’t tell him anything at all. How could I? I don’t exist.”

  Victor placed his hands on the doorjamb and leaned the top half of his body into the room. A black curl of hair plastered itself to his forehead. Victor’s mouth opened, and the bruised look deepened in his eyes. “I’ll take care of you later.” He pushed himself back out of the room.

  Brisk, bouncy theme music blared from the set, and a resonant voice announced: “It’s time for your All-island live action news team!”

  Bulging cheeks and flaring eyes flashed on the screen for a moment, declaring that Joe Ruddler was prepared to savage words, sentences, and paragraphs between his square white teeth.

  Then a blond man with an almost clerical look of concern on his regular features looked at Tom and said, “Tragic death of a local hero. After this.”

  For thirty seconds, a shampoo commercial blew images of billowing hair at him.

  The blond man looked at Tom again and said, “Today Mill Walk has lost a hero. Patrolman Roman Klink, one of two police officers wounded in the native quarter shootout that resulted in the death of suspected murderer Foxhall Edwardes, suffered fatal gunshot wounds in an armed robbery attempt at Mulroney’s Taproom late this afternoon. When Patrolman Klink, working a temporary part-time job at the Taproom while awaiting full recovery from his wounds, pulled his service revolver and attempted to halt the robbery, his assailants gunned him down. Patrolman Klink died instantly of a head wound. Three men were observed fleeing the area, and though no identifications were obtained, arrests are considered imminent.”

  A fuzzy black and white Police Academy photograph of a wide-faced boy in a uniform cap appeared on the screen.

  “A fifteen-year veteran of the Mill Walk police force, Patrolman Roman Klink was forty-two years old, and leaves a wife and one son.”

  The blond man glanced down at his desk, then back at the camera and Tom. “In a related story, Officer Klink’s partner, Patrolman Michael Mendenhall, died today at Shady Mount Hospital of wounds suffered at the hands of Foxhall Edwardes in the Weasel Hollow shootout. Patrolman Mendenhall had been in a coma since the event, one of the most violent in Mill Walk’s history.

  “Both officers will be buried with full police honors at Christ-church Cemetery at two o’clock on Sunday following a memorial service at St. Hilda’s Procathedral. Captain Fulton Bishop has announced that donations to the Police Welfare Fund will be gratefully accepted.”

  He turned his profile to the camera and said, “A sad commentary, Joe.”

  Joe Ruddler burst upwards out of a blue button-down shirt which had captured the tight knot of a yellow challis necktie. “TERRIBLE! OUTRAGEOUS! YOU KNOW WHAT I THINK? I’LL TELL YOU WHAT I THINK! SOME PEOPLE BELIEVE THAT PUBLIC HANGINGS—”

  Tom stood up and switched off the television.

  “Hey, that was Joe Ruddler,” Victor said.

  Tom turned around to see his father standing in the door frame. He had his hands in his pockets. “I like Joe Ruddier.”

  Tom’s stomach clenched—his body from his lungs to his gut felt like a closed fist. He bent down and punched the power button. “—LILY-LIVERED, FAINT-HEARTED COWARDS WHO CAN’T ACCEPT—” Tom twisted the volume control and shut off the sound.

  “A policeman got murdered today.”

  “Cops accept that risk. Believe me, they make up for it.” Victor edged into the room, looking shamefaced. “Uh, Tom, I said some stuff.…” He shook his head. “It isn’t … I don’t want you to think.…”

  “Nobody wants me to think,” Tom said.

  “Yeah, but, I mean it’s good you didn’t tell Glen anything about … you didn’t, huh?”

  “I noticed something about Grand-Dad,” Tom said. “He likes to tell you interesting things, but he never wants to hear them himself.”

  “Okay. Okay. Good.” Victor edged around Tom to get to his recliner. “You want to go up and see your mom now? Turn the sound up on that thing?”

  Tom twisted the volume knob until Joe Ruddler was screaming. “SO SHOOT ME! THAT’S WHAT I THINK!” His father peeked at him. He left the room and went upstairs.

  Gloria was lying on top of her bed in a wrinkled pair of men’s pajamas, with a pillow bunched up behind her and the covers rumpled over a bunch of magazines. The shutters had been closed. A lamp covered by a scarf burned on top of her dressing table. The other lamp, which usually stood beside the bed, lay in two pieces, a thick stand and a long thin neck, on the floor beside the bed. Next to where the lamp should have been stood a brown plastic bottle with a typed prescription label. A
few cloudy bits of glass glinted up from the blue carpet. Tom started picked pieces of broken glass out of the carpet. “You’ll cut yourself,” he said.

  “I felt so tired all day I could hardly get out of bed, and then I thought I heard you and Victor shouting at each other, and …”

  He looked up over the edge of the bed. She had covered her face with her hands. He snatched up as much of the broken glass as he could see, dropped it on the heap of white tissues in the wastebasket beside the bed, and sat down beside his mother. “We had a fight, but it’s over now.” He put his arms around his mother. She felt boneless and stiff at once. “It was just something that happened.” For a moment she leaned her head against his shoulder, and then jerked away. “Don’t touch me. I don’t like that.”

  He instantly dropped his arms. She gave him a cloudy look and yanked at the pajama top and tugged it around until it satisfied her.

  “Do you want me to leave?”

  “Not really. But I hate fights—I get so scared when I hear people fighting.”

  “I hate hearing you scream,” he said. “That makes me feel terrible. I don’t think I can do anything for you—”

  “Do you think I like it? It just happens. This little thing inside me goes pop, and then I hardly know where I am. I used to think—it was like the real me went away somewhere and I had to hide inside myself until she came back. Then later I realized that this was the real me—this thing like a dead person.”

  “You’re not always like this,” he said.

  “Will you turn off the record player? Please?”

  He had not noticed the record spinning on the turntable of the portable record player atop a dresser. He turned around and pushed the reject button, and the tone arm lifted from the end grooves and returned to its post. Tom watched the label stop spinning until he could read the words on the label. Blue Rose, by Glenroy Breakstone and the Targets. He took the record from the turntable and searched for the sleeve in the row of records propped on the floor against the dresser, then saw it half-hidden under the bed. The split seams on its top and bottom had been repaired with yellowing transparent tape. Tom slid the record into the sleeve.

  “What’s he doing now? Watching television?”

  Tom nodded.

  “How does that make him so superior to me? I stay up here and listen to music, and he watches the stupid television downstairs and drinks.”

  “You’re feeling better,” Tom said.

  “If I really felt better, I’d hardly know how to act.” She moved sideways, and levered herself up so that she could pull down her covers and slide her legs beneath them. Some of the magazines slithered onto the floor. Gloria drew the covers up over her body and leaned against the pillows.

  It was like being in the bedroom of a teenage girl, Tom suddenly thought: the little record player on the dresser, the men’s pajamas, the mess of magazines, the darkness, the single bed. There should have been posters and pennants on the walls, but the walls were bare.

  “Do you want me to go?” he asked.

  “You can stay a little while.” She closed her eyes. “He looked ashamed of himself, didn’t he?”

  “I guess.”

  Tom wandered from the side of the bed and sat down backwards on the chair before the dressing table. He was still holding the record in its sleeve. “Grand-Dad just called.” Gloria opened her eyes and pushed herself up against the head of the bed. She reached for the bottle of pills and shook two out into her hand. “Did he?” She broke the pills in half and swallowed two of the small halves without water.

  “He wants me to go to Eagle Lake the day after tomorrow. I can get a ride on the Redwing plane with the Spences.”

  “The Spences are flying up north on the Redwing plane?” After a second, she added, “And you’re going with them?” She put the two small sections of the other pill in her mouth, made a face, and swallowed.

  “Would you like me to stay here?” he asked. “I don’t have to go.”

  “Maybe you should get out of the house for a while. Maybe it’s nicer up north.”

  “You used to go there in the summers,” he said.

  “I used to go a lot of places. I used to have another kind of life, for a little while.”

  “Can you remember your place at the lake?”

  “It was this big, big house. All made of wood. Everything was made of wood. All the lodges were. I knew where everybody lived. Even Lamont von Heilitz. Daddy didn’t want me to talk about him at lunch—the day we went to the Founders Club, remember?”

  Tom nodded.

  “He was famous,” his mother said. “He was a lot more famous than Daddy, and he did wonderful things. I always thought he was rather grand, Lamont von Heilitz.”

  Where does this come from? Tom wondered.

  “And I knew a lady named Jeanine. She was a friend of mine too. That’s another terrible story. One terrible story after another, that’s what it adds up to.”

  “You knew Jeanine Thielman?”

  “There’s a lot I’m not supposed to talk about. So I don’t.”

  “Why aren’t you supposed to talk about Jeanine Thielman?” Tom asked.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter anymore,” Gloria said, and sounded more adult and awake. “But I could tell her things.”

  Tom asked, “How old were you when your mother died?”

  “Four. I didn’t really understand what happened for a long time—I thought she went away to make me feel bad. I thought she wanted to punish me.”

  “Mom, why would she want to do that?”

  She cracked her eyes open, and her puffy face looked childish and sly. “Because I was bad. Because of my secrets.” For a moment, Tom thought that the slyness was like a pat of butter in her mouth. “Sometimes Jeanine would come and talk to me. And hold me. And I talked to her. I hoped she would be my new Mommy. I really did!”

  “I always wondered how my grandmother died,” Tom said. “Nobody ever talked about it.”

  “To me either!” Gloria said. “You can’t tell a little kid something like that.”

  “Something like what?”

  “She killed herself.” Gloria said this flatly, without any emotion at all. “I wasn’t supposed to know. I don’t think Daddy even wanted me to know she was dead, you know. You know Daddy. Pretty soon he was acting like there never was any Mommy. There was just the two of us. Her and her’s Da.” She pulled the covers around herself more tightly, and the magazines still on the bed moved up with them. “There was just her and her’s Da, and that was all there ever was. Because he loved her, really, and she loved him. And she knew everything that happened.”

  She slid deeper into the bed. “But it was all a long time ago. Jeanine was angry, and then a man killed her and put her in the lake too. I heard him shooting—I heard the shots in my bedroom. Pop! Pop! Pop! And I went through the house and out on the veranda and saw a man running through the woods. I started to cry, and I couldn’t find Daddy, and I guess I went to sleep, because when I woke up he was there. And I told him what I saw, and he took me to Barbara Deane’s house. So I’d be safe.”

  “You mean he took you to Miami.”

  “No—first he took me to Barbara Deane’s house, in the village, and I was there a little while. A few days. And he went back to the lake, to look for Jeanine, and then he came back, and then we went to Miami.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  She closed her eyes. “I didn’t like Barbara Deane. She never talked to me. She wasn’t nice.”

  She was silent for a long time, breathing deeply. “I’ll be better tomorrow.”

  He stood up and went to the side of her bed. Her eyelids fluttered. He bent down to kiss her. When his lips touched her forehead, she shuddered and mumbled, “Don’t.”

  In the study, Victor Pasmore lay tilted back in his recliner, asleep before the blaring television. A cigarette that was only a column of ash burned in the ashtray, sending up a thin line of smoke.

  Tom went to t
he front door and let himself out into the cool night. Chinks of light showed through Lamont von Heilitz’s curtains.

  “You’re upset,” said Mr. von Heilitz as soon as he saw Tom on his doorstep. “Hurry on inside, and let me get a better look at you.”

  Tom moved through the door with what felt like the last of his energy and leaned against a file cabinet. The Shadow inserted a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, and squinted at Tom as he inhaled. “You look absolutely ragged, Tom. I’ll pour you a cup of coffee, and then I want you to tell me all about it.”

  Tom straightened up and rubbed his face. “Being here makes me feel better,” he said. “I heard so much today—listened to so much—and it’s all sort of spinning around in my head. I can’t figure it out—I can’t get it straight.”

  “I’d better take care of you,” von Heilitz said. “You sound a little overloaded.” He led Tom back through the enormous room to his kitchen, took out two cups and saucers, and poured coffee from an old black pot that had been bubbling on a gas range, also black, that must have belonged to his parents. Tom liked the entire kitchen, with its wainscoting, hanging lamps, and old-fashioned sinks and high wooden shelves and mellow, clean wooden floorboards.

  The old man said, “In honor of the occasion, I think we could add a little something to the coffee, don’t you?”

  He took a bottle of cognac from another shelf, and tipped a little into each cup.

  “What occasion?” Tom asked.

  “Your being here.” He handed Tom one of the cups, and smiled at him.

  Tom sipped the hot, delicious mixture, and felt the tension drain from him. “I didn’t know that you knew Hattie Bascombe.”

  “Hattie Bascombe is one of the most extraordinary people on this island. That you know about our friendship means that you must have seen her today! But I’m not going to keep you in the kitchen. Let’s go into the other room and hear about what has you so worked up.”

  Tom sprawled back on the old leather couch, and put his feet up on the coffee table covered with books. Von Heilitz said, “One minute,” and put a record on his gleaming stereo equipment. Tom braced himself for more Mahler, but a warm, smoky tenor saxophone began playing one of Miss Ellinghausen’s tunes, “But Not For Me,” and Tom thought that it sounded just like the way the coffee and brandy tasted: and then he recognized it.