“Stay out of here! Stay out!” She drew back the scissors and hurled them at him, backhanded. They sailed harmlessly by, but it seemed to Ella they passed through him. Ella squealed. Her cane. Where was her cane? She groped for it in the snow and, finding it, tottered to her feet. Once erect, she gripped the cane at its tapered base and swung it wildly at the night. “Burke!” she screamed. “Burke!”
“Burke is gone now, Ella.” The voice was almost gentle. “Burke, Bigelow, Hack, your father. They're all gone.”
Ella's thin chest was heaving. Her head remained cocked to one side in a desperate hope that what was vague in her vision would remain vague in form. Her mouth began to froth at its corners. Her eyes were wide and unblinking in spite of the snow.
“It's time, Ella,” the voice said softly.
“I'll kill you,” she hissed.
He smiled. It was a sad smile, as if she'd made a very poor joke.
“It's time to answer for Margaret, and for Jonathan and for poor Lucy. There was never a need to harm Lucy.”
A low, growling wail started deep in her throat. She slashed viciously with her cane, although his shape remained ten feet distant, between her pillars. Now she hurled the cane as she had the scissors. The cane struck his chest, but lengthwise and without force. He snatched it before it could fall and held it for a long moment. He seemed to study it. At last he brought it down to his side. Something in his pose brought another wail from Ella. She spun drunkenly toward the house, her arms reaching for it. She fell face down in the snow. She lay there gasping, staring at it, waiting in terror for the shadow to cross over her.
But instead there was light. Headlights. Their glow grew bright on the snow and—she twisted her head—on her columns and the shape between them. She heard the sound of a motor, first loud, then purring. She heard a car door. And another. Lawrence. Lawrence and Burke. See? They are not gone. Liar. Kill him, Lawrence. Kill him now and you'll be rich.
“Jonathan!” Gwen ran to him, one hand gripping her white skirts. She'd brought no coat. Raymond Lesko approached more slowly. He held the pistol ready in his pocket as he scanned the darkness. He saw Ella. She was kicking her legs, crablike, trying to back away, but she was making no progress. “Kill him,'' she was screeching.
Corbin stared at Gwen. It seemed to her at first that he did not know her. His eyes were odd. Then recognition showed in them, then affection, then something like appreciation. But it was more the look Jonathan might have given her the second or third time they met.
“You must be cold,” he said.
If she was, she was not conscious of it. She stood, looking hard into his eyes as he peeled off his coat and wrapped it around her shoulders.
“Are you Jonathan?” she asked.
His eyes took a sort of hitch, like that made by a film when it jumps to another scene. `
“Yes, sweetheart.” He closed his lapels across her throat. “I'm Jonathan.” He gestured with his head toward the woman who was shouting into the storm. “That's Ella Beckwith.”
”I know. Mr. Lesko told me.”
“She killed them all. Or had it done. She was going to kill us.”
”I know that, too. Jonathan, let's get away from here.”
“In just a minute, sweetheart.” He touched her cheek tenderly. But his eyes changed again as they turned and locked on Ella Beckwith. “In just another minute.”
He was coming for her. Ella hooded her eyes against the coach-light's glare and she saw him moving toward her. Where was Lawrence? Where was Burke? She could not have imagined that they'd come. She'd seen them. Two of them, rushing from the car. Now there was no one. Only him. Except for just an instant she'd imagined she saw his Chicago whore standing at his side, but now she, too, was gone.
Get a grip on yourself. Think. If you can just get to ... where? Get to where?
She tried to remember. There was a building, she knew, that she wanted to reach. A place with light and warmth and stout doors. But the snow was piling high and her feet were numb and the hem of her coat was heavy with ice. She would never reach it. He would be there first.
Ella looked back.
He was coming. Steadily. Unhurried. The cane swinging in his right hand. There was hardly any snow. Why was there so little snow for him and so much for her? Everything seemed turned around somehow. She was even moving downhill now. How could that be when her driveway climbed steeply upward?
At last Ella reached a broad, open space that was flat. It should have been where her front terrace and her wisteria trellis were, but it was all so different. The trellis was so high, so much bigger, and its posts seemed more like steel pillars. She heard a scream. An odd scream, not like a woman's. It came again. From a distance. She stared past the pillars and saw it. It was a horse. A horse was screaming because it had fallen and could not rise and there were two men, policemen. Oh, glory. Yes. Policemen. “Police,” she croaked. ”I need you. Police!” But the wind shredded her words and drove them back into her face.
A Greenwich patrol car, its blue lights strobing, skidded to a stop in front of the car Lesko had driven. Two policemen stepped out. Both had hands over holstered guns. One drew his weapon at the sound of Ella's screams.
“Don't get nervous.” Lesko held up a hand. ”I got ID.”
He showed his wallet and flipped it open to a small gold shield. “New York Detectives,” he said. “Retired last year.”
“Are you armed, Mr. Lesko?” a .tall sergeant named Gorby asked. The second policeman, the one who'd drawn his gun, stepped past Lesko. He quickly appraised Corbin, who stood quietly, his arms around Gwen, then turned and blinked at the old woman who was on her hands and knees, screaming at him from some fifteen feet inside her gate.
Lesko produced the Beretta, butt first. “This belongs to a guy named Burke. Maybe you seen him hung up in a tree.”
The sergeant nodded. “This man did it?” He looked at Corbin.
“Not exactly. I'll tell you later.”
Sergeant Gorby blinked through the snow at the screaming woman. “That's Miss Beckwith, isn't it? What have you been doing to her?”
“Nothing, sergeant. Not a damn thing.”
She ran on, stumbling, her ice-laden coat slapping at her legs, tripping her. And still he came. Closer now. Suddenly she came upon another large building, its front door lit as bright as day. She could find safety there. They would take her in. But for a reason she did not know, Ella turned from that grand house and staggered toward a place where there was darkness and great mounds of snow. The mounds had a maze of alleys between them. She could hide. She could escape. But the spaces had filled in too much. They trapped her legs. They tripped her. She felt herself turning, then stumbling backward. Her arms plunged deep into the snow behind her. And he was there. She could not rise and run again. She could not even claw at his face because her arms were held fast. She spat. And when she did she felt the hard tip of his cane, though it did not hurt her, pressing at a spot between her breasts.
Nothing hurt.
She no longer even felt the cold.
”I do not feel anything.” She was tired. She would rest.
”I know that, Ella.”
“You cannot keep me here, you know.”
“Stay there, Ella. It's where you belong.”
“No.”
“Goodbye, Ella.”
Ella screamed.
”I do not feel anything.”
Sergeant Gorby wrapped his emergency blanket around her head and shoulders. He placed another over her feet.
”I know. But you're going to be fine,” he told her.
“You cannot keep me here, you know.”
“An ambulance is coming, Ella. It won't be long.”
“No.”
“Just sit tight, Ella.”
Sergeant Gorby stood and turned toward Corbin, who had not moved from his place between the gate columns. His policeman's eye saw that no footsteps but his own had crossed Ella Beckwith's property line. L
ooking back, he saw the dim traces of the path the old woman had followed from her house, and a wider flattened area no more than ten feet across where she alone had flailed and tamped the snow. He took two steps toward Corbin, and Ella began screaming again. Screams so loud and long that he feared for her heart. He turned once more to quiet her. But she looked past him as if he did not exist. She saw only Corbin. And when Corbin slowly turned away, the screams, impossibly, grew all the more shrill until her vocal cords gave way and there were only silent clouds of steam. But Ella would never stop screaming in her mind.
Epilogue
Monday was chaos. Just at daybreak, the Greenwich detectives came back for the second time. A New York lawyer, summoned by Sturdevant for Jonathan's sake, arrived, chauffeur-driven, an hour before that.
As word leaked out of police headquarters concerning the magnitude of Sunday evening's events, the press began to arrive in force. A uniformed policeman kept most of them at bay, but two stringers for the New York Post found the unlocked porch door and strolled into the kitchen while Jonathan and Gwen were making breakfast for themselves, Harry Sturdevant, and Raymond Lesko. None of them had eaten since breakfast the day before, except for some Dunkin’ Donuts at the Greenwich police station. The two stringers left quickly after Lesko showed his perfect teeth and wrapped a friendly arm around each of their necks.
At nine o'clock, Gwen Leamas called the Network to explain why neither she nor Mr. Corbin would be in the office for a few days at least. A Network news executive called back ten minutes later, astonished at his good luck to have two Network staffers in the middle of a major story, and announced that he would have a live remote crew there within the hour for an exclusive interview. There would be no interviews, Gwen told him firmly and hung up, though she knew that her refusal would not deter these news types in the slightest.
The next call was for Lesko. Sergeant Gorby had agreed to let him know when Dancer showed signs of regaining
consciousness at Greenwich Hospital. It was Lesko's idea that his presence at Dancer's bedside might do much to loosen his tongue. He further suggested that a Polaroid of Tom Burke's blackened face might also make a nice conversation starter, but Gorby felt that Lesko's face had enough heart attack potential as it was. He would pick up Lesko in ten minutes.
Ella's brother, who had been arrested and booked on the convenient charge of threatening with a gun, had talked freely to detectives for much of the night, ignoring the pleas of a lawyer whom the police had called in on his behalf. He admitted that he had seen his sister murder Tilden Beckwith in 1944 and that, although she soon made him go away to Palm Beach, he knew perfectly well that she was already arranging the eradication of Tilden's entire blood line. An explanation of the Corbin line versus the Beckwith line, to the extent that he fully understood it, took two hours by itself. He would also doze when asked a question he found difficult.
He admitted, after a fashion, that he, and Ella, and Ballanchine had also conspired to murder Jonathan Corbin, Gwen Leamas, and Harry Sturdevant, and that two attempts, which were foiled by Mr. Lesko, had been made, and that a third was in process when it was foiled by Tilden Beckwith himself. It was at this point that the confession began to lose what small measure of clarity it had had. Its usefulness was further compromised, to the lawyer's relief, by Tilden’s insistence on explaining that Jonathan was in fact Tilden and the one called Gwen Leamas was in fact Charlotte Corbin whose name was really Margaret, all of whom, most of whom, were, in any case, dead. Ella's brother dozed again. When he awoke shortly, the only topic that interested him was his continuance as the chairman of Beckwith Enterprises. The detectives promised that he would certainly get their vote and agreed among themselves that there was little point in continuing the interrogation until they'd spoken further with Harry Sturdevant, who seemed best able to make sense out of this.
Sturdevant and Raymond Lesko had already agreed on a simplified version of events. Jonathan Corbin had very
likely been drawn to Greenwich as a result of some forgotten stories he'd heard as a child. Ella Beckwith spotted him one day. His striking resemblance to the murdered Tilden Beckwith and her own fears did the rest. She had had Lesko hired to find out who he was and where he came from. When Lesko learned too much, and began to realize that the Corbins were blood relatives of Tilden Beckwith and all the other Beckwiths were not, and that the Chicago Corbins had probably been murdered as well, Ella Beckwith decided to try once more for a clean sweep. There would be no mention of Charlotte Corbin’ s ever being anyone else. If the name Margaret arose at all, it would be dismissed as a pet name, nothing more. There would certainly be no mention of Corbin's hallucinations or waking dreams, whatever they were. In any event they were gone. Just as his fear of the snow had gone. And Tilden, Jonathan had assured Harry Sturdevant during a quiet moment late last night, was gone as well. Jonathan had felt him go. It was early last evening. Just before Ella Beckwith started screaming.
There was still a chance, Sturdevant’ s chauffeur-driven lawyer advised him, that Jonathan Corbin could be charged with a felony. True, there seemed to be ample evidence that this Tom Burke entered Corbin's property with violent intent and that Corbin defended himself. But hanging the man in the crook of a tree with his own scarf after he was disarmed and disabled could be regarded as excessive force under the law.
“Horseshit,” said Lesko on returning from Greenwich Hospital. “I would have made sure his clock was stopped myself if I knew there was still another guy with a gun on the other side of the house. This is the only town where they'd think about indicting a guy not for what he did but because he did it untidy.”
”I assume Mr. Ballanchine confessed to his role in this.”
“Dancer?” Lesko shook his head. “Guys like him don't confess. They try to deal. He's not awake ten minutes before he's trying to give away the store in return for immunity on the conspiracy and attempted-murder raps. He wants me to come back and see him alone, but he's got nothing to sell. The cops got his gun, they got that crazy old man's testimony, and they got mine. If they get around to searching Dancer's office they'll probably find a recording of him offering me fifteen grand to knock off Corbin.” Lesko almost patted his chest again for emphasis. He'd retrieved the money from Dancer's pocket when he found him on the porch. Last time he patted his chest it got him twelve stitches plus a ride in an icebox. Lesko figured he'd earned it.
“Did he say anything about...” Sturdevant hesitated. “About what happened to him?”
Lesko nodded. “The guy who bashed him talked to him first. He says it wasn't Corbin. He changed his mind later, but that's where he started.”
“It was Tilden?”
Lesko shrugged.
“What do you think, Mr. Lesko?”
”I don't think anything. If you think I'm going to go around saying I believe in ghosts, you're crazier than old lady Beckwith.”
”I don't suppose you'd make an exception, just between us.”
The ex-cop shrugged again. After a thoughtful pause, he shook his head firmly.
“But you've already acknowledged,” Sturdevant persisted, “that it was a very different person who helped you out of that car and who then walked over to Ella Beckwith’ s house. And once he was there, you and Gwen both saw him change right before your eyes.”
“Sorry, Doc. It's as far as I go.” It had taken him this much of his life, he decided, to learn that the simpler you look at things, the less you screw them up. Ghosts, he didn't need. Lesko was already working very hard on forgetting that someone who was dressed like him could be Tilden Beckwith bent down next to Dave Katz and looked at him back when he was laying on Ella Beckwith’s rug with his brains scrambled. The scrambled brains would have been all the explanation Lesko needed if Corbin—if whoever pulled him out of his car hadn't remembered the wisecrack Katz made about his head – the truck tire thing-, but Lesko had almost convinced himself that he hadn't really heard that, either. You can't let yourself start with tha
t stuff. He had all of that he needed back when he was a kid going to Our Lady of Sorrows and the nuns taught them that they all had guardian angels watching them all the time and after that it was a year before most of them could even jerk off in peace.
Lesko knew what Sturdevant wanted to hear. Gwen Leamas had explained it to him. Sort of. Sturdevant had this theory about genetic memory where everybody's brain taps into some ancestor's passed-on genes from time to time, which makes a lot of sense when you think about it, except she says the theory started falling apart where Corbin was concerned because the way the theory is supposed to work is you can only inherit memories that happened before you were conceived. Corbin remembered the Tilden guy's whole life, Gwen Leamas says, by the time he had it out with the old lady. Now Sturdevant has to come up with another theory because he doesn't have the sense to forget about it. He keeps pushing me about ghosts, Lesko decided, I'll tell him about guardian angels and let him see how it feels not to be able to even take a private shit for the next year or so. Anyway, we got more important things to think about.
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