Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She would have rushed forward to her son,—she would have screamed, to summon help,—but, of a sudden, a hoarse breathing or panting just behind her, which she had been half hearing all the while, defined itself unmistakably, and, with no time for caution, nor even dread, she turned, and uttered a small high wail of surprise,—to catch the sharp edge of the bloodied ax, as it fell upon her upraised forehead.

  “The Red-Haired Specter”

  Shortly thereafter, according to the testimonies of several witnesses, the figure of a man of unusual height and size, and of coarse,—nay, brutish—physique, was to be observed running along Jewett’s Lane, from the direction of the cemetery: lumbering, and heavy-footed, and stooped over in an apish posture, and carrying something in his arms: a red-haired stranger of giant proportions, being, it seemed, seven, or eight, or ten feet tall, and possessed of a “fearsome countenance”: a wraith or a specter loosed from Hell, or a mortal man in evident distress—?

  Alas, that the afternoon’s undulating mists had not only deepened by this time, to meld with a premature dusk, but that a light drizzle had begun to fall, the more to obscure visibility!—for of the several witnesses, only one had had the opportunity to gaze upon the creature at close range, and he was but a child of ten years of age; and grievously frightened by the encounter.

  In Jewett Cottage, but an eighth of a mile from Grace Church, Mrs. Bunting’s loyal servant Bessie Hyde found herself making frequent trips from the kitchen to the front parlor, that she might gaze, with some apprehension, out the window: the while berating herself for not having offered to accompany her plucky mistress to the rectory. But it was often the case that Letitia Bunting would go about unescorted, briskly tying on her bonnet, and fastening her cape about her, and professing both surprise and chiding reproach that she might be considered advanced in years, and in any wise infirm. So Mrs. Hyde peered into the lane; and waited, and waited, with some trepidation; consoling herself with the fact that, surely, Reverend Bunting would escort his mother back to the cottage, well in time to allow her to dress for tea . . . Thus it was, the affrighted woman saw the “red-haired specter,”—as, in the earliest phase of the investigation, Jabez Dovekie was so floridly called—running past the cottage from the direction of the church, some twenty or twenty-five minutes (by her confused estimation) after Mrs. Bunting had stepped out. She had known at once that he was a criminal,—most likely a murderer: that he had just committed a monstrous act, and would soon commit another: for, ah!—how hideous, how fearsome, how unnaturally twisted, the creature’s face,—and how gigantic he was, whether human, or demonic! Stooped over in brutish fashion, yet running, it seemed, in a most erratic way,—now toward the center of the graveled lane, now in the overgrown grasses at the side,—swaying, and wavering, and plunging blindly forward, as if, in the exigency of the moment, he lacked animal cunning and scarcely knew what he did. “He is fleeing a murder,” Mrs. Hyde murmured aloud, cringing behind the curtains, her poor heart nearly stopped, in terror that he would turn into the cottage gate, and break down the door. Albeit the fog had grown particularly dense in the low-lying area of Jewett’s Pond, Mrs. Hyde was to insist that she could see clearly enough to discern that the creature’s thick, somewhat overlong hair was red; that his eyes were tawny and ablaze, like smoldering coals; that he wore workingman’s clothes, and no hat; and that he was cradling in his arms an object about the size of a small child, gripped to his chest in an awkward fashion, that much impeded his ability to run. Upon seeing this frightful person, scarcely more than forty feet from where she stood, Mrs. Hyde was so gripped with terror, she came near to fainting dead away,—and could give no thought, for some agitated minutes, as to the well-being of her poor mistress.

  So powerfully had this horrific vision been impressed upon Mrs. Hyde, she would be capable of identifying the fiend with no difficulty, as she afterward told Orrin Wick: and, indeed, would wholeheartedly give evidence against him, to send him to the gallows, and to Hell,—if he be a mortal man.

  In similar wise, and with as much vehemence, Amos Niehardt and his invalided wife, Flora, who lived just up the lane from Jewett Cottage, declared that they could readily identify the “murderer”: for, it seemed, the disheveled creature had tramped through Mrs. Niehardt’s rose-garden in his panicked flight, and had passed within ten feet of their house. Eighty-two-year-old Amos Niehardt’s description of the red-haired figure paralleled Mrs. Hyde’s generally, save that he believed the man to be “at least twelve feet in height,” and wearing bloodstained working clothes, and possessed of a gargoyle-like face, with red-glittering eyes. Moreover, he was carrying in his arms the limp and flimsily clad body of a comely young woman,—the rector’s wife, Perdita, it seemed! (Nor could Mr. Niehardt be budged from this notion, even when it was explained to him that, at the time, Mrs. Harmon Bunting lay unconscious in her boudoir on the second floor of the rectory, her wrists and ankles bound, and a gag tied about her mouth. “Nonetheless I am certain that ’twas she, and no one else, clenched in the brute’s arms,” the elderly gentleman stubbornly asserted, “and Mrs. Niehardt will support me, for, though her eyes are poor, and she was lying abed at the time, she remembers how I exclaimed at once that it must be a kidnapping or an abduction, with the rector’s wife as the victim.”)

  As to whether the red-haired man was a “specter” or not,—the Niehardts debated the issue betwixt themselves, but were undecided, for while there were enormous footprints in the garden, arguing for a material source, it had always been the case that the phantasmal cries from the pond, as well as the sound of running feet in the lane, seemed real enough when they were heard, but were, of course, of unearthly origin; and both the Niehardts had experienced these alarming phenomena countless times, during the fifty-odd years of their residence in Jewett’s Lane. (When Amos Niehardt learned more fully of the ax murders, including that of the much-loved widow Letitia Bunting, he was the more incensed, and voiced the opinion that he hoped “the malefactor was but a mortal man of flesh and blood, that he might be dispatched straightaway to Hell.”)

  Miss Elvira Pitt-Davies, happening to glance out her sewing-room window into the lane at about this time, was startled to see someone passing by in evident haste, with something,—she knew not what, but believed it an inanimate object—gripped in his arms. Alone of the witnesses, however, the fifty-six-year-old maiden lady felt obliged to confess that, owing to the fog and the drizzling rain, it was impossible to see clearly: and she dreaded to involve any innocent person in the case by proffering inaccurate testimony. Indeed, when brought to the station-house to identify Jabez Dovekie, some days later, Miss Pitt-Davies said frankly that she could not: nor could she swear that she had actually seen the running man with something in his arms. Had he been dressed in work clothes; had he been bareheaded; had his hair been red,—Miss Pitt-Davies apologized for her timidity, but, alas, she could not say. “It is a very serious thing to accuse a man of murder, after all,” she told police.

  (The spacious old Colonial house owned by the Pitt-Davies family, on the picturesque northern shore of Jewett Pond, is perhaps three-quarters of a mile from Grace Church, as the crow flies; and situated well uphill, that its inhabitants might enjoy a view of the pond and its wooded surroundings. I mention the fact in this space as, quite by happenstance, Xavier Kilgarvan will reside there for the duration of the case, as a guest of his former teacher and admirer Murre Pitt-Davies, the headmaster of the Winterthurn Academy for Boys. A splendid white clapboard house it is even today, though so much else in Jewett’s Lane, and, indeed, in Winterthurn City itself, has been altered: and one can well imagine Xavier’s romantic yearning as, standing at the window of his bedroom on the second floor of the Pitt-Davies house, he could gaze across the pond to the glinting steeple of Grace Church, and envision his belovèd Perdita in her invalid bed, in the adjoining residence—!)

  Precisely why the ten-year-old Leroy Craven was playing with his Irish setter dog in the cattails and rushes along the sho
re of Jewett’s Pond, in such intemperate weather, was never satisfactorily explained, albeit neighbors spoke of the boy’s habitual queer behavior, and his parents’ indifference in disciplining him. Having no playmates, the child prowled about where he would, exploring the muddiest stretches of the pond, and hiding in the rushes, for unknown purposes: talking to himself, and brandishing “javelins” and “swords” fashioned of tree limbs; at times afflicted with an excruciating shyness, so that he ran from residents of the neighborhood, and, at other times, possessed of a kind of demonism, in that he pelted them with stones and clumps of mud from his hiding places. It was said of Leroy Craven, by his parents as well as his teachers, that he was incapable of discerning truth from fancy; yet, it seems, he acquitted himself in a mature fashion, in describing the “red-haired giant” he had seen running blindly along the lane, splashing through puddles, and whimpering aloud to himself, a bloodied ax cradled in his arms.

  When this nightmare figure first appeared, out of the mist that cloaked the lane, Leroy’s dog growled deep in his throat, and laid his ears back: but was, in the next minute, so terrified by the apparition,—or, it may have been, by the smell of fresh blood—that he turned tail, as the expression goes, and ran cowering away, through a muddy stretch of marsh grass. The fleeing dog drew the man’s attention at once, but drew it, fortunately, away from Leroy Craven, who was squatting nearby in the grasses, frozen with terror, as he knew he would be murdered,—“chopped to pieces by the ax,” as he said—if the man’s wild-rolling eyes chanced to light upon him.

  For the space of some thirty seconds, a most protracted and dreadful period of time, the panting man stood close by, within five feet of the child, as if undecided how to proceed. So near was he, so horrifically near, as Leroy Craven afterward said,—and was to say, indeed, for the remainder of his life, this being its peak—that he could see the beads of perspiration on the brute’s forehead, and hear his sobbing breath, and very nearly feel, or so it seemed, the tumult of his heart: he had time,—ah, how would he have not!—to memorize every detail of that fearsome countenance, which he would never forget so long as he lived: the wide furrowed forehead, the fleshy nose and jowls, the blunt chin, the dazed expression of the eyes. Whether man, or demon, or a monstrous amalgam of both, the paralyzed child knew not, but felt, as it were, in the very instant of his terror, a queer surge of pity for the creature, as he radiated more an air of desperation, than of wickedness.

  Yet the front of his jacket was smeared with blood, and there was no mistaking the authority of the long-handled ax he gripped in both hands, its broad evil head covered with dark stains and what appeared to be hairs, and even the handle discolored for much of its length. “It has been used for murder,” the boy thought, “and will be used again, if I betray my hiding place.”

  Fortune smiled upon the lad, however, for, of a sudden, the red-haired man made the decision to throw the ax into the pond, so far as his powerful muscles would carry it: and, his breath still ragged and panting, he turned to run away,—to disappear into the mist,—and to “disappear,” in a manner of speaking, for a space of several days.

  In the Rectory

  By the time Xavier Kilgarvan arrived in Winterthurn City on the 7:05 train from Manhattan,—to the commingled amazement and apprehension, it scarcely needs be said, of Chief of Police Orrin Wick and his officers—the lurid news had spread through town that the bodies of three persons had been discovered in the Grace Episcopal Church on Berwick Avenue, barbarously hacked to death with an ax: that the unidentified murderer was loose in the city: that the beautiful young wife of Reverend Harmon Bunting had been “grievously and mysteriously violated” by that selfsame murderer: and that a scandalous “love nest” had been exposed,—whether in the hallowed interior of the wealthy Grace Church itself, or in the minister’s residence.

  In addition, it was believed that the minister’s elderly mother, a veritable saint to those who knew her, was amongst the victims: and one of Winterthurn City’s most prominent society ladies was involved: and one of the city’s most prominent clergymen,—taken in adultery, it seemed, and punished forthwith by a vengeful husband!

  Alas, numberless were the variants of these early reports, streaming most promiscuously through the city, in those hours before the Winterthurn Gazette could mobilize its staff to publish a special edition: there being the insistence, in some quarters, that the crime must have been perpetrated by a gang of gypsies; or by a gang of blacks; or by a contingent of striking workers in South Winterthurn,—for there was, at this time, a wildcat strike of cannery workers at a factory owned by the Poindexters, now in its third day. Elsewhere it was stated as a fact that the Episcopal clergyman had been “hacked to death” by a maddened zealot of a heretic sect of Antichrists; and that both murdered women,—Mrs. Letitia Bunting and Mrs. Amanda Poindexter—had been “obscenely abused” before meeting their deaths. A flurry of fresh rumors reported the death as well of the minister’s wife, Mrs. Perdita Bunting, née Kilgarvan: with the curious embellishment that all four victims had died at the hand of Ellery Poindexter, one of the deacons of the church—! Then again, it was offered as factual that a contingent of disgruntled servants, including gravediggers recently discharged by the minister, had “mutinied” against their master, and gone berserk, killing more persons than they had intended: and that Harmon Bunting had been subjected to “ritual punishment” by the Brethren of Jericho,—there having been, at this time, several widely publicized incidents of chastisement of clergymen by the Brethren, with the charge that the men were insufficiently Christian, or American; or that they had “misbehaved morally”; or had spoken out against the patriotic group, in public or in private. Yet again, it was hysterically circulated amongst the wealthier citizens of the city that the murders had been committed by a small band of Anarchists from New York City, of Austrian or Russian origin: and that the murders were but the first of a proposed series, in the systematic erasure of all social classes from the United States. In other neighborhoods of Winterthurn, however, it was presented as self-evident, and with some wicked gloating, that the vainglorious Reverend Bunting had been murdered along with his mistress by an infuriated husband, or an agent of the husband: and that the police had already made their arrest: or (this being a peculiar variant) would not be making any arrest, as the wealthy Poindexter clan had taken swift and pragmatic moves to buy them off.

  It was nothing short of remarkable, how quickly word spread that, at the very least, something had happened up on Berwick Avenue to draw such a bevy of policemen, and so clamorous a throng of spectators, who, despite the rain, not only had gathered on the sloping lawn of the church, but had spilled over, as it were, into the cemetery,—a noisome pack of men and women eager to learn the most gruesome details of the murders, while professing scandalized repugnance; and not above snatching up whatever “souvenirs” were at hand; whether chunks of crumbling stone from the grave markers, or leaves from the handsome hickories and oaks that surrounded the church—! One comely tree, growing unfortunately near the street, and possessed of several low-sweeping limbs, was cruelly vandalized by the crowd, and in danger of being stripped bare of its leaves,—a sobering reflection, as Osmyn Goshawk was to comment in his front-page editorial, on the degeneration of civility and common courtesy in the Modern Era. “The brute devastation within the rectory was echoed, if not mocked, by the brute devastation without”—so Mr. Goshawk charged.

  With the passage of minutes, from late afternoon to early evening, the murmurous throng grew; and both Berwick Avenue and Jewett’s Lane soon became clogged with persons of all ages, not excepting children, of a social class not ordinarily glimpsed in this section of the city. From time to time, flurries of excitement arose with the arrival of certain recognized persons (amongst them Mr. Goshawk of the Gazette, and Dr. Colney Hatch, now white-haired and venerable, and walking with a cane); and with the false report that, at last, the bodies were to be borne out of the rectory to the waiting mortuary van. (
How the onlookers surged forward at this prospect, fairly trampling one another, and scarcely to be held back by restraining police,—and how vociferously disappointed they were when, no bodies appeared!) It was wrongly asserted that Ellery Poindexter had arrived incognito; it was preposterously asserted that the ax murderer had been apprehended by police, and would be shortly brought back to the scene of the crime. Indeed, what was not susceptible to belief, on that notorious autumn day of mists, and drizzling rain, and a red-haired “specter” wielding an ax, and a “love nest” sickeningly befouled with human blood and brains—! All irresponsibly, it was even asserted that Xavier Kilgarvan, who had not set foot in Winterthurn since Valentine Westergaard had walked off scot free, nearly a dozen years before, would now return: a farfetched rumor soon to shade into the truth.

  MUCH CONFUSION AND INITIAL BUNGLING, it scarcely need be said, attended the earliest stage of the police investigation into the murders: partly as a consequence (so rumor would have it) of Police Chief Orrin Wick’s stunned disbelief that what seemed to have happened, had actually happened,—and in his jurisdiction. No one, not even members of the victims’ families, appeared more dazed than the usually vigorous and forthright Mr. Wick, who was observed to have done little but stare at the butchered corpses for some fifteen or twenty minutes, and to give little guidance or instruction to his officers. It was a ghastly enough thing, that three persons should have been murdered in so brutal a way; yet all the more difficult to grasp that an upstanding gentleman of the cloth should have been surprised, as it were, with a lady not his wife,—a lady, moreover, born a Shaw, and married into the Poindexters. And how came it, Mr. Wick asked aloud, that the elderly Mrs. Bunting should have been closeted with them; and why had she been killed? (With especial brutality, it seemed: for while Reverend Bunting had suffered some twenty-three strokes of the ax, by the coroner’s estimate, and Mrs. Poindexter some nineteen, the frail Letitia Bunting must have borne the brunt of the maniac’s untrammeled frenzy, in suffering more than two dozen blows of the weapon, both from its blunt side and its sharp side, any one of which would probably have been lethal: which unspeakable brutality had so extreme an effect upon the elderly woman’s eighty-pound body as to make any exact description of it in this chronicle impossible. Suffice it to say that, upon first glimpsing the mutilated corpse, several of the police officers, including Mr. Wick himself, came very close to fainting dead away: and the youngest had to rush from the room, to succumb to a fit of vomiting. For the horror of the scene was such, Reverend Bunting’s walnut-paneled study may as well have been an abattoir,—there being blood virtually everywhere, save the ceiling some ten feet above; and unmistakable brain tissue, and fragments of bone, sprayed against the furniture, windows, and wall. Indeed, though the law enforcement officers had seen many an ugly sight in their careers, there was no doubting the fact that nothing resembling this carnage had ever before occurred in Winterthurn.)