Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Breathing hoarsely of a sudden, and plucking at his mustache with nicotine-stained fingers, Ellery Poindexter heaved himself to his feet: and stood, for a long awkward moment, staring at Xavier with undisguised loathing. He said: “Why is it of any concern to you, who has killed whom, or why; or whether the ‘narrative,’ as you call it, is complex, or devilishly simple? The former iceman, Dovekie, or Doveski, or whatever be his improbable name, is assuredly the murderer: for he was all but caught red-handed, as the expression would have it, and observed by a number of persons, and it is all perfectly clear!—though hanging the wretch will not bring my poor Amanda back, or the Buntings; or restore to Perdita Bunting what it pleases the gallant to call her lost ‘honor.’ In any case,” Mr. Poindexter continued, in a lowered voice, as, perhaps, he had caught sight of a spasm of sheer rage in Xavier Kilgarvan’s face, “you are not one of us, Mr. Kilgarvan: you are out of your element in Winterthurn, and will only provoke the Fates.”

  Albeit his heartbeat had, at the mere mention of Perdita’s name, accelerated wildly, and a piercing pain started betwixt his eyes, Xavier managed to bear himself calmly; and to murmur that the Fates had evidently been provoked to excess but recently, and he could not see how he might cause harm. “It is only the truth I seek, after all,” he said.

  “Well,—you will regret it,” Mr. Poindexter said.

  “No, it may be that you will regret it,” Xavier said. “Else why do you stare at me in such hateful alarm; and why, my dear sir, is your forehead beaded with perspiration; and a most distracting tic enlivened about your mouth—? Yet more urgently, Mr. Poindexter, your breath has become so labored, and your color so poor, I halfway fear you are about to have an asthmatic attack.”

  Confronted with such unabashèd, albeit chill and formal, hostility, the master of St. Bride’s bethought himself for a moment or two; and essayed to control his breathing; and, finally, with a haphazard smile, strolled to the door, to show his visitor out. Ah, the tension that had arisen, so very swiftly, betwixt these two gentlemen!—of so pronounced a quality, I fancy I can feel the quivering of nerves, and the hot spasmodic rush of ventrical blood, even as I transcribe it. True it was, that Ellery Poindexter’s sallow skin had become beaded with perspiration; and the left corner of his mouth twitched; and his breathing had grown so labored, it was painful to hear. Yet, at the door, he contrived to shake hands with Xavier; and said, with a semblance of a haughty smile: “If this iceman creature is not the murderer, Mr. Kilgarvan, then who is,—and how might it be proved?”

  Half-bowing in farewell, Xavier said, with admirable equanimity: “That is my task,—that is why I am here, and why I was born.”

  Postscript

  Though Xavier had not troubled to explain the progress of his investigation thus far, to Mr. Wick or, indeed, to anyone,—secrecy being a dimension of his professional strategy—I see no reason not to quickly limn it here, for the benefit of the impatient reader. Within a very brief time he had seen that, judging from the quantity and the trajectory of blood, brain tissue, and fragments of bone, splattered across Harmon Bunting’s immense roll-top desk and a section of the walnut wainscoting, the clergyman-victim had been struck down while seated at his desk, in his swivel chair; and his lady companion, Mrs. Poindexter, had been attacked while seated on the divan, facing the desk. How swiftly the murderer had rushed into the room to deal his victims their death blows, and how coldly and savagely he had wielded his lethal weapon, before either of the astounded persons could flee—! (As to poor Mrs. Letitia Bunting,—it was self-evident that she had been murdered simply because she had blundered into the scene of the crime, while the murderer, dripping ax still in hand, hid behind the door.)

  Straightaway, then, the murderer had virtually waded through blood, in order to drag Reverend Bunting’s body to the divan, some four or five yards from his desk; and, doubtless with some difficulty (the inordinate weightiness of the dead oft being remarked upon, in the annals of Murder), to place it in the awkward position in which it was found, with Mrs. Poindexter’s bloodied head on its shoulder; and a cruel scattering of hearts left across the bodies. “So theatrical a display,” the detective inwardly reasoned, “is the work of either a lunatic who seeks revenge of a public sort to assuage his wounded vanity,—a cuckolded husband, in short—or, yet more subtly, an ingenious killer, whether lunatic or no, who hopes to confuse speculation, that his own motive remain a secret.” Thus it struck Xavier Kilgarvan as highly improbable that Jabez Dovekie was the murderer: and his theory was subsequently confirmed by a thorough examination of the study. For whoever had murdered Harmon Bunting, and dragged his lifeless body to the divan, had been required to move about the room considerably; and Dovekie’s enormous bootprints,—matched with those on the marshy bank of Jewett’s Pond, and with other footgear of his, confiscated by the police—were to be found only within a radius of a few feet, just inside the door.

  These findings gratified Xavier Kilgarvan, as they destroyed Mr. Wick’s complacent theory of an open-and-shut case, in which his expert services were not needed: albeit he was sorely vexed that he could isolate no footprints or fingerprints anywhere in the downstairs area of the rectory, that might in probability belong to the murderer. His progress thus far Xavier had disdained to share with Mr. Wick and any of his officers, for he had a very poor opinion of their professional acumen; and worried that they could not keep confidence. “Once I am able to interrogate this luckless Dovekie, then I will know,” he told himself.

  It may have been an error of strategy, as we shall see, for Xavier to have withheld his findings from the police, with whom he seems to have agreed to cooperate: but, ah!—not even a genius of a detective, oft gifted with remarkable powers of intuition, can “remember forward.”

  The Betrothal

  So identified with Xavier Kilgarvan, Consulting Detective, was the emboldened motto “I make my circumstance,”—first printed on Xavier’s calling cards in his thirtieth year—that it was a rare person indeed who remembered that Ralph Waldo Emerson, and not Xavier Kilgarvan, was the originator of the healthy-minded sentiment; and, of all Xavier’s acquaintances and associates, only Murre Pitt-Davies recalled that the full sentiment was “You think me the child of my circumstance; I make my circumstance.”

  Boldly American, this declaration; and altogether necessary to believe, perhaps, for so self-reliant and solitary an American as Xavier Kilgarvan,—whose heroic task, as we have seen, has been for a quarter of a century to ferret out wickedness where he might find it, in the pursuit of Truth. Yet the reader will forgive me, I hope, for demurring as to the absolute truthfulness of the proposition, for the general run of mankind no less than for the great Emerson himself. (Who, as the reader will recall, suffered such crippling losses in his young adulthood, a full mental recovery was impossible!)

  In any case, circumstance alone figured in an altogether unanticipated development in the progress of Xavier’s investigation,—and in that shadowy domain wherein his private fancies and aspirations dwelt. For, on the fourth full day of his sojourn in Winterthurn, while yet more closely examining the minister’s residence, Xavier hit upon not one, but several remarkable discoveries.

  INSOMNIAC THROUGH MUCH OF THE NIGHT, Xavier Kilgarvan woke restless and agitated well before dawn of September 15; spent an hour perusing his notes, diagrams, character assessments, time charts, et al., pertaining to the case; and an additional hour re-examining those half-dozen anonymous letters that had been put into his custody by the chief of police. (He had by this time singularly crude documents addressed to Mrs. Perdita Bunting, and to the Misses Penistone; and, all surprisingly, the two letters extant, from those received by Amanda Poindexter,—for Ellery Poindexter had had them delivered to Xavier by messenger, but a few hours following their interview. “Ah, can it be Poindexter is frightened, and hopes to placate and disarm me?” Xavier bethought himself with a frown. “But he will see, I am not so easily manipulated.”)

  It scarcely needs be said,
that the detective had spent many hours studying these distasteful missives, which alternately scolded, and cajoled, and besought, and accused, the hapless ladies to which they were addressed, in a bold and oversize block-lettered hand. He had examined the hand set beside those of persons whom, given the wilderness of probability, it was not altogether unreasonable to suspect (amongst them Ellery Poindexter, of course; and his chauffeur McPhearson Jones; and Jabez Dovekie; and the elderly sexton Henry Harder; and the assistant pastor John Hathorne; and, not least, Harmon Bunting himself,—for it had early crossed Xavier’s mind that the sanctimonious Bunting could very well have been the culprit); but so far as he was able to determine, no characteristic leapt out, as absolutely identifiable, linking the letters with any one of these persons. (Though, subtle similarities might be seen in each of the hands,—and in a sample of Orrin Wick’s handwriting, perused for mere curiosity.)

  Each of the letters had been printed on a single sheet of white parchment paper, bearing a watermark of the most common variety, and kept in stock in copious quantities by several Winterthurn stationers. Each began with the salutation My Dearest,—and proceeded, in a rambling, stilted, and somewhat Biblical tone, to chastise the lady for her sinful ways, and the lewdness locked in her heart; to beg of her, some small favor (a silk stocking, soiled undergarments, etc.), that she might leave in a public place, for her “admirer” to receive; to beseech her not to be cold, unfeeling, and selfish; to accuse her of frailties common to her sex (amongst them inconstancy, willfulness, vanity, an unclean predilection for men of “brutish physiological type,” and the telling of falsehoods “for their very own sake”). One of the ladies was queried, whether she “imagined herself unobserved” in her wantonness; another, whether she guessed how Almighty God scrutinized her while she daydreamed during church services, like a veritable “Whore of Babylon,” mocking the very pew in which she sat. It was declared to Perdita Bunting, née Kilgarvan, that she was soulless as any member of her family; and to the young Penistone twins, that their hot and lecherous fancies could be read in their “fawnlike eyes.” Amanda Poindexter appeared to have aroused the slanderer’s especial ire, for the shameless way in which she “draped her Bosoms & Hips in costly finery,” and pinched her cheeks to redden them, that she might simulate the “long-lost innocence of girlhood.” And so on, and so forth: a sickly sort of evidence, indeed, which aroused in the gentlemanly Xavier naught but disgust.

  (“How queer it is, that those members of my sex who most despise women, are the very persons who succumb to such obsessions!” Xavier thought.)

  So a somewhat disagreeable hour passed; after which Xavier quietly left the Pitt-Davies house, to stroll along Jewett’s Lane, and to watch the eastern sky delicately lighten with dawn, above the placid and mirrorlike surface of Jewett’s Pond. His eye was naturally drawn to the proud steeple of Grace Church not a quarter-mile distant, and the slate roof of the rectory; and, so oft had he heard the testimonies of the Jewett’s Lane witnesses, regarding the “red-haired giant” or “specter,” he fancied he could envision the lumbering Jabez Dovekie, ax in hand, making his panicked way down the cemetery hill, and along the lane. Poor fool! Dovekie had doubtless made the most egregious of mistakes, in snatching up the bloody murder weapon to run with it: in a paroxysm of terror, or sheer befuddled drunkenness, believing that he would be blamed for the murders,—as, doubtless he would have been, had he summoned help. “In any case,” Xavier thought, “as soon as I am able to question the man, I can determine immediately if my theory is correct.”

  Following this, he hiked the full circumference of Jewett’s Pond; climbed through the cemetery to the residence; and inquired courteously of Mrs. Harwich, whether he might look through the quarters again,—excepting of course the suite of rooms on the second floor, in which the invalided Perdita was ensconced.

  Like many another member of her sex, Mrs. Harwich felt the detective’s subtle appeal, which was all the more powerful, it seemed, for being of a melancholy cast. Not only did this good woman welcome him inside; she insisted upon preparing a hot breakfast for him, far more elaborate than he desired, and obliged him in his inquiries by chattering away, in a nervous voice, on nearly any subject the detective introduced. What sort of person had Reverend Bunting been?—Oh, unfailingly kind, and practical, and moral, and Christian in his every phrase; tireless in his duties as pastor; run near-ragged, as his mother oft-times complained, by the demands of certain selfish parishioners; inclined, it was true, to impatience and exasperation, when his will was crossed; but wondrously well-mannered; and an upstanding gentleman, of old Winterthurn stock. And was he a devoted family man, as well?—Oh, assuredly: most devoted to his mother, the saintly Letitia: and never less than civil to his wife, who,—and here Mrs. Harwich’s voice dropped—did not appear to behave, much of the time, as a rector’s wife ought.

  Casually pressed by Xavier Kilgarvan, the housekeeper artlessly prattled of Perdita Bunting’s mercurial ways, as soon as she was established in the residence as mistress: charming, and vivacious, and sunny, and gay, with a tuneless little song on her lips, and a warm greeting for everyone who came to the door; and then, with no warning, moody, and dull, and tearful, and white-skinned, so despondent, as she phrased it, “with the old, wicked, ne’er-changing ways of the world,” she took to her bed for days at a time. While Reverend Bunting could not be said to be a doting husband, still less an amorous swain,—being, for one thing, inclined in recent years to stoutness and shortness of breath—it was the case that he was a respectful husband; and had every right to be coldly disapproving of his wife, when she behaved in such headstrong ways. “Ah, Mr. Kilgarvan, to hear the sudden unprovoked laughter, when she has been mute as the sepulcher, for days!—childlike, and shrill, and savage as shattering glass, ringing out in the gloom!” So it was, Mrs. Harwich did not worry excessively over her mistress’s current invalided state, for she believed it would one day pass, and the pale-brow’d lady rise from her bed, when sufficient strength returned. “Albeit now Mrs. Bunting is a widow,” Mrs. Harwich murmured, with her hand pressed against her bosom, “and must needs see the world forever altered: draped, as it were, in funeral black.”

  Encouraged by her listener’s sobriety and frowning patience, and wishing, it seemed, not to be left too much alone with her duties, Mrs. Harwich spoke ramblingly of her hellish sojourn in the cellar of the house, and the injuries she had suffered; of Jabez Dovekie’s persistence, and the brutishness of his manner; of Letitia Bunting’s saintliness; of Bessie Hyde’s unearned good fortune, in having had so generous a mistress to serve; of Mrs. Amanda Poindexter, who would give orders to her as if she were a mere maid; of the rudeness of Mrs. Poindexter’s chauffeur, Jones, who drank; of certain parishioners who were always stirring up a fuss; of the odd behavior of Nell,—which is to say, Mrs. Bunting’s personal maid—who had received a message, she claimed, from her ailing mother in Mt. Sweetwater that obliged her to be absent for the full day of September 11,—that very day of unspeakable horror. (“In what way is, or was, the girl’s behavior ‘odd’?” Xavier Kilgarvan inquired, “—for I have questioned Nell, and she tells me the message turned out to be fraudulent, and most baffling: though no less baffling than other aspects of the mystery.” “It is odd,” Mrs. Harwich said, with some reproof, “in that Nell’s mother is always ailing; has been confined to her sickbed, I believe, for years; and so frequently do messages of one kind or another come to Nell, chiding her for not having visited, the girl has grown most callous. Yet, it seems, she was off like a flash that morning, all in tears, and quite agitated,—so piteous in her distress that Mrs. Bunting, our Mrs. Bunting, gave her the price of the train ticket outright: and prevailed upon her to accept it as a gift.”)

  From this, Mrs. Harwich lapsed to her earlier topic of Reverend Bunting’s wife, confiding in Xavier that the life of the rectory had been so disrupted from time to time, she had near quit her post of many years; and had been restrained only by Letitia Bunting’s wis
e counsel. It was not generally known, for instance, that, not long after her marriage, Perdita Bunting had succumbed to an unnatural state of nausea, vomiting, vertigo, and overall malaise, diagnosed by Dr. Hatch as a false pregnancy, in which, though the young woman appeared to be wasting away to a mere skeleton, she fancied that her belly was bloated, and so obscene a sight in the eyes of the world, she was obliged to swathe herself in loose clothes, or hide away in her darkened bedroom—!

  Then again, the young Mrs. Bunting suffered nightmares and night-visions of a frightful nature, in which a spectral figure pressed himself against her bedroom window, and pleaded for admittance: this demon said to be (by Nell, who claimed she had seen it) so cunningly shaped as a man, and a man of some attractions, that it was no wonder the minister’s wife fell into hysterics, in not knowing where to turn. (“Some years ago, it was, when Nell first arrived at the rectory,” Mrs. Harwich said, “she was awakened by Mrs. Bunting’s moans and whimperings, and ventured, all timidly, into her mistress’s bedroom,—for the master and the mistress by this time slept apart—to see the young lady, not fully awake, sitting up in bed distraught, her hair tumbled wildly across her bosom and her nightdress, in Nell’s words, all in disorder: turning to Nell her great dilated eyes, that reflected the flame of Nell’s candle as would the eyes of a cat, and saying quietly, ‘He is here,—he has come,—he is bold and impatient,—it is not my will,—it is not my wish,—I cannot be held to account,—I am wed now, and not his—O sweet Nell, stay with me tonight, that he cannot climb through my window!’ And, Mr. Kilgarvan,” the housekeeper continued, in a rapt lowered voice, “it was poor Nell’s fancy that she did see him, or it,—though for but a fleeting instant, upon that occasion. A most diabolical agent, in that his countenance seemed angelic!—and his features regular and cleanly chiseled, like those of a statue of olden times.”)