Mysteries of Winterthurn

by Joyce Carol Oates

  From the first, it had been Xavier Kilgarvan’s casual suggestion that the police keep a close watch on the Dovekie family: for, knowing as little of Dovekie as he did, Xavier nonetheless speculated that the man, grown desperate, and doubtless limited in his resources, and in his imagination, would be drawn back toward home; and might very well seek a hiding place nearby. If this were the case, he would soon make contact with his family, Xavier reasoned, and it might be that someone,—doubtless a child—would be entrusted with bringing him food: whereupon the police had only to follow the child, and they would find their man.

  So, happily, it turned out, on the fifth day following the murder: for Dovekie was at last discovered to be hiding, like an animal, in the cellar of an abandoned planing mill not a mile from his family: and, after a considerable struggle, was overcome by a dozen or more members of the posse, to be hauled in triumph to the county jail, bleeding from numberless wounds, and trussed and chained like a wild beast. (How recklessly,—nay, how valiantly—the red-haired giant fought his captors!—sensing, perhaps, how he was doomed, once the law took him into custody.)

  By the time word came to Xavier Kilgarvan, at the Pitt-Davies house, that Dovekie was jailed, the man had evidently been in captivity for several hours; yet, even so, for clouded reasons, Xavier was required by the police chief to wait an additional forty minutes, before being allowed to visit with him. “I must plan my strategy to perfection,” Xavier excitedly bethought himself, “not to confuse the wretch with ‘leading’ questions, but to allow him his freedom, to speak as artlessly and as directly as possible: for his every word,—nay, his every syllable—will be precious to me.”

  When, at last, Xavier was escorted to the dank windowless cell in which Dovekie was being held, the thought straightaway occurred to him that this man might be the murderer after all, and Perdita’s assailant: so fierce, so brutish, so subhuman did Dovekie appear, hunched over on his cot, still in his handcuffs and leg-irons, and exuding an air of sickly animal panic, and, most intolerably, gazing at Xavier with the eerie flicker of a smile, or a twitch, about his blood-encrusted lips. (“Why, does he mock me?” Xavier thought in amazement. “Does he know who I am, and what power I have over him—?”)

  Nonetheless, addressing the brute in the most courteous and forthright of voices, Xavier essayed to put him at his ease, that he might tell all he knew of the murders,—all he knew; omitting no detail, however seemingly trivial; and assuring him that he, Xavier Kilgarvan, was prepared to honor his testimony, and had by no means judged him beforehand, as, it appeared, others had done. “Thus,” the detective said, smiling as best he could under the strained circumstances, “I beg you to consider me an ally, and not an antagonist.”

  Despite these kindly words, Jabez Dovekie glared at Xavier in wrathful silence; and drew in long shuddering breaths, and released them, with such intensity, it seemed his lungs must burst, and his eyes, already bloodshot and somewhat protuberant, must bulge from their sockets. Xavier repeated his questions, phrasing them as simply and directly as possible, the while he took uneasy note of the defiant rigidity of Dovekie’s facial muscles, about the jaws in particular.

  “Nay, I am certain that this man was not her assailant,” Xavier chided himself, “and, in any case, I must not judge him beforehand.”

  Though courteously questioned by Xavier, Dovekie did no more than grunt, and sigh, and make a writhing motion with his shoulders; and Xavier took uneasy note of an indefinable queerness about his face,—masklike, and imbecile, and darkly smoldering, as if the blood beat hard and hot beneath the coarse surface of the skin. Withal, the accused man was ugly, at least in his present condition: several of his teeth were missing, and his lips had been badly cut; his broad flat nose had been bloodied; his hair was that of a wild beast’s, all matted, grizzled, and filthy; and his eyebrows, inordinately grizzled as well, lifted spikily from his forehead, like those of a hog. Yet more distressing, Dovekie’s left eye began, of a sudden, to wander,—tracing a pattern in the air, it seemed, beyond Xavier’s head, while the right eye continued to fix Xavier in its bulging glare.

  “Is he mocking me?—is he mad?—what on earth is happening?” Xavier thought in alarm.

  When the lurid motions of the eye stilled, and, it seemed, Dovekie was again attending Xavier’s words,—or, at any rate, staring most intensely at him—Xavier repeated all he had said, even more clearly; and essayed to comfort Dovekie by telling him that, under Law, he had the right to retain legal counsel,—and should by no means proffer a “confession” at the urgings of the police.

  “For it is invariably their wish to make things as tidy as possible,—to proclaim a criminal where, perhaps, there is naught but a suspect,” Xavier said.

  Even these sympathetic words failed to evoke any response from Dovekie, save a louder sigh, verging on a moan; and a series of convulsive motions, in which his entire body participated, the head and shoulders in particular. While the appalled detective stared, Dovekie’s eyes rolled upward, showing the whites: and his lips hideously twitched, in a mockery of a smile: and a pink-flecked foam or froth appeared in his nostrils.

  “Dear God, man, what is wrong!—tell me what is wrong!” Xavier cried, springing to his feet.

  The doomed man likewise heaved himself up from his cot, swaying, and staggering, and making his way to Xavier: now drooling copiously from bloodied lips: his eyes careening out of focus, and every fiber of his being straining to speak. Yet, how queer it was, that naught but hissing sounds, and guttural moans, and nonsensical syllables escaped from him: “—iiiiiyyysssssss,—yyyyyysssschchchchxt,—ghpxytoloththth—” uttered in the most piteously intense of ways, as if, even in his extremity, Dovekie harbored some small margin of confidence that Xavier should understand.

  All bravely, Xavier essayed to hold the staggering giant erect, and did not shrink from his grasp, when, in a wild and panicked motion, he raised his manacled arms above Xavier’s head, to lower them into an embrace: albeit Dovekie must have weighed one hundred pounds more than Xavier, and stood a good six or eight inches taller. Thus, the dying man hissed, and babbled, and groaned, and grunted, and, in spasmodic stammers, mimicked, it seemed, the pattern and rhythm of an ordinary conversation, in which something urgent must be communicated: though, as it scarcely needs be said, poor Xavier could understand not a word,—nay, not a syllable!—and was unable to keep from crying aloud in pain, as Dovekie’s embrace tightened, and tightened, and yet further tightened, squeezing the breath out of the detective, and threatening to crack his ribs.

  Fortuitously, as it turned out, the wretched man was, in this struggle, breathing his last: and, with a final spasm of hisses, and a gargling noise that arose deep in his throat, he relaxed, of a sudden, his grip upon Xavier,—and crashed so heavily to the floor, he pulled the terrified Xavier with him.

  SO IT TRANSPIRED, that Jabez Dovekie, the sole suspect in the Grace Church murders, died within a few hours of his arrest, of causes subsequently deemed “natural” by Hans Deck, the Winterthurn county coroner (who felt obliged to perform the autopsy only at the repeated urgings of Xavier Kilgarvan): albeit it came to be whispered through Winterthurn, in the less affluent neighborhoods in particular, that, when taken into captivity by the police, Dovekie had been so struck, and pummeled, and kicked, about the head especially, it was a testament to his strength and vigor of being, that he had lived as long as he had—!

  Nonetheless, as Dovekie was generally believed to be the ax murderer, and the loathsome assailant of Reverend Bunting’s widow, it was pronounced a blessing of God that he had died when he had, whether of natural causes, or no: for would the murderer not have been hanged, in any case, within a few months? And, in thus dying so handily, he had,—poor wretch!—saved the taxpayers of Winterthurn County the needless expense of a trial, and a stay in jail, and a public execution.

  “A disagreeable end to a disagreeable interlude,” Police Chief Orrin Wick was reported to have said, when queried by the Winterthurn Gaze
tte, “but, at least, it is an end: and we can now turn our thoughts to other things.”

  Postscript: Xavier Kilgarvan’s Vow

  It cannot be,—it cannot have happened,—the poor man,—the hapless brute,—my primary witness,—dying in my arms,—so irrevocably snatched from me, the insult of it cannot be borne!”

  Thus Xavier Kilgarvan inwardly murmured, for days after the untimely death: glimpsed by observers in so dazed and disheveled a state, he might have himself been suffering from a cruel blow to the head.

  For the import of Dovekie’s death was unmistakable, in Xavier’s eyes; and unmistakable, the cynical hand of Poindexter behind it,—bribing the police from Orrin Wick on down; and the coroner as well. “He imagines himself unassailable, in his bastion of wealth and prestige,—his Winterthurn prestige,” Xavier thought, trembling, still, when he recalled the death shudder that had coursed through Dovekie’s body, and his own, “but he is much mistaken, if he thinks he has thwarted me. Why, I shall never rest until Poindexter is run to earth: less for the cruelty to Dovekie and the others, and the insult to my poor honor, than for the outrage against Perdita. That, with God as my witness, I cannot,—I dare not—forget!”

  The Talk of the Town (II)

  After this tumultuous sequence of events, lasting less than a week, but fraught, it scarcely needs be said, with tragic consequences for all of Winterthurn, there ensued an interregnum of merciful calm; only Xavier Kilgarvan was given out to be dissatisfied.

  (Both Murre Pitt-Davies and Miss Thérèse Kilgarvan were oft-times queried as to when Xavier Kilgarvan would be returning to Manhattan: for it struck Winterthurn as decidedly queer, and perhaps troublesome, that the detective had protracted his stay through the remainder of September, and well into October, for no discernible reason. The rumor had become solidly ensconced in society that Xavier felt no kinship, and very little warmth, for anyone in the city of his birth; and was so fired with contempt for the local police,—indeed, for all members of the local government—that he could not trust himself to comment upon them, when asked. He had severed ties with his agèd father, and with his brother Bradford; certainly, he was involved in no romantic attachment; and the murderer of the Buntings and Mrs. Poindexter had been found. Thus, why did he linger; why was he suddenly glimpsed about town, when his manner, though unfailingly courteous, communicated the repugnance,—nay, the hostility—he assuredly felt?

  As to this, Murre Pitt-Davies simply replied that his friend was welcome to stay with him as long as he wished, and for whatever purpose he wished, while Miss Thérèse Kilgarvan more stiffly replied that she had spoken with her cousin but two or three times since his return, and could hardly count herself his confidante. “It may be that Mr. Kilgarvan’s heart is more entangled in Winterthurn than he knows,” the schoolmistress said, in a neutral tone, “and though he should like very much to leave, he cannot.”)

  DURING THESE CHILL AUTUMN WEEKS, as, in stealth, Xavier Kilgarvan pressed on with his private investigation, several minor events occurred, of a problematic nature.

  Mr. John Hathorne, the assistant pastor of Grace Church, found himself so bedeviled by an irksome spirit claiming to be the late Harmon Bunting, and warning him against “ascending to the pulpit” of Reverend Bunting’s church, he suffered a nervous collapse at the very end of September, and had to be relieved of his pastoral duties; Henry Harder, the elderly sexton, complained of being similarly bedeviled by a spirit,—that of poor Letitia Bunting herself, who claimed only that she wanted to comfort her son, as he had been so grievously mistreated by one he had trusted; and the pretty Penistone twins received yet another “anonymous” letter!—this, a coarse missive in a hand very unlike that of the others. (Since his discovery of the drafts of the letters in Reverend Bunting’s collection of sermons, Xavier Kilgarvan had pondered whether to divulge the secret identity of the original malefactor, or no: for, though he had not admired Bunting in life, he did not wish to blacken the man’s reputation after his death; nor did he want to further distress Perdita by so scandalous a revelation. In the end, Xavier shared the secret only with his friend Murre, who, altogether astonished by the evidence, strongly advised Xavier to tell no one. “For it is repugnant enough that Harmon Bunting will be forever whispered of as a common adulterer,” Murre said, “without adding to the ignominy, that he had written perverse letters to his own wife!”)

  Following an unidentified source, Winterthurn police raided a clandestine meeting of a fledgling chapter of the “Wobblies,”—the Industrial Workers of the World—in South Winterthurn, in early October, making the significant discovery that these persons had been connected with Jabez Dovekie: or so it was claimed. Whereupon a dozen arrests were made, on charges of sedition and mischief and conspiracy to commit further crimes against life and property. And when Reverend Bunting’s widow, Perdita, continued in her malaise—oscillating, it was said, betwixt periods of fevered delirium and periods of listlessness and inertia—it was prescribed by her physician, Dr. Colney Hatch, that she be removed to more congenial surroundings, at the home of Contracoeur relatives: whereupon the invalid threw herself into a frenzy, claiming that she did not wish to leave Winterthurn, though it be the place of her damnation. (One can well imagine how indelicate it seemed to Thérèse that her sister, so lately bereft of her husband and her mother-in-law, should ply Thérèse with questions of their cousin Xavier!—at whose home he was dining, with whom he was seen, what was whispered of him, etc. Wishing only to shield the unhappy woman from needless excitement, Thérèse followed Dr. Hatch’s counsel, in telling her that her husband’s murderer had been apprehended, and Justice had been, by an act of God, meted out; that it was understood the case was closed, and the mystery resolved; and that Xavier Kilgarvan had subsequently returned to Manhattan, on very short notice. “He has not. He would not. Ah, you lie, Thérèse! You lie! He would not leave without telling me!” Thus the sickly woman exclaimed, fixing her sister with a look of childlike fury, and refusing to be placated.)

  As to Ellery Poindexter,—where a lesser gentleman might have fled grief and scandal by going abroad, or, at the very least, withdrawing from the public eye, it was his strategy to “brazen it out,” so to speak, by continuing in his usual routine, albeit dressed impeccably in mourning, and oft-times wearing a tall black silken hat. He soon became a conspicuous sight in the Poindexter pew in Grace Church, all prayerful, and reverent, and innocent of any flicker of boredom or irony, of the sort for which he had long been known; he conversed graciously, if rather soberly, with his acquaintances and business associates; he was adamant in establishing a memorial fund in Reverend Bunting’s honor, for the admirable purpose of providing scholarships for deserving young seminarians. When he spoke of his late wife, Amanda, it was invariably in the most solemn and hushed of tones: it was said he arranged for flowers to be delivered to her gravesite each day, through the month of September; and that he had arranged for a well-known Winterthurn portraitist to paint her portrait,—this splendid work of art, measuring five feet by seven, based partly on daguerreotypes of Mrs. Poindexter and partly on the painter’s memory. (Thus it was, Amanda Poindexter, in oils, possessed a far more radiant and youthful beauty than she had in life,—even in her youth; and, her ample womanly charms constrained by a crimson gown, she bespoke a remarkable synthesis of the imperial and the voluptuous, which had perhaps not been altogether her own while she lived. Yet, when viewers were shown the portrait, they did not dare evince any doubt to the widower regarding the authenticity of the likeness; but marveled with him, in hushed and reverent tones, that the artist had so brilliantly captured Mrs. Poindexter’s personality. “Yes, indeed, it is very like Amanda,—it is Amanda,” Ellery Poindexter said, stroking his mustache, and in a voice entirely devoid of irony, “as natural on canvas as she had ever been in life.”)

  True, if, as the weeks passed, Ellery Poindexter began to be seen again in his old haunts,—if he could not always resist a trip to the racetrack, or a game of poker at
his club; if, again, his lengthy absences from home were remarked upon,—it was supposed that these activities were intended to distract him from grief, and not to provide mere recreation.

  The keener-eyed observers of Winterthurn society soon noted, however, that when Ellery Poindexter and Xavier Kilgarvan chanced to meet, a palpable tension in the air might be discerned: for it could never be foretold whether these gentlemen would stare intensely, and, as it were, avidly, at each other; or, more curious still, whether they would look through each other, in the most uncanny manner—! If Poindexter was a past master at snubbing those persons whom he considered his inferiors, or who had offended him in some wise, it soon became evident that the youngest Kilgarvan son was his match; or, it may have been, owing to the detective’s chill gray gaze, he was even Poindexter’s superior. One evening, when the two men were about to be introduced, in the drawing room of the Harrier Von Goelers, Ellery Poindexter gaily interrupted his charming hostess to say: “But Kilgarvan and I have already met, my dear,—several times, many times, a surfeit of times!”—whereupon the detective formally bowed and, with an admirable air of sangfroid, murmured: “No, we have not yet become acquainted,—the pleasure lies all before us.”

  Memento Mori

  Winterthurn’s splendid autumn darkened, by subtle yet inexorable gradations, to winter: the riotous late bloom of Indian summer was soon blasted away by November’s winds: and the days,—ah, the pitiless progression of days!—grew ever more cruelly enshadowed, and chill: the while Xavier Kilgarvan immersed himself so fully in his solitary task, to prove Ellery Poindexter guilty, and to extract a confession from him, he could scarcely have said which season it was, if suddenly asked; or why, indeed, anyone of intelligence should be concerned with so trivial a fact.