For a moment he felt like the coffee and the pancakes were going to come right back up. It took every bit of will power that he had to control the tremble of his hands.
“Who’s Adam Hart?”
“Adam was a real good friend of Johnny’s—they used to be together all the time. You know kids when they hero-worship somebody older than they are.” She put the bar rag down and slid the ketchup bottle into place between the sugar bowl and the salt and pepper. “I didn’t know Adam very well,” she said slowly, looking down at the counter, “but he’s the type you never forget. You could roll all the movie stars into one and they couldn’t even begin to compare. I guess all the girls were crazy about him.”
“Is he around town now?”
She shook her head. “Oh, no. Sooner or later almost everybody leaves Brockton. Adam left about eight years ago.”
His meal was going to stay down after all, he thought. But for a moment she had really frightened him.
“This Hart fellow—what did he look like?”
Her face got pink. “Young, but not too young. Maybe twenty-five or so. Blond hair and tall and kind of thin so he looked like he was a little hungry all the time. Blue eyes and a smile that made the whole world bust right open … .”
She was serious, he thought, amazed. She hadn’t known Hart very well but she had fallen in love with him when she was ten years old. What was more, she still hadn’t shaken it.
She looked wistful. “You’d never forget him, mister. Once you saw him.”
He finished his coffee and just sat there, staring at the nickel-plated faucets and the shining glasses and the little boxes of breakfast food stacked behind the counter.
You could eliminate Petey and Marge, he thought, Adam Hart was a man. Olson was dead and he sure as hell wasn’t chasing himself. Which meant that Adam Hart had to be one of the five remaining men who had been at the meeting that Saturday morning. Even granting that it was eight years later, still …
But the man the waitress described didn’t resemble any of them.
The Olson home was two doors down from where the paved street ended and three up from the encroaching prairie grasses. It was a small, white bungalow—too small and too new for a farm house—and Tanner guessed the Olsons had moved in recently.
He walked up the sidewalk, then hesitated a moment before knocking. It was still rather early in the morning. Maybe too early.
“You want something, mister?”
The man had come around the side of the house, carrying a half-empty bag of grass seed under one arm. He was a tall, leathery-faced man with silvered hair half hidden beneath a dungaree cap. He reminded Tanner of the farmers who used to come to the stockyards with manure still clinging to their boots.
“I’m looking for the Olsons, but maybe it’s too early.”
The man spat. “Not too early, not by two hours. Used to get up at five when I had the farm. Still got a garden and don’t see any reason why I should sleep late now.” He looked sharply at Tanner. “I’m Mark Olson. You got something on your mind?”
Tanner nodded to the small suitcase he had brought along. “I’m from the university. I brought back some of John’s things.”
The old man opened the screen door. “Come on in, son. Mother’s right in the living room.”
It was dim on the inside, with the cool, musty smell that goes with a closed-up house. In the living room, Mrs. Olson was seated in a rocker by the picture window, a colored afghan tucked up around her fleshless limbs. Her face was furrowed and stitched with fine lines and her eyes sunken and dried.
She and her husband were about the same age, Tanner guessed. But her husband was still very much alive and she was close to dying; a worn-out, run-down clock, just waiting for the final, fatal loosening of the mainspring. She had no more interest in life than to sit in her rocker in front of the window and watch the winds dart through the prairie grass and the occasional visitor wander up the street.
“I’m from the university,” he said softly. “I’ve brought back some of John’s things.”
She glanced at him and then turned back to the window, as if looking any place else but through the glass took too much effort.
“Patricia wired us that he died,” she mumbled. “She said it was too late for us to go to the funeral. She said they buried him the same day.”
Which hadn’t been true at all, he thought. Then he looked again at the old lady and realized she would never have survived the trip.
“Johnny was a good boy,” the old lady said weakly. “He should have lived longer than he did … .” Her voice trailed off and her husband tugged at Tanner’s sleeve. Tanner followed him to the small kitchen and took a seat by the table.
The old man was gruff. “You don’t want to talk to Mother too long. She’s been ailing these last few days. Johnny’s dying hit her pretty hard.”
“John was born here in Brockton, wasn’t he, Mr. Olson? Born and brought up here?”
“Lived here all of his life until he went away to college. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone. He came back one or twice in the summer and he wasn’t the same. Kind of unhappy, kind of moody.”
He set a battered, tin coffeepot on the stove and lit the burner with a match. His hand was shaking. “I always told Mother he was a farm boy, that he wasn’t cut out for school in the city.” His voice was low and close to cracking. “I’m going to miss that boy, mister. I never approved of his going to school but I set a lot in store by him just the same.”
He was going to make it painful for the old man, Tanner thought. But it had to be done.
“His whole life was here, wasn’t it? You know, his friends and relatives?”
“He had a lot of good friends.” The old man went to the pantry to get some thick, china mugs. “Never forget one. Fellow named Hart. Adam Hart. Older than Johnny but I always thought the friendship was good for the boy. A youngster makes friends with an older man and he gets a better view of life.”
The coffee was boiling but he made no move to take it off the stove.
“This Adam Hart—Johnny used to talk a lot about him,” Tanner lied. “What sort of a fellow was he?”
“All man, son. Came from a gypsy family that had settled over on the west side of town. One of those families that has two dozen kids in the house and a trained bear in the back yard. The kids just couldn’t keep away. No grass or flowers on the lot but some cherry trees the youngsters could climb. Johnny used to hang around over there. Adam was one of the gypsy boys, a lot older than Johnny. They took to each other and Adam used to help Johnny with his schoolwork and teach him how to play sports.”
He got up and poured out thick, black coffee that smelled burnt and raw. “Adam will be real sorry to hear that Johnny’s … dead.” It took an effort for him to say the word and the coffeepot shook a little, spilling the hot liquid on the oilcloth.
But Adam Hart isn’t sorry, Tanner thought. Probably only a little regretful that he had to go to all that trouble to kill Olson.
“Anybody know where Adam is now?”
“Nope. Nobody’s heard from him since he left town.”
“What did he look like?” The girl in the hotel restaurant had been pretty young when she had seen Hart. Her memory wouldn’t be as good as the old man’s.
“Early twenties—maybe just twenty. Light brown hair. About as tall as me, medium. Well-knit—he’d have been good behind a team of horses.”
Tanner sipped his coffee.
The Adam Hart that the girl had described and the Adam Hart that the old man had known didn’t sound at all like the same person.
Brockton High School looked a little larger than the town deserved. Tanner guessed it served half the county; the town of Brockton and the miles of farm land around it. The classrooms were deserted and for a moment he thought he was out of luck.
But the baseball coach, who was also the football coach and basketball coach and who taught swimming and track and algebra in his spare time, was still
there. Coach Freudenthal was a chubby man in his middle forties with an easy, friendly air. He was working out in the gym, showing two twelve-year-olds how to shoot baskets. The backboards were old and the floor was warped but Tanner was willing to bet they still turned out championship teams.
He told the coach why he was there and the welcome smile slipped away.
“Sure, I remember Johnny. He was the star of the team when he played here. You would never have figured him for it, though.” He turned to the boys and slapped the nearest on the rump. “Okay, kids, shower up and go on home.” He started for his office. “How’d it happen, Professor?”
“His heart gave out. Overwork, I guess.”
“That’s funny, I never would have guessed he was a heart case.” Freudenthal pulled off his sweatshirt and started rubbing down his paunch with a towel. “You know, you’d never have thought he was an athlete. He just didn’t look the type, though let me tell you a lot of them don’t. He just didn’t have the build for it, but when it came to reflexes and a quick eye, I’ve never seen his equal. He won a letter in basketball.” He slipped on a shirt and started buttoning it. “Maybe this sounds odd but I don’t think he ever really enjoyed sports. He kind of drove himself to play them.”
“Was he a good student?”
“One of the best. Just as reliable in his studies as he was on the basketball court.” A smile flickered across his face. “Maybe he was more reliable. Johnny made a monkey out of me one night—he was really off. I couldn’t figure it out, he couldn’t even make a simple lay-up shot.”
“When was that?”
“Don’t remember exactly, sometime during the winter of his junior year—it was the same night the gypsies threw one of their big parties.”
An alarm rang in Tanner’s mind. “Did a fellow named Adam Hart ever go to school here?”
Freudenthal looked surprised. “Hart? Hell, none of the gypsy boys ever went to school. And just between you and me, I don’t think they needed to. The closest Adam Hart ever came to going was when he used to come to watch Johnny play ball.” He went over to the washbasin in the corner and doused his hair. “He was a pretty good friend of Johnny’s, always on the sidelines cheering him on.”
Except for one night when he couldn’t make it, Tanner thought. The night when Olson played such a miserable game.
“Did John ever strike you as being the moody sort?”
“Not to start with. He was sort of a happy-go-lucky kid. You know how the pudgy type are—nothing ever worries them. He started to sober up towards the end of his junior year, got pretty gloomy. I remember I used to talk to him, try to snap him out of it. It didn’t do much good. Something was eating him but I never had any idea of what it was.”
“His folks say he didn’t turn sour until he went off to college.”
“You know how parents are, Professor. They’re the last to know when something goes wrong with their kids.”
Tanner got up to leave. “You wouldn’t know if there are any pictures of Adam Hart around, would you? Any shots of the bleachers where he might have been in the background?”
“Try the Eagle. They’d have photographs if anybody would.”
“Coach …” He hesitated. “What kind of a guy would you say he was?”
Freudenthal edged forward in his chair, his face glowing. “Do you know, I had another Thorpe or Mathias right at my fingertips, Professor. Honest, I mean it. Right at my fingertips. You should have met this Hart. He was a young sprout but he was one of those few people you meet and know that someday they’re really going to be great. He could have been a great athlete. Hell, he could have been great in anything!”
“What’d he look like?”
“Late teens, give or take a year—right at the peak. Kind of a short fellow, dark hair, fairly bulky build. The perfect athletic type. Quiet. He usually didn’t have much to say but when he did, it was worth listening to. Never put on airs, never dressed too sharp. One of the few young fellows you could relax with and talk to. Good head. Mighty good head.”
The coach had described a third man, Tanner thought. Different from the girl in the cafeteria or Olson’s father. The girl in the restaurant had seen the type of man that young girls always wanted to see in their dreams. Smiling, polite, a sharp dresser, a little on the thin and hungry side. Mark Olson had seen an unblemished Son of the Soil. Coach Freudenthal had seen the perfect athlete.
And everybody else in town had probably seen Hart in a slightly different light. Hart had been like a mirror, reflecting back what they had wanted to see.
Which meant that one member of his committee had left seven different impressions on the others. One member looked vastly different to each of the other seven. All he had to do …
Who am I kidding? Hart wouldn’t leave such an obvious opening. He’s masquerading and he’ll do a good job of it, he’s no amateur. I can bet my bottom dollar he looks the same to all of us.
But it would be interesting to see what Hart actually looked like. And the only way to find out would be to get hold of a photograph.
There weren’t any.
The Brockton Eagle had no cut of Adam Hart, though the editor remembered him well enough and went on to describe a man who might have made the perfect country editor. Tanner went through the yellowing files of the newspaper and ran across a photograph or two where the caption listed Adam Hart in the background. But the photos were indistinct and blurry, as if the photographer’s hand had jiggled at the precise moment he had taken the picture.
Adam Hart, apparently the best-known and the best-liked person in town, had been a nonentity as far as pictures went.
Tanner ate lunch back at the hotel and found out from the waitress that the Hart family home had burned to the ground years ago. Later in the afternoon he walked out to the west side of town to take a look at where it had been.
There was nothing there now but an empty lot, grown wild with prairie grass and ragweed and straggling bushes. There were a few cherry trees on the back of the lot and some stunted crab apple trees along one side.
He walked across the street and collared a neighbor who was repairing his front porch.
“The Hart home burned down eight years ago, mister. Just a few weeks after Adam left. Lucky he did, too, or he would have been burned to death with the rest of his family. Worst tragedy we ever had in this town. Old man Hart and his wife and all their kids and relations. Must’ve been close to fifteen—used every coffin we had.”
The man drove another nail into a porch step. “Damned shame. Finest family I ever knew. Some say the bear got loose and knocked the connections off the gas tanks outside the kitchen. They shot the bear the same night; it was pretty badly burned, too.”
“What time did it happen?”
“Late at night, a little after the evening train went through. People in the house panicked and couldn’t unlock the front door, which didn’t make sense because they weren’t the type to lock up anything to begin with. But we found a lot of the bodies piled up behind it. They didn’t have a chance. You know, one of those big wooden houses. Went up like a deck of celluloid cards—regular torch.”
He straightened up and felt in his pockets for more nails. “It was a mighty big funeral. Everybody in town was there and Adam even got wind of it somehow and came back. Never saw a man so cut up, it really hit him.” He tugged at his ear. “Guess it would have hit me, too, if I had lost my family like that. Never felt so sorry for a man in all my life. Believe me, Adam didn’t deserve it. Never a straighter or more generous soul walked the face of the earth, let me tell you …”
Tanner cut him off with a curt “thanks” and headed back towards the hotel. It was near dusk, the sun sinking slowly behind the flat horizon of the endless prairies.
Brockton, he thought. A quiet little town with not too many houses and not too many people.
A little town that didn’t realize it had spawned a monster.
He had supper and read for a while, then turned in
. There wasn’t too much more he could find out, he thought. He knew almost all there was to know about Adam Hart, even if he didn’t know who Adam Hart was.
He stretched out and tucked his hands behind his head. He had come to Brockton to find out about John Olson but he had ended up finding out a lot more about Adam. And what really mattered, of course, was not the education of John Olson but the education of Adam Hart.
He could guess how it had all started. Adam Hart, a personable gypsy boy. Living in a house with a dozen other children, part of a family that kept a trained bear in the back yard and had cherry trees on the lot. Trees that could be climbed and had cherries to be eaten and there was nobody who would chase you away.
A mecca for every kid in town. And John Olson had been no exception. A pudgy little boy, happy-go-lucky and spirited, who hung around with the Hart children and ended up hero-worshipping Adam Hart. Hart’s reaction? He had probably been flattered and somewhat amused. And maybe one day when Adam and John had wandered off fishing together, Adam made his big discovery. Maybe there had been vines overlooking the stream … .
Hart, athletic and with superhuman reflexes, might have swung across or climbed them and dared his younger companion to do the same. John, by himself, couldn’t have done it. He didn’t have the ability, he didn’t have the sheer muscular strength. There had probably been a period of kidding and then John had tried, with Adam Hart, perhaps unconsciously, concentrating on the boy, unintentionally willing him to swing across.
John had done it. Maybe the next time, overconfident and with Hart not concentrating, he hadn’t succeeded and had fallen into the stream. It must have set Hart to thinking.
And maybe Hart had suddenly realized that John hadn’t made it across the river the first time. That it had been he, Adam Hart, who had made it. It had been John’s body, but it had been Adam Hart’s mind and nervous system. He had taken over John’s mind and had pulled the strings that jerked the muscles and reflexes of his youthful puppet.
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