by Jane Langton
“Well, I hope to God they find the bastard.”
Chapter 55
The whole castle was surrounded by a thicket of thorns that grew ever higher. No longer could anything be seen at all.
The Brothers Grimm, “Little Brier Rose”
Bertha Rugg was a small homely woman who had been taking pictures all her life. She was an experienced and clever photographer, the only survivor of her generation on the staff of the Boston Globe. Gone were the old Linotypists, skilled operators of the deafening machines that had turned reservoirs of molten lead into slugs of type. Gone too were the compositors who had clamped the slugs into chases, who could read them backward and upside down. Everything was done with computers nowadays. All over the building there was a soft perpetual clickety-click, as kids barely out of school turned copy into print.
Bertha was painfully conscious of her incompatibility with the current staff of the Globe. She had nothing in common with the burly guys and classy girls who were her picture-taking colleagues. She wasn’t with-it, if that was the right expression. She didn’t understand their jokes. She didn’t speak their language.
But Bertha knew how to do one thing very well. She knew how to get a picture, and by God she was going to get one now.
There was something else she knew that the young ones didn’t, and that was how to get up early. On the day after Homer Kelly and Sergeant Bill Kennebunk unearthed the body of Pearl Small in the woods in Northtown, it was only eight o’clock in the morning when Bertha pulled her car to the side of Baker Bridge Road and took out her binoculars.
From here she could see only the battered roof of the house. The rest was hidden by a tangle of shrubs and a thick stand of trees with bushy new leaves. It was a green blur, a dense jungle, directly in the way.
Twisting the knob of her binoculars, she brought the trees into focus. Very slowly she swept her gaze across them, examining every branch and twig, raising her sights every now and then to check the lineup of a particular tree with the roof of the house behind it. Then she took out her pocket diary and drew precisely what she saw in one place, a little to the left of the tall aspen that was next to the short aspen that was next to the oak tree. When she was done, she reached into the back seat for her long-handled clippers, slung her camera over her shoulder, and set off across the cornfield in a straight line.
The field was like a battleground, with deep trenches between the emerging rows of corn. Her shoes sank in. She could feel small pops along her heavy calves as her pantyhose burst into runs.
Two hours later, she returned to her car, bitten by mosquitoes, stung by a hornet, scratched by thorns and brambles. Her hair stood on end, her arms were sunburned, her face was dirty. Tim Foley shot past her on the road and gave her a surprised look. It was ten o’clock in the morning.
Bertha smiled. The early bird catches the worm.
Once again Harvey Broadstairs looked up at the seven young photographers crowded around his desk. This time he was smiling. He shuffled through the sheaf of pictures—Minnie Peck in her studio, Charlene Gast with a swimming-pool brochure, Homer Kelly coming out the front door, Mary Kelly with a bowl of salad, Henry Coombs with a cake—and picked up a big glossy photograph of Anna Swann standing in front of the dark cavern of her ruined house, her face brightly lit by the sun. She was smiling directly at the camera. Beside her a man stood upside down, his head nearly touching the ground, his feet in the air.
“Hey, this is great,” said Broadstairs. “Who took this one?”
The seven young photographers looked blankly at each other. Then they stepped aside to reveal a small dumpy shape at the back of the room. “It’s mine,” said Bertha Rugg.
“Well, good for you, Bertha,” said Broadstairs.
“Who the hell is the guy?” said Tim Foley. They all bowed over the picture, making room this time for Bertha Rugg.
“As a matter of fact,” said Broadstairs, rubbing his chin, “I just happen to know who it is, but I promised not to say.”
Next morning the picture appeared on page one, and Bertha was paid at page-one rates. But next morning was too late for Bertha Rugg. That very afternoon she faxed it directly to CBS News in New York, and there it was on the evening news. At last the whole country knew what Annie Swann looked like.
Flimnap, who might have been cut out of the picture if he had been standing on his feet, was included as an oddity.
Chapter 56
Like one, that on a lonesome road
Doth walk in fear and dread …
Because he knows, a frightful fiend
Doth close behind him tread.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
Joe had abandoned his new book months ago. But lately he had started to work on it again. He sat now in the cab of his truck with his sketchbook in his lap and sharpened a pencil to a stiletto point with a tiny razor-edged grinder. As usual, his nimble fingers were in perfect control. His large images filled the space, nudging the edges of the page.
The story was common as dirt, the old folk tale of Hansel and Gretel. Joe’s Hansel was a generic moppet with a Dutch haircut, but Gretel was a real person, a tall stocky child with big hands and feet—Annie Swann to the life. The wicked witch was a sly portrait of Roberta Gast. She was urging Annie into the oven—Just creep in and see if it is hot. Clever Annie was holding back, begging for a demonstration—I don’t know how. Show me!
The drawing was done, ready to be rendered in color. Joe looked at it critically, and touched the face of Gretel. Then he closed the sketchbook and laid it gently on the shelf under the rear window. Gripping the handle of the door, he inspected the surrounding woods.
The trees stood silent, the undergrowth was empty. Satisfied, Joe got out, locked the pickup doors, and ambled down the hill, turning now and then to glance at the road behind him.
As always, he had to take care. All it would take was a single shot.
The television set shone brightly in Annie Swann’s dark fortress. Annie, Flimnap and Homer Kelly played gin rummy at the rickety card table. Homer boldly picked up fistfuls of extra cards and couldn’t get rid of them, Annie was too cautious, Flimnap always won. Their heads turned as the voice of the late-night newsman pronounced the name of Anna Swann.
“My God!” said Annie. There she was, as big as life. The camera zoomed in on her face, then moved sideways to show Flimnap upside down. It was the picture taken by Bertha Rugg from the cornfield, after wrenching off with her clippers the branches of a dozen scrub oak trees and slashing her way through a forest of maple saplings.
“Oh, Christ,” said Flimnap, jumping to his feet.
“There you are, the two of you,” said Homer gleefully, “on network television.”
The newsman’s interest shifted to a scandal involving a senator’s wife. Flimnap knocked over his chair, took Annie in his arms and kissed her, then let her go, started for the door, came back to kiss her with more passion, and vanished.
“Good Lord,” said Homer, “what was that all about?”
Annie was speechless.
It did not occur to Joe that the late news might be a repetition of a broadcast five hours earlier. He walked up the hill to his truck. There was plenty of time to clear out.
He was wrong. Millions of television viewers had already seen the photograph taken by Bertha Rugg. One took a special interest in the six o’clock appearance of Anna Swann and her upside-down friend. In his rented room on a back street in the city of Worcester, Frederick Small stared at Joseph Noakes, thunderstruck. Leaping to his feet, he shouted in triumph.
It was Homer’s turn to spend the night in the tent at Fortress Annie. After a long day of grading the final papers of the forty-nine undergraduates in his Thoreau class, he had stopped on the way home to buy buckets of Chinese food; he had brought them home to Annie’s and heated them up in the microwave, and then the three of them had played gin rummy all evening. At last, after gaping at the televi
sion image of Flimnap standing on his hands beside Annie, Homer crawled into the tent, emotionally exhausted, and fell asleep at once.
At the sudden noise, he jerked awake and sat up. It had sounded like a gunshot, a loud blast followed by sharp crackling echoes. Did the hunting season begin in June? Homer didn’t know. Should he get up and look around?
He lay down to think it over.
Annie too heard the shot. With her heart in her mouth she scrambled out of her sleeping bag, went to the door and looked out. For a moment she could hear a car moving away along Concord Road, and then there was only the soft sighing of the trees.
Had Flimnap been shot by some murdering bastard, up there in the woods where he parked his pickup? Was he mortally hurt, was he bleeding to death? Annie grabbed her coat, snatched up her flashlight, and began running up the hill. Flimnap’s ravenous kisses had aroused a trembling fervor. Following the spot of light, stumbling on the stony driveway, she tripped and fell, then scrambled up to run again, and tripped again, and staggered to her feet.
Halfway up the hill she found a track leading off to the left through a low thicket of fern and blueberry. Annie followed it for a hundred yards as it wound its way among pines and hemlocks, until suddenly—there it was—Flimnap’s pickup, a bulky shape looming up in the dark.
The wooden structure that had once formed the back of the truck was gone, Flimnap’s gypsy caravan. He had rebuilt it inside Annie’s ruined house as a bulwark against the collapse of the roof. Now the back of the pickup was open to the sky. Annie’s flashlight explored the empty sleeping bag, the boxes of gear, the duffel bag.
Then, fearing what she might see, she aimed it through the window of the cab, but the wobbling cone of light revealed only the shiny vinyl of the seat.
“Hey,” said Homer Kelly, groping his way into the woods, following the glimmer, “is that you, Annie?”
Feeling for him clumsily in the dark, Annie clutched his arm and said in a tense whisper, “That noise, Uncle Homer! What was that terrible noise?”
He patted her back and put his arm around her. “I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “Probably just a backfire, out there on Concord Road.”
But he was lying. They both knew he was lying.
Chapter 57
The road to the forest led him to the gallows.
The Brothers Grimm, “The Two Travelers”
“Get in my car.” Small gestured with his handgun. “The other side. You’re driving.”
Small’s cartridge had nearly missed its target, but not quite. It left a bloody crease along one side of Joe’s head. He felt no pain. Raging at himself for the careless stupidity that had allowed him to take his time, he climbed in behind the wheel of Small’s big van.
There was no arguing with an AK-47 backed up by a Beretta with fifteen rounds nestled in its little magazine.
In the van the rifle was an awkward size. Small laid it in his lap and sat sideways with his left elbow on the back of the seat. He held the Beretta to Joe’s head and said, “Okay, you bastard, head for Southtown.”
In the dawnlight the ninety-nine acres of Songsparrow Estates was a bald tract of graded dirt. Joe cursed silently as the van plunged along the Pig Road. The feeding platforms had been extracted like bad teeth, and every one of Pearl’s trees had been bulldozed and uprooted, every one of her infant hemlocks and birches, her red cedars and pasture junipers, her bushy little white pines.
The road came to an end at the chain-link fence. Beyond the fence the tops of the rusty scalping towers were bright orange in the morning sun. Joe stopped the car and turned off the engine, thinking swiftly, trying to guess what would happen next.
Small had been talking incessantly. His voice was soft and cheerful and his rabbit eyes were lustrous, as he blamed Joe and Pearl for everything that had happened since the beginning of time. Joe had long since stopped listening. Now Small said, “Get out!” His cheerfulness had vanished. He lowered himself carefully from the van, keeping his eyes on Joe and lifting the rifle to the roof of the car.
Joe slid out from behind the wheel, noting that it was to be the rifle from now on. The Beretta had disappeared. From somewhere Small produced a key to the padlock on the gate of the fence, swung it open, and urged Joe through.
The gravel pit opened below them. At the edge of the cliff a set of steps led to a ramp that rose all the way to the top of the tower. “Up,” said Small, gesturing with the rifle. “Go ahead, go on up.”
Joe climbed the steps slowly, guessing at once the nature of Frederick Small’s grand overarching plan. Since the discovery of a bullet-ridden body might lead to awkward questions, Joe’s death was to be a freakish misadventure. Small would simply shove him off the top of the tower. Sooner or later people would find his flattened carcass, and then they would tut-tut and call it an accident. After all, any fool who neglected the “No Trespassing” sign and joked around at the top of a dangerous tower deserved whatever he got.
Joe’s fear subsided. He grasped the railings firmly, his deft hands flexing and relaxing, his feet nimble on the ramp, which quivered and bounced under his weight.
Small could not keep up. He was out of breath. He grunted at Joe to stop. Obligingly Joe stopped climbing and looked back at him serenely. At last Small nodded, frowning, and they went on climbing.
At the top of the third ramp they stepped off onto a metal platform. “Wait,” gasped Small, struggling to recover his breath.
Joe waited, glancing around at the descending conveyor belts, the sorting screens, the rock crushers, the tilted bin with its gigantic screws, the hoppers on their heavy metal legs. The floor of the quarry was heaped with conical mounds of sand.
Small was breathing normally now, aiming the rifle steadily, staring at Joe. Then, for an instant, his eyes flickered away. The fingers of his left hand moved over a panel and found a switch.
At once the long belt-driven conveyors began to shiver and hum. Some hurried up, others hastened down. They vibrated and shook, climbing and descending steeply. In the slanted bin below the platform the gigantic screws turned slowly, overlapping, meshing smoothly together.
“Okay, now, just stand right over there.” Small did not look at Joe. Nervously he pointed with the AK-47 at the edge of the platform, high above the uppermost descending belt of the system of interlocking conveyors that had for so many years sent millions of tons of rock rattling and thundering down from one belt to another, dropping them at last into the hoppers, and then into an endless procession of trucks to be carried away, far away, supplying armies of highway engineers with the raw material for a thousand miles of highway.
Smiling, Joe looked down, hardly seeing the inexorable descent of the conveyors, thinking instead of the old story by the Brothers Grimm, thinking of Gretel, clever Gretel, who had refused so craftily to crawl into the fiery oven of the wicked witch. Small’s intention was so crude! Just creep in and see if it is hot!
“I don’t get it,” Joe said stupidly. “What do you mean?” I don’t know how. Show me!
Small glowered at him, and hissed, “Asshole.” Fussily, like a grumpy governess, he tramped across the platform and stamped his foot. “Right over here, you fathead. Stand on this spot right here.”
But Frederick Small had never turned a dozen handsprings one after another, he had never balanced upside down on six superimposed chairs, he had never found an egg in anyone’s ear. Now when Joe threw out his arm it was exactly like the tossing of his wooden top. And like the turning top unwinding from its string, Small was whirled downward through the air, landing face down on the moving belt of the conveyor. Screaming, clinging to his rifle, he clawed with his free hand at the railing, but the belt carried him down like a load of gravel. Falling, plummeting, pawing at the railing, he jerked convulsively on the trigger of the gun and Bred off a wild rattle of shots. One streaked past Joe’s head and slammed into the panel of switches, which exploded in a burst of fireworks and set off a series of insane commands. Joe dodged sideways
as an overhead bin discharged its load, and a slurry mix of water and rock began flowing down the chute. In a couple of seconds it caught up with Small and flowed over and around him, blinding him, battering his body, dumping him at last into the hopper below the moving conveyor, burying him under one and a half tons of three-quarter-inch gravel.
Joe sat down on the metal grille of the platform and put his head between his knees, trying to control the churning of his stomach and an overpowering impulse to weep. Then he stopped trying and let the sobs come. When the spasm passed, he stood up shakily and wiped his face with his sleeve. The wound along the side of his head had at last begun to throb. Wincing, Joe pulled a bandanna kerchief out of his pocket, twisted it into a narrow band and tied it around his head, Indian-fashion. Then he did several things very carefully, thinking them out slowly, one at a time.
That afternoon, after school, a couple of thirteen-year-old boys from the Meadowlark housing development approached the chain-link fence. Usually they climbed over it, sticking the toes of their sneakers into the diamond-shaped spaces between the links, grasping with their fists the sharp twisted wires at the top. But this time the gate was wide open, and they walked right in.
As usual they had been attracted by the sign that said “No Trespassing,” and by the weird towers with their long slanting ramps. It wasn’t the first time they had trespassed on the gravel pit. It was a great place for smoking joints and telling dirty stories.
At once they saw the legs sticking up out of the heaped-up gravel in one of the hoppers, and they ran down the steep slope, skidding and sliding, to take a closer look. Clasping one of the hopper’s metal supports with their arms and wrapping their legs around it, they shinnied up and clambered over the metal wall. Then, moving cautiously over the surface of the gravel, they reached the broken and asphyxiated body of Frederick Small, hauled it out, heaved it over the side, and let it fall to the ground. Then they climbed down after it, examined it with horrified delight, and scrambled up the steep slope to telephone the cops.