2
A long, patrician finger beckoned to him. “Please have a seat, Mr. Richardson.”
Richardson shuffled across the floor, feeling like a sick patient. He was definitely dying. Dr. Eddy’s eyes told him that. He was filled with despair. Medical center: a place where the well are made sick. This man could save him. He was not alone: here was a friend. He was eager to trust Dr. Edward Eddy implicitly, grateful for such a champion during his battle with death.
He sat. That he was to die was clear; what he was to die from would now be related. Medicine: a primitive art of identifying the cause of death.
“I see from your questionnaire, Mr. Richardson, that you indicate a concern over the possible presence of a brain tumor.” A washed white finger tapped the paper. “We have done a number of tests on you today which will tell me a great deal about the conditions inside your skull. They’re not completed yet, so I cannot make any kind of judgment. Now, there is a series of other tests I can give you if any of the preliminary tests show up positive. If they return negative, further testing should be superfluous. This auditory hallucination you report I find interesting. Its locus, you say, is internal. Are you sure it isn’t supported by visual hallucinating? A tumor can place considerable pressure on the brain. It can cause severe headaches, blacking out; can press eyes out of focus, cause loss of balance, create ringing in the ears as well as create symptoms in all other parts of the body. If you have any symptoms, I want to know them immediately. Now, you left a question mark in this box. You don’t know whether there’s a history of brain tumors in your family? No. How about mental aberrations, psychosis, mental incompetence?”
“I don’t know. Should I find out?”
“Yes. Find out.” Dr. Eddy sat back. “You can get dressed now.”
His name was Abel Navarre and he was a detective, Police Department, City of New York. He sat in a car at the curb in front of the Brevoort House and watched the crane smash its way through a block of buildings.
When Richardson came up the street, Navarre stepped from his car and nodded at him.
“Mr. Richardson?”
Richardson nodded back.
“Sorry I had to pull you out of your office.” Navarre slammed his car door and opened a small leather folder to show his police identity card. “I’m Abel Navarre.”
Richardson nodded at him.
“Now, you understand that I have no search warrant with me. I’m being admitted to his apartment at your invitation and in your presence. I’m just going to take a look around to see if I can find an indication of his whereabouts.”
“I understand.”
“Chances are I won’t find a thing that’ll tell us anything. If he follows the pattern, he’ll turn up in a day or two himself.”
“I’ll get the key.”
Navarre nodded. “Looks like snow,” he said.
3
Navarre sat down heavily in Goulart’s chair and smoothed a sheet of layout paper. He looked up at the skylight over his head. “Light,” he said. “Lots of light on a cloudy day.” He glanced through the window at the crane. “Front-row seat.” He opened a few drawers in the taboret, glancing at the felt pens, brushes, and art supplies. He looked around the room at the throngs of plants. He rubbed a hand over his beard-dark muzzle, thinking, ingesting a sense of place, trying to get the feel of the absent owner.
He got up at last and walked about the apartment. “A plant nut,” he murmured. “Where did he get them all?”
Richardson sat down on a bench next to one of the plants. “Well, a couple of years ago he was commissioned to do a series of illustrations for a botany textbook. So he went out and bought these plants. When the job was finished, the plants just stayed on and multiplied.”
Navarre opened a closet door slowly and peered in. His hand brushed back a few garments hanging inside. Then he scanned the shelf and the closet floor. He strolled next into the kitchen. More plants. He snorted. “If we were in a joking mood, I’d say the plants drove him out of here.” He turned back to Richardson. “But we're not in a joking mood.” He walked his massive bulk back to Goulart’s chair and sat in it. “I would guess this man was big and bulky—like me.”
“Was?”
“Is, was. He must have been over six-four and ran maybe two thirty, two fifty.”
“How can you tell that?”
“The clothes in the closet. Neck size. Jackets. Shoes. The bed, the height of this chair off the ground, the height of his drawing board. An exceptionally large man.” He raised his eyes to Richardson. “I have very little to go on. There’s a tenant in the building—Clabber’s his name. I talked to him and he's filled with some strange ideas. He says that Goulart was messing around with the spirit world. What is it? Occult?”
Richardson sighed irritably. “I got my ear filled with that the other night from Clabber.”
Navarre had unwavering eyes. They rested, staring, on Richardson’s face. “What do you know about it?”
“Nothing. Not a thing.”
“This Goulart never mentioned anything to you about it?” “Notaboo.”
“You two guys were buddies.”
“Yeah.”
“Goulart never married?”
“No.”
“Are you?”
“Was.”
“Oh. Divorced?”
“Yes.”
“Your wife—she grew up over there, too?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if Goulart was involved with ghosts or spirits or whatever, it figures that he would have mentioned something to you. Wouldn’t you say?”
Richardson shrugged. “I think we managed to stay good friends because we never crowded each other.”
“Meaning—”
“Meaning he had a private life of his own that I didn’t nose too much into.”
Navarre stared at him at length. “You notice any moodiness lately?”
“Yes. He was moody at times lately. Sometimes I would find him just sitting and looking at me. I got the feeling on a number of occasions that he wanted to say something.”
“But he didn’t.”
“No.”
“You have any idea where he might be?”
“No. The snow is pretty well gone, but I followed some tracks the day after he disappeared. I was sure they were his.”
‘Tracks?”
“Yes. I followed them out into the middle of those empty lots and they disappeared. The snow was all blown away out there.”
Navarre looked out. “Could he have gone back to his old house?”
“It’s down. And it was over this way, anyway.”
“Oh. Are you sick?”
“Huh?”
“Sick. When I called, you were out to the doctor’s.”
“No. I was a getting a physical.”
“Oh. Why?”
Richardson looked at the unwavering eyes. “Navarre. I’m not missing or lost. I’m sitting right here looking at you.”
“Uh-huh. Okay. You want to take a guess why Goulart was moody lately?”
“No. But he was and that was unusual.”
“That's what his sister said.”
“Patty? You talked to her?”
Navarre looked at him. “She was the one who reported him missing.”
4
The wind was raw and wet. It blew in from the south off the Sound up through the trees and across the bald brow of the hill. The old snow lay decaying in streaks along the gullied shoulders of the road and amongst the thicket of dead stalks under the trees. The lowering sky and the biting wind promised more snow—a driving, wind-borne, fine-grained snow.
The local Connecticut historian, Mr. Morrow, read the familiar weather signs and pressed his thin bones further into his overcoat. He bowed his behatted head into the wind and walked away from the car with Matthew Willow.
Their leather-soled shoes crunched on the gravel and snow-ice of the old country lane.
“The church was built in 17
31. It was damaged by lightning in 1758 and restored. That's when they added the extra benches. There's good evidence to indicate that the cemetery was established first, probably as early as 1728.”
Willow walked at Mr. Morrow's slow pace, smelling the impending snow in the wind. They turned at the break in the wall of forsythia and entered the cemetery.
“Few people come here now. Rarely used. One burial six years ago.”
At the top of the rising, beyond the cemetery, stood the church. Gaunt, narrow, with an elongated steeple and narrow' windows, it bespoke an austerity of mind.
“Termites,” said Mr. Morrow, pointing at the church. “Abandoned now. There was a movement to restore it and use it, but when the estimates came in, the preservation committee quietly disappeared.” Mr. Morrow smiled with perfect dentures. “Seen it happen many times. The price of preserving the past puts too much of a burden on the present.”
“Tell me about Roger Tully’s family,” said Willow.
“Hmmmm. Yes. Tully. You know, sometimes it’s difficult to identify with the past. I have read many old court records where the amount at issue is so trifling that the litigation seems silly. These old colonists bickered over small things which it turns out aren’t so small. A barrel of nails, for example. Someday you and I will sit down in front of a couple of hot toddies and I’ll tell you a story about a barrel of English nails that nearly tore this county apart. But now, back to Tully. You can identify with this. I’ve stood here in this cemetery and pondered those graves many a time. I wonder how he kept from going mad.” Mr. Morrow gripped Willow’s arm and led him to the left at a deliberate pace while drawing breath through a round O of a mouth. He stopped without warning and Willow found a row of graves before him.
“Eight of them. Mother and seven children. The stones are somewhat weathered, but I know the names by heart anyway.”
With his eyes, Willow counted the graves. A table stone and seven small markers with first names.
“The mother, Elspeth,” murmured Mr. Morrow. “Her father was a farmer and a lawyer. Few miles from here. Tully married her in 1763 and built her a house on the next hill beyond the church. In February of 1779, Tully was in a bad way financially. The war was on and trade with Europe was nonexistent. Must have been rough on him. This Englishman and mercantilist was forced to farm with his bare hands, practically, waiting for the war to end so that he could get back into trade and prosperity. That February of 1779, he went up to Providence on some kind of business, and while he was gone his oldest”—Mr. Morrow shook a foot at the grave next to Elspeth’s—“Roger, Jr.— he was fifteen and in charge of the family. They had a windstorm one night—I’ve seen so many of them roll off that Sound out there—and that was the night the Tully fireplace decided to have a fire in the chimney above the flue. Flames came out of the chimney and set fire to the cedar shake roof, and the high wind did the rest. Before the family was even aware, the wind had blown the flames down the roof and down the side of the building and—poof!—there it was, a raging fire and no way out of the building. The fire was so ferocious that the bodies were practically char. I’ll bet you that there was some doubt as to identities among these seven kids.”
Willow looked at the last headstone and did some mental arithmetic.
“Three,” said Mr. Morrow, watching him. “She was three. After naming her children after every relative in the country, Elspeth gave her own name to this one. And they say she was the spit of her mother. A lively blue-eyed little girl.”
Willow looked away unhappily at the church on the brow of the hill.
“Imagine how he felt,” said Mr. Morrow. “Riding over that knob of land there and looking for his house on the spine and not seeing it. Then the second look and seeing only the chimney. And nothing else.”
And nothing else.
“The minister of the church had been watching for days for Tully, and when he saw him, he went running down the hill to him. How Tully ever survived what the minister told him I’ll never know.”
Willow saw the minister running. Saw the minister gripping the horse’s mane and gasping for breath, struggling to give the man the information.
“Ml dead?”
“Yes, Mr. Tully.”
“All?”
“Yes, Mr. Tully. Ml”
“But-”
But. Willow looked down at the grave of the very least one. Spit of her mother. Elspeth. 1776-1779.
Surely, the fire could have spared one. She was barely a morsel worthy of the flame’s attention. Her hair would have made a mere spark. The small bones—still a baby. And the merry eyes of her mother. Eyes that Roger Tully recalled later in a rare letter-eyes that echoed her mother as a young woman, newly married, pregnant with her first child. Dancing blue eyes. Never to dance again. No more. No more. No more.
Willow stared at Long Island Sound, looked back along the road where Roger Tully’s feet had shambled down to the pier, back to England—shuffled out of history to a room in London, there to gnaw a knuckle and stare his days away. The fire’s ninth casualty.
How did he survive that conversation with the minister?
Willow turned away from the graves and walked slowly back toward the cemetery gate. Genealogy: an instructive and fun-filled pastime for the whole family.
At the car he said, “Could there have been any offspring of the children?”
“Oh, I hardly—ah, no. No no. All the children were at home. Roger, Jr., as I say, was just fifteen. The second, Joseph, barely fourteen. No no.”
“I understand that families with marriageable daughters were not averse to having young men climb into bedroom windows.”
“Oh yes, young men capable of supporting a family. But no farmer in his right mind would let a fifteen-year-old boy—no. No. I hardly think so, Mr. Willow. Hardly think so.”
Willow saw the first grains of snowfall fly across the field of the cemetery. He looked down the road that led to town, to a pier, to merchantman windship, to London and lonely last years for Roger Tully.
The road was empty and filling with snow.
5
The windshield wipers flogged back and forth, back and forth, wiping away the grains of snow. The snow morseled a white covering across the land.
Willow drove onto a shoulder and stopped to read his map. Crystals of snow chattered lightly on the steel shell of the car. He could see clouds of it blowing languidly before him. The least one—a frozen grave. Another winter of snow tapping on the gravestones, filling the cemetery under a freezing moaning wind.
Cut and go home. Yes. Now. Forget death. Remember, oh remember the booming wind in the Channel, the tumbling seas, sea rime and banging, flying spume, the resonant humming of the rigging, the canted mast and deck and the swollen sails and the seething wind. Remember, oh, remember, in your ears the roar of it all, the rhythmical banging and creaking of the sailboat, the seething sizzle of the surf, rolling under the Freeboard line. The hand on the wheel, the eyes going from the compass to the luff of sail, to the compass. Hold her, hold her steady just at the luff point. Sailing on a tilted sea. Just you and the swollen circle of horizon on a limitless sea.
Look at the water, the black-green water, look—see? and where it’s swollen and stretched and humpbacked. Aqua and paler green where the great shafts of sunlight falling through the tumbling masses of incredibly high clouds light the crests of the swells. And everywhere like albino vines, the trails of sea foam. Smell the salt and fish rot in the air, enough to intoxicate you for life.
Exultant. Alive. In the wild world of the Channel. Remember life. Remember and go home. Now. Away from here.
Willow raised his head and looked through the rilling windshield of snow-melt. No. I’ll find him. I’ll see the game out.
And sail no more?
6
At five o’clock, Dr. Martin of the Medical Center called Richardson’s office.
“This is unofficial, of course. I’ll go over your report in detail with you later. But I
know you were concerned and I thought you’d like to know that with almost all of yesterday’s tests completed, you’re as healthy as a horse. No evidence of any drugs in your system. No reason to suspect a brain tumor. Nothing wrong with your ears. Nothing. The only comment I find is from Dr. Asher himself. He notes that you catch cold easily and may need a vitamin supplement.”
Richardson capered, a broken-ankle vaudeville routine, then rooted through his desk files and pulled out a folder on a new bright-orange backpack. A six-weeker this time. Pew could run things. A week—say two—to plan everything. Find an apartment to dump his furniture into. Death Valley in February or early March at the latest. Great, great. He’d do it. Do it.
Then he stopped. Ozzie was still missing.
And the sound was still unexplained.
7
“Deductive reasoning, Richardson,” said Christopher Carson, shaking snow from his coat. He tapped his newspaper lightly on the jamb, spraying the floor with grains of snow. “You can have deductive reasoning, inductive reasoning, or a combination of both. There are no other valid scientific ways of thinking. And deductive is your method, the technique of the scientific detective.”
He stood in the vestibule of the Brevoort House, watching two men lug a couch down the main stairs. It was broadly banded in black and white.
“Zebra stripes,” said Carson absently. He looked again at Richardson. “Deductive reasoning is also called the process of elimination. You find out what it is by finding out what it isn't. What's left is the culprit.”
“Tell that to Clabber,” said Richardson.
“Clabber! Listen, Pete, that guy is something that lives under a rock. I’m not sure he’s human—and I know he's not rational. Look, you know your problem isn’t physical, from the medical report. So now look for an outside agency—hidden microphones, tape recorders... something tangible and real—”
The Search for Joseph Tully Page 9