When Michael Calls

by Farris, John

  "The telephone's in the hall," Helen explained, as Doremus accompanied her. "But I can move it to my office without any trouble—"

  "That isn't necessary. I just want to give my Uncle Swen a ring and ask him a couple of questions about bees."

  "Oh," Helen said. "About bees?" She was about to return to the parlor to help Peggy straighten up but Doremus motioned for her to stay. He sat down on the steps with the telephone in his lap, balanced his lighted cigar on the toe of one shoe and put through his call to Wisconsin.

  "Uncle Swen? This is Doremus. . . . Yep, Doremus. . . . No, I'm not in Chicago, I'm down here in . . . Well, they're all fine far as I know, all seven of 'em. . . . You didn't hear? No, there's seven now; I'm sure they must have sent you an announcement. Karl fell out of a tree this summer and broke his arm. . . . That was last summer, this time it was his arm, but not his pitching arm. Uncle Swen, what I called about, there was a man down here stung to death by bees yesterday, and German bees, Swen. . . . Yep, that's exactly the way I'd describe them. . . . No, he knew what he was doing; he'd handled bees for years. This was indoors, and he was using what he thought was chloroform on the colony before he removed some of the bees for experimental purposes. Only I don't think it was chloroform; it had a different odor. Like ripe bananas."

  Doremus picked up his cigar and clamped it into his mouth, and he listened without uttering a sound for what seemed like five minutes to Helen, and as he listened, new, hard lines came into his face and he looked like a different man. She couldn't help shuddering as the rain roared down on the roof.

  "All right, Swen, thanks for the information. One more thing: what sort of effect would a ghost have on a hive full of bees?" Doremus grinned suddenly and held the receiver of the telephone slightly away from his ear so Helen could hear the hoarse laughter of Uncle Swen in Wisconsin.

  When he could get a word in, Doremus said, "Just a little blackberry cordial after supper, Swen. Thanks again for the information; I'll let you know all about it one of these days. . . . No, I'm still retired. Just sort of poking around the edges of what might be a murder case."

  He hung up, still grinning, but when he saw Helen's shocked face he looked bleak and sorry for his slip of the tongue.

  "How could Andy have been murdered?" Helen asked quietly, looking to see that Peg was nowhere around.

  "I'm not sure," Doremus said hastily. "But I have a clear idea now of what happened to him. He thought he was spraying a solution of chloroform into the opened hive, but the contents of the bottle was something else altogether: an essence of bee venom, strong enough to provoke bees into suicidal rage. A honeybee can only sting once, you know, and then it dies, and bees seem to realize this, so nearly all varieties will put up with a heck of a lot before committing themselves to a sting and death. On the other hand, even the best-natured bees will swarm and sting occasionally for mysterious reasons. As far as my Uncle Swen knows, all bees react violently to the odor of venom. A couple of times he's had to burn those elbow-length gloves beekeepers sometimes wear because the gloves have become saturated with bee venom, and to handle a hive while wearing them might bring on an attack."

  "Andy must have made a mistake and used the wrong bottle," Helen said.

  "That's entirely possible. The bottle was labeled chloroform, but there were many brown and amber bottles on his workroom shelves, some labeled, some not. Undoubtedly one of those contains chloroform. I'll find that out in the morning." Doremus decided his cigar was becoming rank and put it out in a nearby ashtray. "I'm sorry I used the word murder; it's unjustified. Conceivably someone who knew a great deal about Dr. Britton's hobby and afternoon schedule, and quite a lot about bees as well, could have switched labels on two bottles of chloroform and bee venom, which would be as effective as putting a shotgun to the doctor's head, and much safer. It's also conceivable that one of the hands on the Britton farm, sent into the workroom for some purpose or other, got panicky or in too much of a hurry because of the nearness of all those bees, knocked several bottles from the shelves and then in confusion mislabeled them. I'd want a chemist or pharmacist to check the contents of every bottle in that workroom, to make sure the contents matched the label. I suppose Hap can have someone do that."

  "What if only the venom bottle was mislabeled?"

  "Then I'd be inclined to think that it was done on purpose."

  Helen looked for a chair, sat down, hands joined in her lap. "By a—by who? And why? Andy Britton was—I can't believe anyone could dislike him enough to cause his death in such a horrible way."

  "I'd look for simple motives. A long-held grudge, for instance. How old was the doctor? About sixty-five? Probably that rules out women"—Helen looked offended—"but not inevitably." Doremus put the telephone back on the Sheraton table and walked to the front door, stood gazing out at the planetary street light through a waxen shower of rain. "I'd look for simple motives, but there's the problem of Michael. Who is he, and what does he know? What do we know about him? As your nephew Craig says, he's a boy with an amazingly inventive mind, what appears to be an endless capacity for fantasy, and at least a touch of evil. He also has a capacity for getting around—and it's almost too good to be true that Mrs. Britton should happen across him as she's dragging her dead husband from the barn." Doremus pondered his suppositions. "Chances are we're dealing with as many as three boys, all about the same age, linked together by coincidence alone. Or else we're involved with the supernatural, as Miss Lawlor seems to think, but that offends good sense and makes any kind of logical detective work impossible."

  Doremus turned to look at Helen, and his expression became less severe. "Tell me about Michael Young," he said. "How long was he missing before his body was found?"

  "There wasn't . . . a body. Just clothing, and bones. I believe it was seven months altogether before berrypickers discovered the remains, in a gully where he'd fallen."

  "How was he identified? By dental charts?"

  "No. I recognized the plaid coat he'd had on the night he disappeared. That seemed to be enough."

  "He'd be about twenty-six today, wouldn't he?"

  "Yes," Helen said.

  "If he were alive," Doremus said—and Helen came halfway up out of her chair—"if Michael Young were alive after all, then some of our questions would be answered. But that possibility offends good sense too—" He caught sight of Helen again and seemed surprised and chagrined by her reaction. "Sorry, I have this habit of thinking out loud. Say, it's almost eight-thirty; you must be ready to throw me out by now."

  Helen protested, but truthfully she felt the beginnings of a headache and a less definite sense of distress, caused by his presence. Not because she found Doremus difficult to like—he was a little strange but entertaining and always pleasant. Helen objected most to his detachment in discussing Andy's death, in the casual way he treated the whole terrifying sequence of events as an elaborate puzzle contrived for his entertainment. He seemed to forget that she had been very close to Andy, and that she was still anguished about his death, often close to tears, no matter what sort of effort she made for Peggy's sake.

  She wanted very much to be alone and so she protested badly, and Doremus was aware of it; they had nothing to say to each other while Peggy ran upstairs for her own and her mother's coat. Doremus watched the rain come down and retreated into remoteness behind a cigar and Helen simply waited, enduring the wait and the rain and the prospect of a long drive. It was a depressing end for what had been a lively evening.

  Chapter 7

  The rain had stopped completely by the time Helen was on the road back from Doremus's house, with Peggy asleep beside her on the front seat. The air was still and wet and chilly and the moon was trying to come out, but Helen didn't see the black overflow from the little river in the hollow until she rounded a bend and plunged down into it at thirty-five miles an hour.

  Wings of water drenched the windshield but she didn't panic and, relying on memory, she kept the ranch wagon on the road until
she was out of the hollow and the overflow, at which time she recovered sufficiently from shock to start trembling, knowing that if they had veered off the road into the river itself they probably would have drowned.

  At the top of the next rise Helen pulled over and stopped for a few moments to regain her composure, and while she was sitting there the lights flickered and dimmed and she discovered that the engine had died.

  She glanced at Peggy, who unaccountably had slept through the explosion of car into water and who continued to sleep blissfully with her hands clasped under one cheek. But it had been a long, trying day for Peggy. Helen sighed and wished they were home and tried to start the engine.

  After the fourth try she succeeded in killing the lights altogether. Helen knew nothing about automobiles, but she knew that they needed electricity to run, and that undoubtedly there were wires somewhere which must be soaking wet from the overflowing river. So she and Peggy would go nowhere until a car came by.

  In the meantime they were alone in the dark without lights or heat. The moon had broken through high clouds and her surroundings were visible, but Helen didn't need the moon to know exactly where she was, and she was aware of how seldom anyone traveled that particular road after dark. She then began to worry that someone would come, from the direction in which she had come but at a higher speed, and have an accident. Hap should know about the overflow, Helen decided, and she felt sure he would send a car for her.

  She opened the door and got out, taking care not to disturb Peg. There were three mailboxes a few feet from where she had parked, and a gravel road angled up the ridge above her. It was so quiet she could hear rain dripping from the leaves in the woods.

  Three houses on the ridge, Helen thought. But one had burned more than sixteen years ago, and was abandoned; she would not go there. A family named Kutner owned a house about halfway up the road, a distance of perhaps two hundred yards, but Helen could not remember if they were summer people. She told herself that if no one was at home she would not mind breaking in to use the telephone; otherwise she would have to take Peg and walk more than a mile down the dark country road to a point where it intersected Route 22.

  Helen turned and looked through the closed window at her sleeping daughter, then decided to lock both doors. Her footsteps sounded unnaturally loud to her as she walked around the ranch wagon to Peg's side and turned the key in the door lock. It worried her to leave Peggy alone even for ten minutes, but the wagon was pulled well off the blacktop, and probably nothing would happen to disturb her daughter's sleep.

  With the doors locked, Helen walked quietly up the rutted and rain-slicked road, finding her way by the moon. The wood lot to her left was filled with a light luminous mist and looked beautiful in a desolate way. On her right was a crowding woods, impenetrable; it was like a reflecting wall, sending back the sounds of her own hurried breathing.

  She paused to rest, hoping for a lamp in a window of the Kutner place to guide her the rest of the way, but she couldn't see one.

  Instead there was a light like a steady beacon much farther on, at the top of the ridge, where she was certain no one lived.

  Helen walked on uneasily, losing, then picking up the light as trees intervened, and she became so fascinated with this unexpected sign of life that she almost passed by the darkened Kutner house without seeing it.

  For half a minute Helen lingered in front of the house, indecisive and perplexed. Her eyes had become accustomed to the dark and from where she was she could tell that the windows were either shuttered or boarded, which meant that the Kutners had not been there for weeks, and would not return until the following May. Breaking in would be difficult and ultimately expensive—and the beacon on the crest of the ridge held her eye. Was she lost after all, or had someone built up there since the last time she had passed this way?

  Helen doubted it, because Craig owned most of the land on top of the ridge, something like one hundred acres, and she felt certain that he would never give his permission for someone to move onto his property.

  Without having to think about it, Helen started walking again toward the light. The road was worse, loose gravel and clay, and she slipped twice, the second time going down on one knee. Because she was wearing slacks she wasn't hurt, but as she was getting up she saw him, standing perhaps a hundred feet away in the misty wood lot.

  The image of a boy in the wood lot was so compelling—like the inexplicable light above—that at first she felt only a minor current of fear. She strained to distinguish the motionless figure, but the moon was wrapped in a cloud and the figure disappeared gradually, black into black. Her eyes smarted and Helen rubbed at them, and then the fear cut into her strongly, numbing her throat, and she hurried on, not really seeing the road, heedless of falling. Even the light atop the ridge had temporarily vanished, leaving her disoriented and alone. She sobbed for breath, stopped with a jerk, looked back.

  Moonlight again spread through the wood lot, but no one was there.

  I saw him, she thought. I saw—

  She would not let herself think of whom she had seen.

  It was too late to turn around and go back. Already she had come three-quarters of the way and the ridge had leveled. The friendly light was shining, bigger than the moon, white and strong, through a gap in the woods. She would find someone there, Helen thought. Someone real who would help her.

  Hawthorn, sumac and dogwood choked off the road. Helen slipped through the sharp, wet leaves with an animal's desperation, soaking herself, losing her scarf. She stumbled over a root, groaned, beat branches away from her face and came into the stony clearing, where the light glittered like a huge jewel in one blackened window of the cottage in which Michael Young had lived. The light drew her closer. She touched a scratched cheek with her fingertips and went dumbly.

  When she was within a few feet of the cottage, directly in front of the dazzling jagged window, she stopped, pinned down by fear. The light now seemed unearthly to her. There was nothing inside, there was no one; how had the light gotten there?

  The cracked glass of the window seemed to leap out at her, a thousand dazzling pieces, and the light was gone. In the space of the window a face appeared.

  Helen turned away, screaming, and caught a glimpse of him scrambling over the windowsill, coming after her. She tried to run and fell to her knees.

  A hand seized her shoulder.

  "Good God," Craig Young said. "Helen? What are you doing up here?"

  She recoiled from the flashlight beam against her eyes. "Craig?"

  "Let me help you up. You scared the wits out of me, Helen."

  "I . . . I scared you!"

  "Are you hurt?"

  "No . . . fine. I'm . . . my wagon stalled . . . on the road down there, and . . . I walked up to see if one of the summer houses was . . . occupied. Saw there was a light up here. I didn't want to come but—" She broke off and stared up at her nephew. "Craig? Have you . . . been here long?"

  "I'd say about twenty minutes. One of Hap's deputies told me a gang of kids had been up this way, making themselves at home. I wanted to put a stop to it."

  "Kids?" Helen repeated. "Craig, I saw a . . . I think it was a young boy . . . in the wood lot down there. Just standing between a couple of trees, watching the road. He couldn't have been more than . . . than ten, and he was alone."

  "Are you sure you saw someone?"

  "Craig, it wasn't a tree stump, or anything like that. I'm telling you it was a boy. Please don't let go of me. I've never felt like this, I don't think my knees will support me. It was just past the Kutner place. He was close to me, Craig."

  "I'd like to find him. He may be one of the gang who's moved in here."

  "Moved in?"

  "I'll show you what I mean," Craig said grimly, and led her around the cottage to a space where the back door had been. Helen held back involuntarily but Craig angled the powerful beam of his flashlight inside. "Over here."

  Helen stared at an Army-style bed with a mattres
s against one burned and blistered wall of what had been the kitchen of the house. This area was still roofed over and relatively well protected from snow and rain.

  "No telling how long that's been up here," Craig said. "But the metal is rusting and the mattress has mildewed. I suppose that's no difference to the little bastards. They just throw a blanket over the mattress and make out all right."

  "Craig, the boy I saw . . . he wasn't old enough for . . ." Helen paused, looking thoughtfully at the bed. "Craig, why did you smash that window? Didn't you see me?"

  Craig grinned. "I saw somebody coming, and I was in the mood to give them a fright. I'm sorry; no way I could know—"

  "Of course not."

  "I'm going to throw that bed down the steep side of the ridge," Craig vowed, pointing his light into the depths of the gutted house, "and then one of these days when I've got a little money I'll restore this place. It'll be just the way it was."

  Helen said without thinking, "I doubt if Amy—" And then she decided this was presumptuous. "I had to leave Peg in the wagon," she explained, "and I'm afraid she's going to wake up and find me gone. I didn't see your car—"

  "Oh, I hid it the other side of the clearing. Are you feeling better now?"

  "Much better."

  "What did you say was the matter with your wagon?"

  "Drowned out, I'm afraid. There was an overflow from the river and I didn't see the water in time."

  "We'll get it started. If not, you can drive the Chevelle in and send somebody back for me." He shifted the light and they started back to the clearing, picking their way through heaps of stones and across a rotting timber, walking beneath the crippled oak that stood ineffectual guard over the remains of the house that only Craig seemed to care about anymore.

  Peggy sat up straight in the front seat of the ranch wagon, aware that they had stopped, aware that it was dark and quiet. Somehow she knew, though she was not fully awake, they had not stopped in front of their house.