Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  I looked under the bed, saw only the carpet, and joined Robert in a space about the size of Star’s old room at Nettie’s house. Something like fifty suits and jackets, at least a hundred neckties, and dozens of belts and suspenders hung beneath yards of open shelves with sweaters and shirts sorted by color and shade. Robert reached up to a stack of Brooks Brothers boxes, chose one, and opened it to reveal a striped, button-down shirt in a plastic wrapper. I thought of Gatsby.

  “Let’s look at the office downstairs,” I said.

  Robert roamed through a file cabinet. The closet was empty, except for an unopened case of Belvedere. Just above eye level, a carton from Bear, Stearns tilted at an almost unnoticeable angle on the narrow shelf. I pushed back the carton and uncovered a legal-sized manila envelope. I pulled it off the shelf. “The green light at the end of the dock.”

  Robert came up beside me. “I don’t even want to know what that means. Open it.”

  I took a folder crammed with photographs out of the manila envelope and silently apologized to Laurie and my aunts before I even realized that I had suspected them of walking off with Hatch’s pictures.

  “Three cheers for the home team,” Robert said.

  The two men in the double portrait on top of the pile could only have been Omar and Sylvan Dunstan. Both my heart and my stomach seemed to drop six or seven inches within me, and I went to the desk and dumped out the rest of the photographs. Attired in wing collar, dark, linear suit, and high-buttoned waistcoat, the twenty- or twenty-one-year-old Howard Dunstan stared up at me. As his daughters endlessly reiterated, Howard had been a handsome man. He looked intelligent, charming, reckless, willful, and, I thought, half mad: cruelty and despair had already begun to tug at the features of a face uncomfortably similar to Robert’s and mine.

  Stewart had stolen our folder, not his, from Coventry’s files.

  A car, then another, pulled into the driveway. Two doors slammed. I looked at Robert. He shrugged.

  “You asshole,” I said.

  “Everybody makes mistakes.”

  I scooped up the photographs and shoved the folder back into the envelope. Through the window behind Robert, I saw Stewart Hatch entering the garage with Grenville Milton towering beside him. They moved out of the frame of the window, and their footsteps sounded on the cement floor.

  “What do we do now?” I heard them enter the kitchen.

  Signaling for quiet, Robert eased the door shut. “After the old guy leaves, Hatch will go upstairs.”

  Grennie Milton’s voice thundered from the kitchen.

  “If they come here, I’ll take care of it,” Robert said.

  The refrigerator door opened. Ice clinked into glasses.

  I put my hands on the window’s sash and saw the screen blocking my way. “Wait,” Robert whispered.

  Like a blip traveling across a radar screen, Milton’s aggrieved voice marked their progress through the dining room and into the main part of the house, where his words became audible. “These people have something, Stewart. They want financial records back to 1983. Does that sound like a coincidence to you?”

  “Give me a break,” Hatch said.

  The footsteps advanced to the front of the big room. The two men dropped into chairs.

  “My Louisville attorney wants me to separate our cases.”

  “These people don’t know anything. They can’t. It’s as simple as that.”

  “I am not interested in going to jail. Jail is not in the program. Are you listening to me, Stewart?”

  “Am I ever,” Hatch said. “I’ve been listening to your hysterics all afternoon.”

  “Then hear this. If you go down, you go down by yourself.”

  “That’s nice. Grennie, nobody is going down. It’s all smoke. If you separate our cases, you make both of us look guilty. That’s not exactly the perception we want to put out there.”

  “They’re preparing indictments, how does that make us look?”

  “You want to know why they’re preparing indictments? Ashton went around taking statements from everyone under the sun. In the process, she rented cars, she flew in airplanes, she stayed in nice hotels and paid for expensive meals. Where does she come from? Kentucky. These people had no idea of the expenses she was running up. So she goes back home empty-handed.”

  “But—”

  “Ashton gets back to bluegrass country and says, Sorry guys, no dice. I know that. Her boss says, Ashton, this is my job on the line here, we can’t afford to give up now. So what do they do? They make up the indictments, Grennie, that’s what they do, because the indictments justify her expenses. If nothing new turns up, hey, maybe they can cut a deal. It’s about saving face, that’s all.”

  “You can’t argue away the break-in,” Milton said.

  “My system failed. A guy got into the building and trashed the computers. But, Grennie, our records, they were never touched. I guarantee it.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Milton said. “I’m too old for prison.”

  “So am I. Not to mention getting screwed eight ways to Sunday on the home front. I should never have put Laurie on the damn committee. Yet another example that trying to be good to people is generally a terrible idea. What about Rachel?”

  “Rachel put a death lock on my wallet about a month before I gave her the best cosmetic surgery money can buy,” Milton said. “I can’t see her turning vindictive. Well, okay. We’re just going around and around. I have to get home and change before I meet Ming-Hwa.”

  “You want something to worry about, pick her,” Hatch said. “But what do I know?”

  “You wish it was you instead of me,” said Milton. They drifted to the front door and repeated half of what they had already said before Milton’s size 13 wingtips clumped down the driveway.

  Hatch closed the front door, walked to the staircase, and went up a few steps. He hesitated and began coming back down. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned toward the office. Robert winked at me and disappeared, leaving behind a vacant Robert-sized space.

  The knob revolved, and the door began to swing open. I did the only thing I could, short of assault—at the moment Stewart Hatch walked into the room, I bit into time.

  When my eyes cleared, I was standing in an open field, experiencing the pains of my previous journeys, but to a lesser degree. Empty grassland rolled over the hills, and birds soared on outstretched wings through the flawless sky. I walked in what I hoped was the direction of the future Bayberry Lane, trying to remember the distance to the corner. When I thought I was getting close to the car, I did my trick and returned to the tiled border of a backyard swimming pool. Another foot to the right, and I would have been underwater.

  My head felt fine, and my gut reported no more than a mild twinge. However, the woman wearing the bottom half of a bikini who was tilted back in the chaise ten feet in front of me seemed about to go into shock. She propelled herself forward and snatched up a towel. “Where did you come from?”

  “Miss, I’m as embarrassed as you are,” I said. “I was hoping to find someone who could give me directions. I’m supposed to deliver this envelope to an address on Bayberry Lane, but I can’t seem to find it. I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  She tucked the ends of the towel under her arms and smiled. “Whose house are you looking for?”

  “Mr. Hatch’s,” I said.

  “Stewart?” She pointed without raising her arm. “That’s his place.” Fifty yards away, the gray deck jutted out over a smooth, vibrantly green lawn. I had come nowhere near the car. “Go down Elderberry, turn right on Loganberry and right again at the next corner.”

  When I turned the corner into Loganberry Street, Robert was leaning against the Taurus, grinning at me. “To hell with you,” I said.

  “I knew you didn’t really need my help,” Robert said. “But I hope you’re going to tell me how you got away.”

  “Magic carpet,” I said.

  “Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. What do we do
now?”

  “I’m going to Laurie’s, and you’re not. Come to the Brazen Head tonight.”

  “You won’t give me a ride back to town?”

  “Robert,” I said, “I don’t think you’ll have any trouble getting back to town by yourself.”

  He touched his forehead in a mocking salute and was gone. I went to the door of my car and heard someone say, “Mister?”

  A woman in shorts and a halter top was staring at me from across the street. “I have to ask. How did you do that?”

  “My brother’s been pulling that stunt ever since we were kids,” I said. “It used to drive our mother crazy.”

  106

  When Laurie opened her front door, I saw sheer, unalloyed pleasure radiating through all the complications of her beautiful face. “Ned! I’m so glad. Come in.”

  She moved into my arms. “Tell me about the funeral.”

  “It was all right. An old friend of my mother’s named Suki Teeter came, and so did Rachel Milton. The three of us had lunch afterward. Rachel isn’t so bad, after all.”

  “I should phone her. Would you like to hear some good news? Ashleigh called to say they’re working on the indictments. Grennie may not have long to enjoy true love.”

  “Even shitheads get the blues,” I said.

  “Let’s celebrate with a really good bottle of wine.” She went into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Heitz Private Reserve cabernet and two glasses.

  After I poured, she said, “I have to make sure this won’t be too hard on Cobbie. I don’t know how you explain to a kid that his father is going to jail, but I want to protect him. He’s out with Posy, by the way. She took him to see Aladdin.”

  “It’s nice to see you alone.”

  “I’ve been thinking.” She leaned back into the sofa. “Columbia accepted Posy into their Ph.D. program. Cobbie’s going to need more training than he could ever get here. New York might make a lot of sense for us.”

  “Would Posy stay on with you?”

  “She’d jump at the chance, and having her with us would give Cobbie some continuity. Besides, I’m crazy about Posy Fairbrother—I don’t want to lose her, either. If I bought a big apartment or a brownstone, we’d all have enough privacy.”

  “The kind of place you’re talking about costs a fortune,” I said. “Private schools would be another ten or fifteen thousand a year. Plus the music lessons. Can you afford all that?”

  “The trust can,” she said. “I’m not going to let Parker Gillespie run my life.”

  It was the reason she had called Gillespie: Laurie had been thinking about moving to New York before she had ever met me. I said, “It sounds like a great idea. I want to be around the first time Cobbie hears Bach. Or Charlie Parker.”

  “You should be around. Cobbie needs more than music.” Laurie smiled to herself, as if realizing that she had said too much. “Let me back up. Would you like it if I moved to New York?” She moved an inch away and, in a kind of compensation, put her hand on my knee. “I don’t want to put you in an awkward position.”

  “Of course I would,” I said. “Think of all the nice places we could go.” I heard myself say the word “nice” and knew that I was talking about a fantasy. I wanted the fantasy to be true.

  “What places?”

  “The Metropolitan Opera. The Frick museum. The corner of Bedford and Barrow in the Village. Second Avenue on a Sunday morning in August, when all the lights turn green at once and you hardly see a car for miles. The Great Lawn in Central Park. The Esplanade in Brooklyn Heights. The Gotham Book Mart. About a hundred great restaurants.”

  “Let’s find our favorite one and go there once a month, religiously.”

  “Laurie,” I said, “when you met my aunts at the library, did you ask them to take some photographs?”

  “Take snapshots? They didn’t bring a camera.”

  A more innocent answer could not be imagined. I laughed. “I meant, take as in walk out with.”

  She looked puzzled. “Why would I do that?”

  “Forget I asked. Hugh told me that Stewart’s family photos had disappeared. He discovered they were missing after you visited the library with my aunts, who could stuff the Empire State Building into a couple of shopping bags without anyone noticing. I don’t know, maybe you wanted to shake him up a little. It was a bad idea. Sorry.” It was worse than a bad idea—it was ridiculous. Laurie could not have known that Stewart was going to demand the return of his archive.

  “Now two sets of pictures are missing? Yours and Stewart’s?”

  “Awfully strange coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “So strange that you thought I must have had something to do with it. And then didn’t tell you. Which makes it sound like, instead of trying to annoy Stewart, I was concealing something from you.”

  She was right: it did sound like that. I remembered what Rachel Milton had said to me about the Hatch photographs, but Laurie’s talent for perception had already pushed this conversation past anything intended by my thoughtless question. “Whoa,” I said. “Too far, too fast. Around you, I have to watch what I say.”

  “Who drove you to the V.A. Hospital?”

  “I know,” I said.

  A car rolled into the driveway and stopped in front of the garage.

  Laurie kissed my cheek. “Remember who your friends are.”

  * * *

  Cobbie burst in and squealed with pleasure. “Ned, Ned, I have a trick!”

  Posy smiled at me, put down the stroller, and set two shopping bags on the counter. “After the movie, I bought some books and a couple of the CDs Ned recommended.”

  “I have a trick!” Cobbie’s eyes were dancing. He smelled like popcorn.

  “Let me know how much you paid, and I’ll add it to your check.” Laurie hugged Cobbie. “Hello, squirt. Did you like the movie?”

  “Uh-huh. And I—”

  “You want to show us a trick.”

  “Uh-huh.” He paused for dramatic effect and sang an odd series of notes. Then he went limp with laughter.

  “It’s beyond me,” Posy said. “He’s been singing it over and over, and it cracks him up every time.”

  Cobbie began singing the peculiar melody again, and this time he found it so funny he could not get to the end.

  “Do it all the way through,” I said.

  Cobbie stationed himself before me, looked directly into my eyes, and sang the entire sequence of notes.

  I thought I knew why it sounded so odd. “Um, backwards something singing you are, Cobbie?” It took me longer to work out the order of the six words than Cobbie had taken to reverse eight bars of melody.

  “Huh?” Laurie said.

  Chortling, Cobbie trotted to the piano and plunked out the notes.

  “Now play it the right way,” I said.

  He hit the same notes in the opposite order and grinned at Posy.

  “Oh, my God,” she said. “It’s from the movie.”

  “Wholewide Worl,” Cobbie said.

  “That settles it,” I said to Laurie. “He’s going to be Spike Jones when he grows up.”

  “Is Ned staying for dinner?” Cobbie asked.

  “Is he?” Laurie asked me.

  “As long as Cobbie and I can listen to one of those new CDs,” I said, thinking that after dinner, I would go back to Buxton Place to see what Earl Sawyer had hidden in a drawer. Earl Sawyer was a troubling man. He cherished the notion that H. P. Lovecraft’s stories described a literal reality, and he had nearly fainted when I had touched the first edition with the owner’s inscription on the flyleaf. I tried to remember the name: Fleckner? Flecker? Fletcher. W. Wilson Fletcher, of the Fortress Military Academy in Owlsburg, Pennsylvania.

  For about half an hour, Cobbie sat entranced through most of Haydn’s Theresienmesse, occasionally turning to see if I had heard some particular sonic miracle. Now and then, he said “Huh” to himself. During the “Credo” movement, he looked at me with an expression of puzzled delight. �
��That’s called a fugue,” I said. He turned back to the music and muttered, “Foog.” When the movement came to an end, he announced that it was time for cartoons and sped into the room on the other side of the fireplace.

  In the kitchen, Laurie and Posy were gliding back and forth between the counter and the stove. Posy asked if I had seen the books she bought for Cobbie, and I went back into the living room. Posy had found short biographies, written for children, of Beethoven and Mozart. The last book in the bag was The Best of H. P. Lovecraft’s Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre.

  I brought it into the kitchen and said, “You didn’t get this for Cobbie, did you?”

  “Oh, sure,” Posy said. “Laurie and I were talking about the book you brought over the other day. Somebody Rinehart? Lovecraft’s name came up, and I was curious. A guy in my neurobiology seminar is a big Lovecraft fan. I’ve never read anything by him, so I thought I’d take a look. One instance is chance, two are design.”

  “Huh,” I said, and realized that I sounded like Cobbie.

  “You’re not allowed to ogle the staff,” Laurie said. She handed me the wine bottle. “We’ll be ready in about twenty minutes.”

  I poured out the last of the wine, went to the sofa, and began reading “The Dunwich Horror.”

  The story began with an evocation of a sinister area in northern Massachusetts. Cramped between looming hills, the town of Dunwich exuded decay. Generations of inbreeding had warped its native population into degeneracy. The story moved into particulars with the introduction of Lavinia Whateley, cursed by ugliness and albinism, who at thirty-five had given birth to goatish, dark-skinned Wilbur. The child began walking at seven months and learned to speak before his first birthday. Well in advance of his teens, he developed thick lips, yellow skin, wire-brush hair, and the ability to throw dogs into savage fits.

  In the way a particle of food sticks between the teeth, an otherwise unnoticed detail seemed to have lodged in my mind, and I leafed back and found this sentence: “The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer’s common-law wife, Mamie Bishop.”