Mr. X

by Peter Straub

  “And one of the terms of your agreement was never to divulge what you knew about Edward Rinehart.”

  “Which is what makes us so happy to be frank and open now,” Nettie said. “You came along and hit us with that name Rinehart, that was a shock. We had no choice, son, we gave you the best advice we could.”

  “I am completely impressed. You blackmailed Stewart Hatch into giving you a fortune.”

  “ ‘Blackmail’ is not a pretty word,” Nettie said. “We reached a business agreement. All of us walked away happy, including Mr. Hatch.”

  “How much did you squeeze out of that crook?”

  For once, Clark’s smile bore no resemblance to a sneer. “A handsome sum.”

  “I bet it was.” In spite of everything, I was delighted with these three old hoodlums. “You’ve been living off Hatch money for years and years, haven’t you? First you sold the land, and then you sold them a secret. I’m proud of you. The Dunstans have never exactly been law-abiding citizens, but the Hatches were a lot worse.”

  “Neddie?” May set down her knife and fork on a plate that looked as though it had been steam-cleaned. “Now that we can be frank and open, I want to ask you a question. Mr. Rinehart, as he was called then, perished while in prison. I can’t quite see how you came upon his real name.”

  “Now it’s my turn to make a confession,” I said. “I had to borrow those photographs Aunt Nettie was storing in her closet.”

  “Isn’t that interesting?” May said. “I have to say, I never did understand why Mrs. Hatch asked me to magpie them out of the library. It was a piece of cake, though. Those people wouldn’t notice if you took the clothes right off their backs, especially Mr. Covington.”

  “You remember, May,” Nettie said. “Mrs. Hatch told us that Ned had remarked upon your talents, and deep in her heart she had the feeling that those pictures would help us to get back our own precious photographs.”

  “Why, that’s right,” May said. “She did. We never did get them back, though. Maybe we should visit the library again.”

  “Both sets of pictures are in my car,” I said. “I’ll give them to you in a minute. If you send them back to Hugh Coventry, they’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “Isn’t that nice?” Nettie said. “Mrs. Hatch is a very attractive person. She reminds me of those girls on the news who look straight into the camera and say, ‘Earlier today, three children were ripped to pieces by tigers during an excursion to the county zoo. Details after these messages.’ And I liked her little boy.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Nettie turned to May. “I met Mrs. Hatch’s son when we were comforting Star at St. Ann’s. He was so comical! That little boy leaned over the front of his stroller and told me, ‘I ain’t jumped to any conclusions, Mrs. Rutledge.’ I could hardly believe my ears.”

  “You could put a boy like that on television, along with his momma,” Clark said.

  “He said to me, ‘I ain’t jumped to …’ No, it was, ‘I ain’t concluded, and …’ What was it, Neddie?”

  “ ‘I ain’t concluded, and so far I ain’t jumped,’ ” I said. “I’ll go out and get the photographs, and then I want to drop in on Joy. I’m going back to New York later today.”

  “So soon?” May said. “Goodness, it seems like you only got here five minutes ago.”

  Clark gave me a roguish sneer and pushed himself away from the table. “I’ll walk out with you.”

  132

  On our way down the steps, Clark gave me a worldly glance Maurice Chevalier could not have surpassed. The fog had coalesced into a thin gray veil that made everything seem further away than it was. When I handed Clark the folders, he cocked his head in a show of confidentiality that implied the presence of unseen eyes and ears. “I guess you had something going with Mrs. Hatch.”

  “Only a little something,” I said.

  Fatherly pride warmed his red-rimmed eyes. “I believe you could be a real Dunstan, after all.”

  “I believe you’re right.” Then I remembered the unseen eyes and ears and looked across the street. “Do you know if Joy called Mount Baldwin?”

  “Hasn’t been a peep out of Joy in two days. Since we got this far, let’s check in on her.”

  Joy did not respond to a knock on her door. I knocked again. Clark’s forehead divided into what looked like hundreds of parallel creases. “She puts out a key in case of emergencies and the like. Hold on. I’ll remember where it is.”

  I lifted the edge of the mat and picked up a house key.

  “Second you bent down, I remembered. Give that to me.”

  Clark opened the door and flapped his hand in front of his face. “I don’t know how people can live with a stink like that. JOY! IT’S ME AND NEDDIE, STAR’S BOY! HOW YOU BEEN?”

  I heard a high-pitched humming sound.

  “YOU HEAR ME?”

  Silence, except for the humming sound, which Clark could not hear.

  “We better go in.” We moved over the threshold, and the stench enfolded us. “JOY! YOU IN THE CAN?”

  “Let’s try the living room,” I said, hoping that Joy had not died of a stroke while lowering Clarence into the bath. The humming sound grew louder. When we entered the living room, Clarence goggled at us with a mixture of relief and terror and threw himself against the strap. Hmmmmm! Hmmmm!

  “Clark, call Mount Baldwin and have them send an ambulance right now.”

  “Will do,” Clark said. “You scout around for Joy. I don’t like the look of this.”

  Clarence’s Morse code followed me into the dining room and kitchen. Joy had been taking lessons in housekeeping from Earl Sawyer. She had a long way to go, but she was making progress toward the glistening-jelly stage. The bathroom fell even further below Earl’s standards.

  I flipped the light switch at the bottom of the stairs and heard Clark summoning the ambulance from Mount Baldwin. Above me, a bulb stuttered on, and viscous yellow light flattened against a narrow, partially opened door. Clark Rutledge ranted on in the living room. A dull thump I had heard before came from the attic. Some heavy object had been brought into contact with the side of a wooden crate. What came to mind was a softball the size of a pumpkin.

  Clark said, “I’ll wait, but I won’t wait long. You may take that as a warning.” By the time I got to the top of the stairs, he was repeating everything he had said earlier to someone else. On the other side of the attic door, the big softball again thumped the side of the crate. I opened the door the rest of the way and saw a pair of black running shoes with their toes on the pine boards and the soles slanting upward at a right-to-left angle. Extending from the tops of the shoes, two thin legs disappeared beneath a black hem. I said, “Oh, no,” and moved up beside Joy’s body.

  A tray, a spoon, an inverted bowl, and the dried remains of chicken noodle soup lay beyond her outstretched arms. Her skin was cold. A few minutes after I had last seen Joy, she had warmed up a can of soup, poured it into a bowl, taken the tray to the attic, and died.

  A small bed enclosed within a boxlike wooden frame butted against the wall at the far side of the attic. Flat plywood sections three feet high had been nailed to two-by-fours at the bed’s corners. A cot covered with an army surplus blanket stood along the wall at a right angle to the enclosed bed. Whatever was inside the bed struck the side of the frame.

  I remembered the names on the stone slabs behind the ruins on New Providence Road. What had held Joy prisoner had not been a phobia. She and Clarence had been captive to a merciless responsibility. I didn’t want to know about it. I wanted to walk out of the attic, go down the stairs, and drive away. The being—the thing—that was my mother’s cousin struck the frame around its bed hard enough to shake the plywood.

  I walked past Joy’s outstretched arms and the spray of noodles. When I came up to the foot of the bed, a nearly solid cloud of river-bottom stench soaked into me, and I forced myself to look down. Lying on the mattress at the bottom of the wooden frame was a being made up of a
filmy, insubstantial body glowing with light and the face of a man with a graying bush of hair and Confucian white tendrils of beard. His ecstatic brown eyes were already widening in shock. The layers of color sifting through the limbless rectangle of his body darkened from robin’s-egg blue and ripe peach to a violent purple in which swirls of black bloomed like ink. The creature fixed me with a monstrous demand, shuddered sideways, and slammed its head against the side of the pen.

  Without the intervention of anything that could have been described as thought, I went to the cot, pulled the pillow from beneath the army blanket, and pressed it down upon the terrible face. The thing struggled and surged against the pillow. Its jaw opened and closed as its teeth sought my hands. Bands of brilliant red rose to the surface of its body. Then the jaw stopped working, and the color faded. A pure, depthless black swam up over the filmy surface of the little body and faded to a lifeless gray.

  My arms and legs were shaking, but I could not have said if the source of my horror was the thing whose teeth I could still feel beneath the pillow, what I had done to it, or myself. An inarticulate sob flew from my mouth. I released my grip on the pillow and hung on to a length of plywood. The floor seemed to waver, and I thought of Joy’s body sliding toward me over the stiff, snaky shapes of the noodles.

  An unconvincing voice weaker than mine said, “I had to.”

  A wave of crazy hilarity went through me. The same unsteady voice said, “He didn’t have much of a future, did he?”

  No, I thought, he didn’t have much of a future. He didn’t even have his last bowl of chicken noodle soup. I had said that aloud, too.

  I watched my hands tear the pillow out of the pillowcase and fling it onto the cot. My right hand dipped into the pen, closed on a wispy rope of beard, and lifted the thing I had murdered. A limp, ragged substance like old spiderwebs drooped from beneath the beard. I rammed it into the pillowcase and stumbled down the stairs.

  Clark was standing in the hallway. “The ambulance should be here pretty soon.” He glanced at the pillowcase. “Did you locate Joy?”

  “I think she had a heart attack,” I said. “She’s dead. I’m sorry, Clark. We have to call the police, but before you do that, I need a little time.”

  Clark’s eyes moved again to the pillowcase. “I guess little Mousie starved to death.”

  “You knew about him.” I came down the hall with the pillowcase swinging horribly at my side.

  “Speaking personally,” Clark said, “I heard about him, but I never saw the boy. Queenie and my wife assisted at the birth. Clarence and Joy, that child took over their lives. From the time it was born, they never knew a moment’s peace.”

  “They couldn’t have named it Mousie,” I said, and remembered the names on the flat granite stones on New Providence Road.

  “Never really named it at all,” Clark said. “Joy took pride in her command of the French language, you know. The way I heard it, Queenie burst into tears when the baby came out. Joy said, ‘I want to see it.’ And when Nettie held that baby up, Joy said, ‘Moi aussi.’ That means ‘Me, too,’ in the French language. She blamed Howard for the way her baby came out, and she never forgave him. So we called the baby Moi Aussi, which pretty soon it turned into Mousie.”

  “Would you care to say farewell to Mousie?”

  “The shovel’s out behind the kitchen,” Clark said.

  133

  The shortest and grimmest of the three funerals I attended during my stay in Edgerton took place in Joy’s back yard, and the single mourner performed the functions of undertaker and clergyman. In the tangle of weeds against the rotting wooden fence, I dug a hole two feet wide and four feet deep. While I was digging, I heard Clark haranguing the ambulance attendants from Mount Baldwin. I lowered the pillowcase into the hole and scooped earth on top of it. Then I covered the raw earth with severed weeds and yanked living weeds over the dead ones.

  “Mousie,” I said. “Not that it matters to you, but I’m sorry. Your mother wasn’t able to take care of you anymore. Even when she could, you had a terrible life. You never got anything but the short end of the stick. I hope you can forgive me. If you happen to come around again, things almost have to be better, but if you want my advice, stay where you are.”

  I pitched the shovel into the weeds and came back into the house. Clark called 911. We went into the hallway. Ten minutes later, two baby cops piled out of a squad car and jogged to the door. I said that I had found the deceased, Mrs. Joy Crothers, my mother’s aunt. The family had been worried because no one had seen her in two days. My Uncle Clark and I had let ourselves in. Mr. Crothers was in an advanced stage of Alzheimer’s disease, and when we discovered his wife’s body, we telephoned the nursing home to which he had been accepted and had him removed there. “It looks to me like she had a heart attack while bringing lunch up to her husband.”

  On the way upstairs, one of the cops finally mentioned the smell. “Mr. Crothers lost control of his bodily functions years ago,” I said. “And my aunt was an old woman. She didn’t have the strength to clean him properly.”

  “No offense, sir, but this smells worse than that,” one of the cops said.

  In the lead, Clark intoned, “You fellows may be ignorant of what can happen to the human body when it is left to its own devices. Be grateful you still have your health.”

  “Why did she put him in the attic?”

  “I guess she thought he’d be safe there,” I said. “She had a special bed made for him. You’ll see.”

  Clark opened the door, and we trooped in. The cops walked around the body and wrote in their notebooks.

  “She died in the commission of an act of human kindness,” Clark said. “That was her way.”

  “Chicken noodle soup,” said one of the cops. “This isn’t any homicide, but we’ll have to wait for the M.E. to make it official. Is that the bed you were talking about, sir?”

  “She put up the plywood to keep him in,” I said.

  They stared down into Mousie’s crib and looked at Clark. He saw an occasion to which he did not doubt his ability to rise.

  “The woman stayed by his side night and day, ministering to his needs as best she could. The tragedy is, the day before yesterday we found a placement for Clarence at Mount Baldwin. I believe the shock of his imminent departure was a factor in Joy’s demise. Clarence was her life. Boys, always remember to display affection and regard for your wives. A woman needs that kind of thing.”

  “If I come down with Alzheimer’s, I hope my wife won’t dump me into a plywood crib,” said one of the cops.

  “An act of the purest tenderness and love,” Clark said. “You may get an idea of the man’s stature when you hear that it was Mrs. Rachel Milton who arranged for his placement at Mount Baldwin.”

  The cops glanced at each other. “Let’s wait downstairs,” one said.

  Clark excused himself to tell his wife what had happened. They came out onto their porch before the medical examiner drove up in front of Joy’s house, and they crossed the street in time to hurry up the walk behind him. It was the same weary man with mushroom-colored skin who had released Toby Kraft’s body to the police. I was standing outside, and the two cops loomed in the doorway. Nettie caught up to the medical examiner and squared off in front of him. She looked like a mountain with a reputation for rockslides. “Have you come to examine my sister’s body?”

  “That’s my job,” he said.

  “I trust that you will conduct your business in a respectful manner and allow us to deal with my sister’s departure as she would have wished.”

  “Mrs. Rutledge, you will probably get what you want. I’m here to pronounce your sister dead and rule out the possibility of foul play. But to do that, I have to go into the house.”

  “Am I in your way?” Nettie asked.

  One of the cops told the M.E. that the body was upstairs. He turned to Nettie. “How do you account for the odor in this house?”

  “Clarence, mainly,” she said. “
Once his mind faded, his personal hygiene was a matter my poor sister addressed as best she could. The rest of it comes from the refuse my sister accumulated in her kitchen, which is in a sorry state.”

  “That’s not a garbage smell. Did your sister have problems with groundwater in her basement?”

  “Doctor,” Nettie said, “these two handsome young officers are waiting to assist you.”

  The M.E. stepped backward, nearly bumped into me, and murmured an apology. The smirking cops led him up the stairs.

  Nettie sidled up to me. “You did the right thing, son.”

  “I hope so.”

  “My sister’s child claimed her energies from the moment the poor thing first drew breath. Joy sends you blessings for giving Mousie a decent burial. I hope you’ll be coming back to see us on a regular basis.”

  “Aunt Nettie,” I said, “don’t pay too much attention to anything you read about me in the papers. The stories will die down when Stewart Hatch goes on trial.”

  Footsteps descended, and the M.E. came toward us. Nettie took my arm and lifted her chin to stare him down. “Later today, Mrs. Rutledge, I will make out the death certificate, naming heart attack as cause of death. You are free to make any arrangements you wish.”

  “Thank you,” Nettie said, glacially.

  “Was Mr. Crothers an unusually small man? A ‘little person’?”

  “Not at the height of his powers,” Nettie magnificently said. “Illness robbed Clarence of his physical stature in a manner cruel to behold.”

  The M.E. dodged around her and left the house. Nettie directed her commanding gaze upon the policemen. “You young men have been a great help to us in our time of sorrow. It is a comfort to me that gentlemen like yourselves have devoted your lives to public service.”

  A minute later, one of them was on the phone to Mr. Spaulding while the other stood guard at the door.

  “Should I stick around for another day or two?” I asked.

  “I’m thankful you could spend so much time with us,” she said. “And you rescued our pictures! That takes a great weight off my mind, Neddie. Make your travel arrangements, and be sure to keep in touch.”