She had an answer for everything and that only made his mother feel farther away and harder to find. Samuel could feel that he was on the very brink of tears.
“You’re a bad woman.”
Ruth’s hand came up and pushed the hair from his eyes. “I know what it’s like to fret for someone and wish with every part of you that they’d come back. My pa went away.” She shook her head like she was cross with herself. “No, not away. Died, that’s what he did. I wasn’t much older than you when it happened.”
Samuel didn’t want to care about Ruth or her stupid father—but there were some things that practically cried out for answers, even from a scoundrel like Ruth.
“How did he die?”
“He was a blacksmith, a fine one, too, but he never could be happy. He tried—he looked for it all over—but even when he found it, he never could hold it for long.”
Talking of happiness like it was a thing to be found and held didn’t make a great deal of sense to Samuel.
“Pa would stay in bed for days sometimes or he’d go off somewhere and come back a week later even glummer than when he left.” Ruth shrugged and Samuel saw that her eyes were slick with what he guessed was sorrow. “It’s a terrible thing when a person gets worn down by life and decides it’s not for them. Pa had tried once before...”
Samuel wasn’t clear what he had tried once before but he supposed it wasn’t anything good.
“It was summer and he’d stopped working, stopped everything. Ma did what she could to keep things running along—took in washing and cleaned houses for people in town. She was gone most days and she put me in charge of Pa.” Ruth patted her hair down like it was neat and tidy. “The gun had been hidden away, out of his reach, but this one day, I walked into the back room and Pa was cradling it, looking at it like he was waiting for it to say something. ‘Don’t tell your ma,’ he says to me. ‘I’m going hunting tomorrow and I’m going to surprise her with rabbit.’ I believed him. I actually thought it was an answered prayer, that he was getting back to his old self.”
The boy saw the trail now, the path where this story was leading. And it made him sit up.
“That night while we were sleeping, he went down by the henhouse and finished it.” Ruth shut her eyes and put a hand to her mouth. Samuel saw that her fingers were trembling. “I never told anyone about the gun, but I knew Ma blamed me for not keeping him from himself. She hated Pa for what he did and she hated me just as well. Gave me such a beating. I took it, too. Know why, Samuel?” A great moan rushed up and out of her. “I was glad for Pa, God help me. He had his peace and I was glad.”
Ruth sniffed hard and pulled herself up, her heavy eyes finding Samuel. “My pa was haunted by his thoughts and I can see the same thing happening with you. It’s got to stop. I know you’re a boy, and seldom does a sensible thought enter a boy’s head, but you must rid your mind of these malicious thoughts. It’s a poison, and unless you fight against it, Samuel, the venom will destroy you and me both. I’m an honest woman with a good reputation and I won’t have you spreading this nonsense any further, do you hear?”
Samuel couldn’t look at her. But he nodded.
“I’ve been working in this house since you were two, and though it’s not my way to show it, I’ve always had the softest spot of all for you. That’s right, don’t look so shocked. Which is why it upsets me so, to think you really believe I could do something so unspeakable.” She stood up quickly, then needed the wall to steady herself. “Well, this foolishness stops here and now. Are you very clear on that, Samuel Clay?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need the lamp to see myself out.” Ruth turned and made for the door. “Shut it off when I’m gone and good night to you.”
When the bedroom was once again in darkness, Samuel put his hand to his chest and felt it beating. And though he could feel the fear, he sensed that something else was causing it to thump so wildly—the excitement of a hunter catching its prey. Ruth thought she’d been setting his mind to rest with her story, but she had unwittingly given the game away. She was happy her father was dead; she said it made her glad. If Samuel had needed any further proof that Ruth was a killer, he had it now.
28
For all her sins, it was a length of red yarn that would be her undoing. Samuel couldn’t help but smile about that. It was the reason he was down in his mother’s study switching on a lamp in the dead of night. This breakthrough began with the postcards. No, it began when he couldn’t sleep, so full of thoughts about Ruth wanting her father dead and how this testimony of her black heart, coming right from her very own lips, was a greater burden than the boy had imagined. For it confirmed something unspeakable about his mother. But while it was proof enough for him, he couldn’t pretend it was evidence. Wouldn’t it still be her word against his? And didn’t Ruth have a way with words and could twist just about anything to her own ends?
He needed her diary. Or something else that would prove her guilt. Surely if he thought on it long enough something would materialize. The whole thing seemed to take hours and yielded nothing of any use, which Samuel had taken as a personal failing. Picking up the postcards from the side table was more a reflex than anything. He’d read each one a thousand times, but their magic, he reasoned, the warmth that blossomed in his belly when he held one, must be absent now that he knew they were probably written by Ruth’s wicked accomplice in America. Still, the handwriting was so like his mother’s, the words, too, that he couldn’t pretend they didn’t make him feel close to her.
The pictures on the back of each card—a harbor, a bridge, a skyline—were as familiar to Samuel as the writing itself. As he gazed at them, or through them, his mind flew to the atlas and the tiny green flags and the red yarn he had tethered to each pin and the tugboat, trailing the yarn and stranded out in the Atlantic. What a stupid exercise that had been. He’d been captured by Ruth’s lie that his mother was sailing home. Hadn’t he eaten up every rotten word? Samuel had sighed then, thinking on the atlas and how his hopes and dreams about his mother were fixed in its pages just as surely as each pin and tag.
It came to him without warning and without effort, as the right thought will sometimes do. With the postcards in his hand and the map in his mind’s eye, an idea simply dropped into his head, fully formed. A thought so full of possibility it made him gasp. Was it the fly in the ointment of Ruth’s murderous scheme? Samuel looked down at the postcards, finding the one he needed. He read it over. Then he practically leaped from the bed, the cards in hand, and crept down to his mother’s study as quietly as he could.
A pool of dim light washed half-heartedly from the lamp, barely reaching the atlas. But it was enough. Samuel’s eyes traveled along the tracks of red yarn—San Francisco, Dallas, Los Angeles, Florida, Pennsylvania, Toronto, New York City, Boston. But it was the West Coast that drew him back. He lifted the postcard sent from Dallas, Texas, and dated May 24.
Dearest Samuel,
Are you missing me as dreadfully as I miss you? San Francisco wasn’t the great success I hoped it would be—bankers lack imagination by nature, but honestly, what an insipid lot. Their loss! I’ve roared into Dallas without a backward glance, determined to win friends and open checkbooks. I’ll be home as soon as I can manage, my little man. Be good for Ruth.
With love and kisses,
Mother
Though he had read that postcard too many times to count, just like all the others, this time the words seemed to fracture under his watchful gaze, cracking open, to reveal the dark heart underneath the ornate handwriting. His mother wrote of arriving in Dallas after her disappointment in San Francisco without a backward glance—that’s what she said. Yet in the very next postcard, sent ten days later, she was in Los Angeles. That postcard was mainly about the weather, which was oppressively hot, and a promise that she would write again once she reached Florida. So his mother had gone back to Cali
fornia despite leaving the West Coast with no intention of returning there.
Samuel set down the postcard, returning his attention to the atlas. He ran his finger along the yarn from Dallas to Los Angeles. His mother had gone back when the postcard made clear that she was only moving forward. It didn’t make sense. Ruth had made a mistake, that much he knew. But the implications were dizzying and raised other possibilities, which, given the late hour and the ghoulish thrill of this new discovery, the boy could hardly be expected to resist. What if the contrary postcard was a signal from his mother that she was trapped? Locked up somewhere in America by Ruth’s vile accomplice? It was a thought. His mother was being forced to write the postcards against her will and, being a clever sort, had planted a code, something only Samuel could decode. A cipher that would let him know something was wrong. Was that likely? Samuel didn’t pretend the whole thing wasn’t confounding, but weren’t most foul plots complex by design?
The facts didn’t lie. In the postcard from Dallas his mother wrote of having left San Francisco (and therefore California) without a backward glance and then in the next breath she had returned there. Why would she do such a thing? Her words contradicted her actions, and if she had gone back, why not explain the reason in her next postcard? Instead, she had just prattled on about the weather. The boy was looking at the card now, shaking his head. It was shameful that it had taken him so long to see it, and though he wasn’t completely sure what it all proved—a conspiracy this wicked was bound to be unfathomable to someone without a criminal mind—he only knew that he had found a fault line in the fiction that his mother was merrily traveling across America, trying to save the family steel mill. And that meant something else, too. Ruth wasn’t nearly as smart as she thought she was.
* * *
The park was crowded like every other Saturday so the ducks were spoiled for choice. But Samuel wasn’t really paying attention. He stood on the edge of the pond, next to a mother with her two young children, both boys. The woman was crouched down talking to the little ones about this duck or that—she even had names for them—and all the while she had a hand in the small of each boy’s back. There was such tenderness about this, and Samuel didn’t want to hate the boys for it, but it was a struggle.
Ruth had done well at the market that morning. All the shortbread had sold and most of the tea cakes. As they were packing up, Mrs. Pryce, the reverend’s wife, came over to ask Ruth if she could fill a large order of tea cakes and lemon tarts for Monday, as she had the church committee coming for morning tea and her cook had broken her wrist and was utterly useless. That was why Samuel was standing alone by the pond. Ruth was still chatting with Mrs. Pryce, pretending as if she were the nicest housekeeper there ever was.
The boy hadn’t slept after returning to his bedroom. Well, not very much. How could he? There was his new discovery about the postcards to reckon with, not to mention Ruth practically confessing her wickedness about being happy her father had killed himself. Didn’t she just about put the gun in his hand? So it was not a great stretch to think she had done something equally rotten to his mother. The theory that she was being held captive in America had lost some of its power in the hard light of day. Was it really likely? No, he doubted his mother ever set sail for America. Whatever had happened to her, Ruth was behind it. The atlas pointed the way, if you only cared to look. But who could he convince to see things as clearly as he did?
“Waste of good bread.” Ruth came up behind him buttoning up her brown coat. “The ducks are too well-fed to pay you any mind.”
She’d been back to her old self by morning, her hair pulled back, her face set in a faint scowl, barely saying two words to him at breakfast. Samuel figured she was probably angry with herself for revealing just what a monster she was last night. He didn’t know why Ruth had talked so freely, so differently from how she spoke during the day—perhaps she was sleepy and sleepy people forget themselves and say things they otherwise wouldn’t. Perhaps that was it.
The mother with the two small boys gave Samuel a smile and he did his best to return it. “I don’t mind when they’re not hungry,” she told him. “In winter they must be starving so I suppose they save it all up until then.”
“Greedy is more like it,” Ruth said. She had no tolerance for gluttony, even in ducks. “If they didn’t grab at every little thing, they wouldn’t fill up so fast.”
The mother stood up then and took each of her children by the hand, leading them off with promises of toffee apples at the market. The boys squealed as if she had promised them a year of Christmases and Samuel’s eyes followed them as they walked off.
“Spoiled rotten, I should think,” muttered Ruth. “Come on, it’s time we were going. You have the psalm to finish and I have six dozen lemon tarts and four strawberry tea cakes to make.”
They headed home and Ruth got started on her baking, while Samuel was instructed to sit at the kitchen table and get to work on his Bible passage. As Ruth rushed about, she would mumble to herself or hum what to Samuel sounded like funeral music. He stayed quiet, looking down at the great book but not doing very much of anything.
Proof, that’s what he needed. Ruth was a crafty sort and she must have hidden his mother someplace no one would find her. She wasn’t in the cellar or the woodshed or the stables. She wasn’t anywhere. Which meant Samuel needed Ruth’s diary. Of course, he didn’t know for certain that Ruth even had a diary but what else could she have been writing in the dead of night? And when she heard Samuel at the door, hadn’t she hidden it away in the drawer as if she were terrified he might see it? Yes, there had to be a diary—that’s what he needed to prove what Ruth had done. That’s what he needed so that she should be strung up by the neck until she was dead.
Samuel stood.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Ruth was cracking eggs into a bowl.
“I need pencils to draw the picture for Reverend Pryce,” he told her. “They’re upstairs in my bedroom.”
Ruth sniffed. “Be quick about it.”
The boy took the back stairs and ran the whole way.
“No need to pound those stairs!” Ruth yelled from below. “I have enough of a headache without your assistance, Samuel Clay.”
“Sorry, Ruth!”
Samuel hardly slowed as he moved across the landing. His thinking was very simple. The faster he moved, the more time he would have upstairs to find Ruth’s diary. She’d probably written down all the nasty details. What she had done to his mother and how she had suffered and called out for Samuel. And Ruth would certainly have written down where his mother was lying, all alone in some horrid dark hole. Did she know how hard he was trying to find her? Did his mother see him and love him even more for what he was doing?
He thought she must. That she was looking down right at that very moment.
Samuel didn’t pause at Ruth’s bedroom door and say a prayer to his father that it would be unlocked. He just grabbed the doorknob and pushed. But it didn’t yield. He tried again in the way that a boy does when he hopes that the second time the door won’t be as locked as it was the first time. But, of course, it always is. Ruth’s door had never been locked before, as far as he could recall. It’s not that she ever invited him in, but she’d never forbidden it, either. And if he’d ever needed to ask her this or that and she was in her bedroom, he would knock and she would say, “Come in,” and the door would be unlocked. But not now.
Only a person with something terrible to hide would lock her bedroom door. Something about having his worst fears confirmed hit Samuel like a slap to the face. It wasn’t a poison eating up his mind, like Ruth had said. A locked door was real enough. And hadn’t Ruth been happy her father took a gun down by the henhouse and shot himself? That was real enough. And Ruth stealing his mother’s jewelry? Real enough.
Samuel wasn’t aware he was crying. Not at first, because he was angry and anger usually blew away t
he sorrow or at least made it harder to find. Then he heard his own shaky breaths and the broken sobs, which were made even more wretched in the silence of the corridor. She wasn’t coming back. Ruth had truly killed her and she wasn’t ever coming home. He remembered the dream he had had—his mother breezing into the hall, sunlight pouring around her, and the smile on her face that promised brighter days. He’d been right. It would never happen.
The boy ran then, toward her bedroom door. He tried to open it, but thanks to Ruth, this small part of his mother had been taken from him, too. His legs had a mind of their own, and as Samuel wiped his eyes, he saw through a fog of tears that he was running down the corridor to the very last door. His mother’s dressing room. He’d been in there a few times since she disappeared, but Samuel was always mindful that his mother didn’t welcome him there.
He opened the door and stepped inside. Sniffing and wiping his nose, the boy looked around. The dressing room was large and abounding in sunlight. Along three walls were a collection of oak wardrobes, and across the fourth was a row of windows and, in between, three mirrors all at different angles so his mother could catch herself from every side. In the middle of the room was a round red velvet lounge and beside it stood a mannequin that his mother liked to hang her very best dresses on for reasons Samuel couldn’t fathom. The mannequin was bare, its limbless form the very shape and size of his mother. So it made sense, then, that Samuel would wrap his arms around it and tuck his head under its bust. He knew it was wrong—his mother had caught him doing that once before and had been very cross—but right now he hoped she would understand.
When he had stopped crying and let go, Samuel walked slowly around the dressing room. He opened some of the wardrobes, looking inside; most of his mother’s dresses were gone and the few that hung there looked rather lonely. Ruth must have taken the clothes away so that it would look like his mother had packed them all into trunks for her voyage to America. She was a cunning one, old Ruth.
The Boy at the Keyhole Page 14