by Helen McCloy
Standing in the open doorway, their backs to the kitchen, neither one of them noticed an air current that plucked the note to Vanya’s mother from the table, let it drop weightless as a falling leaf to the floor, chivvied it across the linoleum like an invisible kitten and then, with a sigh, let it drift into the narrow crack between wall and refrigerator, where it was lost to view.
“We’ll have to go slow,” said Vanya. “Take my hand.”
They had gone only a little way when Lucinda looked back. She could no longer see Vanya’s house. Already the fog had closed in behind them.
“It’s like a nightmare I had once,” whispered Lucinda. “I was going along a road alone. In front of me, right across the road, there was a wall of mountains, but, with each step I took, the mountains receded, so I could keep going.”
“Nothing nightmarish about that.”
“Oh, but there was because, after a while, I looked back and then . . .”
“And then what?”
“I saw that, with each step I took forward, another wall of mountains had closed across the road behind me. I could never go back the way I had come.”
“What a cockeyed dream!”
“Was it?”
“Well, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t think so. I think it was symbolic.”
“Don’t give me that old maidish, neo-Freudian stuff that sees sex in everything!”
“This isn’t neo-Freudian symbolism. It’s my own personal symbolism. I think the dream was a symbol of time. The past closes behind you and you can never go back.”
“You’re not the first person to realize that. That’s what Stevenson was talking about when he said life is a ‘desperate game.’ The not being able to go back.”
“A murderer must feel that more strongly than anyone else. What could be more irrevocable than murder? It must be awful for the murderer. I never thought of that before. Oh, Vanya, let’s not try to catch this one!”
“And give him a chance to kill somebody else?”
“They don’t in real life, only in books.”
“Oh, yes, they do. That’s one reason some psychologists think murder is compulsive. Anything that’s repetitive is apt to be compulsive.”
They had been inching their way along, blinded by the fog. Now they realized they were near the road because they heard the crunching of snow tires. Yellow fog lights glowed fuzzily for a moment but the car itself was invisible. As it passed them, slowly and cautiously, they realized that the driver was unaware of anyone nearby.
“We’d better not talk now,” whispered Vanya. “Even if people can’t see us, they might hear us before we knew they were there.”
It took time edging uphill silently in deep snow. When they reached the driveway to Crow’s Flight, they were panting. They left the driveway and skirted a snowdrift that masked a clump of mountain laurel, so they could come to the closet under the front steps with less chance of being seen from the house.
Lucinda whispered: “Shove your skis in there with mine. You’d better hide there yourself while I scout around and see if the coast is clear.”
She was back in a few minutes. “Dr. Willing has taken his wife to the hospital. The others are in the dining room having breakfast and Martha’s in the kitchen. We can go through the living room now, if we’re quick and quiet.”
“The letter?”
“Near the hearth, don’t you think? People always burn incriminating letters.”
They mounted the steps on tiptoe and slipped through the front door. Firewood was newly laid and the hearth swept clean. Lucinda laid the letter on the hearthstone.
“Suppose someone lights a fire without seeing the letter and it just gets burned up?”
Lucinda switched the letter to the hearth rug. “There! It looks as if someone tried to burn the letter but a gust of wind came down the chimney and blew one page out onto the hearth rug. At least I hope it does. Shall I scorch the edges?”
“It would take too long. Somebody might come.” Vanya picked up the hearth brush and swept the last fine dust of ashes onto the rug and the letter. “These ashes are the second page that did burn blown out by the wind along with the first page.”
“Why didn’t he use another match?”
“It happened after he’d left the letter burning.”
“Then let’s go. They may finish breakfast at any moment.”
They tiptoed across the living room and up the stairs. Vanya stood on the ramp and fumbled along the wall until the hidden panel yielded to his touch.
“Come on!” He dived into the opening. Lucinda followed, pulling the panel into place behind her.
“Home free!” Vanya exhaled audibly. “I feel as if I’d been holding my breath ever since we started out in that fog.”
“Not so loud!” Lucinda laid a finger across her lips, whispering close to his ear. “If we can hear Them in here, we know that They can hear us out there. Up you go!”
“Okay.”
They were both talking in whispers now. Vanya started to climb the ladderlike crossbeams to the top of the narrow well, Lucinda close behind him. When his eyes were level with the floor of the attic above, he stopped and let out his breath in a gust.
“Move on up!” Lucinda’s head was level with his feet. “Or move over. I need another foothold to get up there.”
But he stood still. “Worm, somebody else has been here.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Look.”
Now he did move. Lucinda scrambled up beside him until her eyes were level with his.
“God in Heaven!” Still she kept her voice down to a whisper as she stared about her.
With dust inside and the fog outside only a pallid half-light seeped through the glass in the skylight overhead, but there was enough light to show that every trunk in the attic had been emptied and its contents strewn all over the floor.
Vanya whispered: “It wasn’t you who—”
“No, I left everything just as I found it,” came Lucinda’s answering whisper. “It must’ve been someone else. Someone who knows just as much about the attic as we do.”
Vanya muttered under his breath: “As much . . . or possibly more. . . .”
Chapter Eleven
OF THE SEVERAL CARS Basil was urged to borrow, he chose the Alcotts’ Lincoln, the largest, as likely to be the most comfortable for a passenger with a fractured ankle bone.
After he left Gisela at the hospital, he walked across the street to the garage that had towed his car away for repairs early this morning.
“At least four more hours,” the garage man said with stony indifference. “Maybe this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow. Better ring me before you come all the way over here again.”
Basil went back to the Alcotts’ Lincoln. Soon he was enmeshed in a web of one-way streets that made him feel like a chesspiece that can move only in one direction.
The sun had begun to pierce the fog and, by its light, he saw that the little Hudson River town was keeping up with the times valiantly. A movie house advertised:
INFIDELITY
and
GIRL-KILLERS
For Mature Adults Only
Another movie house proclaimed:
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
Uncut!
Intact!!
Uncensored!!!
Apparently the earthy, gutsy, bawdy Decalogue was not for immature adults either. . . .
Five minutes later he was in another world, where distant peaks swam in a haze high above the river and the pale winter sunshine sparkled on clean snow. This was the landscape that Bayard Taylor had compared to the Rhine when he stayed at Catskill Mountain House a hundred years ago.
Here and now, all the terrors of last night seemed absurd. Overhead, there was enough watery blue among the clouds to make a pair of Dutchman’s breeches and that was supposed to guarantee sunshine for the rest of the day in Greene County. How could he ever have felt as if this road were somewhere off the ma
p, a dark limbo where you groped among fearful things unseen?
It was too early to meet many other cars on the road, but after he had climbed to the top of the first peak and dipped down again into the first ravine where the frozen waterfall glittered, he rounded a curve and discovered a school bus just ahead of him. The way was too narrow for him to pass the bus while it was in motion and of course the law wisely forbade him to pass when it stopped to pick up children waiting for it by the wayside. The children themselves were charming in gaily colored jackets and caps and mufflers, their cheeks as pink as June roses with the cold, but the slow pace was nonetheless infuriating.
Suddenly he came to a fork where a second road snaked off into the woods on his right He wasn’t sure if it was the one he and Gisela had followed last night to Crow’s Flight, but it led in that general direction. Without a backward glance at the yellow bus toiling up the next incline at about fifteen miles an hour, he turned into the side road.
What a relief to bowl along at normal speed once more! Even if he was taking the long way round to Crow’s Flight, he would feel as if he were getting there more quickly. The way was winding but level here. The unfamiliar car skimmed along like a low-flying bird and his spirits rose. When he came to another fork, he hesitated only a moment, then took a chance on the road to the left. At a third crossroads he bore left again and came to a house that looked like a Swiss chalet. Had he and Gisela passed it in the darkness last night without remarking it?
All the houses they had noticed last night had seemed unoccupied, but there were signs of occupancy here—a car in the driveway, unshuttered windows, white curtains. He would have passed it now without stopping if his glance had not caught the name engraved on one of the two stone pillars at either side of the entrance to the driveway: Radanine.
The tall, rusty iron gates stood open. With a flick of two fingers on the power-steering wheel, he turned the car into the driveway and stopped in the half-circle of gravel before the front door.
There was a small, low porch with pillars. Above there was a balcony that ran all around the house, with a carved wooden railing and a sloping roof. Very Swiss. Beyond the house he saw a sunken garden with low hedges and flower beds and fountains all muffled in soft, new-fallen snow. Rather Italian. There were even small, stone figures around a central fountain. They looked as if they had been suddenly frozen in dancing postures. The fat, dimpled face of one of the amorini smirked under a cap of icicles. Rather like the Swiss Riviera, someplace in motoring distance of Lugano, where Swiss citizens spoke more Italian than German or French.
Beside the front door was suspended a large, plaster cast of a della Robbia bambino and a long, metal bell pull. Basil tugged and heard a bell ring far inside the house, faint but clear. It had the same tone as the cowbells which told you that you were entering Italy before you reached Border Control on the road through the Maritime Alps from Nice to Milan.
The woman who opened the door was almost as tall as Basil himself, but built on more generous lines. She was wearing the fashionable, sleeveless, shapeless dress of the moment that stopped four inches above the knees. Such dresses had a certain decadent style on the fashionable figure of the moment, a figure so skeletal that it suggested a dance of death, but this was a normal, mammalian female in well-fed middle age. The very scale of the opulent curves and quivering cushions of flesh revealed was overpowering. It was rather like looking at a fat little girl seen through an enormously powerful magnifying lens.
“Mrs. Radanine? My name is Basil Willing and—”
“Oh, do come in, Dr. Willing!” The voice was contralto and ripe as the curves of the body, but it was spiced with an accent—not, he thought, a Russian accent. “You stayed at the Swaynes last night, didn’t you? I do so want to hear all about it. Is it true that David Crowe was murdered?”
“What makes you think so?”
“The milkman came by this morning. He’s just been at the Swaynes’ talking to their cook. I got up early to let him in and then I went back to bed.”
Basil smiled. “I keep forgetting the country grapevine. In town we depend on TV or newspapers, but here—”
“Here we have native drums! Do come in and have some coffee, won’t you?”
In an era when, at least in theory, the poor are no longer poor and the rich no longer rich, houses tend to be similar in size and character and there is only one clue left to the financial status of a householder—upkeep. Even cleanliness is a luxury today in terms of either time or money, and repairing, refinishing and repainting are slipping beyond the reach of many. Of course you can do it yourself, but if you don’t want to spend the greater part of your brief time on this planet sanding old furniture and washing windows, you let it go.
Mrs. Radanine belonged in the second category. Basil could not find it in his heart to blame her. To devote one’s life to the care of things had always seemed to him an immoral waste.
The living room was clean enough and the furnishings had the haggard charm of an old, worn, shabby elegance, but obviously there was no Martha here to empty scrap baskets regularly and replace flowers in vases when they faded and attend constantly to all the other little things that made Folly’s housekeeping so irreproachable.
“You will have coffee?”
“Oh, please don’t bother. I just want a word with you.” He had already had one cup at Crow’s Flight and a second cup with Gisela at the hospital coffee shop, and two cups was all he really wanted any morning.
“But I was going to have some myself and it won’t take a moment. I’ll bring you a mug. You see, we are mug people.”
“So I see.” Basil was looking at many rings left by hot mugs on the surface of an old mahogany table.
She was gone before he could make further protest. He hoped she was instant coffee people, too. Mug people usually were. If she wasn’t, he was going to be here for a longer time than he had allowed.
His gaze wandered around the room and once again he was reminded of houses on Lake Lugano. The stair that led to a gallery with a carved wooden railing was Swiss in spirit, but the high windows rounded at the top and the marble terrace beyond with balusters shaped like urns were Italianate. So were most of the furnishings in the room—faded green, oyster-white, tarnished gilt—old, gentle colors. Nothing there forced itself rudely on the eye. Everything waited quietly for appreciation.
The hearth was framed in Italian marble. On the mantel shelf there were scattered piles of books: Poltergeist, Fact or Fancy? by Sacheverell Sitwell, Les Maisons Hantées, by Camille Flammarion, Mysterious Fires and Lights by Vincent H. Gaddis . . .
Basil was reaching for that one when Mrs. Radanine returned with a tray.
The coffee was instant. And weak. And lukewarm. There was no sugar, cream or spoon, but it was all served with such an easy amiability that it would have been churlish to resent the omissions.
She lay back on a rococo daybed and smiled as she lifted her mug to her lips. Cheek and neck, shoulders and bosom were so richly curved and creamy that Basil thought of a mound of pearls. Her shift was heavy, unbleached cotton, decorated with cobweb stitching of Mexican embroidery in black, like scrolls drawn in India ink with a finely pointed pen.
Her hair was black, too, straight and oiled and coiled in a great knot low on her neck where it didn’t interrupt the classic outline of brow and nape. The dark eyes were large and liquid, the cowlike eyes the ancients attributed to Hera. Radanine sounded Russian, but Slavs didn’t look that way. This belonged to the Mediterranean and probably the Eastern Mediterranean.
She put down her mug. “Not quite hot enough.” It was not an apology, but a statement of the inevitable. “It won’t hurt us to drink it tepid. I don’t believe in coddling myself or others. Do you?”
Basil bypassed a question hard to answer within the limits of politeness.
“Now,” she went on. “I want to hear all about this affair of David Crowe.”
“There’s not much I can tell you. The police ar
e at the house. They won’t know whether it was a natural death or not until they get the autopsy report. I really stopped by to ask you a few questions about your son. Vanya, isn’t it?”
“I will not have him called Vanya! It’s a silly nickname. That girl down the road, the Swayne girl, started it. She got it from some story by Tolstoy or somebody.”
“You prefer Ivan?”
“I don’t like Ivan either. My late husband was Russian. He wanted the boy to be called Ivan. I wanted him to be called Giovanni. I was born in Palermo. And now he is neither Ivan nor Giovanni. He is Vanya and all because of a girl down the road.”
“What does he himself want to be called?”
“Something even worse. Johnny. Other boys at school call him that, but to me . . .” Her voice swayed lyrically. “To me he will always be my little Giovanni.”
“Then he’s half Italian and half Russian? That should be an interesting combination. I have some Russian blood myself, but no Italian.”
“Oh, Dr. Willing, Giovanni was born in this country and he’s lived here all his life. He’s just an ordinary American boy.”
“From what I’ve heard, there’s nothing ordinary about him.”
“O-oh?” She made it two syllables with a rising inflection. Her heavy eyelids grew heavier and drooped. She looked more Saracen than Italian now. “And what have you heard?”
Basil evaded that issue. “May I see the boy?”
“Why do you wish to see him, Dr. Willing?”
“The girl—Lucinda Swayne—expected him last night. He didn’t come. I wondered why.”
“But he explained last night. He called the house and told the girl or her father why he couldn’t come. He had a sore throat and could not go out.”
“Are you sure he didn’t?”
“Really, Dr. Willing! You doubt my word?”
“It occurs to me that Giovanni might have slipped out without your knowing anything about it.”
“Dr. Willing, my son would never do anything disobedient or deceitful! Never! He has been brought up according to the latest psychological principles.”