The Best American Noir of the Century

by Otto Penzler (ed)

  “Mother,” I say, intending to add, “Where are Meg and Sarah?” But I stop before I do. One of my mother’s shoes is off, the other askew on her foot. There is mud on the shoes. There is blood on her cotton dress. It is torn, her brittle hair disrupted, blood on her face, her bruised lips are swollen.

  For several moments I am silent with shock. “My God, Mother,” I finally manage to say, and as if the words are a spring releasing me to action I touch her to wake her. But I see that her eyes are open, staring ceilingward, unseeing though alive, and each breath is a sudden full gasp, then slow exhalation.

  “Mother, what has happened? Who did this to you? Meg? Sarah?”

  But she does not look at me, only constant toward the ceiling.

  “For God’s sake, Mother, answer me! Look at me! What has happened?”

  Nothing. Eyes sightless. Between gasps she is like a statue.

  ~ * ~

  What I think is hysterical. Disjointed, contradictory. I must find Meg and Sarah. They must be somewhere, beaten like my mother. Or worse. Find them. Where? But I cannot leave my mother. When she comes to consciousness, she too will be hysterical, frightened, in great pain. How did she end up on the bed?

  In her room there is no sign of the struggle she must have put up against her attacker. It must have happened somewhere else. She crawled from there to here. Then I see the blood on the floor, the swath of blood down the hall from the stairs. Who did this? Where is he? Who would beat a gray, wrinkled, arthritic old woman? Why in God’s name would he do it? I shudder. The pain of the arthritis as she struggled with him.

  Perhaps he is still in the house, waiting for me.

  To the hollow sickness in my stomach now comes fear, hot, pulsing, and I am frantic before I realize what I am doing — grabbing the spare cane my mother always keeps by her bed, flicking on the light in her room, throwing open the closet door and striking in with the cane. Viciously, sounds coming from my throat, the cane flailing among the faded dresses.

  No one. Under the bed. No one. Behind the door. No one.

  I search all the upstairs rooms that way, terrified, constantly checking behind me, clutching the cane and whacking into closets, under beds, behind doors, with a force that would certainly crack a skull. No one.

  “Meg! Sarah!”

  No answer, not even an echo in this sound-absorbing house.

  There is no attic, just an overhead entry to a crawlspace under the eaves, and that opening has long been sealed. No sign of tampering. No one has gone up.

  I rush down the stairs, seeing the trail of blood my mother has left on the carpet, imagining her pain as she crawled, and search the rooms downstairs with the same desperate thoroughness. In the front closet. Behind the sofa and chairs. Behind the drapes.

  No one.

  I lock the front door, lest he be outside in the storm waiting to come in behind me. I remember to draw every blind, close every drape, lest he be out there peering at me. The rain pelts insistently against the windowpanes.

  I cry out again and again for Meg and Sarah. The police. My mother. A doctor. I grab for the phone on the wall by the front stairs, fearful to listen to it, afraid he has cut the line outside. But it is droning. Droning. I ring for the police, working the handle at the side around and around and around.

  ~ * ~

  They are coming, they say. A doctor with them. Stay where I am, they say. But I cannot. Meg and Sarah, I must find them. I know they are not in the basement where the milk is dripping — all the basement is open to view. Except for my childhood things, we have cleared out all the boxes and barrels and the shelves of jars the Saturday before.

  But under the stairs. I have forgotten about under the stairs and now I race down and stand dreading in the milk; but there are only cobwebs there, already re-formed from Saturday when we cleared them. I look up at the side door I first came through, and as if I am seeing through a telescope I focus largely on the handle. It seems to fidget. I have a panicked vision of the intruder bursting through, and I charge up to lock the door, and the door to the barn.

  And then I think: if Meg and Sarah are not in the house they are likely in the barn. But I cannot bring myself to unlock the barn door and go through. He must be there as well. Not in the rain outside but in the shelter of the barn, and there are no lights to turn on there.

  And why the milk? Did he do it and where did he get it? And why? Or did Sarah do it before? No, the milk is too freshly dripping. It has been put there too recently. By him. But why? And who is he? A tramp? An escapee from some prison? Or asylum? No, the nearest institution is far away, hundreds of miles. From the town then. Or a nearby farm.

  I know my questions are for delay, to keep me from entering the barn. But I must. I take the flashlight from the kitchen drawer and unlock the door to the barn, force myself to go in quickly, cane ready, flashing my light. The stalls are still there, listing; and some of the equipment, churners, separators, dull and rusted, webbed and dirty. The must of decaying wood and crumbled hay, the fresh wet smell of the rain gusting through cracks in the walls. Once this was a dairy, as the other farms around still are.

  Flicking my light toward the corners, edging toward the stalls, boards creaking, echoing, I try to control my fright, try to remember as a boy how the cows waited in the stalls for my father to milk them, how the barn was once board-tight and solid, warm to be in, how there was no connecting door from the barn to the house because my father did not want my mother to smell the animals in her kitchen.

  I run my light down the walls, sweep it in arcs through the darkness before me as I draw nearer to the stalls, and in spite of myself I recall that other autumn when the snow came early, four feet deep by morning and still storming thickly, how my father went out to the barn to milk and never returned for lunch, nor supper. There was no phone then, no way to get help, and my mother and I waited all night, unable to make our way through the storm, listening to the slowly dying wind; and the next morning was clear and bright and blinding as we shoveled out to find the cows in agony in their stalls from not having been milked and my father dead, frozen rock-solid in the snow in the middle of the next field where he must have wandered when he lost his bearings in the storm.

  There was a fox, risen earlier than us, nosing at him under the snow, and my father had to be sealed in his coffin before he could lie in state. Days after, the snow was melted, gone, the barnyard a sea of mud, and it was autumn again and my mother had the connecting door put in. My father should have tied a rope from the house to his waist to guide him back in case he lost his way. Certainly he knew enough. But then he was like that, always in a rush. When I was ten.

  Thus I think as I light the shadows near the stalls, terrified of what I may find in any one of them, Meg and Sarah, or him, thinking of how my mother and I searched for my father and how I now search for my wife and child, trying to think of how it was once warm in here and pleasant, chatting with my father, helping him to milk, the sweet smell of new hay and grain, the different sweet smell of fresh droppings, something I always liked and neither my father nor my mother could understand. I know that if I do not think of these good times I will surely go mad in awful anticipation of what I may find. Pray God they have not died!

  What can he have done to them? To assault a five-year-old girl? Split her. The hemorrhaging alone can have killed her.

  And then, even in the barn, I hear my mother cry out for me. The relief I feel to leave and go to her unnerves me. I do want to find Meg and Sarah, to try to save them. Yet I am relieved to go. I think my mother will tell me what has happened, tell me where to find them. That is how I justify my leaving as I wave the light in circles around me, guarding my back, retreating through the door and locking it.

  ~ * ~

  Upstairs she sits stiffly on her bed. I want to make her answer my questions, to shake her, to force her to help, but I know it will only frighten her more, maybe push her mind down to where I can never reach.

  “Mother,” I sa
y to her softly, touching her gently. “What has happened?” My impatience can barely be contained. “Who did this? Where are Meg and Sarah?”

  She smiles at me, reassured by the safety of my presence. Still she cannot answer.

  “Mother. Please,” I say. “I know how bad it must have been. But you must try to help. I must know where they are so I can help them.”

  She says, “Dolls.”

  It chills me. “What dolls, Mother? Did a man come here with dolls? What did he want? You mean he looked like a doll? Wearing a mask like one?”

  Too many questions. All she can do is blink.

  “Please, Mother. You must try your best to tell me. Where are Meg and Sarah?”

  “Dolls,” she says.

  As I first had the foreboding of disaster at the sight of Sarah’s unrumpled satin bedspread, now I am beginning to understand, rejecting it, fighting it.

  “Yes, Mother, the dolls,” I say, refusing to admit what I know. “Please, Mother. Where are Meg and Sarah?”

  “You are a grown boy now. You must stop playing as a child. Your father. Without him you will have to be the man in the house. You must be brave.”

  “No, Mother.” I can feel it swelling in my chest.

  “There will be a great deal of work now, more than any child should know. But we have no choice. You must accept that God has chosen to take him from us, that you are all the man I have left to help me.”

  “No, Mother.”

  “Now you are a man and you must put away the things of a child.”

  Eyes streaming, I am barely able to straighten, leaning wearily against the doorjamb, tears rippling from my face down to my shirt, wetting it cold where it had just begun to dry. I wipe my eyes and see her reaching for me, smiling, and I recoil down the hall, stumbling down the stairs, down, through the sitting room, the kitchen, down, down to the milk, splashing through it to the dollhouse, and in there, crammed and doubled, Sarah. And in the wicker chest, Meg. The toys not on the floor for Sarah to play with, but taken out so Meg could be put in. And both of them, their stomachs slashed, stuffed with sawdust, their eyes rolled up like dolls’ eyes.

  The police are knocking at the side door, pounding, calling out who they are, but I am powerless to let them in. They crash through the door, their rubber raincoats dripping as they stare down at me.

  “The milk,” I say.

  They do not understand. Even as I wait, standing in the milk, listening to the rain pelting on the windows while they come over to see what is in the dollhouse and in the wicker chest, while they go upstairs to my mother and then return so I can tell them again, “The milk.” But they still do not understand.

  “She killed them of course,” one man says. “But I don’t see why the milk.”

  Only when they speak to the neighbors down the road and learn how she came to them, needing the cans of milk, insisting she carry them herself to the car, the agony she was in as she carried them, only when they find the empty cans and the knife in a stall in the barn, can I say, “The milk. The blood. There was so much blood, you know. She needed to deny it, so she washed it away with milk, purified it, started the dairy again. You see, there was so much blood.”

  ~ * ~

  That autumn we live in a house in the country, my mother’s house, the house I was raised in. I have been to the village, struck even more by how nothing in it has changed, yet everything has, because I am older now, seeing it differently. It is as though I am both here now and back then, at once with the mind of a boy and a man ...

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  * * * *

  1979

  PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

  * * *

  SLOWLY, SLOWLY IN THE WIND

  Patricia Highsmith (originally Mary Patricia Plangman) (1921-1995) was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and moved to New York as a child, later graduating from Barnard College. Her mother divorced her father five months before she was born, and had tried to abort her by drinking turpentine, so it is not surprising that they did not have a close relationship. Highsmith moved permanently to Europe in 1963, where she enjoyed greater success, both critical and commercial, than in America.

  Her first short story, “The Heroine,” was published in Harpers Bazaar shortly after her graduation and was selected as one of the twenty-two best stories of 1945. Her first novel, Strangers on a Train (1950), written while still in her twenties, was moderately successful but became a sensation when it was acquired for the movies by Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the classic film noir and released it in 1951; it starred Robert Walker and Farley Granger. More than twenty films are based on her thirty books (twenty-two novels and eight short story collections), many made in France. Apart from the first novel, she has been most avidly read for her series about the amoral, sexually ambiguous murderer and thief Tom Ripley, beginning with The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and continuing with Ripley Under Ground (1970), Ripley’s Game (1974), The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), and Ripley Under Water (1991). Ironically, her career and book sales received a huge boost after she died, when The Talented Mr. Ripley was filmed in 1999 by Anthony Minghella, starring Matt Damon, Gwy-neth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Cate Blanchett. It was followed by Ripley’s Game (2002), starring John Malkovich.

  “Slowly, Slowly in the Wind” was Highsmith’s personal favorite of all her stories, according to an introduction she wrote for Chillers (1990), a collection of her stories that had been adapted for a television series. She acknowledges that the title was inspired by an aide to then-president Richard M. Nixon, who said that he’d like to see a certain enemy twisting slowly, slowly in the wind. It was first published in her collection Slowly, Slowly in the Wind (1976).

  ~ * ~

  E

  dward “skip” skipperton spentmostofhislifefeelingangry.lt was his nature. When he was a boy he had a bad temper; now, as a man, he was impatient with people who were slow or stupid. He often met such people in his work, which was to give advice on managing companies. He was good at his job: he could see when people were doing something the wrong way, and he told them in a loud, clear voice how to do it better. The company directors always followed his advice.

  Now Skipperton was fifty-two. His wife had left him two years ago, because she couldn’t live with his bad temper. She had met a quiet university teacher in Boston, ended her marriage with Skip, and married the teacher. Skip wanted very much to keep their daughter, Maggie, who was then fifteen. With the help of clever lawyers he succeeded.

  A few months after he separated from his wife, Skip had a heart attack. He was better again in six months, but his doctor gave him some strong advice.

  “Stop smoking and drinking now, or you’re a dead man, Skip! And I think you should leave the world of business, too — you’ve got enough money. Why don’t you buy a small farm and live quietly in the country?”

  So Skip looked around, and bought a small farm in Maine with a comfortable farmhouse. A little river, the Coldstream, ran along the bottom of the garden, and the house was called Coldstream Heights. He found a local man, Andy Humbert, to live on the farm and work for him.

  Maggie was moved from her private school in New York to one in Switzerland; she would come home for the holidays. Skip did stop smoking and drinking: when he decided to do something, he always did it immediately. There was work for him on the farm. He helped Andy to plant corn in the field behind the house; he bought two sheep to keep the grass short, and a pig, which soon gave birth to twelve more.

  There was only one thing that annoyed him: his neighbor. Peter Frosby owned the land next to his, including the banks of the Coldstream and the right to catch fish in it. Skip wanted to be able to fish a little. He also wanted to feel that the part of the river which he could see from the house belonged to him. But when he offered to buy the fishing rights, he was told that Frosby refused to sell. Skip did not give up easily. The next week he telephoned Frosby, inviting him to his house for a drink. Frosby arrived in a new Cadillac, driven by a young man. He introduced t
he young man as his son, also called Peter. Frosby was a rather small, thin man with cold gray eyes.

  “The Frosbys don’t sell their land,” he said. “We’ve had the same land for nearly three hundred years, and the river’s always been ours. I can’t understand why you want it.”

  “I’d just like to do a little fishing in the summer,” said Skip. “And think you’ll agree that the price I offer isn’t bad — twenty thousand dollars for about two hundred meters of fishing rights. You won’t get such a good offer again in your lifetime.”

  “I’m not interested in my lifetime,” Frosby said with a little smile. “I’ve got a son here.”

  The son was a good-looking boy with dark hair and strong shoulders, taller than his father. He sat there with his arms across his chest, and appeared to share his father’s negative attitude. Still, he smiled as they were leaving and said, “You’ve made this house look very nice, Mr. Skipperton.” Skip was pleased. He had tried hard to choose the most suitable furniture for the sitting room.