The Night People

by Edward D. Hoch

  But after a time Grace’s messages thinned to one or two a week, and finally to one every other week. Fuller and I began to get on each other’s nerves, and often in the mornings I’d be awakened by the sound of rifle fire as he stood outside the cabin door taking random shots at the occasional snowy owl or arctic ground squirrel that wandered near. We still had the snowmobile, but it was 200 miles to the nearest settlement at Caribou, making a Saturday night’s trip into town out of the question.

  Once, during the evening meal which had grown monotonous with repetition, Fuller said, “Bet you miss her, don’t you, Hank?”

  “Grace? Sure I miss her. It’s been a long time.”

  “Think she’s sitting home nights waiting for us—for you?”

  I put down my fork. “What’s that supposed to mean, Charlie?”

  “Nothing—nothing at all.”

  But the rest of the evening passed under a cloud. By this time we had been up there nearly five months, and it was just too long.

  Christmas came and went, and the winter wind howled outside from morning to night. We fought our way through the snow to gather specimens when we could, and spent the worst of the days in the small lab running tests. The cabin’s heat came from a single gas stove for which we had a number of fuel tanks, and the light was supplied by a small generating unit. It wasn’t exactly like home, but it would have been passable except for the human element.

  It was fantastic, it was unreasonable, but up there—200 miles from the nearest human being—there began to develop between us a sort of rivalry for my wife. An unspoken rivalry, to be sure, a rivalry for a woman nearly 2000 miles away—but still a rivalry.

  “What do you think she’s doing right now, Hank?”

  Or—

  “I wish Grace were here tonight. Warm the place up a bit. Right, Hank?”

  Finally, one evening in January, when a particularly heavy snow had chained us to the inside of the cabin for two long days and nights, the rivalry came to a head. Charlie Fuller was seated at the rough wooden table we used for meals and paperwork and I was in my usual chair facing one of the windows.

  “We’re losing a lot of heat out of this place,” I commented. “Look at those damn icicles.”

  “I’ll go out later and knock them down,” he said.

  I could tell he was in a bad mood and suspected he’d been drinking from the adequate supply of scotch we’d brought along. “We might as well make the best of each other,” I said. “We’re stuck here for another few months together.”

  “Worried, Hank? Anxious to be back in bed with that luscious wife of yours?”

  “Let’s cut out the cracks about Grace, huh? I’m getting sick of it, Charlie.”

  “That’s too bad!” He left the table and went into the lab. After a moment I followed him in and found to my surprise that he was slumped against a cabinet, staring at the floor. “Leave me alone,” he said.

  “Are you sick?”

  “Sick of this place, sick of you!”

  “Then let’s go back.”

  “In this storm?”

  “We’ve got the snowmobile.”

  “No. No, this is one project I can’t walk out on.”

  “Why not? Is it worth this torture day after day?”

  “You don’t understand.” He turned to face me, just barely in control of his emotions. Oddly, though, the anger seemed to have passed from him, replaced by something very close to despair. “I didn’t start out life being a geologist. My field was biology, and I had great plans for being a research scientist at some major pharmaceutical house. They pay very well, you know.”

  “What happened?”

  He leaned against the wall to steady himself. “The damnedest thing, Hank. I couldn’t work with animals. I couldn’t experiment on them, kill them. I don’t think I could ever kill a living thing.”

  “What about the animals and birds you shoot at?”

  “That’s just the point, Hank. I never hit them! I try to, but I purposely miss! That’s why I went into geology—rocks, the earth. That was the only safe thing, the only field in which I wouldn’t make a fool of myself.”

  “You couldn’t make a fool of yourself, Charlie. Even if we called it quits and went back today, the University would still welcome you. You’d still have your professorship.”

  “I’ve got to succeed at something. Hank.” He ran a hand through his graying hair. “Don’t you understand? It’s too late for another failure—too late in life to start over again!”

  He didn’t mention Grace the rest of that day, but I had the sinking sensation that he hadn’t just been talking about his work. His first marriage had been a failure, too. Was he trying to tell me he had to succeed with Grace?

  I slept poorly that night, first because Charlie had decided to walk around the cabin at midnight knocking icicles from the roof, and then because the wind had changed direction and set up a banshee wail in the chimney. I got up once after Charlie was in bed, to look outside, but the windows were frosted over by the wind-driven snow. I could see nothing but the crystal formations of frost on every pane.

  Toward morning I drifted into an uneasy sleep, broken now and then by the occasional bird sounds which told me the storm had ended. It would be pleasant, perhaps even sunny—though the bitter subzero cold might remain for days. I heard Charlie up and around, preparing breakfast, though I paid little attention, trying to get a bit more sleep. An icicle fell, clattering against the side of the cabin.

  Then, sometime later, I sprang awake, knowing I had heard it. A shot! Could Charlie be outside again, firing at the animals? I stretched out in the bed, waiting for some other sound, but nothing reached my ears except the perking of the coffeepot on the gas stove. Finally I got out of bed and went into the other room.

  Charlie Fuller was seated in my chair at the bare table, staring at the wall. A tiny stream of blood was running down his forehead and into one eye. He was dead.

  It took me some moments to comprehend the mere fact of his death, and even after I’d located the bullet wound just above his hairline, I still could not bring myself to fully accept the reality of it. My first thought had been suicide, but now that I had time to let my eyes search the floor and table I could see this was impossible. The bullet had obviously killed him instantly, and there was no weapon anywhere in sight.

  I covered every inch of the room, even looked at the ceiling. There was no gun anywhere—in fact, Fuller’s rifle was missing from its usual place in the corner near the door.

  But if not suicide, what?

  There was no other explanation. Somehow he had killed himself. I warmed up the radio and sent a message to the effect, telling them I’d bring in the body by snowmobile as soon as I could. Our venture into the country above the permafrost line was at an end.

  Then, as I was starting to pack my things, I remembered the coffee. I’d turned off the stove sometime during my search, and even taken a sip of the coffee, all without giving it a thought. Do men about to commit suicide start making breakfast? Do they put a pot of coffee on the stove?

  And then I had to face it. Charlie Fuller had not killed himself.

  All right. It seemed utterly impossible—but there it was. I sat down opposite the body, then got up to cover it with a blanket, and then sat down again.

  What were all the possibilities? Suicide, accident, murder—as simple as that. Not suicide. Not accident. He certainly hadn’t been cleaning his gun at the time.

  That left only one possibility.

  Murder.

  By myself or by an outsider—the only two possibilities.

  Certainly I hadn’t killed Charlie, even in my sleep. I’d come to as soon as I heard the shot, and I’d still been in bed.

  I walked over and crouched behind his chair, trying to see what he must have been seeing in that final moment.

  And then I saw it. Directly opposite, in the center of a frosted window, there was a tiny hole with wisps of snow already drifting in. I ha
dn’t noticed it before—the intricate crystal-like designs of the frost had effectively camouflaged the hole. A few cracks ran from it, but the snow had somehow kept the window from shattering completely.

  It was with a sudden sense of exhilaration that I made the discovery. The bullet had come from outside—the mystery was solved!

  But as soon as I put on my coat and ventured outdoors, I realized that a greater mystery had taken its place. Though the drifting snow had left a narrow walkway under the overhanging roof of the cabin, drifts higher than my head surrounded us on all sides. Even the snowmobile was all but covered. No one could have approached the cabin through that snow, and certainly not without leaving a visible trail.

  I made my way past fallen icicles, some as thick around as my arm, to the punctured window. The snow had drifted a bit beneath it, but I saw at once the butt of Fuller’s rifle protruding from the whiteness. I pulled it out and stared at it, wondering what it could tell me. It had been recently fired, it was the murder weapon, but there was nothing more it could say.

  I took it back into the cabin and sat down. Just the two of us, no one else, and somebody had murdered Charlie Fuller. That narrowed down the suspects considerably.

  As the day passed into noon and the sun appeared finally low in the southern sky, I knew I would have to be moving out soon. I did not relish another night in the cabin with Fuller’s body, and the trip by snowmobile would easily take the remainder of the brief daylight hours and part of the night as well. For a time I debated making for Hudson Bay instead of Caribou, radioing ahead for a ski plane to pick us up. But could I go back, by any route or means, under the circumstances? Charlie Fuller was dead, and I had to discover how it had happened.

  Pacing the cabin, gazing unseeing at the empty laboratory, I knew the answer must lurk here somewhere, within the wooden walls of our temporary home. I went back in my mind over our conversations about Grace. He had loved her, he had wanted her—of that much I was certain. Could he have committed suicide in such a manner that I would be accused of his murder?

  No, there were two things against that theory—it wouldn’t get him Grace, and it wouldn’t get me convicted of the crime. Because even now I was all alone with the physical evidence. I could change the scene any way I wanted, invent any story I liked. Chances are, the police would never even make the trip to the cabin to check my story. I had already called it suicide in my radio report, but I could change it to accident. And there was no one to call it murder.

  No one but myself.

  I went outside again and started sifting through the snow where I’d found the rifle. But there was nothing—a few bits of icicle, but nothing more. Here and there one of Fuller’s footprints remained undrifted, from his icicle-breaking expedition, but I could identify no other prints. If someone had stood at that window to kill Charlie Fuller—

  But no one could have! I stared at the window with growing wonder. The snow and crystallized frost had made it completely opaque, as I’d already noticed during the night. Even if an invisible murderer had dropped from the sky, and somehow got Charlie’s rifle out of the cabin, he could not have fired at Charlie through that window because he could not have seen him through it!

  So where did that leave me?

  I went back inside to the rifle, emptied it, and tried the trigger. It had been adjusted to a hair trigger—the slightest pressure of my finger was enough to click the hammer on the empty chamber.

  Suddenly I felt that I was on the verge of it, that I almost had the answer. I stood staring at the blanket-covered figure in the chair, then went outside and looked through the bullet hole at it again. Lined up perfectly, even through an opaque window.

  And then I knew who had murdered Charlie Fuller.

  I was staring at his body in the chair, but it was my chair! Twenty minutes, a half hour later, and I would have been sitting in that very chair, eating breakfast. Charlie would have called me when the coffee was ready, and I would have come out to sit in that chair, as I did every morning.

  And Charlie Fuller would have killed me.

  It took me five minutes of excited sorting through the bits of icicle in the snow under the window to find the one that was something more. It was ice, all right, but ice encased in a tiny heat-sealed plastic pouch. We used pouches of all sizes in the lab, for the rock specimens we collected. This one had served a different purpose.

  Charlie had driven one of the large icicles into the snow and balanced the rifle on top of it—probably freezing it to the icicle with a few drops of water. Then he’d wiped away a tiny speck of frost on the window to line up the gun barrel with the chair in which I would be sitting. He’d fixed the rifle with a hair trigger, and then jammed the tiny plastic pouch of water between the front of the trigger and the guard.

  When the water in the pouch froze, the ice expanded against the trigger, and the rifle fired through the window at the chair. The recoil had thrown the rifle free of its icicle support, and the frozen pouch of water had dropped into the snow like a simple piece of ice.

  And what had gone wrong? Charlie Fuller must have timed the freezing of the water-filled pouch, but he probably hadn’t timed it in subzero cold with a wind blowing. The water had simply frozen sooner than he’d planned—while he was sitting in my chair for a moment, adjusting it to the precise all-important position facing the window.

  But why had he gone to all that trouble to kill me when we were alone? I thought about that all the way back to Caribou in the snowmobile. He’d probably feared that it would be like the animals he’d told me about, that at the final moment he wouldn’t have been able to squeeze the trigger. Perhaps in the night he’d even stood over my bed with his rifle, unable to go through with it. This way had made it impersonal, like a lab experiment to be set up and observed.

  So Charlie Fuller had murdered himself. But for the authorities, and for Grace, I decided to stick to the suicide story. I didn’t think they’d bother too much about things like the absence of powder burns. Under the circumstances they were stuck with my story, and I wanted to keep it simple. As I said in the beginning, I’m no detective.

  The Way Out

  JOYCE IRELAND FIRST NOTICED the man in the elevator on a rainy Tuesday in October. Perhaps she noticed him because they were the only two without raincoats. She didn’t need one for her daily trip to the bank on the first floor, and seeing him coatless she guessed he too must be on business inside the building.

  He was a tall man, not handsome, with black bushy eyebrows that one noticed before anything else. Joyce came, in fact, to think of him as “The Man with the Eyebrows” when she saw him again on the same elevator two days later. She would have guessed his age at about 35, though he could have been older, and she noticed at once that he wore no wedding ring. At 28, Joyce Ireland was a girl who noticed things like that.

  She had lived alone in a little downtown apartment since the death of her mother the year before. It was a lonely sort of existence, which made her long for the far-away places she’d never be able to see on the $87.50 a week take-home-pay she received from Worldwide Finance Company. In October, with another winter on the way, she had the distinct feeling that life was passing her by. Perhaps it was her looks that were against her. She’d never been pretty, and with the coming of the miniskirt even her unattractive knees were now revealed to the world.

  That was why she began to notice the man with the bushy eyebrows. When he got into the elevator behind her for the third time in a week, she had the wild thought that he was trying to pick her up—a shy lover who had seen her on the street and followed her to the office. Now he would present himself for her approval, and she would get away from Worldwide Finance forever.

  That was her first thought. The second one was that he was going to rob her.

  Joyce made the trip from Worldwide to the ground-floor bank every afternoon at the same time—just a few minutes before the 3:00 bank closing. She always carried a large brown envelope filled with the checks a
nd cash they’d taken in since the previous afternoon. Because of the nature of its business most payments to Worldwide Finance were in cash—very few Worldwide customers had checking accounts. The afternoon trip to the bank was a ritual dating from the days when a girl might carry a few hundred dollars down in the elevator with her. Now, with business increasing steadily, Joyce sometimes had as much as $5,000 in the bulky envelope, especially late in the week when their customers came in faithfully with their pay envelopes.

  This day, a Friday, she’d made up the deposit herself, and she knew she carried $4,355 in cash and a number of checks. She clutched the envelope a little tighter to her bosom, but of course the man with the bushy eyebrows did nothing. There were three other men in the elevator, and they rode all the way down. Perhaps, she decided, the man was waiting for a day when he was alone with her, to grab the money and run.

  Though nothing happened on Friday she thought about the man all weekend, and she decided finally that he was a thief. There was no doubt about it in her mind. At one point, on Saturday night, she was in the act of phoning her boss, Mr. Melrose, to tell him, but then she hung up. He would think she was foolish, or else question why she hadn’t told him sooner. Mr. Melrose was like that.

  Besides, what did she owe the company? Not much for a measly $87.50 a week. Not when she was secretary and part-time bookkeeper and hadn’t had a raise in three years. She was thinking about that last part when the idea came to her—slowly at first, in bits and pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. Suppose, just suppose, there was a robbery and the bandit got away with the money.

  But suppose, she went on in her mind, the bandit lost the money, too. Suppose she—Joyce Ireland—ended up with the four or five thousand dollars. Who would be the loser? Not Worldwide Finance—they were insured against robbery. Certainly not the bandit, who didn’t deserve the money in the first place. It would be hers, all hers, like finding it in the street, like inheriting it from a rich uncle she’d never known.