Murder Among Children

by Donald E. Westlake

  The entrance was under the carport. I went up three steps to an elaborate wooden door, and rang the bell. I stood there for a minute, and then one of the young men called over from the station wagon, “Go on in. Office to your right.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and pushed open the door, and went in.

  The house echoed. That was my first impression, and it never subsequently went away. Everywhere in that building, there was the sense of an echo reverberating just around the next corner, down some nearby corridor, up in the angle of some other ceiling. However muffled one’s own movements might be, whether by carpet or design, an echo existed, independently and without reference to any cause.

  The office was to my right, as the young man had said. I went in and found a girl there, making entries with a ballpoint pen on three-by-five cards. She had long straight brown hair, folk singer style, and wore a white shift and white sandals. I knew her name, too, and many of the details of the breakdown which had made her first suicidal and later catatonic and ultimately had led her here to this building, halfway back to a home that no longer really existed. It was embarrassing somehow to know so much about her without her being aware of my knowledge, as though unknown to her her clothing were gaping open in some disgraceful way. I found it difficult to meet her eye.

  She had no trouble meeting mine. She looked at me, her eyes still full of whatever she was entering on the three-by-five cards, and said, “Yes? May I help you?”

  “Mitchell Tobin,” I said. We’d decided it would be easier and just as safe to use my own name. “I’m the new resident,” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I have your forms here someplace.” Her desk was very messy, and she ruffled through it with the expertise of someone who always keeps her desk very messy, quickly coming up with a large manila folder. She opened this, withdrew a sheaf of papers held together with a paper clip, and passed three of the papers over to me. “Would you fill these out, please? You can sit at that desk there. You’ll find a pen in the drawer.”

  I filled out the forms, putting down the lies and half-truths Doctor Cameron and I had agreed upon, and gave them back to the girl, who glanced at them briefly, had me sign two other pieces of paper, and then got to her feet, saying, “Let’s find somebody to show you to your room.”

  “Couldn’t I find it for myself?”

  “I doubt it,” she said. “It takes a few days to get your bearings around here. We’ve talked about making a map and giving everybody a copy, but nobody knows the place well enough to make the map.”

  She led the way out of the office and down the hall, which turned and forked with no apparent logic. Ahead of us I could hear a ping-pong ball tap-tapping. The girl stopped at a closed door, opened it, and the tapping suddenly increased in volume. She stuck her head in and called, “Jerry, you doing anything?”

  A muffled response.

  “Would you show a new man to his room, please?”

  Another muffled response, and the girl turned toward me, smiling, leaving the door ajar. A few seconds later, out came a man I thought at first to be young, but then saw to be quite old. He was short and wiry, dressed in khakis and T-shirt like the boys outside, plus scuffed white sneakers, and his gray hair was cropped so close to his head it would almost pass for blond. He had a pinched face, a sharp nose, and a wide mouth open now in a broad smile, showing teeth so clean and so studiedly natural that they had to be artificial.

  The girl said, “Jerry, this is Mitchell Tobin. Mr. Tobin, Jerry Kanter.”

  I acknowledged the greeting, telling Jerry Kanter to call me by my first name, and at the same time thinking how very different he was from the mental image I’d picked up from his dossier. Somehow, multiple murderers should be large and somber men, not short narrow-headed men with cheery smiles.

  The girl said to me, “And I’m Debby Lattimore.”

  I was distracted by Jerry Kanter, and nearly said I know, which would have been disastrous. I caught myself, and said, “How do you do?”

  Jerry said, “Where’s Mitch go?”

  “In Marty’s room,” she said. She told me, “Marty left a few weeks ago.”

  “Nice place,” Jerry commented, about the room. “You ready for a hike?”

  “I suppose so,” I said.

  “If you need anything,” Debby said, “I’m usually in the office. Or Doctor Cameron will be there.”

  “I suppose I should see him,” I said. It would be a relief to be with someone in whose presence I wouldn’t have to lie.

  “Oh, he’ll be around,” Debby said. “See you later.” She nodded and smiled, and walked away down the hall.

  Jerry said, “This way,” and I switched my suitcase to the other hand and walked with him. “You’re on the second floor,” he said. “We’ll do the back stairway.”

  The back stairway was enclosed, but broad enough for us to go up side by side. Jerry said, “Where were you?”

  My first real test. “Revo Hill,” I said.

  He frowned. “I don’t think I know it.”

  “In Connecticut.”

  “Oh. I don’t think we have anybody from there.”

  I knew they didn’t. That was why Doctor Cameron had picked it.

  The corridor we emerged to on the second floor was long and wide and lined with doors. Dark portraits of bygone admirals hung on the walls between the doors. Jerry led me along labyrinthine corridors, with me walking more slowly than necessary in order to try to memorize the way, and at last he opened a door on our right. “If you can’t find the place the first few times you leave it,” he said, “just ask somebody. Don’t leave a trail of bread crumbs, we’ve got a mouse problem.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said.

  “Well, I’ll see you,” he said.

  “Thank you for being my guide.”

  “Any time. You play touch football?”

  “A little. Not for a long while.”

  “Well, naturally,” he said. I didn’t understand for a second, and then I saw I’d been on the implied edge of a disastrous slip. If I’d just been released from Revo Hill Sanitarium, naturally I hadn’t played touch football for a while. It shouldn’t even have been necessary to say it.

  I was beginning to see that living a lie isn’t quite as easy as it is made out to be in movies and books. The direct questions can be handled readily enough, but how does one edit his unconscious assumptions?

  Jerry didn’t notice anything particularly wrong, however. He merely assured me I would have a place on the touch football field whenever I wanted it, and went away, and I went into my new room.

  It was quite large, really, and made to seem even larger by being underfurnished. The single bed on the right was far too small for the room, and so was the brown metal bureau on the opposite wall. The imitation Persian carpet was of good size, but the two chairs, writing desk and floor lamp were not by any means enough furniture to place on it.

  I put my suitcase down, shut the door, and went over to look out one of my three windows. I saw lawn and trees, and through the leaves and branches I could make out the orange brick of the house next door. This was the opposite side of the building from the carport and Robert O’Hara and William Merrivale, the two young men washing the station wagon. I unpacked, putting my things away in the closet and bureau, finding no trace of the former resident. The room had been anonymous when I’d walked into it, and when I was done unpacking it was still anonymous, an empty large underfurnished room waiting for somebody other than me.

  I didn’t want to stay in here any more than necessary, and in any case I should be out and around, getting a look at the place. And I hadn’t met any of the injured ones yet. So I left the room, uncomfortable that there was no way to lock the door, and made my way with some difficulty and one wrong turn back to the staircase Jerry and I had come up. I opened the door and stepped through, shut the door behind me, started down the stairs, and felt something catch my ankle.

  I tried to stop myself, but t
here was no banister and my flailing hands bounced off the side walls. My balance was gone. I felt myself toppling, saw the staircase stretching down ahead of me with all those sharp stair edges like the serrations of a steak-knife, and far far away was the bottom.

  I should have gone limp, of course, I should have relaxed and fallen like a rag doll, that’s the way to minimize the danger of injury, but I wasn’t thinking at all. I’d panicked, and I went down with my arms stretched out rigid in front of me, my hands wide open, my fingers splayed out, and when I hit I heard the dry quick snap in my right forearm. And nothing more.

  2

  I DREAMED I WAS WORKING on my wall, and for some reason my arm got caught in it. I looked at it in irritation and dismay and bewilderment, my arm stuck into the wall halfway up to the elbow, cement packed hard all around it, the bricks pressing against it on all sides. I couldn’t understand how I’d done it, how I’d trapped my arm in there without noticing. I tried to move it, but the pressure was too great all around, and my straining made a sickening clammy ache travel up my arm and down my side and into my stomach, so I thought I would faint. Instead, I woke up.

  My wall was still in my mind, so I didn’t make sense for a moment out of what was actually in front of my eyes. In my confusion, all I had to cling to was the thought of my wall.

  It’s a good wall. I’m building it myself, slowly, carefully, a very little bit at a time. I’m in no hurry to finish it, the construction is its own purpose, and the wall is emerging from the ground straight and solid and permanent. When done it will be two feet thick and ten feet high, enclosing the back yard of my house on three sides, with no openings. The house itself is the fourth side, and when the wall is finished the only way into the back yard will be through the house. I have been working on the wall now for over a year, except during the coldest part of the winter, and it has attained so far a height of just over two feet all the way around. This may seem like slow progress, but to me at times it seems far too fast, because I can see that a day will come when the wall will be finished, and what will I think about then?

  I turned my head, my mind full of thoughts about the wall, and gradually I began to recognize elements of the room I was in, and then memory fell into place and I remembered where I was and why I’d come here. And what had happened, the falling, the stairs speeding toward me, the dry snapping sound inside my arm.

  My arm. I tried to lift it, and it seemed to be held down with heavy weights. I lifted my head instead, and looked along the length of my arm, and saw a fresh white plaster cast covering it from just below the elbow to the middle of my fingers. And my head—which ached, a dull foggy ache that made me fuzzy-minded—was wrapped in bandages.

  So he’d gotten me. On arrival, a greeting from my prey. And I had come here warned against him.

  Was he warned against me? Did he know who I was and what I was doing at The Midway? Or was it purely accident that the accident had been arranged for me? That seemed more likely, and in any case I preferred to believe it.

  But how badly was I hurt? With my free hand I pressed and poked at my head beneath the bandage. Two areas near the right front responded with sharp pain, but my fingers didn’t find anything that seemed really serious. I probably had cuts and bruises up there, that’s all.

  My arm? Broken, no question of that. And any other injuries?

  I found it surprisingly easy to sit up, but the instant I did so a blinding headache swept over me, as though a bucket of liquid pain had been dumped on my head. I sat there with head bowed for half a minute or so, till the pain subsided again, and then took inventory of myself.

  I had a bad burn on my right knee. Also a tender spot in my rib cage on the right side. Those two, plus the head and the arm, seemed to be the extent of my injuries.

  I was amazed that I didn’t feel weaker, but then I saw the small puncture mark on the inside of my left elbow. A doctor had been to see me, of course, the cast on my right arm demonstrated that, and he must have given me something to make me sleep. I’d done a lot of my healing already, while unconscious.

  What time was it? The floor lamp was lit and there was darkness outside my windows now, meaning it had to be after nine o’clock at night, and it had been barely noon when I’d taken the spill. My watch had been taken off, along with the rest of my clothing, so I could only make guesses.

  I was starving. The question about time had made me suddenly stop and realize how hungry I was, and it was my stomach rather than my sense of duty or question about time that drove me to get out of bed.

  All movements affected my head, but by moving very slowly and carefully I managed to keep the pain to a low background irritation. I slid my legs over the side—I was dressed in nothing but pajama bottoms—and with a great deal of care stood up.

  Ah. I wasn’t quite as strong as I’d thought while in the safety of the bed. Standing was another matter. I leaned against the wall beside the bed for a minute, till a certain dizziness passed, and then stepped in slow small movements across the large room to the bureau on the opposite wall, on top of which I could see my watch.

  Twenty minutes to five. In the morning? I held the watch to my ear, and it was ticking. I’d been unconscious nearly seventeen hours. No wonder I was so hungry.

  I dressed with a great deal of difficulty. Not only did my head wince at every careless movement, I had a lot of trouble getting any useful assistance from the fingers of my right hand. They jutted from the cast, but didn’t want to work well. Zipping my trousers was bad enough, but tying my shoelaces was very nearly impossible, and when I finally had loose sloppy knots done on both, the headache was with me full-strength. I sat in the chair at the writing desk a few minutes, till I felt a little better, and then got up to finish dressing.

  A shirt was impossible, so what I finally did was put on the tops to the pajama bottoms I’d awakened in, leaving the right sleeve dangling empty and buttoning the buttons awkwardly with my left hand.

  I had brought a small pencil flashlight, and this I tucked into my hip pocket before leaving the room. It was quarter past five when at last I opened the hall door, it having taken me over half an hour to get dressed.

  The corridor lights were on. I shut the room door behind me and stood listening to the silence a moment. The echo was muted late at night, but it still existed, vibrating far away out of sight, as though some tiny bird were caged in the attic.

  I found the staircase this time with no false turns. It was empty, silent, enclosed, with lit ceiling globes at top and bottom. I took out my pencil flash, awkwardly sat down on the top step, switched on the flashlight, and carefully examined the baseboard on both sides. I could see nothing at all on the left, but on the right I could just barely make out the small hole where a nail or tack of some kind had recently been.

  So my guess was probably right. He had stretched some sort of wire or string across the top of the stairs, just at ankle height. I distinctly remembered the feeling that something had caught my ankle.

  He’d been taking quite a chance this time. He’d set the trap in broad daylight—it hadn’t been there when Jerry Kanter and I had come upstairs—and then he’d had to wait nearby until someone was caught, so he could quickly go and remove the evidence, the wire and tacks.

  This was his fifth booby trap, and he hadn’t yet repeated himself. The first had been a table that had collapsed in the dining room, bruising the legs of the two people sitting there and burning them both with hot coffee. The second was when a resident opened a seldom-used storage closet and a six-foot-long metal piece of bed frame which had been leaning against the door on the inside fell out and hit him in the face, cutting his mouth and chipping two of his teeth. The third was the collapse of a small terrace outside a woman resident’s room while she was standing on it to watch a touch football game on the lawn below, the result being that she was now in the local hospital with a broken neck and three broken ribs, among other injuries. And the fourth was a ladder rung that had given way while
a resident was doing some work on the gutters, so that he fell and broke his leg.

  It was the ladder accident that had tipped his hand, since another resident, in putting the ladder away, had seen that it was partly sawn through, and had taken the evidence to Doctor Cameron. They’d checked the terrace and found that that had been tampered with also. There was no way to prove the bed frame had been left dangerously against the door on purpose, and the collapsed table had long since been thrown out, but the evidence of the third and fourth accidents was enough to force Doctor Cameron to take action. The action he had chosen to take was me. I had agreed with great reluctance to come up here and pretend to be another resident while trying to find out who was causing these injuries, and I had promptly become victim number five.

  My only consolation was that so far no one had been victimized twice, though even that was small consolation since most of the booby traps had operated strictly by chance. Anyone at all might have opened that closet door or started down these stairs. Half a dozen residents would have been likely to use that ladder. The injurer didn’t seem to care in particular who was hurt, just so someone was.

  A small sound made me look up. I was still sitting hunched on the top step, the pencil flashlight beamed at the tiny hole in the baseboard, my useless right arm imprisoned inside my pajama top, and the small sound made my hackles rise. Was I about to be pushed? Could I survive two falls like that in the same day?

  I saw black tennis shoes, black denim work pants. My right arm wanted to reach out and grasp the wall, the floor, anything at all for protection and support. In order to look up, to see any more of this person, I would have to tilt my head back over the yawning staircase, and I was very reluctant to do so.