by Gene Wolfe
“That’s what I said,” I told him, but I had to say it to his back.
After that I sat and thought. Outside you could hear the wind in the trees maybe once every five minutes, but that was all. There was somebody else in the house moving around, mostly upstairs, but there was nothing scary about it—he sounded like he must have been working because he moved too much for loafing, but it wasn’t restless pacing up and down either, just somebody walking when he needed to get something. Eventually I heard him come downstairs for maybe the third or fourth time, and he stuck his head in to look at me. He stayed long enough to let me ask for something if I wanted it, and when I didn’t he went away; he had been a big fat sour-faced man who wore moleskin work pants, construction boots, and no shirt.
When things are bad, I always figure that if only I could spend all day thinking about them I could get them straightened out in my mind. But when I really have the time—like then—either I find out it doesn’t take nearly that long, or I just can’t do anything with them and they chase their tails through my brain until they wear me out. This time it was the second one, and finally I knew I’d have to find something else to do or go nuts, so I got up on my crutches and started poking around.
Blue’s desk had a file drawer, and the folders were full of letters. The first one that I read was from somebody who’d been in the slammer with him (black by the sound of it, although you couldn’t be sure) who wanted help when he got outside. The next was from a woman who was answering some kind of ad he’d run and wanted to know if a criminologist could talk sense into her son. The third was from a woman he must not have been seeing anymore who wanted him back. I didn’t know any of the people, and after the last one I got ashamed of what I was doing and stopped.
The drawer above had a little good white bond paper and a lot of cheap yellow paper, a supply of business cards like the one he’d given me on the train, the Greater Chicago White Pages, and a pencil that somebody had chewed. When I saw the paper, I remembered the letter somebody had sent to the Trib; but it had been done on an electric typewriter, and an electric typewriter wouldn’t have fit in here. Anyway, there wasn’t any. The flat drawer in the middle had more pencils, a couple of Bics, rubber bands, and some other junk.
The next drawer was the upper right, and that was where my father had kept that little Gestapo gun in his desk. It had hit me already how much this was like his study at home—I couldn’t have missed it after what Blue had said in the car—and I was a little scared of what I’d find there. I’d already noticed Blue was a lefty (his watch was on his right wrist, which practically advertised it) but just the same …
I could have saved my sweat. A box half full of tapes for one of those little minirecorders, a booze bottle half full of milky stuff that was probably moonshine, and—I am not kidding—a magnifying glass. The lens was in a solid brass frame that looked old enough to qualify for the Barton Antique Fair and Art Festival easy, and I tried to think of something witty along the lines of the difference between rich people and poor people was that rich people had new glasses and old whisky, but magnifying was too long and kept screwing it up.
Just one drawer left, and it was full of big envelopes, a lot of them recycled junk mail; they had clippings inside, and they weren’t labeled, so I couldn’t understand for the life of me how Blue knew what went where. I still can’t. The top one had two pieces on diet (maybe for the fat man, Tick?), one on the social difficulties of obese women, one about the cigarette industry, and one about a guy who stuck radio telltales on sea turtles. Nuts.
There were bookcases made of boards and bricks, and others made out of crates, the crates under the windows and the board-and-brick jobs up against the walls that didn’t have any. Lots of criminology, lots of true crime, and a few mysteries. Great Literature with capital letters. Maugham, Mark Twain, and some other stuff I didn’t know at all and couldn’t place. I found myself a book about the Cincinnati Strangler, a guy I’d never heard of who pulled some cute capers like stealing a cab and answering the calls he heard from the cab company’s dispatcher.
Blue and Muddy got back almost at the same time. Muddy had three rabbits and looked happy, and Blue looked just the way he always did. He didn’t really have an expressionless face like Sandoz’s, and with those blue eyes and the thin, straw-colored hair there wasn’t anything Indian about him. Just the same, you could have lost a lot of money playing poker with him. I said, “How’d it go?” and he said, “All right,” and I said, “Want to tell me about it?” and he said, “Not yet.” And that was that.
Muddy went back to the kitchen and cut the rabbits up, and Tick came in and built a fire and then went out and cut green sticks for us to roast with. We had roast rabbit and bread and apple butter and coffee, and except for the coffee it was about the greatest meal I ever ate in my life; I can still remember it. Tick didn’t eat much (surprising me quite a bit) and Blue hardly ate anything; but Muddy and I put away almost a rabbit apiece. Finally I asked Blue if he was trying to get my father off.
“I’m trying to find out who killed your uncle and Larry Lief,” he said. “It’s much the same thing.”
“You don’t think he did?”
He shook his head; but he wouldn’t say anything else, and when we were through eating he took me out to his car and drove me home. Bill wasn’t around and neither was Mrs. Maas, but Blue helped me on the stairs as much as he could, and I didn’t really have much trouble, although it was slow. While I was undressing I could hear him going downstairs. When he got to the bottom he didn’t go out, though. He went into my father’s study, if I was guessing right from the sounds, and stayed there for maybe half an hour. Okay, I’d searched his desk, so I couldn’t complain.
How We Mulled
It felt funny for our house to be so empty and quiet. I hadn’t really expected Elaine to come running to see if her little girl was okay, but I’d expected, at least, to hear her and Mrs. Maas stirring around. After a while it got spooky. I played records, and that should have helped; but it didn’t because I could hear the silence behind them, if you know what I mean; and when each record was over there would be nothing except the click, click of the changer and the flop of the next one dropping into place. When my hi-fi had gone through the stack, I let it switch itself off; I read for a little and took the medicine that was supposed to stop my leg from hurting, and went to sleep.
A door shutting woke me up. Not the front door—the back. Then I heard Mrs. Maas walking around in the kitchen; I listened for two or three minutes, I guess, before I was sure it was her, and then, boy, did it ever sound good. I could have yelled or rung my bell for her to come up, but I didn’t even think about it.
I switched on my light instead, grabbed my crutches and got up. My little clock said it was after midnight, but I started downstairs, scared to death I’d fall because I couldn’t use both crutches and hang on to the banister at the same time, but bound and determined to find some human company. I decided right then that if I ever get rich and build a house of my own it’s going to have an elevator.
Mrs. Maas must have heard me, because she came and dithered and more or less helped me down the bottom half of the stairs. I don’t think I’ve said a lot about Mrs. Maas so far, but maybe I ought to here. She was blond, a little bigger than average but not really big, solid-looking and muscular. I never asked how old she was, but her hair was starting to get gray and I’d say about fifty. One time she told me she had grown up on a farm, and both her parents had been born in the Old Country. She was a widow.
Here I’m going to psychoanalyze. If you don’t like it (and in a lot of books I’ve read I don’t) you can skip this bit. I think that while Mrs. Maas had been with us I had been trying, without really knowing what I was doing, to make her my mother. Or my grandmother or aunt—whatever. You know what I mean. And I think Mrs. Maas had been through it before someplace and had lost her job because somebody’s real parents saw she was getting closer to their kid than they were.
Naturally I can’t prove any of that; but that night we were both tired and scared, and we practically fell into each other’s arms. She didn’t say anything special to me, just, “Oh, Holly, my poor Holly!” and I didn’t say anything special to her; but by the time she had helped me into one of the kitchen chairs and put on water to make cocoa, we both felt quite a bit better.
“Where have you been?” I said.
And she said, “Didn’t they tell you? They took me away, down to the police.”
“In Barton?”
“Yes, to Barton. Afterward they said if I would take the lie test they would let me come home. I said yes, and we went to Constance.” She showed me where they’d stuck the sensors on her. “They asked a million questions. Some two or three times, saying it different ways.”
“What kind of questions?”
“About your father. Bill is still there, they were going to do him after.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“That he is such a good man, only away too much. They asked if he had fights with your mother, and I said no.”
“Mrs. Maas, that was a lie. The machine must have jumped the track.”
“No, it was not a lie. Not real fights. In fights someone hits or throws. What your father and mother have are arguments. I don’t think you ever in your life saw your mother with a black eye, Holly.”
“Of course not.”
“Not of course. I have seen my own mother with many black eyes.”
“Were you afraid?” I meant when her father hit her mother, but she didn’t understand.
“I was. Yes. Not for myself, because I knew they would let me go. For your father. And for me, too, because if they don’t let him go there will be no place for me and I will have to pack, pack all my things and find a room to live in until the agency gets me a new position. All the time I will be thinking of you and your family and this house.”
The kettle sang, and she went over to pour water for my cocoa, and then the kitchen door opened and there was Elaine in a negligee. “It’s you two,” she said. “How’s your leg, Holly?” I don’t think she knew I’d been gone.
I said, “Okay. The cops had Mrs. Maas.”
“I know. They took Mrs. Maas and Bill. I think they would have taken me, too, if I hadn’t been much too upset to tell them anything. After a while I swallowed four of my pills and went to sleep. I just woke up.”
Mrs. Maas asked, “Would you like cocoa, Mrs. Hollander?”
“Yes,” Elaine said. “I would. I’d like some cocoa.” She got another chair and pulled it up to the table and sat, and I remember thinking it was probably the first time in her entire life that she’d ever sat down in that kitchen. Usually she only went in there if she had to give last-minute orders to Mrs. Maas or the caterers, and got out as fast as she could.
“When do you think we’ll see Dad again?”
“Tomorrow, I suppose. Don’t they let them out on bail?”
“I think so.”
“Then they’ll have to let him go on bail. I’ll call Harvey Webber,” (that was my father’s lawyer) “and Harvey will get him out. But …”
“But what?” I asked.
“But, Holly, it won’t be for terribly long—perhaps not for more than a few weeks. You have to realize that. Then there’ll be the trial, and then he’ll be gone.”
“You think he did it?”
Elaine didn’t answer. Mrs. Maas had brought her cocoa in a pedestal mug exactly like mine; but when she raised it to her lips ever so delicately and sipped like she was afraid it was too hot to drink, which it was, it seemed like hers might be the chalice from the palace holding the brew that was true. There are a lot of pretty women. I’m a pretty woman myself, and maybe Mrs. Maas was once, too, because she was tallish and a blonde, and she must have had a good complexion when she was younger. But Elaine was beautiful the way a sunrise is beautiful, or wild geese flying over you. When you saw her profile like that, not expecting it, it could make you catch your breath.
“What are we going to do?” I asked her finally.
“I don’t know, Holly. I don’t know how much money there will be.”
“If there isn’t much.”
“We’re not going to starve, I don’t mean that. There’ll be enough to keep us. But when I try to think about what I’ll do, I find I’m only thinking about what I won’t. You’ll finish high school and go on to college, and after that, we’ll see. I won’t marry again, or live with some man. Harry wouldn’t like it, and I wouldn’t either.”
I couldn’t help thinking that if she’d felt more like that before, we wouldn’t be in the mess we were in now; I suppose she saw it in my face.
“When you’re older you’ll understand, Holly—or you won’t.” She still wasn’t looking at me, just out of the kitchen window. The ground there sloped down toward the stable, and it seemed to me Elaine was looking at the stars above the treetops. “Whether there’s a great deal of money or just a little, we’ll be able to do what we like, with nobody to say no. I’ll have an apartment in New York or London. I’ll go to plays, and …”
“You’ll have to come back, if you want to visit Dad.”
“I will, of course; I’ll fly. And of course the business—I’ll have a business manager here.” Suddenly she turned to look at me and those big beautiful violet eyes just seemed to swallow me up. “You’ll come to visit me, won’t you, Holly? You’ll have vacations and holidays. We can go shopping together, and if I’m in New York I’ll take you to Sardi’s or the Plaza for luncheon. We’ll have such a good time.”
“I won’t come if you don’t want me to.”
“Oh, but I do! I’ll want to see you, Holly, and we won’t fight anymore. I know you don’t believe me, but you’ll see. We won’t. All this awful pressure will be gone, no more living together when we don’t like it and no more groveling for crumbs. What are you going do with your life when you’re finished with college? Don’t say get married. That isn’t a life.”
I had to think fast, because I really hadn’t done a whole lot of planning. “Get a job on Time, maybe, or The New Yorker.” Elaine smiled and gave my hand a squeeze.
Bill still hadn’t come back when I went up to bed, so I had to do it pretty much on my own. My leg hurt some—there wasn’t any question but that it liked being up on the bed or something better than swinging in the air—but it wasn’t more than I could take, and I was proud of myself for having done what I did.
The trouble was that I couldn’t get back to sleep. I kept thinking about everything that had happened, about what Sandoz had said in my father’s study before he took him away, and about going to Blue’s, and then about Blue and me and my father, then about how Sandoz had come in and everything he’d said, and so on and so forth, around and around. Eventually I got clear back to the day the bomb went off, and even the day that I met Blue when I went out to visit Uncle Herbert. That was when I decided that sooner or later I’d write this book; and I began to write it in my head there in bed that night. Believe me, I was a lot more anxious to see how it came out than you are.
Sometimes when I find a really good mystery, I stop reading a little before the end and go over the whole first part two or three times, underlining the stuff I think might be significant. Then, if the author’s played fair, pretty often I can guess how it’s going to end. So I did it that night, and the underlined parts of my memory are the parts I’ve written down here. That night I tried to solve it, just like I try to solve the books; but I came up against a couple things that bothered me. I think it’s only fair to tell you about them now.
In the first place, in a lot of books I’ve read there are only a certain number of people who could have done it, usually fewer than ten. They’re all in a big house in the country, or maybe on a ship—something like that. But what had happened to Larry and Mr. Munroe and Uncle Herbert and Mrs. Whoosis wasn’t like that at all. The killer could be anybody in the whole wide world, and there was no guarantee wh
atsoever that the killer (I was sure then that it wasn’t my father) who had set the bomb at Barton High had also killed Uncle Herbert. I think it would be awfully nice for the cops if they had more cases like the ones in books, where the murderer’s got to be one of seven or eight people; but until somebody can arrange it, maybe we should have a law that says the murders in books have to be more like real ones.
Another thing was servants. In a book you can bet your booty it isn’t old Portwine the butler, no matter how guilty he looks on page ninety-four; and I think the real reason for that is snobbishness. The murderer has to be somebody important, and somebody important can’t be working class, a fact that would be big news to lots of union presidents. In real life, everybody knows it just isn’t so; working-class people have killed plenty of other people, including quite a few very important ones. So it could be Bill or even Mrs. Maas; I didn’t believe it, but I couldn’t rule them out.
Okay, let’s get down to cases.
The first big question was, where was the bomb? It seemed pretty likely that it had been in Pandora’s Box, since the shell hadn’t been fired (according to Sandoz) and a thing like that—an artillery shell—would have been pretty big and hard to hide. But if I allowed it was in the box, somebody must’ve gotten the box open and put it there, and the only people I could think of that I thought could have done it were my father and Larry. If it had been Larry, he wouldn’t have done it and blown himself up unless he’d wanted to commit suicide.
Only come to think of it, it was possible he had, what with those mysterious calls and all. In a book, naturally, you could rule out suicide, but I couldn’t. Maybe Larry had fixed up the bomb—getting the shell one of the times he came to see Elaine, and picking the lock and so on—just to kill himself. But if he had, we’d never prove it; and anyway, I couldn’t really believe it.
That left Dad. I don’t have to give the case against him, because Sandoz already did; but what about the case for him? He could have picked the lock, sure. The box had been right there in his study for a couple of weeks at least (I couldn’t remember just how long, but it was plenty of time) and so was the shell. Only if it was him it was all over and there was no use thinking about it. And anyway I couldn’t believe that it was. Not just because he was my father and I loved him, but because a bomb at the Fair wouldn’t have been his style. If he’d wanted to mess up Larry and Elaine, he could have done it a dozen ways without doing anything illegal or running any risk. For starters, how about tipping off Molly and filing for divorce, which he could have gotten with no alimony when he showed that Elaine had been unfaithful? He had money and lawyers and a sharp, cool brain. None of that fit with a bomb and risking the chair.