Requiem for Ashes

by David Crossman

  "Midas."

  "Midas! That was him. Big ol' Great Dane."

  "Saint Bernard."

  "Saint Bernard, was it? I always get them two mixed up. I knew it was one a them big ones, though." He relit his pipe.

  "That's the kind you see carry's that little barrel've brandy 'round their neck in the mountains over to Switzerland and around there." Draw. Puff. Puff. "Explains why skiin' caught on so, I guess. Yup. Midas. I remember."

  Albert was beginning to feel the cold. Midas had survived the shooting, but it would have been better if he hadn’t.

  "Nossir, whoever was hunting up here knew they wasn't s'posed to be here. They had to climb the fence, or either come up the drive. More'n likely somebody from Mass'chusetts or somewhere outta state." One of the uniformed policemen emerged from the woods and walked up the hill toward them. "People up here got more sense; least they're sneakier."

  "Charlie," said the uniformed policeman as he joined them. "I think we've found where they parked. Down in that little turn-off just past the driveway."

  "Find anything special?"

  The policeman shrugged. "Nothin' special."

  Charlie turned to Albert. "Mr. Rawlins was here when it happened?"

  "Rawlins?" Albert echoed. "Oh, you mean . . . Rawlins. Yes. He was right there."

  "Could you show me exactly . . . you know . . . where everyone was standing. How it happened?"

  Albert restaged the scene using the uniformed officer - whose name, according to a little sign over his pocket, was LaPointe - as Rawlins, and Charlie Gault as Miss Bjork. He fought consciously to keep the horrifying images of the preceding night from replaying as he reenacted the event. When he had finished, Charlie Gault lay on the porch in Albert's arms. There was something grotesque, almost irreverent, in the act.

  "What do you make of it, Tommy?" said Gault as he puffed and grunted to his feet. Albert got up, too.

  Tommy thought. Charlie relit his pipe. Albert struggled in vain to keep his eyes off the rust-colored stain on the porch.

  "If she was standing here, like he says, and Rawlins was standin' where I am and the bullet was fired from over there where we found the casing . . . hit her on the right side, here," he held out his hand to indicate the approximate trajectory and drew it slowly toward himself in a straight line. "Speakin' as Rawlins, I'm lucky to be alive."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meanin' if she'd stepped outta the way at the last second, this'd be Rawlins's blood."

  Albert tried hard not to ask why she didn't move, why it couldn't have been Rawlins's blood that stained the porch forever. Then he remembered. Shehadmoved at the last possible second. Not out of the path . . . butinto it.

  The police went to rouse Rawlins. Albert trudged off barefoot in no particular direction, the dew-soaked hems of his pajama legs slobbered at his ankles like a toothless dog. He kept trying to put his hands into pockets that weren't there. Habitually he frisked himself for a cigarette.

  Perpetual frustration at a subconscious level has a warming effect on a cool morning.

  Albert found the shallow turn-off that Officer LaPointe had mentioned. He looked blankly at the perfectly imprinted tire tracks; it might as well have been modern art. Why did tires have treads anyway? He stared at them nevertheless. Perhaps he could assimilate some clue through osmosis.

  A pickup truck drove by. The driver leaned out the window and offered a terse critique of Albert's habiliment for the benefit of a companion in the cab.

  Albert didn't hear what they said. His attention was drawn to the truck's tires. Fat. Far apart. He compared them to the imprints at his feet. The tires that made them were narrow and relatively close together.

  A pickup truck had not made these tracks. At least not a big one. Neither had an eighteen wheeler, or a camper, or a train.

  But what had?

  Albert sank to his knees, cleaned his glasses on the hem of his pajama top, and bent to inspect the treads. They reminded him of garden rows, or a huge zipper. Parallel grooves that zigged and zagged but never met, except in one place where some large imperfection in the tire spanned two of the outside channels.

  The pattern repeated itself at regular intervals for the length of the track. Even Holmes couldn't have made much of that. There was nothing else.

  "They just asked me what happened," said Tewksbury over his coffee cup. "I told them."

  "Did you tell them who you are?"

  "Things are complicated enough, aren't they?" Tewksbury was suddenly conscious of the sharpness of his words. He softened the edges. "No, I didn't."

  Albert looked out the window for a long time. Tewksbury could almost eavesdrop on the memories.

  "I'm going to take a shower," said Albert at last. He stood and walked toward the stairs.

  "Albert?"

  Albert turned. He didn't want to hear it.

  "What're you going to do about her?"

  Albert sighed. "She asked me to, . . . to, bury her out there." He tossed a nod through the window, almost choking on the impossibility of the words as he spoke them. Tewksbury's eyes followed to see where it landed.

  "It's pretty up here."

  They were quiet. Albert started up the stairs.

  "Albert?" Tewksbury felt something much bigger than he'd ever put into words, feelings that distilled themselves into the only thing his tongue could handle. "I'm sorry."

  The end of the world was in Albert's eyes as he turned and trudged up the stairs.

  It was snowing as they drove back to school four days later. Tewksbury was at the wheel of Miss Bjork's car, just as he'd been at the wheel of Albert's life for the past ninety-six hours. Albert wasn't surprised that everything got done without him. It always had. It always would. It never occurred to him to wonder how Tewksbury managed to do whatever had to be done to get Miss Bjork buried on his mother's property.

  He wasn't surprised when Miss Bjork's parents showed up at the funeral. Of course they would; she was their daughter. He wasn't surprised that other people were there. Miss Bjork knew people. She enjoyed their company.

  Albert cried through the service. He tried to listen to the minister, but he couldn't hear over his own sobs. What was he saying about her? Where was she going? Why had she died? Why had she lived? What if he was missing all the answers? The only thing that surprised him was that Miss Bjork had a younger sister. They met afterward, when everyone had gone inside to mourn over lunch.

  She looked like Miss Bjork, had the same tilt of the head, the same eyes, except they were red with weeping. She even had the same name: Miss Bjork. She was much younger, though. Less worldly. Less knowing. Less guarded. She hugged him when they were introduced. Miss Bjork had never hugged him.

  "I know how much you meant to Melissa," she said.

  Who? Melissa? He remembered. It was the name on the gravestone.

  "She loved you."

  "She told me," said Albert.

  "She told me, too."

  "Did she?" Albert asked with his eyebrows. How long had she known?

  Miss Bjork nodded and pressed his arm gently. There was something hopeful in that which Albert couldn't understand.

  "She wrote about you in her letters. I'll send you copies, if you like."

  "No," said Albert. "Please don't do that."

  They walked along the ridge toward the house.

  "She loved your music."

  Music. It seemed like a foreign language. Did anybody speak it anymore?

  "She had your records." Albert never knew what to say when people told him that. He didn't say it now.

  "May I write you?"

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You all right?" said Tewksbury.

  They turned off I-95 onto 495 west. The snow was thick and wet. Large flakes flung themselves against the windshield, turned into tears, and were swept away by the mechanical click and thud of the wipers.

  Albert didn't answer. The question got sillier as it hung in the air.

  "Seems strang
e, being free," said Tewksbury. "I can't shake the fugitive mind-set. I want to hide my face, afraid somebody might recognize me. But free . . . !"

  Albert didn't say anything.

  Tewksbury droned on while Albert withdrew into a single disturbing thought that had plagued him for four days; had Miss Bjork . . . Melissa . . . not moved into the line of fire at the last second, Tewksbury would be dead andshe would be driving.

  Something Tewksbury was saying burned through the fog.

  "What?"

  "I said I'll be glad to get back to Crete. Not just miles away from all this . . . light years away. Thousands of years."

  "Dr. Strickland is going to Crete."

  "He always does."

  "I mean, he's the Director now.”

  Someone might have removed the windshield and let the large, wet flakes hit Tewksbury in the face at sixty miles an hour. “What do you mean? Well, yes . . . of course . . . he filled in. Someone had to. With Glenly gone; me gone . . . “

  ‘Leapfrogged both of them.’ Who had said that? Moodie? Lane? It was Lane.

  "It would be Stricks, of course," Tewksbury concluded. "But now, well, I'm back, aren't I? I'll be reinstated. They'll have to reinstate me. I've got tenure. Stricks will probably be bumped up to Glenly's post. That would make sense."

  "But he would have taken yours. That's what he did. It's what he wanted."

  "Who wouldn't?" said Tewksbury, trying on his academic demeanor for the first time in months. It felt funny. Not as comfortable and important as it once had. "But now I'm back."

  You wouldn't be if Miss Bjork hadn't moved, thought Albert. He almost said it.

  "After all, I'm innocent! You proved that, God bless you!"

  Albert thought his contribution was negligible.

  "Of course, Miss Bjork, I'll always be grateful to her, too. Always." Heartfelt sigh. "Butyou were the one who believed in me. The only one."

  "Your dad."

  "Dad. Yes. Him, too. Poor guy. I don't think he understands what's happened. But it's all over now. The whole nightmare. He'll be glad of that. I'll call him tonight."

  The nightmare wasn't over for Albert; it had just reached a higher level of absurdity. If only he had taken a step toward Miss Bjork . . . it would be she and Tewksbury driving home in the snow. Not a comfortable notion. Albert wrestled a bizarre, totally irrational twinge of jealousy. What if he had stepped into the path of the bullet? What if he had died in Miss Bjork's arms?

  Would she still have said the things she said? The thought was almost musical. Romantic. He didn't want to think it and had tried to block it when he saw it coming.

  These and other thoughts wandered the dark, lifeless canyons of Albert's brain in no particular order until, just as they drove into town, two random quarks of information came flying around a corner in opposite direction, collided, creating an alarming possibility: the tire tread with that bothersome little blemish repeating itself at regular intervals. Something was embedded in the tire. What became embedded in tires? Glass. Like when Strickland's car drove over the beer bottle.

  The way Albert was thinking there was no direct route from one thought to the next. Each was an individual entity that traveled in its own erratic orbit and ran headlong into a goodly number of other ideas on the way, each time gathering itself up, somewhat stunned, brushing off and moving on. It was next to impossible to keep up.

  Strickland's little red sports car . . . the wheels would be compact. Close together.

  "Do you know where Strickland lives?"

  "Yes. The other side of town, Arundel Woods."

  "Go there.”

  “But . . . "

  "Go there," said Albert. Concentrate. So many little info-neutrons were wearing the same uniform; if only they could only be sorted out and put in a line . . . like a parade. Think like Sousa.

  Suddenly, magically, the band assembled, with one or two exceptions who were probably still in the ladies' room or whose mothers hadn't dropped them off yet. "I know who killed Miss Bjork," he said.

  "What?"

  Albert was busy trying to grab the tail of each idea as it raced by, to bring it to ground and shake the sense out of it. Only one person had been in the direct line of fire. Tewksbury. If the gunshot was intentional . . . ifit was . . . he had been the intended target. "Never mind."

  "What do you mean 'never mind'? You said you know who killed her. Why? You think someone killed her on purpose?"

  "No. That was an accident."

  "Then what did you mean?"

  "They were trying to killyou."

  "Me?!" Tewksbury looked at Albert in alarm. "Someone was trying to shootme?"

  "And she stepped in the way," Albert said softly. Tewksbury focused his dazed eyes on the road just as a squirrel darted in front of the car. He swerved to one side, plowed through a row of plastic garbage bags, and narrowly missed a fire hydrant before coming to a stop half on the sidewalk, half on the road.

  "You're crazy. Who'd want to kill me?"

  Albert shook his head slightly, bit his lip and massaged the bulging vein in his forehead. "I have to make sure," he said. "Go on."

  "To Strickland's? You think Strickland did it?"

  "I need to check some things," said Albert.

  Tewksbury eased the car back into the road. "Why do you think Stricks would want to kill me?"

  "I didn't say he did."

  "You said you know who killed Melissa Bjork, then you said they were trying to kill me. Now you tell me to take you to Strickland's to check something. You must think . . . that's absurd. What would Strickland want to kill me for?"

  Now was as good a time as any to see if the balloon held water.

  "He wanted your position."

  "My position!" Tewksbury was speaking exclusively in exclamations. "Ancient History? You mean . . . he wanted my job?"

  "Well?"

  "Albert," said Tewksbury, weatherproofing his tone with a sort of paternal patina. "You don't kill someone for a directorship. Leastwise not a temporary one."

  Albert ran his fingers around the outside of the balloon to see where the leak was. "Temporary?"

  "Of course temporary. Stricks doesn't have the credentials to fill the slot. Nobody knows that better than he does. He's just filling in . . . in the interim."

  "But he's directing the project . . . in Crete," said Albert, applying makeshift patches to the shrinking balloon.

  "The dig. He was directing it, yes. Too late to get someone else. Thank heavens. He'd've got one season out of it. Good experience and he'd do a good job, no doubt. He's a smart kid, even if he is an egotistical pain in the peduncle. Still, come fall it'd be all over. One summer in Crete is not something you kill somebody for, Albert. Especially since he was going as my assistant anyway. Besides, all he has to do is bide his time. He'll be head of the department someday. Here we are."

  Miss Bjork's car turned up a hillside drive.

  The trial balloon was little more than a damp rag by this time.

  Albert sat in the car staring blankly at the neat two-story colonial with dark-green shutters, the carefully manicured lawn. On the red-brick doorstep was a newspaper wrapped in plastic to keep the moisture in. But there was no car in the driveway.

  "There's no car," Albert observed.

  "It's school hours," Tewksbury said. "He's at school." He suppressed the urge to add, "You remember school?"

  Albert hadn't thought of that.

  The motor grazed quietly on the asphalt. "Well?" said Tewksbury. "What now? Is that what you wanted? His car? Why?"

  Why? Thank you, Tewksbury! Of course Albert didn't need the car to check the treads! He got out and marched to the narrow strip of road salt and sand the tides of winter had deposited at the foot of the driveway. He was down on his knees inspecting the tire tracks when Tewksbury ambled up beside him.

  "What on earth are you doing, Albert? What're you looking for?"

  Albert found it. "This!" he said, pointing to a small bar-like imperfect
ion in the otherwise symmetrical tread marks.

  "What is it?"

  "It's proof that Strickland was parked beside the road at my mother's house the morning you were . . . Miss Bjork was . . . It's the same mark!"

  "Could be coincidence."

  "It's not," said Albert. He began walking toward the house. ''It goes from G to D."

  "Goes where?"

  "From G to D," Albert said over his shoulder. "There are five grooves in the tread . . . four spaces between them. Just like a staff. The mark made by the broken glass goes from G to D."

  Tewksbury stooped to verify. "He's right," he said to himself. "You're right! G to D. But you said glass. How do you know it's glass?"

  "A beer bottle," said Albert. "Do you think it's open?"

  "What? The house? Now wait a second, Albert," Tewksbury protested. "This is only my fifth day as a free man. I'm not going to do anything to jeopardize . . . "

  "Wait here, then." Albert walked around to the back of the house. Tewksbury followed. The snow, meantime, had metamorphosed into a fine, bitter drizzle that approached the world at an angle like the Eldil, and congregated on the necks of passersby.

  "What do you want to go in there for? I'm sure it's locked." Tewksbury took a burglar's-eye-view of the neighborhood.

  "Come on, Albert. What are you looking for? What do you expect to find?"

  The storm door was open.

  "Listen, Albert, you've done a lot for me, I owe you, but if I get caught breaking into someone's house . . . "

  Albert tried the door; it swung open noiselessly.

  "We don't have to break anything."

  "I'm waiting in the car," said Tewksbury. The desperation throw to first went sailing harmlessly into the dugout; Albert was already inside. Tewksbury followed.

  "As long as we're both going to jail for the rest of our lives - assuming they don’t hang us outright - do you mind telling me what we're looking for?"

  "A gun," said Albert. "Where do people keep guns?" He opened the refrigerator and some cupboards.

  "What kind of gun?"

  "A .410."