An Old Friend of the Family d-3 Read online

  Starting to grow curious at last, she harkened to what the men were saying.

  “. . . so cold, it could be hard to tell.”

  “Yeah.”

  One took her arm to lift it. It clung to her side, amazingly stiff, resisting his pull without the least effort on her part.

  He said, “My own guess is two, three days since she died.”

  FOUR

  Clarissa was sitting in the breakfast room, the cup of coffee that Judy had insisted on pouring for her still untouched, when the sound of wheels on the drive announced the return of Andrew and Lenore from the Chicago morgue.

  Judy jumped up and hurried on ahead, and was almost in the front hall before the old woman could start moving. By the time Clarissa reached the entry, Lenore was inside the house, winter coat still on, sobbing in her younger daughter’s arms as if they were her mother’s. Andrew came in much more slowly, forgetting at first to shut the outer door behind him. His cheeks were for once unshaven, displaying sandy stubble, and loose flesh showed at his collar where it seemed that yesterday there had been none. His coat still on too, buttoned and forgotten, he leaned against the wall and muttered as if to himself.

  “They’re going to do an autopsy on Monday. I asked, why not tomorrow? They said some toxicologist is coming in Sunday night, it would be better if they wait for him.”

  The last word dissolved into a grating sob. Judy got an arm free from her mother, and pulled her father’s head down on her shoulder to give comfort.

  * * *

  Sometime much later in that dazed day, Andrew became aware that Joe Keogh was in the house, wandering about, looking as bewildered and grief-stricken as anyone else. Poor Irish roughneck cop who had thought he was going to marry into wealth. Never to have to face the prospect of him as a son-in-law now. Never have to. Never . . .

  So peaceful Kate had been there on the antiseptic public table. He tried to hold in mind that peaceful, contented look, more like one sleeping than one dead. That look would seem to show she had not suffered. Dying there in that sleazy rooming house. What was she doing there? With whom? Someone must have been there. But Andrew was not ready to face those questions just yet.

  So considerate were all the officials, holding down the publicity as well and as long as they could. Though in the long run they wouldn’t be able to, he understood that. He couldn’t estimate yet the effect on business, good or bad. Just one of those things that could not be planned for . . . time enough for that tomorrow.

  . . . Judy of course went to place herself by the young man when he sat down, and held his prizefighter’s hand. That was her way.

  Meanwhile more police—Andrew lost track of what separate organizations they all represented—were in the house and out again. They talked to Andrew, and ten minutes later he couldn’t remember what they had asked or he had answered. You planned and worked, and built up your business, all for your family, and then . . .

  Johnny, as red-eyed as the rest of the family and for once subdued, came along in late afternoon with the word that he was going over to Clark’s for a while, if his parents didn’t mind. The Birches were close friends and it was natural that they would want to share the burden of the tragedy.

  Andrew spoke to his son in a painful voice. “I don’t think you’re in shape right now to be driving.” He could not really remember himself driving home from Chicago. “I don’t think any of us are.”

  “I’ll walk, Dad.” The Birches lived only about two hundred yards away along Sheridan road, where the shoulders, though unpaved, were smooth and plenty wide enough to walk on without having to dodge traffic.

  “All right, then. Tell them we’ll call them later.”

  Shortly after Johnny left, darkness fell.

  The phone rang, rang. Neighbors and business associates who had just heard the news kept calling in to offer sympathy. There were reporters, who could be brushed off for now. But it was in the papers now anyway, and on TV. In the intervals between incoming calls, Lenore began phoning out, talking to relatives and old friends scattered around the country. As if it helped her, just to have the phone in her hand and talk. Andrew didn’t know where to look for something that would help him. There was Judy, of course. Thank God for Judy. She came and sat beside her father, saying little, just being there.

  Somewhere along the line Joe Keogh had departed. A time came when all the police were gone. Lenore was on the phone, saying for what sounded like the hundredth time: we don’t know yet about the funeral. After tomorrow, sometime.

  Then the family made an attempt at gathering for dinner. Andrew took over the phone, and rang the Birches. “This is Andy. I think a son of mine is over there?”

  “Andy, good lord. Johnny was telling . . . it’s so terrible. What can we say?”

  “I guess there’s nothing.” Andrew hardly knew any longer what he was saying himself. “Is John there?”

  “Why, no, he left some time ago. I think about six. I thought he was going directly home, but he might have stopped in at the Karlsens’.”

  “That’s probably it.” Andrew said goodbye, hung up, and punched for the Karlsens’ home.

  But Johnny wasn’t there either.

  Phone cradled again, Andrew tried to think. The Montoyas? They were in Mexico. Where else might Johnny be? Somewhere in walking distance.

  Andrew slipped on a coat and without saying anything left the house and walked down the long, curving drive. He felt there was no rational reason for what he was doing, but he was not going to let that stop him tonight. He noticed that some stars were out. Could Johnny be standing somewhere, gazing at them? The boy would do that, sometimes. The telescope was put away, back in the small guest house near the lake.

  As he walked down the drive he could hear distant surf behind him, smashing against the icefield, a different sound from that of its impact on rock and beach in summer. From in front came a murmur of light traffic, and passing headlights dazzled at him through the fir trees flanking his drive.

  In the light of the next set of headlights Andrew saw that the flag on his mailbox had been raised. He himself had brought the Saturday mail in earlier in the day, and he had told the family often enough not to put anything out there over the weekend, not after that time when the checks were pilfered . . .

  As he brought it back near the lighted house, Andrew’s mind registered that the little brown-paper-covered package bore no stamps, and that it was addressed, ballpoint in an unfamiliar, clumsy block printing, to himself.

  He carried it inside with him, and as Lenore approached, wondering out loud where he had been, he opened it. Paper fell away, revealing a box that had probably once held a gift pen. It opened easily.

  Looking at the object inside, a freshly amputated finger with a ragged, bloody stump-end that had left blood-smears on the inner lining of the box, Andrew felt something like the beginning of comfort. In a moment he recognized the comfort as of the sort experienced when the nightmare goes too far, and one knows at last that one is dreaming.

  Except that even in his dreams he had never before heard Lenore, he had never heard anyone, make noises like the ones that she was making now . . .

  * * *

  An hour before midnight, with the drive again full of police cars, Clarissa found herself rising like a sleepwalker from her sleepless chair, moving away from the other members of her distraught family and letting herself be drawn back to the library.

  Inside, she closed the door behind her, at the same time switching on one light. The shelves at the far east end were still in dimness.

  In a pocket of her sweater her hand encountered a handkerchief, which, come to think of it, was part of her last year’s Christmas gift from Johnny. Dear God, let him still be alive! But it was too long since she had genuinely tried to pray.

  At the touch of her foot, the library stool glided along the base of the shelves, then settled beneath her modest weight to grip the carpet and hold itself in place. Handkerchief in hand, she ascended t
o the second step. The seldom-disturbed books on the top shelf must be dusty, given the succession of part-time maids who had lately been in charge of cleaning.

  Clarissa whisked with the handkerchief, and pocketed it again. Then her hand went out to the book she wanted, one she had not opened in more than thirty years.

  * * *

  November, 1946. Clarissa, widowed early in the war, had been two years remarried to a Yank, John Southerland, lately a brigadier in the US Eighth Air Force. She was preparing to leave her native England for her husband’s home in far-off Illinois; one step in that preparation was to bid farewell, for what had seemed would quite possibly be the last time, to her grandmother Wilhelmina Harker.

  The old lady had been in her seventies then, though she looked no more than a well-preserved sixty, and another two decades were to pass before she breathed her last. Eight years widowed herself in 1946, Grandmother Harker was still living then in her turn-of-the-century home in Exeter. The house, like the rest of England, had been left almost servantless by World War II, and was in a gloomy, neglected state, with some of last year’s blackout curtains still in place.

  Grandmother Harker had begun the interview by looking keenly at little Andrew, who had accompanied his mother. “Will he be changing his name to Southerland?” she demanded of Clarissa.

  “I think he will.” Clarissa’s chin lifted, and her tone balanced between defiance and toleration. She had never spent much time with her grandmother and did not know her very well.

  “Just as well,” the old lady answered shortly, to Clarissa’s surprise. Then Grandmother Harker had given the child his farewell present, a book of adventure stories, had wished him well among all the Red Indians of America, and then had sent him off to play with some neighbor’s offspring. It turned out that the old woman had, or thought she had, some very private business with Clarissa.

  “When you come right down to it,” Grandmother Harker said, waving at the younger woman a fat, dark-bound book that Clarissa had not noticed until that moment, “jewels and money and such things are trivialities. At least they are once one has enough of them to get along in comfort. I understand your new husband is quite well off?”

  “Quite.”

  “Then I hope you won’t be disappointed that I’m not giving you anything of that sort.”

  Clarissa murmured a truthful denial, and at the same time wondered: A book? What in the world? She herself was not much of a reader, and certainly no collector; nor would she have guessed her grandmother, who in her youth had been rather adventuresome in a physical way, to have any particular leaning in that direction.

  The book was being extended steadily toward Clarissa, in a slender hand that evidently still retained surprising strength. The old lady said to her: “But this is something valuable, my dear, as such a parting gift ought to be. You know, you were always my favorite among your generation of the family. And now, why shouldn’t I say so, and do something to show I mean it? Truthfulness is one of the few luxuries whose enjoyment becomes more practical as we grow older.”

  “A book.” When the sound of her own voice registered in Clarissa’s ears she was afraid that she had said it much too flatly. The book hadn’t been dusty on that day, though certainly it was already very old. “How lovely!”

  “You don’t mean that, though you say it well. Listen to me now. On the pages where I’ve put in the marker, you’ll find something much more useful than mere loveliness, should there ever come a day of extraordinary trouble for you and your new family.”

  Clarissa had accepted the book, and was making some remark appreciative of the old binding, when Grandmother Harker cut her off with a headshake and a sharp sigh. “I do hope I can make you understand me, girl. I’ve had this from the Continent at great—well, at great expense, though I don’t mean of money but of effort. It wouldn’t do for it to be forgotten, or ignored, or used with frivolity. No, that especially wouldn’t do at all.”

  As far back as Clarissa was able to remember, her grandmother had somehow, from time to time, obtained impressive things “from the Continent.” Lace, jewelry, at least once a fifteenth-century painting, later attested as a genuine Jan van Eyck by a surprised appraiser called in by the old lady herself, who must have had her own reasons to be suspicious of the acquisition. And Clarissa could recall, as a child, being introduced by Grandmother to a dark, romantic-looking Continental gentleman of indeterminate age, come from that mysterious cross-Channel realm to visit Grandmother, though Grandmother even then, as even little Clarissa had been able to see, was rather ridiculously overage for such . . .

  * * *

  “Are you attending me, girl? Now when I speak of a day of extraordinary trouble, I certainly do not mean the simple deaths, diseases, cripplings; the common tragedies. Deserting husbands. Financial failures. Those God sends to us all.”

  Grandmother Harker leaned forward in her chair, and something in her eyes came so to life that Clarissa, a sensible woman of thirty-four who had come bravely through the Blitz and her first widowhood, involuntarily leaned away. The old woman went on: “I mean a day when the powers of hell seem well and truly to have you in their grip . . . use it then, and not before. And in God’s name, I say again, never in frivolity. I should never dare to give it, if I thought it might be so abused.”

  “Use it?”

  “Oh, don’t be addle-pated! I can’t abide that in a girl with brains, of which you have a few, though perhaps you don’t like to use them. And while I think of it, mind you go to church when you’re in America. There won’t be Church of England, I suppose, but go.” Then, observing Clarissa’s troubled face, Grandmother Harker at last showed pity. “Simply open the book to the marked page, and do what it says. You remember your Latin, don’t you? Most of the ninnies who might open it up by accident will not, I’m sure, which is a blessing.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother.” In her own mind, Clarissa lighted suddenly on the explanation—though she was not entirely able to believe it—that the old lady must have developed some senile religious mania.

  When she got home from the visit Clarissa opened the old, old book and read the page marked by a ribbon. She looked at the lock of hair secured to the page by an incongruous strip of cellophane tape, and tried to laugh. And then she shut up the book for more than thirty years.

  * * *

  With the momentary feeling that those thirty years had never been, she spread the thick book open now, on a small library table of dark wood. `You remember your Latin, don’t you?’ Candel at any rate gave no trouble.

  Nothing was said about using a particular kind of candle, and Clarissa went out of the library again, past a detective using the telephone in the hall, to extract a cherry-red taper from the Christmas centerpiece in the great empty dining room. Some matches from a holder near the elbow of the man still busy on the phone. Then back into her sanctuary. Candle in hand but still unlighted, she scanned the ancient print with the aid of bifocals and Tensor lamp.

  As the door opened softly behind her, Clarissa started as if caught in a kidnapping herself.

  It was Judy. Like the rest of the surviving household she was face-swollen and dazed. But she took one look at her grandmother and shut the door behind her.

  “What are you doing, Granny?” The words were hushed; despite the open book the question was not, `what are you reading?’

  It crossed Clarissa’s own dazed mind that in an earlier century Judy, in adolescence, would have been just ripe for witchery and hysteria. Perhaps that thought was what made Clarissa want her help. Or perhaps it was only a sudden fear of being left alone again that made the older woman beckon and put on a smile. “Come here, Judy. Help me read these words. I know you’ve had your schoolroom Latin, just as I did once.”

  Judy came to stand beside her. The old head and the young one, almost blond, bent over the old paper. A page cracked when it turned.

  “What is it, Gran, an old prayer book?”

  “About the closest thing
to a prayer left in my life.”

  Each read in silence for a little while.

  “It says to use a mirror, Grandmother.” Not Gran or Granny; not just now.

  Clarissa did what passed for thinking in her present state of shock. “Go fetch that small one from the wall, down the hallway near your room.”

  Young legs in brown slacks, soft-shoed and silent, sprang away (something to be done at last!), were back in only seconds.

  Another minute or two of cooperation and preparations were complete. Stacks of books held the mirror propped vertically upon the table, so that the pages of the old book, opened flat before the mirror, were reflected. And now the words of what was to be read aloud, printed in reverse, sprang to legibility in the glass. The candle burned, stuck clumsily with its own melted wax to the fine wood of the table, and leaning a trifle over the open book.

  Now Clarissa pulled from the page the primitive tape, which in thirty years had deteriorated more than the old paper had in three hundred. It came free easily, and immediately gave up into her fingers the small lock of hair; mixed gray and black. More resilient than either the paper or the tape, as if it might have been trimmed off only this morning. Whose? It did not look or feel at all like Grandmother Harker’s own brown-gray curls, as Clarissa recalled them.

  Side by side the candle flame and Tensor lamp stared at their own reflections in the mirror. Plenty of light, but the words would not come clear for Clarissa. She started reading aloud, stumbled, tried to make sense out of them. All higgledy-piggledy nonsense, about the falling of the sun, the rising of the night. More, just as absurd. Not evil-sounding, no, not the black and evil thing—although right now she might have risked that too—for there in the text were the names of God and Jesus set down to be sworn by with respect. She could see that much, although the words all swam together now . . .

  “Grandmother . . . lean back. Rest, please. Shall I read it for you?”

  “Oh yes, my dear. It’s so important. My own dear grandmother once told me . . .” Clarissa had to pause, or faint.