Killer, Come Back To Me

Maybe it was Uncle Flinny, with his bedtime stories and his quiet ways. He loved Mother so much – his sister. He’d do anything for her or Dad or Grandma or Cousin William. Would he kill for her or Dad or the others to keep this house whole, intact and untouched?

Grandma. Played her cold game of chess day by day and drank her brandy neat. Her whole life was keeping the house moving together. Her whole life was society and position and taste. What if someone came into the house and tried to do all the ordering instead of her? What would she do to her?

All of them! All of them!

Johnny sank shivering back on the springs. A woman walked into a big mothballed old mansion like this and suddenly everyone was afraid. Just one woman.

On the table beside his bed Johnny groped and found the note he’d discovered in the attic dust. He felt of it, and read it again in his mind:

– you’ve got to make it up to me, the way I’ve been treated. It shouldn’t be difficult. I could be Johnny’s teacher. That would explain my presence in the house to everyone. ELLIE.

Johnny turned over.

‘Ellie, my teacher, where are you now?’ he asked the darkness. ‘Lonely and resting in Cousin William’s studio with all the other stiffened mannequins? Playing chess with Grandma, only not moving? In the cold, dark basement like the wine casks put away for all the years? Somewhere in this big house tonight. But maybe not tomorrow. Unless I find you before then …’

There was a huge back yard with many acres to it, fruit trees, a flower garden, the swimming pool, the bathhouse, servants’ quarters immediately behind the big house. Sunlight caught between a row of sycamore trees and a high green fence that shielded all this from the street. There was an oak tree to dangle from in the afternoon, and a policeman who walked his beat just under that tree on the sidewalk beyond the fence. Johnny climbed up and waited.

The policeman walked below. Johnny rattled leaves.

‘Hi, son.’ The policeman looked up. ‘Better watch out. You’ll fall.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Johnny. ‘We got a dead lady in our house and everybody keeps it secret.’

The policeman made a smile. ‘You have, have you?’

Johnny shifted himself. ‘I found her in a trunk. Somebody killed her. I tried to call the police last night, but Dad wouldn’t let me. I tipped the trunk over, and she fell downstairs but she turned out to be a wax doll. It wasn’t the lady after all.’

‘So.’ The policeman chuckled, enjoying it.

‘But the other lady was real,’ insisted Johnny.

‘What other lady?’

‘The first one I found. Cousin William’s a dress designer. He changed bodies. You should have seen everyone at breakfast this morning. Trying to be happy. Like in the movies. But they can’t fool me. They’re not happy. Mother looks tired, and she’s real touchy. I wonder how long they can go around like this without yelling?’

The policeman scowled. ‘Honest to God, you sound just like my kid. Him and his Buck Rogers disintegrators and his comic books. Honest to God, it’s a crime what they give the younger generation to read. Ruin their minds with it. Killing. Corpses. Ah!’

‘But it’s true!’

‘See you later,’ said the policeman, and walked on.

Johnny clung there, and the tree trembled in the wind. Then he dropped down across the fence and gave chase. ‘You got to come look. They’ll take her away if you don’t – then nobody’ll ever find her.’

The policeman was patient. ‘Look, little boy, I can’t go nowhere without no warrant. How do I know you’re not lying?’ He was joking now.

‘You’ve just got to believe me – that’s all.’

The policeman stuck out his hand. ‘Here.’

Johnny took it. The policeman walked.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Johnny. ‘To see your mother.’

‘No!’ Johnny squirmed frantically. ‘That won’t help! She’ll hate me for it! She’ll lie about it!’

The policeman firmly escorted him around front and thumbed the bell. First a maid, and then Mother was at the door, her face pale as milk, her lips a red smear against the white. Her pompadour was a little toppled over. There were blue pouches under her suddenly dull eyes.

‘Johnny!’

‘Better keep him inside, ma’am.’ The policeman touched his cap. ‘He’ll get hurt running in the street.’

‘Thank you, officer.’

The officer looked at her, then at Johnny. Johnny started to speak, but he could only sob. Two tears ran down his cheeks as the door closed, shutting the officer outside.

Mother didn’t say anything to Johnny. Not a word. She just stood there, lost and white, twisting her fingers. That was all.

Hours later in the day, Johnny wrote it all down upon a nickel tablet of paper. Everything he knew about the Trunk Lady, everything he knew about Cousin William, Mom, Dad, Uncle Flinny, Grandma. Wetting his pencil, Johnny put it out in lines like this:

‘The Lady in the Trunk loved Dad. Dad killed her when she came to the house.’ Johnny pouted over that one. ‘Either that or Mom killed her.’ Long years of viewing motion picture murders went through Johnny’s mind. ‘Then, of course, Grandma or Uncle Flinny could have killed her because their authority and security was threatened.’ Yeah. Johnny scribbled quick. Let’s see, now. ‘And Cousin William? Maybe it was his woman friend, after all.’ Johnny sort of hoped it was. He wasn’t very partial to Cousin W. ‘Maybe, maybe there was something in Grandma’s past? Or Uncle Flinny’s?’ Now, how about –

‘Johnny!’

Grandma’s voice. Johnny put away the pad.

Grandma came in the door and guided Johnny out through the hall and into her room, using her cane as a nervous prod. She seated him before the chessboard and nodded at the pale pieces. ‘Those are yours. Mine are black.’ She thought it over, eyes closed.

‘Mine are always black.’

‘We can’t play,’ Johnny announced. ‘Two of your black pieces are missing.’ He pointed.

She looked. ‘Uncle Flinny again. He’s always taking some of my players. Always and forever. We’ll play anyway. I’ll use what I have. Move.’ She jabbed a skinny finger.

‘Where’s Uncle Flinny?’

‘Watering the garden. Move,’ she ordered.

Her eyes watched his fingers in their path. She leaned forward slowly over the shining pieces. ‘We’re all good people, Johnny. We led a good life these twenty years in this house. You’ve been in it only part of that twenty. We never asked for no trouble. Don’t make us any, Johnny.’

He sat there. A fly buzzed against the large window. Far away, below, water ran from a faucet. ‘I don’t want no – trouble,’ he said.

The chessboard blurred and ran away like coloured water. ‘Dad looked so white and funny at breakfast today. Why should he feel that way over a wax doll, Grandma? And Mom, she looks like she’s all twisted up like a spring inside a clock, ready to bust loose. That’s no way to act over a doll, is it?’

Grandma deliberated over her bishop, withdrawn into herself like an old hermit crab in a shell of lace. ‘There was no body. Just your imagination. Forget it. Forget it.’ She glared at the child as if he were responsible. ‘Walk light from now on, sonny. Keep quiet and keep out of the way and forget it. Someone’s got to tell you these things. Don’t know why it’s always me. But just forget it!’

They played chess until twilight. Then the house got dark again too quickly, everybody hurried through supper, and it seemed that everybody went to bed early too.

Johnny listened to the hours chiming out one by one. Someone rapped on the door. Johnny said,

‘Who is it?’

‘Uncle Flinny.’’

‘What do you want, Uncle Flinny!’

‘Time for your bedtime story, Johnny.’’

‘Oh, well – not tonight, please, Uncle Flinny.’

‘Yes. Please. This is a very special story. A very extra special bedtime story.’

Johnny waited. Then: ‘I’m tired, Uncle Flinny. Some other time, huh? Not tonight, please.’

Uncle Flinny went away and after a while the clock chimed again. It was after ten. More time. After eleven. More time. Almost twelve.

Johnny opened the door.

The house was completely asleep. You could tell by the quiet, untouched gleam on the long hall stairs, clear moonlight pouring through great areas of glass, and no shadow moving.

Johnny closed the door behind him. From off somewhere in a quiet land, Grandma breathed heavily in her great four-postered bed. There was a tinkling noise, very faintly, as if bottles were being cautiously rattled behind Cousin William’s door.

Johnny paused at the staircase. All he had to do would be return to bed and forget about it, believe that it was all a mistake, and there would be no trouble. It would be forgotten and things would take up where they’d been a few days ago.

Mother would laugh at her parties. Dad would drive back and forth to the office with his thick briefcase. Grandma would sneak her brandy on the side. Cousin William would insert needles into mannequin flesh, and Uncle Flinny would go on forever telling his feverish bedtime stories that meant nothing.

Yet it was not so easy as that. Things could not go back now. Only ahead. You can’t forget. Dad, his only friend, was a stranger now, since the – incident. Mother was worse than ever. Her eyes looked like they cried at night. Down under the glitter she had to live too. And Grandma, she’d drink two bottles instead of one bottle of brandy a week. And Cousin William, every time he stuck a pin into a mannequin he’d think of the Trunk Lady, blanch, cringe, and start whimpering over his cognac.

And she – the lovely dark-haired stranger in the musty trunk – had looked so lonely up there where he’d found her. So apart. There was a bond between them. She was a stranger to the house – and was killed for it. Johnny was a stranger in the house now too. He wanted to find her again, because of that. They were almost brother and sister. She needed finding. She needed to be remembered, not to be forgotten.

Johnny went down each step with careful footing. He clung to the banister, sliding his fingers. She would not be in the attic now, nor would she be in any of the upstairs rooms. How could they sleep with her so near them? … Downstairs perhaps. Somewhere in the accumulated night of the house. Not in the servants’ quarters.

He had just reached the stair bottom when he heard one of the upstairs doors open very slowly and close. After that there was not a sound, but quite calmly, quietly, someone came and stood at the top of the stairs, looking down.

Johnny froze. He leaned against the wall like a shadow. Sweat came out on his face and trickled in the small palms of his hands. He could not see who it was. They just stood there, watching, looking down, silent and waiting.

Things had to go on. You can’t lie in bed and forget. Johnny couldn’t just forget the stranger, the Trunk Lady, in her lonely attitude of death. The murderer, too, could not forget easily – nor that there was a small boy in the house who was too curious, too incautious.

Johnny breathed very slowly. He waited a moment. Then, when he saw that the person at the top of the stairs was not coming down, he moved quickly down the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door into the moonlit veldt of the garden.

The swimming pool lay flat and shining square, with a fringe of trees beyond it, stars over it, the bathhouse near it, the low garden rows to left and right. Farther down was the greenhouse and the garden toolshed. Johnny ran.

The shadows of the toolshed offered temporary haven. Looking back, he detected no movement in the house, no light. The body would most probably be in one of these outlying houses.

His bed would feel nice now. The lock on the door would be nice. Johnny trembled like the water in the pool. Suddenly he saw someone standing in the upstairs hall window. There was just a hint of a standing figure there. Looking down, as it had looked from the top of the stairs … Then – it was gone.

Now, down the gravel drive on the side of the house, footsteps sounded. Someone was coming from the front of the house, around under the sycamores. Someone moving in sycamore shadows, stealthily and unseen.

Then, very suddenly, breaking into half-light, she was there. She! Not Mother, nor Grandmother. But emerging half into moonlight, half in flecked shadow – was the Trunk Lady.

She looked at Johnny, far across the garden, and said nothing.

Johnny swallowed tightly and blinked. He held onto himself, his thighs, his knees, with clenched fingers. He crouched and squinted and stared in raw disbelief. A night wind set the sycamore leaves to shivering. From a way off an auto horn hooted like a lonely owl.

She was not dead after all. The whole house had tried to fool him. This was some fantastic jest he could not understand. They were all against him. His teacher was alive! There was no murder, no death! She was here, for him alone! In his hour of loneliness, she was here!

He darted out into the moonlight. Panting, not yelling, not laughing, he ran toward her across the grass, to the tiles of the swimming pool, across the tiles, around the pool and toward the sycamores.

She stood waiting for him, arms outstretched to take him into their soft embrace, sycamore shadows stirring over her cocktail dress, setting it into dreamy motion.

He said, ‘Ellie, is that you?’

He reached the rim of stirring shadow and screamed. The universe seemed to explode. The cocktail dress whirled madly, toppling in a drunken insanity. The Trunk Lady bent and there came a hoarse panting sound. She was fainting.

No! She was falling! A shadow hit him across the face, jarring his senses, once, twice, three times. He fell to his knees and before he could rise fingers were over his face, fingers that numbed him, gripping tight his sobbing mouth.

Mother!

The thought slammed him! Mother, dressed in the Trunk Lady’s cocktail dress. Decoying him out into her arms, fooling him.

Mother, don’t kill me! Don’t kill me! he tried to cry. I’m sorry I tried to bring the police! Mother, you love Father – is that why you killed Ellie? Mother, let me go! Mother, you looked so much like her standing in the sycamore shadows!

But the hands would not let him go. There was a rushing, a body against him. A series of shocks. The fingers were so strong, so much thicker than they should be. Much thicker! Johnny screamed inwardly, drawing air in an awful slobbering whistle.

The house leaned over him as if to collapse and crush him in its fall. The great old sleeping house with everyone sleeping in it, unaware that this silent struggle was happening by the flat shine of the pool.

Suddenly he realized that it was not Mother, not the Trunk Lady. The fingers were too strong. Who is stronger than Mother, sterner, more quick and hard?

Grandmother, perhaps?

The body was too hard against him. He half broke free and saw the flat of moonlight, the filmy cocktail dress lying alone, sprawled – and a mannequin hand thrown out into light. The mannequin was on the ground, dead, plastic, cold. Someone else was behind Johnny, holding, fighting.

Cousin William!

But there was no smell of cognac. The actions were the actions of a sober man. The breath was clean and clear and quick, almost sobbing.

Father!

Dad he tried to yell. Don’t, don’t, please don’t!

Then a voice was talking. Something black and small clattered on the tiles beside the swirling water, and Johnny suddenly knew. The hands were tight, the voice tighter, whispering. ‘You hurt your mother!’’

I didn’t mean to, Johnny screamed inwardly.

‘If it hadn’t been for you,’ said the voice, whispering, ‘your mother would never have known about the Dark One dying!’

I didn’t mean to find the Trunk Lady, cried Johnny silently, fighting.

‘It’ll kill her, the shock of it. If she dies, I won’t want to live. She’s all I’ve had ever since twenty years ago when it all happened!’

The voice husked on: ‘Ellie came to the party. They tried to fool me, make out she was somebody else. But I guessed. She came upstairs in her cocktail gown and I gave her a glass of brandy with sleeping powder in it, and I put her to gentle sleep in the old old trunk. Nobody would have known if you hadn’t looked. Ellie would have just disappeared forever. Only Grandma and me would know! But you’re Dark, too, you’re Dark, just like Ellie!’’ the voice whispered. ‘Sometimes, when I look at you, I see her face! So, now –’’

The Dark One. Johnny’s mind spun, ached, and thrust to get free. Uncle Flinny!

Uncle Flinny, he thought. Why do you call Ellie the Dark One? Why? Your bedtime stories, Uncle Flinny. For so many years you’ve told the same story, the same strange story about the Dark One and the beautiful woman, and now the Dark One came to be my teacher, and why did you kill her! What did she do to you? Why do you call her the Dark One? What does the bedtime story mean? I don’t know.

‘Don’t kill me, Uncle Flinny. The water’s cold and shining tonight. I don’t want to be under the cold shine of it.’’

Johnny grabbed onto the body behind him and fell forward. The two of them plunged screaming into the pool. There was a great plunging nausea. The fingers released him. There was a fighting in wet darkness, water stabbing his nostrils, bubbles breaking from his lips.

When Johnny broke surface there was a great sound of air rising from below, a dim surging of an old man jerking against the lazy tide. The man never came to the surface again. Just the bubbles came …

Johnny was crying, screaming to himself as he dragged himself from the pool and saw her lying there so lonely and tired – the mannequin in the cocktail dress. His foot knocked something dark and small rolling on the tiles. He picked it up. One of the dark chess pieces Uncle Flinny was always stealing from the chess set in Grandma’s room.

Johnny held it tight, not seeing it really, and looked at the pool with the slowing ripples on it where Uncle Flinny slept below. It was crazy, so crazy he couldn’t stand it.

He looked at the house through blurred eyes, and he was shaking like a sick dog. Lights were clicking on all over it. Windows in squares of yellow and orange. Father was running downstairs, shouting, and the back door was opening, just as Johnny collapsed, sobbing, upon the cold hard tiles …

Mother sat on one side of the bed, Dad on the other side. Johnny got his crying all out of him and lay back and looked at Dad, then Mom. ‘Mom?’

She said nothing, but smiled weakly and held onto his hands so tightly.

‘Mom, oh, Mom,’ Johnny said. ‘I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep. Why? Why, Dad?’ He looked at Dad again. ‘Dad, what happened? I don’t know.’

Dad found it hard to say. He said it anyway. ‘Uncle Flinny was married twenty years ago. His wife died when their baby was born. Uncle Flinny loved his wife very much. She was very beautiful and good. Uncle Flinny hated the baby. He’d have nothing to do with it. He thought the baby was a murderer. You can understand how he felt, can’t you? You can understand how I’d feel if Mother died?’

Johnny nodded weakly, not too sure at all that he understood. ‘Uncle Flinny put the baby in a girl’s home somewhere. He wouldn’t tell us where. She grew up, bitter, hating Uncle Flinny because he treated her unfairly. After all, she didn’t ask to be born. You see, son?’ he said.

‘Yeah, Dad.’

‘Well, just a month ago, Ellie, the baby, grown up now, found out where we lived somehow. She wrote a letter. We offered her a job as your teacher, which was only right and deserving. We thought to keep it secret from your uncle. When Ellie came, and went upstairs during the party, Uncle Flinny guessed who she was.’

Dad couldn’t speak for a moment. He closed his eyes. ‘Then – you found her in the attic. We tried to keep it quiet. We tried to make you forget. It was no use. We could never forget, ourselves. It was bound to come out. There was so much at stake, though, all our lives, we tried to work it out quietly. Things like money and reputations and business and what people would say made us do it, son … And – really – they’re not worth a damn!’

Johnny turned his head. ‘I kept poking my nose in –’

‘You were our conscience, I guess. A rather active symbol. You kept the house stirred up. Uncle Flinny thought you were hurting your mother. Your mother – his sister – was all he had after his wife’s death.’

‘So he tried to make it look like I was drowned in the pool –’

Mother suddenly bent and held on to Johnny closely. ‘I’m sorry, Johnny. Sometimes we’re blind. I didn’t think he’d do that.’

‘What about the police?’

‘The truth. Flinny killed her and committed suicide.’ Mother’s voice seemed distant and removed and tired. Johnny heard himself talking. ‘Uncle Flinny used to tell me bedtime stories, Mom. I still don’t understand. All about the Dark One and the beautiful wife, and –’

‘Someday, when you’re older, you’ll understand. Poor Ellie. She was always the Dark One.’

Things were fading away, away. It was all over, done. ‘No more bedtime stories, Mom, please. No more, huh?’

Out of the tired darkness, Mom said, ‘No more, Johnny.’

Johnny rolled wearily over into dreams. His left hand opened and the small black object in it fell clattering to the bedroom floor. He was asleep even before the Black Knight ceased rolling.

‘I’m Not So Dumb!’

Oh, I’m not so dumb. No, sir. When those men at Spaulding’s Corner said there was a dead man hereabouts, you think I ran quick to the Sheriff’s office to give in the news?

You got another think coming. I turned around and walked off from them men, looking over my shoulder every second or so to see if they was smiling after me, their eyes shining with a prank, and I went to stare at the body first. It was Mr. Simmons’s body in that empty-echoed farmhouse of his where the green weeds grew thick for years and there was a larkspur, bluebird sprouts, and morning-fires fringing the path. I tromped up to the door, knocked, and when nobody said they was home, I squeaked the door open and looked in.

Only then did I get going for the Sheriff.

On the way some kids threw rocks at me and laughed.

I met the Sheriff coming. When I told him he said yes, yes, he knew all about it, get outa the way! and I shied off, letting him and Mr. Crockwell smelling of farm dirt and Mr. Willis smelling of hardware hinges and Jamie MacHugh smelling of soap and scent and Mr. Duffy smelling of bar beer past.

When I got back to the lonely grey house they were inside bending around like a labour crew working a ditch. Can I come in, I wondered, and they grumbled no, no, go away, you would only be underfoot, Peter.

That’s the way it is. People always shake me to one side, chortling at me. Those folks who told me about the body, you know what they expected? Expected me to call the Sheriff without stopping to see if they was lying or not. Not me, not anymore. I realized what went on last spring when they sent me jogging for a skyhook and shore line for the twenty-seventh time in as many years; and when I sweated all the way down the shore curve to Wembley’s Pier to fetch a pentagonal monkey wrench which I never found in all my tries from the age of seventeen on up to now.

So I fooled them this time by checking first and then running for help.

The Sheriff slouched out of the house half an hour later, shaking his dusty head. ‘Poor Mr. Simmons, his head is all rucked in like the skin of a rusted potbelly stove.’

‘Oh?’ I asked.

The Sheriff flickered a mean yellow glance at me, switching his moustache around on his thin upper lip, balancing it. ‘You damn right it is.’

‘A murder mystery, hunh?’ I asked.