Fletcher Flora

So Lovely — and So Dead

Chapter One

There was no light showing through the crack under the door, and no one answered my knocking. Under the pressure of my hand, the door whispered inward into darkness. Through the slats of a Venetian blind, the light of a street lamp outside fell through to make the pattern of a trellis on the floor. Pushing the door shut behind me, I groped in darkness for an elusive light switch that didn’t seem to be where I remembered it.

Through the pattern of the trellis, a shadow moved toward me with a rush. The arm that I threw up in protection was knocked aside by a blow that caught me on the side of the head and sent me crashing into the wall. On buckling knees, I tried to slip sideways and away, but a hand, brushing my face, grasped me deliberately, almost gently, by the coat and pulled me back into heavy knuckles that smashed my mouth and sent me spinning into a sick world of nauseous, flaring colors.

I threw a fist wildly and felt it slip harmlessly above a twisting shoulder. Then the pitiless knuckles smashed again and again into my face with slow and murderous deliberation, while the hand on my coat held me up to meet them. The only way of escape was through the sick world of flaring colors into utter darkness. I took the way and went.

Later, I came up out of the darkness in a slow, shuddering spiral. Lying quietly on the floor by the wall, I listened intently and heard no sound. With a tremendous effort, I opened my eyes. Light still lay in a trellis pattern on the floor. Terror sharpened my hearing, as memory of that destroying pain returned, and I heard faintly from the bedroom the ticking of a clock. Nothing more.

After a long time, I turned over carefully onto my stomach and lay still again. My face was a mass of raw and burning agony. My head expanded and contracted in a kind of cadenced torture. Fighting nausea, I drew my knees up under me and found the wall with my hands. With infinite caution, I stood and waited for the retching sickness in my stomach to subside. Then, sliding a hand along the wall, I found the light switch and snapped it.

Turning, I looked around the room. Everything seemed to be in order — just as I remembered it. The worn rug, the shabby furniture, the cleanliness that couldn’t do much against its handicaps. Moving along the wall for support, I reached the bedroom door. Feeling around the edge of the doorway on the wall inside, I found another switch and produced light. Standing in the doorway, bracing myself with a hand on each side of the frame, I looked with breath cut short in my throat and sickness returning in a flood to churn my insides.

Everything here, too, was in its proper place. But nothing was in order. Nothing in this room or in all the world was in order, or would ever be in order again. Because of Maggie. Because of Maggie, who had lived here and had now died here. Violently. She lay on the floor between the old brass bed and the tired dresser against the wall at its foot. Except for her shoes, she was fully dressed and looked at first as if she had merely gone to sleep in the wrong place. That was the way she looked before you saw the ugly blue marks on her throat, the starting, terrified eyes, and the thick tongue pressing against the teeth in her open mouth. She had been beautiful, and she was ugly. She had been alive, and she was dead. Forgetting my need of support, I went across the bedroom fast, reeling a little, to the bathroom.

Inside, I stood over the sink, clutching porcelain, until sickness was gone again. In the small mirror of a medicine cabinet, I looked at the black and red reflected face and finally decided that it was mine. Running water into the basin, I did what I could to clean it up. The lower lip would need stitches.

After a while, I sat on the edge of the tub and tried to think, but I couldn’t make anything out of my thoughts. They traveled in circles through throbbing confusion and came out nowhere at all. I had only one idea that made any sense, and that was that I must call the police.

I got up and went back through the bedroom, not looking at Maggie, and back out into the living room. There was no phone in the apartment, but I remembered one in the hall. I went out and called the police and came back again.

Sitting in the living room, on the faded sofa with a broken spring, I waited for the police to come and tried to remember all the times Maggie and I had sat together on the sofa. I found myself going back over all the times, from the latest to the earliest. It gave me something to do, and I had just remembered twenty-three specific times when the hall door opened and a thin, undersized man in a double-breasted gray suit came into the room. He was followed by two other men who looked like detectives and were.

The thin man pushed his hat onto the back of his head, exposing a few wisps of gray hair, and looked at me. After the first startled expression at the sight of the smear for a face, his eyes made no concession to emotion at all.

“You the guy who called the police?”

“Yes.”

“What’d you say your name is?”

“Grieg. Norman Grieg.”

“On the phone, you mentioned murder. Where’s the body?”

“In the bedroom.”

“Okay. You wait here. You can smoke. If you need a drink and there’s anything around, help yourself. I’ll be back.”

He turned and went into the bedroom, the detectives following. Sitting on the sofa, I could hear them moving around and talking, but I couldn’t understand anything they said. Pretty soon more men came in from the hall and over to the bedroom. I heard the explosion of flash bulbs and smelled powder.

Trying again to think, I made a little better job of it than before. I tried to recall every impression I had got of the man who had attacked me in the dark, because I knew the thin, gray man would have questions to ask, and it would be better for me if I had some answers to give. Not that there was much to recall. You just don’t get much of a picture of a man who beats you into sudden insensibility in the dark. About all I could remember were the hard, cruel hands that clutched and smashed with pitiless power.

A fat man wearing a black Homburg and carrying a black bag came out of the bedroom and hurried across to the hall door. Behind him, the thin man in the double-breasted suit stopped in the doorway to the bedroom and said, “Just when you think you’ve seen everything, something new comes up. Thanks, Doc.”

The fat man paused with his hand on the knob, looking back and shaking his head.

“Must have been a giant,” he said. “Never seen anything like it before.”

He opened the door and went out, and the thin man began prowling the living room. Nothing seemed to interest him much, and he ended up in a few minutes in front of the sofa. His eyes, looking down at me, were still very carefully guarded.

“I didn’t tell you my name,” he said. “It’s Muller. Detective Lieutenant.”

I didn’t say anything, and his eyes moved slowly over my ruined face.

“You mean to tell me that little gal in there did all that before you finally managed to choke her to death?”

Words came blurred from between my puffed lips. He leaned a little forward and listened carefully.

“You’re joking,” I said.

“I could tell a better joke than that, Buster. This isn’t funny. Not to me. Not to you. Especially not to you.”

“I didn’t kill her. She was dead when I came.”

“Yes? How come you came?”

“I had a date with her.”

“We got her name as Margaret Hadley. That right?”

“Yes.”

“How well did you know her?”

“We were planning to be married.”

“Oh. How long you known her?”

“About a year.”

“You come here often?”

“Whenever I could. Maybe twice a week.”

“That isn’t very often for a guy to see the girl he’s planning to marry.”

“I’m a graduate student and part-time instructor at the University here. I don’t have many free nights.”

“I see. Was Miss Hadley a student, too?”

“No. She was assistant to the University librarian.”

“You notice anything strange about her lately? Anything that might indicate she was in trouble?”

I answered carefully, trying to say what I felt without giving it exaggerated emphasis.

“I think so. For about a week she’s been rather remote. Worried, I think. I had an idea maybe she was working too hard.”

“Do librarians work so hard?”

“This was unusual. The Stoneman library, you know. Maybe you remember that old man Stoneman left it to the University when he died some time back. Recently, Margaret and Dr. Cross, the librarian, have been working on it. They went out to the Stoneman place together to see to the packing of the books about a week ago. Since then, they’ve been cataloging the stuff, trying to get it properly classified for the stacks.”

“I see. Now we’re to the big question. Where’d you get that face?”

I told him what had happened as exactly as I could. He leaned forward a little farther, listening intently, his eyes frozen in an expression of sharp attention. When I’d finished, he straightened with a sigh.

“Look, Buster. You say you threw one punch over this guy’s shoulder. How’d you throw it?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“How’d you throw the punch? Up? Down? Straight out?”

“Oh. Just about straight out, I think.”

He shook his head.

“I don’t think so. Not unless he was crouching. You heard the Doc when he went out. The fat guy. He mentioned a giant. There’s a bruised place on the girl’s throat that was made by a thumb. There’re four places made by fingers. The places made by fingers come all the way around the throat to the place made by the thumb. Get the idea? She was choked to death with one hand. A big hand. The hand of a big guy.”

I saw again the shadow coming at me through the pattern of light. I sensed again the man who had held me easily with one hand while he beat me brutally with the other. The hands had been big, all right. But not the man. The man hadn’t been any taller than I. Six feet, that is. T shook my head and said so.

Muller didn’t answer. I saw that he was looking down at my own hands, and I held them out.

“They’re not big,” I said.

He sighed again and shrugged.

“No. Not big enough. It’s hard to tell about things in the dark. You must be mistaken. We’re looking for a big man. Maybe not a giant, like Doc said, but a real big guy.”

He turned away and prowded. Apparently not looking for anything in particular. Just prowling. After a while, he came back.

“Think, Buster. Think hard. Can you think of anyone at all who might have had a reason for killing your girl?”

“No one. Not one at all.”

“No idea who the guy was who attacked you in this room tonight?”

“No.”

“I can see you’re not going to be any help. I never saw a guy who knew less about a girl he was going to marry. How about family? She got any?”

“There’s a mother. Lives upstate in a little town called Shelby.”

“That’s something. We’ll get in touch. For all the good you are, you may as well go home. Leave your address.”

A detective wrote my address in a little book, and Muller went back into the bedroom without another word. No one tried to stop me when I walked out of the house and away.

Chapter Two

Murderer’s Trail

I got patched at the infirmary on the campus and went back to the room I rented on Wadlow Street. It was eleven o’clock then. Lying there within the four pressing walls, I thought bitterly of the strange ends little beginnings come to. You meet a girl in a place where you’ve gone for a couple of beers and company, and what began as beer and company winds up as plans for matrimony just as soon as a guy can get that last big degree and scrape together a few bucks. And all the time, though you don’t know it, beer and company and all plans whatever are nothing but diversions on a short road to death. Death by strangulation in a shabby room.

Until tonight, I hadn’t realized how little I knew about Maggie. Trying to find something back of the present that would point to the killer with big hands, I couldn’t remember a thing of any significance. A giant, the medical examiner had said. But he wasn’t. I could swear that the man in Maggie’s dark living room had been no taller than I.

I lay there a long time, almost an hour, thinking of the killer with the hands of a giant who wasn’t a giant. I shivered, remembering those hands. The one that had reached out in darkness to grasp my coat, fumbling in passing at my face and throat, had felt huge.

The Stoneman library. I wondered if there might be anything there to explain Maggie’s brutal death. It seemed so innocent, the inheritance of some books. Something that happened frequently and uneventfully in the life of a University library. But it was the only connection of any kind that I could make. Maggie and Dr. Cross, the old librarian, had worked on the books together. If there were anything, anything strange in the inheritance art all, he might know about it. After a while, I got up and went downstairs to the telephone in the hall.

While the phone rang in long, persistent bursts at the other end of the line, I remembered Maggie’s mentioning that the librarian was alone in the house of a Mrs. Crowder, where he lived a rather solitary life in a single room. The landlady, it seemed, was currently making an extended visit with an ailing sister. I let the phone ring until the operator told me that my party didn’t answer, and then I thanked her and hung up.

Upstairs, I stood in my room and looked at my bed, but the long and sleepless hours of a morning there did not bear thinking of. I put on my coat and went back downstairs and out of the house. Walking south, I crossed the boundary of the campus and after a while moved into the great shadow of the library. The library where Maggie had worked, young and vibrant in the dim light of towering stacks, touching with fingers that had touched my face and hair the dry and brittle bindings of old books. Now she was gone, as if she had never been, and there was nothing saved for me. Not even in printer’s ink. No little particle between buckram or leather.

The library was built on the brow of a hill, so that the rear wall of the building plunged to its foundation several stories below the main entrance at the front. I went around the building and down the slope of the hill. The massive sack of gray stone grew in gloomy and menacing grandeur with every step I took. I came out of its shadow onto a curving drive and went on down into a street of old residences. It was here that Dr. Cross lived alone in the house of Mrs. Crowder.

There was a light in a rear room on the second floor of the house, visible only as a thin, verticle streak between drapes not quite fully drawn across a window. But no one answered my ringing. I stood on the porch with a thumb on the bell button and listened to the shrill clamor of the bell deep in the hall inside. When I had decided that there would be no answer, I opened the door and stepped into the hall. It was then that I heard the music.

It came faintly, from the rear of the floor above. The music was that of strings and reeds and brasses. It was a sigh of breath from the darkest depths of the most abandoned hell. It was the black despair of the last man in his last hour. There was no terror in it, and no fear, for it was beyond fear and beyond terror.

As I stood listening, the music stopped and the old house fell silent. Then the music began again, moving down the dark stairs upon me. Somewhere on the floor above, an automatic record player was repeating the final movement of Tschaikowsky’s Pathetique.

The music grew louder as I went up the stairs. I saw that it was coming from the room at the rear in which I had seen the light from outside. A thin yellow line marked the bottom of the closed door. I knocked on the door and waited, but there was no response beyond it except the continuation of that terrible musical sorrow. I turned the knob and pushed, and the thin line fanned into its source. Symphonic damnation swelled up around me.

The record player stood against a wall, its top braced open. From where I stood in the doorway, I could see the arm of the machine rise and fall smoothly above the platter that spun beneath it. Dr. Cross sat in a heavy leather chair facing the player. I could see no part of him except his left arm and hand, which trailed over the arm of the chair, the fingers of the hand curved slightly, almost touching the worn pile of the rug. I didn’t speak to him. I knew, even then, that there was no use. He was beyond hearing. My voice or Tschaikowsky’s, no matter to this old man. His senses were tuned only to silence and night and whatever comes with death.

I went over and looked down at him and saw without surprise the brutal marks on his throat. The glaring eyes, the swollen tongue. The strangler’s identification. For a time I looked, and then I turned and went out of the room and down the stairs and out of the house. The black music of death faded behind me, ending abruptly with the shutting of the front door, and I stood alone in the cold street, wondering what I should do. Wondering if there would ever again be anything worth the doing.

I didn’t call the police. A little time would make no difference now to the old librarian, and I couldn’t bear the thought of Muller so soon again. I found a stone bench behind the Museum of Natural History and waited there for day.

When the east began to wash a little with light, I had made up my mind about two things. The Stoneman library must somehow have been the link between a girl, an old man, and death. And I would find the strangler. Somehow I would find him, even if it brought his fingers to my own throat.

Before the campus came to life for early classes, I went back to my room on Wadlow Street. I shaved and changed my shirt and put on my other suit. I thought for a moment of the classes I should teach and the studying I should do. Then I went out on the job that had become bigger than all the others together. On the corner below the house, I caught an eight o’clock bus into the city.

The Stoneman residence was on Stoneman Place, a private street in a section that had once been exclusive. Stoneman Place itself still retained its distinction, but the surrounding area, with little consideration for the rich elbow it rubbed, had slipped with time into ungraceful decay. I carried the sense of its hopelessness with me up to the massive door of the Stoneman mansion.

A maid admitted me and put me into a room off the hall. It was a large room, and it could have been light if someone had drawn the drapes back from the windows. Apparently they preferred shadows in this house. The only sunlight came from windows at the end of the room that looked out on a rear lawn. A piano stood before the windows, and a man sat at the piano. He was playing, but nothing in particular. Just scales — and chords. I walked toward him, but he didn’t stop playing. The only concession he made to conversation was to reduce the volume of the piano a little. With the light behind him, I couldn’t get a clear view of his face, but I got an impression of gaunt somberness behind horn-rimmed glasses.

“My name’s Norman Grieg,” I said. “I’ve come to see Miss Stoneman.”

His voice, rising above the chords, still managed to carry the timbre of softness, almost dreaminess.

“I’m Oliver Moon,” he said. “I was the old man’s secretary. My present status is that of fiancé to Miss Stoneman. Perhaps I can do something for you.”

“Perhaps. I’m interested in the library that was left to the University.”

“Yes? Are you from the University?”

“I work there. I’m not acting officially in this matter.”

He shrugged, turning his head so that the light behind him struck a sudden flash from his glasses.

“Then I can’t see why I should talk to you about the matter.”

“Maybe Miss Stoneman will see it differently.”

“Maybe. Marion is usually very generous about impositions. Shall we wait and see?”

We waited through three chords and a scale, and Marion Stoneman came into the room. She was tall and heavily built, and none of the things that money buys had made her anything but plain. Her hand in mine was strong and firm but icy cold.

“Mr. Norman Grieg,” Oliver Moon said. “Or is it Doctor? One never knows with University people. He’s come about the books, my dear.”

Marion Stoneman’s eyebrows lifted a trifle.

“A Miss Hadley and a Dr. Cross have been here. I thought they were handling the library.”

“They were. Not now. They’re dead.”

Oliver Moon’s hands hung suspended over the keys for a moment, and then dropped to sound another chord. Marion Stoneman’s breath eased past her lips with a sigh.

“Dead? Both of them? That’s very tragic, of course, but I can’t see how I am concerned.”

“Miss Hadley and Dr. Cross were murdered. Strangled. There’s always a reason for murder. I’ve been thinking it might lie among the books your father left to the University.”

She turned, moving to the piano.

“How fantastic! They’re just books. Volumes my father gathered over many years. Are you connected with the police?”

“No. Miss Hadley and I were engaged to be married.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. But I’m sure you’re mistaken in thinking the books may be involved. Why should they be?”

Something oppressive lay against my ear drums, and I realized suddenly that it was silence. Oliver Moon had given up his finger exercises. From the piano, he said, “I worked with the books quite a lot. It was one of my duties. If you’re thinking of a rare volume valuable enough to induce murder, you’re wasting your time. Take it from me, there was no such book in the library.”

“It could have been a volume whose value was unknown,” I said. “Except to someone who was willing to kill to keep it from becoming known. Old Cross was an expert on such things.”

Oliver Moon laughed.

“I see. Someone, perhaps, who planned to recover the book from the University stacks after it was cataloged. A place it would never have reached if your Dr. Cross or Miss Hadley recognized its value.”

“That’s the general idea. It makes some kind of sense. Nothing else does.”

He laughed again, resuming his soft chords.

“My friend, the rare book motive is trite even in fiction. Besides, the old man was a scholar, not a collector. You better start over.”

On the polished surface of the grand, Marion Stoneman traced invisible designs with a long index finger. The sunlight touched her hair, and for a moment she possessed a beauty that was not her own.

“I’ve such an odd feeling,” she said. “About Miss Hadley. She was to see me this afternoon. Probably she told you.”

“No. She didn’t tell me.”

“She called yesterday for the appointment. Thinking hack, I seem to remember that she sounded rather distressed.”

Oliver Moon’s fingers were in the low keys, working lightly.

“My dear, your imagination is busy after the fact. You didn’t mention her distress at the time.”

“Sometimes it’s only after the fact that you see the significance of things,” I said. “Did she tell you what she wanted?”

“No. I suppose now that I shall always wonder.”

“Yes,” I said. “I suppose so.”

She turned and came to me across the shadowed room. Again her hand was in mine, and again I felt a little shock at its coldness.

“I wish I could tell you how sorry I am, Mr. Grieg. I’ve always found myself clumsy about such things. Please extend my sympathy to Miss Hadley’s family.”

“There’s only her mother,” I said. “I’m going to see her now.”

Behind me, as I shut the door of the room, there was no sound hut the spaced reverberations of Oliver Moon’s eternal chords.

Chapter Three

The Orphanage

The railroad station was at the east end of the main street, and from its platform you could look straight through the town to the fields on the west side. It was a distance of about ten city blocks. Two of the blocks were occupied by stores and offices. There were also a couple of restaurants and a movie theater painted bright blue. I went down the street to one of the restaurants. A fat woman in a stained white wrapper was behind the counter. There was a peculiar little bulge beneath her lower lip, and pretty soon I saw that she was loaded with snuff. Even that was not enough to kill the hunger that was gnawing at my insides. I ordered a hot beef sandwich and coffee. By a battered alarm clock sitting on a shelf in front of some canned soup, I saw that it was shortly after two o’clock.

“Nice town,” I lied.

The woman looked at me as if she considered the lie too obvious to encourage.

“You figure to stay?”

“No. Just stopping for a few hours.”

“I thought so. Fewer the better. For you, I mean. This town’s a jumping off place. No one in his right mind would stay here.”

She took a shot at a Number Ten can on the floor, and I applied myself to the sandwich. It wasn’t hot, but the gravy hadn’t actually begun to congeal, so I managed to choke it down. I considered telling the fat woman how good it was, just for the sake of points, but I remembered in time she wasn’t susceptible to lies. I ate and kept still.

“Looking for someone in particular?” she asked.

“Yes. A Mrs. Hadley.”

“Sarah Hadley?”

“I guess so. I don’t know her first name.”

“Must be Sarah. She’s the only Hadley in town.”

“This Mrs. Hadley is a widow.”

“That’s Sarah. You know where she lives?”

“No. Maybe you could tell me.”

“Sure. Go right through town. First corner west of the business district, turn south. There isn’t any numbers on the houses. Hers is the second one, east side. Needs paint.”

I thanked her and went out, leaving a half dollar on the counter. Without asking a question, I’d learned one thing. The news of Maggie’s murder was not yet known in the town where she had lived as a child. If it were known at all, it would be known to everyone. Apparently Muller was in no hurry about sending a man to see Mrs. Hadley. No doubt he had his reasons. One of them, I thought suddenly, might be because he was busy at the house of a Mrs. Crowder. The house where an old librarian sat dead in his chair before a repetitious phonograph.

I turned at the corner as directed by the fat woman and saw the house that needed paint. The floor of the front porch sagged under my feet as I crossed it. It was a decadent, defeated house. Not a house of death, but a house where death would be a kind of salvation.

The woman who answered my knock might have been designed by a dyspeptic interior decorator to harmonize with the dreary architecture of the house. Her face was the face of a woman caught up in perpetual sympathy with her own misery. She didn’t speak. She whined. I felt a shock of dull pain to think that Maggie had come from this place. From this woman.

“Mrs. Hadley?”

“That’s right, young man. What do you want?”

“My name’s Norman Grieg. I’d like to speak with you a few minutes. I’m a friend of Margaret’s.”

Her lips twisted against her teeth. The whine sharpened her nose.

“I don’t know why a friend of Margaret’s should come to see me when Margaret doesn’t bother to come herself. You can come in, if you want.”

In a square, ugly living room, I sat in a lumpy mohair chair. Mrs. Hadley sat rigidly on the edge of the sofa which was the chair’s mate. Behind her, the wall was a design of soiled and faded roses. A stain had spread on the ceiling and crept almost half way down the wall.

“Now, young man, perhaps you’ll tell me what you want.”

I wondered how to begin. How do you tell a sour, defeated woman that her daughter has been strangled? How do you tell her what you want, when you don’t really know yourself? Just a hint of something. Just the shadow of a finger out of the dead past pointing to a murderer.

“Margaret’s dead,” I said.

She just sat looking at me. I saw no shock in her eyes. No grief, no pain. Just a sharp retraction into a kind of breathless weariness.

“Dead?”

“Yes. She was murdered. The police will be contacting you.”

The wariness was there in her eyes, remaining, and now there was also a son of ugly hunger, a flash of unholy satisfaction. I felt suddenly sick. The cold gravy was slime in my stomach.

“I told her she shouldn’t go. I told her when she went away with her grand ideas of education. She thought she was too good for me and for the community whose charity she took. Was she in trouble? Who killed her?”

“I don’t know who killed her. Neither do the police. She was in trouble, but it wasn’t the kind of trouble you’re thinking. Mrs. Hadley, someone had a reason for killing your daughter. It must have been a big reason. There may be something in the past, something that happened in this town, to explain it. Can you think of anything?”

She was prim again. Rigid and guarded. Untouched by love or grief or death itself. In no gutter of any city could you find a woman more damned.

“She was not my daughter, you know,” she said.

For a moment we sat alone, that lost woman and I, in a still world bounded by faded roses. Then the clean wind of a bigger world blew in, and I felt a great relief to know that Maggie, who had died in pain and ugliness, had at least not been tainted by the sour blood of Sarah Hadley.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“She was not my daughter. Anyone in this town can tell you that. I took her from the orphanage when she was twelve. I thought she could help me around the house. I thought she would remain in common gratitude to care for me in my old age. But she went away. When she was eighteen, it was. Ten years ago. She never returned. Not once. And now she’s dead, you say. You will understand, perhaps, if I seem unmoved.”

“You never legally adopted her?”

“No. I took her to raise. She used my name. That’s all.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted her dead?”

“No one. To my knowledge, I am the only person she ever injured.”

“Think, Mrs. Hadley. Can you recall anything at all that might have any significance? Maybe something that seemed very minor at the time.”

“I can think of nothing.”

I had no heart for more. At the door, I turned and said, “This orphanage, Mrs. Hadley. Is it near here?”

She stood at the sofa, making no move to show me out.

“It’s just out of town. About a mile by the road. Go out of town by the main street. West, that is. Go north at the first turning. It’s about a mile altogether.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I made no effort to keep the irony out of my voice. “I’m sorry to bring you this bad news, Mrs. Hadley.”

But she was untouched, beyond recall in her own sour hell.

“Margaret Hadley became a stranger to me ten years ago, Mr. Grieg. I’m a poor woman. I have enough only for my own needs. You will not expect me to assume any obligations.”

“I’ll bury her,” I said.

Far back off a narrow road the orphan-age sat, a crumbling red brick building that leaned against the rise of a hill. The long drive that approached it from the road was lined with ancient oaks and maples. More of the great trees scattered over the large unkempt yard, crowding the house itself, stretching their gaunt arms above the slate roof and giving me the uneasy feeling that they were holding the place mesmerized.

Three small kids in jeans and sweaters were playing listlessly under the trees in the front yard. In the rear, I saw a couple other kids coming down to the house from a barn farther up the slope.

I went up across a wide porch into a hall. The floor was almost black from innumerable applications of oily sweeping compound and had long ago begun to splinter away. I stopped inside the door for a minute, adjusting to the oppressive, heavy air. The institutional odor of the place, animal and antiseptic, surrounded me like an invisible fog. At the end of the hall there was a closed door with a small sign posted on the hall side. I went down and read the sign: MR. HENDERSON, SUPERINTENDENT. When I rapped on the door, a voice invited me to enter.

A man sat behind a desk in an early, interior dusk that was the room’s own. The light was too dim for me to distinguish his features until he stood up and came around the desk to meet me. Then I saw that he was old and stooped, with the skin drying on his bones. His grip was firm enough, however, and his voice was soft and resonant, without a quaver.

“Mr. Henderson? My name is Norman Grieg. I’ve come to talk with you about a girl who lived here a long time ago.”

“Sit down, Mr. Grieg. I’ve been here over a quarter of a century. Possibly I may remember her.”

He resumed his seat, lacing his bony fingers on the desk in front of him. The little light that entered the room behind him struck a highlight from his bald dome.

“Who is this girl, Mr. Grieg?”

“Margaret Hadley.”

“Oh, yes. Little Maggie Hadley. I remember her very well. Her name was not Hadley, of course, when we had her here. She took the name from the lady she went to live with. Her parents lived on a farm nearby. The mother died in childbirth. The father died later as the result of an accident while ploughing. Maggie was about two at the time and was placed in the care of this institution. She remained here ten, twelve years. I’ve forgotten exactly. A pretty child. Intelligent I wasn’t happy about placing her in the home of Mrs. Hadley, but unfortunately I’m not the final arbiter in those matters. Later, she went off on her own to college and made a good career for herself as a librarian. I used to receive infrequent letters from her. None now, I think, for all of two years. Are you a friend of Maggie’s?”

“We were engaged to be married,” I said. “She was assistant librarian at State University. I’m an instructor there.”

He stared for a long time at his laced fingers.

“You spoke in the past. Mr. Grieg.” he said. “I’m an old man and have become sensitive to the tense.”

“Margaret Hadley is dead. She died last night in her apartment near the University. She was strangled.”

He kept staring at his laced fingers. Outside the window behind him, the black branches of an oak were like other fingers scratching at the glass. The sound of them was a dry, rasping whisper in the room. The old man’s voice, when he spoke, was hardly louder.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “The thought of little Maggie... If I can be of any help...”

“I want to find the person who killed her. I know so little of her past, of the people she has known. I came here to see if you could suggest a line to follow.”

He stirred restlessly, the light slipping over the curve of his skull.

“I knew her as a child. What could there be in a girl’s childhood?”

“Who knows? If you would just talk. Just tell me what you remember.”

“There’s so little. A small child. A young girl. She did her chores around the place. She did her lessons and learned quickly. She got along well with the other children. She was brought here in the fall, I remember, because it was a terribly bad winter that year.”

“Who else was here then?”

“Who else?”

“What other children, I mean.”

“It’s so hard to recall. A long time ago. So many children came and went altogether. In the spring, I remember, Otto Bloom was placed in our charge. The spring after Maggie came. They grew up together, Otto and Maggie. Otto stayed on after Maggie left for Mrs. Hadley’s. No one, of course, was willing to take him in. He was permitted to leave on his own when he was eighteen. Several years after Maggie’s departure, that was.”

“Who was Otto Bloom? Why do you say no one was willing to take him in?”

He lifted his face, and I had a strange notion that his eyes had retreated suddenly into their sockets. Oak fingers fumbled at the window. Even outside, now, the shadows were deepening. The name of Otto Bloom was a whispered echo inside my skull. Somewhere, sometime, I had heard the name before. The old man stirred again and spoke.

“You are not a native of this section, Mr. Grieg. If you were, you would not need to ask those questions. Otto was the only son of Mona Bloom. The only child. He was the fruit of her fourth and last marriage. To the elder Otto Bloom, that is. Mr. Bloom was a wealthy farmer who lived not more than five or six miles from this place.”

“The name Bloom seems faintly familiar, but I can’t place it.”

“Mona Bloom was a murderess, Mr. Grieg. She killed Otto Bloom with a hatchet as he slept. Alone, in the middle of the night, she buried his body in an orchard below their house. When the body was found and an investigation started, it was learned that Mona Bloom had been married three times previously. In every case, to a man of some wealth. One had simply disappeared and was never heard from again. The other two had died suddenly, one by falling, somehow, on a pitchfork, the other by what was written off as a heart attack. Mona Bloom murdered them, of course. After her conviction for murdering Bloom she confessed the others. Boasted of them, indeed. She died on the gallows.”

“What kind of boy was Otto?”

“What kind would you expect? We tried to keep his mother’s story from him, but such things cannot be kept secret. Who knows what knowledge like that would do to the heart of a boy? He was gloomy, withdrawn. He brooded, but he was intelligent. Remarkably intelligent. He read omnivorously. When he left here at the age of eighteen, he had an education that would he a credit to any college graduate. I never heard from him. Where he went, what he did, I don’t know.”

I felt very strange. The tapping of the oak fingers at the window seemed suddenly very loud. As if they were tapping a message. A message my brain was on the verge of grasping.

“Tell me, Mr. Henderson. Is there anything in particular that you can remember about Otto Bloom? Other than what you’ve told me. Something that might mark him quite distinctly.”

The old man shook his head. He turned his chair suddenly, sharply, so that his profile was toward me. Against the fading light of the window, his naked head and wasted face were the silhouette of a brooding hawk.

“Nothing. I can recall nothing else.” He paused, as if he were listening intently to the faint voice of the past, and when he resumed speaking, his words were measured, dropping slowly and tiredly into the still, shadowed room. “Except that, for a boy who had little use for exercise, he was extremely strong. Much of his strength, I think, was in his hands. He had very large hands.”

I stood up, and the rooms was no longer still for I heard above the rustle at the window, filling this crumbling place with sudden terror, the spaced reverberations of crashing chords.

“Thanks very much, Mr. Henderson,” I said.

He arose, lifting his arms and letting them fall.

“I’m afraid I’ve not been of much help to you.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “You’ve told me everything.”

I went out of the orphanage and down the long drive to the road, and he was waiting for me there in the darkness beneath the ancient trees. We walked down the road together.

“You’ve seen the old man,” he said, and his voice was like the sighing of the wind in the branches overhead.

“Yes.”

Strangely, I was not afraid, because it is too late for fear when you are walking with death on a lonely road. We went downhill to a point where the dry bed of a narrow stream was spanned by the rough planking of a bridge. He stopped there abruptly, turning to stare back at the gloomy bulk of the old orphanage against the hillside. His voice sounded light and free, rising in release from a great oppression.

“He told you, I suppose, about Otto Bloom?”

“He told me. He said that Otto had large hands. Strong hands. Then I remembered the chords. I don’t know much about music, but I know a little. It would take large hands to strike some of those chords. It was a mistake to mention where I was coming.”

“You’re clever, Mr. Grieg. But no matter now. For a long time I had to live with the knowledge that I was the son of a murderess. Now I am a murderer myself, and I no longer find the knowledge a burden. Indeed, I feel a strange elation, Mr. Grieg, as if I had come at last into my true heritage.”

Bitterness rose up within me.

“Sure,” I said. “Murder. A young woman. An old man. Now me. That’s only three. You’re still under family par.”

I heard a long sigh.

“There will be time to improve the record. Later, I may devise something appropriate for the woman who is to be my wife. It was fear of some such thing, I suppose, that compelled little Maggie to behave so rashly. She recognized me, you see. When she and the old librarian came about the books. After all these years. I thought at first she might keep my little secret, but when she called yesterday for the appointment, I understood my error. It seemed obvious that she had confided in the old man and was following his advice. You can see that I was forced to act. As moral people, they couldn’t stand by and see a wealthy woman marry in ignorance the son of a woman who had made a career of marrying and murdering for money. Unfortunately, moral people must bear the consequences of their morality.”

“As murderers must bear the consequences of their murdering,” I said.

His voice rose on an eerie high note of inner laughter.

“A myth, Mr. Grieg. The files of the police are heavy with unsolved murders. Yours, I think, will be among them!”

He threw himself upon me so suddenly that I had time to do no more than reel backward. His hands were at my throat as we crashed into the rotten railing of the old bridge. The decayed wood snapped like punk, pitching us headlong into the ravine.

I twisted violently, wrenching his body over to take the full shock of the impact beneath me, and for a moment I felt his iron fingers go slack. But only for a moment. Before I could pull myself away, they resumed their deep, relentless probing for my throat.

I threw my arms out, clawing at the hard earth, and my fingers closed on a jagged stone.

Long after it was unnecessary, I continued to lift the stone and bring it smashing down.

Afterward, I sat in the dry ravine beside the body of Oliver Moon until I could breathe normally again. Then I got up and walked back up the hill to the orphanage, and on the way I kept thinking of what the preacher had said about the sun rising and the sun setting, and everything coming in the end to its beginning.

Content

Fletcher Flora
So Lovely — and So Dead

Chapter One

Chapter Two Murderer’s Trail

Chapter Three The Orphanage