But there was nothing, and in the wake of that nothingness I accepted fully, and for the first time, that I would never know what had been done to my little boy, nor who had done it to him.
With that acceptance, I returned the yellow rain slicker to its place among Hugo's other scavenged coats, and headed for my car. Once there, I paused only briefly to look back at the house, though even then it was only to feel again what I had so powerfully felt a moment before.
Ashes to ashes, I thought, then hit the ignition and drove back toward Winthrop, to Robinson's Mortuary, where Hugo's particular ashes were already waiting for me.
19
CHARLIE WAS ALSO WAITING, though not for me. I found him slumped against the rear bumper of his car when I came out of Robinson's Mortuary a few minutes later.
"What are you doing here?" I asked.
"Checking on funeral arrangements for Warren Maizey," Charlie said.
"He died?"
"No, but they say he's not going to make it."
"Why not?"
"Liver cancer. Eaten up with it." Charlie shrugged. "So I thought I might do a story on what happens to a guy like that once he kicks the bucket. A guy hated by everyone, I mean. You know, will there be flowers, who'll come to see the bastard, a slice-of-life quickie."
"Slice-of-life quickie" was a phrase Charlie had come up with to describe exactly the sort of article he preferred: short, requiring limited research, but which had a little weird punch.
He looked at the black cardboard box that held Hugo's ashes. "I heard about you doing the ash-scattering thing." He smiled broadly. "I gotta admit, it'll make a great final scene for the obit. You by the river, scattering Hugo's ashes. That's great stuff, George." He glanced at his watch. "Well, gotta run. I want to be ready when Maizey cashes in his chips."
With that Charlie bounded away, and I walked to my car, Hugo's ashes considerably heavier than I'd expected, as if something had been added to them, the full weight, as I imagined it, of his foolish hope that something out there, a sad Residual, perhaps, might one day make things right.
There were several people in the little picnic area by the river when I got there that morning. A few were jogging along the water's edge, others were lounging about, reading the morning paper. None of them noticed me as I made my way past the rock grotto, where I turned to the left and headed out into a somewhat-less-populated area. I found a place on the riverbank that was shielded from view by a high hedge, and it was there, without ceremony, or even so much as a muttered farewell, that I poured Hugo's ashes into the river.
It was just after ten in the morning by then, and I was hungry. I walked back to my car, put the now-empty cardboard box in the backseat, and headed toward Main Street.
Most of the morning crowd had left the coffee shop, so I had no trouble finding a table. There were a few stragglers in various booths, but by the time I'd finished my breakfast, even they were gone, so that I sat for a time, alone and unmolested, quietly sipping the last of my second cup of coffee.
At such moments, the mind can become beautifully unmoored, thoughts and memories twining around and through each other like colored oils. That morning, I let that familiar reverie overtake me, thoughts of Celeste and Teddy easily intertwining with those of my father, my mother, places I'd been, old adventures. Voices rose from their deep wells. I heard Max, Always remember the Unseen, and my father, Why are we here, Georgie? I heard my mother whispering the rosary and Celeste's quirky See you soon, Marco Polo, as she was wheeled into the delivery room. I heard Teddy asking me to pick him up at the bus stop if it stormed, and with the same old pain, my promise that I would, Don't worry, I'll be there. I even heard Cody's odd remark, With a small turn of the screw, anyone can do anything. Then, as if in the form of a stern command, I heard the woman who'd stood in this same coffee shop a few days before, a book in her hand, At some point in life, we should all be fiercely wrong.
None of these remarks took hold, but just at that moment, a picture did. I had probably glanced at it a thousand times, but on this occasion, I noticed the date on the small brass plate beneath it: 1988. The photograph was like several others that hung on the coffee-shop wall, all of them shot from the same vantage point, a traffic island just to the east of where Main Street ended at the park. Some of the photographs were quite old and showed Winthrop in sepia colors, its unpaved street crowded with horses and buggies and people in period dress. The photograph that had been taken in 1988 showed a bustling Main Street of small shops, the river park recently refurbished. The little rock grotto looked much the same as it did now, but twenty years before, there had been no hedge behind which I'd just concealed myself as I'd poured Hugo Tanner's ashes into the water.
But amid the usual familiar sights there was something that caught my eye. Twenty years before, Main Street had extended slightly farther to the east. There'd been a dress shop where the entrance to the park now stood, and beyond it, a small grocery, and beyond the grocery, a ramshackle building in whose window I could faintly make out, bloody and unappetizing, two large sides of beef.
A meat market.
I felt my gaze lock on the store, hold there firmly, as if a voice had sounded in my mind, real as a pointed finger—Look there!—and with those words recalled the white apron that had hung in the foyer of the house to which Maldrow had taken Katherine in the story, and which had perhaps been his own house, either in real life or as Katherine had imagined it, a white apron stained with blood. Then I recalled Cody's story of having waited for the 34 bus, the one that had gone by the old slaughterhouse, his remark that the man Katherine had seen in the park had looked as if he were "killing time," like a man on his way to work.
Suddenly I thought of that moment the night before, when Alice had grimly muttered, "Maldrow is the unknown man," a conclusion that had clearly darkened her already-bleak mind.
But now I wondered if Katherine's story might merely have thrown up a false lead in order to distract us from the real unknown man, or at least a stand-in for him Katherine had once glimpsed in a public park, found something in his look that appealed to her creative imagination, and thus seized upon him as a character she could perhaps track down and explore. And if this were true, I wondered, what would she have done next? I couldn't know what she'd actually done, but as a writer, I knew what I would have done. I would have followed him, tried to hear his voice, perhaps found out where he lived and gone there. It seemed at least possible that Katherine might have done these things, too. But more important than any of this was the troubling fact that Alice had so obviously merged Katherine's story with Katherine's life, and that a line of demarcation needed to be drawn between what Katherine had actually lived and the life she had made up. And so it seemed to me that if I could show that Katherine's story was pure fiction, her actual disappearance unconnected to it, then I could read the rest of Katherine's story without fear that the dreadful darkness she had imagined for her last days would darken Alice's last days, too.
"Old Man Fuller owned that meat market," Wyatt told me a few minutes later. "He was pretty mad when the town condemned the building."
"Where is he now?" I asked. "Could I talk to him?"
"He died ten years ago." Wyatt looked at me warily, as if he feared that I was on the verge of the unhinged. "What's this all about, George?"
"Just something I want to track down," I answered. "Did he have any employees?"
Wyatt sat back and folded his arms over his chest. The wariness in his expression deepened. "He always had some guy working for him," he said cautiously, like a man giving information to a source he suddenly considered unstable. "You couldn't run that business by yourself, and Fuller didn't have any kids to help out."
"Do you have any idea who that would have been in 1988?" I asked.
Wyatt shook his head, his gaze now very still. "I admit I'm the town history buff, George, but I'm not the Encyclopedia of Winthrop."
"Right," I said. "Of course."
I started
to rise, but Wyatt stopped me with a question.
"Why are you interested in someone who might have worked for Old Man Fuller twenty years ago?"
"Just something in what I've been reading," I said. "The story Katherine Carr left behind. Her friend's son—the one who was in the car when she was attacked—told me that she once spotted a guy in the park, that this guy looked like he was killing time, waiting to go to work. Then later in the story, Katherine's character goes to a house and sees a bloody apron."
"So you think it might be a guy who worked at the meat market near the park."
I shrugged. "It's probably a wild-goose chase."
Even so, Wyatt seemed intrigued. "Well, I do know that Old Man Fuller had an old house north of the town," he said. "He sometimes rented it to whoever worked for him in the market. It was a way for the old man to take back some of the wages he paid him. If this guy didn't have a family or a house of his own, he might have rented it."
"Is this house still standing?" I asked.
"Yeah, it's still there," Wyatt said. "I went out there a few years ago, when this development company was interested in buying the property. But the Conservancy took it, instead."
"Did you go into the house?" I asked.
Wyatt shook his head. "No. I was afraid the roof might fall. It's just a shack now, gutted, everything taken out of it."
"How do I get there?" I asked.
"Easy," Wyatt answered. "Just take Route 34. Turn at the old slaughterhouse."
After twenty years had passed, the house Old Man Fuller had sometimes rented to whoever worked for him was located in an area that was no longer exclusively rural, though it remained mostly so; a region of small farms occasionally bordered by a large estate, the country house of some wealthy New Yorker, or perhaps the trophy house of a local success story. The farms were neat and the houses were grand, at least by Winthrop standards, but it was neither the farms nor the houses that drew my attention. I was looking for the tumble-down remains of the old slaughterhouse, and beyond that, according to Wyatt's directions, an unpaved road that led deep into a thickening wood.
It didn't take long to find that road, and when I did, I followed it until the woods parted to reveal a small wooden house gone almost entirely to ruin, its outer walls stripped of paint, the windows broken out, the roof bare of shingles, posts fallen from its cramped front porch.
For a time, I remained in my car, simply looking at the house, wondering if it might actually be the one Katherine had described. Her portrayal had been decidedly grim—even lurid—and I was sure that it was my having read it previously that now created the sense of something creepily alive inside it or, more eerily, that the house itself was still sunk in the deep malignancy she'd described, and which made me wonder if perhaps she actually had come here, made a few careful observations, as any writer would, and from there gone on to write her description of the place.
But whether Katherine had ever come here or not was something I would never be able to prove, I thought, since the house had no doubt had many tenants during the last twenty years, people who might have knocked down walls, added rooms, made all manner of alteration so that even if Katherine had gone inside the house, her description of its interior was likely to be wildly off.
Still, the house as it currently stood was all I had to work with, and it was clearly abandoned, open to my inspection; so, after a moment, I got out of my car and headed up the weedy cement walkway that led to the front door.
Maldrow had found the door closed, but it was wide open when I reached it, so that I felt not at all like an intruder when I stepped inside and, as Katherine had done in her story, briefly stood in the foyer, peering about, looking for nothing in particular, save a sense of the place.
It was in this foyer that she'd seen a stained white coat hanging beside the door, but now there wasn't even a peg to hold such a coat. And so I left the foyer and walked into what was obviously the living room. It was empty now, save for an old sofa, its cushions long removed, the padding rotted, so that there was little left of it but the metal frame and a few strips of moldy cloth.
Next I drifted into the kitchen. A discoloration in the linoleum indicated where a stove and refrigerator had once rested. The sink remained in place, but was nearly rusted through, the spout removed, along with the taps, leaving round holes in the fitting.
It was in the bedroom that Katherine had confronted a terrible evil, though less in human form than as a jangling energy.
I hesitated only briefly at the threshold of that room, then walked to its center and made the same slow turn, taking in the walls, the one window, and finally the door once again, where she suddenly appeared, a figure backlit by the window behind her, her face almost entirely in shadow, her eyes glimmering in the horror-movie way of a cat's in the night.
"I didn't mean to scare you," she said, so that I knew I must have startled visibly.
"You did scare me a little," I admitted.
The woman nodded, but said nothing.
"I just came to take a look at this house," I explained. "It belongs to the state now, so I didn't think I'd be trespassing."
The woman continued to stare at me silently, her eyes very still, a glint of light in the silvering hair that hung in a few willowy strands at her ears.
"I came because someone wrote about it in a story," I added. "The woman in the story said she came here. I thought maybe the author actually had. Writers do that sometimes."
"What was she looking for?" the woman asked.
I hadn't thought to ask myself that question before, but the answer came to me in a way that struck me as being as miraculous as the sudden appearance of a literary image. "Evil," I said. "The feel of it."
"You can feel it in the horror house," the woman said matter-of-factly.
"Horror house?" I repeated.
"Where Eden Taub was murdered," the woman said. "That's what they called it in the paper: the 'horror house.'" Her gaze became oddly penetrating, as if she were conveying a piece of important information. "They just caught him, you know, the one who did it."
"Yeah, I heard that."
"People thought that they'd never catch him," the woman added.
"Sometimes they never do."
The woman nodded. "More's the pity," she said.
I glanced about the room again, took in the peeling wallpaper, the murky water stains that slithered across the ceiling, the windowsill resting place of moths and flies and spiders, and something in the look and feel of it all seared me with the recognition of the worst life had to offer, all its cruelty and ruin, the daily slaughter nature inflicted upon insects and men, and the unnatural one suffered by the Eden Taubs of life, the doomed and luckless ones who, by chance and chance alone, had met their violent fates at the hands of pure malice, and who had no doubt died in just the way Hugo Tanner imagined, tortured by the Unresolved.
"I guess no one's lived here for a long time," I said.
"Not in a long time, no," the woman said.
She added nothing to this as we drifted back down the corridor and into the foyer where, through its open door, I suddenly imagined Maldrow's car as Katherine had described it in her story, parked at the curb, a dusty old sedan, Katherine in the passenger seat, Maldrow behind the wheel, both of them waiting those few charged seconds before they'd gotten out and come down the little path that led to the door, Katherine either the dupe of a man she'd actually met, as Audrey believed, or a character her perfervid imagination had created.
But for all that, I still wondered if my original idea might have some distant merit: that business of the bloody apron, the meat market that had once been at the end of Main Street.
I glanced back into the ruined interior of the house. "I don't suppose you know anything about a man who might have lived there twenty years ago," I asked. "He might have worked at the meat market in Winthrop."
Had I been Archie Goodwin, this question would almost certainly have led to a revelation, the woman b
efore me perhaps a witness to the very events Katherine had described in her visit here that day, one who'd actually seen a strange woman walk up the battered drive, then drift through the house. In such a tale, one remark would have led to another, and at the end, something vital would have been revealed, a lead Archie could take back to Nero Wolfe, a step toward the resolution of the mystery.
But life rarely supplies such neat solutions, so the woman said only, "Hot in here, don't you think?"
"Yes, it is," I said.
With that, we both stepped out into the yard, then walked silently to my car. She was standing at the door as I got in, and even at that late moment, I hoped to get something from her, some little crumb that would lead me farther down the trail.
"Well, nice to have met you," I said.
She eased away, then suddenly glanced upward, and said, "Look there."
I looked up and saw a large bird circling overhead, its wings spread so far they seemed to touch the far corners of the sky.
"They strike at heat," she said. "There's no way to get away from them."
I looked at her quizzically.
"Hawks," the woman added. She pointed up toward the sky. "That's a red-tailed one."
I glanced up to where a dark bird was making wide, slow circles overhead, a little glint of red sometimes winking in the light.
"Beautiful," I said.
She nodded and stepped back toward the house. "Good-bye, then," she said.
Driving away, I glanced in the rearview mirror, expecting to see her still standing in the yard, or strolling away, but like the figure in the favorite poem of Katherine's girlhood, she was gone so quickly that later, when I thought of her, I wondered if, like the figure upon the stairs, she had ever been there at all.