Something in the Shadows (17 page)

“What the hell does
he
care! What the hell does goddam Amos Fenton care!”

“Oh, come
on,
Tom! Lou Hart is on a truth kick; the truth as
he
remembers it, and something just might come up about Amos and me being alone downstairs, and Joseph misinterpreting it. Oh, I’m tired. I’m just tired!”

“Well, finish the story, Maggie. What next?”

“Next? You were here when the phone rang ten minutes ago. It was Joseph. He’s in Trenton. He says he’s leaving the car there at the station for me. He says he’s not going home. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I’m not going home again.’ I said, ‘Let me meet you and talk with you.’ And do you know what he said? He said, ‘I’m leaving you, Maggie. You’ll find someone to marry you again. Some women are too homely, but you’re not.’”

Tom Spencer got up and went around to Maggie’s side. “Maggie,” he said, “I’m a goddamned, pig-headed, selfish huckster! I’ll call Miriam. You spend the night with us, okay? Maggie, good Lord, I’m sorry.”

“He’s somewhere sick, Tom. That’s what keeps going through my mind. He’s somewhere sick, and I don’t think he realizes
how
sick!”

Maggie Meaker began to cry, and Tom Spencer felt
as
though he were watching the Rock of Gibraltar crack in half and crumble. He reached inside his coat and took out a slim cigarette case he kept next to a package of Picks.

“Pull yourself together, Maggie,” he said, offering her a Kent.

He left the car at the train station in Trenton, for Maggie. Then he walked to the corner and checked in at the Y.M.C.A. He asked for directions to the nearest liquor store, went out in the snow and bought a bottle, and took it up to his room. Outside in the halls Christmas carols were playing, pumped in from some central point. “Silent Night,” “Jesus, Tiny Infant,” along with “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” From the vent in his door, he could hear them. He pulled a chair over to the window, watched out, and sipped the gin from a water glass. He would never go back to the house on Old Ferry Road. He was not sure yet where he would go, but the next day, or the day after that, he would walk back down the block and get on a train. For all practical purposes, he was a man who was leaving his wife. He knew full well it would cast suspicion on him, but if he were to run, after the police interviewed him, he would look even more suspicious.

Before he had left the house he had gone out behind the barn. The wood pile was intact and snow-covered, and the cat’s interest had simply been in one log, which she had been using to sharpen her claws. He had actually begun to have delusions that the cat was against him, that she was intent on exposing him to the police. Well, it was time to clear out of there, was all, before there were more delusions, before fear got a grip on him and he could no longer control the crazy impulses that had wanted to overtake him when the police were in his driveway. He had figured it out clearheaded and with considerable thought.

He had written the following note to Maggie, not unaware of the fact the police would probably be interested in its contents.

Maggie would not want to show that note to the police. She would not want to involve Amos Fenton. But Joseph knew Maggie well enough to be positive that she would ask Tom Spencer’s opinion. Joseph knew full well how Tom Spencer felt about Fenton. “You can’t withhold any information from the police, Mag,” Spencer would advise, in his kindest tone, his head spinning with dreams of getting Fenton’s job, once poor old Amos was removed because of the scandal.

If things got bad, they would go that way. Farther and farther away from suspicion of Joseph having any connection with Billy Duncan. Maggie would undoubtedly embellish the whole affair with her personal analysis, in the most up-to-date psychological terms, of Joseph’s pitiful guilt feelings over Louis’ troubles — And Louis’ troubles? Joseph had read enough “thrillers” to reckon that Louis’ troubles amounted to a bag of beans, so long as Billy Duncan’s body remained where it was. Without a body, the Billy Duncan case had no real pulse to it. Certainly under the circumstances, the police were not going to put out a drag-net for Joseph. Tomorrow, or the next day, Joseph would head south, and stay there until the whole thing petered out.

He sat looking out the window of his room in the Y. He was sad, but he knew that it was the gin, and that the sadness was a sort of lightheaded one, not heavy gloom. It was a sadness over little things. He could not remember Ishmael at all, for example, and on the drive to Trenton, he had seen hunters coming from a woods in the snow, and they had not irritated him in the least. He had only noticed that one of them was not wearing gloves, and he had thought that he was glad he had remembered to pack his own gloves. Was he without feeling? He poured more gin into the water glass. He had gone away and simply left the Varda file in his desk drawer, on top of the paperback novels. Before he had packed, he had thought of taking something from the file with him, but when he tried to pick out something he particularly liked, he could find nothing. It was like trying to find a fascinating passage in some favourite book, read when you were very young, only to discover you no longer had whatever it was you had taken to that book, and that now you could get nothing for nothing — the book was strange — you told yourself: “It didn’t hold up.”

He had had so many, many feelings; where were they now? He had been full of wonderful, exalted thoughts that sometimes made him soar, and now where were they? What were they, that they could go like that, with the snap of a finger, the passing of a day? Joseph leaned forward in his chair, not believing what he saw. In the distance was a church, with its glassed-in announcement board near an iron fence in the yard. He stared at the words, spotlighted in the evening. They ran in a straight line downward. They said:

“Oh, no,” Joseph said aloud, “not vices. They were true feelings!” He shut his eyes and drew a long breath, then opened them.

“Am I mad?” He laughed, but it was because he knew he was not mad, and there was that sign. It was nothing from any scripture, it meant nothing, did it? Except to Joseph, who had been asking questions of the night, from his window there in the Trenton Y.

He decided to go out and investigate the sign. He needed food — a hamburger, cup of coffee, and he would walk down toward that church and try to find a lunch stand, or a restaurant of some kind. He put on his coat, and finished the finger of gin in his glass, then opened the door to his room and he was flooded with a chorus singing “Rocking Round the Christmas Tree” over the Y’s public communications speaker. Going down in the elevator he remembered a line from La Rochefoucald’s
Reflections.
“Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.”

Passing through the lobby, he saw a copy of a Trenton newspaper. He stopped and flipped through it, but there was nothing in it about Billy Duncan. On the reading table, there were other newspapers and he walked over, and stood there with his coat on, going through them. One of the small-size New York dailies ran a picture of a young man carrying a suitcase, a cross expression on his delicate countenance. The headline said: “SON OF DR. HART HERE FROM PARIS.”

Joseph closed the newspaper and walked out of the Y. For the first time he wondered if there actually were a possibility that Louis had known Billy Duncan. He could see how stupid Billy Duncan might just park his car in Louis’ drive and go off to hunt, but these reports about the fight in the Danboro Bar were an enigma. As Joseph walked along the snowy block toward the church, he played with the idea that Louis might actually have wanted to murder Billy Duncan. Perhaps he
had
known him; they had had a fight. Perhaps Louis had told Duncan to park in his drive the first day of the deer season. Louis could have gone into Tidd’s Woods with a gun, and stayed there waiting for Duncan. He could have planned to kill him, then sneak back and wait until Duncan’s body was found. His story could have been that he had given Duncan permission to park there, and that he supposed some hunter had killed Duncan by accident, without even knowing it. Neat and perfect. Over that weekend he had drunk for courage; he had signed the register in the motel when he was thoroughly intoxicated, his mind on only one thing: murder. Therefore, the Duncan Tondley. He may well have purposely delayed answering the Tondley call five years back, too; a murderer at heart, was all. Everything would have been all right if it had gone as Louis had planned it. More investigation went on in the case of a missing man than it did in the case of a man accidentally killed hunting. Was that the truth of the whole matter, that Louis had planned to murder Duncan And by a fluke, Duncan had wandered into Joseph’s yard, and perhaps, even as Joseph was pulling the rope tightly around his neck, Louis was watching the scene from behind a tree in the woods. Joseph had committed Louis’ murder for him!

This thought made Joseph’s head spin. At the corner of the street he had to stop and rest his hand against a tree to support his body. Just as easily as that theory could be the truth, so could it be the truth that Louis
was
behind the wheel of his car that Sunday night the cat was killed. Who had checked on this story of the garage mechanic from New Hope?

“Oh, God!” Joseph said.

“Sir?”

Joseph looked down at a young boy with a bag of newspapers over his shoulder. “Is anything wrong, sir?”

Joseph saw the church across the street, the bulletin board lighted up; but he had left his glasses back in the Y on the bureau. He was too far away to read the words; now he felt too weak to cross the street.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he told the boy, “but do me a favour, son?”

“Yessir, if I can. Are you sick?”

“No. I just wondered what that sign says in the church yard.”

“The whole thing?” “What does it say?”

“Well, it says: ‘Consider those O Lord who art not with thee. Christmas Services at 10:00 a.m.'.”

“Then I saw only parts of that sign,” said Joseph. “Sir?”

“Thank you. You see, I couldn’t see the whole thing from my room.”

“Is that all? Are you all right?” “Yes, thank you.”

So he had seen only one side of the bulletin board, and that, in parts, distorting it. Even the one clear side he
could
see was distorted. Had he also only seen one side of the whole mess he was involved in, and not even that too well? There was always too much to see, but when one saw it all put together like a jigsaw puzzle, the truth was so elementary and obvious and simple, one could feel little else but amazement that it had ever become so complex. Was that right? And if Joseph, by some magic, could see the full screen of events, summed up in some simple shot of his life, wouldn’t it be of him standing there with the rope in his hand, about to strangle Billy Duncan? Billy Duncan had always been there in the shadows at his side; he knew him as well as he knew his own soul. Hadn’t he always known that one day he would have to strangle Billy Duncan?

Laughter? Joseph leaned against the tree listening. He shut his eyes and suddenly he could see Louis. It was Louis laughing at him. It was Louis with a glass in his hand, toasting Joseph. “Thanks, Joe, for doing my murder for me. I told you once we were a lot alike.”

“No,” Joseph said in the darkness. He opened his eyes. “It was
my
murder,” he whispered.

He could see his own breath in the winter’s night. “Mine,” he said softly.

“Mine!” Louis’ voice teased in his mind. “You were just my murder tool, Joe.”