A Penny for the Hangman (11 page)

“This particular island was originally called Lookout Cay. It is situated right along the sea lanes used by pirates in the old days, and this house was built for guards and their families, placed here by the Spanish, and eventually the British, to watch for marauders. The guard would light a bonfire here on the cliff that could be seen from the nearest island, and someone there would light another one, and so on, until everyone around here knew to be prepared for an imminent pirate invasion. But the practice was abandoned in 1678 when a band of brigands stole onto this island and killed the British lookout and his family.

“For many years, no one would come near the place, and a legend sprang up—don’t they always?—that the big oak tree at the edge of the cliff beside this house was used by the maritime authorities as a place of execution for the pirates they managed to apprehend. They’d string up the outlaws and leave the corpses hanging there, a lesson and a warning to any passing ships, hence the island’s new name: Hangman Cay.

“When Roddy saw it, with that perfect beach and the forest and sea caves, and this lone house on the cliff, he fell in love with it. It belonged to an eccentric British man who’d expanded the old sentry house back in the 1930s as a vacation home for his family, but he and his wife were killed in the Blitz, and his daughter inherited it. She hated the tropics, so she just ignored the property. Roddy first stumbled on it in 1957.”

“When did you first see it?” Karen asked.

“Shortly after that. We were always best friends, all through school. The outcasts. The other children hated Roddy, and I—well, I suppose I was just too quiet for them. Roddy was the only person in St. Thomas who would have anything to do with me, and vice versa. We explored the beach and the forest and the caves at the far end, but most of our time was spent inside this house. It was locked and boarded up, but we found a loose shutter. We used to play chess at that table in the living room. This was our very own Neverland.”

“How long have you owned it?” Karen asked.

The old man smiled. “I bought Hangman Cay three years ago, from the eccentric Brit’s daughter. I moved here a year later, after the renovations were completed. This sundeck is new, and the generator and the glass windows for the air-conditioning and the furniture. The only original thing I kept was that table the chess service is on. I’ve been here two years, with Mr. and Mrs. Graves for company. They’re…old friends.”

Sid noticed the slight pause before Anderman said that, and he bit his tongue, cursing himself for his masquerade as an assistant who must defer to Karen Tyler. Oh God, what he wouldn’t give to have this man alone, all to himself! The thousand questions he wanted to ask! But now all he could do was smile, pick at the excellent lunch, and bide his time.

Karen, to her credit, was clearly thinking along his lines. She didn’t jump right in, as some might do, merely sipped her iced tea and smiled around at the view and allowed the man to talk freely. But a covert glance at her notepad showed him that she was actually listing things, arranging a series of questions for later, after the amenity of lunch was behind them, perhaps during the photo session.

Anderman was in no hurry to tell his story. He poured more tea, smiled at Karen, and said, “It’s so pleasant to have you here. One grows weary of one’s own company all the time. I’m glad you came.” He glanced over at Sid and added, “And you, too, of course.”

Karen Tyler smiled back and thanked him for inviting her. Sid studied the old man, wondering why he was suddenly so eager to break a fifty-year silence. More than that, Sid couldn’t shake the feeling that Karen was a carefully selected Boswell, a scribe for a scrupulously rehearsed performance. And he—Sid—was an interloper, an unexpected and barely tolerated addition to the party. Anderman was much too well bred and polite to say that, naturally, but Sid felt it just the same.

“Those Awful Boys” (continued)

“Then came that terrible Friday night.” Mrs. Gleason pauses here, remembering, brushing tears from her eyes before continuing. “The following Monday at school—well, the bullies were delighted, having a field day, but most of us were in shock. The headmaster called an assembly and told us that we should pray for them and their victims. I don’t look at the world in the same way since then. I don’t take anyone I meet at face value, and my old school friends agree. You never know about people.”

“Tell me about prison,” Karen said, “and your life since then.”

She smiled as she said it, but she was watching her host, assessing his reaction to such a blunt inquiry. They had left the table, which Mrs. Graves was now clearing, and gone over to stand by the railing. Anderman was posing for the camera, following Don Price’s instructio
ns—“Smile!” and “Look out at the ocean” and “Now a serious expression
”—with patient grace. When Karen spoke, Anderman glanced sharply over at her, apparently surprised by her lack of tact, but then he returned her smile and relaxed. The busy-bee photographer continued working as Anderman delivered his reply.

“How many times a day do you open a door, Karen? Let’s say you’re in a room in your apartment or at the office of your magazine, and you decide to go from one part of it to another. You enter a room, you walk down a street, you dine in a restaurant, you attend a play or film, you shop for clothes or groceries. You never pause to consider the number of times you move freely about your environment. Now, imagine for a moment that all the doors in your world are locked. Not only are you not allowed to go through them, you’re not even allowed to touch them. I don’t know if it’s possible for a pretty young woman like you to picture such a thing, but try.”

“I can’t,” Karen admitted. She stared at him, collecting her thoughts. She hadn’t expected such a speech. Neither had Don Price; he’d stopped clicking his camera. The two of them were a perfect audience, arrested by his unexpected eloquence.

“Well, that’s prison,” Anderman whispered with a fleeting smile and a shrug. “It’s every bit as dark and frightening as you’ve heard, and it goes on and on for years. Everything is boiled down to one simple act: survival. You try not to go mad, and that alone becomes a project.” He laughed suddenly, and his face was transformed into something younger, the harsh lines around his eyes briefly vanishing. “When I got out, the first thing I had to relearn was how to open doors. The act of reaching out and turning a knob may seem simple to you, but it is possible to lose the knack. My second challenge was eating. I constantly had to remind myself to sit upright at the table, not hunched forward with my arms around a metal tray, an animal guarding its feed. On my release, I spent a while in a motel not far from the prison. I remember the first time I took a bath there, what a glorious thing it was—in prison there were only showers. I lay in the tub for hours, until I was one huge wrinkle. Oh, the
luxury
of a private bathroom!”

Karen smiled, charmed, and she heard Don Price’s chuckle beside her. She glanced over at him and gestured to the camera in his hands. He nodded and went back to work, getting a shot of Anderman with the ragged afternoon sky behind him.

“I learned to drive,” their host continued, leaning back against the sundeck rail and smiling at the memory. “I was in a class with a bunch of teenagers, of course, and I got my license and bought a used car. I drove all over town and out along the highways. I couldn’t go far at first—I had to remain in the county for a while—but I must have racked up a few thousand miles in aimless wandering, making up for lost time. The movement itself was so exhilarating, so empowering. That’s freedom; just going where you want, doing as you please, with no one watching you.”

A breeze from the ocean chilled the deck, reminding Karen that a storm was building. She glanced down at her notepad, wondering how to work her other questions into the conversation. This man has a peculiar talent, she thought. He’s able to take over any situation, so subtly that you almost don’t realize how manipulative he is. She’d have to watch herself with him.

“The town where you were, the motel, the kids in the driving school—how were they with you? They must have been curious, to say the least. You and Rodney Harper were quite famous. How did you adjust to being—well, notorious?”

Another shrug from her subject. “When I got out, I was Mr. Huxley. I evaded the army of reporters waiting at the prison gates, and I eventually slipped into obscurity. By the time I arrived in driving school, nobody knew who I was.”

“What about the lawsuit?” Karen asked.

He blinked. “Lawsuit?” Then he nodded and said, “Oh yes, the lawsuit. Random House. But that was New York, so I was Wulf Anderman there, and yes, there were lots of journalists around for it. But I slipped away again when it was over. I’ve been Huxley ever since.”

“How do you feel now, about the book?”

Another shrug. “Sergeant Faison and his book are of no interest to me anymore.”

“
Lieutenant
Faison,” Karen corrected.

“Yes, well, he was merely a sergeant when we knew him.”

Karen noted his attitude as he made this remark, his tone of polite disdain. So, he’s still the privileged, upper-class white boy, she concluded, in spite of all he’s been through.

“You’ve been back in the world since 1981,” she said. “You’ve been free for nearly thirty years, but only here on Hangman Cay for the last two. Where were you before this?”

“Ah,” he said, stepping forward from the railing, once more in charge. “You do have more questions. Quite a few, I should imagine. You must stay for dinner. I insist.”

“But the boat—” Karen began.

Anderman waved an arm in airy dismissal. “The boat is at our disposal. You can go back later. You’re having dinner with me; it’s settled. But first, a tour of the island.”

He hobbled across the sundeck and in through the sliding doors. Karen looked at Don Price, who grinned at her. She smiled back, knowing they were both thinking the same thing: Anderman had managed to prolong their visit, and at the same time he’d avoided answering her question. Oh yes, he was manipulative. As they followed him inside, Karen wondered if Rodney Harper, wherever he was, possessed this same talent.

“Those Awful Boys” (continued)

Rachel Gould was the boys’ English teacher in the two years leading up to the crime. She died in 1988, but her son, Leonard, recalls her stories:

“My parents went to St. Thomas in 1953, and Mom taught there for six years. She was a great teacher; all the kids loved her. But Rodney Harper changed everything. He was the only student she was ever afraid of, and his father was such a big shot on the island. That swastika Rodney always wore, and his obvious admiration for Hitler—it really got to her. Mom lost all four grandparents and three cousins in the camps, and that snotty rich kid made fun of her.

“One day, just before it happened, he came into her class with his usual ‘Heil, Hitler!’ and she finally snapped. She ripped the chain off his neck and threw it into the trash, told him to get out of her classroom. He screamed, told her his father would have her fired, but Mr. Harper actually sided with her. He made Rodney apologize to her in front of everyone. The next day, after school, she found a dead iguana on the driver’s seat of her car. It had been cut wide open, eviscerated.

“My dad was threatening to really hurt Rodney—he didn’t care if he was just a kid—but he never got the chance. Two days later was Friday, March 13. Mom left the school after that semester; she and Dad went back to the States, and she never taught again. She missed teaching a lot, but she was afraid she’d run into another Rodney Harper. She always used to say it just wasn’t worth it.”

“I don’t like it,” Molly said to her husband. “I don’t like it one bit.”

“Just wash up those dishes,” Carl Graves muttered, “then see to the bedrooms.” He didn’t voice the second part of his gruff statement; there was no need for it.
Or else
. The words hung in the air as though they’d actually been spoken. Without another glance at her, he stalked out of the kitchen.

Molly sighed and plunged her rubber-gloved hands into the scalding water in the sink. Gold-rimmed plates, sterling silver forks, crystal wine goblets—she washed and rinsed them carefully, aware of the consequences should anything be broken. No chance of an electric dishwasher in this godforsaken place. She wouldn’t complain about that—not aloud, at any rate. At least she had a washing machine and dryer for the clothes, thank God for small favors, but she sometimes felt her entire life had been spent scrubbing, scraping, and rinsing dishes. Other people’s dishes. When this was over, when she and Carl were back home in the States, she’d ask him for a dishwasher. Who knows? She might even get it.