A Penny for the Hangman (12 page)

Well, she could dream, anyway, of a little house somewhere in their hometown. Athens Place was pretty. Just a few rooms and a kitchen with lots of sunlight and maybe a front yard. A yard would be nice. Flowers—she’d always wanted to try her hand at gardening. Roses and geraniums and smooth green grass, surrounded by a little white fence…

They would have the money for it. Whatever else you could say about Mr. Huxley, he paid them well. Molly had been saving all their wages, ever since they’d arrived here. Her husband had arrived home in their trailer late one night with a story about running into an old “roommate” from “the place.” He never named it, or even said the word “
prison”
; it was always “the place.” Carl had met up with this old pal, Thomas Huxley, in the local dive where he and all the other unemployed ex-cons got together every night for darts and pool, and this Huxley guy had made him a tempting offer, one that included her.

It seemed Huxley was a rich eccentric who’d purchased an island in the West Indies, and he wanted Carl and Molly to join him there, to work for him, keeping house while he wrote his books. Two years in the beautiful tropics, room and board and wages. When she’d heard the amount of the salary, she’d readily agreed—not that she’d had any say in the matter. They gave up the rented trailer, packed what little they had, and traveled two thousand miles to…this. This strange old man in this big house on this speck of land in the back end of nowhere.

At first she’d regarded it as a blessing, despite the heat and the insects and the isolation. Carl was always getting into trouble back home, always falling in with losers who talked him into their drunken schemes to get rich quick while doing as little actual work as possible. This had led to the bungled robbery and the dead man, the night watchman at the jewelry store, and Carl’s double-crossing pals had left him holding the bag for it. Several years of prison had not improved his luck; he was back with the wrong crowd as soon as he was out, and Molly wanted to protect him. At the time, his prison friend’s offer of steady employment in the far-off Virgin Islands had seemed like just the ticket. They’d been married more than thirty years now, they’d had a son together, and her dream of a nice place to retire to was for both of them. For all his faults, she loved Carl, and what choice did she have, anyway? She’d rather be with him than be alone.

The old man—Molly always thought of Mr. Huxley as old, despite the fact that he only had about ten years on Carl—was demanding, and his peculiar hold over her husband had never been explained to her. She knew he wasn’t really “Mr. Huxley,” knew who he really was and what he’d done, this famous killer. But he had a commanding way about him, enough to make Carl run down here at a mere snap of his fingers. And Mr. Huxley was always calculatin
g—you could see it in his eyes. She didn’t care for him, and that was a fact.

But the money was good, and the two years were nearly over. Soon, she thought. Athens Place, maybe; roses and geraniums…

Meanwhile, there were beds to make and dinner to be seen to. These journalists were here for the evening, and the girl was here for the night, even if she didn’t seem to know it yet. Three days, in fact—he planned to have the girl here for three days. Karen Tyler reminded Molly of herself at that age.

No, Molly didn’t like it. She didn’t like it one bit.

“Those Awful Boys” (continued)

Letitia Stewart, 87, was a prominent hostess in St. Thomas’s “Statesider society” at that time, and she remembers the two families:

“Oh, they were the most dreadful people! And they kept to themselves, mainly because most of us would have nothing to do with them. They drank, you know, and there was something so tawdry about the whole setup. Tobias Harper and Hjordis Anderman were carrying on quite openly, and poor Lucinda Harper was a wreck, a born victim. She drank more than the others, and she took a lot of medications. As for Felix Anderman—well, unfortunately he was the best doctor on the island. He was my physician, and everyone else’s, but we all knew about
him
. With those four as parents, I can just imagine the atmosphere in which those two boys grew up. It was a disgrace!”

Did no one on the island attempt to intervene on behalf of the children?

“Well, no, dear,” Stewart says. “There were none of these Social Services or Child Services or whatever they’re called—not in those days. And we didn’t all go about as they do now, interfering in other people’s business. That sort of thing simply wasn’t
done
.”

“Life is an adventure,”
Karen’s mother used to tell her,
“so be sure you experience it when it happens
.
”
It was one of Grace Tyler’s favorites, one of several rules in her “Mom” arsenal, along with the ones about always having umbrellas and clean underwear and quarters for the pay phone.

It seemed odd, now, that Grace would have spoken of life as an adventure to be lived and relished, considering her own history. So pretty, so quiet, so maternal; dedicated to her Catholic beliefs and her job at the law firm and Karen, though not in that order, never in that order. Karen had been the beginning, end, and full substance of Grace Tyler’s modest existence. She’d hardly been the sort of woman to take Life in her teeth and tear out huge chunks of it, and yet this is what she had wished for her daughter.
Live, live, live!
So, here Karen was, being adventurous.

Wulf Anderman knew every inch of this island, every hill and rock and tree. The old man seemed more agile out here than in the house, relying less on his cane. They’d begun their tour at the edge of the cliff beside the big house. Anderman had led the way from the paving into the bushes at the far end of the patio, beyond the stone outbuilding near the kitchen. The brush had been cleared away on the cliff, leaving a flat lawn of wild sea grass with the dramatic drop on three sides to the jagged rocks and roiling foam a hundred feet below. This bare patch of ground resembled nothing so much as a tiny park with a panoramic prospect of ocean and sky, dominated at its tip by the oddest, most sinister-looking tree Karen had ever seen.

The massive, gnarled oak had once been tall, but the charred black bark and the strange shape of the trunk bore silent evidence of some long-ago disaster. Lightning, Karen guessed. Now the tree was bowed, hunched over, as though bending under an oppressive weight. There was a crotch at eye level, bisecting the upper part, and from those two tangential sections the dry, foreshortened limbs reached up into the gray sky, straining—or so it seemed to Karen—in a kind of silent appeal or supplication. One withered arm, thicker than the others, extended straight out over the void, ending in a blunt knob that had presumably once borne leaves, as the entire tree had in its prime. Their host pointed to this branch.

“That’s where they lynched the pirates, or so the story goes,” Anderman said, smiling indulgently at the notion. “The freebooters, the glorious outlaws—men who were so much more glamorous than the ordinary creatures who executed them. This was the hanging tree. The condemned men were required to pay their executioner a gold coin for his services, and then he strung them up. The authorities left the pirates’ bodies there for the vultures—or, in this part of the world, the gulls and pelicans.”

Karen stared at the skeletal limb and blasted black trunk, stark against the sky, while Don Price snapped photos. She was curious. “The tree is dead now; it’s been dead for many years, I should imagine. Wouldn’t it be best to simply cut it down?”

“Oh, my dear, that would be a shame,” Anderman said. “As long as the tree is here, the legend lives on. We’ll always remember the colorful pirates, while the dreary men who destroyed them are long forgotten. Those pious, law-abiding citizens only managed to ensure the immortality of the outlaws they executed. There’s something perfect about that, don’t you think? And speaking of perfection, it’s time for the caves.”

With that, he turned back the way they’d come. Karen gave the dead tree a last, long look, and then she and Don Price went after him. He led them across the patio and away from the house, through more underbrush to the forest above the beach. They followed the ridge the entire length of the island, which was longer than Karen had imagined, and she wondered how far it was to the opposite end. Their sudden descent and the approaching roar of breakers told her they’d reached it, even before they emerged from the trees.

“Holy cow!” Don Price whispered at her shoulder, and they paused to take in the dramatic sight before them. Their host had stopped as well, turning around to face them and waving an arm to indicate the view, grinning at their stunned expressions. He stood on a wide, uneven shelf of rock that gradually sloped downward toward the sea some thirty yards away. A strong breeze from the ocean rushed at them, stinging their faces and whipping their hair out behind them. The rocky escarpment was amazing enough, but what really held their awed attention were the huge black boulders that lined the coast itself, rising straight up from the surf to jagged heights against the sky, some more rounded than others, leaning precariously together as though bracing themselves against the constant onslaught of the waves. Karen’s initial impression of them was of a ring of sentinels, soldiers standing at attention whose commander had long ago instructed them to repel all boarders, and that was precisely what they were doing.

Here, nature was relentless. The roar of crashing breakers was as constant as the massive, graceful spumes of white foam that flew straight up from the rocks before receding, only to smash in again a moment later. She’d seen this unquiet coast from the boat when they’d arrived, but that wasn’t the same as being here, so close that the spray actually misted her and the rhythmic explosions of water against rock tore all other sound out of the world. This was a violent place.

“The Hangman caves!” Wulf Anderman announced, raising his voice to a shout in order to compete with the natural symphony behind him. He came back to join them at the edge of the forest. “Of course, most of them aren’t technically caves, just recesses between the leaning rocks, and you can’t see them from here; they’re under us, below the rock face, at the water’s edge. Down there.” He pointed toward the crashing surf beneath the overhang. “We used to climb down and explore them on calm days; we’d pretend they were our seaside castle. Roddy called this place Tintagel, after the fortress in the King Arthur stories.” He smiled at the memory, then turned and moved across the rock shelf, back the way they’d come. “I think we’ll take the path down to the beach for our return.” He disappeared among the trees, clearly expecting them to follow.

Karen glanced over at Don Price, who was reeling off shots of the dramatic rock formations. When he was done, they hurried to catch up with their host. There was indeed a path here, faint but visible, and Karen wondered how often the old man and his retainers came to this side of the island. Rarely, she decided. It was a difficult trek over a harsh landscape; not something that would attract Mrs. Graves, from what she’d seen of her, and Mr. Graves didn’t look like the outdoor type, either. As they descended toward the beach, she thought about the attraction of this obscure place to two lonely, unusually intelligent teenage boys, and she wondered if returning here had been a prison dream of Wulf Anderman’s, if visions of this island had sustained him in the dull, gray reality of the penitentiary. When they arrived on the sand, she asked him.

“You’re very perceptive, Karen,” he said, and he smiled at her. “I thought about Hangman Cay all the time I was away. I knew I’d find my way back here someday. It’s so removed from the world, and maybe most people would regard it as another form of prison, but it suits me. I feel safe here. I love it.”

“What about Rodney Harper?” Karen asked. “Did he feel the same way about it?”

The old man gazed off across the beach and up at the house on the cliff above its opposite end. He was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “I was happy here. We both were. It was our private little world. I wonder why it ever had to end.”

Don Price had been standing quietly beside her throughout this exchange, but now he spoke, and his words shocked Karen.

“Well,” he said to the older man, “the two of you
did
murder five people.”

Karen stared at the photographer, but her surprise was brief. Don Price had a point, a valid one. She turned back to their host to gauge his reaction to it.

Anderman was still looking off at the house in the distance, his back to them. Then he turned around, and the expression on his face was inscrutable.

“Actually, we didn’t murder them,” he said. Then he smiled and added, “What I mean is
I
didn’t murder them. Roddy did.” With that, he strode away down the beach.

Karen heard the sharp intake of breath beside her, and she and Don Price met each other’s gaze. They turned to stare at the retreating figure, and then they were running, stumbling after him across the white sand.

“Those Awful Boys” (conclusion)