A Penny for the Hangman (4 page)

A
PRIL 26, 2002 (CONTINUED)

The second time I remember the feeling of being observed was when I was 16. Amy Friedman, Lisa Miles, and I had gone to see
Titanic
one snowy January afternoon, and we stopped at a diner on our way home. We were seated at a window table, sipping hot cocoa and sighing over Leonardo DiCaprio, when that odd sensation came over me, a feeling I now recognized. I glanced around the restaurant, then out at the busy sidewalk.

He stood at the curb beside a phone booth, and he was looking directly at us. At me. He was dressed much as before—coat, hat, gloves—and he had a wool scarf around his neck that covered the lower half of his face, under dark glasses. I only glimpsed him for a moment through the twilit flurry, but I was sure he was the same man. When he saw that I had noticed him, he turned and walked away, vanishing in the crowd.

I didn’t tell my friends about it. They would have thought I was crazy. I rejoined the conversation about Leo, finished my cocoa, and walked home with Amy. Along the way, I looked for him, but he was gone. I hadn’t gotten a particularly bad feeling from the man, merely a sense of his quiet intensity. At 16, I was observant enough to have made a note of the men, especially older ones, who stare at schoolgirls. He wasn’t one of those. I remember concluding that he was sad, that maybe I looked like someone he’d loved long ago, as Kate Winslet had loved Leo, and his heart would go on and on.

He showed up again two years later, at my mother’s funeral. It was raining that May morning at Holy Cross Cemetery in Brooklyn, and there were few mourners. I stood under a black umbrella beside the casket, flanked by Mr. Colson and Mr. Janowitz, the law partners for whom she’d worked, and their wives. Amy and her parents were there, and four other friends from high school. Three junior partners and two executive assistants from Colson & Janowitz rounded out our silent cortege. Her estranged parents—my grandparen
ts—and the rest of the Tyler family were not there, conspicuous by their absence, especially since they lived mere blocks from Holy Cross. Father Clark was intoning the final prayer, and I was gazing around at the coworkers and vague acquaintances who made up Mom’s modest procession, when I happened to look behind me, over Mr. Janowitz’s shoulder.

A tall man in a long black raincoat was standing alone in the distance, at the edge of the field, clutching an umbrella. He was watching us. I couldn’t see his face through the deluge, but I experienced that same eerie sense of scrutiny I’d felt twice before. Father Clark’s prayer ended at that moment, and I returned my attention to the gravesite. When I looked behind me again, there was only the rain.

I’m thinking about all this now because I had another encounter with him today. At least I think I did. I was rushing, late, through a downpour from my dorm to my 3:00 English Lit. class (What else is new?), and I was halfway across Washington Square Park when I sensed it. I stopped, getting thoroughly drenched as I looked around at the crowds of students and tourists. I didn’t see him this time, but today I could
feel
him here, on campus. Well, I felt
something,
and it was the same feeling as the earlier times. Then I hurried to class, arriving just in time for the lecture.

I’m beginning to wonder if he’s real. He only seems to arrive in inclement weather, riding in on the rain like a sprite in a fairy tale. Maybe I’ve invented him, cobbled him together from my own secret hopes and dreams, a benign paternal figure who watches over me. Or maybe I’m just crazy.

Karen had to remember to drive on the left. The car was American, with left-side steering, but the traffic laws on this American island were still, unaccountably, British. It took getting used to, but she soon got the hang of it. She followed the instructions on the map that the hotel clerk had provided.

As it turned out, she didn’t have far to go. The road from the hotel wound dramatically around several mountains, with sharp hairpin curves switchbacking above a ravine, and then rose gradually to the crest of a hill, where there was a crossroads. The high stone columns she’d been watching for stood on her left. Tamarind was a mere five-minute drive from the Reef. She turned in through the columns, the name of the house engraved in a brass plaque on the right one, and proceeded up a long, tree-lined drive to the peak of yet another hill. The car emerged from the trees into a clearing, and there it was.

It was a big house painted dark red, and a high iron fence surrounded it. These were her first impressions as she entered a paved, lined, jarringly modern-looking parking lot that held about ten vehicles, including two passenger vans and an ambulette. Karen parked next to the last one, reading the bold red letters on its door as she got out of her car:
The Tamarind Home.

Well, she thought, at least they didn’t turn it into a morbid museum commemorating the crime. Perhaps it’s a nursing home for the elderly….

She walked across the steaming-hot parking lot, following the spiked fence to an open gate that was more functional than decorative, apparently the only entrance into the grounds. Standing in this opening was a big native man in the uniform of a security guard. He watched her as she came up to him.

“Are you a parent?” he asked, his tone doubtful.

Karen looked from him to the patio and lawn beyond him, where a dozen children in shorts and T-shirts were playing softball, monitored from the sidelines by two women in brightly printed island dresses. The women were obviously native West Indians, but the kids were a mix of races and a range of ages. The oldest boy, a Caucasian, looked to be about sixteen, and the youngest child was a pretty native girl of nine or ten. Not a place for old folks, Karen thought, but children.

“No,” she said, switching her focus from the game—she now saw that it was Whiffle Ball—back to the sentry. “I’m not a parent. I’m a journalist, and I just want to see the house where—”

“Oh, yeah. That. Okay.” His suspicious demeanor was instantly replaced by indifference. He turned, caught the eye of one of the native women on the lawn, and signaled to her. She nodded and came across the flagstones to join them. Karen assessed her as she approached: attractive, fiftyish, graying, friendly, strong. More than strong; enormously capable.

“Good afternoon,” the woman said, smiling kindly at Karen as she arrived. “May I help you?”

The truth
—the two words sprang into Karen’s mind the moment she saw the woman up close. Don’t make up a story; just tell the truth. This lady handles teenagers for a living, so she’s heard it all, and then some. Karen was reminded, fleetingly, of her late mother. She stated her name and the purpose of her visit, watching the woman for her reaction. It could go either way, she knew, but she was lucky.

“Ah, the scene of the crime!” the woman said, and her smile widened to display beautiful teeth. “Of course. We usually only do the official tours twice a week, but things are slow today. Welcome to Tamarind, Ms. Tyler. I’m Mrs. MacArthur.”

MacArthur
. Karen froze, staring at the woman, remembering the voice on the phone yesterday mentioning this very name. But there was no time to think about that now; Mrs. MacArthur was already moving away, leading her guest over to the veranda. Karen had no choice but to follow.

From
Virgin Cop: My Life with the VIPD
by Joshua L. Faison (Random House, 1982)

The house is situated high on a hill that is part of a jutting point of land called Bakkeroe, at the extreme eastern edge of the harbor of Charlotte Amalie. The hilltop is some five hundred feet back from the water, and there are several luxury homes on the point below the mansion. These houses are new; they were not there at the time of the incident. Behind Bakkeroe, Flag Hill rises up toward the center of the island, dotted with more gracious residences of recent construction. Down the hill to the west is the section of the island known as Havensight, where the West India Company docks are now used for cruise ships. To the east lies the next point of land, which was then the site of the Flamboyant Hotel, later torn down to make way for the current Frenchman’s Reef. The docks and the hotel are far removed from the Harper house. In 1959, Tamarind commanded its rise in splendid isolation.

The eponymous trees are massive and heavy with fruit, lining the drive and surrounding the residence. This is a dark red stone-and-brick, two-story house, a classic plantation manor with spacious rooms and white-shuttered double doors and windows opening out onto the teak veranda at the front and sides. Flagstone patios ring the veranda, and the green lawns roll away down the hill to the forest on all four sides. Behind the main building is a long stone structure that once housed some of the plantation’s slaves. There is evidence, among the trees and flowering bushes nearby, of the foundations of several other slave quarters, which were torn down long ago. Beyond them is a path leading down through the forest to a private cove….

Karen Tyler was on the veranda with Mrs. MacArthur, and the guy tailing her was in his car on the other side of the parking lot. The big man in the Land Rover nodded to himself, then spoke into his headset. “She’s here, just like you said.”

“And the young man?”

“Yup. Him, too. You were right about both of them.”

A short laugh. “Of course I was. Have you found out any more about him?”

“Yup. I did a little recon at the hotel earlier. I’ll fill you in tonight.”

“Excellent. Will you continue to follow them?”

“Nope. We know what she and MacArthur are talking about, and the guy isn’t doing anything interesting. I’m going back to the hotel for a little more background.”

“You must tell me all about it when you get back.” Another laugh. “It’s rather exciting, don’t you think?”

“If you say so. Gotta move. The guy’s looking over here.”

“Very well. See you soon.”

“Yup.”

With a last glance at the two women on the veranda, the big man steered the Rover down the drive to the main road.

From
Virgin Cop: My Life with the VIPD
by Joshua L. Faison (Random House, 1982)

For most of the eighteenth century and half of the nineteenth, this beautiful manor was the home of Lars Friedrich and his descendants, the owners of the Friedrich Sugar empire. Their famous brand ended upon the abolition of slavery in 1848, mainly because the Friedrichs couldn’t continue their business once they actually had to pay planters, reapers, dryers, muleteers, grinders, packagers, and carters in their cane fields on St. Croix a true living wage. The family fortune was lost, and the house with it. It was sold to the West India Company in 1863, and they stationed executives in it until 1937, when it was sold again, to a young Harvard graduate new to the island, Tobias Harper. He brought his Boston bride, Lucinda, to live there, and the couple soon had two sons: Tobias, Jr., and Rodney.

The stage was set for the tragedy.

“I have a prepared speech about the history of the house,” Mrs. MacArthur was saying as she sank down into a rattan armchair on the well-worn teak porch, “but let’s sit here a moment. Those kids just wear me out. Besides, if you’re the journalist who wrote that article in
Visions,
you probably know more about the place than I could tell you.”

Karen sat in an identical chair facing the woman. “Oh, I know the history, but I wanted to get a feel for it.”

“Yes,” the other woman said. “The photos and descriptions never quite do it justice. You have to experience Tamarind for yourself. We couldn’t let the film people in, of course, not with the children here. The house they used in the movie is on another part of the island. But we let the designers look around so they could re-create it for the film, and, later, the director and actors were here for an afternoon. I must say, those two boys they found to be Rodney and Wulf are the spitting images. To tell you the truth, I was glad when they left.”

Karen pulled a notepad and pen from her purse. “Did you know them—I mean Rodney and Wulf?”

Mrs. MacArthur laughed, the deep, hearty laugh of women of the Islands. “Oh, my dear, they were
way
before my time! I wasn’t even born when it happened—well, only
just
born.”

“What do you do here now?” Karen asked. “What is the Tamarind Home, exactly?”

“It’s a temporary residence.” Mrs. MacArthur waved an arm, indicating the activity on the lawn. “They look happy from here, don’t they? So…normal. But every one of these kids is here for a sad reason. Violent homes, abuse, scrapes with the law. That big boy there, the pitcher—that’s Terry. He’s our oldest at the moment, fifteen. Drugs. He was stealing for them; a security guard caught him breaking into a shop downtown. The judge agreed to send Terry here, to us, instead of juvenile detention or a reform school.”

Karen was writing all this down. “Ironic, isn’t it? I mean, when you consider what happened here…”

“Yes,” the woman said, watching the game. “When we were looking for a place to set up our program, this was available. No one had lived here for years, not since it happened. Rodney Harper’s older brother owned it, but he’d moved to Boston. He sold it to us twelve years ago, a few months before he died. He came down here to close the sale, and I met him. He looked just like Rodney, only he had dark eyes, not those blue ones Rodney had, and he had a beard. Such a sad man, and—well, I think he might have been, you know, drunk. At eleven in the morning. When I told him my plans to make it a group home for kids, I think he was relieved. He said the place was haunted.” Mrs. MacArthur turned to face Karen. “It is, you know. I feel it. Evil was done in this house, and it’s as though the house has held on to some of it. You can never get rid of evil; all you can do is push it away from you. That may be what we’re doing with these children, pushing away the evil of those two boys. As much as we can, anyway. I’m not a fanciful type, Ms. Tyler, but sometimes I feel we’re being watched.”