Clay Hand (2 page)

It was a few seconds before Phil could get the words out. “It’s in the coal mines near the borders of West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio. Dick Coffee is down there.”

Nichols nodded. “He sure is. He was found dead at the bottom of a cliff there a few hours ago.”

M
ARGARET OPENED THE DOOR
to him, and he knew instantly that she had received word of Dick’s death. There were no tears on her face, only a stark muteness. She led him into the living room, walking ahead straight and mechanically. An open telegram lay on the table. He picked it up.

PLEASE CALL SHERIFF SAM FIELDS WINSTON 347 IMMEDIATELY

“You’ve called?” Phil said.

She nodded. Her voice broke through then. “Will you go down with me, Phil?”

“Of course. When do you want to go?”

“Now. It was last night. And here we were at a basketball game tonight, and last night I was sitting in a movie…”

“Don’t think about that now, Margaret. Try to get ready. I’ll make the earliest arrangements I can.”

As soon as she left him, he called the airport. Waiting, he looked about the room. In all the years he had known Dick, this was the first time he had ever been in his house. It was a large, splendid room, with souvenirs of Dick’s overseas travel. Margaret had met him abroad and they were married there just before the war. The strange thing about the room was that it felt more like a museum than a home. All Dick’s things were there, but they were arranged as they might have been had he already been gone many years. A Swiss steeple clock was on the mantle, its hands stopped at seven-thirty, a pair of bronze candelabra were shining, laden with unburned candles; a sword hung above the fireplace, well dusted. It reminded him of the living room at home the day of his return from the army: so much like the way he had left it, he suspected his mother had not lived there in his absence.

He made arrangements for their flight, and went to the door of the bedroom where Margaret was packing. “We can get a plane for Columbus at two,” he said. “I’m going to call home and arrange for someone to bring my car there to meet us.”

She did not answer him. Then after a moment: “Phil, they’re holding an inquest. They asked my permission for an autopsy. What does that mean?”

“It means he died under unusual circumstances.”

“Does it mean he could have taken his own life?”

The question shocked him, more, almost, than had the first word of Dick’s death. “I don’t know, Margaret. I’m going to the hotel and pack now. I’ll be back in an hour. Will you be all right?”

“I’ll be all right.”

She was sitting primly waiting for him in the foyer when he returned. Her black coat and black felt hat made her look smaller than she was, for she was actually a tall woman. Her luggage was beside her, and the house darkened except for the overhead light.

“Is there someone we should call, Margaret? Family?”

“I’ve attended to it,” she said. “Can we go?” They rode through the night and boarded the plane silently, Phil going over in his mind the few remote hours in the past that he had spent with her…. “General Delivery, Winston” … “Does it mean he could have taken his own life?” There was nothing in what he knew of Dick—and he had known him since they were in college together—to suggest such a possibility. He had not seen him in almost a year, but he could not imagine Dick defeated, much less quitting.

Beside him in the plane Margaret sat, her head leaned back, her eyes closed. But she was not asleep. Every few moments she moistened her lips. How well, really, did he know her? He was stationed not far from New York when she and Dick had returned from Europe. He had met them in New York, getting a three-day pass. It was a hilarious three days in an ominous sort of way, with the war almost on them. “A pickup, an honest-to-God pickup,” Dick would say, winking at him. He could scarcely take his eyes off his wife. Nor could Phil. She was radiant then. The glow deepened through the years. He had always recognized it as a danger signal to himself. There was something about her that made him want to touch her, not intimately necessarily, although that too, but just some casual thing to make her respond. For there was something lightning-like in the way she made people aware of her. He had seen her no more than a dozen times since, but at every meeting he had known the same taut quickening of his senses.

They reached Columbus shortly after four o’clock, the other passengers stirring grumpily, many of them expecting sunlight and the warmth of Miami instead of the cold glare of frost still on the windows. Jimmie Gannon, the night garage man where Phil left his car, was waiting for them at the airport. As soon as they were clear of it, the plane started down the runway and roared off overhead. Phil climbed into the back seat of the car after Margaret, and pulled a robe over their knees. He reached for her hand, the need to offer comfort greater than her need for it, apparently, for she drew away and sat apart, colder than the night.

Jimmie was whistling softly in the front, a tuneless reminder of wakefulness. Phil tried to sleep. He would be taking over the wheel in a half hour. But there was no sleep in him now, only the aching awareness of the empty pain beside him that robbed him of his own grief. A resentment of that overtook him then. Dick was his well-loved friend, Margaret, the stranger whose presence had always broken the companionship between them. It was not that way with other friends—their wives were part of the friendship. You didn’t accept Margaret as part of something, he realized then. She was distinct. You turned your back on her or you opened your arms.

“Want me to call your mother, Phil?” Jimmie said over his shoulder.

He recognized the lights of Rockland then. “Would you, Jimmie? Tell her to call the office. I’ll get in touch with them later today.”

They drew up to the Rockland garage, and Phil got out while Jimmie filled the gas tank. An overland truck passed, the driver dimming and raising his lights. Phil waved, and watched him up the deserted street.

“Okay, kid,” Jimmie said. “Good luck.” Phil opened the back door. “You’ll be warmer in the front seat, Margaret.”

Without a word she got out and permitted him to fold the blanket about her there. As he rounded the car, the wind picked up a circle of dust and danced it down the road ahead of them.

On the highway, he kept the speedometer between fifty-five and sixty until they got into the hills. The sky was still a murky black, with no stars showing, and the wind sloughed along the side of the car, a lonely, monotonous cry. The turns on the blackened highway were treacherous. He slowed down, glancing now and then at the dreary progress of the mileage register.

Presently an even band of gray showed beyond the hills to the east. Along the road, lights began to flicker on in the farm houses. An occasional lantern bobbed along in the stride of a farmer between house and barn. Weariness began to overtake him in the tantalizing half-light between dawn and sunrise.

“I’m getting groggy, Margaret. We’ve got to talk or something.”

“Sing,” she said, without looking at him.

He gave no thought to the song he started until he realized the association. All his life he would remember this night drive, singing when his stomach was knotted. And for that song to have come to him then…

“Why do you stop?” Margaret asked.

“It’s queer I should have picked that one. I met Dick in Italy during the war when it was popular. Half the U.S. army seemed to be picking it out on broken-down pianos. I remember one place all bombed out except the damn piano, and there was a G.I. sitting in the middle of the rubble playing that.”

“How far now, Phil?”

He glanced at the speedometer. “Forty miles maybe. Watch for Route 17.”

“Route 17,” she repeated.

“What was Dick doing in Winston, Margaret?”

“I don’t know.”

Route 17 was a gravel road. A gray dawn came slowly over the grayer hills and rolled down them like lazy smoke. They passed an occasional group of men trudging along the roads with dinner pails, others checking in at mine gates. Sweatered women were hanging up Monday washes already, the wind catching the wet clothes and twisting them around the lines. The women hurried into houses that seemed scant protection from the weather, hot or cold—fragile frame buildings that looked to be standing by the grace of God.

“I wonder if Dick was working on these,” he said, nodding at a group of the shabby houses.

She did not answer. Presently she read aloud: “Winston Colliery Number Two.”

Rounding a curve they saw the town in the valley below them, like card houses lined up on a barrel stave, Phil thought, thinning out at either end where the first rises of the hills began. There were two church steeples, the nearest with a cross atop it and alongside it a wide white-dotted cemetery.

“Phil,” Margaret said, her voice almost harsh with the effort, “I’d better tell you now. I don’t think Dick was coming back to me, even if he had lived. I think he was leaving me.”

H
E STOPPED AT AN
intersection in the town, parked and went into Lavery’s General Store. The storekeeper was firing the stove in the middle of the room, his coat collar turned up. A bundle of newspapers lay just inside the door.

“Where can I find the sheriff?” Phil asked.

Lavery wiped the coal dust from his hands on to his overalls and went out on the veranda with him. He pointed through the town.

“Yonder. Krancow’s Funeral Parlor.” He glanced at the license plate on Phil’s car, and then into the car itself. “That Coffee’s wife?” he asked bluntly.

“Yes.”

Lavery shook his head and went back into the store.

They drove up the main street past the fire house, with a single garage door, a drug store, a Penny variety store, a movie house where Buck Rogers was riding still, a grocery…There were a couple of farm trucks parked on the street, and a few cars, all of them dusty but quite new.

“When you live in a hovel,” Phil said, “I guess you make your Studebaker your castle.”

They stopped in front of the funeral parlor, a large house with one great window, the fernery scratching the dusty glass. Two other cars were parked there. He rang the doorbell and walked in, holding the door for Margaret.

The parlor itself was a long, drab room despite its over-furnishing—upholstered chairs, carpeting, and the walls hung with tinted reproductions of holy pictures… The Christ Child in the temple…the garden of Gethsemane… Christ weeping over Jerusalem…. It was a few seconds before anyone came. A delicate-looking little man looked out from a door at the rear of the room. He stepped back to say something and then came in with two other men, one of whom introduced himself.

“I’m Maurice Handy, coroner of Corteau County.”

Phil gave his own name and introduced Margaret, and they in turn met Joseph Krancow, undertaker and constable of Winston, and Sheriff Sam Fields. The Winston men offered Margaret their solicitude.

“We’ll hold the inquest as soon as we can,” the coroner said, “as soon as the sheriff has lined up his witnesses and the medical examiner is ready. We’ve taken the precautions of having an expert.”

There was not much solicitude in him, Phil thought. Perhaps it was good in his job. He gave the impression of knowing that job, at least.

“Am I to be told how my husband died?” Margaret said coldly.

“We’re holding an inquest to determine that, ma’am,” the coroner said. He turned to the sheriff. “Sam, you want to talk to Mrs. Coffee?”

Fields nodded. “First I have to ask you to identify the deceased, Mrs. Coffee. He wasn’t carrying much identification.”

For an instant the wild hope occurred to Phil that it might be someone else who had died in Winston. Margaret dispelled it. “I want to see my husband.”

In the rear room, it was the state medical examiner who guided their viewing of the body. Somewhere in his subconscious, Phil realized that the expert had already begun his work. There was no doubt that the distorted face was Dick Coffee’s. Margaret bit her lip hard, seeing it, but she refused the arm he offered her.

In the parlor again, Fields motioned them into chairs.

“May I stay?” Phil asked.

“I don’t see why not,” the sheriff said, “for the time being, anyway. Sit where you’ll be comfortable, Mrs. Coffee. You’ve had a long trip.”

He was a rangy, hard-bitten man of about fifty. His face had the look of weather about it, and his voice the ring of the hills. He took off his hat and laid it on the table, smoothing down his thin hair. He looked at both of them carefully with an open curiosity that had not a trace of self-consciousness. Then, having taken their measure apparently, he pulled up a straight chair and sat down opposite them.

“You’re a family friend?” He nodded to Phil.

“Yes.”

The sheriff waited, and for some reason Phil felt it necessary to explain further. “I offered to come with Margaret. My home is in Rockland, some miles north of here…” Having started the explanation he didn’t seem to be able to stop. It was as though he was trying to extricate himself from a guiltiness that came of being there with her.

“I know the town,” the sheriff said easily. “Mrs. Coffee, can you tell me why your husband came to Winston?”

“No. I didn’t even know he was coming here when he left.”

“I see. How long were you married?”

“Nine years.”

“Any children?”

“No.”

“You were home this Saturday night past?”

“I was in Chicago. I went to a movie.”

“By yourself?”

“Yes. I often do. Sheriff, for the love of heaven tell me what happened.”

“I’ll tell you what I can in a minute, Mrs. Coffee. First I got to ask you some questions.” He turned abruptly to Phil. “Where were you Saturday night?”

“I was in Chicago covering the basketball tournament for my newspaper.”

“When did you last see your husband, Mrs. Coffee?”

“The last week of January. It was a Thursday night. He left in the morning without waking me.”

“And didn’t say where he was going?”

“That’s right.”

“When did you hear from him then?”