Tales for a Stormy Night (13 page)

The music when he once more tilted the horn into the night had a quiet sadness that soon grew into melancholy. It was a lament that might have been winded over the last fires of a dead hero’s camp. The birds grew still. In the meadow the fog seemed to break, wisping upward in a hundred little pyramids, the slow movement of them suggesting prayer or mourning, and in the midst of them a larger core of whiteness writhed and vibrated. The shadows deepened as the moon passed further over the forest. Jeb played on, the melancholy in him growing deeper. Then the first fears of parting with the horn came to him when he saw a searchlight sweep the sky and was reminded of the dawn. His heart cried out against it, and his whole body shivered with the motion of the core of whiteness in the field. But, as becomes a lover who is still with his beloved, however immanent departure, he was moved to gayety.

The music changed, his fingers flying over the pitchkeys, provoking laughter in the throat of the horn. To this the birds responded, and soon the whole forest was merry. Even the frogs quickened their tympany. In the field the pyramids of mist were dissolving and gradually shaping into white swirls, churning, as if whirled about by many dancers. Inside himself, Jeb felt the growing of some struggle. It was his adolescence again, or more than that, it was a lifetime of adolescence, urging a definition or a freedom—a merging with the music. The field was vibrant. His mouth was burning with the heat of the horn against it, his whole body on fire with the wild white heat.

A sudden stillness came upon the creatures of the forest. Jeb was aware of it although he played on, feeling the climax of his music almost upon him, and feeling as he played that he must be stronger than some force that would try to stop him. Whatever was happening in the field was happening to him, and there was a logic to it, in the ways of his logic that night. There was a presence there, and it was a part of him and his beloved horn. The birds flew out of the trees and about him, almost touching him with their wings, and still he played. There was stirring somewhere behind him, as of the wind starting up suddenly among the leaves, and then came a rattle. It grew louder until he recognized it. The sound was the clanging of chains.

For a moment he stopped, but the horn clung to his lips, and while he listened to the clanging, almost upon him now, the horn grew cold to his touch, but clung still to his lips now like frosty metal in the winter. A terrible fear came on him. The birds were gone, and no small curious eyes stared up at him. In the field, the mist had taken the shapes of a hundred sheep tumbling out of the meadow, moving away from him faster and faster. Watching them go, he felt a great surge of anger that drove the clanging noise from his ears. He stiffened every muscle in his body and forced himself to the greatest height he could reach. He strained his head upward and tightened his grip on the horn until it was cutting into his flesh. Then, poising the dying instrument high above him, he poured the full breath of his lungs into it, and through it—a great long cry that tore through the night like the anguish of the betrayed.

As he sounded the horn a second time he turned and emptied its last fierce tones into the woods, into the face of whatever evil crept upon him there. The chains were silent. His arms fell to his sides, and he heard a tinkling sound as the horn fell from his hand upon the stump. The swishing noise came upon him again, and he thought somehow of taffeta and buckskin trousers. With it came the musty smell of sweat and earth again. Something brushed him to the ground. His legs were too weak to hold him. He fell forward on his face, the ground sweet and steady beneath him. He rolled over, and for a moment saw the mists sweep into the woods above him. Then he slept.

When Jeb awoke the glisten of dawn was all about him. He knew where he was presently, but it seemed that he had come there a long time before. There was a lightness in his head as though he were coming out of ether. From somewhere near him he heard the plaintive lowing of a cow. He stood up and listened for the lowing again, and then followed it through the long, wet grass. “C’boss, c’boss,” he called softly. The forlorn answer came to him, and after it, the weak bleating of a newborn calf. He found them in the shelter of a grove of trees that separated his land from Hank Trilling’s, the cow licking her baby and trying to nudge it closer to the warmth of her body. Jeb took off his coat and wrapped it around the calf. He picked it up and carried it home, its weary mother following after them.

In the barn he scattered fresh straw and threw a blanket over the cow. He prepared a hot mash which he was feeding her when his father came in. The old man watched a few moments without speaking. The calf had found its mother’s milk.

“Come early, didn’t she?” the old man said.

“Some.”

“Where’d you find her?”

“Near Hank’s woods,” Jeb said.

His father was thoughtful for a moment. “I wonder if something could have frightened her?”

“Maybe,” Jeb said.

“You ought to have changed your clothes before you went out to look for her, Jeb.” He said no more and was gone about his chores when Jeb looked up.

The two men arrived early for church services that morning as was their custom. Jeb was weary, but he felt a contentment that he had not known before. The night was no more than a dream to him, and Ellen was waiting at the church gate, as lovely as the spring itself. He got out of the truck and let his father park it.

“Are you all right, Jeb?” she asked, reaching out her hand to him.

“Yes.”

She clung to his hand a moment. “Will you ask me again now to marry you?”

“I will, and I do ask you, Ellen. Will you marry me?”

“Yes, Jeb. Last night when you left me, and when I called and you didn’t answer, I thought that I had lost you, and I knew then that if I had, I had lost my life.”

He smiled at her and tightened her hand between his arm and his side, but he didn’t speak. Near them a group of townsmen were talking.

“…I tell you as sure as I’m standing here,” one of them said, “there was a tornado last night. I saw the spiral on the road when I was going in town. I pulled off the road just ahead of it and the motor died. I jumped out of the car and lay in the ditch, and I heard the wind in it screeching and howling.”

“You dreamt it,” somebody said. “You didn’t hear of any damage this morning, did you?”

Ellen’s hand was pressing into Jeb’s arm as they listened.

Hank Trilling took off his hat and scratched his head. “Well, there was something queer going on last night. The dog kept barking, and I’d go to the door and listen. The birds were singing all night long.”

Nathan Wilkinson was standing among them. He noticed Jeb and excused himself. “Jeb,” he started, having tipped his hat to Ellen, “I’m afraid I was premature in my proposition to you last night. There’s a peculiar revolt in the Board of Elders. I’d find it a bit awkward if they refused to confirm…Well, you see my position?”

“Yes, sir,” Jeb said. “I appreciate your confidence in me anyway.” Then he added with the same blandness: “Perhaps when I’ve proven myself worthy of the honor, you will propose me?”

“Of course, my boy. Of course I shall.” He swept his hat off to Ellen.

Jeb and Ellen walked on toward the church. Among the women on the steps was old Hannah Rutherford. She caught Ellen by the arm and led her and Jeb apart. “Those things I gave Mrs. Robbins, Ellen, was there a horn among them?”

“Yes,” Ellen said, the word scarcely getting out of her throat.

“I don’t believe in superstitions, Ellen, but I think she ought to put that away where no one could try to play it.”

“Why?” Jeb asked. “Why should no one play it, Miss Hannah?”

The old woman looked up at him. “Particularly you, young man. I remember your escapade with the chains. As I say, I put no store by it, but my grandfather found me with it in my hands once and he told me that a young man had brought it to the village in his grandfather’s time when music wasn’t allowed. They caught him playing the devil’s tune on it, with the whole of Tinton dancing like the damned. He was executed as a witch, and he cursed them horribly. He wished them no rest until the chains were gone from Tinton. It’s an old wives’ tale, but I’d put the horn away just the same.”

“Ellen, wait here for me,” Jeb whispered.

He went into the church and up through the choir loft. He pulled the ladder from under the dusty pews stored there and tilted it to the trap door of the belfry. There was nothing but the church bell, which began to toll the service then. The floor was thick with dust except where lately something had been moved from it. But there were no footprints, and the chains were gone.

1957

“…The victim, Mrs. Mary Philips, was the estranged wife of Clement Philips of this city who is now being sought by the police for questioning…”

Nancy Fox reread the sentence. It was from the Rockland, Minnesota
Gazette
, reporting the latest of three murders to occur in the city within a month. “Estranged wife” was the phrase that gave her pause. Common newspaper parlance it might be, but for her it held a special meaning: for all its commonplaceness, it most often signals the tragic story of a woman suddenly alone—a story that she, Nancy Fox, could tell. Oh, how very well she could tell it!—being now an estranged wife herself.

How, she wondered, had Mary Philips taken her estrangement from a husband she probably once adored? Did he drink? Gamble? Was he unfaithful? Reason enough—any one of them—for some women. Or was it a cruelty surprised in him that had started the falling away of love, piece by piece, like the petals from a wasting flower?

Had the making of the final decision consumed Mary Philips’s every thought for months and had the moment of telling it been too terrible to remember? And did it recur, fragmenting the peace it was supposed to have brought? Did the sudden aloneness leave her with the feeling that part of her was missing, that she might never again be a whole person?

Idle questions, surely, to ask now of Mrs. Philips. Mary Philips, age 39, occupation beauty operator, was dead—strangled at the rear of her shop with an electric cord at the hands of an unknown assailant. And Clement Philips was being sought by the police—in point of fact, by Captain Edward Allan Fox of the Rockland force, which was why Nancy Fox had read the story so interestedly in the first place.

Clement Philips was sought, found, and dismissed, having been two thousand miles from Rockland at the time of Mary Philips’s murder. Several others, picked up after each of the three murders, were also dismissed. It was only natural that these suspects were getting testy, talking about their rights.

The Chief of Police was getting testy also. His was a long history of political survival in Rockland. Only in recent years had his work appeared worthy of public confidence, and that was due to the addition, since the war, of Captain Fox to the force. Fox knew it. No one knew his own worth better than “the Fox” did. And he knew how many years past retirement the old chief had stretched his tenure.

The chief paced back and forth before Captain Fox’s desk, grinding one hand into the other behind his back. “I never thought the day would come when we’d turn up such a maniac in this town! He doesn’t belong here, Fox!”

“Ah, but he does—by right of conquest,” Fox said with the quiet sort of provocation he knew grated on the old man.

The chief whirled on him. “You never had such a good time in your life, did you?”

Fox sighed. He was accustomed to the bombast, the show of wrath that made his superior seem almost a caricature. He did not have to take it: the last of the chief’s whipping boys was the custodian now of the city morgue. “Once or twice before, sir,” Fox said, his eyes unwavering before the chiefs.

The old man gave ground. He knew who was running the force, and he was not discontented. He had correctly estimated Fox’s ambition: what Fox had of power, he had only with the old man’s sanction. “In this morning’s brief for me and the mayor, you made quite a thing of the fact that all three victims were separated from their husbands. Now I’m not very deep in this psychology business—and the missus and I haven’t ever been separated more than the weekend it took to bury her sister—so you’re going to have to explain what you meant. Does this separation from their husbands make ’em more—ah—attractive? Is that what you’re getting at? More willing?”

Fox could feel a sudden pulse-throb at his temple. It was a lecher’s picture the old man had conjured with his words and gestures, and his reference to Fox’s own vulnerability—Nancy having left him—stirred him to a fury a weaker man would not have been able to control.

But he managed it, saying, “Only more available—and therefore more susceptible to the advances of their assailant.”

The old man pulled at the loose skin of his throat. “It’s interesting, Fox, how you got at it from the woman’s point of view. The mayor says it makes damn good reading.”

“Thank you, sir,” Fox said for something that obviously was not intended as a compliment. “Do you remember Thomas Coyne?”

“Thomas Coyne,” the chief repeated.

“The carpenter—the friend of Elsie Troy’s husband,” Fox prompted. Elsie Troy had been the first of the three victims. “We’ve picked him up again. No better alibi this time than last—this time, his landlady. I think he’s too damned smug to have the conscience most men live with, so I’ve set a little trap for him. I thought maybe you’d like to be there.”

“Think you can make a case against him?”

Fox rose and took the reports from where the old man had put them. “Chief,” he said then, “there are perhaps a half dozen men in Rockland against whom a case could be made…including myself.”

The old man’s jaw sagged. A lot of other people were also unsure of Ed Fox—of the working mechanism they suspected ran him instead of a heart. “Let’s see this Coyne fellow,” the chief said. “I don’t have much taste for humor at a time like this.”

“I was only pointing up, sir, that our killer’s mania is not apparent to either friends or victims—until it is too late.”