The Man in the Woods (12 page)

Pinky nodded.

“Even a cheap rubber toy set has to be locked in or you can’t print,” said Uncle Max.

“What does that mean?” asked Helen.

“It means both the note and the envelope were written on an extremely old typewriter, or writing machine, as it was called in those days. Before the Civil War. Now, most people think the typewriter was invented around 1880, which is true actually. At least it came into commercial use then. But way back in about 1847 there was a man called Burt and another called Thurber. They fooled around with this writing machine idea. Your note and envelope were typed on a Thurber machine made over in Worcester in 1847. Both samples match the one in my book exactly. Take a look. What confirms it is the raised lettering. You see, Mr. Thurber meant his machine as a sort of braille writer too, so that blind people could read the type with their fingertips. He never got anywhere with it. It was a dismal failure. He spent the rest of his life manufacturing sextants and compasses for ships.”

Helen and Pinky looked at the sample in Uncle Max’s book. “It matches exactly,” said Helen. “Every letter is the same.”

“It’s very strange,” said Uncle Max. “There are only two Thurbers known to exist in the world. One’s in the Smithsonian in Washington, and the other’s in a typewriter museum in England. A Thurber is a very rare beetle indeed. There must have been another one. No wonder your cops, with all the best intentions, couldn’t find it.”

The envelope and the tip-off note rested bleakly on the table beneath the dazzling work light. A photograph of the Smithsonian Institution’s Thurber was reproduced next to the sample. It looked more like an unsuccessful musical instrument than an unsuccessful typewriter. Helen read through the sample in the book. It was an incomplete letter to President Polk, dated March 8, 1848, announcing the invention of the machine itself.

Somewhere in the back of Helen’s mind the horrible little Christmas song began to play again. “He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.” The locket was in her shirt-front pocket, the picture, eyeless. How would he do it to her if
she
wasn’t good. Would he hold her down? She would fight and scream like a tiger. Somehow he’d probably knock her out first. Then it would be easy to get at her eyes.

Miles in the distance thunder volleyed and boomed from the south, as if awakening some long-dead secret by force.

Uncle Max sat in a tattered Barcalounger and poured himself the last inch of Riesling in the bottle. Cleaning the smudges off his glasses, he asked gently, “I wonder who could have a Thurber?”

H
ELEN WATCHED MR. BRZOSTOSKI’S
eyes. He had switched the tape to the beginning again and was listening intently. She worried that although he had no foreign accent whatever, he might have been born in Europe and the words to the song would not come easily to him as they had to her and to Pinky.

When he’d heard it through once more, he took the orange sponge earphones off his head and asked, “
Who
did the police tell your father it was?”

“Some old singer called Bing Crosby who used to whistle on the radio,” said Helen. “Ryser thought it was ‘White Christmas,’ which it isn’t.”

“Did your father point that out? Did he show Ryser the envelope?”

“He said it was done on a toy set.”

“Voiceprints? Fingerprints?”

“Can’t voiceprint whistling. Aunt Stella, me, my father had all handled the cassette. Mr. Bro, I told you they thought it was a joke.”

“And you think I will look at this differently?”

“Well ... do you?” Helen asked.

“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

“At least,” said Helen, “will you help me, Mr. Bro? You’re a history teacher. Will you tell me how to go about looking for a hundred-and-forty-year-old writing machine?”

“Not if it’s in the hands of some maniac, I won’t.”

“Then you
do
believe me?” Helen asked, unable to keep either the sharpness or the honey out of her voice.

Mr. Bro did not answer until he had finished an entire banana. He folded the skin neatly on his blotter. “Yes,” he said, just as neatly. “But I can’t help you.”

Helen stood. “Then I’ll do it myself,” she said. “I’ll find a way.”

“Sit down. No, you won’t,” said Mr. Bro. “Helen, I’m a teacher. A responsible adult. I can’t let you go off the deep end looking for an old typewriter with some nut who uses it. Some nut who pokes out eyes.”

“You think that’s what he means to do to me?”

“Of
course
that’s what he means to do. He’s telling you, you better be good and you better watch out. He has quite deliberately punched out the eyes in the photograph, then placed red paper, cut out exactly in the shape of the locket, behind the picture to give the impression of ... forgive me, gouged out eyes. If this had been simple backing paper, both papers would have holes in them. Beside that ... Mr. Bro removed the photo of Helen’s mother carefully and set it on the desk. He took out the red paper behind it, touched his finger to his tongue, and rubbed it across the tiny scarlet scrap. “Ink,” he declared, looking at his reddened thumb. “Ink. Somebody’s gone to the trouble of coloring that bit of paper with red ink. If it were backing paper or anything else manufactured or printed, it wouldn’t come off with a lick of my finger, would it? So. That’s a warning. It’s clear as day.”

“If it’s so clear to you and me and to Pinky, how come they won’t listen? Why, Mr. Bro?”

Mr. Bro smiled a little bitterly. He folded up the copy of the tip-off note and placed it with the locket and the cassette in the envelope. “If he—whoever it is—cut out letters, say from the newspaper, and pasted them on a sheet of stationery and directly said, ‘Keep out of this or I’ll poke your eyes out,’ believe me the cops would have sat up and taken notice. He’s clever, this fellow. He did it in just such a way as to scare the living daylights out of you and make the cops laugh.”

“What—” Helen began.

“Just let me think,” said Mr. Bro. He swiveled in his chair and gazed out the window, murmuring tiny sounds. Then he swiveled back and faced her. “What would happen,” he asked, “if you went back to the police and showed them Uncle Max’s book and proved to them that both the tip-off note about Stubby’s rock throwing and the threat to you, the envelope anyway, were typed on an identical machine and that it wasn’t a toy at all? It’s a rare antique.”

“I think the cops have kind of had it with me,” said Helen. “They think
I’m
a nut.”

“Okay. You’re right. It was just a thought. I can go to the police
for
you, of course. But I need more than this. There’s a sergeant on the force, name’s Sandy Reynolds. I tutored his son for free last year. He owes me a favor. But first we have to have the location of that machine. That—what is it?—Thurber. And before we even think of doing that, I have to know you’re safe.”

“Safe?”

“Safe,” repeated Mr. Bro. “Let’s see what we know. We know this guy has an education. He knows how to punctuate beautifully. He whistles, but not just tootleydo. He whistles like James Galway. You know who James Galway is?”

“Of course,” said Helen. “Irish flutist. Dad took me to his concert in Boston last April.”

“Good for you,” said Mr. Bro. “And you know he uses a typewriter so old and so unusual there are only two others known in the world. Was there a picture of this Thurber in Uncle Max’s book?”

“Yes. It looked more like a funny old ... well, sort of like a funny old harpsichord or carpenter’s machine. It’s big. About as high as this desk. And it has lots of wooden knobs and rollers—”

“Rickety? Delicate?”

“I think so.”

“Then it probably hasn’t been moved. It’s likely it’s still in its original location because it’s in working order,” said Mr. Bro, “and moving it would almost certainly have broken it. Now, you say the tip-off note was put in the squad car around six o’clock? On the corner of Wharf and Broad?”

“Yes.”

“And he was up in the woods an hour before. He’d have to get out of the woods ... somehow get down to Wharf Street in about forty-five minutes. Not much time. My guess is the machine is in New Bedford. Not far. The bad thing is the town is full of old warehouses, attics, houses, you name it. The good thing is he doesn’t know you saw the tip-off note in the police station, or that Pinky made a copy of it, or that you went to Uncle Max and traced it to the Thurber. So, very quietly, you must find this machine. If you do it exactly the way I tell you, he’ll never guess what you’re up to, even if he is watching you from time to time. He’ll be happy, because you’ll be good, just as he wants. Then, when you find where it is, I promise to go to Sergeant Reynolds.” Mr. Bro looked straight up for a second, smiled, and wrote something on a piece of paper. “Here,” he said. “Your official assignment is History of the Writing Machine, Civil War Era. I will assign similar papers to the rest of the class, which they will hate. Threshing machines, sewing machines, reaping machines. You will keep me informed every single step of the way. Eat this Hershey bar and pray that whoever is after you won’t find out what you’re up to while I explain how you should start.”

Helen munched on the chocolate. While she listened to Mr. Bro, Sister Ignatius’s explanation of the power of prayer came suddenly into her mind and stuck there. It was as crisply imprinted in her memory as the word
Hershey
was on the candy wrapper.

Sister Ignatius despised the religion textbook as much as Mr. Bro despised the history textbook. She taught her students that the power of good was greater than the power of evil. “However, dear children,” she added to this, “do not for one minute think the good Lord is a public official who rushes around answering every prayer like a mayor answering ten phones at once. Do not suppose that in His great wisdom He reaches down into our world like a herring fisherman with a net to pluck every fallen child from the road or every sparrow from the mouth of a fox.”

Mr. Oliver Jenkins, curator of the New Bedford Preservation Society, was an apologetic young man with wispy hair and pink-rimmed eyes. He showed Helen the bank of files. “We’re going to have them microfilmed in a couple of weeks,” he said mournfully, “but until then ...

There were four thousand eight hundred and ninety folders, each one so dusty that on Thursday, the third day of her search, Helen brought with her a whole box of Kleenex and a Vicks inhaler. Her eye rims had taken on the same pinkish tinge that Oliver Jenkins’s had, and Aunt Stella had said she was going to take her to the doctor for her mysterious allergies. On Friday Helen brought Pinky along. He said he hated papers, city halls, and preservation societies, but Helen convinced him he didn’t have to read anything. He just had to find a paper or document with typing on it from the years 1847 to 1880.

“Why 1880?” Pinky asked.

“Because that’s when commercial typewriters were invented. A Thurber would have been outdated by then.”

Pinky sat in an unforgiving oak chair under an excruciatingly dim ceiling light with file number 3020. Helen took up file number 3050, and Oliver Jenkins, in another uncomfortable oak chair, sat with them and made notes on old railroad maps and chewed to bits the stem of an unlit corncob pipe.

Friday afternoon at four-thirty they finished.

“I knew you wouldn’t find anything,” said Oliver Jenkins when Helen replaced the last file in the last drawer. “Sorry we couldn’t help you,” he went on. “But everybody knows there were no typewriters until about 1885. Even then it was considered bad manners to type.” He folded his railway map with care. “After the First World War, of course, everybody typed. But then, you’re not interested in the First World War.”

“No,” said Helen as kindly as she could. She sneezed. Pinky took a sniff of the Vicks. “There
was
such a machine, though, and it was here in New Bedford,” she added hopefully, but feeling no hope at all.

“All those files,” said Oliver Jenkins mournfully. “It’s not in them, is it?”

“No,” said Helen, thinking what a good undertaker Oliver Jenkins would have been and hoping desperately he would have some other files or ideas.

He went on grudgingly. “Of coarse I only believe in hard, factual research, but I hate to see you get a failing grade on your history paper, so I might as well suggest you go see Asa Roche.”

Helen’s eyes lit up. Pinky asked, “Who?”

“He’s a very old man, very old,” said Oliver Jenkins, as if he expected Asa Roche to be dead in the morning. “There aren’t many of the old people left who might still remember. He must have been born around 1890 or so. He won’t remember the Civil War days of course, but the Thurber machine would have been an unusual invention back then. Perhaps his parents or his grandparents remarked on it to him. Doubtful though.” Oliver Jenkins took one of Helen’s Kleenexes and blew his nose. “He or his sister, Elizabeth Fairchild, might be able to tell you who had the first telephone in New Bedford or the first electric lights. You might as well try, even though you’ll probably fail. You’ll have a hard time getting in the front door. Elizabeth Fairchild guards the house like a mastiff.”

“Can’t you comb your hair just a little?” asked Helen.

“I don’t carry a comb,” said Pinky. “What do you think I am? A greaser?”

The old and dignified streets of colonial New Bedford sailed past the windows of the bus. Helen kept her eyes sharp, looking for 156 Orchard Street. “Besides that,” Pinky grumbled, “you’re the one with the hair around here. Not me.”

Helen hated to think that Pinky noticed her hair. Today was a very frizzy day due to the humidity. She glanced at her well-shined shoes and then at Pinky’s sneakers, which were worn and filthy and had two different color laces. “It’s just that it’s going to be hard enough getting through Elizabeth Fairchild without giving her more to object to,” said Helen.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘more to object to’?” Pinky asked.

Helen checked the house numbers. They were now passing the high three hundreds.

“Old Elizabeth might go in for shoeshines and neckties,” she said.

“Neckties!” Pinky squealed.