A Season of Whispers Page 6

  Lyman, while impressed by the show, remained uninfected by the woman’s terror. “I told you before. A turtle is too small to do anybody much harm, Bitty—even a snapping turtle.”

  Bitty danced on the edge of the firelight. “You young fool, ain’t you been listenin’ to a thing I said?” She spread her arms like wings. “Them’s Hobomokos is big.”

  And without another word she sprinted from the scene, faster than Lyman would’ve thought capable.

  Minerva ignored Bitty’s departure. Instead she knelt in the fire’s dying glow, turning a small leather amulet over in her hands. Stamped in the brown hide was a six-petaled daisy wheel, the petals formed by the overlap of circles pressed into it. It reminded her of a sand dollar, washed up on the beach.

  •••

  On any other evening, the brush strokes of Bitty Breadstick’s fireside story, not to mention the color of her quick departure, might have been an artwork to inspire dread in Lyman. Instead he felt cool relief. Like the final scene of a play, all loose threads were tied in conclusive knots. The identity of the larcenist of Lyman’s bureau drawers was indubitably Grosvenor, the old sneak; the strangers spotted hither and yon at Bonaventure were nothing more than a wandering madwoman. Or perhaps Bitty was responsible for both: Lyman suspected Bitty’s fear of the stone house wasn’t so sincere as to preclude the opportunity to nab an odd coin or loose coat button. Doubtless the Albys and Sutton and Presley and every inhabitant of the cabins would find small valuables missing when inventory was finally taken, long after Bitty had decamped for the Whitney farm.

  I am safe, I am unknown—if there were emotions corresponding to those words, then they pulsed through Lyman’s bloodstream.

  In the woods, they stamped out the fire and Lyman returned a pensive Minerva to her father’s house. It was by then suppertime, and after the meal and the chores, Lyman found himself returning to the stone house in almost utter blackness. Having come directly from their walk in the woods, he had neglected to bring a lantern for the return journey to his bed, and it always amazed him how dark the countryside became without the light. But he assured himself the distance wasn’t far, and slowly and carefully set off in what he estimated was the correct direction. Before long the silhouette of stones blotted against the deep blue, and the latch of the front door was in hand as he stepped inside.

  Fingers and thumbs locked around his throat.

  Lyman gasped, clawing at the grip, and felt himself propelled backward. Once and then again and again lights exploded in the blackness as his skull was slammed into the stone wall. Then the hands vanished, and he collapsed on the floor, half-senseless.

  There were sparks and then flames as someone started a fire in the main grate. Another figure took a taper around the room to lantern and lamp until the area was well lit. From his vantage on the floorboards, Lyman saw shoes pass before him, though he had no ability to count or determine how many pairs there were. His vision had attenuated almost to pinpricks; his ears rang.

  Gradually he became aware he was being addressed, and he looked up.

  One of them sat in a chair by the fire. The other lurked nearby, though where precisely Lyman couldn’t say.

  “Boy, we sure had a hard time finding you, Caleb,” said the man in the chair.

  Lyman’s eyesight broadened slightly, and the ringing sank just a little.

  “I have staked my reputation on finding men within sixty days of accepting the contract. Sixty days from handshake to apprehension.”

  Lyman tried to sit up against the wall. Failed.

  “Four months,” said the man. “The better part of four months, we’ve been tailing you. Isn’t that right, Mr. Doyle?”

  “I should know,” said the other man, somewhere. “I’ve been there beside you, Mr. Myerson, every mile of the road.”

  “You certainly have, Mr. Doyle. Your diligence to duty is exemplary.” For a moment there was only the sound of the fire crackling. Lyman smelled pipe smoke.

  “Tracking you to Norwalk wasn’t an issue, Caleb. The problem there, however, was what direction you had gone in. I made the mistake of thinking you might’ve gone to Ohio. I’m afraid much time was wasted in fruitless pursuit of that hypothesis.”

  “Poor Mr. Rose is still out there somewhere, pursuing that false trail,” said the one named Doyle.

  “Indeed,” said Myerson. “But then we returned to the coffeehouse in Norwalk where you frittered away so many mornings. The proprietor kindly informed us that you spent a great number of hours there reading the newspapers. ‘Well now,’ we said to ourselves, ‘maybe our good friend Mr. Caleb Kopf went somewhere he saw in the paper.’ But how to find the newspapers you had been reading weeks prior?”

  Myerson sucked on his pipe and pointed the stem at Lyman.

  “It was wise Mr. Doyle who had the epiphany. The privy.”

  “I had it while in the privy,” said Doyle. “Nothing like a strong cup of coffee to lubricate the bowels.”

  “Indeed. In the privy, about the privy. Because of course what does anybody do with an old newspaper? Why, they cut it up for repurpose in the privy.”

  The two men chuckled.

  “So we took all of the paper out of the coffeehouse privy and we put them back together, and then we looked at the ones existent on those dates we knew you inhabited Norwalk. We learned those dates from your landlady, dear Mrs. Farrington. You remember Mrs. Farrington, don’t you, Caleb? You stayed at her boarding house for a little over two weeks after steeple chasing out of New York.”

  “Very talkative is Mrs. Farrington.”

  “Oh, she’s a garrulous woman, all right,” said Myerson.

  Lyman pushed himself up, spine against the stone. He managed to stay up.

  “Well, one thing led to another and pretty soon we asked ourselves, ‘Wouldn’t it be something if old Caleb used part of that money he stole to buy himself a subscription to this socialist farm they’re talking about in the newspaper?’”

  “I confess I was very doubtful over such a theorem,” said Doyle. “I apologize for my skepticism, Mr. Myerson.”

  “Nothing to apologize for, sir. We all make errors in judgment. I myself was the strongest proponent of Caleb’s heading to Ohio. Before this contract, never in a million years would I have believed, with all that money in a carpet bag, that somebody like Caleb Kopf would go to ground performing manual labor so close to the city where he murdered his employer.”

  In a strange way, it felt good for it to be spoken out loud. The thing Lyman had been living with for so long, to be said and acknowledged.

  “How did that feel just now when I knocked your head against the masonry? Must’ve felt much worse for Mr. Tallmadge.”

  Tallmadge. To hear that name from another’s lips made Tallmadge real, made the act real. It had never been intentional. It had always been an accident, a set of circumstances—of reactions.

  “Evil snowballs, don’t it, Caleb? A few dollars embezzled to impress a young lady, and when Tallmadge confronted you—well, that’s when the molasses hit the pie pan. Then you emptied the safe and ran. And for a while you thought you were secure. But here’s the thing of it: Mrs. Tallmadge. She is not what I’d call the Christian forgiving type.”

  “More of the Book of Exodus kind,” said Doyle, “vengeful and wrath-like.”

  It all started with an apple. Tom Lyman—or Caleb Kopf, as he was known then—had been in the warehouse when the men, careless with the block and tackle, swung a load too wide and tipped over a barrel. A dozen apples rolled nearly to Caleb’s shoe tips. One of the stevedores righted the barrel and collected the loose contents but not before dropping one in each pocket of his coat; and then, conscious of Caleb’s watching, tossed an apple underhanded to him. Caleb caught it without even thinking. Suddenly a flush of heat came over him as if he stood in the Tower of London with a ruby from Victoria’s crown in his palm, and quickly he shoved it inside his coat. The stevedore winked at C
aleb and returned to his lading.

  Things went missing from the warehouse every day, Caleb knew, and not just apples. Commerce was measured in barrels and sacks and crates, never in individual units—what did it matter if a container held a hundred apples or only ninety-nine? Nobody ever counted the innards.

  Nor for that matter did Mr. Tallmadge, Caleb’s employer. That’s what he paid his clerks for, to tally and sum and tell him, in a neatly written figure at the bottom of the right-most column, how many dollars and how many cents he owned. But in the days and weeks following the warehouse incident, Caleb came to reason that money was like apples: if too much was mislaid the absence would be noticed; but should just a few paper notes, here and there, vanish into a coat pocket, the omission was neglected.

  Until it wasn’t. One evening Tallmadge asked Caleb to stay late and then, once everyone else was gone, informed him that occasionally he audited his clerks’ registers. There was a modicum of truth in what Tom Lyman had told Minerva: he’d courted a woman and sought to impress her with the misappropriations. Yet by that terrible sundown, the poor math in Caleb’s book was too substantial to hide. Hot words were said, threats of arrest and lawsuits, and in a moment of panic Caleb grabbed the cast-iron door stop. He only swung it to shut up Tallmadge for a minute so Caleb could think, so he could straighten and make sense of his own story. It worked, in part—Tallmadge never uttered another syllable.

  Myerson rose from the chair. He knocked the ash from his pipe into the fire, placed the pipe in a coat pocket. “She wants you to face justice, Caleb, though she has no druthers on whether it’sa lawman or judge or anyone else who dispenses it. To that end, Mrs. Tallmadge has engaged Mr. Doyle and I to be the instruments of her will.” He stood over him. “But first.”

  He grabbed Lyman under the jaw and hoisted him to his feet. Lyman hammered at the man’s arm but Myerson ignored it, like a father discrediting the strikes of a bawling child.

  “Where’s the money, Caleb? We’ve searched the house—twice. Once while you were picnicking with your whore girlfriend, and another just now.”

  Myerson’s fist smashed into Lyman’s diaphragm.

  “Where?”

  He punched again.

  “I’m afraid if you don’t share it with us, we’re going to have to hurt you.”

  The grip released and as Lyman fell, Myerson hooked a haymaker into his eye socket. Lyman spun to the floor.

  Had they not laid another finger on him after that initial hello inside the door, Lyman would have gladly told them the location of the bag. He cared for beatings even less than he cared for rolling off roofs and whacking his thumbs with hammers; and he calculated the quicker he told them, the sooner the ordeal would end. But as it was, dazed and blurry-eyed and his brain sore and jostled in its case, at that moment he no longer had any recollection of the site. Where had he put the money?

  Myerson picked him off the floor again, jabbed him in the chin. Lyman’s head bounced off the wall behind him. “Where, Caleb?”

  He was sure he would recall, if only it would stop and he could think a minute.

  One-two in the ribs as he keeled downward. A third to the ear. “Where?”

  Wait—what was this about anyway? Lyman forgot more and more.

  Myerson knelt beside him and for variety’s sake socked him with his left fist. “Where?”

  He didn’t know what they wanted. Only what he wanted. He wanted for it to stop. He wanted to see Minerva, one last time. To explain it to her.

  Myerson loomed over him, his breath stinking and hot. “Where, Caleb?”

  “The basement.”

  Myerson looked up at Doyle. “What did he say?”

  Doyle’s eyebrows knitted together. He’d heard the whispered words distinctly, though Lyman’s lips, split and drooling, had barely trembled. “It sounded like he said it’s in the basement.”

  Myerson let go of Lyman’s collar. They had already searched down there, found nothing. “He must’ve buried it.”

  The bounty man stood. “Bring him,” Myerson said to Doyle. Whatever partnership and compatriotism had been in his earlier tone vanished; he spoke as an employer dictates to a wage worker. “I’ll grab the lamps.”

  Doyle pulled Lyman’s arm across his back, and by measures dragged, wrestled, and grappled him down the stairs into the dirt-floored basement. Myerson held a lamp in either hand, wicks high.

  “Where?” He snarled at Lyman. “Goddamn it, I weary of this. Show me where you put it.”

  Lyman’s head rolled on his shoulders.

  “Hey,” said Doyle, gesturing. “Look at that over there.”

  Myerson raised a lamp. He walked over and ducked his head beneath the stairs.

  “Did you notice this before?”

  “No,” said Doyle. “Isn’t that the damnedest?” The closer they approached, the more obvious it seemed: there was a corridor under the stairs that led somewhere else. “Like when the curtains rise at the theater, only with shadows instead.”

  “It’s a passage,” said Myerson. He stepped within.

  Doyle wrenched Lyman to his feet and in moments the three arrived in the dome chamber. Doyle, tired of lugging Lyman’s weight, dropped him on the edge of the cistern.

  Myerson squatted, lowering a lamp inside the well. “What do we have here?” Setting down the lamps, he reeled in the line hanging from the top rung of the ladder. At the end swung a fish full of money.

  The pair of men smiled and whooped.

  “This’ll buy a few sips of whiskey at the hotel tonight,” said Doyle.

  “Oh, and a big steak dinner too,” said Myerson. “We’ll be sure to toast you, Caleb.”

  They turned toward Lyman. During their brief celebration, he’d managed to crawl a few steps toward the passage.

  “Now,” said Myerson, “about that justice Mrs. Tallmadge so stringently insisted upon.”

  Doyle reached behind and drew a long knife from its belt scabbard. “I’ll be quick about it.”

  “Think of your coat, Mr. Doyle.” The bonhomie had returned to Myerson’s tone. “You know from experience how wildly the blood spurts from an opened jugular. Yet here we have a grave already prepared.” He waved toward the cistern and the metal grate. “All Caleb needs to do is hop in, and we’ll do him the favor of closing the casket after.”

  “Aw,” said Doyle, “I’m exhausted from carrying him. You throw him in.”

  “No need. Caleb will deposit himself, won’t you, boy?”

  Myerson walked around so he stood between Lyman and the passage. He drew his foot back, then swiftly kicked him. Lyman reeled backwards.

  “That’s it, Caleb! Direct yourself toward your coffin.”

  Lyman rolled onto all fours, tried to crawl anywhere but.

  This time Doyle kicked him.

  Then Myerson. Then Doyle again, until Lyman lay on the edge of the cistern, his arms crossed over his gashed and bleeding face.

  “No more,” said Myerson. “No more cotillions on your semblance, Caleb. You go on now and climb down that ladder so we can lock you up snug.”

  Lyman lay there.

  “Either you do it—or we do it for you.”

  Arms wobbling, Lyman pushed himself to his knees. One of his eyes was swollen shut. Blood streamed from his broken nose, splattering on the dirt. His breath rasped.

  “Go on, boy.” Myerson and Doyle stood beside him, toes on the rim.

  Lyman reached down for the top rung of the ladder.

  “Go on.”

  If Lyman had any thoughts at that moment, they barely rose above the most instinctual, the most base. In the cistern, at least, he would be away from them. Reduced to an animal level of pure sensation, Lyman was only aware of pain and the impulse to escape its source.

  Yet as his head hung over the precipice of the cistern, staring with a single working orb into the darkness where the lamplight failed, he became aware of another feeling, another s
ensation. He’d encountered it before, on that very first night in the stone house. The whiskers of his beard bent and twisted from the air blowing upon them, and he intuited, deep down in the bestial awareness of his consciousness, that something very large sped toward him at very great speed.

  With his remaining strength, Lyman shoved himself away from the cistern.

  An enormous white mass rose straight from the opening, lifting up and above them as it filled the entire width, and clamped its jaws around Myerson’s head. For an instant it hung there, a marble pillar, talons tight against its bulk, tiny eyelids sealed shut, and then gravity seized it. It dropped out of sight, pulling Myerson with it.

  Neither of the remaining men moved or uttered or blinked. Then a horrible sound echoed from the cistern, a ripping and rending, and two things happened in quick succession. Doyle screamed. Lyman lashed out with his foot, kicking the back of Doyle’s knee. Doyle’s leg folded, his body twisted, and he plummeted over the edge of the well, his transit mapped by the continuing howl. Then another sound issued from the cistern, as of a thick branch being snapped in a giant’s hands. The scream immediately ceased.

  Lyman flipped over, injected with new stamina, and crawled on elbows and knees toward the passage and the stairs and the woods and any spot on the globe except that basement.

  “No one should go.”

  An inarticulate cry scrabbled from Lyman’s throat. He crawled.

  “No one should go. I shall give thee what thou most craves.”

  He reached the wall and turned, expecting it to be right behind him. But he only saw the mouth of the cistern, and the grate in the dirt, and the bag of money, and the two burning lamps.

  “What,” Lyman said. It was everything he could summon. “What do you want?”

  For a long moment, the only reply was the sounds of tearing and chewing inside the well.