A Season of Whispers Page 7

  “To be. Our good friend.”

  Lyman shook his head. “No.”

  “You want. A. Good friend.”

  “I have friends.”

  “Mr. Doyle, Mr. Myerson.” Something popped and crunched.

  “Not those two. They weren’t my friends. I mean real friends.”

  “Real friends? You want a good friend.”

  “I’m leaving. I can make friends in a new place.”

  “No one should go. I shall give thee what thou most craves—a good friend.”

  “You’re just saying that so you can eat me,” said Lyman, “when you’re done with them.”

  Pause. “Absolutely not.”

  “And how am I supposed to believe you?”

  “What an odd question.”

  Lyman wiped his sleeve across his mouth, staining it. If the thing had wanted to devour him, it had not lacked for opportunity in the preceding weeks.

  “We are brothers and sisters?”

  “Not until I know what you want in return.”

  Chomps and cracks and mastication.

  “Why didn’t you grab me the first time I came down here? Or any other time for that matter. Like you did with them.”

  “You were the right man for the job.”

  “How? What job?”

  “Patience, Tom!”

  Lyman shuddered. “I am bargaining with the Devil, it seems.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  “What then is the price of my soul?”

  For a long moment, Lyman’s invisible conversation partner made no reply and the room grew so quiet that Lyman wondered if he was alone. But just as Lyman parted his lips to repeat the question, a whisper echoed from the cistern, the sighing voice rustling through the air like a breeze through falling leaves.

  “A comfortable lunch.”

  TWO

  Minerva Grosvenor closed the thin volume and held it in her lap for a long time. Her impressions rambled and raced in a kind of downhill confusion, dominated perhaps by a kind of elation, the feeling of having searched under every dresser and bedstead for some misplaced thing like an earring or a letter, only to finally discover it in the last place she looked. What she’d found inside the volume—more of a chapbook, really: saddle-stitched and very light—was the key to a lock that everyone at Bonaventure acknowledged to exist but none knew how to penetrate.

  The book was titled The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe. It had been published the previous year and contained two stories. The second story Minerva did not care for, nor did she quite understand the author’s intent in writing it; but upon reaching the back cover, she immediately turned to the beginning to read the first again. This story, after a long and winding introduction, involved the solving of a seeming impossibility: a situation in which two women, a daughter and mother, were graphically murdered—one stuffed up a chimney! the other’s head left hanging by a strip of skin!—inside a room where all the doors and windows were locked, and yet where no trace of the killer could be identified. Nonetheless the narrator’s friend, Dupin, pinpointed the culprit, using only the powers of faculty and observation.

  Her thoughts after this second reading, originally unsettled, tumbled like grapes or blueberries through sieves pocked with decreasingly smaller holes, sorting by circumference, collecting by kinship. Everything, Minerva realized now, was a mystery, an unanswered question.

  Take Bonaventure itself. The commercial: the farming, the crop yields, and varying prices of the produce brought to market. The metaphysical: the community, with the disparate wants and intentions of its members. Each was a question that had yet to be asked. But this man Dupin, this character of Poe’s, could string together questions and make a reply to each. Every silent answer led to the next question like Theseus’s ball of twine through the labyrinth, until finally he could respond to the unspoken thought in his friend’s head, having followed alongside ever since the narrator was jostled by a grocer blocks ago. For Dupin, that ability—that gift—was nothing more than a source of amusement, a broom to sweep away the dust of boredom. What waste! To Minerva it was nothing less than the pinnacle of the mind, a synthesis of ratiocination and intuition. It was the very goal of Bonaventure’s experiment, wrapped in a gruesome tale of blood and horror.

  When Minerva visited her father in his office to inform him it was now her life’s mission to assist humanity in answering these greater mysteries—how shall we live? how shall we worship?—by reconciling the unanswered riddles of the everyday, he barely acknowledged her. He sat at his desk, a set of scales before him. One pan held a number of small brass weights stamped with the numbers of their ounces. The other pan had been hastily covered by a handkerchief just before Minerva’s entry into the office.

  David Grosvenor listened to his daughter’s epiphany, though Minerva couldn’t dismiss the almost tangible feeling that, having interrupted him, he was impatient for her to be gone. Eventually he nodded, and without looking up from the balance scales he suggested she offer her deductive assistance to Mr. Sutton, who had misplaced one of his hogs.

  “And while you’re at it,” said Grosvenor, “see if you can’t locate your friend Mr. Lyman. No one’s seen him in nearly a week.”

  •••

  Mr. Sutton was adamant his hog had not run off. It was stolen.

  “It so happened I looked out my window that morning and saw them rooting through the corn. I told Presley to pull on his drawers and yelled for Mr. Alby to come help. When we herded them back into the pen and counted, we realized we’d caught all of them save John Tyler.”

  Minerva knew, from some of the debates at the supper table, that Mr. Sutton was no booster of their sitting president, whom Sutton likened to a piece of livestock too stupid to understand what lay in store for it.

  “Why do you think it—I mean the pig—didn’t run off? From what you say, the gate had been open all night.”

  “The gate had been opened at night, more correctly,” said Sutton. “Swine can’t work a gate and there’s no chance I or anyone else would have left the gate open after the evening slop for the simple reason that each of us knows how difficult it is to catch a loose pig. It’s a chore nobody wants. I ask you, why would John Tyler mosey off to some far horizon while every other pig headed straight to the cornfield? No. Somebody came and took that hog, and freed the others to cover the absence.”

  A thief then, Minerva thought. Yet she couldn’t imagine anyone leading a full-grown pig far on a rope leash. It began to dawn on Minerva that determining a course of events was difficult without a trail of gore and a bloody shaving razor.

  “Whom do you suspect then? I hate to accuse anyone without more definitive proof, though even I must admit Mr. Whitney over at his farm is a very taciturn man.” She could think of no other potential rustlers beyond the greybeard Whitney, who in the past had accused the Bonaventurists of misconduct after several of his prize milk cows went missing.

  Sutton took a deep breath and appraised Minerva much as one does when he realizes his jacket is hooked on a briar and he stops to study how best to liberate it without tearing the fabric. “I have a man’s name in mind but I fear you’ll not care to hear it.”

  “Please do not think to shield me from cruel truths because of my sex. I think better of you than that, Mr. Sutton.”

  “That isn’t why I hesitate.” Sutton pursed his lips. “I am supposed to deliver the hogs to the butcher next week. John Tyler was the biggest of the bunch—three-hundred pounds market weight by my estimate. That’s thirty pounds of ham at nine cents a pound; eighteen pounds of sausage at eight cents a pound; sixteen pounds of bacon at close to ten cents a pound; twenty-three pounds of chops, another six of ribs, twenty-eight pounds of roasts, all at eight cents per pound; plus ten pounds of stew bones and another sixteen pounds of fat-back at middling prices. That’s near one-hundred fifty pounds of cuts totaling forty dollars, or nearly half of what each of us at Bonaventure
, excluding yourself and your parents naturally, is supposed to have paid to become shareholders of the farm.”

  Minerva crossed her arms over her chest.

  “I have always admired your intelligence, Minerva. I —”

  “Oh please stop flattering me,” she said, “and arrive at your point.”

  Sutton cleared his throat. “It’s just—it has been intimated by your father that our enterprise is not as financially successful as we had hoped. At his suggestion, I assumed responsibility over the care and raising of the hogs because they’re crucial to our survival. The loss of that forty dollars may, in the final summation, decide whether we are still here this time next fall.”

  “Are you suggesting someone might intentionally want to ruin us?”

  “Not intentionally, perhaps. But I can tell you from personal experience that Bonaventure attracts its share of eccentrics. It may also attract worse.” He turned his gaze toward the road leading to the far side of the property.

  There was no answer when Minerva knocked on the front door of the stone house, just as there had been none when she had rapped a week earlier. The note was still pinned to the wood, though now its corners were curled, warning the reader that the occupant within was ill with fever, and that visitors were best advised to observe his self-imposed quarantine. That first time a week ago, alarmed that Lyman had not kept their usual rendezvous for their forest walk, Minerva had called through the door, hoping Lyman would hear, and when there was only silence, she returned daily with a basket of food left on the threshold. The empty basket that awaited her the next day suggested the patient was on the mend. And yet no one had laid eyes on the man during that time. How lonely and awful it must be, Minerva thought, to lay in one’s bed, sweat-soaked and delirious, a half-mile from any assistance, all for the sake of selflessly protecting others from infection.

  Out of habit Minerva tried the latch, expecting it to be locked. It always was. But to her surprise the door creaked open.

  “Tom?”

  She stepped into the house, waving a hand in front of her face to dispel the musty air. Immediately she crossed to the closest window and raised the sash, letting the coolness spill inside. “Tom? It’s Minerva.”

  Nothing. She wondered if he was even at home.

  “Tom?”

  “The basement.”

  “The basement?” Minerva had no notion why he would be down there. “Where are you?” Perhaps he had fallen or was hurt; his voice sounded weak, barely rising above a husky whisper. She wandered toward the kitchen, opening the few doors she found and discovering only shallow closets, until she undid the bolt and found herself staring down a stairway into gloom.

  She couldn’t see him. “Tom? Are you there?”

  “The basement.”

  A breeze blew upon her cheeks, warmer than the air outside. Carefully, not wanting to misstep and tumble into the unknown, she set the toes of her right foot upon the top stair.

  Something gripped her arm, hauling her back. The door slammed inches from her nose and a hand threw home the bar.

  His face was a melted candle of purple, black, and yellow, one eye swollen into a squint, his lips bloated like grubs beneath the coppery beard. Minerva shoved a knuckle into her mouth to stifle a scream.

  “I know,” said Lyman, “I’ve seen myself in the glass. It’s better than it was, believe me.”

  “Tom—what? You said you were in the basement—” Her head tilted toward the door, but her eyes remained locked on him, unable to look away.

  “No, no. You misheard. I was saying, My face is on the mend. I didn’t want you to be shocked by my appearance.”

  For half a moment Minerva said nothing, unsure. Then she reached up to softly brush his cheek. “No fever could do this. You look as if you’ve been beaten.”

  Lyman pulled away. “I hadn’t the courage to tell you. I—I fell off the roof.”

  “You’ve fallen before.”

  “Yes, but this time I broke my fall by landing on a rock. I was so embarrassed; I didn’t have the heart to come up to the house and admit it to all of you.”

  “Oh, Tom.” Impulsively she grabbed him, thrust her head against his chest. “I’ve been so anxious.” After a moment she stood, wiping wetness from the corners of her eyes. “I’m relieved to hear you’re not actually sick. Still, you must stop going on roofs.”

  “Yes, well, I think I almost have the hole over the summer kitchen fixed.”

  Minerva pushed at the pleats of her dress with her palms, resolute and yet unsure. “That’s part of why I came. Other than my concern for your health, of course.”

  Lyman regarded her.

  “Tom, I think you should know that some people at the farm—not many, mind you—but some people are worried that perhaps you aren’t holding your own. That is, by not contributing enough to the community.”

  “I see.”

  “They suggest that you should have completed the restoration of the stone house by now. They even suggest you might be a poor carpenter, or perhaps have never been a carpenter at all. You mustn’t think I believe this. I’m just repeating what’s been said to me. They said that because everyone pays an equal amount to join, and through his or her labor each is allowed an equal share of—”

  “But I haven’t paid the same as everyone else,” said Lyman. “I’ve paid more.”

  Her thoughts came to a halt. “What do you mean?”

  “Didn’t your father tell you? Quite recently I decided that I like the stone house so much I don’t want to leave it. Your father said it was quite out of the question, that it was required to be the men’s dormitory. We struck a bargain in which I offered him another twenty dollars a month for the privilege of living here in the house. Alone. I still have only one share in Bonaventure, of course. I only wanted more control over my living arrangements.”

  Minerva’s eyes and mouth opened like flowers. “You’re paying rent? But—why would Father allow that? It’s against the very nature of Bonaventure, the egalitarianism of what we strive for. No one should be allowed to buy special favors just because they’re wealthy.”

  “Minerva, please—is wanting to be in this house so desirable? Out here, on the opposite edge of the farm, away from everyone. It’s not right to maroon a group in the wilderness and let them fend for themselves. Better for me to stay out here and leave the others to the comfort of the main house.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Well, your father agreed with me.” Or at least, thought Lyman, he agreed to the twenty dollar note. “But if the other members think I’ve been shirking work, I would be happy to help with the farming.” The thinnest thread of indifference laced his tone.

  Minerva cast around her, a little jumbled and lost. “You could assist Mr. Sutton. One of his hogs has disappeared.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I don’t presume you know anything about it.”

  Lyman spread open his palms. “Now where would I hide a hog?”

  Minerva smiled a small smile. “Mr. Sutton is a very suspicious sort.”

  For half a moment, each was silent.

  “It’s not buying a favor. I would never think to do such a wrong.”

  Minerva nodded. “Perhaps there’s some reason in what you say.” Suddenly she clasped him again. “I do hope you’re well enough to go walking with me again. I so enjoy our rambles.”

  Lyman hugged her to him. “I do too,” he said. “It’s good for me to get out of this house.” And although she could not see it, his gaze lingered on the basement door.

  •••

  When they next met to resume their woodland walks, Minerva was much surprised at Lyman’s appearance: though still a little puffy and swollen and colored in the dustiest shades of plum, Lyman’s face had collapsed into something very like its old assemblage. Amazingly this transformation had occurred over scarce days.

  “I have been taking medicine recommend
ed by a friend,” Lyman offered when pressed.

  “What friend?” Minerva asked, perhaps too sharply. “A friend at Bonaventure?”

  “No. A friend down—south. My friend advised that certain minerals when mixed with water would help reduce the swelling.”

  “Really? What minerals, exactly?”

  Lyman let out a low whistle. “I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to speak of it. It’s a secret, you see. The recipe is a home remedy that my friend tells me has been passed down for generations among his, ah—” Lyman trailed off, finally returning to his thought to add the word, “family.”

  “Well,” said Minerva, “I dare say this friend of yours down south must live in Florida and possess the surname de Leon. He should become a cosmetician and mix his minerals into ladies’ toilette soap. When applied to a body less injured, I expect they would restore whole decades.”

  The pair had selected a gray overcast afternoon to restart their walks together, the air unusually warm but the breeze cool as it rained orange leaves upon them.

  “You say the friend recommended your prescription, through the post I assume. It’s odd that I don’t see you up at the Consulate to request your mail,” said Minerva after some moments’ rumination. “Nor do I recall mail addressed to you ever arriving at the house.”

  Lyman shrugged. “I correspond rarely and when I do, I prefer to meet the postman myself to assure delivery and receipt.”

  “Do you worry about someone reading your mail?”

  “Not at all. I worry about misplacement.”

  Minerva said, “So you lack trust in your compatriots.”

  “Mistrust and an acceptance that accidents occur are two very different emotions. Take Mr. Sutton’s pig, for example. You’ve told me he insists it was stolen. Yet there’s no evidence the hog’s disappearance is anything more than an accident.”

  “It’s odd that a hog that size has not reappeared, though. Father sent word around to the other farms and nobody has seen it.”

  “This corner of the state is hardly New York or Boston. A hog could live the remainder of its lifetime in this wilderness outside human awareness.”