Atropos
A Clifford Driscoll Mystery
William L. DeAndrea
for Sandy Manilla
Part One
Clotho
She who spins the thread of life ...
August 1974
H
E HAD EXPECTED IT
to be horrible—burning the house, burning Pina—but it was really sort of pretty.
He stood in the doorway and watched the flames, orange and yellow and blue, crawl their way across the floor toward her body as the linoleum bubbled beneath. He knew he should leave, knew he shouldn’t waste time standing there, watching, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave her so abruptly. He had been very fond of Pina. He would miss her.
He himself was in no danger from the flames. The layout of the bungalow was such that a fire might believably start at the space heater near the cheap bedroom curtains and incinerate the bed before ever endangering the front door, and he had set things up just that way.
It occurred to him that Ainley Masters would be proud of him. A problem had come up, and he’d dealt with it without panic. Not just without
visible
panic, but without panic of any sort. He hadn’t
shown
panic to anyone outside the family and a few trusted family retainers since he was five years old. Gramps had made it clear that a Van Horn must always be
seen
to be in control, whatever he might be feeling inside. And that old man’s cold contempt had been stronger than Hank’s terror. Hank Van Horn got back on the horse—though the horse had round, rolling eyes, and big yellow teeth, and made a noise like lightning in his throat—he got back on the horse and rode it until Gramps said he could stop, and then he went home to the room Gramps kept for him in the big house, and he went into his bathroom and threw up until he felt he was going to turn himself inside out.
Since then, Hank Van Horn had felt a lot of strange things inside, but only the chosen few had ever seen them.
But tonight was different. Tonight he’d faced an impossible situation, and
he hadn’t panicked at all.
Inside
or
out.
Well, he had, just at first, of course he had, or else Pina wouldn’t be dead. But after that first, familiar moment, when the world and his name and History were all crushing in on him, when he couldn’t stop his ears from hearing or his hands from doing, he broke through to a garden of peace and calm. He’d known precisely what to do and how to do it. Fire. Fire would conceal. Fire would purify.
Fire had reached the foot of the bed now, climbing the sheet he had artfully left trailing on the floor, playing with Pina’s feet and legs, and he knew he should leave now, but he was frozen in the doorway. It was fascinating to him that she didn’t try to get herself out of the fire. He knew it was ridiculous to feel that way—of course, she’s dead, dead people can’t feel anything—but he watched with amazement just the same.
The smoke was getting a little thick now, but the smoke, and the smell of the smoke, really, were no worse than at one of Gramps’s famous family barbecues. Gramps had died at the last one. He’d been roasting an ox, and he’d let no one else near the job. In control, as usual. He stood by the coals, watching the carcass darken and drip and sizzle, turning the spit himself more often than not. The doctors said he’d given himself a stroke from the heat and the exertion. But stroke and all, when Gramps had keeled over and fallen into the barbecue pit, he’d tried to get away, clawing at the coals with the unparalyzed arm, trying to push himself free with the leg that could move. Some of the men pulled Gramps out, some of them burning themselves badly in the process, but it was too late. Hank hadn’t been among them. He was too busy being seen to be in control. He’d thrown up that night, too. He’d strained his throat, but he had recovered sufficiently to deliver the eulogy at Gramps’s funeral. The hoarseness made it seem as if Hank had been choked up with emotion—Ainley Masters said that had probably won Hank another twenty-five thousand votes in that year’s election. Not that it made a difference—in that district, the Van Horn name was magic.
The fire had conquered most of the bed now. Hank had left Pina naked—he wondered if he shouldn’t have put a nightgown on her or something, if she wouldn’t have burned more thoroughly with cloth around her. He shrugged it off. Too late to worry about it.
Hank watched. He watched Pina’s long, black hair first crisp, then turn gray-white, then disappear. He watched the fire attack her pretty face, distort it, corrupt it, until it looked just like Gramps’s face when the men had pulled him out of the fire.
And suddenly, overwhelmingly, it
was
horrible, and the spell was broken. Hank Van Horn turned and ran for his life.
He had never meant to kill her. Why in the name of God should he kill her? He liked her. She was a lot of fun. Smart, too. Dedicated. A hard worker. Pina had organized Hank’s out-of-state fund-raising phone calls more efficiently than in any of his previous campaigns.
She was even nice to Ella. That was the really amazing thing. Hank Van Horn had dallied with a lot of girls, and all of them but Pina had shown it when they came in contact with his wife. There was always some kind of smirk on their faces, or some icicle-sharpness to their voices when they talked to Ella, as though they were scoring some big points off her.
It wasn’t as if Ella
cared
or anything. She had her charities and her tennis and a more than generous allowance from the family coffers; she was happy enough. And she had Mark, their son. Since he’d been born twelve years ago, he seemed to be all the man she needed in her life. Mark looked more like his mother all the time, as though proximity reinforced heredity.
And he was sharp, too. He had already learned, with a lot less pain than Hank had, what it meant to be a Van Horn. Hank was proud of him, when he thought about it. He made it a point to tell the boy whenever their schedules coincided.
This tended to happen less and less frequently these days. Ella seemed to want it that way. They’d be together in the fall, when the campaign heated up. Ella always dropped what she was doing to campaign with him. She was a fair campaigner—she could nod sympathetically when a factory worker held her hand and talked about his problems, even though she’d never seen the inside of a factory before her first campaign stop at one. Her real value, though, was in campaign photographs. Ella always photographed beautifully, and she had a way of looking at Hank that always came across as worshipful respect, whatever emotion it really reflected. The message to all who saw the picture was, “If this classy broad feels this way about him, he must really have something.”
It was a big help, and it wasn’t something Hank wanted to lose, so he made it a point to change girlfriends whenever they started to try to lord it over his wife.
Pina never did that, so Pina lasted much longer than any of the others, well into her second year, now. She was his Collierville girl, now, the one who got to live in the modest bungalow in the not-too-great section of town. The house had belonged to the family for years, always as a rent-free home for poorly paid campaign workers far from their own apartments. One time, a columnist in a New York paper had suggested it might be a—a
“love nest”
was the phrase he used—but Gramps had persuaded the paper to discourage the fellow from pursuing the point.
So when Hank was in town, he’d frequently drive Pina home from campaign headquarters when they’d work late. And he’d frequently go inside, where he and Pina would discuss campaign strategy, the way Nelson Rockefeller used to work late on a book about modern art.
That’s what they’d done tonight. Hank and Pina had discussed campaign strategy in the shower, and again in the bed. He was just catching his breath after the second discussion when Pina told him she was pregnant.
Hank looked at her. “I thought you were taking care of that.”
“Hank, darling,” she said. “Nothing works all the time. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t seem sorry.
Then Hank told her she’d have to go somewhere far away, have the abortion under another name. He didn’t need the anti-abortion nuts sniping at him because someone on his staff needed to get herself destorked. He told her he’d get Ainley Masters to handle all the details.
Pina went all Catholic on him. No abortion. Under no circumstances. She was going to have their baby.
That pissed Hank off. She hadn’t been too Catholic to fuck a married man. She hadn’t been too Catholic to suck his dick or ride his toes or do any of the other so-called sinful things they’d done together. She was just too Catholic to keep it from becoming a huge mess because she hadn’t been able to keep from getting pregnant. “Sorry, darling.”
What
really
infuriated him was that it was so
trite,
like a goddam outtake from
Citizen Kane.
If the press got hold of this, they wouldn’t print much of it—the Van Horn name was magic with them, too, and they were having too much fun at the moment with the Nixon impeachment hearings—but there would be a horse laugh in the halls of the Nation’s media that would kick up again every time Hank showed up.
And then Hank saw Pina’s face, and there it was. The smirk she’d never shown to Ella. The self-satisfied look of someone who thinks she’s getting away with something.
Hank could read the future in that face. Pina would make a big deal. She’d insist on marriage, at first. Then she’d settle for money. A lot of money. Or maybe she’d go for money right away, money to go away and have their baby (Hank remembered she hadn’t said
“her
baby”) and she’d raise it and love it, and she’d always be there for him.
