Crawlspace (19 page)

It wasn’t terribly difficult to guess why Richard Atlee, with his marked antipathy for regular employment, suddenly went to work. And our guess was proved out only one week after he’d started his period of employment.

Alice and I rose one morning at the conclusion of that week and went down to breakfast. There we found our freshly squeezed orange juice, fresh biscuits, and a pot of coffee simmering over a low flame. The table was neatly set with two place settings, and beside my plate I found five crisp, new, ten-dollar bills.

Outside, from the garden, came the sound of a spade turning earth. It was Richard turning topsoil in Alice’s hyacinth and lily beds. We went to the window and watched him. Now that he’d taken off the green khaki denims of a garage mechanic and slipped into his old clothes he seemed more his old self again. His spade rose and fell, and he worked with enthusiasm. I imagine he was rather pleased with himself. He’d retired what he thought of as his debt to me. And having done that, he felt free to resign his job at Washburn’s. He’d got the terrible ordeal over with.

Thus went our lives that spring, and indeed as the weather grew warmer, we found Richard doing more and more about the house.

We woke one Sunday morning in April and were stretching our legs around the property when we noticed that something about the garage seemed different. During the winter the structure had taken an awful beating. Pelted by snow and driving rains, its paint had peeled badly and its shutters were in a state of disarray. I had bought paint several weeks earlier and had stashed it in the garage intending to do the job myself.’ Like many distasteful chores I’d put the thing off week after week. Now suddenly the garage rose out of the ground before us, fresh, gleaming, and white, like a wedding cake, with lilacs and white roses sprouting up all around it.

He had painted the outside of the garage, doing his work in the early morning, with such swiftness and efficiency that we never even noticed the transformation that was taking place. It was the stone wall business all over again. He’d never even bothered asking us if he could, or telling us when he had. He’d simply done it in his usual way—while everyone else slept.

The paint job threw Alice into a transport of ecstasy, and that night she baked him a strawberry-rhubarb pie and made a geat fuss over him at supper. She was thrilled with the way the garage looked, and so was I. He’d done a superb job, and I was grateful for that, but the manner in which he’d gone about it irked me, and even as she rattled on and cooed over him and genuflected all around, I felt the cold waves of resentment washing over me like a tide.

Several mornings later, along about sun-up, I was awakened by a rhythmic wooshing sound outside my window. I rolled over to see what it was. The bedroom windows face east, and when I turned and opened my eyes I found myself squinting into a shaft of sunlight. While I struggled to adjust my eyes, Richard Atlee’s face came slowly into focus—sliding back and forth within the frame of the window. He was on a ladder, painting the wall just beneath the eaves with a halo of sunlight blazing all about his shoulders. He had in fact just started to paint the entire exterior of the house.

I recall the angry haste with which I threw on a bathrobe and jammed my bare feet into cold shoes, and then barging outside, the screen door banging behind me and Alice, struggling into a shift, close at my heels. Then I was standing under the ladder and shouting up at him: “Look here—nobody asked you to do that.”

“It needs it.” He made long, rhythmic strokes with the brush, his eyes fixed on the eave beneath the runners.

“Maybe it does,” I said, trying to remain calm. “Nevertheless, I would’ve appreciated your asking me first. Where’d you get the paint for that, anyway?”

“Ordered it.”

“You ordered it.”

“From the hardware store.”

“The hardware—The word stuck in my throat. “By what right did you?” I roared up at him. “You have no right—”

“Oh?” he said.

“Yes. You have no right to order anything unless I specifically—”

“You like it, don’t you?” There was something almost surly in the way he said it.

“I like it fine, but don’t you ever do anything like that in the future unless you ask me first.”

He kept his eyes fixed stolidly on the dirty, rain-spattered eaves, concentrating intently on the steady rhythmic wooshing of his stroke.

“Did you hear me?” I said now as resolutely as I could. “Sure,” he said, never missing a stroke. He didn’t even bother looking up when I stalked off.

We were working out in the garden one morning. Richard had done his chores and was off somewhere. It was a perfect morning—the air cool, the sky a deep blue enamel, and the whole earth full of the smell of new grass. A lot of the birds that had been out of the area for the winter, like the robins and finches, were suddenly back and all around us. We put seed into the feeders and cleaned out the various birdhouses around the property to make ready for them.

When they finally came, they came in profusion—whole chattering, warbling, trilling busy flocks of them—rising and descending, tumbling out of the branches all over the place, with great flashes of color and unspeakably pretty songs.

We went about our work savoring the morning until, quite suddenly, the peace of the moment was spoiled by the high whining sound of a car climbing, in its second gear, the hill running just in front of our property.

When you hear a car in this section of the world you still look up. We did, and saw a station wagon turn into our drive, then bounce and lurch its way up the gravel path and disappear behind the garage.

I dropped my trowel and lumbered to my feet. But before I could get down to the garage, we heard a car door slam and then footsteps on the gravel. In the next moment I saw a tall, square figure turn the corner and move slowly toward us. The first thing I saw was the wide-brimmed hat, and then the boots. Between those two polar points was a long expanse of gray. It was the institutional gray of a civil uniform. Emil Birge was coming toward me.

In the next moment I was staring up into the red, beefy face with the sprays of purple capillaries raked out along each cheek. He was smiling amiably and thrust his hand toward me. I slipped off my gardening glove and took his outstretched hand.

“How are you?” I said while he pumped my hand.

Alice came up behind me and hovered there until he raised his hat to her. “ ’Lo, Miz Graves—”

“Hello, sheriff.”

“Pretty day.”

“Yes, it is,” Alice agreed, smiling, a look of apprehension on her face.

His eyes swung easily round the grounds, up past the garage, and on toward the main house. “You folks sure done a lot of pretty work on this property.” He was looking at the freshly painted main house. “Quigleys just let the place go to hell. Haven’t seen you up to church lately,” he went on.

“We haven’t been there,” I answered somewhat curtly. The subject of the church still rankled in me.

“Missed you,” he said. “Ain’t had no sickness, have you?”

“No,” I said.

“That’s good.” His tone of voice was full of thoughtful concern.

I had the feeling he was mocking us. Surely he knew about our banishment from Reverend Horn’s congregation. We chatted a bit longer while his eyes continued to swing back and forth over the property, as if he were recording every hill and slope of it for all posterity. For all that smiling and all that affability, there was something unpleasant about the man. Obviously he had something on his mind, and at last I got tired of waiting for him to get to the point. “Is there something I can do for you, sheriff?”

“That boy you got up here—”

My heart skipped a beat. “Richard?”

“Richard. That’s it. What’s his surname?”

“Atlee,” I said.

“Richard Atlee,” mumbled Alice right after me.

Birge smiled. “That’s it. Richard Atlee.” He paused a moment, peering back into the garden. “He still living up here with you?”

“Yes, he is,” I said.

“Down in your cellar?” he asked.

“No. He’s upstairs with us now,” I said.

“We’ve made up a room for him on the ground floor,” Alice added.

Birge’s eyes narrowed to a squint. “You folks been awfully good to that boy.”

“He’s been very good to us,” I said. I was beginning to feel a twinge of impatience. I felt I was being toyed with. I could sense him trying to manipulate us by trying to make us guess what was on his mind.

“Where’s he at?” he said quite suddenly.

“Just now?” I asked, trying to appear calm.

“That’s right,” he said.

“He was here this morning,” Alice said.

“You don’t know where he is now?”

“Probably off in the woods somewhere,” I said trying to smile.

“That’s what he likes best of all,” Alice said.

There was a look of amusement in Birge’s eyes. “The woods?”

“That’s what I’d guess,” I said.

“He been with you regularly?” he asked. “Right along?”

“Since about Christmas, I’d say. Wouldn’t you?” I turned to Alice.

“Yes,” she said. “It was right about Christmas.” She was quite nervous.

Birge nodded his head and kept swiveling his eyes from one area to the other. “You mind if I look around?”

“Help yourself,” I said. I couldn’t imagine that he could see any more than he’d already seen.

He started to amble off slowly, and we followed him.

“Has he done anything wrong?” Alice asked, her voice full of apprehension.

Birge didn’t answer. He just shrugged his shoulders and continued to saunter along at a leisurely pace. We followed him around from the garage to the main house, through the gardens and down to the stone wall at the bottom of the property, Alice and I trotting along at his heel like obedient pack dogs.

“Sure took some strength to build that wall,” he said admiringly. Finally I reached the end of my patience.

“You mind telling us what this is all about?” I said.

Birge looked out over the stone wall and into the woods. “Somebody busted into Harlowe Petrie’s last night.”

“Petrie’s?” said Alice again, her eyes widening.

“That’s right, Miz Graves.”

“Why come to us?” I asked.

“Harlowe said you’d know all about it.”

“Know about it?” I snapped. “Does he think the boy robbed his place? He didn’t, i’ll tell you right now.”

“Didn’t say nothin’ about robbery,” Birge said, a look of injury on his face. “Nothing was taken. Someone just got in there last night and made an awful mess.”

“A mess?” Alice said, too overwrought to say much else.

“Busted up the place pretty good,” Birge added.

I felt my anger mounting. “What’s that have to do with Richard?”

“Didn’t say it did,” the sheriff replied.

“Oh, it’s that silly business about the fifty dollars,” Alice said.

“What business is that, Miz Graves?”

“I’m sure Petrie didn’t tell you about that,” I said, feeling vindicated and scornful.

“He didn’t tell me nothin’. Only that you’d know somethin’ about what happened to his place.”

I told him the story about Richard’s encounter with the sales clerk at Petrie’s and about the fifty dollars.

“You got that sales clerk pretty well pegged, don’t you?” said Birge, when I’d finished.

“You wouldn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know it,” I said with growing anger. “You just speak to him.”

Birge lifted his hat and scratched his head. He pawed the earth with his foot, pointing the toe down like a ballet dancer. “Where was he last night?”

“Right here!” I snapped.

“All night?”

“That’s right.”

“You know that for sure?”

I didn’t know, and for a moment I ransacked my brain for some clever reply. “He had supper with us. At nine o’clock he got a book and went to his room. At ten I saw the light go out under his door. It was about ten, wasn’t it, Alice?”

She nodded to Birge. “He always goes to bed at ten.”

“We went to bed around eleven,” I added. “He was still there.”

“How do you know?” Birge asked.

The question pulled me up short. Of course I didn’t know. “Well, where else would he be?”

Birge smiled as if my blustering had told him all he needed to know.

“Would you be surprised if I told you he was seen over in town about midnight?”

“Last night?” Alice asked, looking very skeptical.

“That’s right.”

“And when did this Petrie business take place?” I asked.

“ ’Bout two A.M.”

I caught a glimpse of Alice’s eyes—full of hurt and disbelief.

“Oh—I don’t believe it,” she said.

I must admit very frankly that I half did. But I wasn’t going to say that. For some reason we’d simply assumed that having a room upstairs and a place to eat regularly had put an end to Richard’s nocturnal ramblings. For the life of me now I can’t imagine what reason there was to justify such a wild assumption.

“Well, he’s not a prisoner here,” I said. “He’s always been free to go and come as he pleases.”

Birge looked at me. “Oh?” he said, his voice full of portentousness.

“Is that bad?” I said, already a little terrified that I’d made some huge blunder and inadvertently turned the key in the cell that would encage Richard Atlee forever.

“Nope,” said Birge. “Ain’t bad at all.” His eyes swung out again cross the patch of wood and settled fixedly on the stone wall. “He sure done a pretty job on that wall for you, Albert, ain’t he?”

It always irritated me the way Birge would slip into first names after he’d been calling you by your surname for the past half-hour. “Look here,” I said finally, at the end of my patience, “are you charging him formally?”

“Not charging anyone.”

“Then I’m not going to answer any more questions. And if you want my opinion of Petrie, he’s a son of a bitch. He knows as well as I do that that oily worm of a clerk he’s got working for him stole fifty dollars from the boy!”

Birge gazed at me silently, his greenish-yellow eyes narrowing again until they were thin gashes in his head. “How would you like to come over to Petrie’s with me and have a look around?”

“For what purpose?” I shouted.