Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 03/01/11 (23 page)

The cries and alarm rose not long afterward. I had returned to bed, though not to sleep, when the shouts and sounds of running pounded in from out on the street. Alma had startled awake, and begun her noiseless crying when Mama came in and took us by the hands, and we went to the door together to see what trouble had come. The neighbor men were rushing past, down to where a glow rose behind the Harrisons’ small house. “Get dressed, girls, quickly,” Mother told us, “we’ll go to see if we can help.”

The fire was burning high when we got there, orange and yellow against the still-black sky, the men throwing buckets of water and shovelfuls of snow on the flames rising from the wagon and the two-stall barn. The snow hissed and melted and ran in ashy streams to where we stood with the other women and girls. The boys pushed in closer, and voices rose, loud and harsh as crows, crowded together in a babble of words and cries. “. . . happened . . . start . . . both horses out . . . saw anything . . .” Then a few words began to be repeated. “Lantern . . . broken . . . Garney . . . Garney . . . too much . . . no more . . .”

Finally the fire died down, and the men stood beside the collapsed wagon and the fallen beams and boards of the barn, warning off the boys who danced in near as they dared to the sparking embers. The elders of our ward gathered around Earl Harrison and what they talked of we could not hear. Earl Harrison walked into his unburned house and came out carrying a rifle. The elders turned as one and without regarding those of us who watched, set their buckets and shovels against the fence and walked, each man slow and weary-looking, down the street. Some younger men stayed to stand sentinel over the fire lest the wind rise and feed it, others saw to the horses, and several women went inside with Sarah Harrison to tend to those who had been burned on their hands or faces, but the rest of the crowd, and us with them, followed the elders. Men broke off from the group, went into their dark houses, and when they caught up, carried rifles of their own. I wondered how long it had been since any were fired. Since deer hunting months before, I thought.

They stood at the foot of the steps and looked up at the dark windows of the Garney house. “Brother Garney,” they called out, so he must have been a member of the church at some time, though I had never seen him inside its walls or following its teachings. They called again, voices roughened by smoke and exhaustion. These were men who worked fourteen hours or more most days, and to have lost half of what little rest they could claim each night lay heavy on them all. I wondered what they would do if no answer came, but the door opened and Sarah Garney stood there, the baby in her arms.

“We’ve come to speak with your husband, Sister Garney.”

She shook her head, said, “He’s asleep.”

“Wake him, then. We must see him.”

A long minute went by as she stared at us, then turned away. Before she went back in, I saw her mouth move, though I heard no words from where I stood, but what she said satisfied the men for they stood quiet, shoulders sagging.

A match must have been struck and a lantern lit, for light flared behind a window, and John Garney came out. He leaned against the door, reaching across the narrow space with his other hand, holding onto the frame, and I could see how he shifted, looking for balance and not finding it.

“Where have you been tonight?” he was asked. And so it began, the questions that had no answers anyone wanted or would believe.

“I’ve been in the house all night and what business is it of yours?”

“A good man’s wagon and barn have been burned, the same man you fought for no reason just hours ago. Several of those who helped have suffered injury.”

“That was no doing of mine. If I come at a man he sees my face when I lift my hand to him.”

Through the doorway, I saw Sarah Garney return, to stand behind her husband, just out of reach, and from around the back of the house, Jessie walked, so slowly I think few people marked the movement. She had both twins beside her, one arm around each.

The men waited, calm and implacable, and Garney turned, so unsteady I thought he would fall, but he grabbed his wife by the arm and thrust her before him.

“Tell them,” he said. “Tell them where I’ve been all night.”

Again she waited, silent long enough to give weight to whatever opinion the listeners had of her—that she would lie to protect him, that she would lie out of fear of him, or that she would tell the truth no matter how many were set against her husband.

“He’s been here. He’s been here since the accident.”

Mutters rose in the crowd that it was no accident if a drunk filled himself with moonshine and stepped in front of a team of horses. Nor was it an accident when a lantern broke against both wagon and barn.

I looked over at Jessie, who crouched there now in the snow with her brothers. No one else noticed them. She had made them put on their shoes and coats.

I wondered, was it for waiting in the cold while the grownups talked and made their decisions, or was it preparing to run. She saw me watching her, and her arm tightened around Stephen.

The men shifted, stood with their shoulders touching, made a fence of their tired bodies. One spoke. “You will have to leave, Brother Garney. Whether this burning can be laid at your door by the sheriff or not, we know where the blame rests. This is not the first of the many troubles you have brought us. It must be the last.”

Garney took a step toward them. “I’ll not go. Damn all of you.”

“You will. The elders of his ward will speak to the owner of this house and he will evict your family tomorrow.”

I saw Jessie flinch, and heard the outcry from her mother.

“Or you leave by yourself. We have no quarrel with your wife or children. If you are gone, they may stay. We will help them find work. Choose now.”

Jessie’s eyes blazed through the darkness. She knew. There would be too few lanterns in her house for her not to see that one had vanished. Her hand crept further around Stephen, closer to his mouth to keep him from calling out. But I knew he would not. He was still and silent as the ice frozen down to the mud on the floor of the river.

Had he done it to free them? Known the blame would fall on his father? Known to use the men who stood there to finally stay his father’s hand? Men who waited there tired and worn, who would risk their lives to save wood and iron, but would never have saved his family from beatings. Or had he done it out of the broken thinking of victims I have seen so often acted out, to turn on the one who attacks their attacker? I didn’t know. I still don’t. I only knew Stephen would use no words that night. Whatever sent him out into the night with fire, now he would stand and watch, and see what else was done.

As I watched, I knew what the loss of a father, even one so miserable as John Garney, meant to a family dependent on his earnings, but I said nothing. If any of us who knew—Jessie, me, Stephen himself—told that he had set the fire, a promise of restitution would be demanded, but then everyone would turn away and leave Stephen at the mercy of his father. The smell of smoke and burned things hung in the cold air as we waited for Garney to make his choice, the men thinking they were protecting neighbors and property, while I knew they were shielding one boy. Garney turned to his wife, and Sarah, after a wild-eyed look at the people crowded round her steps, wrapped one arm tighter around the baby she held, the other hand on the toddler who clutched at her skirts, and stumbled down the steps.

“You worthless piece of . . .” he snarled at her, “I’ll be well rid of you and those brats.” He clenched his fist, ready to strike, but she was out of reach so he leaned down, grabbing the worn railing, and spat at her, then spun awkwardly around and disappeared.

My mother moved forward then, put her arm around Sarah Garney, said, “You and your children come home with us until your husband has taken his things and left. The elders will see to him. Marie, Alma, you bring Jessie and the twins along.” So she had noticed them, too.

Before we could turn away, he came back out, a rifle cradled in one arm.

“You’ll not tell me what to do or where to go, you self-righteous sons of whores,” he shouted, and lifted the gun to his shoulder, the barrel swaying back and forth, but always pointed into the crowd.

Two shots rang out, one after another, and he fell back, his shot wild and harming none of us.

Sarah seemed to collapse against my mother, but my mother was strong from lifting clothes heavy with water, so she bore Sarah and the small ones quickly along, and Alma and I followed, Jessie in the center, me beside Micah—I could feel him shaking—and Alma next to Stephen.

My mother forced cup after cup of tea into them all, and then food, and that night they slept in our beds. By the morning, the body was gone, the blood scrubbed from the porch, and the family returned to their house. But a sort of friendship had begun out of the smoke and secrets of that night.

The elders found Mrs. Garney a place at the laundry where my mother worked. Jessie stayed home to care for her little sisters. At her house after school, we would take out our books and homework and teach her what we had learned that day. Stephen and Micah were given jobs at the grocer’s, measuring out grain, washing and trimming vegetables, cleaning up after the butcher. They would come home with their hands nicked and clothes stained, but they would also bring the beets or potatoes or green apples that had not been good enough to sell, and the marbled trimmings the butcher gave to them. The twins never returned to school. Micah eventually drifted off, disappearing for weeks, then months, and then we saw no more of him. As the years passed, Stephen was given increasing responsibilities and came to be manager, and then started his own store. Jessie never married. She had seen enough of the institution and had no use for it, though she would spend her life taking care of other people’s children.

When I finally realized what had come to be between Alma and Stephen, I sat Alma down at the old table and told her what he had done. Not to keep them apart, I had no expectation that was possible, or any wish for it. He was no more like his father than my own had been like his.

Stephen never asked me for silence. I don’t know if Alma told him I knew. I expect she did. They were so close they seemed to share each breath, and after she died, too young, too young, he walked through this world only out of obligation to all those who depended on him.

Copyright © 2011 by Trina Corey

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Fiction

The Long Way Down

by Edward D. Hoch

“One of Ed’s finest stories,” says Douglas Greene of Crippen and Landru, the publisher of several Hoch collections, “is ‘A Long Way Down,’ an impossible crime tale—man jumps out of skyscraper window but disappears on the way down.” The story first appeared in AHMM in February 1965, three years after the author’s first sale to EQMM but eight years prior to his beginning his 36-year streak of unbroken EQMM publication. It’s been reprinted several times, but never before in this magazine.

Many men have disappeared under unusual circum stances, but perhaps none more unusual than those which befell Billy Calm.

The day began in a routine way for McLove. He left his apartment in midtown Manhattan and walked through the foggy March morning just as he did on every working day of the year. When he was still several blocks away, he could make out the bottom floors of the great glass slab that was the home office of the Jupiter Steel & Brass Corporation. But above the tenth floor the fog had taken over, shrouding everything in a dense coat of moisture that could have been the roof of the world.

Underfoot, the going was slushy. The same warm air mass that had caused the fog was making short work of the previous day’s two-inch snowfall. McLove, who didn’t really mind Manhattan winters, was thankful that spring was only days away. Finally he turned into the massive marble lobby of the Jupiter Steel Building, thinking for the hundredth time that only the garish little newsstand in one corner kept it from being an exact replica of the interior of an Egyptian tomb. Anyway, it was dry inside, without slush underfoot.

McLove’s office on the twenty-first floor had been a point of creeping controversy from the very beginning. It was the executive floor, bulging with the vice-presidents and others who formed the inner core of Billy Calm’s little family. The very idea of sharing this exclusive office space with the firm’s security chief had repelled many of them, but when Billy Calm spoke, there were few who openly dared challenge his mandates.

McLove had moved to the executive floor soon after the forty-year-old boy genius of Wall Street had seized control of Jupiter Steel in a proxy battle that had split stockholders into armed camps. On the day Billy Calm first walked through the marble lobby to take command of his newest acquisition, a disgruntled shareholder named Raimey had shot his hat off, and actually managed to get a second shot before being overpowered. From that day on, Billy Calm used the private elevator at the rear of the building, and McLove supervised security from the twenty-first floor.

It was a thankless task that amounted to little more than being a sometime bodyguard for Calm. His duties, in the main, consisted of keeping Calm’s private elevator in working order, attending directors’ meetings with the air of a reluctant outsider, supervising the security forces at the far-flung Jupiter mills, and helping with arrangements for Calm’s numerous public appearances. For this he was paid fifteen thousand dollars a year, which was the principal reason he did it.

On the twenty-first floor, this morning, Margaret Mason was already at her desk outside the directors’ room. She looked up as McLove stepped into the office and flashed him their private smile. “How are you, McLove?”

“Morning, Margaret. Billy in yet?”

“Mr. Calm? Not yet. He’s flying in from Pittsburgh. Should be here anytime now.”

McLove glanced at his watch. He knew the directors’ meeting was scheduled for ten, and that was only twenty minutes away. “Heard anything?” he asked, knowing that Margaret Mason was the best source of information on the entire floor. She knew everything and would tell you most of it, provided it didn’t concern herself.

Now she nodded, and bent forward a bit across the desk. “Mr. Calm phoned from his plane and talked with Jason Greene. The merger is going through. He’ll announce it officially at the meeting this morning.”

“That’ll make some people around here mighty sad.” McLove was thinking of W.T. Knox and Sam Hamilton, two directors who had opposed the merger from the very beginning. Only twenty-four hours earlier, before Billy Calm’s rush flight to Pittsburgh in his private plane, it had appeared that their efforts would be successful.

“They should know better than to buck Mr. Calm,” Margaret said.

“I suppose so.” McLove glanced at his watch again. For some reason, he was getting nervous. “Say, how about lunch, if we get out of the meeting in time?”

“Fine.” She gave him the small smile again. “You’re the only one I feel safe drinking with at noon.”

“Be back in a few minutes.”

“I’ll buzz you if Mr. Calm gets in.”

He glanced at the closed doors of the private elevator and nodded. Then he walked down the hall to his own office once more. He got a pack of cigarettes from his desk and went across the hall to W.T. Knox’s office.

“Morning, W.T. What’s new?”

The tall man looked up from a file folder he’d been studying. Thirty-seven, a man who had retained most of his youthful good looks and all of his charm, Knox was popular with the girls on 21. He’d probably have been more popular if he hadn’t had a pregnant wife and five children of varying ages.

“McLove, look at this weather!” He gestured toward the window, where a curtain of fog still hung. “Every winter I say I’ll move to Florida, and every winter the wife talks me into staying.”

Jason Greene, balding and ultra-efficient, joined them with a sheaf of reports. “Billy should be in at any moment. He phoned me to say the merger had gone through.”

Knox dropped his eyes. “I heard.”

“When the word gets out, Jupiter stock will jump another ten points.”

McLove could almost feel the tension between the two men; one gloating, and the other bitter. He walked to the window and stared out at the fog, trying to see the invisible building across the street. Below, he could not even make out the setback of their own building, though it was only two floors lower. Fog . . . well, at least it meant that spring was on the way.

Then there was a third voice behind him, and he knew without turning that it belonged to Shirley Taggert, the president’s personal secretary. “It’s almost time for the board meeting,” she said, with that hint of a Southern drawl that either attracted or repelled but left no middle ground. “You people ready?”

Shirley was grim-faced but far from ugly. She was a bit younger than Margaret Mason’s mid thirties, a bit sharper of dress and mind. But she paid the penalty for being Billy Calm’s secretary every time she walked down the halls. Conversat ions ceased, suspicious glances followed her, and there was always a half-hidden air of tension at her arrival. She ate lunch alone, and one or two fellows who had been brave enough to ask her for a date hadn’t bothered to ask a second time.

“We’re ready,” Jason Greene told her. “Is he here yet?”

She shook her head and glanced at the clock. “He should be in any minute.”

McLove left them grouped around Knox’s desk and walked back down the hall. Sam Hamilton, the joker, passed him on the way and stopped to tell him a quick gag. He, at least, didn’t seem awfully upset about the impending merger, although he had opposed it. McLove liked Sam better than any of the other direc tors, probably because at the age of fifty he was still a big kid at heart. You could meet him on even ground and, at times, feel like he was letting you outdo him.

“Anything yet?” McLove asked Margaret, returning to her desk outside the director’s room.

“No sign of Mr. Calm, but he shouldn’t be long now. It’s just about ten.”

McLove glanced at the closed door of Billy Calm’s office, next to the directors’ room, and entered the latter. The room was quite plain, with only one door through which he had entered, and unbroken walls of dull oak paneling on either wall. The far end of the room, with two wide windows looking out at the fog, was only twenty feet away, and the conference table that was the room’s only piece of furniture had just the eight necessary chairs grouped around it. Some had been heard to complain that the room lacked the stature of Jupiter Steel, but Billy Calm contended he liked the forced intimacy of it.

Now, as McLove stood looking out the windows, the whole place seemed to reflect the cold mechanization of the modern office building. The windows could not be opened. Even their cleaning had to be done from the outside, on a gondola-like platform that climbed up and down the sheer glass walls. There were no window sills, and McLove’s fingers ran unconsciously along the bottom of the window frame as he stood staring out. The fog might be lifting a little, but he couldn’t be certain.

McLove went out to Margaret Mason’s desk, saw that she was gathering together her copy books and pencils for the meeting, and decided to take a glance into Billy Calm’s office. It was the same size as the directors’ room, and almost as plain in its furnishings. Only the desk, cluttered with the trivia of a businessman’s lifetime, gave proof of human occupancy. On the left wall still hung the faded portrait of the firm’s founder, and on the right, a more recent photograph of Israel Black, former president of Jupiter and still a director though he never came to the meetings. This was Billy Calm’s domain. From here he ruled a vast empire of holdings, and a word from him could send men to their financial ruin.

McLove straightened suddenly on hearing a man’s muffled voice at Margaret’s desk outside. He heard her ask, “What’s the matter?” and then heard the door of the directors’ room open. Hurrying back to her desk, he was just in time to see the door closing again.

“Is he finally here?”

Margaret, unaccountably white-faced, opened her mouth to answer, just as there came the tinkling crash of a breaking window from the inner room. They both heard it clearly, and she dropped the cigarette she’d been in the act of lighting. “Billy!” she screamed out. “No, Billy!”

They were at the door together after only an instant’s hesitation, pushing it open before them, hurrying into the directors’ room. “No,” McLove said softly, staring straight ahead at the empty room and the long table and the shattered window in the opposite wall. “He jumped.” Already the fog seemed to be filling the room with its damp mists as they hurried to the window and peered out at nothing.

“Billy jumped,” Margaret said dully, as if unable to comprehend the fact. “He killed himself.”

McLove turned and saw Knox standing in the doorway. Behind him, Greene and Hamilton and Shirley Taggert were coming up fast. “Billy Calm just jumped out of the window,” McLove told them.

“No,” Margaret Mason said, turning from the window. “No, no, no, no . . .” Then, suddenly overcome with the shock of it, she tumbled to the floor in a dead faint.

“Take care of her,” McLove shouted to the others. “I’ve got to get downstairs.”

Knox bent to lift the girl in his arms, while Sam Hamilton hurried to the tele phone. Shirley had settled into one of the padded directors’ chairs, her face devoid of all expression. And Jason Greene, loyal to the end, actually seemed to be crying.

In the hallway, McLove pushed the button of Billy Calm’s private elevator and waited for it to rise from the depths of the building. The little man would have no further use for it now. He rode it down alone, leaning against its padded walls, listening to, but hardly hearing, the dreary hum of its descent. In another two minutes he was on the street, looking for the crowd that would surely be gathered, listening for the sound of rising sirens.

But there was nothing. Nothing but the usual mid-morning traffic. Nothing but hurrying pedestrians and a gang of workmen drilling at the concrete and a policeman dully directing traffic.

There was no body.

McLove hurried over to the police officer. “A man just jumped out of the Jupiter Steel Building,” he said. “What happened to him?”

The policeman wrinkled his brow. “Jumped? From where?”

“Twenty-first floor. Right above us.”

They both gazed upward into the gradually lifting fog. The police officer shrugged his shoulders. “Mister, I been standing in this very spot for more than an hour. Nobody jumped from up there.”

“But . . .” McLove continued staring into the fog. “But he did jump. I practically saw him do it. And if he’s not down here, where is he?”

Back on 21, McLove found the place in a state somewhere between sheer shock and calm confusion. People were hurrying without purpose in every direction, bent on their own little useless errands. Sam Hamilton was on the phone to his broker, trying to get the latest quotation on Jupiter stock. “The bottom’ll drop out of it when this news hits,” he confided to McLove. “With Billy gone, the merger won’t go through.”

McLove lit a cigarette. “Billy Calm is gone, all right, but he’s not down there. He vanished somewhere between the twenty-first floor and the street.”

“What?”

W.T. Knox joined them, helping a pale but steady Margaret Mason by the arm. “She’ll be all right,” he said. “It was the shock.”

McLove reached out his hand to her. “Tell us exactly what happened. Every word of it.”

“Well . . .” she hesitated and then sat down. Behind her, Hamilton and Shirley Taggert were deep in animated conversation, and Jason Greene had appeared from somewhere with a policeman in tow.

“You were at the desk,” McLove began, helping her. “And I came out of the directors’ room and went into Billy’s office. Then what?”

“Well, Mr. Calm came in, and as he passed my desk he mumbled something. I didn’t catch it, and I asked him what was the matter. He seemed awfully upset about something. Anyway, he passed my desk and went into the directors’ room. He was just closing the door when you came out, and you know the rest.”

McLove nodded. He knew the rest, which was nothing but the shattered window and the vanished man. “Well, the body’s not down there,” he told them again. “It’s not anywhere. Billy Calm dived through that window and flew away.”