Jack of Spades (12 page)

Maybe I could take some of the cards, a handful at least. Or maybe—I could plan to return to the house another time.

No. Hurry. You must leave—now . . .

But somehow, though I understood that I was in danger, and should flee while I could, I did not move. Squatting, hunched over, in a most vulnerable posture I was frowning over this fascinating material, when something nudged against my ankles—the bone-hard head of Satan. Naïvely I reached out to pet the beautiful creature, thinking that he was indeed a co-conspirator, and wished me well; but felt a sudden rake of claws against the back of my hand, penetrating my glove—“God
damn
”—and suddenly, in an instant, chaos seemed to erupt like an exploding comet very near my head.

“Thief! Scoundrel!”—the hoarse voice was unmistakable, close behind me.

Out of the air, the ax. Somehow there was an ax and it rose and fell in a wild swath aimed at my head even as I tried to rise from my squatting position and lost my balance desperate to escape as my legs faltered beneath me and there came a hoarse pleading voice—“No! No please! No”—(was this my own choked voice, unrecognizable?)—as the ax-blade crashed and sank into the splintering desk beside my head, missing my head by inches; by which time I’d fallen heavily onto the floor, a hard unyielding floor beneath the frayed Oriental carpet. I was scrambling to right myself, grabbing for the ax (that was wielded, I could see now, by the wild-white-haired woman, her face distorted by a look of maniacal hatred), desperate to seize the ax, in the blindness of desperation my hands flailing, and the voice (my own? my assailant’s?) high-pitched and hardly human-sounding—“No!
Nooo
”—a fleeting glimpse of the assailant’s stubby fingers and dead-white ropey-muscled arms inside the flimsy sleeves of nightwear, and a grunting cry as of triumph and fury commingled as the ax was wrested to another’s stronger hands; and again the terrible lifting of the ax-head, the dull sheen of the crude ax-blade, and the downward swing of Death once begun unstoppable, irretrievable plunging into a human skull as easily rent as a melon with no more protection than a thick rind, to expose the pulpy gray-matter of the brain amid a torrential gushing of arterial blood.

And still the voice rising disbelieving
No no no no no.

III

20 10-Year-Old Harbourton Boy
Drowns in Quarry,
Catamount Park. July 1973.

No one blamed me.

No one blamed me to my face.

21 Lynx. November 2014.

“Andrew! There’s more of the terrible news here.”

Irina lay the newspaper in front of me, with its lurid banner headline—the first such headline I’d ever seen in the staid
Harbourton Weekly.

HAIDER HEIRESS MURDERED

IN TUMBREL PLACE HOME

Break-in, Robbery Motive

Suspects Questioned

We were at our breakfast table in a glassed-in porch adjacent to our kitchen. Through a haze of headache pain my eyes could barely make out the printed words and the somber photograph of
Corin Wren Haider
that had been taken years ago. A sixty-eight-year-old woman who’d lived alone in one of the grand old houses in Tumbrel Square, Harbourton, since her father’s death in 2003, murdered by an ax-wielding assailant who was believed to have broken into her house sometime after midnight with the intention of robbery.

An ax attack! Irina shuddered, standing behind me.

We had been seeing TV news of the local, brutal murder for several days by the time of the
Harbourton Weekly
publication.

I had been hearing radio updates, “breaking news.”

“The poor woman! You’d said she was mentally unstable. She shouldn’t have been living alone. And how awful, that someone who’d worked for her family, for so long, might be the murderer.”

It was noted that Harbourton detectives were questioning employees of the Haider family. Relatives of the deceased woman were quoted saying that Ms. Haider frequently kept “large sums of money” scattered through her house, out of a distrust of banks. Though few details had been released to the media I knew from a contact at Harbourton police headquarters that the caretaker, who’d worked for the Haiders since 1985, was the prime suspect.

This was stunning news. This was the truly upsetting news in the
Harbourton Weekly.

Look, it isn’t your fault. Andrew J. Rush is not to blame.

You had no choice, it was your life or hers.

Irina was murmuring what a coincidence it was, that the murdered woman was the very person who’d tried to sue me! And what an unhappy person she must have been, living alone in that mansion.

“Evidently ‘C. W. Haider’ had written for the
Harbourton Weekly
and other local publications, years ago. She’d reported on the ‘arts’ and wrote book reviews . . . Oh! Look at her picture, here—taken in 1963. She was quite striking even before her hair turned white.”

Irina had turned to an inside page. Columns of newspaper blurred in my vision. I shut my eyes, for I did not want to see.

It is not your fault—remember that.

Don’t weaken! Don’t be a coward.

You took the ax from her in self-defense. Beyond that—you have nothing to repent.

Irina continued to speak of the “terrible, terrifying” murder. The last such violent incident in Harbourton had happened in 1971—a drunken fight that had resulted in a wife being shoved through a plate glass sliding door. But nowhere near Tumbrel Place.

“Evidently, Ms. Haider ‘feuded’ with her neighbors. And she’d initiated ‘many lawsuits’ over the years.”

Through the throbbing pain in my head I found it difficult to listen to my wife.

You did the right thing. No jury would convict.

No jury would blame Andrew J. Rush.

Since that night, Jack of Spades intruded into my thoughts persistently. For I had no other counsel.

No blame. No blame. No blame.

Shame!

Unpredictably Jack of Spades spoke. At times his voice was thrilling, supportive. At other times, mocking.

Shame shame shame shame.

Yet Andy is not to blame.

“Andrew, darling?”—Irina’s voice was tense—“what did you say?”

“What did I say? I’m sure I didn’t say anything.”

There was a pause. Irina meant to speak but thought better of it. Quickly we finished with the newspaper. No more ax-murder for a while!

“Well. Shall I get us some coffee?”

“Yes, darling. Please.”

Irina went away. Such relief!

Thinking of how, that night, just a few nights ago, I’d managed to escape from the blood-drenched scene.

Astonishing to me now, in the seclusion and quiet of our beautiful glassed-in porch at Mill Brook House, that I had been capable of such action, in such desperate circumstances, so recently. That I, who was feeling now so lethargic, had been able to wrench the ax from Haider’s hands, and break her grip, and seize the ax handle in my own hands, and wield it—
Not you who seized the ax, not you but another whose strength coursed into your body and redeemed it.

Obsessively I’d tried to comprehend: Haider had been wakened from her sleep in an upstairs room, and had come downstairs silently to confront the intruder. No normal woman—no normal citizen of Harbourton—would have behaved so recklessly, and so vengefully. She had not been frightened for a moment. She had not called 911.
She had wanted to attack with the ax.

Many times since the incident I’d wondered if in the dim light she’d recognized Andrew J. Rush from his author photo. If she’d been surprised, or not surprised.

I had been very quiet entering the house. I had been very quiet throughout. It must have been the malicious Satan who’d alerted his mistress.

While I was examining the bookshelves, sleek black Satan had slipped away upstairs to waken Haider, and summon her downstairs to her death.

Why had she given no warning? Why had she not screamed at the intruder, to frighten him away? To save her own life?

She
had been the one to want to crush a skull with the ax, in a vengeful rage. She’d screamed at me only when it was too late, when she was upon me—“Thief! Scoundrel!”

The madwoman is to blame, and not you.

Spotless as a lamb though blood-splattered.

After I wrenched the ax from the woman’s hands it was not clear what happened next. Only vaguely was I aware of smiting her—raising the ax, bringing it down against the wild white hair—not to kill, but to save my own life.

A strangled cry from my own throat—
No no no no no.

At once, there was wetness everywhere. A fierce hot blood-wetness, that spattered onto my face, clothes, gloved hands.

Even as I dropped the ax, the body fell. The wild-white-haired head seemed to sink onto the shoulders, skull split and gushing.

Frantic I may have tried to set her—the body—upright again. Tried to revive her—that is, it. But now a lifeless body heavy as a sack of concrete.

“No! I didn’t mean it—please, no . . .”

(Did I speak aloud? Fortunately, Irina was in the kitchen orchestrating our elaborate coffee machine.)

But the woman—the body she’d become—had fallen, twisted upon itself on the floor, in nightclothes darkened with spreading blood. She who’d been so vituperative, so condemning, was now silent—silenced.

The crazed black cat was hissing at me from a few yards away, eyes glaring. If I’d had the ax in my hands I would have taken a swipe at it for I had a sudden mad wish to cut the jeering creature in two.

“You—
demon
!”

“And then, somehow I’d managed to escape—slipping in blood, gasping for breath, sobbing, shuddering—leaving the murder weapon behind, but having enough presence of mind to take my duffel bag, that was heavy with plunder, and the flashlight with its narrow, powerful beam—escaping not through the opened window in the drawing room but through a side door, that opened out of the kitchen into a pit of darkness beneath overgrown evergreens, and led to a path beside the house, that led in turn to the driveway.

My car was parked a half-block away on Tumbrel Square. At a corner of property owned by the Episcopal rectory.

Like an automaton I managed to drive my car through narrow deserted village streets, onto a deserted state highway and so into the countryside dark as a great ocean. By instinct making my way to Mill Brook Road and so to Mill Brook House where, in our darkened upstairs bedroom, at this hour of 1:40
A
.
M
. Irina slept with no knowledge of any of this horror; and if she’d wakened, and saw that I wasn’t beside her in bed, she would have supposed that I’d slipped away to work in another part of the house, having been unable to sleep.

Poor Andrew! He is so dedicated to his writing, that never seems to be going well though others, who scarcely know him, believe that he writes easily and without a backward glance.

Downstairs, in a guest room, I washed my face that had begun to stiffen with drying blood. I removed my blood-soaked shoes, stripped off my clothes, and rolled them into a bundle, and put the bundle in a large black plastic garbage bag, which I would dispose of the next day in a landfill twelve miles away.

Seeing then, to my horror, that the duffel bag too was soaked in blood, and adding this to the garbage bag.

Haider’s photographs, notes, plot outlines—these I shoved into the garbage bag. But I could not force myself to discard the priceless books, for which I’d sacrificed so much.

After my exertions, I took a shower. I washed my hair, that had grown thin in recent years, in which there were snarls of dried blood. I scrubbed the back of my left hand, where Satan had raked me with his claws through my glove. In a closet, I found fresh clothes. I did not expect to sleep for all my senses were alert and aroused but lay atop the bed in the guest room, which smelled pleasantly of potpourri and expensive soap; so exhausted, I did manage to fall asleep at about four o’clock in the morning, and wakened abruptly at six o’clock, with a thudding heart.

For a moment, I had no idea where I was. I remembered nothing—my mind was blank.

Then, the horror washed over me, with a smell of marshy soil amid the oversweet potpourri and colored soap.

Quickly then I rose, and dressed, and went outside in the air that smelled of frost, and drove the Jaguar to the county landfill north of Hadrian, where as the sky lightened by quick degrees I hiked into the interior of mounds of trash, carrying the garbage bag. I was breathing quickly, panting. I was feeling strangely jubilant. Once I found a likely place to hide the bag, I untied it, and shoved into it miscellaneous articles of trash including broken children’s toys—“That will confuse them!” Tightly I retied the bag, and hid it deep where it would never be found.

When I returned to Mill Brook House, I discovered to my horror that I’d left lights on in the guest room and adjoining bathroom. A smudge of something red on the bathroom tile floor, wiped up with a damp tissue.

It wasn’t clear if Irina was up yet. Probably yes, since it was after 7:00
A
.
M
. But I didn’t hear a sound.

About the precious books: after all that I’d done to acquire them I decided not to hide them timidly away but to boldly display them upstairs, interspersed with my own, more modest collection. Henry James’s
The Turn of the Screw
(signed first edition, 1898), for instance, would be shelved matter-of-factly beside
Ghost Stories of Henry James
(1961). Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
(signed first edition, 1897) would be shelved beside the oversized glossy
Dracula in Hollywood
(1993). None of the news articles about the break-in and the ax-murder had mentioned stolen rare books which led me to assume that no one of Haider’s relatives knew enough about the collection to notice that anything was missing, or to care.

Haider’s relatives had been focused upon more vulgar sorts of theft—money. I had not cared in the slightest for all the money C. W. Haider might have secreted in her house and I felt contempt for the small-minded, who could imagine one might kill for
mere money
.

It was a pleasurable morning I spent alone in the house shelving my new books, while Irina was at the Friends School. On the time-worn covers of
In a Glass Darkly
and
The Island of Dr. Moreau
I discovered faint traces of a dark liquid which I simply rubbed away with a damp cloth—for books so old and so rare are not expected to be in pristine condition.

“No one will know. These are books I might easily have purchased.”

To the victor, the spoils.

“Look, Andrew! Is that a cat, or a lynx?”

Irina had just returned with a tray bearing our coffee in mugs. Excitedly she pointed out the window at a sleek black-furred creature about one hundred feet from the house, making its leisurely way across our field of vision. It was a large black cat—unless it was a wild cat, a lynx—an “endangered” species in this part of New Jersey.

“How beautiful!” Irina cried. “But I hope it won’t attack the birds at our feeders.”

As I stared, the creature disappeared into shrubbery at the side of the house, without a sidelong glance.