The Girl Who Kept Knocking Them Dead (16 page)

“He been up here without servants?” Gibby asked.

“That’s what they tell me, though the story is that he’s got to have somebody to wipe his nose for him even.”

Following the road instructions, we crossed through the town and turned off the highway into a tangle of woods roads. I was guessing that they would have been beautiful by daylight—trees and curves and all the wild nature any man could ask for. By night, and it was one of those dark, overcast nights, it was as black as the inside of my pants pocket, but airier. To a city boy’s nose that air was something special. It smelled woodsy and it would have been quieter than the grave out there if it hadn’t been for the crickets.

“I understand they make that noise by rubbing their legs together,” I said.

“They should have them honed to a fine edge by now,” Gibby muttered. “I wish they’d quit. They make me jumpy.”

“They make other crickets jumpy too. To a cricket that’s a very sexy sound.”

“Yeah,” Gibby said. “This is sexy country out here.”

Taking the last of a complicated series of forks, he rolled into a road that was different from the ones we’d been traveling. It was narrower, but it was better paved. It was, in fact, impeccably surfaced. It was also by many a turn more tortuous than even the curviest job we had encountered up to that time.

“Private road?” I asked.

“Right,” Gibby said. “We’re now on Jellicoe property.”

We continued on Jellicoe property for a good five minutes.

“There’s a lot of it,” I said.

“There has to be a lot of it,” Gibby said, “to provide enough screen for the orgies.”

“They had better be a pretty sober sort of orgies,” I muttered, “or people will be killing themselves all over this road.”

This Jellicoe place didn’t have the look of any run-down farm. It was more like a bit of the primeval wilderness that even the most assiduous of early New Englanders might have passed up as untillable. The trees that loomed by the roadside were rough-barked, thick-boled jobs that represented centuries of growing. Where there weren’t these trees there was a ravine instead and the ground dropped sharply away from the road shoulder down to the rocky bed of a running brook. We could hear its babble as we drove along and when Gibby switched on the car searchlight and turned it that way, we could see the rocks and the way the water broke around them. An uncommonly pretty place; at this moment it was also grim.

The road ran along the rim of the ravine for a considerable distance and then it doubled around again and the big trees again enclosed it on both sides. I had expected that when it broke out of all this heavily wooded land, if it ever did break out, we would come on some broad expanse of lawns and some great, imposing house. It wasn’t like that at all. We did abruptly come out into the open but it was no broad expanse. It was instead what seemed only an intimate bit of garden with a smallish house set at the far end of it. There was a car parked by the house and a man detached himself from the car and came toward us. Gibby slowed down, following the road through the garden, and I realized that the space was actually larger than it seemed and I guessed that the house also would be larger than it looked.

The man called to us. “Mr. Jellicoe?” he said.

“New York County DA’s office,” Gibby answered.

We stopped and the man came and leaned against the car window.

“You’re the ones asked us to keep an eye out for Jellicoe,” he said. “What’s the trouble now? Drunken driving again?”

“That could be a part of it,” Gibby answered.

“You’re not kidding,” the man said.

This, I knew, would be the local constabulary. He was of youngish middle-age, a bit balding, a bit fat. He wasn’t the sort of police officer that impresses anyone with the dignity of the law or with its majesty, implacability, or fearsomeness. This man represented a more kindly, a more flexible, a more understanding law. It was a law that had had long experience of the weaknesses and foibles of mankind, a law that knew more about folly than it did about anything really evil. I could well imagine this officer being quite as firm as might on any occasion be necessary, but he would be gently firm. In speaking of Jellicoe he was taking a tone that was compounded of about equal parts of fatherly mildness and grudging admiration. I could guess that he didn’t too much mind any Jellicoe escapades. He might even welcome them as further embellishments to a local legend.

We got out of the car and looked around. The house was completely dark and completely empty. The officer assured us of that. He had been in it.

“Find an open window?” Gibby asked.

“Just about everything’s open,” the man answered.

He went on to explain that this part of it was nothing new in the legend. It happened periodically. Jellicoe drank pretty much all the time, but periodically there would be one of these crescendos in his drinking and he would reach a pitch where he was too difficult to live with. At that point whatever servants he might have would quit him and he would go on in the house alone. That would last only a day or two and then he would leave it, go off somewhere, be gone a matter of weeks.

Some time during his absence, his long-suffering attorney would come up to the house, survey the damage, restaff the place, and see to necessary repairs. Eventually Jellicoe would return, sober and chastened, but after a few weeks of that, the drinking would start building up again and it would all be to do over again. His departures, therefore, were always highly disorganized forays and he couldn’t be expected to shut windows or lock doors behind him.

“The garage is locked,” the officer volunteered. “He always remembers that. Furniture, stuff in the house, he doesn’t give a hoot, but he does care about his cars. He cares when they’re in the garage anyway. Out on the road the way he is you’d think you could buy them in the dime store. He runs them into trees. He dumps them in ditches, but that’s just his drunken driving, of course.”

“Uhhuh,” Gibby said. “He’s careless with his other possessions, but he’s merely incompetent with his cars. How many has he?”

“Three. A sedan, a convertible, and a station wagon.”

We took a look through the house. As the officer had indicated, it didn’t take any doing. We just walked in by the unlocked front door. Immediately we were inside the place we were crunching broken glass under our shoes. For Jellicoe to have reduced the place to that state of wreckage in just a day or two made him a wrecker of impressive capacities. Chairs and tables were overturned. It was obvious that he had been opening bottles by smashing their necks against the stonework of the fireplace. I suspected that at some point he might have been swinging apelike from the window draperies since only the rags of them remained and those were hanging askew.

“He do this all by himself?” I asked.

“He always does. One time I remember he went right through the place and kicked the glass out of every window. It takes him like that.”

“It was just as well he was alone when he got in this mood,” I remarked.

The officer reminisced about the first time he had ever seen one of these Jellicoe wrecking jobs. He had assumed that it couldn’t just be this simple destruction. He had felt certain that it must have been a fight and he had gone through the whole house looking for blood.

“Matter of fact,” he said, “I was even looking for him. I was sure I’d find him somewhere here and murdered at least. He wasn’t. No blood, no body. I know him better now. He doesn’t do this if there’s anyone around. This is only when he gets lonesome. It’s the one thing he hates worse than anything; being alone.”

We left the house and went around to look at the garage. It was quite as reported, tightly locked up. The house was more interesting and we were headed back to it when the crickets stopped shrilling. Maybe they didn’t really stop. I don’t know whether noises bother crickets or not. Anyhow if they were still shrilling, we couldn’t hear them. They were drowned out. From the woods came a spine-tingling squeal. It took me a moment to identify it for what it was and by that time Gibby was off on the run. It had startled us, but it hadn’t been anything really frightening, just a screaming of brakes, the sort of sound that comes just before the crash of a bad traffic accident or before that sickening silence of the accident most narrowly averted.

I followed after Gibby, and the officer pounded along beside me. Gibby already had the car started by the time we reached him and we just managed to hurl ourselves into it before he picked up speed. We zipped around the driveway that circled the garden and plunged into the woods. We were just into that blackest part among the trees when we heard the crash. This one, I was thinking, wasn’t the accident narrowly averted. It was the accident.

It was only a matter of moments before we were out to the place where the trees dropped away on one side of the road and we were skirting the ravine. Then we saw it: the torn underbrush at the roadside. Gibby pulled up and we looked down over the edge. There was a car down there. It lay overturned among the rocks.

We jumped for the road and scrambled down to the wrecked car. This time it was the local officer who was in the lead. Gibby had to get out from behind the wheel and I had been riding wedged between them. Gibby and I were still on the way down when the cop reached the bottom and disappeared behind the car. We were going to have to work from that side if we were to get the driver out of that wreck.

I was still scrambling down the bank when Gibby hit the stream bottom. There was no footing to speak of and I was going down with my face to the bank, making use of every bit of rock outcropping for either a foothold or a handhold. I turned my head to try to see because I wanted to estimate whether I was far enough down to make the rest of the distance with a jump. What I saw made me forget the distance. I jumped.

Gibby was just started around the back of the wreck, going the way the officer had gone. I didn’t see an arm or even a hand. I just saw the rock, a big hunk of it, hover a moment over his head and then crash into his skull. I saw Gibby go down and I made the leap, landing right beside him. He was lying in the water. I could feel it just above my shoe tops and I was thinking that even though that would be only inches deep, a man could drown in as little as an inch of water if he was unconscious and lying face down in it. I bent to help Gibby. That was the first thing to do, flip him over on his back to make sure he wouldn’t drown. I was bending to him when the hands came around my throat. They fastened there and squeezed. I struggled. I know I struggled but even now I can’t remember it as something I was doing. I had this feeling that I was separated from my body, standing away from it somehow and that the arms and legs I had flailing about, although they were mine and I could feel them, didn’t really belong to me. Gradually I felt them less and less and after a bit I felt nothing, not even the sharp chill of the water in which I lay.

IT WAS pain that brought me back and, as I remember it, I came back just as I had gone out. Again I was struggling and again there was that feeling of separation from my body, from all the violent movements of my arms and legs. Gradually, however, I did become more clearly aware of myself. I was struggling to free myself from the clasp of those powerful hands around my throat and then quite suddenly I realized that I had nothing against which to struggle. I was free. The hands were gone and only the pain of them remained. It took some more time—and it could have been seconds or it could have been hours since I was in that state where everything seemed agonizingly slowed down, the state in which a man can be sharply aware that he is blinking his eye but with a peculiar sort of slow-motion awareness in which the lids seem to be creeping together and then creeping apart again.

I shan’t even try to estimate how long I was in the process of realizing that there was more to the pain than what the strangling had done to me. I was coughing; and coughing, when your throat is that bruised and sore, is an acutely painful business.

I had quite forgotten Gibby and I had quite forgotten where we were. After a while he groaned and he tried to sit up. He didn’t make it on that first try, but he did pull up far enough to take his weight off my shoulder. I found that I could sit up and I helped him. We sat together right in the middle of that little stream. It didn’t matter. We were both of us as wet as we ever could be and it seemed unimportant.

“Mac,” Gibby said feebly. “It is you, Mac?” I tried to answer him and I was astonished by the sound I made. It was an odd, little croaking whisper that bore no relation to any words I’d planned to speak. I didn’t, in fact, think I was making the sound at all until I’d tried again. That second effort wasn’t any more of a success but I found it so sharply painful that I could make no mistake about one thing. That sound, however odd it was, was being ripped out of my own throat.

“The cop,” Gibby muttered. “Where’s the cop?” His voice was a little stronger and steadier but the rest of him wasn’t. He was trying to get to his feet and he flopped about as though he were made of soft rubber. I took him by the shoulders and I sat him down again. I was coughing like a fool. My eyes smarted and the tears kept running out of them. It wasn’t the pain of the coughing that was making me cry, however, even though that coughing did hurt. It hurt even more than did my abortive efforts at trying to speak. The tears, nevertheless, were a completely separate thing. They were caused by the smarting of my eyes. It wasn’t the other way about. I did figure that out for myself and I remember that it made me feel much better. I was alive again. I knew what was going on. It may not sound like much to you but I can remember that I took it big.

I went to look for the cop. In the standing up and moving around department I wasn’t anything too great myself, not there at first, but there was the overturned car to hang on to and by holding on with both hands I did manage it. I got around to the other side of the car and by then stuff was coming back fast. I remembered that I had a flashlight and I even remembered to pray that the wet hadn’t shorted it. I brought it out of my pocket and tried the switch. It hadn’t shorted.