The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (3 page)

LeDonne closed the family-room door firmly behind him, and went back to join the others. The Underhill siblings weren't behaving like any bereaved relatives he'd ever seen, but that didn't prove anything. The few murderers he had seen in county cases were usually hysterical, with some combination of remorse and fear that was difficult to distinguish from genuine bereavement. Guilty people couldn't afford to take things calmly. Except in 'Nam, where you couldn't afford to take them otherwise. Still, their lack of emotion made him wonder. He followed the sound of voices into the kitchen.

Sheriff Spencer Arrowood was talking to the county coroner, Gerald Graybeal, the latest member of his family to run Graybeal's Funeral Home in Hamelin. Beside them on the scarred wood floor lay three body bags, already sealed. Maj. Paul Underhill. Janet Underhill. Simon. And Josh. LeDonne looked around the room.

"We had only three body bags," said Spencer Arrowood, anticipating his question. "I had to put the little boy in with his mother." Beneath

the weariness in his voice there was an unmistakable strain of emotion.

"You taking the rabbit, too?" asked LeDonne.

Spencer nodded toward a green garbage bag folded next to the bodies. "Thought I would. I don't see how it fits in with anything, though. It was outside, and it hadn't been shot."

LeDonne's face darkened. "Be better if it had been. I hope the bastard that did that did get his head blown off."

The sheriff sighed. "I don't think there's much doubt of that. Wish he'd left a note."

"Why should he care what we think?"

Gerald Graybeal, a stout and hairy man with too red a face and too blue black hair, stifled a yawn. He glanced at his heavy gold watch, its band buried in the curl of hairs on his wrist. LeDonne wondered how the man could get it off without ripping out clumps of them. "Is that about it, Sheriff?" he asked. "There's not a whole lot I can do here, you know."

"I know," said Spencer. "But you know and I know that the law says there has to be a coroner present at a death scene to pronounce the victims dead."

"They're dead, all right, Sheriff. I've seen road-killed groundhogs that had a better chance of-"

"Yes, well, I appreciate your help getting them—" He nodded toward the zippered bags.

"Glad to help, boys." Graybeal hesitated. "Should I take them on to the funeral home, or do you need to run some tests?"

"Lab work," said Spencer. "They'll have to go 50

to the medical examiner. I know it's an open-and-shut case, but we still have to do it by the book."

"You never know," said LeDonne unexpectedly.

Graybeal and the sheriff looked at him in surprise. "You don't think the oldest boy did it?"

The deputy shrugged. "I just don't like taking things for granted."

When the crime scene had been thoroughly photographed, measured, and tested and the dead had been sent away, Spencer Arrowood decided that he ought to go in and see the stranger he'd routed out of bed to tend to the living. Nominally, the Bruces' church was the one that Spencer himself attended, because a great-uncle of his had once been pastor there. In recent years he had scarcely set foot inside the sanctuary, but his mother still went regularly, and she had given favorable reports of the new preacher's wife. He had not been able to think of anyone else to call.

He made his way to the colorless sitting room on the other side of the house, where Laura Bruce was deep in conference with the two surviving Underhills, making funeral arrangements. She looked older than Pastor Bruce, the sheriff decided: he was still shy of thirty; she must be closer to forty, but still attractive. Her short dark hair curled about her face becomingly, and there was an earnest sincerity in her face that he found reassuring. She seemed to be coping well with tragedy.

When she saw him standing in the doorway, she excused herself to the Underhill children, who barely seemed to notice, and joined him in the doorway. "Sheriff Arrowood? I'm Laura Bruce," she said a little breathlessly. "Is everything all right?"

The tiredness seemed to hit him in the back of the neck and creep slowly forward to his eyes and mouth. "Well, it's as all right as it's going to get, I reckon. We've finished up here, and the bodies have been removed for autopsy. I just wanted to thank you for coming out here. Is anyone coming out to stay with the brother and sister?"

Laura's eyes clouded with concern. "They say there isn't anybody. I don't think they ought to be left alone, though, so I guess I'll stay."

Spencer Arrowood looked at his watch. It was a little past three o'clock, and he still had reports to write up, and a full day of bureaucratic details to attend to after sunup. He stifled a yawn. "Guess I could stay, too," he said. "Make sure everything's all right."

"Can I go out to the kitchen? I thought I'd make some tea. Would you like some?"

"I could use some, but are you sure you want to go traipsing through this house? We didn't clean it up, you know."

Laura closed her eyes wearily. "I know," she said. "As soon as we finish drinking that tea, I thought I'd start on it."

The twelvemonth and a day being up,

The dead began to speak: "Oh, who sits weeping on my grave,

And will not let me sleep?"

—"The Unquiet Grave"

The medical examiner's report and the inquest that followed were both perfunctory. The Underhills had all died of close-range wounds from the same weapon, a shotgun, and paraffin tests indicated that the gunman had been the deceased adolescent son, Joshua Underhill, who had subsequently committed suicide.

Representatives of the medical examiner's office had inspected the sheriff's diagrams of the crime scene, studying photographs of footprints and patterns of blood spatters on the walls of the farmhouse. As part of their final report on the case, they offered a reconstruction of the events that tallied with the first guess of the sheriff's department. Paul Underhill had died first, and judging from the front-entry shoulder wound, he had attempted to fight off his attacker. A horrifying chase through the house had ensued, leaving traces of blood in several rooms. Finally, another shotgun blast had slammed the retired major against the living-room wall, leaving gouts of blood that sent trickling arrows down to indicate his body, slumped against the baseboard.

Where was Janet during all this? Hiding? Attempting to go for help? She had died last. To the sheriff's surprise, the medical examiner's office insisted that the second victim had been eight-year-old Simon Underhill, the mischievous blond in the family photograph. His head still lay on the pillow, and the stain of blackened blood and gray matter on the wall behind him indicated that he had not raised his head when the killer approached him. Sleeping. There was some mercy in that. The bottom sheet was soaked to the waist level with blood from the head wound, but below that it was perfectly clean. How then to explain blood on the child's hand, curled under his right thigh? Serum testing proved that this blood belonged to an animal. The report offered no speculation regarding this fact. The rabbit outside, Spencer Arrowood thought. Was that a coincidence, or did it mean something? Since Simon Underhill had been shot while asleep in bed, the sheriff had assumed that the child had been an afterthought for the killer, caught by haphazard in the momentum of slaughter.

According to the medical examiner, Janet Underhill had been last. She was found a few feet from an open hall-closet door, lying facedown, shot in the back of the head at almost point-blank range. The killer had found her crouched in the closet, hiding behind the winter coats. He had dragged her out, throwing her facedown on the wooden floor of the hall. Putting his foot (bloodstained shoe print) on her shoulder blade, he had pointed the barrel of the gun at her head

and fired. Not much of her cranial area was left: It had exited in one crimson swath straight in front of her.

But this was her son, Spencer kept telling himself. What would make a boy do that to his family? Drug use? Mental illness? There was no record of either. A tox screen on Josh Underhill's blood sample tested negative for drugs. In cold blood, then. What had made him do it? In order to keep that secret, Josh Underhill had gone upstairs, put the gun in his mouth, and pulled the trigger. He had gone to his own room to do it. That tallied with the suicide's pattern of behavior. In a murder-suicide you almost never found them beside their victim. Spencer pictured the gunman executing his victims in a raging frenzy, lasting ten minutes at most. When the echoes of the last shots fade, there is a great silence, and the killer realizes that his act was irrevocable. More silence; more time passes. Finally, he goes away from the sight of his loved one, and in the privacy of his room, he sits down with the gun between his feet, barrel between his teeth, and reaches down for the trigger.

Four rooms befouled with blood and brain matter, the incidental selfishness of the madman. Why would Mark and Maggie Underhill want to keep living in that house of death?

Spencer had spent a futile morning questioning the two surviving siblings, learning very little about them or the relationships in their troubled family. Had there been any problems within the family? A drinking problem? Had

Josh ever been treated for psychiatric problems? The brother and sister were courteous, but wooden in their replies. Spoken without emotion, their responses might have been comments regarding the deaths in Hamlet. They didn't know what happened, they told him. Perhaps an intruder? No? An accident, then. The sheriff did not even bother to argue with their indifferently proffered theories. The killer was dead; legally, the rest did not matter. It was only the frustration of the enigma that made him pursue it.

A second aspect of the case was his business, and he dreaded bringing it up to two new orphans, but he had no choice. "What are your plans?" he asked them when the crime-related questioning was out of the way.

"Plans?" they echoed, politely blank.

"You're both under eighteen. The law says that you have to have a guardian. You can't stay by yourselves on that remote farm."

"Why not?" asked Mark Underhill. "I can drive. There's the insurance money for us to live on. We can take care of ourselves."

"You don't want to live there. With those memories."

Mark shrugged. "It's an old house. We got used to the idea of people having died there."

"Besides," said Maggie, "we don't have any close relatives. And we don't want to have to go away. We want to finish school here." She was clenching and unclenching her fists in the folds of her skirt.

"We know how to cook and use the washing machine," Mark added.

Spencer sighed impatiently. "It isn't just a question of doing laundry and cooking your own meals. You'd have to see to taxes and house maintenance, and all the rest of the things that adults have to contend with."

The two dark-haired youngsters looked at each other for a moment. Finally, Maggie spoke. "What about Dad's lawyer?"

"Dallas Stuart? He can see to the settling of the estate, and probably to the money matters as well, but he's seventy-two. He can't be riding out to Dark Hollow to see if you need anything."

Mark scowled. "Like we don't have a phone! Okay, Sheriff, appoint us a guardian. Not someone that we have to go and live with but someone who would look in on us every now and then to make sure we were eating all right, and keeping the house in shape."

"The minister's wife, Mrs. Bruce," said Maggie. "She'd do it for us. She said she'd help us in any way that she could."

"I'll talk to her about it," said Spencer Arrowood, disliking the suggestion. Still, it made a certain amount of sense. Why should the kids be forced to leave their home and school just because they had no one to come and stay with them?

"I'm seventeen now," said the boy, sensing the sheriff's weakening. "I'll be eighteen in May. It's just a formality, really. Just a couple of months."

"I'll talk this over with your lawyer and with Mrs. Bruce," Spencer told them. "It isn't settled yet, but I'll do what I can."

"Thank you, Sheriff," said Maggie Underhill with a dreamy smile. '7 hope all will be well. We must be patient: but I cannot choose but weep to think they would lay him i' th' cold ground. My brother shall know of it, and so I thank you for your good counsel . . . Good night!"

Spencer, recognizing the quotation, gave Mark Underhill a questioning look, but the young man only smiled and shook his head. Delayed shock, he thought. He made a mental note to talk to Laura Bruce about arranging counseling for both of them.

The Underhills were buried within the iron gates of Oakdale, the cemetery in Hamelin. There were many small cemeteries on the mountainsides in Dark Hollow, but they were all family plots, on land still owned by descendants of the deceased. Mark and Maggie Underhill hadn't wanted to start such a tradition on the farm. They were still strangers to the land and the community, and perhaps they wanted to remove the memories of the tragedy far from their own doorstep.

They huddled together now at the graveside, a little apart from the other mourners—most curiosity seekers drawn by the notoriety of the case. It was a cloudless autumn day. Buffalo Mountain's maple trees shone like a bloodstain

against the shadows of the pines on its slopes, but the cemetery grass was still green.

Spencer Arrowood watched the two surviving Underhills with pity tinged with defensiveness. There wasn't anything he could have done, he told himself, but he felt obliged to come to the funeral. Now that he was in Oakdale, though, he found himself thinking about another graveside service, more than twenty years ago. He had been Mark Underbill's age then. He wondered if he had looked as pale and stupefied. He knew he had felt like that. The whole world had suddenly—randomly, it seemed—needed readjusting, and he had been given no advance notice to get accustomed to the change. He remembered staring at the flag-draped casket and feeling nothing but adolescent selfconsciousness. Surely all these people were staring at him throughout the ceremony, waiting to report his every facial expression. He had resolved to have none, and that effort of will had made him oblivious to the words of the funeral service. He had never been able to remember what was said that day. Only that it seemed to last a long time in the summer heat and that it had ended with taps.

More than fifty people had turned up for the Underhill burial. Most of them had worn the traditional dark clothes, but because it was cold, they had been forced to add whatever coat they owned over their mourning outfits, so that the assembly was a curious mixture of reds and browns, with an occasional muffler of riotous plaid to break the solemnity. At the edge of the

crowd he saw Laura Bruce, looking solemnly formal in a dark suit and hat. He almost raised his hand to wave to her, but he decided that it wouldn't show proper respect to the deceased to be glad-handing the mourners at the graveside. After the funeral he would approach her and relay the Underhills' request that she be appointed their nonresident guardian until Mark turned eighteen.

He noticed that Nora Bonesteel wasn't present. People said that she never did attend a funeral. Probably just visited with the deceased at her home up there on the mountain, he told himself sardonically. He had heard the legends about the old woman of Ashe Mountain without considering them one way or another. It didn't matter to him if she saw ghosts or not; such things had no place in his world of order and law and finding probable cause. His mother had been full of questions about the Underhill case. Did Nora Bonesteel really foresee the deaths? Had Spencer discussed it with her? (That would be the day.) He hoped none of the supernatural business found its way into the newspaper accounts of the case. The murders were sensational enough without bringing ghost stories into it. He wanted the Underhills to be left in peace.

The elderly lay preacher who was substituting for Will Bruce had balked at the task of delivering a graveside eulogy in such sensational circumstances, and after a short Sunday meeting, the deacons had decided to ask one of the other Hamelin ministers to officiate. The Rev-

erend Charles W. Butcher, recently retired from Hamelin's Wesley Memorial United Methodist Church, had accepted the task. C. W. Butcher had seen it all in his forty years of ministry. He had buried boys shipped back in body bags from Korea and Vietnam; young people pried from the wreckage of their daddy's car after a joy ride; wives killed by estranged husbands mad with pain and rage. He had seen a world of sorrow, and it had left its mark in the deep lines of his face. He stood now in his good black suit, shiny with age, looking down at the four wooden caskets with an expression of serenity that suggested meditation rather than sorrow. No one in the crowd was crying. Earlier there had been murmurs of indignation that the murderer should be laid to rest side by side with his victims. Some even objected to Joshua Underbill being buried in consecrated ground at all.

C. W. Butcher turned to face those gathered at the graveside, friends and neighbors he'd known all his life. In Wake County you see the same faces and the same somber outfits at every funeral. Spencer, who went to more funerals than most people, knew that Dr. Butcher always started his eulogies with a verse of Scripture. He wondered which one he would choose this time. Thou shalt not kill?

With a gentle smile at Mark and Maggie Underbill, C. W. Butcher began. "Jesus said, 'Let not your hearts be troubled, you believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms ..."

Spencer saw Laura Bruce shiver in the wind. He wondered if she, too, had been thinking of the bloodstained floors of the Underhill house, and how she'd scrubbed them on her hands and knees with water and Clorox until first light. Many rooms.

"... And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way where I am going."

A snicker that didn't quite get transformed into a cough erupted from deep in the crowd. Someone was thinking, Maybe you all ain't going to the same place.

C. W. Butcher paused for a moment and gazed out at the crowd, and all was still. "Because these words are in the Bible, few of us stop to think about the writer's experience. Tradition calls St. John the beloved disciple of Jesus. John writes of good times and bad. Jesus laughs at weddings, cries at funerals, and does violence to those who desecrate the Temple." He waited while the phrase "does violence" sank in. They were quiet now.

"So matter-of-fact does the story seem, we forget that historians believe John did not write it down until 95 a.d. —at least sixty-five years after the death, Resurrection, and ascension of the one we call Lord. Did it take John a lifetime to make sense of a homicide, a homicide set apart from all other homicides? Does anyone ever make sense of a killing?

"Remember, it was decades before John could record the words he heard his old friend

say, 'Let not your hearts be troubled . ..' Indeed, we gather today with very troubled hearts, which may remain troubled for a long time to come."

Mark and Maggie seemed to huddle closer together under the collective stares of the crowd. Their impassive faces studied the ground in front of them, never once straying to take in the sight of the four coffins.