The Horse You Came in On (18 page)

“Huh? Oh, yeah, all tore up. Well, hell, you can see—there, and there.” Sinclair pointed to two of the photos. “We thought this Calvert must've surprised someone, maybe in the course of a B and E—break and entry,” he explained.

“We have those in London, too.”

“Yeah.” Sinclair's eyes were riveted on his magazine. His fingers seemed to itch to turn the page.

“What do you think, Sheriff?”

The sheriff clasped his hands over his pot belly, assumed a serious and meditative pose. “Well, like I said, all's we could come up with was robbery. We sent the forensics stuff to Philly.” He shrugged. “No prints, no latents; some fibers, but what's to match with?”

He had a deep voice with a raspy edge to it. Too many cigarettes, perhaps. He also had a direct gaze, when he could lift his eyes from the tantalizing picture of a twelve-point buck, and piercingly blue eyes. “What I mean to say is, for all we ran a check on Calvert, we came up with jackshit.” He shrugged. “If it wasn't a thief, well, then what? But, hell, that little old cabin away out there in the woods? Nothing in it of any value anyone knew about. Well, it just made me wonder.”

“Wonder?”

“Still do. Never got past the wondering stage.” He picked up a small wooden stick with a clawlike end and ran it down his back, up and down. “Trouble is, I got no one to wonder
with
.” He flashed Jury a thin smile as he scrubbed at his back. “Until you.”

 • • • 

The air was redolent with the scent of pines, crisp and cool. There was no proper road to the cabin; what had been the road here tapered off to hard, rutted earth and a worn few square feet where Philip must have parked his Jeep. Jury saw a number of crisscrossed tire tracks. He and Hester got out, still a distance from the cabin of perhaps fifty feet.

It was a log house with a chimney on one side and a small porch in front. The cabin reminded him of a child's drawing—square and sturdy, a window low on each side of the front door and one on each side of the house. The only thing missing from the drawing was smoke rising from the chimney.

There were trees, a lot of them, mostly pine interspersed with oak and walnut. The trees were clumped around the house and behind it, stretching on for some distance through parched brown fields. The ground sloped upward, on and on, and Jury was surprised how distant the woods and how far the horizon looked. It was a lonely place.

Hester had either not wanted to go in yet or not wanted to go in without him. She was standing some feet away, her hands shoved down in her coat pockets and her back to him. Leaves drifted down. There were rustles—small animals, he guessed, but no birds sang. It was too late in the day for that, he supposed. Then a V of dark birds, swallows or perhaps wrens, flew above them across the milky sky. From somewhere came the throaty honking of geese.

He walked toward Hester; his feet made soft sucking sounds in the needles and fallen leaves. Pinecones plopped at his feet.

She was standing looking down at a stream where the barest trickle of water showed there had been no rain for some time. He put his hand on her shoulder and she turned and they went toward the cabin.

 • • • 

It was very simply furnished, probably with secondhand stuff he might have picked up from one of the barn-cum-antique-stores they had passed on the way. There was, as she had said, a potbellied stove. Against one wall was a big horsehair sofa, its worn cover hidden by a couple of bright Indian rugs. Two more rugs were tacked up on the walls. A platform rocker sat beside the sofa, and near the kitchen were a large wooden table and a swivel chair. This was probably an all-purpose table, for it held books and papers and a goosenecked lamp. At the rear of the single room was a bunk bed covered with more of the Indian blankets. Bookcases lined the back wall. It was all very cozy.

Hester was inspecting some records that were stacked beside an old phonograph. Jury picked up what must have been a paperweight from the table and saw that it was a small music box. “It plays that music from
Dr. Zhivago,
” said Hester, returning a record to its sleeve.

The top of the box was a large, round glass bubble inside of which was a winter scene amid drifts of snow. Jury shook it and watched the snow fall. He smiled. He heard a clock ticking, looked towards the shadows at the rear and saw a grandfather clock. He looked at Hester.

She gave a little shrug. “I wound it when I was here last week. I didn't see the harm in it, though it isn't officially mine yet.” Then she sat down, wearily, in the rocker, placed her hands on the arms, and started rocking.

Jury still stood looking around the room, feeling its sentience. His work had found him in many rooms like this, all different, but similar in their air of expectancy, or so he felt it, the sense that the person would
return. It was in the small things—the cup and saucer on the kitchen counter, the dishtowel and washing-up liquid, the book splayed on the shelf, the music box that rested on some papers. Nothing had been put away; they all seemed still to bear the weight of the fingers that had lifted them. He was so young, thought Jury. He was too young never to come back and read the book or wash the cup and saucer.

There was some coal in a black scuttle; he made a fire, and Hester moved her chair closer. And then he started an inspection of the cabin. Useless, of course, after all these weeks. Nevertheless. He opened the bureau drawers, riffled the pages of the books in the bookcase, checked the windows, the door.

“I hate to go home.”

“What?” Her voice brought him out of his musings about Philip Calvert.

“I hate to go home now. Before, there was always the thought that maybe Phil would call and we could talk on the phone. Or maybe meet at the coffee shop. Sometimes we went to movies. Now I go back to my apartment—it's only an efficiency—and I can't stay in it. I go out and sometimes get some ice cream or a cup of coffee. I walk a lot. I'm just waiting for a reasonable hour to go to bed. You can't go too early; it makes you feel old. So I walk or sit in a coffee shop until it's all right to go back and go to bed.”

He sat down in the chair at the table, looking at her, and thought of the text of that Holman Hunt painting in the Tate. To sing songs to someone with a broken heart is like taking away a coat in cold weather. Something like that. Words of supposed comfort that offer no comfort at all to the sufferer but that let the comforter off the hook. He said nothing.

Neither of them had removed their coats, and both of them fell silent until Jury put a question to her about Ellen's student. “No. Phil never mentioned anyone named Beverly. Who is she?”

Jury told her. “A friend of Beverly Brown thought she might have met him when she was taking some sort of course sponsored by the Foundation. Did he teach?”

“No. But I think he might have attended—wait a minute. A black girl? Really good-looking? I saw him talking to a black student a couple of times. He never mentioned her to me, though; I don't think he knew her well.”

They were silent for a moment, she rocking, Jury turning the paperweight over and up. “He didn't have any enemies you know of?”

She sighed. “ ‘Enemies.' It all sounds so melodramatic.”

“Yes. I know. Did anyone, any other of his friends beside you, come up here for a visit?”

She shook her head. “No. That's the same question that detective asked. I honestly don't think so, or Phil would have mentioned it.”

“Not, perhaps, if it were a woman.”

Hester threw him an impatient glance. “Yes, he would. We were friends. I told you. If he was seeing someone or in love or having sex—yes, he'd have told me. He wasn't secretive.”

“I assume that people knew he had this cabin and came up here regularly.” She nodded, and he went on. “So that anyone could have come up here while he was here.” Again she nodded. “Well, I agree that robbery seems very unlikely. Why would anyone come upon this deserted little cabin by accident? Maybe it was him, Philip, after all, Hester. Maybe somebody wanted him out of the way.”

“Of
what?
I told you he didn't have any enemies—not Phil.”

“I know what you told me. Yet here's a cabin miles from nowhere that no one could come upon by accident.”

“Somebody could have followed him not even knowing who he was, but just followed him to see where he was going.”

“Someone could have done; I think someone did. But I also think it was someone who knew him or knew who he was. I think he was killed for a reason that had nothing to do with the cabin here. If it was a thief, why didn't he wait until Philip left the premises?”

“I know.” She sighed. “But
what?
Why?”

Jury shook his head. He turned the paperweight, shook it, and watched snow fall on the snowman, the skaters, the horse and carriage, and then resettle in little drifts. He turned the keys on the bottom and watched again as the scratchy tune, the theme song from
Dr. Zhivago,
played, while the skaters slid in one direction across the mirror pond, and the horse and carriage bobbed off in the opposite direction. Jury dropped his chin on his folded hands and contemplated the tiny tin skaters in their jittery glide along the improvised lake. In the carriage, two tin women rode with hands raised, waving. Beneath his chin he raised a finger, let it fall.

Then he sat up, noticing the quiet. “It's very hushed here, isn't it?”

Hester had been humming along to the music, eyes closed, rocking. She said, “Very. The silence is like thin ice. Even a bird chirping cracks it. It's peaceful.”

They shared the quiet.

She looked from his face to the cluttered table. “You can look through Phil's stuff—I don't think he'd mind. Anyway, that sheriff—” She seemed to be searching for a name.

“Sinclair.”

“Yes. He came up here. I called the local police when Phil didn't come back. He asked me some questions afterwards; I didn't hear from him again.”

Jury pulled a small stack of papers towards him and leafed through them. Bills, a couple of letters.

I hate to go home now. He looked at Hester, again deep in some reverie, and thought of her words and her sadness and said, “It's nice that you got this place, Hester.” He leaned back. “Seems right, your getting it.”

“Thanks.” Her voice was weak. She drew a handkerchief out from the cuff of her sweater, touched it, in an old-fashioned gesture, to the corner of her eyes, and then blew her nose very loudly.

“Hardly anyone that young ever thinks about wills—”

Or graves, or epitaphs, he didn't add.

“—and what to leave to his friends or family.”

Jury couldn't somehow get the boy Chatterton out of his mind. “I expect at that age we think we'll live forever. You know, one of the things that strikes me most about Philip Calvert is how sensible he was. When you're twenty-seven, you might be charming; you're seldom sensible.”

She rocked, resting her fine, fair head on the chair's back. “He is. He was.” She turned her face away from the potbellied stove. He did not know if it was heat or unhappiness that had brought the color up. She said, “He helped me a lot because he was calm. I tend to be excitable and impulsive.”

Jury stopped his shaking of the paperweight; he had to hide a smile as he said, “Yes, you are. You came up here with me.”

But she did not hear his mild joking. “So it was good to have someone—you know—steady.”

He watched the snow fall over the still scene. Then, after a few more moments of this shared silence, he rose. “I expect we'd better be getting back.”

She gathered her coat about her and stood up. The chair kept on rocking.

 • • • 

It was late afternoon, and on the way back they stopped at a diner that Hester liked, one that she and Philip had often eaten at.

“I love diners,” she said when they were settled in a booth with green Naugahyde benches, Jury's mended with gray electrical tape. “If the benches aren't fixed with tape, it doesn't count as a diner.”

“Any other rules?”

“A lot of them. The menus have to be splotchy and the specials written
in, preferably in pencil and misspelled. If nothing's misspelled, you know you've been taken. Let's see, do you have roast beef sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy in England?” Jury shook his head. “With cole slaw on the side?”

The waitress came back, took their order, and served it all up with what Jury considered near-breathtaking speed. They ate their roast beef sandwiches in appreciative silence.

Hester pulled over the menu again: “Pie, preferably à la mode, preferably apple—here it really is good.”

“I can't.” Jury groaned.

“Oh, for heaven's sake—what a sissy!” Hester ordered her pie. The waitress returned with it, a scoop of vanilla ice cream oozing across the top of the thick wedge. The crust, crisp and golden brown around its thumb-depressed edge, had risen high from the filling, so that Jury could see the slices of apple. Steam still rose from the plate. No wonder this was the great American dessert.

Hester watched him with a smile on her face.

Jury signed the waitress that he'd have some too.

They forked into their pieces.

Sweet, tart; hot, cold; smooth, sharp—the taste was sensational.

“Hester, we were meant for this.”

With his copy of the French Romantics, his
Strangers' Guide,
and Ellen's book, he made his way across the campus, his mind moving between the twin puzzles of Beverly Brown and her Poe manuscript and Sweetie and Maxim. He thought of the window in Monsieur P.'s room looking into the building across the courtyard, and there another window looking across the expanse of that room to yet another window. Maxim's rooms were huge, the floors luxurious in their Oriental carpeting, but Spartan in their furnishings. One room was empty save for a grand piano draped with a blue shawl. Melrose remembered these details; the description was striking. And in the dining room, Maxim sat in the single chair at the bottom of the table. . . .