Time Out of Mind (44 page)
Authors: John R. Maxim
Tags: #Horror, #General, #Psychological, #Suspense, #Memory, #Thrillers, #Fiction, #Time Travel
Sunday. Still no indicationof anything really amiss. Except that the forecast was calling for heavy rain. Into the
evening. Several department stores were announcing spring
sales. Sturdevant found himself wondering how Tilden
Beckwith had spent that day of rest. At home with his wife
and her infant, of whom he must surely have been suspi
cious by then? Off with Margaret in some cozy hideaway?
He didn't know. But their final confrontation certainly did
not happen on Sunday.
Monday's edition, the day on which the storm had bro
ken in full fury, was quite thin and generally unenlighten
ing. It had a patchwork look, as if it had been put together
by a skeleton staff. Sturdevant wondered how many copies,
if any, had actually managed to find their way to the public.
On to Tuesday.
There it was. The full magnitude of the disastrous storm screamed from the front page of the
New York Times
dated
Tuesday, March 13. Sunday's heavy rains had changed to
snow shortly after midnight. By six o' clock Monday morn
ing, when the
Times
staff and all other city residents were
preparing to go to work, the temperature had dropped to twenty-three degrees and was still falling. Winds were av
eraging thirty-six miles an hour and gusting as high as
eighty-six. These extraordinary winds began piling the
driven snow in freakish fashion. One side of a street would
be buried in drifts while the other might be swept clean
except for an icy coating. By noon, the temperature had
dropped to five degrees above zero and the winds had
climbed to an average of forty-eight miles an hour. Wires
were down everywhere. Even poles. One item mentioned
150 telephone poles down on Tenth Avenue alone. Not that it mattered in terms of service. The Metropolitan Telephone
Company, which had sixty-nine hundred subscribers at the
time, had asked the electric company not to turn on its
dynamos for fear of setting live wires dancing all over the
city's streets. All electricity was shut off shortly after noon.
Transportation in New York had come to a virtual halt.
Elevated trains, their small engines unable to make the
slightest grade, stalled high above the streets. Entrepreneurs down below secured ladders and began charging passengers
a dollar a head for their use, the alternative being to remain
where they were until they froze or until their bladders gave
them cause to rethink their options.
On the surface, the streets were clogged with abandoned wagons, horsecars, and dead horses. Hack drivers were col
lecting appalling fees, in advance, for the attempt to reach
destinations that might normally be fifteen minutes away. Some made it hours later, some not at all. Sturdevant could
almost see the desperation on the faces of clerks and factory
workers as they struggled on toward jobs in which job security was unknown. A day's pay was the least an absence
might cost them. Even the owners of businesses felt com
pelled to appear, partly as an example to their employees,
partly as an obligation to those who might otherwise arrive and find the doors locked, and because they knew no other
way.
Tuesday's entire issue was dotted with tales of futility,
venality, heroism, and tragedy. B. Altman's department
store had opened Monday and had one customer all day. A
woman bought a spool of thread. R. H. Macy's on Four
teenth Street closed early, brought in food, and turned its
furniture department into a dormitory for the staff. Four
patrons turned up for the dinner show at Tony Pastor's.
Pastor put the show on anyway and treated the cast and the
loyal four to a champagne and sandwich party afterward.
Several well-dressed men appeared at the city jail, confess
ing that they were vagrants who ought to be incarcerated,
at a time when the understaffed jail was offering to release
legitimate vagrants, all of whom declined with thanks. A
policeman found a wagon driver who was coated with ice
and appeared frozen stiff. Upon being roused, the driver
was shocked to learn where he was. He had thought he was
home in bed in Brooklyn.
exposure on her wooden box before anyone noticed that
she was no longer moving. Some of the poor who huddled for warmth near the sidewalk steam grates of office build
ings succumbed there. Several children were discovered.
Two of them had been given baskets and sent out to beg
by their fathers. One man had been observed trying for a
full hour just to cross Seventy-second Street near the Hudson River. At each attempt the wind would slam him down or drive him back. He finally crawled across only to dis
appear in a whirl of snow out of which the helpless witness knew he would never rise. In the fifties, an asthmatic malts
and hops merchant tried to reach his office and sank exhausted into a drift not a block from his home—Hello!
Sturdevant looked up at Corbin, who was helping Gwen
thread a spool of the
Greenwich Graphic.
“
Jonathan,” he asked, “does the name George Bare
more mean anything to you?”
“
Baremore?” Corbin narrowed his eyes. “Was that the
George found dead in the snowbank?”
“
You tell me.”
“
I'm not sure. Baremore sounds like it could be right.”
“
How well did you know him?”
myself saying hello to him at the elevator and making polite
conversation. He was in the beer business, I think.”
Malts and hops. What did he look like?”
A big man. Bigger than me. About my age.”
gave Baremore's age as thirty-seven and noted that even a
two-hundred-pounder was helpless against this storm. “Did
you know he had asthma?”
Yes, Jonathan,” Gwen reminded him. “You said he
looked as though he was gasping for breath.”
Never mind Baremore.” Corbin moved to Sturdevant’ s
shoulder. “If you're looking at a list of the dead, look for Ella.”
There's no list.” Sturdevant gestured toward the page.
“Only random anecdotes. The storm is still going strong as this is written. But I'll move ahead.”
New York Times
de
scribed a city that was entirely cut off from the outside and
eerily stilled. No trains ran anywhere. All supplies, espe
cially coal, were rapidly being depleted, and profiteers were
selling eggs for as much as forty cents each. In the harbor,
nine of New York's pilot boats were sunk. Authorities
feared the loss of up to two hundred other ships of every
description. Searches at sea were impossible because Tues
day's winds still averaged forty-five miles an hour and the
snow kept falling, although temperatures had risen from
one degree below zero at dawn to twenty-three by mid-af
ternoon. More people were found. Many of those who survived would lose one or more limbs to frostbite. Sturdevant
reached for the fast-forward switch and was about to ad
vance the reel to the next day's edition when he felt Cor
bin’ s hand on his own.
No,” Jonathan whispered. “Next page.”
it, Corbin's hand moved slowly into view and his finger
pointed at a column in the top right corner next to an ad
for Scott's Emulsion. Sturdevant saw the name at once,
although it was only one of a dozen names. Missing. Mrs. Tilden Beckwith. Age 24.
Ella.
Reported by her husband. Last seen the evening of March 12th. Heading east on 58th street. Destination unknown to Mr. Beckwith.
“
How dare you accuse me?”
“
Answer me, Ella.” His voice was quiet, controlled. “How is it possible that the child can be mine?”
“
By the usual method, I suppose. There are books on
the subject if human reproduction remains a mystery to
you.”
He realized now that Margaret had tried to tell him. Mar
garet, whom he'd taken out of Georgiana Hastings's house only to neglect most cruelly when a month later Ella told
him she was with child. Ella, who for the first and only
time in her life had actually pleaded with him to come to
her bed during his second night home from his trip abroad.
Ella, who had never again shown such appetites after that
one night. Margaret, in whom he again sought comfort and
companionship, although not without guilt as before be
cause of the child who was swelling his wife's belly. Mar
garet, who had been all his joy these past eight months.
She had tried to tell him. In her gentle way, she had tried
to make him count the months. She would never have said, “Tilden, an infant born in mid-January had to have been conceived in mid-April of the year preceding. You were in
London then,Tilden. All that month and parts of March
and May as well. You have been cuckolded, Tilden.” No.
Instead, Margaret spoke of mother cats and the number of
days in which their kittens would invariably be born after
the encounter that ultimately produced them. Only sixty-
three. So much faster than for cows and women, both of
whom take a full nine months. But Margaret would not
mind. That, she told him. She would take pleasure in every
single day of the nine-month term as long as she had the
child of a man she loved growing inside her. Margaret
would speak of these things and Tilden would notice an
odd sorrow in her eyes. He had never questioned it. He felt
sure that her sorrow was no more than an unspoken regret
that it was Ella who carried his baby and not she.
In the end it was Georgiana who told him. On a Saturday,
two days past when she came to his office to discuss her investments, Georgiana inquired of the child. She asked,
innocently enough, with what name he had been christened.
Ella's choice was Huntington, he told her, after her family
name, but the christening would not be until Sunday a
week. Describe him, she then asked. What is his coloring?
And from there on her questions became even more pointed until at last he demanded their purpose. It was then she told
him of the laughter she'd heard in her house that past April from men who spoke of the absent Tilden and the available
Ella with equal contempt Men who chortled about Ella's
loose tongue in matters of Tilden's business and who made
reference, however unclear to Georgiana, to a relationship
between Ella's infidelity and the financial destruction of
Cyrus Field at Jay Gould's hand. Men to whom she had
thereafter barred her doors. Men named Albert Hacker and
Ansel Carling and another whose name she could not recall.
“
There are books,” Ella had sneered.
”
I need no books, Ella,” he answered her, “only a cal
endar. The child, as all but the blind could see, is not mine.
Whose child is it, Ella?”
“
You are such a fool, Tilden.”
We can rule out Albert Hacker. Hacker is fat, has bad
teeth, and does not clean his fingernails. It is hard for me
to imagine you tumbling with a man so unfastidious.
There's another in that crowd, I forget his name, but he
chews cigars and leaves brown spittle to dry on his vest.
Enough said of him. That would seem to leave Ansel Car
ling, Ella.”
She stiffened but quickly recovered. ”A long rest in an
asylum would do you a world of good, sir. Consider it.”
