Mr. X

"Nothing like that will ever happen. It's your turn to trust me."

"Did you kill him?"

"Are you wearing a wire?"

He smiled.

"You'd have to say he killed himself."

"Let me ask you a question completely from left field. Did any of these missing photographs, including the ones of your family, have anything to do with that?"

“Is there something you're not telling me, Captain?"

“I'll be a little more explicit. When Stewart Hatch accused you of attacking him with a knife, he also said that he suspected you of having broken into his house for the purpose of retrieving some photographs he had mistakenly removed from the library. I don't give a damn if you went into Stewart's house and took back something that belonged to your family. I want to know if you showed those pictures to Cordwainer Hatch."

The alarms ringing throughout my nervous system were getting louder. "Why would I?"

Mullan took a moment to answer, and when he did, it took me another moment to understand what he was telling me. "When I was a boy, my mother once pointed out Howard Dunstan to me on the street. He was an old man, but he didn't look tame, like most old guys. In fact, he scared me. My mother said, 'When I was a girl, Howard Dunstan could make you feel like the first day of spring just by smiling at you.' I gather that he had the same effect on a lot of women."

I stared at Mullan in forthright awe complicated only by my shock. He knew everything—he knew everything hecould know. Ever since we had been left alone in my room at the Brazen Head, Mullan had been leading me toward the point I had been trying to conceal. "You're too good for this town," I said.

"They don't have stories like this in Cape Girardeau. The minute Stewart Hatch laid eyes on you, he tried to get you arrested or run out of town. But he never had any idea whoEarl was, did he?"

"Hethought Cordwainer was dead."

"And Cordwainer didn't know, either. But I have an idea of what he thought he was. Turn around and open that journal, or whatever you call it. He had beautiful penmanship, I'll say that for him."

I swung around and put my hands on the journal. My fingers turned a thick wad of pages, and I readI, too, have had my judases, the first of them one Clothhead Spelvin, whose betrayal I answered with a summary visit to his jail cell.

Further down the page, Cordwainer Hatch's calligraphic handwriting declared,In a weathered manner, I am still handsome, if I say so myself.

On an earlier page, in irate black capitals: I HATE ART.ART NEVER DID ANYONE A BIT OF GOOD.

And on an earlier still:Great Ones, You with whom this Drudge shares a common Ancestry, should You exist at all, I humbly request a degree of recognition commensurate to my Service.

Then I turned to the last words he had written.Iset down the Pen— &close the Book —theTriumphhastens —My Heartless Fathers—

Behind me, Mullan asked, "Did you show him a picture of Howard Dunstan?"

I closed the journal. "What are you going to do with this?"

"That's an excellent question. While the officers you saw posted at the door were looking through the front room, I came in here, opened that book, and read a couple of paragraphs. I ordered the officers outside and skimmed through the rest. Cordwainer Hatch thought he came from a race of alien monsters who put him here to set up their takeover. He claimed he could transport himself through space, enter locked rooms, and make himself invisible. What happens if that goes public? A thousand reporters start digging into these murders. The whole town turns into theNational Enquirer. The chief is out, and I'm out, spending the rest of my life running from people who want to write books about the Edgerton monster."

"Won't you need this as evidence?"

"That cardboard box has all the evidence I'll ever need." He looked down at a glistening garbage-undulation four feet away. A well-fed rat had poked half of its body through the surface and was staring back at him. "Get away from me," Mullan said.

Sleek, prosperous, and unafraid, the rat twitched its nose and emerged from the garbage. Mullan stamped on the floor. The rat inched forward, its black eyes fixed on him.

He unbuttoned his jacket and reached for his revolver. "Sometimes self-respect makes you do things you know you shouldn't." Mullan cocked the revolver and aimed it at the rat.

Baring its teeth, the animal elongated over the floor. Mullan jumped back and fired. A second before it reached Mullan's feet, the rat turned into a bloody lump of hair and an open pink mouth. My ears rang. A tinny echo of Mullan's voice said, "At least I can claim I fired in self-defense." He kicked the corpse into the garbage and reholstered the pistol.

"Good shot." I sounded as though I were speaking through a towel.

“I must be losing my mind." His mouth moved, but all I could hear was the tinny echo. “I think this guy could do everything he says. I don't know any other way to explain how Prentiss and Frenchy were killed."

My muffled voice said, "Good point."

"Do you have a twin brother, Mr. Dunstan?He says you do. He claims this brother of yours killed Minor Keyes."

“I have a brother. He isn't really a human being." Mullan was looking at me, hard, as though seeing more than he wanted to. “I didn't know he existed until he showed himself in that lane."

"That's as far as I want to go, Mr. Dunstan." I thought he wished he had an excuse to plug another ambitious rat. "The position of the Edgerton Police Department is that your father, Cordwainer Hatch, committed his crimes out of rage at his family's rejection. Prints from this hovel are going to match those taken at the time of Cordwainer's first arrest. The FBI will have Rinehart's prints on file, and the body buried at Greenhaven will be an administrative error. Frenchy La Chapelle and Clyde Prentiss were suicides. The murders of Toby Kraft and Cassandra Little have been linked to organized crime. A witness currently under police protection has established to our satisfaction that Cordwainer Hatch, alias Edward Rinehart, alias Earl Sawyer, died in the course of a struggle and that his body can never be recovered."

"Unless you plan to hang me out to dry, I'll have to be a lot more precise about the body." Both of our voices might as well have come from the realm of my father's Cruel Gods.

"Shut up and listen," Mullan said. "Remember what I say, because you'll have to repeat it about a hundred times."

•127

•I will never know, but I'd give three-to-one odds that Captain Mullan was one of those people gifted with the capacity to dream in long, coherent narrative structures. Maybe years of detective work, or of homicide investigations especially, develop the ability to create fiction, in the way working out at a gym develops other muscles.

What I do know is that Mullan reached into his imagination and instantly, without hesitation, unfurled the story that rescued us both. Here and there, I gave him some help. He prompted me to get some details clear in my mind. This is what he told me:

• After my mother had given me Edward Rinehart's name, I learned of his arrest in 1958 and death in the Greenhaven riot. Suki Teeter told me more. Still curious, I asked Hugh Coventry to check the Buxton Place property records and noticed that they had been purchased in the names of characters from the works of Rinehart's favorite author. I visited the properties and encountered Earl Sawyer, who admitted me inside them. Sawyer learned that I was staying at the Brazen Head, remarked that he lived nearby, and gave me his address. The following night, an anonymous man called me from the lobby of the Brazen Head and said that he was in possession of certain missing Dunstan family photographs. He refused to say how he had obtained the photographs, but wondered what they were worth to me. We settled on one hundred dollars. I came downstairs, glimpsed a man going outside, and followed him into Veal Yard.

•“What did he look like?" I asked.

•In the darkness, he had appeared to be a Caucasian male of five-ten or five-eleven and approximately 160 pounds. He had been wearing a dark blue or black zippered jacket, dark trousers, and gloves. I brought the photographs to my room and noticed the resemblance between Howard Dunstan and myself. After my mother's funeral, Rachel Milton advised me to look at some photographs in the care of Hugh Coventry, not the Dunstan photographs I had already obtained. I went to the library and found that the Hatch file had been discovered missing shortly after Mrs. Hatch had accompanied my aunts to the archive.

It occurred to me that my aunts may have taken the Hatch file to hold in ransom for their own, and I later discovered it concealed in my Aunt Nettie's house. The resemblance of a young man I assumed was Cordwainer Hatch to both Howard Dunstan and myself suggested that I had learned Edward Rinehart's true identity.

I visited Mrs. Hatch; I tangled with drunken Stewart. When I returned to the hotel, I thought about calling Earl Sawyer to ask if he would be willing to examine some old photographs. Earl might let slip some small detail that could lead me to his employer. He was not listed in the telephone directory, so I spent half an hour wandering through the lanes in search of his address, then found myself before a derelict building. I realized that I'd had nothing to drink since midafternoon and was extremely thirsty. Yet, there I was, in front of Sawyer's residence. I knocked. Sawyer recoiled at the sight of me, but after I explained why I had come, readily let me in.

I pretended not to notice the condition of his rooms. Sawyer said he knew his place was a mess, but if he could live that way full-time, I could stand it for a couple of minutes.

•"Got that?" Mullan said. " 'If I can live this way full-time, you can stand it for a couple of minutes.' "

"Why is that important?" I asked.

"Because it's specific enough to sound real."

I repeated the phrase, and Mullan went on with my story.

• Sawyer took me into the squalor of the front room. My presence evoked an odd, amused courtliness that seemed edged with hysteria. He asked to see the photographs. I gave him the Dunstan folder, and told him to look at the image of the young Howard Dunstan. He did so without any apparent recognition.

I put the Hatch folder in his hands. Sawyer stared at certain individual photographs with unmistakable interest. He looked again at the photograph of Howard Dunstan and placed it beside a picture of Cordwainer Hatch. He seemed a bit dazed. I asked him if he had any bottled water, and he thrust both of the folders at me and went into the kitchen. I followed, to be certain that whatever I drank came from a bottle and was poured into a clean glass.

Unaware that I had followed him, Sawyer kicked away rubble from in front of his icebox. I noticed the photograph above the table and went up for a closer look. As soon as I had seen what Karl had done to the photograph, I understood that he was Cordwainer Hatch.

He whirled around and asked what I was doing. I pointed at the boy wearing the crown and flaming heart and said,This is you.

What if it is? he asked me. I stopped being Cordwainer Hatch a long time ago.

•“Repeat that," Mullan ordered.

" 'I stopped being Cordwainer Hatch a long time ago.' "

"Then you said, 'You came back to Edgerton as Edward Rinehart, and whether you know it or not, I'm your son.' Repeat that, too."

• Earl Sawyer had not been surprised by my announcement. He nodded, regarding me with the faintly hysterical excitement I had seen on Buxton Place. He said,For what it's worth, I guess you are. I never wanted any part of you. I began to back out of the kitchen, wanting only to return to my room and drink sanitary water from a sanitary glass. Sawyer came toward me, saying,I want to show you something. He opened the back door.I owe you that much. I followed him out into a close, winding passage.

• Mullan opened the back door and said, "Come along, Mr. Dunstan."

•128

•He plunged up the tiny lane, swerving with its abrupt shifts of direction, charging with the ease of long familiarity across unexpected corners and through boxlike courts.

"Do you know what this thing is called?"

"Horsehair," I said.

"Do you know why?"

"Because it's so narrow, I suppose."

"Good guess," Mullan said, leaving me to wonder if it had been no more than that, and turned into a lane twice the width of Horsehair. His dim figure moved aside and waited. The wider lane extended twenty feet to the right and met a brick wall. This was where Horsehair came to an end: not, as I had thought, into one of the streets bordering Hatchtown, but at a bluntly abbreviated lane between a brick wall and the slanting facade of a long-forgotten foundry. I looked at the wall and saw the wordKnacker.

"Do you know what knackers used to do?"

I did not.

He waved to the building I thought was a foundry. Its wide double doors were inset with windows, like the old stable doors on Buxton Place. Mullan lowered his shoulder and pushed one of them sideways, and the entire structure trembled. We went into a long, wide space where hooks glinted from listing walls. In the center of the hard-packed earthen floor was a sunken circle about six feet in diameter. A cold, biting vapor scraped into my sinuses, and I sneezed.

Mullan moved toward the pit. "A hundred years ago, they led old horses through that lane and brought them here. The double doors were supposed to remind them of their stables."

"Tell me what knackers used to do," I said.

"Most places, knackers slaughtered worn-out horses and rendered their hooves into glue. Some stripped the hides and shipped them to tanneries. Here in Edgerton, they sheared the tails and manes and sold them to wig makers and mattress companies. When a horse came inside, the boomer—that's what they called him—hit it in the forehead with a sledgehammer. The horse dropped, and the guy they called the hoist picked it up with that thing." He pointed to a long, half-rotted sling suspended from the ceiling. "The shearers harvested the hair, and the hoist lowered the carcass onto a hook. When the time came, he raised it up again, swung it over the pit, and lowered it in. The pit... the pit disposed of the carcass."

"How deep is it?" I looked down at the still, black pool six or eight inches below the top of the pit.

"Deep enough. On busy days, the knackers dropped ten, twelve horses down there, and none of them ever came back up. Nothing has ever come up since, either. If all the bodies supposedly dumped into the Knacker are really there, they make quite a crowd."

"What's in there, acid?"

Mullan walked over to the side of the long room and scuffed in the earth. He bent down and picked up what looked like a small loaf of bread. When he brought it back, he was holding a broken cobblestone. "Watch this." Mullan gave the stone an underhanded toss toward the pit. When the cobble fell to within two or three inches of the surface, I thought I saw the liquid ripple upward to engulf it. A sizzling jet from beneath the surface twirled the stone like a cork, anda twist of smoke drifted away to cut into my nasal passages. My eyes watered. Whipping end over end, the cobble surged across the face of the pit, already half its previous size. It looked as though a tribe of piranhas kept it afloat. In seconds, the cobble had become a spinning wafer, a crust, a speck.

"That's what acid wants to be when it grows up," Mullan said. "For a couple of months back in the early thirties, the city had the bright idea of using it as a supplementary garbage disposal for this part of Hatchtown. When the word got out, they stopped and issued the usual official denials. Anyhow, this is where Earl Sawyer wound up. He took you here, he pushed open the door, you went in behind him, and he pulled a knife. You dropped your folders right about here." He brushed the sole of a shoe over the earth. "You struggled. Without knowing what was going to happen, you pushed him into the Knacker. Goodbye, Earl. Without a body, that's the best we can do. It'll work. No one's going to waste any time looking for his corpse. And you'd have to be brought here by someone who knew where it was, because you'd never find it by yourself. Most people in Edgerton have never even heard of the Knacker, and three-fourths of those who have think it's a fable. Let's get the rest of this night over with."

He led me back to Sawyer's house and told me to take the journal. “I never saw it. From here on, it never existed."

I moved through the rubble and lifted the book from the clearing on the table. "What now?"

"We're going back to the Brazen Head for the pictures. Then I'm taking you to Headquarters, where you will be questioned until dawn, probably. Can you remember your lines?"

“I think so," I said.

"We'll have time to go over your story again. Anything else you want to do beforehand?"

“I'd better call C. Clayton Creech."

"You and Stewart Hatch." Mullan locked the back door and turned off the lights in what felt like a parody of domesticity.

•129

•In the interrogation room where Lieutenant Rowley had told me he was my best friend, I recounted Captain Mullan's dream to audiences numbering from a pair to half a dozen at a time, over and over, like a jukebox, like a Scheherazade who knew but a single story and would tell it as long as it worked. Before me, displaying curiosity, suspicion, indifference, or weariness, passed male and female police officers of my age dressed in business suits; uniformed men two generations older who smoked cigarette after cigarette, heroically, and instead of looking at me regarded the table in exhausted cynicism; an aide from the mayor's office; the Police Department's press liaison, who patted her hair and blinked at the one-way mirror; Edgerton's chief of police, who advised me to get an unlisted number; and two unexplained, parchment-faced men with the look of Kremlin functionaries destined soon to be erased from state photographs. To all of these people, I sang Captain Mullan's song, and most of the time, Captain Mullan observed my performance from a corner of the room.

Shortly before sunrise, I was declared a ‘protected informant,’ or something like that, and led to a cell. The clanging of the door woke me up at 7:30a.m. With his customary air of having enjoyed a refreshing stroll through a graveyard, C. Clayton Creech glided in, splendidly attired in his old gray suit and old gray felt hat and carrying a black, well-worn briefcase. Creech perched at the foot of my cot and regarded me in a manner that almost suggested a degree of affection.

"Thank you for recommending my services to Mr. Hatch," Creech said. "Stewart comes to me late in the day, but I'll do what I can. On a happier note, you'll be sprung from this shithole pronto." He settled into a comfortable position without visibly moving. "The official viewpoint has it that you have rid Hatchtown of a verminous character and demonstrated the utmost cooperation in your dealings with the constabulary."

“I'm glad to hear it," I said. "What's the unofficial viewpoint?"

"Some of the local bluebottles harbor reservations concerning the anonymous fellow who swapped those photographs for five portraits of Andrew Jackson. It pains me to tell you this."

“I can see that," I said.

"We may take a primitive comfort in two developments. The first is the inability of these gentlemen, clue to the support given you by our chief of police, to do anything about their reservations. The second is that Mr. Stewart Hatch docs not dispute your claim to he the illegitimate son of his Uncle Cordwainer. Apparently, the photographs you supplied to our law enforcement officers offer striking corroboration to the claim."

"Stewart knew it all along," I said.

"Whatever Mr. Hatch knew or did not know is irrelevant to the present conversation."

I swung my legs out and put my back against the wall. "What is relevant, then?"

"Mr. Hatch's admission of prior knowledge. In the light of Mrs. Hatch's failure to support him in his time of trial, Stewart no longer wishes to impede your claim to the inheritance of his family's trust."

"Myclaim? I don't have any claim to his money. I never said I did."

"We are speaking now of 'claim' in the sense of 'right or title to,' not in the sense of 'demand' or 'assertion.' "

Stewart was up to something: he thought he could use me to keep the trust money for himself. I was the extra pass of the hand that misled the eye. Creech had undoubtedly designed this scheme with the impartial, nerveless skill he brought to everything else.

"Mr. Creech," I said, “If Stewart is convicted of a crime, the trust goes to Cobbie. I'm not going to let him swindle his son."

Creech's patience was sublime. "Mr. Hatch has been eliminated from the food chain. I may be able to help him in a number of ways, but I cannot save him from conviction. The state of affairs is this: Ifyou were out of the way—if, for example, you were to remain ignorant of your parentage—Cobden Carpenter Hatch would inherit his family's trust, that is correct. As things stand, however, it must rightfully go to you."

I absolved Creech of complicity. Stewart had made an elementary mistake. "Stewart forgot that the same condition that cuts him out also eliminates me. Cordwainer Hatch was arrested and convicted twice. He's out, so I'm out."

"The condition to which you allude does not apply to Cordwainer. His brother, Cobden Hatch, altered the terms of the trust in May of 1968. The amendment is not retroactive."

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"The clause has no application to actions performed previous to May 1968."

"You're kidding."

“I seldom 'kid,' Mr. Dunstan. It doesn't suit me." Creech folded his left leg over his right, crossed his arms, and drew himself into a tight, self-contained package. A lizardy smile appeared on his face. He was in a state of Creech-bliss.

"Before coming to this delightful facility, I enjoyed a lengthy telephone conversation with Mr. Parker Gillespie, the attorney for the Hatch estate. Mr. Gillespie is a gentleman of choleric disposition. He did not enjoy our little confab, but neither did he fudge. Cobden Hatch wished to drive his son into the path of righteousness by that tried-and-true method, carrot and stick. In 1968, his errant brother was believed safely dead. It never occurred to Cobden Hatch that the trust might wind up in the hands of anyone but his own son. However, we may assume that Stewart Hatch got the picture the second he had you in his peepers. Cordwainer was the first child of his generation; you were his son; the trust was yours. Illegitimacy has no bearing on the conditions as written. Cordwainer Hatch was born to Carpenter and Ellen Hatch. Carpenter's name appears on his birth certificate. Legally, he was Carpenter's son."

"According to my birth certificate, Donald Messmer was my father."

"Meaningless in the face of Stewart's admission of prior knowledge. Face it, Mr. Dunstan. The Hatch trust will be made over to you."

“I don't believe it," I said.

"You didn't the first time, either."

The lizard-smile widened before my incomprehension.

"Now and then, Mr. Dunstan, it is my task to inform you of a substantial inheritance. My role in your life appears to be that of a kind of celestial messenger."

"Sorry," I said. "That first time."

"Due to Carpenter Hatch's desire to stay the dead hand of the past from restricting the financial options available to his heirs, the entire contents of the trust comes to you unencumbered. On a personal note, the spectacle of the Hatch family being so royally harpooned affords me nothing but pleasure."

"How much money are we talking about?"

"Mr. Gillespie estimates the current value at twenty to twenty-five million, conservatively. Mr. Gillespie will be in touch with you today, and I am certain that he will advise you to retain his services. I would anticipate a spine-quivering description of the sorry state awaiting you, should you decline."

“I guess I have to talk to him," I said, which amused Creech.

“In the meantime, I'll prepare the documents necessary to sever Gillespie's relationship to the trust and FedEx them to you in New York. If you wish, I could also do some background work to discover if my colleague has given you an accurate accounting."

"How would you charge me for that?"

"You would be billed at my usual rate of two hundred dollars an hour. If that is acceptable, fax Mr. Gillespie the day you return to New York, instructing him to copy me on everything he sends you. My esteemed colleague will probably defile the seat of his trousers. I suspect that your two hundred dollars an hour should net you an extra two or three million."

"Mr. Creech," I said, "you're my hero."

"Your money is going to be rigorously accounted for. And since I have more experience of your temperament than Mr. Gillespie, let me ask how much of the windfall you intend to give away."

I smiled at him, but he did not smile back. Creech sat on the edge of my prison cot, folded into himself, gaunt, ageless, and impersonal in his gray suit and hat, waiting for whatever I would say.

“I want to take care of Cobbie Hatch," I said.

“Is it your wish to care for the boy by supplying the funds for his education and allowing his mother a reasonable annual stipend sufficient to allow them a comfortable life, or do you intend to make him wealthy?"

"He gets half of the money," I said.

"You are consistent in your methods," Creech said. “I expected you to divide the pot into equal shares. May I make a suggestion?"

I nodded.

“I recommend that you establish a trust similar to the Hatches', which would grant the boy a certain sum each year, along with a separate sum for his mother's living expenses. At twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty, whatever age you specify, the boy would be given the principal. By the time he is twenty-one, it should be equal to the present value of the original trust."

"How long would it take you to set that up?"

“It's about a week's worth of paperwork."

"Let's do it." I thought about the details. "Have Cobbie come into a quarter of the principal at twenty-one, another quarter at twenty-five, and the remainder at thirty. Give Mrs. Hatch two hundred fifty thousand dollars a year in expenses."

He nodded. "Mrs. Hatch's payments will he made from the trust set up for her son. This arrangement, which is extremely generous, will require my involvement on an ongoing basis, you understand. I have the feeling that you would prefer that my services be billed to you rather than to Mrs. Hatch and her son."

"Would you please send Mrs. Hatch a letter outlining the terms we've discussed?"

"Of course." Creech unfolded his legs and placed his hands between his knees in what I thought was preparation for departure. Instead, he took a clutch of papers from his briefcase and placed them in my hands with a feathery glance of rebuke. "These are the documents concerning Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Crothers's financial obligations in regard to Mount Baldwin Elder Care Facility. We agreed that you would sign them in my office the other day, but never mind, I brought them along. Mrs. Crothers will not be beggared."

Apologizing, I signed the papers and watched them disappear into the briefcase. Creech leaned back without bringing his spine into contact with the wall. "Previous to last night, had you heard of the Knacker?" His voice made the question seem weightless.

“I heard some kids in Hatchtown talking about it, but I didn't know what it was."

"Are you aware that the city once used it for garbage disposal?"

I said that Captain Mullan had mentioned it.

"A week after the city put the policy into effect, Hatchtown residents began falling ill at an unprecedented rate. Flu, intestinal disorders. In the first month, six people died of undiagnosed infections. By the end of the second month, birth defects increased noticeably. At the end of the third month, public opinion brought an end to the practice. When I was a boy growing up on Leather Lane, Mr. Dunstan, I knew children younger than I who had been born blind, deaf, severely retarded, with deformed or missing limbs, or with combinations of all the above. The original business had folded long before. The owners opened a fairground."

I said nothing.

“I suppose the Hatches knew that whatever was in that pit, whether they put it there themselves or not, was eventually going to seep into Hatchtown's water supply. To this day, Hatchtown people never drink anything but bottled water."

"So I noticed," I said.

“If Cordwainer Hatch died in the Knacker, he had the honor of meeting several of my former clients." Creech grasped the handle of his briefcase and stood up, uttering a raspy sound I understood was a Creech-chuckle only after he had gone across the cell and called for the guard.

•A quarter of an hour later, an officer escorted us to the lobby. A few cops turned away when they saw Creech. We emerged into an overcast morning twenty degrees cooler than the day before. Wisps of fog meandered across Town Square. The tips of fingers lightly tapped my elbow, I thought in acknowledgment of my new freedom. On a bench near the fountain, Goat Gridwell's golden hair tumbled out from beneath a mound of blankets. "Thank you, Mr. Creech," I said, and discovered that he was gone.

•130

•Through coiling fog I went up the lanes, Dove, Leather, Mutton, Treacle, Wax, with each step anticipating the footfall, the low smear of laughter that would announce Robert's presence behind me. I knew what he had done, and I knew why he had done it. And Robert knew what Ihad done—there could be no more pretense between us. The threat posed by the being I had known as Mr. X had been forever eradicated. I haddone that, I hadcarried it off. Robert and I had come into equilibrium, I thought, and I wanted to tell him that I had given away half of the fortune he had schemed to get. Each of us had saved the other's life. We were finished. It wasover.

I crossed Veal Yard and turned around to scan the narrow buildings and shadowy openings beyond the fountain. Robert was hovering; he was awaiting his moment. I went into the lobby and saw Laurie Hatch floating out of a leather armchair.

She wrapped me in her arms and pressed her smooth cheek against my unshaven cheek. "Thank goodness." She tilted her head and looked into my eyes. "How are you?"

"Reports are still coming in," I said.

“I feel so. ... I don't how I feel. I had to see you. Last night, the world turned upside down, and everything went flying. I felt numb.

Then the police barged in and asked all these questions. They even asked about the pictures. Did they talk to you?"

"They talked to me all night long," I said.

"And let you go. You're not in trouble."

“I'm fine."

Laurie put her head on my chest. I glared over the top of her head at the bug-eyed day clerk, and he scuttled down the counter.

“I'm sorry about what I did to you," I said. “It was a mistake."

"No, Ned, please." She placed her hand on my cheek. "You didn't make a mistake, I did.God, I've been worried. I didn't know if I'd ruined everything, I just kept rolling over and over, wanting you next to me."

I held her hand as we went up the stairs.

When I pushed the door shut behind us, Laurie brought her entire body into contact with mine.

"How long have you known?" I asked.

"Known what?" Her smile widened along my shoulder.

"Did you know who I was the first time you saw me?"

The top of her head nearly struck my chin. She moved a few inches away. "How could I?"

"Stewart pushed you off the committee because he didn't want you to see the pictures I showed you last night."

"Never mind Stewart. Do you think I recognized you?"

“I'm trying to figure that out."

She took another exasperated step away. "Stewart is about a hundred times more interested in his family than I ever was. I don't remember how much attention I paid to the Hatch stuff. I looked through it, if that's what you mean. Maybe your face looked familiar when you came up to me in the hospital, but I wouldn't have known why."

"Didn't you call Parker Gillespie two days later?"

"Of course I did!" She raised her arms and held out her hands, palms up. "Ashleigh was in town, remember? I was worried about what would happen to Cobbie if Stewart went to jail. The natural person to talk to was the lawyer for the estate. Ned, don't make both of us unhappy."

I took her hand in mine and kissed it. “I don't want to make anyone unhappy. I'm just looking for explanations. Tell me about this. A day after you did everything you could to help me find Edward Rinehart, you wanted me to forget the whole thing."

Laurie settled her hand on my hip. "Honey, you toldme you thought you might be putting Cobbie and me in danger."

"You probably haven't heard about Grenville Milton,"

Her eyes deepened.

"Last night, Grennie charged two first-class tickets to Mexico City and took off for a motel in Cape Girardeau. He was carrying a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and a gun, and he begged his girlfriend to come with him. When she refused, he killed himself."

The shadow of a thought as precise as a Euclidean theorem moved across Laurie's eyes. She moved toward the table, tapping her lips with an index finger. "Does Stewart know yet?"

"That's probably why he called C. Clayton Creech."

"Stewart's going to ruin as many people as he can. He'll try to bring down everyone who ever had anything to do with him." Laurie slid out the chair from which Captain Mullan had begun our progress toward a believable fiction and sat down almost heavily. "He's going to smash up everything he can."

"Like the Hatch trust," I said.

The sketchy smile brought to her face by the thought of her husband's destructive passions disappeared. She crossed her legs and waited for what I was going to say. Her face looked as transparent as a mountain stream.

"He called Parker Gillespie," I said. "He couldn't have known that I was talking to a cop named Mullan about Cordwainer Hatch. He just wanted to smash things up."

"He wanted to smash me up," Laurie said.

"He said he was relinquishing his claim to the trust. He told Gillespie that he had discovered the existence of the rightful heir, Ned Dunstan, who was the illegitimate son of his father's older brother. Too bad for Cobden Carpenter Hatch, but he could not suppress the truth. It would have gone something like that."

Laurie shifted sideways in the chair and noticed the tidy graffiti on the edge of the table. She lifted a hand and glided her fingers along it, as Mullan had done. In the inner ear of my inner ear, Star said,He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer. . .

“I never heard very much about Cordwainer," Laurie said. "Wasn't he arrested for something, ages and ages ago?"

. . .and there I was, with you growing inside me, and I thought it was like one beautiful birth after another.

"The part about arrests and convictions doesn't apply to Cordwainer. Cobden Hatch added it in the late sixties."

“I hardly know what to say."

"You don't sound too surprised."

"You gave me a big, fat hint about thirty seconds ago," Laurie said. "That doesn't mean I'm not surprised. Mr. Creech talked this over with Gillespie? There isn't any doubt?"

"Stewart knew what he was doing," I said. "Was any of this on your mind when we talked about you moving to New York?"

Her composure saw her through a long moment of silence. "That was nasty."

“I couldn't blame you for wanting Cobbie to get what he was always supposed to have."

"He should get it." She faced me with a direct appeal. "Ned, I'm still adjusting to your news, and I haven't had time to think about how it will affect you and me, but you must see that this isn't right. Don't you agree? Twenty-four hours ago, you had no idea that Stewart's uncle was your biological father.He didn't want to inherit the trust. He wasn't even a real Hatch!"

"Legally, he was," I said.

"But you—you,Ned Dunstan—you're not that kind of person. You're not like Stewart. I want us to have a life together in New York. You'd be a better father to Cobbie than Stewart ever was or could have been. That'strue. And I love you. There's no reason for the two of us not to have a wonderful life together. But Cobbie's right to the trust is more valid than yours. You see that, don't you?"

"What I see doesn't make any difference," I said. "According to the law, Cobbie has no right to it at all. Before we can start talking about the rest of our lives, you have to deal with the real situation, not what you want it to be."

She continued to focus her utter transparency upon me. "What would have happened if Grennie hadn't killed himself? If Stewart hadn't called Parker Gillespie?"

"You know the answer to that," I said. “I would have gone back to New York and waited for you. I thought that sounded great."

“It still sounds great to me," she said.

"But if Stewart hadn't called him, Parker Gillespie would be about to find himself in a terrible dilemma. This afternoon, everyone in Edgerton is going to learn that Sawyer was Cordwainer Hatch, and that I was his son. What do you think Gillespie would have done?"

"Spoken up," she said. "Obviously. I don't know if he would have done it right away, but it wouldn't have taken him more than a couple of hours. And then we would have celebrated at Le Madrigal."

"Like a happy family."

“Isn't that what you want most of all?"

"Even Stewart had me figured out better than I did," I said. "You saw through me right away."

“I saw the most interesting man I had met in years," Laurie said. “I started falling for you when we had dinner with Ashleigh. You know what you did? You told Grennie he was a jerk, you understood my sense of humor, and you wereall there, Ned, you looked at me with those incredible brown eyes and you werethere. You weren't judging me, you were looking at my face instead of my breasts, and you weren't trying to figure out how fast you could talk me into bed. The last thing I wanted to do was get interested in some new guy, but I couldn't help it. Ashleigh knew what was happening in about ten seconds. If you don't believe what I'm saying, you're a fool."

“I started falling for you in the hospital gift shop," I said. "After Creech told me about the trust, he asked how much I wanted to give away. He could see through me, too, but C. Clayton Creech sees through everybody." I told her about the division of the money and the new trust to be set up for her son. “In the meantime, you'll have two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year, paid from his share."

Nothing had changed in the bright shield of her face, "You don't think we should have talked about these arrangements?"

“I was in a cell at Police Headquarters, Laurie. Creech came in for about fifteen minutes before they let me out. I did what I thought was right."

"Creech convinced you of what he thought was right. It isn't too late to change things." Shining with the utter, straightforward sanity of twenty-twenty foresight, she opened her hand before her as if the world lay in her palm.

"Creech doesn't know about us. And he doesn't understand New York. How could he? The kind of apartment I'm going to need costs about two million. I'll have to have dinner parties, meet the right people, and do the right things. We'll need teachers and tutors and lessons in Europe. How much do you need to be set for life? Three million? Five? The rest could be made over to Cobbie, with a provision that I have something between five and eight hundred thousand a year. We would be together. If we got married, it would he as though you never gave anything up."

"Would you want a prenuptial agreement?"

Laurie leaned back and regarded me in a steady, unflinching manner that seemed less measuring than conducted in the light of previous measurements and considerations held up for revision. None of this was even close to being cold or calculating. The quality of her steady regard spoke for her—it declared the terms of her immense attraction. What I saw in her face was sadness suffused with irony, and it struck me that until then I had never so much as imagined the existence of ironic sadness. I felt the pull of a future open to nuances beyond my own reach: at that moment I could not have denied what seemed the central principle of her life, that in the realm of adult emotion range meant more than depth. Like great, cool wings, Laurie's range extended for miles on both sides. I had taken this capacity for a shield, but it did not fend off or deflect, it took in, and all that it took in increased it. She sat before me, blazing with consciousness.

“I hate the whole idea of prenups," she said. "What a way to begin a marriage. You might as well buy a Coca-Cola franchise." Her face settled into a smile of unreadable privacy. "Philadelphia might be good for us. It's less expensive than Manhattan, and the Curtis Institute is a great music school. Lennie Bernstein went there."

Like C. Clayton Creech, Laurie reassembled herself without altering her posture or moving any part of her body, then smiled at me and stood up.

Her next words clarified whom she had included in "us." "You'd visit Philadelphia, wouldn't you?"

"Better tell Posy to apply to Temple or U. Penn," I said.

“I can always find another Posy." Laurie knew that she had shocked me. The administration of the shock was a deliberate acknowledgment of our new relationship. "Especially in Philadelphia. The hard part was finding one in Edgerton." She kissed my cheek. "Call me before you leave. I need your address and phone number."

I watched her saunter across the hallway to the staircase.

•131

•Wisps of fog drifted across Veal Yard. A film of condensation gleamed on the cobbles. In the gray light, the buildings around the square seemed on the verge of departure. On the far side of the fountain, a woman's black pump stood with its heel lodged between two stones, as if abandoned only minutes before. A woman leaving, a woman walking away with such finality that she had left her shoe in token. ... I remembered the eloquence with which Laurie had passed through my doorway and the undiminished clarity of Star's voice, describing an alto solo in a concert she had seen while pregnant with me.

All at once, grief spoke from every gleaming cobble and wisp of fog, and the world seemed to deepen and enlarge.Grief, I thought, it'severywhere, how could I have supposed I would ever get away from loss —

Robert's face vanished backward into a lane.

"Robert!" I called. “I have to—"

On the way to Cherry Street, I kept glancing over my shoulder to find him sprawled across the back seat and opening his mouth to say something funny and cruel, but I was still the only person in the car when I pulled up in front of Nettie's house. It was a little past 9:00a.m. All three of my favorite relatives would be in the kitchen. I got out of the car and looked at Joy's front windows. The net curtains hung straight and undisturbed. It was too early in the morning for Joy to take up her post.

Nettie and May bustled around the stove, preparing scrambled eggs, bacon, and what smelled like chicken livers. Clark Rutledge sneered up at me from his bowl of pebbles and sugar.

"Good to see you wearing that pretty jacket, boy."

Nettie asked if I wanted to join them for breakfast, and I said that I was hungry enough to eat anything they put in front of me. I sat down next to Clark.

"They say on the radio Grenville Milton killed himself last night. Care to hear my opinion?"

"Fill me in," I said.

“It's a setup, pure and simple. Stewart Hatch has enemies who would stop at nothing to put him in a bad light."

"Mrs. Hatch must be going through the torments of hell," Nettie said. "And such a lovely woman. Isn't she, Ned?"

"One of a kind."

May ladled eggs and chicken livers onto the plates, and Nettie took a foil-wrapped package of bacon from the oven. Clark pushed his empty bowl to the center of the table. "Left Mr. Hatch holding the bag. That was the point of the exercise."

"And him with a wife and child," May said.

"His wife and child are going to get ten or twelve million from a family trust," I said.

"They will have a roof over their heads," May said. “I am comforted."

“I'm comforted to know you'll have a roof over yours," I said. "When Stewart Hatch heard about Milton's suicide, he told his family's lawyer, Parker Gillespie, all about his Uncle Cordwainer, so you won't have to worry about that anymore."

Nettie and May applied themselves to the chicken livers.

"By tomorrow, everyone is going to know he was Edward Rinehart," I said.

May sank back in her chair and gazed heavenward. "That is a great relief. I may not be an eater, but I am a talker, and silence comes hard to me."

"What the devil are you gabbing about?" Clark asked.

"Mr. Hatch has released us from our vow of silence," Nettie said. “It seems we have the boy to thank for that. You've done well by us, son, and we are grateful for your efforts on our behalf."

“I second the motion," Clark said. "Although I regret that Mr. Hatch is bound for the clink. He was generous to a fault."

"Stewart Hatch laid out a lot of money to keep you from talking about his uncle. Which is why you couldn't tell me about Edward Rinehart."

"Well, son," said Nettie, "we couldn't help but know a lot more about Mr. Edward Rinehart than your mother ever did."

"Because he looked like your father."

"You could not miss the resemblance," said May. "And we couldn't tell her the facts. You can't talk about a thing like that to an innocent young girl."

I laughed. “I guess it would have been hard to suggest that her boyfriend was your father's illegitimate son without actually coming out and saying it, but how in the world did you know he was Cordwainer Hatch?"

"Why, that was Joy," said May. "You know how she sits in that window day after day. One evening, she called up and said, 'May, I just saw that scalawag Cordwainer Hatch waltz into our sister's house with Star hanging on his arm.' That was the one and only time Star had him over to meet her family. I put on my best coat and hat and hurried across the street quick as a bug. Right after they left, I called Joy and said, 'Joy, that young man must have fallen off our family tree, but his name was not Cordwainer Hatch.' And Joy said to me, 'Honey, you're wrong as you can be. He must be passing under an assumed name by reason of his scandalous reputation.' "

"How did Joy know he was Cordwainer?" I asked.

"Joy spent three whole months working in that house," Nettie said. "She was eighteen years old. It was the Depression, you know, and while we were still comfortable from the sale of our land out of town, it was all you could do to get a job. Carpenter Hatch advertised for a girl of good character willing to do household work, and Joy interviewed for the position. She said she wanted to get out of the house, can you imagine? To think of her now, you can hardly believe it."

"Carpenter Hatch hired her?" I asked. "Didn't he know who she was?"

“If you ask me, he liked the idea of a Dunstan girl changing his sheets and cleaning his bathroom. Joy started at the end of October. Cordwainer was in boarding school at the time. His parents were forced to send him away, you know." Nettie nodded in a beautiful imitation of sympathetic sorrow. "One day while rearranging the contents of Mrs. Hatch's dresser drawers, Joy came across some photographs the lady had hidden from view. She noticed the resemblance between the boy and our late father. It was not long after that she was let go."

"Hatch fired her because of something she said?" Then I understood what Nettie had told me. "No, Joy wasn't rearranging Mrs. Hatch's dresser drawers, she was redistributing their contents. She was a magpie, like Queenie and May."

"Though not up to our standard," May said. "All the same, Mr. Hatch could never prove anything, but his suspicions settled on her, and then it was farewell, job."

"She told you what she had seen, and you saved it up. When did you have these helpful discussions with Stewart Hatch?"

"When was that, Clark?" Nettie asked.

"Around 1984 or '85. Mr. Reagan was in the Oval Office. Like the man said, it was morning in America."

“I suppose you had gone through the money Carpenter Hatch paid for the property on New Providence Road."

Nettie said, "Clark put a large sum into cranberries."

Clark informed me that the cranberry was a fruit of remarkable versatility. Its juice, health-giving and enjoyable by itself, appeared in several popular cocktails. Rendered into sauce, the cranberry appeared on every table in the country, come Thanksgiving. A note of regret accompanied this recital of the cranberry's virtues.

"Unfortunately," Nettie said, "the cranberry did not render us into millionaires."

"The man I dealt with could be called a common criminal," Clark said. "Though he was as smooth as silk."

"So you had a talk with Stewart Hatch."

"For the purpose of presenting him with a real estate opportunity," Clark said.

"And one of the terms of your agreement was never to divulge what you knew about Edward Rinehart."

"Which is what makes us so happy to be frank and open now," Nettie said. "You came along and hit us with that name Rinehart, that was ashock. We had no choice, son, we gave you the best advice we could."

“I am completely impressed. You blackmailed Stewart Hatch into giving you a fortune."

" 'Blackmail' is not a pretty word," Nettie said. "We reached a business agreement. All of us walked away happy, including Mr. Hatch."

"How much did you squeeze out of that crook?"

For once, Clark's smile bore no resemblance to a sneer. "A handsome sum."

“I bet it was." In spite of everything, I was delighted with these three old hoodlums. "You've been living off Hatch money for years and years, haven't you? First you sold the land, and then you sold them a secret. I'm proud of you. The Dunstans have never exactly been law-abiding citizens, but the Hatches were a lot worse."

"Neddie?" May set down her knife and fork on a plate that looked as though it had been steam-cleaned. "Now that we can be frank and open, I want to ask you a question. Mr. Rinehart, as he was called then, perished while in prison. I can't quite see how you came upon his real name."

"Now it's my turn to make a confession," I said. “I had to borrow those photographs Aunt Nettie was storing in her closet."

“Isn't that interesting?" May said. “I have to say, I never did understand why Mrs. Hatch asked me to magpie them out of the library. It was a piece of cake, though. Those people wouldn't notice if you took the clothes right off their backs, especially Mr. Covington."

"You remember, May," Nettie said. "Mrs. Hatch told us that Ned had remarked upon your talents, and deep in her heart she had the feeling that those pictures would help us to get back our own precious photographs."

"Why, that's right," May said. "She did. We never did get them back, though. Maybe we should visit the library again."

"Both sets of pictures are in my car," I said. “I'll give them to you in a minute. If you send them back to Hugh Coventry, they'll be perfectly safe."

“Isn't that nice?" Nettie said. "Mrs. Hatch is a veryattractive person. She reminds me of those girls on the news who look straight into the camera and say, 'Earlier today, three children were ripped to pieces by tigers during an excursion to the county zoo. Details after these messages.' And I liked her little boy."

"Me, too," I said.

Nettie turned to May. “I met Mrs. Hatch's son when we were comforting Star at St. Ann's. He was so comical! That little boy leaned over the front of his stroller and told me, 'I ain't jumped to any conclusions, Mrs. Rutledge.' I could hardly believe my ears."

"You could put a boy like that on television, along with his momma," Clark said.

"He said to me, 'I ain't jumped to ...' No, it was, 'I ain't concluded, and ...' What was it, Neddie?"

" 'I ain't concluded, and so far I ain't jumped,' " I said. “I'll go out and get the photographs, and then I want to drop in on Joy. I'm going back to New York later today."

"So soon?" May said. "Goodness, it seems like you only got here five minutes ago."

Clark gave me a roguish sneer and pushed himself away from the table. “I'll walk out with you."

•132

• On our way down the steps,Clark gave me a worldly glance Maurice Chevalier could not have surpassed. The fog had coalesced into a thin gray veil that made everything seem further away than it was. When I handed Clark the folders, he cocked his head in a show of confidentiality that implied the presence of unseen eyes and ears. “I guess you had something going with Mrs. Hatch."

"Only a little something," I said.

Fatherly pride warmed his red-rimmed eyes. “I believe you could bea real Dunstan, after all."

“I believe you're right." Then I remembered the unseen eyes and ears and looked across the street. "Do you know if Joy called Mount Baldwin?"

"Hasn't been a peep out of Joy in two days. Since we got this far, let's check in on her."

Joy did not respond to a knock on her door. I knocked again. Clark's forehead divided into what looked like hundreds of parallel creases. "She puts out a key in case of emergencies and the like. Hold on. I'll remember where it is."

I lifted the edge of the mat and picked up a house key.

"Second you bent down, I remembered. Give that to me."

Clark opened the door and flapped his hand in front of his face. “I don't know how people can live with a stink like that. JOY! IT'S ME AND NEDDIE, STAR'S BOY! HOW YOU BEEN?"

I heard a high-pitched humming sound.

"YOU HEAR ME?"

Silence, except for the humming sound, whichClarkcould not hear.

"We better go in." We moved over the threshold, and the stench enfolded us. "JOY! YOU IN THE CAN?"

"Let's try the living room," I said, hoping that Joy had not died of a stroke while lowering Clarence into the bath. The humming sound grew louder. When we entered the living room, Clarence goggled at us with a mixture of relief and terror and threw himself against the strap.Hmmmmml Hmmmm!

"Clark, call Mount Baldwin and have them send an ambulance right now."

"Will do," Clark said. "You scout around for Joy. I don't like the look of this."

Clarence's Morse code followed me into the dining room and kitchen. Joy had been taking lessons in housekeeping from Earl Sawyer. She had a long way to go, but she was making progress toward the glistening-jelly stage. The bathroom fell even further below Earl's standards.

Iflipped the light switch at the bottom of the stairs and heard Clark summoning the ambulance from Mount Baldwin. Above me, a bulb stuttered on, and viscous yellow light flattened against a narrow, partially opened door. Clark Rutledge ranted on in the living room. A dull thump I had heard before came from the attic. Some heavy object had been brought into contact with the side of a wooden crate. What came to mind was a softball the size of a pumpkin.

Clark said, “I'll wait, but I won't wait long. You may take that as a warning." By the time I got to the top of the stairs, he was repeating everything he had said earlier to someone else. On the other side of the attic door, the big softball again thumped the side of the crate. I opened the door the rest of the way and saw a pair of black running shoes with their toes on the pine boards and the soles slanting upward at a right-to-left angle. Extending from the tops of the shoes, two thin legs disappeared beneath a black hem. I said, "Oh, no," and moved up beside Joy's body.

A tray, a spoon, an inverted bowl, and the dried remains of chicken noodle soup lay beyond her outstretched arms. Her skin was cold. A few minutes after I had last seen Joy, she had warmed up a can of soup, poured it into a bowl, taken the tray to the attic, and died.

A small bed enclosed within a boxlike wooden frame butted against the wall at the far side of the attic. Flat plywood sections three feet high had been nailed to two-by-fours at the bed's corners. A cot covered with an army surplus blanket stood along the wall at a right angle to the enclosed bed. Whatever was inside the bed struck the side of the frame.

I remembered the names on the stone slabs behind the ruins on New Providence Road. What had held Joy prisoner had not been a phobia. She and Clarence had been captive to a merciless responsibility. I didn't want to know about it. I wanted to walk out of the attic, go down the stairs, and drive away. The being—thething—that was my mother's cousin struck the frame around its bed hard enough to shake the plywood.

I walked past Joy's outstretched arms and the spray of noodles. When I came up to the foot of the bed, a nearly solid cloud of river-bottom stench soaked into me, and I forced myself to look down. Lying on the mattress at the bottom of the wooden frame was a being made up of a filmy, insubstantial body glowing with light and the face of a man with a graying bush of hair and Confucian white tendrils of beard. His ecstatic brown eyes were already widening in shock. The layers of color sifting through the limbless rectangle of his body darkened from robin's-egg blue and ripe peach to a violent purple in which swirls of black bloomed like ink. The creature fixed me with amonstrous demand, shuddered sideways, and slammed its head against the side of the pen.

Without the intervention of anything that could have been described as thought, I went to the cot, pulled the pillow from beneath the army blanket, and pressed it down upon the terrible face. The thing struggled and surged against the pillow. Its jaw opened and closed as its teeth sought my hands. Bands of brilliant red rose to the surface of its body. Then the jaw stopped working, and the color faded. A pure, depthless black swam up over the filmy surface of the little body and faded to a lifeless gray.

My arms and legs were shaking, but I could not have said if the source of my horror was the thing whose teeth I could still feel beneath the pillow, what I had done to it, or myself. An inarticulate sob flew from my mouth. I released my grip on the pillow and hung on to a length of plywood. The floor seemed to waver, and I thought of Joy's body sliding toward me over the stiff, snaky shapes of the noodles.

An unconvincing voice weaker than mine said, “I had to."

A wave of crazy hilarity went through me. The same unsteady voice said, "He didn't have much of a future, did he?"

No, I thought,he didn't have much of a future. He didn't even have his last howl of chicken noodle soup. I had said that aloud, too.

I watched my hands tear the pillow out of the pillowcase and fling it onto the cot. My right hand dipped into the pen, closed on a wispy rope of beard, and lifted the thing I had murdered. A limp, ragged substance like old spiderwebs drooped from beneath the beard. I rammed it into the pillowcase and stumbled down the stairs.

Clark was standing in the hallway. "The ambulance should be here pretty soon." He glanced at the pillowcase. "Did you locate Joy?"

“I think she had a heart attack," I said. "She's dead. I'm sorry, Clark. We have to call the police, but before you do that, I need a little time."

Clark's eyes moved again to the pillowcase. “I guess little Mousie starved to death."

"You knew about him." I came down the hall with the pillowcase swinging horribly at my side.

"Speaking personally," Clark said, “Iheard about him, but I never saw the boy. Queenie and my wife assisted at the birth. Clarence and

Joy, that child took over their lives. From the time it was horn, they never knew a moment's peace."

"They couldn't have named it Mousie," I said, and remembered the names on the flat granite stones on New Providence Road.

"Never really named it at all," Clark said. "Joy took pride in her command of the French language, you know. The way I heard it, Queenie burst into tears when the baby came out. Joy said, 'I want to see it.' And when Nettie held that baby up, Joy said,'Moi aussi.' That means 'Me, too,' in the French language. She blamed Howard for the way her baby came out, and she never forgave him. So we called the babyMoi Aussi, which pretty soon it turned into Mousie."

"Would you care to say farewell to Mousie?"

"The shovel's out behind the kitchen," Clark said.

•133

•The shortest and grimmest of the three funerals I attended during my stay in Edgerton took place in Joy's back yard, and the single mourner performed the functions of undertaker and clergyman. In the tangle of weeds against the rotting wooden fence, I dug a hole two feet wide and four feet deep. While I was digging, I heard Clark haranguing the ambulance attendants from Mount Baldwin. I lowered the pillowcase into the hole and scooped earth on top of it. Then I covered the raw earth with severed weeds and yanked living weeds over the dead ones.

"Mousie," I said. "Not that it matters to you, but I'm sorry. Your mother wasn't able to take care of you anymore. Even when she could, you had a terrible life. You never got anything but the short end of the stick. I hope you can forgive me. If you happen to come around again, things almost have to be better, but if you want my advice, stay where you are."

I pitched the shovel into the weeds and came back into the house. Clark called 911. We went into the hallway. Ten minutes later, two baby cops piled out of a squad car and jogged to the door. I said that I had found the deceased, Mrs. Joy Crothers, my mother's aunt. The family had been worried because no one had seen her in two days.

My Undo Clark and I had let ourselves in. Mr. Crothers was in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's disease, and when we discovered his wife's body, we telephoned the nursing home to which he had been accepted and had him removed there. “It looks to me like she had a heart attack while bringing lunch up to her husband."

On the way upstairs, one of the cops finally mentioned the smell. "Mr. Crothers lost control of his bodily functions years ago," I said. "And my aunt was an old woman. She didn't have the strength to clean him properly."

"No offense, sir, but this smells worse than that," one of the cops said.

In the lead, Clark intoned, "You fellows may be ignorant of what can happen to the human body when it is left to its own devices. Be grateful you still have your health."

"Why did she put him in the attic?"

“I guess she thought he'd be safe there," I said. "She had a special bed made for him. You'll see."

Clark opened the door, and we trooped in. The cops walked around the body and wrote in their notebooks.

"She died in the commission of an act of human kindness," Clark said. "That was her way."

"Chicken noodle soup," said one of the cops. "This isn't any homicide, but we'll have to wait for the M.E. to make it official. Is that the bed you were talking about, sir?"

"She put up the plywood to keep him in," I said.

They stared down into Mousie's crib and looked at Clark. He saw an occasion to which he did not doubt his ability to rise.

"The woman stayed by his side night and day, ministering to his needs as best she could. The tragedy is, the day before yesterday we found a placement for Clarence at Mount Baldwin. I believe the shock of his imminent departure was a factor in Joy's demise. Clarence was her life. Boys, always remember to display affection and regard for your wives. A woman needs that kind of thing."

“If I come down with Alzheimer's, I hope my wife won't dump me into a plywood crib," said one of the cops.

"An act of the purest tenderness and love," Clark said. "You may get an idea of the man's stature when you hear that it was Mrs. Rachel Milton who arranged for his placement at Mount Baldwin."

The cops glanced at each other. "Let's wait downstairs," one said.

•Clark excused himself to tell his wife what had happened. They came out onto their porch before the medical examiner drove up in front of Joy's house, and they crossed the street in time to hurry up the walk behind him. It was the same weary man with mushroom-colored skin who had released Toby Kraft's body to the police. I was standing outside, and the two cops loomed in the doorway. Nettie caught up to the medical examiner and squared off in front of him. She looked like a mountain with a reputation for rockslides. "Have you come to examine my sister's body?"

"That's my job," he said.

“I trust that you will conduct your business in a respectful manner and allow us to deal with my sister's departure as she would have wished."

"Mrs. Rutledge, you will probably get what you want. I'm here to pronounce your sister dead and rule out the possibility of foul play. But to do that, I have to go into the house."

"Am I in your way?" Nettie asked.

One of the cops told the M.E. that the body was upstairs. He turned to Nettie. "How do you account for the odor in this house?"

"Clarence, mainly," she said. "Once his mind faded, his personal hygiene was a matter my poor sister addressed as best she could. The rest of it comes from the refuse my sister accumulated in her kitchen, which is in a sorry state."

"That's not a garbage smell. Did your sister have problems with groundwater in her basement?"

"Doctor," Nettie said, "these two handsome young officers are waiting to assist you."

The M.E. stepped backward, nearly bumped into me, and murmured an apology. The smirking cops led him up the stairs.

Nettie sidled up to me. "You did the right thing, son."

“I hope so."

"My sister's child claimed her energies from the moment the poor thing first drew breath. Joy sends you blessings for giving Mousie a decent burial. I hope you'll be coming back to see us on a regular basis."

"Aunt Nettie," I said, "don't pay too much attention to anything you read about me in the papers. The stories will die down when Stewart Hatch goes on trial."

Footsteps descended, and the M.E. came toward us. Nettie took my arm and lifted her chin to stare him down. "Later today, Mrs.

Rutledge, I will make out the death certificate, naming heart attack as cause of death. You are free to make any arrangements you wish."

"Thank you," Nettie said, glacially.

"Was Mr. Crothers an unusually small man? A 'little person'?"

"Not at the height of his powers," Nettie magnificently said. “Illness robbed Clarence of his physical stature ina manner cruel to behold."

The M.E. dodged around her and left the house. Nettie directed her commanding gaze upon the policemen. "You young men have been a great help to us in our time of sorrow. It is a comfort to me that gentlemen like yourselves have devoted your lives to public service."

A minute later, one of them was on the phone to Mr. Spaulding while the other stood guard at the door.

"Should I stick around for another day or two?" I asked.

“I'm thankful you could spend so much time with us," she said. "And you rescued our pictures! That takes a great weight off my mind, Neddie. Make your travel arrangements, and be sure to keep in touch."

"Take care," Clark said. "There's not but a few of us left, now Mousie's in his grave."

•134

•The sky had disappeared above Cherry Street. A wet, silvery mist coated my windshield. I sent the wipers back and forth and cleared two transparent semicircles onto a street visible enough for driving.

Back in my room, I charged a seat on a 6:00p.m. flight from St. Louis to New York, giving me more than enough time to lose my way and find it again. After that, I called the rental agency to say that I would be returning their car to the airport in St. Louis with a damaged rear end. A supervisor with the manners of a prison guard put me on hold while he wrangled with the office in St. Louis, then came back on the line and said, "You'll get away with it this time, Mr. Dunstan. When you drop off the keys, leave the details of the accident, the name, address, and telephone number of the other party and the name of his or her insurance carrier."

"You can get that information from Stewart Hatch," I said, "He got drunk and backed his Mercedes into the rear end of your Taurus."

"The surcharge for nonlocal return will be fifty dollars," he said, and hung up.

I called the airline and upgraded my reservation to first class. According to C. Clayton Creech, I had at least ten million dollars, and what was good enough for Grennie Milton was good enough for me. My companions in first class were going to love my pink jacket, and they give you an extra bag of pretzels up there at the front of the plane.

•135

•A few ghostlike relics wandered through the fog thickening on Word Street. The neon stripe ofhote paris tinted the cobbles a soft, slippery red. I threw my bags onto the back seat and got behind the wheel. At Chester Street I turned north, thinking that eventually I would see a sign to a bridge across the Mississippi and the highway to St. Louis. Before I reached College Park, the buildings on either side had retreated into vague backdrops, and the headlights of oncoming cars were like cats' eyes. I remembered Mousie's teeth rising into the pillow, and I saw inky flak bursting within the bands of deep red glowing across his abbreviated body. The dirty spiderweb that body had become, the bowling-ball weight of his head in the pillowcase. The empty expanse of the Albertus campus slid past my car on what seemed the wrong side. I kept driving. I had not turned, therefore I was still going north and following the river as it wound toward St. Louis.

Then I remembered that Chester Street became Fairground Road when it crossed into College Park, and Fairground Road did not go past Albertus, it came to an end at the southern boundary of the campus. Somehow, I had managed to circle around and drive south on an unknown street. Albertus had not shifted its geography, I had shifted mine. Fortunately, I still had hours to get to St. Louis. All I had to do was turn around.

Mousie's pillowcase landed softly, although not softly enough, at the bottom of the hole in Joy's neglected garden. I heard it hit the ground, and thought about the words I had spoken over Mousie's grave. They had not been the right words. Mousie deserved better from his murderer. Mousie had been one of the real Dunstans— Clark had told me that I was turning into a real Dunstan, but I was nothing compared to Mousie. Mousie was up there with Brightness and Screamer. What leaked from the cannon's mouth and the crack in the golden bowl was a being like Mousie. Howard had known it, and the knowledge had poisoned him.

I could not see where I was, and I could not tell where I was going. Looking for a familiar name, I bent over the wheel and peered through the windshield. Ten feet beyond the front of my car, the green banner of a road sign materialized out of the opacity and advanced toward me. A runic scrawl slipped behind me a moment before it would have become decipherable. No matter, I thought: I was still going south when I wanted to go north, so all I had to do was turn right, or west, on the next street, then right, or north, at the one after that.

Two more indecipherable road signs floated past, and I was headed north, moving parallel to the river. In my mind, I could see a map of the Mississippi and the towns in Missouri and Illinois on either side. I was looking for Jonesboro, Murphysboro, and Crystal City. North of Crystal City lay Belleville, only a little way from East St. Louis. The fog would lift; even if it did not, eventually I would drive into clear air. As long as I kept moving, I was making progress.

At ten miles an hour, at five, I followed my headlights through a yielding gray wall. When I could see nothing but the headlights, I stopped, put on the emergency lights, and waited for the boundaries of the road to reform before continuing. If headlights came toward me, as they sometimes did, I pulled over and slowed to a pace that would have let a jogger swing past. An hour crawled by. The fog parted and thinned, and I saw two-dimensional houses set close together on narrow lawns. I had come to Jonesboro, I thought. The fog drew in to erase the houses. Half an hour later, I drove into a gleaming mist widening out over open fields on both sides of the road. It gathered itself into a melting darkness and forced me back down to five miles an hour.

Then I slammed my foot on the brake pedal. The blue plastic of the steering wheel seemed to be rising through my hands as they faded from view. I felt a tingle at the back of my neck and became aware of a presence behind me. I shouted Robert's name and twisted my head to look at the empty back seat. I spoke his name again. Hostility swept toward me like a winter wind.

"Robert, I have to . . ." His invisible presence had left, and I was alone in the car.

"Where are you?" My voice bounced off the fog and died. I held up my hands and saw them restored and solid.

I have to talk to you? I have to know what you want from me?

I remembered the face burning from the end of a lane across Veal Yard.He wants everything, I thought.

Beyond the window, a regal figure in a dashiki of gold, ink-black, and blood-red emerged from the swirling fog. I cranked down the window, and chill, damp fog seeped into the car. Walter Bernstein nodded like a king granting a benediction.

"Walter, where is he?" I asked. "Where did he go?"

"Can't no one tell you that, but you're on the right road. As right as you can make it, anyhow." He faded back into the purple fog.

I wrapped my fingers around the door handle, opened a nimbus of hazy light deep enough to enter, and pushed myself off the seat. At the front of the car, the headlights picked out the shadowy pole of a road sign. Robert hovered beside me, behind, I could not tell which.

"Show yourself," I said. "You owe me that much."

Robert thought he owed me nothing. Robert was like Mousie, he had leaked from the crack in the golden bowl, he had trickled from the mouth of the cannon. Moi aussi. I went up to the shadowy road sign, stood on tiptoe, peered at the white marks on the green metal, and laughed out loud. I had come back to New Providence Road.

I walked past the sign. Because my life depended upon movement, I kept moving. Quiet footsteps ticked from behind, and I whirled around to see no more than two blurry yellow eyes and the glow spilling from the open door. Profound silence rang in the gray air. "This is where we are, Robert," I said. "Do your best."

A hesitant footfall, then another, sounded from behind me. I did what I had to do and went forward. The ground rose to meet my step, and I felt the release of a crazy sense of joy.Where we were was the place we all along had been fighting to reach. Footsteps ticked through the shining fog. I did the one thing my furious double could not and slid thirty-five years down my gullet.

•On the seventeenth day of October in the year 1958, I was standing at the rear of a densely crowded Albertus University auditorium. Sweatered girls, still innocently "co-eds," and boys in sports jackets filled the pitched rows of seats facing the stage, on which a drummer with thick glasses and close-cropped blond hair, a smiling bassist who could have been Walter Bernstein's cousin, and an intense-looking piano player were hammering their way toward the end of what sounded like "Take the A Train." Hands folded over the body of his alto saxophone, a storklike man with retreating hair, black glasses, and a wide, expressive mouth leaned into the curve of the piano and attended to the sounds coming from his fellow musicians. His mingled detachment and involvement reminded me of Laurie Hatch.

Looking down over the audience, I went toward the top of the wide central aisle. Crew cuts; ponytails; daffodil flips; French twists; sleek, short hair with definitive partings. A few measures before the conclusion of "A Train," I caught sight of my mother's dark, unmistakable head. There she was, the eighteen-year-old Star Dunstan, seated ten or twelve rows back from the stage, one seat in from the aisle. The angle of her neck said that she had heard enough of this concert. I moved across the aisle until I had a good view of her companion. The piano player nailed down a chord, the drummer announced a conclusion. The man sitting next to my mother raised his hands and applauded. His profile looked too much like mine.

The piano player turned to the audience and said, "We'd like to do a ballad . . . called 'These Foolish Things.' " He looked up at the saxophonist and sketched a few bars of the melody. The saxophonist pushed himself off the piano, approached a microphone at the front of the stage, and settled his fingers on the keys. He closed his eyes, already in a trance of concentration. When the introduction came to an end, he fastened his mouth to his horn and repeated the fragment of melody just played as if it were newly minted. Then he floated above the line of the song and blew a liquid phrase that said,You know the song, but do you know this story?

Star's head snapped up. Listening without hearing, Edward Rinehart lounged in his seat and concealed his disdain.

At the start of his second chorus, the alto player said,That was just the beginning. An ascending arc of melody streamed from the bell of his horn and printed itself upon the air. The melody expanded, and the alto player said,We are on a journey. As he settled into his story, it opened into interior stories, and variations led to other, completely unexpected, variations. The alto player climbed to passionate resolutions, let them subside, and ascended further.

Star shifted in her seat, opened her mouth, and leaned forward. I felt tears slide down my cheeks.

It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. . . . He kept moving deeper and deeper into that melody until it opened up like a flower and spilled out a hundred other melodies that got richer and richer. . .

That alto player never moved anything but his fingers. He stood with his feet pointed out, his eyes closed, his shoulders in a negligent slouch. In its grip on the reed of his horn, his mouth looked like a flexible sea creature. Note after note, the tremendous story and all of its details soared into the reaches of the auditorium, building on the structure it distilled from its own meaning. The drummer tilted his head and plied his brushes over the crisp drumheads; the smiling bass player set in place the familiar harmonies; the piano player breathed a soft "Yeah, Paul." It seemed effortless, natural, inevitable, like the long unfolding of a landscape seen from the top of a mountain, and it went on and on for what might as well have been a thousand choruses.

In another time, my own, fog swarmed across a road where two sets of footsteps advanced toward whatever was to come. I put my shoulders against the wall and listened for as long as I could—the whole world opened up in front of me.

•136

•What? Ah, you want to know what happened to Robert? I'm sorry, that has already been answered—answered as well as it can be, anyhow. Step after step, through the long transitional passages of airports, down the corridors between the glowing lobbies and welcoming bars of resplendent hotels, along the pavements of every city I inhabit for a week or two in my endless flight, the ticking of Robert's footsteps sounds in my awaiting ear.

But since you have put a question to me, I can ask one in return. Are you sure—really sure—you know who told you this story?

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The dedicated Lovecraftian will have noted the liberties I have taken with the publication history of "The Dunwich Horror." The story's first appearance between hard covers was in the collection The Outsider and Others, edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei and published by Arkham House in 1939, some years prior to Mr. X's enthralled discovery at the Fortress Military Academy of the tale within a fictitious book bearing its name. The collection entitled The Dunwich Horror and Others, edited by Derleth for Arkham House, was not published until 1963.

S. T. Joshi's definitive biography, H. P. Lovecraft: A Life, makes brief mention of "a very strange individual from Buffalo, New York," named William Lumley, who took Lovecraft's mythology of Elder Gods and Great Old Ones, now commonly referred to as "the Cthulhu Mythos," as literal fact and clung to this belief in the face of all denials by the writer and his circle of colleagues and friends. Joshi quotes Lovecraft's ironic summary of Lumley's position from a letter written to Clark Ashton Smith in 1933: "We maythink we're writing fiction, and may even (absurd thought!) disbelieve what we write, but at bottom we are telling the truth in spite of ourselves—serving unwittingly as mouthpieces of Tsathoggua, Crom, Cthulhu, and other pleasant Outside gentry."

I wish to thank Bradford Morrow, Warren Vache, Ralph Vicinanza, David Gernert, Dr. Lila Kalinich, Sheldon Jaffrey, Hap Beasely, my editor, Deb Futter, and my wife, Susan Straub, for their suggestions, support, and assistance during the writing ofMr. X.

Peter Straub

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

peter straubis the author of fourteen novels and one collection of shorter fiction. His work has won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novel, the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in the Novel, the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel, and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. In 1998 he was named Grand Master by the World Horror Convention. His books have been translated into twenty-one foreign languages. He lives in New York City.

ABOUT THE TYPE

This book was set in Fairfield, the first typeface from the hand of the distinguished American artist and engraver Rudolph Ruzicka (1883—1978). Rudolph Ruzicka was born in Bohemia and came to America in 1894. He set up his own shop, devoted to wood engraving and printing, in New York in 1913 after a varied career working as a wood engraver, in photo-engraving and banknote printing plants, and as an art director and freelance artist. He designed and illustrated many books, and was the creator of a considerable list of individual prints—wood engravings, line engravings on copper, and aquatints.