The Horse You Came in On Read online

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

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

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

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

  “I hate to go home.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Not, perhaps, if it were a woman.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  They shared the quiet.

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

  “Sinclair.”

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

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

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

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

  “Hardly anyone that young ever thinks about wills—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • • •

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

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

  “Any other rules?”

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

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

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

  “I can’t.” Jury groaned.

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

  Hester watched him with a smile on her face.

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

  They forked into their pieces.

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

  “Hester, we were meant for this.”

  16

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

  Melrose stopped, sat down on a bench outside an imposing white building, and read:

  Sweetie saw Maxim through what seemed a colonnade of doorways, each one opening onto the room beyond, at the end of which was the dining room where Maxim sat at breakfast at the long mahogany table.

  She walked through the doors and into the room. She stopped and looked from the table to the bank of high windows to the wide lawns. The fountain was dry; the bronze boy rode the fish through dark-stained cement.

  What was going on? It made no sense at all. A dozen pages ago, the gardens beyond the windows had been choked with flowers, absolutely fecund in the warm spring day. The pool had been full of water.

  And now Maxim was lying on the dining room floor in a pool of blood. What was going on? Irritated at himself for being caught up in this weird story, he snapped Windows shut. But unable to help himself, he reached into his satchel and drew out the chapters Ellen had given him, and started to read:

  In the kitchen Sweetie stood with the spatula in her hand poaching an egg and trying to imagine her own death. She watched the transparent white of the egg turn opaque as the envelopes lying beneath the slot. In another pan, sausage fried, spitting up grease. She lifted the egg and drained it and laid it carefully on a piece of toast.

  She sat at the table taking small bites of sausage and wondering as she chewed what it felt like to die or to go mad. How did one “go mad”? What could it possibly feel like? Would there be something like a mental eclipse? Her kitchen was in the English basement and through the bars of the window that opened on pavement level sunlight filtered and lay in bands on the white linoleum. Sweetie thought she should go out, go out and walk, get some air, banish these thoughts from her mind but—could she? Would the sunlight dazzle her and herd her back inside?

  What other explanation could there be for these letters to Lily except that she was going mad? And yet she felt in the same relationship to the things of this world as she had before. She looked at the little face of her wristwatch and saw that the second hand was proceeding around it with the same stuttering sweep, that the minute hand was bisecting time in as orderly a fashion as always. But how else to explain what was happening? As she spooned sugar from the flowered china bowl she felt comfortable with the familiar belongings of the kitchen. Sugar bowl, white milk jug, teacup. She could name them as easily and familiarly as ever. But what if she forgot? In madness, did one forget the names of ordinary objects?

  Carefully, she tore a corner from her napkin, took a pencil from the jelly jar and wrote the word down S U G A R and put the piece of napkin in the bowl. She looked at that and smiled a little and wrote S A L T on another bit of paper and put that under the salt cellar. With her tongue she wet another bit just to dampen it—G L A S S—and this one she pressed to her glass of milk.

  The telephone rang.

  Sweetie sat perfectly still. She was sure if she picked up the receiver there would be nothing on the line but silence. Or if there was a voice it would say “Hello, hello, hello? Lily?”

  On the ninth ring she thought, But it might be for me, it might simply be Bill or Jane or anyone. She went on eating her poached egg, wiping the last corner of toast around in the yolk and listening to the ringing. Thirteen rings. When it stopped she thought it had probably been for her, and if it rang again she would answer it.

  It rang again. She didn’t.

  Here, she said to herself, is what you could do: you can sit in the sidechair opposite the door and watch the mail slot and when another envelope slides through, open the door quickly. And she did so; she was unaware of the passage of time.

  Ultimately, though, she knew this was useless; whoever it was was braced for that and would disappear before she saw him. Him or her. The person would vanish before she could confront him.

  There is something else you can do, she told herself then. She pulled an envelope from the paper band, folded a sheet of stationery and slipped it in. She licked the flap and pressed it shut. Then she turned it over and printed on it

  M A X I M

  Sweetie went to the front door and shoved the envelope through the letter slot. Dark had fallen. After she put her dishes in the sink she went upstairs to bed.

  Melrose was slumped down on the bench, the manuscript pages still in hand, thinking these thoughts. Students were coming out of buildings, released for a while from their classes. They all seemed very jolly, flowing back and forth on the path beyond his feet.

  “He’s dead. He must be dead.” He looked up to see two students staring at him. Probably, they thought he was crazy, babbling away here on a campus bench. The two students smiled uncertainly and gave the bench a wide berth.

  17

  I

  Sweetie.

  She looked at the name, hoping there was a magnetic field around it that would draw other words into its circle. She retyped it in caps: S W E E T I E. Behind her closed eyelids the name pulsed slowly on and off like a neon sign over a diner: EAT—EAT—EAT.

  Thinking about a diner was a mistake; it made her hungry. If it hadn’t been for the chain, she would have been out of her office in a flash, gonezo up the third floor to sit with a cup of coffee and a sugar doughnut. Even better, to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee in a china cup and a cinnamon pull-apart. But it wasn’t time yet; she surely had another good forty-five minutes of writing to do. She looked up at the clock on the wall; that told her nothing, because her scarf hid the face. She always threw something over it; otherwise she’d spend a lot of time looking up there to see how much more tortured time remained. There was the alarm clock, of course; it was inside the filing cabinet, the ticking muted, but the alarm itself was loud enough to shatter glass. It was set for two o’clock.

  Jesus Christ, if anyone who read her books could see her now! She formed a mental image of the Writer, or at least what she supposed a reader would think of a writer writing (if readers ever thought of them). What she saw was herself in a book-encrusted den with mahogany wainscoting, random-width pine floors layered with Oriental rugs, windo
ws overlooking misty fields (writers being always up at dawn), ink across a calfskin notebook, forming words from a Mont Blanc pen with the flourish of a calligrapher. To write in longhand with an inkpen (Ellen mused over why pens were called “inkpens”) was breathing the true, rarefied air of the writer; it was getting down to the very bone of writing. It was much more difficult than typing; far, far more difficult than word processing. Word processing was precisely what it sounded like: churning words like butter into some oleaginous mass. The words came out smoothly, having nothing to do with art, and with that magical quality of letters just popping up almost out of nowhere onto the computer monitor. They looked as if they’d arrived on the screen by way of an extra-human agency.

  So Ellen gritted her teeth and wrote with her ballpoint Bic:

  SWEet i e

  Sweetie had been sitting with the box of candy on her lap long enough for dusk to turn to dark.

  Ellen got up and dragged herself over to the window, wondering: who was trying to kill Sweetie? Was someone trying to kill her? For it was Lily, not Sweetie, to whom the messages were addressed. It was a mystery. Sometimes an answer would dust Ellen’s mind with a mothlike flutter.

  The chain pulled at her ankle. In her concern about Sweetie she had wandered from the window to the filing cabinet, and her fingers were feeling across its smooth surface for the key. It had happened before, this all-but-unconscious trek to the cabinet; thus, she had had to put the key to the bicycle chain up on top and out of reach. (The alarm clock was in the bottom drawer, which she could reach, just. She had made the mistake of putting that also out of reach, and once, in the ensuing blast, several of the faculty had run out of Gilman crying “Fire!”) At first she had positioned the key at a place on the top of the cabinet that she could still reach if she really stretched and strained. That was no good; she’d made a lunge for it one day and banged her chin on the metal handle. So she would first put it up there out of reach before she shoved the lock through the chain.