Murder Without Tears. Leonard Lupton
build Brooklyn.”
She stood there on the grassy bank and was silent for a moment or two. I wondered for the first time if she were just a degree or two removed, one way or the other, from normal.
Finally she said, “A man and a woman probably lived together in that shack on that scow, once upon a time. The lazy, cat-heat of the sun would be in their bones all day, and the whisper of the night breeze would lave over them like tropic waters, soothing, cooling, reviving—”
I wanted to jolt her out of it. I lied. I said, “I remember that very scow, as a kid. The captain was a scurvy old rumpot with pellagra, and the slattern in dirty calico who cooked for him weighed over two hundred pounds and had a harelip.”
She hit me with the back of her palm, not viciously, not enough to hurt. But in the nature of a warning.
“I can dream, can’t I?” she said lightly. But I had caught the wrist of the hand that had struck me and now I shifted my grip to the upper arm and then to the shoulder. She turned to me, her face coming closer and closer as though from a great distance, far beyond my reach. And then suddenly there was no distance left between us at all and she was not beyond my reach, and the experience of vital contact that had come from the mere brushing of our shoulders was a hundredfold increased . . .
I kissed her.
She was shaking a little when she moved away, and I do not think that her eyes quite focused, for she stood for a moment with her hands on my shoulders and her face turned earthward. Her voice seemed incredibly far away when she spoke, and not her natural voice at all.
She said, “Never do that again, Jason. Never.”
And I was so surprised at my own reaction to those unbelievable thirty seconds that I said, “No, Anne. Not if that’s the way you want it—” but I lied, in words and tone, and she guessed at the lie and looked up at me. Suddenly she laughed, and for the moment everything was all right again—almost.
“You were telling me about the clay pit,” she said. “Before we leave I should like to see it.” She turned her back on the old barge which had so interested her only a few minutes before.
I said, “We’ll have to go around to the other side of the yards to see the clay pit. There are a half dozen small depressions where they probed for clay, but the big pit, the pit that kept the yards going for so many years, is off here to the south.”
We reached the car and I had to back it out to the road. When we reached the ruins of the old settlement near the sheds I swung the wheel over and found the rutted trail to the clay pit. I stopped at the shore of a barren, water-filled depression. The top branches of a crabapple tree were just above water level at the end of the lake nearest us, and we could see where the morning sun slanted down through ash-gray spidery branches, waterlogged now and barren of blossoms these many years past.
“This is it?” she asked. “This lake is a clay pit?”
“Yes,” I said.
I glanced at the sun and was sure that it was about right for us to see what I wanted her to see. I led her to the edge of the pond and said, “Look down at an angle, just about in a line with that sumac tree over there.” I waited, and she made a sound of surprise.
“What is it?” she said. “A wagon of some kind—and just where the sun strikes I can see a sloping shelf and the roof of a building.” She shivered. “Is there a world down there still, going on about its business under water?”
I laughed, not yet understanding the unusual trend that her thoughts could take. I said, “That’s an old shed where they kept tools. The sloping shelf is the road out. And the strange-looking cart with the two high wheels is an old clay cart. There are a couple of others at the far end of the pond.”
“Down there, under water, all these years,” she said musingly. “There’s something eerie about it—as though a flood had caught them, just as the lava caught Pompeii.”
I said, “No. The mules that drew the carts had long since gone to the soap factory, and the wheelwrights who shrunk the wide iron rims on the shoulder-high wheels were names on a churchyard stone before the water seeped in.”
She said, “Just the same, there is something eerie about this place. I shall always remember it—think of it at night if ever I drive down this way.”
I tried to laugh at her mood. There must be half a hundred such clay pits up and down the river. I could not see why this one should so impress her. Nor did I ask why she thought that she might be driving down this way some night.
But then I could not guess that this particular clay pit was the one upon which the attention of the whole valley would very soon be focused.
3
WE STARTED back toward River House. It was almost noon. I hadn’t wasted a morning like this since the place had opened. But I didn’t have the feeling that the morning had been wasted—rather I had the sense of standing on the verge of some momentous event.
On the way up the hill I said, “You were joking about breakfast, but I’m not joking about lunch. Can you?”
“Can I what?”
“Have lunch with me.”
She said, “Why not? I told you that I wanted to see River House.”
“All of it?”
“All of it,” she said. Her smile was hardly a smile at all, yet I sensed there was laughter behind it. Not shared laughter, but laughter at my expense.
I tightened up a little inside. I could guess how the brush salesman with his foot in the door must feel when the housewife says that she doesn’t really need any brushes, but she just might take a quick look. I wondered what the brush salesman did then—did he find himself a more likely prospect, or did he take a lopsided pride in his sales talk and move in for the kill?
We turned into the blue-graveled drive, found a space to park and nothing more was said until we were inside. I ordered lunch without counting the house or wondering how big the noon throwaway would be. My mind was not on business. She was wearing a perfume that I had been aware of all morning and it seemed to me that I had never before been so completely aware of a woman.
She said, “You know, you’ve done surprisingly well in changing this place around—in spite of its being entirely commercial, the feeling of the past is still in this room.”
“You aren’t the first to say that, but you’re the first who matters,” I said.
She said, “I’m not teasing now. I meant that. I knew this house well in the old days and I’ve got the unreal feeling that these people lunching here today are guests.”
Well, she had one advantage in appraising River House that I would never have—she had memory. I was going to take her on a tour of this place all right, as soon as we were finished with dessert, to see it through her eyes.
“Do you know,” she said, “I’d especially like to see the upstairs.”
I said, “There’s nothing up there but my room. The rest of the rooms are used only for storage.”
“I know,” she said.
I didn’t wonder how she knew.
“Let’s do it now?” she said abruptly, stood up and started for the green-carpeted stairs. I followed her. I liked to watch her go up the stairs. She had fine, strong legs, with a good curve at the calf and a stout ankle. We stopped in front of the door at the top of the third flight of stairs and I opened the door and looked in. I made a move as though to let her precede me, assuming that she would step first to the window overlooking the river, as I had once or twice seen other girls do.
But she did not even cross the threshold. She stood looking in, and what she saw was a chest of drawers and a bureau and a bed. There was a small desk and a steel filing cabinet against one