Voices in the Dark Read online

  “I don’t know. It’s the only one I remember.”

  “You’re a strange fellow, Dud.”

  “Yes, I’ve always known that.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “The woods, the roadside, chicken coops.”

  The chief lifted his face to catch the cool from the fan. “What do you do in the winter?”

  “I freeze.”

  “And what do you do when you’re not freezing?”

  Dudley smiled. “I kill kids.”

  • • •

  “I hear we got a prisoner,” Floyd Wetherfield said eagerly when the chief stepped out of his office without entirely closing the door behind him. Floyd, who had good looks but bad posture, as if someone long ago had bent his back against his will, was the youngest member of the Bensington Police Department, less than a year on the job, the evening shift. He wore his uniform with prideful aggression, the cap squared, the revolver hitched high. “Can I have a look at him?” he said and, slipping by the chief, peered through the space at the office door. “He’s not cuffed.”

  “He’s not going anywhere.”

  “You gonna lock him up?”

  “Soon as you clean out the cell.”

  “You mean you’re holding him?” Meg O’Brien said with surprise.

  “In a manner of speaking,” the chief said with an odd expression on his face. He glanced at Floyd. “When you finish with the cell, get him something to eat from the Blue Bonnet.”

  Floyd looked at his watch. “It’s closed by now.”

  The chief looked at him. “Somebody will still be there. Rap on the window. Get our fella what he wants.”

  “What’s he want?”

  “Cookies and milk,” the chief said.

  3

  THE MORNING BROKE BRIGHT OVER BENSINGTON, MORE HEAT and high humidity predicted. May Hutchins, who had slept badly, turned with a groan and flumped a pink arm across the bed when her husband rose. For a half hour, off and on, she dozed in and out of quick little dreams, one bearing no involvement with another, though all were vaguely unpleasant. She was running a bath when her husband drove off in his work van, and she was sipping her first cup of coffee, her hair in curlers, when he returned unexpectedly — back from the Blue Bonnet, where he breakfasted most mornings with the early regulars, a bunch of townies gabbing across a communal table, Fred Fossey probably among them.

  “Guess what?” he said. “They caught the tramp you told me about. The chief locked him up.”

  What tramp? Her mind was still fuzzy. Then she remembered. “The chief arrested him?”

  “He’s just holding him.”

  “What’s the difference?” she snapped and chided herself for being short, but she couldn’t help it. It was her age, her time of life, her uneasiness with it. She swallowed coffee. “What’s the chief doing — making a federal case out of it? Hasn’t he got anything better to do?”

  “The tramp could be dangerous, May. You must’ve heard about that business with Dorothea Farnham. He did a mess on her porch.”

  No, she hadn’t heard, and she laughed. “Poetic justice. Dorothea thinks her own is odor-free.”

  “That’s not nice, May. She was your good friend in high school.”

  “That was then.” Then was thirty-six years ago, too upsetting to think about, which was the reason she despised birthdays. Each was a thief. “Roland, stop doing that!” He had a habit of clicking his teeth. Thank God she still had her own. “Did you make a special trip back just to tell me about the tramp?”

  “I thought you’d like to know.”

  “It could’ve waited,” she said, a raw nerve loose in her voice. She liked the house to herself.

  Roland peered at his watch. “I guess I got time,” he said and poured a cup of coffee. He joined her at the table, which forced her to draw her feet in.

  “What did you have for breakfast?”

  “Scrambled eggs,” he said, “fresh from Tish Hopkins’s farm.”

  All that cholesterol — but she couldn’t tell him anything. He ate what he wanted. “Who was there?”

  “You know, the regulars. Malcolm Crandall, Eugene Avery, and the rest of ’em.”

  “Fred Fossey?”

  “No, come to think of it. He hasn’t been showing up lately.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Maybe he gets more gossip at home than an ear can take.”

  He slurped his coffee. “I thought you liked the Fosseys.”

  “Fred’s all right, but Ethel’s a big mouth.”

  “You shouldn’t talk that way.”

  “I’ll talk the way I want.”

  She didn’t mean to be short with him, but what did he know of the great gusts of sadness that swept through her at odd hours, of the dreads that snatched at her heart? At twenty, she had been rightly proud of secretarial skills acquired from McIntosh Business School in Lawrence. The school, like her skills, no longer existed. At twenty, her life had seemed so large. Now it wavered small.

  She watched him finish off his coffee sooner than he had intended and carry the empty mug to the sink to rinse it out. His chubby arms worked like flippers out of a gray short-sleeve shirt that matched his trousers. He was a master electrician with his own business, a good provider throughout the marriage, a fine father, all of which must’ve mattered once, but now the children had families of their own. She wondered what she was still doing with him.

  “I’m not sure what time I’ll be home,” he said, flipping through a pocket notebook, his work schedule.

  “Can’t you give me an idea?”

  “Seven, I guess.” He kissed her cheek, which she barely felt, for she had trouble staying in the present. The past was more attractive. “Anything the matter, May?”

  “Nothing’s the matter. What would be?”

  So little of a person can be shared with another, that was the problem, the whole ball of wax. In the beginning you have your mama and in the end only yourself. She quivered with impatience, her lips apart. She was anxious for him to leave.

  “Well, I’m off.”

  About time, she thought with a sigh. He gave her a tentative smile out of his full rosy face and turned away, poking in his pockets for his keys until he remembered they were in the van. At that moment something tore at her. Perhaps it was the slump of his shoulders or the mere confusion of her own emotions.

  “Roland!”

  He wheeled around almost in terror. She came out of her chair and, curlers dangling, gave him a hard kiss on the mouth, which knocked him off balance. His eyes went one way and then another.

  “What was that for?”

  “Nothing,” she said.

  • • •

  Chief Morgan strode through the growing heat of the morning past the library and the post office and all the way to the Congregational church, which overlooked the far curve of the green, its hickory spire a whiff of whitewash against the Bensington sky. Morgan stepped onto the wide walkway, his gait turning loose and casual, a shade irreverent. Churches did not make him think of God. Apple blossoms did.

  He moved from the walkway to a pebbly path alongside the church that took him beyond to the minister’s quaint little cottage anchored in a surround of shrubs. The sun pounded the latticed windows, in which a few quarrels were broken. Affixed to the front door was a miniature cabinet sheltering paper and pencil for volunteers to leave messages when neither the minister nor his wife was home.

  Morgan went not to the door but around the side to the garden, where the Reverend Austin Stottle was watering flowers with the hose held high, the spray playful. Without looking at the chief, he said, “When you splash water in the sun, you see nothing but jewels.”

  “It looks like fun,” Morgan said.

  “Would you like to try it?”

  “Another time.”

  A black spider, lush with fur, scampered about in the home it had made for itself in the dusty miller. Red roses wallowed in their sh
rill beauty. Reverend Stottle killed the spray, tossed aside the hose, and assumed the stiffness of a prayer book. “I hear you have a prisoner. A lost soul, I gather.”

  “He could well be that,” Morgan said. “An interesting fellow.”

  “Most people are, Chief. Some are very interesting.”

  “This one’s wearing a class ring from Harvard. He could’ve stolen it, but I tend to think otherwise.”

  “As you grow older, the more astonishing life becomes,” Reverend Stottle said with a smile. His hair was wispy, his narrow chin dented.

  “This fellow might not be all there.”

  “Some say that about you, Chief, and I suspect many say it about me.”

  “I was going to let him go, but he said something that blew my mind. He claims he kills children.”

  “Good gracious, does he?”

  “I doubt it,” Morgan said. “I think he’s putting me on. He likes attention.”

  “We all crave that. Some of my parishioners brood all week if they don’t catch my eye during the Sunday sermon. I shouldn’t say this, but Ethel Fossey is one.”

  “I don’t know his whole name,” Morgan went on patiently. “He won’t give it to me.”

  “Stubborn chap, is he?”

  “Sergeant Avery has fingerprinted him, and a friend of mine with the state police is sending the prints to the FBI. That will tell me if he’s on record. I’ve a hunch he isn’t.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I thought you might talk to him, draw him out, give me more to go on.”

  Reverend Stottle drew himself tall with purpose, a mission to perform. “I’ll do it right now, if you’d like.”

  “That would be great.” Then Morgan lowered his voice. “Everything I’ve told you is confidential.”

  “Of course.”

  They began walking away in unison, Reverend Stottle’s stride the more determined one, his shoes crunching pebbles when they reached the path. Then he stopped abruptly and looked back at the house.

  “I’d better tell Sarah first.”

  • • •

  In the luxury of her large bathroom, where fancy soaps exuded fragrances, Regina Smith brushed her black hair and did her nails. Rising from the dressing table, she moistened a monogrammed facecloth and patted her brow. Her face gripped a beauty that her thirty-eight years had only slightly loosened. Elegance escaped her by a few tantalizing flaws, one of which was a barely perceptible cast in one eye.

  Dressed simply in a summer thing, she stepped to the window and gazed down at the pool, where her daughter and her stepson were lounging on rubber rafts. Each was in a minimal bathing suit, which upset her. Patricia, a tender outburst at fifteen, was her prize, the only value that had come out of her first marriage. Anthony, Ira’s only child, was sixteen. His good looks provoked her, angered her. Anxiety whitened her face as she sought in theirs hints of intimacy, which was her worst fear. Boys wanted only the one thing.

  Neither should have been here for the summer. Patricia, through her school in Connecticut, had arranged to stay with a French family outside Paris, but with no knack for a foreign language she had grown homesick and returned after a single week. Anthony had been enrolled in an Outward Bound program in Maine, which he detested. When he came home for the Bodine boy’s funeral, he decided not to go back, much to her chagrin.

  Her gaze focused on him. His mother had died several years ago, which meant that she had had to assume a responsibility. His room was at an opposite end of the house from Patricia’s, she had seen to that, but she had to be on constant guard. How often had she reprimanded Patricia for coming to the breakfast table in only a long T-shirt? How many times, especially in the past weeks, had she sorted through Patricia’s intimate laundry for telltale evidence? She had even pawed through his.

  He was out of the pool. Patricia was joining him. Regina moved back slightly in order not to be seen, but their attention was with themselves. They were talking, laughing, but she did not like the way they stood poised, as if their bodies were scenting each other. She was on the verge of shouting, but good sense prevailed. Order and control guided her life. With invincible calm she turned away.

  Downstairs in the breakfast nook she dipped a spoon into a melon half and chided herself for letting pressures build, but she did not want anyone putting hands on her baby. Even with Ira, she always alerted herself for nuances in his behavior with Patricia. One could not be too careful. For all his maturity, dignity, and reserve, Ira could be contrary, like a boy in new shoes splashing through puddles.

  Finishing the melon, she munched on an unbuttered scone. She took care of herself, ate the proper foods, worked out twice a week at the health spa at the country club, though some of the women got on her nerves, especially the ball player’s wife, who was silly and shy, definitely out of place. And Kate Bodine was not entirely to her liking: too much of a presence, too much of the working girl still in her. Even Phoebe Yarbrough seemed lacking at times, as if something there didn’t quite mesh.

  Pushing aside the remains of the scone, she sipped from a cup of decaf. She was well aware that aloofness was her natural air. As a child she had chosen her friends carefully and had had few — sometimes none. In adolescence she had let her guard down with boys unworthy of her. The choice of her first husband had been reckless, a mistake rectified with Ira.

  He always left a morning paper for her, usually the Globe, occasionally the Times, never the Journal. Today it was the Times. She attempted the crossword puzzle, but it was difficult, unlike the easy ones at the beginning of the week, which she often completed without a pause. Her pencil moved slowly. Twice she erased. The ring of the telephone shattered her concentration.

  The voice on the other end was Harley Bodine’s. “I don’t mean to be a pain in the neck,” he said.

  She filled a plunge of white squares with the missing word in a Shakespearean line but was annoyed that she couldn’t remember the play from which it came. “What is it, Harley?”

  “Please,” he said, “can we talk?”

  • • •

  After introducing them, Chief Morgan left them together in the little cell. Dudley, whose clear eyes showed the benefit of a good night’s sleep, was sitting on the edge of the cot and flexing his toes inside Meg O’Brien’s sneakers. Reverend Stottle held a fat orange. “This is for you,” he said, bestowing it. “A gift from my wife.”

  “I don’t believe I know the woman,” Dudley said, “but thank her for me.” When he began peeling the orange, it squirted its juices. “Would you like half?”

  “It’s all for you,” the reverend said, making himself at home on a gray metal chair. He had imagined the lockup would be an ominous dungeon furnished only with a wooden stool and an unemptied chamber pot. The cot looked quite comfortable, actually, with a pillow provided for the prisoner’s head. A fan with rubber blades stirred the air, and magazines had accumulated on a wall shelf. The old Newsweeks, he guessed, were the chief’s and the Playboys, he figured, belonged to Sergeant Avery or Officer Wetherfield. He said, “How are they treating you?”

  “I could use a TV.”

  “They probably won’t keep you here long.”

  “They don’t intend to let me go,” Dudley said with no apparent alarm.

  The reverend wished he had not been introduced but had sneaked up on the man all at once. A person caught unawares can never be sure what lies on his face. It could be a vital clue to what lurks in the soul. “Otherwise, are you comfortable?”

  “They could’ve dressed me better,” Dudley said, crossing his legs. The sneakers gave him feminine feet.

  “Where do you go to the bathroom, I’m just curious.”

  “They let me use theirs.” He was eating the orange with gusto, both halves, the peels deposited beside him.

  “I understand you don’t remember your full name.”

  “Dudley’s more than enough.”

  “A Harvard man, I hear.”

  “
It may have been Dartmouth.”

  The reverend took into account that mental illness could give a person false selves. Indeed, it could provide access to a whole wardrobe of personalities. He himself had once donned the robes of Jesus, not a comfortable fit and definitely not a pleasant time for his wife, upon whom he had forced the role of Mary Magdalene.

  “Or Yale,” Dudley said. “It’s uncertainty that keeps me young.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I’ve touched fifty.”

  “I’ve scraped it,” Reverend Stottle admitted. He was closer to sixty and subject to moments when everything saddened him: the look on a weary woman’s face, the slant of shadows across the green, the aimless trot of a dog without a collar. With sympathy he said, “It mustn’t be pleasant being locked up.”

  “But I’m not,” Dudley said cheerfully.

  The reverend looked around. “This is a cell. There are bars on the door.”

  “It’s never locked. It only looks it.”

  “Then you could walk out anytime you pleased.”

  “The chief has said as much, though he hinted I wouldn’t get far.”

  Reverend Stottle came up a bit in the metal chair and solemnized his voice. “You said a strange thing to him.”

  “For his ear only.”

  “It was rather bizarre, you must admit.”

  “He shouldn’t take seriously everything I say.”

  The reverend winked conspiratorially. “Does that mean you tell whoppers?”

  Dudley smiled mysteriously and wiped his fingers, the scent of the orange embedded in his nails. The reverend gazed at him full in the face with all the shrewdness he could muster. In a way it was a pretty face more suited for a young man.

  “Can we be friends?”

  “I believe we already are,” Dudley said.

  “Can you tell me anything about yourself? Perhaps where you come from?”

  “That’s not clear.”

  “Perhaps Dudley isn’t your real name at all.”

  “I’m sure it is.”

  The reverend felt vaguely that he was not in charge. Either God was not guiding him, or an invisible hand was working against him. “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”