Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 63, No. 11 & 12, November/December 2018

The Keepers of All Sins by Sharon Hunt

The Albrecht men had a habit of being found floating on water.

The habit began with the grandfather, Carl, in Vienna in 1944. Alcohol was given as the reason he was floating lifeless in a turquoise-tiled pool, although the fact that he was swimming naked at the house of a man who had disappeared the previous day and that the man’s wife had alerted police to Carl’s demise, her face bearing signs of a fresh beating, gave pause to the idea that his death was simple misadventure. Still, money and the power of Albrecht’s widow ensured that the death was quickly labeled as such. The woman who had alerted the police continued on in her house, draining the pool, then staying mostly in the kitchen where she made a bed next to the gigantic stove that gave off a fierce heat, saturating the air with moisture. Fifty years later she was found curled up next to that stove, her hair wet and dripping.

The same year her body was discovered, Carl’s son Caspar drowned in a lake on the opposite side of the world, in northern Ontario, where he owned a summer cottage that rose from the granite like a mountain, on land that was to have remained wild. The construction of the cottage had cost two men their lives after each fell, just days apart, onto the boulders below. Caspar’s body had a softer landing in the water by the dock. Like his father, alcohol was mentioned, but in this case, the woman who found him was his own wife, who always wore long sleeves and never went in the water, although on that day the cuffs of her linen shirt were damp when the police arrived. She said she had tried to pull him out, but his body was too heavy, bloated from years of excess, so she tied his wrist to the dock and let him float until they arrived.

Christian, Caspar’s only son, died in a lake in Switzerland twenty years after that. He had lost his grip on a ferry gate that came unlatched and from which he dangled until slipping into the cold water. There weren’t many passengers left on the ferry at that point and all of them were below in the little room that smelled of oil. The crew heard nothing until the driver of a speedboat radioed that he’d found a body floating toward shore and scooped it up. There was no mention of alcohol, but Christian’s girlfriend Maud had a hazy look, as if something toxic hadn’t left her, yet. Christian couldn’t swim, but he liked the water well enough, she told the officer who came to investigate, having spent his summers at the family cottage in northern Ontario.

“Canada,” she added, since the officer seemed confused.

He didn’t look as if he traveled, rather like someone content to stay where he had been put, like Maud’s grandmother Eleanor had been. She doubted her grandmother could have located Switzerland on a map any faster than this man would northern Ontario.

One of the reasons Maud had been so attracted to Christian in the beginning was how easily place names fell from his lips, money having made travel as common to him as looking for bargains at the grocery store was to her. He had family still in London and Vienna. He would take her to Europe.

She doubted he thought he would die in Europe, but Christian never thought anything bad would happen — to him.

“Toronto,” the officer said, pulling the name from somewhere in his head and smiling.

“Three hours north,” she said and he nodded as if a map had suddenly materialized on the desk between them and the location of the dead man’s summers had been pinpointed.

Earlier in the summer, before Christian took Maud to Europe, he’d taken her to the cottage to meet his mother whose skin was as white as the sweater and trousers she wore. The woman’s black heels made a staccato sound along the granite floor before stopping in front of a sofa in the living room. She motioned for Maud to sit on a chair across from her and tea was brought out.

His mother’s blonde hair was a helmet that didn’t move, but her red fingernails tapped the side of her cup at a pace that made it jump on its saucer. She stared at Maud, whose own fingers caught in her cup’s handle, spilling tea into her lap.

“You’re very pretty,” the woman said, watching Maud press the napkin into the pool of milky tea.

“I’m studying history at university,” Maud said, looking up from her lap and then staring at Christian. For once she wished he would interrupt her like he usually did and tell his mother that they met at a lecture and not some bar, which the woman obviously thought, but he stared out the window at the dock and the shining lake.

“We met at school, at a talk on Queen Anne that a professor from Oxford was giving. She had seventeen pregnancies but no children survived her,” Maud said, and heard Christian sigh.

“Queen Anne or the professor?”

This time Maud sighed. “Well, I mean Queen Anne.”

His mother stood up. “Aristocratic blood gets so polluted with all that inbreeding. We should have a light lunch before you leave.”

“I’m sorry,” Maud said, focusing again on the officer’s mouth. “What were we doing in Zurich? Like I told you, we were waiting for the evening train to Vienna. We were going to visit his uncle. Albrecht. He is a banker.”

“Christopher Albrecht?” The officer suddenly straightened in his chair.

“Yes. Do you know him?”

He chuckled. “I know of him. They say he will become Austria’s president in a few years.”

Maud’s shoulders heaved. She was still dehydrated, despite the water they’d given her at the police station. Neither she nor Christian drank much water all those hours on the ferry. He brought a single bottle with him, saying that since it was a tour boat there would be a canteen. Even when it turned out the boat was a ferry and there was no canteen, Maud had only a few sips of the water. By mid afternoon she told the officer, her head was so thick that she had to focus on every movement.

Right foot.

Left foot.

Walking had become as exacting as marching.

Everything felt so heavy, she said, and he nodded.

Now her feet fluttered up from the floor beneath her chair although he couldn’t see them from where he sat. Besides, he had returned to staring at the shiny red spot at the base of her throat, the size of a thumbprint, although he hadn’t yet asked about it.

When she’d seen the spot this morning, it reminded her of a bull’s-eye. The other marks, almost lacy on her collarbone, down across her breasts and the sides of her body mapped out movements she was still trying to recall. Everything had been easily hidden by her sweater and jeans, but having thrown all her scarves in the garbage after seeing the marks on her wrists, she had nothing to cover up the bull’s-eye. It bothered Christian to see it and she was glad, then, that she hadn’t made any effort to hide it.

The officer had said something again, she suspected, because he knit his fingers together the way he did every time he waited for an answer. They reminded her of that game her grandmother played at the kitchen table when Maud was eating her snack before bed.

This is the church, this is the steeple. Open the doors, there’re all the people.

In another version, her grandmother kept all her fingers straight, as the officer did now, and asked, “Where’re all the people?”

Maud would open her own church doors and wiggle her fingers. “There they are.”

The two of them always laughed.

Now Maud’s fingers were stretched out, quiet in her lap.

The officer looked at her with something that might be concern, but she understood now that people’s expressions were as malleable as Plasticine and as easily refashioned. Her own didn’t betray the fear she felt, not that she would be blamed for Christian’s death but that she was starting to remember what happened to her, and once she did, no amount of water would wash that away.

Maud told the officer that by mid afternoon the ferry had already stopped five times to let off people with bags of vegetables and books pressed against their chests and she and Christian realized that this was not a tour boat, as they’d been promised, but a ferry.

She didn’t say that the sun pounded into them and the water, which from shore looked that beautiful teal blue, was black as she bent over the railing, waiting to throw up. For a moment she wondered how cold the water was and whether she was a strong enough swimmer to get to shore, any shore.

That thought left as quickly as it arrived and leaning on the gate Maud felt it give a little. She pulled back, but with another wave of nausea, she lurched forward and threw up what remained in her stomach, a sour-smelling liquid that formed an orange circle on the surface of the water.

When she looked at Christian again, he was watching her while drinking the last of the water, some of it running down his chin.

As she tucked herself back into what little shade the roof of the bridge provided, Christian closed his eyes.

A smell was coming off him, the smell he had when he was angry or excited, and it made her want to gag.

She had hoped for a lot of things on this trip, but mostly to feel secure in her choice of him and that he took their relationship seriously, but she realized, as she’d suspected after meeting his mother, that he took nothing seriously except his own wants. She could be easily replaced; she doubted he’d spend much time mourning her loss.

She closed her eyes for a few minutes, fighting back tears, although the hopelessness that had welled up in her as she stared out train windows had worn away. Things had festered for too long. Maud had learned, growing up, that there was a point of no return, when things or people couldn’t be saved.

Her grandmother had raised her after her parents died in a car accident when she was seven, and although she was good to Maud, she made the girl traipse around the island they lived on to help care for the sick and dying.

Eleanor healed people, not with a laying on of hands like a pseudo-Christ, but with poultices and ointments, draughts and brews her father had taught her to make. Maud looked at wounds, with their murky gray infections and skin as fragile as tissue paper, and applied hot cloths that allowed the infections to flow out of the skin like undammed rivers. She lifted people’s heads and forced liquid between their lips and when she protested because of the rattling sounds and the stench, her grandmother’s withering look was worse than anything confronting Maud in strange beds.

People who could not be saved whispered in Eleanor’s ear and, nodding, she patted a shoulder or an arm.

“I will keep them,” she said of the sins they gave her to hold and the dying fell back on their pillows, relaxing into death.

The people Eleanor would not save she still watched over until their bodies succumbed to the sickness that marched through their minds. Those people whispered their sins to her, too, sweeping the filth from their souls into hers.

“Some people are diseased long before sickness takes hold of the flesh,” she said. “With them, it’s right to turn a blind eye.”

When a body had been healed or was stilled by death, Eleanor stripped the bed and then swept the floor.

It was soothing to see everyday life continue after illness, trauma, or death.

“These, too, are part of life, but we pretend they won’t happen until our luck runs out or fate takes hold.”

Eleanor had been training Maud to take over healing, but Maud wasn’t strong like her, she told her grandmother. She wanted to turn a blind eye to all of it.

“Sooner or later you won’t be able to do that,” Eleanor said, and didn’t speak to Maud again until she whispered her own sins in her granddaughter’s ear.

Maud sat forward in her chair.

“There was no place to sit in the little room downstairs so we were stuck outside, on that bench. I told Christian we were going to miss the train to Vienna and he ignored me for hours after that.”

There was a window in the room where Maud and the officer sat. Later, she watched another officer at the front desk stand up and press at his hair when Christopher Albrecht arrived. She recognized him from a photograph in Christian’s wallet. Albrecht’s face was red, and for a moment she wondered if this man who talked about collapsing economies might be collapsing himself but he strode forward in the way powerful people did, aware of and enjoying the fact that others watched them in a guarded, almost frightened way.

“There are some people it is best not to cross,” Eleanor had said before she died.

Yes, Maud thought, watching Albrecht advance, there are.

He wore a pale gray suit and when he got to the room, Maud noticed the teal blue loafers on his feet. His fingernails shone. Although he extended his hand to the officer, he didn’t take his eyes off Maud.

“What do we know?” he said, sitting in a chair, facing them.

Maud looked away, watching a cleaning woman sweep the hall floor. The sound of corn bristles along the wooden boards was soothing. She knew she should focus on the two men, but the way the woman’s arms moved the broom, just enough to gather the dirt, back and forth, back and forth... she wanted to sleep, but Christopher Albrecht tapped his fingers faster and faster on the table until she looked back at him.

The room that she and Christian had in Zurich was at the end of a hall with tattered blue carpeting. He liked the stark furnishings — a bed, table, and two straight-backed chairs — because they reminded him of boarding school in England, before his father had enough of Labour politics and immigrated to Canada. Even the lumpy mattress welcomed him to sleep when he was done with Maud, while she stayed awake, trying to tamp down the fear that threatened to choke her.

He had become obsessed with sex, relentless in pushing her to accept his advances at strange moments and in strange places. This trip had unleashed something in him, something that he seemed to keep harnessed at home, although there had been moments back there that the harness loosened and she felt herself shift from excitement to fear The loosening of what had made him seem gentle and kind made her realize how badly she’d failed at judging him and this frightened her more than anything.

In the room next to theirs was a man from Hamburg who introduced himself as Gerhardt. His breath was sour as he leaned close to Maud when he sat down next to her.

The waitress scowled, struggling to fit breakfast on the table and Maud thought she saw Gerhardt’s fingers brush against the woman’s skirt before shaking Christian’s hand.

“He used to make dirty movies,” Christian said later, squeezing Maud’s elbow as they headed out for the day. “Inviting girls back to his apartment and then going at it.”

Maud pulled her arm away.

“It’s only sex, for Christ’s sake. If they all wanted to, what’s the problem?”

“I can’t see women wanting to, with him. He makes my skin crawl.”

“Well, my uncle liked what he did well enough. He told me he used to get Gerhardt to make movies with him, before the Internet made it so easy to find whatever you wanted. You can see some of the movies online now, although he isn’t too happy about that, since he became interested in politics.”

Maud felt her stomach lurch.

“These dark places on the Internet keep all the sins now. They never disappear.”

“Why is he here?” she said.

Christian smiled. “I guess to enjoy himself, like me.”

Christopher Albrecht watched, waiting for a confession or at least an acknowledgement that she hadn’t watched out for his nephew who brought her here and paid for everything.

Well, she had paid too, and that payment was becoming horribly clear as she pieced the fragments together: the sunset reflecting on something metal over by the window in their room, the sudden feeling that her legs would not hold her up any longer, plastic glasses on the bedside table, hands, too many hands, on her arms, fingers undoing the buttons of her sweater, sour breath.

She closed her eyes.

“What happened?” Christopher Albrecht repeated and when she looked at him she wanted to shout, you know what happened, but instead said again, “He drowned in the lake.”

“But how can that be all you know? Didn’t you see him hanging onto the gate?”

“I had passed out,” she said and was certain then, from the same eagerness in his eyes that she had seen in Christian’s yesterday at breakfast, that he knew everything that had happened to her. He’d already seen it.

“Passed out,” he said.

“Yes, passed out.”

In the hall, the sweeping had stopped. The cleaning woman sank against the wall and sighed, although it might have been Maud, herself, sighing.

Her shoulders ached. She rubbed at the base of her throat, trying to erase the spot they couldn’t stop looking at.

“It was a mistake,” Christian had said before she got up off the bench to throw up.

“What was a mistake?” she asked, but he didn’t answer.

“When I came to I had to piece together what happened,” she said.

“And you have, now, pieced things together,” Christopher Albrecht said.

“Yes, I have.”

Maud stroked the scratches on her hand.

“I pieced things together,” she said and stood up, looking at the officer. “I’d like to call my embassy now.”

The officer nodded.

“This is not finished,” Christopher Albrecht said, but uncertainty had crept into his voice.

Maud turned away.

In the hall, the cleaning woman took Maud’s arm and drew her close, whispering in her ear.

Maud nodded and followed the officer down the hall.

The sweeping began again, drowning out Christian’s whispering, his mouth so dry he could hardly speak, begging her for help as she’d loosened his fingers from the gate. By the time she picked up the phone to call the embassy, she couldn’t hear him anymore. He’d quietly floated away.