Ellery Queen. The Best of Suspense

Kathryn Gottlieb Dream House

I’d better begin at the beginning — but when, I ask myself, was that? The day, I suppose, when I agreed to buy the one-acre section of property at the south end of Phil Ritchie’s farm. It was one of those days when for want of something better to do, for want of a home to go to, I hung around the station house for an hour after my tour of duty. I am that figure of fun, a small-town cop. Watch some television series and you’ll know what I mean. They have small eyes and paunches, and sometimes they spit and beat up on the innocent. It makes my blood boil.

About that no-home-to-go-to business. I was married for over twenty years until my wife died last year, and what I can’t understand is why the end of twenty years of an unhappy marriage can leave you feeling lost, at a loss, high and dry in a fog or a desert, take your choice, and without a future. It should be a time for rejoicing, right? Well, the older I get, and I’m forty-eight, the less I know about life. In fact, at my present rate of progress, I should be completely ignorant in another six months, give or take a few.

Well, as I say, on this particular day I ran into Phil Ritchie as I was heading back to my room in Mrs. Plauder’s house, having sold my own house on the advice of my friends and enemies when Connie died. Let me give you one piece of advice: never listen to advice. They said the house was too big for me. Well, there are no apartments in this town for rent, and let me tell you that room of mine is big, but it’s too small for me. Dismal, is what I was feeling. It’s all very well to live in the present when you’re a young kid; you can do it because there’s that great big bank account of time and the unknown up ahead, but when you’re my age and the present is all you’ve got, the absence of a desirable future invades the day you’re living through and turns it black around the edges.

Phil Ritchie is the best type of man you find in a town like this, and I mean that as a compliment. He’s a successful farmer; he also owns the farm-equipment agency down in Skyton, and the only gas station on this stretch of Route 180. Everything brings in money, and with it all he is a calm, friendly, honorable guy who does a lot of good in town, and when he suggested that we stop for a beer and a bite to eat I was glad to go along and sit with him.

He got onto my mood right away and told me I was a damn fool for listening to people about selling my house in a hurry. Then he brightened up and said he had just the solution for me and although it entailed a bit of profit-taking for him, that wasn’t the reason he was offering the idea, which turned out to be this; he owned a one-acre piece of land, wooded, lying at the extreme south end of his farm and between him and the county lands, which as far as he knew they weren’t about to build anything on. It would be an ideal place for me to build myself a house, he said, and start living like a human being again.

I asked him why I needed a house for one man.

“Get yourself a wife,” he said. He is also blunt.

I felt my face turn red. “Like who?” I asked him.

“There are attractive women in town.”

“Name one.”

“Mary Ann Shifler.”

We went up there just before twilight and looked at the piece of land. It was beautiful, a little bit hilly, with a gentle slope running up from the road in a westerly direction, and covered with oak and dogwood except for a little glade right in the middle of it. I knelt and scooped up a handful of earth and let it trickle through my fingers and it smelled of earth and spring and hope and I knew I would pay any price for that place.

“Name me a reasonable figure and I’ll take it off your hands,” I said.

He named a reasonable price, and we shook hands on it.

Ernie and Mary Ann Shifler ran the little grocery store half a block up from Headquarters next to the Texaco station. It was the kind of place where they had a little bit of everything on the shelves, and if you couldn’t find exactly what you wanted — well, you could find something else. It wasn’t a restaurant, or even a luncheonette, but you could get yourself a bit of breakfast there, and there’d be a little crowd in the place before half the town was out of bed.

On the coldest winter morning, you’d see their light go on upstairs over the store along about five o’clock in the morning, and then the light would go on downstairs and you knew they would — she would — be pouring the water into the big coffee urn and it was a friendly feeling it gave you, especially when you’d been on the desk or riding around all night.

When Ernie was still around, they used to serve the coffee from before six in the morning till about eight thirty, along with buttered rolls, or Ernie would cut you a piece of pie. A friendly feeling, as I say, to watch the lights go on, but Ernie was not a friendly man. He was big, broad-shouldered, nice-looking, I guess, but he never smiled. The kind of man who talks too much or not at all, with a surly expression on his face to go with it.

And when he talked, the talk was unkind. Maybe he resented being locked up behind that counter and waiting on people who were not his betters, and maybe he didn’t make a good living in the store, but he was unpleasant in my judgment over and above what circumstances called for.

Some people said he beat his wife, and it is true she wouldn’t show her face in the store for periods of time, but did he beat her? Joe Patris swears he heard her screaming one night when he was driving by and he went and knocked on the door, and after a while Ernie opened up and Joe asked him if anything was wrong and Ernie said no. Joe said he’d like to talk to Mary Ann and Ernie said she’s asleep and then he got a funny look on his face and said, all right, come on up, and they went up to the bedroom and she was sitting up pulling the bedcovers around her. She said, “What’s wrong?” and Joe said, “I thought I heard you screaming,” and she said, “You did. I was having a terrible nightmare.” So what could Joe do but go away?

For a long while after Joe told me that, I pictured Mary Ann Shifler sitting up in her bed pulling those blankets around her. A beautiful woman. How could a man abuse a woman like that? And a nice person, too, just as sweet and cheerful and obliging as she was pretty. Sometimes I’d go in there to pick up cigarettes or odds and ends of groceries, and even while my wife was still alive I’d look at Mary Ann and think, God forgive me, if only I had a wife like that.

And then one night Ernie left her. Just walked out and never came back. You’d think she’d have been glad — everybody else in town who had dealings with him was glad — but it seemed to take her a while to get used to the idea. Probably couldn’t believe her luck, I remember Joe saying. Well, I didn’t understand it at the time, but now, as I say, I am a living witness to the fact that when a bad marriage ends, things don’t necessarily get better right away.

But after a while Mary Ann perked up. She spruced up the store a lot, and she put in a line of ham and eggs along with the breakfast rolls, so I and a lot of the fellows got in the habit of dropping in there fairly regular.

I didn’t need Phil Ritchie to tell me she was attractive. But until he mentioned her to me I had just never thought of her in a truly personal way, as maybe somebody who could care for me. The minute I thought of building the house on the acre up by the county farm, then everything changed, and I could see her in that house, my wife, cooking the ham and eggs for yours truly and forget the store. The funny part is, my reaction at first was to stay away from the store for a while. I didn’t stop to figure it out, but I think maybe I didn’t want to watch her waiting on a bunch of strange men. Not my wife.

And then one day I was walking past the store and there was nobody inside but Mary Ann, so I went in and walked up to her and said, “You and I are alone now. I don’t mean there’s nobody in the store. We’re alone in life now. I want you to come have dinner with me.” She said she’d like to do that.

I took her out to the Red Mill up near Slingerstown, not that I was trying to hide anything but I wanted to take her to a nice place where we wouldn’t be surrounded by people we knew, so we could be alone together and get to know each other. After that we went up there most of the time, and sometimes out to Poole’s place, which isn’t as fancy as the Mill but was nice and clean and quiet and usually half deserted. I don’t know how the Pooles made a living there, except that wasn’t for me to worry about. But being a policeman, you get to thinking after a while that everything’s your business: one of the hazards of the trade.

And being a policeman, I am also inclined to be blunt and come out with what’s on my mind, so right off I asked her if she had divorced Ernie and she told me it was in the works.

And then, it couldn’t have been two weeks later, but I couldn’t have been more sure of what I wanted if I’d waited the rest of my life, I asked her to marry me, and she didn’t look coy or stall me off. She looked a little startled, and she said yes.

What a moment.

I never said a word to her about the new house I was going to build her, or about the dogwood and the oaks and all I was going to hand her on a platter, because I wanted to be sure it was me she wanted, and not something I could give her above and beyond the ordinary. A feeling of modesty. I wanted to be sure.

I guess you’d like to know what she looked like, although I cannot pretend it doesn’t pain me to think of her in that personal way. I am trying to be detached about things. She was a nice height for a woman, just to my shoulder, with a lovely, shapely body, and long shiny hair about the color of a collie dog, one of the reddish brown ones, only sleek and glossy, and a lovely creamy complexion that set off her features so that even if they hadn’t been beautiful they would have looked beautiful, and big clear light brown eyes of that shade you only see in natural redheads.

So I asked her, and she said yes, and then the tears rolled down her cheeks.

“Why are you crying?”

“I’m happy.”

I put my hand over hers. “I want you always to be happy.”

The days started to get longer and I got in the habit of going up to my property in the early evenings when I wasn’t with her and I’d just moon around. The buds were swelling on the dogwoods and showing white in the cracks, while the oak trees were still looking like winter was never going to end.

On the first of April I hired a bulldozer from Phil and when I got up there I saw he had delivered it. It had been run in to the edge of the glade, the way I asked, and neatly — count on Phil — with no trees disturbed; some brush lost, that was all, but of course we’d have to put in a driveway out to the road anyway, so that didn’t matter. The next day was Mary Ann’s birthday, and I planned to spring the big surprise.

I picked her up at the usual time and asked her if she’d like to have dinner at the Red Mill or somewhere else, and she said wherever I’d like, and I said no, I’m asking you; so she said the Red Mill was fine, and then asked me where I was heading, since the Mill was in the opposite direction, and I told her I had something to show her. Something for her, and her eyes lit up and she started to smile. “I suppose you’re looking for a little bracelet in a red box or something like that,” I kidded her.

She shook her head. “I don’t know what I’m looking for. I’m not looking for anything, I’m happy just the way I am.”

“You’re going to be happier,” I said. “I’ve got you a house and lot.”

“You what!” She turned to me all agape, her eyes shining. “What have you gone and done?”

“I bought us the prettiest piece of land for twenty miles around and you and I are going to build our house on it.”

She wrapped her arms around me and landed me a kiss on my ear, don’t ask me why.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey, I’m driving!”

She unwrapped her arms and faced front again, but I noticed she kept one hand on my shoulder that was nearer to her, as though she, well, didn’t want to stop touching me. After a while she said, “Where is it?”

“You’ll see.”

“What’s it like?”

“Beautiful. Oak trees. Dogwood. A hundred dogwoods getting ready to bloom. It’s the one real piece of woods in five miles of town. Beautiful.”

She didn’t ask me again where it was. I guess she could see the way we were heading, and after a minute she dropped her hand from my shoulder and just sat there staring out the window on her side so I couldn’t see her face.

After a while I pulled up to the side of the road under our trees and turned the motor off. “You’ve got a bulldozer in there,” she said. Her voice had a funny tone to it; she was talking in the constrained kind of way that reminded me of when she was Ernie’s wife.

I got out of the car, walked around, and opened her door. “What are you going to do?” she asked me.

“Come on,” I said. I was impatient. “Let’s walk over to where the dozer is. That’s where we’re going to build, right in the little open place. We won’t have to touch a tree if you don’t want to. It’ll be just like a little private castle in the woods.” I stretched my arm out, first one way and then the other, to the big open spaces of Phil’s farm on the one side and the county lands on the other. “We’ll be the lords of it all,” I said.

She got out of the car then and stood beside me. Under the shade of the trees her face looked bleached out, and her eyes — I’ll never forget her eyes — they looked huge, and hard to read. I took her hand. “Your hands are trembling.”

“It’s all too much,” she said.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

She took a deep breath. “I’m grateful to you.”

“Come on.” I started up the path the bulldozer had crushed through the underbrush and we had got nearly to the clearing when she just sank down beside me. My first thought was that she had tripped over a root, but she hadn’t gone down suddenly — she had seemed to drift down. She was kneeling and her head was hanging, and I bent down beside her and put my hand on her forehead. It felt all clammy and cold. She was muttering something and I had to get my head close and ask her what she was saying.

“Just I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“I’ve spoiled my birthday for you.”

“It’s all right.”

“No.”

“Are you sick?”

“You’d better take me home.”

I was plenty worried about her, but she wouldn’t let me come upstairs. She insisted she was going straight to bed and then she’d be as right as rain in the morning. She’d just been feeling queer all day, she said, but trying not to think about it, because of her birthday and all.

I said good night, but I was uneasy. It even crossed my mind that she might be expecting, and what a feeling that was! A father at my age! Well, why not? She said she’d gotten her divorce papers, so we’d just hurry up and get married and ride out the gossip. What did I care? I rejoiced, but I was worried about her just the same.

And the worst of it was the next day it was impossible for me to call her, due to an outbreak of vandalism at the Regional High, the worst mess you ever saw, and the principal spitting with rage and one of the teachers hysterical, and I can’t say I blame her. I can understand crime, but there’s something about that mindless kind of spite these kids go in for that gets you under the skin so that you feel almost capable of murder yourself and no better than they are.

It was nine o’clock before I got back to her place, and then I saw the lights were out, so I figured I ought not to disturb her. But I was still worried. If she was in bed that early, then didn’t it mean she was still not okay? Well, the morning would have to do.

In the morning the store was shut up tight and the lights were out. I banged on the door for a while, then I figured I was drawing too much attention to myself and I went away. The day was endless, and vile. An old lady had been beaten to death and robbed, up on the Slingerstown Road. The road to the Red Mill. It gave me a literal pain across my midsection to drive up that road that day, and I knew I wouldn’t be driving up it again, except in the line of duty.

Her letter was waiting for me at the house when I came off duty.

“My heart is broken,” she wrote, “and I only hope you will not be too unhappy. I have gone away. I will not be back. It was nothing you did. No one was ever so wonderful to me. But it wouldn’t have worked out. I can’t say any more.

“Please see that the stuff in the refrigerator goes to the poor before it spoils, milk, eggs, and there is half a ham. You could run it up to the Sisters of Charity in Slingerstown, they will know what to do with it. I hope you don’t mind my asking.

“I will ever love you.”

It was that last line that got me, because it was poetry, and I believed it was true. My throat got all tight and I couldn’t have spoken if I had to, except that I did, I said her name, over and over.

I was awake until dawn, and then I took my car out and ran up to the cursed ground. I climbed onto the bulldozer and began to move back and forth in the open space, as though I was digging a cellar. I made twenty-seven passes — I didn’t realize I had been counting — and then I saw it, and I let the load down back in the pit and climbed down and looked close.

A thigh bone was sticking out of the loam; not a horse’s, not a dog’s, not a part of any of the animals that run wild in the woods.

Ernie’s.

I got back on the machine and scraped back all the earth into the pit that I had been piling at the edges, which seemed to take a very long time, and then I smoothed it out and spread out a load of brush and leaves over it. All the time I felt very calm and full of hate and pity. But more hate, for him that drove her to it.

Then I moved the bulldozer back out to the road and up the half mile to the side road into Phil’s place, and came back to my car.

I guess the dogwoods bloomed, but I never went back to see them and I guess in God’s good time the oaks leafed out. What am I going to do with the place? I can’t sell it because someone else will dig there and God knows what they will turn up. My guess is a skull with a bullet hole. And for myself, I never want to see the place again. I told Phil I had changed my mind about building there.

“It’s a shame,” he said, shaking his head. “That’s a beautiful place.”

But not a happy one.