So Lovely — and So Dead

Chapter Three The Orphanage

The railroad station was at the east end of the main street, and from its platform you could look straight through the town to the fields on the west side. It was a distance of about ten city blocks. Two of the blocks were occupied by stores and offices. There were also a couple of restaurants and a movie theater painted bright blue. I went down the street to one of the restaurants. A fat woman in a stained white wrapper was behind the counter. There was a peculiar little bulge beneath her lower lip, and pretty soon I saw that she was loaded with snuff. Even that was not enough to kill the hunger that was gnawing at my insides. I ordered a hot beef sandwich and coffee. By a battered alarm clock sitting on a shelf in front of some canned soup, I saw that it was shortly after two o’clock.

“Nice town,” I lied.

The woman looked at me as if she considered the lie too obvious to encourage.

“You figure to stay?”

“No. Just stopping for a few hours.”

“I thought so. Fewer the better. For you, I mean. This town’s a jumping off place. No one in his right mind would stay here.”

She took a shot at a Number Ten can on the floor, and I applied myself to the sandwich. It wasn’t hot, but the gravy hadn’t actually begun to congeal, so I managed to choke it down. I considered telling the fat woman how good it was, just for the sake of points, but I remembered in time she wasn’t susceptible to lies. I ate and kept still.

“Looking for someone in particular?” she asked.

“Yes. A Mrs. Hadley.”

“Sarah Hadley?”

“I guess so. I don’t know her first name.”

“Must be Sarah. She’s the only Hadley in town.”

“This Mrs. Hadley is a widow.”

“That’s Sarah. You know where she lives?”

“No. Maybe you could tell me.”

“Sure. Go right through town. First corner west of the business district, turn south. There isn’t any numbers on the houses. Hers is the second one, east side. Needs paint.”

I thanked her and went out, leaving a half dollar on the counter. Without asking a question, I’d learned one thing. The news of Maggie’s murder was not yet known in the town where she had lived as a child. If it were known at all, it would be known to everyone. Apparently Muller was in no hurry about sending a man to see Mrs. Hadley. No doubt he had his reasons. One of them, I thought suddenly, might be because he was busy at the house of a Mrs. Crowder. The house where an old librarian sat dead in his chair before a repetitious phonograph.

I turned at the corner as directed by the fat woman and saw the house that needed paint. The floor of the front porch sagged under my feet as I crossed it. It was a decadent, defeated house. Not a house of death, but a house where death would be a kind of salvation.

The woman who answered my knock might have been designed by a dyspeptic interior decorator to harmonize with the dreary architecture of the house. Her face was the face of a woman caught up in perpetual sympathy with her own misery. She didn’t speak. She whined. I felt a shock of dull pain to think that Maggie had come from this place. From this woman.

“Mrs. Hadley?”

“That’s right, young man. What do you want?”

“My name’s Norman Grieg. I’d like to speak with you a few minutes. I’m a friend of Margaret’s.”

Her lips twisted against her teeth. The whine sharpened her nose.

“I don’t know why a friend of Margaret’s should come to see me when Margaret doesn’t bother to come herself. You can come in, if you want.”

In a square, ugly living room, I sat in a lumpy mohair chair. Mrs. Hadley sat rigidly on the edge of the sofa which was the chair’s mate. Behind her, the wall was a design of soiled and faded roses. A stain had spread on the ceiling and crept almost half way down the wall.

“Now, young man, perhaps you’ll tell me what you want.”

I wondered how to begin. How do you tell a sour, defeated woman that her daughter has been strangled? How do you tell her what you want, when you don’t really know yourself? Just a hint of something. Just the shadow of a finger out of the dead past pointing to a murderer.

“Margaret’s dead,” I said.

She just sat looking at me. I saw no shock in her eyes. No grief, no pain. Just a sharp retraction into a kind of breathless weariness.

“Dead?”

“Yes. She was murdered. The police will be contacting you.”

The wariness was there in her eyes, remaining, and now there was also a son of ugly hunger, a flash of unholy satisfaction. I felt suddenly sick. The cold gravy was slime in my stomach.

“I told her she shouldn’t go. I told her when she went away with her grand ideas of education. She thought she was too good for me and for the community whose charity she took. Was she in trouble? Who killed her?”

“I don’t know who killed her. Neither do the police. She was in trouble, but it wasn’t the kind of trouble you’re thinking. Mrs. Hadley, someone had a reason for killing your daughter. It must have been a big reason. There may be something in the past, something that happened in this town, to explain it. Can you think of anything?”

She was prim again. Rigid and guarded. Untouched by love or grief or death itself. In no gutter of any city could you find a woman more damned.

“She was not my daughter, you know,” she said.

For a moment we sat alone, that lost woman and I, in a still world bounded by faded roses. Then the clean wind of a bigger world blew in, and I felt a great relief to know that Maggie, who had died in pain and ugliness, had at least not been tainted by the sour blood of Sarah Hadley.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

“She was not my daughter. Anyone in this town can tell you that. I took her from the orphanage when she was twelve. I thought she could help me around the house. I thought she would remain in common gratitude to care for me in my old age. But she went away. When she was eighteen, it was. Ten years ago. She never returned. Not once. And now she’s dead, you say. You will understand, perhaps, if I seem unmoved.”

“You never legally adopted her?”

“No. I took her to raise. She used my name. That’s all.”

“Do you know of anyone who might have wanted her dead?”

“No one. To my knowledge, I am the only person she ever injured.”

“Think, Mrs. Hadley. Can you recall anything at all that might have any significance? Maybe something that seemed very minor at the time.”

“I can think of nothing.”

I had no heart for more. At the door, I turned and said, “This orphanage, Mrs. Hadley. Is it near here?”

She stood at the sofa, making no move to show me out.

“It’s just out of town. About a mile by the road. Go out of town by the main street. West, that is. Go north at the first turning. It’s about a mile altogether.”

“Thanks,” I said, and I made no effort to keep the irony out of my voice. “I’m sorry to bring you this bad news, Mrs. Hadley.”

But she was untouched, beyond recall in her own sour hell.

“Margaret Hadley became a stranger to me ten years ago, Mr. Grieg. I’m a poor woman. I have enough only for my own needs. You will not expect me to assume any obligations.”

“I’ll bury her,” I said.

Far back off a narrow road the orphan-age sat, a crumbling red brick building that leaned against the rise of a hill. The long drive that approached it from the road was lined with ancient oaks and maples. More of the great trees scattered over the large unkempt yard, crowding the house itself, stretching their gaunt arms above the slate roof and giving me the uneasy feeling that they were holding the place mesmerized.

Three small kids in jeans and sweaters were playing listlessly under the trees in the front yard. In the rear, I saw a couple other kids coming down to the house from a barn farther up the slope.

I went up across a wide porch into a hall. The floor was almost black from innumerable applications of oily sweeping compound and had long ago begun to splinter away. I stopped inside the door for a minute, adjusting to the oppressive, heavy air. The institutional odor of the place, animal and antiseptic, surrounded me like an invisible fog. At the end of the hall there was a closed door with a small sign posted on the hall side. I went down and read the sign: MR. HENDERSON, SUPERINTENDENT. When I rapped on the door, a voice invited me to enter.

A man sat behind a desk in an early, interior dusk that was the room’s own. The light was too dim for me to distinguish his features until he stood up and came around the desk to meet me. Then I saw that he was old and stooped, with the skin drying on his bones. His grip was firm enough, however, and his voice was soft and resonant, without a quaver.

“Mr. Henderson? My name is Norman Grieg. I’ve come to talk with you about a girl who lived here a long time ago.”

“Sit down, Mr. Grieg. I’ve been here over a quarter of a century. Possibly I may remember her.”

He resumed his seat, lacing his bony fingers on the desk in front of him. The little light that entered the room behind him struck a highlight from his bald dome.

“Who is this girl, Mr. Grieg?”

“Margaret Hadley.”

“Oh, yes. Little Maggie Hadley. I remember her very well. Her name was not Hadley, of course, when we had her here. She took the name from the lady she went to live with. Her parents lived on a farm nearby. The mother died in childbirth. The father died later as the result of an accident while ploughing. Maggie was about two at the time and was placed in the care of this institution. She remained here ten, twelve years. I’ve forgotten exactly. A pretty child. Intelligent I wasn’t happy about placing her in the home of Mrs. Hadley, but unfortunately I’m not the final arbiter in those matters. Later, she went off on her own to college and made a good career for herself as a librarian. I used to receive infrequent letters from her. None now, I think, for all of two years. Are you a friend of Maggie’s?”

“We were engaged to be married,” I said. “She was assistant librarian at State University. I’m an instructor there.”

He stared for a long time at his laced fingers.

“You spoke in the past. Mr. Grieg.” he said. “I’m an old man and have become sensitive to the tense.”

“Margaret Hadley is dead. She died last night in her apartment near the University. She was strangled.”

He kept staring at his laced fingers. Outside the window behind him, the black branches of an oak were like other fingers scratching at the glass. The sound of them was a dry, rasping whisper in the room. The old man’s voice, when he spoke, was hardly louder.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “The thought of little Maggie... If I can be of any help...”

“I want to find the person who killed her. I know so little of her past, of the people she has known. I came here to see if you could suggest a line to follow.”

He stirred restlessly, the light slipping over the curve of his skull.

“I knew her as a child. What could there be in a girl’s childhood?”

“Who knows? If you would just talk. Just tell me what you remember.”

“There’s so little. A small child. A young girl. She did her chores around the place. She did her lessons and learned quickly. She got along well with the other children. She was brought here in the fall, I remember, because it was a terribly bad winter that year.”

“Who else was here then?”

“Who else?”

“What other children, I mean.”

“It’s so hard to recall. A long time ago. So many children came and went altogether. In the spring, I remember, Otto Bloom was placed in our charge. The spring after Maggie came. They grew up together, Otto and Maggie. Otto stayed on after Maggie left for Mrs. Hadley’s. No one, of course, was willing to take him in. He was permitted to leave on his own when he was eighteen. Several years after Maggie’s departure, that was.”

“Who was Otto Bloom? Why do you say no one was willing to take him in?”

He lifted his face, and I had a strange notion that his eyes had retreated suddenly into their sockets. Oak fingers fumbled at the window. Even outside, now, the shadows were deepening. The name of Otto Bloom was a whispered echo inside my skull. Somewhere, sometime, I had heard the name before. The old man stirred again and spoke.

“You are not a native of this section, Mr. Grieg. If you were, you would not need to ask those questions. Otto was the only son of Mona Bloom. The only child. He was the fruit of her fourth and last marriage. To the elder Otto Bloom, that is. Mr. Bloom was a wealthy farmer who lived not more than five or six miles from this place.”

“The name Bloom seems faintly familiar, but I can’t place it.”

“Mona Bloom was a murderess, Mr. Grieg. She killed Otto Bloom with a hatchet as he slept. Alone, in the middle of the night, she buried his body in an orchard below their house. When the body was found and an investigation started, it was learned that Mona Bloom had been married three times previously. In every case, to a man of some wealth. One had simply disappeared and was never heard from again. The other two had died suddenly, one by falling, somehow, on a pitchfork, the other by what was written off as a heart attack. Mona Bloom murdered them, of course. After her conviction for murdering Bloom she confessed the others. Boasted of them, indeed. She died on the gallows.”

“What kind of boy was Otto?”

“What kind would you expect? We tried to keep his mother’s story from him, but such things cannot be kept secret. Who knows what knowledge like that would do to the heart of a boy? He was gloomy, withdrawn. He brooded, but he was intelligent. Remarkably intelligent. He read omnivorously. When he left here at the age of eighteen, he had an education that would he a credit to any college graduate. I never heard from him. Where he went, what he did, I don’t know.”

I felt very strange. The tapping of the oak fingers at the window seemed suddenly very loud. As if they were tapping a message. A message my brain was on the verge of grasping.

“Tell me, Mr. Henderson. Is there anything in particular that you can remember about Otto Bloom? Other than what you’ve told me. Something that might mark him quite distinctly.”

The old man shook his head. He turned his chair suddenly, sharply, so that his profile was toward me. Against the fading light of the window, his naked head and wasted face were the silhouette of a brooding hawk.

“Nothing. I can recall nothing else.” He paused, as if he were listening intently to the faint voice of the past, and when he resumed speaking, his words were measured, dropping slowly and tiredly into the still, shadowed room. “Except that, for a boy who had little use for exercise, he was extremely strong. Much of his strength, I think, was in his hands. He had very large hands.”

I stood up, and the rooms was no longer still for I heard above the rustle at the window, filling this crumbling place with sudden terror, the spaced reverberations of crashing chords.

“Thanks very much, Mr. Henderson,” I said.

He arose, lifting his arms and letting them fall.

“I’m afraid I’ve not been of much help to you.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “You’ve told me everything.”

I went out of the orphanage and down the long drive to the road, and he was waiting for me there in the darkness beneath the ancient trees. We walked down the road together.

“You’ve seen the old man,” he said, and his voice was like the sighing of the wind in the branches overhead.

“Yes.”

Strangely, I was not afraid, because it is too late for fear when you are walking with death on a lonely road. We went downhill to a point where the dry bed of a narrow stream was spanned by the rough planking of a bridge. He stopped there abruptly, turning to stare back at the gloomy bulk of the old orphanage against the hillside. His voice sounded light and free, rising in release from a great oppression.

“He told you, I suppose, about Otto Bloom?”

“He told me. He said that Otto had large hands. Strong hands. Then I remembered the chords. I don’t know much about music, but I know a little. It would take large hands to strike some of those chords. It was a mistake to mention where I was coming.”

“You’re clever, Mr. Grieg. But no matter now. For a long time I had to live with the knowledge that I was the son of a murderess. Now I am a murderer myself, and I no longer find the knowledge a burden. Indeed, I feel a strange elation, Mr. Grieg, as if I had come at last into my true heritage.”

Bitterness rose up within me.

“Sure,” I said. “Murder. A young woman. An old man. Now me. That’s only three. You’re still under family par.”

I heard a long sigh.

“There will be time to improve the record. Later, I may devise something appropriate for the woman who is to be my wife. It was fear of some such thing, I suppose, that compelled little Maggie to behave so rashly. She recognized me, you see. When she and the old librarian came about the books. After all these years. I thought at first she might keep my little secret, but when she called yesterday for the appointment, I understood my error. It seemed obvious that she had confided in the old man and was following his advice. You can see that I was forced to act. As moral people, they couldn’t stand by and see a wealthy woman marry in ignorance the son of a woman who had made a career of marrying and murdering for money. Unfortunately, moral people must bear the consequences of their morality.”

“As murderers must bear the consequences of their murdering,” I said.

His voice rose on an eerie high note of inner laughter.

“A myth, Mr. Grieg. The files of the police are heavy with unsolved murders. Yours, I think, will be among them!”

He threw himself upon me so suddenly that I had time to do no more than reel backward. His hands were at my throat as we crashed into the rotten railing of the old bridge. The decayed wood snapped like punk, pitching us headlong into the ravine.

I twisted violently, wrenching his body over to take the full shock of the impact beneath me, and for a moment I felt his iron fingers go slack. But only for a moment. Before I could pull myself away, they resumed their deep, relentless probing for my throat.

I threw my arms out, clawing at the hard earth, and my fingers closed on a jagged stone.

Long after it was unnecessary, I continued to lift the stone and bring it smashing down.

Afterward, I sat in the dry ravine beside the body of Oliver Moon until I could breathe normally again. Then I got up and walked back up the hill to the orphanage, and on the way I kept thinking of what the preacher had said about the sun rising and the sun setting, and everything coming in the end to its beginning.