The Doomsters

26

MRS. HUTCHINSON’S cottage was the third of three similar houses built on narrow lots between Elmwood and the highway. Only one side of the short block was built up. The other side was vacant ground overgrown with scrub oaks. A dry creek, brimming with darkness, cut along the back of the empty lots. Beyond the continuous chain-lightning of the highway headlights, I could see the neon outline of the Red Barn, with cars clustered around it.

A softer light shone through lace curtains in Mrs. Hutchinson’s front window. When I knocked on the door, a heavy shadow moved across the light. The old woman spoke through the closed door: “Who is that?”

“Archer. We talked this morning at the Hallman ranch.”

She opened the door cautiously and peered out. “What do you want?”

“Is Martha with you?”

“Sure she is. I put her to bed in my room. It looks like she’s spending the night.”

“Has anyone else been here?”

“The child’s mother was in and out. She didn’t waste much time on us, I can tell you. Mrs. Hallman has more important things on her mind than her little orphan daughter. But don’t let me get started on that or I’ll keep you standing on the steps all night.” She glanced inquiringly at Rose Parish. With the excessive respect for privacy of her class, she had avoided noticing her till now.

“This is Miss Parish, from the State Hospital.”

“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure. You folks come inside, if you want. I’ll ask you to be as quiet as you can. Martha isn’t asleep yet. The poor child’s all keyed up.”

The door opened directly into the front room. The room was small and neat, warmed by rag rugs on the floor, an afghan on the couch. Embroidered mottoes on the plasterboard walls went with the character lines in the old woman’s face. A piece of wool with knitting needles in it lay on the arm of a chair. She picked it up and hid it in a drawer, as if it was evidence of criminal negligence in her housekeeping.

“Sit down, if you can find a place to sit. Did you say you were from the State Hospital? They offered me a job there once, but I always liked private work better.”

Rose Parish sat beside me on the couch. “Are you a nurse, Mrs. Hutchinson?”

“A special nurse. I started to train for an R. N. but I never got my cap. Hutchinson wouldn’t wait. Would you be an R. N., Miss?”

“I’m a psychiatric social worker. I suppose that makes me a sort of nurse. Carl Hallman was one of my patients.”

“You wanted to ask me about him? Is that it? I say it’s a crying shame what happened to that boy. He used to be as nice as you could want. There in that house, I watched him change right in front of my eyes. I could see his mother’s trouble coming out in him like a family curse, and not one of them made a move to help him until it was too late.”

“Did you know his mother?” I said.

“Know her? I nursed her for over a year. Waited on her hand and foot, day and night. I should say I did know her. She was the saddest woman you ever want to see, specially toward the end there. She got the idea in her head that nobody loved her, nobody ever did love her. Her husband didn’t love her, her family didn’t love her, even her poor dead parents didn’t love her when they were alive. It became worse when Carl went away to school. He was always her special darling, and she depended on him. After he left home, she acted like there was nothing for her in life except those pills she took.”

“What kind of pills?” Rose Parish said. “Barbiturates?”

“Them, or anything else she could get her hands on. She was addicted for many years. I guess she ran through every doctor in town, the old ones and then the new ones, ending up with Dr. Grantland. It isn’t for me to second-guess a doctor, but I used to think those pills he let her have were her main trouble. I got up my nerve and told him so, one day toward the end. He said that he was trying to limit her, but Mrs. Hallman would be worse off without them.”

“I doubt that,” Rose Parish said. “He should have committed her; he might have saved her life.”

“Did the question ever come up, Mrs. Hutchinson?”

“Between me and her it did, when the doctor first sent me out there to look after her. I had to use some kind of leverage on her. She was a sad, spoiled woman, spoiled rotten all her life. She was always hiding her pills on me, and taking more than her dosage. When I bawled her out for it, she pulled out that little gun she kept under her pillow. I told her she’d have to give up those shenanigans, or the doctor would have to commit her. She said he better not. She said if he tried it on her, she’d kill herself and ruin him. As for me, I’d never get another job in this town. Oh, she could be a black devil when she was on the rampage.”

Breathing heavily with remembered anger, Mrs. Hutchinson looked up at the wall above her armchair. An embroidered motto there exhorted Christian charity. It calmed her visibly. She said: “I don’t mean she was like that all the time, just when she had a spell. Most of the time she wasn’t a bad sort of lady to have to deal with. I’ve dealt with worse. It’s a pity what had to happen to her. And not only her. You young people don’t read the Bible any more. I know that. There’s a line from the Word keeps running in my head since all this trouble today. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.”

“Right out of Freud,” Rose Parish said in a knowing undertone.

I thought she was putting the cart in front of the horse, but I didn’t bother arguing. The Old Testament words reverberated in my mind. I cut their echo short, and brought Mrs. Hutchinson back to the line of questioning I’d stumbled upon: “It’s funny they’d let Mrs. Hallman have a gun.”

“All the ranch women have them, or used to have. It was a hangover from the old days when there were a lot of hoboes and outlaws wandering around in the west. Mrs. Hallman told me once her father sent her that gun, all the way from the old country – he was a great traveler. She took a pride in it, the way another kind of woman would take pride in a piece of jewelry. It was something like a gewgaw at that – a short-barreled little thing with a pearl handle set in filigree work. She used to spend a lot of time cleaning and polishing it. I remember the fuss she made when the Senator wanted to take it away from her.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t,” Rose Parish said. “We don’t even permit nail files or bottles on our closed wards.”

“I know that, and I told the Senator it was a danger to her. He was a hard man to understand in some ways. He couldn’t really admit to himself that there was anything the matter with her mind. It was the same with his son later. He believed that their troubles were just notions, that all they wanted was to attract some attention to themselves. He let her keep that gun in her room, and the box of shells that went with it, right up to the day of her death. You’d almost think,” she added with the casual insight of the old, “you’d almost think he wanted her to do herself a harm. Or somebody else.”

“Somebody else?” I said.

Mrs. Hutchinson reddened and veiled her eyes. “I didn’t mean anything, I was only talking.”

“You said Mrs. Hallman had that gun right up to the day of her death. Do you know that for a fact?”

“Did I say that? I didn’t mean it that way.”

There was a breathing silence.

“How did you mean it?”

“I wasn’t trying to pin down any exact time. What I said was in a general manner of speaking.”

“Did she have it on the day of her death?”

“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago – more than three years. It doesn’t matter, anyway.” Her statement had the force of a question. Her gray head turned toward me, the skin of her neck stretched in diagonal folds like recalcitrant material being twisted under great pressure.

“Do you know what happened to Mrs. Hallman’s gun?”

“I never was told, no. For all I know it’s safe at the bottom of the ocean.”

“Mrs. Hallman had it the night she drowned herself?”

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know.”

“Did she drown herself?”

“Sure she did. But I couldn’t swear to it. I didn’t see her jump in.” Her pale gaze was still on me, cold and watchful under slack folded lids. “What is it that’s so important about her gun? Do you know where it is?”

“Don’t you?”

The strain was making her irritable. “I wouldn’t be asking you if I knew all about it, would I?”

“The gun is in an evidence case in the sheriff’s office. It was used to shoot Jerry Hallman today. It’s strange you don’t know that, Mrs. Hutchinson.”

“How would I know what they shot him with?” But the color of confusion had deepened in her face. Its vessels were purplish and congested with the hot shame of an unpracticed barefaced liar. “I didn’t even hear the shot, let alone see it happen.”

“There were two shots.”

“That’s news to me. I didn’t hear either one of them. I was in the front room with Martha, and she was playing with that silver bell of her mother’s. It drowned out everything.”

The old woman sat in a listening attitude, screwing up her face as if she was hearing the shots now, after a long delay. I was certain that she was lying. Apart from the evidence of her face, there was at least one discrepancy in her story. I scanned back across the rush and welter of the day, trying to pin it down, but without success. Too many words had been spilled. The sense of discrepancy persisted in my mind, a gap in the known through which the darkness threatened, like sea behind a dike.

Mrs. Hutchinson shuffled her slippered feet in token flight. “Are you trying to tell me I shot him?”

“I made no such accusation. I have to make one, though. You’re hiding something.”

“Me hide something? Why should I do that?”

“It’s the question I’m asking myself. Perhaps you’re protecting a friend, or think you are.”

“My friends don’t get into that kind of trouble,” she said angrily.

“Speaking of friends, have you known Dr. Grantland long?”

“Long enough. That doesn’t mean we’re friends.” She corrected herself hastily: “A special nurse doesn’t consider herself friends with her doctors, not if she knows her place.”

“I gather he got you your job with the Hallmans.”

“He recommended me.”

“And he drove you into town today, shortly after the shooting.”

“He wasn’t doing it for me. He was doing it for her.”

“I know that. Did he mention the shooting to you?”

“I guess he did. Yes. He mentioned it, said it was a terrible thing.”

“Did he mention the gun that was used?”

She hesitated before answering. The color left her face. Otherwise she was completely immobile, concentrating on what she would say and its possible implications. “No. Martha was with us, and all. He didn’t say anything about the gun.”

“It still seems queer to me. Grantland saw the gun. He told me himself that he recognized it, but wasn’t certain of the identification. He must have known that you were familiar with it.”

“I’m no expert on guns.”

“You gave me a good description of it just now. In fact, you probably knew it as well as anyone alive. But Grantland didn’t say a word to you about it, ask you a single question. Or did he?”

There was another pause. “No. He didn’t say a word.”

“Have you seen Dr. Grantland since this afternoon?”

“What if I have?” she answered stolidly.

“Has Grantland been here tonight?”

“What if he was? Him coming here had nothing to do with me.”

“Who did it have to do with? Zinnie?”

Rose Parish stirred on the couch beside me, nudging my knee with hers. She made a small coughing noise of distress. This encouraged Mrs. Hutchinson, as perhaps it was intended to. I could practically see her resistance solidifying. She sat like a monument in flowered silk: “You’re trying to make me talk myself out of a job. I’m too old to get another job. I’ve got too much property to qualify for the pension, and not enough to live on.” After a pause, she said: “No! I’m falsifying myself. I could always get along someway. It’s Martha that keeps me on the job. If it wasn’t for her, I would have quit that house long ago.”

“Why?”

“It’s a bad-luck house, that’s why. It brings bad luck to everybody who goes there. Yes, and I’d be happy to see it burn to the ground like Sodom. That may sound like a terrible thing for a Christian woman to say. No loss of life; I wouldn’t wish that on them; there’s been loss of life enough. I’d just like to see that house destroyed, and that family scattered forevermore.”

I thought without saying it that Mrs. Hutchinson was getting her awesome wish.

“What are you leading up to?” I said. “I know the doctor and Zinnie Hallman are interested in each other. Is that the fact you’re trying to keep from spilling? Or is there more?”

She weighed me in the balance of her eyes. “Just who are you, Mister?”

“I’m a private detective–”

“I know that much. Who’re you detecting for? And who against?”

“Carl Hallman asked me to help him.”

“Carl did? How could that be?”

I explained briefly how it could be. “He was seen in your neighborhood tonight. It’s why Miss Parish and I came here to your house, to head off any possible trouble.”

“You think he might try and do something to the child?”

“It occurred to us as a possibility,” Rose Parish said. “I wouldn’t worry about it. We probably went off half-cocked. I honestly don’t believe that Carl would harm anyone.”

“What about his brother?”

“I don’t believe he shot his brother.” She exchanged glances with me. “Neither of us believes it.”

“I thought, from the paper and all, they had it pinned on him good.”

“It nearly always looks like that when they’re hunting a suspect,” I said.

“You mean it isn’t true?”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“Somebody else did it?”

Her question hung unanswered in the room. An inner door at the far end was opening slowly, softly. Martha slipped in through the narrow aperture. Elfin in blue sleepers, she scampered into the middle of the room, stood and looked at us with enormous eyes.

Mrs. Hutchinson said: “Go back to bed, you minx.”

“I won’t. I’m not sleepy.”

“Come on, I’ll tuck you in.”

The old woman rose ponderously and made a grab for the child, who evaded her.

“I want Mommy to tuck me in. I want my Mommy.”

In the middle of her complaint, Martha stopped in front of Rose Parish. A reaching innocence, like an invisible antenna, stretched upward from her face to the woman’s face, and was met by a similar reaching innocence. Rose opened her arms. Martha climbed into them.

“You’re bothering the lady,” Mrs. Hutchinson said.

“She’s no bother, are you, honey?”

The child was quiet against her breast. We sat in silence for a bit. The tick of thought continued like a tiny stitching in my consciousness or just below it, trying to piece together the rags and bloody tatters of the day. My thoughts threatened the child, the innocent one, perhaps the only one who was perfectly innocent. It wasn’t fair that her milk teeth should be set on edge.