The Night Remembers

6

The Pennyfeather house was up Grande near Bever Park. Even in the sullen, rainy darkness it looked like a pleasant and prosperous home for pleasant and prosperous people, one of those huge, old amiable white houses with green shutters and gables and even a captain’s walk. Easy enough to imagine shiny black Model T’s parked out front and the clink of horseshoes being pitched out back.

Three cars were parked in the driveway: a new Cadillac, a Lincoln Town Car, and a blue Volvo. I thought of how anxious Mrs. Pennyfeather had sounded on the phone. Had she panicked and called in other people to help her, too?

I pulled up under bare elm branches dripping silver rain and went up to the door.

The laughter drifting out from the living room startled me. I don’t know what I’d been expecting exactly, but certainly not laughter.

I glanced around a chinaberry bush into a living room dominated by a huge fireplace with a sculpted mahogany mantel, fawn-colored matching couches that faced each other across a mahogany drop-leaf coffee table, and three different walls of French. doors. Three people sat on each couch. Between them on the coffee table was a cake with innumerable glowing candles, all the more effective because the rheostatic lights had been turned low. The fireplace glowed, too, with a treated log that pulsed slow blue flame.

I wondered if I had come to the wrong place. Perhaps next door... But just then Mrs. Pennyfeather came through one of the French doors bearing a bottle of champagne. Her smile matched those of the others, and her own soft laugh gathered with theirs.

I knocked.

She did the following in pantomime: She glanced to the right, where the front door was, she made a dramatic gift of the champagne to a beautiful girl in a blue dress who could only be her daughter, she leaned over and kissed the slender man who was her husband, and then she waved a delicate hand in excuse as she moved backward to the front door.

It was still several seconds before she reached it. I inhaled the fresh cold air, then exhaled, watching my white breath in front of me. A neighbor’s dog sounded lonely in the long night.

The door came open with a quick whoosh and there she was, looking younger than she had earlier today. Perhaps it was the dark strapless cocktail dress or the way her hair was swept up on the side with a small rhinestone comb caught perfectly in the sweep of it.

She surprised me for the second time tonight. Instead of inviting me in, she came out onto the small porch and said, “Thanks for coming.”

“You sounded pretty scared on the phone.” I nodded inside. “But you’re having a party.”

“I don’t suppose this is anything I should admit, Mr. Walsh, but I’m very good at hiding my feelings. I had to learn that, all those years George was — away.”

I shrugged. “That seems fair enough, Mrs. Pennyfeather. I’m just not sure why you wanted me here.”

In the shadowy porch light, her expression changed abruptly. She rubbed naked shoulders cold in the dark wintry chill. “Would you follow me please?”

“All right.”

We went to our right, so we wouldn’t have to walk past the front window. The grass was soggy from the rain, the night scented with dog droppings. “Those darn dogs in this neighborhood,” she said. “We don’t even have one and yet we have a yard full of—” She let the sentence drop.

The house was more massive than I’d realized, an imposing structure with an overhang roof and a vast screened-in porch on the back where you could imagine Japanese lanterns and fireflies suspended in the velvety night air.

In the back was a two-car garage recently repainted and re-roofed, the shingles gray and shiny in the gloom. Mrs. Pennyfeather may have wanted for companionship and dignity while her husband had been away, but she had obviously not wanted for money.

There was also a gazebo, one of those small but fastidious replicas of band-concert gazebos you used to see in the back yards of the wealthy. Like the garage, the gazebo was many decades old, but it had been kept up with paint and shingles and what appeared to be new latticework. It floated like a dream on the sloping back lawn.

As I approached the gazebo, curious, she put a small gentle hand on my arm. “I’m going to have to do something here I may regret.”

“What’s that, Mrs. Pennyfeather?”

She looked up at me. “I’m going to have to trust you, Mr. Walsh.”

Now I was not only curious but vaguely apprehensive, too. My stomach tightened. “I’m afraid I can’t agree to anything unless I know what we’re talking about, Mrs. Pennyfeather.”

“Just take a look first. Then we’ll talk. All right?”

I sighed, thinking better of what I was about to do. She lifted a frail arm and pointed to the gazebo.

I walked through wet grass down the sloping curve of earth to the structure. Ground fog played at my ankles. A quarter moon was beginning to emerge behind the drizzle and the puffy gray-black clouds. The lonesome dog three or four houses away still sounded lonesome.

In shadow, I stepped up into the white gazebo, bringing enough weight to bear that the old wood creaked and let off a scent of damp rotting boards that no amount of paint could disguise. In the cold wind and rain it gave off the aura of summer dying in autumn.

It was then I saw the woman.

She was easily enough found, a heavyset, dark-haired woman in a cheap tan trench coat, hosed thick ankles in cheap black pumps. Next to her an imitation black patent leather purse had sprayed its contents of lipsticks and powder case and cigarettes and used Kleenex like a cornucopia smashed against a wall. She appeared to have been flung into the swing of the gazebo, a blooming rose of sopping red blood discoloring the matronly heave of her chest.

From the jacket pocket of my sport coat I took the small flashlight I always carry with me and put the light on her face.

She had used too much makeup, her face the puffy texture of an aged doll, the lips too red, the eyebrows too black, the eyes hard blue and drained of life, like diamonds from which the color had somehow been sucked.

From habit, I bent down and began playing the flash to the left and right of her, looking for any of the obvious things you hope to find at a murder scene. Later, when the people from the laboratory got here, they would search for those minuscule clues that cheer overworked county attorneys. For now, I wanted the blind-luck items, the cigarette of foreign make, the footprint left perfect in the mud, the murder weapon itself.

Nothing; nothing.

I didn’t hear Mrs. Pennyfeather come up behind me. She said, “I don’t know who she is.”

“Was,” I said. “Who she was.”

“Oh, yes. Was.”

“When did you find her?”

“About an hour ago.”

“She was out here?”

“Yes. Just where you see her.”

“What were you doing out here?”

“I had gone to the store for some extra ice cream.” She pointed to the garage. “On the way back, I cut through here to the back door. I thought it would save some time.”

“You’re freezing,” I said.

She had begun rubbing her shoulders again, hunching into herself.

“Why don’t you go inside and get a jacket?”

“Then they’d know something was wrong.”

“They’re going to know anyway.”

“I wanted to talk to you first. The thing I’m least worried about right now, Mr. Walsh, is catching a cold.”

I took off my sport coat and draped it over her shoulders. Her flesh felt distractingly good, even covered with rough little goose bumps like the surface of a cat’s tongue.

I put the light back in the face of the dead woman.

“Wouldn’t it be horrible?”

“To be murdered?”

“To be murdered — and to have two people standing above you. Not even knowing who you are. It’s so — impersonal. At least her loved ones would be crying and mourning her. We don’t even care about her, really. She’s just a nuisance, not much else.”

“Nuisance?”

“Of course. Whom do you think the police will suspect, Mr. Walsh?”

I paused. “I see what you mean.”

“They’ll go right to George. He was convicted of murder once. It wouldn’t be all that difficult to convict him of murder again.”

“I suppose you’re right. But there’s a reason she’s here.”

“Oh?”

“It’s unlikely the murderer killed her in your back yard by coincidence.”

“You’re ruling out coincidence? My father was a big fan of Stephen Crane’s. Have you ever read Crane?”

“Some.”

“He believed in a completely random universe. Everything was chance and accident. No God. Just the randomness and the blackness.”

I turned off my light. I didn’t want the dead woman’s face to burn itself into my vision the way a drowning victim’s once had. She’d been ten and pig-tailed and a rotted purple by the time two fishermen found her. For weeks after I would sit in my sons’ room just watching them sleep in the darkness, trying to protect them, though against what exactly I hadn’t been sure.

“How many people are inside?”

She thought a moment. “Seven including myself.”

“How long have they been here?”

“Let’s see — the first arrived about six o’clock; the last one about seven-thirty, I suppose. Why?”

“Because it’s at least a possibility that one of them killed her.”

For the first time, she let me see her considerable anger. “You happen to be talking about my husband, my two children; my husband’s former boss and his wife and his brother. Hardly the type.”

“That isn’t what the police are going to say.”

“You’re alluding, I suppose, to my husband.”

“I’m just telling you how the police are going to view it.”

“The same way they viewed it the first time — that you viewed it the first time, Mr. Walsh — that George was guilty?”

Before I had a chance to say anything, a vague yellow yard light cut through the darkness collected here beneath the bare maples and elms of the back yard. A confident young man’s voice said, “Mother? Mother, are you out there?”

“Over here, dear.” To me, she whispered. “My son, David.”

He came down from the screened-in porch, a tall, young man in a tan sweater and well-pressed dark slacks. He was clean-cut in the way of a stockbroker, and except for his eyes he seemed open and friendly. Even in the shadows you could detect some troubled quality in his gaze. He carried a bottle of Heineken in his right hand and a single potato chip in the other. He came across the wet grass in an amiable stride that faltered only when I stepped down from the gazebo and he saw that his mother had a companion.

“Hello, David,” she said. “This is Mr. Walsh.”

He did not like me and did not particularly try to hide that fact. “In case you’ve forgotten, Mother, there’s a party inside for Father.”

“Oh, I haven’t forgotten,” his mother said. “It’s just—”

“Why don’t you go back inside and I’ll talk to Mr. Walsh. I’d like to know what he’s doing here.”

“We seem to have a problem,” I said, already tired of his attitude.

“Oh,” he said, “and just what would that be?”

If he had been a little less arrogant, I might have spared him the shock tactics. But he wasn’t and I didn’t.

I raised the flash and turned it on the dead woman’s face.

“My God,” David Pennyfeather said there in the cold darkness near the gazebo. “My God.”