The Second Fletcher Flora Mystery MEGAPACK™: 20 Classic Mystery & Crime Stories!

Settlement Out of Court

Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July 1963.

Francis Etheridge was sitting on the floor of a small closet at the foot of the stairs that ascended from the front hall into the shadows of the second floor of the rented house in which he lived with his mother and father. Francis had always lived with his mother and father in rented houses. The house was always old and shabby, furnished with odds and ends that always gave the impression of being strangers to each other, and it was always just a temporary expedient, something to afford shelter until Mr. Etheridge could find something suitable to buy. The funny thing about these houses, as Francis knew them, was that they were all alike. Although they were in different locations and varied somewhat in age and the number of rooms and stories they had, they possessed, nevertheless, a kind of strange and pervasive common denominator that made all these variations unimportant, so that Francis, thinking back, could not remember a single significant difference.

Francis had not been happy in these houses, and that was why, when you came right down to it, he was sitting now on the floor of the small closet in this one. He had learned that any house, no matter how shabby and depressing in general, always had a particular place, a corner or a closet or an attic or someplace where one could withdraw in secret to security and peace. You could sit there, as Francis was now sitting, and do nothing whatever except listen to the silence that formed a soft protective perimeter around a golden core of fantasy. If someone came near, you remained silent. If someone called, you did not answer.

It was dark in the closet. The only light was a dull diagonal swath that fell across the floor from the narrow crack Francis had left in the door. He liked darkness, which was comforting, but he did not like total darkness, which was terrifying. From where he sat, he could look through the crack and up the narrow, steep stairs to the landing above. The upper hall was full of shadows, but an odd layer of light, about eighteen inches thick, lay along the floor like a blanket of fog just at the head of the stairs. Francis was watching this layer of light, because it was odd and interesting and something to watch, and that was how he happened to see the legs move suddenly into the light and stop. The dim scene took on instantly a quality of eerie farce, as if it had been arranged by an intelligence with a sense of insane humor, for the legs appeared to be detached at the knees, the body above them obscured by shadows.

The legs were thin and ugly, a woman’s legs, and they seemed for that reason, their ugliness, to heighten the farcical quality of the scene. Francis felt compelled to laugh, and he covered his mouth with a hand to smother any inadvertent sound, but he did not laugh after all, for there was suddenly a subtle change, an added ingredient of irrational terror. Behind, and a little to one side of the first pair of legs, there was all at once a second pair, simply not there one instant and soundlessly there the next; and it was perfectly clear to Francis, with all the surety of revelation, that the first legs were not aware of the second, and were not meant to be aware.

All was static in utter silence, the four detached legs in a layer of light and Francis watching from the dark closet below, and then the first legs spoke in a high, querulous voice.

“Francis!” the legs said. “Where are you, Francis?”

Francis did not answer. He never answered unless there was a practical certainty that he would be discovered anyhow. The legs, which had remained static, became silent again for an interval of several seconds before speaking again in the same high querulous voice. They did not speak, this time, to Francis, or to anyone else, unless it could be considered that they spoke to themselves.

“Where is the boy?” the legs said. “Why is he never around when I need him? Now I suppose I must go down myself for the aspirin.”

The first legs were his mother, of course, and the second legs were his father. His mother was always taking aspirin, and it seemed that she was always leaving them in a place where she surely wouldn’t be when she needed them next. She was thin and sickly and afflicted with migraine headaches.

His mother’s legs did not begin immediately to descend the stairs. They did not move, the legs of Mr. Etheridge did not move, everything was still and fixed in absolute absence of sound and motion. Then, with startling and almost comic abruptness, like an explosion, the legs of Francis’ mother seemed to fly straight upward into shadows, and an instant later her entire body came flying down across the narrow range of Francis’ vision. It looked for all the world as if she had deliberately dived head foremost down the stairs, and all this odd and comic action was punctuated by a sodden sound that was like the sound made in the imagination by a big, splashy period in an exclamation point.

Francis, who had stopped breathing, took a deep breath and released it slowly with the softest sigh. He continued to sit motionless, Indian fashion, his eyes fixed in the path of his narrow vision. The legs of his father began to descend, steps on the treads exactly cadenced, as if measured slowly by count, the body of his father emerging step by step from the shadows, until it was precisely in view, bounded by door and jamb. His father’s face was like a stone. In his hand, hanging at his side, was a short, heavy piece of wood or dark metal. He passed from sight, slowly descending, and Francis listened to the cadenced steps until they stopped. At almost that instant, the instant of the steps’ stopping, there was a low moan, a whimper of pain, and after that, quickly, a second sudden sound.

Francis waited, his eyes now removed from their vision of the stairs, his head cocked a little in a posture of intent listening. He heard his father in the hall, his steps receding briefly toward the rear of the house. Then he heard a familiar sound and knew that his father was dialing a number on the telephone. A few moments later his father’s voice spoke urgently a doctor’s name. The telephone was behind the stairs, out of view, and Francis, self-schooled in the preservation of silence and solitude, arose in the closet without the slightest sound and slipped into the hall and from the hall into the living room, and so through the dining room and kitchen to the back yard.

At the rear of the yard, its branches spreading over the alley, was a big mulberry tree. No care was taken of it, but the berries, which were large and sweet and dark purple when ripe, somehow escaped the ravishment of worms. Francis often climbed the tree and sat there for long periods eating the berries and thinking about all sorts of things real and unreal, and he went there and climbed it now and sat on a sturdy limb with his back at rest against the trunk.

Sitting so, now and then eating a berry, he began to wonder why his father had killed his mother.

The days before his mother’s funeral were desolate days. The shabby rented house was full of relatives who had to be fed and bedded down, and Francis was even forced to give up his room to a maternal uncle and two cousins. There was simply no place to go to he alone, no place in all the house, not even the small closet in the front hall, to spin securely the golden gossamer web of fantasy. The mulberry tree was invaded daily by the two cousins, both of them too young, in the tolerant opinion of the adults, to behave with the decorum of grief for a woman they had hardly known.

Francis himself felt no grief. He merely felt confused and lonely and violated. He spent most of the time alone in corners, and he kept wondering all this time why his father had killed his mother. He had pushed her down the narrow stairs, and then he had certainly given her a definitive blow with the heavy piece of wood or metal, and Francis wondered why. His mother had been a submissive and oppressive woman, oppressive to the spirit, but she had been kind in her own way, within her limited capacity to sense the need for kindness, and if she had not created love, neither had she incited hatred.

There were reasons, of course, why men killed women. One of the reasons was other women, or another woman, but Francis could not believe that this was true of his father, for he had long ago perceived dimly, although he was very young, that his father had no interest in women, not even in his wife, whom he had killed. He was, in fact, a rigid and moralistic man who abstained from tobacco and alcohol and insisted upon clean speech. He said grace at table and spoke up for old-fashioned modesty as opposed to contemporary wantonness. It seemed strange to Francis, when he thought about it, that his father and mother had ever married, or that they had, having married, continued to live so long together. It was impossible to believe that either was in the least interested in the other, and that they had, sometime in these years, by deliberate design or in eruption of distorted passion, given birth to him, their son, was entirely beyond credence, an intolerable obscenity. He did not think of this so specifically or so precisely, of course. He merely sustained, because it was essential to what he was and had to be, the illusion that his relationship with them did not antedate the deepest probing of his memory.

Another reason why men sometimes killed women, he thought in his corner, was to gain money or something valuable that the women had, but this was even more untenable than love or hate as a motive for his mother’s murder by his father. His mother had been as poor in goods as in spirit and body, and she had left nothing to his father except the expense of burying her and feeding for two or three days all the relatives who came to help him do it. There seemed to be, in fact, no rational reason for killing her at all, nothing to be gained that could not have been gained with less trouble and danger by simply going away. Francis, pondering the mystery, was filled with wonder, if not with grief.

It was a great relief when the funeral was finally over. Services were held in the chapel of the mortuary that had received the body, and Francis sat beside his father in a cool, shadowy alcove lined with gray drapes. He could look across the chapel to the casket in which his mother lay under a spray of fern and red and white carnations, and by lifting his eyes he could see, high in the far wall, a leaded window of stained glass that transmitted the sunlight in glittering fragments of color. Most of the time he watched the window, but once in a while he would glance sidewise from the corners of his eyes at his father’s face. He was curious to see if the secret his father thought he shared with no one would reveal itself, here in this dim alcove, in some naked expression, however fleeting. But if there was such an expression, Francis could not detect it, was not looking, perhaps, in the instant that it came and passed. His father sat as still as stone and stared at nothing with empty eyes.

After the chapel, there was the ordeal of the cemetery. Francis rode out there with his father in the back seat of a big black limousine furnished by the mortician. Beyond the edge of the cemetery where the earth had been opened for his mother’s entry, a meadow of green grass, growing brown in the sun, sloped down to the bank of a stream lined with poplars and oaks and elms. Overhead, while the service was read, a crow flew lazily and constantly cawed. Francis watched the trees and listened to the crow.

Happily, the graveside service was brief, and after it was completed everyone went away, and Francis went home with his father in the limousine. All the relatives began to leave then, to go back to wherever they had come from, and that was the best of a bad time, as the shabby old house approached emptiness and silence. After a while, before dark, no one was left but Francis and his father and Uncle Ted. Uncle Ted, who had to wait until morning to catch a train, was the oldest brother of Francis’ mother, and he and Mr. Etheridge, when all the others had gone, sat in the living room and talked. Francis, hardly noticed, sat behind them in a high-backed chair and looked out a window into the side-yard and listened to what was said.

“Luther,” Uncle Ted said to Mr. Etheridge, “I haven’t wanted to discuss this with you previously, but if you don’t take action in this business, you’re a fool, and that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“I intend to take action,” Mr. Etheridge said.

“If I were you, now that the funeral is over, I’d see a lawyer immediately.”

“I’ve made an appointment for tomorrow, Ted.”

“Good. In my opinion, you have a perfect case. Surely your landlord carries liability insurance.”

“Oh, yes. Certainly. He has numerous rentals, and could hardly afford to be without it.”

“It’s always easier if there’s insurance. If it comes to a jury, they have much less compunction about soaking a big company.”

“I have a notion it will be settled out of court.”

“Quite likely. You mustn’t accept too little, however. After all, your wife is dead and buried.”

“So she is, and I’ll not forget it for a moment. Any settlement will have to be most liberal.”

“Well, the liability is perfectly apparent, I should say. It’s almost criminal. That broken board at the head of the stairs should have been replaced long ago. It’s a landlord’s obligation to take care of such matters.”

Then, of course, Francis knew why his father had pushed his mother down the stairs. There was no longer the least need to wonder about it.

He was in his room upstairs when the investigator from the insurance company came. Francis knew that the visitor was an investigator because Mr. Etheridge brought him right upstairs and showed him the loose board, and then they stood there in the shadowy hall at the head of the stairs and talked about what had happened. Francis had his door closed, and in the beginning could hear only the voices, not the words, and so he walked over silently from his bed, where he had been sitting, and opened the door a crack. Then he could hear clearly what was being said, and could see, by applying an eye to the crack, the investigator and his father standing face to face there in the shadows.

“It happened very suddenly,” Mr. Etheridge was saying. “My wife and I were in our room. She had a severe headache and wanted some aspirin, but she had left the bottle downstairs. I offered to get it for her, but she said no, she couldn’t remember just where she had put it and would have to look for it. She went out of the room, and I followed her, a few steps behind, thinking that I might be of help. When she reached the head of the stairs, she simply seemed to pitch down headfirst, almost as if she had dived. It happened so suddenly, as I said, that I couldn’t reach her, although I tried. She struck her head on the edge of one of the lower steps. Her collarbone was broken also, as you know, but the death was caused by the head injury. The doctor has certified that.”

“I know.” The investigator was a squat man with arms and torso far out of proportion to his legs, which were remarkably short. His voice had a harsh, rasping sound, as if he had a sore throat that was painful to talk through. “Are you positive she tripped? She didn’t merely faint and fall? You said she wasn’t feeling well. She had a severe headache.”

“No, no. She tripped. She didn’t merely collapse, as she would have done in fainting. She pitched forward with considerable momentum. That’s surely obvious from the distance she fell before striking the stairs. You can see the board here. It had rotted away from its nails and came loose. It projects above the others perhaps a quarter of an inch.”

“I see. It’s quite dangerous, being right at the head of the stairs. I’m surprised that you didn’t fix it yourself, Mr. Etheridge.”

“I should have. I reproach myself for not having done so. But I’m not handy at such things. It’s the landlord’s duty to keep the house in repair, and I reported the board to him. He assured me that he would have it replaced.”

“I assume that you were the only one who witnessed the accident?”

“Yes.”

“That’s too bad. It would simplify matters if there were someone to corroborate your testimony.”

“Well, there isn’t. My wife and I were alone in the house. The boy was outside playing.”

It was then that Francis opened the door of his room and walked out into the half and over to his father and the investigator. The door made a thin, squeaking noise in opening, and both men turned their heads in the direction of the sound and watched Francis approach.

“I’ve been in my room,” Francis said, unnecessarily. “I heard you talking.”

“Did you?” Mr. Etheridge’s voice had an edge. “You shouldn’t listen to conversations that don’t concern you, Francis. It’s bad manners.”

“I’m sorry. I just thought I could help.”

“There is nothing you can do. You had better go back to your room.”

“Help in what way?” the investigator said.

“Well,” Francis said, “I heard you say that it would simplify things if there were someone else who saw what happened, and I saw.”

“What’s that? You saw the accident? You saw your mother fall down the stairs?”

“Yes. I was sitting in the closet down there in the hall. I often sit in there, because it’s quiet and no one knows where I am and it’s a good place to be. The door was open a little bit, though, and I could see right up the stairs, and I saw just exactly what happened.”

Francis looked from the investigator to the face of his father, and his father’s face was just like it had been in the alcove in the chapel, as gray as the drapes, as hard as stone. He did not move, watching Francis.

“All right, son,” the investigator said. “Just tell me what you saw.”

Francis turned his eyes back to the investigator. The eyes were pale blue, complementing his pale hair, the wide remote eyes of a dreamer.

“It was just as Father said. Mother tripped and fell. She just came flying down.”

There was a long, sighing sound that was the sound of Mr. Etheridge’s breath being released in the shadows.

“If you saw your mother fall,” he said, “why didn’t you come out to help her?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid, I guess. It was so sudden and so terrible that it frightened me. I don’t know why. Then you came down, and I heard you calling the doctor, and so I just went out the back way and sat in the mulberry tree.”

“Well, I’ll be damned!” The investigator shrugged at Mr. Etheridge. “Kids are odd little animals.”

“Yes,” Mr. Etheridge said, “they are, indeed. Now you will please return to your room, Francis. Thank you for speaking up.”

“You’re welcome,” Francis said.

He went back into his room and closed the door and sat on the floor in a swath of sunlight. There was a large book there that he had been looking at earlier, and he began now to look at it again. It contained thousands of colored pictures of almost every imaginable thing, and Francis was still looking at the pictures about a quarter of an hour later when his father opened the door and came into the room and stood staring down at him.

“What are you looking at, Francis?” Mr. Etheridge said.

Francis looked up from the bright pictures to his father’s gray stone face. His pale blue eyes had a kind of soft sheen on them. The sunlight gathered and caught fire in his pale hair.

“It’s a catalog,” he said. “There are so many beautiful things in the catalog that I’ve always wanted. Are we going to get a lot of money from the insurance company? If we are, maybe we could get some of the things. Maybe even a piano that I could take lessons on.

The soft sheen gave to his eyes a look of blindness. He did not seem to see his father at all.

“Yes,” Mr. Etheridge said. “Maybe even a piano.”