The Man in the Woods (21 page)

The old Indian sputtered helplessly. “Let me up! Let me go!”

“Why didn’t you say who you were when you came down the stairs,” Helen demanded. “You scared us half to death creeping around like that.”

“I wasn’t sure it was you,” said the old man balefully. “I was just as scared as you were. Please put that thing down!” The Indian tucked his shirt tails into his pants and gazed mournfully at the scalpel that Pinky still held at his side.

“I was following him, you see?” he said. “Saw him slam the door down. Figured maybe somebody was in here, so I came down.”

“Who were you following?” asked Helen.

“Why?” asked Pinky.

The Indian didn’t answer. Inside the works of the Thurber machine lay a scrap of crumpled-up paper they hadn’t noticed before with several letters of the alphabet typed on it.

“We better take this to the cops,” said Pinky slyly.

“Wait a minute,” said the Indian at the mention of the police. He sat heavily on the lowest of the cellar steps. “I don’t know who he is,” he mewled. “Swear to God. I was following him because he gives me this stuff. See? In the red bottles. Helps my leg. Good for the rheumatism. Met him last spring over at Sander’s Ridge. Real nice to me. I told him about my leg, and next time I met him, he brought me one of the bottles. Three times that happened. Then last time he tried to charge me. I don’t have no thirty bucks. I was mad, see? So I followed him, and now I found where he keeps it. Right there in those boxes.” He pointed. “I don’t want cops finding me,” he pleaded. “They’ll put me in the state old-folks’ home.”

“Who is he?” asked Helen.

“I don’t know,” said the Indian. “Just a guy. Ordinary-looking.”

“Can you describe him so I can draw him?” asked Helen.

“Guess so,” said the Indian. “Let’s go up in the light. Cellar’s damp. Brings on my pain again.”

Helen had a pencil in her pocketbook but no paper. She ran to the closet at the back of the cellar. Surely there would be a piece of paper, a label of some kind. She grabbed a can of Dr. Buckland’s Scotch Oats Essence and tried to pull off the wrapper, only to find it had been stuck on with a hundred-and-twenty-year-old version of Krazy Glue that smelled of fish. The candle, only half an inch long, now began to burn her fingers. She blew it out and stuffed it in her pocket. She reached wildly in among the shelves, over the lye soap in its slippery oil paper. There were ten large boxes in the back, under the Cuticura Anti-Pain Plasters. She opened one of the boxes and found tin upon tin about the size of pipe-tobacco cans. She picked them up one by one, but they were all sealed tightly with oil paper, except for the last. She breathed a sigh of great relief when the paper label slid off easily.

Helen ran up the stairs and out into the light. She flattened the thin paper on one of the smooth splints Pinky had found and sat next to the Indian on a fallen log.

“How old would you say he was?” he asked.

“Oh, young, young,” said the Indian. “Then, of course, they all look young to me.”

“Who’s they?” asked Helen.

“Everybody,” said the Indian. “I’m ninety-two.”

When Helen had gotten the shape of the head, the ears, the hair, eyes, nose, and mouth all to the Indian’s satisfaction, he rose and said, “You got ’im. That’s him to a tee.” His joints popped as he went down into the cellar again.

When he came back, he was wearing one of the greatcoats. “Took all the red medicine,” he said, grinning. “Put it all in the lining of this coat. Nice warm coat too.” Then he limped off merrily, the hem of the coat dragging and bulging with bottles of laudanum, cure for all maladies and distempers of the human body. He turned and waved once and then clinked and clanked his way off into the fog-filled woods until they could hear him no more.

Chief Ryser was not in the mood. That, Helen and Pinky could tell the moment they were shown into his office. “Your folks have called,” he said sternly to Helen. “Your aunt tried to find you up at the high school. She wanted us to put out a missing person on you two. I figured you’d turn up.”

“Sir,” said Pinky, “we found it.” He put the crumpled scrap of paper with the Thurber type sample on Ryser’s blotter. “We found the machine that was used to write the tip-off note about Stubby Atlas. Also the envelope that Helen’s locket and the tape were in. It’s in a basement up in the woods, off Route Six.”

“And I have a sketch of the guy who was using it,” said Helen. She caught Pinky’s eye for a minute. They would not give the old Indian away. “We ... I saw him for just a second.”

Ryser looked at the type sample and the drawing blankly. “Well, you sure can draw,” he said. He was trying to be kind, Helen knew. But his attention had died. “Frank!” he yelled. “File this and get these kids home before the girl’s aunt has heart failure.”

“Is that all?” Helen asked. “Aren’t you going to go up and take fingerprints from the writing machine?”

“Honey,” said Ryser, standing, leaning on his arms on the desk and shrugging his massive shoulders, “I told you before and I’ll tell you again—” but he was interrupted.

“Where’d you get this, kids?” asked the sergeant at his side. “Where did you find this piece of paper?” He had turned Helen’s drawing over and placed it, back up, on Ryser’s desk.

Ryser scowled, put on his glasses, and read it. The color drained right out of his face and then right back in, until the tiny veins in his cheeks went magenta. “Where?” he asked.

“In the closet at the back of the old cellar,” said Helen.

“Was it wrapped around a container?” snapped Ryser. “Was the container full and heavy? Were there other containers?”

“I don’t know,” answered Helen. “It was so dark. I couldn’t see. There ... yes, there were lots of them. Little tins like pipe tobacco comes in. They were full, all right. They’d never been unpacked. I pried open the carton myself.”

Ryser turned to the sergeant. “Get on the horn,” he said. “Call the lab. See if you can talk to the head, what’s his name? Feinberg. Find out how long this stuff lasts. How long is it potent?”

Pinky had meanwhile taken the wrapper off Ryser’s desk. He handed it to Helen without a word. She turned the paper so that she could read the fancy lettering. On it was printed:

PURE MORPHINE—100% PURE

“Okay,” said Ryser. He pointed his finger at Helen and kept it pointed. “How many cans of this stuff was in the cellar?”

Helen closed her eyes. She wanted to get it just right. She pictured herself in slow motion, struggling with the label of the Scotch oats cannister. Reaching over the lye soaps. Prying off the top of the carton. Reaching in. “At least twenty in the carton I opened,” she said. “The carton was filled with sawdust. All the other cans were wrapped up tight in heavy oily paper. This was the only one that didn’t have the oily paper on it. There were several stacks of cartons. All identical. I took this can from the top box on the left-hand stack. The cellar is very neat and orderly. Everything of one kind is kept together. I’d guess there were twenty cans to a carton and twelve cartons. Maybe ten cartons.”

“Were the cans that you picked up heavy? All of them? Were they full?”

“Yes,” said Helen.

The sergeant returned. “I talked to Feinberg,” he said. “He talked to somebody up at Harvard. If the stuff is sealed tight and kept in a cool, dark place, it might last forever. Apparently somebody out in Ohio found an old bottle two years ago. Something called laudanum. Had it tested. The opium and alcohol were even more potent than they’d expected. It had aged like good wine.”

“Then this morphine could still be converted to heroin,” Ryser said, seeming dazed.

The sergeant shrugged. “Why not?” he said. “Converting it is easy for anybody with a hot plate and some liquid ether. The thing is, it’s the morphine
itself
that’s the gold. Converted or not, it’s worth a mint and a half. If there’s two hundred cans of morphine there—my God—I can’t—I can’t even begin to figure what that’d be worth on the street.”

The fog had lifted and the rain had started again. Helen and Pinky each sat on the back seat of an enormous Harley-Davidson motorcycle, behind an enormous policeman. They tore through the peaceful woods with terrifying, ear-splitting noise and speed.

Helen wished she could talk about her tangled, rushing thoughts to Pinky. Around her policeman’s huge blue back she could just see Pinky. He was up ahead on the first motorcycle, giving directions back to Lucy’s basement. She pictured Pinky, laughing in his ironic way. “With our luck,” he would say, “the typewriter will be clean of prints and the stuff in the cans will be gone by the time we get back there.”

It was.

H
ELEN’S FATHER TALKED TO
her in a voice he usually saved for water polluters. “Liar!” he said for the tenth time.

Helen sat on her bed, her father in a chair. She had been banished to her bedroom for an unspecified length of time the moment Chief Ryser had left the house with a silent, raging Pinky in tow.

“Dad,” said Helen, trying to keep her voice steady, “the cans were full. I felt them. They were heavy.”

“They were empty. The police went through every morphine cannister in those cartons, and every single one of them was
empty
.”

“Dad, please. Please listen. I picked up all the cans in the carton I opened. They were sealed in an oily paper, all except for one, and they were all full. When the cops came back, every single can was empty, and the oily paper wrappings were gone. Somebody was there after Pinky and I left. By the time we got out of the police station, he would have had at least an hour and a half.”

“The cartons were covered with dust,” said her father. “The cops said they hadn’t been touched in a hundred years.”

“There was dust in every corner of that cellar, Dad. All he had to do was take handfuls of it and spread it on the boxes and cans.”

“Can’t you admit to a mistake?” asked her father. “Causing endless trouble and wasting the police’s time. Embarrassing Aunt Stella and me. Can’t you even do that?”

Helen wondered if he was softening slightly. He was saying mistake instead of lie. “It wasn’t a mistake,” she answered heatedly.

“Then it’s a lie,” said her father with even more heat. “It’s a lie just like the lie you trumped up with your boyfriend. Said you were going up to school to the
Whaler
, didn’t you? But you headed out to the woods. Had it all cooked up with him ahead of time, didn’t you?”

“No, no, no, Dad. Pinky did invent that story, but we were halfway to the woods before I knew.”

“You could have turned around!”

“No, I couldn’t. You don’t understand, Dad.”

“You bet I don’t. I understand my daughter’s a liar. That’s what I understand.”

“You!” said Helen, her temper edging out despair. “You sitting down in the living room with Chief Ryser half an hour ago! Not listening to Pinky or me. Just agreeing with him because he’s a man. A man in a uniform. You’d go along with anything any other man says. Being one of the boys. That’s all you care about!”

“That hurt,” said her father.

“Well, you’ve hurt me!”

After he left, Helen sat alone on her bed. She did not cry with the rage and fear that were boiling up inside her but coolly took the morphine label and pinned it drawing side out on the wall over her desk. She stared at the face. The face stared at her. It was a good drawing. Something told her she knew who it was. She struggled to make sense of it, but he remained hidden behind just the wrong eyes, mouth, and hair, like the dark side of a half-moon.

“Who are you?” she asked. “How do you plan to get me? Are you going to get Pinky too?”
Innocent, careless Pinky
, she thought. All the time that the Indian had been describing the face she was drawing, someone had lain hidden in the fog listening. He’d gone into the cellar after they’d left, cleaned the prints off the Thurber, taken away every grain in every can of morphine, and disappeared. But now he knew she hadn’t been good, hadn’t watched out. She put her hands over her eyes.

Aunt Stella knocked tentatively on the door. She’d brought up a portion of tuna fish casserole on one of her best Spode plates. “You have to eat,” she said when Helen showed no inclination to do so.

“Later, please, Aunt Stella,” said Helen. “I’m doing my homework.”

When Aunt Stella left the room, for some reason tip-toeing as if not to disturb a sick patient, Helen shoved the plate of tuna fish away, against the little Hummel figurine that still stood, chipped staff in hand, on her desk top.

Her father came in to say good night. He looked at the untouched food. “Sweet Pea,” he began, but everything that had welled up inside Helen surged out of her. She dropped her head on her cradled arms and cried as desperately as a mother who’d lost a child.

“I brought you some warm milk with nutmeg on it,” he said. “Please, babe. I know it’s hard to be a teenager. Your body goes through a lot of changes. Things’ll seem better in the morning. Please drink the milk. It’ll do you good.”

“Go away,” said Helen. “Please just go away with your milk and your teenage body changes!”

Helen did not lift her head until the house had long been still. Deep, regular snores came from her father’s bedroom. Aunt Stella’s bedroom was always deathly quiet, for Aunt Stella slept as deeply as a sunken ship.

There was nothing to say to Pinky, even if she summoned up the courage to call him. He would be at the motel desk tonight. Saturday was the Seafarer’s busiest night. There was nothing she could tell him that he wouldn’t have worked out in his own head already. All their hard work. All their disappointments and dead ends overcome, and what was left? She had hurt her father terribly, and he had hurt her. What was said could not be unsaid. Beyond was a desert of nothingness because she was afraid that
he
, whoever he was, would climb up the rose trellis and strangle her in her sleep—or her eyes ... her eyes ...

She stared at the face in her drawing again. Without the right shape and nose and mouth it meant nothing. Its expression was as passive as the Hummel figurine’s.
Dear God, where are you tonight?
she asked miserably. But the only answer was the pouring, unrelenting rain.