A Show of Hands Read online

  “ ’Member how foggy it was?” he said. He managed to extricate himself from Crisp’s grasp. “You was just headin’ off down the road and I was goin’ to take the shore path back up here. Well, I just happened to look back up there toward the cemetery, toward the grave, and there was a break in the fog for half a second, and . . . well . . .”

  “You saw her.”

  Mostly nodded. “I sure did.”

  Crisp was suddenly exhausted. The implications of what Mostly was saying were too profound. Too perplexing. First Billy Pringle, now Mostly Sanborn. Of course, there was the possibility that he was dreaming again, or still. That would explain everything. There was an odd comfort in the notion. He stared out the window. “What did she look like?”

  “Like always,” said Mostly without hesitation. “Just like always. You know how she dressed . . . and all that red hair . . .”

  The thought hit Crisp like a thunderbolt, instantly dispelling all the fog and confusion. “Pinch me, Most’,” he said. Once again he put the window screens aside. This time, though, he threw them.

  Crisp ransacked the contents of the trunk, collecting all the wigs he came across. When he was done he had seven in all. Long and straight. Short and curly. Brown, black, and blond. “No auburn,” he whispered, holding them up for inspection with the eager appreciation of a savage admiring his haul of scalps.

  “Red?” Mostly speculated hesitantly.

  Crisp nodded. “Mrs. McKenniston played a redhead on at least one occasion in her early days. “She must have had a red wig.”

  “But there ain’t one there?”

  “Exactly,” said Crisp with a smile. The sun was coming out slowly. It would be spring soon. “But she must have had one . . .” He let the sentence hang. He wanted Mostly to form the same conclusion, as if to validate his own thoughts.

  “Then . . . she lost it,” said Mostly, almost to himself. He, too, was suddenly emboldened by an idea. “Or somebody took it,” he said.

  “Why would anyone take it?” Crisp coaxed.

  “Well . . . could’ve been the kids. They was always into this stuff. Wasn’t s’posed to, but . . .”

  “It probably would have turned up, if that had been the case,” Crisp thought out loud. “Why else would anyone want the wig?”

  Mostly thought. “To use it.”

  “Why?”

  Mostly cringed slightly. He wasn’t accustomed to interrogation. “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do,” said Crisp. “Think, Most’. Why would someone wear a wig?”

  “Well, lots of women wear wigs, don’t they?”

  “Not wigs of an entirely different color than their own hair!”

  “Well, then”—he brightened briefly—“for a costume party!”

  “Or?”

  “Or a play, like this redheaded character you just said.”

  “Or?”

  Mostly pillaged his brain. Wigs were at no ready point of reference. A jumble of random notions, themselves only newly formed and inseminated by Crisp’s gentle persistence, all at once fell together and gave birth to a single, cogent thought. “To look like somebody else?”

  “Who?” Crisp prodded.

  “A redhead,” said Mostly.

  “Which redhead?”

  Mostly found himself in a box canyon. There was no way out. Given the context of their conversation, there was only one redhead in the world. “Mandy,” he whispered. He studied the word in disbelief as it hung in the air. The longer he studied it, the more sense it made. “Mandy!”

  “Bingo,” said Crisp with a sly smile.

  “It wasn’t Mandy we saw up at the cemetery,” said Mostly. He slowly turned his eyes to Crisp from the floor where they had been wandering blindly. “It was somebody who looked like her!”

  “And how much like her would they have to be—in the fog, wearing her clothes and a red wig—at that distance?”

  Mostly sat down on a barrel of pool chemicals. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his balding head. “Not much,” he said. He was staring at the contents of the trunk.

  “And this,” said Crisp, flipping open the lid of the makeup kit, “was the makeup Mandy was covered with.”

  Mostly looked up at him with helpless eyes. His brain had absorbed all it could. “Huh?”

  “Never mind,” said Crisp. “Leeman Russell told me there was a freezer in here. I don’t see it.”

  “He must be thinkin’ ’bout over to Spencer’s,” Mostly replied, jerking his thumb to the south. “Theirs is in the barn.”

  “Then there isn’t one here?”

  “Oh, sure. Everybody up here’s got ’em. Ours is up to the little house.”

  “Can I see it?”

  As they stepped from stone to stone up the sloping path, Crisp learned that the little house, which sat in the shade of three huge old oak trees a few yards down the slope from the big house, was the kitchen and servants’ quarters. It also contained two or three spare bedrooms for those occasions when the big house was full.

  They crossed the porch. Mostly propped the screen door open with his rump and rummaged through a prodigious number of keys on his key ring. “I didn’t know people locked things on the island,” said Crisp.

  “Oh, well, it’s the McKennistons’ orders,” said Mostly. “I guess comin’ from the mainland, they’re just naturally suspicious. Mass’-chu-setts, you know.”

  “I see.”

  “Makes ’em feel good, I guess.”

  Crisp nodded. Mostly extracted yet another key and stuck it in the lock. It worked.

  “There she is!” He turned the doorknob. “ ’Course, we always keep a window or two unlocked in case we forget the keys.”

  As the door swung open, they were greeted by the outrushing of dead air, heavy with the perfume of mothballs and crisp linen. It was colder inside than out, and their breath formed in clouds that hung for an instant in the air, then vanished.

  “This way,” said Mostly. The pine-board floors creaked beneath their feet and echoed through endless whitewashed rooms as they threaded their way among mounds of sheet-shrouded furniture.

  “Why would anybody do such a thing is what I want to know,” said Mostly. They were in the kitchen. “The freezer’s down through that door there,” he said, motioning toward a small archway at the far end of the room. He led on. “I mean, if someone’s fool enough to show up at a funeral dressed like the person that’s gettin’ buried . . . Here it is. This is the pantry and that’s the freezer.” He pulled open the thick insulated door, disclosing a small sheet metal–lined room about five feet wide and six feet long. “The light’s right on the left, there.”

  Deep shelves lined the wall on both sides, leaving an aisle about two feet wide down the center. Directly over the aisle was a rail, firmly embedded in the wall at both ends and supported in the middle by a brace suspended from the ceiling. Four meat hooks hung from the rail. Against the wall at the far end, also suspended from the ceiling, was a small cooling unit.

  “If someone’s fool enough to do that,” Mostly continued, “why didn’t they pop out sooner, so everyone could see?”

  “That’s a good question,” said Crisp. He stepped to the back of the cooler and began inspecting the meat hooks. “Could you pass me a chair, Most’?”

  Mostly handed him a step stool, which was kept under a pantry counter. “This do?”

  “Perfectly.”

  “They musta wanted us to see, don’t you think? I mean, she just stood there, didn’t she?” He shivered. “Man, I tell you, I still half think it was her ghost, you know?”

  Crisp climbed on the stool and studied the meat hooks for a few moments. Then he climbed down and began to examine the floor. “You can take the stool, Most’,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to have a flashlight handy, would you?”

  There was no response. Crisp looked up just as the door closed. The click of the heavy metal latch as it slipped into place was followed immediately by another as the exterio
r bolt was shut. He was locked in. It had all happened in an instant. He hadn’t even had time to get off his knees.

  “Most’?” he said softly, in disbelief. “Mostly!” he shouted. He didn’t get up. He crawled to the door and pounded on it. Once. Twice. “Mostly! Let me out!”

  His voice was stuffed back into his ears by the thickness of the soundproof walls. He might as well have been shouting in the grave, pounding on concrete. “Mostly!” he said weakly.

  He wasn’t surprised when, with a series of kicks, thumps, and wheezes, the generator kicked on. Already he could feel the blast of frigid air. He’d been on the island too long. He’d forgotten to trust no one.

  For what seemed a long time, he tried to loosen the metal latch plate with one of the meat hooks, but his strength gave out long before the latch was compromised. The warmth from his exertion had created condensation on some of the piping, and already it had turned to frost. It was a very efficient cooling system, he thought. Perhaps a bit too large for the room.

  The single lightbulb was recessed in the ceiling and protected behind a sturdy metal cage. He was unable to get his hands close enough to it to keep them warm, only close enough to partially blind himself. His arms got tired, so he held them up one at a time, thrusting the other into a pocket in the interval.

  Within thirty minutes he knew he was freezing to death. His extremities had no sensation. He gave up trying to warm his hands. Perhaps his brain was freezing, as well. He wasn’t afraid. He’d anticipated this day all his life. He’d tempted it. Taunted it. But it had to come. He hadn’t won the war, but he’d won a lot of battles. For what it was worth.

  He thought again of Steve Caton’s eyes and the crucifix-shaped shadow on the wall. He thought what a luxury to have a few minutes to anticipate death. A few precious moments of cognizance in which to organize his thoughts and make his peace. He prayed. Not for the first time, but the first time in a long time. It was a very practical thing to do, given the circumstances.

  It wasn’t long before he couldn’t keep his eyes open. He was completely exhausted. The needlelike pain was lessening now. He even felt warm. He wasn’t sure where exactly, but there was a sensation of warmth somewhere. He lay down in the corner. Sleep was the thing. Sleep.

  For the first time in as long as he could remember, his brain was empty. The myriad of thoughts and worries that had occupied every waking minute of every day, all his life, had been frozen to silence. The insistent snatches of poetry that bolted across the realm of his consciousness like comets, daring him to catch them, surround them with words and commit them to paper . . . gone. The everpresent, overarching, omnipotent feeling of failure that wrapped his every thought and feeling in shadow . . . gone. The chamber of horrors, the faces of the dead whose hollow, staring eyes had haunted him for eternity . . . gone. None of it mattered anymore. None of it would follow where he was going.

  His cheek rested on the floor. His eyes closed. Already death was blissful.

  “You’re going to die?”

  The voice wasn’t human. It didn’t come to his ears, it was in his head. He opened his eyes. Amanda Murphy was sitting in the corner by the door with her legs crossed. She was wearing the same thing she’d worn at the graveside, and she had the makeup on again. It was peeling and cracked in places, missing in others—the same as when he’d seen her in the morgue. He couldn’t tell whether or not she was bleeding. Probably. He tried to speak, but the necessary apparatus had ceased to function. Bits of him seemed to be preceding him into the afterlife. He smiled weakly and nodded.

  “You don’t know yet.”

  He shook his head ever so slightly. No. He didn’t know. He thought he did. Just half an hour ago he felt he had the puzzle by the tail. Then Mostly Sanborn shut him in the freezer. Mostly Sanborn, of all people. That threw everything out the window. He didn’t know anything now, except that none of it mattered. His unconscious had risen to the surface and was doing all his thinking, all by itself concocting idiocies and impossibilities out of thin air. He let it run.

  Would he still be old after he died? Didn’t he read somewhere that we’re all supposed to be thirty-three in heaven? Amanda Murphy wasn’t thirty-three, but she hadn’t really died completely, had she? She was still holding on, somehow.

  Why would she want to?

  Maybe she’d fall in love with him if he was younger. He imagined a broader smile on his face. He suspected she’d just hang around until someone sorted it all out. Maybe she had to. You hear so many stories about the afterlife.

  His field of vision had been reduced to two small orbs of light whose fuzzy edges were rimmed with halos of darkness, and his eyes were too heavy to keep on her. His gaze drifted from her face, down her dress, over her feet, and back across the floor to a faint, oily smudge not a foot from his face. He knew instinctively what it was. Theatrical makeup. Very old. Lead based.

  He’d been right, after all. Amanda Murphy’s murderer had painted her face with makeup, then put her in the freezer. She’d lain in the same place he now occupied . . . and Mostly was the murderer. It all worked out, after all. He certainly had access and opportunity. Motive? Well, it wasn’t too hard to imagine one or two. You never know what goes on in people’s minds.

  It didn’t matter. But it was nice to know he’d had the right idea.

  When he looked up again, Amanda was gone.

  He wouldn’t stay around and haunt people after he died. He wanted to get as far away as possible.

  The floor began to feel warm. He would have liked a pillow.

  Of course, there was the problem of Andy Calderwood’s finger-prints, speaking of haunting. And why the makeup in the first place? And who had played the part of Amanda Murphy in Rockland? Surely not Mostly. And why? Why all the elaborate subterfuge? Of course, murderers often try to incriminate others, but why someone who was dead at the time of the murder? What sane person would do such a thing?

  What sane person?

  That was the whole point, wasn’t it? What if the whole thing had been meticulously planned to make no sense? It would have to be the work of someone completely cold, calculating, and unbelievably ruthless. Someone who had simultaneously planned the murder and the defense—not guilty by reason of insanity. The type abounded in his former profession.

  The murderer had nothing in common with Mostly Sanborn.

  The more he thought about it, the more questions remained unanswered.

  He’d have to stop thinking about it.

  Surprisingly, it wasn’t difficult.

  Sleep was the thing.

  He huddled a little closer in the corner, not because it warmed him, but because it was comfortable. His eyelids threatened to collapse under their own weight, but he’d fight for a minute more. No rush.

  His heart had slowed almost to a stop. His hands and fingers were bright blue and one and a half times their normal size. The color didn’t match his plaid shirt. Charlie Young would know what to do. He could hide them, put them in white dress gloves, if they weren’t too swollen.

  They looked like the hands of an old Black lady. He couldn’t feel them. Couldn’t move them. Maybe they belonged to someone else after all.

  There was a memory tied to the tail of that notion. Something Leeman Russell had said about his bicycle seat. It didn’t look right. Didn’t fit.

  Didn’t fit.

  That was it. Suddenly he knew how the fingerprints of a dead man ended up on Amanda Murphy’s neck. Simple really, for someone mad enough to conceive it.

  The biggest hurdle had been overcome, thanks to Leeman. Thanks to the cold and his big blue hands.

  Something else occurred to him, too. In his time he’d come up against people who were capable of almost anything, people whose mere presence could make the blood run cold.

  They’d have taken off their hats to this one.

  It was going to be good to exit a world through which such a person could pass undetected, but he shuddered to think that he was leaving this par
ticular murderer behind.

  Of course, only the how had been solved. The why remained. That would be someone else’s problem.

  It was time. He hadn’t breathed in a minute or so. Nor did he want to, particularly. He closed his eyes to die.

  As if attending that cue, the cooling fan shut off. There was a rattling at the door. No! Crisp thought. No! He couldn’t open his eyes. He didn’t want to. He was ready to go. He was eager to go. If someone found him now . . . he felt the inrushing of air. Frantic hands were already on him, under his arms, pulling, dragging. One person, probably. Breathing very hard and heavy. Crisp tried to speak. Tried desperately. Leave me alone! I beg you! Nothing came out. Please . . . The freezer door closed behind him. Amanda!

  “It was a good thing Marky Williams was there, is all I can say.” It was Matty’s voice, without the jam and flour smell. He recognized the hospital smell immediately. His hands and feet felt as if they were immersed in lava. The pain was excruciating. “If he hadn’t been . . . well, I hate to think. I just hate to think.”

  Crisp hated to think, too. He hated to think he was still alive. He wanted to cry, but apparently his tears were frozen. Other parts of his body were rapidly tingling to life, screaming in protest at being dragged from the grave’s edge with deafening coruscations of exquisite pain. He opened his mouth. He meant to cry, to scream, to let out the anguish, but nothing came. Finally the tears welled in his eyes, collected at the corners, and coursed down his face. He tasted their warm salt on his tongue.

  “Oh, Lord in heaven!” someone was yelling. Another woman. Not Matty. “Dr. Amburst!” she cried. “Dr. Amburst!” The electronic echo of her voice reverberated through the corridors.

  “Look at him!” Matty screamed. “Do something! Do something!”

  There was no peace anymore. The world was within him and around him. Pain was perfecting itself throughout his body. It may kill him yet. Please, God.

  “One finger and two toes,” said Matty. “That’s all you lost.”