Lawrence Block - The Best American Mystery Stories 1999

“Yes,” I said.

She paused for a moment and poured us all tea. “Anyway, Rose was especially sensitive,” she went on. “She wrote poetry and wanted to go to university to study English literature when it was all over. French, too. She spoke French very well and spent a lot of time talking to the poor wounded French soldiers. Often they were with the English, you know, and there was nobody could talk to them. Rose did. She fell in love with a handsome young English lieutenant. Nicholas, his name was.” She smiled. “But we were young. We were always falling in love back then.”

“What happened to her?” I asked.

“Rose? She broke under the strain. Shell-shock, I suppose you’d call it. You hear a lot about the poor boys, the breakdowns, the self-inflicted wounds, but you never hear much about the women, do you? Where are we in the history books? We might not have been shooting at the Germans and only in minimal danger of getting shot at ourselves — though there were times — but we were there . We saw the slaughter firsthand. We were up to our elbows in blood and guts. Some people just couldn’t take it, the way some of the boys couldn’t take combat. I’ll say this, though, I think it was Nicholas’s death that finally sent Rose over the edge. It was the following year, 1918, the end of March, near a little village on the Somme called St. Quentin. She found him, you know, on the field. It was pure chance. Half his head had been blown away. She was never the same. She used to mutter to herself in French and go into long silences. Eventually, she tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose of morphine, but a doctor found her in time. She was invalided out in the end.”

“Do you know what happened next?”

“I visited her as soon as the war was over. She’d just come out of the hospital and was living with her parents. They were wealthy landowners — very posh, you might say — and they hadn’t a clue what to do with her. She was an embarrassment to them. In the end they set up a small fund for her, so she would never have to go without, and left her to her own devices.”

After a moment or two’s silence, I showed Midge the book of poetry. Again, she fingered it like a blind person looking for meaning. “Oh, yes. Ivor Gurney. She was always reading this.” She turned the pages. “This was her favorite.” She read us a short poem called “Bach and the Sentry,” in which the poet on sentry duty hears his favorite Bach prelude in his imagination and wonders how he will feel later, when he actually plays the piece again in peacetime. Then she shook her head. “Poor mad Rose. Nobody knew what to do with her. Do tell me what became of her.”

I told her what I knew, which wasn’t much, though for some reason I held back the part about Tommy and his mistake. I didn’t want Midge to know that my godson had mistaken her friend for a traitor. It seemed enough to lay the blame at the feet of a Gypsy thief and hope that Midge wasn’t one of those women who followed criminal trials closely in the newspapers.

Nor did I tell her that Rose’s house had been destroyed by a bomb almost a week after the murder and that she would almost certainly have been killed anyway. Midge didn’t need that kind of cruel irony. She had suffered enough; she had enough bad memories to fuel her nightmares, and enough to worry about in the shape of her two boys.

I simply told her that Rose was a very private person, certainly eccentric in her dress and her mannerisms, and that none of us really knew her very well. She was a part of the community, though, and we all mourned her loss.

So Mad Maggie was another of war’s victims, I thought, as I breathed in the scent of the apple tree before getting into bed that night. One of the uncelebrated ones. She came to our community to live out her days in anonymous grief and whatever inner peace she could scrounge for herself, her sole valuable possessions a book of poetry, an old photograph, and a nursing medal.

And so she would have remained, a figure to be mocked by the children and ignored by the adults, had it not been for another damn war, another damaged soul, and the same poppy field in Flanders.

Requiescat in pace, Rose, though I am not a religious man. Requiescat in pace.

It should never have happened, but they hanged Tommy Fletcher for the murder of Rose Faversham at Wandsworth Prison on 25th May, 1941, at eight o’clock in the morning.

Everyone said Tommy should have got off for psychiatric reasons, but his barrister had a permanent hangover, and the judge had an irritable bowel. In addition, the expert psychiatrist hired to evaluate him didn’t know shell-shock from an Oedipus complex.

The only thing we could console ourselves with was that Tommy went to the gallows proud and at peace with himself for having avenged his father’s death.

I hadn’t the heart to tell him that he was wrong about Mad Maggie, that she wasn’t the woman he thought she was.

When I was a boy, I would look at my father and see everything right with the world. He seemed bigger then. At the end of the day, he would come in from the fields with his shirt slung over his shoulder and the sun at his back, and every muscle in his body would be perfectly defined. I had looked up to him back then, like most boys looked up to their fathers. And I had wanted to grow up to be the same man that he was.

The rub of it is... time has a way of changing the order of things.

My father had started drinking nearly twelve years ago, not long after my mother had died of ovarian cancer. At first, though I was only eleven at the time, I thought I had understood: anything to help forget that bone-thin skeleton, that rictus smile that she had become just before her death. It was an image that haunted me for a long time afterward. And it was an image that had never stopped haunting my father.

Now, I was sitting in the truck, staring at the house, wondering how things could change so much in just ten or twelve short years. It was mid-morning. The sun was already high in the sky, and there was a dark shadow enclosing the front porch. I stared a while longer, then climbed out of the truck and closed the door.

By the time I made it to the front steps, my father had come out of the house, dragging himself across the porch like a man who had been ill for a long time now. The screen door bounced off the jamb behind him. He fell into one of the rattan chairs my mother had bought, hawked up a wad of phlegm, and sent it flying over the porch railing. “What’re you doing here?” he asked.

“Just thought I’d come by and see how you’re doing. That’s all.”

“Yeah?” He scratched at the stubble on his chin, which had been growing for better than a week by the look of it. It hadn’t been all that long ago that the first signs of gray had begun to sneak in. Now, it was almost all gray. “Well, I’m doing okay. Anything else?”

“Heard you were in town last night.”

“Believe I was.”

“Heard you got booted out of the Forty-Niner.”

“Did I?”

“That’s what Len Dozier says.”

My father nodded slightly, as if that sounded close enough to the truth to suit him. Then he buried his face in his hands and let out a slow breath of air that seemed like an effort to control something inside that he found frightening. When he looked up again, I was reminded of the fact that this was the morning after. His coloring was ashy, his eyes bloodshot. “I might have,” he said. “I don’t exactly remember.”

“How’d you get home?”

“Drove.”

He thought maybe he had taken Buzzard Roost Road, which was the long way home no matter how you figured it. But he really couldn’t be certain. He might have gone down Old Forty-Four and across. To be honest, he finally confessed, he couldn’t recall much of anything about last night. “Things get a little fuzzy after I stopped at the Forty-Niner.”