Cornell Woolrich - Nightwebs (A Collection of Stories)

“The undertaker’s here.”

And he looked questioningly at Traynor; the latter nodded his permission for removal.

She said, “Oh, I’d better get upstairs; I don’t want to — see him go,” and hurriedly ran inside.

Traynor didn’t hang around to watch, either. He drifted back around the side of the house again. He let himself through the poultry yard, and out at the far side of it, where Fears was puttering around. He approached him with a fine aimlessness, like a man who has nothing to do with himself and gravitates toward the nearest person in sight to kill time chatting.

“He had a nice place here,” he remarked.

Fears straightened, leaned on his hoe, drew his sleeve across his forehead. “No money in it, though.” He was looking the other way, off from Traynor.

“What do you figure she’ll do, keep on running it herself now that he’s gone?”

The question should have brought the other’s head around toward him, at least. It didn’t. Fears spat reflectively, still kept looking stubbornly away from him.

“I don’t think she’s cut out for it, don’t think she’d make a go of it.”

There’s something in this direction, away from where he’s looking, that he doesn’t want me to notice, Traynor told himself. He subtly jockeyed himself around so that he could look behind him without turning his entire head.

There was a toolshed there. Implements were stacked up against the wall at the back of it. The door was open and the sun shone sufficiently far in to reveal them. It glinted from the working edges of shovels, rakes, spades. But he noted a trowel with moist clayey soil drying out along its wedge; it was drying to a dirty gray white color.

“That looks like the well,” he thought. Aloud he said: “Sun’s getting hotter by the minute. Think I’ll have a drink.”

Fears dropped the hoe handle, stooped and got it again.

“I’d advise you to get it from the kitchen,” he said tautly. “Well’s all stirred up and muddy, ‘pears like part of the sides must have crumbled. Have to ‘low it to settle.”

“Oh, I’m not choosy,” Traynor remarked, strolling toward it. It hadn’t rained in weeks. He shifted around to the far side of the structure, where he could face Fears while he pretended to dabble with the chained drinking cup.

There could be no mistaking it, the man was suddenly tense, rigid, out there in the sun, even while he went ahead stiffly hoeing. Every play of his shoulders and arms was forced. He wasn’t even watching what he was doing, his hoe was damaging some tender young shoots. Traynor didn’t bother getting his drink after all. He knew all he needed to know now. What’s Fears been up to down there that he don’t want me to find out about? — Traynor wondered. And more important still, did it have anything to do with Eleazar Hunt’s death? He couldn’t answer the first — yet — but he already had more than a sneaking suspicion that the answer to the second was yes.

He sauntered back toward the tiller.

“You’re right,” he admitted; “it’s all soupy.”

With every step that took him farther away from the well rim, he could see more and more of the apprehension lift from Fears. It was almost physical, the way he seemed to straighten out, loosen up there under his eyes, until he was all relaxed again.

“Told you so,” Fears muttered, and once again he wiped his forehead with a great wide sweep of the arm. But it looked more like relief this time than sweat.

“Well, take it easy.” Traynor drifted lethargically back toward the front of the house once more. He knew Fears’s eyes were following him every step of the way; he could almost feel them boring into the back of his skull. But he knew that if he turned and looked, the other would lower his head too quickly for him to catch him at it, so he didn’t bother.

Hunt’s body had been removed now and Doctor Johnson was on the point of leaving. They walked out to the roadway together toward their cars.

“Well, son,” the doctor wanted to know, “still looking for something ornery in this or are you satisfied?”

“Perfectly satisfied now,” Traynor assured him grimly, but he didn’t say in which way he meant it. “Tell the truth, doc,” he added. “Did you ever see a corpse grin that broadly before?”

“There you go again,” sighed Johnson. “Well, no, can’t say I have. But there is such a thing as cadaveric spasm, you know.”

“There is,” Traynor agreed. “And this isn’t it. In fact this is so remarkable I’m going to have it photographed before I let the undertaker put a finger to him. I’d like to keep a record of it.”

“Shucks,” the doctor scoffed as he got in his coupé. “Why, I bet there never was a normal decease yet that couldn’t be made to ’pear onnatural if you tried hard enough.”

“And there never was an unnatural one yet,” Traynor answered softly, “that couldn’t be made to appear normal — if you were willing to take things for granted.”

After he had arranged for the photographs to be taken, he dropped in at the general store. A place like that, he knew, was the nerve center, the telephone exchange, of the village, so to speak. The news of Eleazar Hunt’s death had spread by now, and the cracker barrel brigade were holding a post-mortem. Traynor, who was not known by sight to anyone present, for his duties had not brought him over this way much, did not identify himself for fear of making them self-conscious in the presence of the law. He hung around, trying to make up his mind between two brands of plug tobacco, neither of which he intended buying, meanwhile getting an earful.

“Waal,” said one individual, chewing a straw, “guess we’ll never know now whether he actually did git all that money from the highway commission folks claim he did, for slicin’ off a corner of his propitty to run that new road through.”

“He always claimed he didn’t. Not a penny of it ever showed up in the bank. My cousin works there and he’d be the first one to know it if it did.”

“They say he tuck and hid it out at his place, that’s why. Too mean to trust the bank, and he didn’t want people thinking he was rich.”

An ancient of eighty stepped forth, right angled over a hickory stick, and tapped it commandingly to gain the floor. “Shows ye it don’t pay to teach an old dog new tricks! I’ve knowed Eleazar Hunt since he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and this is the first time I ever heard tell of him even smiling, let alone laughing fit to kill like they claim he done. Exceptin’ just once, but that were beyond his control and didn’t count.”

“When was that?” asked Traynor, chiming in carefully casual. He knew by experience the best way to bring out these villagers’ full narrative powers was to act bored stiff.

The old man fastened on him eagerly, glad of an audience. “Why, right in here where we’re standing now, ‘bout two years ago. Him and me was both standing up to the counter to git waited on, and Andy took me first and asked me what I wanted. So I raised this here stick of mine to point up at the shelf and without meaning to, I grazed Eleazar’s side with the tip of it — I can’t see so good any more, you know. Well, sir, for a minute I couldn’t believe my ears. Here he was, not only laughing, but giggling like a girl, clutching at his ribs and shying away from me. Then the minute he got free of the stick, he changed right back to his usual self, mouth turned down like a horseshoe, snapped, ‘Careful what you’re doing, will you!’ Ticklish, that’s all it was. Some’s more so than others.”

“Anyone else see that but you?”

“I saw it,” said the storekeeper. “I was standing right behind the counter when it happened. I never knew that about him until then myself. Funny mixture, to be ticklish with a glum disposition like he had.”