Ross MACDONALD - The Underground Man

“How did she find out?”

“Mr. Kilpatrick told her, according to what she said. The man in the travel agency was a friend of Mr. Kilpatrick’s.”

I felt a change behind my eyes, as if a physical adjustment had occurred there. My witnesses were beginning to chime with each other. Mrs. Snow went on with her story:

“It was a nasty quarrel, as I said. Mrs. Broadhurst went into the long history of his womanizing. He turned around and blamed it all on her. I won’t tell you the names he called her. But he claimed she hadn’t been a wife to him in ten years, and he got up and stomped out.

“Poor little Stanley was sick and shaking. He was having his dinner in the kitchen with me but he couldn’t help hearing the quarrel, and he was old enough to know what it meant. He ran out and tried to stop his father, but Captain Broadhurst roared away in his sports car. Then his mother got ready to leave the house. Stanley wanted to go with her, but she wouldn’t take him. She asked me to put him to bed, which I did. But after that I was busy in the kitchen, and he slipped out on me. I remember the shock it gave me when I went to check his bedroom and saw his empty pillow.

“I got another shock when I was going through the rooms looking for him. Mrs. Broadhurst’s pistol case – the one her father left her – was sitting on top of the desk in the study. The box of shells was lying there open, and one of the pistols was gone.” She looked up, unseeing, remembering. “I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. I waited for her and Stanley to come home.”

She sat in her platform rocker, resigned but somehow expectant, as if she was still waiting for that night to end. “They were gone for well over an hour. And when they came home, mother and son, they came home together. Their feet were wet from the night grass, and they were both white and scared-looking. Mrs. Broadhurst hustled Stanley off to bed and dismissed me. When I got home my own boy was missing from his bed. It was a bad night for mothers.”

“And a bad night for sons,” I said. “Do you think Stanley saw his father killed?”

“I don’t know. I do know he heard the shot. He told me later his mother killed an owl – that was the explanation she gave Stanley. But I think that he suspected she shot his father. I think the suspicion kept growing on him, but he couldn’t face up to it. He kept trying to prove that his daddy was alive, right up until the day of his own death.”

“Did he ever discuss his father’s death with you?”

“Not his death. We never mentioned death. But he sometimes asked me what I thought had happened to his father. And I used to tell him stories – that his father had gone to live in another country, like Australia, and maybe he would be coming back some day.” Her eyes came up to my face, clear and intense. “What else could I do? I couldn’t tell him what I suspected – that his mother shot his father.”

“And your son buried him.”

“I didn’t know that at the time.” But her voice hurried away from the point. “Even if I had, I wouldn’t have told Stanley, or anyone else. A woman’s got to look out for her own flesh and blood.”

I left her and drove through pouring rain to the hospital. It was a four-story concrete building occupying a city block and surrounded by clinics and medical office buildings. A Pink Lady in the lobby told me that Mrs. Broadhurst was able to receive visitors and gave me the number of her room on the fourth floor.

Before going up I paid a visit to the pathology department. The office and lab were on the ground floor at the end of a sickly green corridor lined with heating pipes. A sign on the door said: “Authorized Personnel Only.”

A stoic-faced man in a white smock greeted me with polite disinterest. The name board on his desk said: “W. Silcox, M.D.” He told me that the body of Leo Broadhurst hadn’t arrived yet, but was expected shortly.

Behind his horn-rimmed spectacles, the doctor’s eyes showed a certain professional eagerness. “I understand there’s quite a lot of him left.”

“Quite a lot. You should look for gunshot wounds, particularly in the head. I’ve talked to a couple of witnesses who think he was shot there. But my witnesses aren’t entirely dependable. We need concrete evidence.”

“That’s what I’m here for. I tend to learn more from dead people than I do from living ones.”

“Do you still have Stanley Broadhurst’s body?”

“It’s in the mortuary. Would you like to see it?”

“I have. I wanted to check with you on cause of death.”

“Multiple stab wounds, with some kind of long knife.”

“Front or back?”

“Front. In the abdomen. He was also struck at the base of the skull with the pickax.”

Going up in the elevator to the fourth floor, I almost envied Silcox his unliving witnesses. They were past lying, past hurting and being hurt.

I checked in with the girl at the nurses’ station. She said that Mrs. Broadhurst was feeling much better, but I should limit my visit to ten minutes or so.

I tapped on the door of Mrs. Broadhurst’s private room and was bidden to come in. The room was full of flowers in and out of season – roses and carnations, exotic lilacs. A vase of yellow daffodils on the dresser had Brian Kilpatrick’s card standing on edge against it.

Mrs. Broadhurst was sitting up in an armchair beside the streaming window. She had on a multicolored robe which seemed to reflect the flowers in the room, and she looked quite well. But there was a basic hopelessness about her eyes which tied my tongue for a moment.

She spoke first: “You’re Mr. Archer, aren’t you? I’m glad to see you – to have a chance to thank you.”

I was taken by surprise. “What on earth for?”

“My grandson’s safe return. His mother phoned me a short time ago. With my son – my son Stanley gone – Ronny is all I have left.”

“He’s a good boy, and he seems to be all right.”

“Where did you find him? Jean wasn’t quite clear about it.”

I gave her a collapsed account of my weekend and said in conclusion: “Don’t blame the girl too much. She saw your son killed, and it threw her. All she could think about was saving Ronny.”

I remembered as I said it that Susan had witnessed two murders, fifteen years apart. And I asked myself: if Mrs. Broadhurst killed her husband, was it possible that she had also killed her son, or had him killed? I found I couldn’t ask her. Filled with her fragile gratitude, and the flowers her friends had sent her, the room wouldn’t let such questions be spoken aloud.

As witnesses often do, Mrs. Broadhurst provided an opening herself. “I’m afraid I don’t really understand about the girl. What did you say her name was?”

“Susan Crandall.”

“What was she doing on the mountain with my son and grandson?”

“I think she was trying to understand the past.”

“I don’t quite follow. I’m very stupid today.” Her voice and eyes divided her impatience between herself and me.

“Susan had been there before,” I said, “when she was a small child. She went there with her mother one night. Perhaps you remember her mother. Her maiden name was Martha Nickerson, and I believe she used to work for you.”

The displeasure in her voice and eyes deepened. “Who have you been talking to?”

“Quite a number of people. You’re just about the last one on my list. I was hoping you could help me to reconstruct what happened at the Mountain House that night about fifteen years ago.”

She shook her head, and stayed with her face half-averted. Profiled against the window, her head was like a classical medallion laid over the rain-blurred image of the city.