John Manning - The Killing Room

Harry Noons cleared his throat again, leading to a major coughing fit. The sound of phlegm being hacked up in his throat was plainly audible on the tape. Finally he found his voice again.

“It was getting near to fall, you know, kind of like now. Still hot enough most days to call it summer, but a chill would come in now and then. And I remembuh it was chilly that day. Windy. The skies were gray. And Miss Beatrice, she was crying. All day long, every time I seen her, she was crying. And so I asked Clem-”

“Who’s Clem?”

“Well, he was the one who done it.”

“Done what, Mr. Noons?”

“Killed her.”

“Who was he, and why did he kill Beatrice?”

“Well, that’s what I’m telling ya! Clem was kind of a slow-witted man, you know. Big and thick. Body and head, you know. Thick-headed. Clem worked on the grounds, like me, though he did the heavy work and was in charge of the barn. He was always chopping wood or hauling hay for the horses. Those were his jobs. Clem hoped to marry Beatrice, even though that baby was not his. He said he didn’t care, that he loved Beatrice and would be a good father to her baby. So one day I asked him what was wrong with Beatrice. He said he didn’t know. I believe he was telling me the truth then. But later I saw them arguing.”

“Where were they arguing?”

“Outside her room down in the basement,” Harry Noons said. “Back in those days the basement was the servants’ quarters, and there was an entrance from the back of the house. Nowadays that’s been closed off, and you can only get to the basement from the inside of the house. That’s because Mr. Young doesn’t have any servants who live there anymore. After what happened to Beatrice, all the servants were turned into day staff. No servant ever lived in that house again. The servants’ entrance was sealed off.”

“But you were inside the servants’ quarters to witness this argument?”

“Ayuh, I most certainly was. I had gone inside to wash my hands. I was done for the day and I was going home. And I saw Beatrice and Clem arguing. She was saying she’d never marry him, that she was going to marry a much better man than he was, and it was making Clem angry. He didn’t like to be told that anyone was better than him. He was a dumb animal, but like any animal that gets cornered, that gets provoked, he got angry. And I remembuh Beatrice was holding her baby in one arm as she shouted at Clem, and Clem called the baby a bastard. She slapped him then, right across the face.”

“What did you do?”

“I was just trying to mind my business, you know, so I didn’t say nuthin’. I finished washing my hands and got the hell out of there. I went up the stairs back outside and then walked across the terrace to the kitchen entrance. I stepped inside for just a moment to tell Mrs. Young that I was done for the day. The sun was starting to set, I remembuh. The sky was a bright blood red. Mrs. Young told me that Mr. Young would be down in a moment to give me my pay. He was good like that. Always paid me at the end of each day. But then we heard the screams from downstairs. They were horrible. Really bloodcurdling. Mrs. Young turned all white, and I immediately ran back outside and headed down the stairs into the servants’ entrance. There I found Beatrice…”

The old man’s voice faltered.

“How did you find her, Mr. Noons?”

“I found her impaled on the wall with a pitchfork.”

He began coughing again, the horror of the memory overtaking him.

“And where was the baby?”

“Don’t know that. Nowhere that I could see. But Beatrice…she was hanging there on the wall, dripping blood everywhere…”

The old man made a sound of horror and began hacking violently.

Kip switched off the recorder.

“It took him a while to compose himself and be able to speak again,” Kip told them, “so I’ll just paraphrase the rest of what he told me. The household came running, Mr. Young and all the Young sons, including our current Mr. Young, Howard. Harry Noons told them what he’d seen, and they immediately dispersed across the estate looking for Clem. They searched for hours, but couldn’t find him.”

“Did they ever find him?” Douglas asked.

Kip shook his head. “Apparently not. He never resurfaced, as far as Harry Noons ever knew.”

“But the sheriff must have led a manhunt to find him,” Douglas said.

“No.” Kip sighed. “For the simple reason that your great-great-grandfather never made any accusation against him.” Kip sat back down, shaking his head. “The family was terrified of scandal. They only reported that Beatrice had died of an accident. They never let anyone into the house. They never told the sheriff the nature of Beatrice’s accident, and reported simply that she’d been buried in the family cemetery nearby.”

“And such has always been the power of my family that what they decree is accepted by the authorities.” Douglas sighed. “Money has its privileges.”

“But the newspaper reports make no mention that she had a baby,” Carolyn observed.

“No,” Kip said. “That much isn’t all that surprising. Back in the day, a bastard child was an unmentionable in the press.”

“So what happened to the baby?” Carolyn asked.

“Harry Noons was told that Mr. Young had found a home for the baby.”

Douglas seemed aghast. “And the sheriff didn’t even inquire further?”

Kip shook his head. “Mr. Young was apparently simply taken at his word. Of course, this was in the days before aggressive child welfare services and things like that.”

Douglas stood, unnerved and agitated by all that he heard about his family. “And so when the high and mighty Desmond Young issued a pronouncement, the local authorities just shook their heads and said, ‘Yes, sir.’” He snorted. “I know how it works. And it’s not right.”

“So there was never any investigation into Beatrice’s death,” Carolyn said.

“None,” Kip said.

“And no inquiry into what happened to her baby.”

“None.”

Carolyn was adding it all up in her mind. “And Clem disappeared, never to be heard from again.”

“Except to haunt members of the family,” Douglas said. “Okay. So this tells us some of the history. How did the lottery start? What connection does it have?”

“I’m afraid that I can’t tell you precisely,” Kip said. “Yet again, Mr. Young was stingy with some details. All he would say is that without the lottery, without the sacrifice of one member of the family every ten years, the entire clan would perish. This is what was told to his father, Desmond Young, who inaugurated the first lottery a week after Beatrice’s death.”

“Who told him?” Douglas wanted to know. “Who told Desmond Young that they had to send someone into that room? The ghost of Beatrice?”

Kip could only shrug.

“It would appear again,” Carolyn said, “that certain details are being withheld from us, whether through choice or force.”

“Okay,” Douglas said, trying to find some iota of logic in all of this madness, “let’s suppose it was Beatrice who started the curse, or whatever you want to call it. It would seem that it would have to be her, right? Because as far as we know, Clem didn’t die that day. He escaped. So if it was Beatrice, why would she want to hurt a family who had been so good to her? Who hadn’t cast her out when she got pregnant? For a family that feared scandal, that was pretty nice of them. So why would she want to hurt them?”

“Again,” Kip said, “your guess will be as good as mine on that.”

“Perhaps Beatrice is the force in that room,” Carolyn observed, “but perhaps she isn’t the originator of the curse. Perhaps it was someone else-someone we have no idea about as yet.” She stood, wrapping her arms around herself, still struggling to get warm. “As an investigator, I can only go with the facts as we know them. I cannot add two and two to get four, because there may be another variable to consider in the equation. Maybe it’s two plus two plus two again-and we get six.” She smiled. “It’s not enough for me to say that Clem just disappeared. What happened to him? And for that matter, how do we know Harry Noons is a reliable witness? Why did he wait seventy years to tell his story?”