Джон Макдональд - S*E*V*E*N

But I think the old lady made us aware of sin. She was our snake and our apple. Because, after that, it wasn’t ever exactly the same.

We did a lot of singing, and we drove down roads we’d never seen before and would never see again. June, July, August. Nobody knew where we were. Let them sweat it out. Worked at weird jobs, and conned food, and spent our blood fixing up that rotten car about five thousand times. We finally split after we’d been with that group in Arizona three weeks. She thought they were fine, like I did at first. But the group there — fifteen guys, twenty-four women, and nine little kids — were too damned solemn. They had to be, in order to fake themselves out. They made pots and scratched up the ground and planted stuff, and went as close to naked as the weather allowed. They made up instant Indian legends, argued oriental philosophy, compared hallucinations, wove their own cloth, and constantly laid the knock on the military-industrial power complex and the materialistic culture and all that. They made up instant folk songs about it. If every one of them had laughed once each day, I could have adjusted. But they had to be solemn because they were supposed to be dedicated to this much more sincere way of life, which, after all, was just a handy way to excuse themselves for the opportunity they had set up of balling each other, catch as catch can. I found out that the ones who left were the ones who had decided to get married and not come back. And I found out about good old Eddie. An old guy, thirty maybe. Any time they really started to starve, good old Eddie would go to Phoenix and pull a couple hundred out of his trust fund and buy a jeep load of groceries and a couple of more books on mysticism and come back like a hero, sometimes with a new chick for the encampment.

Norrie and I were cooling a little. I guess maybe because we were doing some sharing. I said I’d had it, and she said she wanted to stay. I said good-bye around, and she walked down the rocky road with me. We smiled and shook hands, and then we kissed and we cried. She asked me to stay and I asked her to come with me. We went through the same thing again, and afterwards, when I was almost down to the highway, I looked back and she was still up there, sitting on a rock, knees under her chin, arms wrapped around her legs, and that big skirt dyed with berry juice spread out all around her. I made my contacts and I got into a pretty good place on short notice, and I will never again be in such great shape, I guess. I went through those courses like a madman.

I’m sorry about Norrie. It’s out of my line, but I’d guess that it is sort of like she locked a door and threw away the key. If you can ever make her understand what really happened, then you destroy her all the way. I think she’s just going to drift farther and farther out of touch, and there isn’t a thing anybody can do about it. If I was sure that I could have kept anything like this from happening by staying with her, I never would have left her. I would even live out there in solemn-town with good old Eddie keeping me from starving. I guess she wanted to honeymoon at the cabin as a kind of reassurance, maybe. Along with some defiance.

I don’t know.

It’s too bad, isn’t it?

My name is William D. Maas. I teach courses in criminology at the University of the State of New York and do a considerable amount of lecturing to police groups. I am sometimes called in on a consultant basis by police bodies to give an opinion on the progress of some specific investigation.

Lieutenant Sierma of the Criminal Investigation Division of the New York State Police asked me to give an opinion on the file regarding the murder of Paul Warcroft, age twenty-five. Death had occurred on May tenth at three o’clock, approximately, in the afternoon. I was given access to all the materials, and on June second I went to the Turner farm.

There I was able to compare the terrain and the distances involved with the widow’s statement, which I had read carefully in transcript form.

On the day of the death, the honeymoon couple had cooked small steaks for their lunch on an outdoor grill. She estimated that it had been about two o’clock when she was awakened momentarily from a nap by her husband leaving. She said he had on his swim trunks and was carrying a towel, and he said he was going to the pool. She went back to sleep and was awakened about forty minutes later by some sound outside. She said that it sounded like men’s voices raised in anger. But she could not hear a sound. She looked out the door but could not see her husband. She thought of calling him, then decided to get dressed and go look for him. She put on white shorts and a yellow top and sandals.

She said that when she was halfway to the pool, she saw a young man walking up the slope on the opposite side of the creek. She said that when he turned and looked toward her she recognized him at once as a boy she had known two years before. She was able to describe him in detail, the length of his hair, the style of his immature beard, his hiking boots, rucksack, bedroll, khaki trousers, knit sports shirt, blue baseball cap. She identified him as Michael Lewis Henderson, Jr., and she was able to recall his hometown in Illinois but not his address.

She said she called to him, but he made no response at all. She said he walked up the slope and over the ridge and on out of sight. He did not change stride, answer her call, or even look back toward her again.

As she approached the pool, she saw her husband face down on the bank, under the willows, his legs in the water. She ran to him, calling his name, and pulled him out with difficulty, as he was a man six feet one, weighing one hundred and eighty pounds, and sat and cradled his crushed head in her lap, and finally realized that he was dead. She then ran to the Turner farmhouse, and in their statements they both report her as being in such a condition of hysteria they could not understand what she was trying to tell them. They saw the blood that smeared the white shorts. Mr. Turner went back to the creek and found the body and hurried to the farm and reported it by phone.

After young Mrs. Warcroft had been given sedation, she was able to report what had happened. The description of Henderson was sent to all points, requesting he be picked up for questioning.

A careful search of the scene had produced little helpful information. The weapon used was a field stone formed of native granite, rounded by the action of the water in the creek over centuries. It had been picked up from the edge of the creek, leaving a bowl-shaped depression. It had evidently been hurled at the decedent, struck him a glancing blow, and had rolled to rest against the willow roots. There were bits of tissue and hair along with blood on a small portion of the stone which, in its curvature, was a rough match to the concave fracture of the skull of the decedent. The stone weighed 73.6 pounds.

Before I was asked to enter the case as a consultant, Henderson had been located in Sarasota, Florida, a resident student at a small liberal arts college. He was able to prove to cooperating law enforcement officers in Florida that on the afternoon of the tenth he had been at a local marine biological research laboratory assisting in a demonstration of the effects of water pollution on small marine organisms, a demonstration at which both city and county officials were in attendance.

In the transcribed statement sent north by the Florida officials, Henderson freely admitted to a close and intimate relationship with Elizabeth Norris Ames which had begun at the cabin at the Turner farm and had ended three months later in Arizona. He stated under oath that he had not seen her nor communicated with her during the intervening twenty-two months.

At the time I was brought in, it was Lieutenant Sierma’s theory that Mrs. Warcroft had seen a dangerous drifter who resembled Henderson just enough so that she believed it was he. It was in that place where she had first met Henderson, which made the incorrect identification more plausible. Sierma had gone to the spot where she had said she stood, and he had had one of his men walk up the hill at that same time of the afternoon. Sierma said that there was enough glare to make positive identification unlikely.