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Roy Glashan's Library
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Dime Mystery Magazine, July 1947, with "The Dead Who Kill Again"
"No grave for you, Frank Gurd," the voice called out of the foggy night.
Your daughter, Jed Mather, killed herself because of me.... You, Rodney Stoneham, I was blackmailing into disgrace.... Leila Mornay—your husband—died because of me.... Tom Corbin, I left you a paralytic in a wheelchair.... And now, before the swirling black waters close over me, tell me—who was the fog-hidden figure who left me to the mercy of the night and the seething dark tide?
THERE were no marks on the man's body, except for what the barnacled rocks had done to it. There was nothing to indicate violence and there had been no violence. Nevertheless, he had been murdered....
Some time before dawn, Friday, November fifteenth, the incurving tip of Fish Hook Spit will claw my drowned body out of the current that on the ebb tide sets southeastward across our bay. If it were not for that current, my body would be swept out to the Atlantic. That was what my murderer planned. He told me so.
He or she. Muffled and distorted by thick fog, the voice might well have been a woman's, deep-throated and husky. "No grave for you, Frank Gurd," it called out of the blind night. "You'll lie deep in the cold sea." And then I heard a thump of thole-pins and a splash of oars rowing away.
From those words, from the clumsy handling of the oars, I know my murderer is not one of our bay people. All of us know about the current. None of us would row so clumsily. Even after years inland I remembered the trick of it.
I remember much I'd forgotten. Do you also remember, Jed Mather, as you peer at my corpse drowned and caught in the hook of the spit, do you too remember that other dawn twenty years ago when we peered together at another corpse caught just so among the rocks?
You cannot remember, since you did not know, that I lied when I said I'd come to go with you on your round of lobster pots. I hadn't arrived around the curve of the bay from my house. I'd just slipped out of a back window of yours, at the head of the spit.
What your daughter Nancy had told me just as I was about to leave her had delayed me long enough so that I blundered into you. Because of what she told me, I left Bayton that same night and this was somewhat ironical because it was Nancy who'd kept me here long after I made up my mind to leave.
You stayed. Every dawn you've plodded out of your house and along Fish Hook Spit to where your dory is moored. Before you climb down into your dory you look into the hook of the spit to see what the current has brought you.
It has brought you three corpses. That unknown sailor's. Nancy's, a month after I left. And now mine. An accident. A suicide. Now a murder.
I was murdered. The murderer must not escape punishment.
Who?
The mistake about the current, the clumsy oars, mean that he—or she—is not one of our bay people but someone out of my life since I left Bayton. Someone who knew I was coming here, when, and also that I would row out to the Black Rocks at night in the fog. Someone who knew that the Rocks are uncovered only at low tide, that at flood tide they are eight feet under.
I had to wait for the tide to be just right, low, and soon enough after dark so I could row the five miles to the Rocks and the five miles back and slip away without being seen. The first low tide in full dark would be that of the fourteenth, the last that was not too late, the seventeenth. That gave me four nights, Thursday through Sunday. The moon would be in her last quarter but the starshine is very bright on clear nights, so I must choose a foggy night.
So must the killer. It is obvious that as I planned for myself, I planned for him. Every move I made, made his task easier. If I recall my moves therefore, it should be possible to see how he fitted his moves into mine and so to trap him.
I left the city late Wednesday night. It was already dark when I turned off the parkway at Langdon Traffic Circle and no other car turned off behind mine. The back roads were almost deserted. I would have known if another car had followed. None did. I reached the road behind the house—I'd come back only once in twenty years—a little after midnight. I blacked-out my headlights as I turned into it. My motor runs too quietly to be heard even if anyone had been awake.
I drove down between the dunes and ran the car into the shade where my father used to stow his nets before he died. I carried into the empty house food enough for the four days, a little alcohol stove that would heat the food without smoke, and a half- dozen blankets. I found my rowboat safe under the rotting dock where I'd hidden it, and put it into the water to soak and tighten its seams. I went back to the house, made up a bed on the floor, removed only my overcoat and shoes, and lay down to sleep.
Tired as I was, I could not sleep for thinking of what I would do with the money Rodney Stoneham was waiting to pay me!
Rodney Stoneham!
HE hates me enough to kill me. I've seen the black
hate in his eyes every time he's paid me for silence.
I've hated him as much, and longer. I've hated him ever since he told me the company was sending me to the university for a four-year course, all expenses paid.
"We're not being benevolent," he explained when I bristled. "You're a good mechanic but good mechanics are a dime a dozen. You've got something more, something the company needs if it is to live. We're building for the future. We're making an investment in your ability and your loyalty."
And to safeguard that investment he had me sign a contract that bound me to the company for ten years.
I wasn't twenty yet but that contract put me wise to Stoneham's little game. I played along with him, building for the future. My future. I graduated with honors. I was the best confidential assistant a tycoon ever had—till Stoneham made the slip I knew he'd make. Then he and his company were at my mercy.
A mercy with cash value. But why should Stoneham kill me now when I'd at last agreed to sell him back the documents I took from his safe six years ago? If he's waited this long, why shouldn't he wait a week longer? To kill me before he got them would mean that someone else might find where I'd hidden them. Then the world would know that the company so highly praised for its war effort had actually defrauded the country in its hour of direst need!
He could not know how safely hidden they were, sealed in a waterproof pouch and buried under piled stones on the Black Rocks, far out in our bay.
Wednesday night I wasn't thinking of how Rodney Stoneham hated me or how I hated him. I was thinking how by Monday afternoon at the latest I'd be flying down to Rio. I was thinking of the swank apartment I'd rent in one of the tall houses that edge Copacabana Beach, of lazy afternoons at the Jockey Club, of gay nights on the Avenida Rio Branco. Best of all, I thought, in Rio I would never be cold.
That was why I had to cash in Stoneham's papers. Pneumonia had so ravaged my chest last winter that I can no longer endure cold. Even now the November chill was seeping into the house and striking through the blankets I'd piled over me. The dull ache was starting in my chest.
I shivered. I was dead for sleep but the cold would not let me sleep.
I lit the alcohol stove. The blue flame warmed my hands but it could not warm the cavernous room. I looked longingly at the pale shape of the fireplace with its yawning black mouth. There was driftwood outside, enough for a hundred fires. But the light of a fire in here would be seen for miles.
Years ago, I remembered, September through May, there would be a fire in this room when I came to the head of the stairs, rubbing sleep out of my eyes. The whirr of mother's sewing machine would cut off and by the time I'd reached the bottom step she'd be in the kitchen and the smell of frying bacon would be trailing out to me.
The fire was only glowing embers the fall morning at four that I stole down those stairs for the last time, but the room was still warm. The loose brick from the hearth was warm as I lifted it to get at the money Mrs. Parsons had paid mother the night before for Jen's wedding dress. Outside the bleak chill struck through me as I stopped to lace on my shoes, but it didn't bother me then.
Now, on this Wednesday night—Thursday morning, really—the damp chill seeped deep into me and the pain grew sharper in my chest with each breath that wheezed in my throat. I coughed. I coughed again and again. I must get warm or the coughing would tear me to pieces.
Dunes mounded behind the house and on either side. The front windows looked out across the bay but who would be awake this time of night to see firelight in them? I could put out the fire as soon as the room was warmed, long before dawn.
Even with blankets wrapped awkwardly around me it took me only a few minutes to collect all the driftwood I'd need, and dry some seaweed for kindling, but I was dizzy with coughing when I staggered back in again. I shucked the blankets and draped them over the front windows to keep the firelight inside. Then lay down again close to the hearth.
The first leaping blaze died down to a dance of green and yellow and scarlet flames along charring wood. I recalled telling Leila about the bright colors of a driftwood fire. Leila Mornay!
Her voice is deep-throated, edged by a huskiness that tears the heart out of a man. Muffled by fog, it well might be the voice I heard out of the blind night.
I was still Rodney Stoneham's trusted assistant when I first heard it, saying, "I've been eager to meet you, Mr. Gurd. My husband, Jon Mornay, has told me so much about you."
Sure, I thought. He's told you I'm the guy who can swing that West Coast branch managership his way. And then I really saw the woman who'd come up to me in the hotel bar where I was fortifying myself against one of those dreary dinners Stoneham gives each year to the minor executives and their wives.
I saw white shoulders rising out of a black froth of lace. I saw a neck too long, a face too broadly moulded for beauty. The half-parted lips were moistly red and the thin nostrils quivered. And the eyes, narrow, slumberous glowed with promise.
IN the weeks and months that followed, I forgot Jon
Mornay and the promotion he wanted. Leila forgot neither.
The dark fire glowed always in her eyes but the promise
remained only a promise, so Mornay got his promotion.
But not to the West Coast. The head of our Far Eastern
operations was getting jittery. We brought him and his
family back to Los Angeles and offered his place
to Mornay. "The way things are out there," Stoneham told
him, "it would be unwise for you to take your wife along.
As soon as conditions get back to normal, we'll send her
out to you at company expense."
It was a chance that comes once in a lifetime. Mornay went out to Manila—alone. Conditions did not get back to normal and nearly two years later a nurse who'd escaped from Corregidor wrote Leila how Jon had died.
She showed me the letter. She said, "I'll never forgive myself for letting him go."
I said, "He wouldn't have gone if he really loved you."
She said, "I loved him." She said, "I'll never forgive the man who sent him out there."
I said, "I'm taking care of Rodney Stoneham for you. I'm putting the screws on him, but good. Don't worry about him."
"What do you mean?"
I told her. I could tell her now what I'd planned to do for months and hadn't dared. I could answer the question I'd read in her eyes from the time I resigned. I could tell her how I'd put it over on Stoneham the Magnificent because now she too hated him.
DID she suspect who'd persuaded Stoneham that Jon
Mornay was the best of our young men for the Manila post?
Why otherwise did she tell me that she was going away and
promise to let me know where, then never let me hear from
her again?
Even so, how could Leila Mornay know I'd agreed to sell Stoneham back his papers? How could she possibly know I was coming here to get them?
Remembering Leila, I must have drowsed off for abruptly the fire was almost dead and the windows were paling in the black side-walls. I jumped up, raked out the smoking embers onto the hearth and stamped them out. Still cobweb-brained I stumbled to a window and looked out past the edge of the blanket I'd draped over it.
The sun hadn't yet risen but I could see the bay; leaden gray, heaving in long, smooth swells, it told me there was no wind. The tide was beginning to flood but the Black Rocks still humped up above the swell. Far out and beyond them, the horizon was hazed.
If this weather held I'd have my fog tonight.
The dark arms of the bay's shores almost enclosed its waters. At the incurving tip of the arm to my left a doll-sized man- shape, black against the brightening sky, plodded to the end of Fish Hook Spit. I knew it had to be Jed Mather.
You reached the end of the spit, Jed Mather, and stood there looking down to see what flotsam it had clawed for you out of the ebbing tide. A brilliant red spark broke from the horizon behind you and became the haze-reddened sun leaping out of the sea. The gray drained out of the bay and gave place to an angry red glow. You climbed wearily down into your dory and cast off.
It seemed to me that you turned and looked straight at me before you started to row out to your lobster pots. But why should you? Why should you look toward a house that you thought had been empty since the spring of '30?
That was when I found in the Bayton Gazette the account of my mother's death. I wrote Lawyer Meldrum to sell everything in the house, deduct the funeral expenses and his fee and me what was left, if anything.
I don't know why I didn't tell him to sell the house and land too. I had no idea then that I'd ever come back here.
Mark Meldrum sent me all the sale brought. He explained that my mother had been buried "by those who loved her" (for some reason I recall his exact phrase), but he didn't say why he did not charge me for his own services.
The spit hid you from me. The tide was higher now on the Black Rocks. At the end of the bay's northwest arm, Bayton's roofs were bright in the climbing sun and smoke was beginning to crawl up from their chimneys. The white steeple of the church showed above the red slate roof of Bayton School. I could not see the playing field that stretches from the school to the highway but I remembered it. I remembered how I would stand at the edge of the field, watching the game from which I was barred because of my twisted back. I remembered the pity in the faces of my schoolmates and how I hated them because of it.
I'd twist away and hurry home only to see the same pity in the face of my mother. She who'd borne me twisted and different, I'd throw my books down, run to my boat and row out to the Black Rocks where there was no one to pity me for being fatherless and a cripple.
Your Nancy, Jed Mather, was the only one in whose face I read no pity—no sign of knowing that I was different.
I was rigid suddenly. Taut. I'd heard a sound behind me, a footfall in the empty room.
The sound didn't come again. I made myself turn. No one was in the room. The sound had been only a thud of ancient timbers expanding in the sun's warmth. I jerked the blankets from the windows and let sunlight flood the room. I folded the blankets and piled them for a seat, lit the little stove and put water on to heat. I measured into a canteen cup a teaspoon of coffee powder, opened a box of crackers and a jar of cheese. As I waited for the water to boil, the emptiness of the house crowded in on me.
I wondered why the aloneness should bother me so. I've lived alone ever since Tom Corbin moved out of the flat we shared.
Tom Corbin?
Perhaps more than Rodney Stoneham, certainly more than Leila Mornay, Tom Corbin has reason to hate me.
Tom was a blue-eyed, mild-spoken blond from the Mid-West—captain of the company softball team, organizer of all the employees' outings. Friendly as a kitten and just as naive. Everyone from the porters to the department heads liked him and confided in him. Living with him, I kept my fingers on the pulse of the outfit and knew its secret undercurrents as Stoneham never could.
Tom was even more valuable to me after I left the company and he took my place. He didn't realize how much he told me, in careless words dropped without thought—in half-phrases meaningless to anyone who did not know the company's affairs as I did. When the Acme people suddenly tripled the price they'd asked for a plant the company needed to fulfill its Navy contracts, he was altogether honest in swearing that the leak had not been through him. But it couldn't have been through anyone else. Tom was discharged and, no longer essential to war industry, drafted.
Maybe he lost some of his wide-eyed naivete in the Army. Maybe he got to remembering the words and half-phrases he'd dropped to me and the carefully contrived questions I'd asked. He had a lot of time to remember in the foxholes and hospitals.
But Tom Corbin is hopelessly paralyzed below the waist.
I finished my breakfast in the old house and cleaned up as best I could. I'd brought along a book about Rio, but I couldn't read. I still was dead for sleep but I couldn't sleep. I prowled, the echoes of my footfalls accompanying me, into the kitchen, into mother's room behind the stairs, up the stairs to my own attic room.
THE room that was once mine. It rejected me. The
house rejected me. It would have driven me out if I'd
not been certain I should not need to stay in it another
night.
All day, from the front window to which I returned again and again, I watched the bay heave in the long, smooth swells that meant there was no wind. As the afternoon wore on I watched the sky gray over with cloud and the bay grow leaden. And at last, as the light faded out of the sky, I watched the fog come rolling in from the sea.
It blotted out the horizon. It hid the Black Rocks which were just beginning to appear above the ebbing tide. It reached Fish Hook Spit and I waited for the light to come in in the windows of your house, Jed Mather, but before it did, the fog had rolled over your house and I could no longer see it.
I turned back into the darkening room to pack what I'd brought with me. I would not have to wait for full dark to take the stuff out to the car.
When I opened the door I heard, deep within the fog, the hollow hoot of Bargat Lightship's foghorn but I could not make out its beacon. Nothing was left of the bay save a narrow, hazing strip of water just off the edge of the shore, but the shack where my father used to stow his nets was still plain and I could discern the dunes beyond it, mounding down to the shore.
I had too much to carry to make it in one trip but I brought it all out and piled it on the sand. Once I was out of the house I didn't want to go back again.
I closed the door. I was rid of the house. The house was rid of me.
I carried the first load down to the shack, through the chill damp, and my chest started to ache before I'd stowed the load. I started back for the rest and stopped stock-still, my throat locking.
As I stepped out of the shack a dune suddenly changed form as though someone had pulled back behind it a split-second too late. "Who's there?" I whispered and then found my voice and called aloud, "Who's there?"
No answer. No sound except the sough of the tide and the wheeze of my own breath. And the hoot of the foghorn.
I could go and look for tracks but why should I? No one was there. What I'd seen was merely a swirl of the thickening fog. I got into motion again toward the pile of stuff in front of the house. As I scooped up what I had left, I had the sensation of eyes watching me.
I know now that what I saw was no swirl of the fog. Someone watched me as I hurried back to the shack. Someone watched me hurry to the dock and squeeze between two dripping piles to the boat I'd hidden under the rotting boards.
The marks should be there by the dune west of the house. If they are a man's foot-prints it was Rodney Stoneham who watched me. If the impressions are absurdly small, the toes no wider than two of my fingers and the heels half-inch spikes, it was Leila Mornay. If there are no footprints but only two narrow ruts trailing across the sands from the road, it was Tom Corbin.
Yes, I know the bullet in Tom's spine has robbed him of the use of his legs but I've read how in the hospital they exercise arm and shoulder muscles till they are immensely strong. I've read how the government is giving to men like Tom cars specially equipped for them to drive. He could have driven down here in such a car. He could have lifted his wheelchair out of it, could have lifted himself into the chair and rolled it down between the dunes, the narrow tires soundless in the sand.
The watcher could be Tom Corbin or Leila or Stoneham. Whoever it was saw the fog light up with the glow of my flashlight as I looked to see how much water had leaked into the boat. He heard the thump of the can as I bailed out. He heard the keel scrape as I shoved the boat afloat and tumbled into it over the stern.
He did not hear my oars as I rowed out into the fog.
The night closed around me, blind and featureless. Even I who knew and remembered every ripple and eddy and current for our bay would have been utterly lost had it not been for the recurrent, melancholy hoot of the foghorn. Even so, I almost missed the Black Rocks, would have missed them if the current hadn't taken hold of my boat and nosed toward their dark loom, left of me as I faced the shore.
Left of me the current set from the southeast so the tide already was flooding. I'd taken longer than I'd counted on. Nearly an hour longer—my watch said it was almost eight and dead low was at seven-five.
The bow thumped and grated. I scrambled overside onto a nearly flat rock, probed with my flash beam for a projection to which I could moor my boat and found a finger of stone that would serve. I made sure it was firm, bent a bowline on a bight around it. The hitch was tight and hard. The painter would not slip.
I stood still, bringing back to mind the lay of this pile of boulders which at low tide is a roughly oval island about ten yards across and at flood a drowned reef. Near the center a rock juts slantingly up like a giant's thumb. Beneath this, in the acute angle which its underside makes with its more nearly level neighbor, I'd jammed the oilsilk pouch in which were sealed papers I'd taken from Stoneham's safe. I'd heaped on the pouch a dozen small stones and atop these four or five heavier rocks as large as I could handle.
Abruptly I was trembling but not with the damp chill. I'd made that cairn as safe as I could but what if six years of winter storms had torn it apart? In a fever of haste I scrambled over the rocks, fell and nearly lost the flash, rasped hands on rough stones as I shoved erect again. I went more slowly, using the light and found the jutting rock. The cairn was still at its base but was it still as I had piled it? Down on my knees I pulled it apart with frantic haste, closed bleeding hands on the pouch and breathed again.
Here in my hands was Rio, lazy days, gay nights and eternal warmth to bake the ache from my chest.
I THRUST the sack deep in my overcoat pocket,
pushed up and stumbled back across the rocks to their edge.
My feet splashed into icy water and I coughed, but that
didn't matter. In another few seconds I'd be rowing back to
shore again and the rowing would warm me. The fog swallowed
my light beam only a foot or two from its lens but it found
the stone finger around which I'd hitched the painter.
The stone was black-wet and it was bare of any rope. No boat's bow nosed the flat rock on which I'd landed.
My hitch could not possibly have slipped. I'd come to the wrong spot. These rocks are much alike and—I heard a laugh then; a mirthless, hoarse laugh from out there in the blind night. "Who's there?" I cried out. "Who is it?"
"No grave for you, Frank Gurd," I heard, the voice so muffled, so distorted by the thick fog that I could not tell even whether it was a man's or a woman's. "You'll lie deep in the cold sea."
And then the laugh again and thump of thole pins and a splash of clumsy oars rowing away. Then no sound.
No sound but the foghorn's hoot and the plash of the tide creeping up to drown the Rocks and the wheeze of breath in my tightening throat. I don't know if I could have gotten out a shout had I tried. I didn't try. No one but the owner of that voice would be out on the bay in this fog-filled lark and I would not beg him for mercy. That satisfaction I would not give him, to hear me beg for pity.
I knew it would be futile to try signalling to shore with my flashlight, the lightship's thousand-candle beacon had been invisible from shore so how could this small beam be seen across the five miles?
Time was I could have swum that distance and not felt it, but not now. The rising water washed only over my ankles and already pain flared in my chest. Already the coughing tore at my throat. A minute spent in the icy water and I would be blind and strengthless.
I retreated to the highest boulder of the Rocks, the same beneath which this pouch had lain safely hidden for six years. I could no longer see the water, but I knew it followed me relentlessly, knew it rose and would keep rising till it covered this boulder and swept me from it into the current.
I was done for. Whoever planned this had planned well. I could not escape. But I could make sure that he should not escape punishment.
Which one? Rodney Stoneham or Leila Mornay or Tom Corbin?
Of the three, only Stoneham knew I left the city Wednesday afternoon, and why, but I had given another birthplace when I first started to work for the company and never changed the record. Stoneham knows nothing about Bayton. Only Leila knows that. I let the name slip to her the night when, gazing into her fireplace, I told her about the green and yellow and scarlet flames of a driftwood fire.
Tom Corbin does not know about the papers or about Bayton, but I recall telling him how high the tide rises in the bay where I used to live and how the Black Rocks are above the ebb tide but eight feet under at the flood.
Yet no one followed me as I drove here to Bayton. Hence they must all three have had a part in my murder, all three must have come together and planned it: Rodney Stoneham who let me have a crumb from his over-abundant table and made sure that even for that crumb I should repay him. Leila Mornay who made me a promise and never kept it. Tom Corbin whose straight back reminded me morning and night, night and morning of how my own was twisted.
Standing on the highest boulder of the Black Rocks, clutching the oilskin pouch in my numbed hands, listening to the dark swash of the tide, I knew only that someone had marooned me there to die. I swore flat he should not escape.
I had three hours to wait in this lightless void, to listen to the slow rise of the tide...
I had three hours to write on the backs of these papers, step by step, the moves that brought me here to die on the Black Rocks and so reveal how the killer fitted his moves into mine, hence who he—or she—is.
Stoneham! Whoever executed me, it is evident that Stoneham called the three together to plan it and on Stoneham at least I am sure of my revenge for these papers will be found with my body and they will ruin him. Which of the other two carried out the plan—Go look, Jeff Mather. Go look at the sand dunes.
The tide has risen to my knees. I've just time to...
THE dawn sun burned red through thinning fog.
Gaunt, his eyes black coals in the transparent gray of his
face, Jed Mather sat in his dory reading the papers he'd
taken out of the pouch that lay on the thwart beside him.
The oilskin was wet but it had kept the papers dry and the
scrawled penciling on them was clear enough for even his
tired old eyes to read.
The papers rustled in his palsied hands. He tore them across and across and again across. He picked up the pouch, stuffed the torn bits into it and laid it down again on the thwart. He unshipped an oar, rose, prodded at the body around whose neck the pouch had been tied by its drawstring. The body came free of the barnacled rocks and Mather's oar guided it along the dory's side till it floated across the bow.
Jed Mather glanced across the bay to the house from whose chimney, yesterday dawn, he'd seen a wisp of smoke curl. The rowing became easier as the current took hold of boat and body. Mather rested his oars, picked up the oilskin sack and lets its contents dribble overside, then threw the pouch in after them.
Expressionless, he watched the white bits of paper trail after the dark body, watched the body drift out to sea on the current that with the flood sweeps northwestward across the bay but with the ebb sweeps relentlessly back again to Fish Hook Spit.
When he no longer could see the body, Jed Mather started rowing again. In the long and lonely years of waiting a man's wrists lose something of their strength if not their skill. He still could row silently when there was need, but this morning there was no need. Mather's oars splashed as clumsily as any inlander's as he rowed out to his lobster pots.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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