"I don't know why," said Lewis, taking one of the glasses. "Maybe I'm glad I don't."
"Talk sense for a change," Sears growled. "We're men, Lewis, not animals. We're not supposed to stay cowering in the darkness." He too accepted a glass and sipped. "As a species, we hunger for knowledge. For enlightenment." His pale eyes angrily fixed on Lewis. "Or perhaps I misunderstood you, and you did not actually intend to defend ignorance."
"Overkill, Sears," Ricky said.
"Less jargon, Ricky," Sears retorted. " 'Overkill,' indeed. That might impress Elmer Scales and his sheep, but it does not impress me."
There was something about sheep-but Lewis had forgotten it. He said, "I don't mean to defend ignorance, Sears. I just meant that-hell, I don't know anymore. I guess I meant that it might be too much to take." What he did not articulate but was half aware of was the notion that he feared to peer too closely into the last moments of any suicide's life, be it friend or wife.
"Yes," breathed Ricky.
"Twaddle," said Sears. "I'd be relieved to learn that John was merely despairing. It's the other explanations that frighten me."
Lewis said, "I have the feeling that I'm sort of missing something," and proved to Ricky for the thousandth time that he was not the dullard of Sears's imagination.
"Last night," Ricky said, holding his glass with both hands and smiling fatalistically, "after the other three of us had gone, Sears saw Fenny Bate on his staircase."
"Christ."
"That's enough," Sears warned. "Ricky, I forbid you to go into this. What our friend means, Lewis, is that I thought I saw him. I was badly frightened. It was an hallucination-a ha'nt, as they used to say in these parts."
"Now you're arguing both ways," Ricky pointed out. "For my part, I'd be happy to think you're right. I don't want to see young Wanderley here. I think we might all be sorry, just about the time it's too late."
"You misread me. I want him to come and say: give it up. My Uncle Edward died of smoking and excitement, John Jaffrey was unstable. That's the reason I agreed to John's suggestion. I say, let him come, and the sooner the better."
Lewis said, "If you feel that, I agree with you."
"Is that fair to John?" Ricky asked.
"John's past being fair to," Sears said. He finished the cognac in his glass and leaned forward to pour more from the bottle.
Sudden footsteps on the stairs made all three swivel their heads toward the entrance from the hall.
Turned that way in his chair, Lewis could see Ricky's front window, and he noticed with surprise that it had begun to snow again. Hundreds of big flakes hammered the black window.
Milly Sheehan came in, her hair all flattened on one side and all frowsy on the other. She was sausaged into one of Stella's old dressing gowns. "I heard that, Sears James," she said in a voice like the wail of an ambulance. "You'll bully John even when he's dead."
"Milly, I meant no disrespect," Sears said. "Shouldn't you-"
"No. You won't get rid of me now. I won't give you coffee now and bow and scrape. I have something to say to you. John didn't commit suicide. Lewis Benedikt, you listen too. He didn't. He wouldn't have. John was murdered."
"Milly," Ricky began.
"Do you think I'm deaf? Do you think I don't know what's going on? John was killed, and do you know who killed him? Well, I do." Footsteps, this time Stella's, came hurrying down the stairs. "I know who killed him. It was you. You-you Chowder Society. You killed him with your terrible stories. You made him sick-you and your Fenny Bates!" Her face twisted; Stella rushed in too late to stop Milly's final words. "They ought to call you the Murder Society! They ought to call you Murder Incorporated!"
7
So there they stood, Murder Incorporated, beneath a bright sky in late October. They felt grief, anger, despair, guilt-they had been talking of graves and corpses compulsively for a year, and now they were burying one of their own. The unexpected findings of the autopsy had puzzled and distressed them all; Sears had blown up, choosing to disbelieve. Ricky too had not at first believed that John could have been a dope addict. "Evidence of massive, habitual and longstanding introduction of narcotic substance…" then a lot of fancy medical language, but the point was that the coroner had publicly defamed John Jaffrey. Sears's ranting had been of no use-the man would not change his story. Sears would not alter his opinion that in the course of one autopsy the man had changed from a skillful professional to an incompetent and dangerous fool. The coroner's findings had circulated through Milburn, and some citizens said they sided with Sears and some accepted the autopsy's conclusions, but none came to the funeral. Even the Reverend Neil Wilkinson seemed embarrassed. The funeral of a suicide and drug addict-well!
The new girl, Anna, had been wonderfuclass="underline" she'd helped deal with Sears's rage, cushioning Mrs. Quast from the worst effects of it, she'd been as marvelous with Milly Sheehan as Stella had, and she'd transformed the office. She had forced Ricky to realize that Hawthorne, James had plenty of work if Hawthorne and James wanted to do it. Even during the terrible period of arranging John's funeral, even on the day he took a suit from John's closet and bought a coffin, he and Sears found themselves responding to more letters and answering more phone calls than they had for weeks. They had been drifting toward retirement, sending clients elsewhere as if automatically, and Anna Mostyn seemed to have brought them back to life. She had mentioned her aunt only once, and in the most harmless way: she had asked them what she was like. Sears had come close to blushing and muttered, "Almost as pretty as you, but not as fierce." And she had been staunchly on Sears's side in the matter of the autopsy. Even coroners make mistakes, she had pointed out with placid, undeniable common sense.
Ricky was not so sure; he was not even sure it mattered. John had functioned perfectly well as a doctor; his own body had weakened but he had remained competent at curing other bodies. Surely a "massive, habitual, etc." drug habit would account for the physical decline John had exhibited. A daily insulin injection would have got John used to needles. He found that if John Jaffrey had been an addict, it did not much affect what he thought of him.
And this: it made his suicide explicable. No empty-eyed barefooted Fenny Bate, no Murder Incorporated, no mere stories had killed him-the drug had eaten into his brain as it had eaten into his body. Or he could not take it anymore, the "shame" of addiction. Or something.
Sometimes it was convincing.
In the meantime his nose ran and his chest tickled. He wanted to sit down; he wanted to be warm. Milly Sheehan was gripping Stella as if the two of them were battered by a hurricane, now and then using one hand to pluck another tissue from the box, wipe her eyes, and drop the tissue on the ground.
Ricky took a damp tissue from his own coat pocket, discreetly wiped his nose, and returned it to his pocket.
All of them heard the car coming up the hill to the cemetery.
From the journals of Don Wanderley
8
It seems I am an honorary member of the Chowder Society. It's all very odd-in fact, just the peculiarity of it all is a shade unsettling. Maybe the oddest part of my being here is that my uncle's friends almost seem to fear that they are caught in some kind of real-life horror story, a story like The Nightwatcher. It was because of The Nightwatcher that they wrote me. They saw me as some sort of steel-plated professional, an expert in the supernatural-they saw me as a Van Helsing! My original impressions were correct; they all do feel a distinct foreboding-I suppose you could say they're on the verge of being scared of their own shadows. My role is to investigate, of all things. And what they haven't told me directly, but have implied, is that I am supposed to say, nothing to worry about, boys. There's a rational, reasonable explanation for everything-but of that I have little doubt.