chapter 33
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.
“I’m afraid that I can’t help you. I wasn’t there.”
“Your husband was, Mrs. Broadhurst.”
The cords in her neck pulled her head around. “How can you possibly know that?”
“He never left the place. He was shot and buried there. We dug him up this afternoon.”
“I see.” She didn’t tell me what she saw, but it seemed to make her eyes grimmer and smaller. The bones in her face became more prominent as if in imitation of the dead man’s. “It’s over then.”
“Not entirely.”
“It is for me. You’re telling me that both my men are dead – my husband and my son. You’re telling me that I’ve lost everything I held dear.”
She was struggling to assume a tragic role, but there was a doubleness in her which spoiled her resonance. Her words sounded exaggerated and hollow. I was reminded of the ambivalent words that she had written about her father, staggering across the yellow foolscap toward the edge of breakdown.
“I think you’ve known that your husband was dead and buried for fifteen years.”
“That simply isn’t true.” But the doubleness persisted in her voice as if she was listening to herself read lines. “I warn you, if you make this accusation publicly–”
“We’re very private, Mrs. Broadhurst. You don’t have to put on a front with me. I know you quarreled with your husband that night and followed him up the mountain afterwards.”
“How can you know that if it isn’t so?” She was playing a game that guilty people play, questioning the questioner, trying to convert the truth into a shuttlecock that could be batted back and forth and eventually lost. “Where did you get this alleged information, anyway? From Susan Crandall?”
“Part of it.”
“She’s scarcely a reliable witness. I gather from what you’ve told me that she’s emotionally disturbed. And she couldn’t have been more than three or four at the time. The whole thing must be fantasy on her part.”
“Three-year-olds have memories, and they can see and hear. I have pretty good evidence that she was in the Mountain House, and saw or heard the shot. Her story jibes with other things I know. It also helps to explain her emotional trouble.”
“You admit that she’s disturbed?”
“She has a hangup. Speaking of hangups, I wonder if Stanley didn’t witness the shot, too.”
“No! He couldn’t have.” She drew in her breath audibly, as if she was trying to suck back the words.
“How do you know if you weren’t there?”
“I was at home with Stanley.”
“I don’t think so. I think he followed you up there and heard his father shot, and for the rest of his life he tried to forget it. Or prove that it was just a bad dream he had.”
She had been talking like an advocate who doubted his client’s innocence. Now she gave up on it. “What do you want from me? Money? I’ve been bled white.” She paused, and looked at me with despairing eyes. “Don’t tell Jean I have nothing left. I’d never see Ronny again.”
I thought she was wrong, but I didn’t argue. “Who bled you, Mrs. Broadhurst?”