When I was through making my selection Dorothy Quane said, “You want to try them on?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so.”
“While we’re in here, you wouldn’t want to go to bed, would you — just for old time’s sake?” It was a casual, offhand, deadly serious invitation. Or proposition, I suppose.
“I’d like to, Dorothy, but I think we’d better not.”
“Why?”
That was a good question and the only answer that I could give her that wouldn’t make her threaten suicide or start crying again was a feeble one. “Maybe the boys might come home. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“No, I guess I wouldn’t.”
“Maybe another time,” I said brightly.
“Sure, Harvey. Another time.”
Back in the living room she insisted that two hundred dollars would be a fair price for the suits and jackets, which new had probably cost at least eight hundred. Max had never bought anything but the very best, or the next thing to it.
I wrote out the check and handed it to Dorothy. “If you should need some more, let me know,” I said.
She looked at me curiously. “You really liked Max, didn’t you, even though nobody else did, except maybe Murfin?”
“He was a friend of mine.”
“Do you still like me?”
I fought back a sigh. “I’m very fond of you, Dorothy. So is Ruth. We’ll be expecting you out at the farm on Saturday. You and the boys.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“We’d really like you to come.”
“Maybe I will,” she said, “if I don’t kill myself first.”
Chapter Fifteen
It was a little after seven-thirty when I turned into the dirt lane that led from the road to the house. I stopped the pickup, switched off the engine, reached into the glove compartment, and took out a pair of binoculars. Through the glasses I could see them moving down to the garden. I counted three of them and recognized the one in the lead. He was a big, twelve-point buck deer, an old and valued acquaintance, the kind that a Texan might say of, “We’ve howdied, but we ain’t shook.” With him were two does. The deer were moving into the garden to eat my corn and grow fat. I didn’t mind.
A lot of deer hung around the farm. They seemed to sense that nobody was going to take a shot at them. Sometimes they also came there to die after hunters had shot but only wounded them. When that happened Ruth tried to patch them up, if they would let her, and she had succeeded with four or five. But usually I had to finish them off with a surplus M-l carbine that finally I had bought for just that purpose.
The deer weren’t the only wild animals who thought of the garden as a free lunch. Besides the beavers there were raccoons, wild mink, squirrels, innumerable rabbits, and a swarm of muskrats that everyone told me I should trap, but which I didn’t. The only thing I had ever killed, other than the wounded deer, was a twelve-button timber rattlesnake. There were also a couple of copperhead water moccasins that I might have taken a shot or two at if they hadn’t moved so fast. I left the copperheads for the black snakes, the farmer’s friend, who lived in our attic. At night we could hear them slithering around. Ruth and I found the sound rather comforting, but our infrequent guests said that it kept them awake.
I sat there in the pickup and rolled a cigarette and watched the sun start to go down behind White Rock on the ridge of the Short Hill Mountains. In the morning it would come up behind me over the Blue Ridge Mountains. The farm was in the very northwest tip of Virginia, in Loudoun County, only a mile or so from West Virginia and two miles across the Shenandoah River from Harpers Ferry. Directly in front of me, to the west and over the mountain, was the Potomac River and Maryland. If I got tired of one state, I could walk to another.
Sometimes when I turned into the farm I would stop and stare at it and wonder what impulse had made me buy it twelve years before. I was city born, city bred, and city oriented and even after a dozen years I still measured the farm in city terms: two blocks wide and maybe twelve blocks long, most of it straight uphill.
By trial and error I had turned myself into a pretty fair vegetable gardener and a so-so goatherd. But what I did best was grow Christmas trees. With the aid of the county agent, a proselyter for the John Birch Society, and some additional advice from the Soil Conservation Service, I had eight years ago planted 11,000 white pines. Sentimentalists from as far away as Washington and Baltimore now came with their kids at Christmas to pick out and chop down their own trees. I furnished the axe. If they couldn’t use an axe, they could use my chain saw. I charged five dollars a tree regardless of its size. But this year I was thinking of charging ten. After all, I had had to watch them grow.
As I sat there watching the sun go down I stopped thinking about Christmas trees and started thinking about what was really on my mind, which was the Vullo Foundation and what I had come to regard as The Mysterious Conspiracy Concerning Arch Mix. The area around Harpers Ferry wasn’t a bad place to think about conspiracies. It had been the scene of a corker on October 16, 1859, when old John Brown seized the federal armory and then waited for 18,000 slaves in the area to join up with him in what he hoped would be a big insurrection and just general hell-raising. The only one problem was that Brown forgot to tell any of the slaves that he was coming so none of them showed up.
They sent Lee up from Washington to deal with Brown and what was left of his ragtag band of twenty blacks and whites, most of them under thirty and three of them not yet twenty-one. Lee didn’t even have time to change into uniform. J.E.B. Stuart, plumed hat and all, talked Lee into taking him along. Stuart was just a lieutenant then and always ready for either a fight or a frolic.
A young marine lieutenant actually captured Brown. He wounded him about the neck with a sword, but when he tried to run him through with it the sword bent double. It was a dress sword and not very sharp. Brown capitalized on his wounds. When they tried him he lay on a pallet on the courtroom floor. Most of the time he kept his eyes closed, which was just as well because not too many could hold the gaze of those fierce, strange, grey eyes which nearly everyone said looked quite mad. Brown claimed that he wasn’t crazy, but then he lied a lot. He had an aunt who was crazy, and two nieces and two nephews who had to be locked away in an asylum, so most folks thought it was hereditary. Brown said if anyone should know if he were crazy, he should, and I’m not, he said.
Crazy or not they hanged him in a field just outside of Harpers Ferry. The field was surrounded by 1,500 soldiers and one of the soldiers was Stonewall Jackson, although nobody called him that yet, and another of them was young John Wilkes Booth, then just a cadet, who would come to know considerable about conspiracy.
I quit thinking about Brown and Booth and their conspiracies, both of which had changed history, and went back to The Mysterious Conspiracy Concerning Arch Mix. Mix had disappeared and so far no one knew what had happened to him. Two people who perhaps thought they knew had been killed. Furthermore, the labor union that Mix had headed was making some strange moves out in St. Louis and tomorrow I would fly out there to see if somehow that might have something to do with Mix’s disappearance. Maybe it would all turn out to be part of some giant conspiracy. And then again, maybe it wouldn’t, for if my Uncle Slick were right, there was a chance that Arch Mix was still alive.
I put my cigarette out in the ashtray, started the engine, and eased the car forward over the grave of The Proper Villain. There was a scream in the distance, and then another, but it was only Really Rotten Roger, the peacock, letting the world know that he had finally decided that it was okay for the sun to go down.