“Thanks very much, Mr. Henderson,” I said.
He arose, lifting his arms and letting them fall.
“I’m afraid I’ve not been of much help to you.”
“On the contrary,” I said. “You’ve told me everything.”
I went out of the orphanage and down the long drive to the road, and he was waiting for me there in the darkness beneath the ancient trees. We walked down the road together.
“You’ve seen the old man,” he said, and his voice was like the sighing of the wind in the branches overhead.
“Yes.”
Strangely, I was not afraid, because it is too late for fear when you are walking with death on a lonely road. We went downhill to a point where the dry bed of a narrow stream was spanned by the rough planking of a bridge. He stopped there abruptly, turning to stare back at the gloomy bulk of the old orphanage against the hillside. His voice sounded light and free, rising in release from a great oppression.
“He told you, I suppose, about Otto Bloom?”
“He told me. He said that Otto had large hands. Strong hands. Then I remembered the chords. I don’t know much about music, but I know a little. It would take large hands to strike some of those chords. It was a mistake to mention where I was coming.”
“You’re clever, Mr. Grieg. But no matter now. For a long time I had to live with the knowledge that I was the son of a murderess. Now I am a murderer myself, and I no longer find the knowledge a burden. Indeed, I feel a strange elation, Mr. Grieg, as if I had come at last into my true heritage.”
Bitterness rose up within me.
“Sure,” I said. “Murder. A young woman. An old man. Now me. That’s only three. You’re still under family par.”
I heard a long sigh.
“There will be time to improve the record. Later, I may devise something appropriate for the woman who is to be my wife. It was fear of some such thing, I suppose, that compelled little Maggie to behave so rashly. She recognized me, you see. When she and the old librarian came about the books. After all these years. I thought at first she might keep my little secret, but when she called yesterday for the appointment, I understood my error. It seemed obvious that she had confided in the old man and was following his advice. You can see that I was forced to act. As moral people, they couldn’t stand by and see a wealthy woman marry in ignorance the son of a woman who had made a career of marrying and murdering for money. Unfortunately, moral people must bear the consequences of their morality.”
“As murderers must bear the consequences of their murdering,” I said.
His voice rose on an eerie high note of inner laughter.
“A myth, Mr. Grieg. The files of the police are heavy with unsolved murders. Yours, I think, will be among them!”
He threw himself upon me so suddenly that I had time to do no more than reel backward. His hands were at my throat as we crashed into the rotten railing of the old bridge. The decayed wood snapped like punk, pitching us headlong into the ravine.
I twisted violently, wrenching his body over to take the full shock of the impact beneath me, and for a moment I felt his iron fingers go slack. But only for a moment. Before I could pull myself away, they resumed their deep, relentless probing for my throat.
I threw my arms out, clawing at the hard earth, and my fingers closed on a jagged stone.
Long after it was unnecessary, I continued to lift the stone and bring it smashing down.
Afterward, I sat in the dry ravine beside the body of Oliver Moon until I could breathe normally again. Then I got up and walked back up the hill to the orphanage, and on the way I kept thinking of what the preacher had said about the sun rising and the sun setting, and everything coming in the end to its beginning.