“It’s all right now, Mrs. Deveau.” I put my arm about her shoulders. “It’s all over. Everything’s under control, and Dr. Simmers is on his way.”
Physically she was unhurt, but she needed Doc’s help to get through the aftermath of shock.
As if on cue, Doc’s dusty car rolled up, and when he took over with Valerie Deveau, I hurried around the house, crossed the back yard, and came to a halt a few yards from the Deveau mausoleum.
Although I expected it, the sight of Carlin Soulards corpse stopped the breath in my throat. His death anguish had twisted his body out of shape, jutted his eyes, peeled his lips far apart.
My unwilling gaze was held by the pattern the blood had made on his shirt and pants as it had spurted from his abdomen. His dead hands still clutched the weapon protruding from his belly.
I forced a movement of my eyes and ventured a look inside the crypt. The scene of violence took shape in my mind, the way it must have happened. She slipped inside the crypt, hoping Carlin Soulard would search for her out across the fields... But if he didn’t, if he cornered her, she was desperate for a way to defend herself... She lifted the lid of Robert Deveau’s coffin a few inches... Her fingers closed on the left femur bone with its lower end broken to jagged razor sharpness on a mountainside thirty years ago... And when Carlin hurled himself on her, she used the bone as a strong and desperate woman would have used a sharp dagger...
I stood for a hushed moment, just thinking about it. Why’d she hide in the crypt? For the logical reason that it was the only hiding place? Or because the memory of Robert was strongest there, to strengthen and steady her? And the weapon — had she thought of it for the logical reason that it was the only available weapon? Or because the suggestion came from an unseen source?
I shook the questions out of my head and started toward the house. My mind was made up on at least one thing: Doc Simmers — not the faithful constable of Grande Isle — was going to have the job of removing the weapon from Carlin Soulard s body.
Hope Chest
Originally published in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, August 1976.
The little old lady was a faint flickering in empty spaces where all the stars had gone out, a pinprick of awareness in a timeless nothingness. She was a single spark struggling against the darkness, a wavering candle glow, reaching, searching, writhing higher, bursting at last in a shower of purple, green and gold sparks. The display winked out, spark by spark, leaving the old lady with the vague and troubled notion that she existed.
She didn’t know, in those first moments, who she was, where she had come from, how she had got here. But it didn’t seem to matter. She wasn’t hot or cold. She was comfortable, and comfort was a state to cherish.
She tried to swaddle herself in the darkness, but returning awareness hung on, gathering strength, spreading like the coming a dreary gray dawn. Her brittle old bones, marrowed with creaks and stiffness, took shape bit by bit. Wan light filtered weakly through her open, filmed eyes, a gray seepage, dirty fog.
She realized that she had a body. She was a physical being, a person. She didn’t know yet who the person was. What is a person? She wasn’t quite sure of that, either. Person. Individual. A body. A mind.
Her mind... Little needles of light dashed in and out of the darkness, stabbing at her with impressions that were disjointed and long buried. The glimpse of a lake off beyond green trees from the dizzying heights of her father’s strong shoulders. The hint of lavender in her grandmother’s bedroom. The rustle of silk in her first party dress. The quiet of a cemetery. A headstone with rain washing over the letters of a carven name. Familiar name. Yes. Her husband’s name. And the old lady’s comprehension of self-identity began to slip together like the fitting of bits and pieces of a smashed china vase.
Like a pupa struggling out of its cocoon, the old lady’s senses sagged with exhaustion. She rested, disembodied, formless, cushioned by the blackness. Then the invisible cord began to draw the parts together once more, and a little of the fog washed away from the mirror of memory. A hazy image formed in the gray mists. It was the young girl, the stranger.
She was turning to look at the old lady with startled eyes in her suddenly white face. A soundless conversation took place, very briefly, and the strange girl was fighting to brush the old lady aside, grabbing from the bedside table the ceramic lamp with the heavy bronze base, lifting the lamp and striking. And the old lady heard the echo of her own skull breaking, driving splinters into the brain...
The little old lady was an awkwardly arranged collection of fine bones and sinewy flesh, clothed in cool white dress and sandals, on the thick carpeting of a large bedroom, her bedroom. In years past she’d been one of those petite, glowing women who could flash about a tennis court or manage a small sailboat through a sudden squall. Despite her years, there was still a ghost of the old loveliness in the firmly cut little face — but not about the head with its finely textured silver hair.
Her face was turned slightly toward the nearby wall, and slanting light from the windows in the furthest part of the room touched the sunken spot above the little old woman’s left ear, the pulpy softness where the touch of fingertips would have detected the grating of broken bone. There was no blood. Had it not been for the scooped-out look of the head, the wide, unseeing eyes and the mouth frozen in a twist of agony, the little old lady might have been sleeping.
It was an incongruous room, a spacious air-conditioned chamber in a modern condominium near Naples, Florida. Its designer had envisioned furnishings moderne, with perhaps a touch of cubist art to relieve the expanse of the east wall. But the old lady had filled it with furnishings precious to her. Big four poster she and her husband had shared in long-ago New England. Heavy walnut bedside tables, chest on chest and bureau to match the bed. Portraits of a pair of forebears in large oval frames on the wall.
About eight feet from where the little old lady lay, the huge cedar hope chest sat, its lid ornately carved in a design of leaves and flowers. It had been her grandmother’s, her mother’s and, in due time, hers. A young girl of each generation had patiently and painstakingly filled the hope chest with laces, linens, fine needlework toward the proud day of her marriage.
A shadow fell across the old lady, a fuzzy-edged silhouette of a girl. She was young, in her late twenties, a carelessly sensual figure in knit-top, raveled-edge denim shorts, and scuffed strap sandals. Dark blonde hair was tied with a ribbon away from her face, falling to a ragged ending almost in the small of her back. Her features were small, sharp, but pretty so long as the bloom of youth held.
As she looked at the old woman, she lifted her hand and wiped fine beads of perspiration from under her eyes.
“How can you stand there and look at her?” the man said. He was sitting, humped on the edge of the bed, hands hanging like leaden weights between his knees, a look of sick shock on his narrow, almost effeminate face. His voice was thick with helpless fright and remorse, as if he’d been kicked in the gut, hard, and choked on every word that came out.
The girl walked backward away from the old lady and came around to face the man. He was dressed in a conservative blue suit, white shirt, black tie, the way the old lady had requested him to dress. His name was Hert Everly and he’d worked for the old woman for five years as chauffeur and general man-servant. It was an excellent job, paying well, with quarters here in the apartment and a lot of time off. The old lady had liked to do things for herself, even to most of the cooking when guests weren’t scheduled.