THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Read online

  The lawns of the cemetery, by contrast, were already feeling the influence of spring, and the matted browns and yellows of last year’s grass were interleaved with green. No need to stop at the gatehouse to ask the way, since Giselle had been buried next to her father. Bob, without ever saying so outright, had made it clear that he didn’t want his wife anywhere close by when it came time for him to be buried. An understandable feeling, Joy-Ann thought.

  It was annoying to be able to understand Bob (whom she’d never really liked) and not to have a glimmering of what it was possessed her daughter to run off to Las Vegas. She’d simply appeared at the back door one summer afternoon, without so much as a handbag, nothing but three magnetic potholders (which still worked, after a dozen launderings, just as Giselle had said they would), to announce her intention of “taking a vacation,” not saying where, and to ask for the money for her ticket. At first Joy-Ann supposed there’d been a quarrel that Giselle didn’t want to talk about, but according to Bob, whose surprise (and anger) surely had been genuine, that was not the case.

  Finally Joy-Ann had decided that the explanation must lie in Women’s Liberation. Her daughter had never seemed the sort to be caught up by Women’s Liberation, exactly the opposite, really, but you could scarcely turn on the TV these days or open a magazine without seeing something about how unfair and degrading it was to be a housewife. Bob, God knows, was just the sort of husband Women’s Liberation was trying to stamp out. Compared to him, Dewey had been a saint. Reluctantly Joy-Ann had given Giselle the money she’d asked for, thereby saddling herself with a much heavier burden than the guilt of sharing her crime (if that’s what it was): the burden of a secret she’d never been able to tell anyone. How could she have explained—to Alice, for instance—that she’d made no effort to stop Giselle’s departure, or even to delay it? She didn’t understand it herself. While they were together it had seemed the natural thing to do, regrettable but necessary, but the moment Giselle had waved goodbye from the taxi from outside the bank where they’d gone to make the withdrawal it seemed crazy.

  Ah, but Giselle had looked so beautiful that day, like one of those new movie stars who manage not to look like movie stars, and Joy-Ann had always been a sucker for good looks. Dewey had been a regular Prince Charming, if a little on the short side, and Giselle had inherited all his best features—the nose, the eyes, the slightly dimpled chin. Whereas Bing…

  But Joy-Ann preferred not to think about Bing and had the wonderful ability—an aspect of the gift of grace—not to think of things that might make her feel guilty, angry, or depressed.

  “She’s not here,” Alice Hoffman said, when she’d reached the side of Dewey’s grave, several strides ahead of her friend, who could not, despite the weight she’d lost, keep up an ordinary walking pace.

  “Nonsense, she has to be.”

  But in fact Giselle’s grave wasn’t there. The marker to the right of Dewey’s was for Roberta Liebergott, and the one to the left was for Lester Anker, Joy-Ann’s great-great-uncle, born all the way back in 1891, dead in 1964. Giselle was nowhere to be found.

  “It isn’t possible,” Joy-Ann declared, with a feeling both of indignation and, incongruously, of hopefulness, as though it might be possible that her daughter were not, after all, dead.

  “They’ve made a mistake,” declared Alice, whose distrust of constituted authority was larger than Joy-Ann’s. “They’ve put her in someone else’s plot. Probably this Roberta What’s-her-name. Look, she died just about the same time last summer.”

  “They couldn’t make a mistake in a matter like this. They couldn’t.”

  “We’ll have to check. There must be a directory back at the gate, where the guard was.”

  “She must be right around here,” Joy-Ann said, with a dismal look to where the car was parked, fifty yards away.

  “You stay here. I won’t be a minute. This is outrageous.” And Alice, in a glory of indignation, went striding off to the car.

  It was outrageous, certainly, but Joy-Ann couldn’t help feeling relieved to be given a moment alone by Dewey’s grave. She ought to have thought to bring flowers. Did the dead keep track of such things? She’d find out soon enough. Unusually for Joy-Ann, this reflection on her own exceptionally mortal situation didn’t trigger tears or even melancholy. The weather was too warm, the lawn too green, for gloom to take over. Blue skies, she crooned subvocally, nothing but blue skies heading my way.

  Where could they have put Giselle? Imagine, making a mistake on such a scale! Would they have to dig her up again? What an awful idea.

  She looked around to see if there were any graves that seemed new, and there was one plot three rows ahead and four markers to the right where the grass had a sparser character. She knew by the clenching of something inside of her that that was her daughter’s grave.

  Was it her heart? But there was nothing wrong with her heart.

  And then she could smell, as distinctly as though she’d stepped into her own kitchen, a smell of burning chocolate. She remembered the day that Giselle, who must have been eleven at the time, had set out to make brownies and then, watching a program on TV, had forgotten all about them. Dewey had made the family eat the incinerated brownies that night, as a lesson in home economy, and now, as impossible as the smell of cooking amid these acres of graves, the taste of that dessert was on Joy-Ann’s tongue.

  The smell and the taste of the brownies made her even more certain that the grave in question was Giselle’s. Why then this reluctance to approach it and be sure? I’m being silly, she thought, though that was not at all how she felt as she began, despite herself, to walk on a zigzag course between the low granite markers.

  She noticed, as she drew nearer, the sharp blades of a daffodil (Or was it an iris? Until they bloomed, all flowers that sprang from bulbs were the same to Joy-Ann) thrusting up from the raw dirt at the foot of the grave.

  And there, sure enough, on the low headstone was her daughter’s name and the years of her birth and her death:

  GISELLE ANKER GLANDIER

  1952–1979

  Someone called her and she looked around. It was not Alice; Alice’s car was nowhere in sight. In any case, Alice would not have addressed her as Mummy.

  It’s my nerves, she thought. As who would say, It’s the wind.

  And then she saw that the plant at the foot of the grave, which had not borne any bloom a moment ago, was fully grown and in flower. Joy-Ann was prepared to believe that her other senses might play tricks on her but not her vision. Her eyes had never failed her.

  She knelt down to take a closer look at the impossible flower on her daughter’s grave, and only when she was on her knees did she see that it wasn’t a flower at all that blossomed from the plant’s thick stem but a small pink hand. It grasped Joy-Ann’s finger and tugged at it, as a child might, struggling to keep its balance as it took its first faltering steps.

  Just as Joy-Ann died, Giselle’s voice shrilled delightedly in her ears: Mummy, I’m free! I’m free! Oh, thank you so much.

  CHAPTER 14

  In the first glory of her freedom she could think of nothing but the fact that she was (it seemed) herself again. For days all her attention had been focused on the growth of the flower above her, as it pierced the friable topsoil and thrust conscious leaves into the light. Her spirit had intertwined with bulb and blade until she had almost come to accept, in more peaceful moments, that she was to become a flower, simply and forever that. And why not? Could one have wished for a pleasanter afterlife than this, to sip at the air and the rain, be visited by bees, and relax in a calm appreciation of the sun? Hadn’t those hours of sunbathing by the pool of the Lady Luck Motor Lodge been the happiest of the memories she’d had to rehearse during her entombment, the most illuminating?

  But such moments of acceptance had been rare. She would grow impatient with mere radiance and begin to twist, like a key in a faulty lock, up through the living tunnel of the stem to the small node of potentiality at
the slowly unsealing tip. Does every flower feel such an eagerness to unfurl itself, to spin earth’s inert straw into the gold of life?

  And then she had blossomed, all in an instant, out of the earth—and out of the flower. The last link between spirit and corpse was sundered. She was free, and she soared upward in her freedom like a jet of water rising from a fountain, upward until she reached, as all things will, a point of equipoise. Something still bound her to the world below, but only as birds must from time to time relinquish flight and settle to earth. No longer, however, would she be confined to a sphere of sentience narrow as the cemetery. She could feel her spirit literally expand, like an ever-widening bell of fireworks, almost (it seemed) to the horizon, and then fall back amazed and exhausted.

  Near and far, large and small, all relative dimensions became unfixed and fluid. Her mind, immense in itself, seemed to enclose all consciousness of the cemetery below as in a waterdrop, a crystal ball hovering in the surrounding blaze of light; the moment of her blossoming to birth seemed to have taken place quite as long ago as the birth of her physical body. Of the circumstances of her second birth she could remember only the touch and tug of her mother’s hand, her own responsive cry of delight. All that followed was lost in the rapture of release. She did not know, yet, that the release had produced an equal and opposite reaction. She did not notice, on the ground by the grave, Joy-Ann’s sprawled body, daffodil in hand.

  And God, Who is said to see all things, did He notice? Surely it had been a kindness in Him, and in keeping with His partiality to the Ankers as a family, that He had blessed Joy-Ann with one of His most precious gifts, a swift and un expected death coming at a moment of inward grace. Of her He had shown Himself solicitous; the same could not be said of His regard for Giselle. Though she thought herself free, she was, in fact, no freer than the wind, or any more conscious of the forces that would now direct her actions.

  She would haunt her husband. Even in the grave Giselle had foreseen that, had sensed that the bond that had united her to her own corpse and now anchored her still to the waterdrop world below was in a sense covalent with the bond of her marriage. For this, and for the danger it would put her in, God was not, however, to be blamed. Having set in motion the great clockworks of atom and universe, having introduced thereto the element of random action, He must follow the rules of His creation, as an artist must follow the incised lines of the sketch that will become, in its finished state, the gigantic fresco of His Last Judgment. He must allow to humans, as to electrons, some degree of indeterminacy. Not even His favorites can escape flu viruses or muggings or the greater mischance of a ruinous marriage. Giselle, in marrying Robert Glandier after a two-week courtship, had erred, through laziness and lust. Now even in death she had to live with the consequences of her original mistake. All those years as Glandier’s wife had deformed the shape of her spirit so that even after receiving the gift of grace, and even in death, she remained wedded to him, attached, powerless to turn her attention anywhere but westward, to Willowville, to the house there, to the man in the house who had murdered her.

  CHAPTER 15

  “Mr. Glandier, there’s a call for you. A woman who won’t give her name but says it’s extremely important.” Miss Spaeth struck an attitude of aggrieved obstinacy, planting her hand on the doorjamb and jutting her hip sideways.

  “Probably my mother-in-law.” He took up the phone and said hello.

  “Hello, is this Mr. Glandier?”

  “It is, yes. Who is this?”

  “This is Alice Hoffman. I’m a friend of your mother-in-law, Joy-Ann Anker. Actually we’ve met a few times, at Joy-Ann’s.”

  “Yes, I remember. What can I do for you, Mrs. Hoffman?”

  For an instant Glandier thought Alice Hoffman was being strangled. Then he realized she was sobbing.

  “What is the matter, Mrs. Hoffman? Are you all right?” (And if not, he thought to himself, I’d like you to tell me how that could be any concern of mine.)

  “It’s Joy-Ann, Mr. Glandier. She’s dead. I took her to the cemetery, and then—” She broke off into more slobbering.

  “You took her to the cemetery?” That was expeditious, he thought.

  “To see Giselle’s grave. She’d never been there, and she wanted me to drive. I never thought when I left to look for the gatekeeper… It must have been the shock.”

  He was too confused and too pleased to think what to reply or what to ask. He had just got used to the idea that the chemotherapy was working and that Joy-Ann might linger on for a year or longer. What luck.

  “Mr. Glandier?” Alice Hoffman inquired at last.

  He tried to take a businesslike tone. “Yes, yes. As you say, the shock. Where are you now, and where is Mrs. Anker?”

  “They took her to the hospital. But she is dead, there was no doubt about that. When I came back, it couldn’t have been five minutes later, she was lying on the grass right by Giselle’s grave. With a flower in her hand. I thought I’d have a heart attack myself, Mr. Glandier. I mean, there was no warning. This morning she seemed so cheerful. It was her idea to go out there, I didn’t want any part of it. I think it must have been the—” Alice paused and shifted down to a whisper. “—the drugs you got for her. But don’t worry about that. I looked in her purse before the police came. And afterward, back home, I remembered where she kept that stuff, so I went in through the back door—Joy-Ann never locked the back door—and I took it out of the jar in the drawer with the dishtowels. That’s where she’d been hiding it.”

  “Mrs. Hoffman, I don’t see what any of that has to do with me.”

  “No, of course not. Or with me either. Only I don’t want to have it in my house.”

  “Flush it down the toilet. Put in the garbage. It’s no concern of mine.”

  “But you did buy it for her. I don’t know, it seems like destroying evidence.”

  “You haven’t told anyone about it, have you?”

  “Certainly not. But if they ever asked—of course there’s no reason they would ask, I suppose, but still, if they did—what would I say?”

  “Mrs. Hoffman, there is no reason to become any more upset. I’ll do whatever will make you feel better. I suggest that you don’t talk to anyone else before you feel calmer. Just stay home. I’ll drop by in an hour or so. You live next door?”

  “Across the street. Number Ninety-seven.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he said, and hung up. Only then, his hand still clamped tight around the sweaty receiver, did it occur to him that he hadn’t asked where Joy-Ann had been taken.

  Dead! And the house his. An impulse to celebrate swept over him, to make noise, to dash about. If Joy-Ann’s corpse had been available, he would have embraced it. If he’d had a glass he would have thrown it against the wall. But here in his office he couldn’t so much as let out a whoop or throw a punch of symbolic pleasure into a pillow. He just stood there thinking of the money and quivering under the impact of his own good luck. If he’d killed the old woman himself he could scarcely have felt more pleased.

  CHAPTER 16

  Looking blithe and slightly unreal in an apricot-color safari suit and canary-yellow Qiana shirt, Bing Anker reached into the cage of retumbled numbers, took out one ball, and leaned into the microphone: “N-thirty-one. Ain’t we got fun. N-thirty-one.” He pressed 31 on the console, and the number lighted on the board above his head. “Still no winners?” he demanded of the half-filled hall. “Well, spin ‘em again, Sam.” His foot touched the pedal; the cage whirled; the numbered balls avalanched over each other like clothes in a drier. Bing reached in, took out a ball, called the number: “Again, an N: N-forty-two. I wouldn’t do it, if I were you. N-forty-two. Still no bingo? This is getting to be preposterous!” He exaggerated the plosives in the manner of Sylvester Pussycat and was rewarded with a sprinkling of chuckles. He punched 42 onto the board, spun the cage and drew: “I-sixteen. Sweet sixteen, and never been—”

  “Bingo!” shouted a woman
at the back of the hall. The usher approached her and confirmed her win: a vertical line in the N column and a horizontal line across the center of the card.

  “Well, that was a sweet sixteen indeed, and the jackpot is a juicy two hundred dollars!” He held up a fan of twenty-dollar bills and beckoned the winner from her seat. “Unless you’d rather have a kiss?”

  The winner mounted the steps to the stage unsteadily, clutching both railings. She looked as though she’d die before she got back to her seat.

  “Oh, I can see it already. It’s just my money you’re after. They’re all the same, these out-of-town women. Gold diggers, every last one of them. The Gold Diggers of 1980.”

  There was loyal laughter from his regulars in the front rows, but facing the spectacle of the case history who’d now almost reached his seat of judgment center stage, there could be no larger-scale levity. The woman’s eyes were fixed on the money with the undisguised, anxious hunger of an addict or a starved pet. He switched the money, teasingly, to his left hand and confronted Lady Death with the microphone.

  “Congratulations, Mrs.—” He arched an interrogative eyebrow.

  “Collins.” Her eyes glinted suspiciously.

  “Collins!” he repeated in a loud voice, and the regulars, knowing his tricks, giggled in anticipation. “I’m sorry, we’re out of collins mix, but every winner gets—” He pressed a button that triggered the bugle call. “—a free glass of California champagne. Mindy, where is Mrs. Collins’s champagne?”

  Mindy, in slithery pink satin, came out from the curtain with the two champagne glasses on a tray. He took his (a ginger ale), and Mrs. Collins, with evident reluctance, took hers. They toasted. The bingo players applauded. Making a face, Mrs. Collins bolted the champagne, put the glass back on the tray, and waited for her winnings.