Johnny held it tight, not seeing it really, and looked at the pool with the slowing ripples on it where Uncle Flinny slept below. It was crazy, so crazy he couldn’t stand it.
He looked at the house through blurred eyes, and he was shaking like a sick dog. Lights were clicking on all over it. Windows in squares of yellow and orange. Father was running downstairs, shouting, and the back door was opening, just as Johnny collapsed, sobbing, upon the cold hard tiles.…
* * *
Mother sat on one side of the bed, Dad on the other side. Johnny got his crying all out of him and lay back and looked at Dad, then Mom. “Mom?”
She said nothing, but smiled weakly and held onto his hands so tightly.
‘‘Mom, oh, Mom,” Johnny said. “I’m so tired, but I can’t sleep. Why? Why, Dad?” He looked at Dad again. “Dad, what happened? I don’t know.”
Dad found it hard to say. He said it anyway. ‘‘Uncle Flinny was married twenty years ago. His wife died when their baby was born. Uncle Flinny loved his wife very much. She was very beautiful and good. Uncle Flinny hated the baby. He’d have nothing to do with it. He thought the baby was a murderer. You can understand how he felt, can’t you? You can understand how I’d feel if Mother died?”
Johnny nodded weakly, not too sure at all that he understood. ‘‘Uncle Flinny put the baby in a girl’s home somewhere. He wouldn’t tell us where. She grew up, bitter, hating Uncle Flinny because he treated her unfairly. After all, she didn’t ask to be born. You see, son?” he said.
‘‘Yeah, Dad.”
‘‘Well, just a month ago, Ellie, the baby, grown up now, found out where we lived somehow. She wrote a letter. We offered her a job as your teacher, which was only right and deserving. We thought to keep it secret from your uncle. When Ellie came, and went upstairs during the party, Uncle Flinny guessed who she was.”
Dad couldn’t speak for a moment. He closed his eyes. “Then—you found her in the attic. We tried to keep it quiet. We tried to make you forget. It was no use. We could never forget, ourselves. It was bound to come out. There was so much at stake, though, all our lives, we tried to work it out quietly. Things like money and reputations and business and what people would say made us do it, son.…And—really—they’re not worth a damn!”
Johnny turned his head. “I kept poking my nose in—” “You were our conscience, I guess. A rather active symbol. You kept the house stirred up. Uncle Flinny thought you were hurting your mother. Your mother—his sister—was all he had after his wife’s death.”
“So he tried to make it look like I was drowned in the pool—”
Mother suddenly bent and held on to Johnny closely. “I’m sorry, Johnny. Sometimes we’re blind. I didn’t think he’d do that.”
“What about the police?”
“The truth. Flinny killed her and committed suicide.”
Mother’s voice seemed distant and removed and tired. Johnny heard himself talking. “Uncle Flinny used to tell me bedtime stories, Mom. I still don’t understand. All about the Dark One and the beautiful wife, and—”
“Someday, when you’re older, you’ll understand. Poor Ellie. She was always the Dark One.”
Things were fading away, away. It was all over, done. “No more bedtime stories, Mom, please. No more, huh?”
Out of the tired darkness, Mom said, “No more, Johnny.”
Johnny rolled wearily over into dreams. His left hand opened and the small black object in it fell clattering to the bedroom floor. He was asleep even before the Black Knight ceased rolling.
“I’m Not So Dumb!”
Oh, I’m not so dumb. No, sir. When those men at Spaulding’s Corner said there was a dead man hereabouts, you think I ran quick to the Sheriff’s office to give in the news?
You got another think coming. I turned around and walked off from them men, looking over my shoulder every second or so to see if they was smiling after me, their eyes shining with a prank, and I went to stare at the body first. It was Mr. Simmons’s body in that empty-echoed farmhouse of his where the green weeds grew thick for years and there was a larkspur, bluebird sprouts, and morning-fires fringing the path. I tromped up to the door, knocked, and when nobody said they was home, I squeaked the door open and looked in.
Only then did I get going for the Sheriff.
On the way some kids threw rocks at me and laughed.
I met the Sheriff coming. When I told him he said yes, yes, he knew all about it, get outa the way! and I shied off, letting him and Mr. Crockwell smelling of farm dirt and Mr. Willis smelling of hardware hinges and Jamie MacHugh smelling of soap and scent and Mr. Duffy smelling of bar beer past.
When I got back to the lonely gray house they were inside bending around like a labor crew working a ditch. Can I come in, I wondered, and they grumbled no, no, go away, you would only be underfoot, Peter.
That’s the way it is. People always shake me to one side, chortling at me. Those folks who told me about the body, you know what they expected? Expected me to call the Sheriff without stopping to see if they was lying or not. Not me, not anymore. I realized what went on last spring when they sent me jogging for a skyhook and shore line for the twenty-seventh time in as many years; and when I sweated all the way down the shore curve to Wembley’s Pier to fetch a pentagonal monkey wrench which I never found in all my tries from the age of seventeen on up to now.
So I fooled them this time by checking first and then running for help.