Dad’s face grew pale. He came and took my arm.

“What did you say?” he said.

I sang it again: “I loved you fair, I loved you well.”

“Where did you hear that song?” he shouted.

“Out in the empty lot, just now.”

“But that’s Helen’s song, the one she wrote, years ago, for me!” cried Father. “You can’t know it. Nobody knew it, except Helen and me. I never sang it to anyone, not you or anyone.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Oh, my God!” cried Father, and ran out the door to get a shovel. The last I saw of him he was in the empty lot, digging, and lots of other people with him, digging.

I felt so happy I wanted to cry.

I dialed a number on the phone and when Dippy answered I said, “Hi, Dippy. Everything’s fine. Everything’s worked out keen. The Screaming Woman isn’t screaming any more.”

“Swell,” said Dippy.

“I’ll meet you in the empty lot with a shovel in two minutes,” I said.

“Last one there’s a monkey! So long!” cried Dippy.

“So long, Dippy!” I said, and ran.

The Trunk Lady

Johnny Menlo kicked his shoes and sat down hard on the bottom of the attic stairs. His teacher, his special private tutor, was not coming after all. So he wouldn’t have someone in the house all to himself.

Downstairs the party was running full blast. The sounds of it came up mockingly—the laughter, the cocktail shakers clinking, the music. Johnny thought he had got away from its sounds, sitting way up here, so lonely. His teacher was supposed to have come today. She hadn’t.

Mom and Dad, so busy drinking with people, gave Johnny the kind of look you give your shadow.

Johnny retreated farther up the stairs into the complete musty asylum of the abandoned attic. Even up here the dust and warm afternoon quiet was rustled by the party noises from below.

Johnny glanced around. There were four trunks sitting under veils of webs in the dim corners. A sunbeam fell through a small dirty window, lighted things for Johnny’s curious blue eyes.

The trunk in the north corner, for instance. It was always locked, the key hidden somewhere. The hasps were down now, but the brass tongue in the middle was flipped up, unlocked.

Johnny walked to the trunk and pried the hasps open. He pulled the lid up. Suddenly the attic was very cold.

She was inside.

Curled up, her body was, young, pretty. Her slender face was like chalk etched against the blackboard of her hair. Johnny gasped, but not too loudly. He held onto the trunk rim. Only her perfume was still alive. She looked as lonely and abandoned as he felt. He sympathized. Attics are places for things neglected and forgotten.

Death had apparently come through suffocation. Someone had slammed the heavy airtight lid down upon her curled loveliness. Her hand was like a white fragment of it against her filmy pink cocktail dress.

A moment later he found the balled wad of paper on the floor. It was only part of a note, with her writing on it.

—you’ve got to make it up to me, the way I’ve been treated. It shouldn’t be difficult. I could be Johnny’s teacher. That would explain my presence in the house to everyone. ELLIE.

He looked at her quiet beauty. It seemed as if she might have fallen asleep during the cocktail party and had been carried here and the lid slammed down upon her while in slumber!

The attic dimness moved in about Johnny, shaking him, then drawing out, leaving him numbed and saying, “Are you my teacher? Are you the one I was going to have for myself alone? But they—they killed you? Why should anyone kill my teacher?”

Another thought rushed the first away. He, Johnny Menlo, of the society Menlos, had found a body, hadn’t he? Sure. His eyes widened. Mom and Dad’d have to notice him now, more often.

Tags: Ray Bradbury Crime
Source: readsnovelonline.net