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.

He lifted his face and looked at the girl, the left corner of his mouth twitching, oozing a thin smear of spit. He put his fingers against the tic as if he would mash it out of the flesh. His features twisted a little out of shape, and for a moment he was on the verge of rocking sobs.

“Get hold of yourself, Hertie!” the girl said.

“How could you do it, Carol?” He looked her up and down. His face filled with loathing for her and himself. What had he ever seen in her? She was sleazy, common, coarse. Even the animal magnetism wouldn’t last long. The signs were already there, the broad splayed toes in the crummy sandals, the faint thickness of bone in the ankles, the slight bow in the tapering young legs, the hint of bovine broadness in the hips. One day, before many years had passed, she’d have the allure of a bowling pin capped with brassy hair and a face hardened like cement.

His face mirrored his depth of feeling, and her lips thinned. “You got something on your mind besides the thoughts of a dirty old man chasing a young girl?”

He looked away, a faint murmur, moan-like on his trembling lips. He was fortyish. Old? Right now he felt too old to die. He heard her suck in a breath. He knew the signs. She had a temper like an undisciplined infant. “Carol, please…”

“You thought I was real cool the night you picked me up in the bar,” she said, gathering words, venom. “Afterwards, how about afterwards…lovesick old creep. Always knocking at my door. Making with the flowers and candy. Smooth talker, you! Going to do great things for me. Now look at the mess you’ve got me into!”

“I?” he said. A soft, mild laugh came from him. “I? You were supposed to stay in my quarters, out of sight, any time I brought you here. But today, when I come back to the apartment, what do I hear? What do I see? I hear you in here, in her bedroom. I hear words between you. And a blow. And the sound of her striking the floor. And I rush in—and she is lying there”—a shiver crossed his shoulders—“just as she is now. A hole knocked in her skull. You standing over her with the lamp in your hand.”

He began to giggle. “What brought you in here, Carol? Brattish curiosity? Or were you looking for something to pilfer that she might not miss?”

* * * *

His words were a dash of cold water on her temper. They rebuilt the bugged-out scene in Carol’s mind. She’d got bored in Hertie’s bed-sitting room, nothing on TV that was interesting, nothing to do while she waited for him. She knew the old lady was out and that the cleaning maid wouldn’t come in until later. Being alone in the apartment, she’d felt the prod of temptation.

Twice before she’d sneaked out things that wouldn’t be noticed right away, that could be accounted as lost. A diamond-studded watch the old lady hadn’t worn in a long time, lying carelessly in a drawer. A pair of silver candleholders gathering dust on the back of a shelf in the storage closet.

Never enough to arouse suspicion. Trinkets—junk, the way the rich old lady would look at it. Like, it wasn’t really stealing, just taking crumbs the old woman would never miss in a thousand years.

Today, Carol had seen a pearl brooch in a velvet tray on the bureau. She’d picked it up, stood looking at it and turning it in her hands, judging the risks of taking it.

“How dare you!” the old lady’s voice had sounded almost in Carol’s ear. Caught up in the thought of the brooch, Carol hadn’t heard her come in. “Who are you? What are you doing in here?”

Furious, outraged, the old woman had been swept past fear. Her hand had moved to seize the brooch. “The nerve! The very intolerable idea of coming in here like this!”

“Let me go!”

“I’ll have the police to you. I…” The angry voice broke. The old lady had glimpsed the irrational panic in the young, coarsely pretty face. And then the old head had exploded…

Carol slowly and carefully forced the scene from her mind.

She hardened herself against remorse.

“Hertie,” she said in a sudden change of tone, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean what I did to her or what I just said to you. I’m half out of my mind, that’s all.” Her eyes filled with convincing tears.

He lifted a hollow gaze. “Are you sure she’s dead?”

“Nobody could live with a hole in the head like that. If she isn’t dead already, she’d be dead before we could do anything. What’s done is done, Hertie. We can’t turn it back.”

“We must call someone,” he said. “An ambulance—the police.” But he didn’t make any move to get up. His words were rote, vacant, words that he felt should be said. And she knew that he had no more wish to face the police than she did. She wasn’t the only one with sticky fingers. She knew that he’d been helping himself on a petty scale for a long time, padding bills the old lady had gradually come to depend on him to pay, juggling accounts as he’d blandly wormed his way further into her service.

She slipped down beside him, holding her temper even though he flinched away.

“I won’t want this to be the end of the line for us,” she said. “I do love you, Hertie. I got this crazy temper and I know I’m not good enough for you, but love happens that way sometimes.”

She sensed the conflicts straining within him. He was sick with fright for himself but had no capacity to grieve for others. He could care less for the old lady as a person, caring only that her death was a promise of disaster. He knew what he should do in the situation, but he lacked the nerve to do so.

“Hertie,” she said. “It’s done and over, like I said. If we went to prison and suffered, it wouldn’t bring her back. The only thing we can do now is make what we can for ourselves out of this awful happening.”

“It’s too late, Carol. Everything is ruined!” He reminded her of a trapped rabbit quivering for a way out.

“We have to keep our nerve, Hertie. That’s the main thing. No one knows but us what has happened. We can do a lot before anybody finds out—and by that time we’ll be long ago and far away, under different names, living the beautiful life.”

“You must be crazy!”

“Crazy for life—crazy for what we can get out of this. You don’t know opportunity when it hits you in the face.”

“Opportunity,” the echo of the word gagged him slightly.

She made a small movement, gripping his bicep. “Just listen to me, Hertie. There’s a small fortune in silver, jewels, expensive bits of art right here in the apartment. A Cadillac and Mercedes outside. I know places where we can sell off the stuff fast, no questions asked.”

She paused, but he didn’t break the short silence, and she knew his mind was sniffing, nibbling, pawing at the prospect she’d raised.

“Her goods on hand is for starters, Hertie. Every fancy store in town knows her boy Friday, which is you, does a lot of shopping for her. We’ll hit them all, loading every one of her charge accounts with more goods, mountains of goods.”

He was still fooling around with the bait, but his panic was losing its first slashing edge. He was breathing almost evenly.

“There’s her bank account for whipped cream on the pie,” Carol said. “Can’t do her any good now. Might as well benefit somebody—like us.”

“You’re talking about a forged check?”

“Why not? Must be plenty of papers around the apartment you could trace her signature from. Little old forgery charge ain’t much, compared to the charges already hanging over our heads. You cash checks for her all the time. Everybody at the bank knows you.”

“Not checks big enough to dent her account.”

“And we sure want to make a nice big dent, Hertie. So we play it cool. You don’t go floating into the bank with a check that’s got a long string of zeros after the first number on it. Instead, you make a phone call. You instruct the bank that she wants the boodle delivered here by bank messenger and that her check will be waiting. Nothing about that to raise questions. When the messenger gets here with the sackful of beautiful bread, you trade him the check for it.”

“He’ll want a receipt,” Everly said.

“‘Natch. I’m not so dense I don’t know he’ll want a receipt. You invite him into the living room, excuse yourself, carry the receipt into another room—where we’ll trace her signature on it just like we’ll do on the check. When you start back to the living room, I say something after you, so the messenger will hear a woman’s voice in the apartment. Not loud. Just enough so he’ll know you’re not alone. I’ll say…” Carol’s brow crimped in thought over the line. “I’ll say, ‘Thank that sweet boy for me, Hertie’.”

“That’s not what she would…would have…say at all. She didn’t talk like that. She’d have said, “Tell the gentleman from the bank to have a nice day’. And she didn’t call me Hertie. Everly—that’s what she called me.”

“Okay, Everly. How do you like the idea of being rich? And free. Living the good life.”

His eyes shone for an instant with the way he liked the idea. Then his shoulders twitched. “It won’t work.”

“And why not? It’ll be days before the unpaid charge accounts and forged check start drawing attention.”

“You’re assuming that we have time, Carol. And we haven’t. We still have…” He tried to look at the spindly old body occupying the room with them, a few short paces away. His eyes failed. He took a breath. “We still have her. She’s real—visible. People come and go. In fact—” he looked at his watch, and his mouth became a red gash. “—I’d forgotten. So much happening I didn’t remember.” He jumped up, looking toward the bedroom doorway. “Remember what, Hertie?”

“The maid—due, Overdue. She has her key. She’ll be walking in any minute.”

She sprang up beside him, grabbed his arms in both her hands. “Stop it, Hertie! Only chickens get their heads cut off in this world. So the maid is coming. All we got to do is hide the body. Hide it good. Hide it so we’ll have two, three, four days. More time than we need.”

“Hide it where—under the bed? Sorry.” He croaked a laugh, “But the maid vacuums under the bed.”

“Hide it…” Carol’s eyes swept the room, passed over the ornate cedar hope chest, stopped, darted back.

A tremor of relief shook Carol. “It’s made to order, Hertie. That old chest.”

“Her hope chest,” Everly said. “Somehow it seems wrong.”

“It’s all the way right—plain perfect, if you ask me. She’ll fit in perfectly with a little folding here and there. Even day maids don’t go around opening every chest. The little dead bird will nest in there for days without anybody knowing.”

He trembled, and reached for the bedpost for support. “I can’t touch a dead body, Carol. Can’t drag it over. Can’t stuff it in the hope chest.”

She grabbed his shoulders, turned him, propelled him toward the doorway.

“Then get out there and be ready for the maid. Stall her. Three or four minutes is all I’ll need. I’ll do it myself, Hertie, and see you in your rooms. Then, when the maid is gone, we’ll get started on the rest of it.”

“Carol…”

“Don’t talk, Hertie. Not now. There isn’t any choice left. Just do as I say.”

* * * *

In the old lady’s consciousness, their voices came and went like the rustle of weak surf on a dark, sandy shore. She struggled to break through the veiling paralysis. Her arms and legs were useless dangling appendages. The wan, gray fog remained smeared through her eyes.

The murmurings slipped in and out like the hissings and raspings of vibrations through a faulty telephone. The girl’s voice was the clearer of the two. The other, lower in pitch, perhaps belonged to a man. Everly? She wasn’t sure where the name came from. Who was Everly? Someone she knew. Someone who knew the girl. Everly lived here. Everly was her employee. He had a girl friend in his quarters. Everly was breaking the rules. Everly’s voice rose and broke, saying something about her hope chest.

Her tenuous awareness sagged, fatigued with the effort of identifying and placing Everly. She struggled to stay afloat in the dragging cross currents of a syrupy twilight. She was being borne slowly by the swirling tide. Being moved. Dragged along the carpet. Dropped for a moment.

A little mouse came and squeaked. No, it wasn’t a mouse. It was the sound of hinges on a warped door. An old warped lid. Everly had talked about her hope chest. Now it was being opened.

For what reason? It contained nothing.

Like quicksand, the thin whey was sucking her along once more. It was suddenly rougher on the surface with corrugated waves. She was rising above the soupy mass, and it was dropping from her in thick globs.

Her mind gathered the fragments of sensation and translated them into an experience. And she knew the truth. When the lid fell with a thud, she realized she was in her hope chest. Shut away—hidden. The final tenacious hope of being found before it was too late vanished in the rushing darkness. She was falling, falling, reaching with hands that had no touch, screaming as she tumbled end over end with a voice that had no sound.

She fell nightmarishly until she faded to nothingness. The darkness grew calm. A faint rosy glow spilled across the further horizon. The darkness receded. The golden light grew stronger. All the bonds loosened about her. She rose up, and the years had vanished. It was her nineteenth birthday, and she had never felt so vital and alive. She was the loveliest of images with the golden glow all about her.

She heard music, the gay strains of a Straus waltz. A scene spread before her. She was on a lovely terrace in a night warmed by the delicious breath of summer. The golden light came from Japanese lanterns hung over the fragrant lawns and flower gardens.

Voice were all about her, laughter mingled with the music. Girls in party dresses and handsome young men, so straight, tall and vigorous in white jackets. They crowded about her on this, the occasion of her birthday. She was enfolded in friendships, gay chatter, hugs, quick little kisses, happy jokes.

“Nineteen? And just yesterday I was pulling your pigtails”… “Darling, you are growing older”… “Better live it up, next year you’ll be an old twenty”… “The teens are gone but not forgotten”… “Now! Look at what nineteen years have done to that knobby-kneed kid…”

There was a buffet set up on the end of the terrace with snowy linen and mountains of food. Through a rift in the crowd of people about her, she saw him over there, talking with her father. He glanced in her direction. Their eyes met, held, and he excused himself from her father’s presence. He came toward her, brushing by people as if only she existed.

He was standing before her, dark-haired, craggy-faced, broad in the shoulders. He took her hand and took her away. His arm encircled her and he led her into the waltz. On and on they danced while the music poured forth, and she closed her eyes, wondering if she could bear the joy of it all…

With her busy beehive mind buzzing about problems of her own, Mrs. Daugherty, the maid, entered the apartment and drew up with a gasp. Mr. Everly was standing in the middle of the room, looking very strange. His every muscle seemed pulled tight—his face was absolutely bloodless, oozing a clammy kind of sweat even though the air-conditioning was going full blast.

Mrs. Daugherty had never cared very much for him. He was too smooth, too haughty. She was proud of her ability to take note of little things and arrive at conclusions. She was certain that most other people weren’t quite as sharp. She could look at ashtrays and dirty dishes and tell what kind of gathering had been here the night before. A grocery order would suggest who was coming to dinner tonight. Mrs. Daugherty’s employer was a real lady, who made a point of serving a favored food to a guest.

This Everly, Mrs. Daughterty suspected, had two faces.

“My goodness, Mr. Everly, you gave me a start! Aren’t you feeling well?”

“Certainly, I’m well! We have a tight schedule today. So do what you have to and get through your chores quickly.”

With raised brows, Mrs. Daughterty watched him wheel and leave the room. She heard small noises of his passage and a heavy silence as he retreated to the privacy of his quarters.

Lips thinned, Mrs. Daugherty set her handbag beside the nearest living room chair. She was a spare sallow figure with a sharply featured face and thin graying hair bunned at the nape.

She murmured an opinion of Everly under her breath. Clearly, he didn’t want her around today, whatever the reason. And nuts to him, too. Mrs. Daugherty had no intention of skimping her work. “I always say,” she remarked to no one, “that a thing is worth doing right, if it’s worth doing at all.”

Might as well start with the master bedroom. Mrs. Daugherty marched down the hallway, opened the linen closet and took out sheets, pillow cases, bedspread, towels and wash cloths.

Carrying the linens in a neat stack on her right forearm, she entered the bedroom. She placed the linens carefully on the bureau and went around the room, checking for dust with fingertips, picking up a pair of stockings, inserting a book marker and closing a book on the bedside table.

The brisk efficiency of her movements faltered, came to a halt. She stood at the foot of the bed, her hand idly resting against a post. Something not entirely ordinary had caught her eye and she couldn’t decide what it was.

Her quick, gimlet eyes probed all about the room with their insatiable curiosity. Everything seemed the same, no tilted pictures that needed straightening, no spills from a late-night glass of warm milk.

“Aha!” Mrs. Daughterty said. She moved from the bed a short distance and examined the way the light was striking the thick carpet. Two parallel lines had been impressed in the plush surface. They were about fifteen inches apart. They were exactly the kind of marking that would have been left if someone had tilted a heavy chair and dragged it across the room.

The maid’s portion of her mind decided that she’d have to brush up the nap. Couldn’t leave it like that. But that other portion of her thinking processes wanted an explanation. Nothing had been dragged from the room. Instead, the markings in the carpet pile ran away from the door. Around the bed. They ran right to that old hope chest.

“Now what in the world…” Mrs. Daugherty murmured. She stopped beside the hope chest, her eyes once more searching out the markings. They were almost invisible, the way the light was striking them now.

She knew the chest was empty, an old relic, a cherished part of her employer’s youth. Therefore, something large and rather heavy had been dragged to the chest and put inside. Mrs. Daugherty couldn’t imagine for the life of her what it could be.

So she lifted the lid.

She chocked back her scream, thinking suddenly of Everly’s strangeness today. Now she knew the meaning of the impressions in the carpet pile…the little old lady’s heel marks, imprinted when her body was hoisted by the shoulders and dragged to the hope chest.

Commanding herself not to faint, Mrs. Daugherty tiptoed to the phone.

* * * *

Four hours later. Dr. William Wilford and his assistant, Dr. Elizabeth Crown, came out of emergency surgery together, stripping off surgical gloves and dropping white masks to dangle at their necks.

Neither spoke for a moment, feeling the first pull of exhaustion from what they had just been through.

Dr. Crown lifted a hand to peel off her cap, revealing a lustrous feathery cut of rich brown hair touched with skeins of gray.

“Nice job, Bill. Beautiful job! I think she’ll make it.”

“I know she will,” Dr. Wilford said. “I’ve got that certain feeling. She’s one of those spindly old sparrows with the constitution of a mule. And after all, we’ve patched up heads in worse condition than that one.”

“A few. Not many. She certainly looked dead when she was brought in. If the maid hadn’t found her when she did, we couldn’t have saved her.”

“But the maid did, Lizzy. And we did.”

The old lady remained in intensive care for eight days. Then she was moved to a private room and there were four weeks of returning strength, of solid food, of therapy in whirlpool baths, of rising from a wheelchair, of longer walks and exercises.

She learned that Everly and the girl had escaped from Florida. She read of their capture in New Orleans where, desperate for money, Carol had egged Everly into an abortive liquor store stickup.

An excellent agency, jealous of its prime reputation, at last sent over three applicants for the old lady to interview. She chose Mrs. Hardesty to take Everly’s place. She was middle aged, with a strong frame of central European heritage somewhere in her genes. She was quietly pleasant company, dependable, the kind the old lady decided she could get on well with. She had been in domestic service for fifteen years, since the death of her husband. Her previous employers had moved to the cold of Canada, offering Mrs. Hardesty the chance to continue with them.

“I’m glad you preferred the warmth of Florida,” the little old lady said the day she and Mrs. Hardesty returned to the condominium.

She showed Mrs. Hardesty through the apartment, and within the hour they were smoothly settled in, Mrs. Hardesty back in her own quarters, the old lady sitting stiffly on the edge of a chair in the living room, as if aware of-the silence and sudden emptiness of this place where it had all happened.

She got up slowly and slipped without a whisper of a sound into her own bedroom. She stood very still, holding the edge of the door. Then she closed and moved with gossamer lightness across the room.

She sank to her knees beside the hope chest. A breath trembled on her lips. She moved her hand to stroke the ornate carving of the lid lovingly. Once it had fitted snugly. Now, like herself, it was warped and old, a relic of the past. Lucky that the warpage in the lid let a little air in. Otherwise, she might have smothered.

She lifted the lid and looked at the cedar-lined depths of the chest. A smile stole across her lips. A thrill of anticipation raced through her.

In a series of graceful movements, the little old lady rose, stepped inside the chest, sank down, arranged herself like an infant wriggling to comfort in its crib. Then she slowly lowered the lid on herself with her extended arm, watching while the light disappeared. The darkness inside the chest touched her nostrils with the faint fragrance of old cedar.

She closed her eyes and waited, eager hope pulsing through her. Would it work? Could the lovely miracle happen a second time? Did she have to have a break in the head for it to happen?

Then it began happening. A rosy light spilled from the further horizon. The light grew in strength until it was all about her. She was nineteen, the center of attention at a gay party. An orchestra was playing a Straus Waltz, and there he was, hurrying toward, her as if none of the other vital and happy people existed. He was standing beside her, dark-haired, craggy-faced, broad in the shoulders. His eyes were worshipping her, and her whole being felt like a flower. Life was flawless, just beginning, without end.

He was taking her hand. The strength of his arm encircled her waist. He led her into the Waltz, and she closed her eyes, surrendering to the joy of it all.

On and on they danced, in a waltz that would never cease…