The cottage had a gingerbread look in the last of the afternoon light: snow in a steep frosting on its tilted roof, frost rimming its small windowpanes. I remember now that we knocked, both secretly knowing the absurdity of it, and that walking into that living room was as shocking as opening a Christmas card to find an obscene verse inside.
It wasn’t only the blood on the floorboards, or the brass gleam of the poker standing primly at attention on the hearth. Part of it was the table set for tea at the shadowy end of the room—napkins folded, teapot in a quilted cosy, crusts of bread in a savage litter on the braided rug. And on the window sill in the alcove, like a travesty of domestic comfort, the cat, Snowball.
Beside me, Madden called in his high irritable voice, “Charles?” and in the same split second I shouted, “Anne?”
That was symbolic. Both of us knew that only one of the Jethros could possibly answer, the one who had killed the other.
It’s hard to explain about the Jethros. Even Madden, who had been Charles Jethro’s literary agent for eighteen years, confessed himself baffled. Maybe that was because each of them had two separate personalities, which made a total of four people living together for twenty years.
You may have read some of Jethro’s essays, or attended one of the gatherings at which he was in constant demand as a speaker. He was a big man, about fifty, and handsome in a craggy disarming way. He was sensitive about his failing eyesight and never wore his thick glasses in public, but somehow he contrived a keen and twinkling air when he spoke at what must have been an indistinguishable blur. He had made two successful departures into the field of verse. Broiled Offerings, a sizzling parody of the obscurist school of poetry, was followed by Puzzles in Smoke, which the enlightened public bought with great anticipation and the critics circled as warily as a strange dog, because it might or might not be another parody.
That was the Charles Jethro who sparkled at select cocktail parties and wrote witty inscriptions in his books for favored friends. You had to have known him a long time to be even acquainted with the brutal, vindictive, incredibly foul-tempered man who shared the same skin.
His wife Anne, who was perhaps five years younger than he, was his right hand, his amanuensis, his quietly unerring critic. Someone had been unkind enough to call her his seeing-eye bitch; I often wondered if Jethro himself had thought that up. She was one of those willfully neglected-looking women, with tweeds that never quite fitted and tan hair strained back into a knot. Somewhere in her family there had been an admixture of some surprising blood; her mouth was heavy and her eyes as unfathomable as black bean soup. She did Jethro’s typing—he would trust it to no one else—and kept him to deadlines and defended him from nuisances like a tigress when he was working.
But the steadiness and the constancy had its other side. No one could bear a grudge as implacably as Anne Jethro, or seethe as long, with the lid on tight, like some dangerous stew. When her hand was forced there was usually a hatpin inside—like the time when Jethro had insisted on her entertaining a trio of visiting Englishwomen at tea, and she had docilely cut watercress sandwiches and plum cake. Opened up, the dainty little napkins revealed, in indelible ink, an unrepeatable phrase about Jethro.
“Charles?” called Madden again from the foot of the stairs, and turned back to me. He said, as though he could hold something at bay by his disapproval, “I don’t like this at all, I believe I’ll have a look upstairs. I wish that damned cat wouldn’t sit there like that.”
The cat, Snowball, was a pledge of Jethro’s malice toward his wife just as certainly as a diamond pin was a pledge of another man’s affection. Anne hated and feared cats with the same violent reaction women usually reserve for rats, and I had seen her driven from the room more than once by this one. Jethro had taken it in as a stray, and named it sardonically—if he had adopted a dog he would have insisted on calling it Fido—and while he caviled at Anne’s housekeeping expenditures, he fed it on salmon and sardines. He took a perverse delight in its greed and selfishness and haughty tail-switchings, for the simple reason that the cat repelled and frightened his wife.
Because the Jethros hated each other.
Why did they stay together? Their few close friends advanced various theories. They were used to each other, they were actually stimulated by their weird domestic battles, Charles needed Anne emotionally andAnne was financially dependent on Charles—and so forth.
Madden was much too clever to say anything that might be quoted behind his back, but I had always thought it was because at bottom they hated each other, and were bound in a mutual pact of revenge. Charles twisted Anne’s wrist in one of his ungovernable tempers, and Anne—silent, implacable—hid his glasses for a week while he begged piteously for them. Or Charles hid his glasses himself as an excuse for not making out a check for Anne’s housekeeping money, and Anne marched off to the nearest pawnshop with his mother’s heirloom silver.
People who knew them laughed over these colorful irregularities—“Did you know Jethro hit Anne with one of those baked-bean casseroles?” “No, really? I thought she smashed them all the night those people from Boston came to dinner”—and any uneasiness they felt was slight. Charles could somehow emerge from one of these sessions at his blandest and wittiest, and Anne, sometimes nursing a wrist or a shin, would be calm and helpful with autograph seekers.
But then they had moved to Byfield, the two of them—or the four of them?—into the snows and the silences and the confines of a cottage deep in the country, on the estate of a friend of Jethro’s. The move had been partly Madden’s idea, to coax out an evaluation of Joyce: Jethro on Joyce, he said in an authoritative squeak, would set the literary world by the ears.
But—the snows, the silence, the very aloneness. No friends dropping in, no convivial engagements outside to break into that tiny, too closely-bound world. Anne and Jethro both had the profoundest respect for Jethro’s ability, but that wasn’t enough. There was nothing to stimulate Jethro into being bland and witty, or Anne into shelving her grudges; nothing to check the outbreak of rage, and everything to feed it. I had visited them once for an hour or two on the way down from Boston, and I went away feeling as though I had gotten out of a lion’s cage. Bare trees and frozen shrubs in burlap and the whistlingly bitter wind aren’t for people who hate each other, with no one to see what they do about it. It was as if something had begun to snowball.
The cat—had Jethro named her more originally than he thought?—watched me complacently as I started out of the living room. Upstairs, Madden was clumping about with the heavy tread common to small men who want to make their weight felt. I walked into the tiny old-fashioned kitchen, but there was nothing there to tell me anything, even if the dusk hadn’t begun to close in. The surfaces were bare, the wooden cabinets closed and blank; the black stove Anne had joked about was cold when I touched it.
That would make it—how long since Anne had killed Charles, or Charles had killed Anne?
Madden came downstairs again, tiptoeing solemnly. In spite of his superbly cut cashmere suit and his glowing foulard tie he looked old and cold and worried; for all his petulant squeakings and his ruthless determination to get a book out of his client, he had been fond of Jethro—and Jethro guilty of murder would be in almost as bad a pickle as Jethro dead. He said irritably, “Turn on a light, will you? I suppose we’ll have to call the police.”
“You’ll have to call very loudly then,” I said, as jumpy as he was. “The lights are out and so is the phone. All this white stuff is a blizzard, Madden. They get them in the country. We’ll have to drive into the village.”
“You go,” said Madden, making a large gesture for so small a man. “There are candles somewhere, I suppose, and I’ll know where to look for his notes and manuscript and things. My God, we don’t want the manuscript impounded. Poor Charles.”
“Or poor Anne,” I said.
The car wouldn’t start. I suppose cars never do under such circumstances, although this wasn’t entirely coincidental; Madden, whose car we had driven up from New York in, had in his agitation left the ignition on and the battery was dead.
I scuffled back to the cottage in almost complete darkness, trying to keep to the track we had trampled through the snow when we first arrived. Somewhere under the unmarred surface on either side there had to be other footprints—Jethro’s, plungingly deep as he carried Anne’s body, or Anne’s as she had dragged Jethro’s—but snow couldn’t be peeled back in layers like blankets.
Madden had found candles when I returned, and set them up on that neat, ghastly tea table. The flickering light reached out to the bloodstains, turning them black, and caught a knowing wink from the poker. I told him about the car and he said absently, “Oh,” and then in a queer voice, “The manuscript is gone, and all his notes. Eight months’ work. She might at least,” he said bitterly, “have left us that.”
“Jethro may have taken them himself, as—insurance. Anne would have killed the cat,” I said. “Jethro wouldn’t have.”
Snowball watched us noncommittally. Madden wet his lips. “Anne was probably afraid to kill it, afraid it might spring at her.”
“If she killed Jethro she would have killed the cat. As,” I said uncomfortably, “part of Jethro. If you follow that.”
“I can’t say that I do, quite,” said Madden snappishly. “The thing is—when?”
What he meant was, how far had one of them gotten with the Joyce manuscript and the notes with which to finish it? Madden had wired Jethro two days ago about an offer from Harpers for a series of essays on modem poetry: it was the kind of thing that Jethro would have jumped at, and when a further telephone call—that must have been before the wires went down—produced no response, Madden had gotten worried enough to call me and propose a trip to Byfield.
I suppose an expert could have told from the appearance of the bloodstains how old they were; we were only certain of what they had to mean. But the cat hadn’t been ravenous enough to finish the crusts of bread on the floor beneath the tea table, or thirsty enough to overturn the cream jug, so that it must have been fed the day before. Unless—
“You’re sure,” I said to Madden over a brief stomach-turning, “that there’s nothing upstairs?”
“I don’t know what you mean by nothing,” began Madden crossly, engrossed in his own problems, and looked at Snowball, washing her whiskers with a satisfied air, and turned pale. “My God, how can you even—no, of course not.”
So that placed the time of death—Anne’s, or Jethro’s—at just before tea-time yesterday. With the snow falling, it would have been dark then, and the electricity had been off. And still there had been blood spilled, the poker wiped and put back—all in the dark?
The candles Madden had found in a drawer were new, just now beginning to form shaky threads of wax. There were no kerosene lamps in the house. I stood up, following the vaguest of thoughts, and Snowball moved too.
Madden recoiled at the sudden soft thump. The cat sniffed at a crust and spurned it, and then stalked in a horribly intent way across the floor toward the bloodstains. When she was nearly there she turned around and began briskly to sharpen her claws on one of the small braided rugs with which the living room was furnished.
And the rug slid. As Snowball sharpened away, the bloodstains disappeared under the twisting pattern. An instant later I noticed the candles in the sconce on the inside living room wall, pale yellow in a black iron holder, and burned almost halfway down.
Those candles, then, had provided the light for murder. With the rug in place over the stains, anyone entering the cottage as a matter of neighborly concern might think that the Jethros had merely gone away for a few days.
Except for the cat. For Anne, it must have been a symbol of hatred. Jethro, on the other hand, would have left it food and water enough to last it until he could come back—or would he, once it had served its purpose?
I heard Madden saying with the waspishness of deep worry, “Well, what is it?” but I went on staring at the right-hand candle. They both leaned a little out from the wall, but the frozen waterfall of wax on that one was facing the wall. So it had been taken out of the sconce.
We stayed in the cottage that night, partly because the only alternative was a four-mile walk through the freezing dark, mostly because the place held a curiously pending air. Possibly that was Snowball, back on the window sill, staring expectantly out at the night.
Madden had a flask in his luggage and we shared a couple of moody drinks. With the first shock gone the Jethros became again not killer and victim, but friends of long years’ standing. Madden’s concern was largely for Charles; I kept remembering what intelligent good company Anne could be when she wasn’t simmering.
The cottage was bitterly cold, but by mutual consent we kept away from the hearth and the poker. In the kitchen we found more candles, and in the black depths of the refrigerator the remains of a ham. The half-loaf of bread was faintly stale, but we were both hungry; Madden, a dedicated gourmet, fell upon his sandwich as though it had been snails in his favorite sauce.
Snowball meowed angrily in the doorway, and although I had seen Madden gazing speculatively at a can of sardines, I put them in a saucer on the floor. When the cat had eaten and retired a short way to wash her face I said, “I suppose we’d better let her out.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Madden. He didn’t like cats, but he had a semi-superstitious respect for them. “I think we ought to be able to see where she goes when she does go out.”
There was something frightful in the suggestion of the cat sniffing her way daintily to the corpse, and although it was plain that Madden didn’t like it either, he said stubbornly, “Didn’t Charles have a run for her when they first moved out here?”
There was a short wire-enclosed run behind the cottage; I remembered, on an earlier visit, seeing Snowball batting at the fluffy white flowers on a bush that grew beside it. I opened the kitchen door and ushered her out, and before the wind blew the candle out I saw her vault lightly into the enclosure. She didn’t care for the cold or the snow, and she scratched at the door before Madden had finished his second sandwich.
After that there was nothing to do but go to sleep. It didn’t occur to either of us to occupy the Jethros’ beds. We retired to chairs, covered ourselves with our overcoats, and smoked a final cigarette.
“You know,” said Madden suddenly, in the slightly lowered tone we had both used unconsciously ever since entering the cottage, “there wasn’t much daylight left to look around in. Maybe there’s a note.”
I couldn’t help but stare. “‘Out burying body, back soon’?”
“It was just a thought,” said Madden, looking offended, and blew out the candle.
But there was, after all, something to the suggestion. If the braided rug had been pulled over the bloodstains and the poker and the candle replaced in order to conceal the crime from a casual eye, mightn’t there be a note?
Anne was meticulous over details; she would never have put the candle into its holder backward, so that the flow of wax ran the wrong way. But nearsighted Charles wouldn’t have noticed the wax. Or had Anne thought of that, and acted accordingly?
And was that why Snowball was alive?
It occurred to me on the edge of sleep that, barring the fingerprints which the merest child knew enough not to leave around, it was going to take a little while, even for the police, to figure out which of the Jethros was dead and which to spread a dragnet for. They were the same blood type; that had come out years ago when Charles needed a transfusion after a severe operation. Unless there were hairs on the poker, long tan ones, or gray-tipped black—
I closed my eyes in the darkness, trying to wipe out the vision that summoned up, and when I opened them the room was blue with early daylight.
There was no note; Madden looked for one while I made instant coffee with cold water, achieving an indescribable effect. We were both chilled and stiff and edgy, and there was a short sharp discussion over which of us would walk into the village to get the police. Madden won, or lost, whichever way you look at it, and he had his hand on the doorknob when we suddenly stared at each other, struck by one of those weird communications of thought.
I said, “Had you better check the nearest hospital first?”
“My God...of course. They got cabin fever, and she hit him—”
“Or he hit her—”
“—and realized that this time it had gone too far,” interrupted Madden, waving an impatient hand, “and called a doctor and went off to the hospital. It’s as simple as that. What idiots we’ve been, they’ve been doing this for years on a minor scale. Maybe it’s a good thing, teach them both a lesson. I suppose it’s all over the front page of the local paper, but that can’t be helped. Well, I’m off, I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
All this didn’t explain the missing manuscript, or the fact that the poker and the candle had been put back so tidily, but it did clear up the pending atmosphere, the presence of the cat and, most important of all. the disappearance of both the Jethros. Charles could have carried Anne’s body, and Anne could have dragged his, but what to do with it then?
It would have been impossible to dig a grave in that frozen ground even if there had been tools to work with, and the property wasn’t furnished with any convenient wells or ravines, or even woods, at any handy distance. It was flat and parklike, with a tree here and there and a scattering of winterized shrubs. There were no masses of rhododendron or pines to offer any kind of concealment.
An embargo had been lifted, and I let Snowball out and followed her into the brilliant morning. Maybe Madden was right and this would be a lesson to the Jethros, like delirium tremens to a drinker or an accident to a careless driver. It should certainly teach them to stick to bean casseroles instead of pokers.
Snowball jumped up on the kitchen steps and began a protracted bath; she paused briefly to measure a distant sparrow and then went back to her plumy tail. Beyond her was the wire run, the wrapped bush that bore white flowers in the spring, and a lot of grayish twiggy growth. Bayberry? I knew that it grew around here; Anne was fond of it.
It wasn’t bayberry, and it wasn’t growing. It looked at first like a tree bough blown down by the wind, but it wasn’t that either because the end had been sawed cleanly through.
I suppose I knew what it was then, and why the cat had been allowed to live. The burlap was knotted firmly around the base of the bush when I dug down through the snow, and in the end I had to go back into the cottage for a knife. For me, the pending air was gone, the savage message delivered.
The burlap kept its shape grotesquely in the icy air when I lifted it off. It was the arched and appalling shape of Charles Jethro, frozen wrists tied to frozen ankles, both lashed securely to the base of the bush that had borne the fat white flowers. The snowball bush.