Shadows Everywhere (13 page)

Miss Simms went inside then, into the ordered coolness of the house, and began her daily ritual of straightening and cleaning.

Sometime later, Carl Orton was out in back cutting down some tall weeds Miss Simms had hired him to clear. Since the day was getting extremely hot, she felt it would he an act of kindness to invite him onto the porch for cold lemonade. As he sat in the webbed lawn chair, she knew he'd much rather have another kind of drink, but Miss Simms wasn't about to offer him any of that. He did seem grateful for the lemonade, drinking it so quickly and sloppily that some of it dribbled down his chin onto his bare chest. Miss Simms ignored this breach of manners and offered to refill his glass.

"Sure is a nice place you got here," Carl Orton said. Miss Simms could see that he felt awkward in her presence.

"I do my best to keep it that way, Mr. Orton." She raised her glass to her lips and took a tiny sip. "You're doing a very good job on the weeds."

"Thanks, Miss Simms. Hot day for it, I can tell you. An' those weeds are thick as fur."

"It's amazing how they grow and grow," Miss Simms observed. "Soon they blot out and kill the good grass and flowers."

"That's what they do, all right."

Miss Simms crossed her long legs and twirled the ice in her glass with her little finger.

"I ain't tryin' to be nosy or disrespectful," Carl Orton said, "but livin' all alone up here, don't you ever get...lonely? There's plenty of good places you could live in Bradley or Union or Bakerston."

Miss Simms stopped stirring her lemonade and looked at Carl Orton. She understood his question perfectly. "I like it where I am, thank you," she said.

"Yes'm."

She stood, looking down at him, and stretched languidly against the sun. "I'm going inside for a nap, Mr. Orton. If it's all right with you, I'll pay you for cutting the weeds now."

"Fine with me, Miss Simms."

When she'd given Mr. Orton his money, Miss Simms went inside and locked all the doors carefully. Then she went upstairs and watched him for a while as he stood in the waist-high weeds near the lake and swung the heavy scythe, stopping now and then to wipe his brow with a large red handkerchief and glance up at the back of the house. Miss Simms lay down and thumbed idly through a dress catalog for a while before dozing off.

At about ten that night, when she was cleaning the kitchen for the final time that day, she heard the uneven, rising rumble of the truck engine. She turned off the kitchen light and went upstairs.

From her bedroom window Miss Simms saw the twin lights veer slowly off of the long gravel drive into a grove of trees not far from the house. Even before the truck stopped the headlights faded, and outside there was only darkness.

Miss Simms stood at the window, her breath dragging in her throat. She felt a tightness spread all through her body. She knew by the sound of the motor that it was Carl Orton out there in the darkness. Probably he was drunk, still drinking. She knew he drank Mellow Springs bourbon; she'd seen the empty bottles one day on the floor of his battered truck.

Well, let the fool sit out there,
she thought, switching on the light.

Without pulling the bedroom window shade, Miss Simms casually got completely undressed for bed. After removing her clothes, she didn't put on her nightgown for a while before turning out the light.

Lying there alone in the big bed, she heard the noise outside, a faint noise, a scraping kind of shuffle. It was a wonder she heard it at all, the way the crickets were raising such a racket. It seemed like the crickets were actually screaming that night.

Had Carl Orton gotten tired of sitting there, drinking and watching the square window that was like an eye in the pure white wall of the house?

It was then that Miss Simms remembered she hadn't locked the front door before coming up to bed. For a moment she lay there, her senses straining, then she got quickly out of bed and went noiselessly down the stairs to the hall closet where the deer rifle Uncle Dan had given her for protection was leaning.

Five minutes later the front door of the white frame house opened slowly. At first there was only faint moonlight, then Carl Orton's dark shape was there, and a little unsteadily he leaned forward and walked into the house.

A light came on.

Orton straightened and gasped. Miss Simms was there, as he had seen her through her bedroom window, only she was aiming a rifle at him.

Between them there was a silence, and even the mindless screaming of the crickets seemed to hush.

The crack of the rifle sounded loud in the house and rolled for miles over the hills, but far out in the country nobody paid particular attention to a solitary, distant gunshot.

The next day Miss Simms scrubbed the hall thoroughly and then drove Mr. Orton's battered truck into the old barn beyond the house. Then she drove to a nursery near Bradley where she bought a fair-size plum tree and had it loaded into the back of her station wagon.

She wielded the shovel in the cool of the morning, beating the heat of the rising sun, and by noon the plum tree stood in a circle of crumbled earth near the edge of her property, away from the house, and Carl Orton lay below its grasping roots.

Of course, no one inquired about Carl Orton, and when they would think to inquire it certainly wouldn't be here, at Miss Simms' house. Undoubtedly when he'd paid his nighttime visit he had done so secretly.

Nothing had really changed inside the immaculate white frame house; nothing had changed at all.

By mid-summer there were five plum trees, in a perfect line near the edge of Miss Simms' property. Though still small, they all seemed to be thriving in the rich, dark soil.

Everything was fine, as it had always been, until Mr. Blacker came to talk to her.

He had sold her the house, which he'd built long ago for his sister, and he still lived down the highway near Union, and since he was up that way he'd decided that he'd be the one to let Miss Simms know.

"That contractor's started work on his houses down the road a piece," he said, removing the cigar from his dark crinkled face.

"I'm glad to hear," Miss Simms answered. She thought about offering him some lemonade.

Mr. Blacker stood with one leg propped up on the second porch step, and he peered up at her with his clear blue eyes. "I'm afraid you're gonna hafta transplant those plum trees," he said.

Miss Simms felt her heart stir to frenzy, then controlled it. "Why would I have to do that?"

"Cause of the contractor. He asked me to come tell you about it."

"About what?" Miss Simms dug her nails into her palms.

"Tomorrow mornin' the electric company's gonna lay the underground wiring for them homes, so I thought I oughta tell you about the easement."

"Easement... ?" Miss Simms had no idea what an easement was. "Yes, ma'am. Electric company's got the right to lay their wire or whatever in a five foot strip along the edge of your property."

 
"But... it's mine! I bought it, it's my property!"

"Oh, you own it, all right. It's just that the electric company's got them particular rights. Won't make much difference anyways, after the grass grows back. If you'd like, I can try to get a man up here today to move them plum trees wherever else you want 'em. Late in the summer, but they might live."

"But I want them
there!"

Mr. Blacker shrugged. "Talk to the electric company. Probably it'd interfere with their wirin' if you put 'em back there after they was done diggin'."

Miss Simms didn't answer him, only stood and stared at the neat row of plum trees.

"Anyways," Mr. Blacker said, "if'n you want, I'll see if I can get somebody to transplant 'em."

"No...Miss Simms said. "Thank you, no, Mr. Blacker."

"Well, least you know about it," Mr. Blacker said, taking his foot
down from the porch step and moving back. 'Evenin', Miss Simms," he said as he walked toward his car.

Evening!
It
was
evening, and he'd said the electric company work crew would he there tomorrow morning!

Miss Simms went into the house and walked heavily into the kitchen. The iron rooster clock on the wall above the stove read ten minutes after six. She sat for a while at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of ice water and trying to gather her wits. Then she rose and went upstairs to change into her old pair of slacks and a faded blouse, her work clothes.

The electric company crew found her at nine the next morning. Each plum tree had been dug up and was lying on its side next to a hole in the earth. Miss Simms was sitting cross-legged before the row of holes, staring vacantly, holding the shovel gently across her lap. At first, the work crew thought she'd been taken sick, and tried to help her, and then one of them happened to look into one of the holes by the plum trees. On the other side of the yard one other hole had been dug, but that one was empty.

Miss Simms didn't seem particularly upset, except they couldn't get her to talk. The men took her into the house and called the sheriff, then they all sat quietly and waited.

Miss Simms heard the patrol car brake to a stop on the gravel drive, and she heard the slam of the door. After a little while she heard Sheriff Brogan's loud footsteps on the wooden porch, and he came right into the house, walked right in without knocking. There was a great deal of mud on his heavy hoots and on his hands, and he tromped right over the immaculately polished tile of the entry hall, one hand brushing the white wall and leaving a long dark smudge. Miss Simms could have cried when she saw that.

M
r. John Staples closed the door behind him and walked with straight, brisk strides past his secretary, Mrs. Carvelle, who was watering an arrangement of peonies in a vase atop a filing cabinet. With a curt nod he entered his own office, sat behind his curved mahogany desk and waited for Mrs. Carvelle to enter. Enter she did, with an automatic smile and an unusually thick handful of mail.

"These are the pertinent ones," Mrs. Carvelle said. "There's another stack of letters in the outer office."

Mr. Staples drew a deep breath, held it as he spoke. "Appointments?"

"I canceled most of them, as you instructed. Mr. Brogan at eleven o'clock is still pending."

Mr. Staples lighted a cigarette, took two puffs, snuffed it out in the gold ashtray that had been a gift from the company. As Mrs. Carvelle walked out, he stared at the neat stack of letters she had left on the gleaming desktop. Then he looked around at the sumptuous paneled office that had been his for two years. It had been a long climb here to this office in the huge Consolidated Natural Gas and Power Company Building, a long, hand-over-hand climb from Jack Staples, office manager, all the way to Mr. John Staples, Regional Director–and now this damned thing had to happen.

Yesterday his own personal project, the laying of the gas line across the river bend, had failed. The engineers to whom he had listened had turned out to be wrong–or at least they had turned out to look wrong–which from Mr. Staples' standpoint amounted to the same thing. A valve had not been turned, pressure had built up, metal had ruptured, and four square miles of the tenth biggest city in the country had gone without gas power on one of the coldest days of the dying winter. Thousands of people were without heat, thousands inconvenienced by unusable gas appliances, hospitals switched to auxiliary power; and for this monumental mess Consolidated Natural Gas and Power, Mr. John Staples, Regional Director, bore the brunt of the blame. The letters, the phone calls of complaint, would continue to pour in for weeks.

An aura of gloom hung about Mr. Staples' carefully cultivated executive's face–iron-gray hair combed straight hack to accentuate the broad forehead, and firm countenance flushed by telling high blood pressure–a youthful, dynamic fifty-two.

At the buzz of the intercom, Mr. Staples' tapering, manicured hand reached out. "I instructed you not to disturb me, Mrs. Carvelle."

"I'm sorry, sir, but it's a man from the police department, a Detective Mungweather. He says it's official business."

A vein in Mr. Staples' forehead throbbed colorfully. He hadn't planned on seeing anyone while this mess was being investigated, but a policeman… Enough had public relations, he decided, and he pressed the intercom button. "Send Detective Mungweather in, Mrs. Carvelle."

Mungweather, a small man in his late forties, with thinning hair and a quiet smile, didn't look like a cop, but he had on a cop's cheap suit and he had flat-blue cop's eyes. As he moved toward the desk across the soft carpet, Mr. Staples saw that there must be a tightly wound strength in the small body. He was carrying what appeared to be a box of long-stemmed flowers.

"Detective Mungweather," he said, shaking hands with Mr. Staples and settling himself into the chair before the desk, with the long white box nestled in his lap.

"I suppose it's about some legal ramification of the power failure," Mr. Staples said, sliding a box of cigars toward Detective Mungweather.