Authors: William March
Reginald lighted a cigarette for both himself and his listener, and then went on to say that Richard Bravo had done a remarkable study of August Denker, whom he considered the class victim, the preordained one who turns up over and over in the career of the mass murderer—the one who, through his natural trust and the innocence of his outlook, makes possible the murderer’s triumphs over such extended periods of time. He had seen a photograph of August Denker, taken about the time of his marriage to his incredible wife. He was blond, with delicate, almost feminine, features; and his eyes had looked out at the world with innocence and candor. He was quite handsome in a negative sort of way. He played the violin, but not very well, it was said.…
Mrs. Penmark pressed her hands against her eyes, shook her head, and said under her breath, “No. No, it wasn’t the violin. I’m sure it wasn’t. It was a wind instrument of some sort—at least it was something you
blew
into.… I think it was a cornet.”
A group came onto the terrace and stood chatting near by, and Reginald was silent until they passed out of earshot; then he talked once more of Mrs. Denker and the remarkable things she’d accomplished. At the time she married August Denker, she’d already worked out a master plan for the annihilation of his family, and for a long time everything went according to schedule.
Christine interrupted him after a moment. “How did she get away with it so long?” she asked. “Wasn’t anybody suspicious, with all those deaths?”
In Reginald’s opinion, the fact that Bessie Denker had escaped detection so long wasn’t nearly so implausible as Mrs. Penmark seemed to think. In the first place, good people are rarely suspicious. They cannot imagine others doing the things they themselves are incapable of doing; usually they accept the undramatic solution as the correct one, and let matters rest there. Then, too, the normal are inclined to visualize the multiple killer as one who’s as monstrous in appearance as he is in mind, which is about as far from the truth as one could well get. He paused and then said that these monsters of real life usually looked and behaved in a more normal manner than their actually normal brothers and sisters; they presented a more convincing picture of virtue than virtue presented of itself—just as the wax rosebud or the plastic peach seemed more perfect to the eye, more what the mind thought a rosebud or a peach should be, than the imperfect original from which it had been modeled.
He stretched delicately and went on to say that Bessie Denker must have been one of the truly talented actresses of her time with her church-going, her visiting around with other members of her husband’s family, her tireless baking of pies and cakes for church bazaars, and her little thoughtful errands of mercy for those less fortunate than herself.
He talked on and on, but Mrs. Penmark, growing restive, interrupted him to ask, “Who was Ada Gustafson? What part did she play in Mrs. Denker’s affairs?”
Reginald flicked cigarette ash onto the grass, laughed, and said, “Oh,
that
one!” Then almost at once he went on to explain that Ada Gustafson had been a poor relation of Mrs. Denker, an eccentric spinster who’d come late into the picture, after most of the Denker members had been accomplished, in fact,
and who was usually referred to in the record of Bessie’s trial as “Old Ada Gustafson.” She had been a woman in her late sixties at that time, but she was still spry and strong; and having no place else to go for the remaining days of her life, she had sought asylum with her distant cousin, Mrs. Denker; and once taken in, she had earned her keep by cooking, scrubbing, nursing Bessie’s four children, or even working in the fields with August and the men. She was shrewd and observant with, perhaps, more than a touch of Bessie’s own temperament in her; and she was to be Bessie’s stumbling block at last, the Nemesis of her defeat. She had observed everything that went on at the farm with a cynical lifting of eyelids, a wry pouting of her old lips. For a long time she said nothing, but she fell into the habit of following Cousin Bessie about with her eyes, nodding thoughtfully, as though collating and winnowing the impression she’d already formed of her. It was for the murder of Cousin Ada Gustafson, and not for one of the Denker murders which would have been more difficult to prove, that Mrs. Denker was tried and eventually executed.
Christine listened in silence to the long description, thinking:
I remember Cousin Ada dimly. None of us liked her at home. She had a dog named Spot. He used to snap at Emmy and Sonny, and at me, too, but we made friends with him. But he’d never make friends with Peter, I remember.
Suddenly she moved forward in her chair, put her glass down, and locked her fingers together; there was a sense of inescapable knowledge that she could no longer deny, a feeling of approaching doom which she sought to avoid, but knew now that she could not. She half-turned in her chair, looked steadily at the hedges beyond the green lawns, and said in a voice which was almost inaudible, “What was the name of the youngest of the Denker children?”
Reginald said cheerfully, “Why, her name was Christine, the same as your own. And apparently she was just as pretty as you
are, too. She was blond like her father, and she had his fine features. Your own father met her and was greatly taken by her. His essay on her plight was one of his finest. It’s still reprinted occasionally today.”
Suddenly Mrs. Penmark got up, swayed against her chair, and said she was not feeling well. She thought she’d better go home immediately. Reginald said he’d drive her there, but she insisted it would be simpler to call a taxi. She went at once to Mrs. Breedlove, to explain her sudden indisposition, and the latter said in a provoked voice, “What’s the matter with you these days? You aren’t like yourself at all. Your face is drawn and quite white, my dear. There’s a distinct twitching over your eye.”
Christine, unable at that moment to answer, trembled and turned away; but Mrs. Breedlove caught her by the arm and said in a concerned voice, “If you must go home, then you must go. But don’t bother with a taxi. Edith Marcusson just arrived—you remember Edith, of course?—and her chauffeur is still turning in the driveway.”
She went outside, halted the chauffeur, gave him instructions, and then said, “When you get home, you must lie down and be quiet. When this thing is over, I’ll look in on you.”
Christine nodded and turned away, saying to herself, “I know who I am now. I can’t delude myself any longer.” She leaned back on the seat and pressed her cheek against the upholstery of the car, knowing herself to be on the verge of nervous tears, but once in her own apartment, with her familiar things about her, something of her panic left her; and a little later she knocked on the Forsythe door to call for her child.
Mrs. Forsythe said, “Oh, what a pity! Rhoda and I had planned a little buffet of our own, and we’re just setting the table. We’re going to turn on the radio while we dine, and have music from the Arbor Room. Can’t you let her stay a little longer? I promise to take the very best care of her.”
Her cushionlike pompadour, which she so carefully buttressed and shored up with hairpins and little amber combs, had strained away from its moorings, and the tight, rocklike knot that anchored the mass tilted with its rounded cushion in the direction of her left ear. She sighed and righted her hair, her big, violet eyes wide and imploring.
“It will be such a disappointment if Rhoda leaves now,” she said earnestly. “Such a disappointment to all concerned.”
Mrs. Penmark said the child could stay. She went back to her own living-room, and then, as though impelled by forces stronger than her anxiety and distaste, her determination to think no more of her mother’s dreadful life, she began to read the Denker case at the point where Reginald’s telling of the story had ended.
According to Madison Cravatte, the Denker relationships had been as complex as those in a three-volume Victorian novel. You needed charts and blueprints and a cast of characters at the front of the book to keep them all straight. But little Bessie Schober, after her marriage into the family, hadn’t grudged the time she’d spent studying them for her own deadly purpose. She had analyzed the personalities and characters of her new relations with a most flattering care. She had studied closely the degrees of relationship they bore one another, the closeness of their blood ties to Grandfather Carl Denker, who controlled the money, with the same concentrated attention that a chess player brings to the moves in his championship game.… And if he might be permitted to carry his somewhat trite figure of the chess champion further, her moves to divert the flow of the Denker money from other branches of the family, and to direct it inevitably in her husband’s direction, were as shrewd, as calculated, as coldly brilliant in her game of murder for profit as any champion’s were in his less violent field.
This she had conscientiously done by poison, the ax, the rifle, the shotgun, the simulated suicides by hanging and drowning;
and while it would take far too long to go into these family tragedies in the detail they deserved, he would say that at the end of ten years Bessie had accomplished her goal in twenty-three moves of such boldness, such brilliance of strategy, such remarkable rightness of detail, that she’d become the particular darling of the intellectual murder fan. But if the interested reader wanted more information, to study both this remarkable woman, and the details of each of the varied Denker deaths exhaustively, then he referred him to Jonathan Mundy’s volume on Bessie Denker in the
Great American Criminals
series.
It was getting darker in the apartment, and Christine went to the table and turned on her reading light; but she stopped to look at the western sky, glowing with muted colors. Birds, flying high, made a thin line across the soft, waning colors; the live oaks lifted rhythmically under the evening winds from the Gulf, showing arches of horizon that were cloudless, polished, and deep blue. She stood quietly a moment, and then she walked nervously through her house, turning on lights without sense, and as capriciously turning them off again.
She came back to the case at length, to read its ending:
At the time of Bessie Denker’s trial the only member of the Denker family remaining alive was the little girl Christine, about whom so much has been written. What happened eventually to this tragic child who somehow managed to escape her mother’s “master plan” is not known, although it is generally believed she was taken for adoption by some respectable family. But one cannot help wondering what her life has been like since. Where is she now? Is she married, with children of her own? Has she forgotten the horrors she must have known in her early childhood? Did she ever really know, or understand what her mother had done? One can only wonder at the fate of this tragic, frightened little girl who somehow escaped her mother’s fury. The chances are we will never know now what became of her. Her new identity has been well guarded indeed.
Christine dropped the folder in confusion, lay on her bed, and pressed her face into her pillows. She wept and said, “Here I am, if you want to know. Here I am.” And then, after a moment, “I didn’t escape after all.… Why did you think I escaped?”
Again Mrs. Penmark could not sleep. She lay on her bed staring up at the white ceiling, faintly luminous in the dark, her eyes fixed on the elaborate decoration of fruits and flowers which originally had been the centerpiece of a chandelier. Outside, she could hear trees rustling as the breeze lifted their branches and moved them gently about. There was the smell of crushed camphor leaves near by; and farther away, the sickeningly sweet odor of the night-blooming jasmine bushes on the Kunkels’ lawn; then, when she could no longer bear the silence, nor the thoughts that went through her mind in a repetitive pattern, she got up, went to her rear balcony, and looked up. There was a light on in Mrs. Breedlove’s study, and in desperation she went to her telephone and dialed Monica’s number.
Mrs. Breedlove said, “I’m so glad you called, dear Christine. I wanted to get in touch with you when Emory and I came back from the party, but it was after eleven, and I was sure you’d already retired. But you know how guests are, I’m sure. They never go home, once they get high.”
Then in a softer voice, as though just remembering that her brother was asleep, she lowered her voice, and said, “I was sorry you couldn’t stay to the end. Now, take care of yourself. We mustn’t let you get sick. None of us could endure that, dear Christine.” She paused a moment, and then, as though she’d glanced at her watch in the interval, she said, “Why don’t you run up for a little visit? It’s only half past one, and I’m not in the least sleepy. We’ll make a pot of coffee—I’ll put the water on now—and sit in the kitchen like a couple of old peasant widows.”
She met her guest at the door, a warning finger to her lips. She was wearing a flowered kimono, and her face was smeared wildly with cold cream, her hair rolled up in kid curlers. She laughed cautiously, and said, “I’ve always had a passion for the fat little curl, although the fat little curl is plainly not for me. Laugh heartily, if you’d like to, my dear. I’m not at all concerned when others find me ridiculous.”
Christine nodded and smiled as best she could, thinking:
I should have left well enough alone. I shouldn’t have gone prying into the past to find out what my secret was. My foster parents were so wise in never telling me. They were right in shielding me from a past I could neither change nor help. But I couldn’t let matters remain as they were. I had to go seeking and prying. And now I know.
When the coffee had dripped, Mrs. Breedlove served it, and they sat together under the harsh kitchen light overhead. Monica talked in detail of her buffet party, apologizing occasionally for the muddiness of her thoughts, the clumsiness of her phrasing; then suddenly the tenor of her thoughts changed, and touching Christine’s cheek, she said, “There’s something troubling you. Won’t you tell me what it is? I think you know by this time you can trust me all the way.”
Christine shook her head, sighed, and looked down helplessly. “I can’t. I can’t tell you. Not even you, Monica.” She went to the icebox, took out a carton of cream, and poured it into Monica’s pewter creamer, thinking:
How can I blame Rhoda for the things she’s done? I carried the bad seed that made her what she is. If anybody is guilty, I’m the guilty one, not Rhoda.
She suddenly felt both humble and guilty, thinking how she’d wronged the child, even if she’d done so unwittingly. “I’m the guilty one,” she said again to herself. “I was the carrier of the bad seed.”