The Bad Seed (25 page)

Not long afterward the ice-cream man, trundling his bell-decked cart, came into the street and drew up beside the park gate to sell his wares to the neighborhood children. A flock gathered quickly around him, leaving the park and the courtyard deserted for a time. Rhoda, seeing him there, asked her mother for money to buy an ice-cream stick, and Mrs. Penmark gave it to her. She started for the stairs, and then, as though having made up her mind at last, she turned and went into the kitchen; and Christine watched what she did there. She saw Rhoda take three big kitchen matches from the box above the stove. She held them a moment in her hand, as though debating a point, and then, deciding three matches were too many, she returned one of them to the box. She went slowly down the back stairs, bought her ice-cream stick, and sat on the steps near the basement to enjoy it, eating the stick with
little mincing bites, listening with approval to Leroy’s snores in the room beyond her.

Mrs. Penmark had moved to the kitchen window to watch, wondering what the child intended doing with the matches she’d taken; she did not have long to wonder, for Rhoda, looking cautiously from side to side to see that no eye observed her, went, her face bland and innocent again, to the basement door. She paused at the door and struck one match on the cement wall, shielding the flame with her palm. She disappeared for a moment from her mother’s sight as she went on tiptoes into the basement room. When there, she stooped quickly and touched the match to the excelsior and piled papers of Leroy’s makeshift bed. She came out of the basement quietly, closing the door behind her. She slipped the flimsy bolt that held the door shut when wind blew, and banged it about; then, sitting again in her original place, she nibbled her ice-cream stick, the burned match still held in her disengaged hand.

The thing had happened with such casual efficiency, with such sureness of purpose, that Mrs. Penmark—although part of her mind must certainly have known—had not been able to accept in actuality the event that had happened before her eyes. She stood as though paralyzed beside her concealing curtain; and at the instant she began to scream, she heard Leroy’s fainter, answering screams coming like echoes from the other side of the basement door. Smoke rolled out of the barred windows on either side of the door. He threw his weight against the door, but for a time the bolt held. Then his face appeared at one of the windows. He saw Rhoda enjoying her ice-cream stick. He said in a desperate, coaxing voice, “Unlock the door, Rhoda! I’m not mad at you!”

The child laughed charmingly, and shook her head from side to side.

He knew then, in those dreadful moments before death, precisely what had happened to him. He screamed again, a long,
wailing note of despair, and said, “I haven’t got them shoes! I was only teasing you a little! I don’t know nothing about them shoes!”

Rhoda bent her head rhythmically to her ice-cream stick with delicate, miserly bites, her eyes interested and lifted upward. “You know,” she said gently. “You know where they are.”

Leroy threw his weight against the door time and time again; and at last the bolt gave way. He ran out into the courtyard. His clothing had burned away, and clung to his blackened body in long, fiery rags. Even his shoestrings were burning, even his hair was ablaze. He screamed, “I wasn’t going to tell on you! I don’t know nothing about nothing you done!”

Rhoda’s pink darting tongue touched her treat for a final time; then lifting her head, pressing her palms together, she laughed the lovely, tinkling laugh of childhood and said, “You’re silly.”

She got up from the steps, straightened her frock, and put both stick and waxed paper in the garbage can under the stairs. She stood there smiling and nodding her head, as though in genial approval of a scene planned to divert her, as Leroy ran in flames toward the lily pond. But when his hand was on the knob of the gate, he shuddered and swayed backward; then, still clutching the gate, he sagged down to the cement, released his grip, and died there.

Mrs. Penmark turned from her window, saying to herself, “I’m not going to faint. This is an emergency. It’s necessary for me to keep calm.”

She went toward her bedroom with the intention of lying down a moment, but she did not reach her bed. Against her will, her knees buckled beneath her, and there was the terrible singing of blood in her ears. She lost consciousness for a time, and then, although she never knew how it happened, she was going down the back stairs, holding onto the railing for support, calling in a frantic voice, “Rhoda! Rhoda! Rhoda!”

The courtyard was full of people—people from the apartment house itself, neighbors from across the street, and strangers who had been passing, and had seen the flames from the basement. She went at once to the park fence, and stood beside her daughter, looking down at the dead man at her feet.…

There was somebody screaming somewhere, and she kept wondering who it could be. She turned to the people who watched her and said in a lost, chiding voice, “Quit screaming, please! Screaming doesn’t help!” She closed her eyes and leaned against the fence; and then she knew the person screaming was herself.

Already men had formed a bucket line, and were passing water from one hand to another, or dragging, piece by piece, the burning junk from the cement of the basement to the cement of the courtyard. Then the fire engines were there; then the ambulance that took Leroy’s body away.… Next, she was lying on the grass inside the park, and somebody bathed her face with water from the lily pond that Leroy had never reached. Mrs. Kunkel from across the street was standing over her and saying impatiently, “Stop that screaming! Stop it! Stop it!”

“You must try to control yourself,” said Mrs. Forsythe.

Christine said, “I saw it! I saw it this time! I saw him as he came out of the basement! I saw him die at the gate!”

“You must control yourself,” said Mrs. Forsythe. “You must make an effort to control yourself.” She pressed cool water once more to her friend’s face and continued. “You must take Rhoda as an example. Rhoda isn’t upset at all. She’s behaving like a seasoned little trouper.”

Then, in sudden resolution, as though summoning the last of her strength, Christine stood up, and, supported by Mrs. Forsythe and a man she’d never seen before, she went to her own apartment, and lay flat on her bed. She turned on her side, thinking this time it was surely her fault. She might, with some justice, have found excuses for herself before, but not this time. She said
under her breath, “This time I knew what would happen, or I should have known. And I should have stopped it. I should have done something about Rhoda weeks ago. Something must be done quickly now.”

Mrs. Forsythe went to the kitchen to take ice from the trays; and Rhoda came into the room and stared contemptuously at her mother. She said casually, in a whisper that hardly carried to Christine’s ears. “He knew about the shoes. He was going to tell on me.”

Mrs. Forsythe came back with an improvised ice pack for Mrs. Penmark and said, “He must have been smoking in the basement again, which he’d been told not to do. They think he went to sleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand. Several of us predicted it would happen some day. Oh, I feel such sympathy for his wife and family. I doubt if his wife has enough to bury him decently. It was such a sad accident, really.” She went to the window and adjusted the blinds so that light fell on the wall in small, precise slats that moved and shifted design when the trees moved, with the effect of sunlight shimmering on water. She said, “I’m going to take Rhoda to my apartment, where she won’t disturb you. You must get some sleep if you can. You’ll feel better after a nice sleep. But you must quit worrying so, or you’ll make yourself ill. Just leave everything to me. Just sleep.”

She slept after a time, a deep, dreamless sleep such as she’d not had for a long time; and when she woke, she felt a stolid quietness which was, in its way, more frightening than the wildness of her turmoil had been. It was as though she’d reached at last the windless center of the hurricane that had destroyed her.… Calmly she bathed her face, brushed her hair, put on new lipstick, and called for her child.

Later that afternoon, the telephone rang. It was Mrs. Breedlove. She had heard about the fire and Leroy’s death, and she wanted to know at first hand what had happened. Christine told her what she knew—there was no damage to the apartment
house; there was little damage to the basement itself; it was thought Leroy had gone to sleep with a lighted cigarette in his hand. Monica said in an earnest voice, “I’m pleased to see you’re taking it so sensibly. To tell the truth, I was afraid you’d be upset and nervous again. I really called to see how you were getting along. I wouldn’t blame you if you were upset, my dear. After all, it was a most terrible tragedy.” Then, repeating the little anecdote she’d thought up for the occasion, she laughed for the first time, and hung up her phone.

When it was dusk, Mrs. Penmark called a taxi and went to Leroy’s house on General Jackson Street. The place was filled with people, and she went only as far as the door; she could not bring herself to go inside. The widow, being summoned, came out to see who her visitor was, and sat with her under the blossoming althea tree near the porch. Christine identified herself and said, “I want you to give him the kind of funeral you want to give him. Don’t worry about expenses. I’ll take care of all the bills.” Thelma stared at her in astonishment, and Christine went on. “You know who I am. Have the undertaker and the others telephone me. I’ll tell them what I’ve told you.” Then, getting up, she went to the waiting taxicab.

She awoke next morning with an obsessive desire to read the volume devoted to her mother in the
Great American Criminals
series. She drove to the library, took out the book, and returned with it to her apartment. She sat beside her window, reading again the things she already knew, but in greater detail this time.

When August Denker came into the property his wife had won for him, a change came over him, and he ceased to be the unquestioning, good-natured husband. He took on an air of sudden importance; he began giving orders to others; and, what was worst of all from Mrs. Denker’s standpoint, he seemed bent on dissipating the estate through his impractical plans for its increase. She had not planned to remove him so soon, but seeing
her lifework threatened, she departed for the first time from the cunning conservatism of her master plan and gave him his arsenic in buttermilk.

Her plan had now worked out to its final detail; the dreams of her girlhood had all come true; she was in possession of the Denker money at last. She settled back to enjoy the fruits of her labor, to play the role of the bereaved but courageous widow. It was doubtful that she ever regretted the things she’d done, or thought with remorse of her acts. She probably regarded herself not as a criminal but as a cunning little businesswoman who traveled in an unusual line of merchandise, whose foresight and skill lifted her above the fates of those less gifted than herself.…

But even as she rocked so contentedly in her tidy house, the first baying of the first hound was heard at the edge of the swamp; for Cousin Ada Gustafson, the silent, suspicious one, began to go about the countryside and speak her suspicions aloud: “August hadn’t died of no congestive chill, like the doctor said, and nobody could tell her different. Cousin Bessie put something in August’s buttermilk just as sure as God made little apples!… And Grandfather Denker dying like he did—so sudden, and all—sounded real funny, too. Why, that old man had been strong as a bull.… Then, too, there were those stories they used to tell about Bessie back home when she was a girl. It seemed real funny to her that things didn’t start happening to folks until Cousin Bessie got
interested
in them.”

At first the neighbors listened to the old woman with amusement and disbelief; then Ada went to the sheriff one afternoon and told her story. “Let’s dig up August!” she said. “Let’s dig up August and see!”

Then the county asked permission to exhume August Denker’s body; and when Bessie weepingly refused to have her husband serve as the playing field of Cousin Ada’s spite, the officials got a court order and dug up the body anyway; and for the first time in her life, perhaps, Mrs. Denker felt blind, unreasoning
panic. She lost all the ordinary good sense that had served her so long. She devised a plan for her protection so foolish that it seemed incredible: she told everyone that August and Grandfather Denker had been poisoned, all right, but she wasn’t the one who’d done it. Cousin Ada had committed these crimes, she said, and probably others, too. She’d suspected her from the first, but she’d kept quiet in fear of her own life, and in fear of the lives of her children, too. Cousin Ada had threatened time after time to kill her and the children, and burn the house down, too. If anything happened to her and the children, she wanted them to remember what she’d told them about Cousin Ada, and act as witnesses against her later on.…

That night she killed Ada Gustafson and all her children except the youngest, Christine. Apparently, she’d first stunned Old Ada with the blunt side of her hatchet, and then with a cleaver she’d severed the old woman’s head. When these things were accomplished, she’d dressed the old woman in her own clothes, even putting her wedding ring on Ada’s finger. For her escape, she dressed herself in a suit of her husband’s clothes, and then, going out of her door for the last time, she’d paused long enough to set fire to the place. She’d hoped, although the hope proved to be a forlorn one, that the authorities would mistake the body of the old woman for her own, would assume that she, Ada Gustafson, had committed the crime, had been the murderer all along.

She had wrapped Old Ada’s head in a newspaper parcel, and, taking the bundle with her, she made her escape from the flaming farmhouse; but her disguise mislead nobody. They caught up with her the next morning as she sat in the waiting-room of the Union Station of Kansas City. The circular parcel was resting in her lap, and when the police cut the string and opened it, Miss Gustafson’s head rolled off the seat and halfway across the tiles of the waiting-room floor.