The Pale Blue Eye: A Novel (6 page)

He stopped.

"But then you saw... ?"

"No, sir." Back he came with a rush of air. "I didn't see anything."

"And not seeing anything, you..."

"Well, I just had me this feeling somebody was by. Something. So I said, "Who goes there?" As I'm charged to do, you see. And there weren't any answer, so what I did, I brought my musket to "charge," and I said, "Advance and give the countersign.""

"Still no answer."

"That's correct, sir."

"And what did you do then?"

"Well, I kept going a few paces. But I never once seen him, sir."

"Who?"

"Cadet Fry, sir."

"Well, then, how did you find him?"

He waited a few seconds to steady his voice.

"I brushed him." "Ah." I cleared my throat, gently. "That must have been a surprise, Mr. Huntoon."

"Not at first, sir, "cause I didn't know. But once I knew, why, yes--yes, it was."

I've often thought since that if Epaphras Huntoon had passed a yard to the north or a yard to the south, he might never have found Leroy Fry. For it had been almighty dark that night, cloudy with a bitty thumbnail of a moon and just the lantern in Huntoon's hand to show the way. Yes, a yard in either direction, and he might have passed right by Leroy Fry and been none the wiser.

"What then, Mr. Huntoon?"

"Well, I jumped back, is what I did."

"Perfectly natural."

"And the lantern fell. Out of my hand."

"It fell? Or maybe you dropped it?"

"Um... dropped it, that may be. Can't say, sir."

"And what next?"

He fell silent again. At least his voice box did. The rest of him was talking at a mad pace. Teeth dancing, toes sliding. One hand playing with his tunic, the other with the buttons that ran down the side of his trousers.

"Mr. Huntoon?"

"I didn't rightly know what to do, sir. See, I weren't at my post, so I weren't sure anyone'd hear me if I called. So I run, I expect."

His eyes were cast down now, and that was all it took to press the picture into my mind's eye: Epaphras Huntoon dashing half blind through the forest, clawing the branches out of his face, brass and steel rattling under his cloak, cartridge boxes shivering...

"I run straight back to North Barracks," he said, quietly.

"And who did you report this to?"

"Cadet officer of the guard, sir, and he went and got Lieutenant Kinsley, sir, who was army officer of the day. And they had me go and fetch Captain Hitchcock, and we all of us run back and..."

He looked at Hitchcock now with an unmistakable plea. Tell him, captain.

"Mr. Huntoon," I said. "I think we might take a step back, if you don't object. Back to when you first found the body. Do you think you could face that again?"

Fierce-browed, vise-jawed, he nodded. "Yes, sir." "There's a good man. Now, let me ask you, did you hear anything else at the time?"

"Nothin' you wouldn't hear in the normal way. An owl or two, sir. And... a bullfrog, maybe..."

"And was there anyone else about?"

"No, sir. But then I wasn't looking for no one."

"And I would guess--after that first contact, you didn't touch the body again?"

He twitched his head back to the tree. "I couldn't," he said. "Once I seen what it was."

"Very sensible, Mr. Huntoon. Now maybe you could tell me--" I paused to scan his face. "Maybe you could tell me just how Leroy Fry looked."

"Not well, sir."

And that was the first time I heard Captain Hitchcock laugh. A squoosh of merriment, gouged out of his middle. Surprised even him, I think. And it had this other virtue: it saved me from doing the same.

"I don't doubt it," I said, as softly as I could. "Which of us would have looked our best in such a setting? I was thinking... more the position of the body, if you recall that."

He turned now and faced the tree head on--for the first time, maybe? Letting the memory work through him.

"His head," he said, slowly. "The head was twisted to one side."

"Yes?"

"And the rest of him was... he looked knocked back, sir."

"How so?" I asked.

"Well." He fluttered his lids, chewed his lip. "He wasn't hanging straight.

His backside, sir, it was... like maybe he was getting ready to set. In a chair or hammock or some such."

"Did he look that way because you'd knocked into him?"

"No, sir." He was quite definite on that point, I remember. "No, sir, I only grazed him, word of honor. He never budged."

"Go on, then. What else do you remember?"

"The legs." He extended one of his own. "They were split wide, I think. And they were--they were ahead."

"Not following you, Mr. Huntoon. You say his legs were ahead of him?"

"On account of they were on the ground, sir."

I walked to the tree then. I stood under that dangling length of rope, feeling its tickle against my collarbone.

"Captain Hitchcock," I said. "Do you have any notion of how tall Leroy Fry was?"

"Oh, average or above--maybe an inch or two shorter than yourself, Mr. Landor."

Epaphras Huntoon's eyes were still closed when I came back to him. "Well, sir," I told him, "this is very interesting. You mean to say his feet... his heels, maybe--"

"Yes, sir."

"--were resting on the ground, do I have that right?"

"Yes, sir."

"I can verify that," said Hitchcock. "He was in the same position when I saw him."

"And how much time passed, Mr. Huntoon, between your first sighting of the body and your second?"

"No more 'n twenty minutes, I reckon. Half an hour."

"And did the body's position change at all during that time?"

"No, sir. Not so's I noticed. It was terrible dark."

"I've got just one more question, Mr. Huntoon, and then I'll trouble you no longer. Did you know it was Leroy Fry when you saw him?"

"Yes, sir."

"How?"

A flush of red sprang to his cheeks. His mouth skewed right.

"Well, sir, when I first run into him, I swung the lantern out. Like this. And there he was."

"And you recognized him right off ?"

"Yes, sir." That pickled grin again. "When I was a plebe once, Cadet Fry shaved off half my scalp. Right before dinner formation. Lord, did I catch it."

Narrative of Gus Landor

5 Lazarus began stinking after a few days--why should Leroy Fry have been any different? And as no one was planning to raise him from the dead anytime soon, and as his parents weren't expected for another three weeks, the Academy administrators had a problem on their hands. They could bury the boy right away and brave the ire of the Fry family, or they could keep him above ground and risk the decay of his hard-used body. After some talk, they chose the latter course, but ice was still in demand, and Dr. Marquis was forced to fall back on a practice he'd witnessed many years back as a medical student at Edinburgh University. Which is to say, he submerged Leroy Fry in an alcohol bath.

And that was how we found him, Captain Hitchcock and I. Naked, in an oak box filled with ethyl alcohol. To close his mouth, a stick had been wedged between his breastbone and jaw, and to keep him from rising, a load of charcoal had been dumped inside his chest cavity, but his nose kept breaking the surface, and his eyelids still refused to close. And there he floated, looking more alive than ever, as though he were being carried back to us on the next wave.

The box had been caulked but not tightly enough, for we could hear a dripping on the trestle. All round us rose cool snarly fumes of alcohol, and I figured this was as close to drunk as I would get for some time.

"Captain," I said. "Maybe you've been to the ocean?"

Hitchcock answered that he had, on several occasions.

"Me, I've only been once," I said. "I remember seeing a young girl there--eight, maybe-- making a cathedral in the sand. Remarkable thing, abbeys and bell towers... I couldn't even tell you all the details she piled on. She'd planned for everything--except the tide. The faster she worked, the faster it came on. Before another hour was out, that beautiful thing of hers was just a set of humps in the sand."

I made a leveling motion with my hand.

"Wise girl," I said. "Never shed a tear. I think about her sometimes when I try to pile things on top of these simple facts. You can make something beautiful, and then a wave comes along, and all that's left is the humps. Your foundations. Shame on anyone who forgets them."

"So what are our foundations?" asked Hitchcock.

"Well," I said, "let's look and see. We have this idea that Leroy Fry wanted to die, which seems like a damned good foundation, Captain. Why else would a young man hang himself from a tree? He was beaten down, it's an old story. So what would a beaten man do? Why, he'd leave a note, that's what. Tell his friends and family why he was doing such a thing. Get the hearing he never got when he was alive. So..." I held out my palms. "Where's his note, Captain?"

"We've found none."

"Humm. Well, no matter, not every suicide leaves a note. Lord knows I've seen more than a few just take a leap off a bridge. Very well, Leroy Fry hies himself straight to the nearest bluff--oh, no, stop a minute, he decides to hang himself. Not--not where anyone can find him easy, but maybe he doesn't want to be any trouble..."
I stopped, then started again.

"Very well, he finds himself a good strong tree, loops the rope around the branch... oh, but he's too distracted to--to test the rope's length, so..." I extended one leg, then the other. "He finds this little gallows of his won't even lift him off the ground. All right, he ties the rope all over again... no, no, he doesn't do that. No, Leroy Fry wants to die so badly he just... keeps kicking."

I gave my leg a good shake.

"Till the rope finishes its work." I frowned at the floor. "Well, yes, it's certainly a longer business, going about it that way. And if his neck isn't broken, it takes even longer..."

Hitchcock was rising to the challenge now. "You said yourself he wasn't in his right mind. Why should we expect him to behave rationally?"

"Oh, well. In my experience, Captain, there's nothing so rational as a man bent on killing himself. He knows just how he means to do it. I once--I once saw a woman take her life. She had a very fine picture of it in her head. When she finally got round to it, you'd have sworn she was recollecting the thing. Because she'd already seen it happen, over and over."

And Captain Hitchcock said, "This woman you mention, was she... ?"

No. No, he didn't say that. He said nothing for a short while. Just sketched a path around Leroy Fry's coffin, scuffing up the wax with his boots.

"Perhaps," he said, "it was a trial run of sorts that got out of hand."

"If we're to credit our witness, Captain, there's no way it could have got out of hand. Feet on the ground, upper limb within reach: if Leroy Fry had wanted to call the whole thing off, he very easily might've."

Still Hitchcock kept scuffing the floor. "The rope," he said. "The rope might have given way after he hanged himself. Or perhaps Cadet Huntoon jostled him harder than he knew. There could be any number..."

He was fighting hard, it was his nature. I should have admired him for it, but he was starting to make my eyes hurt.

"Look here," I said.

Whipping off my baize jacket, I rolled up my shirt sleeves and plunged my hand into the alcohol bath. A shock of cold, then a phantom shock of hot. And this, too: the queer feeling that my skin was melting and hardening at the same time. But my hand stayed true, hauled Leroy Fry's head toward the surface. And with the head came the rest of the body, as hard and straight as the trestle on which it lay. I had to lace my other hand beneath him just to keep him from sinking down again.

"The neck," I said. "That's what first struck me. Do you see? Not a clean cinch at all. The rope grabbed at him. Ran up and down the neck, looking for a purchase."

"As though..." "As though he was fighting. And look, if you would. The fingers."

I gestured with my chin, and Captain Hitchcock, after a brief pause, rolled up his sleeves and bowed over the body.

"You see?" I said. "On the right hand. Very tips of the fingers."

"Blisters."

"Just so. Fresh blisters, by the look of them. I'm thinking he was... clutching at the rope, trying to peel the thing off him."

We stared down at Leroy Fry's sealed mouth, stared hard, as though by doing so we might unseal it. And by some strange accident, the room did fill with a voice--not mine, not Hitchcock's--ringing with such force that our hands pulled away, and Leroy Fry sank back with a hiss and a gargle.

"May I ask what is going on here?"

We must have been quite a sight to Dr. Marquis. Bent over the coffin in our shirt sleeves. Daylight grave robbers, by the looks of us.

"Doctor!" I cried. "I'm delighted you could join us. We're in dire need of a medical authority."

"Gentlemen," he sputtered. "This is somewhat irregular."

"It certainly is. I was wondering if you wouldn't mind feeling round the back of Mr. Fry's head?"

He wrestled with the propriety of it, or at least he gave propriety a few more seconds of his time, and then he followed our lead. And by the time he had secured the back of the skull, the wince of effort on his face had been planed into something like peace. A man at home.

"Anything, Doctor?"

"Not yet, I'm... Mm. Mm, yes. A contusion of some sort."

"A lump, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Maybe you could describe it for us."

"Parietal region, best I can make out... perhaps three inches in circumference."

"How thick, roughly speaking?"

"Rising... oh, a quarter inch or so above the skull."

"Now, what might have made such a lump as that, Doctor?" "Same thing causes any lump, I expect: something hard comes in contact with the head. Can't tell you any more without looking at it."

"Might the bruise have been inflicted after death?"

"Not very likely. A bruise comes from extravasated blood--blood escaping from its vessels. If there's no blood circulating--no heart, in plain truth--" He had the good sense to stop his laugh in midcourse. "There can be no bruise."