Burnt Offering Read online

  Well, Heimrich thought. It was not, of course, an unusual name, although it was a good deal less common than, say, Adams. He looked back at the Faye house, slowing still more, almost stopping. It was not one of those in which pride had been shown, whether by owner or tenant. The house was like the majority of the houses, externally reflecting neither special enterprise nor notable slovenliness on the part of those who lived in it. A Ford station wagon, built a good many years before, stood between the Faye house and the one next it, and might be appurtenance of either.

  Heimrich repassed the morose young mother, the fat man in the yachting cap. Within a quarter of a mile it was as if The Flats had never been. Half a mile from the porch on which the fat man sat, automatic sprinklers fought against the drought on a spreading lawn, before a stone house, far from the road, which could most properly be described as an edifice, unless one preferred the word “mansion.” The field south of the house was massed solidly with evergreen. Four or five acres of trees formed a buffer against The Flats. (But all the same, the owner of the edifice must fume that squalor stood so close, callously depreciating the value of property. So, probably, did a good many owners of acreage in the Town of Van Brunt.)

  Heimrich picked up speed. He reduced it again, and drove through Van Brunt Center, between the bank—or whited sepulcher—and the Old Stone Inn, in which policemen “guzzled.” He drove north to The Corners, and the black debris of the fire house. Two men were poking in it. The intersecting road was New York 109, by its metal standards. It was also, by the town’s white sign, Elm Street. Heimrich drove on for another mile and turned left on a narrow, black-surfaced road marked “High Road.” The road writhed uphill. Certainly it was not, as Susan Faye had said it was not, a direct road to anywhere. As commanded, Heimrich sounded his horn for a blind curve and went around it cautiously. Beyond, the road reversed itself, and curved as sharply. Great trees shaded the road; now and then, between trees, over trees lower on a hill, one could see the highlands beyond the river.

  A narrow road—so narrow that Heimrich doubted two cars could pass on its unpaved, but graveled, surface—came from the left to join High Road. The town’s neat signs were there. The little road was “Van Brunt Pass.” Heimrich drove on, the road still winding, still climbing. A sign said “Caution. Hidden Drive.” Heimrich drove, with caution, around another curve.

  There was a mailbox, but at first no sign of a drive. The mailbox was lettered, neatly, “Faye.” Beyond it, the drive, which was impromptu, which was evidently a makeshift, hid itself between two great boulders. That the town authorities had taken a dubious view was understandable. Heimrich turned sharply and passed between the boulders. He followed the makeshift driveway up toward a building which had once, evidently, been a barn; which still was largely a barn, with wide windows opened in it; with a terrace, and outdoor furniture, at one end. The building was painted a soft, quite beautiful, green. A station wagon was parked a little way from the barn, and from this Heimrich gathered that Susan Faye was at home. There was no sign of her, or of anyone, and the sound of Heimrich’s car, churning slowly up the steep drive, brought no one to door or window.

  He stopped the car and got out, and looked away from the house, and for a moment stood so, looking. Far below, above the massed green of trees, the river lay, shining in the mid-afternoon sun. Beyond the brightness of the reflecting water, the heights rose green, folded green, seeming to stretch on to meet the sky. Shadowed valleys lay among bright uplands. On the river a boat moved—just moved. A little boat. (But it was one of the excursion boats; not really a little boat.) Beyond it, close to the far shore, a white sail dipped low, as another boat, and this one so small a hand would hold it, tacked to port.

  Heimrich turned away with some reluctance. It was very still and the sun, still high at four in the afternoon, was here somehow modified by the greenness all around. He went across grass—but the grass was beginning to burn; rain was most badly needed—to the terrace. It was, he found, unfinished; sand was leveled inside concrete edging, waiting (Heimrich supposed) the laying on of flagstones. His feet made no sound on the sand.

  “No,” Susan Faye’s clear voice said. The voice was a little raised. “No! He hasn’t. Has something—”

  She was talking on a telephone in the big room beyond the terrace doors, which stood open. She was excited; there was something that was almost desperation in her voice.

  But then, in response to something said to her, she said, “Oh—thank God. Thank God! I was so—”

  Again she was interrupted.

  Heimrich could see her dimly. He waited.

  “Just a what?” Susan Faye said. “What did you say?” She listened for a moment. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Who is this?” Then, after an instant, “But it does matter. Of course it—” and was again interrupted. She listened longer, this time.

  “Tell?” she said. “Tell what? There isn’t—wait. Wait! You can’t just—” Then she said, “Hello? Hello!”

  It was evident that she was not answered. Her back was to Heimrich; her left arm moved as she replaced the receiver in its cradle. For some seconds she sat without moving. Then, quickly, she stood up, and walked toward the door, and then she saw Heimrich. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve been—” She stopped. She said, “Good afternoon, captain. You found your way, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said. “There are one or two—”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. She spoke hurriedly, abstractedly. She came out onto the terrace and then stood, not looking at Heimrich, but down the driveway toward the road. She wore shorts and a white blouse.

  “I—” Heimrich said, but she stopped him with a quick gesture, then said, “In a minute. Wait a minute,” and began to walk away from him, down the drive.

  She had only started when a very small person appeared, walking up the drive. He wore shorts and a shirt, which was not tucked into the shorts. He wore tennis shoes. He saw his mother and began to run toward her, and then saw Heimrich and slowed to a walk of dignity. He said, “Mommy. I—” and then said, very formally, “Good afternoon, sir.”

  Susan Faye crouched and took her small son in her arms, and held him hard. He looked over her shoulder at Heimrich, and his expression was grave. But at the same time he held tightly to Susan. They stayed so only a moment, and then Susan stood up and took young Michael by the hand and walked back toward the house. She said, “You worried me, young man,” but spoke lightly.

  “A man gave me—” Michael said.

  “It’s all right,” his mother said quickly. “You’re home now. Run in and—you want something to eat?”

  Michael considered this, stopping to do so. His mother waited.

  “No,” Michael said. “I’m sort of full. The man—”

  “Then go in and wash your face,” Susan said. She looked. “And hands,” she said. “Goodness, Michael!”

  “The man said to tell—” Michael began, and again he was not allowed to finish.

  “After while, Michael,” Susan Faye said. “Mother’s busy now. The captain has come all the way to—to see her about something. Haven’t you, captain?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “But if Michael wants to tell you something—”

  “Oh,” Susan said, “he can tell me later. Can’t you, Michael?”

  The little boy with wide-spaced gray eyes, with grave eyes, considered this.

  “I guess so,” he said. “Only—”

  “Run along,” she said, and patted him along. He went, but he did not run. He went into the house.

  “He’s been visiting a friend,” Susan said. “He was supposed to come home right after lunch and—well, you see what time it is. When you came, I was telephoning Johnny’s mother. She said he’d left—oh, that he ought to be home by now. Sure enough he—children don’t think about time, do they?”

  She spoke very quickly, very lightly, making little of it. (And yet explaining where no explanation had been asked.) It did not seem to Heim
rich that her manner was characteristic of her, but, of course, he had known her briefly, known her under strain.

  “Worrying, naturally,” Heimrich said. “He’s a nice boy, Mrs. Faye.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s a very nice boy, captain. What do you want to ask me? Shall we sit down out here or—” She motioned toward chairs. “It’s cooler here,” she said. “And—and we can look at the river.”

  She had, Heimrich said, a beautiful view, an unusual view.

  “That’s mostly why we—” she said. “Michael and I bought this barn. It’s an odd place for a barn, isn’t it? The house was over there—” she gestured—“walled in by trees. And the barn had all this beauty.” She looked across the lawn and across trees, looked toward the bright river and the folded green beyond. “The house burned down years ago. I’ve told you all I know about poor Orville, captain.”

  “No,” Heimrich said. “Not that he was your cousin, Mrs. Faye.”

  She turned from the distant beauty and regarded Heimrich, apparently with surprise.

  “Not told you?” she said. “But—but there’s no secret about it.” She broke off; she shook her head. “I suppose I just thought you knew,” she said. “Took it for granted. His father and my grandmother were brother and sister. There’s no secret about it. Why should there be?”

  “I don’t know of any reason,” Heimrich said.

  “It’s not,” she said. “What’s the word, captain? Pertinent? Significant?” She smiled. “It isn’t as if he’d left me a fortune,” she said. “There’s no danger of that. We weren’t at all—cousinly.”

  “Not a fortune,” Heimrich said. “No. Nevertheless, he seems to have left you ten thousand dollars, Mrs. Faye.”

  She had all the expression of one astounded. She said, “No!”

  Heimrich nodded.

  “But,” she said. “How wonderful! How perfectly wonderful! Now I can—oh!”

  The “oh” was sharply diminished.

  “Now I suppose you’ll think—” she said. “But—I didn’t dream he would, captain. The way he felt—” She broke off again. “It gives me a motive, I suppose you think?”

  “Now Mrs. Faye,” Heimrich said. “I come on two facts. You and Mr. Phipps were cousins. He left you money.”

  “It’s still hard to believe,” she said. “That he left me anything. We’d never been—oh, anything like close. Different generations—different everything. I wasn’t born when he went away and when he came back—” She shrugged slender shoulders under a white nylon blouse. “Father and he hadn’t anything much in common, either. And when father died—” She broke that off, with another movement of her shoulders. “Then when I married—that really did it.”

  “Why?” Heimrich asked. “He objected to your husband. To Lieutenant Faye?”

  She said it was a long story. She asked what difference it made.

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “Probably it doesn’t make any.”

  “It had nothing to do with Orville’s death,” she said. “How could it? Poor Michael’s been dead a—it seems such a long time. Big Michael. He had black hair and blue eyes and he’s been dead for years.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “He came from The Flats,” she said. “Do you know the place we call The Flats, captain? It hasn’t any real name. It’s just a place everybody calls The Flats. Some of Michael’s relatives still live there. Not close relatives. Just—oh, cousins. Perhaps not even cousins. That was the reason—most of the reason. As much as there was a reason.”

  She seemed to think that she had made the reason evident. She sat with the sun on her face; she raised a brown hand to shield her eyes. But, Heimrich noticed, she was breathing quickly. Heimrich waited. After a time, he said, “Go on, Mrs. Faye.”

  She did not respond at once. Then she said that she didn’t know what he wanted. “Go on about what?” she said. “About The Flats? About Michael? Who’s been dead for so long? Why drag it up, captain?”

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “I never know until I do, Mrs. Faye. That’s the kind of job I’ve got.”

  She turned her head, then, and looked at him. Her eyes were wide spaced as her son’s. They considered Heimrich as gravely.

  “I suppose,” she said, “that Michael represented all Orville Phipps hated. Perhaps what he was afraid of. A—a kind of slipping back.”

  Heimrich nodded. He did not interrupt.

  “I slipped back,” she said. “When I married Michael. Or Orville thought I did. You know what The Flats is, captain? Anything about its history?”

  Heimrich shook his head and waited.

  “It started a long time ago,” Susan Faye said, and spoke slowly, watching Heimrich through her widely spaced, gray eyes. “I don’t know how long—a hundred years. Longer. It started when the big places were going up. When the Van Brunts were building big new houses to take the place of houses that had been there since before the Revolution. When the Jacksons were. People like that.” She smiled faintly. “I don’t mean they all built at once,” she said. “I don’t know. It’s just—all of this—what my father told me.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “They brought up workmen from the city,” she said. “Some artisans, I suppose—skilled people. But mostly laboring men. People who had come to this country recently. Irish and English and Germans and Italians. People named Faye. People with first names like Tony. People to use shovels and hammers and break up rocks. These people had to have some place to live, and that’s how The Flats started. They just built shacks there first. That’s what my father said, anyway. That’s what his father had told him.”

  She looked away from Heimrich, then; looked again at the green reach toward the river. But she continued to talk.

  Many of the men brought from the city—from the city slums, she supposed—to work on the big houses some time before the Civil War had remained after the work was done, after most of the building stopped. Some had brought their families with them, some married country girls. They built more shacks.

  “People began to worry then, I suppose,” she said. “The people in the big houses—the Van Brunts and the Jacksons. They called it ‘shack-town’ then, my father said. They called it a disgrace to the community. They thought it was dangerous. Most of them, my father said, apparently thought of the people there as—well, not really as people, like other people. Like some kind of animals—some other kind of animals. Maybe some of them were dangerous. I don’t know.” She stopped for a moment. “People talk about second-class citizens nowadays,” she said. “You’d think it had just happened, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Go on, Mrs. Faye.”

  It was, she thought, early in this century—she did not know exactly when—that three or four of the men in the biggest houses got together, and began to rebuild “shack-town.” They did not rebuild it all at once; they built two or three houses at a time, buying the land, renting the new houses back to the people—often the same people who had had shacks there—and renting cheaply. It had been partly philanthropy, partly a protection of property values. Or so her father had told Susan Faye. New people came in to what became known as The Flats, but the nuclear group remained, and remained dominant. They also remained poor. They also remained second-class citizens—a group known as “those people,” and as “people like that.”

  “The Fayes,” she said. “The Antonellis. You can see the names on the mailboxes. The Fayes and the Antonellis—and the Phippses. Orville was born in The Flats. So was my grandmother. And when Orville”—she hesitated—“when Orville died, he was supervisor of the town. He could call Mrs. Van Brunt ‘Cornelia.’ He had a house as big as any and he was president of the bank.” She paused. “You can’t really want all this,” she said.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said.

  There were no longer any Phippses living in The Flats. Orville had—she supposed the term was “run away,” although she did not think there had been any pursuit. That had b
een when he was in his teens. Where he had run to, she did not know. She thought somewhere in the West. He had made money there, and more money in New York. He had come back to the Town of Van Brunt with a wife, and bought a big house—and, shortly afterward, he had bought The Flats. The families which had owned it had lost money. “When everybody did,” she said. “Except people like Orville—shrewd people like Orville.

  “He’d come up in the world,” she said. “Oh, but he’d come up in the world.” Now there was, for the first time, a kind of bitterness in her voice. “It was wonderful. He’d got ahead of—” She paused. “Well, of the Uptons,” she said. “My grandfather, who had married Orville’s aunt, and taken her out of The Flats, was an Upton. One of—well, one of the Uptons. They’d been here a long time—oh, not like the Van Brunts, or even the Jacksons. But a long time. They had one of the big houses, once. My father sold it a long time ago. And then he lost most of his money when Orville didn’t lose his. But he was still an Upton—a Van Brunt Upton—and Orville had got ahead of him. I was a very little girl, then. About—well, about young Michael’s age. He was as good as anyone, Orville was. He—he was a long way from The Flats. So far away he could own it. And there weren’t any Phippses left there.” She paused, again. “It used to amuse my father a little,” she said. “He was a nice man, my father. Of course, it wasn’t real to him. He hadn’t had—well, to claw his way up. He said that Orville always seemed afraid he would slip back. He said it seemed to him that Orville sometimes confused economic advancement with evolution. Do you see what he meant?”

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said.

  “Then,” she said, “you’ll see how Cousin Orville felt when I married Michael, who’d been born in The Flats—and got out of it and gone to college and everything—but wasn’t tied up about it. Wasn’t ashamed about it. But I was part a Phipps and—well, I’d slipped back. Down the tree. Or, maybe, up into the branches again. I’d married a simian. After all the trouble Orville had gone to—to evolve the family.”