Burnt Offering Read online

  The car plunged down the drive and down Van Brunt Lane toward the highway. At the highway, Heimrich did not stop, did not even slow. He cut left.

  The storm was going on down the valley, now. Clouds still raced above them, but stars showed through, and then the moon. Ahead down the road went the lights of two cars. The police car raced after them. The cars ahead turned, sharply, to the right, leaving the highway.

  She could not lift the boot again, bring it down again, on the panel of the door. She had to stop; she had to rest. She lifted the boot and brought it down, and lifted it and brought it down. She became aware that she was crying, and it was as if some other person were crying, and as if some other person were crying in the little room. She lifted the boot again and brought it down again. But it was no good. It would never be any good. She struck at the door again, and the impact jarred through her straining body.

  The boot seemed to be stuck in the door. She pulled it away and struck again before she realized that the steel plate on the heel of the boot had broken through the wood. The ensuing blow made the opening larger.

  Smoke came through the hole in the door. It came through gently, unhurried. It curled through, softly.

  She struck again and again around the hole in the door, and it was larger than she needed before she realized that it was large enough. She dropped the boot and reached through the opening, and the smoke was coming in faster, now. Someone was coughing in the little room. The one who had been crying was coughing now. (I’m crying; I’m coughing.)

  Reaching through, she could get her hand on the knob. She turned it this way and that way. But no—that was wrong. That was no better than the knob inside. She breathed deeply, and smoke, not air, seemed to pour into her lungs.

  She reached below the knob, searching frantically with blind fingers. And the key was there, firm in the keyhole. She could just touch it with the tips of fingers. She thrust her arm further through the hole in the door, and the jagged wood tore at her arm’s nakedness. She realized pain, but did not feel pain.

  She could close fingers over the key; she could turn the key. She turned the knob, then, and the door opened. And smoke poured into the closet.

  She started to go out, and hesitated. She groped on the floor and found the tweed coat she had discarded and covered herself with it. Her hands sought again on the floor—she would get the wet dress; she would hold it to her face, against the smoke. But she could not find the dress.

  She could not wait there, groping for the dress. She went out into the room, and the smoke was choking.

  Across the room she could see rectangles of light. These were the windows; it must have grown lighter outside. She bent low. In a smoky room, the air was better near the floor. (Was that right? Did she remember it right?) Crouched, she went across the room to the nearest rectangle of light, making her breathing shallow.

  She reached the window and tugged at it, and it resisted. She still was crying; still coughing. The window was locked somehow, and she could not remember how windows were locked. There was something—something— She reached to the top of the sash, and found the familiar catch, and twisted it, and tugged at the window again and the window opened. Air came in, and she leaned forward and gulped the air.

  The window was screened. Her forehead was against the screening. She struck at the screening, blindly, with a clenched hand. But she remembered. There would be hooks at either side. (Her father took the screens down every fall, lifting the hooks from the eyes they fitted. He piled the screens in the—and in the spring he—) She found the hook on one side, and pushed at it. It held and she hit it upward with the edge of her hand. It gave.

  She pushed at the screen. The moon shone on her.

  Even before Heimrich turned the car into the private road which led up to the “old Varney place,” the fire was red, leaping red, against the clearing sky. They could see the fire above the trees. From far away, among the hills, they could hear, then, the mournful rise and fall of a siren. “Somebody got onto them,” Forniss said, and the car made the last turn of the winding road and came out in front of the house. Flames were climbing out through the roof. “There,” Forniss said, and pointed. A corner of the roof had been torn away.

  There were two station wagons—two very similar station wagons—in front of the house. Cornelia Van Brunt and Myra Burns stood between the wagons, and looked up at the house. Myra Burns had her mouth open, as if she were screaming, but she made no sound.

  “They’ve gone in,” Mrs. Van Brunt said. “They’ve both gone in. Sam’s afraid there’s—there’s somebody in the house.”

  The moon rode from behind a cloud; the moon hurried from the cloud, to sail in blue quiet. The light from the moon fell on Mrs. Van Brunt’s face, and her face was a white mask.

  “I tried to make them wait,” she said. “I told them to wait.”

  Over the sound of the fire, they could hear somebody shouting in the house. They could not make out words.

  “Come on,” Heimrich said to Forniss, and started running toward the porch, and then Myra Burns did scream. Part of her scream was wordless. But she screamed words. “Look! Look!” She pointed.

  At that instant, a cloud intercepted the moon’s brightness. Darkness held only for an instant; then the hurrying moon sailed clear again.

  A girl with a coat over her shoulders was at a window above the porch roof. She was tugging at a hook of the screen. The coat fell open, and the moonlight was white on her upper body, on her face.

  She got the screen partly open, and by then Heimrich was running toward the gnarled old apple tree, in which an owl might have found a perch.

  Then Myra screamed again, and, without stopping, Heimrich looked up at the window which opened on the porch roof. He saw Susan Faye fall back from the window, into the room. She fell suddenly, as if, in an instant, strength had gone out of her body.

  The old apple tree was made for climbing. Heavy branches divided from a crotch close to the ground. Heimrich did not seem like a heavy man as he threw himself into the crotch, went up the slanting branch which overhung the porch roof. He dropped to the roof, and ran across it.

  The screen hung partly away from the frame, and Heimrich wrenched it loose. There was fire at the far end of the room, and smoke was heavy in the room. But it eddied back from the window, where air pushed at it.

  Susan Faye lay on the floor, just under the window. The coat had fallen away from her body. Her eyes were open in the white light and, as Heimrich reached for her, she spoke, the words half formed. “Hit me,” she said. “Something—I’d almost got the hook—and—” Her eyes closed.

  Heimrich went through the window. He picked her up and wrapped the coat—somebody’s tweed jacket; a man’s, not a woman’s—around her. He was on the porch roof again, and she seemed to weigh nothing in his arms.

  Forniss had started up the old apple tree. Now he dropped back to the ground again. Heimrich lowered the girl to him, and Forniss carried her back from the burning house. Heimrich hung by his hands from the porch roof, and dropped, and Sam Jackson ran out of the house, across the porch floor. In its extremity, the house still creaked its age.

  “Somebody’s in there!” Jackson said, and raised his voice only enough to be heard above the fire. “Upstairs. Heard Van Brunt yelling at somebody. Then—”

  Henry Van Brunt came out of the door. He was coughing, bent over. He gasped words. “Can’t—get—to—” He stopped. He looked at Susan Faye, lying on grass beyond the gravel of the turn-around, with a raincoat under her, the tweed coat wrapped about her. He looked at Heimrich.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “This is where she is, Mr. Van Brunt.”

  It appeared that Sam Jackson had not seen Susan when he first ran out of the house. He saw her now. He started forward. But then he stopped. He looked at Heimrich. But Cornelia Van Brunt spoke.

  “So strange,” she said. “Such a young person—a girl, really. And for so little.”

  They all looked at her
. They waited.

  “To kill a man,” she said. “Just for a little money. What do you suppose she was looking for, captain? In there?” She pointed toward the house.

  “Something that tied her in,” Henry Van Brunt said. “Something she couldn’t let anybody else find.”

  Heimrich looked at Jackson, then. Heimrich waited.

  “I don’t know,” Jackson said, and seemed to speak as much to himself as to Heimrich. “I—I suppose there must have been something she had—” He did not finish, or need to finish.

  The siren was closer now. It wavered over near-by hills. Heimrich closed his eyes, but only for a moment.

  “All right, Van Brunt,” Heimrich said. His voice was harsh; more harsh than Forniss had ever heard it. “You gave it a try, didn’t you? One hell of a try. Right up to the end.”

  Van Brunt looked at the solid captain of New York State Police. There was now no smile on his face. He looked, then, at his mother.

  “You’ve forgotten, captain,” Mrs. Van Brunt said, and her low-pitched voice was entirely steady. “When Orville was killed, Henry was on a train just—” But there she stopped, because Heimrich was shaking his head slowly.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten, Mrs. Van Brunt. I wasn’t talking about Mr. Phipps. But—you know that, naturally.”

  He looked at her, steadily, and after what seemed a long time she slightly shrugged her shoulders. There was no change in her face, which now was lighted by the fire.

  “He would have ruined the town,” she said, almost absently. She looked at her son, then. “I told you, dear,” Mrs. Van Brunt said, “that you ought to let well enough alone. I kept telling you that. But you’ve always been such an impetuous boy. If only you—”

  “No,” Heimrich said.

  She repeated the word. She seemed surprised.

  “Before your son started,” Heimrich said. “Before he even got here. I suppose there wasn’t anything else you could do. But the grass was much too short. For such dry weather, naturally.”

  She seemed about to answer. But she did not. She did not say anything at all, but got into her station wagon at Sergeant Forniss’s gesture. Her son started to say something, but it appeared that nobody was listening, and he got in, too. Forniss had to wait while the Cold Harbor fire truck panted, screamingly, up the private road. But then he drove them off.

  Susan Faye was sitting up when Heimrich went to her, and she had wrapped the coat about her closely. She was able to walk to the police car, and to sit beside Heimrich while he drove her home. She said only two things—“I must look horrible.” “Poor Sam. How could he know?”

  It was as Heimrich was getting into the car to drive away from Susan Faye’s house that she called him back—called him back to show what she had just then found in the pocket of a tweed jacket which had belonged to the man Cornelia Van Brunt had killed.

  Heimrich was gratified to read Henry Van Brunt’s confession that, while employed by the First National Bank and Trust Company, he had stolen a little under three thousand dollars of the bank’s money. But Heimrich was not surprised. A scientist must sometimes presume what he cannot immediately demonstrate; subsequent confirmation is convenient, but not astonishing. A policeman is under similar necessity.

  Heimrich drove back to the inn, along moonlit roads, in much cooler air.

  XIII

  High road was not, as Susan Faye had said quite early, a direct route to any place. Certainly it was not a route from Carmel, where Heimrich had spent the day, to the Old Stone Inn at Van Brunt Center, where Heimrich had a bill to pay. Heimrich nevertheless turned his car into High Road from Van Brunt Avenue, and climbed its twisting course. Twigs blown from trees by the storm crunched under his tires; several quite large branches had been dragged off the pavement, presumably at the direction of James Purvis, town supervisor of roads.

  It was a little before six in the evening, and the July sun still was high, and still was hot. But the air was cooler than it had been in days; the green of trees and bushes (and of the poison ivy on the stone fences) appeared much refreshed. It was perfectly natural, Heimrich thought, to go to see how Susan Faye was recovering. Even a policeman could do no less; even a somewhat weary policeman. He turned the car into the narrow gap between boulders at Susan’s officially uncountenanced driveway, drove up on worn gravel toward the house which had been a barn.

  Susan Faye lay on a chaise on the terrace, and when she heard the car on the drive turned her eyes from the view which spread itself in front of her. Except that she had a pillow behind her head, she appeared from a distance to be recovering nicely. She turned herself on the chaise, a soft skirt swirling a little around long brown legs; she stood up and waited while Heimrich crossed grass to the terrace. She seemed none the worse at all. It appeared that Captain Heimrich’s mission was accomplished.

  She said, “Hello,” and smiled, and when Heimrich asked—as he had come to ask—whether she was the worse for what had happened, she said, “Just a bump on the head.” But there were scratches on her bare arms, and adhesive bandages covered some of them. “Scratched a little,” she added, and said then, “It’s all over, isn’t it?”

  It was, of course, by no means all over. In one sense, from Heimrich’s point of view, it had only begun. There would be days, there would be weeks, remaining in the case of the People of the State of New York vs. Cornelia Van Brunt, and the case against Henry Van Brunt III, as accessory to a felony, assaulter with intent to kill (two counts) and burglar in a minor degree.

  “But the shouting,” Heimrich heard himself say, regretted the cliché but lacked energy to revise it, sat where bidden. A small grave boy and a large sad dog came around the corner of the green house and stood side by side, regarding Captain Heimrich.

  “The other policeman went away,” Michael Faye said. Heimrich agreed that the other policeman had. “Can I have a Coke?” Michael said. “And the Colonel’s hungry.”

  “You can,” his mother said. “Give him a biscuit.”

  Boy and dog went into the house, and Susan turned on the chaise and watched until the door closed behind them. The lines of worry on her face were not so evident today, Heimrich thought. She turned back to Heimrich.

  “He tried to kill me,” she said. “Knock me unconscious and leave me to—to burn.” Her widely spaced gray eyes were shadowed. The shadow passed. “It’s hard to believe, you know. He looks like—well, just like a nicely brought up young man.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Brought up in a special way, of course. With a certain character resulting.”

  “And face unchanged,” she said. “You look tired, captain. Won’t you have a drink?” She smiled. “It still just runs to gin and tonic,” she said. “Or something with gin.”

  It ran to gin and tonic. When she brought glasses to the terrace, Heimrich was leaning back. His eyes were closed. He looked very solid, and somehow rather permanent. He opened his eyes and started to stand up, and was handed a drink before he could.

  “We’ll have to start cutting grass again now,” she said. “What did you mean about the grass, captain?”

  “You heard that?” he said.

  “That,” she said. “And what Henry said and—what Sam said. Sam thought I was the murderer, didn’t he? The way Mrs. Van Brunt wanted him to?”

  “He’s a lawyer,” Heimrich said. “I suppose he weighs evidence. It was an explanation.”

  “Henry took me there,” she said. “Locked me up. I suppose he had something planned? Was I to leave a confession? And—commit suicide?”

  “Probably,” Heimrich said. “I doubt whether he had worked out the details. He’s—well, his mother says, ‘Henry’s always been so impetuous.’” He paused. “You’d think it was all a series of boyish pranks,” he said. “Rather troublesome pranks, but without real blame.” He paused again, and sipped, and looked out across the sunbright green, toward the distant folded hills. “She’s not impetuous herself, you know. Rather direct. Quite matter
of fact, now. She killed Orville Phipps. Any right-thinking person would have killed him, under the circumstances. She feels that.”

  “Is she insane?” Susan asked. “Is that it?”

  “Now Mrs. Faye,” Heimrich said. “Any murderer is insane. In a sense. Lacks a sense of proportion. She’s no more psychotic than most. Quite sane legally. Quite logical, grant her premise.”

  She waited.

  “Tradition,” Heimrich said. “The character of the community, as Miss Burns says. A heritage, to be protected.”

  “The divine right of the Van Brunts,” Susan said. “You could always feel that. But—this. Murder.”

  “A sacrifice,” Heimrich said. “A—” He hesitated. “A burnt offering,” he said. “Mr. Phipps came from—” He hesitated again.

  “A lesser breed,” she said. “The Flats. As I do, in a way. As—my Michael did.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “So, that he—he particularly—should threaten Van Brunt”—he waved his hand—“all of Van Brunt,” he said. “The town. The past through the future. Well, it was intolerable.”

  “He felt it too,” she said. “From the other side. The Orville Phipps Memorial Park. He was a pompous man.” She sipped her drink. “And her son stole money. The impetuous boy.”

  It had started there, Heimrich agreed. If one could say where anything started. What Mrs. Van Brunt felt, what she finally did, started a hundred years ago. Two hundred. But the sequence which would, one day, end in the Putnam County Court House at Carmel, New York, started with a relatively minor theft.

  “Why he stole, I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “They don’t need money. Perhaps just to prove he could get away with it. Perhaps merely out of boredom.”

  But he had not got away with it. He had been caught by Phipps, forced to sign a confession—and to pay the money back. Phipps had pressed his advantage.

  “The memorial park again,” she said, and Heimrich nodded.