Burnt Offering Read online

  “Something, dear?” Agnes Westlake said. “What—what kind of something?”

  “I don’t know what I meant,” Myra Burns said. “I—I knew you would all be here. Except the captain, of course. The dreadful fire!” She turned quickly to Heimrich. “Is it about the fire?” she asked.

  “Now Miss Burns,” Heimrich said. “My niece brought me. She and John. Just a visiting—” He had been about to say fireman. He thought that might complicate matters. “Uncle,” he said.

  She said, “Oh,” in a tone which dismissed whatever problem she had been hurriedly pecking at. She said, “Just ginger ale, please,” to Agnes. She said, “I hope it’s all right, my coming this way,” to everybody. She did not wait, then. “I may as well say it,” she said. “I’ve been—discharged. By Orville Phipps!”

  Her small face was blank suddenly—blank and puzzled. It was as if she could not believe what she had just heard, although the words she had heard were her own words.

  “Discharged,” she said. “After all these years. By Orville! From the library!”

  It was easy to see in her face; it reflected in other faces. Miss Burns had been discharged, not from a semi-rural library, open afternoons from two to five, three evenings a week from seven until nine—not from a library but from life.

  “But why?” Marian Alden said, her voice a little raised. At the same time, Paul Stidworthy said, in a low, harsh voice, that he’d be damned.

  “Because I renewed the magazines,” Myra Burns said. “The ones he didn’t like. The ones he said were—red. The Atlantic and—” She paused. “The Atlantic!” she repeated. “He said I shouldn’t and I said, ‘Orville, you look after your bank and I’ll take care of the library,’ and then he—” She broke off. She shook her head. “That was yesterday,” she said.

  “The man’s crazy,” Timothy Westlake said. “The man’s—the Atlantic Monthly?” His tone expressed a wild hope that some other magazine must be meant; it implied an Atlantic Weekly.

  “Oh, there were others,” she said. “And some books, of course. He said—he said the library was no better than a cell.” She looked around. “People have to read,” she said, and now there was no emphasis, because one does not underline final truths.

  “So I knew how you all felt about Orville,” she said. “And—there’s nothing anybody can do—but—but people ought to know. I knew there was going to be—you were going to be here after the meeting. Everybody knew that. I thought perhaps because of the fire, but I drove by and the cars were here and—I just came in. I just couldn’t stop myself.” She looked around again. “I just had to tell somebody,” she said.

  There was a considerable pause. The one who broke it was not, under these circumstances, the one Heimrich would have anticipated.

  “Somebody,” Stidworthy said, in his heavy voice. “Somebody ought to do something.”

  And those were, Marian Alden said as, a little after eleven, they drove through quiet roads toward home, were to be classified as famous last words. “Somebody ought to do something.” But nobody did; nobody would.

  “We get together and talk,” she told her husband, told Captain Heimrich. “But Orville Phipps runs the town, just the same. He fires poor little Myra Burns, and it’s all she’s got to live on and she’s over fifty. He keeps Sue out of her house—or tries to. Because she has to have a loan and the savings bank won’t give her one as long as she’s in a—what is it, John?”

  “Violation, I suppose,” John Alden said. “It’s not a residence without a certificate of occupancy. Anyway, if Phipps has got it in for her—” He shrugged. “One banker scratches another banker’s back, maybe. The First National and the Cold Harbor Savings Bank probably go to bed together.”

  Marian laughed at that. She said it made a funny picture, if you wanted to make a picture.

  “And this development thing,” Marian said. “And even down to Jim Purvis’s chicken coop. Who’s on the other side of the line, John?”

  “I’m not on the wrong side of the line,” John Alden said. “Or not much. And everybody drives in the center of the road at night. Because of the deer. Gives you more space to—”

  “Not the road line,” Marian said. “You weren’t listening. The property line. The one Purvis’s chickens are too close to. Who’s on the other side?”

  “Oh,” Alden said, and turned into the Alden driveway. “Depends on which side he’s building on. One way, it’ll be Sam. Other side—” He ran the car into the garage and cut the motor. “Ed Noble, as I recall it,” he said. “Anyway, it’s miles from us.”

  “That’s the way everybody feels,” his wife told him. “That’s why nobody ever does anything about—about octopuses like Mr. Phipps.”

  It was difficult to quarrel with this—as a generalization. John Alden did not. Nor, at that time, did Captain M. L. Heimrich, of the New York State Police, although he should, of course, have known better.

  III

  A sign on Purvis’s garage, at The Corners, promised “Day and Night Towing Service.” This service was represented on Monday night, which was the night of the fire, by Asa Purvis, the youngest but one of the Purvis boys. James Purvis, as was widely—and on the whole favorably—observed, was a man who believed in keeping things in the family. James, Jr., who had been named after his father; Orville, who had been named after Mr. Phipps (and a loan his father had negotiated with the First National Bank and Trust Company shortly before Orville’s birth) and Asa, who was named after his grandfather, shared this belief, although sometimes with reservations.

  Asa—who intermittently wished he had been named after someone else, since he considered his given name lamentably hick—was most reserved in his enthusiasm for keeping things in the family when it was his turn to provide night towing service. The bed in the back room of the garage was hard, and somewhat bumpy. The air, even with the window open, was heavy with the fumes of gasoline and oil, and from a night on duty Asa usually rose with a headache. If it became necessary during the night, Asa had to traverse the garage to reach the sanitary restroom which was situated more for the customers’ convenience than for his.

  He awoke with a headache on the morning after the fire house burned down, but this was not entirely due to the fumes of gasoline in the air. One of the advantages of night duty was that it gave a man a chance to take a drink. James Purvis considered Asa too young for alcohol, holding that there would be time for that. Asa disagreed, feeling the time was now.

  On Monday night, Asa had had his first drink after the fire had smouldered down and the audience, except for a couple of men from the Cold Harbor Fire Department, had left. He had had his second soon after the last firemen, already kept up late enough by what was, after all, somebody else’s fire, had gone off in their car. There had still been embers then, and some acrid smoke had still drifted up from the ruins, but there wasn’t any further danger. The firemen told each other this as they departed—fire out for all practical purposes, no wind, everything well wetted down.

  Asa had had a third drink and had gone to bed, not expecting to be disturbed. In the summer, there was seldom much need for night towing. Cold Harbor got the big wrecks, or Blake’s Garage, in Van Brunt Center. In winter, people slid cars into ditches, and called Purvis’s, usually in great anger, particularly if they had skidded off town roads. (It was James Purvis’s turn to be road supervisor; there was a stubborn belief, among the locals, that he ought to do something about ice. There was little hope that he ever would, or any of Phipps’s crowd. But town elections are held in autumns, and memories are short.)

  Asa had not been disturbed. He awakened with a headache, and with his mind rather fuzzy, and thought of taking another drink. He decided against this. The old man was due in an hour or so. He finished off the coffee in his thermos. He walked through the garage and opened the big doors. He sat on a bench near the pumps and had a cigarette. He was, he had to admit to himself, still pretty bleary. He would, he decided, have to watch himself. He didn’t
want to burn himself out—not at nineteen. Drinking half the night, tomcatting around—a fella had to watch himself. For a few minutes, Asa shook his head over this promising young man, already steeped in vice.

  He was then too intent in fantasy—he was in a night club, in evening clothes, but fallen forward on a table; Marilyn Monroe, or someone very like her, looked at him with pity, youthful promise come to nothing—to notice the jeep station wagon parked so as partially to obstruct access to the pumps. He saw it; he did not notice it. When he did it was at first to think, vaguely, “Hell, it’s still in the way.” But then he thought, “What do I mean? Still in the way?”

  Because he remembered—sure he remembered—when he had gone into the garage for his third drink, and to go to bed, there had been no cars left in front of the garage. There had been plenty there while the fire held; they had piled them in everywhere. But he was sure—sure he was sure—they had all been taken away. Why, then, had his first thought on seeing the jeep been surprise that it was “still” in the way? He must have seen it before when it was in the way, and that could only mean that it had not been driven off when the others were, in the general exodus after the fire. Because, after he had gone to bed he had not got up again. Not unless he had walked in his sleep or—or pulled a blank.

  The last thought worried him. It was all very well—and Asa was mature enough to realize this—to picture one’s self reeling down a primrose path in dinner clothes. It was another thing to pull a blank after a couple of drinks—well, after three drinks. If he couldn’t carry it any better than that—carry half of half a pint, at the most—he’d really better watch himself. Suppose somebody did call for a tow and he didn’t hear the telephone? The old man would—

  Asa Purvis got up from the bench and walked over to the jeep—and felt, as he did so, that he was doing something he had only recently done before. The feeling disquieted him. He walked around the jeep, and recognized it as old man Phipps’s. (He’d filled it often enough; never could get the old man to use high-test.) He was unsurprised to recognize the jeep, at least at first. It was as if he had known it was going to be old man Phipps’s jeep, which tied in with his uneasy feeling that he had done all this before. But then he thought more clearly, and was surprised.

  Whenever it had been there before, what was it doing there now? Why wasn’t it at the Phipps house? Or—he looked at his watch—on its way, with Phipps at the wheel, from the house to the bank. What was it doing here in front of the garage, unoccupied and—he felt—with a cool radiator? Phipps had another car—the old Caddy. But he almost never used it, because it drank gas like—

  Asa shook his head and walked around the jeep again. He looked into it. The key was not in the ignition lock. The ignition switch was off, but not locked off. Asa ran a not very clean hand through thick blond hair. It was a funny thing, all right.

  He lighted another cigarette and looked at the jeep, inviting it to explain itself. Phipps had come to the fire in it. That was obvious—everybody had come to the fire. The town supervisor was certainly not the man to let a thing of so much importance pass unsupervised. Asa did not remember that he had seen Phipps, but people were milling around all over, the fire created funny shadows. There was no reason why he should have seen old man Phipps, to recognize.

  Phipps had come to the fire. He had parked the jeep where there was a place—nobody had paid any attention to what they blocked. But then—what had he done? Walked home? It was, anyway, three miles. And why would he?

  Asa looked around and then, with a feeling of guilt, got into the jeep and turned the ignition switch. The motor took hold at the first grind of the starter. While he was about it, Asa backed the jeep to a place where it did not block the pumps. He cut the motor and got out and walked around the jeep again.

  Somebody had given old man Phipps a ride home. He had left the jeep, for some reason (but not, obviously, because it wouldn’t start), and was planning to pick it up again later. It was, all the same, a hell of a place to leave it. How’d the old man think they were going to sell gas?

  It had to be that way, because there wasn’t any other way—Asa interrupted himself. He looked across the road at the blackened remains of the fire house. “Jeeze,” he said. He began to walk slowly toward the ruins of the fire house. He walked slowly across the road. He was nuts, Asa told himself, to think a thing like that. Things like that—hell, they didn’t happen.

  Captain Heimrich had made the polite sounds of a departing guest and was opening the door of his car when the telephone rang in the Aldens’ house. Marian went back into the house to answer it and Heimrich got into the car and started the motor. But, since goodbyes should be allowed their course, he waited. Marian came back to the door and beckoned and Heimrich turned off the motor and went in. He listened to the commanding officer of Troop K, at Hawthorne. He said, “No, Joe. No, I haven’t.” He said, “All right, I’ll look at it. Let Poughkeepsie know I’m held up, will you?” He went outside again, and his niece and her husband waited.

  “Apparently,” he told them, “somebody fell in the fire last night.” He paused. “They think it’s Mr. Phipps.”

  That was, he added, after he had listened to Marian say it was dreadful, to John Alden’s profane exclamation of surprise and shock, all he knew at the moment. It had been suggested that, since he was in the neighborhood, he look about.

  “Why?” Alden asked him. “I mean, why you?”

  “Now John,” Heimrich said. “I’m here, for one thing. When somebody’s dead.”

  It took him ten minutes to drive from the Alden house to The Corners. This fact was of no conceivable importance, yet Heimrich duly noted it, since, with a man dead, the most trivial things are to be noted. It was a sunny morning, already warm at a little after nine o’clock. The lawns of the few houses he passed needed rain; a corn patch he passed showed brown. In a pasture, two does grazed with the cattle. He crossed a little bridge over a dry watercourse and wondered whether that was, or had been, the brook in which Cornelia Van Brunt had waded as a child. He passed a rural mail carrier, his car half off the road as he pushed letters and newspapers into a box marked “Noble,” which was at the foot of a drive which wound uphill, among trees, presumably to a house the trees hid. He avoided a skunk, dead on the road, victim of all skunks’ confidence in invulnerability. He turned off the road at The Corners, and dust came up under his tires from the graveled area in front of Purvis’s garage. He walked across the black road, already hot underfoot, to join two State troopers, and three deputies from the sheriff’s office. With them, he watched a photographer shooting down into the black debris which had been the Van Brunt Fire House. He walked on hard-baked earth.

  The troopers saluted; the men from the sheriff’s office gestured more casually.

  “Done to a crisp,” one of the deputies said, and gestured. “Poor bastard.”

  The photographer shot once more, using a flash bulb. He said, “O. K., that does it,” and walked out of damp ashes and charred wood. On the drive which had led to the fire house he stamped blackness and ash from his feet. His shoes remained black.

  “You want to look, captain?” one of the troopers asked. “Doesn’t look like being anything for you, but—”

  “Oh yes,” Heimrich said. “Long as I’m here.”

  He walked into the ruins, moving carefully among partly burned timbers, avoiding blackened nails which stabbed upward, seeking unwary feet.

  The building had been, roughly, square. The body was just inside the burned area, at the rear. It was partly under charred beams, but it did not seem to be pinned by them. It was behind the carcasses of the burned fire trucks. The body was black and small; it lay with knees drawn up, and head bent toward knees.

  “Who,” Heimrich asked the trooper who had come in with him, “who decided it was Phipps?”

  “Can’t tell from the looks, can you?” the trooper said, and bent to look closer. “Figures to be—right size, for one thing. And—his jeep turned up
at the garage across the road. There this morning; been there all night, apparently. Phipps didn’t go home last night—anyway, he didn’t sleep there. Woman who keeps house for him went and looked when we called. His bed’s not been used. She put in fresh towels yesterday and they’re not used.”

  “She doesn’t know?” Heimrich asked. “I mean, she wasn’t there last night. Didn’t wonder where Mr. Phipps was?”

  “Goes home every night after dinner,” the trooper said. “Comes again in the morning about seven-thirty. I asked about that. She said, ‘What do you think, young man? I’m a respectable woman.’ She’s about seventy. Phipps is—was—somewhere in his sixties.” He shook his head. “Maybe Kinsey’s got something,” he added.

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, looking down at the body. It was certainly, as the deputy had rather unfortunately said, done to a crisp. “Smells of gasoline, doesn’t it?” Heimrich said. But the whole area had the acrid odor fire leaves behind it.

  “Two trucks burned,” the trooper told him. “Did you see the fire, captain?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I watched the fire.”

  “It looks,” the trooper said, “like Mr. Phipps—or you think maybe it isn’t Phipps?”

  “Now Ted,” Heimrich said. “I think it’s probably Phipps. We don’t know yet, of course. Have to have the teeth looked at. That sort of thing. But it’s probably Phipps. What does it look like?”

  “He went in,” the trooper said. “Upstairs, probably. There was a while when you could have got in at the back. Outside stairs. Isn’t that right?”

  “There were some men back there,” Heimrich said. “The fire hadn’t spread that far when I got here.”

  “Could be he wanted to get something that was upstairs,” the trooper said. “Papers, maybe—I wouldn’t know. Got trapped. Then the building fell in and—” He gestured. “Hot in here, then,” he said. “The boys couldn’t get in—probably nobody tried. The gas fumes and all would cover the—well, the smell.” He stopped abruptly. “Don’t know where I get off talking this way, captain,” he said. “Got it all worked out for you, haven’t I?” His tone was apologetic.