Graves' Retreat Read online

  “It’s all right, Susan,” he sighed. “Why don’t we just go back.”

  “No, please, Les. Let me say something.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t think you gave her a decent chance. She’s a very nice girl.”

  “I know she’s a nice girl.”

  “And I think- Well, I think pride kept you from loving her.”

  “Pride?” For the first time he allowed a note of anger in his voice. "What's pride got to do with it?”

  “Men can be that way, Les. I know. Daddy’s like that. If he thinks something’s not good enough for him-well, it blinds him sometimes.”

  “I never said she’s not good enough for me.”

  “No, you didn’t say it. But I sensed it.”

  “She works in a hat shop and that’s perfectly all right,” Les said. “It is perfectly all right. If only you’d believe that.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Les, I want us to part as friends.”

  “We’re friends, Susan. Don’t worry about that.”

  She stopped him and leaned forward and kissed him gently on the mouth. “I really care about you, Les. I want you to know that.”

  “Yes,” he said, but it was a dull voice and seemed to belong to somebody else. “Yes, I know that.”

  Then they got in the carriage and went back.

  ***

  On the porch, one of the roomers was saying to Mr. Waterhouse, “Tell us about that buried body again.”

  “Well,” Mr. Waterhouse said, “it’s getting kind of late.”

  “Please,” said another boarder, “just that one and then we can all go to bed.”

  Les heard all this as he approached the porch and despite his mood -despite the fact that it was clear now he would never have Susan- he had to smile to himself. The boarders were like children whenever Mr. Waterhouse started telling Cedar Rapids stories. Please, just one more before bedtime, please.

  “Well,” said Mr. Waterhouse, “you know where the old distillery was. Well, on that site right there there’s said to be a body buried- some say it was the result of two men fighting a duel over a woman, and others say it was over money and that the killer buried the body there and then bought the property next day so he’d have a private burial site.”

  Mr. Abernathy, who loved ghost stories, added, “And didn’t you say once that people hear strange howlings there every once in a while?”

  Mr. Waterhouse, who didn’t believe in ghosts but who liked to keep his audience happy, said, “That’s right, Mr. Abernathy. That’s exactly right. Strange howlings every once in a while.”

  “My Lord,” said Mr. Abernathy, absolutely thrilled. “My Lord.” Les muttered a “Good evening” to everyone and then went inside the vestibule.

  Mrs. Smythe had the sliding parlor doors open so she could look up from the chair where she did her knitting and see who came in and out. “Les,” she called when she saw him, “could you come in here a minute, please?”

  He sighed, afraid she was going to ask him how it had gone with Susan. Right now, he didn’t feel like talking.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Smythe.”

  She nodded. “There’s somebody in your room. Waiting.”

  “Who?”

  “He didn’t say. Just said it would be all right with you.”

  Still dazed from his time with Susan, all Les could do was shrug and say, “All right, Mrs. Smythe. Thanks for telling me.”

  He nodded, grateful that they hadn’t talked about Susan, and then made his way back to the stairs. He was exhausted. First all the hoopla earlier today about the game and then tonight with Susan and-

  He pushed open the door and looked in his room. He did not think that anything could shock him anymore today.

  Yet now he stood there absolutely stunned.

  “Hello,” T.Z. said, standing up from the reading chair and putting out his arms. “I’ll bet you’re surprised to see me now, aren’t you, boy?”

  There was no doubt about that.

  All Les could do was stand there gape-mouthed and stare.

  It had been years since he’d seen his older brother, T. Z. Graves. He had been hoping it would be years more before that dubious privilege came again.

  He closed the door and went inside, and then T.Z. said, “Why don’t you and me go for a walk, brother? Neely’s waiting for us a few blocks down at a tavern."

  Neely, Les thought. The coldest and most brutal man he’d ever known.

  He looked with pity and contempt at his older brother-still dashing and handsome and slick. And still, as always, a criminal.

  “Come on, Les. Me and Neely want to talk to you about something.”

  “About what?” Les said.

  “Well, we just kind of want to see how you’re doing, for one thing, in a nice little burg like Cedar Rapids. And for another, we want to talk to you about your job.”

  “What about my job?”

  T.Z. smiled. “You got to admit, Les, it gives a couple bank robbers a pretty good edge when one of their brothers works in a bank.” T.Z. didn’t stop laughing for a full minute about that one.

  Then he said, “But you don’t look too happy to see me.”

  “I’m not.”

  T.Z. glanced around the room. “You sure have gone respectable, Les.”

  “That was my intention.”

  “And I s’pect that’s how most people in Cedar Rapids see you.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Respectable.”

  “Yes, I suppose they do.”

  “Good, then I won’t spoil their impression of you unless you force me to.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  T.Z., in his riverboat gambler outfit, stood there and shook his head ironically. “Well, sir, I don’t imagine folks around here would much take to the idea of somebody working in a bank if they knew he used to stick up banks himself.”

  T.Z. watched Les’s face fall even lower and then said, “If you catch my meaning, Les. If you catch my meaning.”

  Half a minute later, they went to meet Neely.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Susan Edmonds stood outside the French doors looking in at her mother, who sat before the large fieldstone fireplace, with its patriotic decorations on the mantel, doing her knitting for the night.

  The Edmonds house was a three-story wooden structure with a captain’s walk and cupolas and spires that lent it a real grandness. The lawns sprawled a half mile in every direction and the livery was as big as many fine homes.

  From upstairs came the sounds of Chopin on the summer night. Her eleven-year-old sister, Estelle, practicing for her recital the following week.

  From the third-floor comer a light shone, which meant her father was working on books. He was obsessed with work. He had never forgotten his days as a poor farm boy. Her mother always said her father secretly dreaded that somebody would take from him all he’d earned.

  Guiltily, she thought: At least when he’s up in his study, he can’t yell at us.

  When her father was in one of his “moods,” he was the sort of tyrant who made you twitch from nerves and made you tear up and fly from the room. The joke in town was that Clinton Edmonds owned such big grounds because he didn’t want neighbors to hear him bellow. Susan spent her days walking around with her stomach in knots. Even when her father wasn’t ranting, her dread of his doing so produced the same effects. He had done the same things to her two older brothers, both of whom, after college, had gone as far away as possible.

  And now Byron was becoming just one more of her father’s victims.

  She closed her eyes, enjoying the Chopin and the faint glow of the fancy kerosene table lamps and the scent of mint from a nearby tree, and thought of her girlhood dreams of Byron.

  He’d always been so handsome, yet never vain about it; he’d always been so manly (except when it came to sports, where he was so clumsy) and yet gentle, too. He’d gone East to school, to Dartmouth, and gott
en the best grades possible in banking and finance, and then he’d returned here to work for her father. By then it was already assumed by Cedar Rapids society that Byron and she would be married. And indeed they were inseparable-going for canters on Sunday afternoon, attending concerts on Bandstand Hill in Bever Park, leading any other couples in tennis doubles, spending one or two nights a week at the Greene Opera House, where they both enjoyed the antics of such acts as Evans, Bryant & Hoey’s (invariably billed as “A Tidal Wave of Merriment!”) and a singer named Lillie Langtry who always brought her own company to perform a W. S. Gilbert comedy.

  Yes, for the first three years following Byron’s return, everything seemed wonderful. And her father treated Byron with deference, too. Susan sometimes suspected this was true because her father was intimidated by Byron’s Dartmouth degree, her father scarcely having finished the eighth grade. But gradually this attitude changed and Byron slowly became just one more victim of her father’s wrath and bullying until now-

  Well, that’s why Susan had sought solace with Les Graves.

  Standing here now, opening her eyes and trying to give shape to the sprawl of stars that were the Big Dipper, she thought fondly of Les and wondered if she’d been selfish.

  All she’d ever wanted from him was his friendship, but obviously, before she could do anything about it, Les made more of it than was there. One night, seeing the love in his eyes, she became frightened. She did not want to hurt him as she had been hurt all her life by her father and now by Byron, who was losing his integrity to her father…

  She was thinking this when she was interrupted by a thunderous voice (she always thought of him as an Old Testament patriarch), one that automatically caused her to begin shaking and twitching…

  Her father had stormed into the room and stood over her mother and shouted, “My best pen! It’s gone!”

  Her mother had already shriveled up in her rocking chair. “I didn’t take it, Clinton! I know better than to touch your things!”

  “No, you didn’t take it! But you’re so lax with that damn maid of ours that she can lose things without any fear of recrimination!”

  “But Clinton, I-”

  “You keep a terrible house, Arlene! A terrible house!”

  And with that, he stormed out again, leaving in his wake two broken women and a troubled air that would linger for the rest of the night now and cause twitching and shaking, fits and starts of tears and anger that were utterly, utterly useless.

  Susan hurried through the French doors now, to sit at her mother’s knees, to comfort the woman she loved so much. The woman who had been living with this tyrant for four decades.

  By the time she reached her mother, the gray-haired woman had lowered her head and was letting tears roll down her cheeks.

  Even across the room she could hear her mother’s whispered prayer and it was always the same prayer-one that asked not for any retribution against her husband, only that she be able to abide his rages and beratings with patience and charity.

  Susan knelt next to the woman and cradled her head against her shoulder.

  ***

  Neely said, “You’ve got a nice town here, Les. I hear there’s an overall company that pays women twenty-five cents a day for ten hours’ work.”

  T.Z. laughed. “I guess you probably remember that Neely here’s a socialist.”

  “Was a socialist,” Neely said with an edge. “Now I see that both sides are worthless.”

  The tavern was essentially a single long room with a long slab of pine for a bar and several kegs of beer hefted up into cradles behind the bar. There was sawdust on the floor. The only attempts at decoration were some faded posters depicting the “Wild, Wild West” as seen by everybody’s favorite liar, Buffalo Bill Cody. The clientele appeared to be more drifter than workingman-rail-riders mostly.

  “There’s a table over there. Why don’t we take it?” Neely said. “Talk about old times.”

  Les shook his head. “T.Z. told me why you’re here. We don’t have anything to talk about-old or new.”

  Neely smiled his shark smile and gazed ironically at T.Z. “See, he starts going out with a banker’s daughter and right away he gets uppity.”

  Les had forgotten how clever Neely was. “How did you know about Susan?”

  “Tonight, when you were at the river, you turned around and wondered if you hadn’t heard somebody in the bushes.” Neely laughed. “You did. It was me.”

  “You bastard.”

  “Your little brother sure doesn’t seem glad to see us, T.Z.”

  “He’ll calm down. Come on, Les. Let’s go over and sit down and have a beer.”

  Les looked at his brother. As always he had the sense that the man was a complete stranger: his smooth, handsome face, his gambler’s getup, and a certain constant anger in his dark eyes. They had been through so many years together, their mother dying when they were barely ten, and then their father going soon after, and Les struggling to get through high school while T.Z. (Thomas Zecariah) had drifted into one form of trouble after another, always coming back and asking his little brother to hide him out… and his little brother always accommodating him out of guilt and pity and fear. The night the old man died, Les had fallen asleep… it had been T.Z. who sat up with him and then first held the old man when he lay dying (“Don’t dose your eyes!” Les could remember T.Z. screaming, waking Les up) and then later it had been Les whom T.Z. had held, trying to comfort the sobbing and terrified boy… If only T.Z. could always have been the person he’d been at that moment.

  “Come on,” T.Z. said softly. He put a hand on Les’s shoulder. “Even if you don’t want to help us out, you can at least be nice to your brother, can’t you?”

  Les knew he was being manipulated. T.Z. was so good at that. His sad gaze. His gentle voice. His need. T.Z. could manipulate woman or man when he wanted to, and right now he wanted to.

  Les nodded to the bartender for a beer, waited for his mug, and then picked it up and went over and sat down.

  Neely said, “You like it here?”

  “Cedar Rapids?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Actually, it looks like a nice-people little town.”

  “It is.” It was difficult with Neely to keep a defensive tone from your voice. Neely always made you feel you had to apologize for existing. He was smart-smarter than most people, that was for sure -and he never let you forget it.

  “Hey, Les, ease down. I’m not being sarcastic. I spent the day walking around. You didn’t see me-but I was there when you were pitching that scrimmage game and I-well, I was there when you went for a ride with Susan.”

  Before Les could get angry again, T.Z. said, “So you’re pitching again?”

  “Yes.”

  “Too bad that had to happen and all. In Chicago, I mean.”

  “I just got-scared.”

  For once T.Z.’s smile seemed genuine. “You were like that when you were a little kid. You’d want something and then just before you got it-you got scared. Like you didn’t deserve it or something.” T.Z.’s voice was not without a certain sadness. “Where me-I just took the things I wanted.”

  Neely said, “I’m really happy that you two want to talk about the old days. But we’re here on business, T.Z.” He looked at Les. "T.Z.’s wanted for murder.”

  T.Z. slammed his fist on the table. “God, Neely, you promised-”

  “The kid should know the truth.”

  Les just sat there, stunned. “Murder?”

  He had long ago accepted the reality of his brother being a thief. But T.Z. and Neely usually managed to keep their robberies to small-town banks and to cheating traveling businessmen out of their money and working vast scams on groups of greedy suckers.

  “What happened?”

  “Train,” Neely said.

  “You stuck up a train?”

  “Yes,” Neely said, and for the first time he sounded defensive.

  “God,” Les
said.

  “You know all the trouble that goes with that.” Neely leaned forward. “Well, your brother let his mask slip. I thought I’d killed the only man who could identify him, but somebody else saw us as we escaped-” He pulled a folded-up sheet of paper from his pocket. Handed it to Les. It was a wanted poster. $5000 Cash was being offered by the railroad for the apprehension. Dead or Alive, of this man for whom the poster had no name. Fortunately for T.Z., at the time he was seen escaping the train, he’d been wearing a beard.

  “But you just said you killed him,” Les said to Neely.

  “I did. But it doesn’t matter which one of us actually killed him. We’ll both hang if they catch us.”

  “We need money,” T.Z. said. “We need to go to Mexico. Hide out there for a few years.”

  “What about the money from the train?”

  A cruel smile touched Neely’s lips. “T.Z. here seemed to be of the mind that a certain diamond shipment was being sent from Chicago to Sterling.” Neely shook his head. “Seems T.Z. was wrong.”

  “We didn’t get much of anything,” T.Z. said.

  “Then we heard from Oubbins-remember him? He happened to be riding the rails when he spotted you in Cedar Rapids. Working in a bank no less,” Neely said. “So-we came here to see you.” He leaned forward, half whispered, “We figured the way we covered for you the last time you worked in a bank, you’d be more than willing to help us out.”

  “I only took that money because we had to pay off that doctor.”

  T.Z. had been wounded in a failed attempt to rob a telegraph station. By the time they reached the small Nebraska town where Les had been working, T.Z. was nearly dead. There was a doc who’d fix him up and not report him to the law-for $500. None of them had the money, so Les was forced to pilfer it from the bank where he’d been working. Then he had to flee town with them before he was caught.

  Now they were here again, dragging him once more into their web of failure and violence.

  And now murder.

  “I can’t do it,” Les said.

  “He’s gone too respectable, T.Z.,” Neely said coolly. “You see, that’s what’s wrong with the capitalist system. You take Les here. Sure, he loves his brother. Sure, he’s grateful his brother helped raise him after the old man died. But now he’s got this comfortable job making comfortable money and seeing the banker’s daughter on the side-so he has to weigh one thing against the other-the things capitalism has given him against his love for his brother. And capitalism wins every time.”