Beyond the Woods: Fairy Tales Retold Read online

  Gene Wolfe

  The woodcutter came up the walk, and the ornate old house watched him through venetian-blinded eyes. He wore a red-brown tweed suit; his unmarked car was at the curb. The house felt his feet on its porch, his quick knock at its door. It wondered how he had driven along the path through the trees. The witch would split his bones to get the marrow; it would tell the witch.

  It rang its bell.

  Tina Heim opened the door, keeping it on the chain but more or less expecting a neighbor with coleslaw. She had heard you were supposed to bring chicken soup for Death; here it seemed to be slaw, though someone had brought Waldorf salad for Jerry.

  “I’m Lieutenant Price,” the woodcutter said, unsmiling. He held out a badge in a black leather case. “You’re Mrs. Heim? I’d like to talk to you.”

  She began, “Have the children—”

  “I’d like to talk to you,” he repeated. “It might be nicer if we did it in the house and sitting down.”

  “All right.” She unhooked the chain and opened the door.

  He stepped inside. “You were busy in the kitchen.” She had not seen him glance at her apron, but apparently he had. “I was making gingerbread men for school lunches,” she explained. “I like to put a few cookies in their lunches every day.”

  He nodded, still unsmiling. “Smells good. We can talk in there, and you can watch them so they don’t burn.”

  “They’re out already, it only takes a few minutes in the microwave. Can you—” It was too late; he had slipped by her and was out of sight. She hurried through the dark foyer and shadowy dining room, and found him sitting on a dinette chair in her kitchen. “Can you just barge into someone’s home this way?”

  He shook his head. “You know, I didn’t think you could bake in a microwave oven.”

  “It’s hard to get cakes to rise, but nice for cookies.” She wavered between hospitality and anger, and decided on the former. It seemed safer, and she could always get angry later. “Would you care for one?”

  He nodded.

  “And some coffee? Or we have milk if you’d prefer that.”

  “Coffee will be okay,” he told her. “No, Mrs. Heim, we can’t just barge into somebody’s house; we have to get a search warrant. But once you let us in, you can’t stop us from going wherever we want to. I could go up to your bedroom now, for example, and search your bureau.”

  “You’re not—”

  He shook his head. “I was just giving you an example. That’s the way the law is, in this state.”

  She stared down uncomprehendingly at the little mug with the smiley face on its side. It was full of black coffee. She had poured it without thinking, like an automaton. “Do you want cream? Sugar?”

  “No, thanks. Sit down, Mrs. Heim.”

  Tina sat. He had taken the chair she usually used. She took the one across from him, Jerry’s chair, positioning it carefully and feeling as though she had gone somewhere for a job interview.

  “Now then,” he said. He made a steeple of his fingers. It seemed an old man’s gesture, though he looked no older than she. This is my house, she thought. If this is an interview, then I’m interviewing him. She knew it was not true.

  “Mrs. Heim, your husband died last year. In November.” She nodded guardedly.

  “And the cause of death was—?”

  “Lung cancer. It’s on the death certificate.” The covers of a thousand paperbacks flashed past in her imagination: Murder on the Orient Express, Fletch, The Roman Hat Mystery. “You said you were a lieutenant—are you on the Homicide Squad? My god, I’m in a mystery novel!”

  “No,” he said again. “This isn’t fiction, Mrs. Heim. Just a little inquiry. Your late husband was a heavy smoker?”

  She shook her head. “Jerry didn’t smoke.”

  “Maybe he’d been a heavy smoker, and quit?”

  “No,” she said. “Jerry never smoked at all.”

  Price nodded as though to himself. “I’ve read that sidewise smoke gets people sometimes.” He sipped his coffee. “Are you a smoker, Mrs. Heim? I didn’t see any ashtrays.”

  “No. No, I don’t smoke, Lieutenant. I never have.”

  “Uh-huh.” His right hand left the handle of the smiley mug and went to his shirt pocket. “As it happens I smoke, Mrs. Heim. Would it bother you?”

  “Of course not,” she lied. The ashtrays for guests were put away in the cabinet. She brought him one.

  He got out a cigarette and lit it with a disposable plastic lighter. “I’m trying to quit,” he told her. He drew smoke into his lungs. “Was your husband a chemist, Mrs. Heim? Did he work in a chemical plant?”

  She shook her head. “Jerry was an attorney.” Surely Price knew all this.

  “And his age at death was—?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “That’s very young for a nonsmoker to die of lung cancer, Mrs. Heim.”

  “That’s what Jerry’s doctor said.” Not wanting to cry again, Tina poured coffee for herself, adding milk and diet sweetener, stirring until time enough had passed for her to get her feelings once more under control.

  When she sat down again he said, “People must have wondered. My wife died about three years ago, and I know I got a lot of questions.”

  She nodded absently, looking at the little plate on the other side of the dinette table. The gingerbread man had lain there, untouched. Now it was gone. She said, “They X-rayed Jerry’s lungs, Lieutenant. The X-rays showed cancer. That’s what we were told.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “But you don’t believe Jerry died of cancer?”

  He shrugged. “And now your little boy. What was his name?”

  Tina tried to keep all emotion from her voice, and felt she succeeded. “It was Alan.”

  “Just last month. Must have been pretty hard on you.”

  “It was. Lieutenant, can’t we be honest with each other? What are we talking about?”

  “All right.” He took another sip of coffee. “Anyhow, you’ve still got two more. A boy and a girl, isn’t that right?”

  Tina nodded. “Henry and Gail. But Henry and Gail aren’t actually mine.”

  For the first time, he looked surprised. “Why’s that?”

  “They’re stepchildren, that’s all. Of course, I love them as if they were my own, or anyway I try to.”

  “I didn’t know that,” he told her. “But Alan was—?”

  “Our child. Jerry’s and mine.”

  “Your husband had been married before. Divorce?”

  “Yes. Jerry got full custody. Rona doesn’t—didn’t—even have visiting rights.”

  “Like that,” he said.

  “Yes, like that, Lieutenant.”

  “And now that your husband’s dead?” Price flicked ashes into the salad plate that had held the gingerbread man.

  “I don’t know. If Rona tries to take them, I’ll go to court; then we’ll see. Won’t you tell me what this is about?”

  He nodded. “It’s about insurance, really, Mrs. Heim. Your husband had a large policy.”

  She nodded guardedly. “They paid.”

  Price was no longer listening, not to her. “Did Henry or Gail stay home from school, Mrs. Heim? It’s only one-thirty.”

  “No, they won’t be back until after three. Do you want to speak to them?”

  He shook his head. “I heard footsteps upstairs. A kid’s, I thought.”

  “Henry’s eighteen, Lieutenant, and Gail’s sixteen. Believe me, they don’t sound like kids stamping around up there. Do you want to go up and see? You don’t need an excuse—so you said.”

  He ground out his cigarette in the salad plate. “That’s right, I don’t need an excuse. Alan was poisoned, wasn’t he, Mrs. Heim? Lead poisoning?”

  She nodded slowly, pretending there was a lovely clay mask on her face, a mask that would be dissolved by tears, broken by any expression. “He ate paint chips, Lieutenant. In his closet there was a place where the old paint was flaking off. We
had repainted his room, but not in there. He was only two, and—and—”

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “I’ve got two kids of my own.”

  “No, it will never be okay.” She tore off a paper towel and stood in a corner, her back to him, blowing her nose and dabbing at her tears. She hoped that when she turned around, he would be gone.

  “Feeling better now?” he asked. He had lit another cigarette.

  “A little. You know, it’s not fair.”

  “What isn’t?”

  “Your smoking like that. But you’re still alive, and Jerry never smoked, but Jerry’s gone.”

  “I’m trying to quit.” He said it mechanically, toying with his cigarette. “Actually, some insurance people pretty much agree with you, Mrs. Heim.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Your husband had a policy with Attica Life, a hundred thousand dollars.”

  Automatically she shook her head. “Two hundred thousand. That was what they paid.”

  He inhaled smoke and puffed it from his nostrils. “It was a hundred thousand, but it had a double indemnity provision for cancer. A lot of them do now, because people are so worried about it. Cancer generally means big hospital bills.”

  This was it. She waited, fists clenched in her lap.

  “Not with your Jerry, of course. Or anyway, not so much. He was dead in what? Three weeks?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Three weeks after he went into the hospital.”

  “And anyway he had hospitalization insurance, didn’t he? With his law firm?”

  She nodded.

  “And you’d taken out policies on the kids too, and on you, naturally. Twenty-five thousand on each kid, wasn’t it?”

  “It still is. We have a very good agent, Lieutenant. I’ll introduce you.”

  “It still is on Henry and Gail, right? Twenty-five thousand with double indemnity for accidental death. When little Alan died, that was accidental death. A little kid, a baby, swallows paint chips—they call that accidental poisoning.”

  “You think I killed him.” If only my eyes could blast, she thought, he’d be frying like bacon. He’d be burning in Hell. “You think I killed my husband and my son to get that money, don’t you, Lieutenant?” She tried to picture it, his brown suit blazing, his face seared, his hair on fire.

  “No,” he said. “No, I don’t, Mrs. Heim. Not really.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  He ground out the new cigarette beside the last. “Your insurance company’s making waves.”

  He paused, but she said nothing.

  “Do you blame them? Two claims, big claims, double indemnity claims, in less than two years.”

  “I see.” She felt drained now; the fire had gone out. “What do you want me to do—take a lie detector test and say that I didn’t murder my husband? That I didn’t poison Alan? All right, I will.”

  “I want you to sign something, that’s all. This will most likely be the end of it.” The hand that had fumbled for his cigarettes was fumbling again, this time in the breast pocket of his tweed jacket. “You can read it if you want to. Or I’ll tell you. Either way.”

  It was fine print on legal-length paper. Her eyes caught the word exhumation. “Tell me,” she said.

  “This will let them—the Coroner’s Office—check out your husband’s body. They’ll check his lungs, for example, to see if there really was cancer.”

  Gravediggers working at night, perhaps, men with shovels methodically, stolidly, resurrecting those same lumps of earth. Yes, surely by night. They would not want the funeral parties to see that—Rest in Peace. They would have lights with long, orange cords to help them work, or maybe only battery torches. “Can they do that?” she asked. “Can they actually tell anything?” She remembered the woman in the Bible: Lord, it has been four days now; surely there will be a stench. She said, “It’s been more than a year, Lieutenant.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Your husband was embalmed, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. Yes, he was.”

  “Then there’s a good chance. It depends on how good a job they did on him, the soil temperature, and how tight the box is. It depends on a lot of things, really, but there’s a good chance. Then there are some tests they can always run—like for arsenic or lead. You can look at a body a hundred years later and still find those things.”

  “I understand. Do you have a pen?”

  “Sure,” he said. He took it from the same pocket and handed it to her, first pressing the little plastic thing at the top to extend the point. Like a salesman, she thought. He’s just like a salesman who’s made the sale.

  She took the pen and signed, and he smiled and relaxed.

  “You know, I didn’t think they used those lead-based paints anymore.”

  “They don’t.” She pushed the paper back. “This is an old house, and that was old paint. One doctor said it might be from the twenties. Do you want to see it? The closet, I mean, not the paint. I repainted it, so that—”

  “So that it couldn’t happen to somebody else’s kid,” he finished for her. “Sure, let’s go up and have a look.”

  As they went up the stair, he said, “From outside I wasn’t really sure this was an old house, even if it does have all that fancy millwork. It looks like it might have been built new in the old style, like they do at Disney-world.”

  “It was built in eighteen eighty-two,” she told him. “We had a contractor paint the exterior; we were doing the interior ourselves.”

  She led the way down the upstairs hall and opened the door. “I haven’t gone in here since I painted the closet. I think it’s time I did.”

  He nodded, looking appreciatively at the walls and the oak moldings. “This was a maid’s room, I guess, in the old days.”

  “No, this has always been the nursery. The maids’ rooms were upstairs under the eaves.”

  She fell silent. Newspapers daubed with dark paint were still spread over the floor. A can stood where she had left it, its interior hard and cracked. The caked brush lay beside it. She began to say, “I didn’t clean up. I suppose it shows.”

  Before the first word had left her lips, there was a sound. It was a faint sound, yet in the stillness it seemed unnaturally loud—a scraping and shuffling that might have been a small dog scrambling to its feet, or merely some small, hard object sliding from a collection of similar objects, a baby’s rattle leaving the top of a careless pile of toys.

  So that in place of what she had intended, Tina said, “There’s a child in there!”

  “There’s something in there,” Price conceded. He went to the closet and twisted the old-fashioned china knob, but the door did not open. “It’s locked.”

  “I didn’t lock it.” Though she had not been conscious of moving them, her right hand had clasped her left arm, her left hand her right arm. It was cold in the nursery, surely colder than it was outside. Had she shut the vent?

  “Sure, you locked it,” he told her. “It’s a very natural thing to do. That’s okay, I don’t have to see it.”

  He’s looking at the evidence as a favor to me, she thought. Aloud she said, “I don’t even have a key, but we’ve got to get it open. There’s a child inside.”

  “There’s something in there. I doubt if it’s a kid.” He glanced at the keyhole. “Just an old warded lock. Shouldn’t be any trouble.”

  The paint can had a wire handle. He pulled it off, bending it with strong, blunt fingers.

  “I suppose you’re right—there can’t be a child in there. I mean, who would it be?”

  He squatted before the keyhole. “You want my guess? You’ve got a possum in the wall. Or maybe a squirrel. This place doesn’t have rats, does it?”

  “We’ve tried to get rid of them. Jerry set traps in the basement—” there was a faint scrabbling from the closet; she spoke more rapidly to cover the sound: “He even bought a ferret and put it down there, but it died. He thought Henry’d killed it.”

  �
��Oh?” Price said. The lock squeaked, clicked back, and he rose, smiling. “Probably never been oiled. It was a little stiff.”

  He twisted the knob again. This time it turned, but the door did not open. “Stuck too. Did you paint the frame?”

  She nodded wordlessly.

  “Well, you locked it before the paint was dry, Mrs. Heim.” He took a big utility knife from the right pocket of his jacket and opened the screwdriver blade.

  “Call me Tina,” she said. “We don’t have to be so formal.”

  Only a moment before, she had seen him smile for the first time; now he grinned. “Dick,” he said. “No Dick Tracy jokes, please. I get enough at the station.”

  She grinned back. “Okay.”

  The screwdriver blade slipped between the door and the jamb. He turned the knob again as he pried with the blade, and the door popped open. For an instant it seemed to her that there were eyes near the floor.

  He swung the door wide on squealing hinges. “Nothing in here,” he said. “Jerry didn’t believe in lubrication.”

  “Yes, he did—he was always oiling things. He said he was no mechanic, but an oil can was half a mechanic.”

  Price grunted. He had a pen light, its feeble beam playing over the closet walls. “Something’s been in here,” he said. “It was bigger than a rat; a coon, maybe.”

  “Let me see,” she said. She had been picking up the paint-smeared newspapers and stuffing them into the can. Now she came to the closet to look. There were scratches on the walls, tiny scratches that might have been made by little claws or fingernails. Flakes of plaster and paint lay on the closet floor.

  Price snapped off the pen light and glanced at his watch. “I ought to be going. Thanks for signing the permission. I’ll phone you and let you know how the tests came out.”

  She nodded. “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Okay, I will. What’s that book you’ve got?”

  “This?” She held it up. “Just an old children’s book. Jerry found it when he was exploring the attic and brought it down for Alan. It was under the newspapers.”

  She led the way back down the narrow hall. The new, bright paper she and Jerry had hung decked its walls but could not make its way into her mind. When she took her eyes from it, the old, dark paper returned.