Dispatch,” it said, in an appropriately spectral tone, “that I deeply regret what I’ve done, and seek to make amends by telling you just where to look for all that remains of the Willis boy.” And here is where it said to look. . . .
He writes out detailed instructions, creating a perfect verbal treasure map that will lead whoever follows it to the very spot in the old family graveyard where he had such a pleasant time with young Jeffrey, who’d not had a terribly pleasant time of it himself. It brings it all back for him, and he’s tempted to add a precise description of Jeffrey’s last moments, but that would be inconsistent with the letter’s content and tone.
Though it would surely be fun. He’s reminded of Albert Fish, the de-ranged cannibal who murdered young children and ate them. After killing and devouring one Grace Budd, he wrote a note to her parents describing the murder and attesting to their daughter’s succulence on the dinner table. But, he swore to them, “I never fucked her. She died a virgin.” A Budd never forced to bloom, he thinks. How reassuring that must have been for the elder Budds!
You will think at first that this is a hoax, for how could any intelligent person think otherwise? But you can hardly fail to send out a couple of men with a couple of shovels, if there’s the slightest possibility that Jeffrey’s bones (for the 146
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rest of him surely has long since rotted away) are where the spirit has said they are.
When you find them, as surely you shall, you and your readers and the appropriate authorities will have much to ponder. Are you to believe in spirits and their revelations?
Or has someone made a grievous error?
I trust you’ll forgive my not signing this. I have lately learned the importance of anonymity. It is, to be sure, the spiritual foundation of all our traditions.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch has a website, of course, where he’d found the city editor’s e-mail address. He enters that in the appropriate space and sits for several minutes, the cursor poised over the send button. To send it or not, that is the question, and there is no obvious answer. The whole matter of Preston Applewhite has been resolved in a most satisfactory manner, which argues mightily for leaving well enough alone.
On the other hand, it seems to him that it would be more interesting to send the message, to stir the pot, to see what happens. For something will most certainly happen, whereas if he leaves well enough alone, why, nothing will happen, nothing beyond what has happened already.
And interest is everything, isn’t it?
But he’s not too sure of that last paragraph. It will strike a chord with some of the people who read it, and send them rushing madly off in several wrong directions, but it’s really just a private joke, and would deprive him of an opportunity to sign his work. He highlights the last paragraph, hits delete, thinks for a moment, and replaces it with this: I’ll leave you to your work, dear friends, even as I return to my own. I’ll be abandoning my present e-mail address forth-with, so I regret that you’ll be unable to contact me. Should I have occasion to communicate further, I’ll do so from an-All the Flowers Are Dying
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other e-mail address, which, alas, will be as untraceable as this one. But you’ll know me by my signature; I have the honor to be, sir, your most obedient servant, Abel Baker
He smiles his rueful smile, and hits the send button.
He rather likes New York.
He has lived here before, for several years, and he would have stayed longer if circumstances hadn’t compelled him to leave. At the time those circumstances looked like a turn of bad luck, but attitude is everything, as he often says, and he was wise enough to will himself to regard what looked like adversity as opportunity. Hasn’t his exile from New York given him a chance to see something of the country? Hasn’t it furnished him with any number of grand adventures, culminating so recently in the remarkable affair of Preston Applewhite?
When he left, the Twin Towers stood proudly at the foot of Manhattan. He wonders sometimes what it would have been like to be present in the city when it suffered such an unfathomable blow.
That day’s loss of life has no great personal impact upon him. What he does wonder at, though, and what does inspire him, is the awesome power of the man who pulled the strings, the puppet master who convinced his followers to fly planes into buildings. It bespoke an enviable talent for manipulation.
He’s done some manipulation himself. When he lived here he was no mean hand at it, although no subject of his ever did anything all that dra-matic. Still, his people were bright, and success demanded his employing a sort of psychological jujitsu; he won by using their own mental strength against them.
He has been walking as he’s had these thoughts, and he notes with some delight that his steps and his thoughts have brought him to the same place, a house on West Seventy-fourth Street. He was on the outside of this house on many occasions, and inside it once. There were three other 148
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people with him on that occasion, and he killed two of them right here, in this very house, one with a gun and one with a knife, and killed the third an hour later in a house several miles to the south.
He’d thought at the time that the house would be his reward, that the killings would make it his. He thought that was what he wanted, a fine brownstone house a block from Central Park.
He’d thought that was why he killed.
How much freer he is now that he knows the truth about himself!
He’d wondered, on his return to the city, if this house would even still be standing. Years ago, downtown on West Eleventh Street, one brownstone in a row of brownstones had simply disappeared. The place had been a bomb factory for student radicals, owned by the parents of one of them, and how better to fulfill their unconscious motivations than by blowing up a parental home? Wasn’t that, all things considered, the un-derlying purpose of their politics?
By the time he first came to New York, the house had already been replaced. The new structure, sized to match its neighbors, looks to have been given a twist by its architect, with a section jutting out at an oblique angle from the rest of the facade. The ostensible purpose, he knows, was to wed the contemporary to the traditional, but
