Breakheart Hill by Thomas H. Cook
For a moment she looked embarrassed by the state of things inside the house, the dust and clutter. “The place is … well …” She stopped, then added, “As you can see.”
I walked to the center of the room, surprised by how spare it was, with bare walls, a rugless wooden floor, and nothing but a couple of wooden chairs and the old rocker to suggest that it was still lived in.
“Have a seat, Ben. Can I get you something? It’s awful outside. Maybe a cup of coffee to warm you?”
“No, thank you,” I answered.
Miss Troy nodded, then eased herself into the rocker. “Please, Ben, have a seat,” she said as she shifted about slightly, trying to bring herself into a more comfortable position. “Lord knows, you’ve worked hard all day.”
I took a seat in the other chair, dropped my hands into my lap and glanced out the rain-smeared window.
“I sure do appreciate you coming by,” Miss Troy said. She smiled delicately. “I know it makes it a mighty long day for you.”
I turned from the rain and looked at her directly. “Don’t worry about that, ma’am.”
Her ancient eyes narrowed slightly. “I’m sorry you never came by to visit me. But I understand how you must have felt.”
I remained silent.
“The way it was between you and Kelli,” Miss Troy said. “I know it would have been just too hard for you to come here.”
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
“That’s why I so appreciate you coming here tonight,” Miss Troy told me. “Because I know it can’t be easy for you.” She glanced toward her lap, then back up at me. “I guess you heard about Gates, about them shooting him some time back.”
“Yes, I heard about it,” I told her.
“I guess I should have been able to forgive him,” Miss Troy said. “But I couldn’t do that. Not after what he did to Kelli. I kept seeing what that other girl saw. What was her name?”
“Edith Sparks.”
“Kelli’s blood on his hands. And even when I heard he was dead, even then I couldn’t forgive him. Could you, Ben?”
I gave her the only answer that seemed possible. “I guess not, Miss Troy.”
She shook her head. “It’s just in me. This hatred for him. I guess I have a hard heart, you might say.”
My eyes fled toward the window once again, the comfort of its concealing darkness.
Miss Troy drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly, then said, “Well, Kelli sure would be proud of you, Ben. Making a doctor and all, just like you always said you would.”
I continued to stare out into the night.
“She’d be surprised that you came back to Choctaw, though,” Miss Troy added. “She wouldn’t have expected that. She always thought you’d end up in a big city somewhere. Atlanta, maybe, or someplace up north. Why did you come back to Choctaw, Ben?”
I saw all that had flowed from a single rash and heartless act, all that I had spent thirty years trying to amend. “I thought I owed it something,” I said.
Miss Troy smiled gently. “That’s a nice way to think about it.”
“It’s about the only way I can think about it, I guess,” I told her.
She glanced toward the window. “Well, I sure did pick a bad night to ask you over here. But there’s no one else I could have asked.”
“I understand,” I told her.
“What with no family and all, no husband.” Miss Troy’s eyes drifted away, then returned to me. “Did Kelli ever tell you about him? Her father, I mean?”
“No, ma’am.”
“He wasn’t a bad man, you know. And he sure loved Kelli, at least while she let him.”
I nodded, but said nothing.
“But he got involved with another woman, you know. It happens all the time.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“But Kelli just wouldn’t have anything to do with him after that,” Miss Troy went on. “He tried to come and see her, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Just five years old, but she had her own mind.” She shook her head. “He’d disappointed her so. That was one of Kelli’s problems. If people disappointed her, she just cut them off. Like she did her father, just cut him off.” Her eyes drifted over to the only photo of Kelli in the room, taken when she was a little girl. “But you know, Ben, there’s one thing I’m happy about.”
“What’s that, Miss Troy?”
“That before Lyle Gates got his hands on her, Kelli got a little taste of love,” she said.
I saw Kelli as she’d looked that last night with Todd, so passionate and yielding, drawing the ring her grandmother had given her onto his finger, her face lifted delicately toward his.
“Because I know she loved you, Ben,” Miss Troy added. “She told me that.”
“We were friends,” I said softly, and for the first time it struck me as enough, a state of selfless and abiding care which, when the mystery of love can grant no more, should be sufficient to sustain and satisfy us.
Miss Troy drew in a long, soft breath. “There’s something I want you to have, Ben.” She got to her feet, walked slowly over to the mantel and opened a small wooden box. “Something to remember Kelli by,” she said as she pressed it toward me. “Her grandmother’s ring.”
I stared at the ring, my mind hurling back to that long-ago night, to Kelli’s hand pressing it onto Todd Jeffries’s finger.
“Sheriff Stone found it on Breakheart Hill,” Miss Troy said as she sat down again. “And I’m sure Kelli would have wanted you to have it.”
I gazed at her, stunned. “Found it where?”
“On Breakheart Hill,” Miss Troy repeated. “Right at the bottom of it, near that old mining road. I guess it got pulled off her finger somehow.”
In a single wrenching instant I saw the whole dark weave change form. All that I had believed for thirty years shattered suddenly into an even darker pattern of irony and injustice. I saw everything that had to have happened for Sheriff Stone to have found Kelli’s ring at the bottom of Breakheart Hill. I saw Eddie whispering urgently in Todd’s ear, telling him what he’d found out about Kelli Troy. I saw Todd’s face, stricken and amazed, insisting that they meet at some secluded place, Kelli suggesting Breakheart Hill. And after that, the tortuous arrangements—Todd unwilling to pick Kelli up, already in a state of anguished disavowal, his car moving up the old mining road, safe in its absolute seclusion. Then the meeting in all its steadily building fury, Todd’s tormented questions, Kelli rankling under them, growing furious herself, suddenly seeing Todd as no better than Lyle Gates, who at that very moment was trudging up the mountain road, and who a few minutes later would hear a low moan and himself enter those same dark woods. And suddenly, I heard Todd’s voice as it had sounded in my consulting room so many years before: My hand just flew out. I’m sorry, so sorry, a plaintive apology that had seemed to be offered to his wife and son, but which, as I knew now, had been meant for Kelli Troy.
For it had been Todd who’d come toward Kelli out of the thick undergrowth, Todd who’d begun to ask unspeakable questions, each one adding to her fury as she’d watched his former greatness sink beneath a pool of hypocrisy and betrayal and exploded love. I saw Kelli’s face grow taut as she glared at him, then angry in the bitterness of her disappointment, demanding her ring back, words flying from her mouth like small flaming stones, striking Todd again and again, until in one uncontrollable instant he had struck back with an unexpected fury, then watched in horrified astonishment as Kelli tumbled backward onto the ground, her head slamming into the immovable stone, her eyes dimming as she struggled to her feet, then staggered blindly up the hill, leaving him to follow behind her, reaching for her, but not knowing what to do, wrapped in his own terror, until he saw her fall a final time, her body go limp and motionless, a moan come out of her, low and plaintive, calling for that help that finally came in the figure of Lyle Gates.
I felt my body quake as I lifted my eyes from the ring. “Miss Troy, I …”
“Please take
I felt the ring drop into my hand, felt my fingers close around it. “Thank you” was all that I could say.
“Sheriff Stone never could understand how it got pulled off her finger,” Miss Troy said. She shook her head. “I guess it’ll always be a mystery, won’t it, Ben?”
To have answered no would have forced me to tell her everything, and in doing that reveal the malicious core from which so much destruction had sprouted during the last thirty years.
And so I nodded, and said yes.
She hesitated, then said, “Well, there’s no use thinking about it. People have to accept things.” She glanced toward the rear of the house. “Well, I guess we should get to work now.”
I felt my bones stiffen, my throat close tightly, murderously, as if an invisible hand were trying to choke off my last breath.
“There’s not much to do,” Miss Troy added. Then she grasped her cane and rose from her chair, groaning slightly as she rose.
For a moment I could not get up, but only watched, nailed in place, as Miss Troy headed toward the narrow corridor that led to the back of the house.
When she reached it, she turned back toward me. “Down this way, Ben,” she said.
I grabbed the arms of the chair, pulled myself to my feet, and followed her down a long hallway, the old wooden floors creaking under my feet. Miss Troy walked unsteadily in front of me, her cane tapping at the floor until she reached a plain wooden door. She paused a moment, then opened it and motioned me inside.
The room was very dark, and had a dry, musty smell. I could see nothing more than the blurry outline of a chair, covered with bedding and unwashed clothes, tattered nightgowns mostly, soiled and wrinkled.
I heard Miss Troy step into the room, her voice behind me, speaking quietly as her hand moved toward the lamp. “Thank you, Ben, for doing this.”
Then the light flashed on, and I could see her lying on a mound of rumpled sheets, thin and still, with yellow, nearly jaundiced skin and a wild tangle of iron-gray curls.
“Kelli,” I whispered.
Miss Troy moved to the side of the bed, then bent forward and placed her hand against her daughter’s face. The face drew back slightly, and I heard a soft groan. “Now, now,” Miss Troy said gently. “Nothing to be afraid of.”
“Kelli,” I said again.
Miss Troy glanced toward me. “I know this must be hard for you, Ben.”
I could not move, but watched mutely as Miss Troy drew the top sheet from the long, lean body of her daughter, revealing the dark skin, the slender arms, the still-delicate hands. “She needs a bath,” she said.
I peered toward the bed, suddenly numb, all feeling momentarily shaved down to Kelli’s state of darkness, silence, stillness.
“And I’m just too old to do it without help,” Miss Troy added.
I returned to myself suddenly, like a creature rising from a great depth, breaking the murky surface after a long dive.
“I‘ll help you,” I said. Then I walked to the bed, lowered myself down upon it and gathered Kelli Troy into my arms at last. Her head lolled to the left as I drew her from the bed, the side of her face pressed up against my arm, her eyes lifting toward me, floating, disconnected, beyond even the most tender hold of memory.
Miss Troy stood across from me, her eyes glistening suddenly. For a moment she gazed quietly at her daughter, then she looked slowly toward me, still searching for an answer after all these many years. “Why, Ben,” she whispered. “Why?”
I glanced away from her, down toward Kelli, and saw all the others as if they, too, were cradled in my arms. Lyle and Sheila and Rosie. Mary and Raymond. Even Todd. All their faces small and childlike, their eyes glowing oddly, as if illuminated by their youth, their hopes, the futures they had planned, never dreaming that the path ahead of them might be strewn with invisible snares. And I thought that all of Choctaw must be locked in this same unknowing, the whole world, as Kelli had once described it, with everything that is or may ever be. And somewhere woven through it, one injury compounding another, creating another, one long, dark vein of unintended harm.
KELLI DIED THREE MONTHS LATER, FOLLOWED SHORTLY BY her mother. There was a scattering of people at Kelli’s grave, though hardly anyone at Miss Troy’s. And it is perhaps the spare quality of that ceremony that made Luke and me return to my house that day, made him say, “You know, Ben, I’ve never believed what passed for the real story,” a line that sent me off to Lutton, to the smoldering ruin of a church, and then back down the mountain to my house in Choctaw.
When I reached home, I walked into my small office, unlocked one of my desk drawers and drew out the things I kept inside it, a few scattered writings, along with my high school annual, the one from 1962, the year Kelli returned to Choctaw. It was bound in black and gold, the school colors of Choctaw High, and on the front there was the face of a snarling bobcat. I looked through it slowly, stopping at the faces of those who had meant the most to me.
I came to my own picture, and studied it silently. In the photograph, I faced the camera squarely, an air of boldness in the lifted chin, certain that I know exactly who I am. But I’d been far emptier than the photograph could possibly have suggested. And far more ruthless in my emptiness.
I fixed my eyes on the picture, saw all the lies within it and heard my mind pronounce the awesome judgment I had fled from all my life: There’s something missing in that boy.
And I knew what I had to do.
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN I REACHED THE NURSERY. The building was dark, but Luke’s truck was parked outside, so I knew he was there. I walked through the high storm fence that surrounded the building, into a small forest of evergreen shrubs. They stood row on row, potted and neatly pruned, broad and flourishing, reviving the summer air.
Luke was near the back, dressed in gray flannels, his body bent over a box of seedlings. He straightened himself as I came toward him, smiled softly and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “You’re out mighty late,” he said.
I nodded.
Luke’s smile seemed to dissolve into a gathering stillness. His face grew somber as he gazed on mine. “What is it, Ben?” he asked.
I worked to bring it all together, find the proper place for each detail.
Luke stepped toward me. “Why’d you come here this late?”
I saw Kelli sprawled in the vines, heard Mr. Bailey declare that only hate could do a thing like this, and knew that he’d been wrong.
Luke stared at me wonderingly. “What’s this about?”
“Love,” I said. And with that word began to tell the darkest story that I ever heard.
About the Author
THOMAS H. COOK is the author of eighteen novels, including The Chatham School Affair, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel; Instruments of Night; Breakheart Hill; Mortal Memory; Sacrificial Ground and Blood Innocents, both Edgar Award nominees; and Moon over Manhattan, which he co-authored with Larry King. He has also written two works about true crimes, Early Graves and Blood Echoes, which was also nominated for an Edgar Award. He wrote the novelization of the SCI FI Channel television event, Taken, and has co-edited, with Otto Penzler, two anthologies of American crime writing.
He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.
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THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR
THE CHATHAM SCHOOL AFFAIR
by
Thomas H. Cook
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My father had a favorite line. He’d taken it from Milton, and he loved to quote it to the boys of Chatham School. Standing before them on opening day, his hands thrust deep into his trouser pockets, he’d pause a moment, facing them sternly. “Be careful what you do,” he’d say, “for evil on itself doth back recoil.” In later years he could not have imagined how w
Sometimes, particularly on one of those bleak winter days so common to New England, wind tearing at the trees and shrubbery, rain battering the roofs and windows, I feel myself drift back to my father’s world, my own youth, the village he loved and in which I still live. I glance outside my office window and see the main street of Chatham as it once was—a scattering of small shops, a ghostly parade of antique cars with their lights mounted on sloping fenders. In my mind, the dead return to life, assume their earthly shapes. I see Mrs. Albertson delivering a basket of quahogs to Kessler’s Market; Mr. Lawrence lurching forward in his homemade snowmobile, skis on the front, a set of World War I tank tracks on the back, all hooked to the battered chassis of an old roadster pickup. He waves as he goes by, a gloved hand in the timeless air.
Standing once again at the threshold of my past, I feel fifteen again, with a full head of hair and not a single liver spot, heaven far away, no thought of hell. I even sense a certain goodness at the core of life.
Then, from out of nowhere, I think of her again. Not as the young woman I’d known so long ago, but as a little girl, peering out over a glittering blue sea, her father standing beside her in a white linen suit, telling her what fathers have always told their children: that the future is open to them, a field of grass, harboring no dark wood. In my mind I see her as she stood in her cottage that day, hear her voice again, her words like distant bells, sounding the faith she briefly held in life. Take what you want, Henry. There is plenty.
It was my father who greeted her when she stepped from the bus that afternoon. He was headmaster of Chatham School, a man of medium height, but whose manner, so expansive and full of authority, made him seem larger than he was. In one of the many pictures I have of him from that time, this one printed in the Chatham School Annual for 1926, he is seated in his office, behind a massive oak desk, his hands resting on its polished surface, his eyes staring directly into the camera. It was the usual pose of a respectable and accomplished man in those days, one that made him appear quite stern, perhaps even a bit hard, though he was nothing of the kind. Indeed, when I remember him as he was in those days, it is usually as a cheerful, ebullient man with an energetic and kindly manner, slow to anger, quick to forgive, his feelings always visible in his eyes. “The heart is what matters, Henry,” he said to me not long before his death, a principle he’d often voiced through the years, but never for one moment truly lived by. For surely, of all the men I’ve ever known, he was the least enslaved by passion. Now an old man too, it is hard for me to imagine how in my youth I could have despised him so.