The Incident at the Window

The route he and Boone walked was always the same in winter, west along the river and then up through the old streets where the trees were, and it took the two of them, at the end, along Kirkland Street.

The day was cold and clear, one of those first days in March that pretend to be the last day of winter. There had been a light snow in the night and it had gone off the roofs and left them wet, and the sun was out of the south and low, and everything it touched looked scrubbed and new. The wind came up the hill in pieces and then stopped, and the quiet between the gusts was total; you could hear the church bells from three streets off and then not hear them. They came to the low stone wall and the dark house behind it, and they both slowed down without meaning to, which was what they had done every time they passed it since the autumn, and this time Boone stopped.

"Well," he said, "that story is finished, at any rate. We shall never see more of Cal Voss."

"I hope not," Pike said.

"Did I ever tell you," Boone said, "that I saw him once, before all this. The night of the girl in the lane. And that I have not been able to think of him since without wanting to be somewhere else."

"You did tell me. And I know the feeling." Pike looked at the wall. "I met him once myself, in the lane here, at that door."

Boone turned his head. "You never said so."

"There has not been much occasion." Pike put his hands in his coat pockets. "It was in November, near midnight. He came out of the lane and we spoke for a minute. There was very little in it. He gave me his address and told me to come and ask for him there, which is not an arrangement a man proposes twice." He nodded at the blank brick further along the wall. "And I have never in my life wanted so little to be standing in one place as I wanted to be standing there."

"It was impossible to feel one without the other," Boone said. "Everybody says the same. He never did anything to me but knock a child down and walk off, and I would cross a street to avoid him, and I have never been able to say why."

"And by the way," Pike said, "what a fool you must have thought me, all this time, not to have understood that this lane was a back way into Adrian's house."

"You worked it out for yourself," Boone said. "You told me nothing and I asked you nothing, and I stood in front of that door a long time before I understood that the door and the house were one thing."

"It was your story that did it," Pike said. "Until that Sunday I had walked past this lane for twenty years and never once turned my head."

"Well. It was a good piece of work." Boone looked at the house and then at the strip of wet lane and then back at the house. "It is a wicked-looking thing to come out of at night, that door. There is no window in it at all."

"No."

They stood a moment longer. Then Pike said the thing he had been turning over since the morning.

"If that is so," he said, "we might step round into the yard and have a look at the windows. I am uneasy about Adrian. I have not seen him since the middle of the winter, and I am told he does not come out, and I have been kept on the step twice by his own man. Even from outside, a friend's face might do him good. It is not a superstition I usually hold, but I find I hold it this morning."

Boone looked at him a moment and then shrugged, which was as close as he ever came to saying yes to a thing that was not a walk.

They went back to the corner and up the lane and in through the gate at the side, into the yard behind the house.

The yard was colder than the street. It lay in the shadow of the laboratory building, which was long and brick and took the whole of the light on that side, and the snow had not gone off it but had turned to a wet gray crust, and the air in it smelled of wet stone and, underneath the wet stone, of the cold sweet smell he had met once before in this building and had hoped never to meet again. The sun had dropped while they walked and the yard was in that early dusk that comes before the evening, all blue going to gray, when the sky overhead is still bright but the ground has lost its color. Above the far end of the brick the glass roof of the laboratory caught a little light and threw it back, and above the roof, in the third story of the house, the windows came.

There were three of them in a row in the upper wall, small, and the middle one was open the width of a hand. Beside it, close up to the frame, with his shoulder against the wall and his knees drawn up, sitting in the mouth of the window to take the air, sat Adrian Hale.

He did not move when he saw them. He had been looking down at the yard the way a man looks at nothing in particular from a fixed seat on a fixed afternoon, and then he saw who it was below him, and he moved his head a little, and that was all. He had a rug over his legs. His face was gray in the blue light, and the collar of his coat was turned up, and he sat in that window like a man in a cell who had been in it long enough to have found the one place where the air came in.

"Adrian," Pike called up.

Hale looked down at him for a moment.

"Warren."

"You are not well."

"I am very low, Warren," Hale said. His voice came down small and flat through the cold. "Very low. It will not last long, thank God."

"You stay indoors too much. That is half of it. You should be out, walking, getting the blood up, like Boone and me." Pike put a hand on Boone's arm. "This is my cousin, by the way. Terry Boone. Doctor Hale."

Boone raised his hat. Hale lifted a hand from under the rug and let it fall.

"You are very kind," Hale said. "I should like it very much. I would like nothing better than to come down and walk the river with the two of you." He stopped, and something moved in his face and went away. "But no, no, no. It is quite impossible. I dare not. I am telling you the truth, whatever it sounds like. I dare not leave this room." Then, more quickly: "But I am glad to see you. You cannot think how glad. I would ask you and Mister Boone to come up, this minute, and sit with me, and I would mean it, but the place is really not fit. It is not fit for anyone to be in. You have to take my word for it."

"I hear you have given up the laboratory entirely," Pike said.

"I have not given it up. I go in. I work a little. It is the only room in the house I can stand in." Hale shifted against the frame of the window. "Do not ask me what I am working at. It is not worth the telling and you would not follow it."

"I have followed you before."

"You have followed me into courtrooms. This is a different thing altogether." He said it without any sharpness at all, as if he were reading out a fact from a page.

Pike looked up at him for a moment.

"Then the best thing," he said, "is for us to stay down here and talk to you from where we are. There is no law against that."

Hale smiled. It was the old smile, the one Pike had known for twenty-six years, and it went up into his eyes for a moment, and he said, "That is exactly what I was about to propose, if you had not got there first."

And then it happened.

The words were hardly out of his mouth before the smile was struck out of his face as if a hand had come through the wall and taken it. Pike saw it go. It was not a change of mood. It was not the face of a man who has remembered a debt or heard a door. It was the face of a man who has looked over his own shoulder and found something standing there that he had been waiting for and had not thought would come so soon, and it emptied him. The eyes went wide and the mouth came open and the whole face pulled back and down at once, and if Pike had wanted to name it afterward he could not have done better than to call it terror, plain, without any shame in it, the terror of an animal in a corner.

It lasted the length of a breath. Then the window came down, hard, so hard that the glass rang, and the frame caught, and Hale was gone from it, and there was nothing above them but three dark windows in a wall and the wet snow in the yard and their own two faces turned up.

Neither of them said anything.

Boone, to his credit, did not ask. He was a man who could walk a mile in silence and had never once, in twenty years, broken one of Pike's silences with a question. That afternoon he broke nothing. He only walked a little faster than usual, which was his way of saying that he had seen it too.

They left the yard the way they had come in. They went back down the lane, and along Kirkland Street under the trees, and down the hill. The bells had stopped. There was no one else on the walk. Pike counted his own steps for a while without deciding to, and did not look at Boone, and Boone did not look at him, and they came down out of the quiet streets into the wide street at the bottom where there were lights and cars and people and a shop putting its shutters up, and only there, in the noise, did Pike turn around and look at the man beside him.

Boone's face was pale. So was his own, he knew that without needing a window, because he could feel the cold of it in his cheeks. There was a look in Boone's eyes that Pike had never seen there before, and he had known him since he was a boy of ten, and he did not have to ask what had put it there, because he had it in his own.

"God forgive us," Pike said.

Boone looked at him. He did not say anything at all. He nodded once, slowly and seriously, the way a man agrees to a thing he has no words for, and then he turned and walked on down the street in silence, and Pike walked beside him, and they did not speak again until Boone said something about the traffic at the corner, and Pike answered him, and they went on to the end of the walk as if nothing had happened, because there was no other way to finish a walk.

Pike did not go home. He said goodbye to Boone at the corner of the square and turned into State Street and let himself into the office with his own key, which he did not often do on a Sunday, and sat down at his desk in his coat with the lights off and the street light coming in through the window in a long bar across the papers.

He had seen a great deal of the human face. That was the way his work went. He had seen men in the hour of arrest and in the hour of sentencing, and he had seen them the day they learned a thing about themselves they had not known, and he had seen them lie and he had seen them break, and he had learned young that the face is not a window on anything, that it is only a surface, and that a man's face will show you the weather and not the country.

But there was one thing he had never seen until that afternoon, and he had no name for it, and no way of writing it into the file: a man sitting at his own window in the open air, in his own house, looking out at two friends, and then looking past them at nothing at all and going white with a fear that had nothing to do with them. Hale had not looked at Pike when the change came. He had looked over Pike's head, at the corner of the yard, at the empty lane behind the wall, as if something had just walked into it from the far end.

Pike sat there for a long while. Then he turned on the lamp and took the file out of the lower drawer and set it on the desk and opened it and went through it from the beginning, slowly, the way he would have gone through an opponent's correspondence: the memorandum from the night in the lane, with the address the little man had written down in a hand like print; the old will with the odd terms in it; the map he had drawn of the lane and the door; the note from Marta Boyd after she had seen the two sheets; the memorandum of the afternoon on Brattle Street, with the words of the cover set down exactly.

At the back of the file there was one thing that did not belong to the case and had never been entered into it, a single sheet in his own hand, and he had written it the night of the first murder and had not looked at it since. It said, in four lines, what he had seen and what he could not make fit: that the dead man had been killed with a stick Pike had bought, that the man who killed him called himself Cal Voss, and that Cal Voss wrote in the same hand as Adrian Hale with every letter leaned the other way.

Pike read it twice and put the file back together and turned off the lamp and sat in the dark again.

He did not take the envelope out of the safe. He had been within a minute of doing it, twice now, and both times the cover had stopped him, and he had let it, and he knew why. If he opened it he would find out, and when he found out he would have to do something, and whatever the something was it would end the friendship or the man or both, and he was not yet ready to be the one who ended it. So he left it in the dark of the safe where it belonged, with the wax unbroken, and told himself the cover was still in force, which was true.

Adrian Hale was alive. He had been alive that afternoon, sitting in his own window, in his own house, with the air coming in.

But he had not come down. And when Pike thought about the face in the window, the thing he came back to was not the fear. It was the glance. Hale had looked past him at the empty end of the yard, at a place where there was nothing to see, and had gone white at it, and then shut the window on the two of them.

Nobody hides from a friend. A man hides from what a friend might bring in with him.