A Twist Of Noir 518 - Allen Kopp

UNTOUCHED BY MORNING - ALLEN KOPP

Tillman sat beside her bed all night long, hardly moving. In the minutes before the sun came up, as the birds were starting to sing in the trees outside the window, she took her final expiring breath and was dead. He stood up slowly and stretched his cramped body. He went to the window and pulled back the curtain that she had made with her own hands and looked out. It was a beautiful morning in early summer and for that he was glad; she didn’t like the cold—he would have hated to see her go into her grave when the ground was frozen and the trees bare.

He went downstairs and cooked his own breakfast and sat long over it with a cup of strong tea in front of the window. When he saw Windsor, the hired man, moving about in the space between the house and barn, he went out and told him that she had died in the night. He asked him to go to the barn and get the coffin they had been keeping for her and bring it upstairs to her room.

Windsor grunted slightly to show that he understood but, not being the kind to express condolences, said nothing. He finished what he was doing and went straight to the barn and took the coffin off the blocks and, with much noise, carried it up the stairs and set it alongside the bed and took off the lid. He picked her up in his arms as if she were no heavier than a load of wood and put her gently into the box. He was going to nail the lid shut but Tillman stopped him. Word had been sent to her son and, more than likely, he would be coming home and would want to see her one last time.

After Windsor left to go to the little cemetery on the side of the hill to open the grave that had been set aside for her, Tillman went to his room and stripped himself naked and washed from head to toe and put on his good clothes. When he was finished dressing, he went out and sat on the front porch and waited with his feet up on the railing. He held his rifle across his knees but it wasn’t loaded.

In a little while, he saw Peck coming toward the house on the road. He knew it was Peck from a long way off because he walked with a little limp from when he had his leg broken as a child. When Peck came to the gate, he let himself in and came up the walk to the porch and sat down heavily on the top step and blew out his breath.

“It’s a sad day,” Tillman said.

“Is she for sure dead?” Peck asked.

“As dead as the dodo bird,” Tillman said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, each thinking his own thoughts. Peck chewed on his thumbnail and looked off into the distance. A large gray striped tomcat, stepping delicately in the damp grass, came around the side of the house and up the steps and lay down in the sun on the end of the porch and went to sleep.

After a while, they stood up, the two of them, and went up to her room, their boots sounding very loud on the stairs. Tillman went quietly to her door, as though she might only be asleep, and paused and looked over his shoulder at Peck. He thought perhaps he should say something to prepare Peck for the way she looked, but he couldn’t think of anything to say, so he opened the door and both of them went into the room.

Windsor’s strange wife with the white eyes had been in and taken some pains with the body, so she looked better now. She had smoothed her hair out with a brush and put her hands over her stomach and washed her face and put some powder or something on her face to keep her from looking quite so pale.

Peck approached the coffin and knelt beside it and removed his hat while Tillman stood behind him.

“Do you want me to leave you alone with her?” Tillman asked.

Peck didn’t answer so Tillman stayed where he was. After a couple of minutes, Peck stood up and put his hat back on and said, “Do you have a drink in the house?”

They went downstairs to the kitchen. Peck sat down at the table and Tillman got the bottle of brandy he kept on hand for guests. He poured some of it into a glass for Peck and a cup of tea for himself.

“My condolences,” Tillman said, as though proposing a toast. “In spite of your differences, she was your mother and you her son.”

“We were never very friendly,” Peck said. “I believe there were many times she would have cheerfully killed me if she could have done so without consequences.”

“She would have killed me, too, I think, for a good enough reason,” Tillman said.

“Was there a will?” Peck asked.

“Yes, I believe there was,” Tillman said.

He went to the old roll-top desk in the otherwise empty downstairs bedroom and opened the drawer and took out a folded-up piece of paper and went back into the kitchen with it and placed it on the table in front of Peck.

Peck read the will and then refolded it and handed it across the table to Tillman.

“Don’t you think she might have remembered her only son?” he asked quietly.

“You would have had to ask her about that,” Tillman said.

“Why did you ever marry her?” Peck asked. “Was it so you could get her property after she died?”

Tillman laughed. “The place wasn’t worth much when I first came here,” he said. “She was drowning in debt, about to lose everything.”

“So you just happened to come along and, in spite of her being twenty years older than you, you married her out of the goodness of your heart.”

“She would have lost the place for sure if it hadn’t been for me. And she was seventeen years older than me. Not twenty.”

“What did you get out of it?”

“I don’t know. A home. Somebody to talk to. A place to lay my head at night.”

“I heard you married her because you would have gone to jail if you hadn’t.”

“People wag their tongues. You hear anything. Just because people say it doesn’t make it true.”

“I heard that the money you had rightfully belonged to your brother. When he tried to get it back, you had him murdered.”

“That’s not true.”

“That’s when my mother made her deal with the devil. Because she was a landowner, she pulled some strings with the sheriff to get the charges against you dropped. Your brother’s death was ruled an accident, even though any fool could see otherwise.”

“I think you’ve said enough.”

“After you were free, the two of you got married. I don’t know how my mother was able to stand such an arrangement. She had your brother’s blood on her hands as much as you did.”

“That’s not what happened.”

Windsor came into the kitchen just then, so they stopped talking. He went to the sink and got a drink of water and then he turned to Tillman.

“We’re all ready,” he said.

He had brought the wagon around to the door. His wife held the horses while he and Tillman and Peck went upstairs and brought the coffin down and loaded it into the wagon.

Tillman and Peck rode in the wagon carrying the coffin, while Windsor and his wife rode behind in another wagon. When they came to the cemetery, Tillman pulled the wagon as close to the open grave as he could get so they wouldn’t have to carry the coffin very far.

They lowered the coffin with ropes and then Windsor’s wife read a few verses from the Bible. Tillman asked Peck if he wanted to say anything and Peck shook his head. They all stood looking down into the grave for a silent minute and then it was over. Windsor started filling in the grave and Tillman and Peck got back in the wagon and headed back toward the house.

Peck lit a cigar and began humming a tune he liked that he had heard in a barroom.

“You don’t seem very grieved,” Tillman said.

“It doesn’t make much difference to me if she’s alive or dead,” Peck said. He leaned over the side of the wagon and spit and stoked his cigar. “When I was fourteen or fifteen,” he said, “she used to lock me in the shed to keep me from going into town to meet my friends. There was a cot in there and a little wood stove—very cozy. She would leave me in there all night and come and unlock the door in the morning and find me sleeping like an angel. What she didn’t know was that I had a way of getting out and then back in without her knowing about it. I stayed away all night and came back just in time before she was likely to unlock the door. She never caught on.”

“You don’t have much sentiment, do you?” Tillman asked.

“What’s that?”

They came to a place in the road where there was a little clearing for turning around. Tillman pulled the team into the clearing and stopped. The two of them dismounted and walked the thirty yards to the river, which was high and swift due to the spring rains. They sat on a little rise and watched the limbs and debris floating past.

“I need money,” Peck said after a little while.

“Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Tillman said.

“Now that she’s gone, I was hoping you would sell the place and give me half the money. I’d settle for one-third.”

“You’ll settle for nothing. I’m not selling. I plan on staying here for as long as I live.”

“Not everybody lives so long.”

“Meaning what?”

“Nothing. I’m just saying.”

“It sounded like a threat to me.”

“You’re just overly sensitive, with the strain of your wife’s death and all.”

“If I were to give you money, how do I know you wouldn’t just throw it away? How do I know you wouldn’t be back for more?”

“It’s not like that. I want it for a legitimate business investment.”

“Which is what?”

“My partner and I want to open a restaurant and a sort of hotel.”

“Who is this partner?”

“You don’t know him.”

“How much money do you figure on needing?”

“At least ten or twenty thousand.”

“That’s a lot of money.”

“You could easily get that amount by mortgaging the property.”

“And spend the rest of my life paying it back to the bank.”

“I believe I could live with that.”

“I’m not going to do it.”

“I have in my possession a letter.”

“What are you talking about? What letter?”

“Not long after my mother married you, she wrote me a letter. She felt guilty about the part she played in freeing you in your brother’s death. She was afraid she would burn in hell for it. She said in the letter that you had admitted to killing your brother but that you claimed it was self-defense.”

“That’s not true! There is no such letter!”

“She said she wanted me to know the truth about you, but she made me promise I would keep this knowledge to myself until such time as I might need it.”

“If you have such a letter, let me see it!”

“Do you think I’m stupid?”

“I think you’re a liar! Your mother never wrote a letter in her life. She could barely read and write.”

“She was a lot more educated than you thought.”

Not knowing what else to say, Tillman went back to the wagon. He wanted to get back home, indoors and out of sight. He was just about to pull away in the wagon, not caring if he left Peck behind or not, when Peck jumped up on the seat next to him.

When they returned to the house, Tillman left the wagon in the open space in front of the barn for Windsor to put away later. He and Peck went through the back door into the kitchen. Peck sat down at the table and poured another shot of the brandy and drank it down. Tillman pulled out a chair and sat down across from him.

“If I were to raise ten thousand dollars,” he said, “would you give me the letter if such a letter exists?”

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” Peck said.

“I need some time to think. Come back in two or three days and we’ll talk about it.”

“No, we’ll talk about it now.”

“Your mother had some jewelry,” Tillman said. “I don’t know how much it’s worth, but I think it is of great value. You can take it with you when you go. I think you could get a good price for it if from a dealer who knows his gems.”

“That’s more like it!” Peck said, breaking into a broad smile. For him, the tension had gone out of the room. “She had a diamond necklace when I was a small boy,” he said. “She would take it out about once a year and look at it and show it to all of us. I wonder if that’s in with the other stuff you’re talking about.”

“I think it is,” Tillman said. “We can go upstairs to her room and take a look if you want.”

They went upstairs, Peck first, with Tillman following close behind. When they came to her room, Peck pushed the door open and went in as if he belonged there. He was smiling now, happy. When he turned around and opened his mouth to speak, Tillman hit him in the side of the head with the small hatchet he was carrying concealed against his leg.

Peck staggered, grabbing onto the bed. He looked levelly at Tillman, confused, holding his hand to his head, surprised that there was so much blood. “No letter,” he said. “I made it all up.”

Tillman approached him and hit him in the head again, knocking him to the floor. When he started to get up, Tillman pulled a pillow off the bed and, straddling Peck’s chest, held it over his face. Peck struggled and kicked out his legs and flailed his arms about—to no effect—and then he was dead.

Tillman lay on top of Peck for several minutes and then he stood up. He took some towels and wrapped them around Peck’s head to contain the blood. He took the coverlet off the bed and wrapped it around Peck’s body, tying it at the neck and ankles.

When he had Peck’s body wrapped up the best he could manage, he went to the window and looked out. Windsor and his wife hadn’t returned yet. He was sure they would take a good long time tending to the grave.

He picked Peck’s body up and slung it over his shoulder, thinking how fortunate it was that Peck was not a very big man and not difficult to carry. He carried him down the stairs and out the door and put him in the back of the wagon, covering him with a piece of canvas that was used when it rained.

He knew of a place a mile and a half back in the hills, an old homestead where nobody had lived for seventy-five years. There was an abandoned well there that was covered over with rotting timber. It was rumored to be hundreds of feet deep.

The old homestead was just as he remembered it—the foundation of an old house on a little rise back in the trees, with the well only a few feet away from what would have been the front door. He pulled the wagon as close to the well as he could get.

Before dismounting, he sat quietly for a few minutes and looked all around, as though contemplating the silence and solitude. Satisfied that he was not being observed, he dismounted and removed the body from the wagon and carried it to the well and pulled aside the rotting timbers.

“Goodbye, Peck,” he said. “Sorry it had to be this way. Say hello to your mother for me.”

He pushed the body into the well, imagining it plunging down, down into the darkness until it came to rest on the unimaginable bottom. After saying a silent prayer for the acceptance of Peck’s spirit into heaven, he replaced the timbers of the well, making them appear undisturbed.

Driving home, he began to feel a twinge of sadness. He had been hoping that Peck would come and live with him on the old place. He had been going to ask him when the time was right. They would have got along very well living under the same roof; they were really very much alike. Close together in age and temperament, the older stepfather and the slightly younger stepson. They could have made life easier for each other. They could have eased each other’s loneliness.

When he returned home, he was tired and went upstairs to his room and locked himself in. He took off his boots and lay on his back on the bed and watched the play of afternoon light on the ceiling. He went to sleep and awoke with a jolt, remembering what he had done.

In the early evening, Windsor came and tapped lightly on the door. His wife had fixed a special funeral supper, he said, and the food was ready to eat. Tillman mumbled in a strained voice through the door that he was sick and wasn’t taking any supper. When he heard Windsor’s footsteps going back down the stairs, he rolled over on his side and faced the wall, knowing that he had, somehow, to get through the long lonely night that stretched before him.

BIO: Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis. His work has been published in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, Bartleby-Snopes, Skive Magazine, Hoi-Polloi, Conceit Magazine, and Dark and Dreary Magazine. Future work will appear in Sunken Lines, The Storyteller, and The Bracelet Charm. Allen was a contest finalist in the Bartleby-Snopes dialogue-writing contest and a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee for the story “Hermaphrodite Ward.”

A Twist Of Noir 364 - Allen Kopp

A LIGHTED CIGARETTE - ALLEN KOPP

When Freda Ellington awoke, she was confused. She couldn’t remember anything that happened the day or the night before. She looked over at the clock and saw that it had stopped; not knowing the time only added to her confusion. She sat up in the bed and pulled a pillow up behind her so that it was between her back and the headboard and smoked a cigarette and then she remembered the reason for her confusion. She had been sick, she had had a high fever, and the doctor gave her some pills to help make her sleep.

She got out of the bed and slipped into her bathrobe and went into the kitchen. She was glad to see that her husband had gone to the store and bought groceries. He was always good to help out with the housework whenever she wasn’t feeling well. There were milk and oranges in the refrigerator and a loaf of bread on the counter and plenty of cigarettes. She made some coffee and sat down at the table and smoked another cigarette and looked out the window at the gray, hazy sky and waited for the coffee to brew.

She drank half a cup of the coffee and took a few bites of a piece of toast, but she had no appetite and she soon went back into the bedroom and lay down again on the bed. She had a terrible headache and a searing pain in her throat and chest. She took another of her pills and pulled a pillow lightly over her face; in a little while she was able to stop thinking about how bad she felt and she fell again into a very deep sleep.

The next time she awoke, the room was dark. She had slept throughout the entire day and it was night again. She got out of bed and turned on the lights and went into the kitchen, expecting her husband to be there, but he was nowhere in the apartment. She looked at the kitchen clock and saw that it had stopped at exactly two-ten, the same time that the clock in the bedroom had stopped. She thought the pills must be playing tricks on her mind.

Her husband would surely be coming home soon. She felt bad that she kept missing him and hadn’t seen him for what seemed like days, but she couldn’t be sure how long it had been because she had been sleeping so much from the pills. He had been coming home and then leaving again, not wanting to disturb her; that much was obvious. His coffee cup was in a different place, he had left a plate in the sink to be washed, and a jacket he always wore had been taken out of the closet and draped over the back of a chair. She was comforted by these little signs of his presence.

She would sit up and stay awake and wait for him to come home and then she would fix him some dinner and they would talk. He would laugh when she told him she had slept the whole day through and had lost all track of time. He would tell her about things that had been happening to him at work and then she would feel better.

Being awake and alert when he came home suddenly seemed very important to her. She turned on the radio for some company, turning the dial until she found a station that was playing some soothing music, and then she picked up a magazine and sat down on the couch and began looking through it. She smoked a cigarette and then another one. She read a story in the magazine to make herself stay alert, but before she finished the story she was overwhelmed again with drowsiness. She lay full-length on the couch and let her magazine fall to the floor. She would just take a little nap. When her husband came in the door, that would wake her up and he need never know she had been asleep again.

When she awoke it was the next morning and voices on the radio startled her; she thought there were strangers in the room with her. She stood up from the couch rather shakily and turned off the radio and then, thinking that her husband must still be asleep, she went into the bedroom, expecting him to be in the bed, but he wasn’t there. She went into the kitchen, hoping to see him sitting at the table looking through the morning paper, but he wasn’t there, either. He had made some coffee, though. Or had he? When she realized the coffee was cold, she thought maybe it was the coffee she had made the day before, but she couldn’t be sure.

She dressed and had a bite of breakfast and then she took another of her pills. She lit a cigarette and tried calling the doctor to tell him how the pills were making her feel and to ask him whether or not she should keep taking them, but there was no answer; she thought maybe it was Sunday and his office was closed.

She made the bed and washed the dishes and cleaned up the apartment a little until she became tired. She was still not over being sick and her stamina was not what it should be. She lay down on the bed in her clothes and soon she went to sleep.

Then it was night again and she was awakened by a clamor on the street in front of the building. There were excited voices and a sound like bells ringing and a roar that she couldn’t identify. She got up and ran to the window to see what was going on, but there was nothing out of the ordinary happening in front of the building. The stoplight at the intersection turned from red to green and back to red again serenely, with no cars in sight. She thought she must surely have been dreaming the sounds.

In this way several days passed. She continued to take the pills. She slept and woke and then slept again. Time had lost its meaning for her; it seemed fragmented instead of continuous. A day might seem like a minute or a minute an hour. Days and nights were jumbled together. Every time she woke, she expected her husband to be nearby, but he was never there. She wasn’t sure why she kept missing him, but she felt certain he had been there and had left again.

At times she was awakened by a popping sound and the sound of screaming and running somewhere in the building, but she could never be sure if these sounds were real or if they were happening only inside her head. When she heard these sounds, her heart beat rapidly and she went to the door and opened it and stepped out into the hallway, but by then the sounds would cease and the hallway would be quiet. At other times she believed she smelled smoke but when she investigated she wasn’t able to find any source of smoke. Sometimes she would wake with a sensation of heat all over her body, but it went away just as soon as she became aware of it.

Most disturbing of all, though, were the sounds coming from the street. Every night at what seemed exactly the same time she heard the bells and the roaring and the loud voices, and every time she went to the window and looked out, all was quiet. She concluded that the only explanation was that she was going insane.

She hadn’t been out of the apartment for days; she couldn’t remember how long it had been since she had dressed and gone out. Maybe being out in the fresh air would make her feel better, she thought. Just the idea of being someplace other than the apartment cheered her up.

She cleaned herself up and put on her clothes and combed her hair and put on some lipstick. After she put on her shoes, she was ready to go. She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway and locked the door behind her and went down the stairs to the street.

The sunlight hurt her eyes and the traffic noise made her head ache. People she saw seemed indistinct, as though they were out of focus. When she was standing on a corner waiting to cross the street, a couple of women jostled her rudely and knocked her off-balance.

Six blocks away was a little park that she and her husband often walked to on hot summer nights. She made her way to the park and, finding it nearly deserted, found a place to sit on a bench facing a small duck pond. Out in the middle of the pond were two lone ducks swimming side by side. She watched the ducks for a while and then she looked disinterestedly at the sky and at the trees off in the distance and at the few people who passed.

Just to the right of the bench where she sat was a trashcan. She didn’t look toward the trashcan the whole time she was sitting on the bench, but if she had looked at it, she would have seen an old newspaper sticking out of the top of it.

The newspaper was crumpled and dirty, but she could have easily read the headline if she had noticed: Eight Die in Apartment Blaze. If she had pulled the paper from the trashcan and read the article underneath the headline, she would have seen that the fire department was summoned to the Grove Apartments on June the twenty-first at two-ten in the morning. The list of the victims would have revealed her own name and the names of the seven other people who died in the blaze. Her husband made it out of the burning building alive; that’s why she was never able to find him. The building was destroyed. The cause of the fire was under investigation.

She was the first to die in the fire before it spread to the rest of the building. Her husband had warned her that she shouldn’t smoke in bed. The pills she took made her do things she would never have done under other circumstances.

She would continue to exist in an in-between world of darkness and confusion.

Every day and every night she would relive bits of what happened on the night of the fire—the shouts, the commotion in the street in front of the building, the panicked footsteps, the smoke stealing her breath and, finally, the searing heat and flames enveloping her. In time, though, all would be revealed. When she came to an understanding of the responsibility that rested on her head, she would move forward out of the darkness and into the bright light that was waiting to envelope her.

BIO: Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis. His work has been published in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, Bartleby-Snopes, Skive Magazine, Hoi-Polloi, Conceit Magazine, and Dark and Dreary Magazine. Future work will appear in Sunken Lines, The Storyteller, and The Bracelet Charm. Allen was a contest finalist in the Bartleby-Snopes dialogue-writing contest and a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee for the story “Hermaphrodite Ward.”

A Twist Of Noir 305 - Allen Kopp

EMPTY GRAVE - ALLEN KOPP

Damon was working overtime and wouldn’t be home for dinner. Wanting nothing herself, Helen made a chicken stew for Tom and Marilyn. After they were finished eating, they went outside to play baseball with the kids up the street, while Helen cleaned up in the kitchen.

When she was finished washing and putting away the dishes, she went into the living room and sat down on the sofa and began reading a book she had checked out from the library. She didn’t like the book very much and was having a hard time getting interested in it. She made a mental note to turn it back in and get a book that she knew she would like better.

She cast the book aside and lay back on the couch and rested her head on the cushion. She knew it was a perfect opportunity to take a short nap before Tom and Marilyn came home, but she was feeling restless. She hadn’t been out of the house or seen another person for four or five days, and she had the feeling that the walls were closing in on her. She needed some fresh air and a change of scenery. Since the weather was fine—it was one of the first warm days of spring—she would take a walk in the hills behind the house, something she hadn’t done all during the winter.

She was going to write a note for Tom and Marilyn, telling them where she was, but she decided it wasn’t necessary because she would be back long before they were. So, leaving a small lamp on in the living room, she went through the kitchen and out the back door across the yard to the alley. She walked down the alley until she came to a path that led sharply upwards into the woods. She knew a little shortcut; she would keep going until she came to the road and then take the road down to circle around and come back home.

Tom and Marilyn came home just after dark. The first thing they knew when they walked into the house was that no one was there. If their mother had been there, she would have been sitting on the sofa in the living room, reading a book or knitting. Marilyn looked on the kitchen table for a note, which is where a note would have been if there had been one, but the table was empty. Tom went across the street to Gladys King’s house where their mother sometimes went when she wanted somebody to talk to, but Gladys King hadn’t seen her all day, she said.

Marilyn began crying but Tom, being the older of the two, told her to just sit down and stop crying because he was sure Helen would be back soon. There had to be a good explanation for why she was gone and there was no reason to be a baby about it. He got out the cards and tried to get Marilyn to play a hand to help her to feel better, but neither of them could concentrate on the game and stopped playing after a few minutes.

After an hour or so of tense waiting, Tom told Marilyn to go wash her face and hands and get ready for bed, as he knew his mother would have done if she had been there. He told her he would fix her a hot dog while she was getting ready for bed, but she said she wasn’t hungry and didn’t want it.

When Damon came home from work, he knew right away that something was wrong. Marilyn was lying on the couch looking at the ceiling, her eyes puffy from crying. Tom was lying on the floor on his back, throwing a rubber ball up into the air with one hand and catching it with the other hand. They were both wearing their pajamas. Ordinarily they would have been in bed at such a late hour.

Tom told Damon calmly what had happened. He and Marilyn were outside playing after supper. When it became too dark to play any more and they came home, Helen wasn’t in the house. They looked for her and hadn’t been able to find her. They expected her to be back at any minute from wherever she was, but still, after all those hours, there was no sign of her.

Damon rubbed his chin and thought. He was a man of few words. He asked Tom if Helen had seemed all right, and Tom said she seemed all right to him and Marilyn concurred. Had there been any calls or any visitors? None that Tom was aware of. Had she said anything about needing to go anyplace, such as to the hospital to visit a sick relative? Tom had heard her say no such thing.

Damon sat quietly for a while and looked at a spot on the wall. He told Tom and Marilyn to go on and go to bed. When Helen came back, he would have her come in and wake them so they could see she was all right and didn’t need to worry.

After Tom and Marilyn were gone from the room and Damon was alone, he sat for a while in the silent house and then he got up and went into the kitchen and drank a shot of whiskey straight from the bottle. Then he took a flashlight and went outside and searched for any sign of Helen. He walked up one side of the street and down the other. He walked behind every house in the neighborhood, ignoring the dogs setting up a ruckus at the intrusion, and then he walked down the alley to the end, shining his light in all the dark places. When he came to the place where the alley ended at the steep incline going up into the hills, he stood there and shone his light all around. It seemed as if the grass was flattened there where somebody had recently walked on it, but he couldn’t be sure.

Finding no sign of Helen and seeing no neighbors who might have seen her or known of her whereabouts, he finally went home. He was terribly tired after working overtime hours, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to rest until he knew where Helen was. He sat down on the sofa and, barely moving all night, stared into the darkness, alert to any sound.

When morning came and there was still no sign of Helen, he stood up and went to the phone in the kitchen and called the police, stating flatly that his wife had been missing since early evening the night before. The officer he spoke to asked a few questions and he answered them, and when he finished the conversation and hung up, he sat down again to wait for what was going to happen next.

When the police arrived, they asked Damon many probing questions. It seems there’s an unwritten law that says when a wife is missing the husband is a prime suspect, but, after speaking to him for a while, the police were convinced he was telling the truth. The police then questioned Tom and Marilyn, since they were the last to see her before she disappeared. Tom told them what little he knew. No, he hadn’t seen anything unusual in his mother’s behavior. She seemed perfectly fine. Marilyn began crying loudly and asked if her mother was dead. The two police officers exchanged a look before they assured her that they would do everything in their power to find her.

Damon remembered that Helen sometimes liked to go walking in the hills behind the house when the weather was warm, but he had no reason to believe that’s where she went. The police said they would search there and let Damon know if they found anything of interest. Damon said that if they were going to search there, he was going to go along and search with them.

Tom and Marilyn reluctantly went on to school. Damon told them he would let them know as soon as he knew anything. He called his employer and told him he would not be in to work until further notice.

The searching went on in the woods behind the house for days, but nobody found any trace of Helen. The police canvassed the neighborhood, but nobody had seen anything the least bit suspicious; nobody recalled seeing Helen at all on the day she disappeared. Damon searched in the woods from first light to first dark for what seemed an endless succession of days, going over and over the same ground, and still he found nothing. The police began to suspect that the missing woman had been living a double life and had run off, intending that she not be found. Damon told them such a hypothesis was ridiculous; Helen would never walk off and leave her children.

After two weeks, the police called off the search because they were certain that Helen was not to be found. Even if she was dead, they would have found her body or some trace of it. In the unlikely event that she had been killed and eaten by wild animals, there would have been some trace that such a thing had happened. They sent her picture out all over the state and into the neighboring states, hoping that somebody somewhere would have seen her. A woman from the neighborhood propounded the theory that Helen was abducted by an alien spaceship from outer space and that the aliens would return her just as soon as they got tired of her.

After all other avenues had been explored, the police called in a psychic, an old woman who called herself Madame Farfalle. They took her to the woods where they had been searching and gave her a scarf that Helen had frequently worn. She held the scarf over her mouth and walked over a large portion of the ground, bobbing her head like a chicken and making low groaning noises in her throat. The officers accompanying her stood leaning on their car, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and trying not to laugh.

Madame Farfalle reported finally that she did, in fact, pick up psychic emanations from the missing woman but that she was lost to the world forever. She had slipped through one of the portals—extremely rare but not unknown—into a fourth or a fifth dimension. She could hear Helen, very faintly, calling out for someone to help her, but, of course, there was nothing that anybody could do. The police reported the results as inconclusive.

One year after Helen’s disappearance, Damon bought two side-by-side burial plots in the cemetery where his parents were buried. He had a headstone inscribed with Helen’s name, date of birth, and the date she disappeared, and had it erected over the grave on the right-hand side. The grave on the left-hand side was for him when the time came.

The years passed. Tom and Marilyn grew to adulthood and both married and had families of their own. They were able to put their mother’s disappearance behind them. They believed she died—or at least was lost to them forever—on the day she disappeared.

Damon, into his old age, never stopped believing that Helen would return. He never stopped watching, waiting, and listening for her. Every morning when he woke up, he said to himself maybe this will be the day. When he knew the end of his life was approaching, he embraced death more fervently than most because he believed that, in death, the question would finally be answered.

BIO: Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis. His work has been published in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, Bartleby-Snopes, Skive Magazine, Hoi-Polloi, Conceit Magazine, and Dark and Dreary Magazine. Future work will appear in Sunken Lines, The Storyteller, and The Bracelet Charm. Allen was a contest finalist in the Bartleby-Snopes dialogue-writing contest and a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee for the story “Hermaphrodite Ward.”

A Twist Of Noir 251 - Allen Kopp

THE SENTIMENTAL MAN - ALLEN KOPP

The time was between ten and eleven and traffic was light. An occasional car went by, slowly, its lights reflected in wavering bars on the wet pavement. A liquor store in the next block went dark. A policeman walked his beat, rousting a drunk from a doorway.

A man stepped out of a dark alley. He took a few slow steps into the glow of a streetlamp and stopped. He heard a siren off in the distance and lifted his head to listen, but gradually the siren faded to nothing. He reached into the pocket of his coat and removed a cigarette and put it between his lips and lit it with the little gold lighter engraved with his initials that he always carried. He took a long drag on the cigarette and turned and walked down the street.

In appearance he was a man like many others: not young and not old, of average height, lean and muscular, broad through the shoulders and narrow in the hips. He wore an expensive, perfectly tailored suit and a hat low on his brow, making his face difficult to distinguish.

He spotted a policeman walking toward him on the opposite side of the street. He knew without looking directly at him that the policeman was watching him. He didn’t want the policeman to think there was anything about him out of the ordinary or that he was, perhaps, planning on breaking into one of the businesses along the street that were closed down for the night. He began walking a little faster, with apparent purpose in his step, so as not to arouse the policeman’s suspicions.

After he had walked another half-block, he glanced over his shoulder to see if the policeman was still looking at him, but he was far down in the next block peering into a darkened window. A taxi went by, its tires hissing on the wet pavement. A woman’s laughter came from inside the taxi, a high-pitched sound that might have been a drunken laugh or even a scream. The tail lights of the taxi were receding into the distance when movement in an upper window across the street drew his attention. A woman came to the window and was silhouetted in the light behind her. She looked down to the street for a moment—she seemed to be looking right at him but he couldn’t be sure—and then reached above her head and drew the curtain closed. Seconds later the window went dark like all the others.

As he kept walking, he passed an all-night bowling alley and several small bars and cafés that were opened, but all the stores and offices and businesses were dark and shut down for the night.

After walking several more blocks he came to a movie theatre that was an island of light in the sea of darkness. The marquee was outlined in flashing bulbs surrounding the title of the movie currently playing. The sidewalk and the street in front of the theatre were bathed in garish white light. Inside the ticket booth at the front of the theatre a fat woman sat behind the smudged glass. She wore round glasses and a black dress with little red flowers. She had no customers at the moment and so appeared bored. She leaned her head on her hand and looked longingly out at the street.

He stood on the sidewalk underneath the marquee, put his hands in his pockets and leaned his shoulder against the wall. The woman in the ticket booth looked at him and then looked away. If she thought anything about him at all, she would think he was waiting for someone to meet him for the next show. He lit a cigarette and avoided looking at the woman and watched the few cars going by on the street.

A man and a woman walked past on the sidewalk. The woman stood out because she was tall and straight and she wore a red coat and a jaunty red beret with a black feather sticking out of the side. The man was older and shorter; he wore a black hat that seemed too small for his head and was smoking a cigar. They seemed too polite and restrained with each other to be anything other than business associates. They walked past and went to the end of the block and crossed the street and disappeared into the next block.

Suddenly the doors of the theatre opened and people started coming out. At first they came out in twos and threes, and then in dozens. In a couple of minutes there were as many as two hundred people on the sidewalk in front of the theatre. The fat woman in the ticket booth came alive, as dozens of people lined up to buy tickets for the next show.

After the crowd had reached its maximum size and began to dwindle, a lone woman came out of the theatre. She was the only person in the crowd who wasn’t with someone else. She was wearing an ugly tan raincoat like a man’s raincoat and a hat that covered most of her hair, the type of hat worn by women who don’t care how they look when it rains. She walked out to the edge of the sidewalk and looked up and down the street, as though looking for someone. Maybe someone was supposed to meet her or pick her up after the movie and didn’t show up.

From where he was standing under the marquee he watched the woman. She stood at the curb waiting for a couple of minutes and then she began walking down the street. After she was about halfway down in the next block, he began following her, close enough that he could still see her but far enough away that she wouldn’t know he was there.

Something in the woman’s manner indicated that she was not afraid of being alone on a dark street late at night. She looked straight ahead and didn’t seem in any hurry. He knew she didn’t know he was following her. She hadn’t even seen him. He was careful to walk so she wouldn’t hear his footsteps on the sidewalk.

She came to an intersection and stopped, waiting for a couple of cars to pass. When the way was clear, she crossed the street and went through the open door of an all-night drugstore on the corner.

He hesitated for a moment and then went up to the window of the drugstore and stood at the edge and looked in, so that anybody inside would not be able to see him. The inside was brightly lit and cheerful. He could see all the way to the back of the store, rows of display cases and a large rack of magazines and newspapers. Three fans in a triangle hung from the ceiling and turned slowly like airplane propellers in slow motion.

The woman in the tan raincoat went behind a counter and disappeared through a doorway. A man at the magazine rack picked up a magazine and went to the counter to pay for it. An old woman with a little boy standing beside her waited at the prescription counter for the druggist to come back.

Soon the woman in the tan raincoat came out of the doorway at the back of the store. With her was a slightly older woman who resembled her enough that they must have been sisters. The older woman put on a coat and picked up an umbrella and laughed and said goodbye to someone, and then the two of them came out the door. He was standing several feet to the right of the door and, since they turned to the left, they didn’t see him. He stood beside the window and watched them until they turned the corner in the next block and went out of sight.

He turned and began walking again in an easterly direction. There were more people on the sidewalks and more cars in the street than earlier. People were finished with the evening’s activities—the boxing match or club meetings or whatnot—and were heading to bars and nightclubs for some of the nightlife the city was fabled for. A dirty-looking man, a hobo, stepped out of the shadows and blocked his way, asking him for a quarter. He waved the man away and stepped around him to keep from colliding with him.

He came to a bar and stopped and looked at the place. He was tired of walking and needed to sit for a while, have a drink and maybe order some food. He was considering whether or not to go inside, when the door opened and a woman came out. She was wobbly on her feet as though drunk, or nearly drunk. She stumbled and then righted herself and looked up at the sky as though expecting rain. She mumbled something but he didn’t hear what it was.

He saw the red beret and the black feather sticking out of it, and he knew right away it was the same woman he had seen earlier in the evening when he was standing in front of the movie theatre; except now she was alone. He had a fleeting thought that, since it was the second time he had seen her in the same night, they must have been fated to meet. He believed very much that two strangers came together because they were fated beforehand to do so.

He was standing there on the sidewalk in front of the bar, silently, and she didn’t see him until she had almost walked into him. She was startled slightly and confused, but when she looked up at his face and saw he was smiling at her, she relaxed and didn’t regret so much almost bumping into him that way. She apologized profusely and gave a little laugh and stepped around him to continue on her way.

He thought quickly about how he might get her to keep from leaving, how he might engage her in conversation. He took a cigarette out of his pocket and held it between his fingers and asked her for a light. She laughed again and looked grateful that he had asked for anything at all and opened her purse and took out a lighter. She held the flame to the cigarette in his mouth and returned the lighter to her purse.

He took a draw on the cigarette and blew smoke out above her head and smiled at her again and asked if she would like to have a drink. She said she had already had several drinks but she wouldn’t object to a nightcap all the same. She suggested they go to the bar in the hotel where she was staying, which was nearby.

The bar was on the ground floor of the hotel, just off the lobby. They went inside and sat at a small table against the wall. He removed his hat and she took a good look at him. She reached across the table and ran her hand along his arm from his shoulder to his elbow. He looked at her without expression. He didn’t like being touched that way, but he didn’t tell her to stop. The waiter came and took their order and in a couple of minutes their drinks arrived.

She told him the pertinent facts of her life. She came to the city a couple of times a year on business. She always tried to mix in a little fun with the business while she was at it. She had been married once but it didn’t work out and she sent the boy packing back to his mother, where he never should have left in the first place. She liked a man to be a real man and not a grown-up baby.

She lived with her sister in a big dreary house in a small town in another state. Her sister was older and a widow. No fun at all. It was a stale kind of existence, so that’s why she liked to kick up her heels whenever she had the chance. She supposed, however, that was as happy as the next person.

She talked only about herself and didn’t try to find out anything about him, not even his name. She leaned across the table and, breathing into his face, told him she found him exceedingly attractive. She was always stimulated by a man’s indifference, she said. She didn’t like the kind of men who were always cloying and falling all over themselves to present themselves well. She liked a man to be a bit of a brute. He grew bored with her talk, but he pretended to be listening to every word, while in fact listening more to the music playing in the background.

After a while the bar was getting ready to close for the night and everybody was going to have to leave. The woman smiled sadly at him and told him she hated to break up their little party, she was having such a good time. She finished her drink, and he put his hat back on and put some money on the table and they both stood up and walked out into the lobby of the hotel.

He was going to ask her if she’d like to go to a place that didn’t close for the night where they could continue their little tête-à-tête, but they saw through the window of the lobby that it was raining furiously outside and he didn’t think she would want to get wet. As he started to leave, she put her hand on his wrist and said she just had a wonderful idea. She had a full bottle of bourbon in her room and she wasn’t sleepy at all. Would he care to come up to her room for a little while?

When they got to her room on the eighth floor, she was too drunk to fit the key into the lock. She laughed and dropped the key on the floor and he picked it up and opened the door and pushed it open for her to go in before him.

She switched on the lights and took off her red hat with the black feather and put it on the dresser and removed her coat and threw it down and stepped out of her shoes. She told him to make himself comfortable and then she went into the bathroom and closed the door. He took off his hat and jacket and sat down on the couch and waited for what was going to happen next.

In a couple of minutes she came out of the bathroom and turned off all the lights except for the small one in front of the window, throwing one side of the room into darkness. She turned on the radio and found some music she liked. After she adjusted the radio to just the right volume, she opened her bottle of bourbon with some difficulty and poured some out into two tiny paper cups, apologizing for not having anything better.

She handed one of the paper cups to him and sat beside him on the couch to his right. She had partially unbuttoned her blouse so that a large portion of the area between her breasts was visible. She remarked how cozy it was sitting there with him, with the sound of the rain and the music and the drinks.

He finished his drink and she offered to pour him another, but he refused, saying he had had enough for one night. He crumpled up the paper cup and slipped it into his pocket. He put his arm up behind her on the back of the couch and she sat very close to him.

He kissed her lightly on the lips, not because he had any great need to kiss her but because he believed it was what should come next. She kissed him back harder and reached out for his left hand and placed it on her right breast. He squeezed her breast gently and she made little moaning noises.

Suddenly the phone rang shrilly. The woman sighed and stood up and answered it impatiently. He listened carefully to what she was saying; it was the front desk calling to give her a message that was left for her while she was out.

She concluded the call and came back to the couch and sat down beside him again, leaning her body heavily against his. She leaned in for him to kiss her again and he could smell her musky smell and the alcohol on her breath. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing hard.

From his pocket he extracted a two-foot-long silken cord that he always carried, very strong and lightweight. In one deft movement he had the cord around her neck, and before she was aware of what was happening he pulled it very tight. He watched the expression on her face change from surprise to fear and then to pain. He stood up and pulled her sideways on the couch and got behind her and pulled both ends of the cord at the back of her neck.

She made little gurgling noises and tried to get her hands around the cord to pull it loose. She kicked out her feet, propelling her body into his and knocking him off-balance. He pulled the cord tighter and tighter until his arms trembled from the exertion. She gave one violent backward thrust of her body against his and then she began to go limp. When he was sure she was dead, he eased her down onto the floor in front of the couch carefully so as not to make any noise.

He was out of breath and his muscles ached. He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his mouth and when he pulled it away he saw her lipstick that had come off onto the handkerchief. He could smell her perfume and he still had the taste of her mouth in his. He shuddered and retched and collapsed onto the floor.

He lay on the floor until he felt that his legs would carry him again and then he stood up and went to the door and put his ear against it to see if he could hear anything from the hallway outside the door. Hearing nothing, he put on a pair of thin kidskin gloves he carried and began methodically going through the woman’s luggage and purse and other belongings. He found two hundred and ten dollars in cash in a pocket of her suitcase. He folded the money and put it inside the breast pocket of his jacket. Then he found a train ticket and put it with the money without even bothering to look and see where she was bound for.

He turned off the lamp but the light from the windows was enough for him to see the body of the woman on the floor in front of the couch. Her face was turned slightly toward him and her eyes were opened; she seemed to be looking right at him. Her skirt was pushed above her thighs and her legs slightly twisted. Her left arm was folded under her and her right arm was underneath the couch. He went over to her and knelt down and removed the silken cord that was still partway around her neck and returned it to his pocket.

The rain gently pelting the windows was lovelier than any music and made the room seem peaceful and inviting. Suddenly he was tired and every muscle in his body ached; he felt an overwhelming desire for rest and sleep. He would stay for a while and then be on his way. He knew he would be safe there until morning.

He went to the bed that had been carefully made up and lay on his back with his head on the pillow. He had never known a more comfortable bed in his life. Soon he drifted into a sleep as deep as any sleep could be.

He awoke in the morning feeling replenished. He looked at the clock and saw it was not quite seven. He sat up and put on his shoes and went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face and combed his hair, looking at himself in the mirror the whole time.

Suddenly he was eager to be gone, to be on his way again. He straightened the wrinkles out of the bed and put on his jacket. He took a quick look around the room and made sure he was leaving no trace of himself behind. He took one tiny sentimental souvenir of the woman to remember her by.

He put on his hat and went to the door and opened it and stepped out quietly into the hallway and walked up the hallway to the elevator. When the elevator arrived and the door opened, he was relieved to see he was its only passenger.

He took the elevator down to the lobby, crossed the lobby to the front door and went out the revolving door onto the street into the gloomy morning unnoticed. He found a cab and took it to the train station and paid the driver out of the bills he had folded in the pocket of his jacket.

He hadn’t decided yet where he was going, but he planned on taking the earliest available train out. First, though, he would have some breakfast. He bought a newspaper and went into the train station coffee shop.

He sat down in a booth toward the back and a pretty blonde waitress came and brought him a glass of ice water, smiling the whole time. He ordered enough food for two people and while he was waiting for it he lit a cigarette and looked the newspaper over without much interest.

Setting the newspaper aside, he remembered the train ticket he had taken from the woman’s luggage and took it out of his pocket. It was for a train that left at nine o’clock for a city he had never visited before. He would use the ticket and not bother with buying another one. He marveled at how everything had gone so well for him, as if it had all been planned in advance—all the pieces had come together in a most pleasing and beneficial way. He would keep traveling around from one place to another until the time came that he decided he had seen enough, experienced enough. When that time came, he would buy a small farm somewhere and live out the rest of his days.

He took the black feather out of his pocket from the woman’s hat and brushed it over his mouth and held it under his nose. It smelled the way the woman had smelled. Ever since he was a small boy, he had kept a little souvenir of the significant events of his life. He had a whole box of them. From time to time he would open the box and take out each item and relive fond memories of the person or event it represented. He would add the black feather to the collection and it would help him to recollect the woman and her face and the sound of her voice and the time he had spent with her. Of course he would remember her fondly. He remembered all of them fondly, being the sentimental man that he was.

BIO: Allen Kopp is a technical writer and lives in St. Louis. His work has been published in Foliate Oak Literary Journal, Temenos, The Legendary, Danse Macabre, Bartleby-Snopes, Skive Magazine, Hoi-Polloi, Conceit Magazine, and Dark and Dreary Magazine. Future work will appear in Sunken Lines, The Storyteller, and The Bracelet Charm. Allen was a contest finalist in the Bartleby-Snopes dialogue-writing contest and a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee for the story “Hermaphrodite Ward.”