Read Black Evening for Free Online Page B

Where did she put the corpses of those other children? Maybe when they started rotting, she couldn't sustain her make-believe. Maybe this final time she understood what she'd become and hanged herself."
    "It works," the deputy says, nauseated, his face still ashen. "It makes sense."
    "That's the trouble," the doctor says. "A lunatic's always logical, but the logic's horribly twisted."
    There were many things to do. I'd put off phoning for an ambulance. I'd wanted to understand before the scene became disturbed, a clue destroyed, but I knew I had to act now, make those calls, tell the parents. I reached for the phone, but it rang in anticipation.
    "Yes?" I asked, and then I listened, and I realized how wrong we'd been.
    I set down the phone and peered at them.
    "It wasn't her. It wasn't Agnes."
    "What?" The doctor and the deputy stared.
    "It was Andrew," I told them as I rushed toward the door.
    "He left in 1928," the doctor repeated.
    "No, he
never
left."
    They ran out with me toward the cruiser.
    "He's still in there."
    "But we searched the place," the deputy insisted.
    "He was in there. We were just too dumb to see him."
    We scrambled into the cruiser. I sped from the station's lot.
    "But I don't understand," the doctor said.
    I didn't have the will or time to argue. I skidded around corners, raced up side streets. At that once great, now dilapidated section of the town, I ran out, hurrying past the ruined gate, up the weed-choked sidewalk, past the porch holes, through the stained glass door.
    "I know you're in here, Andrew! Come out now! Don't make me look for you!"
    The house was silent, grotesque as I flashed my light and charged in toward the parlor.
    "Dammit, Andrew! If you've harmed her, I swear I'll punish you, the way you punished all those children!"
    In a frenzy, I yanked at the stacks of newspapers.
    "Chief, you'd better get control," the deputy said.
    But I kept pulling, yanking, and the one side of the room was no good. I swung toward the other.
    "Help me!" I yelled to the deputy, the doctor.
    And we found him, Andrew, in the music room, or rather in a room within a room, a room whose walls were stacks of newspapers. He was in there, almost eighty, brittle and yet strangely spry. He glared up at me, smelling old, like ancient newspapers, squirming to hide his secret, but I grabbed his shirt and yanked him to one side, and there she was, another young girl, dressed in clothing from the twenties, gagged and bound and staring, wide-eyed, fearful, for it had been Andrew who grabbed the children. He had never left. He'd only lost his mind. Agnes, to protect and preserve him, hid him. But each time he killed a child, her loyalty had weakened, until at last, faced with awful choices, she had hanged herself, unable to reveal him.
    I'd guessed that he was there because that phone call had informed me of another missing child, a child who from fright was now white-haired, always would be, and if Agnes hadn't done it, who else but Andrew? Yes, that girl, an adult now, is white-haired, I can prove it, for that small child was my daughter, and she sometimes seems to know me when I visit her on weekends.

 
    A final story about a house, "The Hidden Laughter" was published the same year as "Black Evening": 1981. Ever since I attended modern-poetry courses in college, I've been haunted by T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets and
in particular the first section, "Burnt Norton," its eerie otherworldly tone, the sense it creates of falling through and out of time. When my family and I first arrived in Iowa City, we lived in a small, pleasant ranch house, which we eventually outgrew. But even after we moved to a larger house in a different section of town, we often drove back to the old neighborhood and paused to savor the memories associated with our six years in that house. It represented our post-college youth. We associated it with the excitement and difficulty of getting started in the world. I got to wondering if, under the right