Chapter Six The Locked Closet
In which an old sin comes looking for the man who thought he had buried it
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Five hours before he came pounding down that platform after a train already pulling out of reach, Gregory Hostetler had driven calmly across the city from the pier where his ship had docked, to a borrowed apartment on the fourth floor of a respectable building — the flat of a man he'd known abroad, offered for his use during a long absence.
He noted, descending from his cab, the irreproachable address, the doorman, the general air of a neighborhood that suited a man of his particular tastes, and presented his letter of introduction to the building superintendent with the easy confidence of a man used to having doors opened for him.
His first act, once settled, was to unpack his steamer trunk and hang his wedding clothes with some care in the bedroom closet, which stood otherwise empty save for a few boxes shoved onto the high shelf.
Then he telephoned his best man.
"Jeff — sorry for the short notice, the ship ran late making dock, but I'm here now, safe and sound.
" He rattled off a short list of last-minute errands, agreed to arrive at the church a half hour early to be briefed on the arrangements, and asked, almost as an afterthought, whether Calie was resting.
Told that she was tired and had gone to lie down, he agreed readily enough that it was best not to disturb her — there'd be time enough to talk once they were married, and precious little left to say beforehand that his letters hadn't already covered.
He confirmed the ring had been collected, the car arranged, and rang off without much ceremony.
He and Jeff had never much cared for one another, whatever courtesy the occasion required of them both.
He poured himself a good measure of Scotch to steady his nerves for the evening ahead — an evening that would finally bind to him a woman he'd spent years trying to bring to heel, and might genuinely have loved, he sometimes told himself, if she hadn't dared to see so clearly the rot underneath his polish.
Tonight, at last, he would have her — and her very considerable fortune — safely delivered into his keeping.
He dressed with unhurried, self-satisfied care, pausing before the mirror to admire the set of his collar and the smoothness of his mustache, well pleased with the figure he cut.
Then he went to the closet for his coat.
It happened almost too simply to seem fateful — the cuff of his shirtsleeve catching for half a second on the little brass knob of the closet latch, the button giving way, his own irritated jerk at the small delay setting the door swinging shut behind him on its own quiet momentum.
He'd scarcely closed his hand on his wedding coat when a soft click and sudden total darkness told him, with sickening clarity, exactly what his impatience had cost him.
He pushed at the door. It did not move. He felt along the smooth panel for a knob and found nothing but the small, flush brass fitting of a spring latch, built — as such things sometimes are, by carpenters who take a certain private pride in their work — to hold.
He threw his shoulder against it, once, twice, until his shirtfront strained and his collar wilted, but the door held its ground with the calm indifference of good, well-seasoned wood against a man who had spent his own life avoiding anything so honest as real exertion.
He was, quite simply, trapped — alone in the dark, with nothing at all to do but think, and no way at all to avoid it.
He shouted. He kicked, until he thought better of his good wedding shoes. He beat on the door with both fists and roared like a man possessed, and the great indifferent city went on about its business four floors below, entirely unmoved.
The janitor's wife, as it happened, had borrowed the closet the week before to air a good dress, and a fine layer of French chalk still dusted the floorboards.
Gregory Hostetler, worn out at last from useless fury, sank down onto that chalky floor to rest and think, and found — as men often do, once the noise of their own effort finally quiets — that thinking was the very last thing he wanted, and the only thing left available to him.
Four hours the dark closet held him, lit only by a thin gray seam of light beneath the door as evening came on outside. He had lit the gas before dressing, and now that faint glow through the crack seemed the only thread tethering him to sanity.
And then, out of the pressing dark, a face began to take shape before him.
It was gaunt, hollow-eyed, marked with a grief he recognized before he could stop himself from recognizing it — the face of a quiet, trusting old bookkeeper whose signature Gregory had forged on a note fifteen years before, and who had gone to prison for the theft, and died there, some five years past, still protesting an innocence no one had troubled to verify.
He had not thought of that face in years.
He had made his peace with it long ago, filing the whole business away as nothing more than a young man's youthful excess — regrettable, perhaps, but hardly a thing to carry forward as guilt.
He had never once let himself wonder what the shame of it had actually cost the old man, only that the debt collectors had finally stopped calling, and life had gone on comfortably enough after.
But here, in the dark, with nowhere left to look away to, the eyes would not release him.
Numbers 32:23 rose up in him from some forgotten Sunday school lesson of his own boyhood, unbidden and merciless: "Be sure your sin will find you out." He had not thought of that verse in thirty years. He wished, bitterly, that he had never thought of it now.
This is what you cost me, the eyes seemed to say, without needing words at all. It is your turn now.
And behind that first face, more followed — men and women he had cheated over the years with his easy, gentlemanly craft; ruined girls whose lives had paid, in ways he had never once troubled himself to imagine, for his own comfortable living; the wide, uncomprehending eyes of children who had looked to him, at one time or another, for some small mercy, and found none at all.
And last, rising above them all, the eyes of Calie Hawthorne herself — the one thing in his whole selfish life he had ever wanted for reasons that were not entirely mercenary, and the one thing his cruelty had made certain he would never actually have.
He had loved her, in his fashion, more than he had loved anything besides his own comfort — and it had eaten at him for years that no amount of pressure, no threat however carefully applied, could ever bring her to look at him with anything but that same clear, unbending scorn.
Stung past bearing by her contempt, he had turned, slowly and by degrees he preferred not to examine too closely, from courtship to something far uglier — pressure applied here, an old debt of her family's called in there, until her freedom had narrowed, week by week, down to this one wedding day he had planned so carefully to be unable to escape.
Now, in the dark, her eyes seemed to look back at him not with scorn but with something worse — a kind of sorrowful clarity, as if she already knew what manner of man she'd been forced to.
Galatians 6:7 came to him next, cold and final: "Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
" He had never once, in the whole scheming architecture of his life, considered that account might come due on his own wedding night, in a dark closet reeking faintly of French chalk.
He was very nearly certain he was dying — or losing his mind entirely — when at last the building superintendent, making his evening rounds, noticed light leaking from beneath the closet door of the tenant who'd said he'd be leaving on a trip that very evening, and came to investigate.
The eyes vanished the instant the man's key turned in the lock.
Gregory Hostetler flew to the telephone the moment he was free, shouting at the operator for the delay, and when at last he reached the Hawthorne house, a flustered servant informed him that Mrs. Hawthorne and her son were not in — there was a wedding on, the house was full of guests, could he please speak up, she could hardly hear him over the noise?
He raved. He demanded. He got nothing for his trouble but a dead line and a rising, disbelieving horror, and finally slammed down the receiver, tore off his ruined collar, wrestled on another with shaking hands, and bolted from the apartment without so much as paying the superintendent the reward he'd promised for his rescue.
He found a cab at last and gave the Hawthorne address in a voice that cracked with fury.
He arrived to find the reception still in full, cheerful swing, and made, by any fair account, quite a spectacle of himself — chalk dust ground into his trousers, collar askew, hat crushed from where he'd rammed it onto his head in the cab.
He shouted. He demanded to know where Miss Hawthorne was.
When a footman, more amused than alarmed, informed him that Miss Hawthorne had already been married and departed on her wedding trip, Gregory Hostetler turned a shade of purple that silenced the nearest cluster of guests entirely.
"That's impossible," he bellowed. "I am the bridegroom."
The gathering crowd in the front hall took this, not unreasonably, for either a very poor joke or the ravings of a lunatic, and several guests laughed outright before an older gentleman — a family friend, calm and evidently unimpressed — stepped forward to set the matter straight.
"My friend, I believe you're mistaken. Miss Hawthorne was married this evening to Mr. Gregory Hostetler, newly returned from abroad, and the couple have already left to catch their train. You've either come far too late, or you have the wrong Miss Hawthorne entirely."