The Brass Bed

“I love you,” she said, “and I am determined to have you, and now you must never desert me for any reason on earth.”

I wanted to go back to her, and I almost went, but instead I left her alone in her significant brass bed and went downstairs. In the hall, I heard voices in the living room, which was rather surprising under the circumstances, and one of the voices was Sid’s, and the other one seemed to be the voice of Logan Pierce. I stopped and listened to the voices but could not understand what was said, and after listening for a few seconds I went over and looked into the room and saw Sid sitting comfortably in a chair and Pierce leaning against one end of the sofa. They had heard me cross the hall to the entrance and were staring in my direction and had suddenly stopped talking.

“Hello, Felix,” Sid said. “Where did you come from?”

“I’ve been upstairs talking to Jolly.”

“Is that so? I had no idea you were here. How is Jolly?”

“All right. She’s still in bed.”

“I should think so. It’s still quite early, and I’d have gone up myself, but I didn’t want to wake her. You remember Logan Pierce, of course. He has come to tell Jolly that Kirby’s body has been found.”

Logan Pierce was tired and glum and had a gray stubble of beard on his face. He nodded and pursed his lips as if there were a sour taste in his mouth.

“You’re around pretty early, aren’t you?” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “And so are you, for that matter.”

“Sure. That’s so. I been up all night, having come into town with the body after we found it, and now I’d like to see Mrs. Craig and get on home to bed.”

“When did you find it?”

“The body? About one o’clock this morning. It got hung up in the branches of a tree that had fallen over into the water downstream a way. We were lucky to find it so soon. Sometimes it takes a long while to find a body in a river.”

“You say you brought it into town?”

“That’s what I said. It’s in the morgue.”

He paused and blew his lips out and sucked them in and stared at me from under his brows in that way which made him appear to be looking up at a person even though he was actually taller and looking down.

“He’s got a place on his head,” he said. “Looks like he might have been hit pretty hard with something.”

I saw Jolly, as I had seen her last night, rising in the boat and swinging the oar, and it was something a man should not be required to see a second time, even in his mind and knowing it’s only imagination. I closed my eyes and opened them, and this time the trick worked, and she and the river and Kirby in the dark water were all gone in an instant.

“He was in the river a long time,” I said. “It’s a wonder he hasn’t got a lot of bad places on him.”

“True enough. All in all, considering everything, he was in better shape than we had any right to expect. Well, like I said, I want to see Mrs. Craig and get on home. I met Mr. Pollock here on the way in, and he said she was probably still asleep and shouldn’t be disturbed yet, but since you’ve been up talking to her, I guess she’s awake after all and can see me right away. I’m dog tired and don’t want to wait around if I don’t have to.”

“See here, Sheriff,” Sid said. “Why don’t you just tell me what you want Jolly to know, and I can tell her when she comes down. She’s had a pretty bad shock, as you know, and I don’t think it’s such a good idea to talk to her so soon about things like this.”

“No?” Logan Pierce shifted his gaze to Sid, the sour look becoming more pronounced around his mouth. “I’d think it would be a kind of relief to her to learn that her husband’s body is out of the river. Anyhow, I got a few more questions on my mind I’d like to ask, so I guess I’d better talk to her personally even if it might be considered an imposition.”

He was clearly unsatisfied and unhappy because there were things he couldn’t understand, and I think what bothered him most was the awareness that, as things stood and were likely to stand, there was little or no chance of his ever understanding them any better, no matter how hard he worked at it.

“All right, then,” Sid said. “I’ll go up and ask her to come down.”

“As for me,” I said, “I don’t think I’ll stay if I’m not needed.”

“You’re not,” Logan Pierce said.

So I went back into the hall and down to the front door, and Sid followed me to the door instead of going immediately upstairs. He still had that odd assurance about him that Harvey had noticed at the river after the drowning, and I wondered why the hell he was at Jolly’s so early, and I resented his presence a little, as a matter of fact, but not much. It seemed to be impossible to resent Sid very much at any time.

“It’s very difficult for Jolly,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “She will undoubtedly miss being hit in the eye occasionally.”

“Well, no one but a brute would do something like that to a woman, but just the same it’s a very traumatic experience for her, and she will certainly need a great deal of love and comfort to alleviate it.”