The Tell-Tale Heart

‘This is the edge,’ Jackson said, nodding towards the trees on the opposite side of the road. Sam peered through the drowned windscreen where the wiper blades succeeded only in pushing waves of water backwards and forwards – never clearing the glass properly. She looked past the narrow strip of forest down onto the pebble beach that was littered with weathered driftwood tree trunks the size of telegraph poles.

Beyond the beach the grey ocean chopped and churned beneath the constant rain.

‘Nothing after this until Tokyo,’ Jackson explained.

Sam wound down her window a fraction. A fine spray of rain misted her glasses. Forced through the narrow gap in the window, the wet air brought with it the powerful scent of the forest. She breathed it in deeply.

Jackson watched her and smiled, ‘And you always said you were a city girl professor.’

‘I’m adaptable,’ Sam replied.

They really were out on the edge she thought, far away from the relentless real world. She looked at Jackson’s hands on the wheel. She liked to watch him driving. He was careful, methodical, did everything by checklists. She imagined he had learned that in the Navy. It had taken her weeks to finally persuade him to show her a photo from his Navy days. He was standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier dressed in his flight suit and carrying his helmet under one arm.

‘Very Tom Cruise,’ she teased.

‘Now since when has Tom Cruise been a black man?’ he laughed.

She was still not sure what had taken her there on the day they first met. It was some half-formed idea of catching David at his infidelity she thought. It seemed like a very American thing to do, to hire a private investigator. But that hadn’t really been what she wanted. She really just wanted to tell someone about it - someone that she could trust - someone that she either knew really well, or not at all. The brittle friendships that she had built with the people she had met through David didn’t seem capable of bearing the load. So she had chosen a name from the business pages, taken a cab to the office and headed for the door full of confused purpose. Then she had seen the little sign in the window and all at once there was a way out.

‘It’s my boyfriend,’ she had said, ‘He’s cheating on me.’

Jackson had sized her up. She was young, pretty, English – not his usual clientele. He liked her right from the start. Felt like he wanted to help her for noble reasons and not just for a paycheck. She was different he supposed, but her story sure sounded familiar.

‘OK. So you want me to put him under surveillance, get some photos to prove the deal?’ he asked.

‘No. I saw your sign in the window. I want a job’, she said simply.

He had laughed for a long time then. He knew that she was serious straight away. He knew he would hire her then too, if only to find out more about her. She certainly wasn’t the type who was fooled by the false gumshoe glamour of the movies, or the kind who took entirely too much pleasure in the telephoto lens aspects of the job.

It was unusual for people to turn up at the office in person these days, Jackson had told her. Clients normally wanted the investigator to visit them.

‘The days of glamorous dames turning up at the offices of Sam Spade are long gone,’ he said. Then he looked her in the eye and laughed loudly again.

‘Is that why the place is such a mess?’ she asked him. And it was. But when she came back for her first proper day at work the office was tidy. The scattered files had been put away, the water cooler had been refilled and there were new plants on the windowsill.

He had explained to her the three basic kinds of extra-marital affair and the five most common types of client.

She discovered why the water cooler wasn’t working properly and fixed it. She explained the first three laws of thermodynamics to him as she did so.

‘What? Like you’ve got some kind of a degree in physics?’ he joked.

‘I have actually,’ she said quietly, ‘And a PhD. Well, nearly.’

He impressed her by reeling off the official Navy aviator’s version of the Bernoulli Principle. She only had to correct him once.

After that, when he wanted to tease her he called her ‘The Professor’.

He told her about his time flying in the Navy. How one time he had come home from sea to find that his wife had left him and taken their five year old daughter to live in California. That was in 1989.

She told him that made him old enough to be her father.

He told her that some days he felt so old he could be her grandfather.

She told him how she had followed David to Seattle. His research opportunity too good to pass up, her own doctorate put on hold.

Those first days had a thin, borrowed quality. It was like they were living in a bubble that could burst at any moment. But the bubble didn’t burst. The days had turned into weeks and she had stayed.

Jackson was impressed by how fast she learned - how good she was at certain things that he had always had trouble with. He found that it was a lot cheaper for pretty Sam with her English accent to charm the doormen at the expensive apartment blocks than it was for him to bribe them.

Sam had trusted him completely and immediately, and then doubted her own judgement just as quickly. But each day she found herself moving a little closer towards her original, unconditional trust.

She rented a little apartment in the city, not far from the office. He said it was a bad area. He worried about her. She said she could look after herself.

He lived in a little house in Edmonds. The daily commute enraged him.

They never saw each other outside of work.

They worked a lot.

‘It’s here,’ she said, pointing to a turnoff outside the little town of Queets. She held the client’s map against a much smaller scale road map. The client’s map had been put carefully inside a plastic folder Jackson noted.

‘Remember us when it rains!’ said the sign that told them they were leaving Queets.

‘You know they get twelve feet of rain a year here. That’s four metres,’ said Jackson.

He insisted on translating everything into metric measures for her. It was unnecessary but she found it endearing.

‘And this is actually a rainforest?’ she asked as they passed by a National Park Service sign that suggested that it was.

‘Well it’s a forest, and there’s a heck of a lot of rain. They call it temperate rainforest - as opposed to tropical rainforest, which is jungle. There’s not much of it about.’

Sam studied the client’s map again, ‘It’s about five kilometres up here and then we turn left onto a logging track.’

Jackson looked at her, ‘That’s about three miles,’ she said.

The client, Mrs Cameron, was an overweight woman in her late middle age who walked with a stick. She had come to the office on the previous morning having just flown in to Seattle. Sam had learned that Jackson was right – it was unusual when people came to the office in person.

‘She looks like a crier,’ Jackson whispered to Sam as they went into the office, so Sam sat facing her, almost knee to knee and Jackson perched on the desk beside her, taking note of the location of the box of Kleenex.

‘It’s my —,’ began Mrs Cameron and then she paused for a long time, ‘My friend,’ she said at last, ‘he died.’

Jackson had watched as Sam took the woman’s wrist. It was a reflex action. Her first instinct had been to reach out to the grieving woman. It was not something he would have done himself he thought. Not something he could have done. Compassion wasn’t something you could learn he knew. Or fake.

‘Before he died - it was very important to him - he told me…’ Mrs Cameron struggled to tell the story, but Sam had coaxed it out of her gently, professionally.

‘His brother Joe died in the war. The one in Vietnam I mean. He signed up before it really got started. Wasn’t drafted that is. Steve was younger, but the war went on. He got drafted, but he didn’t go.’

Sam looked at Jackson. She wondered how he felt about the dead draft dodger. His own feelings towards his military service were sometimes ambiguous she knew. She couldn’t read his face. He just sat there on the edge of the desk waiting for the woman to continue.

‘He was against the war anyway but he … he was still grieving. He couldn’t go. He went into the woods and hid out there in an old cabin that he and Joe had played in when they were kids. He was there a year and a half before one of the park rangers found the cabin; found that someone had been living there. He couldn’t go back there. He went off to the east coast and built a new life, or a part of one. I’ve only known him these last few years. He got cancer, in his throat and –’

‘What exactly would you like us to do Mrs Cameron?’ Jackson interrupted.

‘I need someone I can trust. I can’t go myself. You see he left it there. In the cabin.’

‘What did he leave Mrs Cameron?’ Sam asked soothingly as she gave Jackson a disapproving look.

‘His brother’s Purple Heart. He wanted to be buried with it.’

Jackson said they would take the case, which surprised Sam a little. He said there would be no fee if they were unsuccessful, which did not.

‘It beats following adulterers and malingerers. When you’ve been doing this as long as I have, you’ll know that unusual cases don’t come along that often.’

It was true, Jackson reflected. He got to see a lot of the less noble side of human nature. You got used to it after a while. He worked hard not to get too cynical. It got easier when you realised that things always followed the same patterns. When people behaved badly they tended not to be too creative about it.

Mrs Cameron had provided them with an old forest ranger’s map that had the location of the cabin marked on it in china graph pencil. The map was dated 1955, Jackson noted.

‘I’ll do it,’ said Sam. ‘You don’t have to hold my hand all the time.’

‘Interesting cases don’t come along that often,’ he repeated, ‘besides, I could use the fresh air.’

The next morning she had shown up at the office dressed in hiking clothes. They suited her he thought.

‘Which is better, hiking boots or wellingtons?’ she asked.

‘Well-ing-tons?’ he said in amazement, suddenly sounding very American, ‘What are well-ing-tons?’ He laughed when she told him. She thought that they had long ago exhausted the differences between British English and American English that seemed to please him so much.

‘What you mean is ‘gumboots’. Pretty appropriate for a gumshoe like yourself,’ he chuckled.

She ended up wearing the hiking boots. He drove and she navigated. They had lunch in a rain swept roadside diner. She told him that she had had a letter from England - from her mother. Her mother wanted to know when Sam was coming home. Sam didn’t know what to tell her. Jackson was quiet for a while as he rearranged the little sachets of sugar. Then he told Sam about the Seahawks game.

‘This is the closest we can get on the road,’ she said. She had brought a GPS handset and programmed the location of the cabin into it. Jackson had been sceptical about the GPS unit, ‘It’s pretty dense forest there. It’s not like English woodland.’

‘It’s less than half a mile from here,’ she said. ‘There’s no path marked on the map. Maybe we can find one.’ She was already clambering down from the raised roadway, already half swallowed by the ferns of the forest floor.

‘OK,’ said Jackson, ‘just remember where we parked.’

They walked quietly for a while. Sam checked the GPS every minute or so. The forest seemed to grow larger, older and wetter with each step they took.

He had been in the forest before but every time was a revelation. There was the same sense you had when entering a cathedral. Like you were entering a huge space that had been carefully designed for contemplation and awe.

‘Look at the size of these trees!’ exclaimed Sam

Jackson looked up. The trees towered above them. Some of them must have been over one hundred feet tall he thought. They had great sweeping branches that stretched wide and high, made muscular and animal by the layers of hairy epiphyte mosses that hung from them as if they were the limbs of woolly mammoths or giant sloths.

The epiphyte mosses were fragile things. They fed off moisture in the air and very little else. It was a precarious existence but they grew luxuriantly here in the wet forest.

‘All I need is the air that I breathe,’ said Jackson as he studied a large beard of moss that hung down across the path in front of them.

Sam looked at him with an amused smirk, waiting for him to complete the lyric. He caught her eye and gave her his best innocent little boy smile.

The GPS receiver beeped. Jackson watched as Sam checked it.

‘There’s no signal here,’ she said. She knew that he wouldn’t say ‘I told you so.’ Somehow she found that more irritating than if he had done.

‘It can’t be far,’ she said, ‘We just need to keep heading in this direction.’

‘What direction is that precisely?’ he asked.

‘This one.’ And she set off again, picking her way through the ferns that grew almost to her chin.

‘I think we should check on the map!’ he called after her.

‘There’s nothing on the map to check,’ she shouted back.

He hurried after her, banging his shin on a hidden log that was submerged beneath the sea of ferns. Jackson felt himself growing angry as he tried to keep up. She was stubborn sometimes – she made rash decisions and stuck to them: like coming to Seattle in the first place, like coming to work for him, like deciding whether she was going to go home.

He caught up with her where the thick stands of trees and ferns thinned out a little. There was a depression in the forest floor before them that stretched away to their right - perhaps a stream that had long ago been submerged by the rain of forest detritus and the choking of thick mosses. A fallen tree lay across the wet ground there.

Jackson made his way towards the steep bank at one end of the depression. He realised that Sam was climbing up onto the fallen tree.

‘That tree looks pretty slippery,’ he said.

She didn’t reply.

‘You know that moss could be covering some pretty deep mud,’

‘It’s fine.’

‘It looks pretty wet there,’ Jackson said as he picked his way around and up the bank that skirted the bog.

‘It’s fine, OK.’

He saw Sam lose her footing on the slick wood. Her right foot plunged into the mossy ground and she sank in up to her knee.

His heart missed a beat.

‘Goddamit, why don’t you listen to me. Just once!’ Why was he shaking?

She twisted her leg free and then used the log to steady herself as she tried to climb back onto it. Her left foot slipped and she plunged back into the mud with both feet. He saw her breathing heavily, trying to contain her own anger.

‘I hate this place!’ she screamed.

Jackson felt something welling up inside him. Something that was not quite anger. Something unstoppable.

‘Well maybe you should just go back to England then!’ he yelled.

There was silence then, but as Sam listened she thought that it was not real silence. She could hear the life of the old forest: above - the gentle sighing of the breathing epiphytes, below - the slow but relentless mulching of the dead and all around - the hour hand creep of the strong growth of trees.

‘Wellies,’ she said and turned to look back at him.

‘Excuse me?’ he shot back.

‘People normally just call them wellies.’

Jackson looked at her with astonishment. Then his face broke into a broad smile. Then he laughed, his deep, booming laugh that seemed as large as the trees.

‘Wellies? That’s perfect!’

She walked slowly out of the mud. As she began to make her way up to him she heard the GPS handset beep. When she reached Jackson up on the bank she realised that the rising ground there gave them a much better view of the sky. The GPS locked on again. She plotted their position on the map. ‘We’re almost there,’ she said studying the receiver again, ‘it’s less than fifty metres that way,’ she pointed and then set off following her own finger.

‘That’s about fifty five yards!’ she called back over her shoulder.

Jackson hurried after her through the heavy undergrowth, pulling aside beard mosses that hung down in his path. He wanted to apologise to her. To say that he didn’t mean what he had said. He would apologise, but he knew that he didn’t need to. She understood him, and he understood her. What they had built was like the epiphytes, something so fragile that it was barely alive, feeding on almost nothing, but at the same time it was ancient and strong and growing.

‘There!’ she said and pointed.

Jackson caught up with her and whistled softly, ‘Our boy wasn’t in any danger of getting drafted from here,’ he said. The cabin was small and stood at one edge of what passed for a clearing in this part of the woods, in that it was free of trees but crowded with ferns and overhung with epiphytes. The roof of the cabin was covered with an inches-thick carpet of green orange moss and the walls had turned the same rich green as the tree trunks but the windows were still glazed and the door was shut.

They picked their way through the ferns. Jackson peered in through the dusty window while Sam tried the door. It opened with little effort.

Inside the cabin was a single room that contained a wooden table and chair and a metal camp bed. There was an old iron stove in the fireplace and a few empty cans stood at the foot of it. Above one of the windows was a small wooden shelf. Jackson reached up on to it and retrieved the only item it contained – a bloated, mouldering copy of ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac.

‘So, she wasn’t too specific about where he left it then?’ said Jackson.

Sam shook her head.

‘She just said that he hid it somewhere in the cabin.’

‘How many places can it be?’ asked Jackson looking around. He went over to the camp bed and began knocking on the frame of it. Sam opened the stove and poked around in the ashes with an unburned piece of kindling.

They searched for a long while, Jackson tapped each brick in the fireplace, and Sam stood on the table and checked the space between each rafter and the corrugated metal roof, without success.

‘Wait!’ said Jackson suddenly.

Sam looked round. He was kneeling by the fireplace, holding a finger up as if asking her to be silent. She stood very still on the table. Her feet felt very cold and wet now. She wished that she had worn Wellingtons.

‘Listen,’ said Jackson.

She listened hard but heard nothing.

‘There! C’mere!’ he waved her down frantically. She climbed off the table and knelt down on the floor next to him. They waited for what seemed like a long time.

She heard it. It was a very faint, hard, wet sound. Jackson shuffled excitedly toward the door and pressed his ear to the floor.

She heard the noise again and then again moments later - a very slow and quiet drumming. Jackson scuttled over towards the bed a few feet and then began furiously dusting the floorboards there.

Sam saw that beneath the muck and lichen that Jackson had scraped away, the floorboard had been cut and replaced. Jackson levered his pocketknife under the cut board and prised it up. He reached into the cavity below the board and drew out an old tobacco tin. It was wet and rusted.

‘There’s water running along the underside of the joist here,’ he said, peering into the cavity. ‘It was dripping onto the tin where the floorboard had been cut.’

Jackson prised open the lid. Inside was a tightly wrapped piece of leather. He opened it out, inside that was a plastic bag, and inside that a wad of tissue paper. He dusted his hands carefully before opening out the tissue paper. He lifted something from the paper and laid it across his left palm.

It was smaller than she thought it would be. Not much more than an inch across. It was heart shaped, but the medal itself was black with a gold border rather than the purple she had imagined. There was a face in profile in the centre of the medal. She didn’t know who it was, but he looked familiar - someone from one of the dollar bills. One of the old presidents, she guessed. The medal had a short purple ribbon with a white trim.

‘The tell-tale heart,’ said Jackson.

She looked at him blankly.

‘It’s a story by Poe. This guy murders an old man and buries him under the floorboards. He thinks he’s got away with it, but when the police come round he hears the heart beating under the floor, so he confesses everything. But the noise isn’t real. It’s just in his head.’

‘It’s not exactly the same is it,’ she said presently.

‘No,’ he admitted.

She took his hand in both of hers and turned it a little so that she could see the medal better.

‘I mean, after all,’ she said slowly, ‘this is a real thing isn’t it? It’s not just in our heads.’

She looked at him. For a moment his face seemed old and sad and then he smiled.

‘I guess not,’ he said.