Manhunt. Volume 9, Number 1, February 1961

For a while Anton labored with a grim determination and a goal of his own. If eventually he were to dig up every grain of soil on the premises, he would inevitably discover Stella’s second grave. So he worked overtime on the projects Mrs. Kopping assigned to him — not six days a week, but seven — not eight hours a day, but twelve. The fiery pain in his back grew hotter every day, but the more he suffered, it seemed, the stronger his determination became.

Gradually, however, certain doubts began to assail him. Mrs. Kopping had kept him busy every daylight moment on new projects, on turning over turf in new areas. But Stella couldn’t have been buried under virgin grass without the grass having been disturbed in some way. She was somewhere then where the earth had already been cultivated at the time of her death. So he tried to remember what places those were, such as the rose border along the drive. And he tried to find a few spare minutes every day to search those old areas. Mrs. Kopping, however, was a difficult task-mistress. His spare time was almost non-existent.

Then there came other doubts. If Mrs. Kopping had been physically capable of moving Stella’s corpse once, she could have done it twice. He could therefore have searched a certain area, only to have Mrs. Kopping move the corpse to that area the very night following the day he had searched it.

The next doubt which occurred to him was still worse. He had long cherished the certainty that Stella had been buried a second time, that Mrs. Kopping had dug another hole in the ground. Then quite suddenly one day he realized that the corpse might be hidden somewhere in the house. He sensed the relative impossibility of this, of course, because he knew that dead bodies rotted and smelled, and that a dead body couldn’t be kept in the house very long. But the notion nagged him anyway, so that he tried whenever he could — and never very successfully — to elude Mrs. Kopping and the housekeeper, and roam through some of the rooms. Sniff as he might though, and imagine as he might, no telltale odor ever reached his nostrils.

The final doubt was the worst of all. It came to him one night in his bed, when he was so weary and pain-racked that the slightest movement shot bolts of agony through his torso. Yet when this doubt came to him, he sat suddenly upright in the bed, a scream involuntarily escaping his lips, a scream both of physical pain and of mental shock.

Suppose that somehow Mrs. Kopping had destroyed Stella’s corpse. Suppose it no longer existed anywhere!

If that were true, she’d been bluffing all this time. She had no evidence against him, no bonds to harness him like a dumb beast to these nine acres of hell. To have suffered all this for nothing!

Could she have destroyed or disposed of the body? His tortured mind raced through a hundred fantastic schemes for doing away with a human corpse, but without any of them seeming logically possible. Yet he could not banish this doubt any more than the others. It remained with him, like a plague of fire-ants, nibbling at his quivering flesh, eating him alive.

He did not know how much time passed. He measured days from dawn to dusk, from the morning when he dragged his unwilling body to the yoke of the shovel and the spade, to the evening when he crawled back to his bed, seeking oblivion in a sound sleep which he could never attain. He had no measurements for weeks or months. The years, of course, ticked off on nature’s clock of awakening plants, of green things growing, budding, flowering, then finally withering, dying, carcasses returning to the soil.

And the years notched themselves too on his own carcass, once upright and sturdy, but now bending ever lower and lower, it too succumbing to the magnetic attraction of the earth for the dust it has lent to life. The pain in his back was now a permanent fact of his existence, like eating or breathing. It was still pain, yet he could not have done without it, for it was his only companion, another self, so overwhelmingly ever-present that it could make him forget his own self — the Anton Vandrak who had committed murder.

So his pain had a merciful aspect too, blotting out his conscience as it did. Does a wrong-doer need to know that what he is suffering is punishment for the thing to be punishment? Not so Anton Vandrak at least. His feeling could scarcely be termed remorse. He wanted Stella back, yes — but not the live Stella. He was a man with a great yearning for a corpse.

But although Anton aged, it did not seem that Harriet Kopping did. She went on watching him from her upper windows, a slave-driver with an invisible whip in her hand. She remained erect, her eyes bright and sharp-seeing, her attitude as basically inscrutable as ever.