Free The Straw Men by Michael Marshall Page A

through a call from a passing motorist. Officers Spurling and McGregor remained on the scene until the ambulance and fire service arrived, and assisted in the removal of the bodies from the car. They followed the ambulance to the hospital, and Spurling had been present when Donald and Philippa Hopkins had been pronounced dead on arrival. The deceased had been identified by their driver’s licenses, with subsequent confirmation from Harold Davids (attorney) and Mary Richards (neighbor) within two hours.
    Officer Spurling was sympathetic to my desire to establish the circumstances of my parents’ death. He providedme with the name of the relevant doctor at the hospital, and suggested I look into counseling. I took him to mean receiving some, rather than as a career. I thanked him for his time, and he wished me the very best. I ended the call hoping I didn’t run into him when I went to the station to retrieve my gun, though chances were he already knew all about it. The counseling suggestion hadn’t sounded entirely uninflected.
    Tracking down the doctor was a good deal more difficult. She wasn’t on duty when I called the hospital, and the length of time it took to elicit this information, via a succession of conversations with harried nurses and other disembodied and bad-tempered voices, suggested that I’d be lucky to get her on the phone when she arrived. The ER was there for the living. Once you were dead you were merely an unwelcome reminder, and out of their hands.
    I drove over and spent a very quiet hour waiting there. Dr. Michaels eventually deigned to come out of her bunker and talk to me. She was in her late twenties, studiously harassed, and awfully pleased with herself. After patronizing me for a few moments she confirmed what I’d already been told. Major head and upper body trauma. Dead as dead could be. If that was all, could I excuse her. She was very grown up now, and had patients to see. I was more than happy to relinquish her company, and tempted to help her along her way with a brisk shove.
    I walked back out of the hospital. The light was gone, a fall evening come early. A few cars were parked randomly around the lot, made monochromatic and anonymous by high overhead lamps. A young woman stood smoking and crying quietly, some distance away.
    I considered what to do next. After finding the note, I’d sat on the coffee table for quite some time. Neither the light-headedness nor the crawling sensation in my stomach went away. A search through the rest of the book showedthat it was empty. There was no question that the note was in my father’s handwriting.
    “Ward,” it read, in writing that was in no way different from what I would expect, neither too large nor too small, not forced or noticeably faint. “We’re not dead.” My father had written this on a piece of paper, slipped it into a book, and then stashed it inside his old chair, taking care to replace the braid that covered the join. A note denying their death had been placed in a position where it would come to light only if they were dead. Why else would I be in the house alone? What would I be doing in his chair? The positioning of the note suggested that whoever had placed it believed that, in the circumstances that next led me to be in the house, I would sit in the old chair—despite knowing it was the least comfortable in the room. As it happened, they’d been right. I had sat there, and for some time. It made sense that I would do so if they were dead, or that I would at least look at it, maybe run my hand over the fabric for a moment. It was exactly the kind of thing a grieving son might be expected to do.
    But, and this was the point that kept jabbing away at me, this implied that some time before their deaths one or both of them had spent time thinking about what would be likely to happen after they died. They had considered the situation in detail, and made judgments on my likely behavior. Why? Why would they be thinking of