A Secret Rage

by Charlaine Harris

  ‘That’ll be the hard one,’ I said soberly.

  ‘I don’t know. I think Jeff Simmons is worse. I spent fifteen minutes this morning, when I was supposed to be grading papers, trying to think of a way to ask the Houghton College president what his blood type is.’ Barbara wrinkled her nose and her glasses slid. I pushed them back up before her hand could reach her nose. She looked at me comically, and we both laughed.

  ‘I feel good,’ I confessed.

  ‘Me too.’ Barbara took a bite from a cookie. ‘I don’t know why. What we’re doing is dangerous.’

  ‘Not unless he knows about semen containing blood secretions,’ I pointed out. ‘Not the world’s best-known fact. Out of all of them, only Tendall will be aware of that, I imagine.’

  ‘It would have to be the most common blood type,’ Barbara said ruefully. ‘I’m O positive myself.’

  ‘I’m A negative.’

  ‘The school has a blood drive every year. A mobile van comes by. Stan went with me last year to give. His type is O negative.’

  ‘Even though he was never on the list, I’m glad,’ I said after a moment. ‘That would have been too horrible.’ It had gone without saying that Stan couldn’t have leaped out of his car and beaten Barbara to her apartment.

  Barbara looked straight ahead. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘So we work on our five.’

  ‘You think the blood van went to the police department?’ I asked.

  She thought. ‘I seem to remember that it did,’ she said uncertainly.

  ‘Stay here a second.’ I fished a dime out of my purse and went to the phone booth in the student-center lobby. I flipped through the tiny Knolls phone book.

  ‘Police Department,’ said a bored voice.

  ‘Detective John Tendall, please.’

  Click click. Buzz. ‘John Tendall speaking.’

  That flat voice called to mind some unpleasant memories. I screwed my eyelids tightly shut. ‘This is Elsie Smith from the blood bank, Mr Tendall,’ I said rapidly and nasally. ‘We have an urgent call for B negative blood. Can you come in and donate?’

  ‘There must be some kind of mix-up,’ Detective Tendall said. ‘You people need to get your records straight. My blood type is O positive.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, my goodness,’ I fluttered, ‘I’ve pulled the wrong card. Thanks anyway.’

  ‘All right,’ Tendall said, and hung up.

  I returned to our table and reported to Barbara in triumph.

  ‘Good for you!’ she said, and grinned.

  ‘But he’s still on the list.’

  ‘What if he’d said, “Okay, I’ll be right down”?’

  We laughed before we simultaneously realized that if Tendall was the guilty man, his discovery that the blood bank call was phony would’ve put him on the alert.

  ‘But I’ll take my laughs where I can find them, nowadays,’ Barbara remarked, and I had to agree with her.

  ‘What if they’re all O positive?’ I said dismally.

  ‘Then it’ll be my turn to think of something,’ Barbara said. She folded her list. ‘Having worked down from a few hundred to five, I’m not about to give up.’

  ‘That’s the spirit. Yea, team!’

  We clumsily punched each other on the shoulder like hearty men, and went our separate ways.

  * * * *

  ‘White gloves, do you remember?’ Mimi smoothed back her mane and smiled at me before she returned her attention to driving. The Cochrans lived close to the college, she’d told me, but on a little suburban loop behind the big houses that faced the college.

  ‘But we carried them, we didn’t wear them.’

  ‘I still have four pair tucked away under my nightgowns,’ she confessed. ‘One pair has little pink rosebuds at the wrists. I can’t imagine when I’ll ever use them, but I just can’t bring myself to throw them away.’

  ‘I threw mine in the fire one night when I was trying to liberate myself from southernness.’

  ‘Why on earth would you want to do that?’

  ‘Now, Mimi, you know there was a lot of garbage we had fed us along with our grits and pralines.’ A figure of speech – neither Mimi nor I would touch grits with a tenfoot pole; though pralines were another matter.

  Mimi pursed her lips thoughtfully as she mulled this over. ‘Oh, sure,’ she admitted. ‘But you know, we’re a dying breed. We’ve got to preserve what we are. You never hear a real heavy accent anymore, except every now and then, like Alicia’s. You never heard anything like the way Grandmother said “water.” Six syllables, at least. It’s Johnny Carson’s fault.’

  ‘The Tonight Show? Johnny Carson is responsible for the decline of southern accents?’

  ‘Sho ’nuff,’ Mimi said with a wild grin. ‘Have you ever heard Johnny Carson say “water”? Nothing to it!’

  Mimi was still expounding on her latest theory when we pulled into the driveway of a very modest ranch-suburban house, the kind you don’t even have to enter to know the floor plan. She stopped in midsentence to glare at a stamped metal eagle, her particular abomination, which was nailed above the front door.

  Sarah Chase Cochran met us at the door with a kind of subdued frenzy of hospitality. Over her shoulder, I glimpsed Barbara looking rather relieved to see us. I was surprised to see her until I remembered she didn’t have any Thursday afternoon classes to teach.

  Mimi was playing hooky from her job. She’d told me that she put in so much phone time and committee work at night and on weekends that she felt perfectly justified in leaving her office a couple of hours early every now and then.

  ‘I’m so glad to see you,’ Sarah Chase was saying. ‘It seems like I never get to see you all anymore, so I just thought well, I’ll have Mimi and her friend over to tea so I can get to sit down and talk to them.’

  I perched on the lumpy plaid couch beside Barbara and answered the usual questions, posed to me in a gracious stream – how I liked Knolls, did I miss New York, how I felt about coming back ‘home,’ how wonderful it was that I was living with Mimi.

  Then Sarah Chase began catching up on Mimi’s activities – she must have already covered Barbara – and I had time to look around me.

  It was the kind of house only a strong personality can vanquish. Sarah Chase’s wasn’t strong enough. From the green shag rug to the smell of polish and cooking, from the decent bargain furniture interspersed with inherited antiques to the truly beautiful silver tea service that Sarah Chase lugged in presently with considerable effort, it was the kind of milieu that hopes to state, ‘Just here temporarily, soon moving up.’

  But Sarah Chase and Theo were somewhat beyond the age at which they should have moved up. The Cochrans were a few rungs behind on that invisible ladder, and Sarah Chase knew it. She was facing it with dignity. I wondered if it was their daughter’s awful illness that had kept the Cochrans down, that had given Sarah Chase the look of someone who’s beaten but won’t leave the ring.

  On the fake mantel stood a picture of a girl I assumed was Nell. She was a plain child but had a liveliness about her face that made her attractive. I wondered if Nell was in the house. I recalled the frozen look on Theo’s face when Barbara had mentioned Nell’s illness at the party, and decided not to risk asking.

  But Mimi braved it. Mimi is awfully good at expressing grave concern. She has a special look for it that isn’t insincere though it’s predetermined. I have accidentally glimpsed the same expression on my own face, in mirrors. So I guess we learned it. The brows draw in to form a pucker above the nose, the mouth assumes a sober line, and one looks directly into the eyes of the object of concern.

  ‘She’s back in the hospital,’ our hostess said with a tiny shake of her head. ‘St Jude’s, in Memphis. Of course, we don’t expect . . .’ Her voice trailed off.

  Didn’t expect Nell to live? Didn’t expect miracles? Didn’t expect Nell would ever come home again?

  With my new empathy for suffering, I felt a fraction of what Sarah Chase and Theo must have been enduring. Thei
r only child was in the process of dying and they were helpless. I glanced at Barbara and saw from her expression that the same thing was crossing her mind. We had a raw surface for pain. We understood helplessness. In a minute, Sarah Chase would see that empathy too. Though I barely knew the woman, that silver service somehow told me that she’d hate to be the object of raw emotion.

  I plunged clumsily into school reminiscences. Soon we were dredging up little anecdotes from our years at Miss Beacham’s. Sarah Chase told us, with more sparkle than she’d yet shown, how it felt to be a student there and at the same time be related to the founder. The Founder.

  ‘I remember taking Theo to meet Aunt Martha for the first time,’ she said with a little smile as she handed around the cookies and nuts again. ‘My Lord, was he scared! And in awe, too. Of course, my whole family talks about Aunt Martha like she was God Almighty. I think we nieces and nephews thought she was, when we were little.’

  ‘How did you meet Theo?’ Mimi asked smoothly. She was determined to keep up this line of talk, since it was obviously cheering to Sarah Chase.

  ‘Well, we were at college together. My whole family is in education, so naturally,’ she said, with a deprecating wave of her hands, ‘I was going to be a teacher too. And Theo wanted to be in the administrative part of education . . . we were in a lot of the same classes. It just kind of happened.’ She shrugged and smiled and looked almost pretty.

  ‘Is Theo’s family in education, too?’ Barbara asked gamely.

  ‘No, he’s a first,’ Sarah Chase responded a little too brightly; so I knew that Theo had pulled himself up by his bootstraps.

  I began to admire Theo Cochran. I knew what it was like to start out at the bottom, unknown, in a profession that depended a great deal on grace and favor and contacts. Mimi was fond of Theo, though she thought him a fuss-budget. He’d modernized Houghton’s record system thoroughly, and was adored by the ladies who worked for him.

  There are lots of good people in the world, I told myself. That was all too easy to forget nowadays. I compared my grievance against fate to the one Theo and Sarah Chase bore. For once, the violence that had been done to me seemed petty. After all, I’d survived it, and it had been over in maybe fifteen minutes. The Cochrans’ ordeal might drag on for years.

  ‘I tried to call you Saturday morning about the faculty Christmas party,’ our hostess was telling Barbara. Mimi looked startled; then she gave a shrug and turned her attention back to the conversation. It did seem a little early to start planning for Christmas. We hadn’t even had Thanksgiving yet. But when a large party was being planned, which had to take place before the faculty scattered for vacation, I supposed you couldn’t start too soon.

  Barbara was explaining she’d been out shopping. ‘Where’s it going to be this year?’ she asked. There followed a logistics debate on the amount of food, liquor, and tables necessary, which degenerated into a discussion of the character of the faculty wife who’d planned the party the year before.

  Theo came in just as they’d settled the whole thing. I was wondering what the other committee members were going to say when Sarah Chase and Barbara presented them with a fait accompli. Mimi, forgetting to mind her expression, was looking faintly bored and stealing glances at her watch.

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies!’ Theo said cheerfully. He kissed Sarah Chase with surprising vigor and looked at us (grouped graciously around the silver) with considerable satisfaction. Whatever else we were – Mimi, Barbara, Sarah Chase, and I – we were bona fide ladies, modern version; and there we were, sitting properly around Theo’s living room chattering. I understood his pleasure now that I’d seen his home and knew more about him; but that obvious satisfaction made me want to say something shocking or sit with my knees askew. I pinched myself surreptitiously for penance.

  ‘All quiet at the college?’ Mimi asked too brightly. She had been getting ready to leave and now felt obliged to stay a few more minutes.

  ‘Yes. Even if Mimi Houghton played hooky this afternoon, the walls were still standing when I left.’ Theo filched a cookie off the plate, and Sarah Chase smiled at him and shook her head in mock admonishment. The affection between them was alive and touching.

  ‘Oh, by the way,’ Theo told Mimi, ‘I checked this afternoon, and Heidi Edmonds didn’t go to Miss Beacham’s.’

  Mimi and I absorbed this without surprise or comment. Barbara looked bewildered. I made a sign to her that I’d explain later. She responded with a look indicating she had something to tell me. I wondered if she’d extracted Theo’s blood type from Sarah Chase.

  ‘Oh, I’m so relieved these awful things aren’t related to Aunt Martha’s school in any way. Theo had thought of it, and he told me you’d thought of it too,’ Sarah Chase said.

  Mimi thanked Theo for checking. ‘I know it was a long shot, but we were just trying to think of anything we could.’

  Theo looked sober, almost grim, and I knew he was thinking that Sarah Chase was out of the pattern and perhaps safe, since there was no Beacham’s tie-in. He put his hand on her shoulder and kept it there. Poor old Theo, with all his troubles. It would be a pleasure to mark his name off the list.

  ‘Listen, what are you all doing for Thanksgiving?’ Mimi said to switch the subject.

  ‘We’re driving over to Aunt Martha’s,’ Sarah Chase answered. ‘I’m afraid this is our Thanksgiving to keep her company. She has nieces and nephews to the feast on rotation.’

  Mimi and I had to laugh at the thought of Miss Beacham marshaling her relatives as she’d marshaled the girls in her care.

  ‘What about you, Barbara?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. It’s too long a drive to go home for just a couple of days.’

  ‘Well, come have your turkey with us,’ I urged her.

  ‘Okay. I’d love to,’ Barbara said happily. I realized she’d been dreading a lonely holiday that would remind her at every minute of Stan’s defection.

  ‘Be prepared to eat more than your share,’ Mimi warned her. ‘Cully and Nick are going out to a party the night before, so they may not be in shape to really dig in!’ Mimi turned to Sarah Chase. ‘Are you sure you can’t come?’ she asked.

  ‘I wish we could; it’s sweet of you to ask, isn’t it, Theo? But Aunt Martha’s Thanksgiving is a command performance. We’ll be leaving early Thursday morning and coming back Friday. We get to pick up Nell at the hospital in Memphis. We got permission. She just loves Aunt Martha; whenever Nell’s in the hospital, Aunt Martha goes to see her every day.’

  With that amazing piece of information, Mimi and I widened our eyes at each other and rose to take our leave. I was glad to go. I was oddly restless and uneasy. Maybe the thought of Nell Cochran oppressed me.

  Barbara got up hastily, too, and after a search for her handbag (which had worked its way under the couch) we were all out the door in a flurry of ‘Enjoyed it’ and ‘Please come see us next time.’

  A chilly mist brushed my face and made my hair go limp as we walked to the car. Barbara shuddered and stood for a second looking at the sky. A Scottie was lifting his leg against her car tires. She sighed. ‘Thanks again for the Thanksgiving invitation,’ she said gratefully.

  Mimi had slung her purse onto the front seat and had one leg inside. ‘Listen, why don’t you come over Wednesday night before Thanksgiving?’ she asked Barbara suddenly. ‘Since Nickie and Cully are going out, I’ll need help wrestling with the damn turkey. I have the worst time getting the legs out of that metal brace, when I’m ready to pull the innards out. And we can share some wine.’

  ‘Okay,’ Barbara said after a moment’s hesitation. She was obviously afraid that Mimi was only asking out of pity. ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven-thirty, I guess.’

  ‘I’ll bring the wine, and you have to let me know what I can cook and bring for the Thanksgiving table,’ Barbara said firmly.

  Mimi gave her a brilliant smile. ‘Sure I will,’ she said. ‘I look forward to it, the whole holiday.’ Then Mimi scoo
ted out of the weather and into the front seat. I folded my longer legs and got in more slowly.

  ‘What was it that surprised you when Sarah Chase and Barbara were talking about the Christmas party?’ I asked Mimi curiously, after she’d negotiated the driveway.

  ‘What?’ she asked blankly.

  ‘You had a pretty strange expression—’

  ‘Oh, that,’ she interrupted. ‘Well—’ Suddenly the Scottie shot across the road in front of us, I gasped, Mimi slammed on the brakes, and we began to skid on the mistslick blacktop. We screeched to a stop about a foot from a mailbox. The Scottie scampered across a lawn, quite unhurt, and Mimi swore for half a minute while belated adrenaline made my mouth taste metallic.

  ‘You better get one of those bumper stickers,’ I advised when Mimi had started driving again. ‘One that says “Warning: I brake for animals.” ’

  ‘Might not be a bad idea,’ Mimi said dryly, and then, glancing at the sky, added, ‘Oh hell, look at that rain.’ It hit the windshield as if someone had thrown a bucket of water at us.

  The heavy gray of the sky, the wind, and the cold rain turned the day into one of those classic early-winter nasties.

  Cully was already home. He opened the kitchen door as we scurried from the car. The kitchen light silhouetted him in the doorway; and the sight of that tall thin outline filled me with a rush of love that made me a little short of breath. I found I was too thankful for the warmth Cully and I had begun to share to ask any more questions about motivation or permanence. I came out of the cold rain into the warmth and comfort of the kitchen. ‘If I were watching a movie, I’d call that symbolic,’ I murmured to the cats as I hung up my coat.

  * * * *

  It was certainly our week for being entertained. Mimi had to answer the phone just when Cully was saying that Elaine and Don had invited us over for Friday night. I nodded assent glumly. I’d seen Elaine a few times since our confrontation a few weeks before, but though we’d made our outward peace, we were both well aware we just plain didn’t like each other.

  I passed Cully another biscuit, and reflected idly that Mimi must have taken her call upstairs, since I couldn’t hear her voice in the hall.