I was more confused than I had ever been in my life.
I will never know how I did it. I don’t think all of me was in my body that night. I think part of me just got up and left. What remained handled it. I did get through the rest of the evening.
12
WHAT COULD I tell Barbara? I didn’t think I’d see her until Monday. She had a date with her fellow professor, J. R. Smith, on Saturday. She really was going to learn how to play poker. Cully and I were going to a nearby state park on Sunday, to shuffle through the falling leaves and have a change of scene.
I surprised Cully with the enthusiasm of my leaf shuffling. I bounded, I sang, I talked about my classes, I told him I thought my mother was improving. I was a one-woman band all day. Cully was obviously a little puzzled by my frenetic mood, but he tried gamely to enter in. I even tried to lose myself in passion; and for an amazing hour among the leaves I succeeded.
I told myself over and over that Don was leaving town Monday night, for a whole week. If nothing happened before he left, I’d have a week to think, a week to decide what I must do and who I should keep faith with – Mimi or Barbara.
I lay awake most of Sunday night, waiting. Those hours of torment were the penalty for my indecisiveness. Every second Monday morning, as I sat through my classes or walked down the halls, I was terrified that someone would come up to me and begin, ‘Oh, Nickie, did you hear about the girl last night . . .’
By midmorning, when Barbara met me in the student center to tell me Theo was type O like Don and Detective Tendall, it hardly seemed to matter. I was glad she was in a hurry to get to a conference with a student. To preserve at least a partial faith, I told her about Charles’s weak head for blood. But I didn’t mention Don.
At three o’clock I knew the Houghtons’ flight had taken off from the Memphis airport. I was sitting in the library snapping the point off my pencil and sharpening it again, to the discomfort of the students around me. Their faces became even more guarded when I shut my eyes and said a brief and silent thanksgiving.
Now I had time.
That night, I buried myself in the paper due that week, and in studying for one remaining test. I finished the paper. Cully laughed at my reading glasses and typed my paper for me while I studied.
‘Your handwriting is terrible, but your paper is very good,’ he told me, and I felt myself turn pink with pleasure. I dived back into my books, as much to dodge thinking as to make a good grade.
* * * *
I trudged home after Tuesday’s test, my eyes watering in the sharp wind, and found Detective Markowitz waiting on the front steps. It was almost as if I’d conjured him up. With the test out of the way, my mind had been running around and around my dilemma.
‘You’re looking better,’ he said approvingly. ‘How you feel, darlin’?’
‘I feel a lot better, too,’ I lied. It would have been the truth a few days ago. I smiled at him. He still looked tired and world-weary, but there was an air of cheer about him that I enjoyed. It was quite a change.
‘I swear, I had no idea you was such a beauty,’ he testified as I unlocked the front door. I told him to come on in.
After he refused coffee or cola, I perched on the couch and asked him what I could do for him. ‘Something new?’ I said hopefully.
‘Well, not much, but something,’ he said. I had known there was a reason for that cheer.
‘Fact is, we’ve eliminated a mighty lot of people. Now, you might not think that’s much,’ he said as he saw my face fall, ‘but in police work, that’s a lot. It’s not like in the books. The sooner we get suspects out of the way, false suspects, the sooner we can get at the real one. And I’ve worked so hard and so long on these cases that I just decided I’d be happy about that.’
Even as he told me this, his little manufactured happiness vanished. ‘I’ve got a daughter myself, you know,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re doing everything we possibly can, honey. So I decided to drop by, again; I know it’s hard on you, having to think about it—’
What else had I been doing?
‘—but I thought I’d ask, one more time, if there was anything, any tiny thing, you’ve recalled since we last talked to you. The last time I saw you, it was still just a week after. I thought maybe you might have thought of something by now, now you’ve had time to calm a little.’
‘Well,’ I said hesitantly.
He pounced. ‘Something?’
I knew I was going to let him down. ‘This is going to sound stupid,’ I began. ‘I don’t remember anything specific, but I do know there’s something to remember. It hasn’t come to me yet, though.’
‘I see,’ he said doubtfully.
‘There’s an impression I got,’ I blundered on. ‘But it won’t come to mind yet. I told you this was going to sound stupid.’
‘No, no,’ he said politely. ‘Call me, any hour, any day. I’m in the book. If you remember. Now, as long as I’m here, would you feel like going over the thing with me again?’
There was nothing I felt less like doing. But of course I said I would.
‘I couldn’t tell how tall, because he was bending over the bed,’ I started out. ‘But not extremely tall, I think.’ I looked at my feet to concentrate better. Markowitz’s brown eyes were too eager. He was on edge and desperate to get something definite out of me. I didn’t have anything to give him.
‘He was pretty heavy,’ I said. I bit my lip. ‘He was white. He didn’t sound very young. Not a kid’s voice.’ I rummaged through my memory. I had thought my film was so exact, but it had been skipping things lately, thank God. ‘Nothing else,’ I said finally. ‘I just can’t form any other conclusions. It was so dark, and with the pillow over my face . . .’
‘Sure, sure,’ Markowitz said hastily. He didn’t want me crying on him. He reached up to check his Jerry Lee Lewis hairdo. It was a weary gesture.
Then I had it.
‘He was bald!’ I shouted.
The detective’s head snapped up. His brown eyes glittered from that blank face. ‘What?’ he said intently.
‘He was bald,’ I said more slowly. I had it now; I remembered. That nagging feeling, like an itch beneath a cast, was gone.
Markowitz looked as though he wanted to turn me upside down and shake the information loose. ‘How do you know?’
‘My arms . . . when he . . .’ I took a deep breath to brace myself. ‘When he lay on top of me, my arms were crossed over my bosom, and the top of his head brushed them, and I felt scalp, not hair.’
The detective actually grabbed my arm. ‘Are you sure?’ His voice was little more than a whisper.
‘Yes.’
Markowitz leapt to his feet. Excitement was jolting through him like an amphetamine. He walked to a window, ran a hand over his hair again, put both hands in his pockets, took them out. His hair was so carefully waved that it looked like a toupee. I wondered suddenly if his partner Tendall did indeed wear a toupee. That thick gray hair, so carefully styled . . .
‘How bald?’ He swung to face me.
‘What?’
‘Completely bald? Or just a little hair combed across the scalp? Or bald on top, with hair around the sides of his head?’
I tried to make the memory more specific. I closed my eyes. I actually crossed my arms over my breasts.
‘I don’t know. I can’t remember any more than that,’ I said finally.
Markowitz accepted my word, to my surprise. It seemed he was so excited at finally having a real clue that he could barely wait to get back to the police station to tell his partner Tendall. And he was proud, I could tell. He’d come back to see me that one additional time, without real hope, just because he was a good cop, and a desperate cop. I didn’t tell him that if he hadn’t had the habit of running his hand over his hair, I never would have remembered.
Markowitz said goodbye hastily and absently. From the front window, I watched him actually do a little dance step before he got into his car. Then he turned and waved.
I walked back to the bedroom and threw myself down on the bed. Now I understood why I’d felt so oddly uneasy around Don and Charles. That evening at Don and Elaine’s, when I’d seen the lamp shining on Don’s bald head, I’d remembered there was something to remember. Charles’s hair was clearly thinning. He combed long strands across, but tanned scalp shone through. Thank God, Cully still had lots of hair.
But when I thought about it, I realized I’d met a lot of men in some stage of baldness since I’d come back to Knolls. Barbara’s friend – ex-friend – Stan. Theo. And I realized I could’ve saved Barbara her half-hour conversation with Jeff Simmons, now that I pictured his luxuriant blondness. I had to laugh when I visualized dignified Jeff Simmons skulking through the Houghton gardens in his three-piece suit. We had actually suspected him! I caught myself up sharp; I gave myself a slap. How could I laugh?
I could laugh. I gave myself permission. My responsibility was over. I’d done everything, every humanly possible thing, to help catch the man who’d attacked me and killed Alicia. The police wouldn’t go by our list. The police wanted facts. And I’d dredged up the very last fact I had. They had the blood type. They knew about the baldness. They’d listened to us when we told them the rapist knew us.
My part in this was over, I swore. My appointed role was that of victim. I’d been the very best little victim I could. I was sick to death of being a victim. I was turning in my pain, crawling out of the bog of suspicion and doubt. I would flounder in it no longer.
I shut a long narrow drawer inside me. The corpse it held was not quite dead; but I slammed the drawer shut with my own kind of ruthlessness. Maybe it would die for lack of air.
13
THE NEXT DAY, the day of the party, I hummed to myself in the bathroom all afternoon, doing things to myself I hadn’t done since I moved to Knolls. Facial treatments, creams, the whole battery of makeup I’d considered never using again, all came out of boxes and tubes I’d stuck far back in my vanity.
After applying them, I felt a cool sheen slip over me, the sheen I’d worn like armor in the city. It didn’t fit as well as it had. But I could still wear it. The New York Nickie had had her points. She’d had that wonderful gloss of safety most people don’t even know they possess until they lose it. She hadn’t been a victim.
For the first time in weeks, I consciously examined my face in the mirror. Today it seemed important; maybe the most important thing about me. I examined every pore, every wrinkle-in-the-making, as I once had done daily. I did my exercises, which had also been neglected lately. My muscles ached afterward. Cully the jogger would be proud of me.
I recalled all the warning stories I’d heard about what happened when you dropped that daily exam and tone-up. I could hear a friend (another model) relating with horror what had happened to a comrade of ours who’d married months before; inexplicably, she had wed an upstate farmer. ‘In weeks, Nickie, just weeks, she’s lost all her muscle tone,’ Cicely had told me in a voice filled with outrage and fear.
Loss of muscle tone; oh my goodness gracious. A fate worse than death. I snickered at the mirror and went on with my work.
Through the bathroom wall, I could hear the thunk of Mimi opening the oven door in the kitchen. She’d forgotten to make cornbread for the dressing and was worried about leaving it out all night to stale, since Mao and Attila had shown themselves partial to cornbread in the past.
Cully had gone to the college to catch up on his paperwork. Most of the students had left for home the day before. His secretary was at home making her own dressing. He was looking forward to the peace and quiet, he’d said, when I’d asked him if it didn’t make him feel uneasy to be alone in the empty psychology building. He had looked at me rather strangely. Of course, men weren’t supposed to be afraid. They didn’t have to be.
I pulled my thoughts away from that dreary track. Was I going to begrudge Cully the fact that he ran no chance of getting raped?
Back to frivolity. Maybe I should turn gay. I’d known plenty of women in New York who liked their own kind, at least occasionally. But the idea had never appealed to me, even at times when I was depressed over some romance that had failed. I pictured myself waltzing into the kitchen and putting the move on Mimi, and laughed at the thought of the look on her face.
She overheard. ‘What’s so funny?’ she called from the kitchen in an aggravated voice.
‘Nothing!’ I’d tell her sometime when she wasn’t worried about sage and poultry seasoning. I felt a little uncomfortable being invited to a party Mimi hadn’t been asked to; but she had told me, almost too vehemently, that she wouldn’t have gone if she’d been asked. I had raised my eyebrows.
‘I’ve only met the guy once, and I didn’t like him,’ she had said lamely. ‘And his wife!’
Aha. ‘What about her?’
‘I hate her,’ Mimi had said to my surprise.
To answer my stare, she’d advanced the story that the woman kept a photograph of her father in his casket – on her bedside table.
How on earth did Mimi know that? Something in her face had warned me not to ask. But I’d told her about the time in New York when I’d gone out for a drink with the photographer who’d said my eyes were like opals (I’d always love him a little for that). He’d confessed to me after several Scotches that when he’d first opened shop, he’d made some money that way. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he told me earnestly, ‘how many people want pictures of their loved ones in their boxes.’ Then he’d made me swear to keep his former sideline a secret.
I mulled over that odd story as I unrolled the special pouch that held my arsenal of brushes. I decided that we all carry our dead with us. My hostess-to-be just carried hers openly and visibly.
Nickie the philosopher.
My left nostril is a fraction larger than my right. I painted it even. The work of art complete, I slithered out to the kitchen in a lounging robe I saved for great occasions, a gorgeous thin slinky thing. The big room was in a state of chaos. Mimi was determined that our Thanksgiving feast be full and traditional. She’d hauled every spice out of the rack so she could pick up what she wanted instantly. A heap of sweet potatoes was piled on the counter, and the turkey was perched to thaw in the drain rack.
Attila was prowling around the fringes of this bounty, hoping to snitch some of it. Mao was curled up on top of the microwave staring at the turkey as if it were a live bird she was stalking. Mimi was crumbling the still-steaming corn bread, a pained expression on her face. She glared at me as I opened the refrigerator.
‘Now, Nick, don’t get drunk tonight, you hear? You can’t have a hangover tomorrow. You won’t eat much if you have a hangover.’
‘Okay, Mimi,’ I said meekly. ‘Can I have a sandwich now?’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, and suddenly grinned. The old warmth was back. ‘I reckon you might find some food around here.’
‘What would you recommend?’ I asked seriously. ‘The peanut butter and jelly or the leftover meat loaf?’
‘Oh, boy, a meat loaf sandwich. Make me one, too, will you? Heat it up in the microwave, with cheese all over it.’
I began rummaging through the refrigerator. It might take me hours to come up with the meat loaf, the shelves were so jammed. ‘You’d think,’ I muttered, ‘we were expecting an army instead of just us and Barbara.’
‘Well . . . Charles is coming.’
I froze with my hand, finally, on the meat loaf. I felt the tension radiating from Mimi. She thought I was still worried about her protection of Charles, but actually I was struggling to slam a mental drawer in which a corpse had just moved and groaned. ‘Okay,’ I said, when I could. I heard her sigh behind me.
Cully hallooed from the door then, so the moment passed. I unearthed the serrated knife to slice some of my homemade bread for our sandwiches. Cully wanted one, too.
‘When’s Barbara coming over?’ Cully asked as we sat on the benches in the breakfast nook wolfing down our food.
‘Seven-thirty, eight,’ Mimi said indistinctly. ‘We’re going to set up the dining table in the living room, and we’re going to figure out when the turkey has to go in, and she’s going to grip the bird while I reach in to get the innards out. I don’t think I got him out of the freezer soon enough, to tell you the truth. I think the cavity’s still frozen.’
‘Wear rubber gloves,’ Cully advised. ‘That’s what Rachel always did.’
Oh, great.
The phone rang when I was halfway to the counter to either make another sandwich or throw the meat loaf at Mimi and Cully. I picked up the receiver on our brand-new kitchen wall phone. (Mimi had gotten tired of standing in the hall to talk, and had had the old one taken out.)
‘Hello? May I speak to Nickie?’
‘Mother?’ I felt age sit on my shoulders. I felt the stillness behind me as Cully and Mimi quit eating.
‘Baby? Guess where I’m calling from!’
Oh, not the outskirts of Knolls, please no. She’d come to see me at Miss Beacham’s like that, once. She didn’t sound drunk. But she sounded uncertain, shaky. I felt my face settle into tense lines.
‘I don’t know, Mother. Where?’
‘Well.’ I heard her take a deep breath. ‘I checked myself into a center for alcoholics two weeks ago.’
‘What?’ I felt dizzy and sat on the floor with a bump, taking the telephone receiver with me. I drew my knees up. ‘You what?’
‘Sober for two weeks,’ she said, and began crying.
‘Oh,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Oh, Mama!’ All the years sloughed off. I pounded my fist against my knee for joy. ‘Mama! Really? Really?’
‘This is my first phone call,’ she said. ‘They don’t let you make a phone call for two weeks, until they can be sure you won’t plead to be taken home.’
I noted the call had not been made to Jay.
‘Where is he?’ I didn’t have to specify who ‘he’ was.
‘Gone.’ Her voice was very controlled. ‘I waited till he went out of town. I’m really kind of a coward, Nickie. I’m glad you’re grown up now. Maybe you can understand. I waited till he was gone. Then I filed for divorce, and I changed all the locks on the doors, and then I packed a bag and I headed here after I called my doctor. I was so drunk I barely made it. In fact, I drove over some bushes at the entrance. But they took me.’
A Secret Rage Page 17