He listened to her soberly. Once, part way through her recitation he got up and made himself another drink, another time he looked at her oddly. She tried to be as methodical as possible, to present a logical facade that was convincing enough to persuade. She finished, restacked the papers neatly and looked over at him.
“Well,” she said. “What do you think?”
He twirled his glass thoughtfully. “I think you and I should go away for a vacation—alone.”
She was piqued. “What does that mean?”
“It means forget it.”
“It’s all there, Rob. You’ve heard all the evidence. I’m not making these things up. They’ve been checked and verified.”
“There’s no motive for anyone to do those insane things.”
“She’s in love with you—or what she calls love.”
“Nonsense.”
“You had an affair.”
“She’d been in prison a long time and I was … well, I explained that to you.”
“Did she ever say or intimate she was in love with you?”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
“Did you tell her you’d marry her.”
“No, of course not.”
“You must have said something, given some indication … something to give her this idea.”
“It’s your idea, not necessarily hers.”
“What did you say, Rob? What did you say that could possibly have been misconstrued on her part?”
“Only that if things were different …”
“Different?”
“That if I’d met her ten or fifteen years ago …”
“You said that …?”
He paused. “Well, no. I said if things were different we might have married. I meant fifteen years ago.”
“My God, do you realize what she thinks you meant by different?”
“She knows I’d never leave you and the children.”
“Yes, she knows that. Rob, I think she killed her brother.”
“She told me about that, he drowned in a boating accident.”
“The same way I might have.”
“She wasn’t even in Connecticut when her brother died. Don’t you think the police would have considered that possibility? She had special permission from her parole officer to go to California for a week. Tavie, she was in California when it happened.”
“A batch of coincidences can fit into a neat puzzle.”
“Our place in Maine is on an island, people spend a good deal of time in boats. If an accident were to happen, more than likely it would occur in a boat. If an accident were to happen in Hartford the odds are it would be an auto wreck.”
“That’s a pleasant thought.”
“You wouldn’t be suspicious if someone ran into your car.”
“I might if they turned around and came back for a second go-round.”
He shook his head several times in dissent. “No way. It’s not her cup of tea, she couldn’t do it.”
“She did once before.”
“We’ve been over that. That was a marital situation with a man and woman exposed to each other daily for years. The cutting edges became so abrasive that something had to happen. She’s a rough cookie in a lot of ways, Tavie. Helen is the kind of person who gets what she wants, who strikes out with a singleness of purpose to grab life. That’s why her first husband drove her bananas. He was a routine, methodical sort of person going nowhere in life, and that’s one thing she couldn’t take.”
“I bet she even changes her own flat tire.”
“Hell, she’d turn the car on its side if she had to.” Faint color moved upwards from his neck and he rubbed his hand across his forehead. “I’m sorry, Tavie, I didn’t mean to compare.”
Tavie knew how often she’d called him at work, or awakened him early in the morning to perform some household task. These small intrusions were her unconscious way of asking for affirmation. The method perpetuated itself over the years until her helplessness became a thread in the fabric of their whole relationship.
“Rob, I’ll give you my word, I’ll read scads of books on auto mechanics, after we go to the police.”
“The police? Why?”
“She’s trying to kill me. And she doesn’t seem to care if she kills the children with me. It’s all there, Rob. It couldn’t be any clearer.”
“Wait a cotton-pickin’ minute. People in Hartford, Connecticut, don’t go around killing whole families.”
“You can’t see.”
“Look at it, you don’t have anything. To begin with, it’s true a boat ran you down. Perhaps, and it’s only a perhaps, because you’re certainly not a qualified expert on nautical matters, perhaps a similar craft was rented to a woman. The name was different and the description is vague. According to the August records of Connecticut Casualty Company, that day Helen was in New York City delivering copy. The copy was delivered, and the agency people positively identify Helen. What do you have left? The possibility that if she ran like hell, she could have gone to New York by plane, delivered the copy, caught a plane to Portland in time to rent a boat, and run you down. Next, our house did burn down. The fire marshall thinks it’s defective wiring, but in your wild imagination it’s set by some dark stranger that you chase through the night. God God, Tavie, you’ve never chased a stray cat.”
“You had an affair with her.”
“And if I don’t admit to that?”
“It’s on the tape.”
“The tape is burned.”
“Then you wouldn’t admit to it?”
“I would, Tavie. I would broadcast it to the world, it’s not something that I’m proud of, but I would if it would help. But don’t you see? You don’t have anything to give to the police.”
“I’m as positive of this as anything in my life.”
“If you hadn’t heard the tale end of that tape before the boating accident, would you have thought anything?”
“No. I would have agreed that it was some nut.”
“And you wouldn’t have chased your unknown apparition after the fire.”
“Perhaps not. I also might have been dead that night if I hadn’t been having nightmares. Rob, we’ve got to go to the police.”
“They’ll think we’re nuts. And you know Helen won’t admit to anything. Assume for the sake of argument that the police take the charge seriously enough to investigate. Helen proves she was in New York that day, and her name isn’t on any flight manifest to Portland, Maine.”
“Anyone can give a false name to an airline.”
“That’s negative, Tav. Evidence is hard fact. Now, go along with my thinking a moment. Helen denies everything. She’d have to admit to seeing me, to my doing the book on her experience—and that’s it. The cops chalk the whole thing up to a jealous wife.”
“There’s the boat and fire incident.”
“No one saw what happened in the middle of the bay. You could have capsized the boat yourself.”
“Rob, good God!”
“I’m not saying you did, Tavie. But it could have happened that way. And as for the fire, you know the results of the fire marshall’s study. No one else on the island saw the person you’ claim to have chased. Mrs. Gorley says that you were gone for a few minutes and were extremely upset when you returned. Everyone chalks that up to anyone’s normal reaction to the fire.”
“Please, Rob …”
“I can’t, Tavie. It would be foolish. You know how small this city is. Things get out. The affair I had, your reaction, we’d both be ruined.”
“Then you won’t?”
“Can’t. There is one thing, though.”
“What?”
“Helen’s disappeared.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Rob stood on the small platform below the stern of the dry-docked boat, addressing an unseen audience. He held a microphone and spoke in the loud singsong of a carnival barker. They had tied her hands and feet across a blade of the boat�
�s propeller.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Rob said. “You see tied securely before you a perfectly normal, middle-class housewife. Can this normal housewife survive the terrible ordeal she is about to undergo?”
A woman, wearing large sunglasses covering most of her face, began to climb the ladder into the cockpit. “I’ll do it,” she said.
“I see we have a volunteer from the audience,” Rob continued. “Madam, will you test this housewife?”
“Absolutely,” the muffled voice replied.
“If you are ready,” Rob said. “Start her up.”
The engine coughed, and Tavie felt the slow motion of the propeller as she turned over and over. The blade gathered momentum as the engine caught. Rob turned into an indistinct blur as she whirled into blackness.
The engine stopped and the propeller slowly swung to a halt. Rob grasped the edge of the blade and held her in an upright position. His hands poked her body and slapped her face until she opened her eyes.
“Ladies and gentlemen, our housewife is alive. Isn’t that marvelous, she is still alive.”
She began to scream without sound.
The side of her face ached as she awoke. Rob wasn’t next to her. It seemed that he never was anymore, and then she remembered that he was sleeping on the couch. Last night’s argument came back.
“Helen’s disappeared,” he had said.
“What do you mean?”
“She never came into work this morning, and when I noticed that her personal things were gone from her desk, I called her apartment. The phone had been disconnected. I called an acquaintance or two that I knew she had, but they didn’t know anything either. Finally, I drove to the apartment and talked to the super. She just moved out—no forwarding address, no information—just gone. Maybe that makes you feel a little better.”
“What do you suppose she’s up to?”
“I don’t know. She never liked working for the company anyway. She had a little money, she doesn’t have to work.”
Tavie felt empty. The research of the past few days had been orderly, progressing from point to point. She had always counted on knowing Helen’s whereabouts. She looked at Rob a moment. “You say you phoned and then went to her apartment.”
“She could have been ill, or the phone turned off by the phone company.”
“You went after her.”
“Not after—to find her and tell her what happened.”
“You told me you would arrange her transfer. You obviously didn’t or you wouldn’t have known her things were gone.”
“It takes time. You know how fine the wheels grind at the company.”
“What are you doing?” She vainly tried to hold down a rising panic. “Rob, what are you up to?”
“Good Lord, nothing.”
“You’re probably still sleeping with her.”
“No, I swear to you.”
“Why bother with the super, you still have a key to her place.”
“I threw it away.”
“But you’ve seen her.”
“Just once. I had to tell her that it was off, that we were giving up the project.”
“Since when is having an affair a project?”
“The book. Now stop it, Tavie. You’re reading too much into this.”
“What else did you tell her?”
“That you knew about the affair and had a couple of serious accidents.”
“And suspected her?”
“Yes.”
“And then you went to bed with her again.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You’re lying to me. Good God, I’ve known you too many years. You were a terrible liar to begin with—age hasn’t improved you.”
“You’re projecting all sorts of personal crap.”
“Projecting? My husband’s having an affair, his mistress is trying to kill me, and I’m paranoid.”
“Hell, yes! It’s hardly normal to continue accusing people of trying to get you.”
“She’s hardly normal.”
“She was caught in a domestic hell, she’s hardly Mad Dog Cole.”
“She’s normal and I’m crazy.”
“I’m beginning to wonder.”
“You bastard! You rotten bastard! The two of you are up to something, maybe both of you are trying to kill me.”
“Stop it!”
“Is that it? While you’re screwing, you plan your next move. While you groan on top of her, you whisper how to do wifey in.”
“You’re crazy.”
“So, stick me in the booby hatch …”
“Goddamn it! I don’t have to listen to this crap.”
“You’ll listen and tell the truth.”
She threw herself at him, her fists pummeling his chest. He shook her by the shoulders. “Tavie, stop it. You’re irrational, stop it,” he said.
“Both of you are trying to kill me.”
“Stop it!” His hand lashed out and slapped her across the cheek. He slapped her again as she fell to the floor crying. He knelt next to her. “Tavie, Tavie, darling. What’s happening to you?”
“Oh, Rob. I don’t know. I’m so terribly frightened.”
“We’ll go away. Alone. Give me a few days to wind up things at the office. We’ll take the kids to your mother’s and go somewhere … the two of us.”
“Yes, let’s do that. Let’s go far away.”
The window lightened with the oncoming day, and it was five by the bedside clock. She found an unopened package of cigarettes in the bureau, took one, and inhaled deeply. Two years ago when she’d given up cigarettes she’d been proud of the test of will. Will power over a slightly harmful habit seemed rather unimportant now.
The unaccustomed nicotine of the cigarette made her slightly dizzy.
Once again she went over last night’s argument. In her anger she had said things she didn’t really believe. She didn’t think that Rob and Helen were continuing their affair and planning her demise. Theirs was a good marriage, and she had to have faith in her husband. Rob’s motives for the affair were probably as he told them—the spice of the situation, a different woman, an unusual woman.
No matter, they would survive. They must survive. Last night’s loss of control still bothered her. In past arguments with Rob she usually withdrew and retreated from any true confrontation. In fact, Rob’s greatest criticism of her was her inability to show true feelings. An outward display of affection or anger was contrary to her whole personality—all of which showed how deeply Helen’s plotting had affected her. It would take something as dire as Helen to break down the veneer—she was sure of that.
It bothered her that Rob still didn’t believe her. After completing her painstaking accumulation of data she had been sure that it was convincing. She knew that a series of coincidences could explain the circumstantial evidence. But then, he hadn’t tread water in the bay as a speedboat circled and came back again and again. She had chased a figure after the fire. Pyromania was not an uncommon syndrome, perhaps it had been a local nut. But Rob hadn’t been there, he hadn’t had to drop his children from a porch roof.
Rob did know Helen. During those long hours he’d spent with her she had become a real person. The realness of Helen made Tavie’s suggestions untenable. She still felt that listening to Helen’s tapes and reading the objective accounts of the trial had given her a better insight into Helen than Rob could have. How could he be objective? For all Tavie knew they might have done the taping in bed.
She showered and dressed slowly in jeans and shirt, but as a gesture to civilization donned a scuffed pair of boat shoes. There was no one else to talk to but Oliver.
Oliver was feeding the ducks as her small car pulled up the driveway. He seemed genuinely glad to see her as he turned and waved.
“I hope you feel better than you look, Octavia?”
Past sadness, she could only laugh. “I feel terrible, and I’m sure I must look it.”
“How’s our obsession this morning?”
“I’ve done my homework.” She handed him the folder.
They went into the study, and Oliver served iced tea. He read slowly, his glasses far down on his nose. Finally, he looked up at her with a frown. “What does Rob say to this?”
She told him of the argument the night before and of Helen’s disappearance.
“Well,” he said. “It’s not unusual for one partner to leave when a love affair is over. In a way that’s good for you, you should be grateful.”
“I don’t believe she’s through with me or Rob.”
“You have nothing here to indicate that.”
“It took her almost four years to get her brother. A few days or weeks won’t bother her. She’s that kind of person, Oliver, and I think she’ll be back.”
He threw the folder into her lap. “If you were a student in my class, and drew conclusions based on what’s in that folder—I’d flunk you twice.”
“You and Rob make me feel ready for the couch.”
“You don’t know what Helen is capable of.”
“The State of Connecticut proved she killed one man, and she probably killed another.”
“The second is conjecture on your part. There are close to one hundred drownings a year in this state alone.”
“Oliver, you’ve always been so intuitive. Am I cracking up?”
He walked over to the bay window and looked out. “Do you think I should get mallards for the pond?”
“The local sportsmen would probably build a duck blind in your front yard.”
“That would be a shame. No, Tavie. I don’t think you’re cracking up. I’ve known you too long and have an innate trust for your instinct. I still think you’ve only done part of your research. You have a great deal of conjecture and little knowledge of Helen.”
“The tapes are gone and she’s disappeared. The subject has become too painful for Rob and me to discuss.”
“Will Haversham.”
“Who?”
“A reporter at the paper. I believe he covered the trial.”
“That’s right. All the articles had his by-line.”
“He covers all that sort of thing for them. Crimes, murders, riots … I’ll arrange an appointment.”
“Thank you, Oliver.”
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