Speak Softly, She Can Hear

by Pam Lewis

  Reed said it is likely the woman died at the scene. It is too soon to know if the body was buried, although he said there was no indication of a grave.

  Persons with information regarding the woman’s identity or circumstances of her death are asked to contact the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Office.

  June 14. That spring. All these years, thinking Rita had never been found, and now this. She’d been found three months later. Carole read it again, and then once more. The errors! The newspaper said Rita was about thirty when she was twenty-eight, that she’d died of strangulation when it had been a broken neck. That she’d died on the spot and not somewhere else. Even the date she’d died was in question.

  Victor had said that this was the only account. He said he’d checked it out in the archives, which meant there never was a public announcement of who she was or any of the rest of it. But how could that be? Mindy had said people knew. And that man in the drugstore. Howie. Howie had known. And those people she called. All these loose ends and nobody tying them together. It was as though people had just given up, as though they weren’t interested enough or Rita wasn’t important enough for them to make the effort. The sheriff and everybody else had let it drop.

  Carole returned the article to the envelope and started the truck again. Nobody had gone looking for Rita. And that knowledge mingled unpleasantly with Carole’s own relief that she had been protected by exactly that. Rita’s anonymity and the lack of urgency into solving her death had allowed Carole to live freely all these years.

  She stopped the truck in front of the house, but she didn’t have the will to get out at first. It was the woodpile that finally got her attention. How could they have let it get that way? A ragged mess. They’d taken logs from it all winter willy-nilly, pulling out the good big ones and leaving all the ugly odd-shaped bits with branch stumps sticking out and slabs of wet bark falling off. It looked like a war zone, a good half cord of junk wood strewn over the dooryard. Why hadn’t she noticed it before?

  She didn’t go into the house at all but put on gloves and started to work. Midway through, she stopped and looked. She’d made progress. The new pile was large and tidy. There was little left to move. She swept the bits of wood and bark off the tarmac and rinsed it down with buckets of water from the house. The water turned instantly to ice, and the black tarmac glistened in the bright midday light. The tarmac was so shiny, she could see her reflection. She stared down at her rippling upside-down self. She would tell Will everything. For sure. It had to be today. She didn’t know how or when, just that she would tell him what had happened and who she was. It was time.

  She removed the manila envelope from the truck, took it inside, and laid it on the dining room table. The telephone rang, and she let the machine take the message. Then she made herself a cup of tea in the kitchen and sat down, the envelope before her. One by one, she laid the photographs facedown on the table. When she was ready, she turned the first one over. It was the close-up that Hector had shown her earlier, of Rita’s calf with its tiny ankle chain. The next one made her gag. In crisp detail, it showed Rita’s face and neck, the flesh partly gone and the teeth set in a ghastly grin.

  The front door banged with a solid shuddering that made her jump. “Where are you?” Will, home early. His steps came loudly across the living room floor toward her. “I called work, and they said you went home early, that you left without telling anybody,” he said, approaching. His voice sounded wary, as if to say, Now what is it? He paused in the doorway and looked at the table and then at her. “What’s all that?”

  She stayed in place, staring at the photos spread out before her.

  “Carole?” he said.

  She turned the photos over. They’d come later. She indicated the chair opposite for him and waited until he sat down, until he was quiet, waiting. “I did something a long time ago. I need to tell you about it.” She could feel the color drain from her face. “I don’t know how to do this.” She shut her eyes and let the stillness of the room settle her thoughts. Will said nothing.

  “When I was sixteen.” She stopped. I killed someone, she thought. In all her imagined conversations with Will, it was how she began. What she hadn’t expected was the panic. She hadn’t expected to be back suddenly in that cabin. Images from that night presented themselves one after the other. Rita’s body on the bed. Her body in the snow. The girl in the shower at the Double Hearth, saying, “You’ve been through the mill.” It all came at once, the way they said your life flashed before your eyes when you died. The images appeared and disappeared like the images rising from the dark water in an eight ball. She saw the beds pushed together and splitting so there wasn’t enough room for the three of them. She’d been the odd man out. The weird blue light of the lamp under a towel. That bucking bronco. And Eddie’s hair slick with sweat, slapping against her. Rita’s voice. It’s okay, honey. She dared to look at Will. She had to look away.

  “When you were sixteen …” Will prompted her.

  The night of Rachel’s CR group, when Jo had confessed to her infidelity, she’d given only fragments of facts and feelings, and yet the story had emerged as a whole. It had stayed with Carole, as though one day she would need to use it. How else could she tell Will what had happened? How could she begin with the worst thing?

  “I’ll start with the day I ran away,” she said.

  “Anywhere. Just do it.”

  “Right after my mother’s memorial service in New York City. I’d dropped out of Vassar by then. I’d been working in a restaurant, but my dad found me and told me my mother was dead. I couldn’t believe it at first. Sometimes I still can’t. Eddie showed up at the service, and I was so scared, I bolted. He wanted money again. I ran from the University Club and got out of there.” Will raised his eyebrows at Eddie’s name, but she kept on. She was feeling stronger. “I took the bus from the Port Authority to Newark, and I was this boiling pot inside, just sitting there on the bus sobbing because of the enormity of everything. Just the sheer size of everything. My mother was dead.

  “This woman at the service had held my dad’s ears. She reached up and took them in her hands and pulled his head down and kissed him, and in that gesture, I knew he would be okay. Women would take care of him. Women like her. A single older guy like him? The women were already jockeying around him at the memorial service. Maybe she was Gloria.

  “And then I got to San Francisco. I knew Rachel was out there and I found her. She was already married to Morgan by then. Pepper is from another man. I don’t know if you knew that or not. We lived in a house. Sort of a commune, but not really. There was always stuff going on. Noise, people coming and going. Drugs. I could go for days without thinking about why I was there.”

  She paused, took a deep breath. “Eddie found out about my mom’s service, getting back to that. He had ways. That’s what made him so scary. Makes him so scary. He said he’d been her lover. My mother.” She looked down at her hands, which looked like a couple of white spiders. “I might have delivered my mother to him. That’s what’s so awful. I’m to blame for that. They ran into each other on the street because of me. My mother was forty. Eddie was a lot younger. After I disappeared, they got together again. Or maybe they still were together. Maybe it started before. I don’t know. My mother was desperate not knowing where I was. My father would have been no help. All the time what Eddie wanted from my mother was to be there if she ever found out where I was. He always wanted to know where I was.”

  Here it came. “But where it really began was when Naomi and I went to Stowe, senior year.” She was able to look at him now, saying all this. “We stayed in this place, a dorm called the Double Hearth, and there was a motel down the road called the Snowtown. Eddie had a room there. The point was to lose our virginity before graduation, and he was the guy. I told you that part, but the real story is that we went up there on purpose. It wasn’t that I got drunk and he took advantage. I did it on purpose, eyes wide open. I lied to my parents about going
there and why. I said it was only me and Naomi, and that we were going to learn to ski.”

  She took another breath, still looking at him square on. “I was asleep in his motel room, and really late, about one or two I think, a woman came to the room and he let her in. I thought it was the owner. But she was this woman. Here I’d just lost my virginity to this guy, and already this other woman was there.” She felt the words ripping out of her faster than she could think them. “Rita was her name, and she kept worrying if it was okay with me. We started doing things. Together. The three of us.”

  There was no way of telling what was going on behind Will’s calm face, but it was too late now. The words wouldn’t stop. “If she’d been bitchy, maybe I wouldn’t have gone along with what we did. Not that I’m blaming her. It’s just one of those things you think. If this, if that. You can’t imagine the times I’ve wondered how my life would have been different if I had just left. But I didn’t leave. I didn’t want to be the one to leave. I wanted her to go because I was the one who deserved him, and who was she to come barging in? But they were really going at it, so I drank some more scotch.

  “Her name was Rita.” She slowed down her speech. She had to. “The beds kept sliding apart, so we had to stay on just one of them, and it was way too small for all three of us. Eddie said to get out of his way. He said to go sit on the other bed and watch, and I didn’t want to, although maybe I would have, but Rita said I should get up at the head of the bed near the wall, which is what I did. I was drunk. I climbed over all these ropes he had. He’d tied her wrists. I was so drunk. The only time in my life. I can’t remember anything in sequence. That’s what is always so hard. I try, Will. I’ve tried for years, but it won’t come. All I know is, I was hitting the wall. I was looking down on them. It was really dark in there. It went on forever.” Will’s eyes narrowed slightly. Here it came. “I killed her.” A shudder bolted through her, and she looked up. His eyes were wide, his mouth open, but he didn’t speak. “I killed her,” she said again.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  She looked away, breathing fast as though she’d just run a race. “I must have leaned on her too hard. I was a big girl then.”

  “Wait a minute,” he said, shaking his head. “I still don’t get it.”

  “I lied to you because I was so ashamed. Am so ashamed.”

  He was staring at her with his mouth open. He shook his head as if to clear it. “Go back a minute. I don’t understand how you killed her.”

  “What is there to understand?” she wailed. “You asked me, Will. You asked what happened, and I told you. Why do you need to make me repeat it?”

  “But how? How did she die?”

  “Broken neck,” she whispered.

  “How do you know that?”

  “He said! He felt along her neck, and it was broken.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Of course, Eddie.”

  “Calm down,” he said. “Calm down. I want to understand this, Carole. I just want to get it straight. You’re all doing your thing there in the motel, and her neck just breaks?”

  She nodded.

  “Because—” he said, drawing out the word. “Because you what, twisted her head?”

  “That’s the problem. I don’t remember the part where it happened. I must have blocked it out.” In the news, there were always stories about people who remembered traumatic events years after they happened, and she’d assumed that one day that would happen. One day when she didn’t expect it, it would come back, complete with the sound of bone and the lewd, crazed behavior that must have overtaken her.

  She tidied the photos into a stack and pushed them across the table, along with the newspaper story. “It’s her. It’s Rita. You’ll see.”

  He turned over the stack and sat staring at the one on top. From where she sat, she could see that it was one of those she hadn’t seen yet. She made out the way Rita’s hand was caught under her body, exactly as it had been that night. She had to look away. She could hear him going through the rest, one at a time, and then the slight fluttering of paper as he read the newspaper account. She looked up at him. “I was bigger then. A lot bigger. So strong. I didn’t know my own strength.”

  He tapped the photos. “Where did you get all this stuff? Have you been keeping it or something?”

  “Oh, God, no,” she said. “They’re Hector’s. That’s another story. He used one of them on the menu. That one.” She pointed to the photo of the men standing around the remains of Rita Boudreau, shielded in the long grass. “Victor Champine guessed it. He got the article at lunch. Oh, my God.” She was near tears now.

  He waited for what seemed like forever. Finally he leaned across the table and took her wrist in his hand. “Okay,” he said. “What did you do? I mean after. What happened then?”

  “We took the body way up in back in the woods. It was woods then. There’s a parking lot there now.”

  “You buried her?” Will put his hands to his temples, shocked, concentrating.

  “Eddie and Naomi and me.” Her voice trailed off, and she felt afraid again. “I shouldn’t be telling. I swore I never would.”

  “You didn’t get help?”

  “I wanted to. I remember that. It was so obvious that we had to. I wanted to call the police or the hospital or something, but he wouldn’t let me. He said if it got out what I did—”

  Will looked down at the photographs again and spread them out facing him. “You say you broke her neck?”

  She nodded.

  “Look here.” He pushed one of the photographs across the table toward her, tapping the place he wanted her to see with his index finger. “Her neck isn’t broken. It’s intact.”

  It was a photo she hadn’t yet seen, a close-up showing the jaw and jointed bones of the neck. She shut her eyes.

  “Come on, Carole, look at it.” He sifted through the pile for other photos and examined each one. “Hector took a lot of pictures of the neck. Looks as though insects got to the exposed parts. The neck would have been important. It doesn’t look broken.”

  “But how—?” Her hope rose. Was this possible? Was he just trying to make her feel better?

  “Let me explain something to you,” he said. “The newspaper is accurate. A broken neck is fairly obvious. They knew early on that it wasn’t broken, that she was strangled. What was Eddie doing? You told me what you were doing, but what about him?”

  “He was, you know. He was fucking her, I guess.” Why was Will doing this to her?

  “Show me, babe. Say that’s the bed.” He pointed to the floor. “Where were you?”

  She hesitated, then dropped to the floor, knees apart, sobbing now. “Here,” she said.

  “And them?”

  She motioned with her hands to the spot between her knees. “I could see his back mostly. I really couldn’t see her too much.”

  “What about his hands?”

  “I don’t know. It was dark. I don’t remember.”

  “What did you hear?”

  “The bed hitting the wall. Them breathing. A lot of groaning.”

  Will breathed in hard and fast, the way he did when they made love. “Like that?”

  “I guess,” she said.

  He made another sound so labored and obstructed it made her stomach pitch, and she had to cover her ears to keep from hearing it.

  He pulled her hands away. “What about that? Answer me.” He made the hateful sound again, and she felt the fear spread hotly through her, as though it was happening all over again, the nausea, the shame, the pitching, rocking bed in that fetid disgusting room.

  She nodded. “Yes, like that. She called him the wrong name. Garrett, that was it.” And now she recalled something else. She put her hand up to Will’s throat. “Like that,” she said. “He put his hand on her neck like that.”

  Will whistled.

  “What is it?”

  “I think the paper was right. She was strangled.”

  “But—�
�

  “Not you. Eddie.” He looked at her for a moment, his lips pursed. “She was probably saying ‘garrote,’ not ‘Garrett.’ It’s something people do to enhance sexual pleasure, and it’s dangerous as hell. They cut off the oxygen supply to the brain. Nobody knows why it happens, it just does. Usually it’s men, but women get orgasm with it. There’s plenty written about it.”

  Sitting in that car outside her dorm at Vassar that time, Eddie had asked if she’d ever heard of it, and she’d said no. She’d thought he was making it up, grossing her out, but he’d been testing her. He wanted to know what she knew.

  “They press on the windpipe,” Will said.

  “She would have had a spasm, though, right? Wouldn’t she have gagged? Like any choking victim, sexual or not. I read it in one of your Red Cross books.”

  “Not necessarily,” Will said. “Maybe she passed out and then she never got enough air because he kept the pressure on a couple more minutes, and then it was done.”

  “But we would have noticed,” she said, desperate to believe him but not daring to. “We would have seen. She was right there. She would have shuddered. Something.”

  Will shook his head. “Not if she passed out.”

  Carole shut her eyes. She was back in that darkened room again now, reeking of sweat, a glimpse of Rita’s upturned face and a detail she’d forgotten. It was the moment when Rita went quiet. She’d thought Eddie would stop. She’d thought Rita wasn’t going anymore, and he didn’t seem to care. He’d kept on going. It must have been the moment Rita passed out.

  “I didn’t kill her?” she whispered.

  “You didn’t break her neck,” Will said.

  She opened her eyes and stared at him.

  “Because her neck’s not broken,” he said. “You didn’t do it. And all this time you thought—”

  “Are you sure?”

  Will looked through the pictures again. “I’m sure,” he said.

  She sat there, her anger gathering, unaware of Will or even her surroundings. It was as though the monster had finally broken through the gluey murk with its sickening, familiar fragmented images, and now, in all its brilliant and steely clarity, was what she’d really done.