Joe must have understood that I wasn't functioning yet at his level because he said gently, "Possibly because you landed on top of Jay Tuttle when you fell down the stairs, Amelia."
"I did that, too?" I said, marveling.
"You were damn lucky, actually. As the police put it all together," he explained, "Holton shot you from behind, from the top of the stairs, and at that same moment you lost consciousness and fell. The bullet hit Tuttle at the bottom of the stairs instead, whereupon he fell over and you landed on top of him. Which is where you were when I smashed down the door and found you."
How very complicated life sounded, I thought, and how very fast Joe talked. "Weird," I said politely, for it had no reality for me now. "I hope no one was hurt." I was still half clinging to the maze, willing it to come back to me so that I could discover what lay at the end of it. But Joe was talking again, naming names that tugged at my other memory and willing me to listen to him instead.
"Tuttle's still alive," he was saying, "but Holton's dead. Holton went back up to the roof and killed himself there. Tuttle's been arraigned as an accessory to your near-murder and he's in all the newspapers but no longer smiling. The police know about Hannah now, too. Robin and I took them all the papers and documents."
"Ah," I said, nodding at the name Hannah, and wondered if it had been she who guided me through the maze. I said drowsily, "I love you, too, Joe, but I couldn't find you. When I got home."
I didn't understand why he looked as if he were going to explode; he looked the same way he'd looked when I told him I had to go to Maine to find Hannah. I watched in wonder as he swallowed his anger, I could see him literally bite it off and swallow it.
He said in a ludicrously controlled, even voice, "I spent two days in Maine looking for you, Amelia. Two days."
"But you left Maine," I said, frowning.
"I went back to Maine," he said. "I phoned you on Tuesday night at the Golden Kingfisher Motel, Amelia. Tuesday night. You weren't there. You weren't there at midnight or at half-past midnight or at one o'clock in the morning, or at two. The manager found your suitcase there, but not you or the van."
"Weird," I said, watching him and thinking he had lovely eyes.
"Weird!" he echoed in a strangled voice. "As soon as I finished in court on Wednesday I hopped the first plane and by two o'clock in the afternoon I was back in Anglesworth with the state police."
I stared at him in amazement.
"I will not," he said, seeing that he had my full attention at last, "go into my reactions when I learned that Hannah's house had burned to the ground, or that the tire marks of a medium-sized van were found nearby in the grass. I will only tell you that it was twenty-four more hours before I knew that you were still alive. That's when the state police finally traced your van to a place called the Bide-a-Wee motel where a girl answering your description registered at ten o'clock soaking wet, and checked out several hours later. And then, Amelia—my God, Amelia, I barely got back in time."
"Back?" I repeated blurredly. It seemed a very long story that Joe insisted I hear.
"To Trafton, to find your telegram on my doorstep. In time to rush to your shop and find you lying with Tuttle at the bottom of the stairs. In time to prevent Hoi ton from shooting you again."
I said clearly and firmly, "They were Despas, Joe, and Nora was one of them, I learned that. But I'm not."
"Amelia," Joe said patiently, "you are going to marry me, aren't you?"
"Well," I began, and then hesitated. Perhaps, I thought, I had found the heart of the maze after all. Right here. Now. In this room. Me. But without finishing either my sentence or my thought I fell asleep, and the next day Joe had to repeat everything he'd said to me all over again.
And so it became just one more sordid story that would titillate newspaper readers all through the fall and winter of the trial. A slightly demented Horatio Alger story of a clever young man who years ago learned to use a handsome face and a broad smile— twelve teeth showing, after all—to charm his way into Hannah's family and destroy it. And an older man, frustrated, pedantic, ambitious, who was looking for just such a young man with a big smile to exploit for his own purposes, for of what use is a handsome face and a broad smile—or ambition and knowledge—without power? And money is power. And Hannah had money.
And they got away with it, like the old-time marauders who sacked villages at night, leaving blood in their wake, except they wore business suits and ties, and they smiled a lot and covered everything up, including their real faces.
The one thing they never dreamed of in their wildest moments was Hannah's note. Or my curiosity, for that matter.
This pleases me. The little things still count.
In the tabloids Hannah was barely mentioned at all, but the New York Times reprinted their long-ago review of The Maze in the Heart of the Castle, and the book is going to be reissued at the same time that In the Land of the Golden Warriors will be published. For the latter book Robin has been asked to write a Foreword, and in it he is explaining the circumstances of the manuscript's discovery, and he is dedicating the book to me because Hannah would have wanted it, he says.
Neither will bring Hannah back to life, of course. Or will they? Just a little? If she was a ghost I think she has been laid to rest now, although at times I still feel very close to her.
I think now about how our lives all touch each other, gently or violently, for good or evil, as Hannah's life touched mine. People's futures have been rearranged by all this. Robin, for instance, is going to have money again, enough so that he needn't dye his hair and climb five flights of stairs to sleep. It's too late for Hannah's will to be upset but a very good lawyer advised him to sue the senator for damages, and when this became evident there was a hasty and very large settlement out of court to avoid even more publicity.
As for Nora, she is dead. Robin tells me that she died of heart failure at what he believes to be the precise moment that Jay Tuttle was shot on the stairs. As if she knew. I think about this sometimes.... The newspapers carried photos of Turtle's heiress wife, daughter of the famous Senator Plumtree—such a very suitable combination for Holton's wildest dreams—and yet I wonder.
Tuttle chose to keep Nora alive and in luxury for years, refusing to allow Holton to kill her, perhaps the only time he ever stood up to Holton; he visited her surprisingly often, too, for such a busy man. There are curious bonds between people of love and guilt and pity and remorse, and who is to say that Nora and Jay hadn't gone on loving each other all those years? Often I wonder what their lives might have been if Tuttle had been less malleable and Holton less ambitious. I blame Hubert Holton for much more than murder.
From Garwin Mason there came flowers: the news of Turtle's fall from grace must have been very big in Maine. There was no note enclosed, only his name on a card, but there was no need for a note, I knew what he wanted to say.
The affair touched even Daisy, or Doris Tucci, who surprised me very much by coming to see me in the hospital. She brought me flowers and also, with a grin, a hairbrush. She shook her head over me and told me I was a damn fool, and lucky to be alive.
"I know," I said meekly, thinking that Daisy had a very broad maternal streak in her. "You told me I was a nut."
"Like a fruitcake," she said, nodding. "The newspapers didn't explain too clearly why this senator and his aide felt they had to kill you, but I got the point, seeing how I was in on the beginning of it."
"Yes you were," I said wonderingly, "and if you hadn't told me—"
"If I hadn't, you wouldn't be lying here," she pointed out, "but also that sexy senator and his pal would still be on the loose, wouldn't they? Well, kid—" She reserved her liveliest bombshell for departure, announcing at the door with an impish grin, "Ollie and I got married yesterday."
I sat up in astonishment. "Daisy! Married? Congratulations!"
"Yeah," she said, nodding. "I owe you for that. Obviously a million bucks attracts leeches and vultures which a person n
eeds like a hole in the head. So stop in sometime and watch me burp babies and do the domestic, okay?"
From the small sounds that reached me from the corridor as she left I guessed that her departure did not go unnoticed by doctors, interns, patients, and visitors.
As for myself, now that my excursion into violence is over, I feel changed in a way that is not explainable except, perhaps, to say that I have moved from Victim to Survivor, a distance of no small import. Some things matter more to me now, and many things less, and the past not at all. Á balance has occurred that astonishes me: I am turning into a very agile tightrope walker, gliding across chasms and abysses without a glance below. I have no more nightmares and, ironically, now that I have come so very near to death it no longer haunts me. Joe says I am moving from Old Age to Middle Age and he suggests we get married in time for my Adolescence.
Amman Singh says that I have begun to walk the path to my Original Self. When I smile and ask him why he only quotes a proverb to the effect that no one can learn to live who has not learned to die.
What Dr. Merivale would say is something else again. As a matter of fact I met him just the other day on Main Street. He looked very trim, very well-groomed in his business suit, his face deeply tanned, which reminded me that May was always his vacation month, when he flew south to the Caribbean.
I said, "Hello there, Dr. Merivale!"
He stopped and looked at me, surprised. "Why—it's Amelia, isn't it?"
I'd forgotten how vague he could be; he'd always been nondirective as a psychiatrist and I suppose this enters subtly into the personality. He said, focusing on me reproachfully, "I'm sorry you've not come back for more treatment, Amelia, I feel your father would have wanted that. What have you been doing since I last saw you?"
I like Dr. Merivale, I really do. I mean, he held my hand for three difficult years and I am grateful for this but I was feeling mischievous that day. He had been away, of course, and so he'd not seen the newspapers, or the photograph of me being carried out on a stretcher from the Ebbtide Shop, with Joe in hot pursuit. I said gravely, "Well, Dr. Merivale, since I last saw you I've been looking for the murderers of a woman killed many years ago. I found them and was nearly murdered myself, and now one killer is dead and the other arrested. I've found a guru of sorts, I've fallen in love, and I've lost my virginity. I really think I've been Affecting My Environment, don't you? At last?"
It's possible that the passing of a truck blurred my words, or it's possible that Dr. Merivale is not by nature playful. His glance at me sharpened suspiciously and then retreated in haste. "Ah," he murmured, nodding. "Mmmm .., well, I hope you will still consider that typing class, Amelia. It's so important—as I've stressed before—that we all have purpose in life." And having said this he gave me a kindly smile and continued walking down the street.
I stood and watched him go, and I laughed. I mean, have you ever stopped to realize—not just the miracle that life is—but how basically comic it is despite its griefs? The wonder of it, as Amman Singh says, is that we take it so seriously.
One day, poised on my tightrope, I hope to manage a glorious cartwheel, or at the very least a pirouette.
In the meantime, however, I bought a flower from the vendor on the corner and carried it home to Joe.
The Tightrope Walker Page 18