“Yesterday,” said Mr. Slocum, “Mrs. Audrey Burton was murdered in the house next door. It was young Amanda here, her stepdaughter, who found her.”
Boyle stopped digging and frowned around his Fatima. “Hey, kid,” he said sadly, “that’s a tough one.”
I did not know what to say. I had not liked him—he had been one of those sudden slapstick clouts that Reality delivers to the face of Imagination—and yet he seemed genuinely concerned.
Stretching out his leg as he continued the search in his pants pocket, he turned to Mr. Slocum. “The part about the lady, Mrs. Burton, I got that from the newspapers. It made the Boston rags already. There’s a couple of their snoops outside, mouth-breathing with the other boobs.” He had at last found what he had sought: a wooden kitchen match. When he snapped it alight with his thumbnail, I glanced at Miss Lizzie to see if she had noticed this, a gesture that might give her a feeling of kinship with Boyle. Evidently it had not; she was staring at him as though she had spied a serpent lazing atop the meringue.
Boyle tossed the match into the ashtray and sat back, exhaling a billow of blue smoke. “So what’s the scoop? What’re the cops up to?”
“Fair enough.” Mr. Slocum nodded, still smiling—he seemed to have taken a fancy to Boyle. He reached down to the floor and pulled up his alligator leather attaché case. He opened it on his lap and eased from it a sheath of papers, tapped them against the case, straightened them with tapered fingers, and then lay them carefully atop it. “First of all,” he said, “I have the results of the preliminary autopsy.” He turned to me, his face kindly, and said, “Amanda, you don’t have to listen to this, you know.”
I shook my head. “I’m all right.” Earlier, Father had explained what an autopsy was, and had said much the same thing. I believed that hearing the facts might in some way diminish the horror of what I had seen. I was also, of course, morbidly curious. Death, despite the horror of yesterday, was as exotic and distant as Siam.
“If you’re certain,” said Mr. Slocum.
I nodded. Father covered my hand with his and squeezed it. “You’re sure, Amanda?”
“Yes.”
Miss Lizzie pursed her lips. Boyle, not looking at me, tapped his cigarette against the rim of the ashtray.
Father said to Mr. Slocum, “I know we can count on Mr. Slocum’s discretion.”
The lawyer nodded, then scanned the top sheet. “Well. Mrs. Burton’s death was caused by a series of blows from a heavy, sharp-edged object, probably a common household hatchet. There was a total of, um, twenty-five blows. At least five of these would have resulted in immediate loss of life.”
Twenty-five, I thought, stunned. How could someone have hated Audrey, have hated anyone, that badly?
Mr. Slocum was reading to himself. “Hmmm,” he said. “I think we’ll just skip that.” He turned over the sheet, peered at the next, looked up and said, “From the, ah, contents of Mrs. Burton’s stomach, the medical examiner has determined that she died approximately two hours after eating.”
I remembered the oatmeal congealing in the saucepan atop the stove, thought of it lying in Audrey’s stomach; my own stomach squirmed.
“How good is this guy?” asked Boyle. “The M.E.”
“Dr. Malone?” said Mr. Slocum. He shrugged. “Competent enough, I imagine. But certainly no genius.”
“So he could maybe be off by an hour or two.”
“Possibly, yes. But Miss Borden tells me that Amanda discovered the body at just a little after twelve o’clock. The police and Dr. Malone examined it fairly soon after that. Malone’s certain that the, ah, various details at the scene fit in with the same time of death. And the police have the testimony of a Mrs. Esther Mortimer …” He riffled through the sheets.
Mrs. Mortimer, I thought with a start. Mrs. Mortimer had been there, she had seen that awful fight between Audrey and William. Had she told the police? I looked at Father. He was staring down at the floor, tracing the pattern in the Persian carpet as though it might lead him somewhere, into the past or into the future. He must have felt my gaze, for he looked up, smiled, and squeezed my hand again. Comforting me when clearly he was in need of comfort himself.
“Here we are,” said Mr. Slocum, sliding a sheet to the top of the pile. “These are only notes, you understand,” he told Boyle. “I didn’t have time to make complete copies of her testimony.”
Boyle nodded. He lit a second Fatima from the glowing butt of the first, then ground out the first in the ashtray.
Mr. Slocum said, “Mrs. Mortimer testified that she’d eaten breakfast with Mrs. Burton at eight-thirty that morning. So you see the stomach contents do tie in with the other indications.”
“So she got”—Boyle glanced at me, sucked on the cigarette, exhaled—“so it happened around ten-thirty?”
“Sometime between ten and eleven, yes.”
“Cops got the weapon? The hatchet?”
“No weapon was found.”
Boyle raised his eyebrows, turned down the corners of his mouth. “Okay,” he said. “So who do they like for it?”
“Well,” said Mr. Slocum, sitting back with a smile, “some of them are convinced that the murder was part of a radical plot.”
This was not so unlikely a possibility as it might appear. In 1920, only a year ago before, the U.S. Attorney General, Mr. Palmer, had corralled over five thousand suspected Communists (none of whom had committed any crime) and deported them. In September of the same year, a bomb had exploded on Wall Street, near J.P. Morgan and Company, killing thirty people and wounding hundreds more. And approximately two weeks before my stepmother’s death, less than a hundred miles away, a court had convicted two obscure Anarchists, Bartolomeo Sacco and Nichola Vanzetti, of murder.
“But those who incline toward this theory,” said Mr. Slocum, “are the same people who believe that the Pope is a Bolshevik.”
Pale-blue smoke streaming from his nostrils, Boyle nodded. One could not tell, from his expression, what he felt about Bolsheviks or about the Pope, or about any possible connection between the two.
Mr. Slocum said, “One or two of the policemen to whom I spoke felt that Mrs. Burton might’ve been murdered by a madman, a stranger. But most of them tend to discount this notion. First, because it would mean, essentially, a motiveless crime, which could prove impossible to solve.” He smiled. “Itinerant madman, as I’m sure you know, are notoriously difficult to locate.”
Boyle shrugged. “Could of happened, though.”
“It could’ve,” Mr. Slocum agreed. “But, second, as again I’m sure you know, most murders are committed by someone close to the victim, someone who knows him. Or, in this case, her.”
Boyle said, “So they’re looking at family and friends.”
“Occam’s razor,” said Mr. Slocum. “Simplify. And the police are great simplifiers. Just now, they feel that there are four likely suspects.” He turned to Father, frowning. “The first of them, I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Burton, is your son.”
Father shook his head. “William would never.”
“No,” said Mr. Slocum diplomatically. “I’m sure he wouldn’t. But according to Mrs. Mortimer’s statement, which was apparently given with much reluctance, your son and Mrs. Burton had something of an altercation yesterday.”
That ninny! (Bitch was a word that had not, unfortunately, yet entered my vocabulary.)
Father shrugged. “An argument. It happened sometimes. Sometimes Audrey could be a difficult woman.”
“Blows were given,” said Mr. Slocum.
“That’s impossible,” Father said firmly. “William would never strike a woman.”
“Apparently Mrs. Burton was the one who did the striking.”
It took Father, who had never raised a hand to his children, a moment to assimilate this. At last he said, in disbelief, “She hit him?”
“According to Mrs. Mortimer’s statement.”
Father looked at me.
“It’s true, Father,” I
said. “I was there.”
“Audrey hit him?” It was as if he were remembering William not as the young man he had become, but as a small helpless child.
“She was in a terrible mood,” I said. “She was angry, she was—”
“But why didn’t you tell me, Amanda?” He seemed more wounded than angry. I would have preferred his being angry.
“At any rate,” Mr. Slocum said smoothly to Boyle, “Mr. Burton’s son has been missing since yesterday.”
“Cops got a warrant yet?” Boyle asked him.
“No, but the Boston police have been notified and asked to keep an eye out for him. The state police too.”
Father looked at me, frowned sadly, and looked away.
Nodding, Boyle blew two plumes of smoke from his nostrils. “Who else they got?”
“Second in line,” Mr. Slocum said, “is you, Mr. Burton.”
Father turned to him, surprised.
Mr. Slocum smiled. “Husbands are always suspects in the murder of a wife. But so long as someone can substantiate your statement, you needn’t worry about it. You were in Boston, I believe you told them, conferring with a client.”
“Yes,” Father said.
Mr. Slocum nodded. “Their third choice,” he said, smiling ironically as he turned to Miss Lizzie, “is you, Miss Borden.”
Miss Lizzie smiled back with an irony that mirrored his. “Only third?”
“Ah.” He smiled. “But first in the heart of Chief Da Silva.” He turned to Boyle. “Our chief of police was a patrolman in Fall River when Miss Borden’s parents were murdered. He worked on the case.”
“Da Silva,” said Boyle. “Right. The cop in the loft.”
So he had known about Miss Lizzie after all. And evidently a good deal more than I had. That loft again. What was its significance?
I looked at her and saw that she was looking at Boyle with one eyebrow slightly raised behind the pince-nez, as though she were reappraising him.
“Yes,” said the lawyer. “He thinks that Miss Borden was unfairly acquitted for those earlier crimes and seems determined to prove her responsible for this one.”
“They got any evidence?” Boyle asked. “Witnesses? Anything?”
“Nothing.”
Boyle nodded, tapping his cigarette into the ashtray. “You said four.”
“Four.” Mr. Slocum nodded. He turned to me and smiled. “Some of them seem to think that Amanda killed Mrs. Burton.”
“That,” said Miss Lizzie, “is absurd.”
“Come on now, Slocum,” Father said impatiently. “Not even the police could think that a thirteen-year-old girl did that.”
Boyle simply sat there, smoke drifting up from his nose, his eyebrows raised quizzically as he waited for my response.
My response, when I heard the words, had been immediately to recognize their truth.
I knew, of course, that I had not actually murdered my stepmother. But if, as the priests maintained, intent were as wicked as act, then I stood condemned as surely as if I had picked up the hatchet and smashed out her life.
Had I not, with my thousand casual brutalities, been killing her day by day, piece by piece, since I met her? Had I not, a thousand times, wished her gone: from me, from Father and William, from our home, our lives: away, vanished, disappeared: nonexistent?
Yesterday, while she raved and screeched and sputtered through the kitchen, her mouth agape, her loose body shuddering as she clubbed at my brother, had I not truly wished the woman dead?
The police were right. I was guilty. And, as a consequence, I was doomed.
I surprised myself by the stoicism with which I accepted this, a fate of eternal hellfire. An image flickered for an instant before my mind’s eye, of myself shrieking and writhing in the flames; and I regarded it not with fear and trembling, but with a detached, almost nonchalant, curiosity. So this is how it feels, I thought, to be damned.
Mr. Slocum was still smiling. “Amanda,” he said gently, “we all know you didn’t do it.”
And I felt a stab of sorrow then, bittersweet, for his kindness, so misplaced, so wrong. I deserved no kindness, least of all from him; for by my wickedness I had lost him, and the choirs of cherubs, and the galleries of harps, forever.
“The police,” he said reasonably, “have to suspect everyone who had the means and who might’ve had a motive. And so, you see, I really think you ought to tell us what happened yesterday.”
Father’s hand tightened over mine. His blue eyes no longer looked wounded. But how would they look when he learned I had kept a secret from him all summer long?
I realized that I must postpone, for the moment, any further consideration of my brimstoned future. I could take it up again later, on a direct basis, one to one, with God himself.
I looked at Miss Lizzie. Her head bowed, her mouth pursed, she was peering at me over her pince-nez. She nodded once. I looked at Boyle. And he confounded me by giving me a broad, slow wink.
I took a deep breath.
EIGHT
TELLING FATHER ABOUT Miss Lizzie and the magic turned out to be, as anticipated events frequently are, anticlimactic. With all the others watching on, keeping any trace of whimper from my voice, I said, “I would’ve told you before, but I was afraid you’d think it was, I don’t know, wrong or something.”
“No, Amanda,” he said. “I do wish you’d told me, but I don’t think it was wrong.” He squeezed my hand and smiled. “You’ll have to show me one of these tricks Miss Borden taught you.”
“Shall I go get some cards?” Wait till he saw my Whispering Queens or my Siamese Twins.
He smiled again. “A little later, maybe. You go ahead with your story.”
When I mentioned Marge Grady and the small cardboard box Audrey had produced, no one said anything. Father and Mr. Slocum only exchanged glances, while Boyle continued to sit back and watch his cigarette smoke wind upward in the hot, still air. Miss Lizzie sat as stiffly erect in her chair as she had when I began.
I finished, and Mr. Slocum said, “All right, Amanda.” He had been gentle throughout, his irony abandoned, his smile considerate as he eased the account out of me with tactful questions and patient encouragement. “Let’s go back a bit. Back to the argument in the kitchen. From what you say, Mrs. Mortimer probably didn’t hear those last words of William’s to your stepmother, out on the back porch.”
You’ll be sorry, Audrey.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “She was in the hallway, on her way out of the house.”
Father said to Slocum, “It’s not in her testimony?” His voice sounded hesitant, diminished.
“No. Now, Amanda, you are certain that while you were upstairs in your bedroom, you heard no noise, no sound at all?”
“I was asleep,” I said.
He nodded. “When you came downstairs afterward, was the back door open, from the kitchen to the porch?”
“Yes. Audrey usually kept it open during the day.”
“The screen door from the porch to the outside Did that have a lock?”
“A latch.”
“Was the latch set?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.”
“Was the door normally kept latched?”
I nodded. “Audrey was afraid of hobos.”
“The windows in the house were open?”
“Yes.”
“Do they all have screens?”
“Yes.”
He turned to Father. “Locks on the screens?”
“Not locks,” he said. Glad, I think, to be certain of something, and able to contribute it. “Hooks and latches.”
“On the inside.”
“Yes.”
“All right. Amanda. When you came downstairs from the guest room, after you found your stepmother, was the front door opened or closed?”
“Closed.”
“Locked?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Was it usually kept locked?”
“Usually.�
�
He turned to Father again. “What kind of lock is it?”
“A Yale.”
“It slam-locks automatically when the door is shut?”
“Yes,” Father said. “And there’s a bolt too. You set it with a small knob on the inside, or with the key outside.”
Mr. Slocum asked me, “You don’t remember if it was bolted?”
“No,” I said. “Is it important?”
“It could be.”
“Why?”
He smiled. “Well, suppose someone wanted to get in, and the back door was latched. Suppose whoever it was didn’t want to cut the screens. If the front door was unlatched, he could’ve used a strip of celluloid to slide back the tongue of the lock.”
Father said, “And that wouldn’t work if the bolt had been set?”
“No,” said Mr. Slocum.
“Are you talking about a burglar?” Father asked him.
“It’s a possibility.”
“But I thought most burglaries took place at night.”
“As a matter of fact, most of them take place in the daytime, when the householders are away.”
Still gazing idly at the streamer of blue smoke, Boyle said, “You get a lotta burglaries round here?”
Mr. Slocum frowned, shook his head. “Not a great many, no.”
Boyle watched the smoke. “Anything taken from the house?”
“Not according to the police,” said Mr. Slocum, and looked at Father.
“They asked me to look,” he said. “Audrey had some jewelry in our bedroom dresser, and we kept some cash in a cookie jar in the kitchen. They were both still there. But maybe there was a burglar, and maybe he got frightened off before he could find them.”
Boyle stopped watching the smoke and looked at Father. “Maybe,” he said. “But why did he go to the guest room first?”
Mr. Slocum said, “What do you mean?”
Boyle sucked on the cigarette. “Why would he go up there before he finished the downstairs? Most burglars, they know the loot in the house is gonna be in the bedroom or in the kitchen. They know all about cookie jars. And most burglars, what they’re thinking the whole time they’re in there is getting out. Someone comes in while he’s upstairs, the burglar’s gonna be trapped up there. Doesn’t it make sense he’d check out the kitchen first?”
Miss Lizzie Page 7