He glanced at the front door as though spies might be loitering outside, then, lowering his head and his voice, he said, “Well now, they had the devil’s own time gettin’ at the trap, I’ll tell ya. The trap, that’s the bendy part in the pipe, ya see, just below the drain thing. Jimmy tells me they had to rip up the tiles and all from the floor of the shower. And the wood too, no less. They had to smash it all up with the hammer. Took ’em forever, Jimmy says. And I guess it’ll take ’em nearly that long to fix it up all proper again.”
It was taking him nearly that long to tell it; but you never hurried a gift.
“And then, when they got to it, ya see, they couldn’t just wrench it out—rusted, it was, from the humidity of it all. They had to use the hacksaw, Jimmy tells me, and even then it was no piece a cake, no, not by a long shot. And in a cramped narrowy space like that, ya see—”
I hurried the gift. “But they found something.”
He nodded with great gravity. “They did that. They found something.”
“Was it blood?”
“It was indeed. It was blood. I’m sorry to say it was your poor stepmother’s own life’s blood they found.”
Miss Lizzie shut the front door on Officer O’Hara and turned to me. “You look pale, child. Would you like to lie down?”
“No,” I said. “No, thank you.” But I was feeling pale, wispy and insubstantial, as though a light held behind my back might shine straight through me, organ, flesh, and bone.
It was all very well to speculate, enjoying the shuddery frisson, about what might be in the drains. But the thought that Audrey’s blood had actually been found in there, trapped with bits of hair and a gray scum of soap, had made me suddenly faint, light-headed. And even now, as we stood there, my stepmother’s “own life’s blood” was slapping against the sides of a tin bucket in the police van, gurgle and slosh.…
“They found it,” Miss Lizzie said.
“Yes.”
“Come sit down, dear. I’ll make you some chamomile.”
She made me some chamomile, brought it to me, and asked if I thought I could eat anything. I told her no, thank you, but said that if she was hungry she should by all means eat. She would have a little something later, she said, and hoped I would join her then. She asked if I’d like to continue with the Nikola system. I told her that just now I thought I would read for a while.
And so we sat there, Miss Lizzie on the sofa working her card tricks, me in the chair using the Harper’s as an excuse for silence.
The drains had proved that the murderer had washed himself clean after killing Audrey. And, to me at least, they had also proved one thing more. That William had not killed her.
I had never believed he had. But now I saw the argument against his guilt as overwhelming, a kind of hierarchy of impossibilities.
William hated even the idea of killing. Once, four years ago in Boston, when he was thirteen and I was nine, he made himself a slingshot. To try it out, he went to a park along the Charles. The very first time he used it, he aimed at a strutting pigeon and hit it. He carried it home in tears. When Father told him there was nothing anyone could do, that the bird was far beyond the stage where it could be nursed back to life, William had buried it at the base of an elm tree on the street, saying prayers and erecting a small cross, sniffling the entire time.
So, William would not have killed Audrey.
I knew that William had a temper—I had seen him pick up a model schooner and hurl it across his bedroom to smash it against the wall, all because, after hours of trying to fit it into place, one single delicate spar had snapped. But his remorse, afterward, was as sudden as his anger. And, unprompted, he had gone to Father and apologized for ruining the gift Father had given him.
He was not a brooder, not one to coddle his anger silently over the hours and days, nursing it with bitterness and hate.
So, if William had killed Audrey, he would not have done it in the guest room, so long after the argument in the kitchen.
William possessed an innate sense of fairness. He was a Greco-Roman wrestler, the best in his weight class at school. Once, during a state championship, both his shoulders had touched the mat, for only an instant and unseen by his opponent, the crowd, or the referee. William could have continued; but he stopped the match and conceded the point and, with it, the championship. Later, when I asked him why, he looked at me as though he did not understand the question. Because I lost, he said. Yes, I said, but no one knew. But Amanda, he said as though he still could not grasp what I meant, I knew.
So, if William had killed Audrey, he would not have done it while she was lying there asleep and vulnerable.
Naturally, I did accept the (extremely remote) possibility that even such a paragon, even one so gentle, brave, and honorable as William could suffer a brain storm, could inexplicably, without warning, go insane. But suppose he had. Suppose some wild demon had taken him over, suppose some lunatic bubble had burst and sent venom foaming through his mind. Suppose he had found a hatchet, returned to the house, climbed up to the guest room, and hacked Audrey to death. He would not, afterward, calmly walk into the shower and sluice himself clean.
But if he was innocent—and, as I say, I knew he was—why had he not come forward after Audrey’s death was discovered? (A question the police were doubtless asking themselves.)
I could see only one reason. He did not know that Audrey was dead.
Which meant that he was no longer here, in town. Had he been here, it would have been impossible for him not to know.
But if he left the town, presumably right after the fight with Audrey, where had he gone?
He would not have run to Boston, not to complain about Audrey to Father: He was too proud. Oh, he might have gone there, to the house, for money or clothes, but it would have been in stealth, no one the wiser.
Had he gone to any of his friends’ houses, one of them would have told him about Audrey’s murder; Boyle had said that the news had made the Boston papers.
So, wherever he had gone, it had to be a place where there were no people, and no newspapers, to tell him what had happened.
And, suddenly, I believed I knew where it was.
ELEVEN
THE HOUSE OF my grandparents lay in the countryside some miles to the west of Boston. After my father’s remarriage, William and I often spent summers there. Father would appear on weekends, usually without my stepmother, who declared herself allergic to an inventory of vegetation that at one time or another, or so it seemed to me, had included every species known to man. (For this reason, the houseplants in our Boston home were cunningly crafted of silk. Which provided the additional benefit that they required little attention and less affection, needing only an occasional dusting now and then.)
But her reluctance to visit, I thought then and I think now, lay more with her sentiment that Father’s parents disapproved of her. In this she was correct; Although they were too polite ever to display outright distaste, they included her in conversation only belatedly, as though discovering, with a start, that this dowdy woman had actually been present in the room all along, and then obliged by etiquette, however reluctantly, to acknowledge that puzzling fact.
In any event, beyond the flat green expanse of grass strung with badminton nets and booby-trapped by croquet wickets, small rectangles of white wire that, during lawn parties, often snared a tipsy guest, my grandparents’ house was flanked on three sides by a forest of maple and elm and oak. To me the forest had always seemed dank and deep, limitless, as impenetrable as any jungle in Africa and as teeming with probably carnivorous and certainly odious wildlife: snakes and lizards, wolves and bears. And other things lurked there too—the spirits of skulking red bepainted savages, and of the innocent and unsuspecting and presumably bewildered settlers tomahawked by these. I wanted never to enter it.
And then one summer—I was ten, William fourteen—I saw that my brother entered it on a regular basis. I watched from the glass-enclosed stone porch at the rear of the
house as, every day, soon after lunch, he would stroll across the lawn, hands in his pockets as though he were taking a constitutional. When he reached the border of the forest, he would glance back once, quickly, furtively (I would duck), then slip like an Indian behind the black ragged trunk of a towering oak, and vanish.
I had no idea what he might be doing in there. Perhaps exploring, playing at Stanley in the Congo. Perhaps meeting a girl. His attitude toward girls, except of course toward myself, had changed over the past few years. Where before he had sneered and sulked whenever in their presence, now he seemed at once fascinated and abashed.
Seeing him disappear regularly into the forest, I pictured him kneeling on the banks of a small bubbling brook, beside a pretty shepherdess who in fact resembled those who, three years later, were frozen in perpetual pertness behind the glass in Miss Lizzie’s guest room. Her hair fell in blond ringlets to her bare white shoulders, and she sat demurely on the grass with her hands atop her lap, the immaculate white skirt of her peasant dress unfolded all around her like an opened blossom.
From where she came, out of what fragments of fantasy and forgotten memory I invented her, I cannot say. I had at that point never seen a Dresden figurine, and at no time during our summers had I seen, or heard, or heard tell of, sheep in the vicinity.
One day, I resolved to follow him. I knew that the lawn was too broad for me to wait at the porch while he walked across it: by the time. I myself arrived at the forest, he would be gone. So at lunch that afternoon, I made some remark to my grandparents about feeling poorly, no-nothing-serious-just-an-upset-stomach, and trudged up the front stairs toward my bedroom. I stood outside it, listening for a moment, then bolted along the corridor, scrambled down the back stairs, scampered silently out the porch, and sprinted across the lawn. I found an oak of my own, and I waited.
Birds twittered, insects buzzed. The forest behind me began to move closer, Birnam woods to Dunsinane, yet still I waited. Back there, snap of twig and slither of leaf said that animals, drawn perhaps by my scent, were on the move; yet still I waited.
At last William came around the house and began his ramble across the lawn. He might have been humming to himself, so nonchalant was he. Then suddenly, where the lawn ended, he dipped behind his oak.
I tarried for only a moment, then cantered over to the tree. Poking my head around it, I watched him as he ambled twenty yards ahead down a shaded path. When he had gone another fifteen yards, I started to stalk him.
Another hundred yards in, he turned to the right. When I reached the spot, I saw that here the path met a crumbling stone wall, one built back in colonial times, probably, by settlers in their pre-tomahawk stage. The irregularly rounded black rocks were splotched with gray lichen and furred with a moss so green it seemed to glow.
And there was William, bounding from stone to stone atop the wall, skimming from shade to light down the tunnel of trees. And then, abruptly, he sprang off to the left.
Hurrying now, afraid I had lost him, I ran awkwardly along the stones, squinting through the foliage. And saw it, off to the side: a flutter of white among the trees. William’s shirt.
I rushed down the path till I had him in sight once more and then, relaxing for the first time, began to notice that the forest was not so dim and dark after all; not so grim, so monolithic. It was open and inviting; it was luminous. All around me, gold danced with green. Sunlight wheeled down through the treetops, splashed against the leaves, washed across the grasses and the wildflowers. Butterflies floated and swooped; slim slight dragonflies with iridescent eyes hovered and darted and hovered again. The pale-brown leaves atop the ground, speckled bright yellow by the sun, looked soft enough to sleep on.
More trees lived here than I would have believed possible. I would not know all their names until much later, but I saw hickories as tall and straight as the masts of ships, gnarled crabapples, shaggy sycamores, delicate dogwoods and their white flowers, each petal tipped with a droplet of dark brown. (The blood of Jesus, my grandmother said.) There were thickets of mountain laurel and honeysuckle. Silver birches, their peeling bark as fragile as onionskin, arched skyward and then dipped their branches toward the earth as though (so Mr. Frost has pointed out) they had been ridden there by the exultant swing of laughing boys.
It was, in short, an Enchanted Place, and, like any other princess in such a locale, I very shortly became lost. William was no longer in sight, and I was no longer certain that the path I followed was the one he had taken. I made tentative forays in several directions; but no William. At last, giving way to panic, I called out his name. No answer. Called it out again. No answer.
The forest closed in again around me, and a low cloud with a black underbelly and an impeccable sense of timing went grinding across the sky and blotted out the sun.
I plopped down hopelessly to the ground and learned that dead leaves, sunspeckled or otherwise, are not soft. They are crumbly and prickly, they make bare legs itch, and they cling to a white cotton dress as though stapled there.
My dress! Somehow it had gotten stained with green, smeared with gray. Grandmother would have a fit!
But then Grandmother would never see me again, nor the dress. Not until next spring, when some hearty woodsman (boots, overalls, hefty axe slung over broad plaid shoulder) stumbled upon the bleached little skeleton lying amid the leaves and the branches and the yellowed cotton tatters.
There would be a funeral, of course, tiny brittle bones rattling in the tiny casket, and everyone would weep at the young life so soon snuffed out. I pictured Grandmother’s grief, and Grandfather’s, and Father’s, and William’s (his mingled with an overwhelming and, one hoped, suicidal sense of guilt), and I began to cry.
A rustle in the forest. The woodsman? Already?
It was William, a look of annoyance on his face. “What are you doing here?”
I stopped crying. “Looking for you.”
“What for?”
“I wanted to see what you were doing.”
“None of your business.”
“I’ll tell Daddy.”
“Oh, yeah? Tell him what?”
“That you’ve got a secret in the woods.”
He gave me a shrewd look. “What kind of secret?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll tell him you come in here every day and you’re hiding something.”
“Hiding what?”
“I don’t know, but Daddy will find out.”
He scowled. “Amanda, how come you’re such a brat?”
“I am not a brat. Come on, William, please tell me what it is?”
He hesitated. I saw my advantage, and pressed it. “Oh, William, please? Just show me. I won’t tell anyone, I promise. Cross my heart and hope to die.”
He was wavering, indecision on his face.
“I swear I won’t. I swear it.”
His eyes narrowed. “Swear it on a Bible?”
“We haven’t got a Bible.”
“They’ve got a whole bunch of them at Grandma’s.”
“All right, I will. I’ll swear on one of those.”
“Swear that if you tell, you’ll go to hell and burn in fire forever?”
“Uh-huh. I swear.”
“I’ll get a Bible, you know, and make you swear on it.” (He did.)
“That’s okay. I swear it, I really do.”
“Well. Okay. Follow me.”
I think that, judging by his pride, he had wanted all along to show someone.
It was a fort. He had built it two years before and had, since then, continually made improvements. It was constructed of branches, each about two inches thick and seven feet long, nailed to either side of a long overhanging limb of oak to form a sort of A-frame eight feet in length and five feet, at the base, in width. A canvas tarp was slung over it, to make it waterproof; and. atop this, leaves had been piled to provide camouflage. (Indeed, from four feet away the structure was invisible.) A small clearing extended before it, in the center of which lay a se
micircle of fire-blackened rocks. The fort, William told me, was designed as a family shelter, to be used in the event the Huns invaded Massachusetts. (The War was still in progress: grown men in the United States had devised schemes no less preposterous than William’s refuge.)
“Can I go inside?” I asked him.
“Okay. But don’t touch anything.”
Inside, the floor of hard-packed earth gave off a woodsy smell of loam and mushroom. (To this day I cannot eat morels without recalling William’s fort.) Against the far wall he had built shelves of rocks and planks, and these were lined with cans of peas, carrots, corn, corned beef, honey, jam, marmalade. There was no sign, however, none at all, of Little Bo Peep.
I clambered back outside. “William, all that food. You took it from Grandma’s pantry.”
“I only borrowed it,” he said. “And besides, when the Huns come, Grandma and Grandpa will get to eat it.”
I eyed the fort skeptically. “We’re all going to live in that?”
“We’ll build additions.”
“What about when the food runs out?”
“We can eat roots and berries. They’re all over the place. And we can trap rabbits.”
“Rabbits? Oh no, William!”
“Only if we have to. To survive, I mean.”
“What about water?”
“There’s a stream just over there.”
“What about the animals?”
“What animals?”
“You know. Bears and things.”
“There aren’t any bears around here.”
“Yes, but snakes.…”
“Animals,” he said with absolute conviction, “don’t bother you if you don’t bother them.” Over the years I have learned that, with the exception of sharks and human beings, he was quite right.
I looked at the fort, looked back at William. “Can I come here?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you’re not here. Can I come and play inside?”
“No, of course not. It’s mine.”
“You said it was for everybody, for the whole family.”
Miss Lizzie Page 10