by Lois Duncan
“You killed David’s grandmother,” Susan said.
“Did Dave tell you that?”
“No, of course not. He doesn’t even realize you knew about his grandmother having the ring. I told you that.” The implications of this last statement struck her with full force. “I did that.”
“And that’s all you’re going on, that I knew she had the ring? You knew it too.” He regarded her quizzically. “If your reasoning holds, that could mean that you killed her.”
“The woman next door saw you. That is, she saw somebody—a boy in a brown sweater—in the room with Mrs. Ruggles right before it happened.”
“How could she see that?”
“Through the window. The house next door has a window exactly opposite the one in Mrs. Ruggles’s room,” Susan caught her breath in a half-sob. “It was you. It couldn’t have been anyone else.”
“So maybe it was me. I went over and got the ring, like I told you I would. Why does that have to mean I killed the old bag?” He glanced back at Betsy. “You don’t think I did that, do you, Bets?”
“No,” Betsy said softly. “No.”
“Good.” Mark nodded approvingly. “Old people fall down, you know? It happens all the time. An old lady tries to jump up out of her chair and stumbles, and down she goes, smacking her head on the window sill. I ask you, what could I do about it? I wasn’t near enough to catch her.”
“Nothing,” Betsy said. “You couldn’t do anything. Not if it happened like that.” She turned and went out to the kitchen. There was the sound of drawers being pulled out and the rattle of silverware.
Betsy came back into the room carrying a paring knife.
“Will this do okay?”
“It’s not the sharpest thing I’ve ever seen, but it’ll do for a curtain cord.” Mark took the knife from her hand and went over to the window.
Held immobile by the grip of Jeff ’s hands, Susan stood, watching as Mark sawed at the cord of the heavy white drapes that were her mother’s pride and joy. “They’re the most impractical things I’ve ever seen,” Mr. McConnell had said when she bought them. “They’ll have to be cleaned every other month,” and Mrs. McConnell had said, “Oh, I don’t think it will be quite that bad,” but it had been.
What are they going to do to me? Susan thought, terrified, and at the same time there was some odd, untouched corner of her mind that was saying, Mom will be so upset about the draperies, surely there’s something else he can use besides those.
“What do we do now?” Jeff asked as Mark came over to them with the cord in his hand.
“Tie her, the way we did Griffin. Put her wrists behind her.”
“And then what?” Jeff loosed his hold on Susan’s shoulder and as she twisted to jerk away from him he pulled her arms back roughly. An idea occurred to him. “Hey, you’re not thinking of doing the same thing with her, are you? Leaving her in the mountains? I don’t want to be part of that.”
“You’re part of whatever we do,” Mark said easily. He looped the cord around Susan’s wrists and pulled it so tight that she gasped in pain. “But, no, that’s not the plan. It’s too close to the other. People would put two and two together too fast.”
“Then what?”
“Lay her down,” Mark said, “and help me get her ankles. Hey, you, watch it!” as Susan’s foot shot out at him. “You kick me and you’re going to be sorry!”
“Down you go,” Jeff said, lifting her easily and laying her squirming body flat on the den floor. He dropped to his knees and bent to pull her legs tightly together. “You want to try to gag her?”
“No sweat. With the noise that wind’s making, she could yell her head off and neighbors wouldn’t hear her.” Mark knotted the cord around Susan’s ankles and then drew it up to the wrist cord so that her legs were bent sharply at the knees. “That’ll keep her from rolling around and getting into trouble. Okay, you two”—he nodded at Jeff and Betsy—“off to Zuni!”
“To Zuni?” Betsy exclaimed in bewilderment. “Now?”
“What do you mean, ‘now’? We’re half an hour behind schedule. That isn’t going to hurt anything though. We’re keeping to the plan. Take the car out there, and I’ll pick you up in Jeff ’s.”
“But what about Sue?” Betsy asked. “We’re just going to leave her here? What about when her parents come home? As soon as they’re in the door she’ll tell them everything that happened.”
“I don’t think she’ll do that.”
“Why not?” Jeff asked. “What’s going to stop her? Look here, Mark, I’m not going to be the one in that Chevy when the sirens start wailing.”
“They won’t be wailing,” Mark said irritably. “I told you, she’s not going to set the cops on us. I guarantee it. What’s the matter, don’t you trust me?”
“Sure,” Jeff said, “except I want to know what’s happening. I’m not going to get off there on the interstate with that car under me without having any idea what the score is.”
“Then take your own car, dammit,” Mark said. “I’ll drive the Chevy. Just get a move on, will you? We want to get back before morning.”
“Trust him, Jeff,” Betsy said. “Mark knows what he’s doing.”
“Jeff, please!” Susan said imploringly. “Don’t leave me here alone with him!”
“I want to know how you’re going to make sure Sue doesn’t talk,” Jeff said stubbornly. “Like I said, I don’t want to get out on that highway—”
“You won’t be risking a thing,” Mark told him. His voice was tightly controlled, but his eyes were beginning to take on a glint like cold steel. The lids had slipped down so that only the pupils showed, small black dots in the half-moons of gray iris. “I told you, I’ll drive the Chevy. If anybody is taking a risk, I’m the one. You and Betsy will be in your car, just as legal as legal. If you get stopped you show the registration, and you’re fine.”
“How could we explain what we were doing out there a couple of hundred miles from home?” Jeff asked.
“Nobody’s going to ask you that.” Mark’s anger was beginning to surface. “If anybody did, you could say you were eloping. That would shake your parents up enough so they’d never think to ask you anything else.” He got to his feet. “I’m telling you for the last time, man, I’ll handle things. I’ve done all right up till now, haven’t I? After you leave, Sue and I are going to have a little talk, and when we’re through she will have changed her mind about everything. Sue’s not a disloyal person, not basically. She’s just gotten a little mixed up on her values.”
“You think you can convince her?” Jeff asked doubtfully.
“Sure, he can,” Betsy said. “He convinced her the last time, didn’t he, after she and Dave found Mr. Griffin? If he could do it then, he can do it now.”
“Okay.” Jeff fumbled in his pocket and drew out a key. “This is for the Chevy.”
“Jeff, please—” Susan tried again in desperation.
“I left your keys in the car. I didn’t think we’d be tied up here so long.” Mark took the key from Jeff ’s hand. “Stop worrying. Leave things to me. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jeff said again. “Well, I’ll go on then. You ready, Bets?”
“I’ve been ready for ages,” Betsy said. She flashed Susan a sudden, bright smile that seemed to come full-blown out of nowhere. “You listen to Mark, Sue. Remember, he knows best.”
“I—hate—you,” Susan whispered. She did not mean it to be a whisper, but in her twisted position she found she could get no breath to accelerate her voice. “I—hate—you—all.”
“We’re not too fond of you either, little snot,” Betsy said, her smile fading. “Come on, Jeff, let Mark take care of her.”
They left. Susan heard the front door open and close.
Then there was silence.
It was not the same silence that had filled the house earlier in the evening, for this time she was not alone. Mark had moved to the other side of her, and Susan had to lift and turn her head in order
to see him.
“You’re not going to talk me into anything,” she said.
“I’m not going to waste my time trying,” Mark said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to open the windows and let in a little air,” he told her.
It was not an easy thing to open the draperies with the cord gone, but he managed it by sliding them along the rods by hand. Then he unlatched the windows and raised them as high as they would go. The wind came sweeping into the room with all its stinging, dust-laden force, knocking the shade askew on a lamp at the end of the sofa and sending a figurine on the mantel crashing onto the floor.
The flames leapt high in the fireplace, sending a spray of sparks out through the screen.
“Watch out,” Susan gasped. “You’ll set the house on fire.”
“Setting fire to a place isn’t that easy,” Mark said lightly. “It takes more work than that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got to get the curtains started. That’s what makes a place really go up. That’s what happened to our house back when I was living in Denver; first the curtains and then—whoosh!—the whole thing!”
“I know,” Susan said. “You told me. That’s how your father died, and I’m sorry. Mark, please, cut me loose! These cords hurt! They’re cutting right through the skin!”
“Don’t be sorry,” Mark said, ignoring the rest of her statement. “He had it coming. You know what that bastard was going to do? Have me stuck in the J.D. home.”
“Why?” Susan mouthed the question without interest. Was this how Mr. Griffin had felt lying there by the stream, hour after endless hour? Oh, please, I hope it wasn’t, she thought wretchedly. I hope he fainted or went unconscious or something so he couldn’t feel any longer.
“Because this guy and I wrote some checks and signed my dad’s name,” Mark said. “They weren’t even for all that much, and the old man could afford to cover them, but do you think he would? No way, not my good old dad. To the wolves with the kid, he said, even if the kid was his only son.”
“Mark, please untie me!”
“So you can run to the cops? You must think I’m pretty stupid. Why would I let you do that?”
“Because you have to,” Susan said with more bravado than she felt. “My parents will be home in an hour or so, and I’ll tell them anyway. Keeping me tied like this for that length of time isn’t going to keep me quiet, so why do it?” She paused and then, with one last hope of reaching him, cried, “Go with me! Let’s go together and tell them! Oh, Mark, there’s got to be one place where we clear the air! Let’s just go—and say how terrible it’s been—and how awful we feel, how the whole thing is. Can’t we?”
“No,” Mark said, “we can’t.”
And he lit the curtain.
He lit it with a rolled newspaper that he had picked up, somehow, without Susan’s noticing, from the coffee table. He touched it to the fire, and he reached across and touched it to the drapes. He held it there a moment. Despite the wind, the drapes took a little while to catch. “They’re such nice, thick material,” Mrs. McConnell had said, and, yes, they were that, for he held the flame at the edge for a long moment, and Susan, lying prone on the floor, watched and her throat was frozen closed so that she could say nothing. She watched the long, red splinters of fire licking at the edges of the curtains, and watched them darken and turn first brown and then black, and finally the red began on the edges, and in an instant it was leaping upward and gripping and climbing, and Susan tried to scream, but no sound came.
“You’re wondering about Jeff and Betsy,” Mark said. “Sure, they’ll be pissed, but what can they do, right? I mean, they’re not in much of a position to do anything. Betsy’s the one who got caught in that parking lot, with the Chevy. Jeff painted it. Nobody helped him. Anything that’s happened, they’re not just ‘in on,’ they’re ‘it’!” He stepped back from the flaming drapes and looked down at Susan.
“You’re okay,” Mark said. “I never wanted anything bad to happen to you, Sue, but I never thought you’d start acting this way. When you’re part of something, you can’t just start switching yourself around. You know?”
The flames on the curtains were growing. Like strange, golden flowers, they were bursting into bloom, and the blossoms changed to red and orange and, once again, gold. Up, up, they climbed, and the heat was stretching itself into the room so that Susan, lying half the room away from the draperies, could feel it. Now it was licking the ceiling. What happens to ceilings when heat touches them? They begin to crack. She had never asked herself such a question before, but now she did—simply because the question was there before her, and lying where she was, she could see the cracks beginning and running in sudden explosive lines away from the window, and then darkening until they looked like sections in a cake that had been placed in the oven and forgotten.
I will be burned alive, Susan thought.
But she could not believe it, because the boy standing in front of her was Mark. He was standing there, quiet, in the center of the room, and there was no longer anger on his face. His was a quiet, beautiful face, with a wide, smooth forehead, and a sweet, strong mouth, and eyes with the glow of far places and lovely dreams. I love him, Susan thought, realizing it for the first time. And I hate him. And he is going to kill me.
“Mark!” she tried to cry, but no sound came.
Mark! Susan cried in silence, Mark, help me, Mark, help me, Mark, you can’t mean this, Mark, it can’t be real, Mark… Mark…
But it was real, and Mark was not looking at her at all. His mind was somewhere else, in another day, at another time, and it was not this fire but another that blazed before his eyes.
“He was going to turn me in,” he said softly, “his only son—his only child. The bastard was going to turn me in.”
He crossed the room to the window and threw a leg across the ledge. It was in the last instant before the end of consciousness that Susan saw the two other figures standing there. The man who reached up and caught hold of Mark and yanked him out, over the sill, into the night outside.
And the woman with the stricken face.
I am going to die, Susan screamed silently, in the great, bursting consciousness that was still her mind. How else could this end, what else could ever happen?
I’m going to die, she screamed to the woman in the window. You’re glad, aren’t you? What else can you be but glad?
Cathy Griffin looked straight at her, and her eyes held no hatred. They were gentle, sad, accepting eyes.
I would never wish that upon you, the eyes said.
CHAPTER 19
Mrs. McConnell rapped lightly on the bedroom door and then opened it and entered without waiting for an answer.
“Good news, Sue,” she said. “Cathy Griffin’s baby was born yesterday, and it’s a boy. It’s in the morning paper.”
“That’s nice,” Susan said dully.
Her mother came over and seated herself on the edge of the bed.
“Sue,” she said, “you can’t go on like this. It’s been ten days now, and it’s time you began to get yourself together. We’ve got to discuss what happened.”
“I don’t want to discuss it,” Susan said. “I don’t want to think about it.”
“You have to. It’s only by facing things that you ever put them behind you.” The firmness in Mrs. McConnell’s voice belied the worry in her eyes. “You’ve never asked why Cathy Griffin and Detective Baca came to our house that night.”
“Does it matter?” Susan said.
“It certainly does. It was their coming there that saved your life. It was reading the name of Lana Turnboldt in the paper that morning that started Cathy Griffin thinking. She had heard the name the day before from Detective Baca, but she had been in such a state of shock at the time that it hadn’t meant anything to her. When she read it in the paper, she realized this was the same girl who had supplied Mark Kinney with a stolen English paper, and that
the ‘former boyfriend’ who had been with her when she discovered the picnic area by the waterfall must have been Mark.
“She remembered she had met Mark here at our house a couple of nights before, and he had been introduced to her as a friend of yours. She knew too that you were supposedly the last person to have seen her husband alive, and she was certain you had not told the truth about the circumstances. She started putting the pieces together, and while they didn’t make a complete picture, they fit well enough to raise some strong questions in her mind. She called Detective Baca and suggested that you be interviewed again, by both of them together. That’s the reason they came over that evening.”
“But why didn’t they ring the doorbell?” Susan asked. “Why did they come around to the back of the house and look in the window?”
“They intended to ring the bell, but when they pulled up in front of our house, Cathy recognized her husband’s car. You can image the effect that had on her. She was stunned. She and Detective Baca decided to circle the house and see if they could get any clue as to what was going on inside without frightening away whoever was there.”
“But Jeff had painted the car,” Susan said. “And Betsy changed the license plate.”
“Remember, honey, it was nighttime,” her mother said. “In the dark it’s impossible to tell the difference between a gray car and a green one. Cathy never looked at the license plate, she looked inside the car and knew the patched upholstery. She had ridden in that car so often, there was no way she could have been fooled by a new paint job.”
“Okay, now I know,” Susan said. “Do we have to keep talking about it?”
“Yes,” her mother said. “We need to talk about it at length with somebody who can help us understand exactly what happened to you and to the others who were under Mark’s influence. Yesterday afternoon your father and I had a counseling session with a psychologist. Detective Baca recommended him to us, and we found it very helpful.”
“You and Dad went to a psychologist?” Susan exclaimed, surprised out of her lethargy. “But why? There’s nothing wrong with the two of you.”