by Sue Miller
“Sorry,” he said to me. “Just relaying that detail. That’s very helpful information.” He was trying to make me feel useful, to relax me. “Okay!” he said. He clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Now. You come in, and you’re standing here, right?” I nodded. “So . . . you hear anything, see anything, right away? Anything funny?”
“No. I . . . I just started to take my stuff off. My scarf.” I gestured to it, looped unevenly over the hook. From another life.
“You had this on.” He lifted it, felt it, as though it might tell him something.
“When I came in, yes. I stood here for a minute, actually.” I backed up a little and leaned against the door. “I was so cold, I suppose I was making a noise.”
“You were making a noise.”
“Yes,” I said.
“What kind of a noise? Someone in the house would have heard it?”
“Well, actually, I think I first called out. I yelled hello or something. In case someone was here.”
“And there was no answer. No noise.”
“No. Not then. So then I took my scarf off.” I paused. I needed to get it right, I thought. Exactly right. “No,” I said. “First I stood here, for . . . it was like a minute, making this other noise. Sort of . . . moaning. I was too cold, too cold to move. Then I yelled hello. And then I took my scarf off. And I started to unlace my boots. One boot.” I looked down now, and there they were, the dangling laces, still untied. There was blood on the knees of my jeans, on the hem and sleeves of my army-surplus parka. I looked up. After a moment, I said, “And then I heard Dana make a noise.”
“What kind of noise?”
“A sigh, sort of.”
“How do you know it was Dana?”
“Well, it came from the living room. I mean, I didn’t know it was her, until I came to the doorway and saw her.”
“So it could have been someone else, couldn’t it? If they left quickly.”
“No, it was Dana.”
“I’m just asking,” he said. “This is just theoretical. I want you to think about the possibility that there was someone else in here with her, who made the noise and then left quickly.”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because why would they? Why would they make a noise? If they were trying to hide.”
“Maybe they were hurt. Maybe there’d been a struggle.”
“No.” I shook my head. “No, she was alone. I would’ve heard them leave, they would have been running or something. And except for her sigh, it was very silent in there. In the whole house.”
“Okay.”
“And then the floorboards, they creak. And if someone had left, I would have seen them, see?” I pointed at the back of the living room, visible from here. “I would have heard them, and then, once they headed back toward the kitchen, I would have seen them.”
He looked and then nodded. “Okay. Okay, so you hear her. And then what do you do?”
“I came to the doorway and saw her.”
“You came here.” He moved to the open doorway and gestured.
“Yes.”
“I’d like you to come here now. I know it’s hard, but she’s not there now. Just come over here. I want you to show me where she was.” His hand made a beckoning motion, drawing me toward him.
I came to the doorway. One of the men working looked up quickly, but the others didn’t pause.
“There.” I pointed past the smaller smear of pooled blood, about a third of the way from the couch to the doorway, to the larger pool, staining the floor by the couch.
Detective Connor put his hand at the back of my waist and pushed me gently forward.
“Where? Exactly.”
We stepped past the smaller mess. I pointed to the bloody smear on the couch and started to cry. “Here. Her head was sort of wedged here, by this blood. Her feet were toward me. I saw them first. They were bloody on the bottom. She was just lying here, on her side.”
“And you came to her.”
“Yes.”
“Did you realize she was dead?”
“No,” I whispered. “Because I had heard her.” I wiped at my eyes and nose with my hand.
“So you thought she was alive.”
“Yes. I thought so. It wasn’t logical.”
“I understand. Here,” he said. He held out a cellophane package of tissues.
I took it, tore at it. “I thought . . . She was warm still. When I touched her. That was it, I think. Her blood, even, was warm. I guess I thought if I could get her to breathe again, then maybe I could get help. It wasn’t logical.”
“No, but that’s how it goes,” he said. “So you tried to give her artificial respiration.”
“Yes, I guess so.” I blew my nose. “I turned her. I tried to blow air into her lungs.”
“And then you heard the noise.”
“Yes.” I didn’t mention, I hadn’t mentioned, the other noise, the noise of my breath escaping from Dana’s wound.
“Now, what kind of noise was it, exactly? From where?”
“I don’t know. It was from the kitchen, I think. It could have been just some old-house noise, something the wind was doing, or the refrigerator or something. I don’t remember it, really.”
“But it panicked you.”
“Yes. That’s when I started to run. And then I realized I couldn’t—that I shouldn’t—leave her, and I came back. But I couldn’t move her.”
“But you said you did move her.”
“I mean, I couldn’t lift her. I was trying to take her with me. I started to. I kind of slid her a little, I guess. But she was heavy, and I was really scared. So I left her.” And now something almost like a wail escaped me, my chest squeezed painfully.
“Okay, okay, okay. C’mon,” he said. He put his arm around my shoulders. He guided me into the kitchen. “C’mon.” He pulled a chair out. There were several men in here, too, and he signaled them somehow and they left. He put a glass of water down in front of me.
I drank a little, and choked. This set me off even more.
Detective Connor was patting me, hard, on the back, when Larry and Sara came in the kitchen door from outside, walking behind one of the uniformed cops. They looked terrified. Sara recoiled from me as I got up and went to them, but Larry reached out and held me, and I leaned against his chest awkwardly—he was shorter than I was—coughing and weeping.
Sometime shortly after that, they decided it would be easier, better, to take us all to the police station. They’d be in the house four or five hours longer, they said, so it made more sense to ask the questions they had for us there. And they’d have to get all our fingerprints anyway, to check against whatever prints they were able to pick up in the house.
I asked if I could change my bloody clothes, and they said they would get a change for me from my room, that they would need the clothes I was wearing. I told them what I wanted, where to find things.
One of the policemen was talking to Larry now, and he must have mentioned the kitty—the money can—because someone else went outside and produced it, an empty coffee can in a plastic bag. They’d found it in the yard. Asked how much was in it, Larry and I each offered a different guess, but Sara had checked it that afternoon—she was due to cook tomorrow—and so she was certain: there was seventeen dollars and change.
“Gone now,” the cop said. “Even the change.”
They drove us to the station in an unmarked car. We had started with Larry toward his, parked at the curb down in front of the house, but one of the policemen gestured us away from it and toward one of theirs; and it was then that it occurred to me for the first time that we were all suspects, in some sense. As we drove to Central Square, they asked for and we gave them Duncan’s and Eli’s names and places of work, and John’s, too, even though he’d been gone for almost a month. As though triggered by the mention of his name, Sara began to weep now.
I changed in the old-f
ashioned ladies’ room at the station, handing each article of clothing over the door to a silent policewoman standing outside the stall. I never saw those clothes again.
We were there for hours, much of the time spent waiting for one another to be questioned. Duncan came in after about the first half hour, but they had greater trouble finding Eli—getting into the building and then locating him in his lab. It was several hours before they led him into the room where all of us but Larry—he was being questioned then—were sitting around a big table. When I saw Eli, I stood up. As soon as I touched him, his mouth dropped open, as though he would cry out. But no noise came. Instead his face crumpled and his eyes filled. His head swayed slowly, weakly, on his neck. “It isn’t true,” he whispered to me after a moment, and the tears spilled down his cheeks.
The cops were nice to us. They brought us coffee and, as the night wore on, doughnuts and Danish. Sometimes a couple of them sat in the room while another of us was being questioned. They talked to us. It was probably just a robbery gone bad, several of them offered, as if this were consolation. Dana had been upstairs, heard something, came down, and interrupted the guy looking for something to steal.
Once, when they’d left us alone for a while, we started talking together about a party the summer before to which the cops had been called by neighbors. Several guests—Dana among them, we thought—had pulled them inside, tried to get them to dance. A kind of numbed exhaustion had overtaken us by now, and we were laughing, remembering this, when one of the detectives came in. He looked quickly from one of us to another, and we stopped, instantly.
It was almost dawn when they brought us home. There were still some plainclothes policemen working in the house—perhaps lab guys, they were wearing plastic gloves—so Larry offered us all beds on Marlborough Street. Duncan said he had friends he’d go to, and Eli thought he’d better get back to the lab—he’d left in the middle of a procedure. But Sara and I, after getting our toiletries under the watchful eyes of one of the detectives, got into Larry’s car and sat silently with him as we drove into Boston. The river was frozen solid again after the thaw of the weekend, and the sky was lightening to a chilly pearly gray above the city. Larry’s heater blew loudly over us and dried my throat and eyes.
We entered his house from a parking area at the back, coming into a cavernous old-fashioned kitchen and then a tiled basement hallway. Upstairs, the carpeting was so plush that we made no noise. The house was enormous, and deeply dark. Larry showed us to a room on the third floor with twin canopied beds and its own bathroom. Light leaked in weakly through the layers of curtain at the windows, but he unhooked the tiebacks for us, and we were in gloom again. His room was directly across the hall, he said. He’d warn his parents we were here. We should sleep as late as we could.
Sara and I talked only briefly while we shed our clothes. As we were drifting off in the muffled dark, she said softly, “It’s so hard to believe. At ten o’clock Larry and I were laughing our heads off at W. C. Fields. Now I can’t believe I’ll ever laugh again.”
The next day the police were not as nice. They had talked to Cappy, my boss, about what time I’d left the night before, and found out he knew me under a different name from the one I’d given them. They had an arrest record on Larry, for various acts of civil disobedience. They’d learned from Duncan and from Eli that Dana had been “sexually involved,” as they put it, with both of them. They’d found dope in Sara’s room and in Duncan’s, they’d discovered Sara’s various illegal pills. They’d found the loose cash in my room, which they saw as connected to the drugs.
All this information loomed larger, became more important, because they hadn’t found much of anything else. The ground was too frozen for footprints, the smear of Dana’s blood on the back door was from a gloved hand, and there were no fingerprints on the knife they had concluded was the murder weapon, one of our own dull kitchen knives the killer had left lying on the floor.
They kept questioning all of us off and on for several days. They made it clear what they thought of our “lifestyle.” They asked about other sexual activities and attractions in the house, they hinted at their belief in the possibility of orgies, of drugged sexual exchanges. They telephoned both my mother and Ted, checking out my identity.
I talked to both of them, too, the second evening—tense, strained conversations. I told them both I’d be back soon. That I had to see through all that was connected with Dana’s death, but when it was over I’d come home. I said that—“I’ll come home”—to each of them, each time not sure what I meant, where home was. Ted’s voice in response was like that of a stranger: polite, incurious. “Do what you feel you have to do,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said, pretending I heard something more generous than I had.
We slept in the house that second night, all but Duncan. He had come home in the afternoon to get some of his stuff, and he told us he thought he’d stay with friends for a while. The police were being hardest on him because they thought they saw some possible motivation for his killing Dana in his having slept with her while he had a girlfriend elsewhere. In Dana’s perhaps dangerous or threatening preoccupation with him.
We couldn’t figure that out: he had an alibi, after all. At the moment Dana lay dying, he was playing the guitar at Sebastian’s in front of thirty or forty people, several of whom had already been called upon to place him there. We were all sitting around the kitchen after he’d left, talking about it. “Maybe they think he hired a hit man,” Sara said, her wide eyes rounded behind her smudged glasses. I burst into a kind of loose, hysterical laughter, and she stared at me, offended, I think. She’d been serious.
I was fragile and on edge because we’d had to clean up Dana’s blood earlier. This was a surprise to me. I don’t know what I’d thought—that the police provided some service? In any case, I was the one who did it.
Eli and I had arrived home at the same time, and we stood together silently in the living room doorway, just staring at the terrible mess. I looked at him. He was white; his mouth hung open.
“Eli?” I said.
He turned and went back into the kitchen. He stood there, looking out the door, as I gathered the cleaning things. Just as I was going back into the living room, he said something.
“What?” I said.
Without turning around, he whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
While I scrubbed, I cried loudly, utterly careless of the tears and mucus flowing freely down into the pinked soapy bubbles on the floor. Eli came back in while I was still kneeling in the mess, and he stood watching wordlessly for a minute before he went upstairs. I could hear him a few moments later in the bathroom, throwing up.
I slept with Larry that second night, for comfort. In my own room, I had been unable to drop off. For one thing, I could hear Sara crying, little whimpers that opened up to whoops of sorrow from time to time. I got up and knocked on her door, but she called back, “No! Please don’t . . . don’t come in.”
“Sara?” I called. I leaned my forehead against her door. “It’s me.”
“I really need to be alone, Licia,” she said in a raw voice. “I just need to cry. You can’t help me.”
“You’ll get me if you want me?”
“If I want you. Yes.”
I stepped away from her door and stood in the open square hallway. The door to Dana’s room was ajar. I’d looked in there only once. The police had taken various things of hers—the photo of Duncan’s girlfriend, a few of her small, strange bronzes, clothing, personal items. All the papers from her desktop were gone. They’d left the bed unmade.
I knocked lightly on Larry’s door. No answer. I opened it and stepped carefully over the weights to his bed. “Larry,” I whispered.
“I’m awake.”
“Can I sleep with you?” I asked.
In answer, he shifted over. “Here,” he said. “Here.” And he reached up and took my hand.
In the three or four days f
ollowing Dana’s death, we all behaved differently. Duncan pulled away, essentially moving out. (He would be the first to say he was, in fact, going to leave.) Sara talked and talked during the day, and then she shut herself away at night and could be heard weeping—a noise that, as it drifted through the walls and closed door, sounded not unlike the cries she’d emitted regularly in her life of more or less constant sex with John. Eli disappeared for longer and longer periods to the lab, seeking comfort, I suppose, in the unvarying routines of work. When he was around, he seemed silenced, stunned, uncomfortable in any room in the house but his own. Once, on my way to the bathroom, I passed his open door and saw him lying, fully clothed, across the tidy bed. The light fell on him and his eyes were open, but he didn’t see me or hear me, and he didn’t move.
Larry’s way was to take charge. He did the shopping, the bulk of the cooking. He drove people where they needed to go—to the police station, to work, to class. He helped Duncan move his belongings out.
And I? I can hardly say. I moved woodenly through what needed to get done. I wept at odd times. I panicked at odd times, too, so frightened occasionally that I couldn’t catch my breath. Sometimes I literally could not believe what had happened, it seemed a long nightmare I would wake from soon. And then I did believe, and I started to cry again, to weep for Dana.
And from the first moment I was able to think clearly about anything except Dana, I realized that my life as Licia Stead was over, and I mourned her too.
Larry was the only one of us who regularly read the papers—the New York Times and the Boston Globe each day. And so it was he, drinking coffee between classes in a cafeteria in Harvard Square, who found the piece about Dana’s death the second day, about the “further discoveries” the police had made. The headline of the Globe article was POLICE LINK LIFESTYLE TO CAMBRIDGE MURDER. Before he came home, he stopped and bought the Herald, too, because he knew it would be even worse there. And it was. “Neighbors reported being regularly disturbed by parties which lasted into the wee hours, by drunken and drugged revelers urinating or vomiting into bushes.” The quantity of drugs found was vastly exaggerated. Of Dana they wrote: “The tall blond beauty had written in notebooks of her obsession with one of the house residents whom she’d been periodically intimate with, but this hadn’t prevented her from having sexual relations with at least one other resident.”