A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 11
Although all of us may have been thinking of what had happened to me, and who might have done it, my two housemates never discussed it unless I brought it up. Cully and Mimi listened whenever the terror and anger got to be too much for me. I tried not to drag on them, to leech them; I only went to them for help when I couldn’t stand my own company anymore.
A week after Cully moved in, I walked in my sleep. He found me looking up the staircase from the foot of the stairs, trying to raise my leg to mount them. I only half-woke when he told me gently to go to bed. I obeyed in a stupor; I only recalled the incident the next day when he cautiously asked me how I was feeling. I don’t think I ever walked in my sleep again. But sometimes when I went to bed very tired or anxious, I would wake about three o’clock with my heart pounding, sweating in the chilly night. Most of those nights I could go back to sleep. If the fear or the rage didn’t keep me awake.
The detectives dropped in again after a week, to ask me if I’d remembered anything else. I had nothing to tell Mr Tendall and Mr Markowitz. They didn’t seem to expect much.
Charles’s lawyer friend didn’t ask me out again. I was not surprised, and not much hurt. Charles himself was very awkward around me when he came to pick up Mimi or to eat supper with us. He treated me like Mad Aunt Letitia taking an outing from her attic; he humored me. But at least, as I kept reminding myself, he was trying to be kind.
I tried, too, even though it nearly cost me my expensive new dental work. I ground my teeth together frequently. The depth of my irritation did surprise me a little. I’d been halfway to liking Charles Seward before I’d been raped. (Everything was divided into two phases for me – before the rape and after.) Now Charles’s mere presence filled me with uneasiness. Don Houghton’s, too. I couldn’t understand it. Don was sweet; he suffered through acute embarrassment to tell me how sorry he was I’d been ‘hurt.’
Other men didn’t affect me that way, so why Charles and Don? What did they have in common? At odd moments I wondered, but I could never figure it out. I dismissed it as a fluke.
Barbara and I met in her office on a Thursday afternoon, which was a free afternoon for both of us. I’d been compiling my list in odd moments. Sometimes in the middle of a class a name would hop into my mind, and I’d surreptitiously whip out my pieces of paper and write it down. The list was dismayingly long, despite the brevity of my life in Knolls. I’d met so many men the times I’d stayed with Mimi years before. There were so many male students in my classes.
Barbara’s list was even more staggering. She knew almost all the male faculty members and at least a couple hundred students. She knew fewer townspeople, but she’d met some, of course, in her years at Houghton.
I guess the same thought crossed both our minds as we stared blankly at the little pile of paper: Our project was impossible. Swiftly I tried to imagine factors that might make our failure less sickeningly disappointing. The depth of our outrage would fade with time. It had to; human beings who wanted to remain mentally healthy could not carry such a crushing load. The rapist might get caught tomorrow, go to trial, get a heavy sentence . . .
But Barbara, who had managed words on paper for years, had other ideas. ‘Our old friend process of elimination,’ she said, her crisp midwestern vowels snapping clearly. ‘Okay!’ She pushed the brown frame of her glasses back up her snubby nose. ‘How old was the voice?’ she asked me.
It was like a pop quiz. ‘I would say – thirty or over,’ I answered slowly. ‘Past youth, way past youth.’
‘Same here. There, we’ve eliminated the students, except for the overage ones.’
I began to feel more optimistic. ‘I only know two students my age or older,’ I said. ‘Two vets. Dan Kirby and Paul Scotti.’
Barbara closed her eyes. ‘Don’t know Paul Scotti,’ she said finally. ‘Dan Kirby’s in my Victorian Prose class.’
‘Then we have one name.’
‘And we’ve eliminated about two hundred fifty men.’
‘In one fell swoop.’
We’d both had the foresight to list students separately. Barbara threw away two sheets of her list and one of mine. ‘What else do we know that could eliminate some more names?’
I pinched my cheek to help me think. ‘White. Since we talked about that before, I presume you didn’t list any blacks.’ Barbara nodded. ‘Heavy . . . and not extremely tall or short. That should knock out a few people.’
‘The short part, anyway. I thought he was average or maybe a little taller.’
‘And you were standing up, so you’d know better than I would. Strike the shorties and the very skinny men.’
Excluding the students except for Dan Kirby, my list consisted of twenty-six names. Barbara said hers reached fifty-one. This purge of too-short, too-thin men pared my list to twenty, Barbara’s to forty-two.
‘Compare, now they’re manageable,’ I suggested, and handed over my list. I watched Barbara’s pen move down the columns. It hesitated over some names, drew a decisive line through others.
‘Cully Houghton’s not on your list,’ she said at one point. ‘He’s on mine.’
‘He was with me when you were raped, Barbara.’
‘Oh. Okay.’ A line, thank God.
At last she threw down her pen and lifted her glasses to rub her eyes.
‘How many?’ I asked anxiously.
‘Nine,’ she said. ‘Just nine. That match.’
I hadn’t thought the list could be narrowed so quickly. At first I felt elated. Then I felt sick.
‘Let’s check before we meet again, to see if either of us forgot anyone. For example, did you include your postman?’
‘Oh,’ I said slowly. ‘Mr McCluskey. No.’
‘But I don’t know him. So he cancels out. Anyone else?’ I shook my head.
‘Then let’s stop. I can’t stand much more of this.’
‘I know what you mean.’ It had its own peculiar ghastliness, our little project. I began to gather up my things. I asked, ‘Did you know the dectectives before?’
Barbara’s hand froze in the act of passing my marked-down list back to me. ‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘I knew John Tendall. Yes.’
‘I met him at a security lecture he gives at every orientation,’ I told her bleakly. ‘I just now remembered.’
Barbara rubbed her forehead. She added John Tendall to both our lists. Ten names.
Jeff Simmons, college president
Jeffrey Tabor, cashier
Don Houghton, businessman
Charles Seward, lawyer
Ray Merritt, salesman
Theo Cochran, registrar
Randy Marquette, English professor
J. R. Smith, English professor
Dan Kirby, student
John Tendall, detective
‘We’ve both got to think,’ she said, as I stuffed the piece of paper in my purse. ‘We’re doing the best we can,’ she added obscurely.
‘I’ll call you as soon as I’m sure I’ve got every single name on there,’ I said.
She smiled up at me. She looked small and frail behind her big littered desk. The deep auburn of her hair made her face seem even whiter.
‘We’re doing the best we can,’ I agreed. And it did seem to me quite an achievement. In thirty-odd minutes we’d managed to establish that our assailant was one of ten men. In making those sweeping eliminations we were able to do what the police could not, because we both were convinced that the man who raped us knew us. Now we couldn’t even try to persuade the detectives who were handling our cases. One of them was on the list.
* * * *
In fact, what the town was doing at this time was figuratively holding its breath and waiting for the next rape, though none of us realized it until afterward. Heidi Edmonds had been raped in early August. Barbara had been raped in early September. I had been raped in the latter part of October. And there were the rumors from Cully’s policeman friend, rumors of at least two victims who hadn’t gone to the police. Cully confirmed one rumor on a night when Mimi and I were wondering out loud if the attacks were evenly spaced.
‘There was one in late August,’ he said, and gave each of us a look to assure our silence.
‘He must be counseling her,’ Mimi murmured over the after-supper dishes. We would never mention it to Cully again. But among his books I noticed several new ones on rape and the treatment of offenders and victims. So it was true that Barbara, myself, and Heidi Edmonds had an unknown companion or two – or three, or even four.
‘We should form a club,’ I told Barbara bitterly one day as we sat in damned-together closeness at a table in the noisy student center. ‘Think how we could narrow down the list!’ The count still stood at ten, though we’d rummaged our brains for men we might have forgotten initially.
Barbara didn’t answer. Stan Haskell had just come in, and her eyes were following him with a mixture of anger and grief. He was with a young anthropology professor who had the kind of quiet pleasant looks Barbara had. Stan picked women of a type. Surely the rapist did too? Perhaps Barbara and I should concentrate on what we had in common, what our near-fatal attraction was, rather than on our list. There was a pattern, I was convinced. There had to be a pattern, a reason. But maybe we two were too close to see our similarity. It might take a less involved person to spot it.
As I walked home a few minutes later I was praying, an infrequent activity for me until recently. I was praying that some nice man would ask Barbara out. Then, self-engrossed human that I am, my thoughts shifted to some reading I had to do, and from there to a letter I’d gotten the day before from my mother. She’d hinted heavily that she and Jay Chalmers weren’t getting along too well. And she’d written it sober, I could tell. A couple of months ago, she’d been able to hold off until after church. I had already written her back, the longest letter I’d sent Mother in years. I hoped. I was afraid to hope.
I climbed the stone steps to the front yard, then the wooden steps to the front porch, with an ease and absence of pain that pleased me. Almost well.
‘Mimi?’ I called. She sometimes came home to lunch, walking for the exercise; so she might be in the house even if her car wasn’t there. I hadn’t glimpsed the bumper from the street, as I could if the car was parked behind the house.
‘I’m up here,’ she called from her floor of the house. She came down in a clatter, dark hair bouncing on her shoulders. She was carrying Attila by his middle, so she was angry. The cat had a guilty, smirky look about him. His big green eyes went from my face to Mimi’s with false affection: I adore you, don’t punish me.
‘This durn cat turned over my bath powder, and now I’m late,’ she said breathlessly. She handed the culprit to me. I gave him a severe shake, but then I hugged him. I’m a born sucker.
‘You want me to get it up off the floor?’ I offered.
‘No, I got it. That’s why I’m late. I’m going to run over to Alicia’s instead of walking back to the college. She’s due at the same meeting in’ – Mimi glanced at her tiny silver watch – ‘five minutes. I’ve got to run. I’ll cut through the backyards, maybe I can catch her going out the door.’
Carrying a straggling Attila, I followed Mimi through the kitchen. I put the cat out and then opened the refrigerator to see if there were any pears left.
‘Her car’s still there!’ Mimi called back triumphantly. She thudded down the back steps. She would cross through old Mrs Harbison’s yard to Alicia’s back door.
I’d washed a pear, dried it, and turned to lock the back door behind Mimi when I heard the sound. I knew immediately it was coming from Mimi, though I’d never heard her scream before. I dropped the pear, ran out the back door, flew down the steps, and crashed through the hedge. I glimpsed Mrs Harbison looking out her kitchen window as I sped across her grass. ‘Call the police!’ I shouted, and saw her begin to turn.
Mimi was screaming no longer: She was stock-still on the steps to Alicia’s glassed-in back porch. She was holding the door open with one hand. The door was smeared with something like rust.
I didn’t want to see what Mimi was seeing. I checked my pace abruptly and stood gasping four feet away. Mimi’s head turned slowly and her eyes met mine. The brown of her irises stood out shockingly in her face, which had turned a dirty gray. I felt my scalp prickle. Against my will, my feet moved until I stood beside my friend.
Alicia’s eyes were also wide and staring. Her face was even grayer. She lay in a crucified sprawl on the floor of the porch. We didn’t need to check her pulse or breathing; even I could tell she had been dead for hours. Because I couldn’t bear to look at her, I raised my eyes and stared through the length of the house. As though I was locked in a dream, I slowly recorded the fact that Alicia’s front door was ajar, its dead bolts pulled back. And I thought, Barbara and I are right. Alicia knew him, too. She let him in.
* * * *
We had to wait for the police. When the patrolmen arrived, they asked Mimi to check briefly to see if anything was missing. I didn’t suppose for a minute that the police really thought the killer had been a panicked burglar. But I guess they had to be sure. After all, it was the first time the rapist had actually killed anyone.
The sunshine was horribly bright in Alicia’s living room. It shone with autumn gilding on the blood spots on the pale gray carpet traced with golden color the rusty handprint on the newel post. I wondered how this house, lavished with Alicia’s care, could tolerate her death so easily; how the sun could bathe the evidence of her last moments with such gracious light. Her mortal fear, the annihilating terror I knew so well, had remained behind her: I felt it.
She had fought for her life every inch of the way. She had almost made it. Almost.
The trail of her last moments led through the house. Spots of blood on the carpet inside that open front door. The handprint on the newel. One of her slippers. A knife scar from a thrust that had missed her and scored the wall. Splotches of blood trailing through the kitchen. And finally her body, collapsed inside the back door, blood from her hands smeared beside the locks as she’d fumbled to work them; had unlatched them but had not been able to get out that door. Alicia had nearly made it out into the yard, where she could have hidden in the shrubs until her screams brought help.
I had seen Alicia’s intact underwear under her bathrobe, pinned askew by her fall. So she’d been spared rape but she’d lost her life, oh Alicia! Her terror and desperation were as thick in the house as a fog. I was frightened for myself, in the part of me capable of selfish thought. It was too soon for me to tolerate this. But I had to, since Mimi was still upstairs.
My old companions Tendall and Markowitz appeared at the back door, surveying what lay there before crunching around to the front door on the gravel of the driveway. Then Alicia’s body was hidden from my view by the police technicians who gathered around her.
She would have hated them seeing her as she was.
The detectives came in the front door, taking care not to touch the knob or sill. They weren’t surprised to see me. Someone must have filled them in. They nodded but were too engrossed in their job to pay me much mind. I stared at John Tendall to watch his reaction, so I could report to Barbara; he was on the list. He simply looked preoccupied and professional. He had thick gray hair, meticulously groomed. With his deep tan and flashy sports jacket, he looked like a smalltime hood rather than a police detective. Markowitz was just as finicky with his hair – he favored sculpted waves of the Jerry Lee Lewis school. He was beefy and pale, with sharp eyes staring from a blank face. They were both workmen absorbed in a technically tricky job.
I was increasingly concerned about Mimi. The police shouldn’t be keeping her so long. She needed to get out of this house. Just as I rose to look for her, she appeared on the stairs. Her face was a horrible color now, even her lips; white as the dresses we’d worn when we graduated from Miss Beacham’s – Mimi, Alicia, and I. Mimi was shaking so hard she looked like she had palsy. One of the patrolmen had to help her down the stairs. I instantly got myself to the foot and waited there with arms uplifted, as if to receive an infant. I had no more grief to spare for the handprint on the newel post. Alicia was dead. Mimi was alive, and Mimi was going to collapse very soon.
Even as I had my arm around her and we turned to go, Markowitz was asking if Mimi knew how they could get in touch with Ray.
‘Call Ray’s mother, Mrs Ralph Merritt,’ I said briefly. Later I wondered how I’d managed to dredge up that long-buried name.
We had to leave by the front door, of course. There were neighbors standing on their front porches looking at the police cars. People in Knolls were as curious as people anywhere, but they were ashamed of it. For a few seconds no one came to help me – not out of fear of involvement but for fear of seeming nosy and meddlesome. Finally old Mrs Harbison (who could consider herself a member of the situation, so to speak, since she’d called the police) hobbled down to give me what assistance she could. It was enough. As soon as the old lady saw I could manage and that Mimi was safely deposited on one of the couches, she left after one quiet question.
‘Is Alicia dead?’
I nodded silently. I remembered what I’d long ago learned from Mimi: Alicia had given Mrs Harbison a ride to church every week. Alicia had called the old lady every time she went to the grocery store, to see if Mrs Harbison needed anything. Now the old lady was shaking her head from side to side, and tears began trickling through the papery wrinkles as she turned to leave.
Mimi was crying convulsively, unable to speak or move. When I thought I could leave her, I called Cully at the college. Ten minutes later he came into the house like a whirlwind. He folded his long arms around his sister and held her to him.
I was unnecessary, and I needed to be by myself. I sat in the kitchen breakfast nook with my hands folded and my legs tight. I stared out the bay window into that lovely serene yard, at the last blowsy rose blooms. The blooms bent their heads waiting for the executioner frost. Time passed.
