A Secret Rage & Sweet and Deadly, page 14
All too soon I was by the gleaming coffin looking down at Alicia. Her face was colorless and smooth and still. Of course . . .
For the first time the absolute immobility of the dead struck me. The complete absence of movement, even the tiny movements of breathing, seemed so remarkable to me that I couldn’t turn away. I wondered briefly if I should, after all, have gone in to see my father. And I wondered how the mortician had managed to fix Alicia up. I felt an eerie professional curiosity about the makeup he’d used. Why had Ray wanted the coffin open? Why on earth had the family consented to lay Alicia out in front of anyone who cared to take a look? It seemed the worst invasion of privacy I’d ever witnessed. I was appalled; but I was also spellbound. She’d looked so awful when I’d last seen her: mouth open, eyes wide, legs sprawled, covered with blood. What I was seeing now, I forced myself to admit, was better – and, after the initial shock, strangely comforting.
Here was no woman frozen in final pain and fear. This was a serene Alicia: clean, her hair arranged, her face turned to one side to cover a scalp wound I remembered. She had the dignity she’d had in life. She was presented as she would have wanted. But I swore to myself on the spot that I would put something in my will about closing my coffin.
I was only vaguely aware of Mrs Harbison wandering away. When I finally looked up from the face I’d last seen smeared with blood, I met Don Houghton’s eyes. His face was smooth and still and white. I shuddered. He looked at me steadily, with an unwavering disregard of what lay literally between us. ‘It’s always a shock, isn’t it?’ he commented.
Maybe it was the carefully dimmed lighting, maybe it was the overwhelming presence of death, or my own horror at seeing Alicia – but he didn’t seem to be the same Don Houghton I’d known for all these years. Not the same man who’d taken us to the zoo in Memphis, the man who’d borne so patiently and lovingly with his difficult wife. I would rather have looked at Alicia’s corpse than at the face of this stranger. When I lowered my eyes, I observed as if from a distance my own hand gripping the rim of the coffin so tightly that my knuckles had turned white. I snatched my hand away.
This man is also on the list, I thought. There was only one list in my life, a list of names. And this man, the father of two people I loved, was on it.
‘In the midst of life . . .’ Don quoted ponderously.
I glanced up involuntarily. He was looking down this time, at Alicia. ‘I always liked that girl,’ he said simply. He walked around the coffin, passing within two feet of me as he went through the archway.
Thank God Cully is so tall. I spotted him immediately and flew to him like a bird homing to its particular tree. He was engaged in low-voiced conversation with a group of college people: Barbara, the Cochrans, Jeff Simmons, a couple of familiar faces I couldn’t label. I jerked at Cully’s coat. He swung round with a surprised look. When he saw my face, he mumbled an excuse over his shoulder and moved me away.
‘I have to get out of here,’ I said through clenched teeth. He saw I meant it, and quickly asked Theo to get Mimi home; and without waiting for an answer he whisked me out the door and into the parking lot just in time. I sped to a clump of bushes on the far side, and I vomited.
‘Romantic, huh?’ I gasped between heaves. He wisely kept his mouth shut. I loved him so much for that that I could have kissed his hands. But love and throwing up, fear and throwing up, don’t blend. In the end, all you think about is throwing up.
That night Cully’s training paid off in spades. He didn’t ask me any questions on the way home. He just murmured soothing things about a hot bath and bed, exactly what I’d been dreaming of myself. I leaned back against the car seat in a jelly of exhaustion. Things gradually quieted down internally.
It wasn’t just the eerie conversation with Cully’s father that had upset me so violently, or Mimi’s painful withdrawal, or Ray’s hostility, though all had contributed. When I’d looked down at Alicia’s still face, I had seen my own. I had seen my longer, thinner hands folded on my waist.
It had been a vile moment, worse than a glimpse of my mother dead drunk, worse than the leer I’d seen in my stepfather’s face; worse, even, than my rape. During that long ordeal, I’d known my enemy. He was right there on me. Now I didn’t know who he was, whether he was observing me, or whether his hatred of me was spent or active. I’d finally reached the end of my rope. My reserves of courage were exhausted. My almost-faded bruises seemed to take on new life. My gums around the loosened teeth ached. I thought I tasted blood in my mouth again.
As I brushed my teeth in the blessed solitude of the bathroom, I decided it would suit me just fine if nothing ever happened to me again in my life. Nothing more distressing than misplacing my keys, nothing more elating than successfully matching some drapes to a rug. Yes, that would suit me just fine.
To make myself feel better, I let myself dream dreams I normally would have dismissed from my mind. Would Cully ask me to marry him? Given the example of my own mother’s remarriage, the misalliance of Elaine and Don Houghton, and Cully’s and Mimi’s washouts, it was amazing that I wanted to contemplate marriage. But the dreams fed you as a child are almost impossible to dislodge. Those dreams can be very comforting when just being an adult is a burden.
As I soaked in the bathtub under a mound of bubbles, I conjured up a vision of myself in candlelight satin and a picture hat (I’d worn a wedding outfit like that in a show once), marching down the aisle to meet Cully – who was in a tux, of course. The whole tableau was fuzzily framed by an old-fashioned church full of flowers and people who wished us well. Mimi was beaming by the minister, her arms full of flowers – but not wearing a hat like mine, I decided judiciously; Mimi would look like a fool in a picture hat . . .
By the time I was ready to switch off the bedside lamp, Cully tucked in beside me, I had designed Mimi’s whole outfit and selected my china and silver. Cully’s love for the wounded, his air of remoteness, had completely vanished in my vision – as had my memory of the years I’d knocked on the doors of his awareness in vain.
As I sank into sleep, Cully’s breathing even and quiet beside me, I almost fantasized myself a virgin again for the wedding night.
* * * *
The funeral was scheduled for Tuesday at two. When I got up that morning it was raining, a cold autumnal rain. I let Mimi give me a lift to my first class; I didn’t want to start the day soggy. I had been debating whether or not I should go to the service. I decided, after slogging between my second and third classes, that I couldn’t. I’d already come up with a rebuttal to the argument I expected from Mimi. But when I got back to the house and announced my decision she only nodded.
Cully had an appointment that would keep him in his office till the last minute, so Mimi left alone. She was drawn with exhaustion: Her eyes looked hollow. Her emotions had been burned away by their intensity. Our conversation, what there was of it, was strained. We all needed time to heal. I wondered if we would have it.
The house was silent except for the patter of the rain. After I watched Mimi’s car back out of the driveway, I tried to settle at my desk with a stack of work. I was doing well in most of my classes so far, particularly well in my English classes. I’d been so afraid that what I’d been through would ruin my grades that I’d actually been working much harder. Desperate concentration helped keep the wolves at bay.
I was supposed to read Macbeth for my Shakespeare class. It was fortunate that I was already familiar with the play, because I couldn’t bury myself in concentration. I tried the devices that usually worked, but nothing seemed to help. The cats were having a running (and vocal) battle, both irritable at being trapped inside by the rain. I kept imagining Alicia’s funeral and feeling guilty I hadn’t gone, if for no other reason than to bolster Mimi. We might be estranged, but love is a habit as well as an emotion.
After I’d run through all my rational reasons for feeling restless, I discovered the true one. I was alone in the house for the first time since I’d gotten raped.
When I realized that, I closed my Shakespeare and began to piece together a conspiracy. If Mimi wasn’t home, Cully was; if neither of them was in the house, it was while I was at school or studying in the library. Since I hadn’t consciously been avoiding an empty house, it occurred to me that the other two had been orchestrating their departures and arrivals to ensure I wasn’t alone. In an instant I was sure of it.
Well. I was alone now. I listened to the drip of rain off the eaves, and stared out the side window into the soaked vegetation between Mimi’s and Mrs Harbison’s empty house. I shivered a little and pulled my sweater closer around me, doubled over my breasts. I couldn’t sit there at the desk a moment longer; not with my back to the silent room.
I prowled the house. Attila had curled up to sleep in my clothes hamper, but Mao drifted at my heels. Upstairs, downstairs, from the kitchen to my bedroom. Back into the living room. All my favorite colors were there, my own harmony in the rugs and furniture; but I took no pleasure in it, in the fineness of the workmanship and wood. I stood at a front window and peered out at the houses across the street. They looked forlorn and dismal in the steady mist.
A man was slogging down the opposite sidewalk, his collar pulled up and his head covered with a plastic-treated rain-hat. I eyed him with idle curiosity, not recognizing him as any of the regular neighborhood walkers. A persistent cuss, to be taking his constitutional in this weather. Only when he was exactly opposite my window and had turned to look at the house did I recognize that the man was John Tendall. I started to open the front door and call to him to come share tea or hot chocolate – that’s how desperate I was. Even flashy Tendall, the detective, whom I associated with that horrible night, seemed preferable to the hush of the house. I caught myself with my hand on the doorknob.
‘You fool,’ I said out loud. ‘That’s right. Just ask a man into the house when you’re alone. A man on the list, yet. Real intelligent.’ My fingers dropped from the knob. ‘Smart, Nickie Callahan.’ It made me feel a little sick, calling myself a fool because I’d been prepared to be friendly, been at the point of extending the trust one automatically feels toward familiar people.
Come to think of it what was John Tendall doing walking in the nasty chilly rain? Especially when almost every other resident of a certain segment of Knolls was sitting in the church a few blocks away? I’d turned to sit at my desk, but now I moved again to the window to watch. Tendall had paused to stare at Alicia’s house. Then, as I watched, he trudged away through the rain.
Maybe Tendall, the dedicated detective, was pondering the crimes. Maybe he’d wanted to stare at my house and Alicia’s to refresh his memory. Maybe he was revisiting the scenes of his crimes.
My thoughts began the same old round. Barbara and I called each other, or saw each other, almost daily. We were still trying to come up with a way to further narrow our list, which remained at six. I’d told her I thought Ray Merritt was out, but she argued quite rightly that we had to have something more substantial than a gut feeling to drop him from the list. We’d temporarily reached a dead end. Maybe I should try again from the other end.
Back to the same old question. What did we, the victims, have in common? A young, inexperienced student. A college professor of thirty-plus. A former model, now writer-to-be and struggling student. An efficient young matron.
Already eliminated: build, hairstyle, access, age. Could be eliminated: Let’s see. Income. Background – Alicia’s and mine similar, but Barbara’s father was a small-scale farmer and her mother a nurse, and Heidi Edmonds’s father was a minister, I recalled. Oh – religion? No. Alicia had been a Baptist, I was an erratic Episcopalian, Barbara a Lutheran.
But there had to be a pattern, a rhyme and reason. This violence, this hatred, had a specific focus. I had to know that focus for my own peace of mind. I might tell myself and everyone else that I was blameless. And I was; of all the usual things rape victims are accused of: leading men on, wearing sexy clothes, being alone outside at night. As if such harmless behavior meant the victim should expect to be raped in consequence. As if lack of wisdom, incaution, merited such a punishment. But always at the back of my mind was the niggling idea that maybe I’d offended somehow, had trodden over delicate ground. In some innocent way, some blind way, I’d aroused that violence, and I wanted to know how.
I couldn’t recall any disagreements I’d had with anyone in Knolls since I’d arrived. No arguments, aside from classroom discussion, came to mind. Those were hardly heated enough or long enough to provoke a reaction of that intensity, and they’d often as not been with other women in the class.
When Mimi and Cully finally pulled into the driveway in their separate cars, I was ready to talk. I wanted to hear voices and ideas other than my own. They wanted to talk, too; anything to wipe out the memory of what they’d just witnessed. They had taken the afternoon off to attend the funeral, so they were home for the day.
Cully kissed me. ‘You were right not to go,’ he said, and went to the kitchen to bring us all some wine. We settled in the living room. I asked him what he’d heard from his policeman friend about the progress of the investigation.
‘He hardly tells me everything,’ Cully warned. ‘But I reckon they’ve checked all the obvious things. Men registered at the motels on the nights of the crimes. Drifters. Anyone in town or close by who has a record of violence or sex offenses. So far, almost everyone they’ve checked has an alibi for one, or all, of the incidents. The people who don’t have alibis seem to be in the clear for other reasons: extremely short, which doesn’t tally with anyone’s impressions, or mentally deficient, which doesn’t either. Or something. Thank God, Ray’s in the clear. He was miles from here with witnesses at the time Alicia must have died.’
So casually, another name was gone. That left five: Jeff Simmons, Charles Seward, Don Houghton, Theo Cochran, John Tendall. I had a fact for Barbara.
‘No one’s seen anything strange on any of the nights the guy’s been at large,’ Cully was rambling on. ‘That’s not too surprising when you consider how early this town goes to bed. No cars parked where they shouldn’t be, no fingerprints, just physical evidence collected from—’ He stopped short.
‘From me and the others,’ I said quietly.
‘What physical evidence?’ Mimi asked suddenly. She’d been drinking her wine very fast, in silence. ‘I don’t want to upset you, Nickie, but I don’t really understand what that means.’
I focused on a snag in my hose. ‘What they got off me, with a kind of sticky-feeling pad,’ I said after a moment, ‘was a pubic hair that was not mine. And – saliva samples, I think, and – semen.’ My fingers plucked the snag into a run.
‘Some men secrete their blood type in the semen,’ Cully told Mimi quickly in a blessedly matter-of-fact way. ‘Some men don’t. But getting a blood type is a good corroboration. This man was a secretor, as it turns out. And from Alicia, I believe, they got some skin and blood from her fingernails, since she fought.’
‘I haven’t noticed anyone going around with a big scratch across his face,’ I said. But I’d watch from now on. What would Alicia have grabbed for? Not his face, dummy. His hands. His knife. Of course. I’d seen what shape Alicia’s hands were in, the palms . . .
‘But none of this is any good, is it?’ Mimi said abruptly. ‘Until you catch the bastard. To match all this evidence up with. It can’t help catch him, right? It’ll just help nail him if he is caught.’
‘That’s right,’ Cully said.
The rest of the day was just something to get through. Neither Mimi nor Cully could come up with anything we victims had in common. I lay awake long after Cully had gone to sleep. I was facing the fact that the man who had harmed me would probably go free. Quite possibly he would go forever unpunished for his violation of my life and body.
Then I had an idea so galvanizing that I sat up straight and drove my fist into my pillow. I shook Cully by the shoulder.
‘Hunh?’
‘Cully, wake up!’
‘You okay, Nickie?’ He rubbed my shoulder.
‘I’m fine, Cully. Listen – did your police friend tell you what blood type the guy is?’ I held my breath.
‘What? Oh. Yeah. Let’s see.’
Dammit, Cully.
‘Not a big help,’ he mumbled finally. ‘O positive. Real common.’
‘Go back to sleep, sweetheart,’ I whispered. ‘Everything’s okay.’ He was snoring in two minutes, but I waited ten before I crawled out of bed to call Barbara.
I knew she’d be awake.
11
THURSDAY MORNING BEGAN marvelously. Cully woke up feeling frisky. Hugging my wonderful plan to me, I was glad to respond. The room was cold. Cully and the bed were warm. My first class had been canceled because of a conference my professor was attending, so I didn’t have to be at school until 9:45. Everything was going beautifully until I giggled when Cully’s fingers brushed a sensitive area. In mock reproof, he lay a hand over my mouth.
I was instantly blind with fear. I struck his hand with all my strength, my breathing seemed to stop, and there went my heart, racing racing for the end, oh God I’m going to die . . .
‘Nickie! Nickie!’ Cully’s face was over me, white and shocked. ‘Oh my God, honey, I forgot! I’m sorry!’
I managed to gasp, ‘Wait. Wait a minute.’ I fought desperately to control my lungs.
He had frightened me so much that for a few seconds I hated him. His black hair rumpled from sleep seemed ludicrous rather than endearing. For an abysmal moment I thought: What is he doing here? I don’t know this man. There was no sap left in me, nothing left that wasn’t burned and shriveled from the blaze of fear and hate.
