Miss Lizzie Read online

“Yeah, but only when the Huns come.”

  I could hardly count upon the Huns; they were notoriously unreliable. “What about when you’re not here? What about when you go over to the Bromptons’ house? Sometimes you stay there for days. Someone could come along and find it.”

  “It’s been here for two years, and no one’s ever found it.”

  “Yes, but part of that was in wintertime and no one was around. I could guard it for you. If anyone came, I could go up to them and tell them I was lost, so they’d have to take me to Grandma’s. They’d never find it then.”

  He considered this.

  “Please, William? I promise I’ll never tell anyone.”

  He had the grace to forbear pointing out that the threat I implied—of actually telling—was empty; I had already sworn an oath.

  “Well, okay. But only when I’m gone. And no dolls or anything.”

  (I did bring my dolls—reasoning that if William had actually known them personally, he would have wanted them to share the fort—but I never told him.)

  He looked over the fort, as pleased as Carnegie admiring his first library, then turned to me. “Do you like it?”

  “William,” I said, “I love it.”

  He beamed.

  I watched Miss Lizzie as she turned over the middle card of three that lay atop the coffee table. It was the ace of spades. She scooped up the cards, shuffled them, used her thumbnail to split the deck, and, holding one-half in each hand, spread them simultaneously into perfect fans. Then, flawlessly, the cards rustling like leaves in a breeze, she melded them together. She glanced up, saw that I was watching, and smiled. “Can I get you something, dear? Some more tea?”

  “No, thank you, Miss Lizzie. I’m all right.” But I was thinking of the fort.

  We had spent last summer at our grandparents’, and the fort had still been there, still stocked with provisions, although William no longer went there every day—at sixteen he had other things on his mind, chiefly girls. (In two years his shyness had dropped away, possibly because, with the faulty taste that only one’s older brother can possess, the girls he chose to court were so simpering and witless.)

  Now, a year later, might he not have gone there once again? Had it not been designed, after all, as a refuge?

  But I had sworn an oath, under pain of hellfire, never to tell anyone about the fort.

  On the other hand, logically speaking I was already damned. Throughout the day, idly, I had been examining the image of Amanda amid the flames, turning it round and about as one might a bright shiny aggie or a gleaming shard of costume jewelry. There was, in the end, only one eternity; you could not be sentenced to it twice.

  Yet violating the oath somehow seemed so much worse than wishing Audrey dead.

  “Miss Lizzie?” I said.

  She was palming the king of hearts. Distracted, she said, “Yes?”

  “What do you think hell is like?”

  “I don’t know, dear. Pittsburgh?” Then, looking up, she saw by my frown that I was serious. “Why do you ask, Amanda?”

  I shrugged. “Just curious, I guess.”

  “Well, child,” she said, kindness in her tone, “I think that perhaps that’s a question you should ask your father.”

  “I will,” I said. Fat chance. “But I wanted to know what you thought about it.”

  She smiled. “What I think may be very different from what your father thinks.”

  “That’s all right. What do you think?”

  “Well,” she said, “this is only my opinion, mind, but I really don’t believe that hell exists. At least not the way the books and the Billy Sundays talk about it.”

  For a moment I was speechless. Startled not so much by what she said—startling enough—as by her saying it, thinking it, without being snatched from the face of the earth and hurled at once into that very place. Stammering, I said, “But—but where would we go then? Afterward? I mean the bad people. Where would they go?”

  “I don’t think they go anywhere. I think they stay here on earth.”

  “You mean like ghosts?”

  “No, not like ghosts.” She smiled faintly, thoughtfully. “Well, some of them, perhaps.” I thought then of her mother, her father. Had they haunted her, hacked and bleeding? Had they come to her on lonely moonlit nights?

  She said, “I think most of us stay here, through our actions, through the events we set in motion. Through the people we’ve known.”

  “But what about our soul? What about our spirit? Where does my me go when I die?”

  She smiled. “Where was it before you were born?”

  I thought about that. “In the Mind of God?”

  She nodded. “All right. Yes. The Mind of God. That’s as good a way as any of putting it.”

  “And we all go there?”

  “We all are there, I think. We’re all pieces of it, expressions of it. Everything is. If you look into the eyes of a dog or a cat, any animal, you can see it there, that Something, that Force. The Mind of God.”

  “Even bugs?”

  She laughed. It seemed like weeks since I had heard her laugh. “If our own eyes were clear enough, yes, I think we could see it even in theirs.”

  “But what about—” I stopped, listening to the sudden murmur from the crowd outside. I looked at her.

  “Perhaps it’s your father coming back.”

  A pounding at the front door.

  I think we both knew that it was not Father.

  Once again I followed her, once again she held her face to the door and called out, “Who is it?”

  “Officer Medley.”

  She unlocked the door, opened it. Medley stepped inside and she closed it behind him.

  Officer Medley seemed grim. “I’m looking for Mr. Burton.”

  “He’s not here,” Miss Lizzie said. “I believe he’s at the Fairview.”

  Medley shook his head. “I checked. He’s not there.”

  “What is it?” I said. “Is it about William?”

  Medley turned to me. His mouth tightened.

  “Is it?” I said. “Is it about William?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  TWELVE

  I STOOD IN my nightgown at the open window of the darkened room, staring past the lace curtains at the empty beach. The tide was low, and by starlight I could see broad fingers of flat gray sandbar curling out into the black glossy sea. I had been standing there for some time.

  Officer Medley had told us only that William was still missing. He refused, stalwartly, to reveal what new information the police had obtained and insisted, earnestly, that he must speak with Father.

  After he left, Miss Lizzie had made some mutton sandwiches, the meat cut from a roast in her icebox; but neither of us had eaten much. By ten o’clock, Father had still not returned. Miss Lizzie suggested I try to get some sleep, assuring me that the moment he did appear, she would send him to my room.

  I had lain for a while, breathing in the smell of camphor, but sleep had not come.

  What had the police found? Evidence, as Mr. Slocum would have said. But evidence of what?

  Had they found him? Had they somehow located his fort? To get to my grandparents’ from Boston, he would have had to hitchhike or take a train. Had someone seen him, reported him?

  Worry, like sadness, feeds upon itself. After a while, lying there fretting in the dark, another thought occurred to me. For the first time since the murder (such is the protective power of self-absorption) I asked myself, if William had not killed Audrey, then who had?

  Who had sneaked into our house with a hatchet, skulked up into the guest room, and chopped at her twenty-five times?

  If he was a madman—and who but a madman could have made those wounds?—then he could be anyone, anywhere. He could be lying awake at this very moment, a few blocks away, gloating, plotting another kill. He might have been one of those anonymous faces in the crowd outside Miss Lizzie’s house. I could imagine him letting his face go slack to mimic the dull f
ascination of those around him, all the while laughing inwardly and hugging his secret to his poisonous heart.

  Whoever he was, he must have known that Audrey had been up there, in the guest room. Otherwise, he would have gone up the stairs at the back of the house, looking for her in Father’s room, or in mine—

  But perhaps he had. Perhaps he had crept up the back stairs, had peered into my parents’ room, then opened the door to mine and seen me lying there. If I had not been asleep, if I had opened my eyes just then, then perhaps I would be as dead now as Audrey. I shuddered. It was not a comforting thought.

  Whoever he was, he had killed my stepmother while I was lying only ten or fifteen feet away.

  There were no connecting doors between the upstairs rooms at the front of the house and the upstairs rooms at the back. But the walls were thin, and there had been times when I was in my room, and Audrey in the guest room, that I had heard her moving about. Why had I not heard her murderer?

  Murder, the act itself, should shriek so loudly that it awakens even the dead. But it did not, apparently. Apparently one could lie asleep in dreamy ignorance while, a few paces away, a human being was smashed, slashed, shattered.

  Who had done that to her? And why?

  The questions, all of them, would not stop drumming at me. Finally I had thrown back the sheet, rolled from the bed, and crossed over to the window. I stood and stared at the sea, as though somewhere out there beneath the skein of stars, between the black velvet and the black glass, the answers might lie. They had not.

  Suddenly I heard, downstairs, the front door open and shut. And voices, low, indistinct, Miss Lizzie and a man. Father? Yes! Footsteps on the stairs. I padded quickly to the bed, hopped in, and whipped the sheet over me.

  A gentle tapping at the door. It cracked open and a bar of light unfolded across the room. Father’s voice called out, softly, almost a whisper, “Amanda?”

  “I’m awake, Father.”

  The door swung open, and he stood silhouetted by the glow of the hallway lamp. From the sag of his shoulders I saw how tired he was.

  “Shall I turn on the light?” He sounded raspy, worn.

  “No, that’s all right.”

  Leaving the door slightly ajar, he moved slowly, heavily, to the bed. He and the mattress sighed together as he sat upon it.

  “William?” I said.

  He shook his head. “They haven’t found him yet.”

  “But they’ve found something, haven’t they? Officer Medley was here.”

  “I know. He told me. I was at Mortimer’s tavern, with Boyle.”

  “What did they find?”

  “I called Mrs. Dougherty”—our housekeeper in Boston—“this morning and told her to let the police go through William’s room. I thought they might find something that’d tell us where he’s gone.”

  “Did they?”

  “Mrs. Dougherty could see that someone had been in there. She’d dusted the room just a few days ago. Some of William’s clothes were missing. And a rucksack.”

  The fort, I thought. He’s gone to the fort.

  Father took a deep breath, let it slowly out. “And they found his clothes on the floor of the closet. The clothes he was wearing yesterday. A white shirt, a pair of white pants.”

  “Yes?”

  “They were stained with blood.”

  I shut my eyes against the image, shook my head. “No,” I said. “No, Father, he didn’t do it.”

  “I know, baby, I know.” His hand found mine. “The Boston police are examining the stains. They’ve got tests now, chemical tests, that can prove it wasn’t Audrey’s blood. But if it wasn’t …”

  “If it wasn’t Audrey’s,” I said, “it was William’s blood.”

  “Yes, but it probably wasn’t anything serious, Amanda. He was well enough, mobile enough, to get to Boston. Maybe he cut himself, or he got a bloody nose somehow.” I knew I was not the only one that Father was trying to convince.

  “Father—”

  “There’s something else, Amanda.”

  “What?”

  “Last night, when I talked to the police, I didn’t tell them the truth.”

  Father lying? “What do you mean?”

  He was looking toward the window, out at the night, as though he, too, sought answers there. “You’re going to hear about it anyway, I’m afraid. You might as well hear it from me.”

  He had me worried now. “Hear what?”

  He took a deep breath and turned to face me. “I told the police I’d been in conference with a friend of mine. Tad Garrison. We had an arrangement, Tad and I. If anyone asked about me on certain days, Tad would say I’d been with him. But I never expected this. And I can hardly blame him for not lying for me.”

  “Lying about what, Father?”

  Another deep breath. “I have a friend, Amanda. A woman. In Boston. I was with her yesterday.”

  Vastly relieved, I said, “Is that all? What difference does that make?”

  He shook his head and smiled ruefully. “No, baby. You don’t understand. In the eyes of the police, in the eyes of the church, what she and I were doing is adultery.”

  Adultery. I had heard it spoken of without ever really knowing what it was. Something Bad, according to the priests. But then, according to the priests, most things were. And obviously, as Father had committed it, it could not be terribly so.

  “Is she a nice person?” I asked him.

  He surprised me by laughing, a low laugh, softened by melancholy. “Amanda,” he said, “it’s a sin. And in Massachusetts, as Chief Da Silva was kind enough to remind me, it’s also a crime.”

  A sin perhaps, but almost certainly a venial one, three Hail Marys and off you go. Couldn’t be much of a crime either; and Da Silva was a bully. “But is she?”

  He sighed. “Yes. Yes, she is. She’s very nice. Very smart, very kind. It was wrong of me, being involved with her the way I was, but I love her.”

  This, now, was serious. Except briefly, at the beginning of their marriage, I had never seen Audrey as a threat to my father’s love for me.

  “What’s her name?” I asked him. As though by knowing it I could gauge the menace she represented, and contain it.

  “Susan.”

  Far too nondescript, I thought, to be dangerous.

  “Susan St. Clair,” he said. “I think you’d like her very much.”

  I doubted that. Not with a name like St. Clair. It conjured up visions of the gay Parisiennes of whom Miss Lizzie had spoken, loose women who pranced across a stage and kicked ruffled skirts toward the ceiling to display their fancy knickers.

  Rather bravely (I thought) in view of the situation, I asked him, “Are you going to leave us for her? Me and William?”

  His hand tightened on mine. “No, Amanda. Of course not. I’ll never leave you. But I had to tell the police about Susan. And now that they know about her, they’ve got even more reason to suspect me for Audrey’s murder. They think I had a motive.”

  That was ridiculous. If the police were so addled that they suspected Father and required a motive, Audrey’s personality, all by itself, would have provided one. I could deal later with the threat represented by the St. Clair strumpet. At the moment, there was a more important consideration. Even if it meant an eternity of brimstone for me, I had to tell him about the fort.

  “Father,” I said, “I think I know where William is.”

  As best I could, I told Father how to find William’s fort. He left Miss Lizzie’s, to telephone my grandparents’ house and, afterward, to begin the long drive up there.

  My life had all at once become extremely cluttered; I could not sleep. I worried about William, and I worried about Father driving when he was so exhausted—he had not slept for two days. I wondered who had killed Audrey, and I wondered why. And periodically, throughout the night, images of Susan St. Clair in her cancan outfit went high-stepping across the shadowed room.

  For a long time I held a serious discussion with God. I
explained that I was perfectly willing to accept his sending me to hell, if that was what he really wanted. But perhaps we could, between us, work out some kind of arrangement—two or three centuries of merely purgatorial suffering in exchange for a lifetime among the nuns or the lepers. (I would have opted, given a choice, for the lepers.) I reminded him that there had been mitigating circumstances both in the case of my violating the oath (William might be hurt right now, and in need of help) and in the case of my wishing Audrey dead (she had been, rest her soul, a witch). I asked him to bear all this in mind before arriving at a possibly precipitate Judgment; and suggested, in passing, that he keep an eye on this St. Clair woman, who might very well be a gold digger.

  I asked for a Sign to indicate that my message had reached him, but there were no visitations, no burning bushes, not even a breeze to stir the limp lace curtains.

  Finally, early in the morning, I fell asleep.

  I stood at the guest-room door, and I saw before me a tall, dark figure bending over Audrey. His back to me, he wore black trousers and a long black Edwardian coat. I saw him raise his arm, saw the gleam of the hatchet’s head, saw his arm swing down and turn the metal to a blur, heard the wet crunch as it smashed into flesh and bone. He raised it again, swung again, and again came the brittle snapping sound; and he raised it again and again, and blood was flying now in spurts across the room.

  I cried out in horror, and he wheeled about and saw me, and I saw him, and I recognized his face.

  … I awoke with a whimper in my throat, and the face vanished. I tried to will it back, desperately tried to recall those familiar features; but the face was gone.

  Gray light seeped through the window. The tide was coming in: I could hear the waves wash against the shore. But they did not sound like sand and water; they sounded like the scrape of steel on gravel, the slow plodding measured beat of someone filling in a grave.

  I lay there, the room gradually forming itself around me, until I heard Miss Lizzie begin to move about.

  Miss Lizzie made griddle cakes, and we ate them in the dining room. The crowd outside the house was much smaller today. Officer O’Hara, who had come in earlier to borrow the use of the facilities again, told me that these were “only the riff-raff, the town scum,” which did not, as I fancy he intended, much comfort me.