Miss Lizzie Read online

  I looked up from my plate and asked Miss Lizzie, “What about the good people?”

  She appeared puzzled. “What, Amanda?”

  “Do you believe there’s a heaven they go to?”

  She smiled. “I think that the good people, the truly good people, are already in a kind of heaven.”

  “And the truly bad people?”

  She paused, her teacup raised halfway to her lips. “The truly bad people, yes, are already in a kind of hell.” She took a sip of tea, set the cup down, touched the napkin to her mouth, and said, as though to herself, “I really must get out today and do some shopping.”

  “But Miss Lizzie! All those people outside.…”

  “Rabble,” she said lightly. “What can they do to me? Gawp and stare? No, I’ve let them have their way entirely too long.”

  “But Mr. Boyle and Mr. Slocum are coming. With the people who answered your advertisement.”

  She pursed her lips. “Afterward, then. I refuse to be kept a prisoner in my own house.”

  But the first visitor to Miss Lizzie’s that morning was neither Mr. Slocum nor Mr. Boyle, nor any of their entourage of potential witnesses.

  THIRTEEN

  “THERE’S A YOUNG gentleman,” said Officer O’Hara, poking his ruddy face around the edge of the door, “to see Miss Amanda.”

  The time was just a little before ten o’clock; we had been in the parlor when he heard the knock on the door. Now as Miss Lizzie looked at me, I looked at Officer O’Hara and asked him, “Who?”

  “Carl Drummond’s son, Roger.” To Miss Lizzie he confided, “He’s a fine lad, works at the candy store, you needn’t worry about that one.”

  “It’s up to Miss Burton,” she said. Officer O’Hara’s approbation cut very little ice with Miss Lizzie.

  “Would it be all right with you?” I asked her.

  “Of course, child.” To O’Hara she spoke as though she were addressing a servant. “Please show the young man in.”

  The face folded into a sour frown, ducked away, and a moment later Roger stepped through the door.

  With all that had happened over the last few days, the thought of Roger had never entered my mind. Now I wondered why.

  Still tall and dark and lean (although neither so tall nor so lean as Mr. Slocum), and still as handsome as Heathcliff (although not so handsome as Mr. Slocum), he wore a natty seersucker suit, a white shirt, a black tie, and black high-topped boots. He grinned at me, showing all his teeth. “Hi, Amanda.”

  “Hello, Roger.” I introduced him to Miss Lizzie. Both of them were stiffly formal, Miss Lizzie, I imagined, because by then she would be wary of any stranger; and Roger—well, I would learn shortly why Roger was so restrained.

  “I was wondering,” he told her, “if I could talk to Amanda.”

  “Certainly,” she said. To me: “Amanda, why don’t you and your guest talk in the parlor.” To Roger, politely: “Would you care for some tea?”

  “No, thanks.” After a second’s hesitation, he added, “Ma’am.”

  Miss Lizzie told me, “If you need anything, I’ll be upstairs in my room.”

  I thanked her and, as she left, showed Roger into the parlor. I felt quite assured and adult, rather as though the room, the house, were my own, and Roger a gentleman caller come to ask my hand.

  He sat down on the sofa and, with a glance toward the parlor door, said, “So that’s her, huh?”

  I sat opposite him in the armchair. “Yes. She’s been really wonderful, Roger.”

  He leaned forward. “She’s a psychopath, Amanda.”

  “What’s a psychopath?”

  “A crazy person. A loon.”

  I laughed. “Oh, Roger, she is not. She’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met.”

  “She killed her parents.”

  “She did not,” I protested. “The jury said so. She was innocent.”

  “The jury said she wasn’t guilty.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not the same thing. Look, do you know anything about the trial?”

  “I know they found her innocent, or not guilty, or whatever. They let her go.”

  He glanced toward the door again, leaned closer, and lowered his voice. I noticed, as I had before, how long his black eyelashes were, longer and finer than my own. (It seemed unfair that a boy could have lashes like those.) Maybe he was not so handsome, so dashing, as Mr. Slo-cum, but through my sins I had lost Mr. Slocum, and Roger, with his dark-brown liquid eyes, his poetic cheekbones, would make a not-altogether unpleasant alternative. “I’ve read all about it,” he assured me. “They’ve got books in the library and copies of the Boston Herald from the time the trial took place. And I’ve talked to people who were there.”

  “What people?”

  “Chief Da Silva, for one.”

  “Chief Da Silva doesn’t like Miss Lizzie.”

  He snorted. “I’ll say. He doesn’t like her because he knows she did it, and she got away with it.”

  “She didn’t do it.”

  “Look,” he said. “Did you know the murders took place in August, on the hottest day of the year?”

  “So what?”

  “Well, for one thing, the number of homicides goes up whenever the temperature is over ninety-eight point six. Body temperature. People get irritated. People who are a little bit crazy get even crazier.”

  “Who says so, Roger?”

  “It’s a scientific fact. And for another thing, the Bordens had a barn in their backyard, okay? It was just a little carriage house, really, but they all called it a barn. They were like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know. Stuck up.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everybody.” He waved a hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter, okay? They called it a barn. And the barn had a loft.”

  The loft, I thought. Perhaps now I would learn what all this talk about the loft had meant.

  “The loft had one entrance,” Roger said, “a trapdoor at the top of a stairway up from the barn, and it had one window, and that was glass, and it was locked. Now at the trial, when they asked her where she’d been that morning, Lizzie said she’d gone up into the loft to get some pieces of lead. She was going to Marion in a few days, she said, and she wanted to use the lead for sinkers on a fishing line.”

  “Roger, I don’t see the point to all this.”

  “Let me finish. First of all, when she went out to the barn, her mother had already been dead for two hours. The medical evidence proved that. Lizzie said she thought her mother was out. Her father was lying down, she said, in the sitting room, asleep. He’d just gotten back from downtown. Okay, she goes up to the loft to get this lead, and she stays there, she says, for fifteen minutes. She says”—sarcasm curled around the word—“that she stood at the window and ate a few pears.”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “On the hottest day of the year? In a closed-in loft? She stood there for fifteen minutes eating pears?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t find those pieces of lead, and she was trying to remember where they were.”

  “Come on, Amanda,” he said, scorn twisting his face. It made his cheekbones seem a good deal less poetic. “There was a box with some lead in it, but it was down-stairs, not in the loft.”

  “But there was lead in the barn.”

  He rolled his eyes theatrically. “All right. Chief Da Silva was only a constable in Fall River. But he was one of the first cops on the scene. While the neighbors and the other cops were talking to Lizzie in the house—”

  “Stop calling her Lizzie.”

  He looked at me, surprised. “What should I call her?”

  “Miss Borden.”

  He laughed. Scornfully. Roger was looking less and less a likely marriage prospect.

  I said, “It sounds nasty the way you say it. Lizzie. She’s not your friend. It’s rude.”

  “She kills her parents with an axe, and
I’m the one who’s rude?”

  “She didn’t kill them.”

  He sighed elaborately. “While the other policemen were talking to Miss Borden in the house, Da Silva went into the barn. He went up into the loft. He stood there at the trapdoor and he held his head at eye level with the floor. He looked all around. There were no footprints in the dust, Amanda. None. And there was plenty of dust—even Miss Borden admitted at the trial that no one in the family had been up there for months. There were no footprints.”

  “So why didn’t Da Silva say so at the trial?”

  “He did. And the defense brought in two kids who said they’d been playing in the loft that morning, before all this happened. Which naturally made Da Silva look like a liar, because if the kids had been up there, they would’ve left footprints all over the place.”

  “So Da Silva was a liar.”

  “Amanda,” he said, with that heavy patience which intentionally fails to disguise its opposite, “the kids had been paid off. Like Bridget, the Bordens’ maid, had been paid off.”

  “By who?”

  “By whom, you mean.” He smiled. Insufferably. “By your friend, Miss Borden.”

  “That’s crazy. If Da Silva wasn’t lying, he just made a mistake. He didn’t see the footprints.”

  “He’s a good cop, Amanda. He knew what he saw up there. There were no footprints. Why do you think he left Fall River? Because he knew she’d done it, and he knew that by paying off those kids, she’d made him look like a liar or a fool.”

  “Roger,” I said, “give me one good reason why Miss Lizzie would kill her parents.”

  “Sex,” he said, and sat back triumphantly, like someone who had just cut an ace from a blind deck.

  “Sex? What are you talking about?” Sex was a thing, like adultery, about which my information was inadequate. It was much in the news, with priests and ministers across the nation denouncing the lax morals of the postwar generation; but no one had ever explained precisely in what direction this laxity lay. In school I had heard tales of petting parties and something called French kissing; but, as naughty and vaguely intriguing as they had sounded, I could not imagine why everyone made such a fuss over them.

  Roger shrugged casually. “She denied her sexual impulses, and because they didn’t have any way to release themselves, they turned violent. It’s a classic case of repression.”

  “Repression?”

  “If you’d already read your Freud, you’d know all about it.”

  “My Froyd?”

  He smiled smugly again. “Sigmund Freud,” he said. “He’s a German doctor who’s discovered everything there is to know about the subconscious.” He crossed his legs like a professor about to elucidate an especially thorny problem to a well-intentioned if somewhat dense undergraduate. “The human mind, see, is divided into these three parts. There’s the libido, which is your primitive, animalistic energy. There’s your ego, which is what you get from your parents. And then there’s your superego, which is what you get from society. Now, if your superego’s too strong, then your libido gets blocked, okay? Your natural impulses get twisted, and you get hysteria and craziness and in some cases even murder.”

  “He’s a doctor, this Sigmund Freud?”

  “One of the greatest who ever lived. He’s revolutionized psychology.”

  “He sounds like a screwball to me.”

  “That,” he announced, “is because you don’t know what you’re talking about.” Roger, alas, was definitely out of the running as a spousal candidate.

  “This superego thing,” I said. “Just how do you get it from society?”

  He shrugged. “From the rules and codes of the social group.”

  “So it’s like a conscience.”

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “Sort of. But naturally it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

  “But how does it become a part of your mind?”

  Impatiently, he waved his hand. “That’s not important, Amanda.” He uncrossed his legs and leaned toward me once again, his forearms resting on his knees. He did have nice long fingers; it was a pity he was such a dope. “The important thing is that repression leads to violence. And your friend Lizzie Borden is repressed. She’s been repressed all her life. She never got married, she was a thirty-two-year-old spinster when she killed her parents.”

  “She didn’t kill her parents. Roger, there are thousands of thirty-two-year-old spinsters, millions of them, probably, and they don’t all go killing their parents.”

  He shrugged again. “Some of them just can’t stand the strain.”

  “How many of them kill their parents?”

  “Geeze, Amanda, it only takes one, you know. Look, there’s no question she did it.”

  “There is for me.”

  He sat back and shook his head, disgusted. “You don’t get it, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

  Once more he leaned toward me. His dark eyes peered intently into mine, Svengali-like. “Listen to me, Amanda. Listen to me. Did you know that your house next door is almost identical to the Bordens’ house in Fall River? The same number of rooms? The same arrangement?”

  “So what?”

  “So listen. Your stepmother was killed in August, on the hottest day of the year. Did you know that Lizzie Borden’s mother wasn’t really her mother? She was her stepmother. And did you know that she was murdered upstairs, in the front room on the left side of the house? The guest room, Amanda. And your stepmother was killed in the guest room.”

  “Oh, Roger, really. You’re not saying—”

  He nodded. “Yes I am, Amanda. She killed your stepmother.”

  FOURTEEN

  “THAT’S IMPOSSIBLE,” I said.

  “It was the heat, Amanda. It got to her, it brought her back to Fall River thirty years ago, and she just went berserk.”

  “Roger, she didn’t even know my stepmother.”

  “So it would have been easier for her to kill her. Don’t you see? I mean, she knew her parents and she killed them.” The logic of this escaped me, but Roger was fervent now, folded forward and jabbing his finger at me. “Look, the police searched all over your house, right? Next door? And they couldn’t find the weapon. But did they search this place?”

  “Of course not. They didn’t have any reason to.”

  “Oh, they’ve got reason to, but it’s not good enough yet to get a warrant. But I’ll bet you, Amanda, I’ll bet you that hatchet is lying right around here somewhere.” He glanced around the room as though he might spot it on the end table, tucked beside the cloisonne vase. He looked back tome. “And the thing is, she could go berserk again any minute, you know. The weather’s still hot, the temperature’s still over ninety-eight point six. She could go off any time, like a bomb.”

  “Roger,” I said, “I think you’re a psychopath.”

  He sat back. “Hey, I’m not the one living in a house with an axe-murderer. Understand? You’re not safe here, Amanda. You could be next.”

  I cocked my head. “Is that why you came over here? To warn me?” Wrongheaded as he was, his heart, at least, might be in the right place.

  “Partly,” he said.

  I hid my disappointment. (And yet why, I asked myself, would I be disappointed? The boy was a boob.) “What other reason?”

  “I’m doing an article for the paper.” I had forgotten that he was a journalism student. He grinned, excited, proud. “This’ll be my first real scoop, Amanda. I’ll get a byline and everything.”

  “But you can’t do that!” I said. “Mr. Slocum, the lawyer, he promised Chief Da Silva that none of us would talk to the newspapers.”

  He waved an airy hand. “I’ve already interviewed Da Silva. He knows what I’m doing.”

  “Yes, and he’s letting you do it because he knows you’ll write what he wants you to.”

  “Hey,” he said, affronted, “I don’t write what anyone wants me to. I write the truth as I see it.” Even at eighteen, he was abl
e to make this vibrate with the dreary self-righteousness of the crusader.

  “Well, you can’t write anything I said,” I told him. “I won’t let you.”

  “Amanda,” he replied, in the now-familiar tone of patient superiority, “it’s a free press, part of a democratic society.”

  “If you write anything bad about Miss Lizzie, she’ll sue you, you know. And the newspaper. For slander. How many articles do you think they’ll let you write then?”

  “Slander is spoken,” he said. “Libel is written.” But the pedantry was distracted, automatic; and he was frowning.

  Once again sensing an advantage—a thirteen-year-old girl can be as ruthless as a Mongol—I pressed it. “You’ll probably never be able to write anything for anybody, ever. None of the newspapers will touch you with a ten-foot pole.”

  “No one can stop a free press,” he said, and I think he meant it to sound like a ringing declaration, but it came out strained and querulous, almost petulant.

  “Well,” I said—and just then came the sound of someone knocking at the front door. Miss Lizzie was upstairs; I would have to answer it myself.

  “Well,” I snapped at him as I stood, “you just remember that the free press won’t have you as a part of it if you write anything bad about Miss Lizzie.” And I turned and flounced from the room, having got the last word and very well pleased with myself.

  At the front door, I held my face against it as I had seen Miss Lizzie do. “Who is it?”

  “Darryl Slocum.”

  I unlocked the door, opened it; the lawyer and Mr. Boyle passed by me into the entranceway. Mr. Slocum was wearing another stylish linen suit, this one pearl gray; the Pinkerton man wore the same rumpled brown thing he had been wearing yesterday.

  “Miss Lizzie’s upstairs,” I told them. “I’ll go get her.”

  As I was closing the door, Roger emerged from the parlor. “I’ve got to be going,” he said to me. He spoke rapidly, uneasily, a small boy nearly caught with his hand in the jam jar.

  “Hello, Roger,” said Mr. Slocum. “How’s your father?”