Miss Lizzie Page 4

  “Here,” she said when we reached the red plush sofa. “You sit down, child, and I’ll—”

  “No!” I cried, and hurled myself into her, clutched at her. Beneath my grappling fingers I felt the stiff whalebone stays of her corset, against my face I felt the swell of her breast and smelled the scent of her, of oranges and cinnamon and cloves. She was warmth and substance, softness and strength; she was real. She was alive.

  “Amanda,” she said gently, after a moment; gently she stroked my hair. “Amanda. Amanda, child.”

  For a long while—I cannot say for how long—she held me, crooning my name as her hand caressed the nape of my neck. I wanted nothing more, forever; and nothing less.

  At last I felt her body gathering itself, stiffening, as though preparing for some enormous effort. She put her hands along my arms. “Amanda, you must be very brave now, and very strong. I want you to sit down on the sofa while I fetch you a wrap.”

  I made a weak protesting sound and shook my head against her.

  “Hush,” she said quietly. “Hush now.” Slowly but steadily she eased me away. Her gray eyes stared unblinking into mine, and possibly for the first time I recognized the intensity of purpose she possessed; her will, beneath the kindliness, was almost palpable. “You’re in shock, child,” she said, “and there are things that must be done. Be brave now, Amanda. Can you do that for me?”

  Mutely, helplessly, I nodded.

  She nodded back, once, crisply. “I know you can. Everything will be all right, I’ll see to it, Amanda. I promise you. You sit down now.”

  I sat, boneless and slack, my hands limp atop my lap. And then, with a whisper of petticoats, Miss Lizzie was gone.

  All around me, slowly, inexorably, like falling snow, the chill began to deepen.

  … from very far away across the Persian carpet, the cat lay upon the red plush armchair and, broad white head poised above fat white paws, regarded me with green eyes as round and blank as stones.

  … a softness unfolding at my neck and shoulders and Miss Lizzie’s face before me as she tucked the afghan round my body, draped it down my knees. She held a bubble-shaped glass half-filled with brown liquid to my lips. “Brandy,” she said. “Drink it, child.”

  I sipped at it. Bitter, and it burned.

  “More,” she urged.

  I took another small swallow, felt it glide fiery down my core, go glowing out along my being. And, stubbornly, I resented it, hated it, for its invasion of my numbness. When she offered the glass again, I shook my head. To this day, despite having tried to do so, even while surrounded by friendship and love, I cannot abide the taste or smell of brandy.

  Miss Lizzie stood, looked down at the glass, then raised it to her lips and drained it. She said, “I’ll return in a moment.

  … suddenly, and lit so garishly that it might have been sprawled beneath a photographer’s flash, the scene in the guest room returned to me, and I saw again the gore-splashed walls, the stains and spatters, that awful thing of meat and bone sprawled along the bed, hacked and smashed and battered. The obscene white glimmer of bone, the black thickening sheen of blood.

  My mind wrenched itself away, spun back, and I toppled into the safety of my solitary, empty Winter.

  … Miss Lizzie again, striding across the carpet to her telephone, one of the few of these luxuries possessed by summer boarders. She looked older and paler and somehow thinner, as though her body had compacted itself against her frame. Before lifting the earpiece, she glanced at me. I could not tell, from within my stupor, what was in that glance, whether pity or compassion or horror. Perhaps all of them; perhaps none. I realized only later that she had gone Up There, into the guest room next door, and seen what I had seen.

  She looked away. For a moment she stood with her hand atop the telephone, resting upon it, leaning her weight upon it. Then, abruptly, she lifted the receiver, waited for the operator, and then asked for a number in Boston.

  I was staring at the floral pattern in the Persian carpet. I heard her give her name, “Miss Lizbeth A. Borden.” From then on, I heard fragments only as I drifted up to and then below the surface of my Chill. “Someone here in town … The best, you say?” Then, explosively: “Of course not, don’t be daft.” I heard her mention Father’s name, and the brokerage firm for which he worked. “Who was the doctor again? … Yes.… Yes, immediately, do you understand? … At my cottage, yes.… Good-bye.”

  She seated the receiver in its cradle, momentarily rested upon it once more, then lifted it again. She asked the operator for a Dr. Bowen.

  I heard: “… Shock, yes.… As soon as possible, if you don’t mind.… Miss Lizbeth A. Borden … One-Oh-Two Water Street.… Borden.… Miss Lizbeth A. Borden …” Snappishly: “Are you there, you silly girl?” Somewhat mollified: “Yes, I shall be most grateful.” She slammed the phone into the cradle and spat out: “Idiot.”

  She stood there for a moment, breathing raggedly. I stared at the carpet.

  “Only one more,” she said.

  I looked up sluggishly, saw that she was speaking to me. I nodded even as I wondered what she meant.

  She lifted the telephone, waited again, and then asked for the police. A pause. Then: “This is Miss Lizbeth A. Borden. I should like to report a murder.”

  … Miss Lizzie sitting beside me, unspeaking, her left arm along the sofa’s back, behind my head. I could smell her comforting sachet smell of citrus and spice; but, beneath my Snow, I was having no more of comfort now.

  … a rap of heavy knuckles at the front door, a sound that in the stillness of the house came as a jolt, sudden and peremptory. Miss Lizzie touched me once, lightly, upon the shoulder; and then, with another rustling sigh of petticoats, moved away.

  … the door opening, a voice other than Miss Lizzie’s, heavy-timbered, hard, Irish, determinedly masculine. Miss Lizzie’s voice, hushed. Another male voice, softer than the first, placating. The first voice again, harsh, aggressive. Miss Lizzie’s voice, temporarily overriding his, growing gradually louder in protest. The second male voice interrupting hers, polite and deferential, but very firm. Miss Lizzie, tired and resigned.

  Footsteps thumping on the carpet.

  … a blue uniform, the slacks neatly pressed, the black shoes carefully polished. I saw that the sole of the shoe on the right had a notch in it, as though a small wedge of leather had been nicked away by a knife. The man squatted onto his heels before me, his cap held in both hands, his elbows braced against his knees. “Hello, sweetheart,” he said softly.

  In his early thirties, he had a tanned face and closely cropped blond hair parted on the left. His eyebrows were also blond, and so was his mustache, which ended exactly at the well-defined creases—smile lines, Father always called them—that curled down from a slightly aquiline nose and bracketed a finely shaped mouth. What saved the face from being entirely too handsome was a tiny raised round mole, chocolate brown, lying at the curve of one chiseled cheekbone. Still, it was an extremely good-looking face, a face that one would be most gratified to see smiling stalwartly down as its owner, with a single deft sweep of his pocket blade, sheered the coils that bound one to the cold train tracks, already humming now to the vibration of the fast-approaching and relentless 9:05.

  The owner of the face said to me, “My name is Officer Medley.” Then, as though embarrassed by the formality, he grinned. Sheepishly, engagingly, charmingly. “But you can call me Tom. Most folk do, hereabouts. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  I looked at Miss Lizzie, who stood off to one side, her hands folded Mandarin style into the loose sleeves of her black dress. Her lips were set in a thin suspicious line. Older and wiser, she was no doubt less susceptible to the allure of looks and charm; and perhaps especially, given her background, when they were being demonstrated by a representative of the Law. But, fractionally, she nodded.

  I looked back at Officer Medley. “Amanda,” I said. My voice still sounded distant, alien; but, warming to the man, I could feel myself begi
n, slowly, to rise up from the depths into which I had tumbled.

  He nodded, smiling. “And your last name is Burton,” he said, “and you’re from Boston. Isn’t that right?”

  I nodded. “But how did you know?”

  He smiled his stalwart smile. “We’re supposed to know stuff like that, it’s all part of our job. Boston, eh? It’s a lovely city, even for such a great big place. I’ve been there many times myself. Sometimes I’ll sit at one of the benches along the grass and watch the boats go sculling up the Charles. Did you ever do that, Amanda?”

  I nodded. “With Father.”

  “That would be Mr. Burton, the stockbroker.”

  I nodded.

  “And I suppose he’d be back in Boston now? For the week, that is?”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he said, and tapped me gently on the knee, “we’ll be in touch with him directly, sweetheart, and I know he’ll be here as soon as he can.”

  Miss Lizzie said stiffly, “I have already made arrangements to apprise Mr. Burton of the situation.”

  Officer Medley looked at her and smiled his charming smile. “Very good, ma’am. Thank you. That was considerate of you.”

  Miss Lizzie gave him a curt nod.

  He turned back to me and thoughtfully pursed his lips. “Now, Amanda,” he said, “I know you’re upset right now, and believe me, I feel very bad for you. But I understand there’s been a terrible accident next door, at your house, and it’s also part of my job to ask you some questions about it. Do you think that’d be all right?”

  I said, “No accident.”

  He nodded, his handsome face serious. “Of course not, sweetheart. Your mother?”

  I shook my head. “Stepmother.”

  “Do you have any idea, Amanda, who might’ve done this thing?”

  I shook my head.

  He nodded. “I wonder if you saw anyone about the house today, on the lawn or in the street, who was acting strangely-like?”

  Again, I shook my head.

  “And you were where, yourself, this morning, Amanda?”

  “Upstairs. Sleeping. The heat.”

  He nodded. “Didn’t you have breakfast, then?”

  “Earlier.”

  “And your stepmother ate with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when might this’ve been?”

  I was about to answer when suddenly more footsteps, heavy and hurried, came pounding on the carpet, and then another policeman, cap still perched atop his head, exploded into the parlor. Shorter than Officer Medley, he was a heavyset man in his late forties with a round shining face and a bulbous nose. His skin would normally (I later learned) be florid with the ruptured veins and shattered capillaries of the valiant drinker, but now only two spots of color were visible, bright red splotches, clownlike, against the pallor of his face. His clothes were considerably less dapper than Officer Medley’s, and considerably less well fitting: the circumference of his shirt, in particular, lagged several inches behind his girth, and a button had popped undone at his belly to reveal a diamond-shaped expanse of taut white undershirt.

  “Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph, Tommy!” he cried in a horrified brogue, his eyes wild. “You should see what the evil bastards done to her! Blood all over, buckets of the stuff!”

  “Frank,” said Officer Medley, slowly, patiently, but with a rising note of warning in his voice that even I could hear.

  The other policeman, however, was too appalled, and too excited, to listen. “Like a slaughterhouse it was! My God, Tommy, I’ve never seen the like, never in me life! They hacked her up like an old heifer, bones pokin’ through and brains spillin’ out across the bedsheets!”

  In a rush, everything came hurtling back to me—the walls, the bed, the gore, the mutilated human wreckage that had been my stepmother—and, with a gasp, I drew up my knees, wrapped my arms around them, and dug my face into the, afghan, my entire body clenched as tightly as a fist.

  I sensed, more than heard, Officer Medley spring from his crouch. “God damn it, Frank!”

  Almost simultaneously from Miss Lizzie: “You clod, you oaf! You insensitive cretin! How dare you?”

  “Now hold on there just a minute, lady,” said the second officer. Nothing brings a policeman to his senses, reminds him of his significant position within an ordered society, more swiftly than a reproach of any sort from a civilian.

  But Miss Lizzie overrode him: “Don’t you dare tell me what to do, you insufferable lout. This girl has had a dreadful shock, and you come blundering in here like some comic opera buffoon. It will not do, it will not do at all. I’ll thank you to leave my house at once.”

  “Listen, lady, you don’t seem to understand who it is, exactly, you’re talkin’ to.” And then, growing heated as he fully appreciated the intolerable indecency of it: “I’m the police, lady, the police, and there’s been a horrible murder committed here, and if anyone’s to be doin’ any orderin’ around, it’ll be me that does it!”

  “Frank,” said Officer Medley. “Let it go.”

  “Did ya hear her, Tommy? Orderin’ me about like a bloody drill sergeant? I’ll have none of that from her, by God, not when likely she’s the one herself that did the old lady in.”

  “Frank—” said Officer Medley.

  “Bloody, Miss Lizzie Borden, and bloody’s the name of the game all right, where Miss Lizzie Borden is involved.”

  “I think,” said Miss Lizzie, and her voice was chill, “that we have had quite enough of this. I am entirely aware of my rights, and of the child’s. A lawyer will be here presently, and I feel constrained to warn you that I shall be—”

  “A bloody lawyer, is it now!”

  “Damn it, Frank!”

  “—shall be discussing with him not only the legal means requisite to protecting the interests of the child, but also such matters as harassment and, of course, slander.”

  “Slander! Slander, is it? Tommy, the whole world knows she whacked her ma and pa!”

  “Jesus, Frank.”

  “Unless you propose to make an arrest,” said Miss Lizzie, “I must ask you—” She broke off for a moment abruptly, and then said in a tone that was, if possible, even more chilled, “And who, might I ask, are you?”

  “Da Silva,” said a voice, an altogether new voice. “The chief of police.” And the voice was so commanding, it seemed to resonate with such absolute authority, that even Miss Lizzie was for the moment speechless.

  I looked up from the afghan. Miss Lizzie, Officer Medley, and the officer called Frank were all staring toward the parlor door. I turned.

  The man who stood there was not exceedingly tall, perhaps a shade below six feet in height, but he seemed much taller because he held his body in a posture so stiffly upright that he might have been a Doric column. Beneath short curly black hair threaded with gray were two thick black eyebrows; and, beneath these, eyes of a color so dark that they too seemed black. A hawklike nose thrust out above broad sensual mouth. The dark face was square and hard, as though it had been sculpted from a single block of granite, a visage of flat planes and sharp angles. He had no mustache; the sculptor had not, perhaps, dared attempt one.

  He was, I would have said, in his mid-fifties; but he seemed immensely fit: broad shoulders, broad and muscular chest, a stomach as flat as a slab of marble. He wore civilian clothes—black shoes, black trousers, white shirt, black tie—but he wore them as a military officer might, starched and pressed, all the creases razor sharp. One expected, almost, to see a swagger stick wedged beneath his arm.

  It would have been wedged, of necessity, beneath his right arm—for he had no left. The left sleeve was neatly folded back and pinned to itself just above the spot where his elbow should have been.

  If you browse through any popular magazine of those years following World War I, you will discover countless advertisements for ingenious and “undetectable” prosthetic devices: hands, arms, feet, legs. Before antibiotics and microsurgery, infection was almost invar
iably lethal, amputation a commonplace. And as a nation we had left more than the dead behind us at the Somme, the Marne, the Argonne.

  But in the case of the man before us, one felt that for him a missing arm, particularly his own, was a thing to be noted and then totally ignored. One felt that he knew he could accomplish more with one arm than any other man might attempt with two.

  He made a small formal nod toward Miss Lizzie and then turned to Officer Medley. “Medley,” he said. “Report.”

  Unconsciously or not, Officer Medley had drawn himself up into something like a position of military attention. “The station received a notification from Miss Borden”—he indicated her with a nod—“that a murder had been committed at One Hundred Water Street and that a relation of the deceased was present at this cottage. Patrolman O’Hara and I were dispatched. I sent Officer O’Hara to investigate the murder scene while I attempted to interview young Miss Burton here, the stepdaughter of the deceased.”

  “Alleged deceased,” said Da Silva. “Have you viewed the murder scene?”

  “No, sir. Officer O’Hara has.”

  Da Silva turned to the other policeman and frowned. It was a flicker of movement only, cold and hard but quickly gone. “O’Hara,” he said. “Your uniform is unkempt.”

  “Sir?” said Officer O’Hara, who also stood at attention. Looking down, he spied the loose button. Sucking in his paunch, he promptly fumbled it back into place. He looked up again. “Sir.”

  Da Silva said, “You visited the murder scene?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Report.”

  O’Hara’s military bearing deserted him. His stomach collapsed against his shirt and he shook his head heavily. “Oh, sir, it was horrible, sir, horrible. Blood all over and bits of her scattered about, horrible, sir. Like someone had gone at her with a cleaver or”—he glanced quickly at Miss Lizzie, glanced away—“or with an axe, like. Sir.”