“Then why after all these years did she suddenly start using your name as an alias?”
A. P. Hill considered the matter. She blushed a little as she spoke. This was delicate ground. “Oh … spite, I think.”
“Spite? Really? After all these years?”
A. P. Hill sighed. “My friends may be a fickle bunch,” she said, “but apparently when I irritate someone, they remember me forever.”
“I see. And what did you do to annoy Patricia Purdue?”
“Nothing that I recall. I suppose my very existence was enough to enrage her. I was the good little girl. I studied all the time, turned my assignments in early, and I never participated much in the social life on our hall. Purdue was a great one for parties and pranks, and I just didn’t go in for that kind of thing.”
“What kind of pranks?”
“Oh, sometimes it was simple ones like fake phone messages leaving a number and telling you to call, say, Mr. Lyon, and the number would turn out to be the zoo. But every so often she’d outdo herself and spend hours on some elaborate scheme just for the hell of it. She liked to pick on the people who would be the most annoyed by it.”
“Can you give me an example of one of her elaborate pranks? Were any of them directed against men?”
“Not that I recall.” A. P. Hill frowned at the memory of college life, trying to choose an accurate but neutral recollection. “Well, she did make a list of bad blind dates and post it by the hall telephone to warn the other girls.”
“Fair enough,” said Paine. “I wouldn’t call that a prank, though. More of a public service really. Anything else?”
She nodded. “I was on the receiving end of one of her major efforts. My term paper got the only A in our lit class, and Purdue was pretty annoyed about it. She wrote brilliantly, but she never turned in anything except a first draft. Her intellect probably got her through high school with straight A’s despite her laziness, but at the university, there is too much competition to get away with that. So she got a C.”
“Not your fault.”
“No. But I got the A by spending two days in the library and rewriting my paper three times. By Purdue’s lights, such behavior was unsporting. So she decided to take me down a peg. She must have worked all night.”
“What did she do?”
“I woke up the next morning about six, and when I opened the door to my room to stumble out to the bathroom, there was no way out. The doorway was blocked by a thin wall of newspaper sheets taped to the door frame from top to bottom. I couldn’t even see out.”
“That’s a lot of work for a brief inconvenience.” Paine grunted. “You can go through a wall of newspaper in two seconds.”
“I did. I took a running start and plunged right through it. The resulting crash woke up everyone on the entire hall. You see, on the outside of the door, behind that curtain of newspaper, Purdue had stacked up a pyramid of Coke cans and glass bottles, most of which broke when they hit the floor. Some of them weren’t empty, either. I spent the next hour cleaning up the mess.”
“You didn’t insist that she do it?”
“No. I had a test that morning, and at six A.M. I had neither the time nor the inclination for a shouting match. Purdue would have protested her innocence, of course. So I cleaned it up myself. She probably thought I was a Goody Two-shoes for that, too.”
“Probably,” Paine agreed. “I’d say she thought you tried too hard to stay out of trouble, and all these years later she has thought of a way to make your life messy again.”
There were several things that A. P. Hill might have told Paine, but she didn’t: the phone call from the fugitive Purdue, for one. While she was debating the wisdom of confiding in him, he said, “Well, it’s a long way from papering a dorm-room doorway to assault and robbery. I’m still not getting a clear picture of her. That story about the newspaper wall was from your undergraduate days, wasn’t it? But weren’t you also in law school with Patricia Purdue?”
“Yes. She was brilliant. That C she got on her term paper was an unusual occurrence for her. By the time we were juniors she had learned how to work the system with a minimum of effort, and her grades were excellent. Besides, she made seven hundred on the LSAT. She had no trouble getting into law school.”
“Women must have been a minority in law school. Did the two of you band together on account of that?”
A. P. Hill thought before she spoke. How much of what she told him would the detective check? Weighing her words carefully, she said, “I think I assumed at first that we’d be friends because there were so few women in the program, but it didn’t turn out that way. We weren’t much alike. She thought I was too serious. I thought she was a time bomb.”
Lewis Paine smiled. “And you were both right.”
He still had the dreams. Sometimes he’d go months without having to relive bits of the past, and he would think that at last he had succeeded in outliving the memories, but then for no apparent reason, the past would come roaring back, indelible in its clarity and just as intense as the experience itself.
The dreams were a part of the depression that had put him in the hospital to begin with. Rage and sorrow at growing old, at opportunities missed, and loved ones lost to time—all these made up the fabric of his despair, but beneath them all lay the dreams. It seemed odd to him to call his condition “depression,” as if the old wounds and losses were only a figment of his imagination, an unhealthy state of mind at odds with reality. The mirror told a different story, though. So did the aches of decades’ old injuries, and there was nothing imaginary about the fact that he was past seventy, and that his death grew less theoretical with each passing day. Sometimes the notion of oblivion frightened him, but mostly, he thought, what he felt was anger over all that he had left undone. He wondered if he would have the time and the means to remedy any of that before his own demise.
He had hoped that his stay in Cherry Hill might offer new choices in drugs, something that would give him sleep without dreams, but if such a pill existed, he had not yet found it. Each night, though, he took the sedative proffered by the night attendant and hoped that he would wake to sunlight, the rustle of starched cotton, and the sounds of familiar voices. Instead, he would drift into awareness in a darkness remembered in his mind. Darkness and then flames.
He wondered what Jack Dolan’s face looked like now—forty-odd years later. It was the photograph of the house that had triggered this latest episode of the nightmare, but in the dream, although he was an old man with his scarred face and his misshapen hand, Jack Dolan had leered back at him unchanged, looking just as he had on that last night.
Chapter 8
“I can’t help it. I was born sneering.”
—W. S. Gilbert, The Mikado
Geoffrey Chandler stood in the open doorway of the Dolan mansion, surveying the hallway with its chipped plaster ceiling, dangling overhead lightbulb, and newly whitened walls.
“I have not come a moment too soon,” he announced.
“That is a matter of opinion,” said his cousin Bill MacPherson, who was still holding on to the front door as if reluctant to relinquish the option of slamming it. “What brings you here, Geoffrey?”
“Why, family solidarity,” said Geoffrey, spreading his hands in his best display of innocence. “I heard about your recent acquisition, so naturally being the one person in the family with taste and an instinctive knowledge of interior design, I came to offer my assistance in this mammoth undertaking of yours.” He glanced about him with narrowed eyes. “Although in this case, I believe the mammoth is a white one.”
“We do not need your so-called skills in interior design,” said Bill, picturing apes and peacocks strutting through the drawing room. “This place just needs a little cosmetic touch-up, that’s all. When we finish with it, it will be a showplace.”
“As is the site of the Little Big Horn,” murmured Geoffrey, easing his way into the hall. He pointed up at the lightbulb dangling on a frayed electrica
l cord. “This is not what they mean by shabby chic, you know.”
“We’re going to replace it,” muttered Bill. “Several of the light fixtures are faulty. I was just going to the hardware store to buy a new one.”
“To the hardware store?” Geoffrey closed his eyes and shuddered dramatically. “Surely you are not planning to purchase furnishings for this house at some local do-it-yourself shop?”
“We don’t have much money to spare right now,” said Bill. “Maybe later …”
“Speaking of money, shouldn’t you be practicing law right now, instead of acting as handyman in the House of Usher?”
“The cases I have now are mostly in the paperwork stage,” said Bill. “Nothing all that time consuming. And my partner is in Richmond, but she’s probably billing her corporate clients for a hefty fee, so, while it’s kind of you to worry—”
Geoffrey waved away his excuses. “Never mind. About the renovations of this place, let me see what I can do. Consider it a housewarming gift.” He pulled a silver-bound notepad out of the breast pocket of his jacket and scribbled a few words. “Now you may show me the rest of the house.”
Elizabeth was not having a good day. She had taken her pills after breakfast, just as she had on every morning since her arrival, but today they might as well have been aspirin, so little effect did they have on the cloud of misery that seemed to envelop her. She sat on the battered sofa in the dayroom, staring at the scuffed tile floor and trying to think of something to do that was better than being dead. So far, nothing qualified.
She knew that she had to be out of the dayroom before the poetry group began its meeting, or risk being bored to death, but so far she could not muster the energy to move, even to escape the perils of amateur poets.
When she saw Emma O. come in carrying a manila folder full of paper, Elizabeth felt a stab of fear. “I thought poetry wasn’t meeting until ten,” she said, struggling to her feet. “I was just leaving.”
Emma O. motioned for her to sit back down. “Relax,” she said. “You’re safe. This isn’t poetry. That group isn’t due in here for another half an hour. Plenty of time for both of us to escape. This folder is my therapy project. It’s designed to improve my attitude.”
“Really?” said Elizabeth. She tried to imagine what sort of papers might improve the personality of Emma O. If a lobotomy was out of the question, Elizabeth would vote for deportation forms, but that probably wasn’t it.
“It’s Dr. Shokie’s idea,” Emma O. said, indicating the papers. “He says that I’m so angry and hostile that I’m making him crazy. Two weeks ago he suggested a beauty makeover, but that didn’t seem to work.”
Elizabeth studied the young woman’s scrubbed reddish moon face and her cropped brown hair. Whatever the makeover had consisted of, its effects had surely worn off. No one could be plainer than this.
Emma O. met her gaze with an indifferent shrug. “Anyhow, nobody noticed. So now he has given up trying to make me fit in. Now he wants me to practice random acts of kindness to mellow my attitude toward humanity.” She shrugged. “I thought I’d give it a shot to humor him.”
“What are you doing?”
“Writing apologies to people.”
“Oh, really? Making amends to people you’ve hurt?” Elizabeth beamed at her encouragingly. “That seems like a very mature and wholesome thing to do.” And it will probably take you two hundred years to write to all the people you’ve annoyed, she added to herself. On the other hand, Emma O. never seemed to notice when people were angry with her, so perhaps by her lights she had relatively few apologies to make.
Emma O. shook her head. “You don’t understand. I’m not apologizing to anyone that I’ve ever offended. All those people were moronic weasels who deserved everything they got from me in the way of invective. My task is a more cosmic approach to restitution. I am apologizing to people who have been mistreated by everyone—by society at large.”
“Oh!” said Elizabeth. “And you feel that you can speak for society?”
“Well, somebody has to. But anyone who wants to participate is welcome to sign the letters. Would you like to sign one?”
“It depends. Who on earth are you writing to? The Plains Indians? The Tuskegee Airmen? Bob Dole?”
“I haven’t made my list yet, but I’ve started with Richard Jewell.”
Elizabeth turned the name over in her mind until she made the connection. “The security guard suspected in the bombing at the Atlanta Olympics?”
“The man was a hero,” said Emma O. “He was helping people. And despite the fact that he was never charged with a crime, and that he later was completely cleared, everybody acted as if he had been convicted; talk-show hosts made jokes about him, and the press made his life miserable. Do you know why?”
“Well,” said Elizabeth, “I think I can guess what you’re going to say. Richard Jewell was heavyset and not good-looking. America bullied him because he fit the image of what they thought a bomber should look like. The movies teach us that the pretty people are the heroes and the ugly people are the villains. Right?”
“Exactly!” Emma held up the handwritten draft of her first letter and began to read, “Oliver North, who looks like a movie star, was mixed up in the Iran-Contra scandal and lied to Congress. What happened to him? Ran for the U.S. Senate, got his own talk show, whereas you, Mr. Jewell, unfashionably overweight and not celebrity material, were a hero but still you were trashed by the media for weeks, despite the fact that you weren’t even charged, much less convicted!”
“Well,” said Elizabeth. “I hope Mr. Jewell takes your letter in the spirit that it was intended.” The message of apology wasn’t exactly her idea of a compliment, but she realized that flattery was foreign to Emma O.’s nature. In social situations Asperger’s people don’t lie, which is why you find them so seldom in social situations.
“We owe Mr. Jewell an abject apology for the way society treated him,” Emma announced. “So he’s getting one from me. Sign here.”
Elizabeth shrugged. “Why not?” she said. On a sheet of paper labeled SIGNATURES, she scribbled her name as illegibly as possible under the scrawl of Rose Hanelon and the neat printing of Matt Pennington. She tried again to reason with the author. “But, you know, Emma, Oliver North can’t help being handsome, and maybe Mr. Jewell can’t help looking the way he does, but it seems to be human nature for people to like and trust pretty people. You can hardly blame them for it.”
“Equal under the law. Constitutional right,” said Emma, waving away human nature. “Shouldn’t matter what a person looks like. The public convicted him without a trial because they didn’t like his looks. We should all be ashamed. I wonder if they’ll let me use a word processor to print out the final copy?”
I wonder if they’ll let you mail it, Elizabeth thought. She tried again. “Emma, are you sure that this is what Dr. Shokie had in mind for your attitude therapy? It doesn’t seem to be making you more mellow. If anything, this project is simply channeling your rage and hostility into new outlets.”
“Yes, but you can’t expect miracles. This is only my first day at it. Anyhow, I am doing good works. Random acts of kindness.”
Elizabeth suppressed a mischievous smile. “You know, Emma,” she said, “if you want to perform a really noble act of kindness, you ought to stay here for the morning poetry reading. You could listen to everyone’s work and then praise all the amateur poets for their efforts.”
With a stricken look Emma O. glanced at the dayroom clock and began to edge toward the door. “I’m an Asperger’s person, remember?” she said. “My whole social life failed because I couldn’t tell lies. Me? Stay for the poetry reading? There is no one in this entire institution who is that crazy.”
Carla Larkin was worried. She had been reading the local newspaper’s graphic account of the abduction of Mr. Jenkins, a prominent local businessman. The PMS Outlaws had driven over the bridge from Arkansas into Tennessee to lessen their chances of being captured,
and now they were staying on the outskirts of Memphis, in an upscale hotel that catered to business travelers. On the room registration they said they were librarians.
The newspaper had been left neatly folded outside the door of their room, a standard amenity for guests. Carla had snatched it up, searching its pages for any mention of their latest exploit. P. J. Purdue, who affected indifference toward their notoriety, ordered the all-American breakfast from room service, then flipped the channels on the television, looking for cartoons, which she said were less stressful than the news and usually more truthful.
That comment certainly applied to the carefully worded news story about the plight of Jenkins the banker, Carla thought. The article implied that Mr. Jenkins had been overpowered while conducting a private business meeting with two prospective investors. Unfortunately, his version of the story would have to go unchallenged. Even his picture was misleading. The file photo that accompanied the story showed the banker at his executive best, in a three-piece suit, staring out at the reader with a silver air of command that put one in mind of a recently retired general. Carla giggled and tapped the picture with her forefinger. “Look, Purdue! There he is, the old stoat. He didn’t look nearly that impressive in polka-dot boxer shorts, did he?”
Purdue smiled. “A photo of Jenkins in his polka-dot shorts chained to the sink pipe would have sold a lot more newspapers. Maybe we should start carrying a camera. We could tell the johns: If you describe us to the cops, we’ll send your picture to the local paper. I’ll bet they’d forget what we look like in a hurry, don’t you?”
“The cops already know what we look like,” said Carla. “Every time we pull one of these jobs, they know exactly who we are within hours.”
“Yes, but you’ve cut your hair, and I’ve dyed mine, so that ought to create a little confusion. Besides, by the time the crime has been reported, we’re long gone.”
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