“Not him!” the man behind the counter raised his head and wailed. “The white boy!”
Narayan stood, still holding his ripe avocado. He staggered out the door. The old van skidded in a circle and drove away. The snow twirled round and round. It all looked clean. There was no sound now. He fell to his knees. “What?” Narayan whispered and dropped into the splendid white. His shimmering eyes became opaque and saw nothing else. A river of red trickled out of his mouth, burned a hole in the snow, and then stopped.
Claire pounded on the door. Still no one came. “Andrew!” she called. “Open the door! I know what you’re up to,” she shouted, not caring who heard. Let them come. Let them call the cops. “Andrew!” she pounded harder. Then she remembered. She walked swiftly down the driveway and climbed up on the garbage pail to the bathroom window. She pushed it up but it wouldn’t budge. She leaned against the window and thought for a moment, regrouping her strength, then pushed again. This time it came unstuck and went right up. She projected herself in, landing with her arms, thwack, onto the tub. Her elbows ached immediately. She pulled her legs down under herself in the tub and straightened up. “Andrew!” she yelled. She’d find him, by God. “Andrew! Give it up!” She threw on the light.
The house was in darkness; she didn’t know which way to go. She decided, as she always did when given the choice, to go left. As she went, she groped the walls for light switches. Her rage and fear for Dharma kept any fear she might have for herself at bay, but as she went along, finding no one, fear grew inside her like a nightmare. Suppose he was crouched somewhere, hiding, waiting for her? She moved, rigid with tension, toward the front door. In the overhead light, the hats cast eerie shadows down the hall. The house was utterly still. As fast as her legs would carry her, she ran for the door. Instead of its giving way when she got there, it stayed shut, waiting for her to unlatch chains and unbolt locks while she watched, terrified, behind her. When the door opened, her anxiety landed her headlong onto the porch and into the snow. She ran, tripping, across the street. Her key, oh, blessed key, was in the geranium pot right where she’d left it. She got herself in the door. She shut it, heard it lock, and shivered with relief. She snapped the hall light on. Safe. But something was wrong. Where was Floozie? Then she realized, in all the excitement, she’d forgotten to lock shut the doggy door. Floozie was probably skulking around the school, where she’d followed her scent. Omigosh! She remembered her folder of photographs for Jupiter Dodd. She’d left them on her chair, back in the auditorium. Anyway, that didn’t matter. The first thing she would do was call the precinct. Wait a minute. She would call from upstairs so she could watch Andrew’s house in case he tried to leave. She took the stairs two at a time. Her bedroom felt different with only her inside the house. So cool and big. She cracked the window, tilted the wooden blinds enough to look out, and picked up the phone, kneeling on her overstuffed blue chair. Only what, exactly, would she tell them? That a father was kidnapping his daughter? No, wait. She put the phone back down. She had to think this out. The doorbell rang. She hadn’t seen anyone come up the walk. She ran downstairs. “Who is it?” she called.
“Claire? Claire, are you all right?” It was Stefan.
“Thank God.” She opened the door.
He hurried in and grabbed hold of her shoulders. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. I’m worried about Dharma. It’s Andrew. He’s taking her away.”
“But what’s the matter?”
“Oh, Stefan, I should have known what he was up to when I saw the passport on the front desk. I should have known. I know, it sounds confusing, but you see, Andrew is … he’s demented.” She sat down, exhausted. She got up and raced back up the stairs. “I have to watch his house,” she gasped. He followed her up the stairs. She went back to her place by the window and looked out. “I know he’s taking her away,” she murmured, “because I saw her suitcase open over there before, but I didn’t put it together.”
Stefan turned and walked around the room.
“He killed her, Stefan. I know he did. I always suspected him but now I’m sure.”
“Sure?” He lowered his eyes and gazed at her. “But how? How, Claire? You have no proof.”
“I know I don’t. But I’m sure.” She looked up at him pacing. “What are you doing here?”
He laughed. “I was worried. You left so … suddenly.”
“Is the play all right?”
“Yes, yes. The play is barrelling along. Which is, actually, why I’m here now. You see, I’m leaving Carmela.”
“Excuse me?”
“I am. There’s no reason to stay anymore. I’ve got her on her way.”
Claire couldn’t help thinking he’d done nothing but hold her back, for all the fancy show of it. If anything, Carmela had been an asset to him.
“She’ll do all right,” he was saying. “She always has done.” He looked at Claire, sitting there prettily on her silly chair. He was doing what he thought was a considerate job of explaining why he could not love her sister, how he had, all this time, loved her instead, and as he went on, he just happened to look in her eyes at the same moment something happened, something clicked, and she remembered something that now fit. Her look passed, in that split second, as her eyeballs moved sideways across the parquet floor, from one of puzzlement to decisiveness to denial to fear.
“Oh, what a shame,” he said. “Now, you will tell me exactly what it is you are thinking and I will spare you my romantic tale of how you are the one I love. Okay?”
“I was, oh Stefan, I was thinking what a beautiful cologne you use,” for she had just remembered where she’d smelled it so intensely once before. The night she had gone to Iris von Lillienfeld’s house and had discovered Mrs. Dixon. Only now she knew it wasn’t only the elusive odor of patchouli she’d recognized, but the smell of patchouli mingled with fear. Or death.
“Where have Dharma and Andrew gone, I wonder?” she asked, too casually.
“Why would I know that?” He looked at her blankly.
“Gee. I don’t know.” She looked to her feet. None of them would be back for hours. All the adults would go to Freddy’s, and the children would go with Stan to her mother’s house. The only hope she had would be if Johnny were to come back. But he wouldn’t. He would stay all night at the hospital. The only thing she could do would be to keep Stefan talking. Now she knew. It wasn’t Andrew who had killed Theresa Dover. It was Stefan.
Stefan grinned from ear to ear. “Tell me how you knew,” he said, as though they’d been playing some board game and she’d caught him out.
She stared at him, frozen, and she saw his expression change and become completely cold and separate. She prayed with all her heart that Swamiji would not decide to return here with Anthony. The only thing she could not bear was something happening to Anthony.
“Stefan!” she jumped up. “We have to go alert the others. He’ll be getting away!”
He stayed where he was and pushed her back with splayed fingers on her chest. “Come-come-come-come-come-come-come-come-come.” He shook his head pleasantly. “Let’s not patronize each other, shall we?”
“All right.” She smiled and held his gaze. She would fight him for her son. She straightened her spine and tried crazily to think of something, any tale that would captivate him, a thousand and one Arabian nights, anything, the truth, even, anything at all that would keep him away from her. “It all began,” she said, “with a little girl’s dream that would not go away.” She kept her voice husky and low, in a singsong. “Dharma is so terrified of the beautiful flowers, the foxglove, that used to grow out in my garden, out her bedroom window in fact, all summer long. But I never knew why. And now I do. I think I do. I just figured it out.” She took a step backwards. If she jumped out the window, she might break an arm but she probably wouldn’t break her neck. The porch was underneath them. She watched his eyes open with interest.
“Sit down,” he smiled. He was too close. She sat bac
k down.
“It was a day in early September,” she carried on in the tone she used to tell the children stories. She felt him relax, ease up. “The children had just started school. Theresa Dover had planned to take her daughter somewhere in the afternoon. I was sure it was Andrew, or had to do with Andrew, but I see now, it was you. She was going to bring her to you. Or meet you. Across the street, at her house. You went there. You walked. You went in.”
“I always went to see her in my man Piece’s clothes,” Stefan continued for her in some new voice she had never heard. It was the voice of a little boy. It sent a chill right down her spine. “He has this English working-class cap. Nobody dreamed it was me. Never. They would look right through me and they wouldn’t know.” He laughed. “This time, Theresa was drunk.” His tone was easy, confidential. “She was always drunk or stoned. At first it was funny, you know, she was a blast, always ‘on’.” He shrugged. “But she started to get so sloppy. Really. I didn’t mind. It wasn’t she I wanted anyhow. It was the girl. The little girl.” He looked at Claire. “Do you know that she is mine? I mean really, actually mine?”
“You mean—”
“She is my daughter, yes.”
“That’s why you sent her gifts. Stones.”
“Oh, she loved stones. I used to leave them for her, signed, ‘your true father,’ and ‘your mystery father.’ Tonight she knows for sure that I am he. She always wondered, I know. She yearned for me. Her mother told her, confidentially, her father was someone special, a sort of prince. So she always waited. She knew, one day, her prince would come.” Stefan beamed with the telling. Then his face dropped and his voice changed again. “But then her mother found them. Found the stones. And that I could not have. Uh. All sorts of complications. She said she wouldn’t let me see the little girl.” Stefan began to roll up his sleeves. “Up until then, I used to sleep with the mother. On and off. That’s a beautiful thing, to sleep with the mother while you’re thinking of the daughter. Just after you’ve played a little bit with the daughter.” He nodded his head and rubbed his eyes. “She told me she was pregnant. It was mine, she said. Well. Who knew? The woman would sleep with anyone. Can you imagine? She wanted money for an abortion.” Stefan cleared the loose phlegm from his throat. “She wanted to keep the stones and she wanted cash as well!” He sighed. “I’m taking Dharma with me to Zurich. Tonight.”
Claire didn’t know what she was going to do. Her mind raced frantically. “I thought it must have been Andrew,” she said again. “I was sure it was Andrew.”
Stefan made a disgusted, belittling sound. “Him,” he said. “He would do anything for money. So you know what he is. Do you know how I got him here? I told him if he delivered Dharma here to me, with her passport, I would give him twenty thousand dollars. Ffff. And he did.” Stefan looked worriedly out the door. Claire wondered if he had killed Andrew. His face looked so dissipated, so haggard. She wondered how she hadn’t known before. His exhaustion was so evident, if she could keep him off guard, throw him off balance and take a chance for the stairs … She started to talk again about the day of the murder; she knew it interested him, she’d seen him come alive when he talked about it. It soothed him, threw him off the track. She watched him visibly relax. “So Dharma,” she said, “was afraid of her nightmare of the foxglove. Horrified. But why, I kept asking myself, why? Digitalis purpurea, the foxglove, kills all right, but it’s immediately recognizable in the simple autopsy lab test they do. And so I knew she hadn’t died that way. I tried to remember the mythological legends, how the bad fairies gave the blossoms to the fox so he could soften his tread by wearing them on his toes when he prowled the roosts. But I knew it wasn’t a legend. I knew something very real had happened. And despite all logic, I kept coming back to the poisonous foxglove, over and over, and knew, just knew from Dharma’s horror, that it was all somehow connected. And it is connected, Stefan, isn’t it? She saw something, didn’t she?” As she talked and as she kept on going, she did see. It all fit together, nicely, deadly.
“You waited until she passed out, didn’t you?” Claire said, the venom in her loathing this time there for him to hear. Oh, and he heard her. He took his chin in one hand, his elbow in the other. He watched her, fascinated.
It was strangely like the old days, Claire and Stefan, talking, talking. She would jump out the frigging window. She didn’t care anymore. She was even looking forward to it.
“You took one of Tree’s hat pins down from the wall and you stuck it, firmly, into her brain. Didn’t you?”
He had his tongue out of his mouth a bit and he was biting it. He was all excited.
“Only then, you heard someone. It was Dharma, home from school. She’d managed it that Dharma would come home for lunch that day because she thought she would confront you, she would put it to you that they needed money, right in front of Dharma, whom she knew you loved. Only Tree got drunk. Real drunk. And you helped her along until she finally passed out. It all was so easy. Only Dharma didn’t get picked up, as her mother surely said she would. But she was a resilient kid. She’d been stranded before. She came home on her own. And when she didn’t get an answer at the door, instead of ringing and ringing, she just came around to the side of the house and climbed in the bathroom window the way she always had done when her mother was passed out, drunk or stoned. And she saw her mother on the floor again, didn’t she? Only this time, she was dead. It was the hatpin Tree had of a flower. It was foxglove, wasn’t it? Foxglove, blown from glass. The morbid, lovely digitalis.”
Stefan sat up. “Yes,” his voice squeaked with delight.
Claire unclenched her fists with conscious determination. “I remember your story of the bowman who would boast that he could kill an elephant. You were telling me then, weren’t you? I remember wondering, even then, why you were telling that story.”
Stefan opened his hands and looked into them. She could hear the quick, excited intake of his breath. She kept on talking. “After Dharma left, you took the hatpin and returned it to the hat. You knew Dharma hadn’t seen you. She couldn’t have seen you or she would have told someone. She ran back to school. She pretended she had never left. It was easy, in the crowded confusion of lunchtime comings and goings. She knew she was in trouble for accepting the stones. She knew this all had something to do with the stones. For hiding them. She thought it was somehow her fault.”
“It was her fault.” Stefan stopped laughing. “Oh, it was.”
Claire hated him, then. That innocent little girl had been guilty of nothing. She hated him almost as much as she was frightened.
“You got away with it, too, didn’t you?” She pretended to admire him with her tone.
He rubbed his forehead wearily. “It was not so easy. She moved. And she opened her eyes and saw me coming. But she misunderstood. She thought I was going to kiss her. She closed up her eyes to be kissed and moved the hair away from behind her ear so I would kiss her where she liked it. Even as I did it, as I rammed it in, I heard the bell. I jumped behind the chifforobe. I thought Theresa would get up. I took a big vase down in my hands to hit her with. Fortunately, she stayed where she was. And when I thought to come out, I heard the window open in the bathroom. I froze. But no one came. Only now you say she had come in, then run away. Funny, that she would see her mother there like that with the beautiful flower growing out of her ear. It is poetic, somehow, don’t you think?”
Claire stayed still.
“When I was sure I could,” he went on casually, “I came out and bent over her body. She was quite dead. I pulled the hatpin from her ear. It was so minute a hole. Exquisite. I had to look again to be sure. I knew right then, no one would ever notice it. I would be safe. She had such beautiful ears. One little drop of blood,” he marveled, “lost in the ear canal.” He shivered. “Oh, yes, I knew they’d think she died from a stroke. The brain just stopped functioning, stopped sending messages. The heart just stopped.” He laughed. “Not to mention that she was so coked up. She had co
ke all over her fingertips, under her fingernails, from smearing it onto her gums. She liked to have it on her senses, for sex. And, what was it? Oh, yuh, gin. She loved her gin. She reeked of it. I can’t imagine what her liver looked like. Really. She would have died soon anyway, no doubt. What I really did was save little Dharma the agony of watching her mother suffer. Quite true. She was a mess. They would have seen that as soon as they opened her up.” He swept his pale aristocratic fingers through his white-blond hair. “Poor Dharma, having to live with such a common slob … Dharma.” He looked back at Claire, remembering her suddenly. “Is like a delicate jewel herself.” He made a soft, angelic face.
“Did you touch her, Stefan?”
“Dharma?” he whirled around. “No!” He trembled, thinking of it. “It’s all too much. I must tell you, I am so very tired. I wish we didn’t have to fly tonight. What time is it? I can’t seem to—Sometimes, I wish it would be over. I just wish—”
“What happened to Mrs. Dixon, Stefan?” Claire tried to prop herself casually on one elbow so when she straightened up, she would be that much farther away from him.
“Oh, that was strange. She wasn’t supposed to die, you know. Not at first. It wasn’t as though she’d ever hurt anyone. I thought I would just take her away from von Lillienfield’s house and … All I did was suggest … Well, no, that’s not true. I tied her hands in a silk kerchief. But she didn’t even fight. I just slipped the noose around her neck. She made it so absurdly easy. I told her what to do and she just did it. It was wild. Really. It was almost comical.” He stroked his left breast thoughtfully. “Shame, really. She had been so useful. Setting herself up. She used to have access to so many little children.” When he said, “little children,” his lips pursed into a tight, happy bow. He snorted. “Or she used to. Do you know, she really thought she deserved to die. So what can you do? She kept saying it was all for the best.”
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