By Mallory’s slow smile, he could tell that they were onto a different brand of sport today. This was the smile that iced his blood. This was a game that would last all his life, and he named this one What Have You Done?
Against his will, he could not help but wonder.
Had there ever been a gun in play? Leonard Crippen might have succumbed to the mere idea of a weapon, perhaps a sensory suggestion that came with a cold touch at the back of his neck—and the whispered endgame line: You’re dead.
And so he was.
• • •
Charles Butler would live to an extreme old age. Well into his nineties and long after the death of Kathy Mallory, he would often go wandering through all the rooms of his mind, pausing in the kitchen, where he kept so many memories of her and kept her alive. Here, he would summon her up from the ether to ask if she had worn a liar’s smile that day.
Or had she been touched by the gopher’s madness and his sorry life?
Had Bugsy affected her in some tender, get-even way that might, in a stretch, pass for humanity? No, scratch that. Leonard Crippen had died in a cruel fashion. And scratch again. On Mallory’s planet, mercy was unheard of; she gave none and got none. And so it would all fit—for a moment or two.
And the next thought on this carousel? Had she ever needed a reason to play that scary game?
Ah, games. Back to the possibility of a lying smile. Perhaps she had only seized the advantage of circumstance and the props of obituaries to make him a little crazy on that long-ago morning—just for fun; sometimes Charles clung to that one. And then, in alternating hours, he would find her capable of anything. Over time, so corrupted was he by a ghost in the kitchen, all he had left of her; a theater critic’s death via Heart Attack Express was refashioned as nobility, and Mallory became the gopher’s champion.
Though she might have been innocent.
Charles would die as he had lived, an ardent player and a fool for love. Near the end of his days, a great-grandchild would come to him on tiptoe and perform her little errand of turning off his bedside lamp, extinguishing the light but not the enigma, as he lay dying, still trying to fathom a single smile that was only one of Mallory’s enduring games.
It Happens in the Dark - M11 Page 36
