by Sarah Smith
The stairs to the basement were deserted. He slipped out the door and walked quickly across the fields toward the Island Hill bridge. It was no distance, perhaps two hundred feet, but when he looked back he had made a dark trail in the dewy grass. So, by the bridge, he looked back through the fence to see whether anyone was noticing the path he’d made, until two dogs from the Clinic ran barking through the misty field, zigzagging through the grass until it was a palimpsest of dark lines. The dogs shook condensation off their coats and trotted away. He sat on the bridge, looking down the river to the lake, light-filled and fogged at this hour, and up the streambed. The heat and dryness had lowered the water level until the current was murmuring at the bottom of the cut, but scoured and darkened rocks made a high-water mark man-high.
Tranquil stream, tranquil morning. He wanted Perdita. He wanted her to sleep in his bed, wanted to wake next to her in the morning, every morning, with her head on his shoulder. He also wanted her to have what she wanted for herself. She was eighteen and ready to make commitments he could not make. He scooped up pieces of gravel from the mossy floorboards of the bridge and threw them one by one, in a kind of meditative frustration, down at the rocky bed of the stream: tak, tak, tak. Then he walked through the woods toward Island Hill and wandered awhile over the lawn and through the rose garden, sitting on the edge of the shore, staring out over the bright, calm, empty lake.
He went back to the house and showered and shaved and changed, still the first one awake except the servants, and read through half the paper, drinking coffee in the dining room. Still he did not know what to think, sleepy in this odd, deep relaxation, in a thought-less funk about her. From time to time thoughts would break through—not even thoughts; words that spoke themselves silently in his brain, that invited him to think about them: She knows. And: I don’t know how to be alone anymore. He had been open with her, had needed to be, and afterward he had been comforted. But she was eighteen, and he wanted her with a force that scared him. He wanted to make love to her, to sit next to her and feel her body against his; he wanted to taste her, touch her, fill his senses with her; and in the end, he supposed, he wanted from her exactly what Harry wanted—by loving her to control her, to make her not so unbearably close to him as she had been last night.
Because I won’t tell. He shivered, then controlled himself as Gilbert walked into the room.
“Richard, did you sleep well last night?” Gilbert looked haggard. Reisden poured him a cup of coffee, wondering if the question were a polite inquiry after his whereabouts, and decided to treat it as though it were.
“I was at the Clinic, trying to find out what had happened; and when Perdita left, I went back to the summer kitchen to think. Did you look for me there? No? I'm afraid I fell asleep there and woke up only an hour or so ago” Perhaps too circumstantial, but a good gentleman’s lie. “Were you looking for me?”
“I just didn’t know where you were.” Gilbert sat down, looking paper-thin. He stared at his coffee without drinking it, then at the newspaper. “Richard, I wonder if you could let me know where you are, when I don’t see you, this time of year?”
This time of year? G-d. August sixth. “Don’t tell yourself ghost stories,” Reisden said sharply.
“It’s very silly.”
“It is.” He added, “But I’m sorry you worried. I didn’t remember what day it is.”
Gilbert looked at him, surprised and as offended as Gilbert could possibly be. “I suppose that is a mercy,” Gilbert said after a minute.
Gilbert went over to the sideboard, where Mrs. Stelling had set out eggs and bacon, but, as if reluctantly, he looked out into the hall and was drawn out there. After a moment Reisden followed with his cup of coffee. Gilbert was staring at the open door of William’s parlor: still unfurnished, still plain white plaster walls and holystoned oak floor.
“I always see you when I come by here,” Gilbert said. “Father dead there, and you halfway up the stairs.”
“Was I halfway up the stairs? Do you know that?”
“I suppose I think that if you saw it, you would have been there.”
“Where was William when he died?”
Gilbert stood in the hall, with his cup cradled in his hand, looking up the stairs, then back into the room as if the place were full of people, and all of them frightened him.
“He was there.” Gilbert moved a few steps inside the room, knelt down and touched the floor. “That was where he died, lying in front of his rocking chair. I saw—a day or so later, you know, when I came up here. Everything was still—much the way it had been—they’d taken Father away, of course. But it was like a battlefield. The smell, and everything broken. Worse because it was at home.” Gilbert looked down for a moment at something invisible, then got to his feet.
“Often I see the headlines about Father’s death in the paper,” Gilbert said. “When I’ve only half unfolded it, you know. Or dream that someone calls me up and tells me Father is dead. There’s a spot in Charlie’s hall, right by the door. I can never go by it without feeling odd all over, and hearing that guard coming down the stairs and asking, ‘Do you know where your nephew Richard is? Because we can’t find him.’”
“Come out of here,” Reisden said.
He took Gilbert by the arm and led him out onto the porch.
“It never really finishes,” Reisden said, “does it?”
“Oh, someday—I hope, Richard. Someday.”
“Perhaps when we know.”
Gilbert stirred his coffee but didn’t drink it. “Perhaps. I wonder if, in a way, it won’t be one of those things that we won’t really know. Like the war. Just…’’he hesitated, “finish with. And yet that would seem very sad.”
“Tell me how it was at Charlie’s the day I disappeared.”
“Oh—” Gilbert looked out over the water. “I don’t remember much that happened during the morning, I suppose it was a quiet day. It was the day before the inquest. Charlie was in and out because people were asking if you could testify. I didn’t think you could. You seemed babyish to me and frightened of putting your hand on the Bible. You asked me to read to you, though you could read quite well, and I read some of The Coral Island, the soothing parts, you know, Richard. You had understood some of what Charlie and I meant to do for you, and you asked me if we would still go away to a foreign country. I said no.” Gilbert’s voice trembled. “I said we didn’t need to now. There was nothing to be frightened of at all.”
Yes. Reisden knew what had happened to Richard.
“Charlie came to get me for some business about the inquest. We went downstairs together and into the little parlor, where Perdita keeps her piano now, you know, and he and I had just come out when the guard told us…” Gilbert’s voice wavered and stopped.
But, Reisden thought, I don’t know what made Richard run, off to that coral island where he thought he’d be safe. Safe from what?
“I thought we could be happy now that you are back,” Gilbert said. “That we could simply—forget it, you know. That, I don’t really know how to say this!—that we deserved to forget it because you and I are…” He drifted for a moment, looking for the right word. “We are not bad people. What do we have to do with murders? I wanted to shut my eyes tight and have it go away.”
We have everything to do with murders, everything, our whole lives. “I don’t want to know about the murders but I have to. And I don’t know how.” Reisden stood up and looked through the door into the hallway: a natural square proscenium. He shivered. “I can’t remember it. If I try, it’s as though I—” He couldn’t think of a metaphor. “F. J. Child once wrote an article about reconstructing an Elizabethan play of which he had only the stage directions and a very corrupt text. Unreadable actions around conjectures and blanks. This feels like acting in that play.”
“You may remember someday.”
Someday, Reisden thought, five or twenty years from now, when it is long unbelievable that I am Richard Knight and I’ve no wa
y to verify what I think I remember. How much more time would Harry leave him here? As little as possible. And memory wasn’t evidence, not the kind of memory he would have.
Something was chasing around in his head. What was he thinking? Francis Child using stage directions as scaffolding to reconstruct the true order of text.
“I directed a few plays when I was at university,” Reisden said. Gilbert blinked. “No, there really is some relevance here. A director has some data points, stage directions, places where the characters must be and actions they must do. And between those points the director makes a structure of the play. Movements, gestures. The right action creates the play.”
“Richard, do you mean you would make a play about it? Like a scene from Shakespeare?”
The play’s the thing, wherein I’ll catch the conscience—of someone. Perhaps my own. “No, I simply meant to block it out on paper, as an experiment.”
“But perhaps you should use real people. I would help if you wanted me to. And if it were a play,” Gilbert said, “it might be easier to deal with somehow.”
Reisden looked through the door into the hall. He could see part of William’s parlor. An empty space full of imaginings: a stage. “I don’t want to do it.” Gilbert was about to agree with him that of course he didn’t have to; but, of course, that wasn’t what either of them meant.
“Charlie would do it too if we asked him.”
Not Shakespeare but Sophocles. I do not want to know but I must know.
Reisden stood in the middle of the empty hall. “We would need four people. William, Jay, Charlie, Richard.” It was as if he were calling them from the walls. “We would start when Charlie talked to William. While he walked down to Mrs. Fen’s point, from which he saw Jay run out of the house, William would be murdered here…” They would need a fifth person: the shadow, the stand-in for whoever murdered William and Jay. He found he had begun to block the movements of all of them in his head. It was not easier to think of them as a play, but it was not thought at all, it was the sense of their closeness.
“When would you have the play, Richard?”
The two men exchanged glances. Not tonight, Gilbert’s pale face said. Not tonight, Reisden thought. It would be tasteless on the anniversary.
“Tonight.”
“Let her have her goodness still”
Charlie Adair brought in the mail, five minutes after Perdita arrived to speak with Harry.
Charlie had his own play to put on. He intended to find the body gone this morning and to tell Gilbert that the body had been Richard. But what he saw instead, through the hall doors into the dining room, was delicate, edgy intimacy: Gilbert was gone from the breakfast room for the moment, Harry was not yet up, and Perdita and Reisden were having breakfast together. Perdita was bringing food for both of them. When she gave Reisden his plate she sat next to him, as if it were natural, as though there were no other chairs anyplace around that whole large table. “Do you want coffee?” Reisden asked her quietly. “It will help with being sleepy.” Charlie’s heart contracted with a pain that was not all physical. They both looked tired, both relaxed, but Reisden was wary of her, and Charlie knew what he was seeing.
“Child, you must learn to drink coffee.” Reisden looked across at her with the wry look that a grownup gives a child. He had debauched her all the same, Charlie thought, and was debauching her now with those eyes that could not leave her, those tired and hungry and wary eyes, looking at her as if he wanted to eat her, slowly, with the salt of her new experiences. The two of them had done something; the question was only how much. More than Charlie had seen at the dance? He thought so. Was it over completely for her? Reisden had a look of holding himself back from her; ah, it didn’t mean he had held back then. So many didn’t, and then left the girls to pay.
Heaven save her and let her have her goodness still.
Charlie turned away. Inside his jacket pocket, over his strained and burning heart, he felt the sharp pricking of the letter that said This body is Richard. Charlie had to sit on a hall chair. His chest was bursting; his muscles pained him all up and down his arms. It was like when he had been backing away from Jay French, trying to focus the gun on something that would stop Jay, not wanting to hurt Jay but simply to stop him, the gun going pop, pop, pop, but he knew that he could not stop anything at all. He could not stop Reisden now.
But he had stopped Jay.
The pain passed and left Charlie limp in the chair. He could not stop Reisden, because he knew only one way to do it. The gun was still in his closet, wrapped in the blanket behind the shelf that the hot-air pipe made.
Not me. Not me.
He sat in the hall for minutes with his head in his hands, trying not to understand what he might do. He wanted salvation, love and friendship, a quiet old age. Lord, let this cup pass from me, Charlie prayed humbly, a murderer quoting God’s words.
And who needed them more, who needed mercy more?
A drawing; “Get him away from her”
Charlie Adair watched while Daugherty opened his letter. The big lawyer read it, reread it, and then scrubbed the palm of his hand over his short hair.
“You sure?”
“I counted the teeth,” Charlie said.
“Sure you got all of ’em?”
“Yes. Only three molars had come in. It is Richard.”
“How sure?— I ain’t doubting you, Charlie, it’s just I’m asking what other folks are going to.” Daugherty sighed. “You know the body’s gone.”
“Yes.”
“Reisden took a look at it, said it was an adult. Gilbert thought the same thing. You got measurements of the bones and stuff?”
Charlie Adair hesitated. “Yes.”
“Let’s see ’em.”
Charlie took a deep breath and let it out again. “No. No, I don’t.”
“Charlie, don’t you lie to me, I ain’t the right one to lie to. You ain’t an expert on identifying bodies, and I got to have good evidence for this one.”
“I know about children’s teeth,” Charlie said as quietly as he could. If he was going to lie he must be believed.
“Yes, and that goes some ways, don’t think it don’t.” Daugherty scrubbed at his head with his palm again. Through his thick glasses his eyes squinted at the paper. “I got to get me some new glasses, these ain’t worth much. How’s your sight, Charlie? You wear glasses too?”
“My sight is fine with glasses.”
“How was the light in that barn? Morning or afternoon?”
“Midday. The light was very good.”
“Hot, was it? Have any trouble with the heat? Your handwriting’s kinda scriggly here.”
Charlie remembered the barn at noon, full of sun and heat, and in the center that black horror. “No,” he said, “I didn’t have trouble.”
Daugherty looked at the paper in his hand, crossed his legs, uncrossed them again. “Charlie, this is as good as you got, I know, and I appreciate your writing it down and showing it to me. It’s going to be real useful if things ever come to court. ”
“Don’t you see that it is Richard?” Because only Richard stood between them and Reisden. For a moment, dizzyingly, he thought of confessing to killing Richard. Or to sending Richard away, as Reisden had said. But he hadn’t and he wouldn’t and no one would believe him, not even himself. He was nice Uncle Charlie, who didn’t commit murders. Why should they think he was anything else? Uncle Charlie was all he wanted to be.
“I don’t want Reisden to stay,” Charlie said with a little gasp. “He’s an immoral man.”
Daugherty coughed behind his hand; Charlie heard the chuckle underneath. “Been messing around with Annie Fen or something, has he?”
“I don’t know.” Charlie did know. “I think he has been, ‘messing around,’ as you call it. But there’s another woman. A girl.”
Daugherty looked across at him, one swift frightened stare.
“You know whom I mean,” Charlie said.
“
He ain’t done nothing.” Daugherty shook his head. “He said he didn’t. That was only just yesterday afternoon.”
But what might have happened since then? Charlie saw Perdita’s tired softness this morning. He couldn’t bear to remember it.
“I’ve seen more than ‘nothing,’ Mr. Daugherty, and earlier than yesterday afternoon, and later, too! She behaves around him so, with such confidence, so familiar, and he looks—he looks at her—how can a man of decency even encourage such a thing? She is engaged to another man.”
“It ain’t so. Reisden’s decent enough by his lights; he wouldn’t do her harm.”
“Mr. Daugherty—” Charlie felt he was being driven to say more than anyone should ever have to. “He wants her. Perhaps he even believes he’d do her no harm. Mr. Daugherty, tell her what kind of a man he is—what he is doing here! ”
“No,” Daugherty said. “It’s too late for that.”
“What?”
“Harry told me this morning. She already knows he’s Reisden.”
Charlie sat down in his chair, and his heart banged and scrabbled like a trapped animal. Reisden could stop pretending to be Richard. But he had taught her to go out to restaurants by herself, to take cabs. He had told her to go to New York, and this morning there had been a big packet of mail for Reisden from New York; Charlie had seen it on Gilbert’s hall table. Reisden’s Swiss address was in the big book Daugherty had shown him, the European nobility book. They could guard Perdita from him forever, but could they guard her against herself if she thought she cared for the man?
“Get him away,” Charlie gasped. “Where she can never find him.”
“He ain’t going to be here for too much longer, Charlie. ”
