The Question of Max

by Amanda Cross

  She did, indeed, need to go to the bathroom, but beyond that she had needed the respite from his presence. Yet this was a mistake. Out of sight of him, she became more nervous. Ought she try the window after all? “Coming out?” his voice called. She opened the door and moved back to her seat.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like a drink?” he asked. “No Scotch here anywhere?”

  “None,” Kate said. “Did you drive here?”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve rented another car. But perhaps I shall soon admit to driving, when it’s quite safe to do that, or perhaps I shall take very public driving lessons, at which I shall be inordinately stupid, and then I shall buy a car. I shall have more money now. You know, Kate, I’m not as well off as you suppose. When you drew all your lovely little conclusions about primogeniture, you were right. Herbert got the property, which was about all there was. I’ve already got an advance on this biography and a good contract. It will make money. Not, as you suppose, because it is about a woman, but because it is written well with true style and cynicism. I shall get reviews every bit as good as Malcolm Muggeridge’s. We are the wave of the future, he and I; not, of course, that we have met.”

  She must keep him talking. That above all else was clear. “What are your plans?” she asked.

  “To write the biography. To edit the rest, judiciously. And to expose the sealed Whitmore papers as spurious. I dare say any handwriting expert can help there. Let us only hope he is not clever enough to spot the real wielder of the pen.”

  “I meant your plans for me.”

  “I have a gun.” Max brought it out and rested it on the table. “You can buy them, easily. You liberals who always want to license guns can’t prevent that. If we all carried guns, and every crook and mugger knew it, there would be less crime.”

  “Am I supposed to have bought this gun?”

  “Certainly. They wouldn’t be able to trace it, but negative evidence is not conclusive. You’ve been gloomy lately. Taken to coming up here alone to brood. Worried about middle age, and the onrush of those who are younger. Disturbed, perhaps, by the death of a student.”

  “Am I to leave a note?”

  “No. All that will be surmised. I have thought it through. No one will know I have been here. My car is hidden in the trees, away from the road. It will be one of thousands of cars returned to Hertz at the end of this weekend. The clerk will not even glance at me as she processes it. Oh, I thought of other forms of death. But the simplest is always the best.”

  “Unfortunately, there are no rocks.”

  “It would hardly have done to repeat oneself.”

  “And the old woman, Cecily’s neighbor. She hadn’t heard anything, or seen anything?”

  “Of course not. But she is old and can be counted on to be forgetful, or to appear so. The lawyer had called me, as it happens, assuming I was still literary executor.”

  “Murderers always think they will get away with it. But something unexpected turns up. I promise you, Reed will never believe your suicide theory. He has access to the most sophisticated of criminal investigations. Wouldn’t it be safer to let me live?”

  “No. I know your sort. I’d never be safe again, or think I was, which comes to the same thing. Oh, if you gave your word, perhaps, but you wouldn’t. Would you promise?”

  “To save my life? Of course. And keep it.”

  “No. You wouldn’t mean it. It wouldn’t count as a promise. You would persuade yourself that I had killed one person and might kill another. One can serve only one life sentence; one would have said ‘die once,’ before you liberals removed the death penalty.”

  With her eyes Kate measured the distance between them. If she began running wildly around, he could hardly shoot. One cannot be supposed to have shot oneself in the back. He had to be able to place the bullet where a suicide might have aimed it. That was on her side. She began to shift her weight in the chair.

  “Don’t move,” he said. “My hope is to shoot you so that the wound looks self-inflicted, but if I must make it look like an intruder, I will. That is less to my purpose because it means that there is someone for whom the police are searching, but I will shoot you if you move.”

  “My feet are asleep.”

  “Stretch them in the chair.”

  “What time is it, Max?”

  “Look at your own watch. What time does it say?”

  “Five.”

  “What I have worked out,” Max said, rising, the gun in his hand, “is that you would not shoot yourself here, in the cabin. You would not want to soil it for Reed, who after all, as you told me the first day I came here, helped to build it and then bought it from Guy. You would walk deep into the woods. Then there would be one shot. Even if the local farmers noticed it, they would, put it down to someone shooting a varmint. Allowable without a license, in any season. Let’s walk out to the woods.”

  Kate, as she rose, willed her body to move, willed herself to rush him, to kick out at him, to tackle him. Too late now to think of all those courses in self-defense which had seemed aimed, somehow, at another generation, in a different sort of life. She could not will her body into combat, or even into a sudden motion. No doubt if he threw himself upon her, she would find the will for defense. But the initiative for a kung-fu leap through the air was beyond her.

  He walked surely as they plunged into the woods; he had a compass. “There is always a danger, in woods, of walking in a circle, particularly when the woods are all evergreens,” he said. “And I want to be able to get straight out. Immediately.” They walked so far that it seemed to Kate they must be about to emerge at the other side, but her sense of time was betraying her in all probability. He kept motioning her on whenever she turned back to look at him. Ahead of him, she felt safer. He would not shoot her in the back if he could help it.

  It was then that the surge of energy which is said to come to animals just before they die in a trap reached Kate. Within one enormous rush of vitality, she realized, her only chance was to run fast into the woods, to take a chance of losing him. Almost as her muscles tensed for the burst he called, “Don’t run Kate, I will shoot.” But she ran anyway, veering off sharply to one side, hoping to get in back of him. And as she rushed, tripping over underbrush and banging into trees, she heard a shout and then the gun was fired. She was by no means certain if she had been shot, since she had run, the moment before, into a tree and been stunned.

  “Kate,” Reed’s voice called. “Kate. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Kate said, and fainted.

  “He’s certainly mad,” Reed said, sometime later, when she had achieved the house with the help of another man (what other man?) and Max, who had been knocked unconscious, had been carried off in an ambulance called by Reed at the telephone in the house of the woman down the road.

  “I hope you paid her,” Kate said, worried.

  “I gave her ten dollars,” Reed said. “Kate. Say hello to Guy. Between Guy and me, we overpowered him.”

  “Yes,” Reed said, later still, when they were driving very slowly back to New York. “Of course I borrowed a police car, with flashing red light going like mad. We must have gone a hundred miles an hour. There’s many a frightened driver along the Taconic Parkway who will not be the same for days. We did it in just under an hour.”

  “But how did you know?”

  “Because, dear Kate, you are a woman of your word. Leo, with his blessed, wonderful athletics, called at three-thirty to say where were you? It was the last game of the season and you had promised to come, and he just wondered, weren’t you coming? ‘Did she say positively?’ I asked, not really worried yet. ‘Yes, I think so. All the other parents are here. But it doesn’t matter,’ Leo said. ‘I just wondered.’ But he had run all the way to Fifth Avenue, when his team was up, to telephone.

  “The game had started at three, which meant you must
have planned to leave the country by one-thirty, two at the very latest. I told myself you had left late, your watch had stopped, you had run into traffic, there had been an accident, but it wasn’t like you. You would have called or left a message for Leo. You don’t leave people hanging, certainly not Leo. And you obviously had to come home first. So I went into your study and there it was, all the sorry evidence. I’d never been really happy about that story; not really happy. Max wasn’t at home. That did it.”

  “And Guy?” Kate asked, so tired she could scarcely form the question.

  “I needed help. I didn’t want to shoot Max; that would have taken too much explaining. And Guy, in addition to being a revoltingly in-shape physical specimen, knew the cabin well and all its woody approaches. Not that we thought you would be in the woods; we decided to creep up on you that way. Then we heard him shout at you.”

  “And his gun just went off?”

  “It just went off when we tackled him. The bullet went into the air and fell to earth I know not where.”

  “Imagine that,” Kate said.

  Later still, as they drove slowly down the Saw Mill River Parkway, Kate, who kept falling asleep against Reed, woke up and said, “So you never really believed in my romantic story. I thought it such a satisfactory explanation. To which, you will remember, Gwendolen returned: ‘Yes dear, if you can believe him,’ and Cecily Cardew said: ‘I don’t. But that does not affect the wonderful beauty of his answer.’ Didn’t you think my story had a wonderful beauty?”

  “What is she talking about?” Guy, who was driving, asked.

  “No doubt it is a quotation,” Reed said. “It almost always is.”

  “I do admire literary people,” Guy said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Leo’s graduation went off as well as could have been expected under the circumstances. Leo’s experiences in his final term at St. Anthony’s lent a certain hollow ring to the ceremony, which was followed, inevitably, by a hideous Fansler family luncheon. All the Fanslers were present, but Kate was at least able to become comfortably sozzled on champagne, an escape the graduation ceremony itself had not offered.

  Leo had moved back to his father’s house. As Reed and Kate finally bid goodbye to the assembled Fanslers, Leo thanked them for “everything,” as though, Reed remarked, they had taken him for the afternoon to the zoo. They decided to walk down the Avenue.

  “I haven’t yet told you the final ironies,” Reed said. “Finlay and Ricardo will doubtless both go to Harvard, one year late. There was never any doubt about Finlay; he is, as Leo kept telling us, a genius. And Max wrote such a moving letter on behalf of the Ricardo boy that Harvard has agreed to consider him most seriously. Max, no doubt, felt he had to keep on the good side of the family. The one who suffered in a sharp way was Leo: the headmaster stopped saying hello to him in the hall. I think Leo minded that.”

  “Crackthorne minded it, too,” Kate said. Reed raised an interrogative eyebrow. “You know,” Kate told him, “the young teacher who was writing a dissertation on the World War I generation; he who used to make the basketball games bearable. He’s leaving St. Anthony’s. I had a note from him. He said he’s had enough expediency and sophistication to last him a lifetime.”

  “Kate, are you ever sorry you haven’t been a parent for more than one year?”

  “Nonsense. That’s exactly the right amount of parenthood. Though, if I had to choose the year again, I would pick one with fewer events and crises. As Lady Bracknell observed in other connections, the crises this spring were considerably above the average that statistics have laid down for our guidance.”

  “You are all right, then. I always feel better when you quote Oscar Wilde. I’ve been a bit concerned about the possible aftereffects of being chased through a dark wood by a homicidal maniac.”

  “The habit of exaggeration is catching, I see. You know, Reed, I shall always wonder about Max. And when I am at the cabin, I shall always see him standing there, looking across the uncut meadow.”

  “We all live with ghosts,” Reed said. “For me, at least, there will always be the ghost of Leo, not yet eighteen.”

  But the roster of ghosts was not complete. Some weeks later, after Kate and Reed had returned from a vacation abroad, an envelope was delivered from the Wallingford.

  “To Kate from Tate,” Sparrow had written. “Which is to say, not our official selves. This photograph turned up among Cecily’s papers; I suspect Max meant to use it in the biography. I ought not, of course, to have had a copy made or to have sent it to anybody.”

  In the photograph, three girls posed for the camera, laughing, arms around each other’s waists. On the back of the picture was written: “Tupe, Hutchins, Whitmore. Oxford, 1920.”

  The girls stood on a lawn, probably at Somerville, in the open sunlight. One could imagine, behind them, the dreaming spires.

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  Amanda Cross

  Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926–2003) attended Wellesley College, class of 1947, and later received her graduate degrees in English Literature from Columbia University, where she joined the faculty in 1960, retiring in 1992 as the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities. She authored nine scholarly books in the fields of feminist literary criticism and autobiography. As Amanda Cross, she wrote fourteen academic mystery novels and several short stories, featuring Kate Fansler, an English professor and amateur sleuth.

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  Bello

  hidden talent rediscovered

  Bello is a digital-only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe new life into previously published, classic books.

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  First published in 1976 by Knopf

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  Copyright © Amanda Cross 1976

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