Someone’s knuckles were rapping at the front door. I turned, called out, “Who is it?”
“O’Hara!”
I opened the door.
“Bloody woman!” he cried, his eyes wide, his face dark red. “Had to have her own bloody way!” He twisted his nightstick like a washerwoman wringing a wet towel. “I told her. But did she listen? Oh no, not Miss bloody-minded Lizzie Borden. I tried to stop her, I did, ya know, before any o’ this happened.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw you.”
“But no. Not her. She had to go to McGee’s and get her bloody fish.” He looked down, shook his head. “Fish!” He looked up. “And just how is she now?”
“She went upstairs. She was … awfully upset.”
“And can ya blame her? Ignorant fools peltin’ her with tomatoes? Bloody idyots.” He turned to scowl at the empty street, then turned back to me. “What sorta fish was it she was after, exactly? What I could do, I was thinkin’, is send young Timothy down to fetch it.”
“Crab,” I said. “She wanted some crab.”
He raised his eyebrows. “Crab, is it? Now ain’t that a bit—” He shook his head, as though suddenly remembering he was in the middle of a kindness. “Never mind. We’ll fetch her the crabs.”
“I’ve got some money—”
“You just keep it, young Miss Burton, and you buy yourself some candy or some nice chocolate cake. I’m no pauper to be takin’ money off a young girl.” He “hesitated, looked off down the hallway, then looked back at me and said softly, “I’ll tell ya one thing, though, between you and me and the lamppost. She may be a horrible murderer, that Lizzie Borden of yours, but God knows she’s as brave as a bull.”
With that, he nodded his good-bye and turned away.
I shut the door. I looked down at the carpet at the spatters of tomato, then looked up toward the upper rear of the house, where Miss Lizzie was.
My mind had been skittering away from one particular thought since the moment I saw her face. Now the thought came back to me. As she stood there, her face mottled, her body tight with rage, Miss Lizzie had quite literally looked angry enough to kill.
EIGHTEEN
MISS LIZZIE CAME back downstairs an hour later. I was sitting on the sofa, hunched over the coffee table, where I had arranged a deck of cards in the pattern of the Nikola system.
She had bathed and changed her dress, washed and dried her hair and wrapped it again into a chignon. She smiled at me. “I see that someone has cleaned all the vegetable puree off the floor. Could that’ve been you?”
I shrugged.
“I thank you,” she said. “And I apologize to you for letting my temper get the better of me.”
I felt that awful lumpishness which overtook me whenever I became embarrassed. “You don’t need to apologize, Miss Lizzie.”
“Of course I do. That was a disgraceful exhibition, and I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself.”
I would have much preferred that she pretended (as I wanted to) that the incident had never happened, so we could return as soon as possible to being the people we had been before. Brightly I said, “Do you still want some crab? Officer O’Hara brought us some. I put it in the icebox.”
“O’Hara?” she said, bemused. “Did he? Well, that was really very kind of him, wasn’t it? I’ll have to repay him. Is he still outside?”
“I think,” I said, “well, I think that he’d be happier if you didn’t, Miss Lizzie. I think it would just make him, you know … sort of upset.”
She looked at me for a moment, and then she said, “The diplomatic corps will be the loser when you become an aviatrix, Amanda.” She smiled. “You’re right, of course. But do you suppose that it would be terribly improper for me to go outside and thank him for his kindness?”
She said this with such a gentle irony, affectionate and teasing, that I had to smile myself. “I think that would be nice.”
“Good. I’ll just do that. And then you and I shall have a crab soufflé. How does that sound?”
“It sounds really good.”
She nodded. “Then that’s settled.”
Miss Lizzie had been right about the rain. As we ate our lunch on the back porch, the storm lumbered in across the water, growling and flickering. The sea was black out there, below the bloated clouds and the dark draperies of rain; closer in, it was a drab slate gray, feathered with froth, ragged where the wind rattled over it. Along the shore the waves were growing larger: They smacked and hissed and sucked against the sand and left dull white streaks of foam slithering behind.
After the flat stagnant heat of the past few days, the gusts that swept through the screens were at first deliciously cool. When we finished the meal, Miss Lizzie lit a cigar and we sat there in silence and watched the squall roll toward us; both of us, I believe, savoring that heady mixture of humility and exaltation that only a top-notch thunderstorm can produce.
But such feelings require the detachment of distance. Not long after Miss Lizzie lit her cigar, perhaps ten minutes later, the wind was whipping bits of ash from its tip and snapping at her dress, and at mine. We gathered up the plates and scuttled with them into the house. Far off, thunder boomed and rumbled.
The rain began as we stood at the kitchen sink—Miss Lizzie washing dishes, me drying them—and it continued to drum against the rooftop all through the evening and long into the night. Father came by after dinner, water streaming off his topcoat. He hooked the coat and his hat on the hallway clothesrack, then sat down in the parlor and drank tea with us while he related what he and Boyle had learned.
The crime lab of the Boston police had completed its examination of William’s clothing and determined that the stains were of Type A blood, the same sort as William’s. They were also, unfortunately—according to the medical examiner, Dr. Malone—the same sort as Audrey’s.
The local police had interviewed the employees at the Hotel Fairview and the attendants at both of the town’s automobile service stations; but no one remembered the man William had described. Boyle had arranged with his agency for another operative to arrive in town tomorrow; the new Pinkerton would try to locate someone who might know the man or who might have seen him.
Father had spoken with Mr. Slocum, and the lawyer had recommended another local attorney, a Mr. Spencer, with whom Father had consulted. Mr. Spencer felt that, despite the apparent evidence, the state’s case was weak. Tomorrow, he thought, it should be possible for William to be released on bail.
Seeing Mr. Spencer had obviously cheered Father. For the first time since Audrey’s death, he was his old self, loose and relaxed. (We did not discuss the possibility of Audrey’s being a blackmailer, and neither of us mentioned Susan St. Clair.)
He asked me, after some fairly broad hinting on my part, to show him a magic trick; and, when I (flawlessly) performed my Knock Out Speller, he was suitably knocked out.
So knocked out, in fact, that he seemed a bit uneasy, as though a part of him wondered why on earth a daughter of his might be bothering with something so outré as sleights of hand. But he put the best face he could upon things, which in this case was an uncertain smile; and to himself, I think, he merely hoped for the best. It was a reaction with which I would become familiar over the years, and not only from Father.
But he was too pleased about the prospect of William’s release to be unsettled for long. Soon he was smiling happily again, and even joking, something he had not done, it seemed, for weeks.
He left around nine o’clock, promising that he would come pick me up at the same time tomorrow morning, to go see William. Shortly afterward, Miss Lizzie and I cleared up the parlor and went upstairs. The wind had died, but rain still pattered against the roof and the air was cool, so she tugged a quilt from the hallway closet and forced it on me before she smiled good night.
I undressed, flipped the quilt over the mattress, scooted into bed. How luxuriously comfortable it was, after those long sweltering nights, to snuggle up in a warm dry bed w
hile the rain rustled overhead and the sea rustled against the shore. The day had been a long one, but it had ended well, and I felt cozy and secure. Miss Lizzie had apparently forgotten about those nincompoops with their tomatoes; Father was rested and happy; and William would be released tomorrow.
I remember thinking that the police would soon find out who had actually committed the murder, and I remember anticipating how pleased I should be to learn that it was someone about whom I knew nothing and cared less. Someone, for example (just picking a name at random), like Susan St. Clair, she of the flounced skirts and black net hose.
But she, I glumly recalled, had been huddled with Father at the time.
Well, even so, they would find someone, and it would not be William.
Things, it seemed, were finally beginning to work out.
I awoke with a shock as sudden as if I had been hurled into icy water. Dread coiled in my chest and sweat lay chill and dank along my skin. For a moment I lay there, heart rapping against my ribs, and tried to understand what had happened, why I had scrambled so panicky from sleep.
It was late; two or three o’clock, one of the darker corners of the night. The rain had stopped, the sea was still, the house was silent. I could hear only the steady metallic dripping of runoff from the roof’s gutter as it plopped to the puddles below.
Then I smelled it.
Smoke.
Today I do not know why, nor did I then, but immediately I assumed that the men who had been outside Miss Lizzie’s house, the men who had pelted her with rotten tomatoes, had returned and set the house afire.
I threw off the covers, swung my legs off the mattress, and stood up. I picked up my robe from the back of my chair and wrapped it around me. I tiptoed over to the door, cracked it open, held my ear to the opening. I heard nothing. Opening the door farther, I saw that Miss Lizzie’s door, across the hall, was ajar, and that a light glowed beyond.
The smoke was drifting from her room, and I recognized it at now as cigar smoke.
Had she fallen asleep with the light on and a cigar burning? If she had, ought I not do something?
I had never been inside Miss Lizzie’s room. She had never invited me in, and during the day she kept the door shut. Perhaps it was locked; I had never tried it, and never asked. Doing either would have been, I thought, a violation of her privacy.
Now, tentatively, I crossed the hall. Without touching the door, I leaned toward it and whispered, “Miss Lizzie?”
Nothing.
I pushed the door open gently and stepped inside.
She had told me she had hired a team of movers to help her transport furniture from her house in Fall River to the shore. As I stood in the doorway, I wondered how many of them had wrestled with the enormous four-poster that sprawled across the room at the far wall. It was a behemoth of dark wood, canopied with pale-pink silk, and it looked solid enough to go sailing across the seas; forever, like the Flying Dutchman. By the light of the kerosene lamp on the nightstand, I could see that someone had lain in it; but it was deserted now.
Then I looked to my left and saw—my breathing stopped, my entire body went cold—two strange women sitting there. They did not move, they did not acknowledge my intrusion. In the flickering lamplight, they had a peculiarly somber and melancholy quality, a pair of specters waiting with infinite patience, but virtually no hope, for some final decision: a ransom, a pardon. Had I not been frozen with surprise, I think I would have run from the room. And then, after a moment, I realized that they were a doubled Miss Lizzie, the woman herself and her reflection in the mirror of a wide mahogany dressing table.
I barely recognized my friend. I had seen her only when she wore her black mourning and her hair was clenched in a chignon, Now her hair tumbled in thick white curls to her shoulders, and she wore a lavender silk dressing gown, belted, on each lapel of which was embroidered a large red rose. Her legs were crossed, right over left, and her head was canted slightly forward. Her hands were in her lap, folded round a balloon glass of dark liquid.
To her right, on the dressing table, sat a tall opaque green bottle and rectangular teakwood jewelry box. Beside them, in a square black ashtray, a cigar sent smoke spiraling up to the ceiling.
I stepped forward. “Miss Lizzie?”
Her glance swung up into the mirror, and she saw me.
“Amanda,” she said tonelessly, watching me in the glass.
“Are you all right?”
She shifted in her chair, cleared her throat. “I couldn’t sleep.”
“Can I get you something?”
“No,” she said, and looked down. “No.” She turned, looked at me directly, and said, “No, dear. Thank you.”
To her left stood a small stool whose red leather matched that of her chair. I walked over to it, sat down, and looked up at her. “Are you okay, Miss Lizzie?”
She raised the balloon glass to her lips, sipped at the liquid. “I’m fine, Amanda. I’m just thinking.”
I glanced into the mirror. It made me uncomfortable, made me feel that there were too many of us in the room. I asked her, “Are you sure? I could make us some tea.”
“I’m sure,” she said. She picked up the cigar, puffed on it, blew a small cloud of smoke. Then she frowned at me. “Amanda? Why are you up so late?”
“I think I had a bad dream. I woke up and I was scared.”
She smiled faintly, one of her inward-looking smiles. “Yes,” she said, and put the cigar back in the ashtray. “That sounds like a bad dream.”
“I don’t remember it, though. Usually I remember the bad ones.”
Looking off, she nodded slowly. “It would be good, wouldn’t it, if we didn’t remember any of the bad ones.” She sipped again from her glass.
“Are you still upset?” I asked her. “About those men yesterday?”
“No,” she said. “No. They were nothing.” She moved the glass in a slow wave of dismissal, and the liquid sloshed against its sides. “A ripple of anger. Hatred.” She shook her head. “Nothing. It passes and the surface is still again.”
I did not know what she meant by that, and I did not know what to do. She seemed to me profoundly unhappy, and I had nothing to offer her. But I did not want to leave her alone. Quickly I glanced around the room. For want of anything better to say, I volunteered inanely, “That’s a really pretty jewelry box.”
She looked toward the box. “Yes,” she said. “Thank you. It was a gift from my father.” She shifted the glass to her left hand, reached out with her right and lifted the lid. A clockwork mechanism was hidden somewhere inside. Music suddenly filled the room, as tinny and as paltry and as poignant as only a music-box tune can be.
“What song is that?” I asked her.
“It’s the music someone wrote for a poem. ‘Hame, Hame, Hame.’ It’s a Scottish word. It means home.”
We listened to the tune play, light and lilting at first, then steadily exhausting itself as the device wound down. The notes grew hollow, leaden; they slowed, faltered, died; and left in the room, all at once, a silence louder than themselves.
In nearly a whisper, looking off again, Miss Lizzie recited, “‘When the flower is in the bud … and the leaf is on the tree … the larks shall sing me hame … in my ain country.’” She looked at me and smiled, and gave me a small soft shrug, as though in apology, as though she were embarrassed by the quality of her reading, or of the poem itself. “It was his favorite song,” she said.
I had noticed that two items lay on the top shelf of the jewelry box, a strand of pearls and a gold-framed picture, portrait sized, facedown. Nodding to the box, I said, “Is that his picture?”
She looked at the box, shook her head. “No.” She reached out, carefully lifted the picture off the velvet lining, and handed it to me.
It was a photograph of a young woman, taken sometime toward the end of the last century. She wore a light-colored dress, its sleeves long, its skirt pleated, its waist sashed; and over it a matching, tightly fitted jacket
whose short ruffled sleeves were bordered with lace. Her blond hair was parted in the middle and pulled back into a bun, a few tendrils escaping artfully at her temples. She stood sideways to the camera, looking into it, holding a bonnet behind her back, a pose that demonstrated to best advantage an excellent, almost a voluptuous, figure. The pose, with the lighting and the expression on her face, seemed to be striving for, while not quite achieving, a soulful esthetic delicacy.
Possibly her face was at fault. Her eyes were set too deeply and too far apart; her mouth was a shade too narrow, a shade too thin. It was a face that suggested some small but potentially troubling weakness of character: willfulness, perhaps, or pettiness.
For all that, she was a very pretty woman, and I said so to Miss Lizzie.
“Yes,” she said, and took another sip from her glass. “She was very pretty.”
“What happened to her?” I asked.
“I killed her,” she said.
NINETEEN
MY FACE MUST have shown my shock, for Miss Lizzie smiled and said, “No, not out here, not in the real world.” She gave the word real a slight sarcastic emphasis. “No. In here.” She gestured with the glass toward her breast. “In my heart.”
“Why?” I asked her. “Who was she?”
She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows speculatively. “Who was she.” She sipped at her drink, then shrugged lightly. As though it answered the question, she said, “She was an actress.”
This I found not especially illuminating. “An actress?”
“One of the best,” Miss Lizzie said simply, and I could see her lassitude begin to fall away. “She was brilliant. I’ve seen Eleanora Duse and Sarah Bernhardt, and neither of them could hold a candle to her.”
She picked up her cigar, puffed at it, put it back down. “I saw her first in 1904 at the Colonial in Boston. Lady Macbeth. Do you know Macbeth?”
I shook my head.
“Lady Macbeth is a difficult role, you see. She’s not a very nice person. She goads her husband into killing the King of Scotland so the two of them can take over the kingdom. She’s tremendously ambitious. A monster, in fact. And many actresses play her that way. Gnashing their teeth, sweeping their arms about, tearing out their hair. Unredeemed evil.”
Miss Lizzie Page 16
