Miss Lizzie

by Walter Satterthwait

  He nodded. “I agree. But so long as he maintains that he killed her, I can’t do a thing. All the evidence in our possession suggests his guilt. He had motive, means, and opportunity.”

  “But you know he didn’t do it.”

  He gave me a small brisk shake of his head. “I believe he didn’t do it. I learned a long time ago that what I believe and what a court accepts as evidence are two completely different things.”

  “But it’s not fair.”

  “It’s the law.”

  “Then the law stinks.”

  He smiled briefly. “It’s all we have. It’s the one thing that keeps us all from behaving like animals.”

  “It doesn’t stop some people. It didn’t stop whoever killed my stepmother.”

  “No. But God willing it’ll allow us to prevent whoever did it from doing it again.”

  “But my brother’s the one in jail, and he didn’t do it.”

  “None of us want to see your brother convicted. We’re still making inquiries. We’re still looking for evidence. I believe that sooner or later we’ll have a ease against the person who was actually responsible.”

  “And meanwhile my brother is stuck in jail.”

  “I know.” For a moment I imagined that the granite of his face changed slightly, that the hard planes softened. “I’m sorry.”

  I looked at him. “You still think it was Miss Lizzie, don’t you?”

  If it had indeed momentarily softened, his face was suddenly all granite once again. “As I said, what I believe doesn’t matter.”

  “She didn’t, you know. I know you don’t like her. From before. I heard about the dust and stuff up in her loft, back in Fall River. But what if you were wrong about all that? What if you made a mistake?”

  He smiled the cool remote smile. “I made no mistake.”

  “How do you know?”

  “There was other evidence.”

  “Then how come you didn’t use it at the trial?”

  “It didn’t present itself until after the acquittal.”

  “What was the evidence?”

  He shrugged his heavy shoulders, which had the effect of drawing my eyes to his empty sleeve. “It doesn’t matter now. That was a long time ago.”

  I did not believe that the long-ago trial did not matter to him. And I did not believe that there was any other evidence. “Can I talk to William?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “He requested that he get no more visitors. That’s his right.”

  “Just for a minute?”

  “I’m sorry.” I imagined no softening this time.

  I had no hope whatever of swaying him. I said, “Does my father know that William confessed?”

  “Yes.”

  Poor Father. One sad thing after another for him. “Why did he go to Boston?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Once again, I did not believe him.

  I was passing by the Woolworth’s, on my way to Miss Lizzie’s, when someone called my name. I turned and saw Roger Drummond.

  TWENTY-TWO

  SURPRISINGLY, ROGER SEEMED even happier to greet me than he had been to leave me, yesterday, at Miss Lizzie’s. He was grinning, his eyes alight, as he waved a folded newspaper under my nose. “Hey, did you see my article? It just came out.”

  “Roger,” I said, “I really don’t have time right now. And besides, why would I want to read a nasty old article about Miss Lizzie?”

  “No, no, it’s not like that,” he said, the words coming out in an excited rush. “Come on, I’ll show you. You’re in it too. We’ll go into Woolworth’s, I’ll buy you a soda.”

  I had enough things on my mind without worrying about Roger’s silly article. But he was so obviously pleased with himself that it would have been cruel to refuse him. Besides, he was the first boy who had ever offered to take me to a soda fountain, at Woolworth’s or anywhere else. Whatever the circumstances, one tries not to let a milestone opportunity slip away.

  As we sat down on the stools at the counter, Roger to my right, he said, “Hey, I heard about your brother. I’m sorry. I really liked him.”

  “Liked him? What do you mean, Roger? He’s not dead or anything.”

  “No, no, I know that. I just meant it’s a tough break for him, being in jail and all.” He opened the newspaper on the counter.

  “He didn’t do it,” I said.

  “Hey, I’m not arguing with you.” He had not yet heard, obviously, about William’s confession; and he would not hear about it from me. “Here, look,” he said, pointing to the page of newsprint. “See that. By Roger Drummond, Special Correspondent. Pretty neat, huh?”

  The waitress came over and Roger, frowning with impatience, ordered a cherry phosphate. I ordered a cup of coffee with cream and sugar, and felt rather pleasantly wicked.

  “I didn’t know you drank coffee,” Roger said, picking up the newspaper as the waitress left.

  “Oh,” I said, “now and then.”

  He shook his head. “Too bitter for me.”

  “You put sugar in it,” I explained.

  But Roger was already reading, his head hidden behind the paper. “‘The entire town was shocked to learn last Tuesday of the brutal murder of Mrs. Audrey Burton of One Hundred Water Street. According to police reports, Mrs. Burton—’” He lowered the paper, looked up at me, blinked, frowned, and said, “Well, that part doesn’t really matter. Let me get to the good stuff. Let’s see.…” He ducked behind the paper again. The waitress brought the phosphate and the coffee and set them down on the counter.

  “Hello, my child,” said a low musical voice to my right.

  It was Mrs. Archer, the spiritualist. She wore a white dress identically strange to the one she had worn yesterday, and she smiled sweetly, brightening her bulldog face. “How are you feeling, Amanda?”

  “I’m all right. This is my friend Roger. Roger, do you know Mrs. Archer?”

  Impatient again, Roger was eyeing her over the rim of the newspaper. “Hi.”

  “How do you do,” said Mrs. Archer, then turned back to me. “It’s so good to see you out and about, my child. You mustn’t grieve, you know. Your stepmother is completely happy to be where she is.”

  Which, if true, would have been a first for Audrey.

  Mrs. Archer leaned toward me, eyes narrowed confidentially between folds of flesh, as though she were about to impart a great Secret. “I’ve spoken with her again, by the way.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  Beyond her, Roger rolled his eyes and disappeared behind the newspaper.

  “She sends her love,” said Mrs. Archer.

  “Oh. Okay. Thanks.” I tasted my coffee.

  “If I can be of any help, my child, I want you to call upon me. Do you have my card? Here, let me give you one.” She opened her carpetbag, which was at least as long as she was tall, and removed from it a white business card. She handed it to me. In spidery raised script it said MADAME HELENE, VOYAGER, CONSULTANT, and gave her telephone number.

  I thanked her.

  “Not at all.” She smiled. “Please don’t hesitate to come to me. I’d be very happy to help you with any problem you might have. There’d be no charge, of course. Well, I must be going. The demands of the corporeal world, you know. So good to see you again. And a pleasure to meet you, Roger.”

  Roger’s head poked above the newspaper. “Sure. Me too.”

  When she was out of earshot, I said, “Roger, that was rude, reading the paper while she was standing right there.”

  He grinned. “You think I should’ve laughed right in her face?”

  “Well,” I said, and sipped at my coffee, “it was still pretty rude.”

  “She’s nuts,” he said. “I’ve heard about her. Talks to ghosts. Bunkum.”

  I teased him: “I wonder what Dr. Fraud would say about her.”

  “Very funny. It’s Freud, and from what I hear about Mrs. Archer, she’s one of the people who could use a little repression.”

 
; “What does that mean?”

  He waved his hand. “Doesn’t matter. C’mon, let me finish this.”

  He read through the article, and it was much kinder and more objective than I had expected. Nowhere was there the slightest suggestion that Miss Lizzie was guilty of anything. She was described as short, white-haired, and dignified. I was described as the young, attractive daughter of the victim. Basking in the glow of the second adjective, I allowed myself to admire the arc of Roger’s cheekbones, the curve of his lashes.

  He finished up: “‘With the current flurry of opinion, it behooves all of us to remember that opinions are somewhat like collar stays. Everyone should have a few, but when trying them out, we must be careful not to poke ourselves.’”

  “Roger!” I said. “That’s not fair. That’s what Mr. Slocum said.”

  He grinned. “He told me I could use it. And I changed it, I added some stuff. I improved it. When you do that, it belongs to you.”

  I shook my head, dubious.

  “Really,” he said. “Everybody knows that.” Eagerly he raised both eyebrows. “So what do you think? About the article?”

  “I think it’s very nice.”

  He grinned. “Yeah?”

  “Yes. I think it’s really very nice.”

  He looked down at the newspaper, studied it silently for a moment, then looked up, grinning once more. “Yeah, it’s not bad at all, is it? You want this copy?” He folded the newspaper, held it out to me. “I’ve got a bunch of them.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and took it. “I’ll bring it back to Miss Lizzie.”

  The animation left his face. “You mean you’re still staying there?”

  “Of course.”

  “You ought to get out of that house, Amanda. Seriously. She’s not normal.”

  I shook my head. “Honestly, Roger. I thought you’d gotten over all that. I mean, the article—”

  “Mr. Benedict and I, he’s the editor, we talked about it and we decided we had to be careful. For the sake of fairness and all. But I’m telling you, she killed her parents.”

  “You and Chief Da Silva, Roger. You don’t give up, do you?”

  “That’s because he knows the same thing I do. That she did it.”

  “It’s not fair,” I said. “Now he even says there’s some kind of evidence that proves she did it. Something that came in after the trial.”

  Roger nodded. “Yeah. The letter.”

  “What letter?”

  I felt a light, tentative tap on my shoulder and swung around on the stool.

  “Oh, hello, Mrs. Mortimer,” I said. “How are you?”

  Clutching her purse in both hands, she said hello to Roger, then turned and smiled sadly at me, cocking her head with a quick birdlike motion. “Amanda, I can’t tell you how sorry we were to hear about this awful thing. Are you all right, dear?”

  I was moved. So far, she was the only person in the whole town who had come forward to say this. “Thank you, Mrs. Mortimer. I’m okay, I guess. How’s Mr. Mortimer?”

  “He’s fine, dear. And he’s just as concerned for you and your father as I am. And your brother too, of course. Is there anything we can do?”

  “No, really. But thank you very much. Everything is—”

  “’Scuse me,” said the waitress, across the counter. “You want some more coffee?”

  “Yes, please,” I told her. She poured it.

  Mrs. Mortimer was watching with a small uncertain frown. “Are you really sure, dear, that you should be drinking that?”

  I smiled. “It’s okay. Really. Father lets me. My stepmother was the one who didn’t. And I used to steal it from her all the time.”

  “Steal it?”

  “When she wasn’t looking. I was kind of a sneak, I guess. I even stole some last Tuesday … you know, after the argument.”

  She frowned, perhaps felt a flicker of pain at the memory, and she reached out a thin hand to touch my shoulder. “I know, dear. It’s probably best not to talk about it.”

  “I’m really sorry you had to be there to see that.”

  “I know, I know. Poor Audrey was so … difficult sometimes. She was such a good woman, but her pride.…” She gave a small sad shrug. “And believe me, Amanda, I’m truly sorry about William. I don’t for a minute think he had anything to do with what happened. I hope you know that.”

  “Yes, sure, of course.”

  “It’s just that the police, they were so persistent. They wanted to know everything, they kept hounding me. They wouldn’t take no for an answer! There just wasn’t any way I could avoid telling them. About the … argument.”

  “I understand, Mrs. Mortimer. It wasn’t your fault.”

  “Well, I wanted you to know how I felt. And I don’t want you to be a stranger, all right? If you need anything, someone to talk to, anything at all, you just come and see us, all right?”

  “Okay, I will. Thank you.”

  “All right, dear. Good-bye now. Good-bye, Roger.”

  Roger and I said good-bye, and she stalked off, tall and angular, her shoulders slightly stooped, her head bobbing atop her long thin neck as though she were searching for slim metallic fish down at her feet, down at the bottom of a shallow lake.

  “You’re getting to be pretty popular,” Roger said.

  “Not everywhere,” I said. “What about this letter?”

  “What letter?”

  “The one you said Chief Da Silva was talking about.”

  “Oh. Yeah. It was a letter from a banker. What it said was, he knew for a fact that on the day of the murder, Andrew Borden, Lizzie’s father, was planning to transfer a piece of property. It was a house, and it had belonged to Lizzie, but he was going to give it to Lizzie’s stepmother. I guess it had been set up for a couple of weeks, the transfer.”

  “Who was the letter sent to?”

  “The chief of police in Fall River. And it was sent after the trial, after Lizzie was acquitted. So he couldn’t do anything about it. You can’t try someone twice for the same crime.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just the law. Anyway, according to the banker, Lizzie’s stepmother was supposed to meet Andrew at the bank at ten-thirty. Well, naturally, she didn’t show up, because right then she was lying upstairs in the guest room, all chopped up—”

  “Roger.”

  He grinned, then suddenly frowned—remembering, I think, my stepmother. “Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Anyway, Lizzie’s father went home early. Usually he didn’t go till lunchtime, around one o’clock. He was looking for his wife, obviously. At the trial, Lizzie said she told him that her stepmother went out, that she’d gotten a note saying someone was sick. But whoever wrote the note never turned up. Because there wasn’t any note.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Her story was in the newspapers, Amanda. The whole town knew the cops were looking for whoever wrote the note.”

  “Maybe he didn’t read the newspapers.”

  “Hey. The murders were the biggest thing that ever happened in Fall River. You think that everyone wasn’t reading the newspapers?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Forget about the note. What was so important about this house?”

  “What was important, see, was that Lizzie was really possessive about property. A real capitalist. Five years before all this happened, her father had done almost exactly the same thing. He’d taken another house that had belonged to Lizzie and given it to his wife.”

  “Why?”

  “How would I know? Anyway, just to make things right, her father bought Lizzie another house, so she could get the income from the rents. But even that didn’t make her happy. She never spoke to her stepmother again. Never stayed in the same room with her, never ate meals with her.”

  “And you think that because her father did the same thing again, Miss Lizzie would go and kill her stepmother? And her father?”

  “Look,” he said. “Here’s what I think happened—and Chief Da Silva agrees with me.”
He sucked some cherry phosphate up through the straw. “To start off with,” he said, “Lizzie was always sort of weird. She was repressed, like I said, really repressed, and once in a while she had these fits. Fits where she didn’t know what she was doing. That’s in the record.

  “Okay. It seems like her father was trying to keep the transfer a secret from Lizzie. Which stands to reason, if you remember the way she acted last time. But she does hear about it.”

  I said, “How do you know?”

  “Because it’s the only thing that makes sense. Just hold on a minute, okay?”

  “It doesn’t make sense to me.”

  “Just wait. So Lizzie gets more and more desperate. She hates her stepmother. She can’t stand the idea that the woman’s getting another piece of Lizzie’s property. And so finally, on the day when she knows her stepmother is supposed to go downtown to sign the papers, Lizzie goes crazy. She has one of her fits and she grabs an axe, goes up into the guest room, and she kills her. Maybe she doesn’t even know what she’s doing. She probably doesn’t. Not while she’s doing it.

  “But as soon it’s over, she does. Her stepmother’s dead, and Lizzie’s got to do something. She washes up and she gets dressed to go outside. So she can say she wasn’t there when it happened.

  “But her father comes home early, see, before she gets a chance to go out, and he asks where Mrs. Borden is. Lizzie tells him about the note, but she knows it’s not going to make any difference. Sooner or later, someone’s going to find the body, and her father’s going to know that Lizzie’s been there all morning. He’s going to know that she’s the only one who could’ve killed her. So Lizzie gets out the axe again, and she kills him.”

  “Someone else could’ve come into the house.”

  “When? Either Lizzie or the maid, one or the other, was downstairs all morning. And the front door was locked. So how’d he get in? And after he got in and killed Mrs. Borden, where’d he hide until he killed Mr. Borden? And why did he kill either one of them?”

  “Wait a minute. You said there was a maid?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Bridget Sullivan.” Smiling, he shook his head. “But that won’t work, Amanda. She didn’t have any reason to kill anyone.”