Miss Lizzie
Page 28
I shook my head. “Only a reminder.”
Slowly, thoughtfully, he tapped the card against the lid of the box. “Imagine,” he said, “if she didn’t do it, didn’t kill her parents, how lonely she must’ve been.”
I stroked the back of his head, the black hair beginning now to gray. “Imagine how lonely she must’ve been if she did.”
There was one thing I had never told Darryl. It was something that happened that night eight years ago, when Miss Lizzie drank brandy in front of the dressing-table mirror. Toward the end of it, her speech slurred slightly, she had looked at me and said, “Life. People. The mind of God. That’s the important thing, Amanda. Not wood or steel or land. Not property. I chose property over people once, and I shall always suffer for it.”
Until Roger Drummond told me about the transfer of land from Miss Lizzie to her mother, I had thought she meant the farm of Nance O’Neil.
I had always wondered whether she ever actually told anyone—Nance, perhaps. I had always wondered if, in some isolate, wounded part of her being, she had wanted to tell, had wanted to confess.
It had been a hatchet, of course, that Miss Lizzie had reflexively chosen as a weapon that night when she went off to meet the anonymous caller—Mrs. Mortimer.
In the Nikola system, the mnemonic pair of images for the position of the six of hearts are a mother and a hatchet.
I left Darryl to his work and carried the box into the bedroom and rested it on my own dressing table. I opened it, lay the card on its shelf, and stared down at it for a long while. And when at last I brought down the lid of the box and sealed the card away, I felt the same sense of ending, of completion—although I knew that Miss Lizzie and all the others from that summer would be with me forever—that one feels when one finishes the final chapter and, with a smile or perhaps a sigh, closes the book.
Acknowledgments
In Thailand, I’d like to thank Joe West, Dusty Rhodes, Igor and Buayem Studnar at Buayem’s Books, and, for his help and chili con carne, Gabe Vallicelli at The Fountain restaurant. Anyone who finds himself with a hankering for American or Italian food while stranded on Koh Samui is advised to check out Gabe’s place.
In the southwest United States, I’d like to thank Jim and Donna Ballin in Phoenix, all the staff at the Coronada Waldenbooks in Albuquerque, and the librarians at the Wyoming branch of the Albuquerque Public Library. Chuck Fair, of Office Incorporated, Santa Fe, has once again been extremely generous, and I’m grateful. Dr. Roger Smithpeter, vascular surgeon and man about town, has been a good friend.
In particular, I want to thank Jeanne W. Satterthwait (Hi Mom) and Jonathan and Claudia Richards, without whose help this book might never have been finished.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1989 by Walter Satterthwait
ISBN: 978-1-4532-5124-9
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