A Field of Darkness

by Cornelia Read

  “Thank you,” I said.

  He poured more wine into my glass.

  “In fact, though,” I said, “I think I may have had enough already. Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Go up another flight and through my office,” he said.

  I stood up, light-headed. The stairs were dimly lit, and the dark banister felt satiny and cool under my hand as I started for the third floor. I got to the top and fumbled inside the door for the light button. The sconces over an old desk lit up, and I glanced over the wall, admiring a jumble of pictures hung between a pair of bookshelves.

  The room was papered in a green and white toile, a pattern of walleyed peacocks, again familiar. I ran my finger down the line of the repeat, but I really had to go to the bathroom.

  I peed, washed up, looked in the mirror, played with my hair, put on lipstick. My cheeks were too red from the wine.

  I came back out. Music from downstairs: Django. “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

  “Oh fuck,” I said.

  Four frames hung in a row alongside the door. In each was a silhouette. There were two crewcut men, one of them perfectly Lapthorne. Above them were two women: one with her hair in a thick braid over the top of her head, the second wearing a high Spanish comb.

  Sphincter chill.

  CHAPTER 29

  I walked slowly back into the dining room, silhouettes in my hand. Lapthorne had indeed broken out a bottle of champagne.

  “So I knew I had to break up with him,” Ellis was saying, “when I went home to his family’s for Thanksgiving and his mother broke out a set of sterling grape scissors. . . .”

  She looked up at me and stopped talking.

  I laid the silhouettes down on the table.

  “Change of subject,” I said.

  Lapthorne’s face went pale in the soft light. “I’ve been waiting for you to—”

  “You’ve been waiting? You knew?” I was shaking, hands clenched.

  He dropped his eyes. “Those exact roses, Madeline? You live in the same city . . .”

  Ellis was silent.

  “So you just figured, what,” I said to him, “act all charming and shit, maybe I wouldn’t ask if you killed those girls?”

  “You think I—”

  “Your dog tags were found at the scene,” I said.

  “Because I gave them to Delphine, and she wouldn’t come with us anyway . . .” he said, then just shook his head and stopped talking—like it hurt too much, producing words.

  I watched the black silk of his eyepatch darken. Seconds later, a fat teardrop crawled down his other cheek.

  “All right,” Lapthorne said finally, “why wouldn’t you believe that I was responsible? I was such a useless piece of shit I let them go. . . . But if I’d known? If I could have stopped it?”

  Ellis stood up, grave for once.

  She gripped his shoulder and said, “Bourbon.”

  We hoisted him up and propelled him down the stairs, back to the library.

  Ellis was pouring Lapthorne an ungodly amount of Jim Beam. We’d settled him into an old leather club chair in the library. I took the one across the butler’s table.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ve gotten bits and pieces. You were drafted, you were based at Fort Drum—”

  The guy was broken, all hunched in on himself like some beat-up doll from a thrift-store nickel bin.

  Ellis set the glass in front of him. He wrapped both hands around the vessel but didn’t try to lift it.

  “How did you get into all this?” he asked, not looking at me.

  “The dog tags,” I said. “I’ve held them in my hand.”

  “I take it you know the date in question?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Let’s hear your version. Start with who the hell the girls were, since no one up in Syracuse has ever figured that out.”

  He fell back in the chair.

  When he didn’t say anything, I pushed his glass closer to him and said, “Where were they from?”

  “France.”

  “How’d they end up at the fair?”

  “They’d been in Buffalo for the summer. Au pairs. Wanted to see a little more of the country before they went home. Chris and I had a pass. . . .”

  Ellis leaned against the back of my chair. “Chris?”

  The silhouettes were laid on the low table before Lapthorne. He tapped the fourth profile. Bottom right. “He was in my unit. I knew him from St. Paul’s.”

  “Tell me about the girls.”

  He drank before speaking, then cleared his throat. “I had a little Porsche, an old 356C. . . . It was beautiful out and we put the top down. Chris saw the girls walking along, near that rose garden downtown. . . .”

  “The E. M. Mills Memorial,” I said, “in Thornden Park.”

  “Just so.”

  He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees and letting his hands hang loose between them, patrician ankles crossed below.

  “You made the garlands?” I asked.

  He nodded. “It was beautiful. The moon, fireflies—heady scent of that last flush of bloom, but just enough breeze. I made them each a crown of blossoms. We’d paired off by then. . . .”

  “What were their names?” I asked.

  “Sophie and Delphine,” he said. “Last name was Descognets. Sisters.”

  “You wouldn’t know it,” I said, “from the photographs. They didn’t look alike.”

  “Photos?” he asked. “Where did you . . . ?”

  “One of those strips from a booth at the fair,” I said. “They found it on the bodies.”

  “Don’t remember when the girls did that. Must have been when Chris and I were buying beers or something, which was why they wouldn’t leave with us.”

  “Why not?” asked Ellis.

  “We were just so hammered.” he said. “Chris and I’d been drinking all afternoon. There was a full moon, did I tell you that? I turned off the headlights when we were driving to the fairgrounds. The girls didn’t like it . . . later they didn’t want to get back in the car with us. . . .”

  He reached for the bourbon and knocked it back.

  “We were just . . . young,” he said. “Didn’t know what the hell was going to happen when they shipped us out, so we were rowdy and stupid. Having so goddamn much fun, but . . . Last time I ever . . .”

  Ellis refilled his glass.

  “I should have made them get in the car,” he said. “We should have stayed with them . . . if I hadn’t been so—” He went silent again.

  “Where’s this Chris guy now?” asked Ellis.

  “Blown up about three weeks after we’d been shipped to Asia,” he said. “A little kid with a grenade taped to him came running up and Chris knew we’d all be . . .”

  Lapthorne swilled bourbon and leaned back. “I remember pelting toward him, yelling at him to stop, to turn away. Caught a piece of shrapnel.” He touched the patch. “So my mouth was open when he . . . there was—”

  “Please,” I said, dinner shifting nastily in my stomach. “Just tell us about the fair.”

  “We were trying to talk the girls into leaving with us, a motel or something, and they wouldn’t. It was still early, and Chris and I were begging them, finally . . . ridiculous. We were so drunk, and Delphine said she’d kiss me if I gave her the dog tags, a souvenir to bring home, and when I did they danced away from us, laughing.”

  He stopped again, covering his eye and the patch with one hand.

  “So then . . .” coaxed Ellis.

  “So then we called after them,” he said, “and told them we’d leave. We were right near my car. I guess we thought that would make them follow us . . . pique their interest. We were going to come back. Just drive around the block . . .”

  I almost asked if that was when he got arrested, but I wanted to hear it from him. A test. See if his version matched Kenny’s.

  “I peeled out of the lot,” he said. “Wanted to make some noise and get their attention. Didn’t get very far and then I
hit a van, sideswiped it, and the guy got out and Chris was pissy to him, took a swing or two and then there was a cop car and we were . . . belligerent. Out of hand.”

  “Did you find the girls again?” asked Ellis.

  “If I hadn’t told the one cop he was a fucking asshole townie and to get his fucking hands off my car, maybe they wouldn’t have cuffed us. And then when he had me up against the car I told him they had to let us go, because we had these French girls decked in roses who were hot for us, all ready to get down and . . . Girls who’d never look at his sorry ass twice, so he slammed my head against the door a couple of times. I started puking, and after that . . .”

  He dropped the hand from his face and looked at me, then turned his head away. “I came to in the holding cell with a rib busted,” he said, “stinking of vomit.”

  “And the girls were killed,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “and the girls were killed. And the cop made sure I knew it before he let us go. End of his shift, and they’d just found them . . . the bodies. He heard it when someone radioed in, told us all about it, how they were still wearing the roses. Took me out of the cell . . .”

  “Oh my God,” said Ellis.

  “I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to . . . when he told me that, like he was gloating, rubbing it in . . .” said Lapthorne. “He said I’d have to live with knowing, bad as if I’d done it myself.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I just . . . He let us go and I couldn’t even tell Chris, not until the day after, when we shipped out.”

  “But at the station, they never asked you . . .” said Ellis. “I mean, if no one knew who the girls were, didn’t he want to . . .”

  I cut her off. “The cop,” I said. “Tell me his name.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, looking like he was going to cry again. “He was right. I’m the one who has to live with it. It wasn’t until we got back to base that I realized I still had the silhouettes, all smashed in my pocket. I’ve kept them, ever since. . . .”

  “Hey, Lapthorne,” I said, leaning across the table, right in his face. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself and tell me his name.”

  He flinched, then quietly answered, “Schneider. Officer Jack.”

  “Schneider?” said Ellis. “We saw him and Madeline thinks he’s—”

  “You what?” said Lapthorne, snapping his head around to look at me. “Goddamnit, Maddie, you saw Schneider? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means,” I said, “that I never believed you killed them.”

  CHAPTER 30

  So all this time you just let me go on thinking . . .” Lapthorne was now totally ticked off at me, which I chalked up to the fact that he’d been acting like, well, kind of a pussy, frankly.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t believe you had done it,” I said, “but I didn’t know for sure. I mean, what would you have done? You get told about a double murder and then right away your cousin’s name turns up?”

  He thought about that. “Of course you’re right. You had no way of knowing whether or not I was . . . my God, someone dangerous.”

  “Well then,” I said.

  “In fact,” he said, rather sheepish, “as your favorite cousin, I forbid you to ever do anything like this again. What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking I had to know,” I said. “Those girls . . . I saw the pictures. Not just the ones from the fair, the ones of them after. They were killed in a strange town and no one knows how it happened, no one even knew who they were.”

  “But now we do,” said Ellis. “Now they have names, and now you know Lapthorne wasn’t involved.”

  “Now I want to know who was,” I said.

  “As do I,” said Lapthorne. “Your money’s on Schneider, Madeline?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know how to ask,” he said, “but if you want to do this . . . it would mean a great deal to me.”

  “Of course we want to do this,” said Ellis.

  I nodded.

  He looked down at the silhouettes. “I’ve kept these for a long time,” he said. “Mostly because I felt responsible. But also because I miss what it was like, before the war, before Delphine and Sophie were . . . I wanted to remember how that felt.”

  He looked up at the two of us. “Thank you.”

  “Our pleasure,” said Ellis.

  They smiled at each other, all sappy. I looked at a clock on the mantel.

  “Sadly, Ellis and I have a train to catch,” I said. “So if we want to figure out what to do next . . .”

  “Won’t you stay?” asked Lapthorne. “Plenty of room, and it would be my pleasure to cook breakfast.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve got to go back to Syracuse tomorrow, early,” I said.

  “So be it, then,” he said. “Let’s get started.”

  “All right,” I began, “here’s what I know so far,” and I explained about meeting up with Sembles at the fair, and our run-in with Schneider and Vomit Girl. I told Lapthorne about Kenny, to let him know I had someone formidable on my side, someone who’d know if I was getting into dangerous territory.

  “What next?” asked Ellis.

  “Have you been to the, ah, crime scene?” asked Lapthorne.

  “I should,” I said. “Maybe I can go from work. Take an hour or something.”

  I checked the mantel clock again . . . time to leave.

  “We’d better hit it,” I said to Ellis.

  She looked twitchy.

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’m going to stay,” she said.

  I just stared at her.

  Lapthorne threaded his fingers through hers and put their hands on his knee.

  Ellis looked at me, a satisfied little smile tipping up one corner of her mouth. “You’ll miss your train.”

  Lapthorne stood up and walked out onto the quiet street with me. He hailed a cab and opened the door, his fingertips just barely trailing along the curve of my lower back as he ushered me in.

  I turned to say goodbye. He kissed me on the mouth again.

  PART III

  SYRACUSE

  A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.

  —DIANE ARBUS

  CHAPTER 31

  It was after nine Sunday night when I reached Green Street. I couldn’t remember when the six-hour drive had ever been so exhausting. Maybe it had been this time because I’d spent mile after mile rehashing every word Lapthorne had said over the last two nights. Or maybe I just didn’t want to face my Dean-free apartment.

  I’d fought sleep since Saugerties, blasting Hendrix and Callas-as-Carmen with the windows down. By Whitney Point, my resistance to the lure of a nap in the breakdown lane was so weak it took sucking back three tragic gas-station coffees before I could soldier on.

  And for what, ultimately? Here I was in my own driveway, not feeling a damn thing but sorry.

  It was just so ugly, after lush downstate. Made me want to shoot out every streetlight on the block.

  Instead I dropped my forehead to the steering wheel, drifting off to sleep while crickets bitched from the dead grass out back.

  I was totally under, right up until someone crunched onto the driveway’s gravel.

  Two steps . . . heavy . . . then a hesitation before the guy’s next stride brought him smack against my still-open window.

  I didn’t flinch, not even when he put a hand on the sill to steady himself into a crouch, down so close I could hear him breathe.

  My keys were hanging out of the ignition. I reached for them slowly, wondering if I could yank fast enough to jam a fistful of Medecos into his eye socket.

  Then he cleared his throat and said, “Hey, Bunny, want me to carry your backpack up?”

  “Dean? Shit!” I snapped my head up. “Why the hell aren’t you in Canada?”

  “Nice to see you, too.”

  “Oh my God! I am so sorry. I thought you were .
. . Jesus, Dean . . . I was about to stab you in the eye with my keys.”

  He laughed and opened my door. “I’m a sucker for feisty, but that would have been pushing it.”

  I jumped up and threw my arms around his neck, mumbling more about Canada into his shoulder.

  “Couldn’t stand it,” he said. “Had to know you were okay. I was going to fly down to Long Island, but when I called Bonwit’s he kept saying it was an obstetrician’s office and hanging up. Your mom finally answered, after you’d left. Came here instead. . . . Got in a couple of hours ago.”

  “How long can you stay?”

  “Tonight,” he said. “Don’t get back first thing tomorrow, I miss the crew. Six a.m. flight and Al’s picking me up on the other end. Then we’re out in the real woods.”

  “Couldn’t you just . . . ?”

  Dean shook his head, reached into the car for my pack.

  “Made your favorite dinner,” he said, throwing it onto one shoulder, “Wafers of Splendor, Nuggets of Glory. In the oven all toasty, ready to go.”

  I followed him down our beautiful sidewalk, up onto the stately front porch of the classically handsome building we lived in.

  I loved everything, right down to the cracked and dented paneling along the splendid staircase, and the painted-over frieze of crowbar marks with which some long-forgotten burglar had once adorned our front door.

  All the lights were on, inside, the Weavers crooning old pinko ballads from the stereo in my honor.

  Dean got out two plates and dished up his wafers and nuggets—zucchini slices and mushrooms, respectively, dipped in cornbread batter and fried. Only thing he knew how to cook, but always killer delicious.

  We didn’t eat them. Didn’t sleep, either. Too busy messing around, except for occasional intermissions spent apologizing about having been such shits to each other, last time we’d both been home.

  By the time the sky started inching toward bright, we were crumpled and useless, sheets all twisted around our legs.

  “Last round almost finished me off,” he said. “Definitely got the poisons out.”

  “Should hope so. Any more, I’d be on crutches past Thanksgiving.”