Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  Kathryn went over to her chair and sat on the arm, laying a hand on her shoulder. Grace leaned against her and wept without restraint. Kathryn, with an assurance born from long sessions with crying students, put both arms around her and patted her consolingly. At the right time she fished a tissue out of her pocket and offered it to Grace, then another one, then a third.

  After what seemed a long time, the sobs subsided. Kathryn plucked the last wadded tissue out of Grace’s hand and offered her a fresh one. This was accepted but not put immediately to any heavy-duty service, and Kathryn judged it time to return to her seat on the bed.

  “I’m sorry,” said Grace, “it’s just so—so—”

  “I’m sure it’s perfectly horrible,” Kathryn said calmly. “I’m sure I can’t even imagine how bad it is.”

  Grace, for some reason, took strength from this admission and started again on her story.

  CHAPTER 26

  She was reaching for the handle of the refrigerator when the phone rang, so she picked up the kitchen extension.

  “Grace?” said a distraught voice.

  “Carolyn? What’s the matter?”

  “I need you to drive me to the airport if you can.”

  “Yes, of course, but what’s wrong?”

  “I’m too upset to drive myself.” As Carolyn’s voice was quavering, Grace had no difficulty believing this, but she couldn’t tell whether her friend was angry or sad or both.

  “Yes, Carolyn, but what’s upset you?”

  “I can’t tell you now. It’s too awful. I’ve just had a hell of a row, I can’t remember when I’ve been so angry.”

  Grace felt a flicker of apprehension. “What, uh, what’s made you angry?”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about it on the phone, I’ll tell you in the car. Oh, God, you love someone, you trust someone for years, then they betray you. Everything’s changed. Everything. My world has just—I can’t even stay at the Mark, Patricia is canceling my reservation, my whole life is just—” She stopped, at a loss for words.

  Grace’s heart sank even as a flush rose to her cheeks. She couldn’t make head or tail of the bit about the hotel, but the word betray was all too easy to understand. She stammered something, she hardly knew what.

  Carolyn asked, “Can you leave in ten minutes?”

  “Sure, sure, but, uh, my car’s in the shop.”

  “That’s all right, you can drive mine. Ten minutes?”

  “Ten minutes, yes. Bye.” Grace hung up the phone and saw that her hand was trembling. Carolyn had obviously found out. “But why on earth,” Grace asked herself out loud, “isn’t she mad at me?” She found a chair in the living room and almost fell into it. At first her brain just repeated the question dully, but eventually she began to think. After ten minutes the only explanation she had produced was that somehow Carolyn had found out Bill was having an affair, but she hadn’t figured out who he was having it with. Grace could not imagine how she was going to share a car with Carolyn all the way to the airport without giving herself away. But she didn’t have any more time to pull herself together; it was one-twenty.

  She left her house by the front door, crossed her yard and the Stanleys’, and let herself in their front door with her key. She called Carolyn’s name but got no answer. Thinking she must still be upstairs, Grace went up to the bedroom but found it empty. “Carolyn?” she called toward the open bathroom door, but there was no response. She went back downstairs, walked through the dining room, and entered the kitchen. The earth stopped.

  She did not scream, but that was only because she could not catch her breath. She stood in the doorway, her mouth frozen open, as waves of nausea hit her like breakers. The nausea passed. A short eternity passed. She dimly realized that she was moving forward on legs that did not seem to belong to her.

  She knelt on the floor beside the body. Not to see if Carolyn was dead—she knew that already—but because something terrible inside her drew her down for a closer look.

  The blood had stopped flowing. It lay in perfect stillness on the white tile floor, a glistening scarlet halo around the upper torso of the dead woman. The dress was white, too—or had been before the knife went through it. The knife now lay on the floor beside the body, oddly inconspicuous amid a gory miscellany of flatware and small utensils; every implement was as wet and as red as if it had been dipped in crimson paint.

  The door of the dishwasher hung limp on broken hinges, pointing downward toward the body as if in mute apology. Three of the four small plates in the lower rack had slid from their places and lay in an untidy stack, facedown, where the cutlery rack had been before it had fallen to the floor. Like everything else within arm’s reach, the rack and the plates in it were liberally splashed with blood.

  She looked at the body, at the blood, at the knife. She thought she ought to feel something—anger, pity, remorse, anything—but no feeling came. Nothing except a fine buzzing that hummed in her ears and danced all over her body, as though an electric current ran through her skin. She did not seem to be able to move.

  For how many minutes she remained kneeling, numbly gazing at Carolyn, she did not know.

  Neither did she know how long Bill had been standing in the doorway to the hall. She had not heard him come. His presence had crept into her senses gradually, through the buzzing, until there came a moment when she knew, unsurprised, that he was there.

  She tried to look up, but she did not want to see his face; her eyes instead found his hands, and that somehow was worse.

  He started to say something, but only a voiceless whisper came. He stopped, cleared his throat, tried again, and this time spoke. But what she heard was a thin, pinched travesty of his voice, the ghost of his voice.

  It said, “Do you have any of the blood on you?”

  For some reason the pedestrian practicality of the question offended her. The flicker of anger broke through the buzzing paralysis, or at least loosened it slightly. He was cool? So would she be.

  “There’s a little on my skirt.”

  “Stand up before there’s more of it.”

  She stood up. Too suddenly, for the room heaved; she put out a hand to steady herself.

  “Don’t touch that!” he cried.

  She snatched her hand back from the countertop, half-expecting to see a bloody handprint on the white surface. Like Lady Macbeth! she thought wildly. Then reason reasserted itself. “Don’t be absurd. My fingerprints are all over this kitchen. All over the house.”

  He made a motion in the air in front of his face, as though to clear something away. “Of course,” he said. “I— Yes, of course.”

  There was a silence. She could no longer look at the body now that he was there.

  “I think you had better leave,” he said.

  “Yes,” she replied, still not meeting his eyes. “Yes, I believe it’s time.” She moved stiffly, carefully, toward the back door.

  Carolyn’s Mercedes stood in the driveway. The driver’s door was open. It seemed like an invitation. Grace got in, shut the door, started the engine, and drove. She moved automatically, as though she were running through some prewritten script.

  She wasn’t quite sure at what point she came to herself. Perhaps it was when she realized she was driving toward the airport. Perhaps it was when she stopped at a red light, and a police car pulled up beside her.

  Oddly, her first thought was that she was driving without her license. She was to wonder about this later; surely the sight of a policeman should have made her think of the scene she had left behind in Harton. But no, instead, she thought, Oh, God, I don’t have my driver’s license with me. Instinctively she looked at the passenger seat, where her handbag would normally have been. And there was Carolyn’s blue lizard handbag. She thought she must have dropped hers when she saw Carolyn’s body. And she had left the house without it.

  Sticking out of Carolyn’s handbag was a colored folder with a travel agent’s name on it. Of course. That would be Carolyn’s
plane ticket. And maybe a confirmation of her hotel reservation. The one now canceled.

  The light turned green. Grace drove to the airport, parked close to the terminal building, took the blue lizard handbag, and tried unsuccessfully to take the luggage out of the backseat. Leaving it, she walked into the terminal and got herself onto Carolyn’s flight to San Francisco. The plane was over Kansas before she figured out what she was doing. She was running away.

  CHAPTER 27

  You’re probably thinking that was a stupid thing to do,” said Grace, looking into her plastic cup and finding it empty.

  “Not at all,” Kathryn replied, rising to pour refills for both of them. “I think it was an eminently reasonable thing to do. You wanted to get away—and God knows I don’t blame you. And there was an escape route right in front of you. The only problem was that the trail would be fairly easy to follow, so at five o’clock the next morning you decamped and headed in the unlikely direction of the bus depot.”

  To Kathryn’s considerable surprise, faint color stole up Grace’s throat and cheeks, and she stared at her scotch, not offering any reply. At last she said, “Um, yes,” but she would not look up.

  Kathryn decided on boldness. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

  Grace lifted her head. Her cheeks were still pink. “Yes. But it has nothing to do with Carolyn or—any of this disaster. It’s just something private.”

  Inspiration hit Kathryn, and before she could stop herself she said, “You had to get away from a man.”

  Grace was stunned. “How did you know?”

  “I once left a place at dawn to get away from a man myself.”

  “Oh. But you’re—” She gestured toward Kathryn.

  “Don’t let the collar fool you.”

  “Oh,” said Grace again. There was a pause, then she said, “There was something—I don’t know why I did this, I told him I was Carolyn. I mean, I told him my name was Carolyn Stanley.”

  Kathryn considered a moment. “I think that adds up. You were trying to escape, right? Trying to get away from everything? Well, if you used Carolyn’s name, you could escape from yourself, too, after a fashion. Whatever you did, it wasn’t you doing it.”

  To Kathryn’s dismay, the flush stole again over Grace’s face, making it painfully clear what the “it” was that Grace had been doing. Kathryn, possibly the more embarrassed of the two, plunged into a different topic. “Let me try another of my theories. Tell me about your suitcase.” She nodded in the direction of the bag, which was sitting on an antiquated dresser under a cracked and somewhat grimy mirror.

  “What? Oh. Well, since I came out here with nothing but Carolyn’s handbag and the clothes I had on, I took a taxi from the airport to a shopping center and got just enough to keep me for a few days.”

  “Including a suitcase rather like the ones you’ve got at home.”

  “Yes.” There was another pause while Grace’s mind, the worst of the ordeal over, recovered sufficiently to rise to curiosity. “How did you know that?”

  “Kidneys,” said Kathryn solemnly, tapping her forehead.

  Grace attempted a laugh. “No, tell me. Tell me how you found me, too. I mean, how you knew it was me.”

  “Well, it’s the same story, actually. Miscellaneous bits from my friend the policeman.” Kathryn started to number them on her fingers: “One: The missing Grace Kimbrough is presumed dead because a runaway takes her suitcases, and Grace leaves hers behind—all seven brown tweed bags with leather straps. Two: Carolyn Stanley checks in at the airport with no luggage. Three: Carolyn arrives at the Mark Hopkins with one brown Hartmann. Four: Carolyn’s car is found in the parking lot at the airport with luggage in the backseat. Hypothesis: Carolyn, knowing or suspecting that her husband has murdered Grace, is in such a panic to get on the plane that she forgets her luggage and leaves it in the car. Obviously I got that bit wrong, but it didn’t matter in the end. So she leaves the luggage, then, when she gets to San Francisco, she takes a taxi to a late-night store and buys a respectable suitcase, with contents, to take to the Mark Hopkins. But then my friend the policeman drops it on me that the luggage in the car at the airport—like the car itself—is white with blue trim. And this reminds me of Carolyn herself, who likes ‘fragile’ colors, and wears nothing but white and pastels, even in the winter. How much of a state would Carolyn have to be in to buy a brown suitcase?”

  Grace knit her brow. “But you can’t mean—is that all? Just what color the suitcase was?”

  Kathryn stopped herself from saying “What bothered me to begin with was that I couldn’t believe that Carolyn would have run away.” It would sound like a criticism of Grace, and there was no point in chastising the woman. So instead she said, “The color of the suitcase told me it wasn’t Carolyn. And there was only one other woman unaccounted for, so it had to be you.”

  “But—but that’s—” Grace was incredulous. “That’s just silly. If Carolyn was in a state, she’d buy anything, the color wouldn’t matter. I should know, because I was the one doing it. I just pointed at the first thing I saw and said, ‘I’ll take that.’ ”

  “But because it doesn’t matter, you do what’s automatic, and what’s automatic is what you’re used to. You bought the first thing you saw, and it just happened to be brown. But if it had been Carolyn, the first thing she saw would probably just happen to have been blue or white or even pink. You were eating a club sandwich over there across the street, or trying to. What did you order for lunch?”

  “A club sandwich.”

  “And what do you normally order when you go out to eat a light lunch with your friends?”

  Grace smiled faintly. “I see your point.”

  “But I really ought to admit,” Kathryn continued, “that there was one other telling detail, besides the color of the suitcase, which made sense only if it was you in California, not Carolyn.”

  “Yes?”

  “When they arrested Bill for the murder of Grace Kimbrough, he cracked up laughing. The police didn’t know what the hell to make of that.”

  Grace looked measuringly at Kathryn. “You know,” she said, “you must be awfully clever.”

  Kathryn attempted to smile modestly. “People have occasionally told me so,” she replied. “Let’s see if it’s true. Let me try to guess why you’re in this godforsaken excuse for a motel.”

  Grace actually chuckled. “It’s awful, isn’t it?”

  “It’s incredible. You are here because it was the first thing you saw when you got off the bus, and you were beyond caring.”

  “That’s partly it. I wanted somewhere cheap, too. There was five hundred dollars in Carolyn’s handbag, but I didn’t know how long I’d be—uh, out here, and I didn’t want to use her credit cards anymore. I’d used her American Express card at the store and the hotel, and nobody questioned it, but it made me a little nervous. I really didn’t want to go on doing it. And besides—”

  “You had decided it was time to drop the Stanley in favor of your maiden name.”

  “Well, some name besides Stanley, anyway. I decided on my maiden name only when the woman out there—” She broke off and stared at Kathryn in undisguised awe. “How did you know it was my maiden name?”

  Kathryn perceived that she was being credited with omniscience, and shook her head, laughing. “No, I’m only fair-to-middlin’ bright. If you want clever, really clever, I shall have to introduce you to Ms. Sally Withers!—which I ought to do about now, anyway, so the lady can call it a night.” Kathryn was feeling better now. She had handled the conversation well; she had gotten out of Grace everything she needed to hear. It hadn’t been fun, but she had done it, and she had done it right. She tossed off the last sip of scotch in her cup and stood. “Now, Mrs. Kimbrough—that’s ridiculous, I’m going to call you Grace, and my name is Kathryn, in case you’ve forgotten. Grace: I propose to take you back to New Jersey on an eleven o’clock flight tomorrow morning. O.K.?”

  Grace set her jaw. �
�O.K.”

  “Meanwhile,” Kathryn continued in her finest steamroller manner, “I propose to take you away from all this. I have plenty of plastic, all of it legally mine, and you and I, my dear”—she laid a hand lightly on Grace’s head—“are going to spend the rest of this rather awful night in the Holiday Inn. I’m told there actually is one, little though you might expect it from what you’ve seen of this town so far. One of God’s little surprises.”

  CHAPTER 28

  i

  Something had to be done. Something. Anything. He couldn’t just go on waiting. But what could he do? It would have been easy if he’d actually been a killer.

  But of course he wasn’t a killer. What had happened, that was an accident. Well, half an accident. He had moved the knife, yes, but that had been, well, a sudden temptation, a split-second act, he had done it without thinking. Crime of passion, heat of the moment, that sort of thing.

  Besides, it might not have killed her. He pushed her, yes, and the knife was there where he put it, but it was possible, wasn’t it, that she could have fallen sideways, or caught herself, or something? It was just a chance, just bad luck, that she had died. No one could blame him for that. It was almost like the thing had happened by itself. Like fate or something, nothing to do with him.

  But fate, or luck, or whatever it was, had now deserted him. He couldn’t think of anything he could do. Besides wait. So he waited.

  ii

  They had to find her. They had been house-to-house in the neighborhood. They had combed the bushes in everybody’s yards, front and back. They had talked to her mother over and over again and it was always the same: During that brief spell of sun in the morning, she had let Tita go outside for five minutes, just to sit on the swing, just for a little breath of fresh air; she was watching her through the kitchen window. But the phone had rung, and when she looked out the window again, her daughter was gone.