Crooked Heart

by Cristina Sumners

  “I can’t tell him. I can’t.”

  “Then don’t tell him. But don’t leave him. You can’t just keep running away, you know.”

  Grace hesitated, and Kathryn glanced at Harry Beeton, who recognized his cue instantly. “Mrs. Kimbrough, I can take you back to Harton, if you like. As soon as we’re through talking to Bill.”

  Slowly Grace turned, then walked back to the table and sat down where she had been sitting before, across from Bill. The blush had long gone, and she was very pale.

  Kathryn started out the door but turned back. “Grace. I don’t think you should go home to George.”

  Grace managed to speak. “That’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “Come back to my place.”

  “I shouldn’t impose on you. But I can’t think of what else to do right now, so I guess I will. Thanks.”

  Kathryn told Harry Beeton her address, stepped out of the room, and set out to find the front entrance to the building. She found it, emerged onto a main thoroughfare, and eventually spotted and hailed a taxi. As the driver whistled his way out of Trenton, Kathryn collapsed in the backseat and sank into a misery like quicksand.

  She felt as if her ego spread through her like a cancer, contaminating the whole of her. Across her mind came a line from the old form of the General Confession; the Prayer Book revisers had judged it theologically unsound and had changed it, but to Kathryn at that moment it seemed written for her: “There is no health in us.”

  She had gloried in herself, fancying herself a sort of Peter Wimsey with a few credits in pastoral counseling; she had wanted to be thought clever, she had wanted to impress. Well, she had succeeded. The Chief of Police had patted her on the shoulder and told her she had done well. And that child, that engaging, delightful child—

  Oh, God, don’t let her be dead, she prayed, but she knew it was a foolish prayer. If Tita had disappeared because she was a dangerous witness, she would not be hidden or held for ransom, she would be silenced. Kathryn felt sick.

  Suddenly in the black depths of her guilt a new pit yawned at her feet: Could she have prevented it?

  It was bad enough that she had been playing ego games while a child was being murdered, but in her first wave of horror it had not occurred to her that her guilt might extend to actual responsibility for Tita’s death. It occurred to her now. She was no longer sick, she was stunned. It was several minutes before her brain struggled out of its paralysis and began to attempt to deal with the question.

  She had put off getting Grace and her story to Tom Holder in favor of a good night’s sleep. But Tita had vanished long before their plane had landed—about twelve hours before, in fact. About the time she and Grace had been waking up Saturday morning in the Holiday Inn. But what if she had called Tom when she’d found Grace, told him her story then and there? She hadn’t done so because she had wanted to be onstage when he learned about Grace; she had wanted to watch his amazement.

  And of course there had been no urgency; Carolyn Stanley was dead, and the murderer, supposedly, in custody. It had simply been a matter of getting straight who the victim had been. She had been wrong. She had been congratulating herself on being the only one who had it right, and she had been disastrously wrong.

  She didn’t notice they were approaching her house until the cab actually stopped. She paid the driver, and somehow got herself out of the car, up the walk, and in the front door. The house was silent. Mrs. Warburton would still be at church; the Presbyterians drank coffee until well past noon. Kathryn dropped her handbag on the first chair she passed and her coat and scarf on the second, and flung herself onto the sofa. Now that she had the privacy for a good cry, she seemed to have run out of tears. Or perhaps the matter had gone beyond tears.

  She was still rehearsing, dully, alternate sequences of events. If she had called Tom Friday night. If she had told him what Grace had said. But what would Tom have done? Would he not have assumed, as she had, that the value of Grace’s story was its damning evidence against Bill Stanley and the likelihood that it would provoke him to confess? Would Tom have done anything other than wait for Grace’s return to arrange a confrontation between her and Bill? Impossible to tell. But he might have done something else, and it might have made a difference. She would never know now. It was too late.

  CHAPTER 33

  Eventually Kathryn began to wonder how long it would take Tom Holder to get his search warrants. Was he at George’s even now, or at Patricia’s? How long would it be before they found something, something they would have to report to Tita’s parents?

  Tita’s parents.

  Duty summoned Kathryn out of despair. There was very little she could do for the Robinsons, but that little must be done. It was an obligation. There was nobody in the world she wanted more to avoid, but she would go to their house and wait with them until someone came to tell them what had happened to their daughter. She went upstairs to replenish her supply of handkerchiefs and pocket tissues, and thus supplied, got her car from the garage and drove to Dickens Street.

  James and Julia Robinson opened the front door together, their faces stiff with dread and the shreds of unkillable hope. Kathryn looked at Julia and said immediately, “I don’t have any news. I’ve just come to be with you while you wait.”

  Tita’s father, of course, had no idea who she was, and in the state Tita’s mother was in, it took her a moment to recognize Kathryn.

  “Oh—oh, yes, of course, you’re the policeman’s friend from church, the Sunday school teacher. Uh, Jim, this is, uh—”

  Kathryn told James Robinson her name; he told her his, trying automatically to smile, and invited her in.

  They turned to lead Kathryn to the living room, and saw a group of anxious faces in the doorway. “It’s nothing,” Julia told them, “I mean—it’s not news. Uh, this is Kathryn Koerney, she’s been helping the police. My mother, Mrs. Selby; our friends, Bob and Sheila Holtam, Ruth Childs.”

  They all shook hands and made little murmurs at each other. Awkwardly, they found their seats again, James bringing forward a chair for Kathryn. There was silence.

  “Have they—” Tita’s mother began, and stopped. “No, you said—no news. It’s just—it’s just that we can’t understand, because Bill Stanley’s in jail, isn’t he? And isn’t he the one who killed Grace?”

  The question startled Kathryn; she had forgotten how little the Robinsons knew. She hesitated. She was privy to information Tom would surely not want publicized. On the other hand, certain basic facts—like who was still alive and who wasn’t—would be public knowledge by the following day, if only because of her own stupidity in steering Grace right into a flock of reporters. That cat was already out of its bag; it couldn’t hurt to describe it to the Robinsons and their friends.

  Kathryn reflected that if she did this right, she could make it last a half hour or more. Or until Tom came. So she gave them a carefully edited account of everything that had happened the previous Monday, and how it had come to light. She omitted the details that pointed to George Kimbrough or Patricia Clyde. No one seemed eager for her to get on with the story; they accepted her snail’s pace as though they, too, knew that all that could be done was to pass the time in any way it could be passed.

  Finally, however, she ran out of things to say. There were a few halfhearted responses. Somebody said, “How terrible for Mrs. Kimbrough.” Then a clock-ticking silence fell.

  One of the friends announced that she would make some coffee, and began to make a great business of taking orders.

  Somewhere in the brittle exchanges—“Let me help you”—“Oh, it’s no trouble”—“Black, with sugar”—Kathryn’s mind wandered off the track; people and voices faded into a gray silence in which a ginger-haired child sat on the sofa and spoke in a small, sure voice, and said, with complete confidence—something that was wrong. No, not wrong when she said it, it was wrong only later. Later when? At the fence. At the fence and at the window, it was wrong. “Julia,” said
Kathryn rather too loudly.

  The bustle about the coffee died instantly, and every eye in the room went to Kathryn. She looked at the anxious faces and thought, Oh, God, if I say anything, they’ll think it might help; they’ll start hoping. Still, something stirred in her, and it would not be quiet; it insisted that she discover it. And in that insistence there was an urgency she did not understand, but responded to as if to divine command. “Julia, could I—would it—” She stopped, then forced herself to speak firmly. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to go look at the backyard again.”

  Julia blinked, stared a moment, then said, “Sure. This way.” She led Kathryn out of the room and through the kitchen to the back door. Kathryn thanked her and stepped outside.

  It was exactly as it had been when she and Tom had been there last Wednesday: the same damp yard, the same wet swing set, the same still trees, under the same November sky. Kathryn walked across the soggy grass toward the back fence. As she approached it, the feeling grew in her that there was something to notice, something to remark. Something, perhaps, Tita had noticed but had thought unimportant, or had forgotten, and so not told them? For one thing was certain: Tita had not been killed because of what she had said in her statement on Wednesday. That damage was done. It profits nothing to dispose of a witness who has already revealed what needs to be kept secret. The witness who is dangerous is the one who has seen something but has not yet spoken of it. What had Tita seen, and not recognized as important?

  Kathryn climbed a few boards up the fence and looked over it into the Stanleys’ backyard. Oddly, she had the feeling that she had been closer to seeing what she was looking for before she had mounted the fence. The sensation of trembling right on the brink of discovery had been strongest a few feet away from it; once she touched the boards, the intuition fled. It was like trying to sharpen an image in a telescope by turning the focus ring, and then turning it a fraction too far. The clarity had been there for a sliver of an instant, but now it was gone. She descended to the ground and stepped back a few feet. The fence stood blankly in front of her. She turned, walked several yards back toward the house, turned again, and once more approached the fence. Yes, it was that blank wall that was trying to tell her something. But what? That something didn’t fit, something wasn’t right. But it eluded her.

  She walked back to the house, noticing, for the first time, the little audience that peered hopefully out of the living room window. Taken aback, Kathryn shook her head. They thought she was looking for Tita, when all she was looking for was answers.

  Julia met her at the kitchen door. “What is it?” she asked softly.

  Kathryn laid her hands on the woman’s shoulders. “Please. You mustn’t—you mustn’t get your hopes up. I’m just trying to figure out why.” She dropped her hands. “But I’d like to see Tita’s bedroom again.”

  Julia nodded, and again led the way. Leaving the group in the living room in a kind of suspended animation, they went upstairs to Tita’s bedroom, crossed to the window, and looked out. It was somewhere outside, whatever was bothering Kathryn. Somewhere out there with the lawn, and the trees, and the fence.

  Kathryn stared out the window at the commonplace suburban view, but it stubbornly refused to yield anything to her. There was nothing there to see. Absolutely nothing. But that was the problem, surely? Should there not have been something? Something the window did not offer, that she had rightly expected to find?

  Tita’s mother started to speak into the obviously barren silence, but Kathryn made an abrupt noise and flung up a hand to ward off the interruption. Neither woman was in any condition to notice that she’d been rude. Julia held her breath, and Kathryn stood frozen, her hand still splay-fingered in midair, her face contracted in a fury of attempted recollection.

  Suddenly she covered her face with her hands and a voice inside her cried desperately at God, Show me! Then she lowered her hands and looked again.

  And saw.

  CHAPTER 34

  It was so obvious, she could not imagine how she had failed to see it.

  She turned to Julia Robinson and asked, “Did Tita often stand on the fence, looking into the Stanleys’ backyard?”

  “I—ah, don’t know. I don’t think—I ever saw her do it.”

  “But you have to climb the fence in order to see into the Stanleys’ backyard.”

  “Uh, I guess so. Yes.”

  “You can’t see the Stanleys’ backyard, or their back door, while standing on the ground in your backyard, because the fence is too high.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Her voice rose on the last word, making almost a question.

  Kathryn pointed out the window. “But you can’t see the Stanleys’ backyard, or driveway, or back door, from this window, either, because of those two trees.”

  “Yes?” Definitely a question.

  “Then how does Tita know how Bill Stanley goes up his back steps? She described it exactly. Hand on the rail, two steps at a time. She said he always did it that way. How does she know that? She was sure of it, like she’d seen it a dozen times.”

  Julia stared blankly. “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Does Tita go over there to visit, to their yard?”

  “No, I don’t think so. They don’t have any children.”

  “Then how did she get to be so familiar with Bill Stanley going up his back steps?”

  “I can’t—oh! Maybe the attic? That’s higher, but I’d have thought the trees would still be— Let’s look,” she said suddenly, and hurried from the room.

  With Kathryn hard on her heels, Julia Robinson made for a door at the end of the hall, threw it open, and ran up the narrow flight of stairs to the attic. In five swift strides she crossed to the little living area by the back dormer, and leaned over to look out of the low window. Behind her, Kathryn dropped into the armchair, slouched down to what might be a child’s height, and looked past Julia’s elbow out the window. From this high vantage point there was a space in the evergreens. And there, neatly framed by branches, was an unobstructed view of the Stanleys’ back porch.

  Kathryn stared at it for a moment, then looked up at Julia Robinson’s face in time to see the hope die out of it and the dread come back in a wave. They had not discovered a clue to Tita’s whereabouts; they had found only a horribly good reason for her disappearance.

  “Was she—” Kathryn cleared her throat and tried again. “Was she up here that afternoon? Last Monday? She was sick, remember.”

  “I can’t—I can’t think.” Julia’s eyes had seen too much and had gone blank with fear.

  “It was Monday night when she woke you up talking about Bill Stanley and a body.”

  Julia stifled a sob, and swallowed. “Yes, that was it. I remember I thought she shouldn’t have come up here, because it had obviously made her worse.”

  “What time was it, about?”

  Julia thought a moment. “I think it was just after lunch.”

  Kathryn was looking around on the bookshelf and the floor by the chair. “Did she have a separate notebook for up here?”

  Tita’s mother heard the past tense, and reached out to the back of the chair for support. “No,” she said in a tight voice. “I gave her only one.”

  “And she didn’t use it up here.”

  “Yes, she did. She had been writing in it when I found her here.”

  Kathryn protested: “All the entries in the book say ‘From the Bedroom Window.’ ”

  Julia was clutching the chair back, slogging through the conversation by sheer strength of will. “But I could have sworn I saw a page marked ‘From the Attic.’ I’m sure—well, I’m pretty sure, that it said something about the attic.”

  “What else did it say?”

  Julia shook her head helplessly. “I didn’t really look that closely. Is it important, do you think?”

  “I have no idea. But I’m going to find out.” Kathryn discovered, as she followed Julia Robinson downstairs and took hasty leave of the people i
n the living room, that the unidentifiable urgency that had propelled her to examine the back fence and the bedroom window still had hold of her. If anything, it was growing more acute.

  She hurried down the walk to her car, and drove home at a speed that would have shocked Tom Holder—indeed, would have shocked herself if she had been in any state to notice. At Alexander Street she burst through the front door past a startled Mrs. Warburton and sprinted down the hall and into her workroom.

  From under a pile of papers she snatched the spiral notebook she had not looked at since Tom Holder had given it to her the previous Thursday. Too excited to sit, she stood over her desk, breathless, her hands shaking as they scrambled over the pages, looking for the right day.

  She found it. Just as Tom had said, at the top of the page: “Monday, November 7th. From the Bedroom Window.” Then a short list of activities that had taken place that morning in the Robinsons’ backyard and that of the Hensons, next door. Nothing else. The next page was blank, and so, apparently, was the rest of the book.

  Tita’s mother was wrong.

  Kathryn was baffled. Tita’s big adventure had been Monday night. Why was there no word about it? She had had the book all of Tuesday and Wednesday before handing it over to her father Thursday morning to take to the police. Why had she abandoned her game just when it got interesting?

  Kathryn fanned the pages of the notebook, a swift succession of blank sheets her only reward. She flipped through them again, a little more carefully. Two thirds of the way through, she thought she caught a fleeting glimpse of writing. She paged back to it. The spiral was of the variety that is divided into three sections by two pages of stiff colored card, and this was the first page of the third section. It tended to cling to the divider, so that when the pages were fanned rapidly, only its blank verso was visible. This page contained a paragraph, unheaded, that began: “Last night in the middle of the night I heard funny noises in the Stanleys’ garage.” It was a less-official version of Tita’s statement. Kathryn scanned it; it contained nothing new. The next page was blank. She flipped back to the first page of the second section, which also hid its written face against the divider that preceded it. She opened it out.